While White Noise music is explicitly designed to inspire racially or politically motivated violence and is seen as part and parcel of the revolutionary ultra-nationalist subculture, he suggests that ‘metapolitical fascism’ has its own cultural reflection in the domain of sound, namely, apoliteic music [employing a concept from Julius Evola -- TOQ Editor]. This is a type of music whose ideological message contains obvious or veiled references to the core elements of fascism but is simultaneously detached from any practical attempts to realize these elements through political activity. Apoliteic music neither promotes outright violence nor is publicly related to the activities of radical right-wing political organizations or parties. Nor can it be seen as a means of direct recruitment to any political tendency.

Shekhovtsov’s article focuses on this type of music, and the thesis is tested by examining bands and artists that work in such musical genres as Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial, whose roots lie in cultural revolutionary and national folk traditions.

From Traditionalists, December 3, 2009

"Ares Ludovisi," Roman copy of Greek original by Skopas (Palazzo Altemps, Museo Romano Nazionale)

Translated by Greg Johnson

Allow me an “archeofuturist” parable based on the eternal symbol of the tree, which I will compare to that the rocket. But before that, let us contemplate the grim face of the coming century.

The twenty-first century will be a century of iron and storms. It will not resemble those harmonious futures predicted up to the 1970s. It will not be the global village prophesied by Marshall MacLuhan in 1966, or Bill Gates’ planetary network, or Francis Fukuyama’s end of history: a liberal global civilization directed by a universal state. It will be a century of competing peoples and ethnic identities. And paradoxically, the victorious peoples will be those that remain faithful to, or return to, ancestral values and realities—which are biological, cultural, ethical, social, and spiritual—and that at the same time will master technoscience. The twenty-first century will be the one in which European civilization, Promethean and tragic but eminently fragile, will undergo a metamorphosis or enter its irremediable twilight. It will be a decisive century.

In the West, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a time of belief in emancipation from the laws of life, belief that it was possible to continue on indefinitely after having gone to the moon. The twenty-first century will probably set the record straight and we will “return to reality,” probably through suffering.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the apogee of the bourgeois spirit, that mental small pox, that monstrous and deformed simulacrum of the idea of an elite. The twenty-first century, a time of storms, will see the joint renewal of the concepts of a people and an aristocracy. The bourgeois dream will crumble from the putrefaction of its fundamental principles and petty promises: happiness does not come from materialism and consumerism, triumphant transnational capitalism, and individualism. Nor from safety, peace, or social justice.

Let us cultivate the pessimistic optimism of Nietzsche. As Drieu La Rochelle wrote: “There is no more order to conserve; it is necessary to create a new one.” Will the beginning of the twenty-first century be difficult? Are all the indicators in the red? So much the better. They predicted the end of history after the collapse of the USSR? We wish to speed its return: thunderous, bellicose, and archaic. Islam resumes its wars of conquest. American imperialism is unleashed. China and India wish to become superpowers. And so forth. The twenty-first century will be placed under the double sign of Mars, the god of war, and of Hephaestus, the god who forges swords, the master of technology and the chthonic fires.

Towards the Fourth Age of European Civilization

European civilization—one should not hesitate to call it higher civilization, despite the mealy-mouthed ethnomasochist xenophiles—will survive the twenty-first century only through an agonizing reappraisal of some of its principles. It will be able if it remains anchored in its eternal metamorphic personality: to change while remaining itself, to cultivate rootedness and transcendence, fidelity to its identity and grand historical ambitions.

The First Age of European civilization includes antiquity and the medieval period: a time of gestation and growth. The Second Age goes from the Age of Discovery to the First World War: it is the Assumption. European civilization conquers the world. But like Rome or Alexander’s Empire, it was devoured by its own prodigal children, the West and America, and by the very peoples it (superficially) colonized. The Third Age of European Civilization commences, in a tragic acceleration of the historical process, with the Treaty of Versailles and end of the civil war of 1914-18: the catastrophic twentieth century. Four generations were enough to undo the labor of more than forty. History resembles the trigonometrical asymptotes of the “theory of catastrophe”: it is at the peak of its splendor that the rose withers; it is after a time of sunshine and calm that the cyclone bursts. The Tarpeian Rock is close to the Capitol!

Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, "Venus and Vulcan," 1590

Europe fell victim to its own tragic Prometheanism, its own opening to the world. Victim of the excess of any imperial expansion: universalism, oblivious of all ethnic solidarity, thus also the victim of petty nationalism.

The Fourth Age of European civilization begins today. It will be the Age of rebirth or perdition. The twenty-first century will be for this civilization, the heir of the fraternal Indo-European peoples, the fateful century, the century of life or death. But destiny is not simply fate. Contrary to the religions of the desert, the European people know at the bottom of their hearts that destiny and divinities are not all-powerful in relation to the human will. Like Achilles, like Ulysses, the original European man does not prostrate himself or kneel before the gods, but stands upright. There is no inevitability in history.

The Parable of the Tree

A Tree has roots, a trunk, and leaves. That is to say, the principle, the body, and the soul.

1) The roots represent the “principle,” the biological footing of a people and its territory, its motherland. They do not belong to us; one passes them on. They belong to the people, to the ancestral soul, and come from the people, what the Greeks called ethnos and the Germans Volk. They come from the ancestors; they are intended for new generations. (This is why any interbreeding is an undue appropriation of a good that is to be passed on and thus a betrayal.) If the principle disappears, nothing is possible any longer. If one cuts the tree trunk, it might well grow back. Even wounded, the Tree can continue to grow, provided that it recovers fidelity with its own roots, with its own ancestral foundation, the soil that nourishes its sap. But if the roots are torn up or the soil polluted, the tree is finished. This is why territorial colonization and racial amalgamation are infinitely more serious and deadly than cultural or political enslavement, from which a people can recover.

The roots, the Dionysian principle, grow and penetrate the soil in new ramifications: demographic vitality and territorial protection of the Tree against weeds. The roots, the “principle,” are never fixed. They deepen their essence, as Heidegger saw. The roots are at the same time “tradition” (what is handed down) and “arche” (life source, eternal renewal). The roots are thus manifestation of the deepest memory of the ancestral and of eternal Dionysian youthfulness. The latter refers back to the fundamental concept of deepening.

2) The trunk is its “soma,” the body, the cultural and psychic expression of the people, always innovating but nourished by sap from the roots. It is not solidified, not gelled. It grows in concentric layers and it rises towards the sky. Today, those who want to neutralize and abolish European culture try to “preserve” it in the form of monuments of the past, as in formaldehyde, for “neutral” scholars, or to just abolish the historical memory of the young generations. They do the work of lumberjacks. The trunk, on the earth that bears it, is, age after age, growth and metamorphosis. The Tree of old European culture is both uprooted and removed. A ten year old oak does not resemble a thousand year old oak. But it is the same oak. The trunk, which stands up to the lightning, obeys the Jupiterian principle.

3) The foliage is most fragile and most beautiful. It dies, withers, and reappears like the sun. It grows in all directions. The foliage represents psyche, i.e., civilization, the production and the profusion of new forms of creation. It is the raison d’être of the Tree, its assumption. In addition, which law does the growth of leaves obey? Photosynthesis. That is to say, “the utilization of the force of light.” The sun nourishes the leaves which, in exchange, produce vital oxygen. The efflorescent foliage thus follows the Apollonian principle. But watch out: if it grows inordinately and anarchically (like European civilization, which wanted to become the global Occident and extend to the whole planet), it will be caught by the storm, like a badly carded sail, and it will pull down and uproot the Tree that carries it. The foliage must be pruned, disciplined. If European civilization wishes to survive, it should not extend itself to the whole Earth, nor practice the strategy of open arms . . . as foliage that is too intrepid overextends itself, or allows itself to be smothered by vines. It will have to concentrate on its vital space, i.e., Eurosiberia. Hence the importance of the imperative of ethnocentrism, a term that is politically incorrect, but that is to be preferred to the “ethnopluralist” and in fact multiethnic model that dupes or schemers put forth to confuse the spirit of resistance of the rebellious elite of the youth.

One can compare the tripartite metaphor of the Tree with that of that extraordinary European invention the Rocket. The burning engines correspond to the roots, with chthonic fire. The cylindrical body is like the tree’s trunk. And the capsule, from which satellites or vessels powered by solar panels are deployed, brings to mind foliage.

Is it really an accident that the five great space rocket series built by Europeans—including expatriates in the USA—were respectively called Apollo, Atlas, Mercury, Thor, and Ariadne? The Tree is the people. Like the rocket, it rises towards the sky, but it starts from a land, a fertile soil where no other parasitic root can be allowed. On a spatial basis, one ensures a perfect protection, a total clearing of the launching site. In the same way, the good gardener knows that if the tree is to grow tall and strong, he must clear its base of the weeds that drain its roots, free its trunk of the grip of parasitic plants, and also prune the sagging and prolix branches.

From Dusk to Dawn

This century will be that of the metamorphic rebirth of Europe, like the Phoenix, or of its disappearance as a historical civilization and its transformation into a cosmopolitan and sterile Luna Park, while the other peoples will preserve their identities and develop their power. Europe is threatened by two related viruses: that of forgetting oneself, of interior desiccation and of excessive “opening to the other.” In the twenty-first century, Europe, to survive, will have to both regroup, i.e., return to its memory, and pursue its Faustian and Promethean aspirations. Such is the requirement of the coincidentia oppositorum, the convergence of opposites, or the double need for memory and will for power, contemplation and innovative creation, rootedness and transcendence. Heidegger and Nietzsche . . .

The beginning of twenty-first century will be the despairing midnight of the world of which Hölderlin spoke. But it is always darkest before the dawn. One knows that the sun will return, sol invictus. After the twilight of the gods: the dawn of the gods. Our enemies always believed in the Great Evening, and their flags bear the stars of the night. Our flags, on the contrary, are emblazoned with the star of the Great Morning, with branching rays; with the wheel, the flower of the sun at Midday.

Great civilizations can pass from the darkness of decline to rebirth: Islam and China prove it. The United States is not a civilization, but a society, the global materialization of bourgeois society, a comet, with a power as insolent as it is transitory. It does not have roots. It is not our true competitor on the stage of history, merely a parasite.

The time of conquest is over. Now is the time of reconquest, inner and outer: the reappropriation of our memory and our space: and what a space! Fourteen time zones on which the sun never sets. From Brest to the Bering Straits, it is truly the Empire of the Sun, the very space of the birth and expansion of the Indo-European people. To the south-east are our Indian cousins. To the east is the great Chinese civilization, which could decide to be our enemy or our ally. To the west, on the other side of the ocean: America whose desire will always be to prevent continental union. But will it always be able to stop it?

And then, to the south: the main threat, resurging from the depths of the ages, the one with which we cannot compromise.

Loggers try to cut down the Tree, among them many traitors and collaborators. Let us defend our land, preserve our people. The countdown has begun. We have time, but only a little.

And then, even if they cut the trunk or the storm knocks it down, the roots will remain, always fertile. Only one ember is enough to reignite a fire.

Obviously, they may cut down the Tree and dismember its corpse, in a twilight song, and anaesthetized Europeans may not feel the pain. But the earth is fertile, and only one seed is enough to begin the growth again. In the twenty-first century, let us prepare our children for war. Let us educate our youth, be it only a minority, as a new aristocracy.

Today we need more than morality. We need hypermorality, i.e., the Nietzschean ethics of difficult times. When one defends one’s people, i.e., one’s own children, one defends the essential. Then one follows the rule of Agamemnon and Leonidas but also of Charles Martel: what prevails is the law of the sword, whose bronze or steel reflects the glare of the sun. The tree, the rocket, the sword: three vertical symbols thrust from the ground towards the light, from the Earth to the Sun, animated by sap, fire, and blood.

Reading Occidental Dissent, I came across a comment by a so-called “White Advocate” making the following common “argument”:

Aside from that, sorry, but if Spaniards, Maltese, Italians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Greeks, Georgians and Armenians are considered White, then there is no damn reason why Ashkenazi Jews, or people of European descent with some Ashkenazi blood as well, are not White as well. Nobody can make a RATIONAL and FACTBASED argument why this is not the case.

I will provide some rational and fact-based arguments why it is indeed not the case. The genetic data are fact-based and the ethnic formation/indigenous argument is, in my opinion, rational. The cultural arguments incorporate some degree of subjectivity, but that subjectivity is derived from knowledgeable commentators, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and, most likely, is consistent with objective truth.

First, if by ‘White’ is meant ‘(native) indigenous European,’ many people do not consider Georgians and Armenians in this category. Georgia and Armenia are lands that are biologically and culturally on the border between Occident and Orient, and examples of both Western and Eastern types can be found within these populations. Albanians are (likely) genetically European, but as Islam is culturally outside of the West, those Albanians who practice that faith may be seen by many Westerners as being “them” rather than “us.” The other groups mentioned by “White Advocate” are Europeans of a Western and historically Christian background. It may serve his purposes to cite a constellation of varied and highly distinct Caucasian ethnic groups — some European and some not — to divert attention from the specific question at hand: how should the Ashkenazim be racially and culturally identified?. . . Read the whole article.

Power to the Swiss people and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP). The image caption reads, “Swiss quality, the middle class’ party.”

Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques – NYTimes.com:
The government must now draft a supporting law on the ban, a process that could take at least a year and could put Switzerland in breach of international conventions on human rights.

Apparently even the mildest, most indirect attempts to resist genocidal levels of immigration can put Whites in breach of “international conventions on human rights.”

Of 150 mosques or prayer rooms in Switzerland, only 4 have minarets, and only 2 more minarets are planned. None conduct the call to prayer. There are about 400,000 Muslims in a population of some 7.5 million people. Close to 90 percent of Muslims in Switzerland are from Kosovo and Turkey, and most do not adhere to the codes of dress and conduct associated with conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, said Manon Schick, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International in Switzerland.

Nothing to see here. Only 5 percent of Switzerland’s population is muslim, close to 100 percent of them cultural and genetic aliens.

“Most painful for us is not the minaret ban, but the symbol sent by this vote,” said Farhad Afshar, who runs the Coordination of Islamic Organizations in Switzerland. “Muslims do not feel accepted as a religious community.”

