Oswald Spengler

Can the West and its peoples be saved? And what will this take–particularly if we are concerned with a long-term solution rather than a last ditch “stop gap?” Can a new High Culture of the West arise to secure the existence of the peoples of the West for an extended time frame? What characteristics should such a new culture have?

I will assume the reader is familiar with the civilizational model of Oswald Spengler, a model essentially adopted by Francis Parker Yockey in his various works on the West and its future possibilities. With a Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter of a High Culture, “Winter” is the phase of oncoming oblivion. It is clear, at least to me (and it seems that Michael O’Meara agrees with this assessment), that we are in the “Winter” of our current modern Western (i.e., “Faustian”) High Culture. And, immersed within this decay, bereft of an overriding organizing principle to provide a spiritual structure for its continued existence, the white race is dying, failing to reproduce, being displaced by aliens, and offering an inadequate level of resistance to the death of the West.

In actual physical weather/climate seasons, spring follows winter. Can the same hold true for particular peoples and their High Cultures? If civilizational (re)birth will lead to long-term racial survival, should we at least consider the possibilities? Of course, one cannot predict with full accuracy if a civilizational (re)birth will take place, much less the precise form such an event would take. Further, one cannot pre-plan and create a High Culture in the manner of a general formulating a strategy and then leading troops into battle. A High Culture must develop along its own lines, according to factors not entirely within (conscious) human control. However, one can, and should, examine the evidence, consider the possibilities, and to the extent it is possible, encourage those trends leading to a civilizational (re)birth. Further, these trends could, and should, be guided, to the extent possible, in directions that would be most fruitful and most consistent with the nature of our people.

A starting point is to consider our present High Culture, the dying remnants of which we see around us. The so-called “Western” or “Faustian” civilization has been described by Spengler and is summarized thus (emphasis added):

. . . the modern Westerners being Faustian. According to its theories, we are now living in the winter time of the Faustian civilization. His description of the Faustian civilization is one where the populace constantly strives for the unattainable—making Western Man a proud but tragic figure, for while he strives and creates he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached.

Here we see two defining characteristics of the “Faustian” civilization of the modern (i.e., post-Classical) West: first, a focus on infinity and the unknown, and second, that the striving toward that focus will always be unsuccessful; the objectives of Western Man are always “unattainable.” The second point, and its implications, will be further discussed below. For now, let us accept the Spenglerian model and also accept that we are in the Winter of the Faustian culture. Now, the Spenglerian school, steeped in “stoic acceptance” (“pessimism”) will advise us to accept, and make the most of, our circumstances. The era in which we live in is what it is, and, like a Roman soldier on guard under erupting Vesuvius, we must stand at our post until the end, until all is enveloped in inescapable decay (civilizational entropy, if you will).

But if race and culture are linked, the dissipation of the culture means the destruction of the race. Or does it? The Faustian is not the first High Culture of Europe; it was preceded by the Classical. Spengler and his follower Yockey break with previous cultural interpretations to stress the sharp discontinuity between Classical and Faustian. These are perceived as being two distinct High Cultures, as different from each other as each is to, say, the Egyptian or the Magian.

Therefore, from the same article on Spengler’s work, we read (emphasis added):

Spengler borrows frequently from mathematical philosophy. He holds that the mathematics and art of a civilization reveal its world-view. He notes that in Greek classical mathematics that there are only integers and no real concepts of limits or infinity. Therefore, without a concept of the infinite, all events of the distant past were viewed as equally distant, thus Alexander the Great had no problem declaring himself a descendant of a god. On the other hand, the western world—which has concepts of the zero, the infinite, and the limit—has a historical world-view which places a high amount of importance on exact dates.

Similarly, Revilo Oliver writes (emphasis added):

Spengler identifies as two entirely separate and discrete civilizations the Classical (“Apollonian”), c. 1100 B.C.-A.D. 300, and the Western (“Faustian”), c. A.D. 900-2200. These are the two for which we have the fullest information, and between them Spengler establishes some of his most brilliant synchronisms (e.g., Alexander the Great corresponds to Napoleon). Even a century ago, this dichotomy would have seemed almost mad, for everyone knew and took for granted that whatever might be true of alien cultures, our own was a continuation, or, at least, revival of the Classical. Spengler’s denial of that continuity was the most radical and startling aspect of his historical synthesis, but so great has been his overshadowing influence that it has been accepted by a majority of the many subsequent writers on the philosophy of history, of whom we may mention here only Toynbee, Raven, Bagby, and Brown. (20) The Classical, we are told, was a civilization like the Egyptian, now dead and gone and with no organic connection with our own. . . . Spengler (whom Brown especially follows in this respect) supports his drastic dichotomy by impressively contrasting Graeco-Roman mathematics and technology with our own; from that contrast he deduces differences in the perception of space and time, exhibited particularly in music, and reaches the conclusion that the Classical Weltanschauung was essentially static, desiring and recognizing only a strictly delimited and familiar world, whereas ours is dynamic and exhibits a passionate yearning for the infinite and the unknown. One can advance various objections to the generalizations I have so curtly and inadequately summarized (e.g., is the difference in outlook really greater than that between the “classical” literature of Eighteenth-Century Europe and the Romanticism of the following era?), but the crucial point is whether the differences, which belong to the order that we must call spiritual for want of a better term, (21) are fundamental or epiphenomenal.

I have tended toward the “epiphenomenal” explanation – but in any case, one can agree with Oliver’s overarching conclusion in his various works: either the Classical and Faustian are different yet connected phases of the same Civilization, or, even if completely distinct, Western Man is capable of producing multiple High Cultures. Either way, one can conclude two things: (1) a successor to the Faustian High Culture is possible and has a precedent, and (2) this successor will be intimately connected in important ways to its predecessor (s) (even if Spengler and Yockey would deny this could be possible).

Therefore, either the Classical and Faustian are indeed linked (by a generalized common gene pool, “racial soul,” and Western outlook) or, if they are indeed distinct, they are not completely unconnected, as they derive from a common wellspring or foundation (again, the generalized gene pool, “racial soul,” and Western mindset of greater individualism and empiricism compared to other peoples and cultures). Not only are the Classical and the Faustian in some sense linked but, contrary to Spengler and Yockey–and, indeed, a blasphemy of the Spenglerian school that rejects a linear history–there is a sense of progression, in that the worldview of the Faustian is broader than that of the Classical; indeed, this greater breadth of vision is a defining characteristic of the Faustian. This breadth being manifested in such phenomena as high level technics, and a mass knowledge base of science, history, philosophy and morality-ethics, the foundation is therefore laid for a new High Culture of a vision even broader than that of the Faustian. A Spenglerian would argue that any new High Culture of the West, even if possible (and they may deny this possibility), would be completely disconnected to the “Faustian” aspects of the former, (i.e., present) Western Faustian High Culture. However, I argue that, having being awakened to the universe at large, it is unlikely that the white man would create a new High Culture that would be insular, rejecting the infinite. To the (albeit limited) extent we can predict, or even influence, the development of a new High Culture, a potential direction is one that is not purely “Faustian”–in the sense of striving for the unattainable. Instead, one can project a future High Culture that is based upon the ultimate and successful (eventual) achievement of what was previously considered to be “unattainable.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

I would argue that the Christian foundation of the Faustian High Culture is responsible for the fact that the ultimate goals that Western man strives toward end up being “unattainable” – and secretly known by him to be “unattainable.” The Christian mindset places inherent limits within the mind of Western man, so he is doomed to ultimately fail even if full success is theoretically possible (eventually). After all, the focus of Christianity is God and not Man, it is “salvation” and not overcoming, and it is a focus on “the next world” and not this, our real world. For man to achieve godhood–or to even have that as a goal–is a form of “blasphemy,” it is something that cannot be countenanced. Therefore, ultimate failure must occur, for attainment of the “Faustian” goal (attainment itself would then make the event no longer be truly “Faustian”) is simply not possible in a High Culture based upon Christianity. The full development of Western man has been restrained by an alien religion that has placed shackles on his mind and his soul. Nietzsche well recognized the constraints imposed by (Judeo-) Christianity; in his The Antichrist we find (emphasis added):

Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible–of God’s mortal terror of science? . . . No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, ”God” faces only one great danger.–

The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain. What does he do? He creates man–man is entertaining. . . But then he notices that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining–he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal” himself.–So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end–and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.–”Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva”–every priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil in the world”–every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science. . . It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.–What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike–it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!–Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.–”Thou shalt not know”–the rest follows from that.–God’s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought–and all thoughts are bad thoughts!–Man must not think.–And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness–nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow him to think. . . Nevertheless–how terrible!–, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods–what is to be done?--The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (–the priests have always had need of war….). War–among other things, a great disturber of science !–Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.–So the old God comes to his final resolution: “Man has become scientific–there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”

Indeed. If “the meek shall inherit the Earth” there is no place for any human striving for the infinite that is successful, and which places Man on the same plane as God. If meekness, humility, the “humble lamb of God” is the foundational archetype of a culture, then of course infinity and the unknown will always be unattainable. “Thou shalt not know”: it is amazing how much we have achieved despite that, and these remarkable Western achievements coming have occurred–not by coincidence–primarily during the Autumn and Winter periods of the Faustian High Culture. Only when the constraints imposed by the Christian-defined culture have to a large extent dissipated has the a priori acceptance of failure been weakened. The problem is that with a decaying, dying High Culture, this (partial) emancipation from the cult of humility will go for naught. Only a new High Culture built upon the fundamental concept of human transcendence, and on the attainment of infinity/the unknown, will allow Western Man to fulfill his density. The crumbling ruins of the previous High Culture can serve as building blocks for the future, certainly, they can provide inspiration, certainly, and be a source of pride, certainly. But we need to look toward the Future, and not stand guard over a dying, or dead, Past, analogous to Spengler’s Roman soldier.

While I mean no disrespect to anyone’s beliefs, be they Christian or Pagan, I do not see a revival of ancient pagan gods as a forward-thinking improvement over the decay of Faustianism. Replacing Jesus with Thor, in my mind, simply replaces one fantasy-crutch with another. White men should no longer require any exogenous gods, whether new or old; we instead should strive toward godhood for our race. It is time for the white man to grow up and put away the fantasies of childhood, fantasies of gods and external intelligent forces controlling a destiny that should be ours, and ours alone, to mold. The motto of the Classical World was “Know Thyself,” while that of the Faustian Age was a combination of “Thou Shalt Not Know” with “Thou Shalt Try to Know and Thou Shalt Fail.” I propose that the new High Culture of the West have the motto: “Thou Shalt Know and Thou Shalt Overcome.” This will usher in an era in which Western Man unlocks his potential by unlocking the shackles imposed by an assumed inferiority to imaginary gods.

Francis Parker Yockey

The following quote from Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe summarizes the palingenetic objective that we could, if we so wished, strive for:

Our European Mission is to create the Culture-State-Nation-Imperium of the West, and thereby we shall perform such deeds, accomplish such works, and so transform our world that our distant posterity, when they behold the remains of our buildings and ramparts, will tell their grandchildren that on the soil of Europe once dwelt a tribe of gods.

In other words, no imaginary gods. It is Man that will become “God.” In the book The Portable Nietzsche, editor Walter Kaufmann interprets Nietzsche’s “overman” thus:

what is called for is not a super-brute but a human being who has created for himself that unique position in the cosmos that the Bible considered his birthright.

That was going well until that last part – “The Bible.” No, Mr. Kaufman, the Bible does not consider the Overman to be the ultimate birthright of humanity but instead the “last man” as the “prize” instead. It is we who must choose what our “birthright” is, not the wild fantasies of “the Bible.” However, that being so, the rest of the description is sound, if we consider that it is to be applied to the race as a whole and not only to selected individuals within the race. No more “proud, tragic” failure in “striving for the unattainable” in the “Faustian” culture – instead the Overman Culture will be characterized by the proud successful attainment of the infinite. That is what a hopeful individual can project as the new High Culture of the West, with links to the Classical and the Faustian, but surpassing both in the aim and objective of the human spirit. That is what Western Destiny can and should be.

What can we do to get things on the right track?

Although the Jewish author Isaac Asimov may not be popular among many white gentile racial nationalists, his Foundation series can provide a useful analogy here. “The Foundation” was meant to jumpstart a new civilization after the collapse of the “Galactic Empire,” so that the post-collapse “era of barbarism” would be a mere thousand years, instead of 30,000. Facing as we do the collapse of the West through the Winter of the Faustian age, it may be prudent to lay the seeds of a new emergent white, Western civilization for the long term, as we also fight the more short-term and medium-term battles to preserve the white race and save as much of Western Faustian civilization as possible. Without these shorter range objectives, the long term civilizational (re)birth will not be possible. Conversely, without a civilizational (re)birth, long-term white preservationism would be questionable.

So, there are two things that need to be going on here. First is the ongoing struggle for white racial preservationism and to save as much of the Faustian culture as possible, to serve as a knowledge base and building blocks for the new High Culture of the West. Second, an effort must be initiated to begin the process of laying the groundwork for this new High Culture. As indicated above, of course a High Culture is an organic phenomenon that cannot be created in a pre-planned form and artificially imposed on a people. However, it is possible to plant the seeds and to have some choice as to which seeds are planted. And then, we can nurture the seedling as it grows, and as it develops according to its own inherent character. This we can do and this we must do.

This is a serious matter requiring forward-thinking strategy of an extreme visionary character, not something that can be productively “discussed” on “blog threads” or other (typically inane) public forums. It is not something that can occur overnight. This is a long-term, multi-generational project that needs to be undertaken by dedicated individuals who wish to lay the foundation of something great and noble for posterity. This will not be not any “quick fix” whose results may be seen in a decade or two; instead, this is a project that has the potential to influence the course of human history and it must be conducted on that higher level.

Therefore, this essay is simply a call for action and an initial and cursory consideration of the possibilities. If such a project is ever initiated, it should not, and must not, devolve into the mundane “movement” minutiae that many obsess over, nor can it be linked to the more serious, yet short-term, necessary “stop-gap” activism required to save our people and culture today. This is another matter, on another level, entirely.

Many are called; few are chosen. The Future Awaits.

Julius Evola

With the likes of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline he translated for an Italian readership, and Jose Ortega y Gasset, Julius Evola (1898 – 1974) stands as one of the notably incisive mid-Twentieth Century critics of modernity. Like Spengler and Ortega, Evola understood himself to owe a formative debt to Friedrich Nietzsche, but more forcefully than Spengler or Ortega, Evola saw the limitations – the contradictions and inconsistencies – in Nietzsche’s thinking.

Evola differed from Spengler and Ortega in another way: like certain other Men of the Right during the same decades, he involved himself deeply in matters mystical and occult, creating a reputation during the last part of his life as an expert in such topics as Eastern religiosity, alchemy, and the vast range of esoteric doctrines. Hermann Keyserling comes to mind also, as having directed his interest to these matters. Nevertheless, Keyserling, who knew Evola’s work, avoided Evola, rather as Spengler had shied from Keyserling. It would have been in part because Evola’s occult investment struck Keyserling as more blatant and far-reaching than his own and in part because Evola appeared, in the early 1930s, to be sympathetic to Fascism and National Socialism, whereas Keyserling, like Spengler, saw these unequivocally as signs of the spreading decadence of his time and so criticized them from their beginnings.

While Evola’s transient proclivities justified Keyserling’s misgivings, swift mounting mutual distaste put actual distance between Evola and the dictatorships. Had he known, Keyserling might have warmed to Evola. By the time war broke out, the self-styled Baron had explicitly repudiated dictatorial principles. Evola, who had his own theory of race, expressed particular revulsion towards Nazi race-policy and Mussolini’s aping of it in Italy after 1938.

Evola nevertheless makes difficulties for those of conservative temperament who would appreciate his critique of modernity. He could be dismissive of Christianity, at least in its modern form, as a social religion; and like his counterparts on the Left, he despised the bourgeoisie and its values, so much so that at least one of his biographers has compared him, by no means implausibly, to Frankfurt-School types like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno. Yet Evola’s all-around prickliness belongs to his allure. Thus in a 1929 article, “Bolchevismo ed Americanismo,” Evola condemns with equal fervor Muscovite communism and American money-democracy, as representing, the both of them, the mechanization and dehumanization of life. Unlike the Marxists – and unlike the Fascists and National Socialists – Evola saw the only hope for Western Civilization as lying in a revival of what he liked to capitalize, on the one hand, as Tradition and, on the other, as Transcendence; he thus rejected all materialism and instrumentalism as crude reductions of reality for coarse minds and, so too, as symptoms of a prevailing and altogether repugnant decadence.

I. Evola scholar H. T. Hansen sets out the details of his subject’s political involvements, making a generous exculpatory case, in the article that serves as introduction to the English translation of Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1951). I direct readers to that article and to Evola’s own Autodifesa, which the same volume offers as an appendix to the main text, should they be interested in the particulars. Evola’s analysis of modernity interests me in what follows more than his vanishing political affinities in the Italy of his early maturity. Evola’s passionate distaste for the vulgarity of such things as democracy (that fetish of the modern world), “the social question,” and economics – which, as E. Christian Kopff points out in a recent article at the online journal Alternative Right, he regarded as “demonic” – belongs to his absolute conviction that the West has been locked in a downward-spiraling crisis of nihilism since the Eighteenth Century at the latest. The break-up of the Holy Roman Empire in the wars of religious factionalism presaged the break-up of coherent wisdom in the self-nominating Enlightenment’s war against faith. The era of the nation-state, as Evola sees it, disestablished the principle that political authority derives from a transcendent source. Evola admired what he calls the Ghibellinism of the Empire although he defends it against its modern detractors without nostalgia. One can never go back; one must deal with conditions, as they exist.

Evola seems to have conceived Men Among the Ruins:, its title already commenting on existing conditions, and Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (1961) as a dual introduction to his masterwork, Revolt Against the Modern World (1934).

In Men among the Ruins, Evola assesses the contemporary crisis, the “disease” and “the disorder of our age,” paradoxically: Totalitarianism, a grim trend fully abetted by eager widespread conformism, is, in effect, a type of chaos such that the maximum of illegitimate coercion exists in a society simultaneously with the maximum of riotous lawlessness; meanwhile the proliferation of dazzling technical gadgetry, in fascination with which the masses believe themselves to be participating in progress, coexists with a descent from the social and ethical refinements of medieval civilization into various resurgences of degrading primitivism. One might think of the way in which the Internet is bound up with pornography and gambling. In Evola’s scheme, the Reformation, the rise of science, and the Industrial Revolution mark stages of descent, not of ascent, in the history of viable socio-political forms. For Evola, the modern exaltation of the instrumental, the practical, and the material is tantamount not only to a petulant rejection of every “higher dimension of life” but also to a perverse embrace of “spiritual formlessness.”

