Race, Identity, Community – Tudor

Race, Identity, Community

By Lucian Tudor

Translations: Español (see note at the bottom of this page)

Modern Right-wingers who assert the importance of racial differences and advocate racial separatism, especially White Nationalists, face a number of philosophical challenges which they need to be aware of and ready to address. It is all too common to rely on presuppositions, assumptions, or implications without being prepared to respond to more in-depth issues or the complications involving the interpretation of facts and ideas. What is needed in the modern Right is a developed philosophy of race and culture, of identity and community, which clarifies the issues involved and which gives depth to their standpoint.

Without this philosophical or intellectual depth supporting their worldview in their minds, they are less and less likely to successfully challenge their opponents and convince others. The intellectual resources to establish this depth have already been provided by the thought of the German “Conservative Revolution” and the European “New Right,” but their contributions and ideas have not yet been fully recognized or utilized. We hope to bring to attention some basic philosophical problems and the necessity of being of aware of them and being prepared to address them. Of course, we do not pretend to investigate or tackle all the issues involving these topics and in enough depth; rather, our purpose here is to fulfill the aim of simply spreading an awareness of the most typical complications involved.

Ethnic Identity and Culture

Human beings are defined by their particular identities; the notion of an abstract humanity before which all particularity is unimportant is completely groundless. Yet it always needs to be kept in mind that identity per se is a complicated subject, encompassing both the details of individual or personal identity as well as various types of group or collective identities – ideological, political, religious, social, etc. Group identities may also overlap or conflict with each other (which still does not eliminate their validity), they may be voluntary or involuntary, and they may be inherited or chosen. It cannot be denied that a person’s identity as part of a collective group, even a racial or ethnic group, has a subjective dimension and involves conscious identification, just as it cannot be denied that some types of identity or aspects of them are inherited and inescapable.[1]

However, what concerns us here in particular is the role and function of ethnic and racial identity, and the undeniable relationship between these two forms of collective identity. “Ethnicity” has become a word with many meanings, encompassing both larger and smaller groups which are defined by the possession of certain common elementary characteristics, especially in the field of culture. Properly defined, an ethnicity signifies a people or a folk which constitutes (and is thus defined) as an organic cultural unity with a particular spirit and a particular historical continuity. In many cases, the term “nation” or “nationality” is synonymous with ethnicity, although it is always important to distinguish a “nation” in the ethno-cultural sense from the idea of “civic nation.”

However, it always needs to be kept in mind that culture exists on multiple levels, which means that an ethnicity or folk is not the only level at which culture operates; it is not the only valid form of cultural unity. This is why it is valid to speak of cultural groups encompassing multiple ethnicities (for example, a general Celtic culture), a larger Western culture, or, greater still, a general Indo-European or European culture. It is for this reason that Guillaume Faye is right to assert the position that one can identify both with local as well as with greater ethno-cultural groups: “to each European his own fatherland, national or regional (chosen on the basis of intimate, emotive affinities) – and to all Europeans the Great Fatherland, this land of intimately related peoples. The consciousness of belonging to both a ‘small native land’ and a ‘great fatherland’ is very difficult for contemporaries to grasp.”[2]

Each cultural entity is furthermore in contact with and sometimes connected with other cultural entities. Although cultures exist separately from other cultures, they cannot be regarded as forming different universes and they normally engage in contact and exchange ideas with each other. Each exchange results in the appropriation – or better, re-appropriation – of the cultural creations of another group in a new way based on the particular local spirit of a folk.

The different ethnic groups of Europe have generally engaged in a “cultural dialogue” with each other throughout their history, oftentimes drawing ideas, cultural objects and practices from other groups or from past cultures. Europeans have also exchanged certain cultural creations with non-European peoples, although this “dialogue” naturally occurred in a very selective and limited form because of the foreignness of these peoples. Thus one can, as Hans Freyer has done, justly speak of a “world-history of Europe,” while simultaneously upholding the fact that Europeans have always maintained their uniqueness and particularity.[3]

This fact of course, brings up the question of openness to other cultures, and whether or not it is valid for a cultural group to be either completely open or completely closed to others. On the one hand, liberals and globalists advocate complete opening, while on the other hand some (although not all) Right-wingers advocate total closure. In reality, neither complete closure nor complete openness are normal or healthy states, but rather a selective communication with partial (not absolute) barriers. It is a fact that, as Alain de Benoist pointed out, the “diversity of peoples and cultures exists . . . only because, in the past, these various peoples and cultures were relatively isolated from one another,” and thus in order to maintain their existence as different cultures, “communication can only be imperfect. Without this imperfection, it would lose its raison d’être and its very possibility of existing.”[4]

Racial Issues

The matter of race is closely bound up with that of ethnicity, which therefore also links racial identity with ethnic identity. It is not satisfactory to merely point out the reality of race, since opponents can argue that its reality is insignificant; one must assert its importance and function. Race is, of course, primarily a biological type, defined by certain physical-anthropological traits and certain subtle traits of character which are inherited.

