Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939

Mark Antliff, a professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, has put together a useful analysis of the cultural-aesthetic memes utilized by French fascists of 1909-1939 to promote their visions of national renewal. Antliff’s analysis focuses on the connection between fascist ideologies and the European avant-garde, which most people would more likely associate with the anti-national left. Antliff is fairly even handed in the book, with the occasional use of scare quotes to express his skepticism/disdain for certain “fascist ideas.”

In contrast, I believe his use of the term “democracy” should always have scare quotes, as “democratic” systems deceive the populace into believing that someone other than self-interested elites are running the show; however, apparently, Antliff and I disagree on our political preferences. Antliff also concludes the book with a line about how the ideas of the French fascists were not able to stem the tide of the “bloodshed” caused by the military aggressions of Hitler and Mussolini (including the invasion of France). Very well. One hopes an academic will write about the real blood that has been shed imposing “equality” on “the people” – either that of the mass-murdering Marxists or the genocidal globalist multiculturalists and their plans for a multiracial West. So much for my complaints about the book. What about fascism and avant-garde aesthetics?

Roger Griffin, in his Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), famously described fascism as “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” – making the elements of renewal, rebirth, and regeneration central to all permutations of this ideology. It is also important to differentiate between real fascism and “para-fascist” ersatz fascism. Para-fascism is often confused with real fascism in the public mind, which gives the false impression that fascism is ossified reactionary conservatism, rather than a revolutionary movement interested in avant-garde themes and ideas.

The differences between real revolutionary fascism and para-fascism are easily summarized: Para-fascist regimes are authoritarian, traditionalist, reactionary regimes, often military dictatorships, that fossilize a status quo favoring traditional elites of business, nobility, religion, and the military. Such regimes want nothing to do with the revolutionary and palingenetic aspects of true fascism; the idea that the secular religious, Futuristic, and avant-garde characteristics of, say, (early) Italian Fascism has anything to do with Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile is absurd.

Indeed, as Griffin makes clear, fascists and para-fascists are usually, by their very nature, bitter enemies. While para-fascists may co-opt some superficial characteristics of their fascist opponents, in power they tend to ruthlessly suppress the expression of revolutionary fascism. When para-fascism attempts to co-opt fascism by sharing power – as Antonescu attempted in Romania with the Legionaries — conflict is inevitable, since the objectives of the two parties are completely different: para-fascist ossification vs. fascist palingenetic regeneration. Thus, in Romania, civil war between para-fascists and fascists led to the victory of the para-fascists, and the exile of the fascist forces. The idea that Antonescu was “fascist” is a byproduct of either ideological ignorance or ideological mendacity, a Marxist desire to strip their fascist competitors of revolutionary dynamism and reduce them to mere “bourgeois hooligans.”

Not all fascisms were equally “fascist” and revolutionary, and even individual fascist movements have oscillated between revolutionary ideals and borderline reactionary para-fascism.

For example, Italian fascism went through three distinct phases. In the years before the seizure of power and in the first half-dozen years of Mussolini’s regime, Italian fascism was in its “purest” form – revolutionary and palingenetic – emphasizing the regeneration of the Italian people and the Italian nation-state. Avant-garde themes and theorists, particularly Futurism, were important in this period, and individuals such as Marinetti were influential in early day Italian fascism.

However, the forces of reaction and of compromise with the establishment were always present; the presence of the King and the Vatican were two impediments to the process of “fascistization” that Mussolini could not, or would not, deal with. In the end, the Concordat was a turning point and the regime’s second phase veered to the “right” in the 1930s, becoming more conservative and reactionary, replacing internal regeneration with external imperialism. Without WW II, chances were good that Italian fascism would have degenerated into a stagnant para-fascist regime similar to that of Franco’s Spain.

Military defeat and the overthrow of Il Duce stopped that process; in the last and third phase of Italian fascism, the “Salo Republic,” the ideology shifted to the left, embracing a militant socialism, and becoming overtly pan-European in scope.

What about the Hitler and the Nazis? There has been some debate as to whether German National Socialism was a form of fascism. It seems to me obvious that it was; that differences existed between the Italian and German forms of fascism is not an argument against that conclusion. All genuine fascisms displayed important differences, yet still contained within themselves the core components of Griffin’s “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism.”

In the case of National Socialism, the palingenesis was biological; Nazism was a heavily racialized and materialist form of fascism. The German National Socialists were tribalistic in worldview rather than Futurist, and, internal debates aside; Hitler himself was very hostile to the European avant-garde.

Thus, key differences between fascist forms are observed. The German brand had the biopolitical advantage of recognizing the importance of race. On the other hand, the Italian brand had the sociopolitical advantage of a more optimistic Futurist orientation, and was more open-minded with respect to tapping into the cultural energies created by the avant-garde artistic and sociopolitical movements extant in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In some sense, perhaps the “purest” brand of fascism was that of Codreanu and his “Legion of the Archangel Michael,” also known as the Iron Guard. This intensely palingenetic movement emphasized spiritual and moral regeneration to create a Romanian “New Man” to lead the nation to a higher level and fulfill the destiny of the Romanian people. This highly “virulent” form of “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” proved itself unable to co-exist with Antonescu’s conservative authoritarian para-fascism; the Legionary movement’s attempt to seize full power for itself (rather than share it with para-fascists; this sharing was correctly seen by the Legionaries as being an emasculating compromise of their ideology) was crushed by the para-fascist military apparatus.

Three fascisms, three different movements. But the revolutionary energies unleashed by these ideologies stand in sharp contrast to the moribund and ossified conservatism of the para-fascists. The political/cultural avant-garde (Italian), the biological-racialist (German), and the spiritual/moral (Romanian) components of these fascisms are important to us today.

And it is probably wrong to separate out the avant-garde mindset as being only applicable to the political/cultural sphere. After all, we really do need new, cutting-edge memes with respect to both materialist race and non-materialist morality. To quote a certain pro-fascist poet: “Make it new!”

With respect to Antliff’s book itself, chapter topics include Sorelian myth and anti-Semitism, and the fascistic politics of Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier. The importance of Sorelian myth was underscored by a recent Michael O’Meara piece that appeared on TOQ Online. Antliff stresses that culture and aesthetics were extremely important to Sorel in his quest to formulate a doctrine of instrumentally utilizing myth to overturn the hated rationalist-capitalist-democratic system. Art is part of this aesthetic emphasis and, truth be told, Sorel focused on culture over politics; indeed, he was scornful of the power of the myth being used and squandered for low-level political aims.

