Translated by Greg Johnson

The Jewish people have a plan for humanity; a grandiose plan that they have pursued on all fronts for centuries: universal peace on earth. The concept of “peace” is, indeed, at the heart of Judaism, and it is not just chance that this word (shalom, in Hebrew), is frequently used by Jews the world over.

In this perfect world that they would build, all conflicts will have disappeared from the face of the earth, especially conflicts between nations. This is why the Jews militate incessantly for the removal of borders and the dissolution of national identities. Nations being the causes of wars and disorder, it is thus necessary to weaken them and, in the long term, to abolish them in favor of a world government that can only make happiness and prosperity reign on earth.

Whether they are leftists or rightists, Marxists or liberals, believers or atheists, Zionists or “perfectly assimilated,” the Jews are always the most fervent supporters of the multicultural society, planetary miscegenation, and global Empire. When all other identities disappear, only the Jewish people will remain, recognized by all as the “chosen people” of God.

Jewish Fanaticism, first off, is the thirty million deaths, Russians and Ukrainians liquidated in the Communist adventure of 1917 to 1947. One can never say enough about the appalling role of Jewish ideologues, Jewish bureaucrats, and Jewish torturers in this story.

Jewish Fanaticism, it is this systematic eagerness to make Europeans feel guilty, to make them hang their heads and fall to their knees for crimes they did not commit, or for crimes for which Jews themselves might feel a little guilty but prefer “to transfer” to others. One thinks here of the leaders of the black slave trade, for example, or the shameless exploitation of the wealth and raw materials of the Third World.

Jewish Fanaticism, it is this unrestrained propaganda, conveyed through all the media, in favor of immigration and the multicultural society. Jewish intellectuals, Jewish politicians, and Jewish financiers bear most of the responsibility for the immigration invasion that has disfigured France in only 30 years. It is necessary to say it again and again: immigration is not a natural phenomenon but the result of a tireless campaign of cosmopolitan propaganda which is part of the politico-religious plan of the Jewish people.

Jewish Fanaticism, it is also warmongering politics that ultimately amounts to whipping up the hatred of the Western masses against any nation that still refuses democratic domination and the hegemony of Israel. Today they are preparing us for a war against Iran, as they once stirred up wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, and Germany.

Jewish Fanaticism, it is also this “great intolerance of frustration,” to give it a medical diagnosis. Anyone who has the audacity to say one word against the “Jewish lobby,” Israeli policy, or Jewish “over-representation” in the media immediately finds himself dragged through the mud by the whole media system, covered in spit, calumniated, vilified, delivered to the feet and fists of a hysterical mob hypnotized by the buzzwords of Big Brother.

In this new book of 400 pages, I base my case once again primarily on the writings of Jewish intellectuals, ancient and modern. Thus my conclusions are incontestable. If I speak about “Israeli hegemony,” it is because explicit documents allow us to say that the Jews seek to establish world domination. And if I write “the Jews” and not “certain Jews,” it is because my sources are now sufficiently many and varied to support such generality.

September 2007

Source: http://storage.canalblog.com/29/53/516490/47626715.pdf

The federal government is seeking applicants who are mentally ill, mentally retarded or both to work as lawyers in the Justice Department. Specifically, a job announcement for “up to 10 experienced attorneys for the position of Trial Attorney in the Voting Section in Washington, D.C.” contains the following language:

The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine. Applicants who meet the qualification requirements and are able to perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodation are encouraged to identify targeted disabilities in response to the questions in the Avue application system seeking that information.

Overlawyered.com, February 4, 2010

I have always enjoyed the escapism of reading a good book about the White Republic. It is a relief to return on occasion to an earlier chapter of American history when the racial and cultural foundations of our national identity were unquestioned. White men once enjoyed the luxury of being able to engage in real politics. Back then our nation was not yet under the control of alien parasites.

Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty is a chronicle of America’s youthful innocence. It was a very different time from our own. From 1789 to 1815, the United States was unquestionably a “white man’s country.” The first several naturalization laws restricted citizenship to “free white persons.” Neither major political party considered women fit for the political responsibilities of republican citizenship. The Indians were not thought of as “Native Americans,” but as savages and foreigners allied with America’s enemies, Britain and Spain. Blacks were considered an inferior race best enslaved, dominated, or deported.

Racial attitudes hardened in this period. After 1800, Jefferson’s hereditarian account of racial differences overwhelmed Samuel Stanhope Smith’s naive environmentalism. In the North, several states passed anti-miscegenation laws, black codes, and restricted black voting rights. Southerners passed new laws against free blacks and placed new restrictions on black voting rights and civil liberties. Antislavery sentiment in the South waned and collapsed after the Haitian Revolution and Gabriel’s Rebellion.

In spite of the American government’s professed benevolent intentions toward the Indians, White settlers poured across the Appalachians into the Northwest and Southwest, violated Indian treaties, and soaked the frontier in low level warfare. The Indians suffered several major defeats against the U.S. Army at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), Battle of Tippecanoe (1811), and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814). By 1815, the various Indian tribes of Transappalachia had surrendered most of their land, and philanthropists were advocating their resettlement on Western reservations.

I believe it was Leonard Zeskind who recently said that America has always had two hearts: one beating heart is White and Christian, the other heart is liberal and democratic. The two have often been at odds. Wood’s Empire of Liberty is more about the latter than the former. Although every major figure in this period was a White male, Wood doesn’t really draw attention to this. The irreducible whiteness of the Early Republic is taken for granted. It is assumed like the water in an aquarium.

The real story that Gordon Wood wants to tell is the division of Americans into Federalists and Republicans. The America of 1815 wasn’t envisioned by the Founders. They didn’t anticipate the rise of political parties or the partisan press. They created a republic, not a liberal democracy. When the Constitution was ratified, “democracy” was still held in disrepute. It was a discredited political theory. “Democrat” was a pejorative term.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the Federalists began to have second thoughts about the popular forces they had unleashed. Their ideal was a strong European style nation-state with a formidable military and commercial economy. They looked forward to the day when America would mature into a class based society like England. The Federalists wanted a republic presided over by the better sort of men: the wise, learned, propertied, well born, cosmopolitan. They believed hierarchy was the foundation of civilization and moral virtue the bedrock of the social order.

Some Federalists wanted America to become a monarchy. They advised George Washington to imitate the British court throughout his presidency. John Adams was obsessed with titles and the trappings of aristocracy. Alexander Hamilton called democracy a “disease.” After American independence was secured and a strong national government was created, the Federalists wanted all the revolutionary jargon to go away. They often spoke about bringing “erroneous notions of liberty and equality” to heel.

The U.S. Constitution was designed to reverse the democratic excesses of the state legislatures. The Federalists were appalled by the Jacobinism and licentiousness they saw spreading through American society. Commoners were refusing to show their customary deference. Parvenus were everywhere aspiring to gentlemen status. “Aristocrat” was becoming an abusive term. It was a charge the Federalists were often slimed with.

The Republican social revolution that followed the ratification of the Constitution was a time of ferment and chaos more profound than the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. By the time it was over, the traditional social hierarchy of the eighteenth century was in shambles. Slavery fell in the Northern states. Patriarchy took a hit. Honor was on the way out. Divorce laws were liberalized. Primogeniture was abandoned. The prison system replaced the mutilation that prevailed in colonial times. Illegitimacy and alcoholism skyrocketed. The mainline Protestant churches were disestablished. Jews were extended rights they previously had not enjoyed.

The acid of liberty and equality systematically eroded every hierarchical institution. The Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians lost their former dominance to Baptists and Methodists. America became the most commercialized society in the world. Wealth became the primary determinant of social status, not birth, blood, or education. After the triumph of the Democratic-Republicans, a wave of egalitarianism swept away the distinctions that had once existed between White men.

By 1815, America had evolved from an aristocratic republic to the liberal capitalist democracy that it remains to this day. Corporations were sprouting up everywhere. In the North, a middling commercialized society of religious fundamentalists had emerged. In the South, the invention of the cotton gin was creating the Cotton Kingdom of the Antebellum era. Slaveowners had lost their previous enthusiasm for revolutionary liberalism. In Congress, the familiar sort of politicians (ex. Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren) were being elected to public office.

Much of Empire of Liberty is given over to what you would expect: the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the XYZ Affair, the Quasi War with France, the Crisis of 1798/1799, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Court and judicial review, the Louis and Clark expedition, the Burr conspiracy, Jefferson’s embargo on Britain, and the War of 1812. I found it to be an excellent introduction to all of these topics.

The seeds of America’s racial decline were sown in the earliest years of the White Republic. In these years, the Republicans began the practice of celebrating the Declaration of Independence. Centuries later, Americanism would be redefined by their successors as the ideological principles of liberty and equality. The degenerate society that our generation inherited evolved out of the flaws inherent in that document. Empire of Liberty is a useful resource in understanding how that ball was set into motion.

From Occidental Dissent, January 15, 2010

Sometime ago I visited my local surgery. At the reception desk, I was confronted with a poster, bearing Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) logo. The poster was produced by the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), which is a spawn of the British government’s Department of Health. Across the top of the poster, in large white letters set against a black background, it read, “YOUR CHOICE OF TREATMENT.” Below followed eight captioned photographs, depicting eight models in different attires. The four on the left, under the captions “pharmacy,” “optician,” “dentist,” and “doctor,” sported smiling faces and a friendly manner; they were also ethnically diverse, with 50%–75% of the physiognomies bearing partly or wholly non-European features. The four on the right, under the captions “security,” “police,” “court,” and “prison,” sported serious faces and an unfriendly manner; they were ethnically homogeneous, with 100% of the physiognomies bearing Northern European features. Further down, in large white letters against a bright red background, the poster demanded “STOP ABUSE OF NHS STAFF,” and warned, “Verbal or physical abuse of our staff could result in prosecution.”

I am sure I am not the only here who has found the distribution of models rather odd. As it stands, the poster carries with it an obnoxious subtext: friendly help comes from the ethically diverse camp, while unfriendly punishment comes from the indigenous, White Britons. None of the three possible explanations for this subtext are flattering to the NHSBSA.

The first possible explanation is that the IQ distribution among members of the NHSBSA management is restricted to points along the far left end of the Bell Curve. And as the mean IQ is obviously very low, we must assume that some of the points on that curve will be found at such distance from the Caucasoid mean that supplying sufficient paper to print the full graph would necessitate clearing out the Amazon forest twice over. Were this not the case, the management at the NHSBSA would have quickly detected and harshly rebuked the knavish attempt to infuse the agency’s anti-white bigotry into their commission.

Unfortunately, they did not, thus suggesting either that the NHSBSA’s professed zeal for inclusiveness has motivated them to maintain lax cognitive requirements for employment within their organisation; or that their human resources department has been forced to lower their expectations from the available pool of labour in modern Britain, due to the accumulated dysgenic effects of Tory and Labour government policies.

The second possible explanation is that the NHSBSA is imperfectly committed to multiculturalism: They think it is OK to multiculturalize the NHS, but are happy to advocate institutional racism when it comes to extending the process of multiculturalization to private security agencies and the criminal justice system. A perfect commitment to multiculturalism would have demanded that either the Asian pharmacist or the African dentist be swapped with one of the scowling Englishmen on the right hand side for the sake of balance. . . . Read the whole article.

Pareto and Fascism

Before we enter into the controversy surrounding Pareto’s sympathy for Italian leader Benito Mussolini, let us take pains to avoid the error of viewing events of the 1920s through the spectacles of the post-World War II era, for what seemed apparent in 1945 was not at all evident twenty years before. Inarguably, throughout the whole of the 1920s, Mussolini was an enormously popular man in Italy and abroad, with all except perhaps the most inveterate leftists. An American writer puts it as follows:

Postwar [First World War] Italy … was a sewer of corruption and degeneracy. In this quagmire Fascism appeared like a gust of fresh air, a tempest-like purgation of all that was defiled, leveled, fetid. Based on the invigorating instincts of nationalist idealism, Fascism “was the opposite of wild ideas, of lawlessness, of injustice, of cowardice, of treason, of crime, of class warfare, of special privilege; and it represented square-dealing, patriotism and common sense.” As for Mussolini, “there has never been a word uttered against his absolute sincerity and honesty. Whatever the cause on which he embarked, he proved to be a natural-born leader and a gluttonous worker.” Under Mussolini’s dynamic leadership, the brave Blackshirts made short shrift of the radicals, restored the rights of property, and purged the country of self-seeking politicians who thrive on corruption endemic to mass democracy.” [30]

If the Italian Duce was so popular in the 1920s that he received the accolades of the Saturday Evening Post [31] and the American Legion [32], and the highest praises of British and American establishment figures such as Winston Churchill [33] and Ambassador Richard Washburn Child, [34] how much more enthusiastic must have been Italians of Pareto’s conservative bent at that time. They credited Mussolini with nothing less than rescuing Italy from chaos and Bolshevism. The coming tragedies of the ’40s, needless to say, were far away, over a distant horizon, invisible to all.

Pareto invariably expressed contempt for the pluto-democratic governments that ruled Italy throughout most of his life. His rancor towards liberal politicians and their methods surfaces all through his books; these men are the object of his scorn and sharp wit. Pareto translator Arthur Livingston writes, “He was convinced that ten men of courage could at any time march on Rome and put the band of ‘speculators’ that were filling their pockets and ruining Italy to flight.” [35] Consequently, in October 1922, after the Fascist March on Rome and Mussolini’s appointment by the King as Prime Minister, “Pareto was able to rise from a sick-bed and utter a triumphant ‘I told you so!’.” [36] Yet, Pareto never joined the Fascist Party. Well into his seventies and severely ill with heart disease, he remained secluded in his villa in Switzerland.

The new government, however, extended many honors to Pareto. He was designated as delegate to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva, was made a Senator of the Kingdom, and was listed as a contributor to the Duce’s personal periodical, Gerarchia. [37] Many of these honors he declined due to the state of his health, yet he remained favorably disposed towards the regime corresponding with Mussolini and offering advice in the formulation of economic and social policies. [38]

Many years before the March on Rome, Mussolini attended Pareto’s lectures in Lausanne and listened to the professor with rapt attention. “I looked forward to every one,” Mussolini wrote, “[F]or here was a teacher who was outlining the fundamental economic philosophy of the future.” [39] The young Italian was obviously deeply impressed and, after his elevation to power, sought immediately to transform his aged mentor’s thoughts into action:

In the first years of his rule Mussolini literally executed the policy prescribed by Pareto, destroying political liberalism, but at the same time largely replacing state management of private enterprise, diminishing taxes on property, favoring industrial development, imposing a religious education in dogmas….” [40]

Of course, it was not only Pareto’s economic theories that influenced the course of the Fascist state, but especially the sociological theories: “the Sociologia Generale has become for many Fascists a treatise on government,” [41] noted one writer at the time. Clearly, there was some agreement between Pareto and the new government. Pareto’s theory of rule by elites, his authoritarian leanings, his uncompromising rejection of the liberal fixation with Economic Man, his hatred of disorder, his devotion to the hierarchical arrangement of society, and his belief in an aristocracy of merit are all ideas in harmony with Fascism. Let us keep in mind, however, that all of these ideas were formulated by Pareto decades before anyone had ever heard of Fascism and Mussolini. Likewise, it may be said that they are as much in harmony with age-old monarchical ideas, or those of the ancient authoritarian republics, as with any modern political creeds.