There are also evidently many disagreements on racial classification, which is why one must always be prepared to defend one’s particular view of racial typology. We will only mention here that we believe that, contrary to certain scientists who insisted on asserting the primacy of sub-racial groups among Europeans, that European peoples as a whole, due to their close relatedness, form primarily a general “white” or European race. The existence of this common racial type among all European ethnic groups forms a bond between them and allows them to better relate to each other (in ways that they surely cannot relate to non-white peoples). This fact certainly does not eliminate differences between European groups, but to deny the racial relatedness of European peoples is akin to and just as incorrect as denying the existence of a general European culture and type.[5]

However, it also needs to be mentioned that race should not be seen in a simplistic biological sense, since it has an important and undeniable sociological function. Race has a spiritual dimension, permeating society and culture, due to the fact that racial type is also defined by its style of expression. Race is a force “which has deposited itself in man’s bodily and psychic existence, and which confers an intrinsic norm upon all the expressions of a culture, even the highest, most individual creations.”[6] This does not mean that culture and society can be reduced to race, which would be a fallacious biological reductionism, since many cultural and social changes occur independently of race and because of multiple factors. Nevertheless it is clear that racial type is an important influence on the nature of culture and society (which may themselves convey a reciprocal influence on race), even if it is one influence among a number of others.[7]

Thus, to quote Nicolas Lahovary, “the first explanation [of history] is generally found in the nature of a human being and his derives, in all the cases where he acts as a collective being, from the nature of his people. The latter, in turn, depends on the race that imprints its seal upon it.”[8] Therefore, it is evident from this that since any significant level of racial miscegenation transforms the basic structure of a racial type, it also transforms ethnic type; a concrete change in racial background causes a fundamental change in identity. The notion that culture and ethnicity can exist entirely independently of race can thus be seen as naïve and ill-founded; ethno-cultural type and identity is strongly influenced by race, even by racial phenotype alone, with which it has a psychological association.

The problem of miscegenation, however, is not readily solved. Anyone who believes in the importance of racial differences and in the separation of racial groups[9] must be prepared to challenge the “multiculturalist” argument that racial miscegenation is acceptable and normal due to its incidence all throughout history. Without touching upon the reasons for the occurrence of miscegenation, we must remind our readers that it is necessary to argue, on the basis of racial principles and values which hold a meta-historical value, that miscegenation, despite its presence throughout history, is a deviation from normality, not an expression of it. Maintaining stability in racial type was regarded as the norm in most traditional societies.[10]

Likewise, the notion that miscegenation is beneficial and brings about positive transformations (and is thus desirable) is of course entirely lacking in foundations, not only because race-mixing is usually associated with negative changes but also because it is completely unnecessary for positive transformation, as such transformations often occur within homogeneous populations.

It needs to be emphasized, in this regard, that evoking mere biological racial survival or preservation – as is commonly done by White Nationalists – is by itself never a sufficient argument against multiculturalism (or, more precisely, multiracialism). It always needs to be contended that even if, theoretically, the white or European race could survive in the presence of rampant multiculturalism and multiracialism, multiracial society would still be problematic.

The racial type can only live and thrive when it is able to express itself, to live in accordance with its own inner being and nature, in a homogeneous society without psychological and sociological interference from the immediate presence of other races. Just as a unique cultural type and spirit cannot survive when it is completely merged with other cultures, so a unique racial expressive style is unfulfilled and altered in a multiracial society; it denies a race complete fulfillment in its own way of being. This means that racial being only truly manifests itself in a homogeneous community, and is distorted or harmed by social mixing (the “integration” of different races). Furthermore, as Benoist pointed out, mixing can be opposed not only for biological but also for socio-cultural reasons:

In fact, hostility to miscegenation may very well be inspired by cultural or religious considerations. . . . Moreover, it is well known that in societies where there are many interracial marriages, the social status of these married couples depends, to a large extent, on their closeness to the dominant racial phenotype — all of which impacts on the marriage and on genetic selection.[11]

The Importance of Community

As previously implied, racial identity and ethnic identity only find their full meaning and validity in the presence of a sense of organic spiritual community. Of course, similarity in racial and ethnic type among the people contributes to their sense of organic community, but the latter also in turn influences the collective identities based on the former. This type of community mentioned here can be understood better by distinguishing the idea of community (Gemeinschaft) from that of society (Gesellschaft), as in the terminology of Ferdinand Tönnies.[12]

A true community exists where a group of people feel an organic sense of belonging and solidarity, with the existence of psychological bonds between each other, whereas a society is a mere mass or collection of essentially disconnected individuals. In society, bonds between individuals are superficial and mechanical (hence also their transitory nature). On the other hand, in organic community, in Othmar Spann’s words, “individuals may no longer be looked upon as self-sufficing and independent entities; the energy of their being inheres in their spiritual interconnexion, in the whole . . .”[13]

This stands in contrast to liberal individualism – which, in theory, means regarding society as nothing more than a sum of its parts, and, in social life, means the fundamental feeling of separation between individuals. The traditional holistic view of society holds that the normal state of human social order is thus the spiritual community and not the individualistic society, that the community is higher than the individual. This, of course, does not lead to totalitarianism or deny the importance of the individual personality, which is given value within the context of community life.[14] Rather, holism rejects individualism as a perversion of social life and a negative deviation, as opposed to being a normal condition.

Individualism results in the atomization of social life, in the disintegration of the feeling of community and the sense of spiritual bonds. All sense of community is of course never fully lost, since it is inherent in all human societies, but it can be weakened or harmed, with the consequences being that an active sense of the common good and interdependence between all the members of the community deteriorates or disappears entirely.[15] It signifies, in short, departing from the organic community into the modern society. To quote Edgar Julius Jung, in a description that is even more valid today than it was in his time, “the sum of men with equal rights forms the modern [Western] society. Without the spirit of true community, without inner binding, they live in dumb spitefulness beside one another. Formal courtesy and badly warmed up humanity conceal strenuous envy, dislike, and joylessness . . .”[16]

Consequently, as Tomislav Sunić wrote, the individualistic society of “liberal countries gradually leads to social alienation, the obsession with privacy and individualism, and most important, to ethnic and national uprootedness or Entwurzelung.”[17] In other words, collective identities – such as ethnic and racial identities – are destabilized or dissolved in an atomized individualistic society due to people’s lack of community-feeling and solidarity. Without the organic sense of community and spiritual bonds, peoples are disintegrated and transformed into a mass of individuals. Racial and ethnic identity can no longer have the meaning it once had in past social forms.