Further, Sorel went through a distinctly “anti-Semitic” phase, in which Jews were considered the exemplars of ultra-rationalist anti-creators, whose worldview set them in opposition to native peoples and native cultural expressions and aesthetics. Opposing the pro-Dreyfus “French” journal La revue blanche, Sorel sarcastically referred to the journal’s Jewish founders as “two Jews come from Poland in order to regenerate our poor country, so unhappily still contaminated by the Christian civilization of the seventeenth century.” Sorel accused Jewish intellectuals of wanting to promote an abstract (i.e., non-ethnic, non-national, non-cultural) concept of (French) citizenship and to also promote “cosmopolitan anarchy.”

Related to this “anti-Semitism,” Sorel admired and promoted the Classical World; the values of classical heroes, such as the Greeks at Thermopylae, were something counterpoised against the Jewish ethic and the degeneration of parliamentary democracy.

Sorel considered art as related to the creativity of work, a creativity that he wished to inculcate into the “productive workers” in place of assembly line mass capitalism and rationalized “one man-one vote” democracy. He also considered an enlightened “proletariat” as being able to reinvigorate a stagnant bourgeoisie through class conflict.

Georges Valois, 1878–1945

Georges Valois (born Alfred-Georges Gressent) went through a wide variety of ideological contortions in his lifetime, from fascism to “libertarian communism,” ending up dying in a Nazi concentration camp after being captured as a member of the “French Resistance.” While such an unbalanced individual represents much of what is wrong with the “movement” (changing your mind is one thing – completely switching your worldview from one moment to the next is another), some of his activities during his “fascist stage” are of interest.

Particularly enlightening is the focus on the urbanism of Le Corbusier, which stands in contrast to much of the American “movement” and its anti-urbanist emphasis on militant ruralism. No doubt, in the West today, the city is an anti-white, anti-Western disaster, full of racial enemies. No doubt as well that throughout much of human history, the city was an unhealthy and sterilizing place, inimical to racial survival and racial progress.

However, in our modern technological age, if we can solve our racial problems, the city itself does not necessarily have to be a racial evil. As part of a natural continuum of human ecologies – isolated rural, rural, suburban/town, small city, larger cities, etc. – the city may play an important role in the Futurist racial ethnostate of tomorrow, a place of technological advancement, racially healthy avant-garde memes, and sociopolitical dynamism. Racial nationalism can and should be reconciled to a certain degree of urbanism – not the urbanism of degeneration, but that of regeneration.

This of course underlies a schism within activism that often goes unnoticed – between modernist, technological tribalist-racialist Futurism and a ruralist anti-technological ecotribalism. It is clear that the French fascists described by Antliff for the most part fall into the first group. Thus, a major divide exists between the Futurist-Modernist fascists (think Marinetti in Italy) and the ruralist soil-oriented romantic past-oriented fascists (think Darre in Germany, or the agrarian-nostalgic Vichy regime in France).

Of course, a healthy society needs both worldviews, and in practical terms a balance is required. For example, Valois incorporated a “love for the native soil” along with his Futurist mindset. Indeed, Valois contrasted “Asiatic nomadness” associated with communism with the “Latin sedentary” style — derived from “cultured Roman legions” — of the French, tied to the native soil and inclined to fascism. He also associated the hated nomadic lifestyle with capitalism, since hyper-rational capitalism uprooted the workers from grounding in an organic society and turned them into atomized, rootless “nomads.”

A related issue is the relationship between Futurism and the veneration of the past. Antliff makes clear that the emphasis on the past in fascism (e.g., the Greco-Roman classical world) was not meant to mean turning back the clock and shunning progress. Instead, this look to the past was, paradoxically, futurist, in that the fascists wanted to take from the past certain noble values and behaviors and use these to help build the modern, technological world of tomorrow. Therefore, one need not discard the past to build a new future, but judiciously use elements of the past as necessary building blocks for the projected futurist edifice. Different strands of fascist thought need not be incompatible, just as common ground must be found between the tribalist futurist and tribalist ruralist strands of modern racial nationalist thought.

Another French fascist, Philippe Lamour, also went through many ideological “twists and turns,” ultimately rejecting fascism in favor of anti-fascism and syndicalism. Lamour originally represented the fascist variant of “machine primitivism” – that is, an anti-rationalist “new consciousness attuned to the dynamism of technology.” Thus, urban industrialism, technology, productivity, and futurist modernism need not be associated with “rational” egalitarianism but with tribalistic fascism. Lamour wished to create a “community of producers” integrating the different classes of French society to overturn liberal democracy in favor of a modernist technologically dynamic fascist state.

Early French fascists such as Lamour also promoted the idea of a European federation, and attempted to make common cause with more pan-European and “leftist” German National Socialists, such as the Strasserian “Black Front,” who favored European cooperation as opposed to Hitler’s hegemony through military conquest. Not coincidentally, before he fell into Hitler’s orbit, Mussolini also favored an alliance of European (fascist) states, promoted through the doctrine of “Roman Universality,” with practical expression through events such as the pan-fascist Montreux conference.

Lamour’s greatest contribution to French fascism was the promotion of the “conflict of generations,” pitting the younger fascistic generation of WW I against the older generation of parliamentary democrats. This latter group was seen as being out of touch with the new age of national regeneration, avant-garde culture and politics, Sorelian myth, as well as technological productivity. Lamour and his “war generation” were at the forefront of the battle of youth vs. the image of fossilized reactionary status quo politicians.

Aesthetically, the work of German artist Germaine Krull and even Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein influenced the avant-garde sensibilities of “machine primitive” young French fascists such as Lamour. Antliff summarizes Lamour’s unique contribution to the ideology of interwar French fascism as the melding of “machine aesthetics” to the concept of generational warfare. Thus, to Lamour, technological dynamism and the replacement of the ossified previous generation with fresh youth were the Sorelian myths required to spark an era of national renewal.

Thierry Maulnier, 1908–1988

Thierry Maulnier (born Jacques Talagrand), author of “Crisis Is in Man,” had as his concept of Sorelian myth “classical violence.” Within the journal Combat, Maulnier and colleagues opposed the leftist French Popular Front’s Marxist-themed “culture” with their own view of aesthetics in architecture and sculpture. Antliff describes Combat’s as focusing on “three interrelated spheres: political institutions, human spirituality, and aesthetics.” The classicism of the Maulnier school promoted the idea of a “synthesis of Dionysian energy and Apollonian restraint.”

