A culture is the achievement of a particular blood line.

As such, “culture wars” may be seen as ultimately blood wars between competing conceptions of race and identity.

The culture war in the university between those advocating a “culturally diverse” curriculum and those advocating a curriculum based on the “Great Books” is, for example, essentially a debate about the future of American nationhood – will it be “Western” (i.e., white) or will it be “culturally” (racially) inclusive.

In the West, these sorts of wars have raged for nearly two centuries now. Many still fought in the United States are, in fact, but continuations of ones begun long ago in the old country.

This seems especially the case with the culture wars of Victorian England – in which the “progressive” or “liberal” forces, allied with “low-church” Protestants, challenged the traditional authority of the Church of England.

Since its establishment in the sixteenth century, the Church of England had rested on the social prominence of the landed aristocracy and gentry, and, more generally, on the organization of rural society, all of which began to decay with the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. As the numbers and prominence of the Protestant dissenters (responsible for much of the invention and entrepreneurialism that made Britain the world’s dominant economic power) grew in the course of the nineteenth century, especially after the Second Reform Bill of 1867 made them a majority of the expanded electorate, they more and more challenged the religious and cultural hegemony of the landed interests – the “Old Corruption,” so-called.

The dissenters’ demands for religious disestablishment were frequently raised in reference to the United States, cited as a vibrant, successful nation without a state church,

It was in the context of this cultural war between the landed interests and “the rising bourgeoisie” that the poet and critic Matthew Arnold intervened to rebuff the anti-traditionalists.

He argued that “All America Hebraises” and that England risked becoming Hebraic if it should follow the dissenters council, separate church from state, and let themselves fall into the “anarchy” that would come with disestablishment.

Having a not insignificant impact on subsequent American developments (especially in the university),¹ Arnold’s argument speaks to us still in addressing the origins of our own culturally troubled age, particularly as it relates to our people’s cultural identity.

The Blood of the Isles

Arnold was steeped in the racial thought of his era, though his racialism tended toward the unsystematic and unorthodox. He had little patience with “rabbis,” men of a school or system who singlemindedly applied their fixed “truths” as if they were Holy Scripture.²

In his writings, particularly Culture and Anarchy (1869) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) Arnold often framed his arguments about cultural developments in ethnological and racial terms.

All races, he believed, “have some one peculiar characteristic by which they are known.”

Race in this view denotes not just inherited physiological or genotypical differences but spiritual, psychological, and cultural ones that constitute “the soul of a race” and shape its history and civilization. A race’s soul or character is, then, just as fixed as its anatomic properties. Indeed, race so defined would serve in this period as a rough synonym for what we today call “culture.”

Arnold’s method, accordingly, was to ascertain the pre-eminent or representative characteristic of a race (or nation) and then seek evidence for it in fields where the race (or nation) exerted itself.

One representative example of his method is evident in his use of these lines from an old Irish verse.

For acuteness and valor, the Greeks;
For excessive pride, the Romans;
For dullness, the creeping Saxons;
For beauty and amorousness, the Gaels.

Despite the Irish boast is this, Arnold thought it captured a certain truth about his people’s character.

A morally earnest race, the English, he believed, lacked the lively, creative spirit of the Celts. This didn’t make them inferior, for dull as they allegedly were, the English were nevertheless the world’s foremost people: earnest, energetic, morally serious, and world-creating. Everything else, he held, rested on these “sterling” qualities.

But Arnold also believed the moral earnestness of the “Saxons,” especially in orienting them to money-making and individual salvation, had a tendency to make them one-dimensional – dull – and that this dullness was starting to take a toll on English national life.

Such reflections on national character were not atypical of his age. The third quarter of the nineteenth century (Arnold was 37 in 1859 when Darwin published his own On the Origin of Species) was a flourishing era of racial thought, particularly in its “Teutomania” (which, inspired by Tacitus’ flattering description of the early Germans, held that the most vital and regenerative elements in the West were Germanic in origin). Englishmen, Germans, Americans, and other North European peoples were all touched by it. (Manifest Destiny, Anglo-Saxonism, and Turner’s powerful frontier thesis were some of its more notable expressions in the US.)