Thus the degradation of the person, a term that Evola uses in a special way, belongs to a regime that achieves control, entirely for the sake of control, by encouraging the lowest appetitive urges of that desperate but useful creature, the mere numerical individual. Evola here avails himself frankly of Ortega’s category of the mass man, whose sole quality consists in his unavoidable overwhelming quantity.

Evola identifies the proximate source of these trends in “the subversion introduced in Europe by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848” although analysis could trace both outbursts to prior stages and events. In equality, the central fetish of revolutionary subversion, Evola sees a phenomenon neither natural nor properly cultural that suggests the deeply seated aversion of a reputedly liberated consciousness to the actual, graduated structure of reality. In particular, as Evola remarks, contemporary humanity has cut itself off entirely from the only context that could clarify a man’s worth for him and integrate him into a meaningful life: that concinnity of “sovereignty, authority, and legitimacy” by which “every true State” achieves “transcendence of its own principle.” More Platonist than Christian – perhaps in certain moods, as I have suggested, anti-Christian – Evola insists that the meaning of a polity consists solely in its embodying “a higher order,” through which alone its “power” derives. A traditional polity, being essentially hierarchical, will thus never adopt the face of democracy; indeed, its aristocrats will rule by “absoluteness,” in the sense that their stewardship of order, their “Imperium,” will always take direction from their spiritual participation in the same “aeterna auctoritas” that bestows intelligibility on the physical cosmos.

The social classes of the traditional polity recognize the authority embodied in their governors by its outward signs of dignity and justice proper to regal persons. Democracy represents the opposite principle to these (insofar, that is, as it can be said to represent any principle): democracy is dissolute; it liquefies all achieved structure and all justified value-subordination in its amoeba-like abolition of true differences.

One might note that a faint echo of what Evola would recognize as genuine order informs even so late a stage of modernity as the American founding, with its references to a “Creator.” Nevertheless, Evola’s assertion that the polity and its governors must make manifest a transcendent order – cosmic, divine, and paternal – lies so far from the prevailing definition of existence that even most of those calling themselves conservative must gape at it in dumb non-understanding. Modern practice has crassly inverted the traditional vision of order, orienting itself downwards to the chthonic, the animistic, and the maternal. Democracy, for Evola, belongs with this infantilizing abasement of life, as does the obsessive and vacuous notion, as he sees it, of individuality. Here too the prevailing mentality must recoil – how could anyone not advocate for the individual? Is not the sanctity of the individual the indispensable basis of Anglo-Saxon society? Is not the Bill of Right a set of guarantees for the individual?

But Evola rigorously distinguishes the individual from the person, valorizing the latter. “The person,” Evola writes, “is an individual who is differentiated through his qualities, endowed with his own face, his proper nature, and a series of attributes that make him who he is and distinguish him from all others.” By distinction, “the individual may be conceived only as an atomic unit… a mere fiction of an abstraction.” Persons, being actually individuated, hold rank as “peers” in the differentiated company; in “the will to equality,” by contrast, Evola sees only “the will to what is formless.”

Evola also insists on distinguishing “the organic State” from “the totalitarian State,” linking the former to individuation within a functioning hierarchy (to persons) and the latter to the featurelessness of democracy:

A state is organic when it has a center, and this center is an idea that shapes the various domains of life in an efficacious way; it is organic when it ignores the division and the autonomization of the particular and when, by virtue of the system of hierarchical participation, every part within its relative autonomy performs its own function and enjoys an intimate connection with the whole.

Evola writes that, “In totalitarianism we usually find a tendency toward uniformity and intolerance for any autonomy and any degree of freedom, [and] for any intermediate body between the center and periphery, between the peak and the bottom of the social pyramid.” In a society where Tradition governs, the “axiom… is that the supreme values… are not liable to change and becoming.” In a liberal society where democracy governs (which will be indistinguishable from a dictatorship), “there are no principles, systems, and norms with values independent from the period in which they have assumed a historical form, on the basis of contingent… and irrational factors.”

Evola refuses to retreat from the two phases of a stark judgment: First that “the beginning of the disintegration of the traditional sociopolitical structures, or at least what was left of them in Europe, occurred through liberalism,” which is the direct precursor of revolution; and second that “the essence of liberalism is individualism.” Because the notion of equality amounts to “sheer nonsense” and constitutes a “logical absurdity,” any implementation of equality will necessarily entail a destruction of that which, by existing really and actually, offends democratic sentiment. Thus for Evola democracy itself is nihilism.

II. Where Men Among the Ruins takes on the task of describing our post-catastrophic predicament, Ride the Tiger prescribes how a genuinely individuated person might comport himself in a culturally devastated and morally degenerate environment. Ride the Tiger nevertheless also analyzes the topics that fascinate Evola, generally the grand spectacle of civilization in deliquescence and particularly the outward forms of the dominant corruption. The reader finds then, in Ride the Tiger, chapters devoted to “The Disguises of European Nihilism,” “[The] Collapse of Existentialism,” “Covering Up Nature – Phenomenology,” “The Dissolution of Modern Art,” and “Second Religiosity,” among many others. In respect of the mid-Twentieth Century situation Evola urges his readers not to mistake the ongoing visible disintegration of the bourgeois world for the primary cataclysm in whose shattered landscape they live: “Socially, politically, and culturally, what is crashing down [today] is the system that took shape after the revolution of the Third Estate and the first industrial revolution, even though there were often mixed up in it some remnants of a more ancient order, drained of their original vitality.” Evola remains steadfastly loyal to that “more ancient order,” in the resurrection of whose vitality the well-being of persons in a hostile world is implicated.

Nihilism, in Evola’s discussion of it, knows how to conceal and dissimulate itself, how to smile, soothe, and cajole. The ability to ferret out nihilism’s hiding places and to penetrate its masks thus plays a key role in the continued autonomy of the individuated person or “aristocrat of the spirit.” Evola takes Nietzsche’s trope of “The Death of God” as usefully designating a particular “fracture… of an ontological character” that afflicts the contemporary scene. Through this “fracture,” Evola writes, “human life loses any real reference to transcendence,” and in its train the innumerable “doubles and surrogates” of “the God who is Dead” rise into prominence. Thus “when the level of the sacred is lost,” only empty formulas – ideologies – persist, like the “categorical imperative” posited by Kant or the “ethical rationalism” (as Evola names it) promulgated by Mill and his followers. Lurking beyond the scrim of these and other constructions, Evola sees “nihilism already visible.” For example, nihilism bodies forth in “the Romantic hero: the man who feels himself alone in the face of divine indifference” and who “claims for himself exceptional rights to what is forbidden.”

After Romanticism, the spirit of negation appears under the label of “the absurd,” with its axiom of universal non-meaning and its dramatis personae of “lost youth,” “teddy boys,” and “rebels without a cause.” Hollywood and commercial culture continuously reinvent these limited types.

With a reference to Kopff’s recent article, I mentioned earlier how Evola characterizes modern economic theory as “demonic.” Evola applies this label irrespective of whether the theory under scrutiny advocates a view rooted in Karl Marx or in Adam Smith because both represent masquerading nihilism. A rational concept of wealth becomes a “demonic” theory when the idea of money and its relation to goods, first, reduces itself to something entirely abstract and, next, inflates itself until it is the central and dominating Mumbo-Jumbo of a polity.

It matters not whether the prevailing ideology is socialism or capitalism: “The error and illusion are the same,” namely that “material want” is the cause of all “existential misery” and that abundance generates happiness and lawfulness. In a stunning sentence, whose import almost no currently serving politician could grasp, Evola offers that, “the truth of the matter is that the meaning of existence can be as lacking in one group [rich or poor] as in the other, and that there is no correlation between material and spiritual misery.” Evola remarks that all of modern politics tends towards “socioeconomic messianism.”

According to Evola, virtually all of modern and Twentieth Century philosophy is evasion or deception. Ride the Tiger’s chapters on Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre – not to mention Nietzsche – exposit the view that these thinkers, too, partake in the process of reducing reality to nothingness.

Nietzsche, in Evola’s commentary, participates in the reduction of Transcendence to immanence: “Once the idols have fallen, good and evil have been surpassed, along with all the surrogates of God, and this mist has lifted from one’s eyes, nothing is left to Nietzsche but ‘this world,’ life, the body.” The Übermensch is Nietzsche’s ersatz-Transcendence. Evola ranks the Übermensch, a deferred futurity that supposedly justifies action now on its non-present behalf, as “not very different from Marxist-communist ideology,” with its sinewy image of Socialist Humanity. Nietzsche’s Will and Power are mere guises of “formlessness.”

Husserl strikes Evola also as misguided, engaging in the old project of Saving the Appearances by de-realizing the appearances even further and so cutting off consciousness from its contact both with nature and Transcendence.

As for Heidegger, as Evola sees things, the Dasein-philosopher has failed to go beyond Nietzsche and like his precursor has reduced life to desperate immanence. Heidegger’s doctrine “is a projection of modern man in crisis, rather than of modern man beyond crisis.”

Nihilism can counterfeit itself in the guise of spirituality and religion. Thus what Evola calls “modern naturalism” and “the animal ideal” is linked to what he calls, while borrowing the term from Spengler, “second religiosity.” The labels “modern naturalism” and “the animal ideal” refer to the “back to nature” idea that the history of concepts traces to an original codification in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “The natural state for man has never existed,” writes Evola, because “at the beginning [man] was placed in a supranatural state from which he has now fallen.” A de-individuating descent to the bosom of Mother Earth remains impossible by definition for culturally mature persons. Thus “every return to nature is a regressive phenomenon, including any protest in the name of instinctual rights, the unconscious, the flesh, life uninhibited by the intellect, and so forth.” The neo-Chthonic movements familiar on the modern scene belong to “second religiosity.” Like the “second religiosity” of the ancient world, that of the modern world is effeminate, matriarchal, and anti-intellectual; it is also thoroughly anti-spiritual. “Second religiosity” permeates modern life in “sporadic forms of spirituality and mysticism, even in irruptions from the supersensible.” However, such “symptoms” definitely “do not indicate re-ascent” to anything genuinely metaphysical.

Evola died before environmentalism found its pseudo-Gospel in the scientifically now-discredited “Global Warming” hysteria, before organized feminism began its systematic emasculation of Western institutions, and before these trends had coalesced in Mountebanks and Priests-of-Atargatis like “Gaia” theorist James Lovelock and ex-Senator Albert “We-are-the-Enemy” Gore. Readers may take Evola as prescient when he writes that, “nothing is more indicative of the level of… neospiritualism than the human material of the majority of those who cultivate it.” Evola notes that, “mystification and superstition are constantly mingled in neospiritualism, another of whose traits, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, is the high percentage of women (women who are failures, dropouts, or ‘past it’).” In a metaphor, Evola compares these manifestations of “escapism, alienation, and confused compensation” to “the fluorescence that appears when corpses decay.”

III. It might seem to have entailed an insuperable contradiction when, in my introduction, I wrote that Hermann Keyserling had shunned Evola because Evola’s investment in occult ideas stood in uncomfortable excess to Keyserling’s own; whereas, at the end of the foregoing section I reported on Evola’s critical hostility to “mysticism” and “superstition,” using his own terms from Ride the Tiger. There is no actual contradiction.

Evola’s idea of Transcendence lies not so distant from similar ideas in the work of Giambattista Vico, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Eric Voegelin, and Richard Weaver. Evola, whose literary education was large, knows from the ancient texts that the sequence of intense visionary experience – followed by virile propagation of an at-first essentially religious order – lies at the inception of all known complex societies and civilizations. The similitude of mythic or prophetic foundations suggests that they all correspond to a singular source even though they cannot tell us, in modern rational language, what that source is.

Whether it is Homer’s “Dike” (“Justice”) whose origin is Zeus, the Hebrew’s “I am that I am,” the Middle Kingdom’s “Dao,” or the beatific vision in Plato, Augustine, and Dante – the formative effect of the experience is to establish a notional hierarchy of structures, oriented to that which is “above” the human world, which, while announcing itself as eternal Being, takes physical form through human creative activity in the actual world. Founding visions organize people anagogically. That is an historical fact.

Even Spengler, a rigorous skeptic, writes, in The Decline (Vol. I), that, “a Culture is born when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality… and detaches itself, a form from the formless.” Toynbee, quirkily Catholic, writing in Civilization on Trial (1948), recognizes Christianity as a vision of life that “arose out of the spiritual travail which was a consequence of the breakdown of the Graeco-Roman civilization” and which forecast the shape of a successor-civilization amidst the ruins of the old. As for Voegelin, in Israel and Revelation (1956), he writes: “Cosmological symbolization is neither a theory nor an allegory. It is the mythical expression of the participation, experienced as real, of the order of society in the divine being that also orders the cosmos.”

Evola, while prickly and eccentric, may nevertheless claim lively company in the convergent testimonies of so many legends and sagas from antiquity and the middle ages. Evola’s great work, Revolt against the Modern World, makes explicit the philological and anthropological bases of his convictions concerning Tradition. Evola divides Revolt into two parts: First, a comprehensive description of the structures and assumptions of those historical societies that body forth Tradition; Second, a “genealogy” of modern decadence.

In Part One of Revolt, Evola draws heavily on James G. Frazer, Franz Cumont, Georges Dumézil, Fustel de Coulanges, and other scholars who, without prejudice, had attempted to understand primitive and archaic customs and institutions, as it were, from the inside out. Evola admires ancient and historical societies for the virility of their structures – royalty, aristocracy, priesthood, warrior, worker, and serf – which, in his view, allowed people to integrate themselves in a meaningful, living arrangement with others, including their superiors, with a minimum of invidious friction. Every station in the hierarchy has its privileges, but every station also has its obligations to the stations below it, just as each has its duties to the whole.

Modern people find in social hierarchies, and such institutions as castes and guilds, something arbitrary and limiting, but Evola insists that traditional estates and vocations allowed for a natural sorting-out of talents and potentials and that they permitted people, by apprenticeship and initiation, to realize personal progress in a well-defined context. Evola also remarks that, especially in medieval society, certain institutions cut across the estates, so that a man whose trade, say, was a cobbler, might, as a member of one or another lay order, attain social recognition for activity outside that by which he earned his bread. Hans Sachs, in Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger, is by trade a shoemaker, but his peers celebrate him as an artist-adept of Stabreim and Minnelied. The Church, too, cut across the estates and offered avenues of mobility. By constant implication, Evola suggests that, insofar as happiness concerns us, people have been happier in traditional societies than they are, despite material comforts, in modern society. Evola is aware, as was Nietzsche, that the dissolution of forms exacerbates resentment and that modern people are more resentful than their predecessors.

Evola goes so far as to defend the attitudes of Aristotle and the Old Testament to slavery, attitudes that occasion reflexive dudgeon in modern commentary:

Let us set aside the fact that Europeans reintroduced and maintained slavery up to the nineteenth century in their overseas colonies in such heinous forms as to be rarely found in the ancient world; what should be emphasized is that if there ever were a civilization of slaves on a grand scale, the one in which we are living is it.

Modern people wear the badge of their “dignity” brazenly. Yet “no traditional civilization ever saw such great masses of people condemned to perform shallow, impersonal, automatic jobs.” It is the case furthermore that, “in the contemporary slave system the counterparts of figures such as lords or enlightened rulers are nowhere to be found,” but only rather “the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society.” Must one say that this makes no brief for slavery? Rather it condemns the parochialism and self-righteousness of liberals and democrats, and castigates the spiritually destructive tedium of the bureaucratic functions on which liberal-democratic society bases itself.

In the same paragraph from which I draw the foregoing lines, Evola mentions the Soviet slave-labor camps, which attest for him the evil inherent in “the physical and moral subjection of man to the goals of collectivization.”

As any admirer of chivalry must, Evola deplores feminism and female enfranchisement, both belonging, in his view, to the trend of the purely quantitative individual, with his infantilized egocentrism. “A practical and superficial lifestyle of a masculine type,” Evola writes, “has perverted [woman’s] nature and thrown her into the same male pit of work, profits, frantic activity, and politics.” It follows that, “modern woman in wanting to be for herself has destroyed herself” because “the ‘personality’ she so much yearned for is killing all semblance of female personality in her.” But Evola never spares anyone: “We must not forget that man is mostly responsible for [female] decadence… In a society run by real men, woman would never have yearned for or even been capable of taking the path she is following today.” As Kopff writes: “Evola rejected the Enlightenment Project lock, stock, and barrel, and had little use for the Renaissance and the Reformation. For Evola those really opposed to the leftist regime, the true Right, are not embarrassed to describe themselves as reactionary and counterrevolutionary.”

IV. Part Two of Revolt Against the Modern World traces the pedigree of the existing nihilism-crisis by providing “a bird’s eye view of history.” Naturally, Evola refuses to follow standard historiography, dismissing roundly its most basic assumption – namely that the original human societies were primitive and that civilization is a late stage in the social development of humanity. Evola similarly rejects the related Darwinian idea that complex entities evolve from primitive entities. In both instances he sees things the other way around, not out of egocentric crankiness, but rather as he writes, because Tradition itself, to which he defers, sees things the other way around.

He takes seriously, for example, the archaic poet Hesiod’s five phases of humanity from the didactic poem Works and Days; he takes seriously Plato’s “Atlantis” story from the tandem dialogues Timaeus and Critias, and he admits as respectable similar model polities or societies that the variety of myth and literature locates in an antediluvian age. In the Hesiodic scheme, the earliest men were those of the Golden Race after which came the Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Races. Hesiod famously vows that he wished he did not belong to the degenerate Iron Race, so wicked and unsalvageable is it. In Plato’s “Atlantis” story, the original Atlanteans are demigods, who live in a technically and morally perfected state; but their descendants become gross, materialistic, and degenerate.

Before one dismisses this framework as an instance of irremediable credulity, one should carefully note two things. The first is that unlike the ideologues whom he criticizes, who place their Social Justice or their Master Race in the indefinite future, Evola places the irreproducible model-polity in an irretrievable past, from which locus it can justify no reality-altering agenda; it can only serve as a remote measure for conscientious persons who seek standards other than contemporary ones.

The second is that Evola thinks by habit in mythopoeic terms, as did Plato and Giambattista Vico; and it is through symbols and metaphors that he defeats the mechanistic-literalistic pseudo-cognition that he deplores.

Like Plato and Vico – and like P. D. Ouspensky, who also entertained the idea of cycles of civilization and destruction, and who was certainly not a fantasist – Evola would advise honest people to begin their contemplation of human achievement from a position of humbleness rather than arrogance. I note that this tenet, central to Evola’s ethos, excuses him from the charge of Gnosticism. Despite Evola’s many references to esoteric knowledge, he never qualifies such knowledge as miraculously or uniquely vouchsafed him. He asserts that he has teased it out of myth, saga, and folklore by diligent study.