Politically, Maulnier wished for a form of French fascism that rejected parliamentary democracy but which still supported the rights and aspirations of the individual, as opposed to what was perceived as the more authoritarian and collectivist societies of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany. These distinctions between French and other fascisms became more salient after Mussolini fell into Hitler’s orbit and became hostile to French national interests. Indeed, before the start of WW II, Maulnier advocated a “minimal fascist program” for France that would be both a short-term “fix” to bolster the French military for confrontation with the Axis, as well as preparation for the long-term and permanent fascistic remodeling of society after the Axis threat had dissipated.

It must be noted that the Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier fascist ideologies, while linked together by a palingenetic call for national renewal and a rejection of parliamentary democracy, did differ in important ways. In particular, the classicism of Maulnier can be contrasted with the militant futurism and “machine primitivism” of Lamour. Although Antliff stresses that the French fascist focus on the classical world does not necessarily imply a rejection of modernism per se, the specific differences between Maulnier and Lamour were the greatest of any of the individuals profiled by Antliff. Valois and Lamour both embraced the image of “industrial production” as a central motif of their ideology; however, while Lamour spun together a myth of generational conflict, Valois instead emphasized a “spirit of victory” in which the heroism of WW I will now be turned to a battle of the entire nation to create an organized fascist-industrial society. Of these three men, it was Lamour who was the most steadfastly “avant-garde” in cultural-aesthetic orientation, Maulnier the least.

Crude ethnic stereotyping may lead one to conclude that an emphasis on art, culture, and aesthetics in the creation of fascist ideology was (and is) a particularly “French” phenomenon. Of course, other fascist movements were concerned with these issues, sometimes to a significant extent, but none of them incorporated such memes into the core of the political thinking as did French fascist thinkers. Indeed, the cultural-aesthetic emphasis of the French strain of fascism is a breath of fresh air after immersion in the more focused political thought of the Italian Fascists and the racialist ideals of the German National Socialists.

In fact, all three areas of focus – cultural-aesthetic, political, and racialist – are required for a complete memetic complex to promote fascistic ideals. As a biological reductionist, I would emphasize the racialist first of all, but doing so with respect to modern genetic science rather than the sort of quackery that passed as “racial science” under the Nazis. However, biological racialism by itself is not enough. Without an edifice of political and cultural-aesthetic memes, the foundation of ultimate interests will go nowhere.

Related to this issue of political aesthetics, I was impressed by Alex Kurtagic’s analysis of “semiotic systems” and the importance of style in shaping perceptions of status within nationalist memes. This is important. Of course, the enemy will, as a matter of course, attempt to oppose this approach through co-option and/or mockery.

Co-option is a problem for any memetic threat to establishment power; for example, the GOP has effectively co-opted “rightist, racist” concerns through the exploitation of “implicit whiteness.” This strategy has enabled the Republicans to retain white support while at the same time moving continuously leftward in the direction of overtly anti-white policies.

Thus, while aesthetics and style are important, they always must be innately linked to content to prevent the establishment from utilizing the same semiotic systems to promote the exact opposite of our objectives. Dealing with co-option will be difficult, and it is crucially important that the problem be analyzed from the beginning in a proactive fashion.

In other words, right from the start, the construction of unique avant-garde racial-nationalist semiotic systems must incorporate strategies for preventing co-option and dealing with co-option if these preventive measures fail. Therefore, we must identify, in advance, as many problems with each approach as possible, and develop multiple contingency plans for dealing with each emergent counter-move of the establishment.

Mockery is also a problem; the establishment, utilizing its control of the mass media and its stable of celebrity puppets, can subject any racial-nationalist semiotic system to a barrage of withering ridicule. It is important that the elitist and superior nature of the system be of sufficient strength that adherents can turn around such ridicule and assert it as a matter of pride and not shame. In other words, the establishment ridicule itself must be mocked as the pathetic attempts of a dying and out-of-touch system to delegitimize a novel movement of which they are afraid.

Again, careful planning is required to plan against the establishment’s ridicule strategy, but if both co-option and mockery can be successfully dealt with, the semiotic-aesthetic strategy has a chance to achieve its objectives. And those objectives are, in essence, to defuse the “social pricing” attacks of the establishment against racial-nationalist activists and adherents, by providing an alternative value system opposed to, and independent of, establishment standards and acceptance.

In summary, Antliff has dissected a particularly interesting and heretofore unexplored strain of French fascism characterized by an embrace of avant-garde cultural concepts, modernism, Futurism, productivity and the planned society, urbanism and industrial technology, exemplified by so-called “machine primitivism.”

With today’s worries of “peak oil,” and concerns that the multiracial West will collapse, visions of decentralized ruralistic tribalism have again become prominent in nationalist thought. However, the white man is endlessly inventive, and free of the shackles of genocidal globalist multiculturalism, the technological genius of whites, so unleashed, may provide the foundation for a Futurist, technologically advanced and tribalist society. Such a society would have options for both the urbanist technological and ruralist agrarian lifestyles for those whose preferences are for one or the other.

Although I am sure he is an “anti-fascist,” Antliff’s work helps us to consider one technological Futurist option. The major conclusion from both Antliff’s and Kurtagic’s analyses is that staid and conformist methods for sociopolitical activism may be best replaced, at least in part, by avant-garde memes that let some “fresh air” into stale “movement” environs.

“Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land.”
– Walter Scott

One.

Some time in the second half of the 1990s, a terminological change occurred in the racially conscious community.

Many who previously identified themselves as White Power advocates, segregationists, separatists, supremacists, survivalists, neo-Confederates, biological realists, etc. started calling themselves “white nationalists.”

At the time (and I didn’t know much about these things then), I thought this reflected a changing political consciousness.

For what began after 1945 as a “movement” to maintain the integrity of America’s racial character and prevent alien races from intruding into its various “life worlds” had, by the 1990s, ceased to be a realistic project — 30 years of Third-World immigration, “civil rights” legislation, and various measures imposed by the federal government to subordinate white interests to those of nonwhites had irrevocably transformed the American people so that it was increasingly difficult to characterize them as even a majority-white population.

As a consequence, “white advocates” in the late 1990s started making traditional nationalist claims for secession and self-determination because the United States, in their eyes, had become a threat to their people.

Two.

This interpretation was not at all unreasonable. But, alas, it didn’t quite accord with the facts.

I’ve since learned that those calling themselves “white nationalists” are not necessarily nationalists in the sense of wanting to secede from the United States in order to form an independent ethnostate. Most, I think it’s fair to say, are racially conscious conservatives who want to work through the existing institutions to regain control of the country their ancestors made — in order, ultimately, to dismantle the present anti-white system of preferences and restore something of the white man’s former hegemony.

