TOQ: First, provide a brief description of your professional career, academic background, and life’s work.

JG: My Ph.D. is in Russian literature, which seemingly is unrelated to eugenics, but there is a connection: I edited and translated two Russian books on the Soviet forced-labor camps and one for Holocaust Library on the slaughter of Jews on occupied Soviet territory. I then went on to create a statistical model of IQ lowering as a result of violence targeted against high-IQ groups. To my surprise the mean was not significantly affected, but the right tail of the statistical curve suffered enormously. Imagine, for example, that two dozen of the world’s most brilliant composers had never been conceived: The average ability of subsequent generations would not be measurably different, but how impoverished music would be! Since at the time I was directing the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, I was able to give a lecture on the topic in the Smithsonian Castle on the Washington, D.C. Mall. If I had had to submit a proposal to make such a presentation, it would have been denied.

The fact that my training is in a different field is not only not an accident, it’s an essential precondition. Geneticists, sociologists, anthropologists, et al. who openly advocate eugenics are unemployable. My website (http://whatwemaybe.org) is the most widely visited of any website on eugenics. It is getting 8,000 hits a day, and a third of a million people have downloaded my free book Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century.

TOQ: What is the essence of your argument and the thesis of your latest book?

JG: Despite the revolution in our knowledge of genetics that has taken place since the founding of the formal eugenics movement, the essential argument for eugenics remains unchanged: a negative correlation between intelligence and fecundity and also the need to maintain selection in a modern world where virtually every women lives to experience menopause, thus transforming selection by survival into selection by fertility. We have effectively reversed evolutionary selection with devastating consequences for our genetic patrimony.

But eugenics is more than just preventing the squandering of our genetic patrimony. It is also continuing evolution. The most likely candidate for continuing evolution is the creation of the machine brain. Why should humans be the end of evolution? This is speculative, of course, and I may be wrong in betting on the cybernetic horse.

TOQ: Why did you decide to write on this topic?

JG: Ideology often serves as a rationalization for deep-seated emotional attitudes. Basically either we are satisfied with our own species and even see ourselves as created by God in his own image or we reject this view as hubris. Diversity is indeed a great richness within our species, but not when it extends to low intelligence and disease. The reality is that the bulk of humanity has been left out of culture, science, and civilization.

There is so much to admire in our species that it is a truly humbling experience. At the same time I’m not happy with the species in many ways. For that matter, I’m not all that pleased with myself.

TOQ: You identify eugenics as a human rights issue. Could you elaborate on this point?

JG: I define humanity, not as the totality of people alive today, but as the totality of people who will ever live. Thus the greater good argument (utilitarian ethics) dictates that we assume our parental responsibilities.

Our moral obligation to do everything in our power to ensure that children be born healthy and intelligent seems so obvious that it should not have to be argued.

Eugenics is also flesh and blood of the environmental movement. It is human ecology. We cannot act as the ultimate invasive species, counting on moving to a different planet after we have trashed our own. Eugenics is joined at the hip with the heritage of Malthus.

TOQ: Considering the underlying science of the concept of selective genetic breeding (the concept of the thoroughbred among some species) is demonstrably sound, why does the topic remain so taboo as it pertains to human reproduction? Some would argue that establishing government eugenic programs is the slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Do you agree? Explain.

JG: The traditional counterarguments to eugenics—that nurture is everything, that testing is useless, that heritability is zero—are straw men that cannot be taken seriously. Nevertheless, the fear of eugenics is unfortunately not without justification. Marx never envisaged the Soviet purges. Proponents of eugenics cannot know who will take up their banner. But the refusal to intervene in human selection is also a choice. And it is a choice that reverses the momentum of evolution. So I would rather take a risk than face inevitable doom.

TOQ: Resistance to eugenics, particularly as it applies to human reproduction, stems from religious beliefs over the “sanctity of life”; abortion, birth control, embryonic selection, in vitro fertilization, and gene replacement therapy contravene natural law according to many Christian denominations, most notably the Roman Catholic Church. Is this an unbridgeable chasm between religion and science? Would Catholics as well as fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants compromise their own religious convictions by embracing eugenics?

JG: Religion represents an attempt to explain the universe. Science is a competing paradigm. There is also the inertia of tradition. Still, religion has accepted science in other areas. Religious believers accept the multiplication table, why not eugenics?

TOQ: In her book Preaching Eugenics author Christine Rosen describes how several prominent religious leaders embraced the idea of eugenics. The Rev. William Dean Inge (1860–1954) is one of the more notable examples. Do you consider this to be an anomaly? What has changed since then to widen the gap between the clergy and eugenicists?

JG: Prior to the issuance of the 1930 Papal encyclical Casti connubii the Catholic Church was in many respects supportive of eugenics. The antieugenics position of Pius XI was reinforced by the conservative religious denial of evolution itself. Then came the onslaught of radical egalitarianism—Marxism, behaviorism, Margaret Mead/Franz Boas-style anthropology, Freudianism. This was momentum that had been building for more than a century. Its weak spot is that it is scientifically invalid. Sociobiology in its study of animal behavior has fatally undermined traditional morality. Religion-based denial of evolution is a temporary aberration that could be reversed far more abruptly than many realize.

TOQ: One misconception of eugenics is that it is “anti-family” in orientation. One could argue that the positions of active participants in the American Eugenics Society were “pro-family,” given their orientation toward “Fitter Family Contests” and their concern that too many professional couples were forgoing marriage and raising smaller families, thereby leading to dysgenic results, an underlying theme of the recent movie Idiocracy. How do you view this?

JG: Traditional family values present a mixed picture. No animal breeder would even consider monogamy. The biggest hurdle that eugenics will have to overcome in the long run is the abandonment of the “reproductive rights” of genetically disadvantaged persons. No one is denying them the right to marry and have children by using donated sperm or eggs. With this reservation, the traditional family is a wonderful model for bringing future generations into the world. But resistance will be fierce and perhaps impossible to overcome.

TOQ: One controversial argument of your book is that Jews, who were once avid supporters of eugenics in the pre-World War II era, are guided by misconceptions and myths that eugenics is synonymous with ethnic and racial genocide. Elaborate on your position of why you think Jews (and other groups) should come to value the importance of eugenics.

JG: I am gathering material for a new book, to be entitled Don’t Do What I Do: Jewish Eugenics. Jewry is in its very essence the historical product of eugenic inbreeding. And while it is true that the early eugenics movement was largely a WASP phenomenon, Jews played their own modest role in the movement. The Jewish assault on eugenics did not begin until the late 1960s—a quarter century after the end of World War II. Today Israel is the world leader in practicing eugenics; Jewish practitioners of eugenics just avoid using the word eugenics. But Diaspora Jews swim in the larger intellectual tide; more than half now marry non-Jews, and their Total Fertility Rate is below replacement level. Thus Diaspora Jewry is rapidly committing suicide as a result of its nominal rejection of eugenics. I published an article to this effect in the New York newspaper Jewish Week, and the editor received a number of positive responses from readers, one of which he published. Given the reality of Jewish political muscle, the only way that eugenics can resume its formerly leading role is to explain to the Jewish community that they are acting contrary to their own best interests. The same is true for immigration controls.

I have been reading late nineteenth century anthropological discussions, and I am struck by the collegial spirit that prevailed among Jewish and non-Jewish scholars. Today the prevailing climate is one of anger on the one side and paranoia on the other. And since a handful of Jewish billionaires have bought up the media, the upshot is censorship. I must tell you that I see TOQ’s position as counter-productive. The eugenics movement can be revived and “damage control” can be achieved with regard to immigration only by bringing along Jewish opinion. This is doable. Any political position declared “anti-Semitic” is dead in the water.

Eugenics is for everybody. Those who advocate eugenics for their own group only are not only acting in an immoral fashion, they are hurting eugenics for their own group.

TOQ: The grip of contemporary political correctness on modern intellectual life in Western societies constricts freedom of inquiry and speech beyond general taboos to the point of quasi-criminalization of certain views and perspectives. Do you see parallels between what is happening within academia and among elites in these societies and the rigid government-enforced conformity that defined the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union? Where do you think this is headed? Is there reason to be optimistic about a return to more open debate and discussion of taboo and controversial subjects without the risk of losing a job or facing some sort of social sanction?

JG: All societies have always been regulated by a mixture of manipulation and coercion. The Soviet government placed greater emphasis on coercion than does the U.S. governmental duopoly, which has proven more skilled in manipulation. But the iron fist of coercion is always on the ready, should manipulation fail. The war on terrorism is snake oil. Any modern state is inherently and hopelessly vulnerable. The current U.S. government is laying the foundations of a police state that would have immeasurably greater resources for controlling the population than did the Soviets. Still, it is unwise to underestimate the power of chaos.

TOQ: In the past eugenicists have proposed various government-sponsored initiatives to implement eugenic policies and programs. They range from positive eugenic measures, such as William McDougall’s tax-subsidized payments to middle and upper middle-class couples for having large families, to negative eugenic plans, such as William Shockley’s proposal to pay welfare mothers not to have children. Should the government establish eugenic policies, and if so, which policies should the government adopt? If you were overseeing the government’s initiative in this area, what specific policies would you urge?

JG: First of all I want to say that I believe in a universalist eugenics that is based on genuine affection for all ethnic groups, without exception.

The very diversity of human populations, shaped over the ages by radically differing environments, is a great resource for our species, even though eugenics does aim at a reduction of that portion of genetic variance that leads to sickness and low intelligence. All groups have strengths, and any association of eugenics with intergroup hostility or the denigration of other groups creates ill will for eugenics and is counterproductive.

Eugenics is feasible only to the degree that currently living people are willing to implement it. That means that radical solutions are not practical. It goes without saying that the ability to guide subsequent evolution depends on the strength and will of government, but even a relatively weak government can exercise considerable influence over fertility.

In my opinion the proposals advanced by Shockley and McDougall have no chance for implementation just now, but the following steps are entirely doable within the current intellectual climate, so different now from what it was a hundred years ago:

First, quantity, not quality, should be the chief priority of population management. It does appear that there are too many people for the environment to sustain them in perpetuity without environmental degradation.

If this perception proves to be overly pessimistic, the error can be easily and expeditiously corrected. If it is correct, however, the consequences will be irreversible.

Women all over the planet generally want to limit their fertility. U.S. foreign policy should shift away from its current fixation on political manipulation, codenamed “democracy,” and provide the encouragement that women require and the assistance that they want. The “demographic transition” is too uneven and needs to be urged along. To take but one example, Bangladesh is home to 150 million people but is only about the size of the state of Wisconsin, and 80 percent of its land area is flood plain.

Who will take in these people in the face of rising sea levels?

Resistance to abortion as part of family-planning can be overcome by presenting family planning as the ideal way to reduce abortions, albeit not eliminate abortion since termination of pregnancy is often the only line of defense for low-IQ populations.

Second, the current system of rendering assistance exclusively to needy single mothers is a genetic disaster that makes low-IQ groups our breeding pool. It should be replaced with national medical insurance and free day care for all. This would provide essential assistance to welfare populations that would permit them to work, but not encourage them to have still more children.

Third, it is not in America’s national interest to massively import the underclass of other countries to “do jobs that Americans do not want to do” and who then become part of our breeding pool. On the other hand, neither is it morally right for us to rob the underdeveloped countries of their persons of ability. Unfortunately, and I stress the word “unfortunately,” the introduction of an enforceable national ID card that will remove the source of temptation is essential.

Fourth, incredibly, a majority of Americans still advocate the teaching of creationism in the schools. How can genetic selection even be discussed in such a climate!? The government needs to invest heavily in education.

Fifth, the Jewish community, which suffers disproportionately from genetic illnesses as a result of historic inbreeding, is actively pursuing genetic testing and counseling in a truly enlightened fashion, and its policies should be held up as a model for everyone.

None of these policies is not particularly controversial and all are entirely feasible within the context of the current intellectual climate. More ambitious measures can be undertaken when eugenics wins broader acceptance.

TOQ: If each racial-ethnic group practiced eugenics on a comparable level, where more competent individuals with stable personalities—those on the upper end of the Bell Curve—reproduced at comparable rates, would this close “the educational/IQ gap” and would disparities in socioeconomic indicators (income, crime, educational achievement) decline as a result? If not, why not? Will we have to live indefinitely with differences in average ability levels and the prospect of human inequality from group to group?

JG: The question of between-group abilities and emotional proclivities is a scientific question with moral implications. Eugenics is for all groups, and all groups possess persons whose genetic patrimony should be preserved. A group of lesser native ability can even outstrip a more talented group, depending on the energy with which it pursues genetic selection. We should not feel threatened by other groups’ successes, but instead should be happy for them and attempt to emulate their success.

TOQ: Do you envision a future in which popular opinion or at least a large part of it will come to embrace eugenic policies?

JG: I advocate the de-demonization of eugenics, but I am leery of seeing it “embraced” by the broad public. The historical eugenics movement was quite influential on a more selective basis, and even then the amount of dilettantism and sheer snobbery was depressing. A delicate balance is necessary, enlightening elites, who go on to take genetic consequences of government programs into consideration. Practical eugenics is actually a very conservative, low-key, common-sense worldview. What is wild-eyed radicalism is the extreme egalitarianism that is still being presented to the public. But to be fair to its proponents, they have legitimate fears—fears that I share—and thus they present an ideology in which they themselves only partly believe, but which is really intended for the masses.

TOQ: Genetic screening is frequently attacked as “the new eugenics.”

JG: Actually, in a sense precisely the opposite can be true.

Prior to the advent of genetic testing, the only method of combating genetic illnesses was to reduce fertility among persons actively manifesting such diseases, but this was extremely ineffective in instances of recessive genes, which usually do not occur with great frequency.

The current practice of prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion of affected fetuses is the mirror image of inbreeding, which seems to be dysgenic in that it increases the frequency of tragic genetic illnesses but at the same time reduces the number of carriers—a decidedly eugenic consequence. Similarly, selective abortion seems eugenic in that it reduces the number of persons actively suffering from genetic illnesses, but also increases the number of carriers. Eugenic is what helps the gene pool. It is of course desirable that genetic screening be employed to reduce the number of sick people in the next generation, but carrier fertility also needs to be reduced.

Heightened mortality is evolution’s cruel way of correcting for inbreeding. Primitive societies evolved genetically through polygamy and inbreeding. Selective abortions liberate harmful genes from negative selectionary pressure and allow them to replicate themselves with greater frequency.

TOQ: And just how do you reduce such undesirable fertility?

JG: We have been molded by evolution to sacrifice everything for our children, and even to neglect our own parents, since effort expended on them is effort taken away from our children, reducing what sociobiology refers to as our “fitness” as a species. But concern for distant posterity is not part of our mental hardware. In discussing eugenics I have frequently heard the objection “What have future generations ever done for me?” The fundamental dilemma of eugenics is that it argues on behalf of a still nonexistent constituency, so that no quid pro quo is possible. Politics amounts to coalition building. Who will partner with them?

The available social levers are either a) an appeal to conscience or b) coercion. The former is ineffective, and the latter is improbable. This is the strongest argument against eugenics—that it is utopian and thus unrealistic. That is always the response to idealism. Sometimes you have to do what you can—even when prospects seem bleak.

Still, when all is said and done, while genetic illnesses are significant, they are peripheral to the fundamental core of eugenics—the negative correlation between intelligence and fertility, and, as plant and animal breeders have always known, “like breeds like.” Modern genetic knowledge has never challenged that fundamental fact. So perhaps the optimists have a chance at success after all. We have to try.

TOQ, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 2007)

I was never actually involved in politics, as I was never a member of a political party. Nevertheless I am a citizen interested in political questions but of course not in the usual plain and trivial way, as I have no intention to become a candidate, council deputy or Member of Parliament.

For me “politics” means to maintain continuities or, if you prefer, traditions. But traditions that are embedded in the actual history of a particular human community. I started to read historical and political books at the tender age of 14. This lead to a rejection of established ideologies or non-values.

