Eurasia – Dugin

Eurasia Above All: Manifest of the Eurasist Movement

By Alexander Dugin

Translated by Martino Conserva

 

Introductory Note: We should note to our audience that while the present text is among the manifestos of the Russian Eurasia Movement, it should not be taken as a sufficient view into either Alexander Dugin’s philosophy or the Neo-Eurasianist philosophy in general. For example, the ideas of organic, participatory democracy as well as the idea of the Reich or “Empire” in the non-imperialist sense are not represented here. Furthermore, it should be remembered that although it is not entirely clear from the present article, Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism can be seen as a Russian form of “Revolutionary Conservatism,” drawing its philosophical foundations not only from the original Eurasianist theorists, but also the philosophers of the German “Conservative Revolution” (Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Carl Schmitt, Werner Sombart, etc.), the Perennial Traditionalist school (Julius Evola, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Mircea Eliade, etc.), and the European “New Right” (Alain de Benoist, Julien Freund, Armin Mohler, etc.). We urge our audience to read the other texts by or about Alexander Dugin on this site for a more complete understanding.  – Daniel Macek (Editor of the “New European Conservative”)

Crisis of ideas in contemporary Russia

In our Russian* society – especially in the social and political sphere – at the beginning of the new millennium a deficiency of ideas is painfully felt. The majority of the people – including governors, politicians, scientists, workers – are guided in life, in political choice by a set of momentary factors, casual concerns, transient ephemeral calls. We are quickly losing any general representation about the sense of life, about the logic of history, about the problems of man, about the destiny of the world.

Existential and social choice has been substituted by aggressive advertising. In the place of meaningful and accountable political ideology stands some effective (or ineffective) PR. The outcome of the struggle of ideas is defined by the volume of investments in entertainment. Dramatic clashes of peoples, cultures and religions are turned into shows inspired by transnational corporations and oil holdings. Human blood, human life, human spirit became statistical abstraction, consumer cost, at its best – demagogic figure of speech in mellifluous and ambiguous humanitarian lamentations, hiding a double standard.

In the place of totalitarian uniformity, a totalitarian indifference has come. The majority of political parties and formalised social movements pursue tactical purposes. Practically nowhere can be found an explicit and consequent ideology capable to snatch man from a state of sleepy indifference, to make life worth living.

Americanism and the need for an alternative

The most rigorous – but at the same time most harmful – world-view project has been formulated by consequent liberals. These forces, geopolitical oriented towards the US and the West, take as a sample for copying the American politics, American economy, American type of the society, American culture, American civilisation ideal. This camp has its dignity – their project is logical and consistent, its theory and practice are linked. But also logical are world evil, death, dissolving, division and loss of organic wholeness. The liberals say a decisive “yes” to that “uniform world”, confused, vain, individualist, oligarchic, deprived of any moral, spiritual and traditional orienting points, which the US – world superpower – strive to create on a planetary scale, understanding their technological and economic superiority as a mandate for a privately-owned hegemony on a planetary scale. This Americanisation of Russia, of the whole world, this slavish submission to the new world gendarme – gendarme of shows – obviously is not very much pleasant to many people. But this opposition more often appears only emotionally, fragmentarily, inconsistently. Peoples and whole socio-political movements are inertially satisfied with the old thongs, with the residuals of different, more harmonious and noble epochs, with anything at least in some way differing from the Atlantist tsunami which drags along the remains of our own Russian civilisation. The hostility to the American way of life, to the famous “new world order” is a fully positive quality, which should be greeted with favour anywhere we meet it. But it is not enough. An active counterproposal, a realistic, concrete and capable alternative is indispensable for us. Conditions at the beginning of the millennium are considerably new. And those who want a different future, rather than that controlled chaos and neon-light disintegration imposed on us by America, are compelled not only to say “no”, but also to formulate, to put forward, to demonstrate and to defend a different, our own, civilisation Plan.

The most massive, most generalising world-view offering such an alternative to the American hegemony, to the unipolar world, to the triumph of West, is Eurasism.

The founding-fathers of Eurasism

Historically, Eurasism existed for 20 years as an attempt to interpret to the logic of socio-political, cultural and geopolitical development of Russia as a uniform and basically continuous process from Kievan Rus to the USSR. The Eurasists have detected behind the dialectics of national destiny of the Russian people and the Russian State a unitary historical mission, differently expressed at the various stages. One major thesis of early Eurasists (count N.S.Trubetskoy, P. Savitsky) sounded like this: “The West against mankind ”, i.e. the nations of the world blossoming complexity of cultures and civilisations against the unitary, totalitarian Western pattern, against the economic, political and cultural domination of the West. Russia (both ancient, and orthodox-monarchic, and Soviet) saw the Eurasists as a stronghold and avant-garde of this world process, as a citadel of freedom against the unidimensional hegemony on mankind of an irreligious, secularised, pragmatical and egotistical excrescence – the Western civilisation, claiming for supremacy and for juridical, material and spiritual domination. On this basis the Eurasists accepted the USSR as a new – paradoxical – form of the original path of Russia. Disapproving atheism and materialism in the cultural sphere, they recognised behind the external facade of communism the archaic national features, behind Soviet Russia the legitimate geopolitical heritage of the Russian mission.

Being consequent and convinced Russian patriots, the Eurasists came to a conclusion about the inadequacy of the traditional forms, in which the National Idea in Russia was vested during the last centuries. The Romanov motto – “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” – was only a conservative facade hiding behind itself quite modern contents, basically copied from Europe.** Soviet patriotism expressed the national idea in class terms, which neither grasps the essence of the civilizational problem, nor did it recognise the meaning of the historical mission of Russia. The secular nationalism of the Romanov was but a formal imitation of the European regimes. Soviet patriotism ignored the national element, broke off the connection to traditions, swept aside the Belief of the fathers.

A synthetical new approach was indispensable. Such approach was also developed within the framework of Eurasist philosophy, within the social and political movement of the Eurasists. The founding-fathers of Eurasism for the first time gave the highest possible estimation to the multi-national (imperial) nature of the Russian State. They were especially attentive to the Turkish factor. The role of the heritage of Gengis-Khan, trustee of the Tatar statehood assimilated by Moscow in the XVI century, was seen as a decisive turn of Russia to the East, to its origins, to its own values. In the orthodox legend just this epoch is linked to the Sacred Rus, to the transformation of Moscow in the Third Rome (after the fall of Tsargrad and the end of the Byzantian Empire). The mission of the Sacred Rus was expressed in the self-assertion of its own Eurasian culture, of an original social system, distinct in its main features from that path followed by the countries of the Roman Catholic and Protestant West.

Russia was conceived by the Eurasists as the avant-garde of the East against the West, as a forward defence line of traditional society against modern, secular, ordinary, rationalised society. But in the centuries-old struggle for preserving a cultural “ego”, Russia differently from other Eastern societies actively acquired experience of the West, adopted the techniques it applied, borrowed some methods – but every time with the only purpose to confront the West with its own weapons. In modern language, this is called “modernisation without westernization”. Therefore Russia also managed longer than other traditional societies to effectively counter the pressure of the West.

From this the Eurasists came to a major conclusion: Russia needs not simply to go back to its roots, but to combining a conservative and a revolutionary new start. Russia must actively modernise, develop, partially open to the surrounding world, but strictly saving and hardening its own identity. Therefore some called the Eurasists as the “Orthodox Bolsheviks”.

Alas, historically, this remarkable movement was not appreciated in due measure. The impressing successes of Marxist ideology made the refined conservative-revolutionary perspective of the Eurasist ineffective, superfluous. By the end of the ‘30s, the original impulse of the Eurasist movement, both in Russia and among the Russian emigration, had definitively died away.

The relay race of the Eurasist idea was run henceforth not so much by politicians and ideologists, how much by scientists (first of all the great Russian historian Lev Gumilyov).

Neo-Eurasism

The dramatic events of the last decades in Russia, all over the world, have made again the Eurasists’ ideas urgent, essential. The West coped with its most serious civilizational opponent – the USSR. Marxist ideology suddenly lost its appeal. But a general new alternative to Westernism and liberalism (which today are embodied in their fullest development by the US and American civilisation – from which even the Europeans, the grandparents of the world monster, begin to feel nervous) has not appeared yet. And could not appear anyway.

The separate pieces – pre-Revolutionary nationalism, clericalism, the all-inertial Sovietism or the extravagant imagination of ecologism and leftism – could not turn into a united front. There was no common world-view base, no common denominator. The occasional rapprochement of positions of the opponents to globalism and Americanisation did not result in a true synthesis of world-views.

In this moment the most attentive minds, the purest hearts and the most flaming souls were converted too to the Eurasist heritage. In it they discerned a saving source, a germ of that doctrine, that ideology, which ideally met the requirements of the present historical moment.

Neo-Eurasism began to be built as a social, philosophical, scientific, geopolitical, cultural current since the end the ‘80s. Distancing from the heritage of the Russian Eurasists of the ‘20-30s, having incorporated the spiritual experience of the staroobryad tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, being enriched by the social criticism of Russian populists and socialists, having interpreted in a new way the achievements of the Soviet stage of domestic history, and at the same time having mastered the philosophy of traditionalism and conservative revolution, geopolitical methodology and original revolutionary doctrines of the “new left” (i.e. those intellectual currents, which were elaborated in the West, but directed against the dominant logic of its development) – Neo-Eurasism became the most serious world-view platform in modern Russian society, acquiring the form of complete scientific school, of a system of social and cultural initiatives.

Neo-Eurasism laid the bases of modern Russian geopolitics, gained a strong personnel potential of supporters in government structures and ministries and offices linked to the military sector, basing on Eurasist geopolitics many serious operational international, military and economic projects.

Neo-Eurasism influenced modern domestic politology, sociology, and philosophy.

Neo-Eurasism gradually became a relevant conceptual instrument of Russian state monopolies requiring a strategic pattern for developing a long-term strategy of macroeconomic activity, depending not from momentary political processes, but from historical, geographical and civilizational constants.

Neo-Eurasism laid the basis of the whole set of vanguard currents in youth culture, gave a vivifying impulse to creative, passionate development of the whole direction in art.

Neo-Eurasism had a strong impact upon political parties and movements in modern Russia – we find large borrowings from neo-Eurasist ideological arsenal in the programmatic documents of “Unity”, KPFR [Communist Party], OVR [Otetchestvo-Vsyo Rossiya], LDPR [Liberal-democratic Party], the movement “Russia” and of a series of smaller movements and parties. However these borrowings remain fragmentary, combined with other sometimes heterogeneous and even contradictory elements (all this makes large Russian parties rather tactical, de-ideologized formations created for the solution of short-term, local political problems).

The new social and political subject

The time has come to make the following step, to add Eurasism a concrete social and political dimension. Neo-Eurasist ideology gradually exceeded the level of pure theoretical elaboration. The new government of Russia is seriously engaged in the solution of strategic problems facing the country, and is obviously not satisfied with the primitive and destructive recipes imposed by the West and the bearers of Western influence in Russia: it needs a world-view and social and political support. The present authorities, their specificity, their social image, considerably differ both from the post-Soviet period and from the times of uncritical passion for reckless liberalism. A new state world-view, a new domestic pattern of polit-correctness have ripened. This is testified by that persevering search of a National Idea in which the authorities are today engaged.
If the usual political and party system is suitable for the decision of momentary problems (though we consider it as inadequate even in the narrow pragmatical sense), in an medium-term perspective (let alone a long-term strategic sight) it has no chance at all, and requires radical reforming. The existing system evolved during the process of demolition of the Soviet model and its substitution by a liberal-democratic pro-Western formation. But today neither the former, nor the latter is acceptable for Russia. And furthermore, it is inappropriate in the face of the very difficult situation the country is confronted to – a consequence of ludicrous policies previously followed. What we need are parties and movements based on a world-view, reflecting the interests of concrete strata of the population, merged with the people, educating, training and defending it, instead of exploiting the trust (and naivety) of the masses for the sake of private or group benefit.

All conditions have blossomed for the appearance of a rigorous Eurasist movement in new Russia. And those who stood at the origins of Neo-Eurasism, who formed the theoretical premises and bases of Russian geopolitics, Eurasist philosophy, conservative-revolutionary politology and sociology, who spent years fighting for the ideals of Eurasia, for the revival of the Russian people and our Great Power – those made the decision to form the new social and political movement “EURASIA”.

Who shall be the participants to the movement “Eurasia”?

To whom are we addressing the call to enter and to back our movement? To each Russian, educated and not, influential and the last of the dispossessed, to the worker and to the manager, to the needy and the well-off person, to the Russian and the Tatar, to the orthodox and the jew, to the conservative and the modernist, to the student and to the defender of the law, to the soldier and the weaver, to the governor and the rock-musician. But only to the one who loves Russia, who cannot think of himself without it, who has realised the necessity of a severe effort, which is required from all of us so that our country and our people remains on the map of the new millennium (from which they persistently attempt to erase us), to the one who wants, passionately wants, that all of us at last would raise in a mighty power, would cast away from our common organism its parasitic excrescence, would tear the veil of mental mist, would affirm above the country, the continent, the world our solar Russian ideals – ideals of Freedom, Equity, Fidelity to the Origins.

Radical Centre

The movement “Eurasia” is founded on the principles of radical centre. We are neither leftists nor rightists, we are neither slavishly compliant to the authorities, nor oppositionists at any cost, barking with a reason and without . We realise that today’s authority in Russia, the President of Russia Vladimir Vladimirovic Putin requires help, support, solidarity, cohesion. But at the same time blind submission to the leaders, uncritical connivance to authority only because it is authority, are today not less (if not more) pernicious than straight rebellion. We are centrists to the extent that the President and the authority act for the sake of the Power, for the sake of the people. And not in a populist and transient way, but in a medium and long-term perspective. Here again we will be for the President fervently, radically, up to the end, not paying attention to small inaccuracies, accepting all hardships and difficulties, which will arise since Russia will seriously be set by the purpose of rescuing itself and all the rest of the world from the terrible threat creeping from the West. Anything more centrist than our unconditional and total support to the patriotic power-building of the authority (even in its most unpopular actions) simply could not be. So, our forerunners, the Eurasists, supported the hated orthodox fundamentalist and Marxist regimes because they confronted the West – the worst of evils. But our radical centrism is not passive. We clearly realise that the present authority in Russia according to the logic of things has no (and cannot have) clear representation of the fundamental strategic purposes, of the philosophical and spiritual dramatic problem which is born by the new millennium – terrible, risky, threatening, problematic, misunderstood during centuries of bloody battles and cruel sufferings … In this sense the authority today is lost and requires help, orienting points, landmarks, specifying which is the task of the people, its most active, strong-willed, clever, idealistic, patriotic side (this also should gather in our movement, to become its core).

Here the roles are changed, and now is the turn of the authority to listen to the voice of Eurasia. This voice is not the servile “yes, sir? ” of condescending and artificial parties, good for chairs and tv-screens. It is the mighty radical appeal of the earth, the vote of generations, the cry from the depths of our spirit and our blood.

Priorities of the Eurasia movement

Our movement spreads the Eurasist principles to all levels of life.

In the religious sphere it means constructive solid dialogue between the creeds traditional for Russia, – Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism.*** The Eurasian branches of world religions have many differences from those forms which have taken roots in other regions of the world. There is a common style of Eurasist spiritual view, which, however, does not eliminate at all differences and originality of tenets. This is a serious and positive basis for rapprochement, mutual respect, mutual understanding. Due to the Eurasist approach to religious questions many inter-confessional frictions can be bypassed or arranged.