By contrast, white nationalists in the strict sense (i.e., those favoring secession) have no interest in restoring the old ways, let alone regaining control of the central state, whose authority is already slipping and whose rule is increasingly dysfunctional. Indeed, the American state system, as its more astute supporters acknowledge, is now beyond reform.

Instead, white nationalists aspire to create a counter-elite to lead disaffected white youth in a movement to found a whites-only nation-state somewhere in North America, once the poorly managed enterprise known as the United States collapses in a centrifugal dispersion of its decaying and perverted powers.

Without an organizational presence in the real world and with a “public” largely of computer hobbyists, white nationalists at present have no hope of actually mobilizing the white populace in opposition to the existing anti-white regime. Rather, their immediate goal is to prepare the way for the development of a revolutionary nationalist vanguard to lead the struggle for white liberation. They aspire thus not to recapture the rotting corpse of the US government, but to free themselves from it — in order to be themselves, in their own land, in their own way.

White nationalists, as such, politically define themselves in wanting to create a sovereign state in North America. They endeavor, therefore, not to “put things back the way they were,” as conservatives wish, but to rid themselves of them completely.

A National Revolution, they hold, will alone restore “the white man to his rightful place in the world.”

Inspired by the birthright handed down by the blood and sacrifice of ancestors, their project, relatedly, is not about restoring the Third Reich, the Confederacy, or Jim Crow, as leftists imagine, but about creating a future white homeland in which their kind will be able “to pursue their destiny without interference from other races.”

Three.

White nationalism is a variant of historic ethnonationalism, what Walker Connor calls nationalism “in its pristine sense.”

All three — racial, ethno, and pristine nationalism — define the nation in terms of blood.

The creedal or civic nationalism of the present regime, which makes loyalty to the state, not the nation, primary, is “nationalist” only in a narrow ideological sense, confusing as it does patriotism (loyalty to the state or affection for the land) with loyalty to the people (nationalism). It thus defines the nation in terms of certain abstract democratic principles, seeing it as a collection of individuals, each more important than the whole.

Though ethnonationalists privilege the nation’s spirit above all else, they nevertheless define it organically, in terms of blood, as an extended family, an endogamous kin group, or a genetic commonwealth.

Unlike European nations, formed around long-established ethnic cores (which had developed in the Middle Ages, as Germanic and other tribal confederations evolved into larger political, regional, and cultural identities), American national identity was, historically, defined in explicitly racial terms.

As Sir Arthur Keith characterized it: “In Europe the stock has been broken up into local national breeds; in America the local breeds have been reunited.”

In both cases, a national identity grew out of a real or imagined blood relationship linking the nation’s members to inherited customs and institutions.

Because the American form of racial nationhood lacks the ethnic dimension distinct to European nationalism, it is a source of some misunderstanding, especially in its purely negative expression as anti-Semitism or Negrophobia.

For example, even Euronationalists who struggle for a continental nation-state tend to reject white nationalism — because it seems to imply the typical American leveling of cultural and other identities by subsuming them under a homogenizing biological concept that negates the particularisms of European nationhood and subjects them to Anglo-American hegemony.

In this, however, our European cousins misunderstand the aim of white nationalism, though some white nationalists in their one-sided reaction to nonwhites may, admittedly, have given cause to their misunderstanding.

White nationalism is a distinctly American (or, better said, New World) nationalism, not a European one, and the two are analogous only at the highest level, where the national community, defined ethnically or racially, affirms it right to control its own destiny.

This is not to say that American racial nationalism — which makes white European racial ascriptions the basis of American identity — has no ethnic or historic component.

The country’s original settlers were largely of Anglo-Protestant descent and this had a formative effect on American institutions and folkways.

The organic basis of the American nation, however, was less English ethnicity than “whiteness.”

Even before the War of Independence (the first American war of secession), more than a quarter of the population was of non-English, mainly North European stock: Scots-Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenots, etc. By about the mid-eighteenth century, the “American English” were increasingly referred to as “Americans,” a people “selected by a whole series of ordeals which [had] killed off the weak and worthless” and conferred a distinct vitality on their laws, attitudes, and local institutions

The bitterness of the War of Independence and the War of 1812, US-British acrimony and rivalry, which lasted late into the 19th century, in addition to the nationalist compulsion to celebrate an American identity independent of the English — all tended to minimize the significance of the colonists’ original national origins, as they were reborn as pure Americans. In fact, American nationalism arose on the basis of a certain popular revulsion against the English.

Nevertheless, English-Americans were the original native Americans, and all the rest of us have since become American by assimilating something of the ethos derived from their unique genos.

Though Anglo-Protestant ethnicity continues to animate the inner reaches of American culture, it wasn’t, however, the genotypical basis of American identity. Rather, it was the racial experience of transplanted Englishmen in seventeenth-century Virginia, then the “exotic far western periphery . . . of the metropolitan European cultural system.”

In the New World part of this system, the ever-looming presence of African slaves, considered “by nature vicious and morally inferior,” and “savage” red Indians, who posed an ongoing threat, could not but foster an acute racial consciousness.

Given that economic opportunities, vast expanses of virgin land, and new fortunes prevented the old European social hierarchies from forming, these racial bearings acted as the one fixed hierarchy ordering colonial life.

Forged, thus, in conflict with nonwhites, the colonists’ early racial consciousness served to mark the boundaries of the emerging American identity. The historian Winthrop Jordan claims that “Anglo-Americans” were already identifying themselves as “whites” rather than “Englishmen” as early as 1680.

National or ethnic differences in this racially mixed environment were simply less meaningful than differences between Europeans and non-Europeans.

These differences were institutionalized when the American colonists declared their independence, for they declared in effect their intent to become a self-determined people in the evolutionary sense, by becoming a nation, an organic body with its own sovereign state and its own laws of growth.

Then, following the revolution, as republican principles were gradually extended to all white males, the country’s Herrenvolk democracy posed an insurmountable obstacle to the extension of these principles to nonwhites — for the new, explicitly white nation was based not on the liberal fiction of “humanity,” but on the assumption that human nature is a product of blood and race.

Indeed, the white egalitarianism of the early republic, shaped largely in opposition to the Toryism of anglophile Federalists (who represented the bourgeois interests of liberal market society and its connection to British commerce) was premised on the Negro’s otherness and the primacy of white racial ascriptions, all of which further contributed to the nation’s self-consciousness, coherence, and communality, as British and European Americans, largely under the leadership of Indian-fighting, pro-slavery, and expansionist Southerners, came to share not just the same horizontal sense of right and identity, but the same vertical qualities and dignities of their stock.