However, a return to community is always possible; social formlessness is not a permanent condition. It is therefore clear that one of the key tasks of the modern Right is the battle for the restoration of the living community, to validate collective identities. It is likewise an intellectual necessity to constantly reassert the holistic vision which values the organic spiritual community and which rejects individualism as an error. A failure to do so can only mean a failure to carry out one’s ideas to the fullest extent, to fully defend one’s worldview. With the fundamental values of race, ethnos, and tradition must always be included the community, which binds them all into a higher unity. As Freyer once wrote:

Man is free when he is free in his Volk, and when it is free in its realm. Man is free when he is part of a concrete collective will, which takes responsibility for its history. Only reality can decide whether such a collective will exist, a will that binds men and endows their private existence with historical meaning.[18]

Concluding Remarks

To conclude this discussion, we wish to reemphasize certain essential points argued for above for the purpose of clarity:

(1) Ethnicities exist as distinct cultural entities, although cultural and ethnic groups exist on both smaller and larger levels, which is why one can speak of both European peoples and a single European people.

(2) Cultures generally communicate with each other and exchange creations; they are normally not fully closed from other cultures. Under normal conditions this communication does not eliminate their uniqueness and existence as separate cultures due to the naturally selective and limited nature of cultural dialogue; only complete openness, which is abnormal, eliminates particularity.

(3) Racial type has an important sociological function, making its mark on both culture and ethnicity. Race is a factor in ethnic identity; to change the racial background of an ethnicity also changes its character and identity. The survival of a particular ethno-cultural identity thus depends on resisting race-mixing, which negatively transforms racial type.

(4) Racial miscegenation, however, cannot be opposed merely by evoking the notion of preservation, but must be opposed on principle. The mixing of races must be rejected as a deviation from normal social order; racial homogeneity is required for ethno-cultural stability.

(5) Finally, racial and ethnic identity finds meaning only when there exists a sense of belonging to a spiritual community, which is itself augmented by ethnic and racial homogeneity. In individualistic liberal societies where the original sense of organic community is weakened, ethnic bonds and identity are weakened as well.

What we have provided here thus far is merely an introduction to some essential concepts of the European New Right. By writing this essay, we hope to see these concepts be more frequently utilized so that not only do the arguments of White Nationalists improve, but so that they are also better understood. The way forward – towards changing the social reality and overcoming liberalism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism – exists first in the realm of thought, in the ability to successfully challenge the dominant ideology on the intellectual plane. Then, and only then, will the hegemony of liberalism begin to collapse.

Notes

[1] For a more in-depth – if somewhat unsatisfactory with certain topics (particularly race and ethnicity) – discussion of the problem of identity, see Alain de Benoist, “On Identity,” Telos, Vol. 2004, No. 128 (Summer 2004), pp. 9–64. http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/on_identity.pdf.

[2] Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (London: Arktos, 2011), p. 143. See also Benoist, “On Identity,” pp. 46–51.

[3] See the overview of Hans Freyer’s Weltgeschichte Europas in Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 330 ff.

[4] Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?” Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 114 (Winter 1999), pp. 46–47. http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf. On the issue of cultural openness, see also Benoist, “Confronting Globalization,” Telos, Vol. 1996, No. 108, (Summer 1996), pp. 117–37. http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/confronting_globalization.pdf.

[5] For a discussion of the racial and cultural unity and relatedness of all Europeans, see for example the comments in Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, 2nd edition (London: Arktos, 2013), pp. 236 ff. This position has also been argued for by many other New Right authors (including Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Pierre Krebs, Dominique Venner, Pierre Vial, etc.).

[6] Hans Freyer, “Tradition und Revolution im Weltbild,” Europäische Revue 10 (1934), pp. 74–75. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 263.

[7] Another source which readers may reference on this matter is Michael O’Meara, “Race, Culture, and Anarchy,” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 35–64. http://toqonline.com/archives/v9n2/TOQv9n2OMeara.pdf.

[8] Nicolas Lahovary, Les peuples européens: leur passé ethnologique et leurs parentés réciproques,d’après les dernières recherches sanguines et anthropologiques (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), p. 35. Quoted in Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 21, n. 13.

[9] A position which is, needless to say, not equivalent to “racism” (whose distinguishing feature is the belief in racial superiority and hierarchy, not merely the belief that races are different and should live separately), as Alain de Benoist among other New Right authors have pointed out.

[10] See for example: the chapters “Life and Death of Civilizations” and “The Decline of Superior Races” in Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1995); the commentaries in Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age (London: Arktos Media, 2010); the chapter “The Beauty and the Beast: Race and Racism in Europe” in Tomislav Sunić, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).

[11] Benoist, “What is Racism?,” p. 34.

[12] See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (London and New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2002). For a good overview of Tönnies’s ideas, see Alain de Benoist and Tomislav Sunić, “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: A Sociological View of the Decay of Modern Society,” Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1994). http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain6.html.

[13] Othmar Spann, Types of Economic Theory (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 61.

[14] As O’Meara noted, “emphasis on the social constituents of individualism by no means implies a hostility to personalism or a penchant for a faceless collectivism” (New Culture, New Right, pp. 113–14, n. 31), meaning that the rejection of individualism and the valuing of the community over the individual does not imply absolute and unlimited collectivism. Many other writers associated with the Conservative Revolution as well as the New Right have made this point as well.