In the sphere of foreign policy, Eurasism implies a wide process of strategic integration. Reconstruction on the basis of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] of a solid Eurasian Union (analogue to the USSR on a new ideological, economic and administrative basis).

The strategic integration of internal spaces of the CIS should be gradually spread also to wider areas – to the countries of the Moscow-Teheran-Delhi-Beijing axis. An Eurasist policy is invoked to open for Russia an exit to the warm seas, not through war and sufferings, but through peace and open friendly co-operation.

Eurasist policies towards the West implies prioritary relations with the European countries. Modern Europe – as opposed to the epoch when the founding-fathers of Eurasism acted – does not represent anymore the source of “world evil”. The quick political events of the XX century contributed to transfer this doubtful record even more westward – to Northern America, to the US. Therefore at a present stage Russia can find in Europe strategical partners interested in the revival of its former political power. Eurasist Russia should play the role of the deliverers of Europe, but this time from the American political, economic and cultural occupation.

The Eurasist policy of Russia is directed towards active co-operation with the countries of the Pacific region, first of all with Japan. The economic giants of this area should see in the Eurasist policies of Russia the orienting point for a self-supporting political system, and also for a strategic potential of resources and new markets.

At a planetary level Eurasism means active and universal opposition to globalisation, is equal to the “anti-globalist movement ”. Eurasism defends the blossoming complexity of peoples, religions and nations. All anti-globalist tendencies are intrinsically “Eurasist”.

We are consequent supporters of “Eurasist federalism”. This means a combination of strategic unity and ethno-cultural (in definite cases economic) autonomies. Different ways of life at a local level in combination with strict centralism in the basic moments, linked to State interests.

We should revive the traditions of the Russian people, contribute to the recovery of Russian demographic growth. And most important, awake in the people its intrinsic organic spirituality, morale, high ideals, living and fervent patriotism. Without the prioritary revival of the Russian nation, the Eurasist project has no chance to become a reality. Understanding this fact is the base of our world-view.

Eurasism in social sphere means the priority of the public principle above the individual, subordination of economic patterns to strategic, social problems. The whole economic history of Eurasia proves that the development of economic mechanisms here happens according to an alternative logic than the liberal-capitalist, individualist patterns of personal benefit which evolved in the West on the basis of Protestant ethics. The liberal logic of management is alien to Eurasia, and despite enormous efforts there is no way to break this deep-rooted feature of our people. The collective, communitarian principle of governing the economy, the contribution of the criterion of “equity” in the distribution process – all this represent a steady feature of our economic history. Eurasism insists on a positive account and evaluation of this circumstance, and on this basis gives preference to socially-oriented economic patterns.

Eurasism implies a positive re-evaluation of the archaic, of the ancient. It fervently refers to the past, to the world of Tradition. The development of cultural process is seen by Eurasism in a new reference to the archaic, to the insertion of original cultural motives in the fabric of modern forms. The priority in this area is given back to national motives, to the sources of national creativity, to the continuation and revival of traditions.

Being a new and fresh world-view, just having taken a definite form, Eurasism primarily addresses itself to the youth, to the people whose consciousness has not been spoiled yet by random jumps from one inadequate ideological pattern to another, even less adequate. The Eurasist ideal is the strong, passionate, healthy and beautiful man (instead of the bastard cocaine-addict of mondialist discos, the half-assed gangster or the slut for sale). We are in the condition to offer different, positive values, instead of the cult of ugliness and pathology, instead of the cynicism and servilism before the surrogates of world shows. We shall not allow our children to be killed, violated, degraded, perverted, sold or chained to a needle. Our ideal is a celebration of physical and spiritual health, force and worthiness, faith and honour.

The movement “Eurasia” can become a reality only in the event that many people will gather around it. Much can be done even by a single man, but, as Lautréamont said, everyone should care for poetry!

To an even greater extent – everyone should care for Eurasia!

Now everything depends on our efforts. Nobody is promising just victories, raise of welfare or entertainment industry shares. Ahead stays daily laborious work, often invisible from the outside.

Ahead stay difficulty and battle, loss and labours, but ahead also stay pleasure and Great Purpose!

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Added Notes:

* Rossiskiy, i.e. with reference to citizenship of the Russian Federation. – Tr.

** Dugin here uses the term “Europe” (and thus also “European”) in the common Russian sense – also used by many Westerners – which equates “Europe” with the “West” in the old-fashioned sense, and therefore excludes not only Russians but most Eastern Europeans as well. This must be distinguished from the meaning of Europe in the much broader sense as is commonly used by many other peoples, whereby Eastern Slavic peoples are also considered European. – Ed.

*** We can also add to this list Paganism, for, as Leonid Savin – a major leader of the Eurasia Movement – has pointed out, “Russia is the only country in Europe that still has authentic pagan societies (Republics of Mari-El, Mordovia, Komi) with very interesting rites and traditions” (quoted from his Euro-Synergies interview, “Establish a Multipolar World Order”). It is also significant that Russian Eurasianism – along with Kazakh Eurasianism – aims for a respect for and study of Pagan religions and therefore also the maintenance of surviving Pagan communities. As Savin further commented, “Europe must learn from the Russian experience of coexistence of different religions (not forgetting paganism and shamanism – this belief is widely found in Siberia). In Europe, they use the term tolerance but we, Eurasianists, prefer the term complimentarity, proposed by Lev Gumilev, meaning a subconscious sympathy between different ethnic groups.” – Ed.

 

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Dugin, Alexander. “Eurasa Above All.” Arctogaia, 1 January 2001. <http://arctogaia.com/public/eng/Manifesto.html >.

See also: “Main Principles of Eurasist Policy” by Alexander Dugin

 

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The Turning Point? – Benoist

The Turning Point?

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic

 

Centuries never immediately acquire a character that can reward them with a right spot in history. Thus the 20^th century did not really start until 1914. Will the 21^st century be labeled as “the 2015 century”? Without wishing to predict the future, which remains by definition unpredictable, we can try to look at today’s events, which in turn, can help us sketch the general framework of the future. One thing remains certain though: never has the world been so uncertain, never have we witnessed such across -the -board upheavals. In each domain decks of cards are being shuffled and reshuffled. With the old issues disappearing, new ones keep popping up on the horizon. Which are these main driving forces?

The background scene is pretty well known by all. Among the major problems emerging in the coming decades, four, at least, will prove to be crucial: the inevitable depletion of natural resources; the future of international migrations and inter-ethnic relations; the rise of new types of warfare (war for oil and war for water, space warfare, and cyber warfare), including the planned merging of electronics and living beings. What about the rest of the things?

Will the 21st century be a Eurasian century? The United States has obsessive fear of seeing an assertive China-Russia alliance as a prelude to the constitution of a large continental bloc. Having been embarked on a series of geopolitical wars of aggression, it will do everything to encircle China and Russia, to impose the Trans-Atlantic “Free Trade” Agreement designed primarily to cut off Europe from Russia, to manipulate artificially the price of oil, and it will do so with its habitual brutality based on the principle: “If you are not our vassals, you are against us.” Events in Ukraine, a country which is the real geostrategic pivot of Eurasia, have already helped reactivate the Cold War — which had never really come to an end in the first place. The Maidan Square “revolution” has been from the outset more anti-Russian than pro-European, but it was the Americans who eventually drew benefit from it. The United States is prepared for anything, absolutely anything in order to uphold its status of “the indispensable nation.”

“De-Americanization of the World”

Russia, for its part, is seeking to implement a new geopolitical axis with Beijing and Tehran, a factor of multipolar balance of power opposed to the Atlanticist endeavors. The Chinese, after long procrastination, are no longer hiding their desire to “de- Americanize the world.” Yet, the future of Russia, a great power, albeit still fragile, in a similar way as China, with its own inner contradictions, remains uncertain. Countries of Eastern Europe are still hesitant as to which path to follow—all the more so as Germany is seeking to replace the former USSR as a federating factor in Eastern and Central Europe.

We are witnessing a restructuring of the forms of world domination. The United States, with its financial markets, its armed forces, its language and its culture industries remains the leading world power. Its economic impact, however, is decreasing bit by bit (its share of global industrial output has fallen from 45% in 1945 to 17.5% today), with the dollar representing today only a third of world trade in comparison to more than a half in 2000. The process of “de- dollarization” has already and simultaneously begun, in oil and gas trading and on the monetary front. Russia and China, emulated by other Third World countries, are using more and more their national currencies in trade and investment. The project of trade in energy and raw materials, without resorting to the dollar, is beginning to take shape. Meanwhile, the purchase of gold is gathering momentum. The advent of a new international reserve currency, designed to replace the dollar, seems inevitable.

The total debt of the United States has now reached a staggering $60 trillion figure (400% of GDP. i.e. public debt, private debt, corporate debt and household debt), which, for all intent and purposes, is no longer repayable. Other nations, trapped in the cauldron of debt, also run the risk of default. As a leading figure of a growth company, albeit with no growth in sight, Europe, which is already on the brink of recession, appears now to be close to collapse. The crisis of 2008 was only a dress rehearsal. A bubble in government bonds of all OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries keeps swelling. There are today over 100 trillion dollars’ worth of bonds and more than 555 trillion dollars in derivatives. What will happen when this “bond bubble” burst?

Self-Destruction of Capitalism

The fact of the matter is that capitalism has become incapable of continuing the “development of its logic within the framework shaped ironically by the logic of its own development” (Francis Cousin). To offset its declining level of performance, capitalism must constantly increase the volume of its profit, that is to say, it must constantly expand the scope of its trade opportunities. In order to insure, however, the free flow of goods and commodities, it must raise its productivity level, which in turn means lowering the share of living labor that has been domesticated through the wage labor system. Hence the proliferation of “superfluous people” — i.e., the unemployed. How to sell ever more and more to customers who are being forced to earn less and less with their wages? Conversely, how to deal with the zero marginal costs of digital goods and services? Capitalism is now facing the fundamental problem of the devaluation of capital value. The flight into the loan system and into calculated obsolescence, followed by the race into financial speculation and “derivatives,” has its limits. The model of consumerism through credit is coming to an end. Having destroyed everything, capitalism, just like a scorpion, is bound to destroy itself.

Saturation of the market, the explosion of debt, the downward trend in the rate of profit, the decline of Europe, the widespread rise of false consciousness, the activation of a sub-chaotic process of de-civilization — the world seems to have entered into an implosive and terminal stage. Can we get out of it other than by war?

It is no longer unreasonable to think that the war is approaching and that it will be a new world war. This will not be a “clash of civilizations” (for this to happen one needs some civilizations), nor a war between “Islam” and the “West.” Again it will be a war between the East and the West. A “final battle” between the powers of the Earth and the powers of the Sea, between the continental powers and thalassocratic powers, between the money system and the principle of reality. NATO, which has become an offensive military alliance servicing the American wars, remains the most threatening coalition to world peace. A sign went out when Vladimir Putin was labeled by the Americans as the main enemy. On December 4, 2014, the House of Representatives passed a resolution amounting to the declaration of war against Russia. The alternative is war.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “The Turning Point?” The Occidental Observer, 21 February 2015. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/02/the-turning-point/ >.

 

Interview with Dominique Venner – Gérard

An Interview with Dominique Venner

Translated by Giuliano Adriano Malvicini

 

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vernal equinox MMI

Notes

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

 

————

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

 

Foundations of Russian Nationalism – Steuckers

Foundations of Russian Nationalism

By Robert Steuckers

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

Translations: Czech, Portuguese

Throughout its history, Russia has been estranged from European dynamics. Its nationalism and national ideology are marked by a double game of attraction and revulsion towards Europe in particular and the West in general.

The famous Italian Slavist Aldo Ferrari points out that from the 10th to the 13th centuries, the Russia of Kiev was well-integrated into the medieval economic system. The Tartar invasion tore Russia away from the West. Later, when the Principality of Moscow reorganized itself and rolled back the residues of the Tartar Empire, Russia came to see itself as a new Orthodox Byzantium, different from the Catholic and Protestant West. The victory of Moscow began the Russian drive towards the Siberian vastness.

The rise of Peter the Great, the reign of Catherine the Great, and the 19th century brought a tentative rapprochement with the West.

To many observers, the Communist revolution inaugurated a new phase of autarkic isolation and de-Westernization, in spite of the Western European origin of its ideology, Marxism.

But the Westernization of the 19th century had not been unanimously accepted. At the beginning of the century, a fundamentalist, romantic, nationalist current appeared with vehemence all over Russia: against the “Occidentalists” rose the “Slavophiles.” The major cleavage between the left and the right was born in Russia, in the wake of German romanticism. It is still alive today in Moscow, where the debate is increasingly lively.

The leader of the Occidentalists in the 19th century was Piotr Chaadaev. The most outstanding figures of the “Slavophile” camp were Ivan Kireevski, Aleksei Khomiakov, and Ivan Axakov. Russian Occidentalism developed in several directions: liberal, anarchist, socialist. The Slavophiles developed an ideological current resting on two systems of values: Orthodox Christendom and peasant community. In non-propagandistic terms, that meant the autonomy of the national churches and a savage anti-individualism that regarded Western liberalism, especially the Anglo-Saxon variety, as a true abomination.

Over the decades, this division became increasingly complex. Certain leftists evolved towards a Russian particularism, an anti-capitalist, anarchist-peasant socialism. The Slavophile right mutated into “panslavism” manipulated to further Russian expansion in the Balkans (supporting the Romanians, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks against the Ottomans).

Among these “panslavists” was the philosopher Nikolay Danilevsky, author of an audacious historical panorama depicting Europe as a community of old people drained of their historical energies, and the Slavs as a phalange of young people destined to govern the world. Under the direction of Russia, the Slavs must seize Constantinople, re-assume the role of Byzantium, and build an imperishable empire.

Against the Danilevsky’s program, the philosopher Konstantin Leontiev wanted an alliance between Islam and Orthodoxy against the liberal ferment of dissolution from the West. He opposed all conflict between Russians and Ottomans in the Balkans. The enemy was above all Anglo-Saxon. Leontiev’s vision still appeals to many Russians today.

Lastly, in the Diary of Writer, Dostoevsky developed similar ideas (the youthfulness of the Slavic peoples, the perversion of the liberal West) to which he added a radical anti-Catholicism. Dostoevsky came to inspire in particular the German “national-Bolsheviks” of the Weimar Republic (Niekisch, Paetel, Moeller van den Bruck, who was his translator).

Following the construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad under the energetic direction of the minister Witte, a pragmatic and autarkical ideology of “Eurasianism” emerged that aimed to put the region under Russian control, whether directed by a Tsar or a Soviet Vojd (“Chief”).

The “Eurasian” ideologists are Troubetzkoy, Savitski, and Vernadsky. For them, Russia is not an Eastern part of Europe but a continent in itself, which occupies the center of the “World Island” that the British geopolitician Halford John Mackinder called the “Heartland.” For Mackinder, the power that managed to control “Heartland” was automatically master of the planet.

Indeed, this “Heartland,” namely the area extending from Moscow to the Urals and the Urals to the Transbaikal, was inaccessible to the maritime powers like England and the United States. It could thus hold them in check.

Soviet policy, especially during the Cold War, always tried to realize Mackinder’s worst fears, i.e., to make the Russo-Siberian center of the USSR impregnable. Even in the era of nuclear power, aviation, and transcontinental missiles. This “sanctuarization” of the Soviet “Heartland” constituted the semi-official ideology of the Red Army from Stalin to Brezhnev.

The imperial neo-nationalists, the national-Communists, and the patriots opposed Gorbachev and Yeltsin because they dismantled the Eastern-European, Ukrainian, Baltic, and central-Asian glacis of this “Heartland.”