The kosovars, turks, and other muslims can go home, feel accepted, and build as many minarets as they like. Most painful for the Swiss is that if “international human rights” prevail it’s only a matter of time before the Swiss will be entirely dispossessed of their one and only homeland.

To the consternation of anti-White internationalists resistance is beginning to come not just from the “nativist,” “xenophobic,” “racist,” “nazi” SVP — but also from leftist feminists.

Women lead Swiss in vote to ban minarets – Times Online:

A right-wing campaign to outlaw minarets on mosques in a referendum being held in Switzerland today has received an unlikely boost from radical feminists arguing that the tower-like structures are “male power symbols” and reminders of Islam’s oppression of women.

A “stop the minarets” campaign has provoked ferment in the land of Heidi, where women are more likely than men to vote for the ban after warnings from prominent feminists that Islam threatens their rights.

This resistance is “right-wing” with “an unlikely boost” only if seen from an anti-White internationalist cheerleading point of view. Media bias isn’t “liberal,” it’s anti-White.

Socialist politicians have been furious to see icons of the left joining what is regarded as an anti-immigrant campaign by the populist Swiss People’s party, the biggest group in parliament.

One of them, Julia Onken, warned that failure to ban minarets would be “a signal of the state’s acceptance of the oppression of women.” She has sent out 4,000 emails attacking Muslims who condone forced marriage, honour killings and beating women.

Normal, healthy people don’t like being replaced by aliens who look, think, and act alien, obliterating their precious homeland and traditions before their very eyes, forever. Apparently, neither do radical feminists.

Swiss business is horrified. There are fears of a reaction against Swiss products similar to the one suffered by Denmark over the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in 2005.

“The brand ‘Swiss’ must continue to represent values such as openness, pluralism and freedom of religion,” said Hanspeter Rentsch, a member of the board of Swatch, the watchmaker.

It’s more horrorifying that Swiss businessmen feel free to favor “brand ‘Swiss’” over people Swiss. The irony is that openness and pluralism will eventually destroy the Swiss and all their “brands,” and the freedom to build minarets will ultimately be very, very bad for business.

Can you guess who else thinks openness, pluralism and freedom of religion are more important than Swiss self-determination?

Push to ban minarets in Switzerland a ‘threat’:

Switzerland’s biggest Jewish groups said Wednesday that a far-right push to ban the construction of minarets here was a “threat” to religious harmony and hindered the integration of Muslims.

The referendum infringes religious freedom, a concept enshrined in the constitution — said the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities and the Platform of Liberal Jews in Switzerland in a statement.

It  also poses a threat to peaceful relations between the religions and inhibits the integration endeavours of Muslims in Switzerland they added.

This is pure double-talk. Immigration brings the threat to harmony. The Swiss citizenry, who to the extent they’ve been informed and consulted have expressed their disfavor for immigration, muslim or otherwise, and should not be forced to suffer it, whether the immigrants wish to “integrate” with them or not. It is their very existence which is being infringed. What gives “jewish communities,” who have not integrated after more than two millennia among Europeans, any standing to lecture anyone about immigration or integration? They consider themselves jews first, not Swiss, so they can STFU or move to israel and lecture their own tribe about immigration and integration.

The two Jewish groups said they take seriously the fears of the population that extremist ideas could be disseminated in Switzerland.

But banning minarets is no solution. It only creates in Muslims in Switzerland a sense of alienation and discrimination they said.

If creating a sense of alienation is the concern then surely the alienation the native Swiss feel at the sight of minarets in their homeland trumps the senses of migrant muslims and jews, who after all are only guests. What the Swiss and all other Whites should take seriously is how jews and muslims do not hesitate to “discriminate,” i.e. identify with and advocate in favor of their own groups, even as they pathologize Whites for any attempt to do so.

It’s true that banning minarets is no solution. Deporting aliens would be better, but even that wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem is “international human rights.” What horrifies Swiss business is the precedent for internationalist punishment that has already been set by organized jewry. See The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany: The Economic Boycott of 1933.

Why would any normal, healthy people want to see the dysfunctional middle east recreated inside their country’s borders? In part because we’re constantly told, as we’re reminded here in this case, that it harms peaceful relations, harmony, and integration to see it this way. And in part because if we set that concern aside and persist then we’re threatened — all the double-talk about peaceful relations, harmony, and integration aside — with open war.

Some pundits characterize what’s happening to every White country, and only White countries, as “suicide,” or “self-destruction” caused by “liberalism.” This story of resistance from Switzerland, among others, puts the lie to that poisonous, blame-shifting meme.

UPDATE 2 Dec 2009: In a comment on Interview: Arthur Kemp, Hunter Wallace writes:

Banning minarets is treating symptoms, not the disease.

I disagree.

The disease is the idea, which produced its most fateful results during the Enlightenment in the service of emancipating jews, that Whites, and only Whites, must not “discriminate” against “minorities.” Since this meme took root it has been fed and twisted to genocidal proportions. Whites everywhere now live under a regime which subsidizes, supports, and even directly imposes “discrimination” against Whites, defending the interests of interloping aliens over the interests of the native-born citizenry.

The banning of minarets by popular vote strikes only obliquely at this idea, but it is a blow against the disease itself. Organized jewry roundly condemns it for exactly this reason. “Liberal” feminists played a prominent part in the minaret ban, putting the lie to the corollary meme, pimped constantly by faux-White pro-jews and others, that “suicidal” White “liberalism” is to blame for all that ills us. Even “liberals,” it turns out, resist when their “suicide” becomes too blatant. The genocide is inflicted in the name of “liberal” “non-discrimination” in name but not in fact, and it is inflicted by “the international community” — which means the plutocrats, their media, their jet-setting cosmopolitan courtiers, jewish groups, muslim groups, and the treasonous costume clowns who serve their interests in their governments.

“Treating symptoms” is more fairly applied to much of what conservatives do here in the US — for example, to their focus on the transfer of wealth via taxes or healthcare, never identifying who the wealth is transferred from or to; or to the “culture war,” never identifying who’s at war with whom.

The discussion began with Alex Kurtagic’s “White Noise” (October 19, 2009), which we have already linked on this site.

Followups include:

R. J. Stove, “That’s Professor Ozzy Osbourne to You!” (November 7, 2009)

Devin Reid Saucier’s reply to Stove (November 7, 2009)

Alex Kurtagic’s “Volk the System!” (November 11, 2009)

And finally there is Nina Kouprianova’s “Death (Metal) of the West” (November 12, 2009)

Check out our own Christopher Donovan’s article on his experiences at an AC/DC concert: “Implicit Whiteness, with Pyrotechnics: Or, the Night White People Took over Washington, DC” from The Occidental Observer (November 18, 2008).

Also, the Fall 2009 issue of The Occidental Quarterly will feature a major essay by Alex Kurtagic: “Black Metal: Conservative Revolution in Popular Culture.”

Nathaniel Drake, the hero of "Uncharted" II: "Among Thieves"

On October 13, 2009, Sony Computer Entertainment released Uncharted 2: Among Thieves for the Playstation 3 video gaming console. It was received warmly by nearly every video game critic in the US, having won numerous awards including “Best PS3 Action Game” and given a nearly perfect rating across the board. Adam Sessler of G4 (a video gaming news channel) even claimed it is the “best single-player game I have ever played” in a recent review. The game’s Creative Director, Amy Hennig, recently stated that she “would definitely say it’s exceeding expectations” regarding total sales thus far; nearly 900,000 copies were sold within the first week of its release.

As white people still constitute the majority in the US (albeit probably for not much longer), and since video games are integral to the lives of American youth, the game’s nearly record-breaking sales certify that innumerable young white people are playing Uncharted 2. As a white racialist and a gamer, I thought it pertinent to give the game a whirl and see if it held anything racially positive for these young minds. I was skeptical at first, assuming the game was just another shootem’ up with no substantial plotline; having just completed the game, however, my opinion has done a 180. While the game is not quite the racial treasure trove that The Elder Scrolls and other role-playing games are, it still bears many notable, racially healthy qualities that make it a game fit for any wholesome white household.

The player assumes the role of Nathaniel Drake, a ruggedly masculine treasure-hunter and fictional descendant of Sir Francis Drake. At the beginning of the game, Drake agrees to take a job offer to steal a Mongolian lamp from a Turkish museum that is rumored to contain clues regarding the fate of Marco Polo’s lost ships. With the help of characters Harry Flynn and Chloe Frazer, Drake climbs, ducks, swings, grapples, and tranquilizes his way through the museum to the artifact—leaving a trail of unconscious Turks as he does so. He finds within the lamp a map written up by Marco Polo himself; the map reveals the location of the ships that were lost on Polo’s disastrous homecoming voyage, and hints that one of them was carrying a mythical object, the Cintamani Stone, which it recovered from the lost land of Shambhala. At this point, Drake is betrayed by Flynn and left for the Turkish police to apprehend.

After three months in a Turkish prison, Drake is freed due to the “palm-greasing” of a few officials by some of his fellow treasure-hunting friends, including Chloe. He then embarks on an adventure to track down Flynn and his employer, a brutal Serbian warlord named Lazarevic (who reminds one of paramilitary leader “Arkan”), and also to secure the Stone for himself. He ultimately discovers that the Stone has the ability to make those who possess it nearly invincible, hence Lazarevic’s desire for it. From Borneo to the Himalayas, the player must control Drake as he climbs mountains, belays himself across chasms, swings from vines, escapes collapsing bridges, shoots down helicopters, hops train cars, all while facing off against hundreds of heavily armed Serbian paramilitaries a là Indiana Jones. He meets a variety of interesting characters along the way: in a Tibetan village he discovers a former SS officer who murdered his entire expedition to prevent Hitler from obtaining the Cintamani Stone, and then “went native.”

Ultimately, Drake ends up in Shambhala itself to battle against Lazarevic while also fending off a legion of debased humanoid guardians of the realm.

Racially Healthy Themes

While the game provides a gripping, action-packed storyline that keeps the gamer on edge, it also offers a racially positive experience for the young mind. For starters, all of the main characters are white: Drake is a rugged, muscular brunette with a five o’clock shadow; the main female characters, Elena and Chloe, are an American blonde and English brunette, respectively; then there’s the American, Sully; the Australian, Flynn; the German ex-Nazi, Schafer; and the Serb, Lazarevic. The only non-white character of significance is a Tibetan mountain man, Tinzin, whose inability to communicate with the others in English makes him appear somewhat subordinate.

Next to this, the game promotes endogamous relationships: Drake has a romantic history with both Elena and Chloe, and there is even a steamy make-out scene between him and the latter. At the game’s end, a sarcastic yet affectionate dialogue between Drake and Elena implies that they will end up together for the long haul. Meanwhile, Sully begins to chase after Chloe, causing Drake to jokingly yell “You’re a sick old man, Sully!” To top it all off, these interactions come across as realistic and down-to-Earth—the sorts of conversations that regular people have regarding sex and relationships.

Of no mean importance is the way the game lauds heroic masculinity. Drake represents the standard of the virile hero: he’s handsome, physically fit, athletic, and adheres to honorable behavior. On one mission, the player must control him as he hoists a wounded reporter, who is white, through the war-torn streets of a besieged Nepalese city. Though he does not know the man, and though he suspects he may even be Elena’s (his ex) new boyfriend, he endures the pain of dragging him out of harm’s way amid whizzing bullets. Even Chloe’s desperate wish that Drake leave him behind has no effect; he presses on like a classic hero. In other missions Elena and Chloe are captured at different times, but Drake does not cease his pursuit until he’s rescued both, as a truly Aryan man would.

The game is also littered with Indo-European mythological themes. Drake ultimately locates the seat of Shambhala, a mystical land of significance to the Indo-Aryan tradition. Esotericist and spiritual father of the European New Right, Julius Evola, describes it as “the mystical ‘northern city,’ or ‘city of peace,’ also thought to be the island on which the hero Gesar was said to have been ‘born’ (just like Zarathustra was born in the Ariyana Vaego).” It “will be the birth place of Kalki-avatara, the one who will put an end to the Dark Age.” Shambhala is of course an Eastern rendering of what the Greeks called Hyperborea, “the land beyond the North Wind” (Pindar), where Apollo is said to dwell; this was also Asgard to the Germanic peoples, wherein dwelled the race of gods (Aesir) led by Odin.

The game even does an excellent job of tying Eastern and Western Aryan Tradition together. When Drake reaches Shambhala, he finds that it is not actually a stone that Lazarevic is after, but a blue resin secreted from a giant tree in the city’s center, the “Tree of Life.” Anyone schooled in Nordic myth knows this tree to be the Yggdrasil, which connected Earth (Midgard) to the various realms beyond. One is also led to this conclusion upon reflecting on an earlier scene in the game when Drake finds a picture of the “Irminsul” among the murdered bodies of Schafer’s expedition crew. Instead of infinite knowledge, however, the tree in the game offers superhuman strength to those who eat its resin.

To be fair, the game does have a few drawbacks. For one, Lazarevic’s quest for Shambhala and the powers held therein is portrayed in a negative light. He comes across as a bloodthirsty mercenary eager to become a global tyrant. According to European traditions, however, such a quest is to be considered a heroic endeavor. An example is Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail (a symbolic representation of the powers hidden in Shambhala and the self-overcoming that one experiences upon receiving them), which he went on in order to help restore peace and order to Camelot. Evola would probably have this to say: “Here we find a fundamental and characteristic motif: the transformation into sin of what in the Aryan version of the myth was regarded as a heroic, bold deed, often crowned by success.” Another problem I have with the game is the use of a Serb militiaman as the main antagonist; this may perhaps further the American anti-European party line that the Serb Christians are evil but the Albanian Muslims and their drug-dealing, slave-trading, terrorist vanguard are completely innocent. These aside, the cons are much fewer than the pros in Uncharted 2.

In the ideal white ethnostate, video games will not play as crucial a role in young peoples’ lives as they do in the technocratic, zombified monstrosity that is America. The time that is spent on digital entertainment, however, would not be wasted on a game like Uncharted 2. It praises heroism; it shows that interpersonal relationships among whites can be adventurous and exciting, and that sexuality between a white man and white woman is enticing and invigorating, even if it is portrayed in a pixelised cartoon; it also informs the gamer of his Aryan ancestors’ myths, which may even encourage personal study along those lines. When I have children, Uncharted 2 will certainly be allowed to go on their game shelf next to The Elder Scrolls III and IV. Of course, they will not have access to these until they’ve completed their daily rounds of homework, personal study, and exercise!