From the age of 15 onwards, with the help of a secondary school history teacher, a certain Mr. Kennof, I realized that people should grasp the main trends of history in keys and always make use of historical atlasses (I have collected them ever since) in order to understand in one glimpse the main forces animating the world scene at a precise moment of time. Maps are very important for politics at a high level (diplomacy, for instance).

The principal idea I acquired at this young age was that all ideologies, thoughts or blue prints which wanted to get rid of the past, to sever the links people have with their historical continuities, were fundamentally wrong. As a consequence, all political actions should aim at preserving and strengthening historical and political continuities, even when futurist (pro-active) actions are often necessary to save a community from a sterile repetition of obsolete habits and customs.

The discourses of most ideologies, including the various expressions of the so-called far right, were in my eyes artificial in the Western World just as communism was an abstraction in front of the whole of Russian history in the East or an abstraction obliterating the genuine historical patterns of the East-European peoples submitted to Soviet rule after 1945. The rupture of continuities or the repetition of dead past “forms” leads to the political-ideological confusion we know nowadays, where conservatives aren’t conservative and socialists aren’t socialists anymore, and so on.

Fundamental political ideas are better served in my eyes by “Orders” than by political parties. Orders provide a continuous education of the affiliated and stress the notion of service. They feel reluctant in front of the mere politicians’ petty ambitions. Such Orders are the Chivalric Orders of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance in Europe, the notion of fatwa in the Persian Islamic world as well as later experiments, including in the 20th Century (The Legion of Michael the Archangel Michael in Romania, the Verdinaso in Flanders, etc.).

Please explain what you mean by the term “Conservative Revolution” and, if possible, provide us with an outline of some of its chief ideologues.

When the phrase “Conservative Revolution” is used in Europe, it is mostly in the sense given to it by Armin Mohler in his famous book Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932. Mohler listed a long list of authors who rejected the pseudo-values of 1789 (dismissed by Edmund Burke as mere “blue prints”), stressed the role of the Germanic in the evolution of European thought and received the influence of Nietzsche. Mohler avoided, for instance, purely religious “conservatives,” be they Catholics or Protestants.

For Mohler the main brandmark of “Conservative Revolution” is a non-linear vision of history. But he doesn’t simply take over the cyclical vision of traditionalism. After Nietzsche, Mohler believes in a spherical conception of history. What does that mean? It means that history is neither simply a repetition of the same patterns at regular intervals nor a linear path leading to happiness — to the end of history, to a Paradise on Earth, to felicity, etc. — but is a sphere that can run (or be pushed) in every direction according to the impulsion it receives from strong charismatic personalities. Such charismatic personalities bend the course of history towards some very particular ways, ways that were never previously foreseen by any kind of Providence.

Mohler in this sense never believes in universalistic political receipts or doctrines but always in particular and personal trends. Like Jünger, he wants to struggle against everything that is “general” and to support everything that is “particular”. Further, Mohler expressed his vision of the dynamic particularities by using the some awkward terminology of “nominalism.” For him “nominalism” was indeed the word that expressed at best the will of strong personalities to cut for themselves and their followers an original and never used path through the jungle of existence.

The main figures of the movement were Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, and Ernst Jünger (and his brother Friedrich-Georg). We can add to these triumviri Ludwig Klages and Ernst Niekisch. Carl Schmitt, as a Catholic lawyer and constitutionalist, represents another important aspect of the so-called “Conservative Revolution”.

Spengler remains the author of a brilliant fresco of the world civilizations that inspired the British philosopher Arnold Toynbee. Spengler spoke of Europe as a Faustian civilization, at best expressed by the Gothic cathedrals, the interaction of light and colors in the glass-works, the stormy skies with white and gray clouds in most of the Dutch, English, and German paintings. This civilization is an aspiration of the human soul towards light and towards self-commitment.

Another important idea of Spengler is the idea of “pseudo-morphosis”: a civilization never disappears completely after a decay or a violent conquest. Its elements pass into the new civilization that takes its succession and bends it towards original paths.

Moeller van den Bruck was the first German translator of Dostoevsky. He was deeply influenced by Dostoevsky’s diary, containing some severe judgments on the West. In the German context after 1918, Moeller van den Bruck advocated, on the basis of Dostoevsky’s arguments, a German-Russian alliance against the West.

How could the respectable German gentleman, with an immense artist’s culture, plea in favor of an alliance with the Bolsheviks? His arguments were the following: in the whole diplomatic tradition of the 19th century, Russia was considered as the shield of reaction against all the repercussions of the French Revolution and of the revolutionist mind and moods. Dostoevsky, as a former Russian revolutionist who admitted later that his revolutionist options were wrong and mere blue prints, considered more or less that Russia’s mission in the world was to wipe out of Europe the tracks of the ideas of 1789.

For Moeller van den Bruck, the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia was only a changing of ideological clothe Russia remained, despite the Bolshevik discourse, the antidote to the Western liberal mind. So defeated Germany should ally to this fortress of anti-revolutionism to oppose the West, which in the eyes of Moeller van den Bruck is the incarnation of liberalism. Liberalism, stated Moeller van den Bruck, is always the final disease of a people. After some decades of liberalism, a people will ineluctably enter into a terminal phase of decay.

The path followed by Ernst Jünger is known enough to everyone. He started as an ardent and gallant young soldier in the First World War, leaving the trenches with no gun, simply with a hand grenade under his arm, worn with elegance like the stick of a typical British officer. For Jünger the First World War was the end of the petty bourgeois world of the 19th Century and the “Belle Epoque,” where everyone had to be “as it should be,” i.e. behave according to said patterns pre-cut by borrowing teachers or priests, exactly as we all today have to behave according to the self-proclaimed rules of “political correctness.”

Under the “storms of steel,” the soldier could state his nothingness, his mere fragile biological being, but this statement couldn’t in his eyes lead to an inept pessimism, to fear and desperation. Having experimented the most cruel destiny in the trenches and under the shelling of thousands of artillery guns, shaking the earth thoroughly, reducing everything to the “elemental,” the infantrymen knew better of cruel human destiny on the surface of this planet. All artificiality of civilised urban life appeared to them as mere fake.

After the first World War Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich-Georg turned out to be the best national-revolutionist journalists and writers.

Ernst evolved to a kind of cynical, soft, ironical, and serene observer of humanity and the facts of life. During a carpet bombing raid on a Parisian suburb, where factories were producing war material for the German army during WWII, Jünger was terrified by the unnatural straight air path taken by the American flying fortresses. The linearity of the planes’ path in the air above Paris was the negation of all the curves and sinuosities of organic life. Modern war implied the crushing of those winding and serpentine organicities. Ernst Jünger started his career as a writer by being an apologist of war. After having observed the irresistible lines thrust forward by the American B-17s, he became totally disgusted by the unchivalrousness of the pure technical way of running a war.

After WWII, his brother Friedrich-Georg wrote a first theoretical work leading to the development of the new German critical and ecological thinking, Die Perfektion der Technik (The Perfection of Technics). The main idea of this book, in my eyes, is the critique of “connection.” The modern world is a process trying to connect human communities and individuals to big structures. This process of connection ruins the principle of liberty. You are a poor chained prole if you are “connected” to a big structure, even if you earn £3000 or more in one month. You are a free man if you are totally disconnected from those big iron heels. In a certain way, Friedrich-Georg developed the theory that Kerouac experimented untheoretically by choosing to drop out and travel, becoming a singing tramp.

Ludwig Klages was another philosopher of organic life against abstract thinking. For him the main dichotomy was between Life and Spirit (Leben und Geist). Life is crushed by abstract spirit. Klages was born in Northern Germany but migrated as a student to Munich, where he spent his free time in the pubs of Schwabing, the district in which artists and poets met (and still meet today). He became a friend of the poet Stefan Georg and a student of the most original figure of Schwabing, the philosopher Alfred Schuler, who believed himself to be the reincarnation of an ancient Roman settler in the German Rhineland.

Schuler had a genuine sense of theater. He disguised himself in the toga of a Roman Emperor, admired Nero, and set up plays remembering the audience of the ancient Greek or Roman world. But beyond his lively fantasy, Schuler acquired a cardinal importance in philosophy by stressing for instance the idea of “Entlichtung,” i.e. the gradual disappearance of Light since the time of the Ancient City-State of Greece and Roman Italy. There is no progress in history: On the contrary, Light is vanishing as well as the freedom of the free citizen to shape his own destiny.

Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, on the left or conservative-liberal side, were inspired by this idea and adapted it for different audiences. The modern world is the world of complete darkness, with little hope of finding “be-lighted” periods again, unless charismatic personalities, like Nero, dedicated to art and Dionysian lifestyle, wedge in a new era of splendor which would only last for the blessed time of one spring.

Klages developed the ideas of Schuler, who never wrote a complete book, after he died in 1923 due to an ill-prepared operation. Klages, just before WW1, pronounced a famous speech on the Horer Meissner Hill in Central Germany, in front of the assembled youth movements (Wandervogel). This speech bore the title of “Man and Earth” and can be seen as the first organic manifesto of ecology, with a clear and understandable but nevertheless solid philosophical background.

Carl Schmitt started his career as a law teacher in 1912 but lived till the respectable age of 97. He wrote his last essay at 91. I cannot enumerate all the important points of Carl Schmitt’s work in the frame of this modest interview. Let us summarize by saying that Schmitt developed two main idea the idea of decision in political life and the idea of “Great Space.”

The art of shaping politics or a good policy lays in decision, not in discussion. The leader has to decide in order to lead, protect, and develop the political community he is in charge of. Decision is not dictatorship as many liberals would say nowadays in our era of “political correctness.” On the contrary: a personalisation of power is more democratic, in the sense that a king, an emperor, or a charismatic leader is always a mortal person. The system he eventually imposes is not eternal, as he is doomed to die like any human being. A nomocratic system, on the contrary, aims at remaining eternal, even if current events and innovations contradict the norms or principles.

Second big topic in Schmitt’s work the idea of a European Grand Space (Grossraum). “Out-of-Space” powers should be prevented to intervene within the frame of this Great Space. Schmitt wanted to apply to Europe the same simple principle that animated US President Monroe. America for the Americans. OK, said Schmitt, but let us apply “Europe to the Europeans.” Schmitt can be compared to the North-American “continentalists,” who criticised Roosevelt’s interventions in Europe and Asia. Latin Americans also developed similar continentalist ideas as well as Japanese imperialists. Schmitt gave to this idea of “Greater Space” a strong juridical base.

Ernst Niekisch is a fascinating figure in the sense that he started his career as a Communist leader of the “Councils’ Republic of Bavaria” of 1918-19, that was crushed down by the Free Corps of von Epp, von Lettow-Vorbeck, etc. Obviously, Niekisch was disappointed by the absence of a historical vision among the Bolshevik trio in revolutionist Munich (Lewin, Leviné, Axelrod).

Niekisch developed a Eurasian vision, based on an alliance between the Soviet Union, Germany, India, and China. The ideal figure who was supposed to be the human motor of this alliance was the peasant, the adversary of the Western bourgeoisie. A certain parallel with Mao Tse-Tung is obvious here. In the journals that Niekisch edited, we discover all the German tentatives to support anti-British or anti-French movements in the colonial empires or in Europe (Ireland against England, Flanders against a Frenchified Belgium, Indian nationalists against Britain, etc.).

I hope I have explained in a nutshell the main trends of the so-called conservative revolution in Germany between 1918 and 1933. May those who know this pluri-stratified movement of ideas forgive my schematic introduction.

Do you have a “spiritual angle”?

By answering this question, I risk being too succinct. Among the group of friends who exchanged political and cultural ideas at the end of the Seventies, we concentrated of course on Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World. Some of us rejected totally the spiritual bias, because it lead to sterile speculation: they preferred to read Popper, Lorenz, etc. I accepted many of their criticisms, and I still dislike the uttermost Evolian speculations, alleging a spiritual world of Tradition beyond all reality. The real world being disregarded as mere triviality. But this is of course a cult of Tradition mainly supported by young people “feeling ill in their own skin,” as we say. The dream to live like beings in fairy tales is a form of refusing to accept reality.

In Chapter 7 of Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola, on the contrary, stresses the importance of the “numena“, the forces acting within things, natural phenomena or powers. The initial Roman mythology laid the accent more on the numena than on the personalised divinities. This bias is mine. Beyond the people and the gods of the usual religions (be they Pagan or Christian), there are acting forces and man should be in concordance with them in order to be successful in his earthly actions.

My religious/spiritual orientation is more mystical than dogmatic, in the sense that the mystical tradition of Flanders and Rhineland (Ruusbroec, Meister Eckhart), as well as the mystical tradition of Ibn Arabî in the Muslim area or of Sohrawardî in the Persian realm, admire and worship the total splendor of Life and the World. In these traditions, there is no clear-cut dichotomy between the godly, the sacred, and the holy on the one side and the worldly, the profane, and the simple on the other. Mystical tradition means omni-compenetration and synergy of all the forces yeasting in the world.

Please explain to our readers why you place such importance on concepts like geopolitics and Eurasianism.

Geopolitics is a mixture of history and geography. In other words of time and space. Geopolitics is a set of disciplines (not a single discipline) leading to a good governance of time and space. Geopolitics is a mixture of history and geography. No serious power can survive without continuity, be it an institutional or historical continuity. No serious power can survive without a domination and a yielding of land and space.

All traditional empires first organized the land by building roads (Rome) or by mastering the big rivers (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China), then lead on to the emergence of a long history, to the sense of a continuity, to the birth of the first practical sciences (astronomy, meteorology, geography, mathematics) under the protection of well structured armies with a code of honor, especially codified in Persia, the womb of Chivalry.

The Roman Empire, the first empire on European soil, was focussed on the Mediterranean Sea. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation couldn’t find a proper core as well coordinated as the Mediterranean. The waterways of Central Europe lead to the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, or the Black Sea, but without any link between them. This was the true tragedy of German and European history. The country was torn between centrifugal forces. The Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen tried to restore the Mediterranean realm, with Sicily as the central geographical piece.

His attempt was a tragic failure. It is only now that the emergence of a renewed imperial form (even under a modern ideology) is possible in Europe: after the opening of the canal between the Rhine-Main system and the Danube river system. There is a single waterway now between the North Sea, including the Thames system in Britain, and the Black Sea, allowing the economical and cultural forces of Central Europe to reach all the shores of the Black Sea and the Caucasian countries.

Those who have a good historical memory, not blinded by the usual ideological blue-prints of modernism, will remember the role of the Black Sea shores in the spiritual history of Europe: in Crimea, many old traditions, be they Pagan or Byzantine, were preserved in caves by monks. The influences of Persia, especially the values of the oldest (Zoroastrian) Chivalry in world history, could influence the development of similar spiritual forces in Central and Western Europe. Without those influences, Europe is spiritually mutilated.

Therefore the Mediterranean area, the Rhine (also coupled to the Rhone) and the Danube, the Russian rivers, the Black Sea and the Caucasus should constitute a single civilization area, defended by a unified military force, based on a spirituality inherited from Ancient Persia. This, in my eyes, means Eurasia. My position is slightly different than that of Dughin but both positions are not incompatible.

When the Ottomans gained complete control over the Balkan Peninsula in the 15th Century, the land routes were cut for all Europeans. Moreover, with the help of the North African sea rovers assembled by the Turkish-born Barbarossa based in Algiers, the Mediterranean was closed to peaceful European commercial expansion towards India and China. The Muslim world worked as a bolt to contain Europe and Moscovy, core of the future Russian Empire.

All together, Europeans and Russians joined their efforts to destroy the Ottoman bolt. The Portuguese, Spaniards, English and Dutch tried the sea routes and circumvented the African and Asian land mass, ruining first the Moroccan kingdom, which drew gold from subtropical Western African mines and claims in order to build an army to conquer again the Iberian Peninsula. By landing in Western Africa, the Portuguese got the gold more easily for themselves and the Moroccan kingdom was reduced to a mere residual superpower. The Portuguese passed around the African continent and entered the Indian Ocean, circumventing definitively the Ottoman bolt, and giving for the first time a real Eurasian dimension to European history.