One might also note that in the last fifty years archeology has steadily deepened the chronologies of complex human associations and of material achievement; and that in the same period the once-discredited idea of a primordial human language from which all others descend has reappeared, quite respectably, in the “Nostratic” and “World” hypotheses.

Why, one might ask, as long as the theory of African Genesis remains formally unobjectionable, should anyone object to Evola’s theory of Far-Northern or Hyperborean ethogenesis, formally speaking? The theory of the Hyperborean Ur-Tradition explains cultural diffusion as adequately as the standing theory; the preference for which is a matter largely of sanctified prejudice. Indeed, a “boreal” first formation of high culture in no way makes impossible a prior equatorial appearance of Homo sapiens, considered under a purely biological category. As Evola points out, many southern people place their culture-ancestors in a northern homeland. Of course, the main interest in Revolt, Part Two, is in the diagnosis of modern corruption.

What is Evola’s history of that corruption? In a remote first collapse in “the regression of the castes,” as Evola calls the long-term degenerative process, “the regality of blood replaced the regality of spirit,” and this alteration corresponded with an insurgency of “The Civilization of the Mother” over the original “Patriciate.” Much later – in the Late Medieval Period – “a second collapse occurred as the aristocracies began to fall and the monarchies to shake at the foundations,” when “through revolutions and constitutions they became useless institutions subject to the ‘will of the nation.’” Next comes the collapse from an already-narrowed nation-consciousness to the paradoxical undifferentiated collectivism of the bourgeois society of mere individuals, where equality is the tyrannical Shibboleth and absolute conformity the mode. Next, out of the incipient collectivism of the bourgeois society, comes “the proletarian revolt against capitalism,” in which Evola discerns “a reduction of horizon and value to the plane of matter, the machine, and the reign of quantity.” The phenomenon is a nadir, entirely “subhuman.” Thus, “in the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution it is possible to detect a ruthless ideological coherence.”

As his early article “Bolschevismus ed Americanismus” should lead one to guess, Evola never spares the United States: “America too, in the essential way it views life and the world, has created a ‘civilization’ that represents the exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition.” In words reminiscent of Spengler’s diction, Evola describes the United States “a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking in any background of transcendence.” Whereas “Soviet communism officially professes atheism,” Evola remarks, and whereas “America does not go that far”; nevertheless, “without realizing it, and often believing the contrary, it is running down the same path in which nothing is left of… religious meaning.” According to Evola, “the great majority of Americans could be said to represent a refutation on a large scale of the Cartesian principle… they ‘do not think and are.’” Evola links American anti-intellectualism with the proliferation in the United States of “the feminist idiocy,” which travels in tandem with “the materialistic and practical degradation of man.”

In its conclusion, Evola’s Revolt forecasts a new “dark age,” for which his preferred term is the Vedic Kali Yuga. America will assimilate the crusading impulse of Soviet communism and will begin to try to universalize its destructive pseudo-values through imperialistic aggression; the Imperium will be a short-lived calamity leading to global wreckage. When Evola speaks thusly in 1934, one listens, and dismissing him becomes difficult.

What is one to do then with a writer of foresight, whose literacy and education remain indubitable, who nevertheless serves up his social and political analysis, however trenchant it is, in the context of an alternate history, the details of which resemble the background of story by Lord Dunsany or Clark Ashton Smith? I am strongly tempted to answer my own question in this way: That perhaps we should begin by reassessing Dunsany and Smith, especially Smith, whose tales of decadent remnant-societies – half-ruined, eroticized, brooding over a shored-up luxuriance, and succumbing to momentary appetite with fatalistic abandon – speak with powerful intuition to our actual circumstances. I do not mean to say, however, that Evola is only metaphorically true, as though his work, like Smith’s, were fiction. I mean that Evola is truly true, on the order of one of Plato’s “True Myths,” no matter how much his truth disconcerts us.

The Brussels Journal, March 29, 2010

This absence of professionalism and this facile subjectivism have produced occasionally disastrous consequences. From the beginning Nietzsche’s thought has defied systematic construction. Even now the most memorable characteristics of his pioneering work are his ferocious fulminations, his deconstruction, and the acrid stench left by those who have raided his texts. One cannot hope to say finally what Nietzsche really meant. But it may be possible to find a unifying thread. This requires ignoring abusive and merely subjectivist interpretations while highlighting those of true value. The renewed interest in Nietzsche’s works has produced a vast body of relevant literature, much of it critical.

In June 1981 Rudolf Augstein, editor of Der Spiegel, stated without qualification that Hitler was the man of action who put Nietzsche’s thought into practice. The journalist took for proof the falsifications of some of Nietzsche’s manuscripts by his sister Elisabeth Nietzsche-Forster, who had shaken Hitler’s hand in the twilight of her life. This argument is perhaps a bit thin in view of the many other writings that his sister did not doctor.

Augstein is concerned not just about Nietzsche’s revival by a young generation of German philosophers but also by the progressive abandonment among German intellectuals of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School for Social Research. For Germans educated in the wake of “de-Nazification,” the Frankfurt School’s attack on bourgeois values, though often couched in arcane phrases, represented an effort to come to terms with the German past. Nonetheless, Frankfurt’s total rejection of all thought that affirms a given fact has led to an impasse. Negativity cannot be an end in itself; no one can progress intellectually or artistically through a permanent process of negation.

For Jürgen Habermas, the last important representative of the Frankfurt School, the Real is bad in that it does not include from the start all the Good existing in ideal form. Confronted by the imperfect Real, one feels compelled to maximize the Good, to moralize ad extremum in order to minimize the force of evil encrusted in a real world marked by incompleteness. Imperfect reality must call forth a redeeming revolution. But this revolution runs the risk of affirming and shaping another more or less imperfect real thing. Habermas rejects great global revolutions that initiate new eras. Instead he prefers sporadic micro-revolutions that inaugurate ages of permanent corrections, small injections of the Good into the sociopolitical tissue inevitably tainted by the Bad. But the world of political philosophy cannot rest content with this constant tinkering, this dogged adherence to reform without limit, this social engineering without substance. The suspicion of Nazism weighing heavily on Nietzscheism and the impossibility of keeping philosophy at the level of permanent negation make it necessary to reject the obsession with the proto-Nazi Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School’s negative attitude toward any given.

Nietzsche and Socialism

Nietzsche certainly had his share of Nazi interpreters. Philosophers who fellow-traveled with the Nazis often made kind references to his thought. Yet recent scholarship shows that Nietzsche found not only Nazi admirers but also socialist and leftist ones. In Nietzsche in German Politics and Society 1890-1918 (1983), the British Professor R. Hinton Thomas demonstrates the close relationship between Nietzsche and German socialism. Thomas deals with Nietzsche’s impact in Imperial Germany on social democratic circles, on anarchists and feminists, and on the youth movement. This produced, on balance more resolute enemies of the Third Reich than Nazi cadres. Thomas shows that Nietzsche helped shape a libertarian ideology during the rise of the German social democratic movement. At the urging of August Bebel, the famed German socialist, the infant Social Democratic Party in 1875 adopted the Gotha Program, which sought to achieve redistributionist aims through legal means. In 1878 the government enacted anti-socialist laws, which curbed the party’s activities. In 1890, with the Erfurt Program, the party took on a harder revolutionary cast in conformity with Marxist doctrine. Social democracy subsequently oscillated between strict legalism, also known as “revisionism” or “reformism” because it accepted a liberal capitalist society, and a rhetorical commitment to revolution accompanied by demands for far-reaching changes.

According to Thomas, this second tendency remained a minority position but incorporated Nietzschean elements. A faction of the party, led by Bruno Wille, ridiculed the powerlessness of reformist social democrats. This group, which called itself Die Jungen (The Youths), appealed to grass-roots democracy, spoke of the need for more communication within the party, and ended up rejecting its rigid parent. Wille and his friends mocked the conformism of party functionaries, great and small, and the “cage” constituting organized social democracy. The party’s stifling constraints subdued the will and thwarted individual self-actualization. Die Jungen exalted “voluntarism,” or the exercise of will, which they associated with true socialism. This emphasis on will left little place for the deterministic materialism of Marxism, which the group described as an “enslaving” system.

Kurt Eisner, the leader of the revolutionary socialist Bavarian Republic, devoted his first book in 1919 to the philosophy of Nietzsche. Though he criticized the “megalomania” that he found in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he also praised its aristocratic ideals. The aristocratic values found in Nietzsche, he said, had to be put at the service of the people, not treated as ends in themselves. Gustav Landauer (1870-1919), another founder of the Bavarian “Red Republic,” emphasized Nietzschean voluntarism in his training of political revolutionaries. Landauer’s original anarchistic individualism became more communitarian and populist during the course of his political career, approaching the folkish, nationalist thinking of his enemies. Landauer died in the streets of Munich fighting the soldiers of the Freikorps, a group of paramilitary adventurers who were classified as “rightist” but who shared much of Landauer’s outlook.

Contrary to a later persistent misconception, Nietzsche aroused suspicion on the nationalist Right at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Thomas, this was because Nietzsche mocked many things German (which offended the pan-Germanists), was generally contemptuous of politics, had no enthusiasm for nationalism, and fell out with the composer Richard Wagner, a fervent and anti-Semitic German nationalist.

Nietzsche as a Naturalist

Nietzsche’s vitalist concepts and naturalist vocabulary may account for his early support on the European Left and for his later popularity on the non-Christian Right. Nietzsche’s emphasis on will and his affirmation of an ethic of creativity have had diverse appeal. In his concise work, Helmut Pfotenhauer assesses Nietzsche’s legacy from the point of view of physiology, a term with a naturalistic connotation. This word appears frequently in Nietzsche’s work in the phrase Kunst als Physiologie, art as physiology.

The great French writer Balzac, who coined the phrase “physiology of marriage,” said about this neologism: “Physiology was formerly the science dealing with the mechanism of the coccyx, the progress of the fetus, or the life of the tapeworm. Today physiology is the art of speaking and writing incorrectly about anything.” In the nineteenth century the term physiology was associated with a type of popular literature such as the garrulous serials in daily newspapers. Physiology was intended to classify the main features of daily life. Thus there was a physiology of the stroller or of the English tourist pacing up and down Paris boulevards. In that sense physiology has some limited relationship to the zoological classifications of Buffon or Linnaeas. In his Comedie humaine, Balzac draws a parallel between the animal world and human society. “Political zoology” is used by various nineteenth-century writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Edgar Allen Poe. Nietzsche was aware of the literary and scientific usage of physiology. He noted that the physiological style was invading universities and that the vocabulary of his time was embellished with terms drawn from biology. One wonders why Nietzsche resorted to the term physiology when he believed that it was often used carelessly.

In Pfotenhauer’s view, Nietzsche had no intention of giving respectability to the pseudoscientific or pseudo-aesthetic excesses of the “physiologists” of his day. His intention, as interpreted by Pfotenhauer, was to challenge an established form of aesthetics. He constructed the expression “physiology of the art,” insofar as the arts were conventionally approached as mere objects of contemplation. From Nietzsche’s perspective, artistic productivity is an expression of our nature and ultimately of Nature itself. Through art, Nature becomes more active within us.

By using the term physiology Nietzsche was making a didactic point. He celebrated the exuberance of vital forces, while frowning on any attempt to neutralize the vital processes by giving a value to the average. In other words, Nietzsche rejected those sciences that limited their investigations to the averages, excluding the singular and exceptional. Nietzsche though that Charles Darwin, by limiting himself to broad classes in his biology, favored the generic without focusing on the exceptional individual. Nietzsche saw physiology as a tool to do for the individual confronting existential questions what Darwin had accomplished as a classifier of entire phyla and species. He attempted to analyze clinically the struggle of superior individuals for self-fulfillment in a world without inherent metaphysical meaning.

The Death of God

“God is dead” is an aphorism identified with Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that, together with God, all important ontological and metaphysical systems had died. Only the innocence of human destiny remained, and he did not want it to be frozen in some “superior unity of being.” Recognizing the reign of destiny, he thought, involves certain risks. In the river of changing life, creative geniuses run the risk of drowning, of being only fragmentary and contingent moments. How can anyone gladly say “yes” to life without an assurance that his achievements will be preserved, not simply yielded to the natural rhythms of destiny? Perhaps the query of Silenus to King Midas is well-founded: “Is this fleeting life worth being lived? Would it not have been better had we not been born?” Would it not be ideal to die as quickly as possible?

These questions pick up the theme of Arthur Schopenhauer, the famous philosopher of pessimism. The hatred of life that flowed from Schopenhauer’s pessimism was unsatisfactory to Nietzsche. He believed that in an age of spiritual confusion the first necessity was to affirm life itself. This is the meaning of “the transvaluation of all values” as understood by Pfotenhauer. Nietzsche’s teachings about the will were intended to accomplish the task of reconstructing values. The creative exercise of will was both an object of knowledge and an attitude of the knowing subject. The vital processes were to be perceived from the point of view of constant creativity.

The Superman

Through the abundance of creative energy, man can assume divine characteristics. The one who embraces his own destiny without any resentment or hesitation turns himself into an embodiment of that destiny. Life should express itself in all its mobility and fluctuation; immobilizing or freezing it into a system was an assault on creativity. The destiny that Nietzsche urged his readers to embrace was to be a source of creative growth. The philosopher was a “full-scale artist” who organized the world in the face of chaos and spiritual decline. Nietzsche’s use of physiology was an attempt to endow vital processes with an appropriate language. Physiology expressed the intended balance between Nature and mere rationality.

Myth, for Nietzsche, had no ethnological point of reference. It was, says Pfotenhauer, the “science of the concrete” and the expression of the tragedy resulting from the confrontation between man’s physical fragility (Hinfälligkeit) and his heroic possibilities. Resorting to myth was not a lapse into folk superstition, as the rationalists believed it to be. It was rather an attempt to see man’s place within Nature.

Pfotenhauer systematically explored the content of Nietzsche’s library, finding “vitalist” arguments drawn from popular treatments of science. The themes that riveted Nietzsche’s attention were: adaptation, the increase of potential within the same living species, references to vital forces, corrective eugenics, and spontaneous generation. Nietzsche’s ideas were drawn from the scientific or parascientific speculations of his time and from literary, cultural, and artistic tracts. He criticized the imitative classicism of some French authors and praised the profuse style of the Baroque. In the philosopher’s eyes, the creativity of genius and rich personalities had more value than mere elegant conversation. Uncertainty, associated with the ceaseless production of life, meant more to him than the search for certainty, which always implied a static perfection. On the basis of this passion for spiritual adventure he founded a “new hierarchization of values.” The man who internalized the search for spiritual adventure anticipated the “superman,” about whom so much has been said. Pfotenhauer’s Nietzsche is made to represent the position that the creative man allies himself with the power of vital impulse against stagnant ideas, accepting destiny’s countless differences and despising limitations. Nietzschean man does not react with anguish in the face of fated change.

Nietzsche had no desire to inaugurate a worry-free era. Instead, he responded to the symptoms of a declining Christian culture by criticizing society from the standpoint of creative and heroic fatalism. This criticism, which refuses to accept the world as it is, claims to be formative and affirmative: it represents a will to create new forms of existence. Nietzsche substituted an innovative criticism affirming destiny for an older classical view based on fixed concepts. Nietzsche’s criticism does not include an irrational return to an a historic and unformed existence. Nietzsche, as presented by Pfotenhauer, constructs his own physiology of man’s nature as a creative being.

Source: http://foster.20megsfree.com/417.htm

Masculinity has always changed. Men have been writing and speaking and arguing about what makes a man throughout history. As the particulars of a society change, the prevailing model of masculinity becomes more nuanced or more brutal according to need.

When men helmed Western civilization, they maintained a smooth continuity through changing times because they knew themselves. They knew what men were, they knew what men could — and could not — become. They knew what stirred their own souls, they knew how to speak to each other and reach common ground. They knew the kinds of ideas that would take their own hearts and move them into battle with swords or muskets, in animal skins or sharp uniforms. They knew that in peacetime men could not be ruled by fear alone, that masculine ideals and codes of honor would reveal both the stronger and the nobler aspects of a man even when he was not being watched. Men were able to carve a hard jaw, a stern brow and a proud, noble chin for mankind because they knew themselves. They knew how to shape a head that fit the body of a Man. Embodied Man had a rich and sustaining bloodline; he lived and thrived in the context of history and Tradition.

“Modern,” headless man has no life-sustaining bloodline. Women and men with counter-masculine, alien, anti-Western agendas have successfully severed him from his history of heroes, ideals, and the world of masculine Tradition. Traditional Man is their fearsome enemy, the agent of their supposed oppression and the Man to blame for all violence and what they call injustice. Their project is one of ressentiment –to cast the heroic Traditional man as the ultimate villain, and to ennoble their own set of “virtues” as the ideal.

(T)he problem with the other origin of the “good,” of the good man, as the person of ressentiment has thought it out for himself, demands some conclusion. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, “These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,–should he not be good?” then there is nothing to carp with in this ideal’s establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, “We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

The wealth and luxury of the modern world have made possible an age of the lamb, and oh how the eagle is cursed!

Women, the weakest men, men with an exploited sense of chivalry. and misguided advocates for men are struggling to fashion a sheep’s head for the eagle. But that project, too, is an unnatural, bloodless monstrosity. Frankenstein’s work. The head doesn’t fit. The body of Man rejects it, shrugs it off and remains headless. The enemies of Men toil under the assumption that the age of the sheep will last forever, and that the eagle must don a sheep’s head if he is to survive at all.

Forever is a very long time.

The project for Traditional Man is first an archeological one. He venture out onto the lake of ice and recovers the frozen remains of Man’s severed head. What follows is an anthropological project. He must study paleo-masculinity; he must reverse engineer the head and understand the mechanics of masculinity as it functioned before Man’s beheading. He must understand what came before, and repair his connection with his bloodline.

The sheep are crafting a world and a “modern” masculinity meant only for sheep. Eagles have no place in it.

But the age of sheep can’t last forever. It is artificially ordered, unbalanced, unsustainable. The meek have inherited the earth, but by the very nature of their meekness they will be unable to keep it.

Traditional Man must find and keep his head, his manhood’s redoubt. It is difficult to find and walk a path of honor in a world that is hateful to honor. It’s a lonely path. But ultimately, every man is alone with his Honor.

Ennio Morricone is playing.

Eventually, an Interphase will come.

And another Age of Eagles.