Different in ways from ethnicity, race formed the psychological bonds that joined American whites and differentiated them from nonwhites, just as the language, customs, and early institutions of the original Anglo-Protestant settlers established the cultural-linguistic framework in which white Americans became a self-conscious nation.

Four.

The ethnogenic process that gradually imposed a common culture and identity on the former colonists, as they became Virginians and New Englanders, and more generally, Americans, was interrupted in the 1840s by the mass influx of Irish and German Catholics — the former seen almost as an alien race. Then, in the late 19th century, this was followed by a second great immigrant wave, from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Today the Third World invasion is taking the ethnogenic process to a new extreme, as the state, with its inorganic definition of the nation, endeavors to “transcend” the perennially white, Christian character of the American people for the sake of its oxymoronic “universal nation.”

At each nodal point in this demographic transformation, except the most recent, native Americans, however resistant to the newcomers, succeeded in assimilating them on the basis of their racial ascriptions, as the Anglo-Protestant character of American identity became progressively more “ecumenical.”

Indeed, it’s increasingly difficult today to talk of “hyphenated-Americans,” given that the different European ethnic strains making up the white population have so extensively intermarried that many now no longer know their ethnic origins. As one historian writes: “Ellis Island whiteness” has come to replace “Plymouth Rock whiteness.”

But there were obvious limits to assimilation. As Woodrow Wilson put it: “We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.” Against this view, many “new,” especially Jewish immigrants, advanced the cause for greater ethnic diversity, as if America’s vocation was to become a boardinghouse to all the world’s peoples. The Old America, though, would have none of this, and, in Stoddard’s words, dismissed such claims with the insistence “that America is basically ‘made’ — and that it shall not be unmade.”

When the post-1945 National Security State, armed with its newly acquired “mandate of heaven,” endeavored to turn Roosevelt’s liberal-managerial state system into a world empire, premised on the belief that it was based on an idea, not a people, it launched what amounted to an assault on America’s historic identity — an assault whose overarching aim has been to undermine the population’s racial consciousness and promote ethnocidal practices facilitating its “demographic” reconstitution. The state’s “anti-racism” came thus to serve as an instrument of its social engineers, who sought to turn whites into herds of “tamed sheep [who] care not in which flock [they] are driven.”

It was only natural, then, that once the shearing got under way the most racially conscious whites began to see themselves as an oppressed nation in need of their own sovereign state.

Five.

Racial conservatives have offered numerous criticisms of nationalists advocating secession from the United States. The most common of these — made in a period which has witnessed successful secessionist movements (in the former SU, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, etc.), as well as other popular movements resisting a despotic, leveling centralization in the name of regionalism, devolution, and the defense of historic identities — is that the prospect of creating a white ethnostate in North America free of the United States is totally unrealizable . . . a fantasy . . . pure and utter folly.

But this, they fail to realize, is hardly criticism at all.

For those with the courage of their convictions, it’s never a matter of calculating the odds and going with the winning side, but of doing what needs to be done — like that Roman soldier of Pompeii cited by Spengler in Man and Technics, whose Aryan sense of duty kept him at his post, as Vesuvius exploded in fire.

Six.

Viewed “objectively,” neither secession nor a white conservative reconquest has a chance, not one in a universe of infinite possibilities. Both are figments of a few white minds troubled by the prospect of their people’s imminent demise.

But that’s the way all great movements begin.

If a presently unattainable ideal is not first articulated as a mythic possibility, it remains unrealized, for its idealization is part of the process that quickens its realization.

In 1774, only a few believed in American independence. After 1776 it was a critical mass.

Secession, as such, cannot be submitted to the usual criticism, for it’s not a fact or even an idea so much as it is a way of being — or a wanting to be.

Central to its realization, therefore, is not the objective forces opposing it, but the subjective will seeking its triumph.

Many things, of course, would have to change before either secession or reconquest become remotely realizable (though our postmodern age, the Kali Yuga of the Traditionalists, is an age in which time and events have greatly accelerated, as all things hurtle toward the inevitable crackup, the Ragnarok, which precedes every rebirth).

The thought, nevertheless, of whites breaking free of the United States, in this period when the multi-cult empire has experienced the first of its death agonies, seems, from a secessionist perspective, somewhat less of a fantasy than trying to reform it, which sixty years of experience suggest is unreformable.

Seven.

Almost every criticisms that can be made of secession is to be found in Sam Francis’s “Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival” (1995).

Sam, who I have paid high tribute to in the pages of this journal, was an important transitional figure in the development of a white nationalist outlook.

Though one of his feet was solidly planted in the white nationalist camp, the other, however, was never quite freed from his former “new right” and paleocon beliefs. Divided, his critique of secession reflected an old-fashioned patriotism unwilling to break from the US — though, perhaps, if he had lived, he might feel differently, now that the dusky helmsman has begun steering the ship of state perilously close to the shoals of what promises to be an even more horrendous fate.

As an anti-secessionist, Sam considered separation from the United States tantamount to surrender — surrender of the country our ancestors created, surrender of its history, traditions, interests.

But Sam was wrong.

Secessionists surrender nothing but the slow death of their people. For among other things, secession is about survival — and the prospect of being able to fight another day.

To do that, one must live. But where, how?

For all practical purposes whites have lost the United States. Though still a near majority, we are surrounded by armed forces seeking our destruction; we are running out of ammunition, and the ground troops are being ordered in to clean up the remaining pockets of resistance. It looks as if we’re doomed.

Secession is a way of avoiding the deadly pincers closing in on white life.

In the last sixty years, absolutely NOTHING — not one little thing — has been accomplished to interrupt the programmed destruction of European America.
Nevertheless, the critics of secession drone on: “Why give up the country when you can take it back?”

These two-fisted patriots who think this is the most powerful argument against secession are likely to be singing the same song in the not too distanced future, when colored novelists start writing about “The Last of the Europeans.”

But even if feasible, what self-respecting white man would want to take back the United States, this monstrous, bureaucratic Leviathan whose Jewish, race-mixing, homophile, feminist, fraudulent, anti-Christian, and degenerate practices stand as an affront to everything his ancestors stood for.

The hard truth is that it’s gotten to the point where the US can no longer be defended as “my mother, drunk or sober,” only repulsed as an alien body-snatcher.

To this end, secessionists emulate the proud Danes, who said after the loss of Schleswig-Holstein in 1865, that “What has been lost externally will be gained internally.”

But more than refusing to abide the state responsible for their dispossession, secessionists see this “abomination of desolation” as their principal enemy. Only by freeing themselves from it and acquiring their own land under their own sovereignty do they see a future for their kind.