At the same time, Russia repelled the Tartars, took the City of Kazan, and destroyed the Tartar shackle of the Muslim bolt. This was the starting point of the continental Russian Eurasian geopolitical perspective.

The aim of American global strategy, developed by a man like Zbigniew Bzrzezinski, is to recreate artificially the Muslim bolt by supporting Turkish militarism and Panturanism. In this perspective, they support tacitly and still secretly the Moroccan claims on the Canary Isles and use Pakistan to prevent any land link between India and Russia. Hence the double necessity today for Europe and Russia to remember the counter-strategy elaborated by ALL European people in the 15th and 16th Century.

European history has always been conceived as petty nationalist visions. It is time to reconsider European history by stressing the common alliances and convergencies. The Portuguese seaborne and the Russian landborne actions are such convergencies and are naturally Eurasian. The Battle of Lepanto, where the Venetian, Genoan, and Spanish fleets joined their efforts to master the East Mediterranean area under the command of Don Juan of Austria, is also a historical model to meditate upon and to remember.

But the most important Eurasian alliance was without any doubt the Holy Alliance lead by Eugene of Savoy at the end of the 17th Century, which compelled the Ottomans to retrocede 400,000 sq. km of land in the Balkans and Southern Russia. This victory allowed the Russian Tsars of the 18th Century, especially Catherine II, to win decisive battles once more.

My Eurasianism (and of course my whole geopolitical thought) is a clear answer to Bzrzezinski’s strategy and is deeply rooted in European history. It is absolutely not to be compared with the silly postures of some pseudo-national-revolutionist crackpots or with the poor aesthetic blueprints of new rightist would-be philosophers. Besides, one last remark concerning geopolitics and Eurasianism: my main sources of inspiration are English. I mean the historical atlas of Colin McEvedy, the books of Peter Hopkirk about the secret service in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, along the Silk Road and in Tibet, the reflections of Sir Arnold Toynbee in the twelve volumes of A Study of History.

What is your view of the State? Is it really essential to have systems or infrastructure as a means of socio-political organization, or do you think a decentralized form of tribalism and ethnic identity would be a better solution?

Your question needs a whole book to be properly and completely answered. Firstly, I would say that it is impossible to have A view of THE State, as there are many forms of States throughout the world. I make of course the distinction between a State, which is still a genuine and efficient instrument to promote the will of a people and also to protect its citizens against all evils be they machinated by external, internal or natural foes (calamities, floods, starvation, etc.).

The State should also be carved for one population living on a specific land. I am critical, of course, of all artificial States like those that were imposed as so-called universal patterns. Such States are pure machines to crush or to exploit a population for an oligarchy or foreign masters. An organization of the peoples, according to ethnic criteria, could be an ideal solution, but unfortunately as the events in the Balkans show us the ebbs and flows of populations in European, African, or Asian history have very often spread ethnical groups beyond natural boarders or settled them within territories which were formerly controlled by others. Homogeneous States cannot be built in such situations. This is the source of many tragedies, especially in Middle and Eastern Europe. Therefore the only perspective today is to think in terms of Civilizations as Samuel Huntington taught us in his famous article and book, The Clash of Civilizations, first written in 1993.

In 1986, you said “the Third Way exists in Europe at the level of theory. What it needs is militants.” ["Europe: A New Perspective" in The Scorpion, Issue #9, p.6] Is this is still the case, or have things developed since then?

Indeed, the situation is still the same. Or even worse because, growing older, I state that the level of classical education is vanishing. Our way of thinking is in a certain way Spenglerian, as it encompasses the complete history of the human kind.

Guy Debord, leader of the French Situationnists from the end of the Fifties until the Eighties, could observe and deplore that the “society of the spectacle” or the “show society” has as its main purpose to destroy all thinking and thought in terms of history and replace them by artificial and constructed blueprints or simple lies. The eradication of historical perspectives in the heads of pupils, students, and citizens, through the diluting work of the mass-media, is the big manipulation, leading us to an Orwellian world without any memory. In such a situation, we all risk becoming isolated. No fresh troops of volunteers are ready to take over the struggle.

Finally, tell us about your involvement with Synergies and your long-term plans for the future.

“Synergies” was created in order to bring people together, especially those who publish magazines, in order to spread more quickly the messages our authors had to deliver. But the knowledge of languages is also undergoing a set-back. Being plurilingual, as you certainly know, I have always been puzzled by the repetition of the same arguments at each national level. Marc Lüdders from Synergon-Germany agrees with me. It’s a pity for instance that the tremendous amount of work performed in Italy is not known in France or in Germany. And vice-versa. In order to keep this short: my main wish is to see such an exchange of texts realized in a swift manner within the next twenty years.

Synthesis, http://www.rosenoire.org/interviews/steuckers.php

Translated by Greg Johnson

Réfléchir et Agir: You have published a fourth book on Judaism, a volume of 400 pages. Why another? Haven’t you said all there is to say?

Hervé Ryssen: I thought so too! But Judaism is a very closed world, very secret, thus after all these years of study, one still learns new things. This time, I explored the criminal world operating within the international Jewish community, and what one discovers there is, strictly speaking, incredible. The fact is that the Jewish Mafia is the main Mafia that exists today on this planet: racketeering, prostitution, drug trafficking, arms trading, contraband diamond smuggling, traffic in works of art, murder for hire, organized swindles, armed robberies, etc. Pornography, casinos, and discotheques are also largely held by Jewish gangsters.

R&A: You claim that international drug trafficking is mainly in the hands of the Jewish Mafia. Are you quite certain you are not overstating your case?

H. R.: I do not claim that the Jewish mafia controls most of the international illegal drug trade, since there are no statistics on the subject, but it does not appear incredible to me, judging by all information I could gather. The fact is that from the Chinese opium traffic of the nineteenth century to the present day, this mafia has been quite active in this field. In the traffic of ecstasy, one can say for certain that the Jewish mafia holds a monopoly. Today, ecstasy is the drug that is most harmful to European young people. A pill of ecstasy gives a feeling of strength and well-being for a few hours, but it is above all a veritable chemical garbage bin. Its long-term effects are alarming because irreversible: memory loss; behavioral, sleep, and concentration problems; brain lesions in the children of druggie mother. The premier producer is Holland, but the big traffickers who were arrested ten years ago in France, Belgium, the United States, or Australia, all have Israeli passports. The business of ecstasy is 100% in the hands of Jewish gangsters, not all of whom come from Russia, since there are Sephardic traffickers as well. If you buy a pill of ecstasy, in every instance, you can be certain you are financing the Jewish mafia. Certain big ecstasy traffickers are also deeply involved in the heroin and cocaine trade.

R&A: Is the Jewish mafia connected with the famous Colombian drug cartels?

H. R.: There is no doubt. Here is just one example: on February 16th, 1993, the Russian police of Viborg, close to the Russo-Finnish border, near Saint Petersburg, seized more than a ton of Colombian cocaine disguised as cans of corned beef. It was an Israeli resident in Bogota, Elias Cohen, married to a Colombian in cahoots with one of the clans related to the Cali cartel, who managed the network along with one Yuval Shemesh. The final destination of the cocaine was a group of Israeli traffickers established in the Netherlands, headed by one Jacob Korakin, a kippa-wearing religious Jew from the diamond district of Antwerp.

R&A: Certain diamond traders of Antwerp, New York, and Tel-Aviv play a large role in the Jewish mafia, particularly in money laundering.

H. R.: Diamond traders are at the heart of money-laundering operations for the Colombian cartels. In Manhattan, 47th Street, which is the heart of their activity, is also the largest drug money laundry. A Rabbi Yosef Crozer was arrested in February 1990 while going to Brooklyn with suitcases and bags stuffed with small-denomination banknotes. He carried $300,000 every day. His co-operation with police made it possible the following month to arrest around 30 people in the Orthodox Jewish community. One of them was Avraham Sharir, another pious Jew who owned a gold shop on 47th Street and who proved to be one of the key characters in drug money laundering in New York. Sharir, an Israeli citizen of 45 years, confessed to laundering $200 million on behalf of the Cali cartel. His employees, who counted banknotes, were regularly obliged to go our for fresh air, because so many of the small bills had been rolled for use in snorting cocaine.

R&A: Certain religious Jews do not seem to have too many scruples, one might say . . .

H. R.: Even Hassidic Jews are deeply implicated in drug trafficking. In 2001, the police broke up a ring directed by Sean Erez, a Hassidic Jew who trafficked in ecstasy. The drug had been smuggled in the hats and prayer scrolls of these pious Jews, whom customs officers were not supposed to suspect.

In July 1998, the small diamond cutting community of Antwerp was strongly shaken by a series of arrests of Lubavitchers. It had been discovered that the diamond business in the Flemish city was a cover for the international heroin traffic. Fifteen kilos had been seized. An Orthodox Jew, Dror Hazenfratz, was the head of the network. Born in Haïfa, Hazenfratz had an Israeli passport as well as a Belgian identity card. Before the court, he appeared in traditional black garb—caftan, cap, and curls—which did not prevent him from being condemned to eleven years in prison. There are many other examples.

R&A: You go back to the “American” gangsters of the Thirties . . .

H. R.: Yes, I was also interested in these mythical gangsters who had worked with the Sicilian mafia. The Jewish gangsters were particularly involved in “Murder Incorporated,” a kind of mutual insurance company of assassination thanks to which a local leader could profit from the services of killers coming from another locality and thus avoid blame. Murder Incorporated was a gang made up of mainly Jewish gangsters, who took care of the crime syndicate’s dirty work. It is estimated that from 1933 to 1940 the organization was responsible of more than 700 assassinations, but some speak of 2000. Because firearms are too easily traceable, they preferred to kill their victims with drowning, knives, bats, piano wire, and especially ice picks. All this is also part of the history of the Jewish people.

R&A: Why don’t people talk about this?

H. R.: It is always the famous reflex of “projection” about which I spoke in my two preceding books. Jewish intellectuals always project on others that about which they feel guilty. They say they were victims of Communism, for example, when in fact they were the main instigators. In the same way, Freud projected a problem specific to the Jewish people—rampant incest—on a universal level, and everyone fell into the trap.

In the 1990s, the media spoke about the terrible “Russian Mafia.” But truth to tell, all the “Russian” gangsters who were arrested had Israeli passports. The biggest one, Semion Mogilevitch, a major trafficker of weapons who also prostituted hundreds of Russian and Ukrainian girls in Prague and Budapest, was stopped in Moscow in January 2008. In France, the Courrierinternational was the only newspaper that reported it, but obviously his Jewishness was not mentioned: he was “Russian”!

Likewise, in Hollywood cinema, the drug traffickers, gangsters, “bad guys,” if they are not Sicilian, are very often Nordic white men: never Jews! The cosmopolitan directors undoubtedly have something to do with this sleight of hand.

Source: http://storage.canalblog.com/21/91/516490/47626766.pdf

James Edwards

The Political Cesspool can be heard live each Saturday night from 6pm-9pm Central Time on AM 1380 WLRM in Memphis, Tennessee, and on the AM / FM affiliate stations of the Liberty News Radio Network.

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James Edwards

My good friend Sam Dickson has often noted that whites in America are like abused children. The more whites are mistreated and abused by those in authority, the tighter we cling to them.

It’s easy to see why a small child clings to abusive parents. In his limited understanding of the world around him, his parents are everything. He’ll do his best to try to please them, to conform to the twisted world those parents create for him.

Why grown men and women do the same is harder to explain. The more their freedoms and rights are trampled and spit upon, the harder they wave the flag.

Take the American Renaissance conference as an example. It was canceled after the fourth or fifth hotel turned them away. Hotel employees received death threats and who knows what other kind of pressure.

I’m sure if you wandered around CPAC this week, asking the respectable conservative types manning the tables about the AmRen cancellation, they would all applaud the fact that such “hate” was snuffed out.

Even if they were stout enough to repeat the tired platitude, “I may not like what you have to say, but I’ll defend your right to say it” it’s not very likely that they will draw the obvious conclusion.

It’s too unpleasant to consider. Easier to stand in line for a picture with Sarah Palin.

What is the obvious conclusion we have to draw from the AmRen experience? There are only two choices.

One is that the billions of dollars spent on “Homeland Security” have been poured down a rat hole. If we can’t stop a bunch of creeps from the local Yeshiva from repeatedly calling in death threats to major hotels all around our capitol city, over a period of several weeks, then who are we kidding?

The second choice is that the establishment supports these stooges and has no intention of stopping them. They are doing their master’s bidding.

Which option do you prefer? Which one gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling like Sarah Palin?

How would your local congressman answer the question? Cuts pretty deeply to the heart of the issue, doesn’t it?

Think you’ll hear it discussed at CPAC, or by Rush, Hannity, or Beck?

How about at your local Tea Party, or by the Dead Elephants?

No, that’s the sort of thing you’ll only get on the Cesspool, or in a party like the American 3rd Position.

Well, this Saturday night (Feb. 20), you won’t have to choose, as we interview the chairman of American3P, Bill Johnson.

I’m a member of their board of directors, and proud to be associated with them.

Learn more about the American 3rd Position here:

And tune in Saturday night, for a little American relic, known as freedom of speech.

See you then,
James Edwards

The Political Cesspool can be heard live each Saturday night from 6pm-9pm Central Time on AM 1380 WLRM in Memphis, Tennessee, and on the AM / FM affiliate stations of the Liberty News Radio Network.

The Political Cesspool, February 20, 2010

To listen and/or download the show for free, see the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Topics for discussion will include:

1. How Alexander Kojeve laid bare the most fundamental political differences between the Left and the Right. Dr. Devlin explains how Kojeve’s philosophy uses Hegelianism to understand the modern world making his ideas the “logical culmination of modern thought.”

2. How the Left uses tropes like History is Over and The End of History as a means of imposing its “universal homogeneous state” on the world’s wide-ranging populations.

3. Traditional gender roles as fundamental obstacles to the Leftist Universal State. Dr. Devlin explains how feminism has devalued women into nothing more than political subjects. How feminism has transformed the high-status the European world has traditionally given to women into social misery.

4. Tom and Roger discuss Solzhenitsyn’s last and most powerful book, Two Hundred Years Together. Devlin provides brilliant insight into the Jewish involvement within Russia’s frequent revolutionary movements.

About F. Roger Devlin:

To learn more about F. Roger Devlin and his unique perspective read his insightful essays at The Occidental Quarterly, TOQ Online, American Renaissance, and VDARE. His important book Alexandre Kojeve and the Outcome of Modern Thought is available on Amazon.com.

Listening and download instructions:

The interview will air on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network. To tune in to the live feed for this and all VoR programming, click here to use Windows Media Player or here for Winamp. For iTunes: open iTunes, press Ctrl+U on your keyboard, copy/paste http://208.110.82.50/vor_high.pls into the Open Audio Stream dialog box, then click OK (you will now be able to listen to VoR live on iTunes any time by clicking on ‘Voice of Reason Broadcast Network’ in your music list). If you cannot catch it as it airs on Tuesday, the interview will be archived in mp3 format for download on Tom’s page at the VoR site soon after the show ends (archived shows are listed on the right side of page).

Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor, prolific author and editor of American Renaissance, will be James Edwards’ guest on The Political Cesspool Radio Program on Saturday, January 23, 2010.

The Political Cesspool can be heard live each Saturday night from 6pm-9pm Central Time on AM 1380 WLRM in Memphis, Tennessee, and on the AM / FM affiliate stations of the Liberty News Radio Network.

Alain de Benoist

On Tuesday, January 19, 2010, at 9 pm Eastern US time, Tom will begin his two-hour interview with renowned scholar and French-European philosopher Alain de Benoist. Mr Alain de Benoist is a man of staggering Renaissance erudition, whose wide range of expertise is acknowledged by both his intellectual friends and his opponents. Among his vast literary and philosophical output Alain de Benoist deals with a variety of diverse topics ranging from the concept of the sacred, the concept of the political in postmodernity, onto modern sociobiology and the analysis of medieval European poetry.