Some writers have speculated that had Pareto lived he would have found many points of disagreement with the Fascist state as it developed, and it is true that he expressed his disapprobation over limitations placed by the regime on freedom of expression, particularly in academia. [42] As we have already seen, however, it was in Pareto’s nature to find fault with nearly all regimes, past and present, and so it would not have been surprising had he found reason occasionally to criticize Mussolini’s.

Neither Pareto nor Mussolini, it should be pointed out, were rigid ideologues. Mussolini once declared, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, that “every system is a mistake and every theory a prison.” [43] While government must be guided by a general set of principles, he believed, one must not be constrained by inflexible doctrines that become nothing more than wearisome impedimenta in dealing with new and unexplained situations. An early Fascist writer explained, in part, Mussolini’s affinity with Pareto in this respect:

“To seek!” — a word of power. In a sense, a nobler word than “to find.” With more of intention in it, less of chance. You may “find” something that is false; but he who seeks goes on seeking increasingly, always hoping to attain to the truth. Vilfredo Pareto was a master of this school. He kept moving. Without movement, Plato said, everything becomes corrupted. As Homer sang, the eternal surge of the sea is the father of mankind. Every one of Pareto’s new books or of the new editions of them, includes any number of commentaries upon and modifications of his previous books, and deals in detail with the criticisms, corrections, and objections which they have elicited. He generally refutes his critics, but while doing so, he indicates other and more serious points in regard to which they might have, and ought to have, reproved or questioned him. Reflecting over his subject, he himself proceeds to deal with these points, finding some of them specious, some important, and correcting his earlier conclusions accordingly. [44]

Though Fascist rule in Italy came to an end with the military victory of the Anglo-Americans in 1945, Pareto’s influence was not seriously touched by that mighty upheaval. Today, new editions of his works and new books about his view of society continue to appear. That his ideas endured the catastrophe of the war virtually without damage, and that they are still discussed among and debated by serious thinkers, is suggestive of their universality and timelessness.

ENDNOTES

[30] John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 17. Diggins’ quotations in the cited paragraph come from the writings of an American Mussolini enthusiast of the 1920s, Kenneth L. Roberts.

[31] Ibid., p. 27.

[32] Ibid., p. 206. Mussolini was officially invited to attend the San Francisco Legion Convention of 1923 (he declined) and some years later was made an honorary member of the American Legion by a delegation of Legionnaires visiting Rome. The Duce received the delegation in his palace and was awarded a membership badge by the delighted American visitors.

[33] In an interview published in the London Times, January 21, 1927, immediately after a visit by Churchill to Mussolini, the future British Prime Minister said: “If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you [Mussolini] from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” See Luigi Villari, Italian Foreign Policy Under Mussolini (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1956), p. 43.

[34] The United States Ambassador to Italy in the ’20s, Child dubbed Mussolini “the Spartan genius,” ghostwrote an “autobiography” of Mussolini for publication in America, and perpetually extolled the Italian leader in the most extravagant terms. Diggins, p. 27.

[35] Pareto, Treatise, p. xvii.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Franz Borkenau, Pareto (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1936), p. 18.

[38] Ibid., p. 20.

[39] Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), p. 14.

[40] Borkenau, p. 18.

[41] George C. Homans and Charles P. Curtis, Jr., An Introduction to Pareto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), p. 9.

[42] Borkenau, p. 18. In a letter written to Mussolini written shortly before Pareto’s death, the sociologist cautioned that the Fascist regime must relentlessly strike down all active opponents. Those, however, whose opposition was merely verbal should not be molested since, he believed, that would serve only to conceal public opinion. “Let the crows craw but be merciless when it comes to acts,” Pareto admonished the Duce. See Alistair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919-1945 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1971), pp. 44-5.

[43] Margherita G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), p. 101.

[44] Ibid, p. 102.

Taking Sex Differences Seriously

John Adams once famously wrote to his wife that he studied politics and war so his children could study mathematics and philosophy and his grandchildren poetry and music.  Only a man of the Enlightenment could be so naive.  More than two hundred years later some students do study mathematics and music.  But it would’ve probably never crossed Adams’ mind in a thousand years that yet others would be studying “gender.”

Political scientist Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously is one of those books that is as interesting as its necessity is depressing.  Nothing that is written here — men are more interested in sports than women, women prefer status in men, females are better suited to care for children, etc. — would have been controversial in Adams’ day or amongst any band of hunter-gatherers.  But here we are in 2009, explaining that girls are not boys.  The Enlightenment philosophers’ mistake was projecting their belief in reason onto the rest of humanity.

From the First Day

One-day-old female infants have a stronger response to hearing a human in distress than their male counterparts.  Three days after birth, the stronger female interest in people is present.  Girls will maintain eye contact with a silent adult twice as long as boys do.  If the adult talks, girls but not boys will look longer.  Week-old baby girls but not boys can distinguish between an infant’s cry and other noises.  Only females are able to separate photographs of people they know from those they don’t by the age of four months.  Infants separate by sex very early.  One-year-olds prefer to play with their own kind and when watching a movie of babies will look at the members of their own sex more than the other.

If the above paragraph alone isn’t enough to kill the socialization hypothesis, we can look at real life examples of attempts to thwart Mother Nature.  In 1966, a circumcision gone wrong left one male identical twin without a penis.  Psychologist Dr. John Money of John Hopkins University persuaded the parents to raise the child as a female.  Surgeons completely castrated him and built what looked like a female vagina.  “Brenda” was from that point on treated like a girl.  She was given female steroids that would “facilitate and mimic female pubertal growth and feminization.”  When Brenda was 12, he/she was reported to be doing fine.  Time magazine ran a long piece on the story and the 1979 Textbook of Sexual Medicine claimed that Brenda’s “remarkably feminine” development proved the “plasticity of human gender identity.”  What’s missed here is that even if Brenda’s story was true, a lot more than socialization was going on.  Female hormones were injected and removal of the testicles ensured that some male hormones wouldn’t be produced.

But chemical tinkering and socialization together weren’t enough to make a boy into a girl.  Researchers eventually showed that Dr. Money was a fraud (whether he was embarrassed over the pain he caused or simply a maniac who liked seeing children mutilated and tortured we don’t know).  By the 1990s, Brenda had become David and was working in a slaughterhouse.  At the age of 14 he decided to start living as a male and a year later his parents told him the truth.  David was given male hormones, his breasts were removed, and he had a constructed penis installed.

After the real story came out, researchers at John Hopkins decided to find out what had happened to other boys that they decided would live as females.  They located twenty-five of them.  Each enjoyed rough-and-tumble play.  Fourteen had declared themselves boys, with one doing so as early as at five-years-old.

Simone de Beauvoir

The Ugly Implications of Feminism

If males and females should put the same amount of time and effort towards work, than the principle of equality demands that men do just as much work raising children.  As feminist Susan Okin has written about her just world:

In its social structures and practices, one’s sex would have no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.  No assumptions would be made about “male” and “female” roles; childbearing would be so conceptually separate from child rearing and other family responsibilities that it would be a cause for surprise, and no little concern, if men and women were not equally responsible for domestic life or if children were to spend much more time with one parent than the other.

Presumably, since we don’t want a world where people do more of what they don’t like or aren’t good at, we can socially construct one where men and women will like or dislike child rearing equally.  According to Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, “Motherly love ain’t everything it has been cracked up to be.”

Getting in the way of these egalitarian fantasies are the wishes of actual women.  In surveys, women are more likely than men to say that they enjoy spending time with infants.  Sweden, always on the cutting edge, decided in the 1970s to allow parental leave for a family only if the father took it.  The government undertook a propaganda campaign to get men to take care of their children.  To this day, Swedish mothers take parental leave twice as often as fathers do and for six times as long.  Similar evidence comes from the Israeli kibbutzim.  These small communities aimed specifically at doing away with traditional sex roles.  At the beginning, children were raised away from their parents.  After lobbying by young mothers, the family is once again the center of society.

No wonder that in 1975 feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.  Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.  It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.

This authoritarian streak is part of mainstream feminism.  Women’s advocates will support day care subsidies but not tax breaks for dependents, because the former is only financially beneficial if women work.

Perhaps it is the childlessness of feminists that makes them unable to understand their fellow women.  The peptide oxytocin is the most important nurturing hormone.  It promotes bonding and a relaxed emotional state.  It’s released in males during orgasm and in females while they are pregnant or breastfeeding.  Females have more receptors for the hormone and the number increases when a woman is pregnant.  Rhoads explains:

Oxytocin and prolactin, another hormone that surges during pregnancy and breastfeeding, change women’s personalities in ways that make them better mothers.  These hormones seem to make routine more tolerable.  Compared with other women their age, pregnant and breastfeeding women have been found to be more tolerant of monotony.  They are also more prone to please and obey-a trait that some researchers think is nature’s way of making them more ready “to ‘take orders’ from their babies.”  Even the act of stroking her baby releases oxytocin in the mother, causing her to feel a “beatific calm” and somewhat sedated.

. . . Many women feel euphoric or exhilarated while nursing.  A few even have orgasms.

When asked to rate how important on a 10 point scale different parts of their lives are to their happiness, 86 percent of mothers say that their children are a 10 while only 30 percent of working women give their careers a rating that high.  Many women who buy into the worldview of the nihilists end up regretting it.  Sylvia Hewlett set out to write a book on women who had achieved great things.  After interviewing the first ten, she was struck by the fact that each one was childless.  Not a single woman was so by choice.  Hewlett then went out and commissioned a survey of women who were making more than $60,000 a year in midcareer.  When they graduated from college, 14 percent knew they didn’t want children but 33 percent ended up childless.  Hewlett wrote that she was “continually surprised — and humbled — by how raw and near to the surface the emotions” were.  A women said to Hewlett that is was “frightening, this yearning for a child — it’s hard to fathom the desperate urgency.”  There is no equivalent feeling in childless successful men.  Quite a few of the older women had unrealistic expectations of being able to get pregnant in their 40s.  They were like Hillary Clinton, who said at the age of 49 that she might like to have another child.

Not even ideological feminists are immune.  A childless newswoman from Australia said that she was “Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel.  Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfillment came with a leather briefcase.”  A female journalist with a Yale degree said that when she realized that she wanted to mother her baby, “a huge and terrifying abyss” opened up beneath her.

A primate female is built for birthing and raising children.  Her psychological makeup and hormonal balance evolved for it.  Some skills are remarkably specialized.  When a baby cries in pain, mothers and fathers react the same way.  But when the cry is “I want” (food, comfort) the female is quicker to respond.  When childless women watch a video of a baby crying their heart rates accelerate.  Those of childless men decelerate.

As much as women need children, children need their mothers.  Infants prefer their moms to their dads.  One researcher explains the subtle dance that goes on when a child is nursing:

During a feeding, dozens of events occur.  The baby sucks, winces, squirms, relaxes, lets go of the nipple, burps, falls asleep, hiccups, smiles, roots, cries, opens his eyes, tenses his face or softens his expression.  His mother rocks, sits still, hums, is silent, adjusts her position, tenses, relaxes, gazes, smiles, talks, pats, strokes, lifts the baby, puts him down.  Each event is a remark.

It’s unclear whether fathers have interactions of comparable complexity with their infants because it’s difficult to find men who are with their babies long enough to be researched.  One study found that men on average talked to their infants 38 seconds per day.

While in the womb, a baby can recognize a mother’s heartbeat and voice.  After birth, he is calmed by both.  In one experiment researchers took monkey babies away from their mothers and noted the “grief, listlessness, the obvious and heart-rendering despair.”  One person involved declared, “Thank God, we only have to do it once to prove the point.”  If only our culture showed such consideration for human children.

The Chivalrous Conservative

Men are given much less attention than women in this book.  While the tragedy of Title IX and the havoc its wrecked on male sports is given its own chapter, besides that things are supposedly going pretty well for men.  According to Rhoads, “The sexual revolution gave men, not women, what they wanted.”  Perhaps a very small minority of men.  Rhoads writes that on college campuses today women sleep around, and in general it’s men who decide if the relationship continues.  That wasn’t the experience of most college students I knew.

I’m guessing that the sample that the author worked with was biased.  Men who aren’t doing well with women generally don’t like to talk about their nonexistent sex lives, and many aren’t above lying when they do.  The female sample is also unlikely to be representative.  The author tells us about pretty girls who gain weight so men will leave them alone, but the views of females too fat to even attract ugly men aren’t given much consideration.  Although the latter is most certainly more common, girls whose attractiveness and not obesity is the source of their pain are much more likely to talk about it.

There is a tendency noted by Roger Devlin for anti-feminist conservatives to cast themselves as the true defenders of women’s rights. Attention is given to the fact that women aren’t attracted to men who are beneath them in status (making it extremely difficult for high-achieving women to find husbands) but not much to the men who lose status and mating opportunities because their jobs go to women.  Affirmative action is not mentioned.  While it would be pointless to get into a discussion about who — men, women or children — have been most victimized by feminism, ignoring the plight of males is itself a product of this evil ideology.

The Need for Righteous Anger

At the beginning of his chapter on the psychoanalytic movement in the The Culture of Critique Kevin MacDonald quotes Paul Churchland who said: “How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted — on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments . . . is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.”  The same thing has to be asked about feminism.  How did a movement so destructive to both utilitarian and biological interests gain such widespread acceptance?

It’s really may not that much of a mystery at all.  We’ve got these giant brains, and sometimes they lead us astray.  Religious groups that don’t believe in procreation have popped up and gone extinct.  The Western world has become such a death cult.  The nihilists will leave this planet and the patriarchal shall inherit the earth.

Rhoads notes that his classes on sex differences are overwhelmingly female.  The young co-eds are on the edge of their seats while the few men look bored.  The author writes fondly about the young “radical feminists” he’s had in his classes.  He’s too kind.  My reaction to leftists has been closer to that of Paul Gottfried, who said in his Encounters that over the years he “developed a Nietzschean reaction to the girly men and virago women that populate university settings.”  Feminists and multiculturalists changed society while motivated with a burning hatred for those they considered the epitome of evil, not by making friends with those they considered simply misguided. It’s a lesson we ought to learn.

Vilfredo Pareto, 1848 - 1923

Pareto is additionally important for us today because he is a towering figure in one of Europe’s most distinguished, and yet widely suppressed, intellectual currents.That broad school of thought includes such diverse figures as Burke, Taine, Dostoyevsky, Burckhardt, Donoso Cortés, Nietzsche, and Spengler and stands in staunch opposition to rationalism, liberalism, egalitarianism, Marxism, and all of the other offspring of Enlightenment doctrinaires.

Life and Personality

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was born in Paris in 1848. [4] He was of mixed Italian-French ancestry, the only son of the Marquis Raffaele Pareto, an Italian exiled from his native Genoa because of his political views, and Marie Mattenier. Because his father earned a reasonably comfortable living as a hydrological engineer, Pareto was reared in a middle-class environment, enjoying the many advantages that accrued to people of his class in that age. He received a quality education in both France and Italy, ultimately completing his degree in engineering at the Istituto Politecnico of Turin where he graduated at the top of his class. For some years after graduation, he worked as a civil engineer, first for the state-owned Italian Railway Company and later in private industry.