One might call this “surrendering large parts of the country to nonwhites” — though these aliens already occupy large parts of it and will continue to do so until whites are completely replaced.

The secessionists’ ultimate consideration, then, is not what will be lost, but what gives whites the best chance to survive.

“Any proposal for separation,” Sam argued, “would simply alienate the most patriotic and nationalist loyalties of American whites and lead them to see separatists as un-American.” Most whites would also “refuse to abandon their allegiance to the US or forsake its territory.”

Here Sam confused loyalty to the state with loyalty to the nation, paying tribute, in effect, to Caesar in his own coin. Given the logic of his argument, one might question what his position would have been in 1774, when secession from the Mother Country was originally proposed? Or what his position would be if the United States should start following in the footsteps of the former Soviet Union? And, finally, one wonders how patriotic most Americans are going to be once they discover that their grandchildren will be paying off the debts of the present US government — at a time when American citizenship will probably be little more than a form of Chinese peonage.

Secessionists don’t care if most whites would refuse to abandon “their” country. “Most” whites, de-Ayranized as they are, allowed a Negro to become president.
Only those who care for their kind and are willing to fight for them can possibly found a new nation.

The flag-waving, Constitution-worshipping types — who know nothing outside the ideology of liberal democracy, old (“conservative”) or new (“progressive”), and who believe that there is something sacred about the unholy United States — will never be mobilized for the sake of “racial preservation”; that ship has sailed.

In secessionist eyes, it’s better to lose a bit of territory and shed the race’s detritus than to lose whatever remains of the white nation — especially in view of the coming age, which is certain to be filled with cascading catastrophes, set off by the imploding contradictions of liberalism’s dystopian regime.

In the context of such a possible secession, Sam wondered how the races could possibly be separated and what would prevent them from “unseparating.” Here again he didn’t see what was coming. Since the end of the Second World War there have been numerous population transfers by partitioned states (the most important of which were sanctioned by the US). These transfers occurred in the recent past, will undoubtedly occur again, and already occur in little ways every day in the US, as the relocation of nonwhites forces whites out of their neighborhoods.

Secession implies both population transfers and territorial partition — historically justifiable measures, sanctioned by US precedent, and executable with a minimum of force, unlike the pipe dreams of anti-secessionists, whose imagined “reconquest” would be of a state with a hundred million nonwhite citizens, all with their hands out.

In its desire for cheap labor, Sam thought a separate white nation, would simply repeat the process that got whites into the present mess — as if the struggle for secession (and all it will entail) wouldn’t lead to an explicitly racial definition of nationality, to an inversion of the market’s primacy, and to a spiritual triumph over the materialism that has corrupted so many whites.

As a conservative, he couldn’t see that white secession (unlike the secession of the Confederacy) is a revolutionary project premised on a rejection not just of the illegal alienations of the federal government, but of the entire social, economic, and moral order sustaining its ethnocidal rule.

A white breakaway state, Sam also claimed, would be surrounded by hostile powers, vulnerable to invasion, and unable to defend itself against the rising demographic tide outside its borders. Again, these are non-criticisms. Any region seceded from the United States would have all the resources necessary for its survival. More crucially, the racially homogenous populace of a seceded white republic would be imbued with the nationalist fervor and irrepressible convictions that are the inevitable offshoots of newly forged nations.

To think that a mutilated United States, with its warring racial factions, welfare politics, and rubber-spine army would be able to crush an armed, autonomous white republic is to abandon the realm of logic. Even at the height of its expansionist powers, National Socialist Germany never thought of invading tiny, mountainous Switzerland, where every citizen was armed and ready to defend his nation. The US Army, need it be said, is no Wehrmacht.

Eight.

European Americans will not survive many more generations under the present regime.

Racially-conscious conservatives are counting on a future white backlash to mobilize in defense of white interests. Through such a mobilization, and a much talked about, though little practiced, “march through the institutions,” they hope to raise white racial consciousness, counter the demographic threat posed by nonwhites, and introduce political and legal reforms to curtail nonwhite power — all of which, of course, are totally desirable.

But they expect to arrive at this Utopia without explaining how they would counter a population half of which will be nonwhite in 33 years (2042); without explaining how they would challenge a government that criminalizes white dissent; without explaining how a system can be fundamentally changed without fundamentally changing the institutions and powers that govern it and make it what it is; without any of these things, racial conservatives mock the notion of secession, as if their own not particularly successful project is the sole conceivable alternative.

Nine.

Unlike their critics, secessionists have a plan, a simple, straightforward one, that offers whites an alternative to an unreformable system and an inescapable death.
This plan has the advantage of being (a) eminently political, (b) based on proven historical precedents, and (c) imbued with the power to generate a will to nationhood.

Given the increasingly totalitarian nature of the existing system, where the mere mention of “race” can be taken as an incitement to crimes against humanity, this aspect of secession, ought, perhaps, to be discussed in historical rather than explicitly programmatic terms.

Much of the history of European nationalism speaks to the American situation today, especially (in my admittedly partisan view) Irish nationalism.

In the 1870s and ’80s, a generation after the An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger), revolutionary and conservative nationalists agreed to be allies in the common struggle for Irish nationhood. The revolutionary Fenians, preeminently in the form of Michael Davitt’s Land League, which led the rebellion in the countryside, gave the constitutionalists in Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party the social leverage to force concessions from the English at Westminster — concessions that eventually won back many Irish lands. Then, once the constitutionalists had gone as far as they could, by about 1912 or 1914, the revolutionary, physical-force wing of Irish nationalism took over, completing the nationalist project.

We American secessionists want whatever works best for the future of our people. If our “constitutionalists,” perhaps in the form of a third party, can create dissension and vulnerability among the “English” in a way that promotes American interests, they are to be supported. But if they should fail, others are likely to turn, as did the Irish, to the methods of Connelly and Pearse.

Those who know Hibernian — or any other European — nationalist history also know the immeasurable power of the nation, especially the nation rising to nationhood.
This is the spirit we secessionists hope to stir in white Americans.

The situation today may be totally grim, but politically there is no more feasible or marketable of strategies to awaken our people, especially as they become aware of their approaching minority status and all it implies.

Imagine, then, for a moment, a white homeland in North America, free of the alien-dominated US government, with its colored multitudes and parasitic institutions: In my mind, this one image says everything, explains everything, promises everything.
The powerful imagery of an autonomous white nation also possesses the mythic potential that the General Strike has in the thought of Georges Sorel.

All great movements, Sorel saw, are driven not by rational arguments or party programs, but by their myths (which “are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act”).