[15] It must be clarified that this does not mean that every individual person who is individualist is necessarily an immoral person, or a person of bad quality. As Edgar Julius Jung pointed out, “he [the individualist] can be, personally, also a man striving for the good; he may even pay attention to and maintain the existing morals (mores). But he does not have any more the living connection with the significance of these morals” (The Rule of the Inferiour, vol. I [Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995], p. 53). Thus one can still maintain that individualism essentially means the “splitting-up” of the community, the weakening of bonds and solidarity which are essential to the existence of the true community. As Jung wrote, “community-spirit without a feeling-oriented connectedness with the community, without a supraindividualistic [above the individual] value-standard, is an illusion” (Ibid., p. 134).

[16] Ibid., p. 271.

[17] Tomislav Sunić, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, 3rd edition (London: Arktos, 2010), p. 128.

[18] Hans Freyer, Revolution von Rechts (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1931), p. 69. Quoted in Hajo Funke and Elliot Yale Neaman, The Ideology of the Radical Right in Germany: Past and Present (Minneapolis: Institute of International Studies, College of Liberal Arts, 1991), p. 5.

 

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Tudor, Lucian. “Race, Identity, Community.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 6 August 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/race-identity-community/ >.

Note: This essay by Tudor has also been translated into Spanish as “Raza, Identidad, Comunidad” (published online 17 March 2014 by Fuerza Nacional Identitaria). We have also made this translated file available on our site here: Raza, Identidad, Comunidad

On the matters discussed in the above essay, see also a more complete exposition in Lucian Tudor, “The Philosophy of Identity: Ethnicity, Culture, and Race in Identitarian Thought,” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 83-112.

 

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Race, Culture, & Anarchy – O’Meara

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

Race, Culture, and Anarchy

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

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

 

What is Racism? – Benoist

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

What is Racism?

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

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

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

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

 

Europe vs. the West – Devlin

Europe vs. the West

By F. Roger Devlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From this Krebs infers that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Added Notes:

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

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

 

From Nihilism to Tradition – O’Meara

From Nihilism to Tradition

By Michael O’Meara

Histoire et tradition des européennes:
30,000 ans d’identité
Dominique Venner
Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2002

I. Race of Blood, Race of Spirit

In the United States, nationalists take their stand on the question of race, arguing that it denotes meaningful differences between subspecies, that these differences have significant behavioral and social ramifications, and that the present threat to white racial survival constitutes the single, most vital issue facing our people. In Europe, by contrast, our counterparts pursue a somewhat different strategy. Against the antiwhite forces of multiculturalism, Third World immigration, feminism, and globalization, European nationalists tend to privilege not race per se, but the defense of their cultural/historical identity.

This identitarian emphasis might be explained by the absence in Europe of “First Amendment rights” and hence of the freedom to treat racial questions forthrightly. But there is, I think, another, more interesting reason for these transatlantic differences: namely, that European nationalists define race not simply as a matter of blood, but also as a spiritual—that is, as a historical and cultural—phenomenon. Implicit in this view is the assumption that the body is inseparable from the spirit animating it, that biological difference, as a distinct vitality, is another form of spiritual difference, and that the significance of such differences (given that man is a spiritual being, not merely an animal) is best seen in terms of culture and history rather than nineteenth-century biological science.

Race, then, may be the necessary organic substratum to every historically and culturally distinct people, but its biological properties, however primordial, are only the form, not the substance, of its spiritual manifestation. Thus, whilst we Americans search for psychological, sociological, conspiratorial, or political explanations to account for the racially self-destructive behavior of our people, Europeans look to the loss of their culture and tradition—and the identity they define.

II. Dominique Venner
These distinctions reflect not just strategic differences between US and continental nationalisms but the larger civilizational divide separating America from Europe—and hence their different historical trajectories. This is especially evident in the fact that Europeans of all political persuasions are presently embarked on an epoch-making project—a politically united Europe—that promises them dominance in tomorrow’s world. There is, moreover, real debate about how the European project is to be realized, especially in France, where the will to power is most developed. The New Class forces in control of the European Union, as might be expected, favor the liberal, economic, and quantitative principles that are leading white people everywhere to ruin, envisaging Europe as a multiracial civilization based on free markets, unguarded borders, and an ethnocidal humanitarianism. Against them, the various anti-system parties challenging the “liberal-democratic” order of money imposed on Europe in 1945, along with hundreds of New Right, far Right, revolutionary nationalist, and revolutionary conservative formations making up the Right’s extra-parliamentary wing, marshal an array of persuasive counter-arguments and do so not simply in the language of race. For unlike their New World homologues, these anti-liberals have the millennia-long tradition of Europe’s race-culture to buttress their opposition.

It is as part of this larger debate on Europe that Dominique Venner’s Histoire et tradition des européennes: 30 000 ans d’identité (History and Tradition of the Europeans: 30,000 Years of Identity) is to be situated. Few living writers are better qualified than Venner to speak for the white men of the West. For five decades, on paper and on numerous battlefields, he has earned the right to do so. His first arena in service to the European cause was French Algeria, where he served as an elite paratrooper. Later, in the 1960s, after discovering that the cosmopolitan forces of international capital had captured all the seats of power, he fought on another front, playing a leading role in the period’s far-right campaigns. Besides getting to know more than one French prison, he helped launch the metapolitical career of the “European New Right” (or “New Culture”), which has since become the chief ideological opponent of the Judeo-liberal forces allied with le parti américain.