These are the premises of Russian nationalism, whose multiple currents today oscillate between a populist-Slavophile pole (“narodniki,” from “narod,” people), a panslavist pole, and an Eurasian pole. For Aldo Ferrari, today’s Russian nationalism is subdivided between four currents: (a) neo-Slavophiles, (b) eurasianists, (c) national-Communists, and (d) ethnic nationalists.

The neo-Slavophiles are primarily those who advocate the theses of Solzhenitsyn. In How to Restore Our Russia?, the writer exiled in the United States preached putting Russia on a diet: She must give up all imperial inclinations and fully recognize the right to self-determination of the peoples on her periphery. Solzhenitsyn then recommended a federation of the three great Slavic nations of the ex-USSR (Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine). To maximize the development of Siberia, he suggested a democracy based on small communities, a bit like the Swiss model. The other neo-nationalists reproach him for mutilating the imperial motherland and for propagating a ruralist utopianism, unrealizable in the hyper-modern world in which we live.

The Eurasianists are everywhere in the current Russian political arena. The philosopher to whom they refer is Lev Gumilev, a kind of Russian Spengler who analyzes the events of history according to the degree of passion that animates a people. When the people are impassioned, they create great things. When inner passion dims, the people decline and die. Such is the fate of the West.

For Gumilev, the Soviet borders are intangible but new Russia must adhere to the principle of ethnic pluralism. It is thus not a question of Russianizing the people of the periphery but of making of them definitive allies of the “imperial people.”

Gumilev, who died in June 1992, interpreted the ideas of Leontiev in a secular direction: the Russians and the Turkish-speaking peoples of Central Asia were to make common cause, setting aside their religious differences.

Today, the heritage of Gumilev is found in the columns of Elementy, the review of the Russian “New Right” of Alexandre Dugin, and Dyeïnn (which became Zavtra, after the prohibition of October 1993), the newspaper of Alexander Prokhanov, the leading national-patriotic writers and journalists. But one also finds it among certain Moslems of the “Party of Islamic Rebirth,” in particular Djemal Haydar. More curiously, two members of Yeltsin’s staff, Rahr and Tolz, were followers of Eurasianism. Their advice was hardly followed.

According to Aldo Ferrari, the national-Communists assert the continuity of the Soviet State as an historical entity and autonomous geopolitical space. But they understand that Marxism is no longer valid. Today, they advocate a “third way” in which the concept of national solidarity is cardinal. This is particularly the case of the chief of the Communist Party of the Russuan Federation, Gennady Zyuganov.

The ethnic nationalists are inspired more by the pre-1914 Russian extreme right that wished to preserve the “ethnic purity” of the people. In a certain sense, they are xenophobic and populist. They want people from the Caucasus to return to their homelands and are sometimes strident anti-Semites, in the Russian tradition.

Indeed, Russian neo-nationalism is rooted in the tradition of 19th century nationalism. In the 1960s, the neo-ruralists (Valentine Raspoutin, Vassili Belov, Soloukhine, Fiodor Abramov, etc.) came to completely reject “Western liberalism,” based on a veritable “conservative revolution”—all with the blessing of the Soviet power structure!

The literary review Nache Sovremenik was made the vehicle of this ideology: neo-Orthodox, ruralist, conservative, concerned with ethical values, ecological. Communism, they said, extirpated the “mythical consciousness” and created a “humanity of amoral monsters” completely “depraved,” ready to accept Western mirages.

Ultimately, this “conservative revolution” was quietly imposed in Russia while in the West the “masquerade” of 1968 (De Gaulle) caused the cultural catastrophe we are still suffering.

The Russian conservatives also put an end to the Communist phantasm of the “progressive interpretation of history.” The Communists, indeed, took from the Russian past whatever presaged the Revolution and rejected the rest. To the “progressivist and selective interpretation,” the conservatives opposed the “unique flow”: they simultaneously valorized all Russian historical traditions and mortally relativized the linear conception of Marxism.

Bibliography

Aldo FERRARI, «Radici e prospettive del nazionalismo russe», in Relazioni internazionali, janvier 1994.

Robert STEUCKERS (éd.), Dossier «National-communisme», in Vouloir, n°105/108, juillet-septembre 1993 (textes sur les variantes du nationalisme russe d’aujourd’hui, sur le “national-bolchévisme” russe des années 20 et 30, sur le fascisme russe, sur V. Raspoutine, sur la polé­mique parisienne de l’été 93).

Gerd KOENEN/Karla HIELSCHER, Die schwarze Front, Rowohlt, Reinbeck, 1991.

Walter LAQUEUR, Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch. Der militante Nationalismus der russi­schen Rechten, Kindler, München, 1993.

Mikhaïl AGURSKI, La Terza Roma. Il nazionalbolscevismo in Unione Sovietico, Il Mulino, Bologne, 1989.

Alexandre SOLJENITSYNE, Comment réaménager notre Russie?, Fayard, Paris, 1990.

Alexandre DOUGUINE (DUGHIN), Continente Russia, Ed. all’insegna del Veltro, Parme, 1991. Extrait dans Vouloir n°76/79, 1991, «L’inconscient de l’Eurasie. Réflexions sur la pensée “eurasiatique” en Russie». Prix de ce numéro 50 FF (chèques à l’ordre de R. Steuckers).

Alexandre DOUGUINE, «La révolution conservatrice russe», manuscrit, texte à paraître dans Vouloir.

Konstantin LEONTIEV, Bizantinismo e Mondo Slavo, Ed. all’insegna del Veltro, Parme, 1987 (trad. d’Aldo FERRARI).

N.I. DANILEVSKY, Rußland und Europa, Otto Zeller Verlag, 1965.

Michael PAULWITZ, Gott, Zar, Muttererde: Solschenizyn und die Neo-Slawophilen im heutigen Rußland, Burschenschaft Danubia, München, 1990.

Hans KOHN, Le panslavisme. Son histoire et son idéologie, Payot, Paris, 1963.

Walter SCHUBART, Russia and Western Man, F. Ungar, New York, 1950.

Walter SCHUBART, Europa und die Seele des Ostens, G. Neske, Pfullingen, 1951.

Johan DEVRIENDT, Op zoek naar de verloren harmonie – mens, natuur, gemeenschap en spi­ritualiteit bij Valentin Raspoetin, Mémoire, Rijksuniversiteit Gent/Université d’Etat de Gand, 1992 (non publié).

Koenraad LOGGHE, «Valentin Grigorjevitsj Raspoetin en de Russische traditie», in Teksten, Kommentaren en Studies, n°71, 1993.

Alexander YANOV, The Russian New Right. Right-Wing Ideologies in the Contemporary USSR, IIS/University of California, Berkeley, 1978.

Wolfgang STRAUSS, Rußland, was nun?, Österreichische Landmannschaft/Eckart-Schriften 124, Vienne, 1993.

Pierre PASCAL, Strömungen russischen Denkens 1850-1950, Age d’Homme/Karolinger Verlag, Vienne (Autriche), 1981.

Raymond BEAZLEY, Nevill FORBES & G.A. BIRKETT, Russia from the Varangians to the Bolsheviks, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1918.

Jean LOTHE, Gleb Ivanovitch Uspenskij et le populisme russe, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1963.

Richard MOELLER, Russland. Wesen und Werden, Goldmann, Leipzig, 1939.

Viatcheslav OGRYZKO, Entretien avec Lev GOUMILEV, in Lettres Soviétiques, n°376, 1990.

Thierry MASURE, «De cultuurmorfologie van Nikolaj Danilevski», in Dietsland Europa, n°3 et n°4, 1984 (version française à paraître dans Vouloir).

Source: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2010/06/14/fondements-du-nationalisme-russe.html

 

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Steuckers, Robert. “Foundations of Russian Nationalism.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 16 April 2014. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/04/foundations-of-russian-nationalism-2/ >.

 

The War on Russia – Dugin

The War on Russia in Its Ideological Dimension: An Analysis from the Perspective of the Fourth Political Theory

By Alexander Dugin

(Edited by John B. Morgan, Editor-in-Chief, Arktos Media)

 

The coming war as concept

The war against Russia is currently the most discussed issue in the West. At this point it is only a suggestion and a possibility, but it can become a reality depending on the decisions taken by all parties involved in the Ukrainian conflict – Moscow, Washington, Kiev, and Brussels.

I don’t want to discuss all the aspects and history of this conflict here. Instead I propose to analyze its deep ideological roots. My conception of the most relevant events are based on the Fourth Political Theory, whose principles I have described in my book under the same name that was published in English by Arktos Media in 2012.

Therefore I will not examine the war of the West on Russia in terms of its risks, dangers, issues, costs or consequences, but rather in an ideological sense as seen from the global perspective. I will therefore meditate on the sense of such a war, and not on the war itself (which may be either real or virtual).

Essence of liberalism

In the modern West, there is one ruling, dominant ideology – liberalism. It may appear in many shades, versions and forms, but the essence is always the same. Liberalism contains an inner, fundamental structure which follows axiomatic principles:

• Anthropological individualism (the individual is the measure of all things);
• Belief in progress (the world is heading toward a better future, and the past is always worse than the present);
• Technocracy (technical development and its execution are taken as the most important criteria by which to judge the nature of a society);
• Eurocentrism (Euro-American societies are accepted as the standard of measure for the rest of humanity);
• Economy as destiny (the free market economy is the only normative economic system – all the rest types are to either be reformed or destroyed);
• Democracy is the rule of minorities (defending themselves from the majority, which is always prone to degenerate into totalitarianism or “populism”);
• The middle class is the only really existing social actor and universal norm (independent from the fact of whether or not an individual has already reached this status or is on the way to becoming actually middle class, representing for the moment only a would-be middle class);
• One-world globalism (human beings are all essentially the same with only one distinction, namely that of their individual nature – the world should be integrated on the basis of the individual and cosmopolitism; in other words, world citizenship).

These are the core values of liberalism, and they are a manifestation of one of the three tendencies that originated in the Enlightenment alongside communism and fascism, which collectively proposed varying interpretations of the spirit of modernity. During the twentieth century, liberalism defeated its rivals, and since 1991 has become the sole, dominant ideology of the world.

The only freedom of choice in the kingdom of global liberalism is that between Right liberalism, Left liberalism or radical liberalism, including far-Right liberalism, far-Left liberalism and extremely radical liberalism. As a consequence, liberalism has been installed as the operational system of Western civilization and of all other societies that find themselves in the zone of Western influence. It has become the common denominator for any politically correct discourse, and the distinguishing mark which determines who is accepted by mainstream politics and who is marginalized and rejected. Conventional wisdom itself became liberal.

Geopolitically, liberalism was inscribed in the America-centered model in which Anglo-Saxons formed the ethnical core, based upon the Atlanticist Euro-American partnership, NATO, which represents the strategic core of the system of global security. Global security has come to be seen as being synonymous with the security of the West, and in the last instance with American security. So liberalism is not only an ideological power but also a political, military and strategic power. NATO is liberal in its roots. It defends liberal societies, and it fights to extend liberalism to new areas.

Liberalism as nihilism

There is one point in liberal ideology that has brought about a crisis within it: liberalism is profoundly nihilistic at its core. The set of values defended by liberalism is essentially linked to its main thesis: the primacy of liberty. But liberty in the liberal vision is an essentially negative category: it claims to be free from (as per John Stuart Mill), not to be free for something. It is not secondary; it is the essence of the problem.

Liberalism fights against all forms of collective identity, and against all types of values, projects, strategies, goals, methods and so on that are collectivist, or at least non-individualist. That is the reason why one of the most important theorists of liberalism, Karl Popper (following Friedrich von Hayek), held in his important book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, that liberals should fight against any ideology or political philosophy (ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Hegel) that suggests that human society should have some common goal, common value, or common meaning. (It should be noted that George Soros regards this book as his personal bible.) Any goal, any value, and any meaning in liberal society, or the open society, should be strictly based upon the individual. So the enemies of the open society, which is synonymous with Western society post-1991, and which has become the norm for the rest of the world, are concrete. Its primary enemies are communism and fascism, both ideologies which emerged from the same Enlightenment philosophy, and which contained central, non-individualistic concepts – class in Marxism, race in National Socialism, and the national State in fascism). So the source of liberalism’s conflict with the existing alternatives of modernity, fascism or communism, is quite obvious. Liberals claim to liberate society from fascism and communism, or from the two major permutations of explicitly non-individualistic modern totalitarianism. Liberalism’s struggle, when viewed as a part of the process of the liquidation of non-liberal societies, is quite meaningful: it acquires its meaning from the fact of the very existence of ideologies that explicitly deny the individual as society’s highest value. It is quite clear what the struggle opposes: liberation from its opposite. But the fact that liberty, as it is conceived by liberals, is an essentially negative category is not clearly perceived here. The enemy is present and is concrete. That very fact gives liberalism its solid content. Something other than the open society exists, and the fact of its existence is enough to justify the process of liberation.

Unipolar period: threat of implosion

In 1991, when the Soviet Union as the last opponent of Western liberalism fell, some Westerners, such as Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the end of history. This was quite logical: as there was no longer an explicit enemy of the open society, therefore there was no more history as had occurred during the modern period, which was defined by the struggle between three political ideologies (liberalism, communism and fascism) for the heritage of the Enlightenment. That was, strategically speaking, the moment when “unipolar moment” was realized (Charles Krauthammer). The period between 1991 and 2014, at the midpoint of which Bin Laden’s attack against the World Trade Center occurred, was the period of the global domination of liberalism. The axioms of liberalism were accepted by all the main geopolitical actors, including China (in economic terms) and Russia (in its ideology, economy, and political system). There were liberals and would-be liberals, not-yet liberals, not-liberal-enough liberals and so on. The real and explicit exceptions were few (such as Iran and North Korea). So the world became axiomatically liberal according to its ideology.

This has been the most important moment in the history of liberalism. It has defeated its enemies, but at the same time it has lost them. Liberalism is essentially the liberation from and the fight against all that is not liberal (at present or in what has the potential to become such). Liberalism acquired its real meaning and its content from its enemies. When the choice is presented as being between not-freedom (as represented by concrete totalitarian societies) or freedom, many choose freedom, not understanding it in terms of freedom for what, or freedom to do what… When there is an illiberal society, liberalism is positive. It only begins to show its negative essence after victory.

After the victory of 1991, liberalism stepped into its implosive phase. After having defeated communism as well as fascism, it stood alone, with no enemy to fight. And that was the moment when inner conflicts emerged, when liberal societies began to attempt to purge themselves of their last remaining non-liberal elements: sexism, politically incorrectness, inequality between the sexes, any remnants of the non-individualistic dimensions of institutions such as the State and the Church, and so on. Liberalism always needs an enemy to liberate from. Otherwise it loses its purpose, and its implicit nihilism becomes too salient. The absolute triumph of liberalism is its death.

That is the ideological meaning of the financial crises of 2000 and of 2008. The successes and not the failures of the new, entirely profit-based economy (of turbocapitalism, according to Edward Luttwak) are responsible for its collapse. The liberty to do anything you want, but restricted to the individual scale, provokes an implosion of the personality. The human passes to the infra-human realm, and to sub-individual domains. And here he encounters virtuality, as a dream of sub-individuality, the freedom from anything. This is the evaporation of the human, and brings about the Empire of nothingness as the last word in the total victory of liberalism. Postmodernism prepares the terrain for that post-historic, self-referential recycling of non-sense.

The West is in need of an enemy

You may ask now, what the Hell does all of this have to do with the (presumable) coming war with Russia? I am ready to answer that now.