Pareto married in 1889. His new spouse Dina Bakunin, a Russian, apparently loved an active social life, which was rather in conflict with Pareto’s own love of privacy and solitude. After twelve years of marriage Dina abandoned her husband. His second wife, Jane Régis, joined him shortly after the collapse of his marriage and the two remained devoted to one another throughout the remainder of Pareto’s life.

During these years Pareto acquired a deep interest in the political life of his country and expressed his views on a variety of topics in lectures, in articles for various journals, and in direct political activity. Steadfast in his support of free enterprise economic theory and free trade, he never ceased arguing that these concepts were vital necessities for the development of Italy. Vociferous and polemical in his advocacy of these ideas, and sharp in his denunciation of his opponents (who happened to be in power in Italy at that time), his public lectures were sufficiently controversial that they were sometimes raided and closed down by the police, and occasionally brought threats of violence from hired thugs. Making little headway with his economic concepts at the time, Pareto retired from active political life and was appointed Professor of Political Economy at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1893. There he established his reputation as an economist and sociologist. So substantial did this reputation eventually become that he has been dubbed “the Karl Marx of the Bourgeoisie” by his Marxist opponents. In economic theory, his Manual of Political Economy [5] and his critique of Marxian socialism, Les Systèmes socialistes, [6] remain among his most important works.

Pareto turned to sociology somewhat late in life, but he is nonetheless acclaimed in this field. His monumental Treatise on General Sociology, and two smaller volumes, The Rise and Fall of the Elites and The Transformation of Democracy, are his sociological masterworks. [7] Subsequently, we will consider the nature of some of the theories contained in these books.

The title of Marquis was bestowed on Pareto’s great-great-great- grandfather in 1729 and, after his father’s death in 1882, that dignity passed to Pareto himself. He never used the title, however, insisting that since it was not earned, it held little meaning for him. Conversely, after his appointment to the University of Lausanne, he did use the title “Professor,” since that was something which, he felt, he merited because of his lifetime of study. These facts point to one of the most dominant characteristics of this man — his extreme independence.

Pareto’s great intelligence caused him difficulties in working under any kind of supervision. All of his life he moved, step by step, towards personal independence. Because he was thoroughly conscious of his own brilliance, his confidence in his abilities and in his intellectual superiority often irritated and offended people around him. Pareto, in discussing almost any question about which he felt certain, could be stubborn in his views and disdainful of those with divergent opinions. Furthermore, he could be harsh and sarcastic in his remarks. As a result, some people came to see Pareto as disputatious, caustic, and careless of people’s feelings.

In contrast, Pareto could be generous to those he perceived as “underdogs.” He was always ready to take up his pen in defense of the poor or to denounce corruption in government and the exploitation of those unable to defend themselves. As author and sociologist Charles Powers writes,

For many years Pareto offered money, shelter, and counsel to political exiles (especially in 1898 following the tumultuous events of that year in Italy]. Like his father, Pareto was conservative in his personal tastes and inclinations, but he was also capable of sympathizing with others and appreciating protests for equality of opportunity and freedom of expression.[8] Pareto was a free thinker. In some respects, he is reminiscent of an early libertarian. He was possessed of that duality of mood we continue to find among people who are extremely conservative and yet ardent in their belief in personal liberty. [9]

Since he was an expert in the use of the sword, as well as a crack shot, he was disinclined to give way before any threats to his person, a mode of behavior he considered cowardly and contrary to his personal sense of honor. More than once he sent bullies and thugs running in terror. [10]

Pareto suffered from heart disease towards the end of his life and struggled through his last years in considerable ill health. He died August 19, 1923.

Les Systèmes socialistes

A lifelong opponent of Marxism and liberal egalitarianism, Pareto published a withering broadside against the Marxist-liberal worldview in 1902. Considering the almost universal respect accorded the more salient aspects of Marxism and liberalism, it is regrettable that Pareto’s Les Systèmes socialistes has not been translated into English in its entirety. Only a few excerpts have appeared in print. In an often quoted passage that might be taken as a prophetic warning for our own age, Pareto writes:

A sign which almost invariably presages the decadence of an aristocracy is the intrusion of humanitarian feelings and of affected sentimentalizing which render the aristocracy incapable of defending its position. Violence, we should note, is not to be confused with force. Often enough one observes cases in which individuals and classes which have lost the force to maintain themselves in power make themselves more and more hated because of their outbursts of random violence. The strong man strikes only when it is absolutely necessary, and then nothing stops him. Trajan was strong, not violent: Caligula was violent, not strong.When a living creature loses the sentiments which, in given circumstances are necessary to it in order to maintain the struggle for life, this is a certain sign of degeneration, for the absence of these sentiments will, sooner or later, entail the extinction of the species. The living creature which shrinks from giving blow for blow and from shedding its adversary’s blood thereby puts itself at the mercy of this adversary. The sheep has always found a wolf to devour it; if it now escapes this peril, it is only because man reserves it for his own prey.

Any people which has horror of blood to the point of not knowing how to defend itself will sooner or later become the prey of some bellicose people or other. There is not perhaps on this globe a single foot of ground which has not been conquered by the sword at some time or other, and where the people occupying it have not maintained themselves on it by force. If the Negroes were stronger than the Europeans, Europe would be partitioned by the Negroes and not Africa by the Europeans. The “right” claimed by people who bestow on themselves the title of “civilized’ to conquer other peoples, whom it pleases them to call “uncivilized,” is altogether ridiculous, or rather, this right is nothing other than force. For as long as the Europeans are stronger than the Chinese, they will impose their will on them; but if the Chinese should become stronger than the Europeans, then the roles would be reversed, and it is highly probable that humanitarian sentiments could never be opposed with any effectiveness to any army. [11]

In another portion of this same work that calls to mind the words of German philosopher Oswald Spengler, Pareto similarly warns against what he regarded as the suicidal danger of “humanitarianism”:

Any elite which is not prepared to join in battle to defend its position is in full decadence, and all that is left to it is to give way to another elite having the virile qualities it lacks. It is pure day-dreaming to imagine that the humanitarian principles it may have proclaimed will be applied to it: its vanquishers will stun it with the implacable cry, Vae Victis [="woe to the vanquished"]. The knife of the guillotine was being sharpened in the shadows when, at the end of the eighteenth century, the ruling classes in France were engrossed in developing their “sensibility.” This idle and frivolous society, living like a parasite off the country, discoursed at its elegant supper parties of delivering the world from superstition and of crushing l’Infâme, all unsuspecting that it was itself going to be crushed. [12]

Marxism

A substantial portion of Les Systèmes socialistes is devoted to a scathing assessment of the basic premises of Marxism. According to historian H. Stuart Hughes, this work caused Lenin “many a sleepless night.” [13]

In Pareto’s view, the Marxist emphasis on the historical struggle between the unpropertied working class — the proletariat — and the property-owning capitalist class is skewed and terribly misleading. History is indeed full of conflict, but the proletariat-capitalist struggle is merely one of many and by no means the most historically important. As Pareto explains:

The class struggle, to which Marx has specially drawn attention, is a real factor, the tokens of which are to be found on every page of history. But the struggle is not confined only to two classes: the proletariat and the capitalist; it occurs between an infinite number of groups with different interests, and above all between the elites contending for power. The existence of these groups may vary in duration, they may be based on permanent or more or less temporary characteristics. In the most savage peoples, and perhaps in all, sex determines two of these groups. The oppression of which the proletariat complains, or had cause to complain of, is as nothing in comparison with that which the women of the Australian aborigines suffer. Characteristics to a greater or lesser degree real — nationality, religion, race, language, etc. — may give rise to these groups. In our own day [i.e. 1902] the struggle of the Czechs and the Germans in Bohemia is more intense than that of the proletariat and the capitalists in England. [14]

Marx’s ideology represents merely an attempt, Pareto believes, to supplant one ruling elite with another, despite Marxist promises to the contrary:

The socialists of our own day have clearly perceived that the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century led merely to the bourgeoisie’s taking the place of the old elite. They exaggerate a good deal the burden of oppression imposed by the new masters, but they do sincerely believe that a new elite of politicians will stand by their promises better than those which have come and gone up to the present day. All revolutionaries proclaim, in turn, that previous revolutions have ultimately ended up by deceiving the people; it is their revolution alone which is the true revolution. “All previous historical movements” declared the Communist Manifesto of 1848, “were movements of minorities or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.” Unfortunately this true revolution, which is to bring men an unmixed happiness, is only a deceptive mirage that never becomes a reality. It is akin to the golden age of the millenarians: forever awaited, it is forever lost in the mists of the future, forever eluding its devotees just when they think they have it. [15]

ENDNOTES

[1] See, for example, W. Rex Crawford, “Representative Italian Contributions to Sociology: Pareto, Loria, Vaccaro, Gini, and Sighele,” chap. in An Introduction to The History of Sociology, Harry Elmer Barnes, editor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), Howard Becker and Harry Elmer Barnes, “Sociology in Italy,” chap. in Social Thought From Lore to Science, (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), and James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: The John Day Company, 1943).

[2] G. Duncan Mitchell, A Hundred Years of Sociology (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968), p. 115.

[3] Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 102.

[4] Biographical details are taken from Charles H. Powers, Vilfredo Pareto, vol. 5, Masters of Social Theory, Jonathan H. Turner, Editor (Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1987), pp. 13-20.

[5] Appearing originally in 1909, the Manuele di economia politica has been translated into English: Ann Schwier translator, Ann Schwier and Alfred Page, Editors (New York: August M. Kelly, 1971).

[6] (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1965). Published originally 1902-3. The book has never been fully published in English.

[7] The Treatise on General Sociology (Trattato di Sociologia Generale), was first published in English under the name The Mind and Society, A. Borngiorno and Arthur Livingston, translators (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1935). It was reprinted in 1963 under its original title (New York: Dover Publications) and remains in print (New York: AMS Press, 1983). The Rise and Fall of the Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology (Totowa, New Jersey: The Bedminster Press, 1968; reprint, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1991) is a translation of Pareto’s monograph, “Un Applicazione de teorie sociologiche,” published in 1901 in Revista Italiana di Sociologia. The Transformation of Democracy (Trasformazioni della democrazia), Charles Power, editor, R. Girola, translator (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1984). The original Italian edition appeared in 1921.

[8] This term, “equality of opportunity” is so misused in our own time, especially in America, that some clarification is appropriate. “Equality of opportunity” refers merely to Pareto’s belief that in a healthy society advancement must be opened to superior members of all social classes — “Meritocracy,” in other words. See Powers, pp. 22-3.

[9] Powers, p. 19.

[10] Ibid., p. 20.

[11] Adrian Lyttelton, Editor, Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 79-80.

[12] Ibid., p. 81.

[13] H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), p. 16.

[14] Lyttelton, p. 86.

[15] Ibid., pp. 82-3.

Editor’s Note: A different version of the preceding article appeared in the Journal of Historical Review, 14/5 (September-October 1994), 10-18. The text presented here, however, includes some additional material and is from Irminsul’s Racial Nationalist Library. This is the first of four parts. The divisions were introduced by TOQ Online.

[. . .]

The Hour of Decision, like everything that Spengler authored, is a rich mine of observation and insight, difficult to summarize, mainly because it communicates so thoroughly with the monumental Decline, to which it forms an epilogue.  The core of The Hour is its diptych of concluding chapters on what Spengler calls “The White World-Revolution” and “The Coloured World-Revolution.”  [. . .]

Conjuring the image of the modern megalopolis and echoing Ortega’s alarm over the masses, Spengler writes, “A pile of atoms is no more alive than a single one.”  Crudely quantitative in its mental processes, the modern mass subject equates “the material product of economic activity” with “civilization and history.”  Spengler insists that economics is merely a sleight-of-hand discourse for disguising the real nature of the “catastrophe” that has overcome the West, which is a failure of cultural nerve.

In The Hour, Spengler builds on notions he had developed in The Decline, particularly the idea that the West has ceased to be a “Culture,” a healthy, vital thing, and has entered into the moribund phase of its life, or what Spengler calls “Civilization.” Into the megalopolis, “this world of stone and petrifaction,” writes Spengler, “flock ever-growing crowds of peasant folk uprooted from the land, the ‘masses’ in the terrifying sense, formless human sand from which artificial and therefore fleeting figures can be kneaded.”  Spengler stresses the formlessness of “Civilization,” in which “the instinct for the permanence of family and race” stands abolished.  Where “Culture is growth,” and “an abundance of children,” “Civilization” is “cold intelligence… the mere intelligence of the day, of the daily papers, ephemeral literature, and national assemblies,” with no urge to prolong itself as settled custom, well-bred offspring, or a posterity that honors tradition.  The “White World-Revolution” consists in the triumph of “the mob, the underworld in every sense.”

The mob, which sees everything from below, hates refinement and despises anything permanent.  The masses want “liberation from all… bonds [and] from every kind of form and custom, from all the people whose mode of life they feel in their dull fury to be superior.”  Hence the appeal of egalitarianism to the masses.  But, as Spengler argues, egalitarianism is really only a slogan, a euphemism.  The real trend is “Nihilism.”

The pattern of “Nihilism” emerged in the French Revolution, with its vocabulary of leveling, as in the radically politicizing etiquette of “citoyen” and in the supposedly universal demand for “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”  “The central demand of political liberalism,” writes Spengler, consists in “the desire to be free from the ethical restrictions of the Old Culture.”  Yet as Spengler insists: “The demand was anything but universal; it was only called so by the ranters and writers who lived by it and sought to further private aims through this freedom.”  We see this identical pattern today in the various concocted emergencies and so-called universal demands that the current thoroughly liberal-nihilistic regime in the United States trots out serially to justify its consolidation of power, whereby it ceaselessly attacks what remains in the American body-politic of form and custom.  In Spengler’s aphorism: “Active liberalism progresses from Jacobinism to Bolshevism logically.”

In Spengler’s judgment, moreover, one would make a mistake in equating Bolshevism, as people would have done in the 1930s, uniquely with the Soviet Union.  “Actually [Bolshevism] was born in Western Europe, and born indeed of logical necessity as the last phase of the liberal democracy of 1770 – which is to say, of the presumptuous intention to control living history by paper systems and ideals.”

When Spengler remarks on the theme of tolerance (so-called) in liberalism-nihilism, one thinks again of the existing situation in Europe and North America the first decade of the Twenty-First Century.  Inherent to form is its rigorous exclusion of the formless.  In its aggressive demand for inclusion of the rightly excluded, which belongs to its destructive impetus, the liberal-nihilistic regime works actively to de-stigmatize anti-social behavior.  Thus under liberalism-nihilism “tolerance is extended,” by self-denominating representatives of the people, “to the destructive forces, not demanded by them.”  Of course, the “destructive forces” do not refuse the extension.  On historical analogy, Spengler refers to this as “the Gracchan method.”  When once, as had already happened in Europe in Spengler’s time, “the concept of the proletariat [had] been accepted by the middle classes,” then the formula for cultural suicide had at last all of its ingredients in place.  “I am aware,” writes Spengler, “that most people will refuse with horror to admit that this irrevocable crashing of everything that centuries have built up was intentional, the result of deliberate working to that end… But it is so.”