In addition to having shown courage and integrity under fire, Venner is a favorite of the muses, having authored more than forty books and innumerable articles on the most diverse facets of the European experience. Most of his books are works of historical popularization. His books on Vichy France, however, rank with the most important scholarly contributions to the field, as do his numerous books on firearms and hunting (one of which has been translated into English). Venner’s military history of the Red Army (Histoire de l’Armée Rouge 1917-1924) won the coveted prize of the Académie Française. His Le coeur rebel, a memoir of his years as a paratrooper in Algeria and a militant in the thick of Parisian nationalist politics during the 1960s, I think is one of the finest works of its kind. Venner has also founded and edited several historical reviews, the latest being the Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, whose web address is http://www.n-r-h.net/.

In his most recent work, Histoire et tradition des européennes, this gifted European turns to his people’s distant past to answer the great questions posed by their uncertain future.

III. Nihilism

Writing at the advent of the new millennium, Venner notes that for the first time in history, Europeans no longer dominate the land of their fathers, having lost control of their borders, their institutions, and the very means of reproducing themselves as a people. He characterizes the present period as one of cultural chaos and racial masochism. No fluke of fate, this dark age culminates a long period of spiritual upheaval, in which Europeans have been severed from their roots and forced to find themselves in all the wrong places, including the negation of themselves. The loss of meaning and purpose fostered by this upheaval in which traditional forms of identity have given way to false ones, Venner calls “nihilism.”

For Nietzsche, the most prominent popularizer of the term, nihilism is a product of “God’s death,” which undermines Christian belief and leaves the world without a sense of purpose. Venner sees it in somewhat broader terms, designating not simply the loss of religious belief, but the loss of the larger cultural heritage as nihilism’s principal source. In this sense, nihilism subverts those transcendent references that formerly oriented the Occident, leaving modern man with a disenchanted world of materialist satisfactions and scientific certainties, but indifferent to “all the higher values of life and personality.” Given its focus on the physical basis of existence, nihilism fosters a condition devoid of sense, form, or order and hence one deprived of those standards that might aid us in negotiating the great trials of our age. An especially dire consequence of this loss of transcendence is a civilizational crisis in which the survival of our race becomes a matter of general indifference.

Venner traces nihilism’s roots to the advent of Spengler’s “Faustian civilization,” which began innocently enough when Saint Thomas introduced Aristotelian logic to Christian theology, privileging thereby the forces of rationality. Because Christianity held that there was a single truth and a single spiritual authority (the Church), reason in this Thomist makeover was made the principal means of accessing the divine. But once the Christian God became dependent on reason, He risked eventually being repudiated by it. This came with Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, who turned reason into a purely instrumental and calculative faculty. In the form of science, technology, and industry, Cartesian rationalism reduced everything to a mechanical causality, associating reason with the progressive mastery of nature, a belief in progress (soon to supplant the belief in Providence), and, ultimately, the rule of money.

Venner claims a desiccated mathematicized reason, no matter how technologically potent, is no substitute for transcendent references, for a disenchanted world governed by its principles is a world devoid of meaning and purpose. The ongoing mechanization of human existence and the quantitative, economic priorities it favors are, indeed, premised on the eradication of those transgenerational structures of history, tradition, and culture which inform all traditional belief systems. And once such structures give way to rationalism’s anti-organic propositions, so too does the significance of those qualities distinguishing Europeans from other members of the human family. In this spirit, the world born of nihilism takes as its ideal an abstract, uniform, and coffee-colored humanity indifferent to pre-rational life forms based on Europe’s organic heritage.

The greater the barrenness of the encroaching nihilism, the greater, Venner contends, is the need to reconnect with the primordial sources of European being. This, however, is now possible only through research and reflection, for these sources have been largely extirpated from European life. In uncovering the principal tropes of Europe’s history and tradition, Venner does not, then, propose a literal return to origins (which, in any case, is impossible), but rather a hermeneutical encounter that seeks out something of their creative impetus. From this perspective, Homer’s Iliad, written thirty centuries ago, still has the capacity to empower us because it expresses something primordial in our racial soul, connecting us with who we were at the dawn of our history—and with what we might be in the adventures that lie ahead. Whenever Europeans reconnect with these primordial sources, they take, thus, a step toward realizing an identity—and a destiny—that is distinctly their own.

IV. Tradition

When Venner speaks of tradition, he refers not to the customary rites and practices that anthropologists study, nor does he accept the utilitarian approach of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, who treat it as the accumulated wisdom of former ages, nor, finally, does he view it as that transhistorical body of principles undergirding the world’s religions, as René Guénon and Julius Evola do. Tradition in his view is that which is immutable and perpetually reborn in a people’s experience of its history, for it is rooted in a people’s primordial substratum. It ought not, then, to be confused with the traditions or customs bequeathed by the past but, instead, seen as the enduring essence—the truth—of a particular historical community, constituting, as such, the infrastructural basis—the cultural scaffolding—of its spirit and vitality.

From this perspective, Europe was born not with the signing of certain free-trade agreements in the late twentieth century, but from millennia of tradition. Nowhere is this clearer than in the themes linking the Iliad, the medieval epics, the Norse sagas, even the national poem of the Armenian Maherr, where we encounter the same warrior ethic that makes courage the ultimate test of a man’s character; the same aristocratic notions of service and loyalty; the same chivalric codes whose standards are informed by beauty, justice, and harmony; the same defiance in face of unjust authority and ignoble sentiments, but, above all, the same metaphysical rebellion against an unexamined existence. From these Aryan themes, Venner claims the organic legacy that is Europe takes form.