For it is myth — and the memories and hopes animating it — that shape a nation, that turn a “motley horde” into a people with a shared sense of purpose and identity, that mobilize them against the state of things, and prepare them for self-sacrifice and self-rule.

A Sovereign Independent State, as the Irish called it in 1916 — the White Republic, as I call it — is the secessionist myth, symbolizing the determination of white men to assert themselves as a free people somewhere in an all-white America.

]]> http://www.toqonline.com/blog/toward-the-white-republic/feed/ 31 http://www.toqonline.com/blog/filippo-marinetti/ http://www.toqonline.com/blog/filippo-marinetti/#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:00:40 +0000 Kerry Bolton http://www.toqonline.com/?p=3389

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.

“J’attends les Cosaques et le Saint-Esprit.”
-Leon Bloy

Georges Sorel, 1847 - 1922

My talk this evening is about what might be called “the power of myth.”

I refer here not to the Bill Moyers’ program of the same name, but rather to the politics of white racial preservation and specifically to what preservation entails at the deepest level of the human psyche, at that level of primordial symbolical activity which is the realm of myth and epic poetry.

In approaching this subject, let me start with a few words about The Occidental Quarterly, for that’s where the subject begins.

The Quarterly‘s project is not about myth per se, but about “metapolitics,” which, though it has a mythic dimension, deals mainly with rationally-examined ideas and values.

What is “metapolitics”?

This is a term you won’t find in the dictionary, and when it enters political discourse its meaning is often unclear.

As I understand the term — and I understand “metapolitics” mainly by analogy — it is to politics as metaphysics is to physics.

What, then, is the relationship of metaphysics to physics?

According to my dictionary, physics is “the science of matter and energy and of the interaction between the two.”

“Metaphysics,” by contrast, is about that which is beyond physics — that is, it’s about the ultimate reality (assuming there is one) upon which the world of energy and matter rests.

Metaphysics, then, studies that which is the basis for the study of physics (whatever that may be).

Now if metapolitics is to politics as metaphysics is to physics, then metapolitics might be defined as that which addresses all those things that make politics possible.

Like the broad sense of metaphysics, metapolitics refers to a number of possible subjects.  For example: It can refer to ideology, to culture, to the prevailing conceptual paradigms, to the social hegemonies shaping the political field and framing the way we approach it, it can even refer to the irrational and subliminal forces affecting public behavior.

I can’t give you a precise definition of “metapolitics” (I think none exists), but I can explain something of what metapolitics means to The Occidental Quarterly.

The Quarterly‘s subtitle is: “Western Perspectives on Man, Culture, and Politics.”

“Western Perspectives” here means “white” or “European-American” perspectives on man, culture, and politics.

Accordingly, the Quarterly‘s metapolitical project examines and entertains ideas of man, culture, and politics from the perspective of what they mean for white men — and by implication what they mean in terms of their fitness, suitability, and adaptability to the politics of white racial preservation.

This metapolitical project is important not simply because ideas, as our conservatives tell us, “have consequences.”  But also because we live in an age of inversion, where all the traditional ideas, along with all the traditional values and beliefs, have been subverted and turned against whites.

The Quarterly‘s metapolitical project, it follows, is about intellectually arming whites so that, at one level, horizontally, they can collectively orient to the inverted forces threatening them as a people — and that, vertically, they can affirm and assert those ideas and values which are distinct to the  European-American spirit.

Yet, despite all this and despite the fact that its metapolitical project addresses the most elemental aspects of our existence, the Quarterly‘s focus on ideas, and sometimes high ideas, is of interest, alas, to but a few.

The people as a mass lack any interest in what they see as the unreal, impractical, and often inaccessible realm of ideas.

Whenever they enter the historical arena under the banner of the great social and nationalist movements, they are, for this reason, moved not by ideas, not even by self-interest, but by something else entirely — which has to do with (let’s call it) the mythic core of metapolitics.

Before getting to this, let me just quickly finish what I started to say about The Occidental Quarterly.  The writers, activists, and sponsors who support its metapolitical project are not merely interested in understanding and interpreting the inverted world that seeks the destruction of their kind.  They would also like to change this world.

The Quarterly‘s metapolitical project aims, thus, at putting in motion a movement — in thought, to start — that will lead to the eventual founding of a white ethnostate and, with it, a restoration of the white man’s rightful place in the world — and I don’t mean this in any Hollywood Nazi sense, but rather in terms of a people’s national right to retain the ownership and control of their own lands

If history is any guide, the great transformative movements of the past depended on a variety of subjective and objective factors.  Objectively, some sort of crisis of regime has usually been a precondition for setting an oppositional movement in motion; this could entail a crisis of legitimacy or a  social or economic breakdown.  Such a crisis will not, however, culminate in a revolutionary transformation unless certain subjective forces — in the form of a revolutionary movement — are prepared to exploit the crisis for the movement’s sake. Generally, this entails that a movement possesses both a cadre (capable of leading the movement) and a mass following (that gives the movement’s leadership the social leverage to carry out a revolutionary transformation of the existing system).

The cadre are the active minorities, the militants and intellectuals, who possess the communication and bargaining skills to articulate and define the movement’s cause, who establish the organizations that represent the cause in the real world, and who lay the groundwork that — ideally — will eventually intersect the mobilized masses, whose leadership they aspire to win.

These active minorities are the movement’s brains and hands, for their cultural and organizational activities prepare the way for the movement’s history-changing role.

The Quarterly‘s metapolitical project falls within the domain of such activity, which is why it has an important role to play in this period.

But if every great movement is articulated and organized by its active minorities, who constitute, in effect, a potential counter-elite, challenging the ruling elites, its success in the end depends less on the quality of their ideas or even the viability of their organization than on the masses who identify with their struggle and willingly make the sacrifices necessary to realize the movement’s goals.

Indeed, without significant mass support, no revolutionary movement has ever reached its goal.

As one German nationalist put it: “The history of the world is made by [active] minorities only if they embody the will and aspirations of the majority.”

If the heroism and self-sacrifice of the masses have been pivotal to virtually every revolutionary transformation of the modern era — and if these same masses are moved not by ideas or self-interest — how, then, are they to be rallied to the cause of white racial preservation?

One of the great revolutionaries who started us thinking about this question is Georges Sorel, who, not coincidentally, had a major influence on the anti-liberal wing of the labor movement, as well as on the anti-liberal wing of the nationalist movement (and its worth mentioning that the historical synthesis of these two movements — of the revolutionary labor and nationalist movements — in the interwar period [1918 - 1939] led directly to the emergence of Fascism, National Socialism, and other anti-liberal Third Way tendencies representing the historical high-water mark of revolutionary nationalism).