[. . .]

IV. Like another, later analyst of modernity in its agony, Eric Voegelin, Spengler sees at the root of Liberalism-Nihilism the perversion of a religious idea.  “All Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought: More’s Utopia, the Sun-State of the Dominica Campanella, the doctrines of Luther’s disciples Karlstadt and Thomas Münzer, and Fichte’s state-socialism… Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”  The materialism – which is again a type of nihilism – of Marxism and socialism never contradicts the case for liberalism-nihilism as a perversion of Gospel themes.  “As soon as one mixes up the concepts of poverty, hunger, distress, work, and wages (with the moral undertone of rich and poor, right and wrong) and is led thereby to join in the social and economic demands of the proletarian sort – that is, money demands – one is a materialist.”  But, this being Spengler’s point, one may have the belief-attitude with respect to one’s materialist doctrines that the fanatic of God has for his mental idol, with the concomitant fierceness and ruthlessness.  The end of real Christianity is “renunciation.”  With reference to the sentence of Adam, writes Spengler, the Gospel tells men, “do not regard this hard meaning of life as misery and seek to circumvent it by party politics.”

In a precise description of the modern, immigration-friendly, general-welfare state, Spengler remarks that “for proletarian election propaganda,” an opposite principle to the Gospel one is required: “The materialist prefers to eat the bread that others have earned in the sweat of their face.”  When the Gracchan rabble dominates from below so that the demagogues might manipulate from above, then it will come to pass that “the parasitic egoism of inferior minds, who regard the economic life of other people, and that of the whole, as an object from which to squeeze with the least possible exertion the greatest possible enjoyment” will seek its bestial end in “panem et circenses.” Once the majority descends to vulgar consumption through extortion – and through a mere pretence of work under the welfare-umbrella of “the political wage” – then the society has doomed itself.  It can only lurch in the direction of its inevitable demise.  Even the keen-eyed will not want to confront reality.  They will, as Spengler writes, “refuse in horror” to believe what they see.  Spengler might have been thinking about a letter from his correspondent Roderich Schlubach dated 9 October 1931.  Schlubach writes: “I frankly admit that much of what you prophesied [in The Decline] has taken place.  The decline of the West seems to be at hand, and still I do not believe in an end of the world, only in an entire change in our circumstances.”

That is “The White World-Revolution” – the triumph of rabble-envy, the destruction of form, childlessness, and the childishness of mass entertainments.  Indeed, “an entire change in our circumstances,” as Schlubach says, not grasping that his words mean the opposite of what he intends.  What of “The Coloured World-Revolution”?  Keyserling had admonished, in the concluding chapter of Europe, that Europe in its chafing unity would come under threat from the nearby non-European world.  In Spengler’s historical theory, the threat of external barbarism always coincides with the passage of the “Culture” into its deliquescent rabble-stage – the stage that the Decline-author ironically calls “Civilization.”  Earlier, in the robustness of the culture-stage, the ascendant people inevitably imposes itself on neighboring and foreign peoples whose levels of social complexity and technical sophistication are lower and who cannot effectively resist encroachment.  Spengler emphasizes that it cannot be otherwise.  The people of the less-developed society gradually grow conscious of a difference, which the emergent demagogue-class of the more-developed society in its liberal paroxysm swiftly encourages them to see as an injustice.

Thus, Spengler asserts, “the White Revolution since 1770 has been preparing the soil for the Coloured one.”  The process has followed this course:

The literature of the English liberals like Mill and Spencer… supplied the “world outlook” to the higher schools of India.  And thence the way to Marx was easy for the young reformers themselves to find.  Sun Yat Sen, the leader of the Chinese Revolution, found it in America.  And out of it all there arose a revolutionary literature of which the Radicalism puts that of Marx and Borodin to shame. . . . Read the whole article.

is section no. 38 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols. A discussion question: How might Nietzsche be used to explain why America’s founding generation and the presidents drawn from it were greater than every subsequent generation brought up under the system they created?

38. My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of “pleasure.” The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.

How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by “tyrants” are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.

Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.

is section no. 39 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols.

39. Critique of modernity. — Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good enough for them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power: in Human, All-Too-Human (I, 472) I already characterized modern democracy, together with its hybrids such as the “German Reich,” as the form of decline of the state. In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum. When this will is present, something like the imperium Romanum is founded; or like Russia, the only power today which has endurance, which can wait, which can still promise something — Russia, the concept that suggests the opposite of the wretched European nervousness and system of small states, which has entered a critical phase with the founding of the German Reich.

The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called “freedom.” That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word “authority” is even spoken out loud. That is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.

Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage — that lay in the husband’s sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage — that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family’s responsibility for the choice of a spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on “love” — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.

Men Among the Ruins:
Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

Baron Julius Evola (1899-1974) was an important Italian intellectual, although he despised the term. As poet and painter, he was the major Italian representative of Dadaism (1916-1922). Later he became the leading Italian exponent of the intellectually rigorous esotericism of René Guénon (1886-1951). He enjoyed an international reputation as the author of books on magic, alchemy and eastern religious traditions and won the respect of such important scholars as Mircea Eliade and Giuseppe Tucci. His book on early Buddhism, The Doctrine of Awakening,[1] which was translated in 1951, established his reputation among English-speaking esotericists. In 1983, Inner Traditions International, directed by Ehud Sperling, published Evola’s 1958 book, The Metaphysics of Sex, which it reprinted as Eros and the Mysteries of Love in 1992, the same year it published his 1949 book on Tantra, The Yoga of Power.[2]

The marketing appeal of the topic of sex is obvious. Both books, however, are serious studies, not sex manuals. Since then Inner Traditions has reprinted The Doctrine of Awakening and published many of Evola’s esoteric books, including studies of alchemy and magic,[3] and what Evola himself considered his most important exposition of his beliefs, Revolt Against the Modern World.[4]

In Europe Evola is known not only as an esotericist, but also as a brilliant and incisive right-wing thinker. During the 1980s most of his books, New Age and political, were translated into French under the aegis of Alain de Benoist, the leader of the French Nouvelle Droite.[5] Books and articles by Evola have been translated into German and published in every decade since the 1930s.[6]

Discussion of Evola’s politics reached North America slowly. In the 1980s political scientists Thomas Sheehan, Franco Ferraresi, and Richard Drake wrote about him unsympathetically, blaming him for Neo-Fascist terrorism.[7] In 1990 the esoteric journal, Gnosis, devoted part of an issue to Evola. Robin Waterfield, a classicist and author of a book on René Guénon, contributed a thoughtful appreciation of his work on the basis of French translations.[8] Italian esotericist Elémire Zolla discussed Evola’s development accurately but ungenerously.[9] The essay by Gnosis editor Jay Kinney was driven by an almost hysterical fear of the word “Fascist.” He did not appear to have read Evola’s books in any language, called the 1983 edition of The Metaphysics of Sex Evola’s “only book translated into English” and concluded “Evola’s esotericism appears to be well outside of the main currents of Western tradition. It remains to be seen whether his Hermetic virtues can be disentangled from his political sins. Meanwhile, he serves as a persuasive argument for the separation of esoteric ‘Church and State.’”[10]

With the publication of Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist,[11] English speakers can read Evola’s political views for themselves. They will find that the text, in Guido Stucco’s workman-like translation, edited by Michael Moynihan, is guarded by a double firewall. Joscelyn Godwin’s “Foreword” answers Jay Kinney’s hysterical diatribe of 1990. Godwin defends publishing Evola’s political writings by an appeal to “academic freedom,” which works “with the tools of rationality and scholarship, unsullied by emotionality or subjective references” and favors making all of Evola’s works available because “it would be academically dishonest to suppress anything.” Godwin’s high praise for The Doctrine of Awakening implicitly condemns Kinney’s ignorance. Evola’s books on esoteric topics reveal “one of the keenest minds in the field . . . The challenge to esotericists is that when Evola came down to earth, he was so ‘incorrect’ – by the received standards of our society. He was no fool; and he cannot possibly have been right . . . so what is one to make of it?”

Godwin’s “Preface” is followed by an introduction of more than 100 pages by Austrian esotericist H. T. Hansen on “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” translated from the 1991 German version of Men Among the Ruins,[12] with additional notes and corrections (called “Preface to the American Edition”). Hansen’s introduction to Revolt Against the Modern World[13] is, with Robin Waterfield’s Gnosis essay, the best short introduction to Evola in English. His longer essay is essential for serious students, and Inner Traditions deserves warm thanks for publishing it. The major book on Evola is Christophe Boutin, Politique et Tradition: Julius Evola dans le siècle (1898-1974).[14]

Readers of books published by Inner Traditions might have guessed Evola’s politics. The Mystery of the Grail,[15] first published in 1937, praises the Holy Roman Empire as a great political force, led by Germans and Italians, which tried to unite Europe under the Nordic Ghibellines. Esotericists will probably guess that the title of Revolt Against the Modern World is an homage to Crisis of the Modern World,[16] the most accessible of René Guénon’s many books. The variation is also a challenge. Evola and Guénon see the modern world as the fulfillment of the Hindu Kali Yuga, or Dark Age, that will end one cosmic cycle and introduce another. For Guénon the modern world is to be endured, but Evola believed that real men are not passive. His praise of “The World of Tradition” with its warrior aristocracies and sacral kingship is peppered with contempt for democracy, but New Age writers often make such remarks, just as scientists do. If you believe you know the truth, it is hard not to be contemptuous of a system that determines matters by counting heads and ignores the distinction between the knowledgeable and the ignorant.

Visionary Among Italian Conservative Revolutionaries

Evola was not only an important figure in Guénon’s Integral Traditionalism, but also the leading Italian exponent of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, which included Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Jünger.[17] From 1934-43, Evola was editor of what we would now call the “op-ed” page of a major Italian newspaper (Regime Fascista) and published Conservative Revolutionaries and other right-wing and traditionalist authors.[18] He corresponded with Schmitt,[19] translated Spengler’s Decline of the West and Jünger’s An der Zeitmauer (At the Time Barrier) into Italian and wrote the best introduction to Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (The Worker), “The Worker” in Ernst Jünger’s Thought.[20]

Spengler has been well served by translation into English, but other important figures of the Conservative Revolution had to wait a long time. Carl Schmitt’s major works have been translated only in the past few decades.[21] Jünger’s most important work of social criticism, Der Arbeiter, has never been translated.[22] The major scholarly book on the movement has never been translated, either.[23] It is a significant statement on the limits of expression in the United States that so many leftist mediocrities are published, while major European thinkers of the rank of Schmitt, Jünger, and Evola have to wait so long for translation, if the day ever comes. It is certainly intriguing that a New Age press has undertaken the translation and publishing of Evola’s books, with excellent introductions.

The divorced wife of a respected free market economist once remarked to me, “Yale used to say that conservatives were just old-fashioned liberals.”[24] People who accept that definition will be flabbergasted by Julius Evola. Like Georges Sorel, Oswald Spengler, Whittaker Chambers, and Régis Debray, Evola insists that liberals and communists are in fundamental agreement on basic principles. This agreement is significant, because for Evola politics is an expression of basic principles and he never tires of repeating his own. The transcendent is real. Man’s knowledge of his relationship to transcendence has been handed down from the beginning of human culture. This is Tradition, with a capital T. Human beings are tri-partite: body, soul, and spirit. State and society are hierarchical and the clearer the hierarchy, the healthier the society. The worst traits of the modern world are its denial of transcendence, reductionist vision of man and egalitarianism.

These traits come together in what Evola called “la daimonìa dell’economia,” translated by Stucco as “the demonic nature of the economy.”[25] Real men exist to attain knowledge of the transcendent and to strive and accomplish heroically. The economy is only a tool to provide the basis for such accomplishments and to sustain the kind of society that permits the best to attain sanctity and greatness. The modern world denies this vision.

In both individual and collective life the economic factor is the most important, real, and decisive one . . . An economic era is already by definition a fundamentally anarchical and anti-hierarchical era; it represents a subversion of the normal order . . . This subversive character is found in both Marxism and in its apparent nemesis, modern capitalism. Thus, it is absurd and deplorable for those who pretend to represent the political ‘Right’ to fail to leave the dark and small circle that is determined by the demonic power of the economy – a circle including capitalism, Marxism, and all the intermediate economic degrees. This should be firmly upheld by those today who are taking a stand against the forces of the Left. Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical.[26]

Most conservatives do not like the leftist hegemony we live under, but they still want to cling to some aspect of modernity to preserve a toehold on respectability. Evola rejected the Enlightenment project lock, stock, and barrel, and had little use for the Renaissance and the Reformation. His books ask us to take seriously the attempt to imagine an intellectual and political world that radically rejects the leftist worldview. He insists that those really opposed to the leftist regime, the true Right, are not embarrassed to use words like reactionary and counter revolutionary. If you are afraid of these words, you do not have the courage to stand up to the modern world.

He also countenances the German expression, Conservative Revolution, if properly understood. Revolution is acceptable only if it is true re-volution, a turning back to origins. Conservatism is valid only when it preserves the true Tradition. So loyalty to the bourgeois order is a false conservatism, because on the level of principle, the bourgeoisie is an economic class, not a true aristocracy. That is one reason why at the end of his life, Evola was planning a right-wing journal to be called The Reactionary, in conscious opposition to the leading Italian conservative magazine, Il Borghese, “The Bourgeois.”

For Evola the state creates the nation, not the opposite. Although Evola maintained a critical distance from Fascism and never joined the Fascist Party,[27] here he was in substantial agreement with Mussolini and the famous article on “Fascism” in the Enciclopedia Italiana, authored by the philosopher and educator, Giovanni Gentile. He disagreed strongly with the official philosophy of 1930’s Germany. The Volk is not the basis of a true state, an imperium. Rather the state creates the people. Naturally, Evola rejected Locke’s notion of the Social Contract, where rational, utilitarian individuals come together to give up some of their natural rights in order to preserve the most important one, the right to property. Evola also disagreed with Aristotle’s idea that the state developed from the family. The state was created from Männerbünde, disciplined groups entered through initiation by men who were to become warriors and priests. The Männerbund, not the family, is the original basis of true political life.[28]

Evola saw his mission as finding men who could be initiated into a real warrior aristocracy, the Hindu kshatriya, to carry out Bismarck’s “Revolution from above,” what Joseph de Maistre called “not a counterrevolution, but the opposite of a revolution.” This was not a mass movement, nor did it depend on the support of the masses, by their nature incapable of great accomplishments. Hansen thinks these plans were utopian, but Evola was in touch with the latest political science. The study of elites and their role in every society, especially liberal democracies, was virtually an Italian monopoly in the first half of the Twentieth century, carried on by men like Roberto Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto. Evola saw that nothing can be accomplished without leadership. The modern world needs a true elite to rescue it from its involution into materialism, egalitarianism and its obsession with the economy and to restore a healthy regime of order, hierarchy and spiritual creativity. When that elite is educated and initiated, then (and only then) a true state can be created and the Dark Age will come to an end.