Alternative Right, March 21, 2010

How Judaism is like getting jumped into a gang:

The ritual of getting jumped into a gang goes like this: the group beats the crap out of you, then if they decide you took it well, then they are all your “gang brothers” or whatever. They’re your best friends, and I would imagine a new gang member is “showered” with congratulations.

A Jewish baby boy also goes through the ritual of Punishment/Pain at birth, and then “showered with gifts” at 13 years old. They are made to understand that “membership has its privileges.” Deep in the psyche there is a memory of the extremely painful cutting. This lets them know “who’s the boss.”

Anybody who says babies don’t feel that, and/or they don’t remember it, is deluded. It’s like saying the fish doesn’t feel the hook. It’s a typical “break you down, build you back up,” cycle, not unlike military basic training.

There is a broad concept called “trans-humanism.” I believe the reason that Jewry has surpassed Christendom in global power, is because Jewry has encouraged trans-humanist enhancements in its members, while Christian ministers have feared competition for their collection plates.

What is Transhumanism?

From Wikipedia:

Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. Transhumanists look to biotechnologies and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Dangers, as well as benefits, are also of concern to the transhumanist movement.

The term “transhumanism” is symbolized by H+ or h+ and is often used as a synonym for “human enhancement”. Although the first known use of the term dates from 1957, the contemporary meaning is a product of the 1980s when futurists in the United States began to organize what has since grown into the transhumanist movement. Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label “posthuman.” Transhumanism is therefore sometimes referred to as “posthumanism” or a form of transformational activism influenced by posthumanist ideals.

The transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives. Transhumanism has been described by one critic, Francis Fukuyama, as the world’s most dangerous idea, while one proponent, Ronald Bailey, counters that it is the “movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity.”

Arno Breker's "Bereitschaft" ("Readiness")

A very familiar example of trans-humanism is bodybuilding, or physical conditioning in general. This of course was eventually permitted by Christianity, and you had the “muscular Christians.”

My own father was a prime example. He was a YMCA director and all-around athlete, from gymnastics to soccer to skiing to swimming.

However, there was an implicit sense that there were “normal methods” of self-improvement, like the weight room, and then there were the methods of “the weirdos,” the “non-Western” styles of self-improvement, such as the housewives in the leotards doing yoga.

Power is Good, Weakness is Evil

Eventually I became so enamored of the possibility of self improvement that I lost all taboos. Anything that made me more powerful, I decided, was good.

For years I listened to Jay Hughes’ “Change Surfer Radio,” and didn’t realize to what degree I myself was a transhumanist. I dismissed the term as “for weirdos” because it sounded too much like “transsexual.” When Jay Hughes talked about the Terminator movies as extreme examples of transhumanism, it suddenly made sense.

Hughes also talked about “breeding 160 IQ perfect Nordics, and this might not be a good thing for a radically democratic society. Rich people might breed themselves into Aryan overlords.”

Don’t laugh — we already have the technology. All it takes is for someone who isn’t held back by the “implicit Christian minister” wagging his index finger, saying, “that’s too weird.”

The whole aspect of Christianity that says, “Don’t go there,” is why the Middle Ages was “1,000 years without a bath.” Bathing was considered “ungodly,” i.e., “transhumanist.” It was paganistic, unnecessary self-improvement for the pious.

If there is a trigger in your brain that says, “Nah, that’s too weird.” That’s the same impulse that told us not to take a bath for 1,000 years. Dissassemble that implanted, alien circuit and throw it away.

Turn on a new circuit, one that’s already in your brain. It’s the one that says, “anything that gives me power, is good.”

The dominance of the current order depends on “implicit Christianity” that’s been implanted in us since Sunday school. It’s that in you which shrinks from the Will to Power, from a fanatic, obsessive striving for dominance.

If words like “power, fanatic, obsessive, dominance” bother you, that’s the implicit Christian minister in the back of your head. Turn him off. Imagine in your mind that he’s wagging his finger at you. Laugh at him, and then take him like a rag doll and throw him out of your brain.

In his place, put Arnold Schwarzenegger saying in his Austrian accent, “That which makes me more powerful, is good. That which weakens me, is bad.”

Learn from the Enemy

I figured this out from studying the enemy. Leftist Jews have taken great advantage of this “implicit Christian” impulse, even while practicing transhumanism and a religion of power themselves. Their power lies in controlling us.

This doesn’t mean someone like Tim Wise doesn’t “believe” in what he preaches. He has to. To hypnotize someone, you have to believe it yourself. He’s able to believe in something, that he knows is a “beneficial fraud,” or a “noble lie.”

Let us ask what Tim Wise thinks is “bad.” From the paragraph below we see “dominance” on the part of Whites is his “ultimate evil.” Good whites will “roll over and show their belly.” Good Jews do the opposite, of course.

Good (Christian) whites avoid that “weird transhumanism” stuff. Good (Christian) whites don’t want to “dominate” because we’re all equal now. Even secular liberal types claim that seeking dominance just “perpetuates the cycle of dominance.” Well, duh. It’s not going away. Anybody who voluntary gives up striving for dominance is going to end up a slave . . . literally. Even if they are able to live all peaceful and hippie now in the woods of Oregon, if we get an ANC style colored government in the US, there will be as much peace for them as there is for the Whites of the former Rhodesia.

If Rhodesia/Zimbabwe is a bad outcome, then anything that leads to that is bad, or perhaps downright evil. Volunteering to submit is EVIL. It’s the wrong decision, in every way. The Christian minister, or the Tim Wise, telling you to “give up your power,” is your executioner.

So what is good? Let’s ask Arnold again:

“That which makes me more powerful, is good. That which weakens me, is bad.”

I watch Jews. I saw how they live in Boston. They are really into everything that Christians were discouraged from doing. Self-enhancement, selfishness, collective-mindedness. Sure they are a bunch of neurotics, but if you laugh at Woody Allen, you’re missing the Jew who’s taken over your culture. I’m sure as hell not laughing.

We can learn from the enemy, what ideals to have, by seeing what they fear. Tim Wise gave away the store when he wrote the below paragraph, my comments in parentheses:

http://www.laprogressive.com/rankism/obama-black-voters-and-the-myth-of-reverse-racism/

But for members of groups that have not been subordinated to “think with their skin” or their racial identity is quite a bit different, and more problematic. For dominant group members to engage in racial bonding only makes sense as a way to maintain dominance [to maintain a sane society where 14 year old white girls don't get pregnant or infected with HIV from black males]. It can’t be about “getting a piece of the pie,” since such persons already have access to it, and pieces galore; rather, it has to be about preventing others from getting their [pieces of white flesh], from taking parts of the pie to which the dominant group had come to feel entitled (of course. We own ourselves as a Racial Family. No other races may claim a piece of us) It is not to seek a place at the table, but to seek to secure the table you already have from the intrusion of others [just as we prevent intrusion into our own homes, so we prevent intrusion into our gene pool and the piece of the Planet Earth our race needs to survive]. White bonding, in other words, amounts to racism because it is redundant: it amounts to having those who are already largely in control, secure that control in perpetuity. It results in the maintenance of racial inequity [Blaming us for inequalities in natural endownment], unequal opportunity and massive disparities in access and life chances [Welcome to Planet Earth]. Black and brown bonding, on the other hand, is about gaining access [and sustaining Jewish Dominance as the gate-openers for the blacks and browns and rulers over whites], securing a spot, and collectively lifting up members of subordinated communities to a place where they can compete as equals with those who have always been in charge [can they compete as equals if they aren't equals?]. There is nothing supremacist or racist about that at all, unless one presumes that–as Jesse Jackson and others have long said–there is no fundamental difference between a “Welcome” mat and a “No Trespassing” sign [synagogues and Jewish yeshiva schools display the latter].

Weakness . . . in us . . . is evil. Weakness leads to Zimbabwe. It leads to Nushawn Williams infecting a dozen white teenaged girls with AIDS and impregnating 6 of them, and of course this has happened a million times over since 1997.

To overcome our implanted programming, our “implicit Christianity,” we have to kill the Christian minister in our subconscious, and replace him with a religion of power.

The Jewish rabbi in the back of the head of every Jew is always saying, “Is it good for the Jews?”

We need a new superego, a new divine-consciousness, that says Yes to power and dominance, rather than shrinking from it like a coward. We must end the vestigial “thousand years without a bath” thinking and cultivate a transhumanist religion of power.

Last time I saw Jonathan Bowden, I asked him how he was. His answer, delivered with bared teeth and so typical of him, elicited peals of laughter from Bowden himself, “I am always superb and getting stronger!” Bowden, you see, loves an audience, but he is quite able to entertain himself without one, as the second volume of his art eloquently shows.

The present volume differs substantially from the first, which I reviewed last November: where the latter compiled the artist’s adult work, the former compiles his juvenilia, covering his childhood through to his majority.

And what is it that we find between its covers? Anybody who has met Jonathan Bowden and spoken to him for any length of time will easily guess the answer: comic strips, of course! What we have here is a 200-page coffee table book bulging with comic strips, or graphic novels, drawn by a fervid, truculent little boy, obsessed with power and violence, with a brain the size of a planet balanced on a toothpick.

Unfortunately, as in Volume 1, we are deprived of a full-length, scholarly introduction, so, to gain a deeper understanding of his early output, one has to go directly to the artist’s maw. My initial attempts resulted in a couple of profuse emails from Bowden, replete with erudite references and overflowing with theoretical verbiage.

His efforts were highly entertaining, of course, and gave me a flavor of the sort of introduction he would like to have added to a future edition of his art books: obviously, a lengthy, esoteric text of such impenetrable density as to require nanonic circuitry implanted on the brain to permit a modicum of comprehension; a text, needless to say, bursting with quotes from, or mention of, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Carlyle, D. H. Lawrence, Grünewald, Balthus, Bacon, and Buffet, and comprised of epic, syntactically-complex sentences with enough sesquipedalophilia to titillate even an excessive logovore like Alexander Theroux.

Yet, to me this was insufficient, for such introductions, interesting as they may be on a hyper-intellectual plane, often obscure more than they clarify. A game of cat and mouse thus ensued, with me attempting to corkscrew useful biographical data from Bowden, an insatiable orator who is permanently on stage, even when he has an audience of one. My efforts yielded interesting results.

It is impossible to imagine Bowden as a child. For one, he has looked forty years of age since he was eighteen (visit his website and browse through his gallery, if you doubt me). For another, he appears barely human: whereas Tomislav Sunic is so down to earth that he will happily receive visitors in slippers and pajama, Jonathan Bowden is the exact opposite, to the point where one decides that he probably sleeps with his shoes on, wearing a suit and tie, in a coffin, with his eyes wide open.

But a boy he was, once upon the time, and the following anecdote will give you an idea of the kind of little monster his patient parents had to put up with. In 1972, when Bowden was 10, he witnessed a man slip on a banana peel, strategically placed by life on a high street pavement. The man, morbidly obese, fell with such force that he dove straight into a shop window, which shattered and rained a million pieces all over the man’s face. The demon child burst out laughing, of course, and roared with gleeful hilarity, his short body convulsing in a paroxysm of decachinating sadism as his pointed finger drew attention to the source. Bowden tells that this went on for so long that his mother deemed it necessary to scold him publicly. “Don’t laugh, Jonathan” she apparently said, “Don’t you see that the poor man is suffering?” Like a true Nietzschean, Jonathan replied, “But that’s why it’s funny!”

Such scorn for the Christian values of empathy and compassion is evident in every story contained in this volume. It is clear that Bowden was heavily influenced by Marvel comics, and his graphic novels faithfully reproduce all the expected tropes: ghoulish, power-crazed villains; mad science; ornamental women; a tardy and rather useless police force; and an indefatigable, unconquerable hero.

What is significant, however, is that his chosen alter ego happens to be Iron Man. (One smiles knowingly at the thought: how could it be any different?)

What is more, his stories are crammed, and indeed self-consciously make a virtue of, ruthless violence – and this violence does not result from a moral struggle of good versus evil, but from a struggle for power between subhuman and superhuman. Where the villains possess superhuman powers, they are specializations suggestive of science or nature pushed to its most grotesque limits. In this titanic struggle, ordinary citizens are, needless to say, helpless, and political leaders weak, corrupt, and irrelevant.

Indeed, there is evidence of political as well as linguistic precocity, as we find here references to American political crises from the early 1970s, such as the energy crisis and the Watergate Tapes. It is impossible not to notice that these references are all negative, all linked to weak and/or corrupt political leadership, so we can conclude also that political precocity and contempt towards democratic politics came at an early age. (Then again, is this surprising, when one considers that Bowden grew up in a decade when there were brownouts, three-day weeks, and frequent labor strikes?) This is where we notice the divergence between the Marvel original and Bowden’s reinterpretation.

Another area where Bowden’s personality is felt is in two facets that in his adulthood were channeled into segregated media: coloring technique and torrential verbosity. The latter is just as prominent as the violence, and each page carries a great deal of text, coming from three sources: the character’s mouths, the character’s minds, and Jonathan Bowden, the invisible and irrepressible narrator. The individual stories follow relatively elaborate plots, carrying narrative threads that are – or were intended to be – ongoing and involving numerous, interacting characters.

The coloring technique, on the other hand, attempts to mimic that of the old Marvel strips, but ends up being almost an abstraction: Bowden used color pencils rather lightly before applying a black marker to highlight outlines and shadows. This he did very intricately and belaboredly, to the point where each page ended up looking like Roy Lichtenstein doing an impression of Jackson Pollock. Save for the vignette outlines, we find few straight lines and it is all executed rather nervously and obsessively.

This reveals the dual nature of Bowden’s personality: one side is inclined towards madness, chaos, brute force, excess, raw emotion, and hyper-individualism; the other side is inclined towards meticulousness, fastidiousness, authority, and order (the latter is quite apparent in his electronic communication, where even mobile text messages are impeccably formatted, punctuated, and grammatical). These two tendencies form a tense and turbulent nexus that many probably perceive as dangerously unstable and volatile: I would not be surprised if, while in education, his coevals saw him as a gifted loner and a loose cannon. He certainly seems to have spent a great deal of time drawing these graphic novels.

Is it original? Evidently, like most children, Bowden had no conception of copyright – and like most gifted children, his brain was like a sponge, like that alien blob that gobbles and grows, ready to absorb anything that came in its way. In this case, it was, for reasons as yet unclear, Marvel comics. That he responded to them in the way that he did seems now almost inevitable, given what we know about him now: this is the man, after all, who caricatures everyone, cartoonifies every situation, and extrapolates and exaggerates everything to the limits of the absurd, the monstrous, and the insane; for whom each moment in life is a vignette in a Nietzschean comic strip.

Yet, as can be inferred from my discussion, it is possible to see where Bowden departs from his original inspiration and begins to assert his own vision, however derivative it might have been in his childhood years. This is really the most important aspect of this volume, for, otherwise, it is all quite haphazard, with the unfinished and overlapping plotlines, the randomness, and the omissions that are typical of an age when one tends to bore easily and divert attention each time a novel stimulus comes along.

The preservation of this early work is rather remarkable, given its age (indeed some of it is quite degraded) and the fact that parents tend to dispose of at least a part of a child’s possessions every time they move. Obviously, this proto-portfolio was both jealously guarded by Bowden and ignored by his progenitors. Bowden tells me that his parents were never really interested in his pop art and that, in fact, they rather disapproved of it. They thought that it would “warp” his mind. If Bowden was anything like me, he would have replied: “The fact that I am drawing it suggests my mind is already warped; and since you made me, you only have yourselves to blame!”

The Art of Jonathan Bowden, vol. 2 can be obtained through the artist’s website for a modest sum. The miser, the hostile, and the impecunious, however, can view the totality of the images, entirely free of charge as well.

"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.

Kdo by měl vládnout?

Každý den, když si prohlížím internetové zpravodajství a diskusní servery, vidím, že otázka, jak by se měla rekrutovat skutečná vládnoucí elita, je ostrým bodem sváru mezi politickými komentátory. Až dosud jsem neměl osobně k problematice příliš co říci. Nechci ostatním vnucovat svůj názor. Být politikem by nevyhovovalo mé spíše introvertní povaze, je to úkol, který radši přenechám jiným. Bude lepší se tedy skutečně podívat na podstatu věci, než pokračovat v kypění debat bez znalosti patřičných souvislostí.

Zastánci Nietzscheho

Jak zde jistě každý bude vědět, zastánci a příznivci filosofa Friedricha Nietzscheho jsou jeho zanícenými obdivovateli a poněkud nezvykle interpretují teorie svého vzoru. Věří v kastovní systém kněží, válečníků a rolníků (dělníků), sami sebe jako součást úzké skupinky vyvolených, kteří by tvořili vládnoucí elity ve vysněném etnicky homogenním státě. Každý z nich věří, že každý člověk má svou niternou podstatu, panskou nebo otrockou, dominantní, či submisivní a od tohoto základu odvozují morální systém, korespondující s prvotním rozdělením lidí na silné a slabé. Tak jako Nietzsche hlásal „panskou morálku“, jeho zastánci chtějí o tom, kdo bude vládnout, rozhodovat „vyšší typ člověka“ a skoncovat s liberální demokracií.

Zastánci Thomase Jeffersona

Ve Spojených státech představují tito lidé nejpočetnější část konzervativních a národních kruhů. Z jejich pohledu je nejlepší vláda ta, která má nejmenší moc. Na americkém systému nespatřují apriorně nic špatného. Věří ve stát a lokální vládu a instinktivně oponují shromažďování moci ve Washingtonu. Jeffersonovi zastánci by rádi přičetli úpadek porodnosti a civilizační pokles korumpujícími tlaku vnějších sil, jmenovitě Židů (či Izraeli) a argumentují, že rozumná rasová politika (založená na odmítnutí imigrace, pozn. překl.) by například mohla po odstranění této rakoviny vyvést Ameriku ze společenských potíží. V jeffersoniánském systému by byla vládnoucí elita delegována lokálními volby a hromaděním národního bohatství.

Zastánci Alexandra Hamiltona

Podobně jako zastánci Jeffersona, tak i zastánci pojetí AlexanderaHamiltona stále věří v republikánskou (samo)vládu, ale na rozdíl od prvně jmenovaných preferují silný, centralizovaný stát, oslabující lidský individualismus. Namísto volného obchodu, požadují „America First“, tedy víceméně soběstačnou obchodní politiku. Zastánci Hamiltona podporují silný veřejný sektor a regulovaný trh s cílem zabezpečit rovnocennou distribuci bohatství. Věří, že ústavní reformy mohou zbrzdit, nebo zastavit kulturní a etnický úpadek západní civilizace. Vládnoucí elitu by formovaly volby a akumulace bohatství v soukromé sféře.

