By Rodolphe Lussac | 6 Comments |
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Why Are We Political Soldiers?
Ed. and trans. by Michael O’Meara
“In the final instance civilization is always saved by a platoon of soldiers.”
–Spengler
We are soldiers who serve the cause of Europe’s Renaissance — a cause as pure, hard, and imperious as our banners.
We are soldiers because we refuse the reformist tinkering of the dominant system, which — through its electoral and party committees, its partisan venalities, and its parliamentary charade — endeavors to ensure the self-regulation and recycling of the corrupt elites controlling the existing plutocratic system.
We are soldiers because we believe that the salvation of Europe’s family of nations depends on the destruction of the present system.
We are soldiers who serve and not merely talk, we reflect and we act.
We serve the cause of politics in the sense of Julien Freund [France's leading Schmittian scholar], knowing that the essence of action is action itself.
Our trifold praxeological, destining, and eschatological understanding of politics transcends the purely operational, pragmatic, and secular policies of modern politics. Going further, we think that propaganda by ideas is a chimera and that ideas come from action and not the reverse.
This is why we embrace the revolutionary dialectic of Carlo Pisacane, Enrico Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, Paul Brousse, and José Antonio, who advocated the propaganda of the deed — the deed pregnant with ideas.
Our soldierly faith and duty is wedded to the national-revolutionary ideal that seeks a new political, aristocratic, hierarchical, anti-democratic, and anti-egalitarian order, situated within a European continental frame, geopolitically self-centered, disconnected from the global economy, independent of our present Atlanticist servitude, and rooted in a Eurocultural concept of civilization based on the values of blood and soil.
We are soldiers because we see history as a clashing dialectic between antagonistic forces, whose constituent elements are peoples and nations.
For conflict and struggle, as the work of Stéphane Lupasco and Max Planck demonstrates, are inherent to every system.
History is thus an endless battle between peoples organized around their distinct cultures and communities, each, consciously or unconsciously, motivated by a desire to expand and dominate.
As soldiers, we fight for the restoration of the poltical principle in the noble sense of politea, imperium, and auctoritas, and in function of Evola’s anagogy, which is capable of impregnating peoples with those specific metapolitical, spiritual, and anti-materialist values that ensure the masses’ spontaneous adhesion.
For us, as for Carl Schmitt, politics is that privileged arena in which the enemy and the friend is clearly designated.
This is why we reject the administrative or managerial concept favored by party politicians, who promote a state sustained by hedonistic frenzies — a state whose subjects are cretinized and emasculated, manipulated by consumer society and the media — subjected in this way to a whoring enterprise which organizes, directs, and patronizes them in order to dissolve all revolutionary effort in the solvent of a fake, hyper-festive order of permanent entertainment.
As soldiers, we advocate the ideal of a “polemological” state charged, above all else, with defending the survival and growth of Europe’s power from assaults by American hegemonism, radical Islam, and the extra-European colonization of our ancient lands. In this sense, we categorically reject the social-contractual conception of the nation and seek to restore it as that mystical body passed from one generation to another.
The nation for us remains a determinism, a necessity, a force, and a will.
We are soldiers because we believe that war-like activity is the highest degree by which civilizations become complex and by which history’s primordial lever raises motherlands and city-states.
War in this Heraclitian sense has animated international relations from the time of Thucydides and from that of Machiavelli.
War is the highest expression of the state, as Hegel shows; it evokes its greatest consciousness and its greatest efficacy.
The state is and remains above all a war machine and all its other functions are subordinate to it, even if the bourgeois and managerial conception of the dominant democratic state has patched together a certain order from the ruling delinquency and its corrupting prosperity.
The international authority of the state is as great as its ability to inflict harm, and history shows that only those attached to mos majorum (ancestral law) and to a conservative opposition to the centrifugal forces succeed in attaining the aureole sovereignty of military glory.
This is the way it was in the Rome of Augustus and Diocletian, in the Russia of Peter the Great and Lenin, in the Islam of Mehmet Ali and Mustapha Kemal, in the China of Huang-di and Mao Zedong, each of whom won domestic and foreign victories before daring to impose the profound revolutionary transformation in which they believed.
As political soldiers, we seek to restore the ideal of a political vocation that transcends contemporary economism and to re-legitimate the ideal of those exceptional men who articulate and embody an ethic of conviction, responsibility, and duty.
Within the bourgeois democracies governing and offending us, there thrives a class of professional politicians and bureaucrats, of demagogues and opportunists of all sorts, whose mercenary use of high political office is motivated solely by reasons of personal gain or career.
As soldiers, we will make the necessary sweep that sends these impostors, these betrayers of our great European political ideals, to the devil. And in this we aspire to see emperor and proletarian, animated by the same revolutionary faith, marching shoulder to shoulder: paradigm of a new heroism.
We uphold that there is an essential contingency between the state of exception and the essence of political sovereignty, constituting the point of disequilibrium separating public law from political fact.
We advocate a state of exception in order to establish the state as the emanation of a new order, as a means of terminating the general anomie and the reigning disorder.
The syntagma “force of law” rests on a long tradition of Roman and medieval law constituted for efficacy and loyalty.
We would like to restore an operational perspective invested with the archetype of the Roman juridical institution — the iustitium – enacted whenever the Roman Senate was informed of a situation that might compromise the Republic — a senatus consultum ultimum dictating measures necessary to ensure the state’s security.
This way of dealing with states of emergency harped back to the ancient concept of sol-stitium: to those instances when the law came to a stop, like the sun at its solstice, [and where the question of sovereignty -- the question of who holds ultimate authority -- was forthrightly posed].
Above all, we are political soldiers because we are militants.