Egalitarianism, Fascism, Race, and Roman Catholicism

Despite his criticism of the demagogic and populist aspects of Fascism and National Socialism, Evola believed that under their aegis Italy and Germany had turned away from liberalism and communism and provided the basis for a return to aristocracy, the restoration of the castes and the renewal of a social order based on Tradition and the transcendent. Even after their defeat in World War II, Evola believed that the fight was not over, although he became increasingly discouraged and embittered in the decades after the war. (Pain from a crippling injury suffered in an air raid may have contributed to this feeling.)

Although Evola believed that the transcendent was essential for a true revival, he did not look to the Catholic Church for leadership. Men Among the Ruins was published in 1953, when the official position of the Church was still strongly anti-Communist and Evola had lived through the 1920s and 1930s when the Vatican signed the Concordat with Mussolini. So his analysis of the Church, modified but not changed for the second edition in 1967, is impressive as is his prediction that the Church would move to the left.

After the times of De Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés, and the Syllabus have passed, Catholicism has been characterized by political maneuvering . . . Inevitably, the Church’s sympathies must gravitate toward a democratic-liberal political system. Moreover, Catholicism had for a long time espoused the theory of ‘natural right,’ which hardly agrees with the positive and differentiated right, on which a strong and hierarchical State can be built . . . Militant Catholics like Maritain had revived Bergson’s formula according to which ‘democracy is essentially evangelical’; they tried to demonstrate that the democratic impulse in history appears as a temporal manifestation of the authentic Christian and Catholic spirit . . . By now, the categorical condemnations of modernism and progressivism are a thing of the past . . . When today’s Catholics reject the ‘medieval residues’ of their tradition; when Vatican II and its implementations have pushed for debilitating forms of ‘bringing things up to date’; when popes uphold the United Nations (a ridiculous hybrid and illegitimate organization) practically as the prefiguration of a future Christian ecumene – this leaves no doubt in which direction the Church is being dragged. All things considered, Catholicism’s capability of providing an adequate support for a revolutionary-conservative and traditionalist movement must be resolutely denied.[29]

Although his 1967 analysis mentions Vatican II, Evola’s position on the Catholic Church went back to the 1920s, when after his early Dadaism he was developing a philosophy based on the traditions of India, the Far East and ancient Rome under the influence of Arturo Reghini (1878-1946).[30] Reghini introduced Evola to Guénon’s ideas on Tradition and his own thinking on Roman “Pagan Imperialism” as an alternative to the Twentieth Century’s democratic ideals and plutocratic reality. Working with a leading Fascist ideologue, Giuseppe Bottai (1895-1959), Evola wrote a series of articles in Bottai’s Critica Fascista in 1926-27, praising the Roman Empire as a synthesis of the sacred and the regal, an aristocratic and hierarchical system under a true leader. Evola rejected the Catholic Church as a source of religion and morality independent of the state, because he saw its universalistic claims as compatible with and tending toward liberal egalitarianism and humanitarianism, despite its anti-Communist rhetoric.

Evola’s articles enjoyed a national succès de scandale and he expanded them into a book, Imperialismo Pagano (1928), which provoked a heated debate involving many Fascist and Catholic intellectuals, including, significantly, Giovanni Battista Montini (1897-1978), who, when Evola published the second edition of Men Among the Ruins in 1967, had become the liberal Pope Paul VI. Meanwhile, Mussolini was negotiating with Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) for a reconciliation in which the Church would give its blessings to his regime in return for protection of its property and official recognition as the religion of Italy. Italy had been united by the Piedmontese conquest of Papal Rome in 1870, and the Popes had never recognized the new regime. So Evola wrote in 1928, “Every Italian and every Fascist should remember that the King of Italy is still considered a usurper by the Vatican.”[31] The signing of the Vatican Accords on February 11, 1929, ended that situation and the debate. Even Reghini and Bottai turned against Evola.[32]

Evola later regretted the tone of his polemic, but he also pointed out that the fact that this debate took place gave the lie direct to extreme assertions about lack of freedom of speech in Fascist Italy. Evola has been vindicated on the main point. The Catholic Church accepts liberal democracy and even defends it as the only legitimate regime. Notre Dame University is not the only Catholic university with a Jacques Maritain Center, but neither Notre Dame nor any other Catholic university in America has a Center named after Joseph de Maistre or Louis de Bonald or Juan Donoso Cortés. Pope Pius IX was beatified for proclaiming the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, not for his Syllabus Errorum, which denounced the idea of coming to terms with liberalism and modern civilization.

Those who want to distance Evola from Fascism emphasize the debate over Pagan Imperialism. For several years afterwards Fascist toughs harassed Evola, until he won the patronage of Roberto Farinacci, the Fascist boss of Cremona. Evola edited the opinion page of Farinacci’s newspaper, Regime Fascista, from 1934 to 1943 in an independent fashion. Although there are anecdotes about Mussolini’s fear of Evola, the documentary evidence points in the opposite direction. Yvon de Begnac’s talks with Mussolini, published in 1990, report Mussolini consistently speaking of Evola with respect. Il Duce had the following comments about the Pagan Imperialism debate:

Despite what is generally thought, I was not at all irritated by Doctor Julius Evola’s pronouncements made a few months before the Conciliation on the modification of relations between the Holy See and Italy. Anyhow, Doctor Evola’s attitude did not directly concern relations between Italy and the Holy See, but what seemed to him the long-term irreconcilability of the Roman tradition and the Catholic tradition. Since he identified Fascism with the Roman tradition, he had no choice but to reckon as its adversary any historical vision of a universalistic order.[33]

Mussolini’s strongest support for Evola came on the subject of race, which became an issue after Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. Influenced by Nazi Germany, Italy passed Racial Laws in 1938. Evola was already writing on the racial views consistent with a Traditional vision of mankind in opposition to what he saw as the biological reductionism and materialism of Nazi racial thought. His writings infuriated Guido Landra, editor of the journal, La Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race). Landra and other scientific racists were especially irritated by Evola’s article, “Scientific Racism’s Mistake.”[34] Mussolini, however, praised Evola’s writings as early as 1935 and permitted Evola’s Summary of Racial Doctrine to be translated into German as Compendium of Fascist Racial Doctrine to represent the official Fascist position.[35]

Evola accepts the Traditional division of man into body, soul, and spirit and argues that there are races of all three.

While in a ‘pure blood’ horse or cat the biological element constitutes the central one, and therefore racial considerations can be legitimately restricted to it, this is certainly not the case with man, or at least any man worthy of the name . . . Therefore racial treatment of man can not stop only at a biological level.[36]

Just as the state creates the people and the nation, so the spirit forms the races of body and soul. Evola had done considerable research on the history of racial studies and wrote a history of racial thought from Classical Antiquity to the 1930’s, The Blood Myth: The Genesis of Racism.[37] Evola knew that in addition to the tradition of scientific racism, represented by Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg, and Landra was one that appreciated extra- or super-biological elements and whose adherents included Montaigne, Herder, Fichte, Gustave Le Bon, and Evola’s contemporary and friend, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, a German biologist at the University of Berlin.[38]

Hansen has a thorough discussion of “Evola’s Attitude Toward the Jews.” Evola thought that the negative traits associated with Jews were spiritual, not physical. So a biological Jew might have an Aryan soul or spirit and biological Aryans might – and did – have a Semitic soul or spirit. As Landra saw, this was the end of any politically useful scientific racism. The greatest academic authority on Fascism, Renzo de Felice argued in The Jews in Fascist Italy that Evola’s theories are wrong, but that they have a distinguished intellectual ancestry, and Evola argued for them in an honorable way.[39] In recent years, Bill Clinton was proclaimed America’s first black president. This instinctive privileging of style over biology is in line with Evola’s views.

Hansen does not discuss Evola’s views on Negroes, to which Christophe Boutin devotes several pages of Politique et Tradition.[40] In his 1968 collection of essays, The Bow and the Club,[41] there is a chapter on “America Negrizzata,” which argues that, while there was relatively little miscegenation in the United States, the Telluric or Negro spirit has had considerable influence on the quality of American culture. The 1972 edition of Men Among the Ruins ends with an “Appendix on the Myths of our Time,” of which number IV is “Taboos of our Times.”[42] The two taboos discussed forbid a frank discussion of the “working class,” common in Europe, and of the Negro. Although written thirty years ago, it is up-to-date in its description of this subject and notices that the word “Negro” itself was becoming taboo as “offensive.”[43] La vera Destra, a real Right, will oppose this development. This appendix is not translated in the Inner Traditions or the 1991 German editions, confirming its accuracy.

At the end of Men Among the Ruins, instead of the Appendix of the 1972 edition, stands Evola’s 1951 Autodifesa, the speech he gave in his own defense when he was tried by the Italian democracy for “defending Fascism,” attempting to reconstitute the dissolved Fascist Party” and being the “master” and inspirer” of young Neo-Fascists.[44] Like Socrates, he was accused of not worshipping the gods of the democracy and of corrupting youth. When he asked in open court where in his published writings he had defended “ideas proper to Fascism,” the prosecutor, Dr. Sangiorgi, admitted that there were no such passages, but that the general spirit of his works promoted “ideas proper to Fascism,” such as monocracy, hierarchism, aristocracy or elitism. Evola responded.

I should say that if such are the terms of the accusation,[45] I would be honored to see, seated at the same bank of accusation, such people as Aristotle, Plato, the Dante of De Monarchia, and so on up to Metternich and Bismarck. In the same spirit as a Metternich, a Bismarck,[46] or the great Catholic philosophers of the principle of authority, De Maistre and Donoso Cortés, I reject all that which derives, directly or indirectly, from the French Revolution and which, in my opinion, has as its extreme consequence Bolshevism; to which I counterpose the ‘world of Tradition.’ . . . My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.[47]

Evola’s Autodifesa was more effective than Socrates’ Apology, since the jury found him “innocent” of the charges. (Italian juries may find a defendant “innocent,” “not guilty for lack of proof,” or “guilty.”) Evola noted in his speech, “Some like to depict Fascism as an ‘oblique tyranny.’[48] During that ‘tyranny’ I never had to undergo a situation like the present one.” Evola was no lackey of the Fascist regime. He attacked conciliation with the Vatican in the years before the 1929 Vatican Accords and developed an interpretation of race that directly contradicted the one favored by the German government and important currents within Fascism. His journal, La Torre (The Tower), was closed down in 1930 because of his criticism of Fascist toughs, gli squadristi. Evola, however, never had to face jail for his serious writings during the Fascist era. That had to wait for liberal democracy. Godwin and Hansen are absolutely correct to emphasize Evola’s consistency and coherence as an esoteric thinker and his independence from any party-line adherence to Fascism. On the other hand, Evola considered his politics a direct deduction from his beliefs about Tradition. He was a sympathetic critic of Fascism, but a remorseless opponent of liberal democracy.

Inner Traditions and the Holmes Publishing Group[49] have published translations of most of Evola’s esoteric writings and some important political books. Will they go on to publish the rest of his oeuvre? Joscelyn Godwin, after all, wrote, “It would be intellectually dishonest to suppress anything.” Evola’s book on Ernst Jünger might encourage a translation of Der Arbeiter. Riding the Tiger[50] explains how the “differentiated man” (uomo differenziato) can maintain his integrity in the Dark Age. It bears the same relation to Men Among the Ruins that Aristotle’s Ethics bears to his Politics and, although published later, was written at the same time.Riding the Tiger[51] There are brilliant essays in The Bow and the Club, but can a book be published in contemporary America with an essay entitled “America Negrizzata?” Pagan Imperialism is a young man’s book, vigorous and invigorating.

The most challenging book for readers who enjoy Men Among the Ruins is Fascism Seen from the Right, with its appendix, “Notes on the Third Reich,”Riding the Tiger[52] where Evola criticizes both regimes as not right-wing enough. A world respectful of communism and liberalism (and accustomed to using the word “Fascist” as an angry epithet) will find it hard to appreciate a book critical, but not disrespectful, of il Ventennio (the Twenty Years of Fascist rule). I would suggest beginning with the short pamphlet, Orientamenti (Orientations),[53] which Evola composed in 1950 as a summary of the doctrine of Men Among the Ruins.

Hansen quotes right-wing Italians who say that Evola’s influence discourages political action because his Tradition comes from an impossibly distant past and assumes an impossibly transcendent truth and a hopelessly pessimistic view of the present. Yet Evola confronts the modern world with an absolute challenge. Its materialism, egalitarianism, feminism, and economism are fundamentally wrong. The way out is through rejecting these mistakes and returning to spirit, transcendence and hierarchy, to the Männerbund and the Legionary Spirit. It may be discouraging to think that we are living in a Dark Age, but the Kali Yuga is also the end of a cosmic cycle. When the current age ends, a new one will begin. This is not Spengler’s biologistic vision, where our civilization is an individual, not linked to earlier ones and doomed to die without offspring, like all earlier ones.[54]

We are linked to the past by Tradition and when the Dark Age comes to an end, Tradition will light the way to new greatness and accomplishment. We may live to see that day. If not, what will survive is the legionary spirit Evola described in Orientamenti:

It is the attitude of a man who can choose the hardest road, fight even when he knows that the battle is materially lost and live up to the words of the ancient saga, ‘Loyalty is stronger than fire!’ Through him the traditional idea is asserted, that it is the sense of honor and of shame – not halfway measures drawn from middle class moralities – that creates a substantial, existential difference among beings, almost as great as between one race and another race. If anything positive can be accomplished today or tomorrow, it will not come from the skills of agitators and politicians, but from the natural prestige of men both of yesterday but also, and more so, from the new generation, who recognize what they can achieve and so vouch for their idea.[55]

This is the ideal of Oswald Spengler’s Roman soldier, who died at this post at Pompeii as the sky fell on him, because he had not been relieved. We do not need programs and marketing strategies, but men like that. “It is men, provided they are really men, who make and unmake history.”[56] Evola’s ideal continues to speak to the right person. “Keep your eye on just one thing: to remain on your feet in a world of ruins.”

End Notes

[1]. La dottrina del risveglio, Bari, 1943, revised in 1965.

[2]. Lo Yoga della potenza, Milan, 1949, revised in 1968, was a new edition of L’Uomo come Potenza, Rome, 1926; Metafisica del sesso, Rome, 1958, revised 1969.

[3]. Introduzione alla magia quale scienza del’Io, 3 volumes, Rome, 1927-29, revised 1971, Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus, Rochester, VT: 2001; La tradizione hermetica (Bari, 1931), revised 1948, 1971; The Hermetic Tradition, Rochester, VT: 1995.

[4]. Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, Milan, 1934, revised 1951, 1969.

[5]. Robin Waterfield gives a useful bibliography at the end of his Gnosis essay (note 8, below) p. 17.

[6]. Karlheinz Weissman, “Bibliographie” in Menschen immitten von Ruinen, Tübingen, 1991, pp. 403-406, e.g., Heidnischer Imperialismus, Leipzig, 1933; Erhebung wider die moderne Welt, Stuttgart, 1935; Revolte gegen die moderne Welt, Berlin, 1982; Den Tiger Reiten, Vilsborg, 1997.