Liberalism has continued to gain momentum on a global scale. Since 1991, it has been an inescapable fact. And it has now begun to implode. It has arrived at its terminal point and started to liquidate itself. Mass immigration, the clash of cultures and civilizations, the financial crisis, terrorism, and the growth of ethnic nationalism are indicators of approaching chaos. This chaos endangers the established order: any kind of order, including the liberal order itself. The more liberalism succeeds, the faster it approaches its end and the end of the present world. Here we are dealing with the nihilistic essence of liberal philosophy, with nothingness as the inner (me)ontological principle of freedom-from. The German anthropologist Arnold Gehlen justly defined the human as a “deprived being,” or Mangelwesen. Man in himself is nothing. It takes all that comprises its identity from society, history, people, and politics. So if he returns to his pure essence, he can no longer recognize anything. The abyss is hidden behind the fragmented debris of feelings, vague thoughts, and dim desires. The virtuality of sub-human emotions is a thin veil; behind it there is pure darkness. So the explicit discovery of this nihilistic basis of human nature is the last achievement of liberalism. But that is the end, and the end also for those who use the liberalism for their own purposes and who are beneficiaries of liberal expansion; in other words, the masters of globalization. Any and all order collapses in such an emergency of nihilism: the liberal order, too.

In order to rescue the rule of this liberal elite, they need to take a certain step back. Liberalism will reacquire its meaning only when it is confronted once more with non-liberal society. This step back is the only way to save what remains of order, and to save liberalism from itself. Therefore, Putin’s Russia appears on its horizon. Modern Russia is not anti-liberal, not totalitarian, not nationalist, and not communist, nor is it yet too liberal, fully liberal-democrat, sufficiently cosmopolite, or so radically anti-communist. It is rather on the way to becoming liberal, step by step, within the process of a Gramscian adjustment to global hegemony and the subsequent transformation this entails (“transformismo” in Gramscian language).

However, in the global agenda of liberalism as represented by the United States and NATO, there is a need for another actor, for another Russia that would justify the order of the liberal camp, and help to mobilize the West as it threatens to break apart from inner strife. This will delay the irruption of liberalism’s inner nihilism and thus save it from its inevitable end. That is why they badly need Putin, Russia, and war. It is the only way to prevent chaos in the West and to save what remains of its global and domestic order. In this ideological play, Russia would justify liberalism’s existence, because that is the enemy which would give a meaning to the struggle of the open society, and which would help it to consolidate and continue to affirm itself globally. Radical Islam, such as represented by al-Qaeda, was another candidate for this role, but it lacked sufficient stature to become a real enemy. It was used, but only on a local scale. It justified the intervention in Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, the overthrow of Gaddafi, and started a civil war in Syria, but it was too weak and ideologically primitive to represent the real challenge that is needed by liberals.

Russia, the traditional geopolitical enemy of Anglo-Saxons, is much more serious as an opponent. It fits the needed role extremely well – the memory of the Cold War is still fresh in many minds. Hate for Russia is an easy thing to provoke by relatively simple means. This is why I think that war with Russia is possible. It is ideologically necessary as the last means to postpone the final implosion of the liberal West. It is the needed “one step back.”

To save the liberal order

Considering the different layers of this concept of a possible war with Russia, I suggest a few points:

1. A war with Russia will help to delay the coming disorder on a global scale. The majority of the countries that are involved in the liberal economy, and which share the axioms and institutions of liberal democracy, and which are either dependent upon or directly controlled by the United States and NATO, will forge a common front once more behind the cause of the liberal West in its quest to oppose the anti-liberal Putin. This will serve to reaffirm liberalism as a positive identity when this identity is beginning to dissolving as a result of the manifestation of its nihilistic essence.
2. A war with Russia would strengthen NATO and above all its European members, who will be obliged once more to regard American hyperpower as something positive and useful, and the old Cold War stance will no longer seem obsolete. Out of a fear of the coming of the “evil Russians”, Europeans will again feel loyal to the United States as their protector and savior. As a result, the leading role of the U.S. in NATO will be reaffirmed.
3. The EU is falling apart. The supposed “common threat” of the Russians could prevent it from an eventual split, mobilizing these societies and making their peoples once again eager to defend their liberties and values under the threat of Putin’s “imperial ambitions”.
4. The Ukraine junta in Kiev needs this war to justify and conceal all the misdeeds they carried out during the Maidan protests on both the juridical and constitutional levels, thus allowing them to suspend democracy, that would impede their rule in the southeastern, mostly pro-Russian districts and would enable them to establish their authority and nationalistic order through extra-parliamentary means.

The only country that doesn’t want war now is Russia. But Putin cannot let the radically anti-Russian government in Ukraine to dominate a country that has a population that is half-Russian and which contains many pro-Russian regions. If he allows this, he will be finished on the international and domestic levels. So, reluctantly, he accepts war. And once he begins on this course, there will be no other solution for Russia but to win it.

I don’t like to speculate regarding the strategic aspects of this coming war. I leave that to other, more qualified analysts. Instead I would like to formulate some ideas concerning the ideological dimension of this war.

Framing Putin

The meaning of this war on Russia is in essence the last effort of globalist liberalism to save itself from implosion. As such, liberals need to define Putin’s Russia ideologically – and obviously identify it with the enemy of the open society. But in the dictionary of modern ideologies there are only three primary iterations: liberalism, communism and fascism. It is quite clear that liberalism is represented by all the nations involved in this conflict except for Russia (the United States, the NATO member states, and Euromaidan/the Kiev junta). This leaves only communism and fascism. Therefore Putin is made out to be a “neo-Soviet revanchist” and a “return of the KGB”. This is the picture that is being sold to the most stupid sort of Western public. But some aspects of the patriotic reaction emanating from the pro-Russian and anti-Banderite population (i.e., the defense of Lenin’s monuments, Stalin portraits and memorials to the Soviet involvement in the Second World War) could confirm this idea in the minds of this public. Nazism and fascism are too far removed from Putin and the reality of modern Russia, but Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism will be evoked within the image of the Great Evil that is being drawn. Therefore Putin is being made out to be a “radical nationalist”, a fascist and an “imperialist”. This will work on many Westerners. Under this logic, Putin can be both “communist” and “fascist” at the same time, so he will be depicted as a “National Bolshevik” (although this is a little bit too complicated for the postmodern Western public). It is obvious that in reality, Putin is neither – he is not a Communist nor a fascist, nor both simultaneously. He is a political pragmatist in the realm of International Relations – this is why he admires Kissinger, and why Kissinger likes him in return. He has no ideology whatsoever. But he will be obliged to embrace the ideological frame that he has been assigned. It is not his choice. But such are the rules of the game. In the course of this war on Russia, Putin will be framed in this way, and that is the most interesting and important aspect of this situation.

The main idea that liberals will try to advance to define Putin ideologically will be as the shadow of the past, as a vampire: “Sometimes they come back.” That is the rationale behind this attempt to prevent the final implosion of liberalism. The primary message is that liberalism is still alive and vital because there is something in the world that we all must be liberated from. Russia will become the object from which it must be liberated. The goal is first to liberate Ukraine, and by extension Europe and the rest of humanity, who will likewise be depicted as being under threat, from Russia, and in the end Russia itself will be said to be in need of rescue from its own non-liberal identity. So now we have an enemy. Such an enemy gives to the liberalism its raison d’être once more. So Russia is being made out to be a challenger from the pre-liberal past thrown into the liberal present. Without such a challenge there is no more life in liberalism, no more order in the world, and everything associated with them will dissolve and implode. With this challenge, the falling giant of globalism acquires new vigor. Russia is here to save the liberals.

But in order for this to happen, Russia is being ideologically framed as something pre-liberal. She must be either communist, fascist or at perhaps National Bolshevist Russia. That is the ideological rule. Therefore, in fighting with Russia, or in considering to fight her, or in not fighting her, there is a deeper task – to frame Russia ideologically. It will be done from both the inside and the outside. They will try to force Russia to accept either communism or extreme nationalism, or else they will simply treat Russia as if it were these things. It is a framing game.

Post-liberal Russia: The first war of the Fourth Political Theory

In conclusion, what I propose is the following:

We need to consciously counter any provocation to frame Russia as a pre-liberal power. We need to refuse to allow the liberals to save themselves from their fast-approaching end. Rather than helping them to delay it, we need to accelerate it. In order to do this, we need to present Russia not as a pre-liberal entity but as a post-liberal revolutionary force that struggles for an alternative future for all the peoples of the planet. The Russian war will be not only be for Russian national interests, but will be in the cause of a just multipolar world, for real dignity and for real, positive freedom – not (nihilistic) freedom from but (creative) freedom for. In this war, Russia will set an example as the defender of Tradition, conservative organic values, and will represent real liberation from the open society and its beneficiaries – the global financial oligarchy. This war is not against Ukrainians or even against part of the Ukrainian populace. Nor is it against Europe. It is against the liberal world (dis)order. We are not going to save liberalism, per their designs. We are going to kill it once and for all. Modernity was always essentially wrong, and we are now at the terminal point of modernity. For those who rendered modernity and their own destiny synonymous, or who let that occur unconsciously, this will mean the end. But for those who are on the side of eternal truth and of Tradition, of faith, and of the spiritual and immortal human essence, it will be a new beginning, ABSOLUTE BEGINNING.

The most important fight at present is the fight for the Fourth Political Theory. It is our weapon, and with it we are going to prevent the liberals from realizing their wish of framing Putin and Russia in their own manner, and in so doing we will reaffirm Russia as the first post-liberal ideological power struggling against nihilistic liberalism for the sake of an open, multipolar and genuinely free future.

 

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Dugin, Alexander. “The War on Russia in Its Ideological Dimension: An Analysis from the Perspective of the Fourth Political Theory.” Open Revolt, 11 March 2014. <http://openrevolt.info/2014/03/11/alexander-dugin-the-war-on-russia-in-its-ideological-dimension/ >.

 

Curse of Victimhood & Negative Identity – Sunic

The Curse of Victimhood and Negative Identity

By Tomislav Sunic

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

On Fascism – Benoist

On Fascism

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Lucian Tudor

 

Translator’s Note: In the present brief article, Alain de Benoist sets forth a basic definition of “Fascism,” challenging by implication the unacceptable generalizations of this term by certain Liberal and Leftist scholars today. Benoist also makes it clear that Fascism is a time-bound phenomenon which arose in very specific circumstances, and is therefore not a metahistorical idea (as some pretend). This understanding allows one to differentiate it from other forms of Right-wing thought (whether we speak of Traditionalism, Revolutionary Conservatism, Identitarianism, or others) and also to recognize the necessity of doing away with the simplistic and outdated struggle of “Fascism” versus “anti-Fascism.”

***

Innumerable definitions of Fascism have been proposed. The simplest is still the best: Fascism is a revolutionary political form, characterized by the fusion of three principal elements: a nationalism of the Jacobin type, a non-democratic socialism, and the authoritarian call to the mobilization of the masses.

Insofar as it is an ideology, Fascism was born of a reorientation of socialism in a direction hostile to materialism and internationalism. Addressing itself to an electorate mostly of the Right, it has often had promoters among men of the Left. Neither racism nor anti-Semitism are consubstantial to it (Zeev Sternhell). In its concrete incarnations, it has been shaped by historical occurrences of the beginning of the 20th Century (the First World War, the Soviet Revolution), by the general frame of the epoch (the modernization of the global society), and by the nature of its electorate (essentially of the middle classes, sometimes with a proletarian component).

The experience of the trenches along with disenchantment by technology, Jünger has written very well, has marked a fundamental breakage. During the First World War, society appeared to divide itself into two groups: the combatants and the others. Returned from the front, the first had the feeling of having conquered rights over those others who had not fought. The combatants had believed in a society where the virtues of war (courage, the spirit of camaraderie, permanent availability) would also reign in times of peace. The patriotic rhetoric, when it is developed on a foundation of class struggle, could not be but a deceptive illusion.

After the Great War there had been seen, for the first time, the coincidence of nationalist exaltation and the (relative) disappearance of social differences. In the end, it is also with the First World War that the anti-democratic spirit “ceased to seek its principal supports in the past” (Georges Valois). An explosive mixture. The Bolshevik Revolution, at the same time, shows that a revolutionary movement can come to power by mobilizing the masses. It introduces the idea of the new man and imposes the model of political commitment of the priestly type; a political apostolate. The forms taken by Fascism to avert the menace of Communism would often be mimetic forms: they imitated those of the opponent so much so that they could effectively combat it (Ernst Nolte).

Behind a discourse at times traditionalist, understood as archaic, Fascism has been fundamentally modernist: it has encouraged and sustained all the developments of science and of industry, has favored the emerging technocracy, has contributed to the rationalization of the economy and to the institutionalization of the welfare state. To the extent by which it had glimpsed the abolition of the social classes of the 19th Century, and which, on the other hand, it had carried a will to power that it could not dismiss any of the tools placed at its disposal by techno-science, it could not act in any other manner. As Adorno and Horkheimer have already observed on the eve of the Second World War, Fascism, Communism, and the New Deal represented different versions of a project of social reconstruction where the State was called to play a principal function in the rationalization of the economy and in the reconfiguration of social relations.

At its foundation, Fascism is based upon the modern trilogy: State-People-Nation. All its effort is directed to making synonyms of these three terms, which are nowadays separated. Born over the sign of the Fasces, before anything else Fascism has wanted to appear like it. Thus it had wanted to bring together the social classes and the political families, opposed in another epoch, to consolidate the unity of the nation. This was at the same time its strength and its weakness. Obsessed by the unity, it has been the centralizer.

Pretending to avert the specter of civil war, it has engendered absolute hatreds, left as a fractured, irreparable heritage. Its Jacobinism, its subjective nationalism, is the source of all its failures: the one who tends to that unity necessarily excludes that one who does not allow himself to be driven to the unity.

That spirit of community, which has profoundly marked Fascism, does not permit Fascism to characterize it as its own. Fascism has not produced anything more than a particular version. In Fascism, the idea of community is vitiated by the conviction that that it must be animated and directed from the above, in a statist perspective, whereas a true community spirit is incompatible with statism.

The 20th century has without doubt been the century of Fascisms and of Communisms. Fascism was born of war and died in war. Communism was born of a political and social explosion and died in a political and social implosion. It could not have been Fascism if not in a given stage of the process of modernization and industrialization, a stage which now belongs to the past, at least in the countries of Western Europe. The time of Fascism and of Communism is finished.

In Western Europe, all “Fascism” today cannot be anything other than a parody. And the same occurs with the residual “anti-Fascism,” which responds to this phantasm with even more anachronistic words. It is because the time of the Fascisms has passed away that today it is possible to speak of it without moral indignation or complacent nostalgia, as one of the central pages of the history of the century which has just ended.

 

Source: Alain de Benoist, “El Fascismo,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea No. 67 (15 Mayo 2014), pp. 9-10; http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n___67._fascismo_i.

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De Benoist, Alain. “On Fascism.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 27 January 2015. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/on-fascism/ >.

 

On Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing – Gottfried

Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing

By Paul Gottfried

 

The death of Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing on January 25, 2009, brought an end to the career of one of the most insightful German political thinkers of his generation. Although perhaps not as well known as other figures associated with the postwar intellectual Right, Schrenck-Notzing displayed a critical honesty, combined with an elegant prose style, which made him stand out among his contemporaries. A descendant of Bavarian Protestant nobility who had been knights of the Holy Roman Empire, Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing was preceded by an illustrious grandfather, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, who had been a close friend of the author Thomas Mann. While that grandfather became famous as an exponent of parapsychology, and the other grandfather, Ludwig Ganghofer, as a novelist, Caspar turned his inherited flair for language toward political analysis.