Libertariáni

Libertariáni jsou podmnožinou zastánců Jeffersona, kteří věří v minimální stát. Tvrdí, že jediná funkce státu, která by měla příslušet státu, je ochrana práv jednotlivce: čili policie, armáda a soudy. Libertariáni odmítají veškeré pokrokářství devatenáctého století ve jménu individuální svobody. V ideálním libertariánském státě by se vládnoucí elita legitimizovala skrze participaci na tržní ekonomice a jako vládnoucí moc by byla omezena striktní Ústavou.

Fašisté

Fašisté (zahrnující nacionální socialisty a další různorodé odrůdy fašismu) požadují autoritativní stát v čele s mocným vůdcem s pokud možno absolutní mocí. Rádi by se zřekli liberální demokracie a nahradili ji vládou hierarchizované, režimu věrné byrokracie. Tato koncentrace moci a síly by byla užita ke zbavení se pro fašistický stát nežádoucích elementů (různých politických odpůrců, etnických skupin – Židů, atp.). Vládnoucí stav by se delegoval z vládnoucí strany, jejíž představitelé by zároveň tvořili lídry establishementu.

Platonisté

Nemohu najít lepšího slova, ale „Platonisté“ jsou v zásadě ti, kdo obhajují pravidla, stanovená Vládcem. Vládci budou vybírání na základě svého chování a morální hodnoty.

Konzervativní nacionalisté

Konzervativní nacionalisté věří v silnou, obrozenou vládu Christianitas. V podstatě to znamená, že požadují stát, postavený na hodnotách Evangelia. Někteří konzervativní nacionalisté preferují republiku, jiní monarchii, někteří teokratickou diktaturu. Ve všech případech je vládnoucí vrstva úzce spjata se zbožností.

Monarchisté

Požadují vládu krále a dědičné aristokracie. Vládnoucí vrstva je odvozena z královské krve.

Anarchisté

Chtějí zcela odstranit jakoukoli vládu. V jimi navrhovaném stavu není žádná vláda, politika neexistuje a stejně tak žádný mechanismus pro selekci elit. V beztřídní společnosti jsou si všichni teoreticky rovni.

Kde stojím já?

Po tomto výčtu nezbývá než zformulovat vlastní odpověď na vytyčenou otázku.
Politicky někde mezi Hamiltoniány a Platonisty. Domnívám se, že vláda může být dobrým silovým prostředkem v situaci, kdy potřebujeme mít silný stát k odvrácení invaze masového přistěhovalectví. Republikánský systém je osvědčený model pro zajištění kontinuity a mírovou výměnu moci. Myslím, že bychom nebyli moudří, kdybychom se těchto jistot vzdávali ve jménu některých vratkých idejí, vyjmenovaných výše.

Nejhorší aspekty republikanismu však spočívají v obchodovatelnosti s ústavními principy. Osobně například nevěřím v rovnost volebního práva. V mé osobní, hypotetické, ideální republice, by bylo případnému rozšíření volebního práva vyhověno jen za určitých podmínek. Volič by musel být inteligentní, kompetentní a mít určité morální minimum, postačující k tomu, aby využil privilegia generovat svou volbou vládnoucí elitu. Také vládnoucí vrstva by měla více moci než „lid“.

Z morálního (nikoli tedy politického) hlediska mě v těchto otázkách ovlivnil Alasdair MacIntyre. Stejně jako on, i já věřím, že morálka má smysl vždy pouze v určitém kontextu etablovaných tradic. Na světě máme celou řadu morálních řádů, každý z nich má vlastní historii, každý z nich vzešel z odlišných předpokladů a odlišných počátků. Je nemožné snažit se najít společný jmenovatel ideální vlády mezi nesouměřitelnými tradicemi a sdílenými morálkami jednotlivých společností.

Myslím, že současný stav západní morálky se stal obětí katastrofy, popsané MacIntyrem v předmluvě knihy „After Virtue“: ovládáme pouze malé části našeho koherentního morálního systému, termíny, které ztratily svůj kontext, když se jednou stali hodnověrnými a že racionálně uvažující jedinci jsou odkloněni do nihilismu tímto zmatkem. Nejsou zde žádné univerzální, objektivně platné morální principy analogické zákonům vědy. Namísto toho se morální filosofie stala praktickou vědou a popřela tak své poslání, o kterém hovořil Aristoteles: je to návod k tomu, jak realizovat daný ideál dobra. Jinými slovy, věřím tomu, že morálka (na jakémkoli stupni a v jakékoli společnosti), je redukovatelná na dobro. To je ale pro jinou diskusi.

To byly mé odpovědi. A jaké jsou vaše?

From Réfléchir & Agir, no. 9 (Summer 2001).

To avoid repeating myself, I must first point out the statement that I made at the beginning of the manifesto Why We Fight. Now let us summarize, following this statement, some suggestions referred to in this manifesto. Because of our historically unprecedented situation, I recommend a strategy inspired by certain revolutionary leaders whose names need not be mentioned.

1. First off, it is important to unify, on a European scale, all the identitarian forces of resistance around a doctrine and a basic revolutionary program.

Ignoring the secondary ideological or emotional quarrels which are often merely the expressions of petty nationalisms and family or sectarian disputes, we should follow Lenin’s counsel to “settle our quarrels after the revolution.” For pity’s sake, it is necessary to cease the oh-so-delicious internal disputes (the rumors, excommunications, and paranoias) and to reserve our blows for the real enemy. We concentrate on the essential, on what brings us together, because we are confronted with an absolute emergency (the Erntsfall, theorized by Carl Schmitt). Look at the Moslems: they cease fighting one another as soon as it is a question of carrying out the Jihad against the infidel.

2. For us the common and main enemy (the one who invades concretely, physically) is the alien colonization and settlement under the banner of Islam; obviously, one can share certain common values with the enemy, but one should not fall into the trap of feeling any sympathy for him. The enemy, moreover, profits from collaborationists — from those good European ethnomasochists who are the most dangerous to us. As for the common adversary (which seeks to weaken and dominate us), it is the United States, the objective ally of the former.

3. Our movement — which is one of radical (and not “extremist”) thought — has a true monopoly on revolutionary dissidence, since we are the only ones who seek a total inversion of the dominant values and civilizational forms (Nietzsche’s Umwertung [transvaluation]).

4. The three pillars of an ideology and project of European unity are (1) awakening an ethnic consciousness that makes defending our common biological heritage, our race, the top priority; (2) the regeneration of ancestral values, the forgetting of which is the main cause of today’s tragedies; and (3) the creative assertion of an all-inclusive and revolutionary European political doctrine.

5. As indicated in the excellent title of your magazine [Réfléchir & Agir], reflection is fundamental, but by the same token it is also necessary to act. But how to act? What is to be done? This is always the key question. We must form a European network of resistance, solidarity, and action around a common ideological program. This should not exclude, but include politics. It is too late now to win power by the ballot box and parliamentary democracy. It is necessary to make the following bet. It is risky like any bet, but it is our only chance in this twilight age: in the next ten to fifteen years there is likely to be a major crisis (“chaos”) which will take the form of an ethnic conflict of great magnitude, probably based on economic impoverishment; this could change the mentality of the masses, who are today force-fed like geese by our neo-totalitarian mass media.

It is a matter, then, of anticipating the “post-chaos,” of preparing for the coming storm by constituting a European network — horizontal, web-like, informal, polymorphic — of revolutionary minorities, a network of solidarity, a European international of resistance and propaganda. “The Network” should not take any name or institutional form. It is what I call the strategy of the cobra. It must stretch, in a clandestine but unshakeable manner, from Portugal to Russia, connecting cadres or elected officials of political parties, associations and circles of all natures, individuals, publishers, businessmen, financiers, net surfers, media people, etc. With three objectives: general agitprop, formation and recruitment, and the acquisition of media. In a word, it must prepare us for the inevitable confrontation. It is a matter of being ready and powerful for that day when the hurricane comes, the hurricane which is our only chance, our only lever to move the world. We also have to stop thinking that “the system is invincible.” It is strong only because of our current weakness and disorganization. Finally, it is necessary to forsake this psychopathic cult of defeat, of the “last stand.” The only people who win are those tragic optimists who think of themselves as the “first stand.”

When such a network exists, it will be time to pass to the next, properly political, stage, which is impossible to plan for today. Let us begin, then, by building our network with patience, determination, and professionalism. And let us cull from our ranks the incompetents, mediocrities, hotheads, and  kooks. For such a network, united around a clear and common doctrine, must above all constitute a rigorous elite. From Resistance to Reconquest, from Reconquest to Revolution.

The root of this consternation was the perception by liberal fanatics that the BBC was lending credibility to the Chairman of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, by giving him a spot on the panel of Question Time. The fact that the BBC’s guidelines require them to host representatives who have achieved a certain level of influence among the electorate is totally irrelevant to this apoplectic rabble hell-bent on censorship.

The frantic attempt by the enemies of Life to silence a critic of their agenda filled me with excitement and anticipation. Many of the machinations of the protesters outside the TV Centre were being broadcast live on BBC News, and their desperation to stop Griffin’s appearance was so transparent that it provoked many thinking men into taking a closer look at Griffin and his ideas.

While I was concerned with whether or not Nick Griffin would make it into the BBC studio safely, I didn’t give much thought to problems that would arise once he was already on the air. I was sure that he would handle himself well once he got his foot in the door. Griffin had sent out an e-mail update, just hours before the broadcast was recorded, in which he stated that the panel, and the audience, of QT would be deliberately stacked against him; however, he said that he was prepared for this and that he would use this vehicle to disseminate our message and cut through the fog of media lies. Right before entering the studio, he said he was prepared for an old-fashioned, political rough-and-tumble.

I assumed that we would see an intelligent, well-educated (Nick is a Cambridge man), polished orator and Political Soldier deliver a life-affirming defense of our Cause, remaining steadfast in the face of blistering criticism. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by Mr. Griffin’s performance on Question Time , and it truly saddens me that such an extraordinary opportunity to reach the British public was squandered.

The program was clearly configured to discredit Nick Griffin, and the usual format of the show was altered in a manner conducive to the witch hunt they sought, by consistently providing traps into which they hoped Griffin would fall; sadly, on more than one occasion, he did just that. David Duke provides some good analysis of the performance on his web site, which I think is worth reading for anyone who aspires to a role of prominence in Identity politics. Whatever your opinion might be of David Duke, he handles the media adroitly, and his exchange with Wolf Blitzer, which aired live on CNN, is legendary.

Griffin knew going into this situation that he was facing a group of people entirely hostile to his perspective, and yet he failed to assumed a posture that fit the situation. Rather than steeling himself for the inevitable hostility and projecting confidence in the face of overwhelming opposition, he sat there sheepishly grinning, staring at the desk, and forcing himself to clap for the other panelists, one of which was a particularly acerbic Negress with a habit of deriding the BNP constituency, and all of whom were obviously tasked with assailing him. Shockingly, they did not return Griffin’s civility. He patiently waited for his turn to speak and allowed each of them to state their opinions clearly, whereas they shouted over him and subjected him to a torrent of verbal abuse.

We, as White Nationalists, must not allow ourselves to swallow, to any degree, the enemy propaganda that we are doing something shameful or dirty by standing up for ourselves, our culture, and our collective identity. When the angry Negress told Griffin that no party in the world is based on “indigenous populations,” he had a perfect opportunity to name some of the many parties in the world with consanguineous prerequisites.

Specifically, he had a chance to touch on Israel: a bigoted, war-mongering, Apartheid state whose outrages should be brought into the public discourse as much as possible. However, as Duke notes, Griffin negated that opportunity by previously stating his support for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. I understand why Griffin does not want to attack the Jews, even if I disagree with this tactic; however, there is a big difference between not attacking Jews and being so philosemitic that you justify Zionist atrocities. What does Griffin hope to achieve by fawning over Israel? Does he think we will ever really achieve support from Jews? Does he think Jewish money comes without strings attached?

Griffin was easily lured into criticism of Muslims and other out-groups, yet he spoke very little about the nature of British Identity, how it is unique, and why it must be safeguarded. He was afforded the chance to defend our heritage and unique nature several times, most notably when the Negress on the panel rejected the notion of indigenous British people and began mumbling about Neanderthals.

We must defend our identity without being lured into disparaging others. We should provide newcomers and lemmings with very common metaphors to which they can relate: “I love my children more than the children of others, but that doesn’t mean I hate other children.” Don’t get into arguments about superiority and inter-cultural value judgments. It’s just not worth the hassle. European people are superior at reproducing other European people, and that is simply a fact. We don’t need to prove anything beyond that; our uniqueness is of intrinsic value and anyone who denies that is trying to deny Life.

Too often, Griffin came across as a dejected outsider peddling the politics of ressentiment. He seemed to lack resolve, and more importantly, Geist. He nodded his head, smiled, and seemed to concur when other panelists suggested that people were voting for the BNP simply out of frustration and a lack of options. The panelists argued that these were not so much votes for the BNP, but rather protest votes against the current system, and Griffin did not seem to challenge this. I was reminded of Nietzsche’s quote from On the Genealogy of Morals:

The slave revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the resentment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what
is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye — this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself — is of the essence of resentment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external environment: it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all –
its action is fundamentally reaction.

How many BNP voters are truly committed to our world-view, and how many vote for the BNP in secrecy and shame, largely to protest the current state of affairs? This is an important question, and one of the reasons why I believe it is vital for us to be strong, determined, and life-affirming in our rhetoric. We must vanquish “the cloud” to which Jonathan Bowden often refers: a cloud which will continue to descend upon us, confusing and distorting our efforts, until we summon the resolve necessary to lift it. Lifting this cloud is an essential first step in the “reevaluation of values” needed in order to restore ourselves to health. Greg Johnson summed up this imperative quite well in a recent e-mail:

We will never save ourselves, much less recover what we have lost, until we have a moral revolution: until we stop apologizing for our ancestors, stop apologizing for ourselves, and start asserting ourselves and our interests — not furtively, sneakily, and apologetically — but righteously, with the unshakable conviction that we make the world a better place. It is the self-assertion that comes naturally to any healthy organism, and if we cannot summon it, then we will be culled as one of nature’s rejects.

We can no longer afford to politely play the games of our enemies, by their rules, hoping to get lucky at some point. We must overturn the tables and expose the sinister rigging beneath it. We must do this boldly and openly, coupling mastery of style with uncorrupted masculine principle. I urge Mr. Griffin to consider the choice outlined by his fellow countryman, Alex Kurtagic, and insist on assuming a place of majesty rather than servitude.

NOTE: The appearance is now available on YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=videos&search_query=BNP+Nick+Griffin+on+BBC+Question&search_sort=video_recently_uploaded

From Occidental Dissent, October 23, 2009

Who should rule?

Logging on this morning, I see that this has once again become a burning issue among the commentators. So far, I haven’t had much to say about the topic. I don’t aspire to rule over anyone. Becoming a politician isn’t a good fit with my introverted personality type. It is a task that I would prefer to leave to others. We have already had one commentator storm off the site because of a controversial turn in this discussion. It is better to discuss the matter now (in its own definitive blog entry) than to have it continue to spill over into unrelated threads.

Nietzscheans

As everyone here knows by now, NeoNietzsche is a passionate admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche and subscribes to a peculiar interpretation of his theories. He believes in a caste system (warrior, cleric, peasant) and sees himself as part of the elect few who should rule in a White Nationalist ethnostate. Following Nietzsche, NN believes everyone has an essential orientation, master or slave, dominant or submissive, and that different moral systems correspond to this primordial mammalian division. As an advocate of “master morality,” he would abolish liberal democracy and confer elite status upon the “higher types” who are naturally born to rule.

Jeffersonians

In the United States, Jeffersonians are the most numerous in White Nationalist circles. In their view, the best type of government is the one that governs least. These people don’t see anything essentially wrong with the American system. They believe in state and local government and instinctively oppose the consolidation of power in Washington. Jeffersonians like to attribute our racial decline to the corrupting influence of outside forces, namely the Jews, and argue that racial sanity would quickly return to America after the excise of this cancer. Under the Jeffersonian system, elite status would be conferred through local elections and the private accumulation of wealth in a capitalist economy.

Hamiltonians

Like the Jeffersonians, the Hamiltonians still believe in republican self government, but prefer a strong, centralized state to a weak one. Instead of free trade, they want an America First trade policy. Hamiltonians support a strong public sector and a regulated market economy to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth. They believe a few constitutional reforms will be sufficient to reverse our racial decline. In their ideal White ethnostate, elite status would also be conferred through elections and wealth accumulation in the private sphere.

Libertarians

The libertarians are a subset of the Jeffersonians who believe in a minimal state. They believe the only function of the state is to protect individual rights: military, police, courts. The libertarians would scrap the entire ediface of twentieth century progressive reforms in the name of liberty. In a libertarian White ethnostate, elite status would be conferred through participation in the market economy, as government would be hamstrung by a strict constitution.

Fascists

The fascists (this includes National Socialists and related species of fascism) want an authoritarian state headed by a dynamic leader with near absolute power. They would dispense with liberal democracy entirely and replace it with a racialized bureaucracy. This concentration of power would be used to rid the fascist ethnostate of Jews and other undesirable elements. Elite status would be conferred through rising in the party and pleasing its established leaders.

Platonists

For lack of a better word, the “Platonists” are White Nationalists who advocate rule by a Guardian caste or order. These Guardians would be chosen through breeding and merit. Exemplary Whites imbued with an unusual dedication to their race would enjoy rights and privileges that other citizens would not.

Christian Nationalists

The Christian Nationalists believe a strong, rejuvenated Christianity is a necessary component of a White ethnostate. In essence, they want an ethnostate based on Christian moral values. Some Christian Nationalists want a republic; some a monarchy; some a theocratic dictatorship. In all cases, elite status would be strongly connected to religious piety.

Monarchists

The monarchists want a king and hereditary aristocracy. Elite status would be conferred through the possession of royal blood.

Anarchists

The anarchists want to dispense with government entirely. In their proposed ethnostate, as there would be no government, politics would not exist and there would be no mechanism for selecting elites. In theory, everyone would be equal in this classless society.

Where I Stand

So, after all this, what is my answer to this question?

Politically, I stand between the Hamiltonians and Platonists. I think that government can be a force for good and that White Nationalists will need a strong central state to repel invasions by our multitude of enemies. The republican system is a proven model for ensuring continuity and the peaceful transfer of power. I think we would be unwise to dispense with it in pursuit of some of the more outré, untested ideas discussed above.

The worst aspects of republicanism can be dealt with through constitutional reforms. For one, I don’t believe in universal voting rights. In my ideal republic, the franchise would only be extended after certain conditions are met. Voters would be required to demonstrate they are intelligent, competent, and moral enough to enjoy the privilege of selecting our leaders. I also believe that the Guardian caste should have more sway than the average citizen. A real electoral college could be set up in which the Guardians could exercise a veto over bad popular selections.