[7]. Thomas Sheehan, “Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist,” Social Research 48: 1981, pp. 45-73; Franco Ferraresi, “Julius Evola: tradition, reaction and the Radical Right,” Archives européennes de sociologie 28: 1987, pp. 107-151; Richard Drake, “Julius Evola and the Ideological Origins of the Radical Right in Contemporary Italy,” in Peter H. Merkl, (ed.), Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations, Berkeley, 1986, pp. 61-89; idem, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, Bloomington, 1989.

[8]. Robin Waterfield, “Baron Julius Evola and the Hermetic Tradition,” Gnosis 14:1989-90, pp. 12-17.

[9]. Elémire Zolla, “The Evolution of Julius Evola’s Thought,” Gnosis 14: 1989-90, pp. 18-20.

[10]. Jay Kinney, “Who’s Afraid of the Bogeyman? The Phantasm of Esoteric Terrorism,” Gnosis 14: 1989-90, pp. 21-24.

[11].. Gli uomini e le rovine, Rome, 1953, revised 1967, with a new appendix, 1972.

[12]. H. T. Hansen, “Julius Evolas politisches Wirken,” Menshen immitten von Ruinen (note 6, above) pp. 7-131.

[13]. H. T. Hansen, “A Short Introduction to Julius Evola” in Revolt Against the Modern World, Rochester, VT, 1995, ix-xxii, translated from Hansen’s article in Theosophical History 5, January 1994, pp. 11-22.

[14]. Christophe Boutin, Politique et Tradition: Julius Evola dans le siècle, 1898-1974; Paris, 1992.

[15]. Il mistero del Graal e la tradizione ghibellina dell’Impero, Bari, 1937, revised 1962, 1972; translated as The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit, Rochester, Vt., 1997.

[16]. René Guénon, Crise du monde moderne (Paris, 1927) has been translated several times into English.

[17]. H. T. Hansen, “Julius Evola und die deutsche konservative Revolution,” Criticón 158 (April/Mai/June 1998) pp. 16-32.

[18]. Diorema: Antologia della pagina special di “Regime Fascista,” Marco Tarchi, (ed.) Rome, 1974.

[19]. Lettere di Julius Evola a Carl Schmitt, 1951-1963, Rome, 2000.

[20]. L”Operaio” nel pensiero di Ernst Jünger (Rome, 1960), revised 1974; reprinted with additions, 1998.

[21]. The Concept of the Political, New Brunswick, NJ, 1976; The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Cambridge, MA, 1985; Political Theology, Cambridge, MA, 1985; Political Romanticism, Cambridge, MA, 1986. Recent commentary includes Paul Gottfried, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, New York, 1990; Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London, 2000.

[22]. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt, Hamburg, 1932, was translated into Italian in 1985.

[23]. Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932, Stuttgart, 1950, revised and expanded in 1972, 1989, 1994, 1999.

[24]. Panajotis Kondylis, Conservativismus: Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang, Stuttgart, 1986, devotes 553 pages to this theme.

[25]. My impression is that daimonìa dell’economia implies “demonic possession by the economy.” In Orientamenti (see note 53, below), Evola writes of “l’allucinazione e la daimonìa dell’economia,” “hallucination and demonic possession.”

[26]. Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, Rochester, VT, 2002, p. 166. “Absurd and deplorable” is for assurdo peggiore, literally, “the worst absurdity;” circolo buio e chiuso “dark and small circle,” literally “dark and closed circle.” Chiuso is used in weather reports for “overcast.”

[27]. Evola applied for membership in the Fascist Party in 1939 in order to enlist in the army as an officer, but in vain for reasons discussed by Hansen (note 26, above) xiii. The application was found by Dana Lloyd Thomas, “Quando Evola du degradato,” Il Borghese, March 29, 1999, pp. 10-13. Evola mentioned this in an interview with Gianfranco De Turris, I’Italiano 11, September, 1971, which can be found in some reprints of L’Orientamenti, e.g., Catania, 1981, 33 (See note 53, below).

[28]. Evola cites Heinrich Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1902; A. van Gennep, Les rites du passage, Paris, 1909; The Rites of Passage, Chicago, 1960.

[29]. Men Among the Ruins (note 26, above) pp. 210-211; Gli uomini e le rovine (note 11, above) pp. 15-151. “A ridiculous hybrid and illegitimate organization” translates questa ridicola associazione ibrida e bastarda.

[30]. Elémire Zolla gives the essentials about Reghini’s influence on Evola in his Gnosis essay (note 9, above).

[31]. Imperialismo Pagano, Rome, 1928, p. 40.

[32]. Richard Drake, “Julius Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords,” Catholic Historical Review 74, 1988, pp. 403-319; E. Christian Kopff. “Italian Fascism and the Roman Empire,” Classical Bulletin 76: 2000, pp. 109-115.

[33]. Yvon de Begnac, Taccuini Mussoliniani, Francesco Perfetti, (ed.), Bologna, 1990, p. 647.

[34]. “L’Equivoco del razzismo scientifico,” Vita Italiana 30, September 1942.

[35]. Sintesi di dottrina della razza, Milan, 1941; Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre, Berlin, 1943.

[36]. Sintesi di dottrina della razza (note 35, above) p. 35. Since Hansen (note 26, above) 71 uses the German translation (note 12, above) 90, the last sentence reads “Fascist racial doctrine (Die faschistischen Rassenlehre) therefore holds a purely biological view of race to be inadequate.”

[37]. Il mito del sangue: Genesi del razzismo, Rome, 1937, revised 1942.

[38]. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Rasse und Seele. Eine Einführung in den Sinn der leiblichen Gestalt, Munich, 1937; Rasse ist Gestalt, Munich, 1937.

[39]. Renzo de Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, New York, 2001, 378, translation of Storia degli Ebrei Italiani sotto il Fascismo, Turin, 1961, revised 1972, 1988, 1993. Evola is discussed on pp. 392-3.

[40]. Boutin (note 14, above) pp. 197-200.

[41]. L’Arco e la clava, Milan, 1968, revised 1971. The article is pp. 39-46 of the new edition, Rome, 1995.

[42]. Gli uomini e le rovine (note 11, above) Appendice sui miti del nostro tempo, pp. 255-282; Tabù dei nostri tempi, pp. 275-282.

[43]. Gli uomini e le rovine (note 11, above) p. 276: la tabuizzazione che porta fino ad evitare l’uso della designazione “negro,” per le sue implicazioni “offensive.”

[44]. J. Evola, Autodifesa (Quaderni di testi Evoliani, no. 2) (Rome, n.d.)

[45]. Banco degli accusati is what is called in England the “prisoner’s dock.”

[46]. At this point, according to Autodifesa (note 44, above) p. 4, Evola’s lawyer, Franceso Carnelutti, called out, “La polizia è andata in cerca anche di costoro.” (“The police have gone to look for them, too.”)

[47]. Men Among the Ruins (note 25, above) pp. 293-294; Autodifesa (note 44, above) pp. 10-11.

[48]. Bieca is literally “oblique,” but in this context means rather “grim, sinister.”

[49]. Holmes Publishing Group (Edwards, WA) has published shorter works by Evola edited by the Julius Evola Foundation in Rome, e.g. René Guénon: A Teacher for Modern Times; Taoism: The Magic of Mysticism; Zen: The Religion of the Samurai; The Path of Enlightenment in the Mithraic Mysteries.

[50]. Cavalcare la tigre, Rome, 1961, revised 1971.

[51]. Gianfranco de Turris, “Nota del Curatore,” Cavalcare la tigre , 5th edition: Rome, 1995, pp. 7-11.

[52]. Il Fascismo, Rome, 1964; Il Fascismo visto dalla Destra, con Note sul terzo Reich, Rome, 1970.

[53]. Orientamenti (Rome, 1951), with many reprints.

[54]. J. Evola, Spengler e “Il tramonto dell’Occidente” (Quaderni di testi Evoliani, no. 14) (Rome, 1981).

[55]. Orientamenti, (note [53]., above), p. 12; somewhat differently translated by Hansen (note 26, above) p. 101.

[56]. Orientamenti (note 53, above) p. 16. Hansen (note [26]., above) p. 93 translates “It is humans, as far as they are truly human, that make history or tear it down,” reflecting the German (note 12, above) p. 118: “Es sind die Menschen, sofern sie wahrhaft Menschen sind, die die Geschichte machen oder sie niederreissen.” The parallel sentence in Men Among the Ruins (note 11, above) p. 109: sono gli uomini, finché sono veramente tali, a fare o a disfare la storia, is translated by Stucco (note 26, above) p. 181: “It is men who make or undo history.” He omits finché sono veramente tali, but gets the meaning of uomini right.

James Fenimore Cooper, 1789 - 1851

Benjamin Franklin had a specious little equation in providential mathematics:

Rum + Savage = 0. Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.

Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a dead savage nought? Can you make a land virgin by killing off its aborigines ?

The Aztec is gone, and the Incas. The Red lndian, the Esquimo, the Patagonian are reduced to negligible numbers.

0u sont les neiges d’antan?

My dear, wherever they are, they will come down again next winter, sure as houses.

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.

The Red Man died hating the white man. What remnant of him lives, lives hating the white man. Go near the Indians, and you just feel it. As far as we are concerned, the Red Man is subtly and unremittingly diabolic. Even when he doesn’t know it. He is dispossessed in life, and unforgiving. He doesn’t believe in us and our civilization, and so is our mystic enemy, for we push him off the face of the earth.

Belief is a mysterious thing. It is the only healer of the soul’s wounds. There is no belief in the world.

The Red Man is dead, disbelieving in us. He is dead and unappeased. Do not imagine him happy in his Happy Hunting Ground. No. Only those that die in belief die happy. Those that are pushed out of life in chagrin come back unappeased, for revenge.

A curious thing about the Spirit of Place is the fact that no place exerts its full influence upon a new-comer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America. While the Red Indian existed in fairly large numbers, the new colonials were in a great measure immune from the daimon, or demon, of America. The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. At present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the unconscious or under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness, sometimes. The Mexican is macabre and disintegrated in his own way. Up till now, the unexpressed spirit of America has worked covertly in the American, the white American soul. But within the present generation the surviving Red Indians are due to merge in the great white swamp. Then the Daimon of America will work overtly, and we shall see real changes.

There has been all the time, in the white American soul, a dual feeling about the Indian. First was Franklin’s feeling, that a wise Providence no doubt intended the extirpation of these savages. Then came Crevecoeur’s contradictory feeling about the noble Red Man and the innocent life of the wigwam. Now we hate to subscribe to Benjamin’s belief in a Providence that wisely extirpates the Indian to make room for ‘cultivators of the soil’. In Crevecoeur we meet a sentimental desire for the glorification of the savages. Absolutely sentimental. Hector pops over to Paris to enthuse about the wigwam.

The desire to extirpate the Indian. And the contradictory desire to glorify him. Both are rampant still, today.

The bulk of the white people who live in contact with the Indian today would like to see this Red brother exterminated; not only for the sake of grabbing his land, but because of the silent, invisible, but deadly hostility between the spirit of the two races. The minority of whites intellectualize the Red Man and laud him to the skies. But this minority of whites is mostly a high-brow minority with a big grouch against its own whiteness. So there you are.

I doubt if there is possible any real reconciliation, in the flesh, between the white and the red. For instance, a Red Indian girl who is servant in the white man’s home, if she is treated with natural consideration, will probably serve well, even happily. She is happy with the new power over the white woman’s kitchen. The white world makes her feel prouder, so long as she is free to go back to her own people at the given times. But she is happy because she is playing at being a white woman. There are other Indian women who would never serve the white people, and who would rather die than have a white man for a lover.

In either case, there is no reconciliation. There is no mystic conjunction between the spirit of the two races. The Indian girl who happily serves white people leaves out her own race-consideration, for the time being.

Supposing a white man goes out hunting in the mountains with an Indian. The two will probably get on like brothers. But let the same white man go alone with two Indians, and there will start a most subtle persecution of the unsuspecting white. If they, the Indians, discover that he has a natural fear of steep places, then over every precipice in the country will the trail lead. And so on. Malice! That is the basic feeling in the Indian heart, towards the white. It may even be purely unconscious.

Supposing an Indian loves a white woman, and lives with her. He will probably be very proud of it, for he will be a big man among his own people, especially if the white mistress has money. He will never get over the feeling of pride at dining in a white dining-room and smoking in a white drawing-room. But at the same time he will subtly jeer at his white mistress, try to destroy her white pride. He will submit to her, if he is forced to, with a kind of false, unwilling childishness, and even love her with the same childlike gentleness, sometimes beautiful. But at the bottom of his heart he is gibing, gibing, gibing at her. Not only is it the sex resistance, but the race resistance as well.

There seems to be no reconciliation in the flesh. That leaves us only expiation, and then reconciliation in the soul. Some strange atonement: expiation and oneing.

Fenimore Cooper has probably done more than any writer to present the Red Man to the white man. But Cooper’s presentment is indeed a wish-fulfilment. That is why Fenimore is such a success still.

Modern critics begrudge Cooper his success. I think I resent it a little myself. This popular wish-fulfilment stuff makes it so hard for the real thing to come through, later.

Cooper was a rich American of good family. His father founded Cooperstown, by Lake Champlain. And Fenimore was a gentleman of culture. No denying it.

It is amazing how cultured these Americans of the first half of the eighteenth century were. Most intensely so. Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang are flea-bites in comparison. Volumes of very raffine light verse and finely drawn familiar literature will prove it to anyone who cares to commit himself to these elderly books. The English and French writers of the same period were clumsy and hoydenish, judged by the same standards.

Truly, European decadence was anticipated in America; and American influence passed over to Europe, was assimilated there, and then returned to this land of innocence as something purplish in its modernity and a little wicked. So absurd things are.

Cooper quotes a Frenchman, who says, ‘L’Am‚rique est pourrie avant d’etre mure.’ And there is a great deal in it. America was not taught by France — by Baudelaire, for example. Baudelaire learned his lesson from America.

Cooper’s novels fall into two classes: his white novels, such asHomeward Bound, Eve Effingham, The Spy, The Pilot, and then the Leatherstocking Series. Let us look at the white novels first.

The Effinghams are three extremely refined, genteel Americans who are ‘Homeward Bound’ from England to the States. Their party consists of father, daughter, and uncle, and faithful nurse. The daughter has just finished her education in Europe. She has, indeed, skimmed the cream off Europe. England, France, Italy, and Germany have nothing more to teach her. She is bright and charming, admirable creature; a real modern heroine; intrepid, calm, and self-collected, yet admirably impulsive, always in perfectly good taste; clever and assured in her speech, like a man, but withal charmingly deferential and modest before the stronger sex. It is the perfection of the ideal female. We have learned to shudder at her, but Cooper still admired.

On board is the other type of American, the parvenu, the demagogue, who has ‘done’ Europe and put it in his breeches pocket, in a month. Oh, Septimus Dodge, if a European had drawn you, that European would never have been forgiven by America. But an American drew you, so Americans wisely ignore you.

Septimus is the American self-made man. God had no hand in his make-up. He made himself. He has been to Europe, no doubt seen everything, including the Venus de Milo. ‘What, is that the Venus de Milo?’ And he turns his back on the lady. He’s seen her. He’s got her. She’s a fish he has hooked, and he’s off to America with her, leaving the scum of a statue standing in the Louvre.