In Part 1, Tom and Mr.Alain de Benoist will discuss the awkward label the European “New Right” and why this label creates such confusions, particularly in the USA. In addition, they will offer thoughtful reflections on the present cultural climate in Europe and America along with its political implications.

How to listen and/or download the show for free is listed at the bottom of this page.

Further topics for discussion will include:

* A description of the New Right along with its origins and its current perspectives. Alain eloquently explains how “New” is more important than “Right.” In addition, he emphasizes the importance of ideas over insignificant political categories.

*  The semantic distortions connected with the labels “Liberal” and “Conservative.” How the terms “Left” and “Right” were born out of modernity and have since lost their meaning as we step fully into postmodernity.

* The major themes in his book On Being a Pagan. Among them are the polytheistic mindset versus its monotheistic counterpart and the advocacy of cultural pluralism as opposed to multiculturalized “sameness.”

Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943. He is married and has two children. He has studied law, philosophy, sociology, and the history of religions in Paris, France. A journalist and a writer, he is the editor of two journals: Nouvelle Ecole (since 1968) and Krisis (since 1988). His main fields of interest include the history of ideas, political philosophy, classical philosophy, and archaeology. He has published more than fifty books and three thousand articles. He is also a regular contributor to many French and European publications, journals, and papers (including Valeurs Actuelles, Le Spectacle du Monde, Magazine-Hebdo, Le Figaro-Magazine, in France, Telos and The Occidental Quarterly in the United States, and Junge Freiheit in Germany). In 1978 he received the Grand Prix de l’Essai from the Academie Francaise for his book Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idees contemporaines (Copernic, 1977). He has also been a regular contributor to the radio program France-Culture and has appeared in numerous television debates.

To learn more about Alain de Benoist you can also read his insightful articles at his personal website and at The Alain De Benoist Collection.

Listening and download instructions:

It will air on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network. To tune in to the live feed for this and all VoR programming, click here to use Windows Media Player or here for Winamp. For iTunes: open iTunes, press Ctrl+U on your keyboard, copy/paste http://208.110.82.50/vor_high.pls into the Open Audio Stream dialog box, then click OK (you will now be able to listen to VoR live on iTunes any time by clicking on ‘Voice of Reason Broadcast Network’ in your music list). If you cannot catch it as it airs on Tuesday, the interview will be archived in mp3 format for download on Tom’s page at the VoR site soon after the show ends (archived shows are listed on the right side of page).

TOQ: I really enjoy your novels. I have reviewed the Northwest Quartet, and I have also read Slow Coming Dark, Fire And Rain, and most recently The Stars In Their Path, as well as the collection Other Voices, Darker Rooms. Who are your main literary influences? Which of your works are your favorites and why?

Harold Covington: My father was a reader of pulp science fiction back in the 1950s and 1960s, and he had these big cardboard cartons of old sci-fi paperbacks in the basement, including a lot of the old Ace doubles that went for 50 cents in those days and would probably go for a couple of hundred bucks apiece today if you could get hold of an intact copy. They were written by all the sci-fi greats of the 50s and 60s: Robert A. Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Edmond Hamilton, Alan E. Nourse, Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury, etc. Those were my first bulk reading, and then starting about age 14 I somehow (don’t remember how) discovered H. P. Lovecraft, and that was love at first sight. I still lug around three-volume Arkham House set of his complete works with me wherever I go.

My Northwest novels are purely political polemics, wherein I say things that wouldn’t be politic to say openly in any other context. They are for the purpose of imparting ideas and disseminating practical information using what Lenin called “Aesopian Language,” the language of fable. My actual fiction as such, novels like The Stars In Their Path, The Renegade, Vindictus, etc. aren’t really “influenced” by anyone or anything. They’re just stories I get into my febrile brain and which I have to purge by telling them and letting them out.

As to my favorites, excluding the Quartet, which don’t count because they’re not really novels in the true sense of the word, I’d have to say that The Madman and Marina [in Other Voices, Darker Rooms] is the best short piece I’ve ever done. It may possibly even be the best piece, period—I once had an e-mail correspondent in St. Petersburg tell me he didn’t believe that my name is Covington, that I had to be a Russian writing under an American pseudonym, because only a Russian could produce such a Dostoyevskyan story. I consider that to be the best review I’ve ever had.

Personal favorite among the long novels? The Stars In Their Path, I’d say. Like all my other books it tells a story, but I use reincarnation as a device to keep on telling the same story over and over and over again, a different way each time and with different characters, rather than draw the same plot out to 100,000 words of padding. I think that was neat, if I do say so myself.

TOQ: In the Northwest Quartet and Fire And Rain, I was especially impressed with how you can blend intense drama with light comedy, classical eloquence with pop-culture slang and vulgarity. Joss Whedon and Quentin Tarantino came to mind. Do you pay attention to popular culture? Do you watch movies or television? Name some favorite writers, directors, movies, TV shows.

Harold Covington: I don’t watch television any more, and haven’t for a long time. It’s not just that it’s Judaized to the max and politically nauseating, it’s just stupid. Moronic. I glance over hulu.com every now and then, and I don’t see anything on there that prompts me to get cable again. Why pay $75 a month for drivel?

Movies are another matter. DVDs from the Blockbuster bargain racks are about the only form of recreation I can afford, besides a library card. In that sense yes, I have managed to keep up with enough popular culture, especially among young White people (negrofied though that culture is) so that I can make my young characters believable. I think so, anyway. None of my youthful readers have complained so far.

There are certain movies that just plain creep me out, like Naked Lunch, and there are certain flicks I find fascinating because they’re just plain bizarre, like Dark Star and the American version of Kingdom Hospital, which IMHO is the just plain weirdest thing ever shown on television. My own DVD collection includes Henry the Fifth, (Kenneth Branagh version), Zulu, The 13th Warrior, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and a few oddballs from the 70s like Time After Time and Absolution. I gave some friends of mine the first five episodes of Sharpe’s Rifles. I like a lot of escapist swashbuckling stuff, as you can tell.

TOQ: Do you plan to write any more novels?

Harold Covington: At this point I would say probably not. I’m pretty much NVA’ed out. There is a limit to what can be accomplished through fantasy and the creation of a fictional mythos. If I have not yet succeeded in imparting a vision of possibility to our people in the four Northwest novels already extant, I probably never will. I am concentrating henceforth on trying to turn the vision into reality through the Northwest Front, the “Party” of the novels, and it’s a five-star bitch. Getting “our” people to peep out from behind their computers and commit a real live physical act out here in the real world is like pulling teeth. Half of my contacts I can’t even get to respond to an e-mail.

I still have some bits and pieces of novels and stories lying around in manuscript form and on my computer, plus some ideas I’d like to play with if I ever get the time and the right situation (like the long prison sentence on some ridiculous fabricated charge which I’m sure our lords and masters would like to oblige me with). The main one is a kind of adult version of the Harry Potter series where a secret society of powerful Aryan spirits operating in a kind of nether world one step above this dimension use their magical powers to try and reverse the destruction of our people wrought by the Sauron-like Jewish overlord of the Dark World, although it would hopefully come across a little more convincing than that. I doubt I’ll ever get around to it, though. I need to concentrate what time I have left on building something in the real world.

Read Part 4 here.

Harold Covington: The internet is a reality of 21st century life. I understand and accept that. It can no more be un-invented than gunpowder or nuclear power can be un-invented. The Net has become a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless, in my opinion.

For one thing, the internet is largely sterile politically. It produces almost nothing except more Net. Somebody sees a great pro-White web site and they are inspired with enthusiasm—to build another web site. There is this immense disconnect between what is essentially a fantasy world in cyber-space and the real world out here where White people are unemployed and foreclosed White families are beginning to live in tent cities called Obamavilles.

The internet gives the White male a feel-good factor which he doesn’t have to earn. He sits down at his computer after work with a bowl of nachos and a few cold brewskis, he plays around on VNN or surfs the web looking for racial stuff, maybe he makes a post or two, and then at the end of the evening he gets up and staggers off to bed with the feeling that he has accomplished something, but he hasn’t. All he has done is to generate words, and words are no good on earth if they never translate into physical action.

The internet provides the White male with a substitute for action, and with a place where he can hide. Yes, I understand that most of us have jobs and families and homes we have to protect, but the fact remains that at some point in time we are going to have to stand erect once more, like men, and not with our heads hung down and our eyes lowered and our feet shuffling in the presence of our Jewish and liberal lords and masters. The internet does not facilitate the strengthening of the one ancient virtue of our people which we need most of all to re-discover: simple physical courage.

Finally, the internet provides something that our highly dysfunctional people cannot resist: consequences-free misbehavior. This is not just a Movement phenomenon; it’s a White thing. The internet is a looney bin, and everyone knows it. The internet is where sick and twisted and often quite deranged people go to vomit. I have never seen anything like some of the filth, the depravity, the idiocy, and the just plain raving madness that I find on the internet every day. I know quite ordinary and apparently stable, functional, and successful people who sit down behind that keyboard, and all of a sudden they get a visit from Mr. Hyde. You’ve heard of discovering one’s Inner Child? It’s like the lure of consequences-free misbehavior on the internet unlocks some people’s Inner Nut.

All of this having been said, the internet remains the only medium of mass communication we have access to, the only place that provides anything remotely resembling a level playing field, which is probably why the Jews and the government hate it so much. Love the internet or hate it, we seem to be stuck with it.

TOQ: Many of our people dwell on negative signs, and there are plenty of them. Do you see positive signs? Do you think there are good reasons for hope?

Harold Covington: Oh, yes, certainly. So long as one doesn’t confuse hope with optimism.

For one thing, it is a historical truism that nothing last forever. This Francis Fukuyama rap about liberal democracy being the “end of history” is horse dung. Everything ends, and the present Zionist world order will end as well, quite possibly within the lifetime of those now born. It may not end the way we want it to end, and it may drag the White race and Western civilization down with it, but oh, yes, it will end. Our task in this and coming generations is to make sure that we survive the collapse of this massive evil, along with at least some semblance of Western civilization.

For another thing, for all our weaknesses and flaws we are still the most intelligent and potentially the bravest and most hardy race on earth. It takes more than 100 years of liberal brainwashing, political correctness, and McDonalds’ Happy Meals to contaminate and extinguish a whole human genotype. Deep down we are still the men our ancestors were, it’s just sometimes it’s so deep down we can’t read our genetic script.

We can do this thing. We can beat these bastards, any time we so choose. The question is, will we so choose? The Weltfiend is counting on his ability to obscure our racial light in a murk of questions, indecision, introspection, corruption, and apathy, to drag the whole world into the shades of grey in which the Jew thrives. If we can achieve moral clarity in our souls we will recover our courage, and when we recover our courage we will rip their hearts out.

TOQ: One of the things that most struck me about your Northwest Quartet is the attitude of high moral seriousness that these novels communicate, which I think is a valuable corrective to the movement’s general ethos of emotional self-indulgence. But you are better at communicating this than I am. Most white nationalists accept that our race is facing oblivion. What more do they need to get serious?

Harold Covington: The stock answer to that is that things have to get so bad that every White man, woman and child is personally affected in their own lives by the current crisis of civilization. They must lose their houses, their jobs, their SUVs and their plasma TVs and all that nice cold beer in the fridge. This is certainly true as far as it goes, and it is now at long last beginning to happen during this onset of the Obama Depression.

But I believe that more has to happen. There has to be a genuine spiritual awakening that burns away the past several generations of excrement that the Jews have caked around our souls. Our people must once more learn to value something higher than their own private lives and their own creature comforts. I personally found this in National Socialism, others find it in religion, but one of the advantages of turning this into a colonial war is that it allows for the creation of a new (or rather old) idealism in our hearts, a secular nationalism that aspires to the creation of a new country, free of alien oppressors. That will work. Ask the Irish.

TOQ: Early in your career, you were an avowed National Socialist. How has your thinking changed since then? In your view, what are the enduring truths in National Socialism, and what are its limitations?

Harold Covington: I am just as much a National Socialist now as I ever was. The enduring truth of National Socialism lies in one slogan: “Our race is our nation.” National Socialism affirms the primacy of race over lesser aspects of human existence such as religion and nationality.

I have, however, come to realize that most Americans are totally spiritually unequipped to accept such a doctrine. They don’t speak the language. They simply haven’t been engineered that way, and of course 70 years of Jewish hate propaganda, misrepresentation, and distortion hasn’t helped. Back in my youth in the old Party, we had the idea that through a process of long and slow education we could wean a sufficient number of our people away from the Jewish narrative and make them see the truth, but we didn’t do so hot at that, and now we are out of time. Simply and starkly, it’s about racial survival now, and that has to take first place in our strategy.

In order to convince people, you must first put yourself on a credible basis of communication with them, and you can’t do that by immediately confronting them with symbols and ideas that they have been conditioned from birth to reject. Every essential principle of National Socialism has a perfectly reasonable and understandable circumlocution that can be used within the American context so as to bypass the socially-engineered rejection mechanisms which have been implanted in White people’s brains. Call it National Socialism Lite, if you will. I don’t like it, but the urgency of our racial crisis overrides my personal feelings.

TOQ: What are the books, writers, and historical events that have most shaped your particular version of white nationalism?

Harold Covington: Besides National Socialist works and history? First and foremost there is the life and work of Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. There’s the American Civil War, of course. I was born and raised in the last of the Old South, when it was considered entirely normal to have Confederate flags on one’s possessions and when it was still possible to see Confederate heroes positively portrayed on TV and in comic books, etc.

Easter 1916 and the Irish War of Independence is another obvious example. I think the situation in Ireland in the 1920s is probably as close a parallel to our situation today as can be drawn. Later on we may draw some insight from the Spanish Civil War, which I always liked—the last war the good guys actually won.

My main Movement mentors were Major William Gaedtke, the last head of the old America First Committee (the Lindbergh one) and Pastor Robert Miles. They taught me the ropes. I learned a lot from Matt Koehl as well. I never thought I’d say this, and I still don’t agree with what Koehl did to the NSWPP, but after three decades I now understand why Koehl did a lot of the things he did.

Read Part 3 here.

Read Greg Johnson’s review of Harold Covington’s Northwest Quartet here.

Harold Covington: I was born in Burlington, North Carolina in 1953. I had my first dose of racial reality at age 15 when I was thrown into an integrated high school in Chapel Hill, NC which was bad by the standards of the day (1968) but which of course was a kindergarten compared to the racial situation that exists in our schools today. All we had to worry about back in my time was blacks with knives rather than organized gangs and drug dealers armed with semi-autos, and of course there were the hippy-dippy SDS type radicals, many of whom I noticed even at the time appeared to be Jews. Homosexuals didn’t even come into the equation back in those days, and the drugs at school were just beer and grass and LSD, not ecstasy or coke or crack.

I won’t go off into a long digression about the various horrible racial experiences I had in high school, but on the day I finally left there, I looked back and made a silent personal vow that I would devote my life somehow to making sure that no young White person ever again had to go through what I had to go through in that place. Again, I didn’t realize how relatively mild my problems had been and how terrible things would become in my lifetime.

For reasons I won’t get into, basically having to do with the fact that my father was a psychopath, he ordered me out of the family home and I went into the United States army at 17. My experiences in the military provided a further dose of racial reality, although once again I understand they were nothing compared to what young White enlistees go through nowadays when the military has in desperation lowered the recruitment criteria to include drug addicts, criminals, gang-bangers, etc.

I did my basic at Fort Polk, Louisiana and then was sent for infantry training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina and Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. At Fort Jackson I picked up a paperback book in the day room called The Order of the Death’s Head, by a German named Heinze Höhne. Rare among studies of the Third Reich, the book was actually reasonably objective, and it had the effect of more or less converting me to National Socialism. I remain a National Socialist in my personal outlook to this day. While I was stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii I joined the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP), which was founded by George Lincoln Rockwell, and was then run by a man named Matt Koehl. I formed a unit of a Party front group called the White Servicemen’s League and ended up getting discharged early, albeit under honorable conditions. Nowadays, of course, I’d probably end up in Leavenworth for it.