Dr. Pendleton’s fans will be interested to hear that he is also working on review essays about David E. Williams, Jerome Deppe, and Der Blutharsch.

Studies in Classic American Literature

Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790

The Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical contrivance.

Education! Which of the various me’s do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress?

Anyhow, I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to supress me, according to your dummy standards.

The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio D¡az?

There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience?

Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be?

Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you, or Harvard College?

The ideal self! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eyes in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own.

The perfectibility of man, dear God! When every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. Which of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other?

Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He’ll rig him up for you, the pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American.

At the beginning of his career this cunning little Benjamin  drew up for himself a creed that should ‘satisfy the professors of every religion, but shock none’.

Now wasn’t that a real American thing to do ?

‘ That there is One God, who made all things.’

(But Benjamin made Him.)

‘That He governs the world by His Providence.’

(Benjamin knowing all about Providence.)

‘ That He ought to be worshipped with adoration, prayer, and thanks- giving.’

(Which cost nothing.)

‘But–’ But me no buts, Benjamin, saith the Lord.

‘But that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to men.’

(God having no choice in the matter.)

‘ That the soul is immortal.’

(You’ll see why, in the next clause.)

‘And that God will certainly reward virtue and punish vice, either here or hereafter.’

Now if Mr Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better. Benjamin did it for him in the eighteenth century. God is the supreme servant of men who want to get on, to produce. Providence. The provider. The heavenly storekeeper. The everlasting Wanamaker.

And this is all the God the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.

‘ That the soul is immortal.’

The trite way Benjamin says it!

But man has a soul, though you can’t locate it either in his purse or his pocket-book or his heart or his stomach or his head. The wholeness of a man is his soul. Not merely that nice little comfortable bit which Benjamin marks out.

It’s a queer thing is a man’s soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny, professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden. And we’ve all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things. Hail Columbia !

The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white-skinned hordes of the next civilization.

Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!

Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsoothl And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound for ever? More fools they.

This is Benjamin’s barbed wire fence. He made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock.

1. TEMPERANCE

Eat not to fulness; drink not to elevation.

2. SILENCE

Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. ORDER

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. RESOLUTION

Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. FRUGALITY

Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself i.e., waste nothing.

6. INDUSTRY

Lose no time, be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary action.

7. SINCERITY

Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. JUSTICE

Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. MODERATION

Avoid extremes, forbear resenting injuries as much as you think they deserve.

10. CLEANLINESS

Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.

11. TRANQUILLITY

Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. CHASTITY

Rarely use venery but for health and offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

13. HUMILITY

Imitate Jesus and Socrates.A Quaker friend told Franklin that he, Benjamin, was generally considered proud, so Benjamin put in the Humility touch as an afterthought. The amusing part is the sort of humility it displays. ‘Imitate Jesus and Socrates,’ and mind you don’t outshine either of these two. One can just imagine Socrates and Alcibiades roaring in their cups over Philadel- phian Benjamin, and Jesus looking at him a little puzzled, and murmuring: ‘Aren’t you wise in your own conceit, Ben?’

Henceforth be masterless,’ retorts Ben. ‘ Be ye each one his own master unto himself, and don’t let even the Lord put His spoke in.’ ‘Each man his own master’ is but a puffing up of masterlessness.

Well, the first of Americans practiced this enticing list with assiduity, setting a national example. He had the virtues in columns, and gave himself good and bad marks according as he thought his behaviour deserved. Pity these conduct charts are lost to us. He only remarks that Order was his stumbling  block. He could not learn to be neat and tidy.

Isn’t it nice to have nothing worse to confess ?

He was a little model, was Benjamin. Doctor Franklin. Snuff-coloured little man! Immortal soul and all!

The immortal soul part was a sort of cheap insurance policy.

Benjamin had no concern, really, with the immortal soul. He was too busy with social man.

(1) He swept and lighted the streets of young Philadelphia.

(2) He invented electrical appliances.

(3) He was the centre of a moralizing club in Philadelphia, and he wrote the moral humorisms of Poor Richard.

(4) He was a member of all the important councils of Philadelphia, and then of the American colonies.

(5) He won the cause of American Independence at the French Court, and was the economic father of the United States.

Now what more can you want of a man? And yet he is infra dig., even in Philadelphia.

I admire him. I admire his sturdy courage first of all, then his sagacity, then his glimpsing into the thunders of electricity, then his common-sense humour. All the qualities of a great man, and never more than a great citizen. Middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor Franklin, one of the soundest citizens that ever trod or ‘used venery’.

I do not like him.

And, by the way, I always thought books of Venery were about hunting deer.

There is a certain earnest naivet‚ about him. Like a child. And like a little old man. He has again become as a little child, always as wise as his grandfather, or wiser.

Perhaps, as I say, the most complete citizen that ever ‘used venery’.

Printer, philosopher, scientist, author and patriot, impeccable husband and citizen, why isn’t he an archetype?

Pioneer, Oh Pioneers! Benjamin was one of the greatest pioneers of the United States. Yet we just can’t do with him.

What’s wrong with him then ? Or what’s wrong with us ?

I can remember, when I was a little boy, my father used to buy a scrubby yearly almanac with the sun and moon and stars on the cover. And it used to prophesy bloodshed and famine. But also crammed in corners it had little anecdotes and humorisms, with a moral tag. And I used to have my little priggish laugh at the woman who counted her chickens before they were hatched and so forth, and I was convinced that honesty was the best policy, also a little priggishly. The author of these bits was Poor Richard, and Poor Richard was Benjamin Franklin, writing in Philadelphia well over a hundred years before.

And probably I haven’t got over those Poor Richard tags yet. I rankle still with them. They are thorns in young flesh.

Because, although I still believe that honesty is the best policy, I dislike policy altogether; though it is just as well not to count your chickens before they are hatched, it’s still more hateful to count them with gloating when they are hatched. It has taken me many years and countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up. Here am I now in tatters and scratched to ribbons, sitting in the middle of Benjamin’s America looking at the barbed wire, and the fat sheep crawling under the fence to get fat outside, and the watch-dogs yelling at the gate lest by chance anyone should get out by the proper exit. Oh America! Oh Benjamin! And I just utter a long loud curse against Benjamin and the American corral.

Moral America! Most moral Benjamin. Sound, satisfied Ben!

He had to go to the frontiers of his State to settle some disturbance among the Indians. On this occasion he writes:

We found that they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women quarrelling and fighting. Their dark-coloured bodies, half-naked, seen only by the  gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with fire-brands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could be well imagined. There was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice.

The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their counsellors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum, and then endeavoured to excuse the rum by saying: ‘The Great Spirit, who made all things, made everything for some use; and whatever he designed anything for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he had made the rum, he said: ” Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with.” And it must be so.’

And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited all the seacoast . . .

This, from the good doctor with such suave complacency, is a little disenchanting. Almost too good to bc true.

But there you are! The barbed wire fence. ‘Extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth.’ Oh, Benjamin Franklin! He even ‘ used venery’ as a cultivator of seed.

Cultivate the earth, ye gods! The Indians did that, as much as they needed. And they left off there. Who built Chicago? Who cultivated the earth until it spawned Pittsburgh, Pa?

The moral issue! Just look at it! Cultivation included. If it’s a mere choice of Kultur or cultivation, I give it up.

Which brings us right back to our question, what’s wrong with Benjamin, that we can’t stand him? Or else, what’s wrong with us, that we kind fault with such a paragon?

Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I’m going to remain such. I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. ‘This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,’ saith Benjamin, and all America with him. ‘But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.’

I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don’t work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity – justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I’m really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.

Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe:

‘That I am I.’

‘ That my soul is a dark forest.’

‘That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.’

‘That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.’

‘ That I must have the courage to let them come and go.’

‘ That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.’

There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.

Then for a ‘list’. It is rather fun to play at Benjamin.

1. TEMPERANCE

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods.

2. SILENCE

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

3. ORDER

Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest. Recognize your superiors and your inferiors, according to the gods. This is  the root of all order.

4. RESOLUTION

Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost.

5. FRUGALITY

Demand nothing; accept what you see fit. Don’t waste your pride or squander your emotion.

6. INDUSTRY

Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind.

7. SINCERITY

To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me.

8. JUSTICE

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

9. MODERATION

Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.

10. CLEANLINESS

Don’t be too clean. It impoverishes the blood.

11. TRANQUILITY

The soul has many motions, many gods come and go. Try and find your deepest issue, in every confusion, and abide by that. Obey the man in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost; command when your honour comes to command.

12. CHASTITY

Never ‘use’ venery at all. Follow your passional impulse, if it be answered in the other being; but never have any motive in mind, neither offspring nor health nor even pleasure, nor even service. Only know that ‘venery’ is of the great gods. An offering-up of yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else.

13. HUMILITY

See all men and women according to the Holy Ghost that is within them. Never yield before the barren.There’s my list. I have been trying dimly to realize it for a long time, and only America and old Benjamin have at last goaded me into trying to formulate it.

And now I, at least, know why I can’t stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be free, without an illimitable background? And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes.

And how can I be free, without gods that come and go? But Benjamin won’t let anything exist except my useful fellow men, and I’m sick of them; as for his Godhead, his Providence, He is Head of nothing except a vast heavenly store that keeps every imaginable line of goods, from victrolas to cat-o’-nine tails.

And how can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won’t sell at any price? But Benjamin doesn’t let me have a soul of my own. He says I am nothing but a servant of mankind — galley-slave I call it — and if I don’t get my wages here below — that is, if Mr Pierpont Morgan or Mr Nosey Hebrew or the grand United States Government, the great US, US or SOMEOFUS, manages to scoop in my bit, along with their lump — why, never mind, I shall get my wages HEREAFTER.

Oh Benjamin! Oh Binjum! You do NOT suck me in any longer.

And why, oh why should the snuff-coloured little trap have wanted to take us all in? Why did he do it?

Out of sheer human cussedness, in the first place. We do all like to get things inside a barbed wire corral. Especially our fellow men. We love to round them up inside the barbed wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ‘em work. ‘ Work, you free jewel, WORK!’ shouts the liberator, cracking his whip. Benjamin, I will not work. I do not choose to be a free democrat. I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost.

Sheer cussedness! But there was as well the salt of a subtler purpose. Benjamin was just in his eyeholes — to use an English vulgarism, meaning he was just delighted — when he was at Paris judiciously milking money out of the French monarchy for the overthrow of all monarchy. If you want to ride your horse to somewhere you must put a bit in his mouth. And Benjamin wanted to ride his horse so that it would upset the whole apple-cart of the old masters. He wanted the whole European apple-cart upset. So he had to put a strong bit in the mouth of his ass.

‘Henceforth be masterless.’

That is, he had to break-in the human ass completely, so that much more might be broken, in the long run. For the moment it was the British Government that had to have a hole knocked in it. The first real hole it ever had: the breach of the American rebellion.

Benjamin, in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a long process. In the depths of his own underconsciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated  the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be American. But you can’t change your nature and mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have finished. Like a son escaping from the domination of his parents. The escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process.

So with the American. He was a European when he first went over the Atlantic. He is in the main a recreant European still. From Benjamin Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride along the same road. There is no new road. The same old road, become dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic.

Why then did Benjamin set up this dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern to America ? Of course, he did it in perfect good faith, as far as he knew. He thought it simply was the true ideal. But what we think we do is not very important. We never really know what we are doing. Either we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin, or we move in the gesture of creation, from our deepest self, usually unconscious. We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. IT is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. The best we can do is to try to hold ourselves in unison with the deeps which are inside us. And the worst we can do is to try to have things our own way, when we run counter to IT, and in the long run get our knuckles rapped for our presumption.

So Benjamin contriving money out of the Court of France. He was contriving the first steps of the overthrow of all Europe, France included. You can never have a new thing without breaking an old. Europe happens to be the old thing. America, unless the people in America assert themselves too much in opposition to the inner gods, should be the new thing. The new thing is the death of the old. But you can’t cut the throat of an epoch. You’ve got to steal the life from it through several centuries.

And Benjamin worked for this both directly and indirectly. Directly, at the Court of France, making a small but very dangerous hole in the side of England, through which hole Europe has by now almost bled to death. And indirectly in Philadelphia, setting up this unlovely, snuff-coloured little ideal, or automaton, of a pattern American. The pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat, has done more to ruin the old Europe than any Russian nihilist. He has done it by slow attrition, like a son who has stayed at home and obeyed his parents, all the while silently hating their authority, and silently, in his soul, destroying not only their authority but their whole existence. For the American spiritually stayed at home in Europe. The spiritual home of America was, and still is, Europe. This is the galling bondage, in spite of several billions of heaped-up gold. Your heaps of gold are only so many muck-heaps, America, and will remain so till  you become a reality to yourselves.

All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-nots, and shut up fast in her own ‘productive’ machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.

Now is your chance, Europe. Now let Hell loose and get your own back, and paddle your own canoe on a new sea, while clever America lies on her muck-heaps of gold, strangled in her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms. While she goes out to work like millions of squirrels in millions of cages. Production!

Let Hell loose, and get your own back, Europe!

From "The Elder Scrolls" IV: "Oblivion"

Today’s youth are especially preoccupied with video games, spending countless hours on Xbox Live or the World of Warcraft, working with other gamers worldwide on quests to destroy goblins and liberate office buildings from zombie infestations; this time could be better used for homework, personal study, exercise, or productive hobbies.

Video games have become such an integral part of young people’s lives that they have even led to fatalities among dedicated gamers. One woman essentially drowned herself in a contest to win a Nintendo Wii for her children by drinking gallons of water and holding in her urine (whoever held it the longest would win).

In another legendary incident, a man killed himself because his character in a particular game was accidentally deleted. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the dynamics of video games, players are able to save their progress onto a “memory card” at a given time during the main quest and return to it later.)

But what if there were a video game that had an educational significance, and a racial one at that? What if there were a video game that subliminally opened the player up to issues of race, politics, and culture? I believe I have found just such a game, as I myself have enjoyed it for many hours at a time over the last few years — I’m in my early twenties, so give me a break — and have had a chance to dissect its contents. It is not a single game exactly, but rather a series: The Elder Scrolls (TES).