Perhaps he will best be remembered as the editor of the journal Criticón, which he founded in 1970, and which was destined to become the most widely read and respected theoretical organ of the German Right in the 1970s and 1980s. In the pages of Criticón an entire generation of non-leftist German intellectuals found an outlet for their ideas; and such academic figures as Robert Spämann, Günter Rohrmöser, and Odo Marquard became public voices beyond the closed world of philosophical theory. In his signature editorials, Criticón‘s editor raked over the coals the center-conservative coalition of the Christian Democratic (CDU) and the Christian Social (CSU) parties, which for long periods formed the postwar governments of West Germany.

Despite the CDU/CSU promise of a “turn toward the traditional Right,” the hoped-for “Wende nach rechts” never seemed to occur, and Helmut Kohl’s ascent to power in the 1980s convinced Schrenck-Notzing that not much good could come from the party governments of the Federal Republic for those with his own political leanings. In 1998 the aging theorist gave up the editorship of Criticón, and he handed over the helm of the publication to advocates of a market economy. Although Schrenck-Notzing did not entirely oppose this new direction, as a German traditionalist he was certainly less hostile to the state as an institution than were Criticón‘s new editors.

But clearly, during the last ten years of his life, Schrenck-Notzing had lost a sense of urgency about the need for a magazine stressing current events. He decided to devote his remaining energy to a more theoretical task—that of understanding the defective nature of postwar German conservatism. The title of an anthology to which he contributed his own study and also edited, Die kupierte Alternative (The Truncated Alternative), indicated where Schrenck-Notzing saw the deficiencies of the postwar German Right. As a younger German conservative historian, Karl- Heinz Weissmann, echoing Schrenck-Notzing, has observed, one cannot create a sustainable and authentic Right on the basis of “democratic values.” One needs a living past to do so. An encyclopedia of conservatism edited by Schrenck-Notzing that appeared in 1996 provides portraits of German statesmen and thinkers whom the editor clearly admired. Needless to say, not even one of those subjects was alive at the time of the encyclopedia’s publication.

What allows a significant force against the Left to become effective, according to Schrenck-Notzing, is the continuity of nations and inherited social authorities. In the German case, devotion to a Basic Law promulgated in 1947 and really imposed on a defeated and demoralized country by its conquerors could not replace historical structures and national cohesion. Although Schrenck-Notzing published opinions in his journal that were more enthusiastic than his own about the reconstructed Germany of the postwar years, he never shared such “constitutional patriotism.” He never deviated from his understanding of why the post-war German Right had become an increasingly empty opposition to the German Left: it had arisen in a confused and humiliated society, and it drew its strength from the values that its occupiers had given it and from its prolonged submission to American political interests. Schrenck-Notzing continually called attention to the need for respect for one’s own nation as the necessary basis for a viable traditionalism. Long before it was evident to most, he predicted that the worship of the postwar German Basic Law and its “democratic” values would not only fail to produce a “conservative” philosophy in Germany; he also fully grasped that this orientation would be a mere transition to an anti-national, leftist political culture. What happened to Germany after 1968 was for him already implicit in the “constitutional patriotism” that treated German history as an unrelieved horror up until the moment of the Allied occupation.

For many years Schrenck-Notzing had published books highlighting the special problems of post-war German society and its inability to configure a Right that could contain these problems. In 2000 he added to his already daunting publishing tasks the creation and maintenance of an institute, the Förderstiftung Konservative Bildung und Forschung, which was established to examine theoretical conservative themes. With his able assistant Dr. Harald Bergbauer and the promotional work of the chairman of the institute’s board, Dieter Stein, who also edits the German weekly, Junge Freiheit, Schrenck-Notzing applied himself to studies that neither here nor in Germany have elicited much support. As Schrenck-Notzing pointed out, the study of the opposite of whatever the Left mutates into is never particularly profitable, because those whom he called “the future-makers” are invariably in seats of power. And nowhere was this truer than in Germany, whose postwar government was imposed precisely to dismantle the traditional Right, understood as the “source” of Nazism and “Prussianism.” The Allies not only demonized the Third Reich, according to Schrenck-Notzing, but went out of their way, until the onset of the Cold War, to marginalize anything in German history and culture that was not associated with the Left, if not with outright communism.

This was the theme of Schrenck-Notzing’s most famous book, Charakterwäsche: Die Politik der amerikanischen Umerziehung in Deutschland, a study of the intent and effects of American re-education policies during the occupation of Germany. This provocative book appeared in three separate editions. While the first edition, in 1965, was widely reviewed and critically acclaimed, by the time the third edition was released by Leopold Stocker Verlag in 2004, its author seemed to be tilting at windmills. Everything he castigated in his book had come to pass in the current German society—and in such a repressive, anti-German form that it is doubtful that the author thirty years earlier would have been able to conceive of his worst nightmares coming to life to such a degree. In his book, Schrenck-Notzing documents the mixture of spiteful vengeance and leftist utopianism that had shaped the Allies’ forced re-education of the Germans, and he makes it clear that the only things that slowed down this experiment were the victories of the anticommunist Republicans in U.S. elections and the necessities of the Cold War. Neither development had been foreseen when the plan was put into operation immediately after the war.

Charakterwäsche documents the degree to which social psychologists and “antifascist” social engineers were given a free hand in reconstructing postwar German “political culture.” Although the first edition was published before the anti-national and anti-anticommunist German Left had taken full power, the book shows the likelihood that such elements would soon rise to political power, seeing that they had already ensconced themselves in the media and the university. For anyone but a hardened German-hater, it is hard to finish this book without snorting in disgust at any attempt to portray Germany’s re-education as a “necessary precondition” for a free society.

What might have happened without such a drastic, punitive intervention? It is highly doubtful that the postwar Germans would have placed rabid Nazis back in power. The country had had a parliamentary tradition and a large, prosperous bourgeoisie since the early nineteenth century, and the leaders of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, who took over after the occupation, all had ties to the pre-Nazi German state. To the extent that postwar Germany did not look like its present leftist version, it was only because it took about a generation before the work of the re-educators could bear its full fruit. In due course, their efforts did accomplish what Schrenck-Notzing claimed they would—turning the Germans into a masochistic, self-hating people who would lose any capacity for collective self-respect. Germany’s present pampering of Muslim terrorists, its utter lack of what we in the U.S. until recently would have recognized as academic freedom, the compulsion felt by German leaders to denigrate all of German history before 1945, and the freedom with which “antifascist” mobs close down insufficiently leftist or anti-national lectures and discussions are all directly related to the process of German re-education under Allied control.

Exposure to Schrenck-Notzing’s magnum opus was, for me, a defining moment in understanding the present age. By the time I wrote The Strange Death of Marxism in 2005, his image of postwar Germany had become my image of the post-Marxist Left. The brain-snatchers we had set loose on a hated former enemy had come back to subdue the entire Western world. The battle waged by American re-educators against “the surreptitious traces” of fascist ideology among the German Christian bourgeoisie had become the opening shots in the crusade for political correctness. Except for the detention camps and the beating of prisoners that were part of the occupation scene, the attempt to create a “prejudice-free” society by laundering brains has continued down to the present. Schrenck-Notzing revealed the model that therapeutic liberators would apply at home, once they had fi nished with Central Europeans. Significantly, their achievement in Germany was so great that it continues to gain momentum in Western Europe (and not only in Germany) with each passing generation.

The publication Unsere Agenda, which Schrenck-Notzing’s institute published (on a shoestring) between 2004 and 2008, devoted considerable space to the American Old Right and especially to the paleoconservatives. One drew the sense from reading it that Schrenck-Notzing and his colleague Bergbauer felt an affinity for American critics of late modernity, an admiration that vastly exceeded the political and media significance of the groups they examined. At our meetings he spoke favorably about the young thinkers from ISI whom he had met in Europe and at a particular gathering of the Philadelphia Society. These were the Americans with whom he resonated and with whom he was hoping to establish a long-term relationship. It is therefore fitting that his accomplishments be noted in the pages of Modern Age. Unfortunately, it is by no means clear that the critical analysis he provided will have any effect in today’s German society. The reasons are the ones that Schrenck-Notzing gave in his monumental work on German re-education. The postwar re-educators did their work too well to allow the Germans to become a normal nation again.

 

——————

Gottfried, Paul. “Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, RIP.” Modern Age, Vol. 51, No. 3 & 4 (Summer/Fall 2009), pp. 326-329. Retrieved from: <http://www.mmisi.org/ma/51_3&4/gottfried.pdf >.

 

Mishima: Paleocon as Samurai – Raimondo

Yukio Mishima: Paleocon as Samurai

By Justin Raimondo

 

In Runaway Horses, Yukio Mishima’s portrait of a young right-winger and would-be assassin, the main character, Isao, is inspired by a pamphlet, The League of the Divine Wind, by Tsunanori Yamao—a work of pure imagination, albeit based on historical reality, which takes up all or most of Chapter 9. This is the story of the Shinpuren Incident of 1876, in which a band of rebellious samurai rose up against the “reforms” of the Meiji Restoration. These were radical traditionalists of a uniquely consistent sort: they disdained such Western inventions as guns and cannon, and wielded spears and swords to attack the local garrison.

It was a highly stylized gesture of defiance against the onset of modernity, just the sort of thing that would interest Mishima, whose aesthetics as well as his politics made him sympathetic to the motivations of the rebels, who chafed at the failure of the authorities to resist “foreign influence” and “expel the barbarians.” Mishima lists the outrages that inflame them, starting off with “In Meiji 3, permission was granted to an imperial prince to study in Germany.”

The traditions of the samurai class were being systematically dismantled: not only were their subsidies and subventions, which came out of the Imperial Treasury, dramatically reduced and eventually cut off, to add insult to injury they were told to cut off their top-knots and turn in their swords. It became a crime to carry a sword in public. For the followers of Oen Hayashi—who held white fans over their heads as they walked under electric wires for fear of contamination by Western emanations–that was the last straw.

Oen was a Shinto priest and scholarly defender of the old gods, whose zeal on their behalf inspires a group of young samurai. His views, propagated after his death by the League of the Divine Wind, are clearly Mishima’s, who sums up Oen’s politics thusly:

Cherishing as he did the ideal of glorifying the Imperial Tradition within the land and upholding the national honor in the face of foreign incursion, he was appalled by the vacillation of the Shogunate officials at the time of Perry’s arrival and also by the tactics of those who turned away from the policy of ‘Expel the Barbrians’ but tried to use it to overthrow the Shogunate. He became a recluse and gave himself over to the contemplation of occult wisdom.

Against the arrival of Commodore Perry and modernity, the leaders of the League approach the elder gods with a petition to act. The opening line of Tsunanori’s story sets the stage: “One day in the summer of 1873–the Sixth Year of the Meiji era–four stalwart men of high ideals gathered at the Imperial Shrine in Shingai Village.” They are there to consult the will of the gods in the ritual known as Ukei: in Mishima’s version, a fresh-cut peach branch festooned with paper pendants inscribed with questions for the gods is waved over the Sacred Mirror, and the answers drop from the branch like rain, or tears:

The first of these was in accordance with the wishes of Harukata Kaya and read as follows: ‘To bring an end to misgovernment by admonishing authority even to the forfeiture of life.’

Kaya was bent upon the use of argument, of subduing their enemy without shedding any blood but his own. He wished to insure that his admonition achieved its goal by emulating Ysautake Yokoyama, the samurai of the Satsuma Clan who, in Meiji 3, set the seal upon his heroic remonstrance by slaying himself with his sword as soon as he had delivered his petition. Kaya’s comrades, however, had misgivings about the efficacy of such a course.

The second appeal laid out before the judgement of the gods was “to cut down the unworthy ministers by striking in darkness with the sword,” i.e. a terrorist campaign targeted at the sell-outs and traitors who were delivering Old Nippon over to the foreigners. A poem written on the headband of the 16-year-old Tadao Saruwatari, sums up the feelings of the rebels:

Our land divided, sold to barbarians,
The Sacred Throne in peril.
May the gods of heaven and earth
Behold our loyal devotion.

The leaders of the League twice implored the gods, and twice the answer was the same: the time for action was not propitious. On the third try, however, the gods were apparently in a good mood–or, perhaps, a bad one–because they not only gave the go ahead, but deemed the League a divine army that was to spark a general rising. Their destiny sealed, the League set about making preparations. Nothing was done, of course, without consulting the Divine Will: the battle plan, the division of the forces and their various tasks, the timing–all were calculated according to the sanctions of tradition and the will of the war god Hachiman.

Numbering less than two hundred, they would take on the garrison of the castle of Kumamoto, defended by two thousand government troops. Perhaps some hi-tech firepower might have given them some advantage – say, a cannon or two – but, as Mishima notes, they hotly disdained using the weapons of the foreigners, and rode into battle with swords, spears, and halberds – although they also made several hundreds primitive Molotov cocktails using two bowls packed with gunpowder and gravel.

With the advantage of surprise – and surprise certainly describes the reaction of the garrison, as these oddly-garbed figures, bearing swords and spears, swarmed through the barracks – the League achieved a victory as sweet as it was short: all two thousand defenders fled “like frightened women.” Yet they soon regrouped, and, heartened by reinforcements, went on the counterattack.

The League fought valiantly, but, in the end, they were overwhelmed by superior numbers, not to mention the modern weaponry of their opponents. The defeated army of the gods, gathered together in the sanctuary of a nearby Shinto shrine, determined to fight on, and yet it soon became all too clear that resistance was futile. Government troops swarmed over the countryside like ants in search of sugar. Driven to the ground, the survivors took the only honorable course: they committed seppuku, ritual suicide, one-by-one and in groups. Young and old, priests and samurai, commoners and nobility–yes, and even one woman!–they all went into the next life without hesitation or regret, slitting their throats, falling on their swords, and disemboweling themselves in the gruesome ritual known in the West as hari-kiri.

This, for them–and for the author—was the supreme duty, the proof of their purity, and any other course would have been unthinkable, under the circumstances, and they did it as simply, as easily, as naturally as a Westerner would close his eyes and go to sleep. Their fate prefigured that of the author, and, as he wrote Runaway Horses, Mishima was no doubt already planning his dramatic denouement, an act that would shock the world–but not yet.

Mishima was a writer of extraordinary talent, and so prolific that I cannot even get a handle on how many novels he actually wrote: the number we usually encounter is 40, but that’s not counting the serialized “popular” novels, some of which were never published between book covers, and not thought of as serious by the author. In addition, he produced such a quantity of short stories, essays, plays, screenplays, poems, and polemics that it seemed as if, behind his byline, lurked a literary team rather than a single author.

In his personal life, too, the same energy was evident: at the height of his fame, Mishima was everywhere, socializing with the high and the low, appearing on television, religiously going to the gym where he devoted himself to body-building and kendo, at one point starring in a gangster movie, and traveling the world from Bangkok to Manhattan, reveling in life even as he dreamt endless dreams of death.

Born Kimitake Hiroaka, a small, spindly Mama’s boy, he grew up in wartime Japan a bookish odd-man-out, burdened with a morbid imagination and a predilection for perversions that included but were not limited to homosexuality. Much of his best known earlier work is largely an attempt to work through and come to terms with his childhood demons. Taken from his mother after a mere week or so of life, and forced to attend to his witch of a grandmother in her sickbed, he was not allowed to play with other children, especially boys, and was forced to stay inside playing with origami and reading. He soon devoured all the books in his well-read grandmother’s library: the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, as well as Oscar Wilde, and the poems of Rilke and the Decadents.