After I got out of the army I served on permanent NSWPP staff at the headquarters in El Monte, California under the now-legendary Lt. Joseph Tommasi, who was murdered in 1975. I then became editor of the Party newspaper White Power in Arlington, Virginia. In 1974 I worked for a construction company in Johannesburg, South Africa for about six months, and then went to Rhodesia and joined the Rhodesian Army. In 1976 I was deported from Rhodesia for my activities with the proto-NS Rhodesia White People’s Party, along with two of my fellow Americans, Eric Thomson and Jeffrey Spencer. That’s an interesting example of conservatives being our true worst enemy. I was deported on the personal orders of Ian Smith, and we all know what Mr. Smith’s conservatism did to Rhodesia.

From then on it was the usual long Movement history of different groups, different approaches, all of them pretty much dead ends because there basically isn’t anything that can be done on an all-America basis in order to reverse the terminal decline of Western civilization on this continent, at least not without the use of a level of armed force which practically speaking, the Movement will never have at its disposal.

In 1982 I more or less went on the run for five years due to a legal situation which I’m still not certain it’s completely safe for me to get into, given the paranoid nature of our lords and masters these days and their eagerness to find something, anything, to use as an excuse to plop me down in the cell next to Bill White and Matt Hale. I ended up in Ireland, which at that time had no extradition treaty with the USA, due to the embarrassment and political complications for the Dublin government which would be caused by possibly extraditing IRA men back and forth across the Atlantic.

I learned a lot in Ireland. I didn’t just hang out in pubs guzzling Guinness; I read all the newspapers and watched RTE and BBC Northern Ireland, I made trips into the North, I talked to certain people (very carefully) and I sat quietly in certain known IRA pubs nursing a pint or two of Smithwick’s, listening and observing very carefully. Basically, in Ireland, I saw how it’s done in the modern world, not in 1930s Germany, and it was an invaluable education.

It’s true the IRA didn’t win in the main sense of the term, but Communists though they are (and I know that) this small band of dedicated White working class men and women fought a major Western democratic military power to a standstill, and forced the Brits to buy them off instead of crushing them. Like Rocky Balboa, they went a full fifteen rounds with Godzilla and they were still standing at the end of it. The lesson I draw from this and other events in the past 20 years is that it can be done.

In 2000, in the aftermath of what Morris Dees did to Pastor Butler, I finally came out openly for territorial White separatism in the form of the Northwest Imperative.

TOQ: Can you explain the Northwest Imperative, and tell us how you came to believe in it?

Harold Covington: The Northwest Imperative is based on the conviction, an accurate one, that the United States of America in its present form is doomed, and that it is necessary to the physical survival of the White race that we establish a Homeland for all of our people worldwide somewhere on the North American continent. Economics, demographics, and logistics dictate that the best location for such a Homeland is here in the Pacific Northwest. In addition, we have a long history here of commitment and martyrdom here in the Northwest: Bob Mathews and the Order men, Sam and Vicky Weaver, Gordon Kahl, and our latest martyr from the Northwest Front, Jeff Hughes of Vancouver, Canada.

The essence of the Northwest Idea is to reduce the problem to manageable proportions. We are simply too weak, disorganized, and too few to take over the United States, and we need to accept that just ain’t gonna happen. Instead of a whole huge continent and 300 million mostly hostile people to worry about, we reduce the problem geographically and demographically to three and a half states with about 12 million people, mostly White. Given the inevitable coming implosion of the United States and the collapse of the central authority in Washington D.C., when they run out of money to pay their mercenaries, bureaucrats, and enforcers, the Northwest Imperative is do-able in a way that no other plan we’ve ever come up with is do-able.

The Northwest Imperative also reduces the problem to that of a colonial war, and there are numerous models from the last century as to how to wage and win a colonial war. The objective is to make the disputed territory ungovernable and turn it into a massive rathole down which the occupying power bleeds money, manpower, and resources until it can’t stand the hemorrhage any longer and cuts its losses. The most important statement in any of my Northwest novels, so important that I have various characters say it over and over again in all four books, is this: “In a colonial war, it’s never the generals who surrender. It’s the accountants.”

TOQ: Can you tell us what you are doing to promote the idea of a Northwest homeland and to prepare for its concrete realization?

Harold Covington: We have formed the “Party” of the Northwest novels, called the Northwest Front, although it isn’t really a Party yet and probably won’t be for some time. Right now it’s just what the name says, a broad front rather than a party. We have participation from people who are involved with other groups and from people who are involved with none. There is no formal membership status, no chain of command, and no hierarchy. We provide what support we can to anyone who lives here or who is willing to come here to the Homeland and work for Northwest independence.

Eventually that will have to change, of course. Eventually there must be a disciplined, fighting revolutionary Party of political soldiers, but that’s going to take us a while. White Americans are the sloppiest, laziest, most narcissistic and most undisciplined people in the world, and they simply can’t wrap their minds around a European concept such as the political soldier. Not yet. They will have to change, or they will perish from the earth.

Read Part 2 here.

Read Greg Johnson’s review of Harold Covington’s Northwest Quartet here.

David Duke: I think only a very few have done so. Even more unfortunately, most of them had no real organization, woefully inadequate finances, and very little political savvy. Often they ran for offices far beyond their reach, such as US House of Representatives, rather than local races or what I think is the best starting point: the state legislature.

TOQ: What would you recommend for young nationalists who are thinking of getting involved in politics?

Here are a few of the guidelines that I think are essential for political success for our advocates.

1. Build a strong local organization such as EURO first so that you have at least a hundred dedicated volunteers and supporters. I had a local organization of about 1,000 supporters when I made my first race.

2. Pick the right race at the right time. Run for an office where you can actually touch the hands of a majority of the voters in your district. Establish residence in a district that has the right demographics and where a politician is vulnerable or a seat is opening up. “The right race at the right time.”

3. Run as a member of one of the major parties, not third party. Third party candidacies have huge disadvantages and also bring the perception of an inability to win, which is politically fatal.

4. Make sure you are an expert at campaigning. Go to Republican or Democratic political schools. Read the books on the subject. More importantly work in some campaigns and learn the science of campaigning. Have the latest voters list from the registrar of voters and get it paired with telephone numbers. Strategically develop a plan for you to conceivably knock on every door in your district, and your volunteers at least twice more singing your praises.

5. Make your candidacy very visible. One of the biggest tasks you have is to appear viable. The best way to do that in district is with yard signs. When I campaigned I walked the main thoroughfares and access roads in my District first, getting yard sign commitments. 60 days before the actual election came up, my yard sign crews went out one day and night and put up over 1000 signs. It looked like everyone was for me, and that changed the psychology of the election. Suddenly, people became unafraid to say that they were voting for me as they could see, thousands of others were.

6. Make your program true to our principles, but focused on issues that will get you votes, not cost you votes. Issues that will separate you from the crowd and give the most people strong reasons not to vote for you. For instance, even though you may favor a different US policy in the Mideast, that is not a vital issue in a state race. Why alienate people who are not educated on that issue? This is a campaign not an ideological journal like TOQ.

If something like comes up in an state election I would simply say, “Foreign policy is not an issue in a state race, but sure, I favor a policy that always puts American interest first and favors no special interests,” and then move on and say something like, “The ‘foreign policy’ that affects our state the most is the illegal alien and immigration policies that lead to more crime, more taxes and destruction of our traditional communities.”

Go with issues that have the most support among our people that are consonant with our views. For instance, hit hard against the racial discrimination of affirmative action, the cultural attacks against our people, destructions of our schools with forced integration, busing, rap, crime, etc. Hit hard on the welfare rip-off of the middle class taxpayer, the huge rip-off by the politically connected corporations, and the terrible taxes paid by our hard-pressed middle class to support these two parts of the economic vice squeezing our people.

My literature is available for everyone to see and the issues presented by it are certainly still valid. For some presentation advice read my threads on Stormfront critiquing Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC debate. There is a lot to be learned from those threads.

7. Note: It is vital that one does not sell out our basic concepts, yet at the same time present our views in way that is appealing rather than unattractive or disingenuous. It is tightrope that you must learn to walk if you take part in the political process.

8. Be super presentable, lose those extra pounds, or gain some muscle if need be. Physical strength and a well-dressed and well-groomed appearance are essential.

9. Attend every community election forum and usually there are dozens of them. If you do your homework you will shine above all the rest and give the people in attendance a real motivation to vote for you.

10. Operate a phone bank where you have 10 or more people who can call for you. Skype makes this very easy. Have them work the voters list. Promote a key issue or two, ask for their support, ask for a yard sign placement, and identity the favorable voters so you can get them out on election day.

11. If you are serious about the race, you need to take a leave of absence from your work, or let someone else run your business and be prepared to spend at least 5 months working 15 hour days on the project. For a local legislative house race you must raise at least $50,000 with $100,000 more desirable. If you have a good organization you can raise that kind of money. Voters are prepared to contribute to candidates, they want access to their representative.

12. Also important in preparing for a run for office is long-time community involvement. Become vocal long before the election on issues that come up which dovetail with our views. Make sure you are community active. You should be active in a number of community organizations such as Kiwanis, Red Cross, Lion’s Club, Rotary, etc. Not only can you do good work for your fellows, such involvement destroys the stereotype the media tries to portray of us. And over the months, and preferably years, the people in these organizations will respect you, many will help in the campaign, others will contribute and your membership in those groups will give a lot assurance to people who are suspicious of you because of media attacks.

13. One last thing. Go to church. Find a large church and a pastor or priest that you find the most agreeable. You might be surprised but you can almost always find a pastor who is sympathetic (usually quietly) to our views. Get involved in Church activities. And by the way, never be afraid to offer a differing view in Sunday School if some of the lessons stray into political and racial drivel. Just do it in decent way and you can have the whole class agreeing.

Because the media portrays people like us to be strange, anti-social, etc. it is more important for you to engage in these activities than for almost any other politician. And almost all successful political personages do this whether they believe or not. Bill Clinton in church has to be one hell of a joke.

Your viewpoints will set you apart and the media will try to characterize you in stereotypes, so it is vitally important for you to set deep community anchors that refute those stereotypes to the people you must reach to win political office.

Those are just a few concepts that I have learned over the years. I was elected to the House of Representatives in Louisiana in race with 5 opponents who were all millionaires. I received over 60 percent of the White vote in two statewide elections for US Senate and Governor and was elected to the Republican Executive Committee in the largest Republican district of Louisiana, and then subsequently elected chairman by the other 14 elected committeemen. If I can do that with the constant media attacks on me for my affiliations decades earlier, your road is much easier. Just standing up for our people’s rights and heritage will garner a lot of publicity on its own, and if elected on that platform you will become a nationally known political figure.

It is disgrace that there aren’t at least 1000 of our people in state legislatures across America, and at least a hundred in Congress. As of now there is not one elected politician in America would say “I am proud of the fact that I defend the rights of heritage of European-Americans.” Not one. Let’s change that!

Good luck!

TOQ: How would you respond to someone who would say the following: “Dr. Duke, you have political talent and skills equal to anyone in the US Senate right now. Why did you not pull out all the stops, do anything, say anything to get there? Why didn’t you renounce racism, kiss black babies, hug Oprah and blubber about your change of heart, anything to get real political power?”

David Duke: Again, it is the art of walking the tightrope. I did make it clear again and again that my beliefs weren’t the stereotypical White racist beliefs and slanders presented by the media, but I wasn’t going to renounce my core beliefs of preserving our heritage. Politics and mass democracy in the land of MTV is distasteful, and there are a thousand cuts at your integrity necessary to get elected. You are no longer a private person who can share every thought or every belief, otherwise at some point you would alienate in some way every voter. That goes for a David Duke, a Bill Clinton, or a Barak Obama. It’s the political reality of an alien controlled media.

I did whatever I had to do to get the votes I needed, but I could not and will not ever compromise the essential issues of our people’s survival. As far as I was personally concerned, I thought I had compromised too much in quest of a victory and power that could have served our Movement so much.

Also, understand, even if I would have recanted all, it would have made no difference, because the Jewish extremists who dominate the media and political process never forgive and never forget. They still would have launched all their forces against me and in reality, showing political cowardice on the key issues would have taken the wind from the sails of the thousands of dedicated people who worked day and night in my campaign.

We had an historic 42,000 supporters of the campaign in Louisiana, and 5000 volunteers. I got over 6 out of 10 of the White voters, but needed 7, and I did everything I could to get to 7, but my radical past (with photos) caused media induced prejudice among too many White voters.

The biggest factor in the race as boasted by Jewish researchers, was the economic blackmail against the state. We lost at least 2 out of 10 White folks because of that fact, they thought their jobs would be lost, their businesses driven to ground if I were elected.

Many people think they understand the incredible power of our Jewish supremacist enemies, but they have no idea of the true extent of Jewish power until they pose a real threat to system, then they unleash all their power in a torrent that few can withstand. I have endured years of constant, vicious Jewish lies and slanders, as would any man who threatened their power. Yet, I have endured and still fight for our people every day of my life. They couldn’t afford my presence among the most powerful 100 men in the world: the United States Senate. They knew that would have started a revolution, not just in America but across the Western World.

I hope young patriots can build on what I have accomplished and take the next step upward. I am there to advise or help anyone who is really serious.

Craig Bodeker

TOQ: In A Conversation About Race, you explain how you came to be a believer in “white guilt.” How did you come to be a disbeliever? How did you become racially-conscious?

Craig Bodeker: By traveling. From my early experiences in the American South and in Hawaii. I was able to see firsthand the differences between racially homogeneous areas — like Minnesota in the 1970s, and these more racially diverse areas. In the South, I learned that many African-Americans call each other “nigger.” This amazed me. I was brought up to believe that this word was actually more offensive to blacks than ANY of those seven words one couldn’t say on television, yet here were American blacks calling one another that infamous epithet at will.

If I would have suggested, in my Minnesota classroom, that African-Americans freely call each other that offensive word, I would have been ridiculed and corrected. I was learning that there’s a large disconnect between the real world, and the classroom, on the subject of race.

In Hawaii, I learned that for all the blather about how “diversity is strength,” it’s still white men that carry most of the state’s financial burden. The State of Hawaii levies what’s called a General Excise Tax of 5% of one’s GROSS INCOME — (in addition to the already sky-high state and federal tax liabilities one incurs while living there). But this special tax is applied only to specific professions. Realtors, insurance reps, bankers, accountants, lawyers, and others are all subject to this “special-tax.” These are all arguably, areas where whites excel, and this is illustrated by the number of whites in Hawaii that work in these professions. But targeting positions where whites are a majority for special-taxation, according to Hawaii, is not a matter of “disparate impact” against whites. No, it’s just how it has to be, in order for Hawaii to survive financially . . .

TOQ: Have you sent copies of A Conversation About Race to Mr. Lee and Mr. Dragland, the schoolteachers you mention whose brainwashing turned you into a believer in white guilt?

Craig Bodeker: No. I left Minnesota at 18, and have no wishes to return, or to try to educate Minnesotans. Mr. Lee and Mr. Dragland — (from the film), chose to emotionally abuse 5th graders in their charge, with their “lesson” on “racism.” I’ve learned that in the Religion of Multiculturalism, there are Believers and there are Priests. Although Mr. Lee was supportive of me in other ways during the 5th and 6th grades, both teachers must be considered Priests of the PC Church. And as such, cannot be responsive to reason or logic. Efforts at persuasion are wasted.

Minnesotans seem to enjoy the moral superiority so many of them preach, even as they’re politically represented by the likes of Keith Ellison and Al Franken, and Islamic Somalis fill their welfare rolls and their jails.

TOQ: How did you decide to make A Conversation About Race?