The setting, or “universe” of the TES series is the fictional world of Nirn. Nirn is like Earth, having numerous continents and oceans; every game in the series takes place on the continent known as Tamriel, which is populated by a multitude of sentient humanoid races that hail from their own respective countries and kingdoms (e.g. the Nords of Skyrim and the Argonians of Black Marsh).

Tamriel is currently ruled over by the great Cyrodiilic Empire which resembles Ancient Rome in its people, language, material culture, religion, and cosmopolitan social structure, among other things. Though it boasts the most powerful military force, the Imperial Legion, Cyrodiil is a waning power, beset by continual internal threats that demand the intervention of the game’s players for resolution.

Subliminal Racialism

Racial themes permeate every aspect of TES games. At the very beginning of the game the player must construct a basic identity for his character: a name, class (knight, mage, assassin, etc.), gender, and race, among other things, comprise this identity. There are nine playable races, and interestingly enough, each one bears notable similarities to actual races in our world. Not all races in the game are human, however.

The peoples of Tamriel are divided into Man, Mer (Elves), and different bestial races. The subspecies of Man include the Nords, a tall, robust, fair-skinned people who physically and culturally resemble Nordic Vikings; the Imperials, or Cyrodiilic peoples who bear Greco-Roman sounding names and resemble White Mediterraneans; the Redguards, an African-looking people who even have African-American sounding names (e.g. Trevond); and the Bretons, a very short and pale-skinned mix of Man and Elf with French-sounding names.

Among the Elven peoples come the Altmer, or “High Elves,” who are a tall, golden-skinned, Aryan-like race that sees itself as superior to the other races; the Dunmer, or “Dark Elves,” a xenophobic and deeply religious group that reminds one of the ancient Hebrews (in no small reason because they were said to have departed from their proto-Elven kin under the leadership of a prophet who felt that they needed the guidance of different gods); the green-skinned and monstrous Orsimer (Orcs); and the Bosmer, or “Wood Elves,” who live in tree-top villages and embrace a pantheistic way of life.

Each of the above has a genetically determined set of racial traits. Each has a unique “special power” that the player can use for defense or attack (e.g., Bosmer can command animals to assist them in battle, while the folk-oriented Dunmer can call forth ancestral spirits). Some races are more gifted in the magical arts while others make better warriors; some have high resistances to diseases and elemental attacks while others are severely weakened by them. To give a specific example, the reptilian-humanoid Argonians can breath underwater while other races have a limited amount of breathing time while submerged, after which their health is impaired.

All of the above is presented to the player within the first five minutes of game play. In choosing their character attributes the players are immediately opened up to the concept of racial differences. The rest of the game is saturated with issues of race and culture.

The different races in the game have predispositions toward one another, both positive and negative. These relations are based on the rich racial history of Tamriel that the player can actually read about in in-game books. In-game books are items the player can actually pick up, place into their inventory, and read when they choose; they can be found anywhere from obscure caves to well-stocked stores in cities. If the player has a particular interest in the Dark Elves, for example, he or she can go to a book store and learn the following:

1. They have a very xenophobic culture that precludes them from friendly relations with other peoples, whom they refer to collectively as n’wah (sounds rather Semitic).

2. They have a particular hatred for the Argonians because the two peoples have fought numerous wars over territorial expansion and slavery. (The Dark Elves see the Argonians as an easily procurable source of slave labor.)

As a result of these history-based inter-ethnic relations, the player’s race determines how other characters feel about him. If characters have a negative attitude toward the player they will refuse to impart bits of information that are crucial to completing the game. The player will then be forced to bribe them with money or manipulate them verbally (a skill that is governed by “Personality” points, which can be increased as the player gains experience; the starting number of points, however, is determined by the player’s race).

In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, racial epithets are flung around liberally. At the start of the game the player finds himself in a prison cell opposite one of a nasty Dark Elf. Depending on the player’s race, the Dark Elf will go into a particular racist diatribe against him. Take for example his monologue against an Orc player:

By the Nine Divines, you’re an ugly one. But then, all Orcs are ugly. The most repulsive race in all of Tamriel, really. At least you’ve got that brutish strength, huh? Must be nice to just rip someone apart like some kind of monster. Oh, but you must be the one Orc weakling, huh? Captured by Imperials. How pathetic. You’re going to die in here, Orc! Like an animal in a cage!

Enemies at later points in the game will also hurl racial insults at the player: “All you Elves/Humans are the same: all flash and no fury!” If the player is in combat with an enemy of the same race, the latter will sometimes cry “You’re a traitor to your own race!” One would turn a lot of heads for uttering those words in the real world, especially if one is white. Nevertheless, such barrages constantly remind the player of racial differences, which is significant even if the message comes from a fictional universe.

Racial verbal exchanges are not always negative. In Oblivion the player will often be addressed as “brother” by members of the same race as he passes them in the streets of Cyrodiil; these characters will also have a more positive disposition towards the player, making them more likely to assist him during missions or sell goods for cheaper prices.

Certain god characters in the game favor certain races. For example, Malacath, the apotheosized ancestor of the Orcs, will say to an Orc character in Oblivion who approaches his shrine: “Nice present! Good! And from a nice Orc, too! Double good! Orcs are smart. They know, you want something, you do what the Boss tells you.”

The game series also includes intellectual analyses of race. In The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, the player is able to uncover a book on physical anthropology titled Notes on Racial Phylogeny. Here is an excerpt:

After much analysis of living specimens, the Council long ago determined that all “races” of elves and humans may mate with each other and bear fertile offspring. Generally the offspring bear the racial traits of the mother, though some traces of the father’s race may also be present. It is less clear whether the Argonians and Khajiit are interfertile with both humans and elves. . . . Khajiit differ from humans and elves not only their skeletal and dermal physiology — the “fur” that covers their bodies — but their metabolism and digestion as well. Argonians, like the dreugh, appear to be a semi-aquatic troglophile form of humans, though it is by no means clear whether the Argonians should be classified with dreugh, men, mer, or (in this author’s opinion), certain tree-dwelling lizards in Black Marsh.

The above sounds like something out of a book by Carleton Coon or H. F. K. Günther, if they were Elven scholars. Another in-game book describes the genesis of the Orc race in similar anthropological terms: “Orcs were born during the latter days of the Dawn Era. History has mislabeled them beastfolk, related to the goblin races, but the Orcs are actually the children of Trinimac, strongest of the Altmeri ancestor spirits.”

Parallels to European Mythology

The fictional world of Nirn has an exhaustive history that can be researched through in-game books and dialogues between characters. What is significant to the white racialist about this history are its countless elements of Indo-European mythology and mythical conceptions of racial genesis.

The history of Nirn, particularly its continent of Tamriel, is cyclical like the history of our world as viewed by the Ancients and later by Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola. Rather than following a straight line of events, Tamriel has gone through a series of “Eras” that each represent a new stage of civilized development. The transition from one phase to the next usually entails a step down from archetypal perfection, a view also held by the ancients.

In the beginning was the Dawn Era where the archetype of order, Anu, clashed with the forces of chaos represented by Padomay-Sithis over the love of a celestial being named Nir. The battle caused the universe, the stars, and a multitude of deities to materialize. This bears a striking similarity to the Nordic understanding of cosmogenesis in which the ice of the realm Niflheim converged with the fires of Muspelheim in a middle space known as Ginnungagap, which caused the universe to explode forth. In fact, the order-chaos dichotomy in general is a theme that pervades virtually all Indo-European origin stories.

One of the gods born from this cataclysmic event was Lorkhan, also known as the “Trickster-Deity.” The spelling of his name along with his personality suggest that his role was inspired by the Nordic god Loki, who was notorious for malevolent knavery (e.g. he fooled the other gods into slaying Baldur, one of their most beloved kin). In any event, Lorkhan ultimately tricked half of his divine kin, the Aedra (a term bearing notable similarities to the Nordic Aesir and Hindu Asuras), into constructing a sentient world at the expense of their own immortality; the result was the Earth-like planet known as Nirn. Now sapped of their divinity, the gods were forced to dwell in their new realm as imperfect demigods.

This Era corresponds in many ways to the “Golden Age” or “Satya Yuga” of Indo-European myth. It was a time when the gods were pristine and immortal, and they maintained perfect order in the cosmos. However, a fall ultimately occurred that rendered the gods imperfect and ushered in a new age. As Hesiod writes:

Worse than the first, a second Age appears,
Which the Celestials call the Silver Years.
The Golden Age’s Virtues are no more;
Nature grows weaker than she was before . . .

Though they were no longer gods in the transcendental sense, these demigods did not merely die off. Several of them ascended into the heavens and metamorphosed into what look like planets, if one were looking up at the sky from Nirn’s surface. By so doing, they are able to exert an occult influence on their sentient creation in the form of “magicka” for the rest of time. Magicka is an ethereal substance that allows people to cast magical spells, similar to the numina of Latin myth. We once again see a parallel in Hesiod’s prehistory:

Aeiral Spirts, by great Jove design’d,
To be on Earth the Guardians of Mankind;
Invisible to mortal Eyes they go,
And mark our Actions, good, or bad, below . . .

Those demigods who did not enter the sky ultimately degenerated as they begat further generations of beings through reproduction. The inevitable result was the birth of the Ehlnofey, or the antecedents of both Elves and Humans who claimed the island of Aldmeris as their primordial seat. The birth of this race officially ushered in the Merethic Era.

Shortly thereafter, the Ehlnofey diverged into separate races: the Aldmer, or proto-Elves who remained on Aldmeris, and the Nedes, or proto-Humans who emigrated to a new continent called Atmora. For various reasons the two ultimately reconnected on the continent of Tamriel and quarreled.

What happened to Aldmeris and Atmora according to the in-game history books betrays another Indo-European mythic theme used by the designers: lost continents. Aldmeris was said to sink beneath the sea for unknown reasons (likely magical), forcing the Aldmer to settle in Tamriel. There they splintered off into the miscellany of Elven races discussed above. This story invokes the mythical account of Atlantis from Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, the continent “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” that was submerged by metaphysical causes.

Meanwhile, Atmora was said to have frozen over and become inhospitable, which forced the Nedes to migrate into Tamriel and diverge into the multitude of human stocks. In this we find a parallel event in the Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta where the primordial Airyano Vaego is destroyed by the “fatal winters,” forcing the first humans to flee under the leadership of King Yima; among the ancient Greeks this primordial seat was known as Hyperborea or Thule.

For many centuries the Elves were the dominant race on Tamriel, having erected grand civilizations across the continent and enslaving the Men and beast-folk (the animal-like races that were created when Nirn came into being) for manpower. Like many empires, the Elves became decadent, suffered intra-racial discord, and were overthrown by a human slave revolt. This event marked the beginning of the First Era and the dominance of Man under the Cyrodiilic Empire.

Julius Evola, the Italian esotericist, comparative mythologist, and founding father of the European New Right, referred to such a development as the “regression of the castes,” in which a lower stratum of society seizes power from that directly above it (e.g., the merchants surmount the nobility) and thus completely alters the cultural style of that society. From the First to the Third Era the Imperials would wax and wane in power, but with the passage of time came ultimate decline, as it does in any human civilization.

The Third Era ends with the Oblivion Crisis (the central plot of TES IV: Oblivion), in which hordes of Daedra (the gods not tricked by Lorkhan) spill into the realm of Nirn from the chaotic dimension of Oblivion and attempt to destroy Tamriel. The game is completed when the player brings the empire’s crown prince (voiced by actor Sean Bean) into the capital city, where he is transfigured into the avatar of another deity and obliterates the hellish invaders.

In this sequence more Indo-European motifs are found. Firstly, the final battle between the forces of chaos (Daedra) and the forces of order (the Empire and its divine patrons) at the close of an Era is similar to the Nordic Ragnarok, when the Aesir engage in an apocalyptic war with the Vanir that leads to a radically new period of human existence. Secondly, the concept of an avatar acting on behalf of the gods and defeating chaos is clearly inspired by Hindu mythology.

Next to the complex metaphysical themes are more simple aspects of European mythology: the existence of Elves and forest-dwelling sprites, the ability to don legendary armor like mithril and adamant, brewing magical potions, raiding caves and slaying goblins, going pound for pound with a troll, looting treasure, rescuing damsels, pursuing necromancers, dueling with undead legions, freeing the specters of tormented souls, crusading for relics, saving kingdoms, and the like — all are elements of the heroic spirit that permeates Celtic, Germanic, and Classical folkways. Constant exposure to them in the world or Nirn cannot help but generate interest in their real-world origins.

Conclusion

Maybe I am just a nerd who gives too much credit to a form of modern entertainment. Be that as it may, one cannot deny the value that TES holds for white racialism. Of critical importance is that this game appeals predominantly to intelligent white people (with a few Asians thrown in). Being young myself, I have had a chance to observe the habits of American youth. One thing I have noticed is that the plebeian-minded simpletons always contented themselves with sports games and shoot’em ups, whereas the truly intelligent kids always go for role-playing games. Even if you went back in time to the 80s, before video games were as prevalent, you would see the student council members, chess club chairmen, math geniuses, and other future leaders of society spending their Friday nights slaying goblins and casting lightning bolts in the board game Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, with TES games, bright white youth are being overtly and covertly bombarded with racial concepts and Indo-European cultural themes. From the first five minutes of the game to the very end, they are exposed to a steady barrage of racial differences, physical anthropology, medieval Gothic architecture, feudalism, Indo-Aryan myths, and Greek and Nordic myths — a subliminal course in Indo-European humanities. For whites who care about our cultural legacy and genetic future, perhaps TES games will prove a useful weapon in our occult war against the Daedra of our world, that is, multiculturalism and decadent modernism.

Other role-playing games are also significant tools in the battle for young minds. Games like the Final Fantasy series, Secret of Mana, World of Warcraft, Chrono Trigger, Neverwinter Nights, and Warhammer are saturated with ancient, medieval, and archaeo-futuristic themes of European inspiration. In playing such games our youth might very well take an interest in the racial and cultural history of their people, then put down the in-game books and pick up some real ones about who we are.