Morally, Alasdair MacIntyre has been the major influence on my views. Like MacIntyre, I believe that morality is only logical within the context of established traditions. There are a number of moral traditions out there, each of them with their own history, each of them having different premisses as their starting point. It is impossible to properly reason across these incommensurate traditions.

I believe our moral discourse has been the victim of the catastrophe described by MacIntyre in the Preface of After Virtue: we only possess fragments of a coherent moral framework, terms which have lost the context which once made them plausible, and that rational people are diverted into nihilism by this disarray. There are no universal, objective moral principles analogous to the laws of science. Instead, moral philosophy is a practical science like Aristotle always claimed it was: it is a how-to guide for actualizing some given ideal. In other words, I believe that morality (at some level) is reducible to aesthetics. That’s a topic for another day.

These are only my answers. What are yours?

From Occidental Dissent, October 20, 2009

Nietzsche –- to speak of his own life -– came from a long line of Lutheran pastors, and there remains a decidedly Protestant cast to his thought. Born in 1844, he specialized in classical philology, wrote his thesis on Theognis, an aristocratic radical, and found himself offered a professorship at the tender age of 24! Enoch Powell happened to be granted a similar academic posting, in Australia, at the same age. Nor need it surprise us that Powell was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, before a decisive turn back to Anglicanism a la T. S. Eliot.

Nietzsche’s first act involved blowing his own discipline wide open. This resulted from issuing The Birth of Tragedy from the press. It effectively sought to kill off his own specialism with one sword thrust to the heart. In it, he posited the dialectic of Apollonian vis-a-vis Dionysian in Greek theater, placed Aeschylus above the other tragedians, and sought in the shambles of the House of Atreus a solution to Western decadence. Like a mortician, he dissected contemporary mores, found them wanting, and offered Wagnerian opera as a lance to an ever-present boil. He soon dispensed with this, given the perennial Christian stance in Parsifal. His Grail lay elsewhere.

How to sum up his thinking? When we recall that the Karl Schlechta edition, in its pomp, runs to eighteen volumes, including poetry and letters. He even composed music, although, rather like Anthony Burgess, it has never been performed. Perhaps, reminiscent of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, he could always hear the threnody welling up in his own ears?

First up, he declared that God is dead in men’s minds, and that mortal life must be totally visualized at our level. Second, he asserted the non-normative or spendthrift quality of truth, but denied relativism through the epistemology of a Strong Man’s hammer. Rather like the circus, did not life beat out its meaning on a purposive anvil? Next, or third in our trajectory, he uttered the prophecy of the Superman; the one who exists beyond Good and Evil, and who will recreate intention by utilizing the masses as putty. Contrary to democratic license, he sees life as quintessentially divided into masters and slaves. Which group do you identify with, or, in the words of the Kentucky miners’ anthem from the nineteen-forties, ‘whose side are you on, boy, whose side are you on?’ To follow: he notates Will to Power, or desire to control energy within a form, as a relocation of teleology or future perfect. If we might adapt the Tofflers, it is not a future shock — merely a shocking future. Again, and to close, he requires all of this to be foregrounded by the Endless Return, so as to cheat death by a karmic insistence not on reincarnation but on Renaissance.

To him, existence was a bullet passing through screens, life is death, all circumstances recur, ethical insight remains pagan, aesthetics constitutes a new master class, pity can be characterized as the sentimentality of worms, and Spencer’s natural fallacy isn’t one. In other words, Might constitutes right, the world is as it should be, heroic struggle mitigates stoicism, and suffering must be lightly borne with aristocratic sang-froid. It might even be Schadenfreude . . .  For him, Christianity as a mass faith will perish, but the little people deeply require it as a socialist opiate, held aloft with feminine compassion, and beholden to one Hippy’s auto-da-fe.

All of these ideas were put forward in a series of books, from Untimely Meditations to Ecce Homo, the autobiography at life’s end. An existence whose closure, almost scripted by Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, ended in madness due to tertiary syphilis. Contrary to the thesis of My Sister and I, a forgery, this was probably contracted from a brothel during his student days. Try to imagine the thesis of Ibsen’s Ghosts, when crossed with the anti-metaphysics of Epstein’s Rock-drill.

For Nietzsche, unlike Evola in his revolt against modernity, preaches a type of modernism which is subtly different. One that revolves around an illiberal and elitist rendition of modern life — its acceptance, its merging in, its energization, its over-coming. Finally, accompanied by the eagle who evinces courage and the pet snake who beguiles wisdom, Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s Aryan sage, wanders out into the mountains to face Life.

A signification of death . . . or is it the coming of a great Noon-time?

Note: In biology, “adaptive” means (very precisely) promoting the survival and reproduction of an organism’s genes. “Natural selection” is the logical and empirical process whereby forces of nature affect the survival and reproduction of some genes over others. The terms, “natural selection” and “selection pressures” (particular causes of selection) help one think clearly.

Many of us remember getting the message about Social Darwinism during the Franz Boas-dominated second half of the twentieth Century. According to Boasians, the behavior of humans is remarkably exempt from biological forces and is instead governed mainly by social constructs. Thus humans can achieve utopian peacefulness and universal altruism by developing the appropriate cultural mores. In contrast, Social Darwinism was the idea that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” so that we might as well go along with it, along with all the other animals, and be as ruthless as we like: kill, kill, kill!! Ruthlessness would be a natural, thoroughly acceptable lifestyle since it is part of what we inherit rather than learn, and it would be unnatural to keep trying to override such built-in tendencies. If we inherited them, they must be adaptive and therefore good.

But the social learning advocates explained to us that just because, say, a tornado, was natural didn’t mean we had to like it. That would be the flawed logic of confounding the empirical with the moral — confusing “what is” with “what should be.” It was also pointed out that much of Darwinian evolution occurs not through bloody battles but via such non-violent processes as mutations for, say, better digestion of milk in adulthood and better immune systems. No “red in tooth and claw” there. “Survival of the fittest” was declared a tautology, meaning only that those organisms that ended up having the most surviving and reproducing offspring were, in modern biology’s jargon, the “fittest” — but only because “fittest” no longer meant that the “fittest” somehow deserved to survive, or might be expected to survive, but only that they in fact did survive.

The book under review, Might Is Right . . . , (MIR), would certainly be considered by many to be the reductio ad absurdum of ninteenth-century Social Darwinism. “Ragnar Redbeard” (RR) was evidently greatly enamored of Darwin’s theory of natural selection including sexual selection (in which choice of mate by both males and females influences which genes are propagated) despite the fact that he, like Darwin, could not have known about genes or modern molecular biology. Nevertheless he manifested an intuitive understanding of one important modern term, “inclusive fitness”: “A man’s family is . . . part of himself. Therefore his natural business is to defend it, as he would his own life” (p. 49).

“Ragnar Redbeard” was a pen name, but whoever he was, he was an extremely well-informed, erudite person, albeit with a rather florid literary style which might be off-putting for some readers. I came to find both style and content quite amusing. In fact, it occurred to me more than once that I was reading a satire, one suitably embellished by esoteric Biblical references and Victorian phraseology: a worthy companion to Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.

On the other hand, suppose MIR was not a satire. Then why would anyone in the twenty-first century look twice at such a book? One reason would be the emergence today of a rethinking of conventional wisdoms: in economics (OK, communism is out, but aren’t there big problems with unregulated market economies, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and fractional reserve banking?), in politics (what happened to the Republican Party and “true conservatives”?), human nature (we don’t all have the same IQ?), or race relations (diversity is not a utopia?). Much of this rethinking is taking place on the internet, of course.

Some have even concluded late in their lives that they’ve been the butt of a big ideological con game. They eventually realize that humans, either individually or in groups, cannot possibly be at all “equal” except in the restricted sense of each person theoretically having one vote (“one idiot, one vote”). And is “democracy” really all that sacred? Instead of living under a dictatorship of one man, we have a dictatorship of a majority manipulated by Hollywood, the mainstream media, and obscure elites. But many of us have given up on utopias and now simply want to obtain or defend a half-decent way of life which we are awake enough now to see is severely threatened if not already lost — given the ubiquity of muggings, rapes, and car-jackings in US cities, the Wall Street shakedowns, the dumbing down of schools. So, having had so many of our assumptions about what is “right” or “good” turned up-side-down, maybe we should re-examine “Social Darwinism” too.

So consider several issues raised in MIR.

Much of MIR focuses, albeit a bit repetitively, on what RR perceives as an unending history of horrible treatment meted out by humans on their enemies and the logical and empirical imperative of relying on “might” in the normal course of human affairs. He probably commits one empirical excess in an especially misanthropic diatribe in Chapter IV: While stating that the story of Jews stealing and murdering Christian infants in order to use their blood for Passover rituals is a myth, he accepts as fact an exceedingly high estimate of the frequency of human cannibalism — perhaps understandably given the dearth of reliable anthropological evidence 100 years ago.

Now, the anti-Social Darwinists complain that evolution and natural selection are not always so horribly bloody. Quite right. However, that does not mean that violence is never adaptive. Consider Genghis Khan whose Y chromosome has been found by geneticists to be so widespread across Asia due to the fact that the leaders of the Mongol armies controlled the women in the areas they conquered.

Actually, RR may be advocating “power” more than bloody battles, thus helpfully broadening the concept of might. No one has to tell us that power is extremely important to human lives, but again, we should pay attention. This issue is at the heart of a recent debate between Eric P. Kaufman and Kevin MacDonald concerning the precipitous decline of the West and of WAS(P) and Northern European dominance of the United States.

RR is quite successful in demonstrating the ubiquity of power relations, and then is surprisingly convincing in his argument that striving for power is not only an essential and inevitable feature of life but is highly desirable as a course of action for any man wanting to make a success of his life (RR seems to be addressing primarily males.)

About equality: one of RR’s main messages is that there is no such thing, in any practical sense, and never will be; the idea of “equal rights” is nonsensical. Instead, people vary in their abilities and other characteristics all over the lot. People have always been and always will be in a state of competition; so that the only thing to do, really, is to strive to compete as well as one can and forget about ever being treated equally. The only way to be treated as one would like is to have the power to enforce such treatment.

An obvious implication for Whites in the West is that anyone happily waiting for other races and ethnies to treat us “equally” or even well, once they take over (very soon) as majorities in the US and Europe, is an illusion. With the votes they will simply run our countries as they see fit and to hell with us.

STOP!! Devout Christians will find the next paragraphs offensive! Read at your own risk!

RR provides an extraordinarily articulate, and to me hilarious, critique of Jesus Christ and Christianity. Might-makes-right being his number one rule, he has nothing but contempt for Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and celebration of the weak, the poor, the miserable. RR values the courageous, the powerful, the ruthless. Why in the world would any sane person value, desire, or want to emulate what Christ recommended?

[W]e must either abandon our reason or abandon Christ…All that is enervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies — all that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces. . . . He praises “the humble” and he curses the proud. He blesses the failures and damns the successful. All that is noble he perverts — all that is atrocious he upholds. He inverts all the natural instincts of mankind and urges us to live artificial lives . . . he advises his admirers to submit in quietness to every insult, contumely [outrage], indignity; to be slaves, de-facto. . . . this preacher of all eunuch-virtues — of self-abasement, of passive suffering. (p. 7)

Anyone who wonders if Christianity is fundamentally a malevolent Jewish stratagem for emasculating goyim will find this treatise exhilarating. Everything within the Christian church seems designed simply to fleece the flock:

The bliss of a sheep! How superlatively delightful? How divinely glorious? And a Jew as the Good Shepard, who leadeth his lambs ‘to green pastures, and quiet resting places, the pleasant waters by.’ . . . For two thousand years or so, his fleecy flocks have been fattening themselves up with commendable diligence — for the shearing-shed and the butchers-block.” (p. 14)

With RR, not even the “golden rule” goes unscathed — on the grounds that it makes no sense to follow it given that no one else does. Shades of the alternative “Golden Rule”: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

The theme extends to practical politics where “deceitful Ideals are cunningly woven by dexterous political spiders, to capture and exploit swarms of human flies” (p. 18). He follows with a searing analysis of America’s “Declaration of Independence” which he says begins with “an unctuous falsehood, a black, degrading, self-evident lie — a lie which no one could possibly believe but a born fool. With insolent effrontery it brazenly proclaims as ‘a self-evident truth’ that ‘all men are created equal’ and that they are ‘endowed by their Creator’ with certain inalienable rights’” (p. 19). The subsequent . . . “democracy” as practiced by Americans is viewed as an elaborate con game, a view that should strike a chord after the recent bank bailouts and the Iraq war.

We must then ask ourselves: Is the extreme altruism advocated by Christianity at all responsible for the West “giving away the farm”? Think about Teddy Kennedy and his Jewish associates who opened up America to immigration from the whole world.

RR’s attack on Christianity and “equality” of course begs the question of alternatives. As a friend recently remarked:

While many people (in our movement and without) sneer at what they see as an emotional crutch for weaklings, the fact remains that the birthrate is closely correlated with a hopeful, optimistic view of life. No society has ever been able to function without a religion. And it is most unlikely that anyone will be able to create a religionless society in the future.

If that is true, and this writer agrees, a major contribution to the survival of our people, the indigenous people of the British Isles and Europe including those who migrated to the Western Hemisphere, would be to develop a religious alternative to Christianity. Such a religion would regard the survival of our people as its primary sacred goal and hopefully would be more consistent with scientific knowledge. It would establish communities of the like-minded of common ethny (as Jews have done). It would develop either new rituals or utilize those imagined as originating in pagan or Druidic times. Perhaps, as a friend suggests, some existing Christian communities, especially those whose main goal is “community,” could be gradually “retro-fitted” along these lines. Keep the harmless features of Christianity, especially the European cultural details, but throw out or simply ignore everything that RR is making fun of.

What then do we now make of the main issue raised by MIR, the relationship between “what is and what ought”? RR seems to be saying that “what is” (e.g., human ruthlessness) determines directly “what ought.”

First, we should note that evolutionary biologists/psychologists have in recent years argued strongly that our values and morals do originate in aspects of human nature (what is) that evolved biologically. Actually, David Hume pretty much figured this out back in the eighteenth century. This would be the first “link” — between brain mechanisms (emotions, motives) that are adaptive and what a person feels is the right thing to do even if the feeling of right is logically distinguishable from what “really” is right.

That distinction is the basis for the “naturalistic fallacy” critique of Social Darwinism. Oliver Curry has well reviewed why this fallacy is, itself, a fallacy: The logical distinction between “is” and “ought” does not detract from the empirical relationship between what is adaptive and what a person normally values.

We must ask, then, if there is anything more important to us than our own survival and that of our close relatives. If there isn’t, then how could we do anything more ethical or morally correct than doing whatever is adaptive for us and ours? For us, whatever is adaptive should be morally correct, no?

But wait! Morally correct for whom? Isn’t there a flaw here in the anti-Social Darwinists’ reasoning? They have in mind a morality that not only applies to everyone on the planet but a morality of which the consequences are beneficial to all of humanity, not just ourselves and relatively close kin. Sounds like a corollary of Christianity! (Unless Jesus intended that his principles apply only to relations among fellow Jews.)

Such a moral principle necessarily stands outside of human evolution in the sense that, according to all the widely accepted theory in evolutionary biology, such a moral principle could not have evolved as an adaptive trait of individuals. A moral principle is certainly not a measurable physical force like gravity, permeating everything. It exists only within a person’s brain.

This does not mean that people could not act according to such principles. But it would mean that doing so would not automatically “feel good” in the same way that helping oneself or helping one’s family feels good. With enough propaganda, of course, nearly anything is possible. But that’s what it is: Propaganda.

This is probably what’s behind the controversy over government-run health care in the US: For most Whites, it doesn’t feel good to support a program where they would pay disproportionately for medical care for the hordes of non-Whites who now populate the country — even if they could be convinced it was good for the country as a whole.

A universal principle of doing what’s best for humanity also runs into problems because of individual differences:

1) Sociopaths/psychopaths apparently lack normal moral feelings/values. They feel no guilt, so nothing like a universal moral imperative to help humanity there.

2) The fact that, say, the desire for revenge is found throughout the world as a human universal, would be consistent with it being adaptive. But individuals will still vary in the strength of that desire which is subject to the natural selection common to all biological variables.

Finally, a universal principle of doing what’s best for humanity fails to deal adequately with conflicts of interest. Individuals are often in competition because of different interests: Hunters feel morally justified in shooting a deer to eat. The deer, were he capable of such thought, would feel differently about being shot. No common morality there. Same logic within our species. What seems morally justified to the Hatfields will not be to the McCoys.

So there would not seem to be a universal moral code by which everyone would agree on the same ethical course of action in a particular circumstance. Bye, bye Christianity.

So RR may have been onto something in taking his strongly Social Darwinist position. His book’s heuristic value lies in the hard-nosed, un-blinking acknowledgement that life is tough; one had better get used to it, get prepared for it early in life, appreciate the warriors among us and never go “soft” (except, as RR says, around close family members and close friends!) If you cease being prepared, you’ll get run over by those who are tougher and more ruthless.

MIR is not advocating indiscriminate homicide, since the real focus of the game, evident by the end of the book, is simply “power”, which can be obtained in myriad ways. A further caution would be that what has been adaptive in the past may not be so in the future since relevant selection pressures may change. What is adaptive in one situation may not be so in another.

Long term, the unanticipated consequences may be the most important. Biologically, it might seem adaptive to simply slaughter your enemy. But as Daly and Wilson once suggested, whether one adheres to a policy of “an eye for an eye” or a “massacre” should depend on whether an attempted massacre of one’s enemy seems likely to be total. If they don’t all get killed, the survivors may have a long memory and your own survival and reproduction may suffer.

Here one might reflect on the Nazis’ “final solution” that ended well before completion: The surviving Jews have displayed great energy in obtaining reparations and hunting down escaped Nazis. The “Empire Strikes Back” is the situation facing the British, as descendents of once conquered peoples have non-violently emigrated to the U.K. Similarly, Mexicans are subjecting the American Southwest to a “reconquista” by presenting themselves as a useful labor force and congenial nannies.

There is a lesson in MIR, then, for anyone attempting to protect his family or his nation or a collection of allied nations, depending on which level one’s adversary is targeting. For example, Whites in America and Europe today are generally under threat. The lesson would be to gain power, economic as well as territorial, establish enclaves wherever convenient but eventually, as the late Sam Francis declared, re-conquer the whole of one’s country. A few Christians may balk at this, but encourage them to be hypocrites.