Craig Bodeker: It was the disconnects in logic. Every day they seemed more obvious. Before Obama’s election, many American’s believed that we would never elect an African-American as our President, and that this “fact” was proof of America’s “racism.” Yet no one is saying now, that “racism” is dead, due to Obama’s election.  Whites who vote for white candidates, as opposed to “diverse” candidates, are just more proof of our racial-bias. But when non-whites vote for fellow non-whites, it’s NOT proof of their racial-bias . . .?

When I first began posting short videos on Youtube, I learned that on the Internet, there is a verbal-war being waged right now, between those on the white side of issues, and those on the black, and “diverse” side of issues. For all the lip-service we hear about our desire for a post-racial society, there exists today a heated conflict between blacks and whites in cyberspace. If you have any doubts about this, just go to any Youtube video, and make a comment, either pro-white, pro-black or pro “diversity”, and wait for the responses. We can ignore this real and growing conflict by dismissing it as online hate-speech, but we do so at our own peril. Those big 20th century media companies that still want to influence our lives, say it’s not really happening, but that it’s simply a few bigots in their pajamas ruining it for everyone.

These disconnects between the media-world, and the real one we live in, were becoming so pronounced and obvious to me, I came to realize that if I didn’t make this film soon, someone else would . . . !

TOQ: What are some of the more memorable reactions to A Conversation About Race?

Craig Bodeker: The single most memorable reaction was my wife’s face, when the truck pulled up to our home with the first ten, large crates of ACAR DVDs. I’ve never seen a better effort at blending a WTF, with loving support . . . ! She admits now that she didn’t know quite what to think, when I told her I wanted to use our savings to produce a controversial documentary film. Thankfully, she kept whatever doubts she had to to herself. I appreciate her quiet faith in me, and I’ll never forger that look.

Another memorable reaction occurred at a health-club. The subject of ACAR came up in a dry-sauna. One older, tall, actor-looking fellow said he’d be interested in seeing it, and I gave him a copy. A week or so later I saw him again and asked his opinion. He was a bit reluctant at first, but then he told me that he felt ACAR was dishonest. He said that in the film, I never declared my intentions as the filmmaker. I had to stop him there, and remind him that I clearly stated my intentions, in the first three minutes of the film. He then said that that I never stated my REAL intentions.

Next, he claimed I didn’t define my terms in the film. When I mentioned that the definitions also appear at the beginning of the film, he stammered, repeated his assertion that ACAR was dishonest, and then really let me have it. He called me a White Supremacist!

One conclusion I reach in A Conversation About Race, is that if a white person is not INDIFFERENT to the subject of his race, he MUST then be a White Supremacist! There can be no middle-ground for people with ancestors from Europe. All others are allowed, and encouraged, toward racial or ethnic advocacy, in today’s PC culture, but not whites.

This is memorable for me, because it reinforces the label I used in the film for people like the man in the sauna. That label was “Believer,” and this man was not going to let pesky facts interfere with his beliefs on “racism.” He was incapable of acknowledging any of the clear points the film made, and that fact made me realize that many Americans today are so thoroughly brainwashed by Political Correctness, they’ve become impervious to elementary logic and reason. This was a sobering realization.

TOQ: Was A Conversation About Race influenced, in content or style, by any other documentaries?

Craig Bodeker: Sorry for the short answer, but no. It was completely self-inspired.

To be honest, I can’t really think of any documentary producers that have really impacted me. Growing up, I always enjoyed feature films.

I was impressed with much of Evan Coyne Maloneys’  Indoctrinate U.  I just saw it in 2009. If I had to choose a feature filmmaker, I’d say Terry Gilliam has always been a favorite of mine and that his film Brazil would be an excellent candidate for a new CGI-enhanced remake. I also like a lot of the early David Lynch work.

As for newer films, I loved District 9 and Up.

TOQ: Have you seen Errol Morris’s Mr. Death? If so, what do you think of it?

Craig Bodeker: I have not seen it, but have seen others on the topic.  My opinion is that European “hate-speech” laws are counter-productive. American founding father; Thomas Jefferson, spoke eloquently about how truth needs no defenders.

TOQ: What White Nationalist thinkers, writers, and websites have influenced you and how?

Craig Bodeker: The term White Nationalist itself is a bit vague to me, and I don’t necessarily consider myself one. Many WN’s tell me I’m not qualified for membership . . . I’ll say that Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance has been influential.  I am impressed with both their civility, and their use of humor.  I also benefit from Peter Brimelow’s VDARE website. Both of these sites are courageous and unwavering in their positions, and yet they manage to exercise restraint and subtlety in their rhetoric. The Council of Conservative Citizens also has a good site. And they bear the additional burden of coming from the South, so therefore must automatically be stereotyped as  ”white racists.” I visit The Occidental Quarterly, and the National Policy Institute‘s websites often as well.

I’d also mention James Edwards’ The Political Cesspool blog and radio-show, which is broadcast from Memphis, Tennessee, as well as streamed online. There are those that will label these sites as “hate” websites. But just as we’re discovering the true motives behind those who support Global Warming legislation, we’re also discovering the true motives behind those that champion the cause of “eliminating hate . . .”   It’s more about gaining political power and money, than it is about helping the oppressed.

TOQ: You have traveled quite widely in other countries. Where have you gone, which ones were your favorites, and why?

Craig Bodeker: Wow. Big question. I remember when, as a boy, our family packed up the motor-home and took vacations all around the USA. I particularly remember one time, while driving the family toward California, when my Dad declared that “travel was the best education.” Even at eight years old, I was encouraged.

As I grew older, and began traveling on my own to Mexico and Canada, I discovered that my Dad was right. I can learn more watching how other people and cultures address their issues than I can sitting in a classroom, reading about them from textbooks.

While living in Hawaii, I discovered Asia. Flying to the US mainland from Hawaii for “getaways” had become somewhat tiresome. I wanted adventure, and when a friend told me that the flight to Tokyo lasted about as long as a flight to Las Vegas, I began considering travel to Asia.

I’ll always love the Kingdom of Thailand. I’ll admit that when I was a young, single man, I was curious about Thailand’s night-life-industry and it’s bar-girls. But after getting to know that part of Thailand, I started becoming aware of the real Thailand, The Land of Smiles, as it’s known, and of her proud, yet gentle people. From a practical standpoint, I like Thailand because it’s cheap!  No nation on Earth has tastier traditional food, and If you like to stick to a budget, it’s hard to beat Thailand for first-world comforts, at second and third-world prices. You can stay in a jungle/beach-front resort, dine on giant prawns, and genuinely relax on an exotic, white-sand beach, for a fraction of what it costs elsewhere.

I’ll also say that the nation of Myanmar (Burma), made an impression on me. This is an outcast nation that was actually boycotted by the “International Community.” It’s the cheapest place I’ve ever visited, but it’s also, most definitely, the third-world. Most roads consist of dirt and craters, but some, newer roads are made by manually placing flat rocks over a graded section of Earth, then covering it all with hot-asphalt. It ends up being a fairly smooth ride. This back-breaking work is nearly always performed by women.

What impressed me about Myanmar though, was not their road-crews, but their desire to remain Burmese. The “International Community” demands that Myanmar open herself to outsiders, in order to exploit her rich natural resources. The Burmese know that their deep poverty would end the moment they did so, yet they choose isolation. They don’t see their neighbor to the west, Thailand, as positively as I have described. They acknowledge the blessings of Thailand’s wealth, but they also acknowledge the replacement of Thai culture, with the current culture of drugs and prostitution. The everyday Burmese I spoke with were not cringing in fear of their narco-trafficking dictators, as our Government and media would have us believe, but rather, were concerned about keeping their identity as a people. They would rather be poor and Burmese, than rich and International.

China is as fascinating as it is huge. One could spend a lifetime there and not see it all. They are a proud people, but don’t handle a “loss of face” well. If you ask a typical Chinese for directions to a place he is not familiar with, he would rather make-up fake directions, sending you to God-knows-where, than suffer the “loss of face” that accompanies any expression of ignorance. It is better to be wrong about a thing in China, than it is to say, “I don’t know.”

China has race-based admission policies to public parks and such. There are fees to enter, and I am normally charged ten times what my American-Chinese friends are charged. The official policy is a nationalist one, not a racial one, but every time I’ve entered with an American-Chinese, they’ve always seemed to know that  he was from America, and yet charged him the Chinese price . . . ?

Of course, Europe holds a special place for me. Both of my grandparent families came to the USA from Germany in the 1870s and 1880s. I love to explore Europe, and hope to do so, in much more detail, in the future. One of my favorite photos is of my wife and I standing in front of Neuschwanstein Castle, outside Munich.

We normally avoid large cities, but Paris is a must-see destination. More examples western heritage and culture can be found there than anywhere (along with much that is non-western). And the best food in the world as well! But each year in France, more Churches close their doors, and more Mosques open theirs. Visit Paris, before it’s no longer Paris.

The Netherlands are also fascinating to me. Once the commerce-engine of the world, their recent experiments in liberalism have nearly bankrupted them. And as I wandered along the canals (and coffee-shops), of Amsterdam, I couldn’t help but notice the contrasts: family-owned business under the same roof for 400 years, situated next to a porno shop with gigantic dildos in the window. I makes me wonder, is there already a culture-war being waged? Which culture will prevail? Which one wants it more?

TOQ: How did traveling in foreign countries, especially in the Far East, make you more aware of your own racial and cultural identity?

Craig Bodeker: I learned quickly in Asia, that to the extent that the term “racist” has any meaning at all, Asians are racists. And especially the Chinese! (See the previous answer about China). Skin-whiteners are the rage throughout Asia, and especially in the south, where people are darker-skinned. Many light-skinned Mandarin speakers–from China’s north, where Beijing is the center of Government, automatically look down upon Cantonese speakers from the south, even when said Cantonese speaker is a Hong Kong millionaire.

Caucasian whites in China are known as “White-Devils”  and are not to be trusted.

In the Philippines, most Filipinos admire whites. Whether from Europe, Canada, America or Australia, we’re considered capable, ethical, and smart. Blacks and other dark-skinned peoples, including the blacker Filipinos, are considered less-capable and ethical, and are commonly looked down upon.

In Hawaii, the prevailing culture says that the best mate a successful white man living there can find, will be a Japanese woman. (White women are less frequent in Hawaii). And If you absolutely cannot find a willing Japanese girl, a Korean girl will make for an acceptable compromise, but not one of the myriad other, darker-skinned Asians that populate the islands.

A white man dating a white woman while living in Hawaii is considered  gauche. Hawaiians place the Japanese on the top of the racial totem-pole and the Filipinos and darker-skinned Asians at the bottom. Whites belong somewhere in the middle.

I’ve never met a person in Asia concerned about racial-diversity. Most would say  that diversity is their enemy, and that racial-homogeneity is the key to their own national success.

Somehow, all of these big media companies, in all of their “documentaries” and “specials” on “racism,” have managed to not once stumble-upon this attitude, which is common sense to most non-white races? I wonder why that is.

TOQ: What is your next documentary going to be about?

Craig Bodeker: Still working on that. I’ll be part of a roundtable discussion on race at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina (an historically black college), in January. And I’ll proudly be speaking at the American Renaissance Conference in Washington DC in February. I’ll probably film my travels to each of these events from Denver, Colorado, in hopes of creating something with a bit more color, and music, than used in A Conversation About Race.

TOQ: Thank you.

You can buy A Conversation About Race from Craig Bodeker’s website.

Read Greg Johnson’s review of A Conversation About Race here.

Tomislav Sunic

On Tuesday, December 1, 2009, at 9 PM Eastern US time, Dr. Tomislav Sunic will interview Dr. Greg Johnson, editor of The Occidental Quarterly on the “Sunic Journal.”

The interview will air on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network. To tune in to the live feed for this and all VoR programming, click here to use Windows Media Player or here for Winamp. For iTunes: open iTunes, press Ctrl+U on your keyboard, copy/paste http://208.110.82.50/vor_high.pls into the Open Audio Stream dialog box, then click OK (you will now be able to listen to VoR live on iTunes any time by clicking on ‘Voice of Reason Broadcast Network’ in your music list).

If you cannot catch it as it airs on Tuesday, the interview will be archived in mp3 format for download on Tom’s page at the VoR site soon after the show ends (archived shows are listed on the right side of page).

Topics for discussion will include the history, creators, and purpose of The Occidental Quarterly; themes of recent and forthcoming issues of TOQ; the relationship of race and culture, including the effects of culture on race; the purpose of TOQ Online; the role of conspiracies in history; and Alain de Benoist’s On Being a Pagan.

William Holman Hunt's "The Scapegoat" (1854 - 1856) (detail)

From Mechanopolis, February 24, 2009

Translated by Greg Johnson

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.
Read Part 4 here.

Mechanopolis: Isn’t the desire to found a world government one of the delusions of the “enlightened,” as Taguieff would say?

Hervé Ryssen: It is quite clear that all this is being done to make us disavow our roots, our traditions, our history, our families, and our fatherlands, in order to make us more receptive to the “open” society dear to cosmopolitan hearts and to the idea of a world government. Alain Finkielkraut insists on this point: “Evil,” he writes, “enters the world with fatherlands and patronyms [par les patries et par les patronymes]”(Alain Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue [Lost Humanity], p.154.). The post-modern man must cease “pursuing traces of the past in himself as in others.” His claim to fame “is to be cosmopolitan, and to make war on parochialism” (Alain Finkielkraut, Le Mécontemporain [Paris: Gallimard, 1991], pp. 174-77).  From there, one can finally admit the idea of a “planetary confederation,” as advocated by the sociologist Edgar “Morin” in all his books, or better yet, to work for the introduction of world government, as Jacques Attali expresses it: “After the installation of European continental institutions, the urgent need for a world government will appear” (Dictionnaire du XXIe siècle [Dictionary of the Twenty-First Century]). All that, obviously, will still not prevent the famous anti-fascist trapper Pierre-André Taguieff from being indignant at the wild imaginings of anti-Semites and to claim that the idea of world domination is an aberration or a “deception.”

Mechanopolis: One cannot deny however that the Jews experienced atrocious persecutions down through the centuries. How do they themselves explain their misfortunes?

Hervé Ryssen: It is probably the most stunning question of all. On this point as well, the explanations are all concordant and are usually based on the theory of the “scapegoat”: in difficult times the government or the people turn against a specially designated victim who is charged with “all” faults “past, present, or future.”

Those who should be most concerned to understand anti-Semitism often express a total incomprehension of the phenomenon. Thus for Clara Malraux (the wife of the writer) anti-Semitic hatred “is less hard to bear when one knows that it is totally and absolutely unjustified and that, by this fact, the enemy is transformed into the enemy of humanity” (Clara Malraux, Rahel, Ma grande sœur . . . [Rahel, My big sister . . .] [Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1980], p. 15.). The enemy of the Jews is the enemy of all humanity. This is also what Elie Wiesel means when he writes in volume 2 of his Memories: “Thus it is and cannot be otherwise: the enemy of the Jews is the enemy of humanity. . . . By killing the Jews, the killers undertook to assassinate all of humanity” (Elie Wiesel, Mémoires, vol. 2, [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996], pp. 72, 319). Indeed, to kill a Jew who is, so to speak, innocent by nature, is inevitably to attack every innocent person and every other community. Thus one is correctly defined as the enemy of humanity. But there is also another interpretation, more classical, which is based on the idea that the Jews alone are defined as humanity, the other nations deriving, according to a so-called formula of the Talmud, from “the seed of cattle.”

In his  2004 book Le Discours de la haine [Hate Speech], the philosopher André Glucksmann maintains that “hatred of the Jews is the enigma among all enigmas. . . . Jews are not at all the source of anti-Semitism; it is necessary to consider this passion in itself and by itself, as if the Jews which it hounds . . . did not exist.” (André Glucksmann, Le Discours de la haine [Paris: Plon, 2004], pp. 73, 86, 88.).  You have to understand:  “the Jew” is always innocent. These too are not isolated testimonies, and this attitude seems to be that of a majority of the Jewish intellectuals. Emmanuel Lévinas also expressed this opinion, just like another Jewish philosopher, Shmuel Trigano for whom the phenomenon of anti-Semitism “remained unexplained in spite of an immense library on the subject” (Shmuel Trigano, L’Idéal démocratique… à l’épreuve de la shoah [The Democratic Ideal . . . the Test of the Shoah] [Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1999], p. 17).