Guillaume Faye

Translator’s Note: Excerpted from chapter IV of Faye’s La colonisation de l’Europe: Discours vrai sur l’immigration et l’islam (Paris: Aencre, 2000), 69-70. Trans. Irmin. Faye and his publisher were found guilty and fined, at the behest of the “anti-racist” organizations MRAP and LICRA, for “spreading racial hatred” — that is, for the thought crime of writing critically about Islam and Third World immigration.

There are officially four million Muslims in France today. The real figure is almost certainly higher, probably between six and seven million believers. Islam is already France’s second largest religion, with 1,430 official mosques. Its followers are young, whereas practicing Catholics are old. If demographic trends are taken into account (a steady, uncontrolled flow of immigrants and a higher birth rate) Islam will become the dominant religion in France as early as 2015, if nothing is done to prevent it. France currently has more Muslims than Albania and Bosnia combined. In the European Union, the number of Muslims is estimated at fifteen million. It is growing in all European countries.

To claim today that France could never become an Islamic republic or even a Muslim country is as risky as someone denying in the 1980s the possibility of German reunification or the demise of Communism in the USSR.

None of my remarks will be hateful toward Islam, though it does not always reciprocate. On the other hand, I do indeed consider Islam a grave threat and an enemy, since this conquering religion is engaged in a massive and deliberate settlement of Europe. You do not despise an enemy; you combat him. And in attempting to understand your enemy, you should not descend to the naivety of contemporary intellectuals, who reflexively declare Islam tolerant, without ever having studied it.

It is perfectly possible to share values in common with your enemy. His character as enemy arises, in this case, only because he has first imposed himself on you as an occupier. We can, in agreement with Islam, resist or deplore the West’s materialism and its exaggerated, deranged individualism, but nevertheless regard the establishment of Islam in Europe as an act of war, according to the Koran’s own rigorous teachings. Carl Schmitt’s warning aptly applies to all Europeans who remain naive and tolerant toward Islam: “You don’t decide who your enemy is; he decides. You can easily declare him your friend, but if he decides that he is your enemy, there is nothing you can do about it.”

Contrary to the opinion of Islamophiles, Islam is not simply a “universal faith” like Christianity; it is also a community of civilization (umma) which aims at expansion. The implicit project of Islam is quite simply the conquest of Europe, both religiously and ethnically, as the Koran stipulates. We are already at war. Westerners, unlike the Russians, have not yet grasped this fact.

For even if Islam conveys transcendent values and proposes an individual and a collective doctrine of life — imposing high, intangible standards on its believers, thus endowing their lives with meaning — it nevertheless corresponds to nothing in the European soul and temperament. Its massive introduction into Europe would disfigure a European culture already damaged by Americanization. An assertive dogmatism, an absence of the Faustian spirit, a fundamental denial of humanism (understood as the autonomy of the human will) in favor of an absolute submission to God, an extreme rigidity of social obligations and prohibitions, a theocratic confusion of civil society, religion and the political State, an absolute monotheism, a profound ambivalence toward artistic freedom and scientific inquiry — all these traits are incompatible with traditional European patterns of thought, which are fundamentally polytheistic.

Those who believe that Islam can be Europeanized, can adapt to European culture, can accept the concept of secularism, make a dreadful error. Islam, essentially, does not understand compromise. Its essence is authoritarian and bellicose. It is the religion par excellence of a desert people. Put differently, with the colonizing introduction of Islam into Europe, two dangers arise: disfiguration or war.

The cover of Laibach's "Volk"

Volk
Laibach
London: Mute Records, 2006

Kunst Der Fuge
Laibach
Ljubljana: Dallas Records, 2008

Laibach is a Slovenian music group founded in 1980 in Communist Yugoslavia. Although Laibach’s music is often classified as “industrial,” that term does not begin to capture the band’s musical and conceptual versatility. Laibach’s releases run the gamut from a Beatles cover album (Let It Be[1]), to a heavy metal concept album on God (Jesus Christ Superstars[2]), to a “techno” concept album on war, globalization, and Western imperialism in the Balkans (NATO[3]), to the two albums under review here: Volk, a concept album about nationalism, and Kunst der Fuge, an electronic realization of J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue.

“Laibach” is the German name for the Slovenian capital Ljubljana. The name first appeared in the twelfth century and became “official” after Rudolf von Hapsburg conquered the town in 1278. The name remained in use until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. From 1943 to 1945, the name was revived when Slovenia was occupied by the Germans. The Germans found many Slovenian collaborators, who combined Slovenian nationalism, anti-Communism, and pro-German sentiments. After the war, thousands of collaborators were murdered by the Communists, and the very name Laibach was banned. Thus from the beginning Laibach the band was as much about politics as music. Its very name was a challenge to the Yugoslav political order, and beyond that to all universalist ideologies and homogenizing political and economic systems.

Laibach’s flirtation with nationalism does not stop with its name. Laibach posters and album covers feature National Socialist propaganda images.

In the video of “Das Spiel ist aus” (“The Game is Up”–the video is available on the compilation Laibach – The Videos, the song on the compilation Laibach, Anthems), the members of Laibach appear in Nazi uniforms–on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and pushing a shopping cart through a mall, surrounded by shocked onlookers.[4] (The effect is hilarious.)

After the Yugoslav government banned the group from using the name “Laibach,” they adopted a simple seal: a cross with four equal arms surrounded by a toothed wheel. Is this an ironic juxtaposition of Christian and Communist motifs? Is a cross in a circle meant to resemble a swastika in a circle? Quite a few of Laibach’s songs are sung in German too-although a good many are sung in English, which is perhaps the group’s only concession to the international pop market.

Vlad the Impaler

But Laibach cannot be accused of an anachronistic adherence to German National Socialism, if only because of the ambiguous and contingent connection between National Socialism and Slovenian nationalism. Beyond that, Laibach’s work also contains currents of a broader Eastern European nationalism. For example, lead vocalist Milan Fras appears in headgear that makes him resemble the famous Vienna portrait of Vlad the Impaler, a Wallachian nationalist who resisted the power of both Turkish armies and German burghers. Laibach’s 1994 NATO album clearly rejects American and Western European imperialism in the name of the “Eastern Nation,” which I understand as a broad Eastern European nationalism. In light of subsequent events in Serbia and Kosovo, the album now seems prophetic.

In 1994, Laibach added an additional twist to their engagement with nationalism by creating their own virtual nation, NSK, which stands for Neue Slowenische Kunst, German (!) for New Slovenian Art. NSK was founded as an artist’s collective with music, painting, video, graphics, theatre, and theory divisions. It issues passports and postage stamps and conducts foreign exhibitions as diplomatic events.

Thus Laibach’s overriding theme seems to be nationalism as such. To borrow a phrase from Savitri Devi, they are “nationalists of every nation.” The Volk album certainly supports this thesis. The album’s fourteen songs are interpretations and transformations of the national anthems of fifteen nations in which fragments of the original words and melodies are embedded in new songs with additional words.

Track 1, “Germania,” is based on “Deutschland über Alles,” the melody of which was composed by Joseph Haydn. The meaning of “Germany before All” (or “Germany First”) is simply that for Germans, Germany should come first in their hearts before all other countries. It does not mean that for non-Germans, Germany should come first as well. (Of course the fact that the song appears first on the CD may indicate that for Laibach too Germany really does come first.)

Laibach’s lyrics ask whether “Deutschland über Alles” will continue to be sung, and, more importantly, will it mean anything in the future: “And in times of misfortune/ and in times of mistrust / shall this song  continue / from generation to generation, / from present to past, / shall this song continue / more than ever / in this time of mistrust?” This question is poignant because Germans today are punished by their Allied Occupation regime for openly putting Germany first in their hearts, and for expressing nostalgia for the Third Reich, the last time when Germans put Germany first.

The Third Reich, the War, and the Occupation together constitute a historical “fall” from which Germans must find redemption: “After the unspeakable, /after you have fallen as only angels can fall, /go and find your peace again, /get back home and grow your tree.” The trauma of the fall has, however, induced a kind of collective amnesia: “No victory, /no defeat, /no shame, and Fatherland no more . . .” All these are replaced with “only Unity, Justice, and Freedom for all.” I take this to mean a universalist credo that will erase Germany in the hearts of Germans-as a prelude to erasing Germany from the world entirely. Laibach’s words conclude “There will be no memory / or there will be no home.” The grammar is a little off, but I take this to mean that unless Germany remembers itself, it will be dismembered; it will perish; there will be no home. This is “the lesson you have to learn / now and in the future. / Do you think you can make it, Deutschland?”

Track 2, “America,” begins with the album’s only assault of loud, ugly “industrial” noise-a singularly appropriate gesture-followed by a montage of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the preamble to the US constitution, the blaring sirens of urban hellholes, the fire and brimstone rantings of televangelists, and Laibach’s own accusatory lyrics.

If the Third Reich is Laibach’s model of ethno-nationalism, the United States is their model of anti-nationalism. The United States was born with an identity crisis. Culturally and genetically European, the different strands of the American populace could have formed a new European nation with a unified national self-consciousness.

Cover of Laibach's "Kunst der Fuge"

But our founding stock was selected for rootlessness and a penchant for universalistic ideological fixations, religious and secular. This provided fertile soil for an abstract, universalistic, creedal conception of identity, which became more and more useful with the immigration of ever-more heterogeneous and unassimilable populations. America is now no longer a people, but merely a system: a technological, capitalistic plutocracy at war with its founding stock. Beyond that, the American system is at war with every distinct and independent people, with every culture but pop culture, with every ideal but self-indulgence.

The triumph of this “universal homogeneous state” is what Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of history.” History ended first in America, and America’s mission is to end it everywhere else. It is not a civilizing mission, but a barbarizing one, spread under the banner of emancipation. Laibach ask “O the land of the free / and the home of the brave, / are you heaven on Earth, / or the gloom of the grave?” The answer is both, for the heaven of liberal democracy is the graveyard of all nations, cultures, and ideals. America is “the end of history, / the end of time, / the end of family, /the end of crime.”

Accordingly, Laibach prays (while mocking the American tendency to inject religion into politics):

NSK passport

Praise the Lord
And praise the Holy Spirit
To save us from your freedom,
Justice, peace . . .
from arrogance and pride,
from violence and conflusion . . .

Your great despair
And great depression
satanic verses of your superstition,
the land of plenty.

Your Bill of Rights, free enterprise,
the free will and the unbroken one,
your self-esteem and self-desire,
your trust in God and the religious fire.

Track 3, “Anglia,” is based on “God Save the Queen.” If the United States is the Mighty Fortress of the Universal Homogeneous State, the United Kingdom is its “Airstrip One,” from which American airpower can depart to rain death upon any nationalist upstarts in Europe or the Near East. Amazingly, this utterly degraded and subordinate role in the process of global denationalization co-exists with a sturdy nationalism-really more a nostalgia for England’s past imperial greatness. (Americans should not laugh, because we exist in the same position vis-à-vis Israel.) Hence Laibach begins: “So you still believe you are ruling the World, / using all your tricks to keep the picture blurred, / scatter your enemies, /confound their politics, /so you still believe you are ruling the world. . . . So you still believe you are superior, / and all other nations are inferior, / any sedition-hushed, / rebellious Scots-crushed, / so you still believe you are superior!” Unfortunately, British nationalism, like American, has been channeled into the destruction of its own people. Hence Laibach adds a single line to the first verse of “God Save the Queen,” which functions as the chorus of “Anglia”: “God save you all.”

Camp mit Laibach?

If Laibach think that National Socialist Germany represents the past of nationalism, track 4, “Rossiya” indicates that they think its future lies in Russia. Furthermore, the band seems to share the surprising fusion of Russian nationalism and Communism in the minds of many Russian nationalists today. “Rossiya” combines the Communist anthem “The Internationale” with the current “State Anthem of the Russian Federation,” which is based on the 1944 Soviet national anthem. Although the current Russian anthem removes the phrase “an unbreakable union” from the old Soviet anthem, Laibach quietly restores it, speaking of “an unbreakable union of fraternal states, united forever in Great Russia’s embrace.”

After the fall of Communism and the integration of Russia into the global capitalist marketplace, Russians learned that, for all its faults, Communism at least did not hand the resources of the nation over to international robber barons based in New York, London, and Tel Aviv. To Russians condemned to cold, hunger, and hopelessness by the transition to capitalism, there was a new poignancy to “The Internationale”: “Arise, the prisoners of starvation, /arise, the damned of the earth.” To this, Laibach adds: “let’s gather together, / let’s break us free, / the world is changing at its core!” Communism, like nationalism, is collectivist in spirit. And in practice, Soviet Communism was nationalistic. Thus the move from national Communism to international capitalism was seen as a step in the wrong direction.

And what of Communism’s decades of terror, its tens of millions of victims? These seem to be minimized or forgotten. Or perhaps they have merely been assimilated to the harsh environment, the Mongol hordes, and the cruel autocrats who made the Russians the toughest nation in Europe. Laibach’s opening verse captures this fiery, frozen crucible of the Russian character: “United forever in vast, endless space, / created in struggle by unhappy race, / where sunrays of freedom / are frozen in ice, / united forever in Great Russia’s embrace.” Ironically, by alleviating such conditions, liberal democracy and consumer society might prove a greater threat to the survival of the Russian nation than Communism ever was.

Laibach cover incorporating National Socialist image

This connection between Communism and Slavic nationalism[5] is underscored in track 12, “Slovania” (“Slovenia”), which is based on “Hey Slavs,” the unofficial pan-Slavic anthem which later became the anthem of Communist Yugoslavia. Laibach’s own contribution consists in dedications of “Hey Slavs”: “These words are for those who died, / these words are for those left behind. / These words are for you, Poland, / and these ones for my homeland.” The other dedicatees are “the spirit of our fathers,” “the glory of our sons,” “the power of the Spectre” (Communism?), “the Holy Alliance” (the 1815 alliance between the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the Kingdom of Prussia against the ideals of the French Revolution), “lovers,” “warriors,” and “all communists.” The final lines are cryptic, but they hint at a modern, Russian-oriented pan-Slavism: “Out of the feudal darkness, / away from the Nameless One / we stand alone in history, / facing East in sacrifice.” The references to Communism and the Holy Alliance indicate that the spirit of this pan-Slavism will be collectivist, anti-liberal, and Christian.