His first novel, Hanazakari no Mori (“The Forest in Full Bloom”), was steeped in the spirit and history of Ancient Japan: it consists of profiles of aristocratic figures from widely disparate historical eras. The Japan Mishima evoked was a memory of a time when the grasping egotism and “modern” crudity of contemporary Japanese militarists was unthinkable: When it was a “forest in full bloom,” Japan was a courtly society, where ancient forms were followed to the letter as a matter of course. Mishima’s language, studded with rare words like polished jewels, was elegant, archaic, and yet precise. As one of his translators put it: “He knew the exact word for everything.”

Mishima’s literary debut was overshadowed, however, by the start of the war–an event that transformed everything for the seventeen year old author. As Japan’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, Mishima and his school-fellows lived with the prospect of conscription—and certain death—hanging over them like a tsunami about to crash onto their once-peaceful beach. For the first time since a fortunate wind blew the approaching Mongol fleet off course–that, by the way, is where the League of the Divine Wind got its name–Japan faced the prospect of foreign invasion. The idea that they would die young, and gloriously, was part of the air they breathed.

Mishima became associated with a group of nationalist writers, the Bungei Bunka, for whom the war was a holy task. Known as the Roman-ha (Japanese Romanticists), their goal, in literary-emotional terms, was “purity of sentiment,” as Henry Scott-Stokes puts it in The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, while their politics consisted of an eclectic mix of Emperor-worship and Marxism: like Mishima, they pined for the Old Japan, which they idealized. They hated the zaibatsu (huge industrial combines that dominated wartime Japan) and Westernized politicians, valorized the samurai, and reveled in the “irony” that defeat, too, could be sweet if it was experienced as the denouement of a heroic gesture.

Mishima’s father, Azusa, was a demanding, unsympathetic character who had squandered the family’s money in an unsuccessful bid to become an entrepreneur: he regularly invaded the boy’s room and tore up his manuscripts, rationalizing his brutality with the view that writing was unproductive and could only divert his young son away from the straight and narrow. In spite of the boy’s literary prowess–he was already being praised by the Bungei Bunka as a genius–Azusa finally prevailed upon him to study law at Tokyo University. That in itself was a feat of some magnitude, since Mishima had always ignored his father’s hectoring as much as possible.

The reason for this unusual concession was no doubt because Mishima found the law intellectually challenging: but there was not much studying done that year. The war was moving rapidly toward its end, and air raids were constant. Students were yanked out of the classroom and mobilized to support the war effort: Mishima and his fellow future lawyers of Japan were put to work in a factory making kamikaze planes:

This great factory worked on a mysterious system of production costs: taking no account of the dictum that capital investment should produce a return, it was dedicated to a monstrous nothingness. No wonder then that each morning the workers had to recite a mystic oath. I have never seen such a strange factory. In it all the techniques of modern science and management, together with the exact and rational thinking of many superior brains, were dedicated to a single end: Death. Producing the Zero-model combat plane used by the suicide squadrons, this great factory resembled a secret cult that operated thunderously–groaning, shrieking, roaring.

This description of the factory appeared in Confessions of a Mask–the book that catapulted him to fame. Fame, however, was in the future: for now, he was just a lonely aesthete amid the unfolding disaster of wartime Japan. As he ran to the air raid shelter, he clutched the pages of what he thought of as his “last” novel, The Middle Ages, an historical tale based on the life and death of Prince Yoshihisa, the son of a Shogun who lived in the 15th century. Yoshihisa attempted a coup, but was killed in battle: what followed was a long period of chaos and fighting, known as the era of the Onin wars, that nearly destroyed Japanese society. Kyoto, the capital, was burned to the ground–a condition that was about to be replicated in contemporary Japan. The feeling of impending disaster was everywhere, and it was just like Mishima to translate this foreboding into a tale out of the fifteenth century.

Japan was slowly but surely being defeated, and as the Americans inched closer to the Japanese homeland, Mishima received the call to report for duty: he was being drafted. As it turned out, however, he was so sickly and thin that they rejected him, much to his relief: the military doctor mistakenly diagnosed him with incipient tuberculosis. Later, in Confessions, he would remark that he had been “forsaken even by Death.” He had escaped, and yet Death still haunted him: or, rather, the desire to embrace it haunted him. He had been denied a glorious death by the army doctor, but he believed he would meet his end in a final cataclysm, as enemy bombers dropped fire from the skies and Tokyo was aflame. “It was in death,” he wrote, “that I had discovered my real ‘life’s aim.’”

As the Japanese government prepared for surrender, Mishima was immersed in his books, writing his first published stories, and making contacts with older authors who would prove instrumental to his career. Hiroshima was devastated, and then Nagasaki: the Americans dropped leaflets over Tokyo laying out the terms of surrender. The Japanese government capitulated.

Mishima was in shock: the Emperor went on the radio to declare that he wasn’t a god, after all. Of this time, he wrote:

The war ended. All I was thinking about, as I listened to the Imperial Rescript announcing the surrender, was the Golden Temple. The bond between the temple and myself had been severed. I thought, now I shall return … to a state in which I exist on one side and beauty on the other. A state which will never improve so long as the world endures.

The death of his sister, Mitsuko, underscored the end of the world he had known: she succumbed to typhoid in October, 1945. The old Japan was crashing down all around him, but to this larger catastrophe Mishima was numbed and oblivious: he simply withdrew into his own private world. He was determined to become a writer, and not only that, but a literary star: one senior literary figure, to whom he brought his work, criticized him for his extravagant Romanticism, and asked him if he wanted to be an original or a popular author: Mishima unhesitatingly chose the latter.

The “reforms” of the MacArthur Regency, the economic and social tumult that surrounded him, did not, at the time, concern him: his family home had escaped any damage, and he hid himself away in what he called his “castle.” Amidst the physical destruction of Tokyo, and the disintegration of all the old values, including the aristocratic “courtly” literary traditions he and his fellows of the Roman-ha upheld, he wasn’t merely indifferent to it all, including the momentous political developments–he was determinedly oblivious. His focus was exclusively on the development of his unique literary imagination, and his efforts to break into the Bundan, the exclusive and inbred club of the Japanese literary establishment.

If Mishima was indifferent to such worldly concerns as politics, then politics weren’t indifferent to him. Postwar Japan was dominated by the Left, and the political trials and purges carried out under the occupation, with the full and enthusiastic cooperation of the Japanese Communist Party, extended into the literary realm. In the winter of 1945, as Mishima was gathering a book of stories for publication, a committee of leftist writers and critics issued an indictment of “literary war criminals,” among whom Mishima’s former mentors and sponsors figured prominently. This was followed by an official purge executed by the American occupation authorities.

Mishima’s effort to storm the castle of the Bundan met with intractable resistance: his association with the Roman-ha as well as his extravagant subjectivism, his stylistic archaicism, and his decidedly un-“progressive” subject matter all kept him out of print, albeit only temporarily.

Mishima was inwardly beset by all sorts of demons, which he mercilessly dissected in his famous Confessions, the book that made him as a writer. Yet he had a will of steel, and this was reflected not only in his ambition, but in his highly disciplined sensibility, which approached every task with a relentless concentration. Still a law student, he studied diligently and prepared for his entrance examination to the civil service with the same fierce concentration that produced reams of stories and a first novel, The Thieves, the story of a young couple that enter into a suicide pact, albeit not out of love for each other.

His career as a civil servant—he was accepted as a minor functionary into the Ministry of Finance—didn’t last very long, and Azusa bitterly opposed his decision to leave his job and become a full-time writer. But when it became apparent that Mishima would persist, his father turned to him and said: “Well then, go ahead, but make sure you are the best writer in the land.” Father and son, so unlike each other in every other way, shared a belief in this possibility. Mishima, for his part, was certain of his destiny: indeed, this certitude seemed almost fully formed from early youth.

Not long before his spectacular death, Mishima was asked by the Tobu department store, one of the biggest such establishments in Japan, to help put together a photographic exhibition of his life and work: it was displayed from November 12 – 19, in 1970. During that time, one-hundred thousand visited the display with it’s black-draped photographs arranged around an antique samurai sword that was to be the instrument of Mishima’s death a few days later. The catalogue, bound in black, contained an introduction by Mishima, in which he said of the exhibition:

I made only one suggestion: that was to divide my forty-five years of life–a life so full of contradictions–into Four Rivers, ‘Writing,,’ ‘Theater,’ ‘Body,” and ‘Action,’ all finally flowing into The Sea of Fertility.

This last was the title of his tetralogy, consisting of Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel, which covers the period from 1912 to 1975, and can be considered his literary and philosophical testament.

The rivers of writing and action flowed together in the evolution of his political views, from the non-committal anti-political stance of his early works, which are steeped in the personal and the subjective, to his fulsome embrace of Japanese nationalism, albeit of a unique sort.

John Nathan, in his introduction to the new edition of his 1974 biography of Mishima, regrets that his analysis of the writer’s political ideology was overshadowed by Mishima’s personal pathology–the obsession with death revealed in Confessions, and in much of his fiction, rooted in sado-masochistic eroticism. In re-reading the work he hadn’t opened in many years, Nathan confides he was “troubled by the skepticism my argument required me to sustain. In declining to accept Mishima’s words or actions at face value, I failed to recognize the courage and unflinching honesty that are there to be observed.”

In a piece published on New Year’s Day, 1967, Mishima explained that his Westernized lifestyle–he lived in a Western-style house, wore Western clothes, etc.–did not really contradict his nationalist sentiments because “My true life as a writer is in the pure Japan of the Japanese language I use every night in my study. Compared to this, “he averred, “nothing else is of any importance.” Nathan writes:

In the biography, my commitment to reveal Mishima’s nationalism as specious, and as a device for achieving death, prompted me to dismiss this claim as ‘a lame and silly argument’…. Today, I am persuaded, indeed moved, by the same logic I once ridiculed.

Mishima’s fate, Nathan continues, “now appears as one of two historical moments” that seem to have underscored the predicament of modern Japan. Not that Nathan gives up entirely his tiresomely predictable way of looking at Mishima through the lens of amateur psychology: after all, Mishima’s work is the very exemplar of “psychological” fiction, in that the real action is taking place inside the characters’ skulls. So that all the physical action – and there is a lot of that, too–proceeds logically from a clear albeit unique motivation. Yet there was a growing political consciousness, a current that flowed from the merging rivers of writing and action, that represented Mishima’s mature thought.

As he outgrew his exoticism, and shed the skin of a sensitive youth, Mishima underwent a remarkable transformation. One of his critics once remarked that what scared him about Mishima is that he seemed to have sprouted up so fast as a writer that he was all flower and no leaves. And there was something distinctly unhealthy about his extreme aestheticism, with its overtones of Wilde and Raymond Radiguet.

All that began to change, however, as he approached the pinnacle of his success: his novels were being made into films, and there was talk that he was up for a Nobel. For much of his youth, he had swum exclusively in the rivers of writing and theater: as for the body, the thin and sickly Kimitake Hiroaka, with his thin shoulders and pallid complexion, was banished, finally, like a ghost that has lingered too long on this earth, replaced by the chiseled physique of a dedicated bodybuilder. This led directly to the rising of the river of theater, especially when he posed semi-naked in a notorious series of photographs, one of which has him in the classic pose of St. Sebastian, tied to a post and stuck full of arrows. It was a most un-Japanese way of calling attention to himself, and this was made worse when he ventured onto the stage as an actor, appearing in a couple of cheap gangster movies. It was an embarrassment, but Mishima was clearly enjoying himself, and, for all his avowed traditionalism, his innate exhibitionism overrode the Japanese sense of propriety.

The last of the four rivers to swell from a stream into a rushing torrent was that of action, and it propelled him toward his fate. This was really, however, the river of ideology, which for Mishima was his own unique brand of Japanese nationalism: it might be called Japan’s version of paleoconservatism. He didn’t think of himself standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” Instead, he demanded that history must reverse course, and go back to that juncture where a wrong turn was taken.

For Japan, as far as Mishima was concerned, that juncture was located precisely. On February 26, 1936, when he was 11 years old, the young army officers of the Imperial Way faction, at the head of 1,400 troops, seized the Tokyo center and assassinated a number of government officials. They were rising against the power of the “Control” faction, led by Hideki Tojo and a group of old-line bureaucrats who would later come to be charged as war criminals and executed.

At the time, there was great division in military circles and the emperor’s court as to which direction Japanese expansionism ought to take: should they go eastward, and occupy China, or go north and take on the Soviet Union? The Imperial Way faction, being staunchly anti-Communist, wanted to make war on the Kremlin and build a Nipponese empire in the north. The Control group wanted to conquer the Chinese coastline and make its way inward to the Han heartland: this meant also taking on the colonial powers of the West–including the United States—whose interests in China and Southeast Asia were at stake.

The Imperial Way group believed that the Emperor had lost control to a cabal of bureaucratic technocrats, exemplified by Tojo, who had betrayed the traditions of old Japan in their rush to modernize. The Imperial Way solution was to appeal to the Emperor Hirohito to take direct control of the government, and dispense with his scheming ministers and other Westernizers: thus their name Koda-ha, or Imperial Way. They particularly resented to power of the zaibatsu, the great industrial combines that monopolized industry and extended their talons into the government and the Imperial Court. The Emperor, they believed, had been misled: their rebellion was a direct appeal to Hirohito – who firmly rejected their entreaties. Indeed, the Emperor directed the army to put down the rebellion, even as some councilors urged him to compromise: the uprising was crushed, its leaders committed seppuku, and the February Incident went down in the history of Japan was yet another eruption of Nipponese irrationality and “extremism,” like the Shimpuren Incident.

Mishima, however, was sympathetic to the rebels, and it is easy to see why. If the Imperial Way had won, and Tojo and his group cast aside, Japan would never have gone to war with the West, and the devastation of Japan, the occupation, and the radical process of Westernization would all have been avoided. Japan would not have been relegated to the role of an international castrati, forbidden to have a real army, and locked into a mandatory pacifism in which the specter of death had been banished, and, along with it, any sense of meaning, or so Mishima came to believe. “Surely some great God died when the Ni Ni Roku Incident failed,” he wrote. It figured prominently in his later works: the short story “Patriotism,” the prose poem “Voices of the Heroic Dead,” a play, Toka no Kiku, and also in Runaway Horses, where the hero, Isao, invokes it as the inspiration for his own plans for an uprising.

In “Patriotism,” the hero, Lieutenant Takeyama, is the commander of a unit that receives the order to move against the February rebels. As a friend and sympathizer of the rebel leaders, this puts him in a predicament: he will not take up arms against his comrades, yet is unwilling to disobey the direct order of the Emperor. He is shamed that he has been left out of the rebellion: The only way out is to commit seppuku. What follows is the longest, most detailed description of ritual suicide in Japanese literature, bloody and gory and yet strangely idealized. As Lieutenant Takeyama’s intestines are spilling out onto the floor, Mishima remarks: “It would be difficult to imagine a more heroic sight than that of the lieutenant at this moment, as he mustered his strength and flung back his head.”