Mechanopolis: One also often hears that anti-Semitism is a mental illness.

Hervé Ryssen: Since anti-Semitism is unexplained, and the Jews are innocent, logically the problem can come only from the goys. Consider the testimony of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, philosopher of religions, found in the book entitled Portraits juifs: “It is a phenomenon which is historically incomprehensible. Anti-Semitism for me is not a problem of the Jews but of the goyim” (Herlinde Loelbl, Portraits juifs, 2003). In the first volume of his Mémoires, Elie Wiesel writes: “It is their problem, not ours” (Elie Wiesel, Mémoires, vol. I [Paris: Le Seuil, 1994], pp. 30, 31).

The explanation of anti-Semitism as mental derangement is very frequently found in the writings of Jewish intellectuals. Le livre de Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine, publié en 1995, reprend cette idée : The 1995 book of Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine [Jewish Identity, Human Identity], takes up this idea: “The anti-Semite attributes to the Jew the intentions that he himself nourishes. . . . The psychopathological dimension of such a construction cannot be ignored. . . . The presented Jews are really projected Jews; the “Judaized” image belongs to the delusions of anti-Semites” (Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine [Paris: Armand Colin, 1995], pp. 390-92).

The Russian writer Vassili Grossman expresses the same idea: “Anti-Semitism,” he says, “is the mirror of the defects of a man taken individually, of civil society, of official systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what you yourself are guilty of. National Socialism, when it attributed to the Jewish people traits that it itelf had invented, like racism, the will to dominate the world, or the cosmopolitan indifference to the German fatherland, had in fact given the Jews its own characteristics” (Vassili Grossman, Vie et destin [Paris: Ed. Julliard, 1960], pp. 456-58). In sum, the anti-semite rejects in the Jews his own tares. On this level, it does indeed fall into the realm of psychotherapy. But it remains to be seen whether it is really the goyim who need it most!

The End

Read Michael O’Meara’s review of Ryssen’s Les Espérances planétariennes.

Emilio Sala Frances, "The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain" (1889, Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada) The figure in the foreground is either Don Isaac Abravanel or Don Abraham Senior.

From Mechanopolis, February 24, 2009

Translated by Greg Johnson

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.

Mechanopolis: How do you explain this obvious lust for vengeance in [Jewish] religious texts that profess universal peace? What is the source of this vengefulness?

Hervé Ryssen: The spirit of revenge is found in quite a few texts. It appears in novels like Albert Cohen’s Frères humains or Patrick Modiano’s La Place de l’Etoile. The current American guru of Afrocentrism, Martin Bernal, who is “white,” also evokes this sentiment: “My goal is to reduce the intellectual arrogance of Europeans.” Now, if one plunges into the remote past, one realizes that these attitudes have traversed the centuries without so much as a wrinkle.

At the beginning of the 16th century, for example, Rabbi Shlomo Molkho, who was regarded by many Jews as a Messianic figure, wrote his very revealing prophetic visions in which one finds the idea of a “revenge against the gentiles” which will be achieved. He also assures us that “the foreigners will be broken” and that “the nations will tremble” (Moshe Idel, Messianisme et mystique, 1994, pp. 65-66). Moshe Idel comments: “the poem of Molkho clearly refers to the advent of a double revenge: against Edom and Ishmael,” i.e., against Christendom and Islam, then he adds furthermore: “God reveals not only how to fight against Christianity . . . but still how to break the force of Christianity so that the Redemption occurs” (p. 48). Isn’t it clear?

One can find this type of delirious prophecy in many other Jewish historical characters, such as Isaac Abravanel, who was the chief of the Jewish community of Spain before the expulsion of 1492, and who became one of the mythical heroes of the Jews of Iberian origin. He also quite explicitly calls for the revenge of the people of Israel against Christendom and invited “all the nations to go to war against the land of Edom” (the vision of Obadia, in Genesis 20:13, quoted in John-Christoph Attias, Isaac Abravanel: La mémoire et l’espérance [Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1992], p. 256).

For those who still wonder about the reasons for this secular hatred, here is a small explanation: “It is close the day when the eternal will take revenge on all the nations that destroyed the First Temple and which controlled Israel in the exile. And with you also, Edom, as you made at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, you will know the sword and revenge (Obadia). . . . Any deliverance promised to Israel is associated with the fall of Edom” (Lamentations 4:22; p. 276).

This vengeful hatred, nursed for twenty centuries, was also expressed by the philosopher Jacob Talmon, who wrote in 1965: “The Jews have very old blood feuds to settle with the Christian West” (J.-L. Talmon, Destin d’Israël, [Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1965, 1967], p. 18). Pierre Paraf, the former President of the LICA (League against Anti-Semitism), writes, in the voice of a character of his novel republished in 2000: “So many of our brothers marked by circumcision groan under the whip of the Christians. Glory to God! Jerusalem will gather them together one day; they will have their revenge!” (Quand Israël aima [Paris: Les belles letters, 1929, 2000, p. 19). These people are tenacious in their resentment.

Mechanopolis: We really are far from the cinematic stereotype of the “poor little persecuted Jew.” In the end, can one take seriously the widespread idea, or “prejudice,” that “the Jews want to dominate the world”?

Hervé Ryssen: I do not have any personal ideas on this subject, and I am content to analyze what is written. Consequently, I cannot say that it is a general disposition of all Jewish intellectuals. But this idea was expressed by some of them. The book on Abravanel confirms this interpretation, on the basis of biblical texts: “At the time of the Messiah,” he writes, “Samuel thought that all the nations would be subjects of Israel, in accordance with what is written: ‘His empire will extend from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth’” (Zechariah 9: 10, p. 181). “During the deliverance to come, a king of the house of David will reign” (Attias, Isaac Abravanel, p. 228). In fact “the great peace would reign on earth at the time of the King-Messiah” (Attias, Isaac Abravanel, p. 198). Here we have confirmation that Israel militates for “peace”!

Camille Marbo, in her novel Flammes juives (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1936, 1999) tells the story of young Moroccan Jews who leave their mellah and settle in France in the 1920s. One explicitly speaks about the “conquest of the world by Israel” (p. 10). One also finds such passages: “‘Israel must control the world,’ said Daniel. . . . ‘They fear us,’ repeated the old man Benatar, ‘because we are the race of the Prophets’” (p. 18); “Our generation which can conquer Christendom has not yet come. You yourselves will lay the foundations, and your children will carry out the task. They will confound the Christians. Israel will lead the world as it must” (p. 126). There are many other texts on this subject.

Read Part 5 here.

Bernd Rabehl is an academic sociologist and a veteran of the German student movement of the 1960s led by Rudy Dutschke. Pace our conservatives, the oppositional movements of the period were not monolithic in their subversion. Not a few of its participants were like myself (I was a 68er at Berkeley) in seeking not the further actualization of the nihilism inherent in the post-1945 System, but rather an active resistance to the toll it had already taken on American life in the decade leading up to the Sixties.

Here, in this slightly abridged translation, an ex-oppositionist reflects on the complete loss of German values since the break-up of the Soviet Empire and the East German Democratic Republic (the Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR). –Michael O’Meara

Question (Bernhard Tomaschitz): Professor Rabehl, twenty years ago the Berlin Wall fell. In what ways has Germany changed since then?

Rabehl: It has been completely transformed. First, the DDR was totally dismantled. Its industry was deliberately destroyed, creating vast swaths of de-industrialization in the East. Then, a third of the DDR’s population, above all those with college degrees and skills, were resettled in West Germany, and in some cases in the US and Australia. The little industry remaining in the East was in no way comparable to that of West Germany, so it’s impossible to speak of any parity now between the new Länder (provinces) of the East and those of the West.

Question: Was any aspect of the DDR heritage carried over into the newly reunified Federal Republic?

Rabehl: This is an interesting question because the politics of the SED [the ruling East German Communist party] always took its references from the German, especially the Prussian, political tradition. In this optic, the DDR’s politics remained German, while West Germany [under the heal of the Judeo-American powers] was founded on a rejection of that tradition.

Question: Given that West Germany had severed its links with the German past, ought German Reunification [after 1989] be considered “a historical accident”?

Rabehl: The West German political Establishment had no interest in reunification. Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats [then the ruling party] was committed to the postwar division of Germany. No one in the West imagined that East Germany might possibly collapse (it was simply accepted that there should be two states) and no one wanted anything to do with a state still rooted in the German political tradition. It was the Soviet Union that initiated the reunification process because it feared the complete collapse of Eastern Europe. The KGB elites around Gorbachev knew that such a collapse would bring war and revolution, threatening thus the very existence of the Red Army and the Russian state. This is why two or three years before 1989, the Russians began developing plans to ensure a peaceful reunification. The American president at the time, Bush Senior, and Gorbachev then negotiated the reunification and presented it to Kohl. Following the massive demonstrations in Leipzig, East Berlin, and Rostock [which undermined the DDR's legitimacy in 1989], it was clear that the German Communist state could no longer be preserved, since the Russians were no longer prepared or able to support such a state.

Question: To what degree did “the Basic Antifascist Consensus (Antifaschistische Grundkonsensens), which was the founding ideology of the West German Federal Republic, become the prevailing dogma of reunified Germany?

Rabehl: Antifascism in the former DDR was use to designate “the enemy,” all enemies. A “fascist,” accordingly, was anyone who didn’t support the [East German Communist] system. Included in this category were Social Democrats, liberals, leftists, and, of course, conservatives and reactionaries. “Fascism,” as such, was a concept of struggle, extendable to virtually anyone or anything.

Once the Federal Republic lost its enemy in the East, there was a certain [ideological] shift. Previously, it wasn’t fascism that was the enemy, but rather Communism, whose subversions were resisted. Then, as the German Communist state disappeared in the East, the reunified German state embrace the antifascist cause for its own uses, this time against the German state tradition — and against all who sought to change the new Germany, especially its relationship to the European Union. In this context, it’s pertinent to note that well before 1989 West German parties had privileged the American ideology of “human rights” and “individual liberties” and assigned no value to maintaining the German heritage, the German language, German values — having abandoned every specifically German political and social tradition.

Question: If German values are no longer of any importance, what was it that was celebrated during the anniversary of German Reunification?

Rabehl: Essentially, what was celebrated was the fact that there had been no revolution in either the East or the West. In the East, in 1989, those who had descended into the street, chanting “We are one people,” were bought off with a monetary reform and a gift of several hundred marks to welcome them to the West. They were then shorn of their political identity. This was easily accomplished, given the weak organization and lack of continuity of the East German protest movement.

That which is celebrated now, twenty years later, is the fact that the constitution, “the Basic Law,” and the former political structures of the West have been imposed on the Länder of the East — that there is nothing left of the DDR. In effect, what is celebrated is the total Americanization of all Germans.

Question: Isn’t it remarkable that twenty years after the Wall’s collapse the [recently passed] Treaty of Lisbon calls for the “de-state-ification” of Germany and other EU member states?

Rabehl: All of Europe’s states have been effectively “de-state-ified.” In the process, the EU has acquired a supra-state sovereignty and become a super-state. But for all that Europe in no sense is a great power. It can’t be because it remains tied to the United States — by treaties regulating NATO and by other accords related to matters of security. There were certain timid measures taken to give Europe the stature of a great power, but since 2003, the US has intervened to prevent it, informing Europeans that only the United States can decide matters of war and peace for them. So much for the European super-state — for the question of war and peace is what makes a state sovereign.

Question: What forces have profited from the “de-state-ification” of the European states?

Rabehl: Obviously, it’s the United States, which, since 1945, has systematically endeavored to impose its own political model on Europe . . . This political system, which I call “liberal materialism,” has completely taken over Germany.

In the past, the state was always primary: This was the case with the monarchical state and the administrative state and the independent political forces which once opposed the “party-cratic” state perverted by machine politicians and partisan interests.

It’s often said today that the state has degenerated into a sort of country inn, without any real structure, where partisan interests maneuver for maximum advantage and for state hand-outs. Isn’t this typically American?

Question: What do you think Germany will look like twenty years from now, when we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Wall’s fall?

Rabehl: That depends on how the political life of the nation is affected by our pseudoelites, who favor the existing parties and recruit an increasingly ever more mediocre personnel.

If corruption becomes everywhere prevalent, if private interests and lobbies end up dominating the parties themselves and the state machinery, then we are likely to sink deeper into political paralysis. States and governments will then no longer be able to act — which was already evident under Kohl is even more so under Angela Merkel.

Every government affected by such paralysis, in avoiding problems and reacting only on the spur of the moment, will find itself incapable of resolving the crises besetting it.

They will consequentially fail to resolve social conflicts or navigate the turbulent storms affecting the larger social order.

In such a case, it’s possible to imagine that Europe’s peoples and nations will begin at last to resist, even to rise in insurrection, as they confront the state’s inaction, feeling that “it can no longer go on like this.”

If Merkel, for example, doesn’t find a solution for [the financially-troubled car manufacturer] Opel, its workers are likely to take to the streets, banging the table and demanding that a solution be found.

When other European nations discover that they too have been swindled, they, in turn, will also begin to resist.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

From Mechanopolis, February 24, 2009

Translated by Greg Johnson

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

Mechanopolis: Is there unanimity among Jewish intellectuals on the question of immigration?

Hervé Ryssen: Jewish intellectuals can be liberals, Marxists, Zionists, religious, or atheists. But all these divergences do not at all invalidate the messianic foundation of their aspirations. And on immigration, I can assure you that they are unanimous. Here for example is what Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former leader of May ’68 and assistant mayor of Frankfurt says: “In Frankfurt on the Mainz, the population is more than 25% foreign, but one can say that Frankfurt would not crumble if the percentage from abroad one day reached one third of the whole” (Xénophobies, 1998, p. 14).

This is perfectly in sync with the socialist Jacques Attali writing about Germany’s aging population: “It is indeed necessary that the naturalized foreign population reaches a third of the entire population, and half of that of the cities” (Dictionnaire du XXIe siècle, 1998). One could, of course, encourage the German birthrate. But Jacques Attali does not consider it, because only a multiracial society guarantees the realization of the planetarian project. For France, Attali suggests the same solution: “It will also have to pursue the means to rejuvenate its population, to accept the entrance of a great number from abroad” (L’Homme nomade, 2003, p. 436).

A November 2005 report of the World Bank also encourages Russia to open its borders and to undertake a large-scale immigration policy, which would be “one of the main conditions of a stable economic growth” and would make it possible to face the ageing of the population. Let us note all the same that Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank, has never encouraged Arab immigration to Israel to support the wavering population of this country.

Jacques Attali

Remarks of this sort are found systematically in almost all Jewish intellectuals, be they Marxists like Jacques Derrida, socialists like Guy Konopnicki, or liberals like Guy Sorman or Alain Minc. Moreover, they all show an annoying tendency to treat us like morons, by telling us, for example, that immigration has not increased for twenty years or that insecurity would not in any case be related to this phenomenon. Cohn-Bendit ensures us straightforwardly that “to stop racism, it  would be best to further increase the number from abroad”! Their remarks on this subject are staggeringly brazen. For instance, Guy Sorman flatly states that the France of yesteryear, with its dialects and patois, was altogether “more multicultural than it is it today” (En attendant les barbares, pp. 174-79). It is one example among many of this invincible brazenness, of which they are very proud, and which they call “chutzpah.”

The objective is to destroy the white world, and, in a more general way, all rooted societies. All these intellectuals assure us that this development is inescapable, and that consequently, there is no use opposing it. Note that in the Marxist schema, it was the classless society which was to be “inescapable.” According to Jean “Daniel”: “Nothing will stop the movement of impoverished populations towards an old and rich Occident. . . . This is why wisdom, reason, consists in from now on preparing to receive more and more immigrants” (Le Nouvel Observateur, October 13, 2005). You must understand that they seek to prohibit the very idea of defending oneself. The unanimity of cosmopolitan discourse on this subject is really astonishing.