Track 13, “Vaticanae,” is a suitably ethereal arrangement of the “Papal Anthem and March,” which indicates that for Laibach, Slovenia’s western-looking Catholicism, like their eastern-looking pan-Slavism, is an important aspect of the nation’s identity.[6] Track 14, “NSK,” is the anthem of Laibach’s own state Neue Slowenische Kunst. Over a march that sounds like it is being played on a scratchy vinyl record from the 1940s, an electronic voice reads the stirring concluding words of Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech of June 4, 1940. In light of “Anglia,” the irony is delicious.

Tracks 5 through 7 deal with France (“Francia”), Italy (“Italia”), and Spain (“España”). “Francia” is based “La Marseillaise,” but Laibach rallies the “children of the fatherland” not against French monarchists, but against “foreign hordes” of African invaders transforming France into an African (and Muslim) nation stretching from the Congo to Calais. “Italia,” based on “Il Canto degli Italiani” (“The Song of the Italians”) also called “Fratelli d’Italia” (“Brothers of Italy”), is Volk‘s most straightforward (and beautiful) adaptation of an anthem. Yet it adds two cryptic and sinister verses describing Italy as “the slave of Rome” and asking Italy if she will die for her freedom or forget her past and its ties. “España” is a melodic, martial, and triumphant fusion of the music of Spain’s wordless national anthem “La Marcha Real” (“The Royal March”) and the words of “El Himno de Riego” (“The Song of Riego”) the anthem of the Spanish Republic, which was banned under Franco. It is hard to see how the Communist Republic has anything to do with a healthy Spanish nationalism, but “El Himno de Riego” is truly a stirring call to arms. Laibach’s interpolations, moreover, have nothing to do with Communism, invoking instead the masculine and heroic Christianity of Spanish tradition: “Brave is your Jesus-El Toreador!” and “Brave is your Jesus-El Conquistador!”

Tracks 8 through 11 deal with non-European nations. Track 8, “Yisra’el” (“Israel”) is an ironic blending of the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”) with the martial Palestinian national anthem “Biladi” (“My Country”). Track 9, “Türkiye” (“Turkey”) is based on the Turkish national anthem “İstiklâl Marşı” (“Independence March”). Track 10, “Zhoughuá” (“China”) blends “The Internationale” with the Chinese anthem “Yìyǒngjūn Jìnxíngqǔ” (“March of the Volunteers”), for in China too, Communism has fused with nationalism. The hauntingly beautiful track 11, “Nippon” (“Japan”), is based on the Japanese anthem “Kimi ga Yo” (“May Your Reign Last Forever”).

If you are encountering Laibach for the first time, Volk is definitely the place to begin. Musically, it is Laibach’s most melodic and accessible recording, yet all the group’s distinct sonic trademarks are present. Conceptually, it is the group’s most ambitious and thought-provoking project so far, yet it is also rich with humor and irony (but only at the expense of their enemies).

Poster for Laibach/Bach "Kunst der Fuge" concert

Laibach’s latest release, Kunst der Fuge, is a Laibachian electronic realization of Bach’s last, unfinished work The Art of the Fugue. I found this choice surprising, but I shouldn’t have, since Laibach’s earlier works demonstrate a wide knowledge of classical music, including Baroque counterpoint. (This is used to droll effect when combined with a monotonous, thumping techno bass line on NATO‘s cover of the Swedish glam-metal band Europe’s “The Final Countdown.”)

“Original instruments” purists, of course, would dismiss such electronic performances without a listening. But Bach himself did not write The Art of the Fugue for a particular instrument. And for those of us who first heard Bach played by Walter/Wendy Carlos, synthesizers are original instruments anyway. I have a number of performances of The Art of the Fugue in various arrangements–piano, organ, string quartet, and chamber orchestra–and Laibach’s has taken its place among them as a legitimate and sometimes revelatory interpretation. Like all of Laibach’s works, there are playful and ironic moments. But the core is deeply serious, even spiritual. At the brink of death, Bach was writing pure, Platonic Gedankenmusik, and it is Laibach’s electronic realization, precisely because of its iciness and inhumanity–its cold interstellar vastness–that brings this listener right to eternity’s edge.

Is Laibach mystical then as well as militant, in the tradition of the Christian warrior-monks like the Templars and Teutonic Knights? The closing words of “Das Spiel ist aus” certainly seem to view European man’s struggle for survival from the aspect of eternity:

Was erstanden ist, das muss vergehen.
Was vergangen ist, muss auferstehen!
Wir der Böse sind, und wir sind Gott.
Wir sind zeitlos. Und du bist tot!
Raus! Das Spiel ist aus!

What has risen must pass away.
What has passed must rise again!
We are the Devil, and we are God.[7]
We are timeless. And you are dead!
Out! The game is up!

Forthcoming in TOQ vol. 9, no.1, Spring 2009

[2] Laibach, Jesus Christ Superstars (London: Mute Records, 1996).

[3] Laibach, NATO (London: Mute Records, 1994).

[4] The video of “Das Spiel ist aus” is available on Laibach-The Videos (Mute DVD, 2004). The version of “Das Spiel is aus” accompanying the video is available on the compilation Laibach, Anthems (London: Mute Records, 2004). Another version of “Das Spiel ist aus” originally appeared on Laibach, WAT (London: Mute Records, 2003).

[5] A similar connection is drawn in “National Reservation” on NATO, Laibach’s anti-war, anti-Western imperialism CD. A remake of “Indian Reservation,” a Cherokee lament that became a US number one single for Paul Revere and the Raiders in 1971, “National Reservation” substitutes “Eastern” (i.e., Eastern European) for “Cherokee” and leaves the rest of the song pretty much unaltered, including the lines “Though we wear shirts and ties, / we’re still the red men [i.e., Communists] deep inside.”

[6] Consider the imagery of Also sprach Johann Paul II, by the Laibach side project 300.000 V.K. (= 300,000 Verschiedene Krawalle, 300,000 Assorted Riots) (A.M.D.G., 1996). On the back cover, the Polish pope is depicted as Vlad the Impaler, as portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula. On the CD itself, John Paul’s voice is mixed with Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra over a throbbing, martial techno beat. The CD evokes the muscular, heroic, crusading Christianity of those who resisted the Muslim invasions of Europe, not today’s decadent Christianity that has thrown open the gates.

[7] This is Gnostic or Vedantic non-dualism, of course, not orthodox Christianity.

From the Guillaume Faye Archive

Here, freely translated from Guillaume Faye’s Pourquoi nous combattons (2001), are ten ideas I think relevant to this struggle.

Guillaume Faye

*EUROPE is at war, but doesn’t know it…It is occupied and colonized by peoples from the South and economically, strategically, and culturally subjugated by America’s New World Order…It is the sick man of the world. [page 9]

*ARCHEOFUTURISM: The spirit which realizes that the future arises from a resurgence of ancestral values and that notions of modernity and traditionalism need to be dialectically overcome [59]…To confront the future, especially today, dictates a recourse to an archaic mentality that is premodern, inegalitarian, and non-humanistic, to a mentality that restores ancestral values and those of social order…The future thus is neither the negation of tradition nor of a people’s historical memory, but rather its metamorphosis and ultimately its growth and regeneration. [From Archéofuturisme 11, 72]

*IDENTITY: Characteristic of humanity is the diversity and singularity of its peoples and cultures. Every homogenization is synonymous with death and sclerosis…Ethnic identity and cultural identity form a block, but biological identity is primary, for without it culture and civilization are impossible to sustain…Identity is never frozen. It remains itself only in evolving, reconciling being and becoming. [146-48]

*BIOPOLITICS: A political project responsive to a people’s biological and demographic imperatives…Biopolitics is guided by the principle that a people’s biological quality is essential to its survival and well-being. [63-64]

*SELECTION: The collective process, based on competition, that minimizes or eliminates the weak and selects out the strong and capable. Selection entails both the natural evolution of a species and the historical development of a culture and civilization…Contemporary society prevents a just selection and instead imposes a savage, unjust one based on the law of the jungle. [212-13]

*INTERREGNUM: The period between the end of one civilization and the possible birth of another. We are currently living through an interregnum, a tragic historical moment when everything is in flames and when everything, like a Phoenix, might rise reborn from its ashes. [153]

*ETHNIC CIVIL WAR: Only the outbreak of such a war will resolve the problems created by the current colonization, Africanization, and Islamization of Europe…Only with their backs to the wall is a people spurred to come up with solutions that in other times would be unthinkable. [130]

*REVOLUTION: The violent reversal of a political situation that follows a profound crisis and is the work of an “active minority”…A true revolution is a metamorphosis, that is, a radical reversal of all values. The sole revolutionary of the modern era is Nietzsche…and not Marx, who sought simply another form of bourgeois society…We have long passed the point of no return, where it is possible to arrest the prevailing decay with moderate political reforms. [210-11]

*ARISTOCRACY: A true aristocracy embodies its people’s essence, which it serves with courage, disinterest, modesty, taste, simplicity, and stature…To recreate a new aristocracy is the eternal task of every rrevolutionary project…The creation of such an aristocracy is possible only through war, which is the most merciless of selective forces. [60-61]

*WILL TO POWER: The tendency of all life to perpetuate itself, to ensure its survival, and to enhance its domination, its superiority, and its creative capacities…The will to power accepts that life is struggle, an eternal struggle for supremacy, the endless struggle to improve and perfect oneself, the absolute refusal of nihilism, the opposite of contemporary relativism…It is the force of life and of history. It is not simply the organic imperative for domination, but for survival and continuity…A people or a civilization that abandons its will to power inevitably perishes. [227]]]> http://www.toqonline.com/blog/ten-untimely-ideas/feed/ 1 http://www.toqonline.com/blog/from-dusk-to-dawn/ http://www.toqonline.com/blog/from-dusk-to-dawn/#comments Sat, 09 May 2009 04:01:36 +0000 Guillaume Faye http://www.toqonline.com/?p=1249 From the Guillaume Faye Archive

The following talk was given in Moscow on May 17, 2006.

Guillaume Faye

Not since the fall of the Roman Empire has Europe experienced such a dramatic situation. It faces a danger unparalleled in its history and doesn’t even know it — or rather refuses to see it.

It’s been invaded, occupied, and colonized by peoples from the South and by Islam. It’s dominated by the United States, which wages a merciless economic war on it. It’s collapsing demographically, as its population ages and it ceases to reproduce itself. It’s been emasculated by decadent, nihilist ideologies cloaked in a facile optimism, and it’s been subjected to an unprecedented regression of culture and education, to primitivism and materialism. Europe is the sick man of the world. And its political classes, along with its intellectual elites, are actively collaborating in this race suicide. The argument I’m making is not, though, just about immigration, but also about a colonization and an invasion that is transforming Europe’s biological and ethno-cultural stock; it’s about not giving way to despair; about seeing that the struggle is only just beginning; and knowing that the closely related peoples of Europe have no alternative but to unite in their common defense.

The Destruction of Europe’s Ethno-Biological Stock
The demographics of the non-White invasion of France and Europe is terrifying. In a recent work, France africaine (African France), a well known demographer predicts that if present trends continue, more than 40 percent of the French population will be Black or Arab by 2040. Twenty-five percent of school children in France and Belgium today and more than 30 percent of infants are already of non-European origin. Of France’s present population of 61 million, more than 10 million are non-European and have a far higher birth rate than Whites. Every year 100,000 non-Europeans are naturalized as French citizens and another 300,000, most illegal, cross our undefended borders. The situation is not much different in the rest of Europe and signals the virtual end of our civilization, though the political classes have apparently yet to notice it.

Worldwide, including the United States, the White race is in steep numerical decline. It’s often said that our technological superiority will compensate for this disparity, but I don’t think so: The only meaningful forms of wealth and power are in human beings. For a civilization is based primarily on what the Romans called “germen,” that is, on the ethno-biological stock, the roots, that nourish a civilization and culture.

The non-European invasion of Europe that began in the 1960s was largely self-engendered, provoked: By left and right-wing politicians contaminated with Marxist and Trotskyist ideas; by an employer class greedy for cheap labor; by Jewish intellectuals demanding a multiracial society; by the ideology of human rights that had sprung from the secularization of certain Christian principles.

In France and in Europe, the collaborators abetting the invasion have established a system of preferences for the invaders that native Whites are obliged to pay for. Illegal immigrants are thus not only rarely repatriated when caught, they continue to receive the lavish social welfare benefits handed out to them by the anti-White forces in control of the state. At the same time, “anti-racists” have introduced a host of discriminatory laws that protect immigrants from normal social restraints, even though they are largely responsible for the on-going explosion of criminality (more than a thousand percent in the last 50 years).

The invasion is taking place as much in the maternity wards as it is along our porous borders. Combined with the demographic decline of the White population, immigration has become an economic disaster for Western Europe. It’s estimated to cost $180 billion per year (if the growing insecurity, as well as the innumerable forms of social assistance benefiting immigrants, including illegals, is figured in). This, in turn, creates new lures for the invaders: It is simply far more interesting to be unemployed in Europe than to work in the Third World. While the educated and creative segments of our population are beginning to flee, mainly to the United States, they are being replaced by Africa’s refuse, which has to be fed and supported by us and hasn’t anything in the way of skills or intelligence to offer.

All these facts suggest that the 21st-century European economy will be a depressed, Third-World one.

Islam’s Third Major Offensive
In addition to this mass, non-White invasion, Islam is again on the offensive. With single-minded persistence, its totalitarian and aggressive religion/ideology seeks the conquest of Europe. We’ve already suffered three great assaults by Islam, which today stretches from Gibraltar to Indonesia. The first of these offensives was halted at Portiers in 732 by Charles Martel; the second in 1683, during the Ottoman siege of Vienna; the third [in the form of the present invasion and colonization] is now underway [and virtually unopposed]. Islam has a long memory and its objective is to establish on our continent what [the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the ayattolla] Khomeiny called the “universal Caliphate.”