A slogan recently seen on a T-shirt, “Fighting Solves Everything”, may be an oversimplification. But the attitude is a good one. Inculcate it in your children.

MIR is available for only $10.00 from the Occidental Press. Get it for your friends and relatives.

Philosophers, as a rule, are a rather low-key bunch. They generally discuss mundane, technical, or utterly abstract topics that cause little concern among society at large. Of course there were exceptions, primarily during the Renaissance when the early humanists incurred the wrath of the Church (think of Bruno or Spinoza); this required some to publish their works either pseudonymously or posthumously. And Marx and Engels have certainly garnered their fair share of enmity. But by and large philosophers throughout the ages have raised few serious hackles.

A major exception is the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, certainly one of the most controversial philosophers in history. The epitome of non-political-correctness, Nietzsche clearly did not give a damn about whom he might offend. He was on a mission to uncover the fundamental flaws in Western society, to expose hypocrisy and moral corruption, and to undermine every aspect of degenerate modern society. Only by getting to the root of the problem, he thought, could we find our way forward—a path to the greatness that is human destiny.

The sad state of modern life, he said, is a consequence of the overturning of classical values that occurred in the early post-Christian world. These classic values—originating in ancient Greece and embraced by the Romans—emphasized strength, robustness, nobility, self-determination, and personal excellence. These life-affirming values, the ‘master’ or ‘aristocratic’ values, were the foundation upon which the great civilizations of Athens and Rome were built.

One consequence of this development was the powerful and expansive Roman Empire. It reached Palestine by the year 60 b.c., and held that territory for over five hundred years, until the fall of the Western Empire in 476 (though the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire continued on much longer). During this time, Nietzsche claimed, the oppression felt by the Jews and early Christians grew to the point at which a new value system—the Judeo-Christian value system—came into being, as a kind of religious and ethical response to Roman domination. Though a single unified system, it carried different emphases for the two groups. For Jews the focus was on self-pity, ethnic cohesion, a thirst for revenge, an obsession with freedom, a hatred of the strong and powerful, and a desire to recover lost wealth. The Christians—through the figure of Jesus—preferred to emphasize the value of the down-trodden (“blessed are the meek”), faith in God to bring justice (“the meek shall inherit the earth”), salvation in the afterlife, and a fixation on love as a means for ameliorating suffering. Arising as it did out of the quasi-slavery imposed by the Romans, Nietzsche deemed this collective Judeo-Christian response a ‘slave’ or ‘priestly’ morality.

When the Western Empire, based in Rome, collapsed in the 5th century a.d., the master morality collapsed with it. As the only real competitor, slave morality rose to take its place as the dominant ethical system of the West. And there it has remained for nearly two thousand years. In this sense, Nietzsche says, the slave has defeated the master, and become the new master.

But the actual outcome has been far from positive. Quite the contrary: it has been an absolute disaster for humanity. When combined with booming populations and advancing technology, there now exists a distinctly modern form of the priestly mindset, one based on subservience, conformity, equality, pity, guilt, suffering, revenge, and self-hatred: the herd morality. One could scarcely devise a lower conception of man.

Which brings us to the question of the Jews. . . . Read the whole article.

rom section no. 57 of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ. The translation is by H. L. Menken. The paragraph breaks have been introduced for online readability. The ellipses are Nietzsche’s.

A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates.

The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience is based.

The problem lies exactly here.—At a certain point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall live—or can live—has come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experience.

In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation—the continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infinitum.

Against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle . . . ; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one’s forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.

The higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been proved to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism—a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu’s means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.

The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection.

It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity—the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select.

The superior caste—I call it the fewest—has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum [few men are noble]: goodness is a privilege.

Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. “The world is perfect”—so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life. “Imperfection, whatever is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of this perfection.”

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct.

They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others . . . . Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most honorable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they are; they are not at liberty to play second.

The second caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them all that is rough in the business of ruling—their followers, their right hand, their most apt disciples.

In all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing “made up”; whatever is to the contrary is made up—by it nature is brought to shame. . . . The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.

A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism.

The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization.

It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty . . . .

Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge . . . . Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights . . . . What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.

is section no. 43 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols.

43. Whispered to the conservatives. — What was not known formerly, what is known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.

Filippo Marinetti, 1876 - 1944

Filippo Marinetti is unlike most of the post-nineteenth Century cultural avant-garde who were rebelling against the spirit of several centuries of liberalism, rationalism, the rise of the democratic mass, industrialism, and the rule of the moneyed elite. His revolt against the leveling impact of the democratic era was not to hark back to certain perceived ‘golden ages’ such as the medieval eras upheld by Yeats and Evola, or to reject technology in favor of a return to rural life, as advocated by Henry Williamson and Knut Hamsun. To the contrary, Marinetti embraced the new facts of technology, the machine, speed, and dynamic energy, in a movement called Futurism.

The futurist response to the facts of the new age is therefore a quite unique reaction from the anti-liberal literati and artists and one that continues to influence certain aspects of industrial and post-industrial sub cultures. An example of a contemporary cultural movement paralleling Futurists is New Slovenian Art, which like futurism embodies music, graphic arts, architecture, and drama. It is a movement whose influence is felt beyond the borders of Slovenia. The best-known manifestation of this art form is the industrial music group Laibach.

Marinetti is also the inventor of free verse in poetry, and Futurist adherents have had a lasting impact on architecture, motion pictures and the theatre. The Futurists were the pioneers of street theatre. They inspired both the Constructivist movement in the USSR and the English Vorticists Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.

Marinetti was born in Alexandria Egypt in 1876. He graduated in law in Genoa in 1899. Although the political and philosophical aspects of the course held his interest, he traveled frequently between France and Italy and interested himself in the avant-garde arts of the later nineteenth Century promoting young poets in both countries. He was already a strong critic of the conservative and traditional approaches of Italian poets. He was at this time an enthusiast for the modern, revolutionary music of Wagner, seeing it as assailing “equilibrium and sobriety . . . meditation and silence . . . ”

By 1904, Futurist elements had manifested in his writing, particularly in his poem Destruction that he called “an erotic and anarchist poem,” a eulogy to the “avenging sea” as a symbol of revolution. After an apocalyptic destruction, the process of rebuilding begins on the ruins of the “Old World.” Here already is the praise of death as a dynamic and transformative.

With the death of Marinetti’s father in 1907, his wealth allowed him to travel widely and he became a well-known cultural figure throughout Europe. Nietzsche was at this time one of the most well-known intellectuals who desired liberation from the old order. Nietzsche was widely read among the literati of Italy, and D’Annunzio was the most prominent in promoting Nietzsche. Among the other philosophers of particular importance whom Marinetti studied was the French syndicalist theorist Georges Sorel, who inclined towards the anarchism of Proudhon. This rejected Marxism in favor of a society comprised of small productive, cooperative units or syndicates; and founded a new myth of heroic action and struggle. Rejecting much of the pacifism of the left. Sorel viewed war as a dynamic of human action. Sorel in turn was himself influenced by Nietzsche, and applying the Nietzschean Overman to socialism, states that the working class revolution requires heroic leaders. Sorel became influential not only among Left wing syndicalists but also among certain radical nationalists in both France and Italy.

Futurist Manifesto

Marinetti’s artistic ideas crystallized in the Futurist movement that originated from a meeting of artists and musicians in Milan in 1909 to draft a Futurist Manifesto. With Marinetti were Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. The manifesto was first published in the Parisian paper Le Figaro, and exhorted youth to, “Sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness.”

The Futurists were contemptuous of all tradition, of all that is past:
“We want to exult aggressive motion . . . we affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

The machine was poetically eulogized. The racing car became the icon of the new epoch, “which seems to run as a machine gun.” The Futurist aesthetic was to be joy in violence and war, as “the sole hygiene of the world.” Motion, dynamic energy, action, and heroism were the foundations of “the culture of the Futurist future. The fisticuffs, the sprint and the kick were expressions of culture. The Futurist Manifesto is as much a challenge to the political and social order as it is to the status quo in the arts.

It declared:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of an explosive breath–a roaring car that seems to ride on grape shot is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

7. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries. Why should we look back when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible? Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

8. We will glorify war–the world’s only hygiene–militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, the beautiful ideas that kill, and scorn for women.

9. We will destroy the museums libraries academies of every kind, will fight moralism feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

10. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot. We will sing of the multi-colored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modem capitals, we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric motors, greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents, factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon: deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing: and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Museums: cemeteries! . . .  Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day, that we grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that . . .  but I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot? And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely? Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off in violent spasms of action and creation.

Do you then wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth we tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner . . .  But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! . . .  Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! . . .  Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . .  Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

The oldest of us is thirty so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts–we want it to happen!

They will come against us, our successors will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing dog-like at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.

But we won’t be there . . .  At last they’ll find us–one winter’s night–in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.

They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us. Driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.

Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes. Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power, have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting . . . Look at us We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed . . .  Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again, we hurl our defiance at the stars.

You have objections?–Enough! Enough! We know them . . .  We’ve understood! . . .  Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors–Perhaps! . . .  If only it were so!–But who cares? We don’t want to understand! . . . Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again! Lift up your heads. Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance after stars!”

A plethora of manifestos by Marinetti and his colleagues followed, futurist cinema, painting, music (“noise”), prose, plus the political and sociological implications.

War, the World’s Only Hygiene

Portrait of Marinetti by Prampolini

Marinetti’s manifesto on war shows the central place violence and conflict have in the Futurist doctrine.

We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the Lame and Paralyzed, have glorified the love of danger and violence, praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are happy to finally experience this great Futurist hour of Italy, while the foul tribe of pacifists huddles dying in the deep cellars of the ridiculous palace at The Hague. We have recently had the pleasure of fighting in the streets with the most fervent adversaries of the war and shouting in their faces our firm beliefs:

1. All liberties should be given to the individual and the collectivity, save that of being cowardly.

2. Let it be proclaimed that the word Italy should prevail over the word Freedom.

3. Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be canceled by an Italian greatness a hundred times greater.

For us today, Italy has the shape and power of a fine Dreadnought battleship with its squadron of torpedo-boat islands. Proud to feel that the martial fervor throughout the nation is equal to ours, we urge the Italian government, Futurist at last, to magnify all the national ambitions, disdaining the stupid accusations of piracy, and proclaim the birth of Pan-Italianism.

Futurist poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians of Italy! As long as the war lasts let us set aside our verse, our brushes, scapulas, and orchestras! The red holidays of genius have begun! There is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnel and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery molds among the masses of the enemy.

Artistic Storm Trooper

Marinetti brought his dynamic character into an aggressive campaign to promote Futurism. The Futurists aimed to aggravate society out of bourgeoisie complacency and the safe existence through innovative street theater, abrasive art, speeches, and manifestos. The speaking style of Marinetti was itself bombastic and thunderous. The art was aggravating to conventional society and the art establishment. If a painting was that of a man with a moustache, the whiskers would be depicted with the bristles of a shaving brush pasted onto the canvas. A train would be depicted with the words “puff, puff.”

Both the words and deeds of the Futurists matched the nature of the art in expressing contempt for the status quo with its preoccupation with “pastism” or the “passe.” Marinetti for example, described Venice as “a city of dead fish and decaying houses, inhabited by a race of waiters and touts.”

To the Futurist Boccioni, Dante, Beethoven and Michelangelo were “sickening” Whilst Carra set about painting sounds, noises and even smells. Marinetti traversed Europe giving interviews, arranging exhibitions, meetings and dinners. Vermilion posters with huge block letters spelling ‘futurism’ were plastered throughout Italy on factories, in dance halls, cafes and town squares. Futurist performances were organized to provoke riot. Glue was put onto seats. Two tickets for the same seat would be sold to provoke a fight. “Noise music” would blare while poetry or manifestos were recited and paintings shown. Fruit and rotten spaghetti would be thrown from the audience, and the performances would usually end in brawls.

Marinetti replied to jeers with humor. He ate the fruit thrown at him. He welcomed the hostility as proving that Futurism was not appealing to the mediocre.

Politics

Portrait of Marinetti by Carlo Carra

The first political contacts of Marinetti and the Futurists were from the Left rather than the Right, despite Marinetti’s extreme nationalism and call for war as the “hygiene of mankind.” There were syndicalists and even some anarchists who shared Marinetti’s views on the energizing and revolutionary nature of war and gave him a reception.

In 1909, Marinetti entered the general elections and issued a “First Political Manifesto” which is anti-clerical and states that the only Futurist political program is “national pride,” calling for the elimination of pacifism and the representatives of the old order. During that year, Marinetti was heavily involved in agitating for Italian sovereignty over Austrian-ruled Trieste. The political alliance with the extreme Left began with the anarcho-syndicalist Ottavio Dinale, whose paper reprinted the Futurist manifesto. The paper, La demolizione was not especially anarcho-syndicalist, but of a general combative nature, aiming to unite into one “fascio” all those of revolutionary tendencies, to “oppose with full energy the inertia and indolence that threatens to suffocate all life.” The phrase is distinctly Futurist.

Marinetti announced that he intended to campaign politically as both a syndicalist and a nationalist, a synthesis that would eventually arise in Fascism. In 1910, he forged links with the Italian Nationalist Association, which from its birth also had a pro-labor, syndicalist aspect. In 1913 a Futurist political manifesto was issued which called for enlargement of the military, an “aggressive foreign policy,” colonial expansionism, and “pan-Italianism”; a “cult” of progress, speed, and heroism; opposition to the nostalgia for monuments, ruins, and museums; economic protectionism, anti-socialism, anti-clericalism. The movement gained wide enthusiasm among university students.

Interventionism

The chance for Italy’s “place in the sun” came with World War I. Not only the nationalists were demanding Italy’s entry into the war, but so too were certain revolutionary syndicalists and a faction of socialists led by Mussolini. From the literati came D’Annunzio and Marinetti.

In a manifesto addressed to students in 1914 Marinetti states the purpose of Futurism and calls for intervention in the war. Futurism was the “doctor” to cure Italy of “pastism,” a remedy “valid for every country.” The “ancestor cult far from cementing the race” was making Italians “anaemic and putrid.” Futurism was now “being fully realised in the great world war.”

The present war is the most beautiful Futurist poem which has so far been seen. Futurism was the militarization of innovating artists.

The war would sweep away all the proponents of the old and senile, diplomats, professors, philosophers, archaeologists, libraries, and museums.

The war will promote gymnastics, sport, practical schools of agriculture, business and industrialists. The war will rejuvenate Italy: will enrich her with men of action, will force her to live no longer off the past, off ruins and the mild climate, but off her own national forces.

The Futurists were the first to organize pro-war protests. Mussolini and Marinetti held their first joint meeting in Milan on March 31st 1915. In April, both were arrested in Rome for organizing a demonstration.

Futurists were no mere windbags. Nearly all distinguished themselves in the war, as did Mussolini and D’Annunzio. The Futurist architect Sant Elia was killed. Marinetti enlisted with the Alpini regiment and was wounded and decorated for valor.

Futurist Party

Ritratto di Marinetti by Thayat

In 1918, Marinetti began directing his attention to a new postwar Italy. He published a manifesto announcing the Futurist Political Party, which called for “Revolutionary nationalism” for both imperialism and social revolution. “We must carry our war to total victory.”

Demands of the manifesto included the eight hour day and equal pay for women, the nationalization and redistribution of land to veterans; heavy taxes on acquired and inherited wealth and the gradual abolition of marriage through easy divorce; a strong Italy freed, from nostalgia, tourists, and priests; industrialization and modernization of “moribund cities” that live as tourist centers. A Corporatist policy called for the abolition of parliament and its replacement with a technical government of 30 or 40 young directors elected form the trade associations.

The Futurist party concentrated its propaganda on the soldiers, and recruited many war veterans of the elite Arditi (daredevils), who had been the black-shirted shock troops of the army who would charge into battle stripped to the waist, a grenade in each hand and a dagger between their teeth.

In December 1919, the Futurists revived the “Fasci” or “groups.” which had been organised in 1914 and 1915 to campaign for war intervention, and from which was to emerge the Fascists.

Futurists and Fascists

The first joint post-war action between Mussolini and Marinetti took place in 1919 when a Socialist Party rally was disrupted in Milan.

That year Mussolini founded his own Fasci di Combattimento in Milan with the support of Marinetti and the poet Ungasetti. The futurists and the Arditi comprised the core of the Fascist leadership. The first Fascist manifesto was based on that of Marinetti’s Futurist party.

In April, against the wishes of Mussolini who thought the action premature, Marinetti led Fascists and Futurists and Arditi against a mass Socialist Party demonstration. Marinetti waded in with fists, but intervened to save a socialist from being severely beaten by Arditi. (To place the post-war situation in perspective, the Socialists had regularly beaten, abused, and even killed returning war veterans). The Fascists and futurists then proceeded to the offices of the Socialist Party paper Avanti, which they sacked and burned.

Marinetti stood as a Fascist candidate in the 1919 elections and persuaded Toscanini to do so. Whilst the Fascists held back, the Futurists threw their support behind the poet-soldier D’Annunzio’s takeover of Fiume. Marinetti arrived and was warmly welcomed by D’Annunzio.

When the Fascist Congress of 1920 refused to support the Futurist demand to exile the King and the Pope, Marinetti and other Futurists resigned from the Fascist party. Marinetti considered that the Fascist party was compromising with conservatism and the bourgeoisie. He was also critical of the Fascist concentration on anti-socialist agitation and on opposition to strikes. Certain futurist factions realigned themselves specifically with the extreme Left. In 1922, there were several Futurist exhibitions and performances organized by the Communist cultural association, Pro-letkul, which also arranged a lecture by Marinetti to explain the doctrine of Futurism.

Futurism and the Fascist Regime

A futurist Mussolini

When the Fascists assumed power in 1922 Marinetti, like D’Annunzio, was critically supportive of the regime. Marinetti considered: “The coming to power of the Fascists constitutes the realization of the minimum futurist program.”

Of Mussolini the statesman, Marinetti wrote: “Prophets and forerunners of the great Italy of today, we Futurists are happy to salute in our not yet 40-year-old Prime Minister of marvelous futurist temperament.”

In 1923, Marinetti began a rapprochement with the Fascists and presented to Mussolini his manifesto “The Artistic Rights Promoted by Italian Futurists.” Here he rejected the Bolshevik alignment of Futurists in the USSR. He pointed to the Futurist sentiments that had been expressed by Mussolini in speeches, alluding to Fascism being a “government of speed, curtailing everything that represents stagnation in the national life.” Under Mussolini’s leadership, writes Marinetti:

Fascism has rejuvenated Italy. It is now his duty to help us overhaul the artistic establishment . . . . The political revolution must sustain the artistic revolutions Marinetti was among the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals who in 1923 approved the measures taken by the regime to restore order by curtailing certain constitutional liberties amidst increasing chaos caused by both out-of-control radical Fascist squadisti and anti-Fascists.