Mechanopolis: One often hears that the Jews were regarded by the Nazis as an “inferior race.” Your research, I believe, tends to show that they regard themselves as “the superior race.” Please explain.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Hervé Ryssen: I can assure you that there is an immense pride in belonging to the “chosen people.” And among intellectuals this pride combines with a no less great contempt for the sedentary nations, considered to be very definitely inferior. Remarks on this subject are innumerable. For example Bernard-Henri Levy wrote, in the first number of the journal Globe in 1985: “Of course we are resolutely cosmopolitan. Of course all that is earthy, bourrées, bagpipes, in short typically French or chauvinist, is foreign, even odious to us.” “Fatherlands of any kind and their processions of old-fashioned things” disgust him utterly: all that is nothing but a “timid and exasperated retreat to the most impoverished identities.” “To speak patois, to dance bourrées, to march to the sound of bagpipes . . . such stupidity is nauseating” (L’Idéologie française, 1981, pp. 212-16).

The philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas has also expressed his faith in the virtues of rootlessness and nomadism. For him, the greatest backwardness, undoubtedly, was represented by the pagan civilizations of antiquity: “Paganism,” he writes, “is the local spirit: a cruel and pitiless nationalism. A forest humanity, a pre-human humanity.” Certainly all that is unworthy of the genius of the Bedouins of the desert: “It is on the arid ground of the desert where nothing is fixed, where the true spirit descended in a text to achieve itself universally. . . . The faith in the liberation of man can only be a shock to sedentary civilizations, crumbling away the heavy layers of the past. . . . It is necessary to be underdeveloped to take up their cause and fight on their behalf for a place in the modern world” (Difficile liberté, p. 299).

Emanuel Lévinas

It is not enough for these intellectuals to talk nonsense, to lull us with “human rights,” to bind us with repressive laws, and to inject us with alien cultural poisons. They also have to pour into our ears their contempt for our old cultures. But this contempt does not seem to fully satisfy their thirst for revenge. They must also insult us and spit in our faces: “ignoramuses, xenophobes, paranoiacs, morons, lunatics, etc.” That is what we are. In La Vengeance des Nations (1990), Alain Minc, who explains to us the benefits of immigration, ensures us that it is “ignorance which feeds xenophobia” (p. 154), that it is thus necessary “to fight against the crazy xenophobes, and be done with this “French paranoia” (pp. 208). Toward this end, Alain Minc proposes systematically to favor immigrants over the native French, on the American model. As media sensation Michael Moore proclaims in his 2002 book Stupid White Men, in the United States it is no longer really necessary to treat stupid white men with kid gloves, since they do not understand anything that is happening to them.

And I will not recount the innumerable films in which the cosmopolitan scriptwriters take their revenge against Christian civilization and the white man in general. It seems obvious to me, regarding all this logorrhea, that these people hate us. It could not be any more obvious if they wore flashing neon signs on their heads.

Read Part 4 here.

Read Michael O’Meara’s review of Ryssen’s Les Espérances planétariennes.

From Mechanopolis, February 24, 2009

Translated by Greg Johnson

Read Part I here.

Mechanopolis: Judging by the policy of US President George W. Bush, it does not appear that his numerous Zionist advisers are promoting the world of “peace” about which you speak. How do you explain this?

Hervé Ryssen: It is undeniable that the leaders of the American Jewish community bear a good part of the blame for the war in Iraq. One would have to be blind not to see it; one would have to be insincere to deny it. Their political weight has been important in each successive US government since the beginning of the 20th century. American nationalists like the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh denounced the pressures of the “Jewish lobby” (in the United States, it is a lobby among others) to push his strongly isolationist people into the war against Nazi Germany. Already in the 1920s, the manufacturer Henry Ford had grasped the magnitude of the problem and widely publicized it in a newspaper created for this purpose. One should also note that Madeleine “Albright” and the hawks of the American State Department threw their whole weight behind the war against Serbia in 1999. You are thus perfectly right to stress this contradiction between Messianic faith and “terrestrial operations,” so to speak.

But people will state in all sincerity that these wars are works of “peace”! Just listen to  Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Prize for “Peace,” who was naturally an ultra-warmonger in 1991, when he agitated for war against Iraq: “It is not only a question of helping Kuwait,” he said then, “but of protecting the entire Arab world.” Thus all Westerners were to be mobilized against the “butcher of Baghdad,” guilty because he threatened the state of Israel: “Against war,” Elie Wiesel writes, “it is imperative to make war. Against destructive force employed against humanity, it is necessary to oppose a greater force, so that humanity can survive. For the sake of the safety of the civilized world, its right to peace, and not only for the future of Israel. . . . A thirst for vengeance? No: a thirst for justice. And for peace” (Elie Wiesel, Mémoires 2, [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996], pp. 144, 146, 152).

Note that he does not hesitate to drape himself in the grand ideals of peace and love when it is a question of destroying his enemy. But it is of course out of the question that the Jewish state itself should deal with this military grunt work. It is the task of the West, which must be convinced by “sensitivity” campaigns, to go to oust the dictator. Once your enemy is vanquished, your tireless combat for democracy and “peace” can be resuscitated whenever politically convenient. Indeed, after having crushed one’s enemies, one is always for “peace.”

Mechanopolis: You speak about “democracy.” What kind of relationship can there be between a political system and Messianic faith? Is democracy necessary for the arrival of the Messiah?

Hervé Ryssen: Democracy was not always the sole vehicle of planetarian hopes. For a long time, the Marxist ideal also played this role. It is well-known that Marx himself, and the great majority of the main Marxist ideologues and leaders, were Jewish: Lenin had Jewish origins, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukacs, Ernest Mandel, etc., just as were almost all of the leaders of May ’68. It is not an accident, and every Communist militant knows it. Marxism aspires to the establishment of a perfect world, where religions, like nations, will have disappeared along with social conflicts. This schema, we note, fits perfectly within the messianic framework. The thought of Marx is ultimately only the secularization of traditional Jewish eschatology.

George Steiner has presented Marxism from the point of view of biblical prophecies: “Marxism,” he says, “is at bottom merely Judaism in a hurry. The Messiah was too long in coming or, more precisely, in not coming. It is man himself who will found the kingdom of justice, on this earth, here and now . . . preached Karl Marx in his manuscripts of 1844, where one recognizes the transparent echo of the phraseology of the Psalms and the prophets” (George Steiner, De la Bible à Kafka [Bayard, 2002]).

Neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Trotsky believed in a God, and yet their Jewish origins appear in full light within the framework of Jewish messianism. Political Marxism was nevertheless marginalized in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fact is that, in the projects of planetary unification, democracy triumphed everywhere that Communism failed. It is obvious, however, that the groups of the extreme left continue to profit from all the media attention in Western society: it is because they represent the spearhead of the project of a leveling and multiracial society and channel in a globalist direction the radical oppositions aroused by the liberal system. This mobilizing Utopia is always necessary for a despairing democratic system, which offers nothing to its youth but trips to the mall. Thus Marxism ultimately renders its best services when it is nested inside democracy. Marxism and democracy are two absolutely complementary and mutually indispensable forces in the project of constructing  a global Empire. Without Communism, the opposition would inevitably move towards nationalist currents, and the system would not survive it.

Mechanopolis: After the failure of state Communism, are multiracial democracy and “human rights” now the absolute weapon of the “planetarian”  forces?

Hervé Ryssen: The objective of the globalists is to destroy rooted, traditional cultures to create a uniform world. This aspiration to unity was expressed by the Hasidic philosopher Martin Buber, who does not appear to realize that he is giving us an exact definition of totalitarianism: “Everywhere,” he writes, “one will find [in Judaism] the aspiration towards unity. Towards unity within the individual. Towards unity between the divided members of the people, and between the nations. Towards the unity of man and all living things, towards the unity of God and of the world” (Judaïsme, 1982, p. 35). To arrive to this perfect world, it is thus necessary to mix, crush, dissolve all national resistances and ethnic or religious identities. “Unity” can be created only from human powder and the residues of great civilizations, and in this enterprise of destroying traditional civilizations, immigration plays a crucial role. The doctrines of “human rights” are here a weapon of war of a terrible effectiveness.

Here is what grand rabbi Kaplan says: “The advent of an era without menaces to  mankind will depend largely upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. . . . Respect for the Universal declaration of human rights is an obligation so pressing that it is the duty of everyone to contribute to all the projects tending toward its universal and complete application. ” The whole of humanity must submit to it. This amounts to saying that “human rights” are the tool privileged for carrying out the promises of Yahweh. Thus it is no accident that René Cassin, the inspirer of the 1948 declaration, was also the general secretary of the Alliance israélite universelle. In 1945, General de Gaulle appointed him the head of the Council of State. His body rests in the Pantheon, in the temple of the great men of the republic.

Read Part 3 here.

Read Michael O’Meara’s review of Ryssen’s Les Espérances planétariennes.

Translated by Greg Johnson

Mechanopolis: Hervé Ryssen, you have just published a book, Les Espérances planétariennes [Planetarian Hopes] (Levallois-Perret: Éditions Baskerville, 2005) which finally exposes the logic of globalism and its religious foundations. For far too long, intellectuals of the nationalist movement have shied away from such controversial topics and avoided denouncing cosmopolitan propaganda. Could you first of all clarify the title of your book for our readers?

Hervé Ryssen: I considered the writings of Jewish intellectuals to attempt to understand their vision of the world. After having read dozens of political essays, novels, and narratives of all sorts, I noticed that the word “hope” appeared regularly in these texts. Of course for them it stands for expectations of a better world, the Messiah, and the “promised land.” Let us recall that although the Christians have accepted their Messiah, the Jews still await theirs. This Messianic expectation is the heart of the Hebraic religion and the Jewish mentality in general, including that of atheistic Jews. This is the fundamental point. As for the term “planetarian,” it is a neologism which simply means the desire for a world without borders.

My work is exclusively focused on Jewish intellectuals. Contrary to what most people think, the use of the word “Jew” is not yet against the law. I know that many in the nationalist milieu begin sweating at the simple mention of the word, probably because they fear hearing anti-Semitic remarks which are indeed strongly punished today. Personally, I am not afraid of this, since my work is exclusively based on researching Jewish sources. Let us say that I have a rational and I daresay completely dispassionate approach to the subject.

Mechanopolis: One often hears Jews speak of the “promised land” and the “messiah,” but we have always misunderstood what these concepts mean. Isn’t the “promised land” the state of Israel?

Hervé Ryssen: Historically, it is the land of Canaan, which Yahweh gave to Abraham, as one reads Genesis, the first book of the Torah. But even before the destruction of the second Temple by the Roman legions of Titus and the dispersion of the Jews, many Jews already lived in the diaspora. There they remained until 1917, when the Balfour declaration created a “Jewish homeland in Palestine,” and certain Jews thought that by recovering the “promised land,” Messianic times were finally at hand. But it should not be forgotten that other Jews, far more numerous, thought at the same time that the promised land was located more to the North, in the immense Soviet Union where, after the revolution of October 1917, so many Jews appeared at the highest levels of power. However, if one reads slightly older texts, in the 19th century, it was France—the land of human rights—that raised Jewish hopes and constituted, in the eyes of Jews around the world, the “promised land.” Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century, or Weimar Germany between the wars, also could be regarded as “promised lands,” since culture and finance, in particular, were very largely influenced by bankers, intellectuals, and artists of Jewish origin.

This hope always ends in cruel disillusion. The state of Israel is no “haven of peace,” to say the least. As for Judeo-Bolshevik Russia, it turned against the Jews who were evicted from power after the Second World War. The France of “human rights” is today in the process of Third-Worldization, and since 2001 some Jews have decided to flee this “anti-Semitic” country where Jews increasingly suffer the anger of young Arabs. In short, for the Jews, it always seems to end badly, no matter where they go, no matter what they do.

For a long time, the “promised land” was incarnated in the American dream. In the 1880s, millions of Jews left Central Europe for the United States where they hoped for a better life, far from the Cossacks, the pogroms, and the hated Tsar. But the most recent “promised land” was obviously Russia after the collapse of the USSR. In a few years, a handful of “oligarchs” had their hooks in most of the privatized Russian wealth. Best known among them, the billionaire Khodorkovski, sleeps today in the prisons of the new Russia of Vladimir Putin. Obviously, this new “promised land” did not work out either! In short, one must understand that since their departure from the ghetto, the Jews have never ceased changing “promised lands,” and their wandering ends systematically in disappointment. Only the United States still represents in their eyes this Eldorado and still nourishes their hopes. But for how long?

Mechanopolis: You speak of history and geography, but aren’t messianism and the idea of the promised land religious concepts instead?

Hervé Ryssen: Here we come back to the heart of the matter. If you talk with a rabbi in the rue des Rosiers, he will immediately tell you that the Jews aspire above all to the creation of a world of peace, a world in which all conflicts will have disappeared, whether they are social conflicts or conflicts between races or nations. It is necessary to arrive at this world of universal peace, since they identify the world of peace with Messianic times. The authors are rather clear here. Here is what the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas writes on this subject: “One can group the promises of the prophets in two categories: political and social. The alienation which introduces arbitrary political power into the whole human enterprise will disappear; but social injustice, the hold of the rich person on the poor, will disappear at the same time as political violence. . . .” As for the future world, our text goes on to define it as “humanity linked in a collective destiny” (Difficile liberté [Difficult Freedom] [Paris: Albin Michel, 1963], pp. 85-86.).

In Le vrai Visage du judaïsme [The True Face of Judaism] (Paris: Stock, 1987), Jacob Kaplan, the Chief rabbi of the central Consistory, points out the famous passage which is one of the sources of the Jewish messianism: “the wolf will live with the ewe; the tiger will rest with the kid; calf, lion cub, ram will live together, and a young child will lead them” (Isaiah, xi, 6-9). Kaplan adds: “It is obviously an image of the relations which will be established between the nations, happy to maintain unity and concord between them.”

In his book on messianism, David Banon confirms this vision of the world: “The Messianic era such as it was described by the whole of the prophets consists of the suppression of political violence and social injustice” (David Banon, Le Messianisme [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998], pp. 15-16.).

Hebraic prophecies thus promise the progression of humanity towards a unified world, and parallel to that, the suppression of social inequalities. Here one can see the primitive sources of Marxism as well as the inspiration of our planetarian ideology at the beginning of third millennium, which, propagated by the media, is the dream of so many of our fellow citizens. Here is the heart of the Jewish vision of the world. One must start here if one wants to understand the mental universe of the Jews. This is what explains why the Jews always mouth the word “peace.” Their “combat for peace” is ceaseless.

For example, in March 2000, Chirac inaugurated a “Wall for Peace” on the Champ de Mars, conceived by Clara Halter, the wife of the writer Marek Halter. It is a kind of hall of glass, where little Clara wrote the word “Peace” in thirty-two languages, to deride, one imagines, the cadets of the military academy just opposite. These works have a religious significance that very few goyim can detect.

One can thus argue that the concept of “promised land” means nothing less than a hope of planetary dimensions, where all the nations will have disappeared. It is just what the philosopher Edgar Morin tells us, when he writes: “We do not have the Promised land, but we have an aspiration, a wish, a myth, a dream: to realize a global fatherland” (Edgar Morin, Un nouveau commencement [Paris: Seuil, 1991], p. 9). And it is also what Jacques Attali speaks about in L’Homme nomade: “to make world a promised land” (Paris: Fayard, 2003, p. 34).  It is thus this unified, pacified world that will be the “promised land.” Sometimes these texts lend the impression that in the minds of certain intellectuals, the idea is taken in the literal sense: that is would be good if the whole Earth were promised to them! Which sometimes leads to behaviors that are a bit invasive . . .

Read Part 2 here.

Read Michael O’Meara’s review of Les Espérances planétariennes.