The invasion of Europe has begun and the figures [testifying to its extent] are alarming. The continent, including Russia, is now occupied by 55 million Muslims, a number that increases at a 6 percent annual rate. In France, there are at least 6 million. Like those in Belgium and Britain, these French Muslims are starting to demand a share of political power. The government, for its part, simply refuses to take seriously their objective of transforming France into an Islamic Republic by the year 2020, when the demographic weight of the Arab/Muslim population will have become determinant. Meanwhile, it is financing the construction of Mosques throughout the country in the hope of buying social peace; there are already more than 2,000 in France, nearly double the number in Morocco. Islam is at present the second largest religion in France, behind Catholicism, but the largest in the numbers of practitioners. [The republic’s president] Jacques Chirac has even declared that “France is now an Islamic power.” Everywhere in the West there prevails the unfounded belief that there’s a difference between Islam and “Islamism,” and that a Western, secularized, that is, moderate, Islam is possible. There’s no such thing. Every Muslim is potentially a jihadist. For Islam is a theocracy that confuses the spiritual with the temporal, faith with law, and seeks to impose its Shari’a [Islamic law] on a Europe whose civilizational precepts are absolutely incompatible with it.

The Advent of Race War
The criminality and delinquency in Western Europe caused by mass immigration and the collapse of civic values have reached insupportable levels. In France in 2004, more than a 100,000 cars were torched and 80 policemen killed. Every week race riots erupt in the banlieues [the “suburbs” housing the immigrant masses]. In the public schools, violence is endemic and educational levels have almost collapsed. Among youth under 20, nearly 20 percent are illiterate. While racist assaults on Whites are steadily rising, they are routinely ignored in the name of the anti-racist vulgate, which holds that only Whites can be racists. At the same time, an arsenal of repressive legislation, worthy of Soviet Communism, has imposed “laws” whose purely ideological and subjective intent make no pretence to fairness, let alone objectivity. All criticism of immigration or Islam is prohibited. I myself have been tried several times and levied with an enormous fine for having written La colonisation de l’Europe [The Colonization of Europe].

A race war is foreseeable now in several European countries, a subterranean war that will be far more destructive than “terrorism.” The White population is being displaced, a sort of genocide is being carried out against it with the complicity or the abstention of the ruling class, the media, and the politicians, for the ideology these collaborating elites uphold is infused with a pathological hatred of their own people and a morbid passion for miscegenation.

The state’s utopian plan for “republican integration” has nevertheless failed because it assumed peaceful coexistence between foreigners and natives, non-Whites and Whites, was possible in a single territory. Our rulers haven’t read Aristotle, who taught that no city can possibly be democratic and orderly if it isn’t ethnically homogenous. European societies today are devolving into an unmanageable ethnic chaos.

I’m a native of Southwest France, of the area along the Atlantic coast, and speak not a word of Russian, but I feel infinitely closer to a Russian than to a French-speaking Arab or African, even if they happen to be “French” citizens.

The Moral Crisis and Archeofuturism
The present situation can be explained, almost clinically, as a sort of “mental AIDS.” Our present afflictions come from the virus of nihilism, which Nietzsche foresaw, and which has weakened all our natural defenses. Thus infected, Europeans have succumbed to a feverish self-extinction. They have voluntarily opened the city gates.

The primary symptom of this disease is “xenophilia:” a systematic preference for the Other rather than for the Same. A second symptom is “ethnomasochism,” a hatred of one’s own civilization and origins. A third is emasculation [dévirilisation], or what might be called the cult of weakness and a preference for male homosexuality. Historically proven values associated with the use of force and a people’s survival — values associated with honor, loyalty, family, fertility, patriotism, the will to survive, etc. — are treated today as ridiculous shortcomings. This sort of decadence owes a good deal to the secularization of Christian charity and its egalitarian offshoot, human rights.

Europeans may take inspiration from certain values still upheld in Russia: For example, the consciousness of belonging to a superior civilization and of maintaining a “right to distance” from other peoples. We need to break with all forms of “ethnopluralism,” which is simply another kind of egalitarianism, and reclaim the right to “ethnocentrism,” the right to live in our own lands without the Other. We also have to reclaim the principle: “To each his own.” Besides, only Westerners believe race-mixing is a virtue or envisage the future as a melting pot. They alone believe in cosmopolitanism. But the 21st century will be dominated by a resurgence of ethno-religious blocs, especially in the South and the East. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” will never happen. Instead, we’re going to experience an acceleration of history with the “clash of civilizations.” Europeans also need to break with the “presentism” in which they are sunk and learn to see themselves again (as do Muslims, Chinese, and Indians) as a “long-living people,” bearers of a future. The mental revolution needed to bring about this change in European attitudes is, though, only possible through a gigantic crisis, a violent shock, which is already on its way and which I will say a few words about below.

The New American Imperialism
Europeans also have to come to terms with what I called in my last book “the new American imperialism,” an imperialism more heavy-handed than that of the Cold War era, but one that is also more blundering. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, American administrations seem to have lost all sense of measure, becoming even more hubristic, as they embark on a fantastic quest for world domination, dressed up in the simulacra of a new Roman empire. Much of this, of course, is explainable in terms of neoconservative ideology, linked with Zionism, but it’s also driven by a messianic, almost pathological sense of having a “divine mission.”

What are the goals of this new American imperialism? To encircle and neutralize Russia, preventing any meaningful alliance between her and Europe (the Pentagon’s worst nightmare); to deflect Europe’s challenge to its hegemony by making Islam and Muslim Turkey a part of it; to subjugate the Eastern and Central European parts of the former Soviet empire; to wage a relentless economic war on the European Union and do so in such a way that the latter doesn’t dream of resisting. Everywhere, the crusading spirit of this new American imperialism endeavors to impose “democracy”, especially on Russia’s periphery. “Democracy” has come to mean “pro-American regime.”

But we shouldn’t complain of these American ambitions, which accord with the country’s geopolitical and thalassocratic desire for domination. In history, everyone is responsible only for oneself.

That’s why I oppose the “obsessional and hysterical anti-Americanism” so prevalent in France, for it is counter-productive, self-victimizing, and irresponsible.

A people or nation must learn to distinguish between its “principal adversary” and its “principal enemy.” The first tries to dominate and undermine, the second to kill. We shouldn’t forget Carl Schmitt’s formula: “It’s not only you who chooses your enemy, it’s more often your enemy who chooses you.” America, specifically its ruling class, is Europe’s and Russia’s “principal adversary” at the level of geopolitics, economics, and culture. Europe’s “principal enemy” is the peoples of the South, increasingly assembled under the banner of Islam, whose invasion of the continent is already well underway, facilitated by a political class and an intelligentsia who have opened the gates (to Washington’s delight) and who seek a miscegenated, non-European Europe.

Like Atlanticists, the hysterical anti-Americans overestimate the United States, without understanding that it is only as strong as we are weak. The Americans’ catastrophic and counter-productive occupation of little Iraq, to which they have brought nothing but chaos, makes this all indisputably evident. In the 21st century, the U.S. will cease to be the premier world power. That will be China — or, if we have the will, what I call “Euro-Siberia” — a federated alliance between the peoples of the European peninsular and Russia.

The Convergence of Catastrophes
I’ve postulated the hypothesis that the present global system, founded on a belief in miracles, a belief in the myth of indefinite progress, is on the verge of collapse. For the first time in history, humanity as a whole is threatened by a cataclysmic crisis that is likely to occur sometime between 2010 and 2020—a crisis provoked by the on-going degradation of the ecosystem and climatic disruptions, by the exhaustion of fossil fuel sources and food producing capacity, by the increased fragility of an international economic order based on speculation and massive indebtedness, by the return of epidemics, by the rise of nationalism, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation, by the growing aggressiveness of Islam’s world offense, and by the dramatic aging of the West’s population.

We need to prepare for these converging catastrophes, which will mark the transition from one era to another, as their cataclysmic effects sweep away liberal modernity and bring about a New Middle Age. With such a convergence, there will also come an opportunity for rebirth, for every major historical regeneration emerges from chaos. This is especially the case with a civilization like our own, whose very nature is “metamorphic.”

Eurosiberia
The Europe of the future must no longer be envisaged in the mushy, ungovernable forms of the present European Union, which is a powerless Medusa, unable to control its borders, dominated by the mania of free-trade, and subject to American domination. We need to imagine a federal, imperial Grande Europe, ethnically homogenous (that is, European), based on a single autonomous area, and inseparably linked to Russia. I call this enormous continental bloc “Euro-Siberia.” Having no need to be aggressive toward its neighbors because it would be unattackable, such a bloc would become the premier world power (in a world partitioned into large blocs), self-centered, and opposed to all the dangerous dogmas now associated with globalism. It would have the capacity to practice the “autarky of great spaces,” whose principles have already been worked out by the Noble Prize winning economist, Maurice Allais. The destiny of the European peninsular cannot be separated from continental Russia, for both ethno-cultural and geopolitical reasons. It’s absolutely imperative for America’s mercantile thalassocracy to prevent the birth of a Euro-Siberian federation.

This is not the place to speak of the Israeli state. Only a word: For essentially demographic reasons, I believe the Zionist utopia conceived by Hertzl and Buber and realized since 1948 will not survive any longer than Soviet communism did; indeed, its end is already in sight. I’m presently writing a book on The New Jewish Question, which I hope will be translated into Russian.

Conclusion
Fatalism is never appropriate. History is always open-ended and presents innumerable unexpected caprices and turns. Let’s not forget the formula of William of Orange: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” The period we are presently living through is a one of resistance and of preparation for the even more threatening events to come, such as might follow the juncture of a race war and a massive economic downturn. We need to start thinking in post-chaos terms and organize accordingly. In closing, let me leave you with a favorite watchword of mine: “From Resistance to Reconquest, From Reconquest to Renaissance.”

Dominique Venner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From TOQ vol. 4, no. 2, Summer 2004

The cover of Alex Kurtagic's novel MISTER

After completing my university education in 1992, I quickly discovered that my degree was not especially useful in the “real world.” It was not until twelve years later, after having founded and grown a successful business, and after having become aware of the cultural pathologies of our times, that I decided that a degree in Cultural Studies was what I required.

My business catered (and still caters) to a sector within the anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian counterculture through the production, distribution, and sale of Black Metal and related forms of underground music. . . . More

We start to wonder about our identity at the moment when we are about to lose it. Our grandparents never asked questions about the meaning of identity; they never worried about who they were. They took for granted their affiliation to their religion, to their tribe, and to their race. It is with the rising tide of multiculturalism, followed by the waning of the traditional nation-state that identity becomes a problem.

The term “identity” has become fashionable because it can mean everything and nothing at the same time. . . . more

Venner lauds the (collective) memory of the Jews, the Japanese, and the Chinese, apparently referring to the current public utilization of their long national traditions. The important word here, I argue, is public, for we should not forget the ideological nature of memory.

An individual’s isolated memory is quite fragile, and unless its contents are repeatedly introduced into public discourse (thereby turning individual memory into “collective” or “public memory”), it has very limited power. At the individual level, a person’s memory is shallow, myopic, and, above all, vulnerable. But a constructed collective memory can be a very powerful and enduring sociopolitical tool.

No one among the Chinese, for example, actually remembers the Taiping Rebellion, yet because of Maoist appropriation of that conflict, today every young person in China learns from it the righteousness of revolution. The same holds for the Japanese: the failed invasions of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century remain a centerpiece of the Japanese national myth. And the Jews, of course, maintain their unique coherence as a group by celebrating as holidays their historical conflicts with the non-Jewish world.

In all of these cases, memory is ideological, in that it reinforces the dominant sociopolitical system’s grip on the public.

Likewise, forgetting is also a vital ideological function. The fact that Moses, arguably the central figure in Hebraic lore, married a Midianite, a non-Jewish outsider, does little to further the racial character of modern Zionism; therefore, it has been “forgotten” at the collective level. Though anyone can read the book of Exodus and stumble upon that fact, and though it appears in the most sacred and popular of all Jewish texts, because it is a politically dangerous fact it will remain irretrievably absent from Jewish public memory—and that’s the memory that counts. Similarly, certain politically dangerous facts—facts of which we’re all aware—have been erased from the European and American public memories.

Yet the foremost problem is not, as Venner suggests, that Europeans have been “deprived of their memory”; it is that we have been supplied with an alternative, destructive memory.

“The prime danger,” writes Paul Ricoeur, “lies in the handling of authorized, imposed, celebrated, commemorated history—an official history. The resource of narrative then becomes the trap, when higher powers take over this emplotment and impose a canonical narrative by means of intimidation or seduction, fear or flattery.” He goes on to assert, rather insightfully, that “this dispossession is not without a secret complicity,” which is characterized “by an obscure will not to inform oneself, not to investigate the hard done by the citizen’s environment, in short by a wanting not-to-know. Western Europe and indeed all of Europe, after the dismal years of the middle of the twentieth century, has furnished the painful spectacle of this stubborn will.”[1]

One might say that, not only have we Europeans been dealt a destructive, ideological collective memory, we as a people suffer from a willing amnesia. We’ve willingly forgotten the traditions that made our people one over the millennia; we are passively complicit in the disappearance of what once forged our strength as a people. At the collective level, we simply don’t want to know the historically rooted values that made us unique, because the hegemonic Euro-American historical narrative that constitutes our public memory is now a tale of our race’s cruelty, hypocrisy, and ignorance. We have been told that ours is a terrible tale not worth learning.

In a healthy society it is the role of responsible public leaders to function as the arbiters and enforcers of a positive, progressive collective memory. Yet unlike the ruling classes of the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Jews, our elites have developed a public memory that favors our own dispossession and propagates the myth of our inherent racial guilt. We can find, I argue, the source of many of our people’s problems in this vicious public memory. Yet, as Venner notes, if we work to change the content of this destructive collective image of ourselves and our relationship with the world, it may also prove to be the source of our liberation.

Dominique Venner

“Memory” is a much abused word. But so too is the word “love,” which doesn’t mean it can’t be used in its fullest sense. It’s the force of “memory,” transmitted within the bosum of the family, that enables a community to endure, despite all that seeks its dissolution. It’s the long “memory” of the Chinese, the Japanese, the Jews, and other such peoples that has enabled them to surmount the perils and persecutions to which every people is heir. To their disadvantage, due to the rupture of their history, Europeans have been deprived of their memory.

I am reminded of this rupture evey time students ask me to speak about Europe’s future. For whenever the word “Europe” is pronounced, it evokes a host of ambiguities. To some, it evokes the European Union, either positively — or negatively insofar as it’s not a “power.” To avoid confusion, I always specify that the Europe of which I speak is not Europe in its political sense. Guided by Epictetus’s principle of distinguishing between “that which depends on us and that which doesn’t depend on us,” I know that it depends on me to base my life on authentic European values, whereas I have no say on what politics Europe pursues. I also know that without an animating idea, there is no coherent action, [political or otherwise].