“Voices of the Heroic Dead” was controversial with both the Left and the Right: the former because it valorized the kamikazee fighters as well as the rebel officers of Ni Ni Roku, and the latter because it criticized Emperor Hirohito for repudiating his own godhood and failing to support the Imperial Way. Here we are taken into a séance, in which the voices of the perished kamikazee pilots and the coup leaders of the Imperial Way group reproach the Emperor Hirohito: “Why did the emperor have to become a human being?” The ghosts of these departed patriots echo this refrain throughout the text. Mishima disdains the second half of the Showa era – Hirohito’s reign – as a time of national listlessness and a “smiling full-bellied peace,” that led to boredom and nihilism. Lassitude had set in:

Strength is decried, the body disdained
Pleasure has lost its substance
Joy and grief alike vanish in an instant
Purity is marketed, dissipation enfeebled
Feeling is dulled, sharpness blunted
Virulent and manly spirits have fled the earth….

This anomie is what he had succumbed to in his youth, and now was learning to conquer. The sickly Kimitake Hiroaka, who cowered in his room and watched the destruction of Tokyo from a distance, as if it were a play, longed for action, for commitment, for belief–and this desire was manifested in his emerging nationalist politics.

The emergence of Mishima as an ideologue of the Emperor system is widely misunderstood: he was not an authoritarian, but rather a critic of Westernized Japanese democracy, which was merely the old bureaucratic zaibatsu-dominated system wearing a “democratic” mask. He saw the Emperor and the Shinto system of Emperor-worship as the essence of the Japanese spirit. The postwar order emasculated Japanese culture, which had previously been represented by both the Chrysanthemum and the Sword: after the Defeat, however, only the Chrysanthemum remained. The Sword was permanently sheathed, the American-imposed “constitution” forbade any form of military activity, and Japanese culture was represented by such pacifistic activities as ikebana (flower arranging), while the darker side was entirely missing.

This dark side, however, was about to reassert itself, Mishima was sure of it, and he did his own part to help it along with the creation of his Tatenokai group, or Shield Society, a group of young patriots he gathered around him in reaction to the tumult of the 1960s, when the Left made giant inroads in Japan (and around the world). This tumult reached a crescendo in Japan with the riots, in the spring of 1960, that greeted the ratification of the US-Japan Security Treaty, which was opposed by both the radical Left and the nationalist Right, albeit for antipathetic reasons.

The student leftists, who took to the streets and battled the police, fascinated Mishima, who admired them for their style if not the substance of their pro-Communist politics. He went out into the streets and reported on the riots for the Mainichi Shimbun. “Patriotism” was written about this time, and his political sensibility began to be more fully developed. The Tatenokai – which he called “the world’s smallest and most spiritual army”—was the culmination of this trend in his thinking: together with these hundred or so patriotic young recruits, in their spiffy designer uniforms, he jumped head-first into the river of action.

Through his connections with influential Liberal Democratic Party mandarins, Mishima managed to get permission for the Tatenokai to participate in training sessions with the Japanese Defense Force. They spend weeks in the JDF training camps, and Mishima is in his element: the world of action. Yet that is just the beginning of his journey down this particular river ….

Mishima’s death is the most well-known aspect of his life, which seems somehow appropriate, given his life-long morbid focus on the subject. It is, however, unfortunate, because the irony is that he was such a creative force: his collected works fill some thirty-plus thick volumes. In his day to day life, too, he was a veritable tornado of activity: he did everything with high energy and intensive focus, whether it was his writing, his body-building, his extensive socializing with a wide network of friends and fellow writers. In the final months and weeks of his life, the pace of his normally hectic activity picked up: he rushed to finish the final volume of “The Sea of Fertility” tetralogy, which was published as The Decay of the Angel.

He had been planning his final gesture of defiance for years, and finally the day approached: he put all his affairs in order, and proceeded with his usual thoroughness and alacrity. Mishima’s initial plan was to somehow enlist the aid of the Japanese Defense Force, which, together with the Tatenokai, would occupy Parliament and demand the revision of the constitution. This fell through, however, when Mishima’s inquiries met with a total lack of interest on the part of JDF officers. The plan was revised: they would take a senior JDF commander hostage, force the authorities to gather the soldiers in a place where Mishima would address them, and then, together, the Tatenokai and the rebel soldiers would carry out a coup, place the Emperor in command of the nation, and reassert Japan’s signal cultural, political, and military identity.

It was a ridiculous scheme, sure to fail, and Mishima–who was no fool–must have known that. Yet he went ahead with it. We can only assume that he knew how it would have to end, and that he wanted it to end precisely as it did.

On November 25, 1970, Mishima was awake and up early with the songbirds. Yoko, his wife, was out of the house, having taken the children to school. He dressed carefully, donning a fundoshi and his Tatenokai uniform. He assembled the items he was taking with him: a brown attache case, which contained a number of daggers, some papers, and a long samurai sword. He placed the final manuscript of The Decay of the Angel on a table in the hallway, in an envelope addressed to the publisher: they were scheduled to come pick it up later in the day. He then made a few phone calls to friendly reporters, hinting that something big was in the works—without saying precisely what was going to happen—and told them to show up at the Ichigaya base of the Japanese defense force in the center of Tokyo. As the morning wore on, a young man in the uniform of the Tatenokai walked through the garden to the front door: Mishima greeted him, and handed him three envelopes, with instructions that these should be taken out to the waiting car and read by the four members of the Tatenokai who had been chosen to accompany him on his final dip in the rive of action. Then he gathered up his briefcase, and left the house.

General Mashita, commander of the Eastern Army, was waiting for his visitors when they arrived at the base, and they were led into his office. After a few preliminary pleasantries, Mishima took off his sword, hanging in its scabbard on his belt, and placed it against the chair as he sat down.

“Tell me,” said General Mashita, “what is this sword you have with you? Did anyone ask you about it on the way in? I am not very clear about the rules on swords, as we don’t carry them anymore ourselves.”

Mishima assured him it was okay, and began to talk about the sword: an antique, made in the seventeenth century by the famous classical smith Seki no Magoroku. “Would you like to see it?”

Mashita indicated that he would, and as he held it, one of the Tatenokai inched forward, according to the plan. Mishima said to the young man: “A handkerchief?” This was the cue, and Mishima’s young follower moved toward the General, who, oblivious to the hidden meaning of the scene playing out before him, returned to his desk to get a tissue with which to wipe the sword. There was more small talk as Mashita examined the blade after wiping it, remarking that he had never seen such a superb weapon in private hands. Mishima looked at his flustered acolyte, who took the hint and moved toward the General, stepped behind him and reached for the General’s neck ….

Mishima and his followers moved quickly: after binding and gagging Mashita, they barricaded the door with heavy furniture. What they didn’t realize, however, was that they were being observed through a peephole in the office door, which allowed anyone outside in the anteroom to look in and see what was happening. The gig was soon up.

Twice unarmed officers tried to break into the room and free the General, and twice they were repulsed by Mishima, who slashed at them with his sword, wounding several. At this point, the Japanese officers–who were confirming by the minute Mishima’s contemptuous dismissal of contemporary Japanese men as all chrysanthemum and no sword–asked what Mishima’s demands were. He readily complied with a written statement slipped under the door: the soldiers of the garrison must assemble in front of the headquarters no later than the hour of noon. Mishima would then be allowed to address them from the balcony outside Mashita’s office window. A ninety-minute truce would be declared, during which time Mishima and his men would not face attack from the JDF. If the officers would not agree, Mishima said he would kill the General and commit suicide. After some urging from Mashita, the officers radioed their commanders, who told them to handle the situation as they saw fit. They agreed to Mishima’s demands.

The soldiers gathered in response to an announcement over the loudspeaker system–and a siren wailed, as if in terror at what was to follow. The news media–already alerted by Mishima–was there in droves, and Mishima crowed: “What a lot of people for the party!”

The four Tatenokai appeared on the balcony, bearing banners that spelled out the conditions under which Mashita’s safety was assured. Mishima’s manifesto, printed as a leaflet, was dropped, and carried by the wind to its intended recipients, who glanced at it with curiosity but hardly any understanding: in it, Mishima appealed to the armed forces to stop being a “toy,” as mandated by the pacifistic Constitution, demanded the restoration of the Emperor to his rightful place as ruler, and complained “we have waited in vain for the Jieitai [JDF] to rebel. If no action is taken, the Western powers will control Japan for the next century!”

The manifesto ended with these stirring words (yes, stirring even to a foreigner):

Let us restore Nippon to its true state and let us die. Will you value only life and let the spirit die? … We will show you a value which is greater than respect for life. Not liberty, not democracy. It is Nippon! Nippon, the land of history and tradition. The Japan we love.

The toy soldiers of the Jieitai read this with incomprehension. Their bafflement only grew as Mishima himself appeared on the balcony. By this time the noise level, already high with the helicopters whirling overhead and the soldiers shouting to each other, reached a crescendo of abuse rising up from the ranks of the men Mishima had hoped to inspire. His plan was to speak for 30 minutes: seven minutes into his speech, however, he gave up. The Jieitai were rebelling, alright–against him. There was nothing to be done but carry out the final act of the drama that had been so long in rehearsals.

Mishima had jumped atop the parapet to be seen by the troops, and now he dropped down back onto the balcony. Inside Mashita’s office, the General’s gag had been loosened, and, as it became apparent what Mishima was about to do, Mashita yelled: “Stop!”

But there was no stopping him. Mishima stripped down to his loincloth, and knelt on the floor, expelling the air from his stomach and shouting a last salute to the Emperor. Then he forced a dagger into his stomach, and cut crosswise, in the prescribed manner. Seppuku is not butchery: it requires precision. As his entrails spilled out, he bent his neck to receive the death blow from Morita, his chief acolyte, who brought down the sword with much force–but missed his mark. Twice more Morita tried, and failed, to decapitate Mishima, instead wounding him grievously. One of the others came forward, who had experience in fencing and kendo, took the sword, and divided Mishima’s head from his body with a single clean stroke.

Today Mishima is looked upon as a fanatic, a crazy person, at best a talented yet flawed writer whose personal demons devoured him in the end: his politics are considered a diversion away from what he was really about, a mere façade for the darkness in his soul. Yet his view of Japan has been vindicated by the gradual rearmament of the Japanese military, and the rise of a new nationalism in Japan, which–while it has hardly inspired a new Shimpuren Incident, or a replay of the February rising of 1936–is reasserting itself. He wanted to live in a nation that had regained a sense of its self, its true self–not the consumerist imitative ikebana-Hello Kitty caricature, but the real, historical Japan, whose origins are lost in the mist of Mount Fuji, the dwelling place of the gods.

 

————–

Raimondo, Justin. “Mishima—Paleocon as Samurai.” Taki’s Magazine, 12 May 2008. <http://takimag.com/article/mishimapaleocon_as_samurai/print#axzz3PfJypKJo >.

 

Notes: For further reading about Mishima and his works, see Riki Rei’s Review of Naoki Inose’s Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima, and also the Yukio Mishima Webpage. For an introduction to Natsume Soseki, a famous Japanese novelist who was an influence on Mishima, see Hoang Nguyen’s discussion of Soseki’s Kokoro and Japan’s modernisation.

For further reading and a list of useful resources about modern Japan and its culture, see the page of Alexander Dugin’s “In the Country of the Rising ‘Do’.”

For those interested in researching Japanese literature in general (which is also useful for the study of Japan’s culture, history, and religious attitudes), we recommend the following two anthologies which were edited by Donald Keene: Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1955), and Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day (New York: Grove Press, 1956). Concerning important modern classic Japanese authors (other than Yukio Mishima) whose works have been translated, we can note the following for readers who are interested: Natsume Soseki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kyoka Izumi, Osamu Dazai, Junichiro Tanizaki, Eiji Yoshikawa, Edogawa Rampo, Yasunari Kawabata, Fumiko Enchi, Yasushi Inoue, Shuhei Fujisawa, and Hisashi Inoue.

 

Review of Inose’s Biography of Mishima – Rei

Review of Naoki Inose’s Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima

By Riki Rei

 

Naoki Inose
Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima
Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2013

Editor’s Note: This is a review of the Japanese edition of Persona, which is available now in English translation. I have read the translation, which appears to be much longer (864 pages) than the Japanese original. It is a treasure trove of information on Mishima. As an aside, the book’s unselfconscious frankness about sex and meticulous cataloging of genealogy and rank give one a sense of the consciousness of pre-Christian European society. – Greg Johnson

***

The Japanese version of Persona was originally published in November 1995 by Bungei Shunshu (literally meaning “the Literary Spring and Autumn”), an established and prestigious publishing house in Japan. The author, Mr. Naoki Inose, is a maverick and contentious figure who served as the vice governor of Tokyo municipality for a long time while also being a highly prolific and popular writer, having penned no less than 30 books so far, mostly on political, historical, and cultural themes. He was lately in hot water, being forced to step down from his official post due to alleged involvement in a murky financial scandal. His political and administrative stance, by post-war Japanese standards, is mainstream conservatism (center-Right).

The main body of the book has about 390 pages, including a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue. There is also a brief postscript and an extensive bibliography which together occupy another nine pages. Considering the length of the book, it is surprising that there are only four chapters. The 17-page Prologue is a novel-like start, the main character of which is a former schoolmate of Yukio Mishima, and whose father also happened to be an old acquaintance and old schoolmate of Mishima’s father Azusa Hiraoka (Hiraoka is the real family name of Mishima), both pursuing the careers of elite imperial government officials, but with quite different fates. The author’s intention in starting the book in this way was to highlight Mishima’s family background so as to shed light on the factors, both familial and historical, that shaped and molded the early development of Mishima’s quite unorthodox and eccentric personality.

Indeed, the author goes far further than most would expect, expatiating on the overall political and social picture of Japan in the late Meiji and early Taisho periods at the very beginning of the 20th century, which, in the author’s presumed reckoning, might better disclose and clarify the political, socio-cultural, and family backdrops of Mishima’s childhood, which was characterized by a mixture of docile and rebellious elements. The first chapter, called “The Mystery of the Assassination of Takashi Hara,” lasts almost 80 pages. Here the author talks about the historical background of the time in which Mishima’s grandfather Sadataro Hiraoka saw his career blossom then wither due to larger and uncontrollable political struggles.

Sadataro was a capable functionary favored and appointed by then the Internal Minister and later the Prime Minister of Japan Takashi Hara, nicknamed the “Commoner Prime Minister,” to be the governor of Karabuto (the Southern half of the Sakhalin Island, ceded to Japan by treaty after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and forcibly annexed by Soviet Union at the end of WWII). However, due to some suspicious financial dealing and mishaps which were seized by political foes to attack him, and political sectarian conflicts during the Hara administration and after his assassination, Sadataro was relieved of his governorship, and from then on, Mishima’s family’s fortune started to take an abrupt and sharp downturn.

The second chapter, “The Insulated Childhood,” shifts attention from the rise and fall of the Hiraokas to Mishima himself. Mr. Inose spends 90 pages on Mishima’s complex and seeming contradictory childhood, using narration interspersed by flashbacks, and talks about the family life of the Hiraokas, the inter-relationship of family members, religion, Mishima’s grandparents and parents, especially his fastidious and arbitrary grandmother and his bemused father, against the background of decline of the family’s fortunes as a result of political failures of his grandfather. The author devotes large passages to explaining such matters as Mishima’s poor physical health, his tender, timid, and self-isolating personality as a child molded by the uncannily tense family ambience, and his father’s desperate last-ditch effort that brought about his narrow escape from the military draft in his late teen years near the end of the Second World War.

In this chapter, the author also starts to introduce Mishima’s passion for literature, which developed quite early, and his first attempts at writing, as well as his friendship and literary exchanges with several likeminded youths who gave him encouragement and inspiration. One point meriting emphasis is the influence of Zenmei Hasuda, a young imperial army officer, a steadfast traditionalist and nationalist, and a talented writer who killed a senior officer for cursing the Emperor and then committed suicide near the end of the war.