The word itself “Europe” is nearly three millennia old, coined by the Greeks to distinguish themselves from the peoples of Africa and Asia. Not coincidentally, Hellenic Europe was forged—mythically in Homer, historically in the Persian Wars—in opposition to Asia. The roots of Europe’s tradition reach back, though, beyond the Greeks, beyond even the Indo-Europeans, who shaped the linguistic and cultural structures of its root peoples. It begins 30,000 years ago, at the dawn of Cro-Magnon man, whose cultural imagery lingers in the extraordinary cave paintings of Chauvet (France) and Kapova (Ukraine), in that region stretching from the Pyrenees to the Urals, where, for nearly 20,000 years, until the last Ice Age arrived, the germ of European civilization took form, as race and culture fused in a uniquely brilliant synergy. Every subsequent era has passed on, reframed, and added to this traditional heritage—every era, that is, except the present nihilist one, in which liberals and aliens dominate.

V. History

Darwin may have been right in explaining the evolution of species, but, Venner insists, history operates irrespective of zoological or scientific laws. As such, history is less a rectilinear progression than a spiral, without beginning or end, with cycles of decay and rebirth intricate to its endless unfoldings. No single determinism or causality can thus conceivably grasp the complexity of its varied movements. Nor can any overarching cause explain them. Given, therefore, that a multitude of determinisms are at work in history, each having an open-ended effect, the course and significance of which are decided by the historical actor, human freedom regains its rights. And as it does, history can no longer be seen as having an in-built teleology, as “scientific” or ideological history-writing, with its reductionist determinisms, presumes. This means there is nothing inevitable about the historical process for, at any moment, it can take an entirely new direction. What would the present be like, Venner asks, if Hitler had not survived the Battle of Ypres or if Lee had triumphed at Gettysburg? None of the great events of the past, in fact, respond to “necessity,” which is always an a posteriori invention.

In conditioning a people’s growth, the existing heritage constitutes but one determinant among many. According to Venner, the existing heritage enters into endless combination with the forces of fortune (whose classic symbol is a woman precariously balanced on a spinning wheel) and virtù, a Roman quality expressive of individual will, audacity, and energy, to produce a specific historical outcome. In this conjuncture of determinism and fortune, the virtù of the historical actor becomes potentially decisive. Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini—like Alexander, Caesar, and Arminius before them—or Frederick II, Peter the Great, Napoleon—were all men whose virtù was of world historical magnitude. Without their interventions, in an arena organized by the heritage of the past and subject to the forces of chance, history might have taken a different course. This suggests that history is perpetually open—and open in the sense that its unfolding is continually affected by human consciousness. History’s significance, therefore, is not to be found in the anonymous currents shaping its entropic movements, but in the meanings men impose upon them. For in face of the alleged determinisms justifying the existing order, it is the courage—the virtù—of the historical actor that bends the historical process in ways significant to who we are as a people.

In Venner’s view, the European of history is best seen as a warrior bearing a sword, symbol of his will. The virtù of this warrior is affirmed every time he imposes his cosmos (order) upon a world whose only order is that which he himself gives it. History, thus, is no immobilizing determinism, but a theater of the will, upon whose stage the great men of our people exert themselves. Both as intellectual discipline and individual act of will, it seems hardly coincidental that history is Europe’s preeminent art form.

VI. In Defense of Who We Are

Like history, life has no beginning or end, being a process of struggle, an overcoming of obstacles, a combat, in which the actor’s will is pivotal. While it inexorably ends in death and destruction, from its challenges all our greatness flows. The Hellenes entered history by refusing to be slaves. Bearing their sword against an Asiatic foe, they won the right to be who they were. If a single theme animates Venner’s treatment of Europe’s history and tradition, it is that Europeans surmounted the endless challenges to their existence only because they faced them with sword in hand—forthrightly, with the knowledge that this was not just part of the human condition, but the way to prove that they were worthy of their fate. Thus, as classical Greece rose in struggle against the Persians, the Romans against the Carthaginians, medieval and early modern Europe against Arabic, then Turkish, Islam, we too today have to stand on our borders, with sword in hand, to earn the right to be ourselves.

Europeans, Venner concludes, must look to their history and tradition—especially to the honor, heroism, and heritage Homer immortalized—to rediscover themselves. Otherwise, all that seeks the suppression of their spirit and the extinction of their blood will sweep them aside. The question thus looms: In the ethnocidal clash between the reigning nihilism and the white men of the West, who will prevail? From Venner’s extraordinary book, in which the historian turns from the drama of the event to the scene of our longue durée, we are led to believe that this question will be answered in our favor only if we remain true to who we are, to what our forefathers have made of us, and to what Francis Parker Yockey, in the bleak years following the Second World War, called the primacy of the spirit.

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O’Meara, Michael. “From Nihilism to Tradition.” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2, Summer 2004. <http://www.toqonline.com/blog/from-nihilism-to-tradition/>

Note: In Spanish, see a related work by Dominique Venner known as Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010).

 

Ludwig Clauss – Sunic

“Ludwig F. Clauss: Racial Style, Racial Character” by Tomislav Sunic (PDF – 406 KB):

Ludwig F. Clauss

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Sunic, Tomislav. “Ludwig F. Clauss: Racial Style, Racial Character (Part 1).” The Occidental Observer. 9 August 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/08/ludwig-f-clauss-racial-style-racial-character-part-i/ >.

Sunic, Tomislav. “Ludwig F. Clauss: Racial Style, Racial Character (Part 2)” The Occidental Observer. 18 August 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/08/ludwig-f-clauss-racial-style-racial-character-part-ii/ >.