That is one American way of Vandalism. The original Vandals would have given the complacent dame a knock with a battle-axe, and ended her. The insatiable American looks at her. ‘Is that the Venus de Milo? – come on!’ And the Venus de Milo stands there like a naked slave in a market-place, whom someone has spat on. Spat on!

I have often thought, hearing American tourists in Europe — in the Bargello in Florence, for example, or in the Piazza di San Marco in Venice – exclaiming, ‘Isn’t that just too cunning!’ or else, ‘Aren’t you perfectly crazy about Saint Mark’s! Don’t you think those cupolas are like the loveliest turnips upside down, you know’ — as if the beautiful things of Europe were just having their guts pulled out by these American admirers. They admire so wholesale. Sometimes they even seem to grovel. But the golden cupolas of St Mark’s in Venice are turnips upside down in a stale stew, after enough American tourists have looked at them. Turnips upside down in a stale stew. Poor Europe!

And there you are. When a few German bombs fell upon Rheims Cathedral up went a howl of execration. But there are more ways than one of vandalism. I should think the American admiration of five-minutes tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.

But there you are. Europe has got to fall, and peace hath her victories.

Behold then Mr Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.

Now the aristocratic Effinghams, Homeward Bound from Europe to America, are at the mercy of Mr Dodge: Septimus. He is their compatriot, so they may not disown him. Had they been English, of course, they would never once have let themselves become aware of his existence. But no. They are American democrats, and therefore, if Mr Dodge marches up and says: ‘Mr Effingham? Pleased to meet you, Mr Effingham’ — why, then Mr Effingham is forced to reply: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Dodge.’ If he didn’t he would have the terrible hounds of democracy on his heels and at his throat, the moment he landed in the Land of the Free. An Englishman is free to continue unaware of the existence of a fellowcountryman, if the looks of that fellow-countryman are distasteful. But every American citizen is free to force his presence upon you, no matter how unwilling you may be.

Freedom!

The Effinghams detest Mr Dodge. They abhor him. They loathe and despise him. They have an unmitigated contempt for him. Everything he is, says, and does, seems to them too vulgar, too despicable. Yet they are forced to answer, when he presents himself: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Dodge.’

Freedom !

Mr Dodge, of Dodge-town, alternately fawns and intrudes, cringes and bullies. And the Effinghams, terribly ‘superior’ in a land of equality, writhe helpless. They would fain snub Septimus out of existence. But Septimus is not to be snubbed. As a true democrat, he is unsnubbable. As a true democrat, he has right on his side. And right is might.

Right is might. It is the old struggle for power.

Septimus, as a true democrat, is the equal of any man. As a true democrat with a full pocket, he is, by the amount that fills his pocket, so much the superior of the democrats with empty pockets. Because, though all men are born equal and die equal, you will not get anybody to admit that ten dollars equal ten thousand dollars. No, no, there’s a difference there, however far you may push equality.

Septimus has the Effinghams on the hip. He has them fast, and they will not escape. What tortures await them at home, in the Land of the Free, at the hands of the hideously affable Dodge, we do not care to disclose. What was the persecution of a haughty Lord or a marauding Baron or an inquisitorial Abbot compared to the persecution of a million Dodges ? The proud Effinghams are like men buried naked to the chin in ant-heaps, to be bitten into extinction by a myriad ants. Stoically, as good democrats and idealists, they writhe and endure, without making too much moan.

They writhe and endure. There is no escape. Not from that time to this. No escape. They writhed on the horns of the Dodge dilemma.

Since then Ford has gone one worse.

Through these white novels of Cooper runs this acid of ant-bites, the formic acid of democratic poisoning. The Effinghams feel superior. Cooper felt superior. Mrs Cooper felt superior too. And bitten.

For they were democrats. They didn’t believe in kings, or lords, or masters, or real superiority of any sort. Before God, of course. In the sight of God, of course, all men were equal. This they believed. And therefore, though they felt terribly superior to Mr Dodge, yet, since they were his equals in the sight of God, they could not feel free to say to him: ‘ Mr Dodge, please go to the devil.’ They had to say: ‘Pleased to meet you.’

What a lie to tell! Democratic lies.

What a dilemma! To feel so superior. To know you are superior. And yet to believe that, in the sight of God, you are equal. Can’t help yourself.

Why couldn’t they let the Lord Almighty look after the equality, since it seems to happen specifically in His sight, and stick themselves to their own superiority. Why couldn’t they ?

Somehow they daren’t.

They were Americans, idealists. How dare they balance a mere intense feeling against an IDEA and an IDEAL?

Ideally — i.e., in the sight of God, Mr Dodge was their equal.

What a low opinion they held of the Almighty’s faculty for discrimination.

But it was so. The IDEAL of EQUALITY.

Pleased to meet you, Mr Dodge.

We are equal in the sight of God, of course. But er –

Very glad to meet you, Miss Effingham. Did you say — er? Well now, I think my bank balance will bear it.

Poor Eve Effingham.

Eve! Think of it. Eve! And birds of paradise. And apples.

And Mr Dodge.

This is where apples of knowledge get you, Miss Eve. You should leave ‘em alone.

‘Mr Dodge, you are a hopeless and insufferable inferior.’

Why couldn’t she say it? She felt it. And she was a heroine.

Alas, she was an American heroine. She was an EDUCATED WOMAN. She KNEW all about IDEALS. She swallowed the IDEAL of EQUALITY with her first mouthful of KNOWLEDGE. Alas for her and that apple of Sodom that looked so rosy. Alas for all her knowing.

Mr Dodge (in check knickerbockers): Well, feeling a little uncomfortable below the belt, are you, Miss Effingham?

Miss Effingham (with difficulty withdrawing her gaze from the INFINITE OCEAN): Good morning, Mr Dodge. I was admiring the dark blue distance.

Mr Dodge: Say, couldn’t you admire something a bit nearer ?

Think how easy it would have been for her to say ‘Go away! ‘ or ‘Leave me, varlet!’ — or ‘Hence, base-born knave!’ Or just to turn her back on him.

But then he would simply have marched round to the other side of her.

Was she his superior, or wasn’t she?

Why surely, intrinsically, she was. Intrinsically Fenimore Cooper was the superior of the Dodges of his day. He felt it. But he felt he ought not to feel it. And he never had it out with himself.

That is why one rather gets impatient with him. He feels he is superior, and feels he ought not to feel so, and is therefore rather snobbish, and at the same time a little apologetic. Which is surely tiresome.

If a man feels superior, he should have it out with himself. ‘Do I feel superior because I am superior? Or is it just the snobbishness of class, or education, or money?’

Class, education, money won’t make a man superior. But if he’s just born superior, in himself, there it is. Why deny it ?

It is a nasty sight to see the Effinghams putting themselves at the mercy of a Dodge, just because of a mere idea or ideal. Fools. They ruin more than they know. Because at the same time they are snobbish.

Septimus at the Court of King Arthur.

Septimus: Hello, Arthur! Pleased to meet you. By the way, what’s all that great long sword about?

Arthur: This is Excalibur, the sword of my knighthood and my kingship.

Septimus: That so! We’re all equal in the sight of God, you know, Arthur.

Arthur: Yes.

Septimus: Then I guess it’s about time I had that yard-and- a-half of Excalibur to play with. Don’t you think so ? We’re equal in the sight of God, and you’ve had it for quite a while.

Arthur: Yes, I agree. (Hands him Excalibur.)

Septimus (prodding Arthur with Excalibur): Say, Art, which is your fifth rib?

Superiority is a sword. Hand it over to Septimus, and you’ll get it back between your ribs. — The whole moral of democracy.

But there you are. Eve Effingham had pinned herself down on the Contrat Social, and she was prouder of that pin through her body than of any mortal thing else. Her IDEAL. Her IDEAL of DEMOCRACY.

When America set out to destroy Kings and Lords and Masters, and the whole paraphernalia of European superiority, it pushed a pin right through its own body, and on that pin it still flaps and buzzes and twists in misery. The pin of democratic equality. Freedom.

There’ll never be any life in America till you pull the pin out and admit natural inequality. Natural superiority, natural inferiority. Till such time, Americans just buzz round like various sorts of propellers, pinned down by their freedom and equality.

That’s why these white novels of Fenimore Cooper are only historically and sardonically interesting. The people are all pinned down by some social pin, and buzzing away in social importance or friction, round and round on the pin. Never real human beings. Always things pinned down, choosing to be pinned down, transfixed by the idea or ideal of equality and democracy, on which they turn loudly and importantly, like propellers propelling. These States. Humanly, it is boring. As a historic phenomenon, it is amazing, ludicrous, and irritating.

If you don’t pull the pin out in time, you’ll never be able to pull it out. You must turn on it for ever, or bleed to death.

Naked to the waist was I
And deep within my breast did lie,
Though no man any blood could spy,
The truncheon of a spear –

It is already too late?

Oh God, the democratic pin!

Freedom, Equality, Equal Opportunity, Education, Rights of Man.

The pin! The pin!

Well, there buzzes Eve Effingham, snobbishly impaled. She is a perfect American heroine, and I’m sure she wore the first smartly-tailored ‘suit’ that ever woman wore. I’m sure she spoke several languages. I’m sure she was hopelessly competent. I’m sure she ‘adored’ her husband, and spent masses of his money, and divorced him because he didn’t understand LOVE.

American women in their perfect ‘suits’. American men in their perfect coats and skirts!

I feel I’m the superior of most men I meet. Not in birth, because I never had a great-grandfather. Not in money, because I’ve got none. Not in education, because I’m merely scrappy. And certainly not in beauty or in manly strength.

Well, what then?

Just in myself.

When I’m challenged, I do feel myself superior to most of the men I meet. Just a natural superiority.

But not till there enters an element of challenge.

When I meet another man, and he is just himself — even if he is an ignorant Mexican pitted with small-pox — then there is no question between us of superiority or inferiority. He is a man and I am a man. We are ourselves. There is no question between us.

But let a question arise, let there be a challenge, and then I feel he should do reverence to the gods in me, because they are more than the gods in him. And he should give reverence to the very me, because it is more at one with the gods than is his very self.

If this is conceit, I am sorry. But it’s the gods in me that matter. And in other men.

As for me, I am so glad to salute the brave, reckless gods in another man. So glad to meet a man who will abide by his very self.

Ideas! Ideals! All this paper between us. What a weariness.

If only people would meet in their very selves, without wanting to put some idea over one another, or some ideal.

Damn all ideas and all ideals. Damn all the false stress, and the pins.

I am I. Here am I. Where are you?

Ah, there you are! Now, damn the consequences, we have met.

That’s my idea of democracy, if you can call it an idea.

Francis Parker Yockey, 1917 - 1960

Race, as has been shown, is not a unit of existence, but is an aspect of existence. Specifically it is the aspect of existence in which the relation of the human being to the great cosmic rhythms is revealed. It is thus the non-individual aspect of Life, whether it be the life of a plant, animal, or human being.

The plant exhibits — at least, not to us — no consciousness, i.e., no tension with its environment. The plant has thus only race, so to speak, for it is totally submerged in the cosmic flow. The animal exhibits tension, consciousness, individuality. Man has in addition self-consciousness and the ability and necessity of living a higher life in the realm of symbols. All men have this, but the difference in degree between primitive man and Culture-man in this respect is so vast that it seems almost a difference in kind.

It is the racial beat which informs primitive impulses, which informs action generally. Opposed to it is the illuminated part of the mind, the rootless reason, the intellect. The stronger these things are in relation to the racial plane, the more the existence bears an intellectual instead of a racial stamp.

Each individual, as well as each higher organic unit, has these two aspects. Race impels toward self-preservation, continuance of the cycle of generations, increase of power. Intellect decides the meaning of the Life, and the aim, and this may, for various reasons, deny one or all of these fundamental urges. The celibacy of the priest and the sterility of the libertine both come from intellect, but one of them is an expression of High Culture, and the other is the denial of Culture, an expression of total degeneracy. Intellect may thus be in the service of Culture, or opposed to it.

Race is, in the first instance — in its subjective sense — what a man feels. This influences, whether immediately or eventually, what he does. A man of race is not born to slavery. If his intellect counsel him to a temporary submission, rather than an heroic death, in the hope of future changes, it is a mere postponement of his breaking out. The man without race will submit permanently to any humiliation, any insult, any dishonor, so long as he is permitted to live. The continuance of breathing and digestion are Life to the man without race. To the man of race, Life itself represents no value, but only Life under the right conditions, affirmative Life, rich, expressive and growing.

Heroism can be motivated from either side of the soul: the martyr dies for the Truth which he knows, the fighting man who dies with weapons in his hands rather than submit to his enemies dies for the honor that he feels. But the man who dies for something higher shows that he has race, regardless of his intellectualized motives. For Race is the faculty of being true to one’s self. It is the placing of a beyond-value on one’s own individual soul.

In this subjective sense, Race is not the way one talks, looks, gestures, walks, it is not a matter of stock, color, anatomy, skeletal structure, or anything else objective. Men of Race are scattered through all populations everywhere, through all races, peoples, nations. In each unit they make up the warriors, the leaders of action, the creators in the sphere of politics and war.

Thus in the subjective sense, there is also a hierarchy of race. Above the men of race, below — those without race. The first are swept up into action and events by the great cosmic rhythm of motion, the second are passed over by History. The first are the materials of high History, the second have outlasted every Culture, and when the stillness resumes its sway over the landscape after the whirlwind of events, these are the great mass. The Chinese mothers counsel their children with the ancient admonition: “Make thy heart small.” This is the wisdom of the man without race, and of the race without will. The men of race are skimmed off every population that is caught up into the course of motion of a High Culture, and this process continues through the generations of History on the heights. What is left is the fellaheen.

Race in the subjective sense is thus seen to be a matter of instinct. The man with strong instincts has race, the man with weak or bad instincts has it not. Strength of intellect has nothing to do with the existence of race — it may merely, in some cases, such as that of the man who takes a vow of celibacy — influence the expression of a part of race. Strong intellect and strong instincts can co-exist — think of the Gothic bishops who led their flocks to war — they are merely opposed directions of thought and action, but it is the instincts that furnish the driving force for great intellectual accomplishments also. The center of gravity of ascendant Life is on the side of instinct, will, race, blood. Life which places rationalistic ideals of “individualism,” “happiness,” “freedom” before the perpetuation and increase of power is decadent. Decadent means — moving toward extinction, extinction of higher Life in particular, and finally even of the life of the race. The intellectual of the great city is the type of the man without race. In every Civilization, he has been the inner ally of the outer barbarian.

This quality of having race has, obviously, no connection with which race one feels community. Race in the objective sense is a creation of history. One’s destiny must express itself within a certain framework — the framework of Fate. Thus a man of race born in Kirghizia belongs by Fate to the barbarian world of Asia with its historical mission of destruction of the Western Civilization. Rare exceptions are of course possible — Life submits to no generalization entirely. Some Poles, Ukrainians, or even Russians, might be impelled by their souls to share the spirit of the West. If so, they belong to the Western race, and every healthy, ascendant race accepts recruits who come in on its terms and who have the proper feeling. In the same way, there are numerous intellectuals in the West who feel community with the outer idea of Asiatic Nihilism. How numerous they are is indicated by the journalism, novels and plays that live from them. But the converse would not be true of men without race — they are not even acceptable to the enemy. They have nothing to contribute to an organic group — they are the human grains of sand, atoms of intellect, without cohesion upwards or downwards.