Among Victorian England’s leading lights, it was everywhere assumed that the English were the purest of the Teutonic peoples, having been fathered by the Angle, Saxon, Jute, and Frisian invaders of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries and later by the Vikings and their descendants in French Normandy, while the Germans (the people who bore the name) were a Mischvolk, a product of different European stocks, and thus less “Germanic” than the English.

The Celts, the Irish especially, were, by contrast, seen as the near antithesis of the Teutons, foreign “in blood, belief, and religion.” Arnold’s own father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, claimed the distance between the English and the Irish was greater than that between “any other race in the world.”³ The good doctor, like his (born of a Cornish mother), had, revealingly, a good deal of Irish blood in his veins. More typically, Benjamin Disraeli described the history of “this wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and superstitious race” as “an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”⁴ Such sentiments would lead Ralph Waldo Emerson to argue in English Traits that “race avails much” and “all Celts were Catholic and believers in authoritarian government, while all Saxons were Protestants and believers in the representative principle.⁵

Arnold’s methodology was analogous in describing peoples or nations as collective personalities defined by their dominant traits. But, unlike most of his contemporaries, he was critical of the reigning Teutomania and lacked the religious biases of his day (whose anti-Celticism was usually a surrogate anti-Catholicism).

He was also informed by the latest racial research and saw how culturally distorting these biases were.

This was particularly evident, he thought, in the disproportionate way the English treated Irishmen and Jews. The latter, he pointed out, especially after Puritanism, “seemed a thousand times nearer than the Celt to us.” As a result, “a steady, middle-class Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Enud’s cousin than Ossian’s.”⁶ The English, in other words, were more inclined to identify with alien Semites than with their closest blood cousins, the Irish.

What especially set Arnold apart from the classically trained Englishmen of his day was his familiarity with French and German thought, especially the pioneering Indo-European and Celtic studies that Ernst Renan and Amedee Thierry were carrying out in France.

From their studies, Arnold had learned that Saxons and Celts were closely related Indo-European peoples and that much of the existing archaeological and historical evidence contradicted the prevailing belief that the earlier Germanic invaders had other exterminated the indigenous Celtic Britons or else driven them to the island’s mountainous extremities in the west and north. He thus suspected that: “The Englishman who thinks himself sprung from the Saxons or the Normans is often in reality the descendant of the Britons” (i.e., the Celts).⁷

Indeed, Arnold believed it was the Celts’ gift for style – and “their vehement reaction against the despotism of fact” – that had saved England from “the Philistine vulgarity” he found offensive in North Germany.⁸

He thus celebrated the kinship of blood and spirit that had never before imagined to exist between Celt and Saxon, courageously doing so in a period when Fenian political violence had aroused a good deal of anti-Irish sentiment in Britain.⁹

“Hebraism” Versus Hellenism

In this context, Arnold coined the term “Hebraism” to characterize the moralizing tendency of various “Teutonic” peoples influenced by Calvinism’s strict biblical standards.

Following Renan, who was instrumental in presenting Judaism as the counter-phenomenon of “Aryanism,” Arnold believed Indo-European peoples had been responsible for the world’s great intellectual, political, and cultural movements, while the Semitic race was responsible for the great religious movements of monotheism.

Yet, if the Hebrews glory was their elevated morality, outside religion, their achievement, it seemed, was largely negative.

Englishmen Hebraised in an evangelical Protestantism may therefore have been morally resistant to the reputed “lubricity” of Continentals, something every earnest Victorian prized, but they were olso, Arnold saw, “narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive.” In his view, the prevailing coarseness and vulgarity of the evangelicals reflected, moreover, a deeper ailment associated with Jewish self-righteousness: “Der Englander,” as Goethe put it, “ist eigentlich ohne Intelligenz.”¹⁰

“Unintelligence” here denotes not “stupidity,” but rather the inability to grasp a thing’s relation to its larger context or value because a cramped conviction closed off a broader, more accurate view. As a result, Arnold argued that the Jews’ biblical “unintelligence” tended to make nonconformists Philistine, “vulgar on the side of beauty and grace, coarse on the side of mind, spirit, and intelligence.”¹¹

As such, the nonconformists (”Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Baptists”) treated biblical moral standards as if they were the unum necessarium (the one thing needful) and, worse, were satisfied with a “very crude conception” of what these moral standards implied.