At the 1924 Futurist Congress, the delegates upheld Marinetti’s declaration:

The Italian Futurists, more than ever devoted to ideas and art, far removed from politics, say to their old comrade Benito Mussolini, free yourself from parliament with one necessary and violent stroke. Restore to Fascism and Italy the marvelous, disinterested, bold, anti-socialist, anti-clerical, anti-monarchical spirit . . .  Refuse to let monarchy suffocate the greatest, most brilliant and just Italy of tomorrow . . .  Quell the clerical opposition . . . . With a steely and dynamic aristocracy of thought.

In 1929, Marinetti accepted election to the Italian Academy, considering it important that “Futurism be represented” He was also elected secretary of the Fascist Writer’s Union and as such was the official representative for fascist culture. Futurism became a part of fascist cultural exhibitions and was utilized in the propaganda art of the regime. During the 1930s, in particular the Fascist cultural expression was undergoing a drift away from tradition and towards futurism, with the fascist emphasis on technology and modernization. Mussolini had already in 1926 defined the creation of a “fascist art” that would be based on a synthesis culturally as it was politically: “traditionalistic and at the same time modern.”

In 1943, with the Allies invading Italy, the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini and surrendered to the occupation forces. The fascist faithful established a last stand, in the north, named the Italian Social Republic.

With a new idealism, even former Communist and liberal leaders were drawn to the Republic. The Manifesto of Verona was drafted, restoring various liberties, and championing labour against plutocracy within the vision of a united Europe. Marinetti continued to be honoured by the Social Republic. He died in 1944.

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

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

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

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

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

New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe

For Part I, click here.

. . .  The New Right itself in recent years has moved away not only from its early attraction to a biological view of human nature and society but also from its opposition to multiculturalism, if not to immigration as well.  The earlier position, as O’Meara explains, offered a firm rejection of multiculturalism:

In contrast to liberalism’s homogenized world of fractured cultures and peoples, New Rightists advocate a heterogenous world of homogenous peoples, each rooted in their own culture and soil. Every people, they claim, has a droit à la différence: that is, the right to pursue their destiny in accord with the organic dictates of their own identity. They see, moreover, no convincing reason why Europeans should feel obliged to abandon their millennial heritage for the sake of a dubious cosmopolitan fashion. (p. 77)

But the new position has changed course radically.

Recently, however, GRECE’s opposition to multiculturalism has undergone a significant shift. Until 1998, it consistently opposed multiculturalist efforts to recognize immigrant communities as separate legal entities, for it claimed these efforts threatened the integrity of French identity. Then, rather unexpectedly, it reversed course, adopting a “communitarian” position favoring the public recognition of non-French communities—so that immigrants could be able to “keep alive the structures of their collective cultural existence.” To some, this shift constitutes nothing less than an identitarian betrayal, for others a recognition that Europe’s enemy is not the immigrant per se, but the system responsible for immigration. (p. 77)

The shift was not without controversy, with New Rightists like Guillaume Faye and others rejecting it. As O’Meara comments:

When Grécistes first sloganized the droit à la différence, they sought to rebuff liberal efforts to stigmatize European identitarianism as a form of racism. At a certain point, however, its defense of cultural/ethnic difference took on a life of its own . . . This eventually led to a qualified form of multiculturalism, as the GRECE reversed much of its earlier argumentation and joined the liberal chorus demanding the institutional recognition of the immigrants’ cultural identity. The problem with its metapolitics, however, did not end here, for its defense of European identity has consistently been waged on the Left’s cosmopolitan terrain—in that it fought not for the primacy of their own people, but for the application of pluralistic standards to support Europeans in the defense of their heritage . . . . Le droit à la différence ended up, then, parroting the ideology of liberal pluralist society and its relativist values. Needless to add, this augurs badly for the future of the GRECE’s identitarianism, for it now tacitly acknowledges the right of non-Europeans to occupy and partition European lands. (pp. 77-78)

Interestingly the same trend and its implications appear on the American hard right, as advocates of territorial secessionism and proponents of “Euro-American” identity present themselves not as the rightful heirs of the European civilization in North America but merely as one more chip in the multiculturalist mosaic demanding (or in the case of the right, begging for) recognition. One would have thought that French intellectuals intimate with Gramsci and Nietzsche would have avoided this trap.

The withering of the New Right’s opposition to multiculturalism is one of the major flaws of the movement from the perspective of the American right. Two other problems that most Americans will find troublesome are the French Rightists’ anti-Christianism and their anti-Americanism. Actually, both positions have a good deal to be said for them, but both are also problematical.

The New Right’s distaste for Christianity owes little to the conventional rationalist and secularist critique associated with figures like Bertrand Russell and T. H. Huxley and far more to the ancient pagan criticisms of Christianity before its acquisition of power under Constantine. The New Right argues that Christianity, and more generally monotheism itself in the forms of Judaism and Islam, have been destructive forces that have spawned intolerance, dogmatism, and a narrow-minded dualism in the European mentality and have authorized massive persecutions, exterminations, and cultural genocide of its victims.  Christianity did not emerge from the European folk tradition and identity but was adopted as a theological construct shaped by its Semitic origins and its underclass adherents and was then imposed by the state and the church, often through repression of its rivals and critics. Only through a long process of “Germanization” (O’Meara here cites James Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) or “Aryanization” did early Christianity become at all compatible with European identity. New Rightists share Nietzsche’s critique that Christianity represented a slave revolt against the aristocratic paganism of ancient Europe and under the sway of its otherworldly and universalist beliefs rejected “national and cultural particularisms” and promoted the destruction and amalgamation of distinct peoples. They argue that by substituting its “logos” for the ancient pagan view of nature as suffused with many divinities and supernatural beings Christianity “desacralized” nature and prepared the way for the advent of modern rationalism and the secularized depredations of modern capitalism and mass democracy.

For nearly fifteen centuries Christianity dominated the continent. In disenchanting the world, associating faith with reason, and fostering individual subjectivity, Benoist claims it prepared the present “eclipse of the sacred.” As a result, Europeans now lack the spiritual references—the transcendent certainties—that once inspired them, for a post-Christian world, in which science or liberal ideology has been substituted for the church’s discredited teachings, is a world that knows only life’s material properties and the existential groundlessness that dooms the individual to impotence. Spiritually adrift, Europeans seem to have dissipated even their instinct for survival, as ethnomasochism becomes foremost in their hierarchy of values and effeminacy renders them defenseless before larger dangers. Faced with the nihilism born of this void, New Rightists call for “a return to ourselves”—and to the primal sources of their heritage—advocated not for the sake of some pre-Christian Golden Age, but as a means of reviving the European project—and hence Europe’s will to power. (p. 98)

It has to be said that there is a good deal of truth in much of the New Right’s attack on Christianity, especially as Christianity appears today, whether on the political left or the political right, with its support for an egalitarianism and universalism that reject race and nation in general and the historic European (especially pre-Christian) identity in particular.  Nevertheless, the New Right’s critique is also somewhat overdrawn, as O’Meara notes in his last chapter, which offers a critique of the New Right itself. Christianity, whatever its origins in the Near East and the deracinated proletariat of the late Roman Empire, was in fact “Germanized,” as Russell argues, assimilated itself to much of the heritage of Europe, and played a major role in creating the European civilization we have known since the early Middle Ages, including its art, music, philosophy, and even science. It is simply vacuous to claim that the actual Christianity of history displays the character Benoist describes. In any case, Christianity has been the religious identity of European man for some two thousand years, and to argue, as the New Right does, for the resuscitation of paganism as the “real” tradition of Europe is simply a posture, even if it is not intended literally.

In appealing to the pagan heritage, New Rightists do not actually seek a restoration of ancient pagan practices, just as they distance themselves from New Age pagans, whose eclectic mix of ancient cults and postmodern hedonism are no less anti-identitarian than the Christian/modernist practices they oppose. Instead, their paganism strives to resuscitate Europe’s ancestral concept of the cosmos, its classical ethical principles, its notion of time and history, and its affirmation of community. It thus affirms the integrity of the European project and “all the inscrutable creative powers manifested in their nature,” rejecting, in the process, a misanthropic religious conception that leaves man begging forgiveness from a god forged in the image of a Near Eastern despot. Above all, the New Right’s paganism aims at transvaluing the Judeo-Christian values that have inverted all that is strong and noble in their heritage. (p. 99)

Christianity today is virtually extinct, at least in Europe among real Europeans, and it is not that much more alive in America, which is why American churches are so zealous in their support for a mass immigration that replenishes the stock of an institution whites have abandoned. But apart from the pop paganism of the New Age cults, there is no real sign of a revival of a serious paganism of the kind the New Right talks about at either the popular or higher levels of culture. Whatever the merits of its critique of Christianity, the New Right’s neo-paganism seems to have born little fruit.

New Right paganism looks to the studies of Indo-European mythology and social structure of the late Georges Dumézil and invokes “mythos” as a pagan counterpart to the Christian “logos.”  The latter, as O’Meara acknowledges, may

be a more logically, analytically, and clearly developed form of thought, but cognitively it is not superior to mythos and often less suggestive and encompassing. More important still, logos—especially in its modern form—empties the world of those mythic truths that once constituted the essence of the European project. Against this “disenchantment,” which leaves the European powerless before the great challenges threatening him, a revival of Europe’s mythic heritage holds out the prospect that the true sources of his being might be recovered and the European project reborn. (p. 102)

Just as problematic as its hostility to Christianity, at least for many on the American right, is the French New Right’s outright hatred of America itself. While the New Right is surely correct that both contemporary “mainstream” (and even “conservative”) Christianity and the hegemonic forces of contemporary America are the enemies of European Man, it insists on pushing its critique of them far beyond contemporary manifestations.

In the case of America, its critique is not confined simply to the modern post–World War II managerial regime in which state, corporation, and mass culture coalesce to dominate and deracinate the world as well as traditional American culture, but extends to America as it originated and developed. In the New Right’s view, the current American regime is merely the logical and natural extension of America as it was founded and is the most complete expression of modernity itself.

The New Right’s critique of America is in fact a mirror image of what the left thinks about it or would like America to be—the “proposition country,” “creedal nation,” or “first universal nation” of liberal and neo-conservative folklore. Pointing to the millennialist and utopian language of the early Puritans in New England, the egalitarian and universalist slogans of the Declaration of Independence, and the anti-European fulminations of Mark Twain and other progressivists in American history and culture, the New Right claims that this and the political and economic system reflecting it are all that exists in America. As such, it regards this country as the main enemy of European Man and his tradition and identity (as well as of the Third World peoples whose cause the New Right increasingly seems to champion).

As an anti-Europe, the United States represents the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity. Nowhere else, the Grécistes argue, were the Enlightenment principles—of equality, rationality, universalism, individuality, economism, and developmentalism—more thoroughly realized than in this new land “liberated from the dead hand of the European past.” The country’s constitutional Framers, it follows, were steeped in eighteenth-century liberalism—which “blended with the earlier ecclesiastical culture of New England” (Carl Bridenbaugh) and later with the Emersonian ideals of individualism. This led them to adopt a political system whose ideological underpinnings rested on rationalist abstractions exalting the individual rather than the history and traditions of its people. The federal state was thus conceived not as an instrument of its people’s destiny—nationality in the European sense did not exist in America—but as a cosmopolis, potentially open to all humanity.

Contrary to the contention of certain paleo-conservatives, as well as the arguments of those historians associated with the school of “civic republicanism,” this propositional notion of the American state was not the invention of latter-day Jacobins, of whom William J. Clinton and George W. Bush are the descendants, but inherent to the country’s original constitutional project. (p. 145)

The hostility of the New Right to America and its global hegemony leads it to sympathize with the Soviet Union, as O’Meara notes. “Given the nature of the existing geopolitical realities, the GRECE has long sympathized with Russia, even during the Cold War.” The sympathy was not due to any affiliation with Marxism but to the New Right’s belief that Marxism-Leninism penetrated into and deformed Russian society far less than liberal modernism permeates American and contemporary European society, that the Russians are an Indo-European people and thus share a racial and deep-cultural identity with Europe, and that their imperial identity is derived from what Rightists like to call “tellurocratic” (based on land power, like Sparta, Rome, and Germany) rather than “thalassocratic” (sea-based power, like that of Athens, Carthage, Britain, and America). Moreover, if Russia recovers economically, it would be capable of mounting political and military resistance to the global hegemony of American liberal modernism.

If European capital and know-how continue to penetrate eastward, contributing to Russia’s recovery, the ex-Soviet Union holds out the prospect of becoming a vast continental power, with an abundance of natural resources (especially oil), an immense reservoir of human talent, and a will to power. A Eurasian rapprochement (which is already occurring in numerous areas of trade, research, and development) would thus portent [sic] an empire of unparalleled immensity and a possible “staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution” . . . . It would not be at all “unnatural,” then, if European and Russian destinies should merge and an “Empire of the Sun” stretching across fourteen times zones, arise. (p. 193)

The New Right’s anti-Americanism is not confined to a political critique but extends also to American culture or what the critics claim passes for culture in this country. O’Meara cites a recent special issue of the New Right periodical Terre et peuple that ridiculed America as the “Planet of the Clowns,” taking “particular delight in emphasizing the absurdity of homo americanus.”

From that part of the population claiming to have been abducted by aliens, to creationist accounts of human origins, to a president claiming fellatio by a student aide ought not be considered a “sexual relation,” they have had a field day. (pp. 149-50)

Any number of responses to this line of criticism may be offered, and O’Meara, though he appears to be sympathetic to much of it (recapitulating the thesis of Jewish liberal historian Louis Hartz that America is a society founded on Lockean liberalism and has neither conservative institutions nor conservative ideas), offers a response himself in his final chapter, in which he quotes paleo-conservative historian Paul Gottfried’s perfectly accurate comments that the New Right view of America is in large part simply a caricature of the reality.

First, as for America being a pure product of the Enlightenment and the triumph of modernity, that is certainly true of the system that has prevailed in this country since the New Deal era and increasingly since the Civil War. But it is arguable (indeed, it is the paleo-conservative argument) that this dominant system is by no means the only or real American identity, an identity steeped in racial and tribal realities far more than most Europeans today are. (Pace the French Rightists, “the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity” is not America but the French Revolution.) Some New Rightists seem to perceive this, however dimly, but their knowledge of the realities of American history appears to be thin. O’Meara in a footnote notes that much of American modernism was simply the result of the triumph of the Northern base in the Civil War. “By contrast, the American South, closer to the legacy of the English gentry than New England Puritanism, was far more European in character,” and “In a characteristic expression of anti-liberal disdain for the North’s ‘anti-culture,’ Maurice Bardèche describes Sheridan’s terrorist assault on Atlanta and the subsequent crushing of Southern civilization as nothing less than a ‘barbarian victory.’” (p. 158)

Bardèche is correct, of course, except that someone should explain to him that it was not Philip Sheridan but William T. Sherman who burned Atlanta (Sheridan did enough damage in the Shenandoah Valley)—facts that any American schoolchild would know. That Bardèche (and perhaps O’Meara, who fails to correct his error) does not know them suggests that much of the New Right sneering and snorting about America is really not much more than an affected European snobbery and resentment of a more successful and more powerful political order.

Moreover, despite the rhetorical and ideological dominance of American political forms by Enlightenment rationalism, the reality of American national political and social life is rather different. Americans, both their leaders and average citizens, love to boast of their egalitarianism but almost all of them live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods, attend racially homogeneous churches, and place their children in racially homogeneous schools. I have no disposition to defend creationism any more than I would claims of alien abductions, but the New Right might try to grasp that the Americans who embrace creationism are rejecting the Darwinian naturalism that the New Right itself claims to oppose.

What the New Right does not appear to understand is that despite the presence and increasingly the domination of the liberal modernism it despises in this country and the American rejection of specific European traditions, American society, like any human society, re-invents itself as a naturally hierarchical, cultic, racially conscious community. The great promise of American nationhood was neither that it might replicate and perpetuate the specific obsolete and irrelevant European manifestations of such natural human formations nor that it might escape from history and nature and recreate the egalitarian Eden or construct a utopian “city on a hill,” but that, having discarded many of the particular feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic, and nationalistic distractions, deformities, and conflicts of old Europe, European Man could find in North America a more authentic destiny than the European baggage permitted. That hope remains possible of fulfillment even today, but it cannot be realized until the present managerial regime and its calculated annihilation of European Man domestically and abroad is dismantled. Only if the fundamental European character of the American nation is identified and championed can the regime be challenged at all either politically or culturally. The French New Right’s total and cartoonishly simplistic rejection of all American culture ab ovo renders any such effort impossible.

Indeed, it is difficult to see how the French New Right could mount any kind of effective opposition to modernity, given that it rejects almost every aspect of European society. The Christian view of man and society that shaped the classical conservatism that resisted the French Revolution and defended the eighteenth century dynastic states it rejects as bitterly as it does contemporary America. It also has come to affect a skepticism of the racial and sociobiological findings of recent science and of science as a whole. There appears to be no social or political group or force in modern European society with which it expresses any kinship or sympathy. It increasingly seems to ooze sympathy for the Third World invaders of Europe and the violently anti-Western states from which they come. And it regards the Soviet Union as preferable to the contemporary United States.

Since the collapse of American conservatism under Ronald Reagan and afterwards, there has been a desperate need for the emergence of a new identity for the right, both in Europe and America, a right that is less concerned with defending the “wisdom of our ancestors,” “the free market,” the Constitution, and similar bromides and is more interested in conserving a specific human group, its biological foundations, and its cultural extensions—in the case of Euro-American conservatism, European Man as a race and the heir and creator of a civilization, whether on the European or North American continents. There is increasing evidence that such a right is slowly beginning to emerge in the United States in the reactions against immigration and the invasion of Iraq, among other issues.

Much of what the French New Right has to offer in its philosophical critique of modernity and its defenses of the enduring legacies of ancient pre-Christian values and ideals is a valuable contribution to formulating the basis of such a right. The emerging American right (if it does or will exist) should pay more attention to what it has to say and would be well advised to emulate its intellectual depth and seriousness and to learn something from its “metapolitical” cultural war. Michael O’Meara’s book is by far the best and most comprehensive account of the thought of the French New Right now available in English, and there is far more in it than this review has been able to encompass (the influence of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, René Guénon, Francis Parker Yockey, and others, for example), but as a whole the specifics of much of what the New Right is offering do not really speak to either the practical issues or the underlying philosophical and cultural problems that a real new right, in either the Europe or America of today and the future, requires.

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

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

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

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