The motive force behind mass movements, Sorel saw, cannot be explained, as liberals and Marxists do, in terms of rationalist, pragmatic, materialist, or self-interested factors — for the masses making up a social movement do not behave like liberalism’s Economic Man. Sorel, in fact, saw excessive rationalism as both a source and a symptom of contemporary decadence.

The bonds that tie men to reality and compel them to act are rarely based on cold reason or calculation.  The human intellect, especially its rationalist mode, is simply part of a larger human consciousness — a consciousness synonymous not just with man’s reasoning mind, but more fundamentally with his life as a social, moral being.  At this level, the consciousness that motivates collective behavior is “irrational” to the degree that it is dictated not by self-interest and calculation, but by more elemental passions associated with the world of the great masses.

Reason, self-interest, and other such factors may, of course, motivate reform and self-improvement and every social system depends on them, but these factors never propel men into battle at the risk of life and limb, they never cause a people to go beyond the bounds of reasonable considerations, to shun their narrow egoism, and to take risks that challenge the prevailing state of things.

Something more primordial is always at work whenever the masses enter the historical arena.

For Sorel, a people assumes a historical role only when they are seized by an enthralling myth, whose symbols embody both their conscious and unconscious worldview and accords with their moral and ethical judgments about what’s fair or just.  Myth, as such, forms communities of like-minded people and thus a sense of solidarity, just as the heroic sensibility it fosters makes possible the social and moral renewal that’s part of every revolutionary transformation.

“As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses,” Sorel writes, “one may go on talking of revolt indefinitely, without provoking any revolutionary movement.”

In Sorel’s view, myth is that “body of images which, by intuition alone,” is “capable of evoking . . . the sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations” of a people’s distinct spirit, as this people struggles to assert itself as a specific life form.

Myth thus translates a people’s hopes and needs into their own idiom and feeds these hopes and needs back to them in ways that render them plausible and attractive.

Myth, in this Sorelian sense, grows out of the unmediated life of those who come to believe it.

Born, thus, from a people’s sense of itself, myth creates not just a sense of mission, but the courage to act — as a self-conscious, self-asserting life force.

In this way, it serves as an assertion of a people’s will, the projection or the imagining of an alternative life that appeals to what is best in the spirit of their kind.

The myth can be about the Second Coming of Christ or about the General Strike of the syndicalists.  What’s important is that the myth condenses and amalgamates the beliefs of its believers into a single compelling image that overwhelms every category opposing it.

As an unconscious but compelling life force, myth justifies a people, it explains why they differ from other people, it affirms them in their right to assert themselves as who they are, it defines them and their friends, just as it distinguishes them from their enemies.  One might even follow Schelling in believing that myth is what founds a people as a community of consciousness.

Because it arises from a people’s conviction and experience (some of which go back to Homer), it has nothing to do with Utopian or ideological plans for what should be or can be.

Myth is indeed not a description of things or a rational alternative to the present, but an expression of a determination to act.

To use a religious term (though it is not necessarily about religion), myth has an eschatological role to play, for it refers to the Final Days, to “ultimate and last things,” or to that coming catastrophic collision between the forces of good and evil.

Given its eschatological role, myth, ultimately, is a matter of faith — the faith of those who believe that no matter how grim or disappointing the present may be, their cause and their kind are bound to triumph once the moment of decision strikes — because their cause and their kind await a higher destiny than the negative one that their enemies would have them follow.

This heroic and self-confident faith is what imbues the myth’s believers with the willingness to make great sacrifices, even to die, for their beliefs — these same people who would normally never go out of their way for an idea, a political project, or a theory.

Those in the grip of a great myth — Irish nationalists in communion with Pearse’s Blood Sacrifice, sixteenth-century Calvinists convinced of their Predestination — such peoples, through the force that myth exerts on their character, acquire the power to make history.

But lacking such a captivating myth, there can be no history-changing movement.

In this context, The Occidental Quarterly may play a role in educating active minorities in the tradition they inherit, which is crucial to any future organization or tendency representing the white nationalist movement, but without the simultaneous spread of a myth that grips the white masses and instills in them a sense of historical meaning, there will be no National Revolution to liberate white America.

At this point, the question inevitably arises: What myth could possibly capture the imagination of the white masses and instill in them the enthusiasm for a white homeland?

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know.  A myth cannot be rationally constructed and imposed on a people.

It cannot even become self-conscious, for once it is seen as a myth it ceases to work.

By nature, a myth grows out of a people’s life and speaks to the sense they have of themselves.

But after saying this, I nevertheless think it’s safe to claim that the white nationalist myth will have little to do with IQ scores, black crime rates, Jewish malfeasance, or the superiority of European culture (though it will likely have a lot to do with the anti-white practices that have come with the colored invasion of white lands).  To the degree any of these issues have the capacity to move the white masses, I suspect it will be in conjunction with whatever myth ends up capturing their imagination.  For however important, these things in themselves are not the stuff of myth.

No one can predict, then, what the founding myth of a white nationalist movement will be.

But speaking personally, I know that I myself am already in the grips of a powerful myth — the myth of what I call the White Republic.

Other possible myths probably exist or will come to exist.

But for me it’s the White Republic that evokes the total captivating image of what we are about as a movement.

I recently wrote: “The prospect of an independent white homeland in North America, free of the US government, with its colored multitudes and parasitic institutions: This one image says everything, explains everything, promises everything.”

Why?  Because the myth of a White Republic means secession from the  United States.  It implies, as such, an all-white national community, which, in turn, would mean a total rejection of the blood-sucking system of cultural-racial chaos that shames us and causes us to hate the world in which we have to live.

At the same time, the myth of a White Republic implies an end to miscegenation, to affirmative action, to the rising tide of color.  But above all, the image of the White Republic implies a regeneration of our people, reborn on the basis of principles of self-assertion, self-interest, self-determination, and sovereignty.

I believe all these implications, which the image of a White Republic awakens in us, are the stuff of myth, for, in my mind at least, its image says everything, explains everything, promises everything.

The Occidental Quarterly will continue, of course, to validate the truths that inspire the white nationalist project, the truths whose criterion is life, not bloodless reason.  But what we white nationalists await most impatiently is the moment when our people begin to take inspiration from their own myths.

For if white men should ever again come to believe in themselves and their myths, then, at that point, all the diseased and contemptible human offshoots of late twentieth-century American barbarism, whose culminating abomination is the existing anti-white System, will at last be forced, as the wheel of history turns, to flee in fear of their lives.

It is images of this sort, I believe, that will shape the white nationalist myth.

Source: Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hume and J. Roth (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950).