In the third chapter, that lasts almost 100 pages, the author continues to elaborate on the young Mishima’s literary and private life, culminating in his crowning literary achievement, the novel Kinkakuji translated as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which the author rightfully perceives as a landmark of the first phase of Mishima’s literary life, which is characterized by richly colored, minutely detailed, and often unsettling depictions of the inner lives of men among the ruins of post-war Japan — a formerly proud nation wallowing in nihilism.

It is noteworthy that Mishima’s works at this stage are rather different from the second stage of his literary activities, in which his works display a clearly nationalist and Rightist perspective. While Mishima’s exquisite writing reached its peak (or near peak) quite early in his life, his understanding of and awakening to the Japanese identity and nationalism centered on the monarchist tradition underwent a gradual process of maturation and was still immature and inchoate at his first literary stage, i.e. the time around his writing of Kinkakuji and other non-nationalist works, in contrast to his second literary phase of more virile, robust, and nationalistic works from Sun and Steel to The Sea of Fertility. In addition, Mishima’s dandyesque personal life of drinking, socializing, and mingling with fashion-conscious rich girls as described in this chapter was also indicative of his less than mature literature and personality at his stage of his life.

Chapter four, being the longest of the four chapters at about 110 pages, stands out as a relatively independent account of Mishima’s later years, dealing with both literature and political/ideological developments, leading to his failed coup, featuring his impassioned exhortation to the military servicemen and his ritual suicide by seppuku. This part covers the Mishima most familiar and interesting to Western readers. The chapter covers his body-building practices, his continued literary endeavors, consummated by the masterpiece The Sea of Fertility,his nominations for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his increasingly active socio-political undertakings, including organizing his private militia troop, the Tatenokai (Shield Society), his serious and strenuous military training in Jieitai (Self-Defense Force), the post-war Japanese military — with the rather naïve aim of safeguarding the Emperor in concerted effort with the military in case of domestic unrest or even sedition at the hands of the leftist or communist radicals — and the events of this final day, November 25, 1970.

Although Persona has an overly long and detailed discussion of Mishima’s family history, the book still flows and proves an engaging read on the whole. The last chapter, though a bit overshadowed by the three preceding chapters, is definitely the most pertinent and fascinating of the whole, filled with interesting facts with insightful and trenchant observations.

Mishima’s veneration of the Emperor (Tenno) and ultimately the Imperial bloodline (Kotoh) of Japan, his candid criticism of Emperor Hirohito, and his final urge toward the coup and the subsequent suicide were already implied in his Kinkakuji, albeit symbolically as the impregnable top floor of the Kinkakuji pavilion itself. These themes became explicit in Voice of the Spirits of Martyrs published in 1966, which especially demonstrates Mishima’s mixed feelings if not overtly bitter resentment of Hirohito for his ignoble role in the failed Ni-Ni-Roku (Feb. 26) Coup of 1936[1] and his abject “I-am-a-human-not-a-god” announcement in 1945.[2] In the book, Mishima speaks through the mouth of a 23-year-old blind man, giving voice to the spirits of the Ni-Ni-Roku rebels and the Kamikaze pilots, i.e., the spirits of martyrs, speaking of the post-war economic boom coupled with the moral decay of Japanese society:

Under the benevolent imperial reign, the society brims with peace and stability. People smile albeit not without conflicts of interest and confusion of friends and foes. Foreign money drives and goads people, and pseudo-humanism becomes a necessity for making a living. The world is shrouded in hypocrisy while physical force and manual labor are despised. Youthful generations feel suffocated by torpor, sloth, drugs, and meaningless fights, yet they all move along the prearranged path of mundanity like meek sheep. People think about making money, even small amounts, for which they degrade their own value. Private cars multiply, whose stupid high speed renders people soulless. Tall buildings mushroom while the righteous cause and moral principles collapse, and the glittering glass windows of those buildings are just like fluorescent lights of implacable desires. Eagles flying high in the sky and break their wings, and the immortal glories are sneered at and derided by termites. In such a time, the Emperor has become a human.[3]

According to Mishima, the daily routines under the rapid economic growth of 1960s is but an ugly and hollow sign of happiness, all attributable to the fact that the Emperor Hirohito has proclaimed himself no longer a divine figure, a sacrosanct “Arahitogami”[4] but a mere human being devoid of sanctity. Mishima expressed this view via the collective voice of the spirits of the martyrs, that the Emperor has assumed a duality of image, one being the last sacred embodiment of the national myth, and the other being one kind smiling grandfather presiding over the economic rationalism of the current age, and it is the latter, the protector of the daily routines of the post-war Japan, that Mishima found intolerable, as the voice of the martyr spirits makes quite clear:

The reign of His Majesty has been dyed in two different colors. The period of the bloody red color ends with the last day of the war, and the period of the ash grey color begins from that day. The period of the authentic red color soaked with blood starts with the day when the utmost sincerity of the brotherly spirits was thrown away, and the period of that pallid grey color starts from the day of the ‘I-am-a-human’ announcement of His Majesty. The immortality of our deaths is thus desecrated.[5]

The “brotherly spirits” here refer to the soldiers of the failed 2.26 coup of 1936, failed by the Emperor Hirohito, by his headstrong refusal to understand and sympathize with their righteous patriotism and pure sincerity. Mishima also believed that the “I-am-a-Human” announcement of Hirohito in the wake of WWII rendered the heroic sacrifices of the lives of the Kamikaze Tokkottai (Special Attack Units) utterly futile and pointless.

According to the author, Mishima’s mother Shizue revealed a little secret about the writing of Voices of the Spirits of Martyrs on the occasion of the commemoration of the seventh anniversary of Mishima’s death, namely, the work was actually written one night. She recollected that Mishima handed the manuscript to her as he had always done and uttered “I wrote this in one stroke last night, and it’s now completed.” She read through it quickly, felt her “blood curdled,” and asked Mishima how he wrote this piece. Mishima answered: “I felt my hand moving naturally and the pen sliding on the paper freely. I simply couldn’t help it even if I wanted to stop my hand. Low voices as if murmuring could be heard across my room in the midnight. The voices seemed to be from a group of men. When I held my breath to listen carefully, I found they were the voices of the dead soldiers who had participated in the 2.26 Incident.” Shizue continued to remark that “I had known the saying about haunting spirits before but didn’t paid attention until that moment when I came to realize that Kimitake (Mishima’s real first name) was perhaps haunted by something, and I felt chills down my spine.”[6]

In the summer of the same year Voices of the Spirits of Martyrs was published, Mishima went to Kumamoto Prefecture on Kyushu Island, South Japan, and this trip would prove to have a decisively catalyzing effect on the consolidation of the nationalist and traditionalist ideology that guided his later literary and political actions, provided the urge for the writing of his final work The Sea of Fertility, and eventually paved the way for his suicide. The pivot of Mishima’s interest was the local Samurai warrior group Shinpuren (The League of Divine Wind) which was violently opposed to the various policies of westernizing reform enacted by the Meiji regime in the 1870s.

The original driving force of the Meiji Restoration was the idea of “Revering the Emperor and Repelling the Foreign Barbarians” (Sonnojoi), which stipulated that legitimacy came not from the Shogun but from the Emperor and that Western forces, epitomized by the dreaded “Black Ships,” must be decisively expelled.[7] Yet after abolishing the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate by uniting around the rallying call of “Sonnojoi,” the newly-established Meiji regime immediately and drastically changed its course and started to purse a policy of reform: opening Japan to the outside world, imitating Western ways, and curbing or eliminating the traditional customs of Japanese society deemed by the new regime as un-Western and uncivilized. New laws were promulgated by the Meiji government: the former Shizoku (Samurai aristocrats) were prohibited from carrying swords in public places, a sacred and unalienable right in their eyes, marking their distinguished status from the masses. They were also forced to change their hairstyles (cutting off the buns at the back of their heads). These were the direct causes to the Insurrection of Shinpuren in 1876 (the ninth year of the Meiji period).

The members of Shinpuren were so thoroughly alienated and infuriated by the Meiji government that they went to comical lengths to reject modernity. For example, when banknotes replaced traditional metal coins, they refused to touch them with their hands, picking them up with chopsticks instead. They made long detours to avoid walking under electrical wires. If no detour was possible, they would cover their heads with a white paper fan and pass hurriedly under the wires. They cast salt on the ground after meeting anyone dressed in western garb. When they decided to revolt against the Meiji government, they insisted on using only traditional bladed weapons like the sword (Katana), spear (Yari), and cane knife (Naginata), instead of the “dirty weapons of the western barbarians.”

This group, consisting of about 170 men, launched a night-time attack on the Kumamoto garrison. The garrison troops were caught off guard and initially panicked. But they regrouped and started to fire volleys of bullets into the armor-wearing, sword-wielding Shinpuren warriors storming at them. The samurai fell one after another, and altogether 123 warriors died in the battle or committed seppuku after sustaining serious wounds, including a dozen 16- or 17-year-old teenagers.

It was indeed a sad and heart-wrenching story. Why were they willing to die to protect their right to carry samurai swords? It is hard to comprehend it by the commonsense of our de-spiritualized modern age. The rebellion was mocked by newspapers in Tokyo as an anachronism even at the time, let alone in post-War Japan. Nevertheless, the Shinpuren samurai believed they were serving the cause of righteousness and justice, and it was their spotless sincerity and combination of faith and action that deeply impressed Mishima. The following passage his comment on Shinpuren in a dialogue with Fusao Hayashi[8]:

Talk about the thoroughness of thinking, when thinking expresses itself in an action, there are bound to be impurities entering it, tactics entering it, and human betrayals entering it. This is the case with the concept of ideology in which ends always seem to justify means. Yet the Shinpuren was an exception to the mode of ends justifying means, for which ends equal means and means equal ends, both following the will of gods, thus being exempt from the contradiction and deviation of means and ends in all political movements. This is equivalent to the relation between content and style in arts. I believe there also lies the most essential, and in a sense the most fanatical sheer experimentation of the Japanese spirit (Yamatodamashii).[9]

As hinted previously, the trip to Kumamoto and the examination of the historical record of Shinpuren gave Mishima a model and meaning for his future suicide. In fact, three years before his suicide he published a piece in the Yomiuri Shinbun, in which he stated rather wistfully the following words: “I think forty-two is an age that is barely in time for being a hero. I went to Kumamoto recently to investigate the Shinpuren and was moved by many facts pertaining to it. Among those I discovered, one that struck me particularly was that one of the leaders of theirs named Harukata Kaya died a heroic death at the same age as I am now. It seems I am now at the ceiling age of being a hero.”[10] From such clues, which are actually numerous, the author argues that Mishima started at about forty to reflect on his own death and probably settled on terminating his own life upon the completion of his four-volume lifework The Sea of Fertility.

The heavy influence of Shinpuren is manifest in the second volume of The Sea of Fertility, namely Runaway Horses, in which the protagonist Isao Iinuma, a Right-wing youth, holds a pamphlet titled The Historical Story of Shinpuren and was depicted as possessing an burning aspiration of “raising a Shinpuren of the Showa age.” And the full content of the aforementioned book was inserted into Runaway Horses in the form of a minor drama within a major drama. The historical background of the novel was set in early 1930s. The 19-year-old Isao attempts to assassinate a man called Kurahara, known as the king fixer of backdoor financial dealing, who was in Mishima’s eyes the representation of Japanese bureaucrats who considered the “stability of currency” as the ultimate happiness of the people and preached a cool-headedly mechanical if not callous way of crafting economic policies. Kurahara was quoted saying, “Economics is not a philanthropy; you’ve got to treat 10% of the population as expendable, whereby the rest 90% will be saved, or the entire 100% will die” — the self-justifying words of a typical ultra-realist and even a nihilist — a stark contrast to the pre-War ideal of the Emperor as an absolute patriarch, a profoundly benevolent feudal ruler who guarded the identity, history, and destiny of the Japanese people — a metaphysical figure that Mishima embraced, held dear, and vowed to defend and revive regardless of cost.

In sum, Mishima’s spiritual and historical encounter with Shinpuren and his military training can be viewed as elements in the design of his own death, as steps ascending to the grand stage. Shortly after concluding his military training, Mishima wrote a short book, A Guide to Hagakure, on Jocho Yamamoto’ famous summation of Bushido doctrine, Hagakure. Mishima’s Guide also illuminates his final action:

One needs to learn the value of the martial arts to be pure and noble. If one wants to both live and die with a sense of beauty, one must first strive to fulfill necessary conditions. If one prepares longer, one will decide and act swifter. And though one can choose to perform a decisive action oneself, one cannot always choose the timing of such an action. The timing is made by external factors, is beyond a person’s powers, and falls upon him like a sudden assault. And to live is to prepare for such a fateful moment of being chosen by destiny, isn’t it?! Hagakure means to place stress on a prior awareness and a regulation of the actions for such preparations and for such moments that fate chooses you.[11]

It is exactly in such a fashion that Mishima prepared for and embraced his self-conceived and fate-ordained final moment, to serve a noble, beautiful, and righteous cause.

Notes

1. Emperor Hirohito was angry at the assassinations of his trusted imperial ministers at the hands of the rebel soldiers. He vehemently refused to lend an ear to the sincere patriotic views of the rebels, refused to side with them, and immediately ordered the suppression of the coup and had the leaders tried and executed quickly.
2. Emperor Hirohito made this announcement partly due to the pressure of the US occupation forces, i.e. the GHQ, and partly willingly, as a cooperative gesture if not an overtly eager attempt to ingratiate himself with the conqueror.
3. Naoki Inose, Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima (Tokyo: Bungei Shunshu Press, 1995), p. 323.
4. Meaning literally “a god appearing in human form,” a highly reverential reference to the Japanese Emperor until the end of WWII.
5. Persona, pp. 323, 324.
6. Persona, p. 324.
7. American naval fleets commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry to force Japan to open itself to the world, which first arrived in 1853 and once again in 1854.
8. A famous and highly accomplished literary figure of contemporary Japan who is known for being flamboyant and highly contentious writer and literary critic. As a young man, he was a Leftist, he turned toward the Right-wing nationalism in the 1930s and remained a staunch and steadfast nationalist during the war and throughout the post-war years until his death.
9. Persona, pp. 327, 328.
10. Persona, p. 333.
11. Persona, p. 341.

 

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Rei, Riki. “Naoki Inose’s Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 15 September 2014. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/09/naoko-inoses-persona-a-biography-of-yukio-mishima/ >.

 

Notes: For further reading about Mishima and his works, see Justin Raimondo’s biographical sketch “Mishima: Paleocon as Samurai”, and also the Yukio Mishima Webpage. For an introduction to Natsume Soseki, a famous Japanese novelist who was an influence on Mishima, see Hoang Nguyen’s discussion of Soseki’s Kokoro and Japan’s modernisation.

For further reading and a list of useful resources about modern Japan and its culture, see the page of Alexander Dugin’s “In the Country of the Rising ‘Do’.”

For those interested in researching Japanese literature in general (which is also useful for the study of Japan’s culture, history, and religious attitudes), we recommend the following two anthologies which were edited by Donald Keene: Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1955), and Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day (New York: Grove Press, 1956). Concerning important modern classic Japanese authors (other than Yukio Mishima) whose works have been translated, we can note the following for readers who are interested: Natsume Soseki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kyoka Izumi, Osamu Dazai, Junichiro Tanizaki, Eiji Yoshikawa, Edogawa Rampo, Yasunari Kawabata, Fumiko Enchi, Yasushi Inoue, Shuhei Fujisawa, and Hisashi Inoue.