This animating idea is rooted in the consciousness of Europe’s civilization, a consciousness that transcends its regions and nations. You can be a Breton or a Provençal, French and European, son of the same civilization which has endured over the ages, since its first crystallization in the Homeric poems.

“A civilization,” Fernand Braudel says, “is a continuity, even when it profoundly changes, such as when adopting a new religion, for it incorporates its old values in the new, retaining its substance.” To this continuity, we are obliged to be who we are.

Diverse as they are, men exist only in that which distinguishes them from one another — clans, peoples, nations, cultures, civilizations — and not by their animality, which is universal. Sexuality is common to all humanity, as is the necessity to eat. But love, like gastronomy, is distinct to each civilization, that is, it’s the result of a long conscious effort. As Europeans conceive it, love was already evident in the Homeric poems, as exhibited by such distinct characters as Helen, Nausicâa, Hector, Andromache, Ulysses, and Penelope. The sort of love evinced through these characters is completely different from that found in the great Asian civilizations, whose refinement and beauty are a matter of record.

The idea that is made of love is no more frivolous than the tragic sense of history that characterizes the European spirit. It defines the civilization, its immanent spirit, and each person’s sense of life, in the same way the idea shapes one’s work. Is the sole point of work to make money, as they believe across the Atlantic, or, besides ensuring a just return, is it to realize oneself in a job well done, even in such apparently trivial things as keeping one’s house. This idea urged our ancestors to create beauty in their most humble and most lofty efforts. To be conscious of the idea is to give a metaphysical sense to “memory.”

To cultivate our “memory,” to transmit it in a living way to our children, to contemplate the ordeals that history has imposed on us–this is requisite to any renaissance. Faced with the unprecedented challenges that the catastrophes of the twentieth century have imposed on us and the terrible demoralization it has fostered, we will discover in the reconquest of our racial “memory” the way to respond to these challenges, which were unknown to our ancestors, who lived in a stable, strong, well-defended world.

Source: “Métaphysique de la mémoire,” La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire n. 40 (January-February 2009).

Internet source: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2009/02/05/d-venner-metaphysique-de-la-memoire.html.

]]> http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-metaphysics-of-memory/feed/ 0 http://www.toqonline.com/blog/greek-and-barbarian/ http://www.toqonline.com/blog/greek-and-barbarian/#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 05:10:18 +0000 F. Roger Devlin http://www.toqonline.com/?p=682 The Landmark Herodotus:
The Histories
Edited by Robert B. Strassler
New York: Pantheon, 2007

Independent scholar Robert Strassler has produced far and away the best English edition aimed at the general reader of the work which remains the fountainhead of the Western historical tradition. Let us hope there is still a fit audience out there for it—men, that is, capable of learning what Herodotus has to teach. Generations of schoolboys at British public schools, German Gymnasia, and American rural academies once read his Histories to learn who they were—in other words, what it meant to be men of the West.

On a first approach, Herodotus’s great work appears a confusing welter of names, colorful stories, digressions, and miscellaneous ethnographic information. I have taught the work to undergraduates and remember students valiantly struggling to discuss “that one King of Wherever, who was fighting that tribe, whatever they were called . . .” In reality, the narrative is carefully—indeed intricately—structured, but in a manner that only becomes clear after repeated readings. What Strassler has done is provide a wealth of maps, indices, cross references, notes, illustrations, and appendices which reduce the preliminary mental effort required merely to grasp this overall structure. The reader can thus proceed more quickly to genuine historical understanding.

It is remarkable that no one in the small, overspecialized world of academic classical studies has ever bothered to attempt such a project. Strassler himself fetchingly admits: “I am not a scholar of ancient Greek and indeed can barely parse a simple sentence in that language” (xlvi). He commissioned a new translation for this edition by Andrea Purvis of Duke University. It is not “dazzling,” as the publisher’s blurb claims, but perhaps something better: unpretentiously accurate, and less mannered than its nearest competitor, David Grene’s 1987 version.

Herodotus grew up in Halicarnassus, an important trading center on the edge of the Greek world, where Greek and Barbarian came into frequent contact. He traveled widely, visiting Egypt as well as many Greek cities; he interviewed public figures and veterans of the events he recounts and gave public readings of his work, which he called the “Inquiries” (historiē in Greek). His great theme is the contrast between Greek and Barbarian, and more particularly the struggle of Greek freedom with Asiatic despotism. The narrative is designed from the beginning to culminate in a description of the successful Greek struggle to repel the Persian invasions of 490 and 480 BC.

Herodotus, like most ancient writers, was concerned with freedom primarily in a political sense. He says nothing about freedom of commerce or religion or conscience or of individual action. All of these may be fine things, but they are ideals which belong to a later age.

During the Cold War, many were inclined to cite the greater efficiency of the market economy as the fundamental distinguishing trait of the West, proudly pointing to our groaning supermarket shelves and favorably contrasting them with Soviet bread lines. Persons used to this way of viewing matters will be especially liable to a feeling of cognitive dissonance when reading Herodotus, who constantly stresses the wealth of oriental despotisms; whereas “in Hellas,” according to one Greek quoted in the Histories, “poverty is always and forever a native resident” (Book 7: chapter 102).

An especially famous and illustrative story, not less significant for being probably unhistorical, concerns Solon the Athenian lawgiver and Croesus of Lydia (immortalized in the expression “rich as Croesus”). After proudly displaying his wealth to his Athenian visitor, Croesus hopefully asks whether Solon in all his travels has “yet seen anyone who surpasses all others in happiness and prosperity?” Solon disappoints him by naming a number of Greeks who lived in relatively moderate circumstances. Croesus indignantly asks “are you disparaging my happiness as though it were nothing? Do you think me worth less than even a common man?” Solon explains that no judgment can be made while Croesus is still alive, for reversals of fortune are too common. (1:30-32) Croesus eventually attempts to conquer the Persians, but is defeated by them and deprived of his kingdom.

The Asiatics as portrayed by Herodotus might be described, for lack of a better word, as accumulators. This applies no less to political power than to wealth. “We have conquered and made slaves of the Sacae, Indians, Ethiopians, Assyrians, and many other great nations” says one Persian grandee matter of factly, “not because they had committed injustices against Persia, but only to increase our own power through them” (7:8). In other words, they are believers in what a contemporary neoconservative journalist might call “national greatness.” They build larger monuments than the Greeks and undertake vast projects such as diverting rivers. It never seems to occur to them that anything might become too big or too organized. When they attempt the conquest of Greece, Herodotus shows them becoming encumbered by their vast baggage trains, unable to moor their multitude of ships properly in tiny Greek coves—generally crushed beneath their own weight like a beached whale as much as they are defeated by the Hellenic armies.

A related Asiatic trait is a failure to acknowledge human limitations. When Xerxes’ invasion is delayed by stormy weather at the Hellespont, he orders the beachhead scourged and branded. His slaves are instructed to say: “Bitter water, your Master is imposing this penalty upon you for wronging him. King Xerxes will cross you whether you like it or not” (7:35). Similarly, there is no real place in the Asiatic’s thought for death, because it is the ultimate limitation on human planning and power. Xerxes weeps while reviewing his army as it occurs to him that all his men will be dead in a hundred years, but decides he must simply put the matter out of his mind.

The Solonian view of happiness as a life well lived from beginning to end, by contrast, begins with the fundamental fact of human finitude. It is this characteristically Greek view which Aristotle eventually formalized and extended in his discussion of happiness (eudaimonia) in the Nicomachian Ethics, and which has continued to influence the best minds of Christendom to this day. The modern “consumerist” mentality, by contrast, might be understood as a relapse into Asiatic barbarism.

The Persians make efforts to buy off Greek leaders. Herodotus describes the wealth of a Persian Satrap named Hydarnes, and then recounts his advice to some Spartan envoys passing through his province on the way to the Persian capitol:

“Lacedaemonians, why are you trying to avoid becoming the King’s friends? You can see that the King knows how to honor good men when you look at me and the state of my affairs. This could be the same for you if only you would surrender yourselves to the King, since he would surely think you to be good men and allow each of you Greek territory to rule over.” To this they replied, “Hydarnes, you offer us this advice only because you do not have a fair and proper perspective. For you counsel us based on your experience of only one way of life, but you have had no experience of the other: you know well how to be a slave but have not yet experienced freedom, nor have you felt whether it is sweet or not. But if you could try freedom, you would advise us to fight for it, and not only with spears, but with axes!” (7:135)

When the envoys arrive in Susa,

At first the King’s bodyguards ordered them and actually tried to force them to prostrate themselves before the King; but they refused to do so, saying that they would never do that, even if the bodyguards should try to push them down to the ground headfirst, since it was not their custom [nomos] to prostrate themselves before any human being. (7:136)

King Xerxes, by contrast, is a great believer in “leadership:” if he were alive today, one might picture him topping the bestseller lists with books on his “Seven Principles of Effective Leadership.” Before invading Greece, he asks:

How could 1,000 or even 10,000 or 50,000 men, all of them alike being free and lacking one man to rule over them, stand up to an army as great as mine? Now if they were under the rule of one man, as is our way, they would fear that man and be better able, in spite of their natural inclinations, to go out and confront larger forces, despite their being outnumbered, because they would then be compelled by the lash. But they would never dare to do such a thing if they were allowed their freedom! (7:103)

At the Battle of Salamis, he has a throne erected for himself on a prominent hill, convinced that his men will fight best knowing they are under his watchful eye.

Herodotus leaves us in no doubt where he stands on this issue; he relates in his own voice that

the Athenians increased in strength, which demonstrates that an equal voice in government has beneficial impact not merely in one way, but in every way: the Athenians, while ruled by tyrants, were no better in war than any of the peoples living around them, but once they were rid of tyrants, they became by far the best of all. Thus it is clear that they were deliberately slack while repressed, since they were working for a master, but that after they were freed, they became ardently devoted to working hard so as to win achievements for themselves as individuals. (5:78)

This comparative lack of emphasis on leadership does not mean the ancients were egalitarian levelers. All successful enterprises must be organized hierarchically, because this is what allows men to coordinate their efforts. The Greeks, in fact, made a proverb of a line from Homer’s Iliad: “Lordship for many is no good thing; let there be one ruler.” Moreover, they greatly honored men who performed leadership functions successfully.

Public offices were, however, always distinguished from the particular men holding them. They did not regard their magistrates as sacred, and none ever claimed to be descended from Zeus. Aristotle defined political freedom as “ruling and being ruled in turn.” In battle, Greek captains fought in a corner of the phalanx beside their men; they could be difficult for an enemy to distinguish.

What allowed Greeks to combine effective organization with political freedom? Herodotus suggests it was a kind of “rule of law.” As a Greek advisor explains to Xerxes:

Though they are free, they are not free in all respects, for they are actually ruled by a lord and master: law [nomos] is their master, and it is the law that they inwardly fear—much more so than your men fear you. They do whatever it commands, which is always the same: it forbids them to flee from battle, and no matter how many men they are fighting, it orders them to remain in their rank and either prevail or perish. (7:104)

In order to appreciate what is being said here, it is important to understand what is meant by law, or nomos. If it were possible to make intelligible to Herodotus such modern legal phenomena as executive orders, Supreme Court decrees, or annually updated administrative regulations, it is more than doubtful whether he would have considered them examples of nomos. These are simply instruments of power, not much different from what existed in the Persian Empire or any despotism. A “rule of law” in this sense makes no particular contribution to freedom. In fact, much of the West’s current predicament results from our traditional respect for law being converted into a weapon against us, rendering us subject to a regime of arbitrary commands disguised as “law” and concocted by an irresponsible power elite hostile to our interests.

It is essential to nomos that it be superpersonal. Often the word can be translated “custom,” which helps one understand that it cannot be decreed by any man, whether King or Hellenic magistrate. Freedom under nomos is not lack of a master, as Herodotus makes clear, but the capacity for self-mastery. In battle, it extends even to the point of demanding total self-sacrifice.

This helps to explain why wealth is dangerous to freedom; the man who becomes used to gratifying his desires comes to be ruled by desire and loses his capacity for self-mastery and sacrifice. When an earlier King of Persia is threatened by rebellion, Herodotus shows him being advised as follows:

Prohibit them from possessing weapons of war, order them to wear tunics under their cloaks and soft boots, instruct them to play the lyre and the harp, and tell them to educate their sons to be shopkeepers. If you do this, sire, you will soon see that they will become women instead of men and thus will pose no danger or threat to you of any future rebellion. (1:155)

The limitations of the Asiatic leadership principle become evident when an Asiatic army loses its leader. It is liable to cease being an army—to become a rabble, a mob of individuals incapable of organization or initiative. A famous episode from later Greek history makes clear how the Greek way was different: In 401 BC, about a generation after Herodotus’ death, an army of ten thousand Greek mercenaries marched into the heart of the Persian Empire in support of a rival candidate for the Imperial title. Their leader was killed in battle and they were stranded hundreds of miles deep in hostile territory. A Persian representative came to accept their surrender and collect their weapons, and was flummoxed to learn the Greeks had no intention of handing any weapons over. Instead, they simply met in assembly and elected a new leader for themselves—exactly as they were accustomed to do in the political assembles of their home cities. They proceeded to fight their way back to Greece with most of them surviving, and the entire might of the Persian Empire was insufficient to stop them. It is safe to say that no Persian army could have equaled the feat.

This spirit of independence and self-reliance did not last forever. The Greek cities wore out their strength through decades of fighting with one another. In 338, they finally fell to Philip, King of Macedon. By 291, Athenians were celebrating the triumphal return of a Macedonian general to their city in hymns describing him as a “living god.” He used the Parthenon to house his harem. Economic historians tell us that the overall Greek standard of living was higher in this later age, however.

Today we see a traitorous leadership consciously abandons our heritage of freedom to a barbarism worse than Persian, buying us off with the bread and circuses of television, shopping malls, and tax subsidies for collaborators, punishing the few who offer even verbal resistance. The reader who still has a mind to do something about this situation might find some lessons in the pages of Herodotus. He would be well advised to take a little time from our current plight to reacquaint himself with what Western man has been.

F. Roger Devlin, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and the author of Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2004).