Given that non unum necessarium frees human beings from the obligation of thinking what to do in life’s multiple realms, this “one thing needful” was wont to justify the “vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence” of its deformed spirit.¹² To see things as they are, on the other hand, requires a larger conception of human nature – a conception of which those of the unum necessarium felt little need.

For Arnold, then, “to Hebraise” meant to sacrifice “all sides of our being to the religious side” – at the expense not only of a fuller understanding, but of a more balanced or complete life.¹³

As embodied in the Puritan middle class, the morally earnest Hebrew was responsible for what Arnold called the increasingly “humdrum, plain, ugly, and ignoble” character of English national life.¹⁴

The growing influence of this “stiff-necked and perverse” stratum, Arnold feared, meant that industrializing England risked a terrible deculturation, if the materialism and individualism of this class should become hegemonic and if the old traditions and established creeds, with their emphasis on beauty, harmony, and balance, were forced to retreat before a market-based culture in which all that mattered was commerce and industry.

Like the Continental bourgeoisie, the English middle class had tended to stand apart from the main currents of European society, for both Ancient and Medieval civilizations held the merchant in low repute. When this class assumed greater social weight in the industrial nineteenth century, it quite naturally retained something of its hostility to the traditional order, rebuking not just its political tenets, but its larger heritage. In practical terms, Arnold feared this was leading to the loss of English unity, of community, of a common system of value and belief, and, ultimately, of a shared sense of meaning and beauty.

Arnold was no enemy of the nonconformists and always stressed that they had contributed much of what was “strongest and most serious” in the English nation. He may have been unusually evenhanded as a Victorian in dealing with Catholicism, but he was decisively on the Protestant side, for the latter’s individual conscience allegedly made Protestants more religiously serious than Catholics and thus less prone to the “dissolute” life.¹⁵ For all his love of the Hellenic cultural tradition, Arnold still felt, as one critic put it, “the powerful appeal of the Old Testament conception of righteousness.¹⁶

He nevertheless criticized nonconformists for having “not enough added to their care for walking staunchly by the best light they have … [for developing] one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and [for becoming] incomplete and mutilated men in consequence.” ¹⁷

The victory of “bourgeois civilization” in England and the development of a market society based on Hebraic principles may have made England a rich, powerful country, but, Arnold warned, it also threatened the older traditions of beauty, knowledge, and purpose, without which a people lacks a sense of direction or meaning.¹⁸

Given its narrow horizons and “mechanical” mental habits, the dissenting middle class seemed, then, to be divesting itself of the heritage native Indo-European peoples, cutting itself off from “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”

More immediately, this Hebraic tendency to dismiss every criterion but economic and individualistic ones, the nationalist-minded Arnold feared, meant that Continental peoples, with less energy than the English, but greater intelligence, would soon encroach on their supremacy – a rather bold and prescient idea in this age of British world supremacy.

Worse still, he feared that low-church Philistinism would make the English complacent about the factories and slums, the iconoclastic chapels and gin palaces, which were changing the nation’s character.

Against the Philistines and the spiritual impoverishment they served, Arnold took up the cause of “culture” and what he called “Hellenism.” For if the Puritan Reformation had, in Christopher Dawson’s phrase, “rebuilt the Jewish temple,” recasting Englishmen in a Hebraic mold, the Renaissance, against which the Reformation revolted, had “replanted the groves of Academus.”¹⁹

The Renaissance awakening of the larger Greco-European heritage that Arnold called “Hellenism” had the potential, he thought, to return “humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are,” unsmudged by the soot and smoke of a petty Hebraic conscience.²⁰ (In this spirit, the Renaissance Pope, Leo X, had professed a greater love of Plato than of Christ.)