Note: Readers may also be interested in the mention of Clauss’s race psychology made in Lucian Tudor, “Othmar Spann: A Catholic Radical Traditionalist,” Counter-Currents.com, 19 March 2013, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/03/othmar-spann-a-catholic-radical-traditionalist/ >.

 

Evola on Race – Sunic

Julius Evola on Race

By Tomislav Sunic

Growing interest in English speaking countries for the Italian philosopher Julius Evola may be a sign of the revival of the awesome cultural legacy of the Western civilization (see here and here). This legacy is awkwardly termed the “traditional –revolutionary – elitist – anti-egalitarian – postmodern thought.” But why not simply call it classical thought?

The advantage of Evola, in contrast to many modern scholars of the same calibre, may be his staggering erudition that goes well beyond the narrow study of race. Evola was just as much at ease writing thick volumes about religion, language and sexuality as writing about legal issues related to international politics, or depicting decadence of the liberal system. His shortcomings are, viewed from the American academic perspective, that his prose is often not focused enough and his narrative often embraces too many topics at once. Evola was not a self-proclaimed “expert” on race — yet his erudition made him compose several impressive books on race from angles that are sorely missing among modern sociobiologists and race experts. Therefore, Evola’s works on race must be always put in a lager perspective.

In this short survey of Evola’s position on race I am using the hard cover of the French translation of Indirizzi per una educazione razziale (1941) (Eléments pour une éduction raciale, 1984) and the more expanded Sintesi di dottrina della razza (1941), (“Synthesis of the racial doctrine”), translated into German by the author himself and by Annemarie Rasch and published in Germany in 1943. To my knowledge these two books are not available in English translation. His and Rasch’s excellent German translation of Sintesi had received (in my view an awkward and unnecessary) ‘political’ title; Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre (“Outlines of the fascist racial doctrine”) and is available on line.

Race of the Body vs. Race of the Spirit

Evola writes that race represents a crucial element in the life of all humans. However, while acknowledging the clear-cut physical and biological markers of each race, he stresses over and over again the paramount importance of the spiritual and internal aspects of race — two points that are decisive for genuine racial awareness of the White man. Without full comprehension of these constituent racial parts — i.e., the “race of the soul” and the “race of the spirit” — no racial awareness is possible. Evola is adamantly opposed to conceptualizing race from a purely biological, mechanistic and Darwinian perspective. He sees that approach as dangerously reductionist, leading to unnecessary political and intellectual infighting.

Diverse causes have contributed until now to the fact that racism has become the object of propaganda entrusted to incompetent people, to individuals who are waking up any day now as racists and anti-Semites and whose simple sloganeering has replaced serious principles and information. (Eléments pour une éduction raciale,p. 15)

Evola freely uses the term ‘racism’ (razzismo) and ‘racist’ (razzista). This was quite understandable in his epoch given that these words in Europe in the early thirties of the 20^th century had a very neutral meaning with no dreaded symbols of the absolute evil ascribed to them today. The same can be said of the word ‘fascism’ and even ‘totalitarianism’ — words which Evola uses in a normative manner when depicting an organic and holistic society designed for the future of the Western civilization. For Evola, the sense of racial awareness is more a spiritual endeavor and less a form of biological typology.

And in this respect, we need to repeat it; we are dealing here with a formation of a mentality, a sensibility, and not with intellectual schemes or classifications for natural science manuals. (Elémentsp. 16)

For Evola, being White is not just a matter of good looks and high IQ, or for that matter something that needs to be sported in public. Racial awareness implies a sense of mysticism combined with the knowledge of one’s family lineage as well as a spiritual effort to delve into the White man’s primordial and mythical times. This is a task, which in the age of liberal chaos, must be entrusted only to élites completely detached from any material or pecuniary temptation.

Thus, racism invigorates and renders tangible the concept of tradition; it makes the individual get used to observing in our ancestors not just a series of the more or less illustrious “dead,” but rather the expression of something still alive in ourselves and to which we are tied in our interior. We are the carriers of a heritage that has been transmitted to us and that we need to transmit – and in this spirit it is something going beyond time, something indicating, what we called elsewhere, ‘the eternal race.’ (Eléments, p.31)

In other words race is at a same time a heritage and a collective substrate. Irrespective of the fact that it expresses itself among all people, it is only among few that it attains its perfect realization and it is precisely there that the action and the significance of the individual and the personality can assert themselves. (Eléments, p.34)

Evola offers the same views in his more expanded Sintesi (Grundrisse), albeit by using a somewhat different wording. Racial awareness for Evola requires moral courage and impeccable character and not just physical prowess. It is questionable to what extent many White racists today, in a self-proclaimed “movement” of theirs, with their silly paraphernalia on public display, are capable of such a mental exercise.

Race means superiority, wholeness, decisiveness in life. There are common people and there are people “of race”. Regardless of which social status they belong to, these people form an aristocracy(Grundrisse, p.17).

In this particular regard, the racial doctrine rejects the doctrine of the environment, known to be an accessory to liberalism, to the idea of humanity and to Marxism. These false doctrines have picked up on the theory of the environment in order to defend the dogma of fundamental equality of all people. (Grundrisse, p. 17)

And further Evola writes:

Our position, when we claim that race exists as much in the body as in the spirit, goes beyond these two points of view. Race is a profound forcemanifesting itself in the realm of the body (race of the body) as in the realm of the spirit (race of the interior, race of the sprit). In its full meaning the purity of race occurs when these two manifestations coincide; in other words, when the race of the body matches the race of the spirit and when it is capable of serving the most adequate organ of expression. (p.48)

Racial-Spiritual Involution and the present Dark Ages

Evola is aware of the dangerous dichotomy between the race of the spirit and the race of the body that may occur within the same race — or, as we call it, within the same ingroup. This tragic phenomenon occurs as a result of selecting the wrong mates, miscegenation, and genetic flaws going back into the White man’s primordial times. Modern social decadence also fosters racial chaos. Evola argues that very often the “race of the body” may be perfectly pure, with the “race of the spirit” being already tainted or destroyed. This results in a cognitive clash between a distorted perception of objective reality vs. subjective reality, and which sooner or later leads to strife or civil war.