Etymologically, “militants” refer to the theological distinction between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant.
An analogy can be made between the political militant and the believer, whose truths inform all aspects of his being, especially in its essence and totality
The militant fights, attacks, and pays with his person for the triumph of his ideals.
The verb “to militate” comes from the Latin militari, which means “soldiers” (in the plural), to whom belonged a Church (an army) that required a spirit of discipline, self-sacrifice, and abnegation.
This is why militancy is at the heart of our political struggle.
The ideal militant for us must be a revolutionary, capable of dialectically linking his theoretical and practical knowledge to a global understanding of the society in which he lives. He thus voluntarily submits himself to a disciplined routine, realizing in it a unity of theory and practice.
As political soldiers, we do not believe that evolution is automatic or that revolutions are spontaneous, because there are no fatalities in politics or in economics; the dominant, liberal, capitalist order well knows how to regenerate itself and how to overcome contradictions in order to survive.
The masses too are not solely exploited, they are mentally manipulated and alienated.
There is no revolutionary advance without a process of development, culminating in a struggle between warring peoples (lutte des peuples).
These struggles are manifested in many forms, in sectional or local struggles (at the level of the enterprise, the region, etc.)
They may appear spontaneous but they are linked to a changing consciousness and to the effort of militants who rise from below as they are directed from above.
Rank and file struggles, however exemplary, cannot accomplish a global change of the system, because such struggles address only certain lived particulars, products of the larger social complex, [not the system itself].
Instead, they need to be linked and coordinated in the form of a global, ideological vanguardist action, capable of posing issues from a system-wide perspective. It is necessary, then, to avoid an overly rigid elitism and an unserious reformism — in order to ensure a dialectical liaison between the global struggle and the local struggle, between the political action of the vanguard and the mass movement.
As political soldiers we advocate a revolution that brings about not merely structural change in the economy and the state, but also in the spirit, an ontological change that will lead to the formation a new man, free of bourgeois individualism and egoism.
This “total revolution” will affect the relations and ethics regulating the larger significance of our quotidian life.
The revolution we advocate will be a return to origins, a revolving back, that establishes an authoritarian state-order, a managed economy, and an exclusive conception of identity — a revolution carried out in harmony with the distinct mentality of European peoples and in accord with a principle of homology that purges institutions and mentalities of alien, distorting elements.
As political soldiers, we are irredeemably imbued with a tragic conception of life, knowing, with Alfred Weber, that every superior order ends up perpetuating a certain chaos as it enhances its power.
Tragic because we are conscious of the imponderable grandeur of the universe and the world and of the imperfection and finitude of human nature.
In face of this constant and paradoxical metaphysics, we advocate a re-enchantment of the world and an aestheticization of the state, as envisaged by German romantics like Goethe, Novalis, Schlegel, and Müller — conscious, as we are, that the illuminist ideas of the French Revolution [the liberal revolution of 1789], along with the general process of secularization, has since disenchanted the world in Max Weber’s sense.
We want, like Novalis, our revolution to become an organic, poetical totality in which the new state is the existential and aesthetic embodiment of our ideal of human perfection.
And once we complete this task, we will go somewhere else, farther away, always farther, way over there near our gods.
Source: “Pourquoi sommes-nous des soldats politiques?” (2003)
http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/tag/soldats%20politiques


Thank you for this translation!
Who is Rodolphe Lussac? A short presentation (maybe a sentence or two) of your writers would be useful. I think many of them are unknown to a large part of your readers.
I agree with Ulf, though not with everything the article states.
I wouldn’t worry about “American Hedgemonism” much longer. America is a third world country with first world liablilities.
Rodolphe Lussac isn’t a TOQ writer, he’s with Robert Steuckers’ Euro Synergies.
The above piece should be required reading. It explains so many key concepts that are lacking in the wider Anglosphere nationalist movements. Of course there are many groups and people that understand these concepts, those already identifying as political soldiers/militants/cadre. But that’s not enough, the less theoretical amongst us that are active or want to become so must understand the concept of the political soldier.
The propaganda of the deed has been a concept utilized by national-revolutionaries for a few years now in Australia. Of course, older groups have engaged in it for decades, but not consciously as propaganda of the deed. BANA comes to mind as an American example.
Wonderful translation Michael, you’ve retained the vigor and vitality of the original piece. That style which characterizes Continental national-revolutionary writing. Truly stirring stuff.
Another excellent article that discusses the political soldier is Dominique Venner’s For a Positive Critique.
Ulf,
I don’t know anything about the author. As Morgan points out, he is associated with Robert Steuckers’ Euro-Synergie movement and is obviously French.
I might add that there were three intellectual power-houses to emerge from the Nouvelle Droite: Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, and Robert Steuckers.
As the years pass, Steuckers increasingly appears to me to be the most important. He has written, literally, thousands of articles — though very few have appeared in English. I’ve translated a few of his pieces, which can still be found, I think, in certain remote corners of the web.
Steuckers speaks all the major European languages, possesses a vast erudition, and is arguably the best geopolitical thinker among Europe’s revolutionary nationalists.
I highly recommend his website (accessible through the above link) which I consider the most important anti-liberal one in the English, French and German languages I routinely consult. Everyday he posts up to a half dozen articles — even an occasional piece by Greg Johnson or myself.
Thank you Michael for having issued this interesting piece of Lussac, which was also translated into Spanish. It gives Lussac the opportunity of being read in half the world. Remind your friends in America that I can directly write in English, provided you make some corrections and add some up-to-date colloquial expressions: the kind non-native speakers always lack.
Kind regards to you all,
Yours,
Robert Steuckers.