Every race, no matter how transitory it may be contemplated from the viewpoint of History, expresses a certain idea, a certain plane of existence by its life, and its idea is bound to be attractive to some individuals outside it. Thus in Western life, we are not unfamiliar with the man who, after associating with Jews, reading their literature, and adopting their viewpoint, actually becomes a Jew in the fullest sense of the word. It is not necessary that he have “Jewish blood.” The converse is also known: many Jews have adopted Western feelings and rhythms, and have thereby acquired Western race. This process — contemptuously called “assimilation” by the Jewish leaders — threatened during the nineteenth century the very existence of the Jewish race by ultimate absorption of its total racial body into the Western races. To halt it, the leaders of the Jews evolved the program of Zionism, which was solely an expedient for maintaining the unity of the Jewish race, and maintaining its continued existence as such. For this reason they also recognized the value of anti-semitism of the social type. It was serving the same purpose of preserving the racial unity of the Jews.

II

The dying out of racial instincts means the same thing to an individual as it does to a race, people, nation, State, Culture: unfruitfulness, lack of will-to-power, lack of ability to believe in or follow great aims, lack of inner discipline, desire for a life of ease and pleasure.

The symptoms of this racial decadence in various parts of the Western Civilization are manifold. There is first the ghastly distortion of the sexual life arising from the complete dissociation of sexual love from reproduction. The great symbol of this in the Western Civilization is everything suggested by the name Hollywood. The message of Hollywood is the total significance of sexual love as an end in itself — the erotic without consequences. The sexual love of two grains of sand, two rootless individuals, not the primeval sexual love looking to the continuity of Life, the family of many children. One child is permitted, as being a more complicated toy than a dog, perhaps even two, one boy and one girl — but the family of many children is a subject for humor to this decadent outlook.

The instinct of decadence takes many forms in this realm: dissolution of Marriage by divorce laws, attempts to discard, through repeal or non-enforcement, the laws against abortion, preaching in the form of novel, drama, journalism, the identification of “happiness” with sexual love, holding it up as the great value, before which all honor, duty, patriotism, consecration of Life to a higher aim, must give way. An erotomania is abroad through our civilization, not indeed like the sexual obsession of the 13th century which was at least racially affirmative, in that it increased the Western Peoples, but always a purely rootless erotic-without-consequences. This spiritual disease is the suicide of the race.

The weakening of the will — Nietzsche called it “paralysis of will” — another symptom of dying out of racial instincts, leads to a total deterioration of public life in the afflicted races. Government leaders dare not offer a stern program to their masses of human grains of sand: they abdicate, but remain in office as private men. Government ceases; the only functions that continue are the ones that have always gone on, no new aim, no sacrifices. Keep the old going; no creation! No effort! That would be too hard. Keep the pleasures going, the panem et circenses. Never mind the necessities of life, we are willing to renounce them as long as we have the pleasures.

This weakening of the will leads to voluntary abandonment of empires conquered with the blood of millions over ten generations. It leads to abysmal hatred of whoever and whatever represents sternness, creation, the Future. One of its products is Pacifism, and the only way a racially-dissolving population can be driven to war is through conscription coupled with pacifist propaganda — “This is the last war — actually it is a war against war.” Only an intellectual could be taken in by such stark Unreality. The weak will of society manifests itself in the Bolshevism of the upper classes, the sympathy with the enemies of society. Anyone with unimpaired will however is really felt to be the enemy — even cogent reasoning is hated: ideals are so much less demanding.

Mediocrity rises over the horizon of a dying race as its last great ideal; total mediocrity, renunciation of all greatness and distinction of any kind whatever; also mediocrity of the racial blood-stream — anyone can come in now, not only on our terms, for there are no more terms, and there are no racial differences, everything is one, dull, eventless, mediocre.

The weakening of the will is not hard put to find an ideology which rationalizes it as “progress,” everything desirable, the aim of all previous history. The democracy-liberalism complex lies to hand, and it acquires in such times the meaning of Death — of race, nation and Culture. There are no human differences, everyone is equal, men are women, women are men, “the individual” is everything. Life is a long holiday whose main problem is devising new and more stupid pleasures, there is no God, no State, off with the head of anyone who says there is a mission, who wishes to resurrect Authority.

These symptoms, or similar ones, will be found present at the demise of every upper stratum whose will is weakened. Thus Tocqueville has described for us how the French upper stratum of 1789 had no suspicion whatever of the impending Revolution, how nobility waxed enthusiastic over the “natural goodness of Humanity,” the “virtuous people,” the “innocence of Man” while the Terror of 1793 lay before their very feet — spectacle terrible et ridicule. Did not the Petrine nobility of Russia up until 1917 go through the same performance? The Tsar resisted pleas to leave while there was time with “My people will not hurt me.” Their picture of the Russian peasant was that of a happy, simple muzhik, basically good. Similarly the weakening of the Western will in certain countries was shown by the deluge of pro-Russian propaganda spread, sometimes with official encouragement, in those countries from 1920 to 1960.

from Francis Parker Yockey (Ulick Varange), Imperium (1948; Costa Mesa, Cal.: Noontide Press, 1962), 292-99. Imperium is available in the TOQ Online Bookshop.

Milford H. Wolpoff, Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

In 2008, 60 Minutes ran a story on Spenser Wells, Explorer in Residence for the National Geographic Society, who is mapping the genetic linkages of the world population. The media are naturally eager to plug Wells’ genetic mapping because it supports the “Out of Africa” or “African Eve” hypothesis put forward in recent times by some geneticists. The Liberal Establishment is eager to proclaim that we are all part of a nebulous mass of humanity without any differences other than what can be learned. The interviewer, a blond woman, was pleased to state that she was “once an African” (sic).

While this is the current theory in vogue, the new orthodoxy—to bolster the very old orthodoxy of the “Noble Savage” which has provided an ideological basis for subversive doctrines since the French Revolution—contrary evidence is suppressed. Those geneticists advocating the “African Eve” hypothesis are not in agreement with another branch of science—paleoanthropology, the examination of fossil remains. On the basis of the fossil remains paleoanthropologists maintain that there is a wide divergence of humanity going well back prior to the mere 200,000 years ascribed to different populations by the “African Eve” protagonists. On the basis of the fossil evidence human divergence occurred one to two million years ago, where the features that today mark Europeans, Australian Aborigines, Chinese et al. were already present.

The “out of Africa” hypothesis of human migrations 200,000 years ago was proposed by Wilson and Cann in 1992 (Allan C. Wilson and Rebecca L. Cann, “The Recent African Genesis of Humans,” Scientific American 1992, no. 266: 68-73.).

Multi-Regional Evolution
What paleoanthropologists now call “multiregional evolution” on the other hand postulates racial divergence far beyond that time, on the basis of the fossil evidence. Alan G. Thorne and Milford H. Wolpoff state the polygenic or multiregional basis of modern human origins. They maintain that there is no single recent dispersal for modern humans, that humans originated in Africa and then slowly developed their modern forms in every area of the Old World.

According to the multiregional view, mtDNA is not our only source of evidence. Fossil remains and artefacts represent more reliable evidence. Multiregional evolution traces all populations to humans first leaving Africa 1.8 million years ago. Distinctive populations have maintained physical differences. The features that distinguish Asians, Australian Aborigines and Europeans are said to have evolved over a long period where these peoples are found today.

The hominid fossils from Australasia show a continuous anatomic sequence, with the earliest Australians displaying features seen in Indonesia 100,000 years ago. Similar evidence is seen in northern Asia where one million years old Chinese fossils differ from Javan fossils in ways that parallel the differences between north Asians and Australians today (Alan G. Thorne and Milford H. Wolpoff, “The Multiregional Evolution of Humans,” Scientific American 1992, no. 266: 76-83).

In a typically biased account by P. Shipman in the January 16, 1993 issue of The New Scientist the hypothesis of Thorne and Wolpoff was nonetheless succinctly described among misleading comments about how genetic differences among races play no role in their relationship to society. Some of the relevant descriptions of the Thorne, Wolpoff hypothesis follow:

. . . At what stage in human evolution did the modern races evolve? And can ethnic behaviours and customs act as a selective force in human evolution, helping to shape the physical characteristics of the five or so genetic subgroups of humanity that we call races? Recent attempts to find clues in fossil and skeletal remains have triggered some fierce academic skirmishes.

The main battle centres on the attempts of a small band of researchers to prove that human races are hundreds of thousands of years older than conventional theories would have us believe. Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan and his colleagues maintain that the principal human races-Negroids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Australian aboriginal peoples and southern African Bushmen-began to evolve well before the appearance of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens. Contrary to mainstream thinking, races did not evolve as a result of modern humans leaving Africa to colonise the rest of the world some 100 000 to 200 000 years ago. Or so Wolpoff argues.

. . . Ironically, in everyday life most of the divisions we recognise are ethnic-that is, concern learned behaviour and cultural traditions rather than biological factors. Yet in science it is race that is often the flashpoint . . . .

To anthropologists and palaeontologists, the question of when in prehistory races began to evolve is no less controversial. Wolpoff, Alan Thorne of the Australian National University and their colleagues would trace racial characteristics as far back as 2 million years ago, to the extinct human species Homo erectus. According to their so-called multiregional hypothesis (see “The case against Eve,” New Scientist, 22 June 1991), anatomically modern humans evolved from this more ancient form simultaneously in different parts of the world, and it was during this period of simultaneous evolution that the racial characteristics of Homo sapiens first emerged . . .

Parallel Evolution
Thorne and Wolpoff are not the first to state the antiquity of human divergence. Carlton S. Coon, head of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, one of the most eminent of physical anthropologists, was one of the more well-known proponents of what is today called “multiregional evolution”, and what was then called “parallel evolution”. Like Thorne, Wolpoff and other sceptics of the “African Eve” hypothesis, Coon stated that today’s races evolved separately, in different continents, over different time periods.
Coon writing in 1962 stated of the origin and early divergence of humankind into races:

Where homo sapiens arose, and Africa is at present the likeliest continent, he soon dispersed, in a very primitive form, throughout the warm regions of the Old World. Three of the five human subspecies crossed the sapiens line elsewhere. If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools.

As far as we know, the Congoid line started on the same evolutionary level as the Eurasiatic ones in the Middle Pleistocene and then stood still for a half a million years, after which Negroes and Pygmies appeared as if out of nowhere. . . .

R. Ruggles Gates, at the time the most experienced anthropologist human geneticist, had much earlier said: “Isolation has been the great factor, or at any rate, an essential factor, in the differentiation of races” (R. R. Gates, Heredity in Man [London: Constable, 1929], 295. Gates was the founder of chromosome genetics.).

The multi-regional evolution of separate races almost two million years ago, was the commonly held theory among both geneticists and anthropologists until recent times. The fossil evidence accords with the very early divergence and separate evolution of the primary races.

All Chimps Now?
A major tactic of the One World One Race scientists and their street and media level shock troops is to pompously declare that there is only “one race—the human race” on the basis that all subspecies of man share 99.9 percent of their genes.

This argument purports to establish moral and political equality on the basis of genetic similarity. But similarity is not equality. If our rights and obligations to one another are based on genetic similarity, and genetic similarity is a matter of degree, then so too must be rights and obligations. We would have greater obligations to closer kin than to distant ones. But this is not the sort of egalitarianism desired by the One World, One Race crowd.

Furthermore, the genetic similarity = moral equality position begins to look absurd when applied to non-humans as well. After all, the genetic relationship between chimpanzees and humans is 98.5 percent. Some scientists are now contending on that basis that chimps and humans should now be classified as of the same genus. Pickrell writing in National Geographic News, states:

A new report argues that chimpanzees are so closely related to humans that they should be included in our branch of the tree of life. Chimpanzees and other apes have historically been separated from humans in classification schemes, with humans deemed the only living members of the hominid family of species.

Now, biologists at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan, provide new genetic evidence that lineages of chimps (currently Pan troglodytes) and humans (Homo sapiens) diverged so recently that chimps should be reclassed as Homo troglodytes. The move would make chimps full members of our genus Homo, along with Neandertals, and all other human-like fossil species. “We humans appear as only slightly remodelled chimpanzee-like apes,” says the study . . .

The term genus describes a very closely related group of similar species, thought to have diverged from one another relatively recently, and is the first grouping above the species level. Common chimpanzees and bonobos have until now been classified into their own genus, Pan.

Studies indicate that humans and chimps are between 95 and 98.5 percent genetically identical. . . .

Derek E. Wildman, Goodman, and other co-authors at Wayne State argue in their new study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that given the evidence, it’s somewhat surprising that humans and chimps are still classified into different genera. Other mammalian genera often contain groups of species that diverged much earlier than chimps and humans did, said Goodman. “To be consistent, we need to revise our definition of the human branch of the tree of life,” he said. (J. Pickrell, “Chimps Belong on Human Branch of Family Tree, Study Says,” National Geographic News, May 20, 2003.)

But if chimps belong to the human genus, doesn’t that mean that it is “racism” to buy and sell them? Is it racism to keep them in cages? Does it mean that it is racism not to give them the right to vote, the right to drive, the right to mate with one’s daughter? Is it racism if we do not allow chimps to go to school? Will white people be blamed when chimps cannot pass the first grade? Will the President of the United States demand that “no chimp be left behind”? I am all for humane treatment of chimps, but that does not require that we treat them as human beings.

Behind the “One World, One Race” Propaganda
What has brought about the widespread belief in the African Eve” hypothesis? Clearly it suits the political agenda of today, and has become a new article of faith among orthodox academe.

Just as the myth of the “Noble Savage,” the notion of an Edenic idyll existing among the primitive races untouched by the corrupting influences of European civilization, became the vogue among the so-called educated and cultivated classes of the eighteenth century and provided the ideological impetus for the French Revolution, so the new myth of the “African Eve” is now serving similar interests.

The “African Eve,” “All Africans” dogma provides pseudo-scholarly impetus for the leveling of humankind into a nebulous mass, without identity, easily malleable in the hands of those who seek to establish a “new world order.”

The New Scientist article quoted above started with the obligatory references to “neo-Nazism” and “racism.” Yet what we have arising from the dogma of “One World, One Race” implied in the “African Eve” hypothesis is something vastly more totalitarian. The egalitarian fallacy has wrought more evil—from the guillotine to the Gulag, from the “killing fields” of Pol Pot, to the mass suicides of Jonestown—than the worst excesses of Hitlerism.

If Hitlerism aimed at the creation of a “Master Race,” the One World, One Race ideology aspires to its mirror image: the extermination of all distinct peoples through miscegenation and their replacement with a homogeneous, dumbed-down slave race.

In looking for distant, primitive origins, we might just as well go back beyond the “African Eve” to the primal slime of undifferentiated existence from which all life ultimately emerged, for it is just such a characterless, indistinct blob of humankind that our new slave masters seek to impose through the dysgenic reversal of evolution.

Freedom and justice are best served not through the dead weight of an enforced “equality”, but through the recognition of differentiation, for it is in the differences that humanity can best be appreciated and valued.