Evola harbors no illusions about master race; he advocates racial hygiene, always emphasizing the spiritual aspect of the race first. On a practical level, regarding modern White nationalists, Evola’s words are important insofar as they represent a harsh indictment of the endless bickering, petty sectarianism and petty jealousy seen so often among Whites. A White nationalist may be endowed with a perfect race of the body, but his racial spirit may be dangerously mongrelized.

Studying racial psychology is a crucial task for all White racialists — an endeavor in which Evola was greatly influenced by the German racial scholar and his contemporary Ludwig F. Clauss.

Furthermore, a special circumstance must be singled out, confirming the already stated fact that races that have best biologically preserved the Nordic type are inwardly sometimes in a higher degree of regression than other races of the same family. Some Nordic nations — especially the Anglo-Saxons — are those in which the tradition-conditioned normal relationship between the sexes has been turned upside down. The so-called emancipation of woman — which in reality only means the mutilation and degradation of woman — has actually started out among these nations and has been most widespread among them, whereas this relationship still retains something of a tradition-based view among other nations, regardless of it its bourgeois or its conventional echo.(Grundrisse p. 84).

Evola is well aware of the complexity of understanding race as well as our still meager knowledge of the topic. He is well aware that race cannot be just the subject of biologists, but also of paleontologists, psycho-anthropologists and mystics, such as the French mystic René Guenon, whom he knew well and whom he often quotes.

Following in Evola’s footsteps we may raise a haunting question. Why individuals of the same White race, i.e. of the same White in-group frequently do not understand each other? Why is it that the most murderous wars have occurred within the same race, i.e. within the same White ingroup, despite the fact that the European ingroup is more or less biologically bonded together by mutual blood ties? One must always keep in mind that the bloodiest wars in the 20th century occurred not between two racially opposed out-groups, but often within the same White ingroup. The level of violence between Whites and Whites during the American civil war, the savagery of the intra-White civil war in Spain from 1936 to 1939, the degree of mutual hatred amidst White Europeans during WWII, and not least the recent intra-White barbarity of the Yugoslav conflict, are often incomprehensible for a member of the non-European outgroup. This remains an issue that needs to be urgently addressed by all sociobiologists. It must be pondered by all White nationalist activists all over the world.

There are actually too many cases of people who are somatically of the same race, of the same tribe, indeed who are fathers and sons of the same blood in the strict sense of the word and, yet who cannot “understand” each other. A demarcation line separates their souls; their way of feeling and judging is different and their common race of the body cannot do much about it, nor their common blood. The impossibility of mutual understanding lies therefore on the level of supra-biology (“überbiologische Ebene”). Mutual understanding and hence real togetherness, as well as deeper unity, are only possible where the common “race of the soul” and the “spirit” coexist. (Grundrisse, 89)

In order to understand his political and moral predicament, the White man must therefore delve into myths of his prehistory and look for his faults. For Evola, we are all victims of rationalism, Enlightenment and positivistic sciences that keep us imprisoned in a straitjacket of “either-or,” always in search for causal and rational explanations. Only by grasping the supraracial (superraza) meaning of ancient European myths and by using them as role models, can we come to terms with the contemporary racial chaos of the modern system.

It is absolutely crucial to grasp the living significance of such a change of perspectives inherent to racist conceptions; the superior does not derive from the inferior. In the mystery of our blood, in the depth of our most abysmal of our being, resides the ineffaceable heredity of our primordial times. This is not heredity of brutality of bestial and savage instincts gone astray, as argued by psychoanalysis, and which, as one may logically conclude, derive from “evolutionism” or Darwinism. This heredity of origins, this heredity which comes from the deepest depth of times is theheredity of the light. (Eléments 72–73)

Briefly, Evola rejects the widespread idea that we have evolved from exotic African monkeys, as the standard theory of evolution goes, and which is still widely accepted by modern scientists. He believes that we have now become the tainted progeny of the mythical Hyperborean race, which has significantly racially deteriorated over the eons and which has been adrift both in time and space. Amidst the ruins of the modern world, gripped by perversion and decadence, Evola suggest for new political elites the two crucial criteria, “the character and the form of the spirit, much more than intelligence.” As a racial mystic, Evola warns:

Because the concept of the world can be much more precise with a man without instruction than with a writer; it can be more solid with a soldier, or a peasant loyal to his land, than with a bourgeois intellectual, professor, or a journalist. (quoted in Alain de Benoist’s, Vu de droite, 1977, p. 435)

We could only add that the best cultural weapons for our White “super-race” are our common Indo-Aryan myths, our sagas, our will to power — and our inexorable sense of the tragic.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “Julius Evola on Race.” The Occidental Observer. May 1, 2010. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/05/sunic-evola-on-race/ >.

Note: For another analysis of Evola’s idea of race which helps to clarify it even further, see Michael Bell, “Julius Evola’s Concept of Race: A Racism of Three Degrees.” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, Winter 2009–2010. Available online here: <http://toqonline.com/archives/v9n2/TOQv9n2Bell.pdf >.