As the antithesis of Hebraism, Hellenism meant comprehending “things in their essence and beauty.” Arnold thought that Hellenism might even further the moral designs of Hebraism, for its Puritan distillation had made a great caricature of grace, faith, election, and righteousness. “No man, who knows nothing else,” Arnold professed, “knows even his Bible.”²¹

In awakening the creative impulse of its repressed Celtic heritage and imbuing its middle class with the “sweetness and light” of Europe’s Hellenic tradition, Arnold hoped to turn “the practical, utilitarian mentality” of the middle class toward higher, more noble aspirations.

Arnold’s Concept of Culture

When members of our racially conscious community hear the word “culture,” many react in the way Hermann Goering allegedly did – by reaching for their holster.²²

No concept, in fact, has so often been used in the twentieth century to deny racial differences and relativize the white man’s values as the anthropological notion of culture – a notion, I nevertheless hold, that is of foremost relevance to the white-nationalist project.

When Arnold took up the cause of “culture” as a remedy to the threat of “anarchy,” the term did not quite mean what it currently does. In Keywords, Raymond Williams points out that “culture” is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language, with a long, complex etymology.²³ It was originally used to define that which undergoes a process of tending or cultivation – like a crop of domesticated herds – and was thus initially associated with agriculture. During the eighteenth century, the French began to use the term as a synonym for “civilization,” but the early Romantic reaction to the Revolution of 1789 (particularly in German-speaking lands) associated Kultur with the spiritual heritage of a material civilization – and thus with the process of becoming civilized, specifically as it relates to human development (i.e., as Bildung or éducation).

In the late 1860s, when Arnold took up the cause of “culture,” it lacked the anthropological definition it would acquire in the twentieth century. Nor was the term widely used in English. Among those Englishmen conversant with it, the term was associated with the “frivolous and unedifying curiosity” of self-occupied Frenchmen and Germans and thus used disapprovingly.²⁴

Only with the publication of E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871 was the way opened for the word’s subsequent evolution into an anthropological term to denote “socially patterned human thought and behavior” – though it ought to be added that Tylor, like Arnold and like the viewpoint expressed herein, associated culture with race.²⁵

For Arnold culture is:

the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.²⁶

Culture in this is self-culture: that is, the self-cultivation of man’s being through a formation in the finest achievements of his civilization. Hence, the definition found in older editions of the OED: “The training, development, refinement of mind, tastes, and manners.”

For Arnold the striving to improve and enhance oneself (”perfection”) was the ideal state of the mind, just as health was the ideal state of the body.

Culture here is more a state of mind than a body of knowledge. For the mind’s love of perfection implies a process of becoming rather than of obtaining, designating an inward condition higher or greater than outward materialism. In submitting to “the sweetness and light” (the beauty and intelligence) of the great poetry and literature of the Western heritage, the individual imbues his mind with a balance, clarity, and fullness of thought, which Hebraisim – in its stern reaction to the moral indifference of Renaissance Hellenism – closes off.

As such, culture preserves an openness as it strives for the best, fostering in the process “human wholeness” and “social health.”

“Culture,” then, is essentially two things for Arnold: primarily, it’s a general process of “intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development” in the individual, and, secondly, it’s a body of works and practices representing the best in European artistic and intellectual achievement.

This notion of culture as the harmonious development of human nature through the individual’s cultivation of his mind has been subject to numerous criticisms. For example, it has been criticized for being too individualist and too bookish, for favoring “high” culture over folk culture, for being too abstract and having no reality in contemporary society, and nowadays for being exclusive and exclusionary, etc.

Whatever the justice of these criticisms, Arnold’s notion of culture (which is, admittedly, dated) must ultimately be valued not as an unconcealing truth, but as a valiant rearguard defense of the Western tradition – waged in an age when the West had begun to war on its own culture. (The white man, to be sure, didn’t have to await the Jews’ “culture of critique” to start assailing his heritage. It had already started in Arnold’s day, having grown out of the liberal modernist impulses of industrial society.)²⁷

Arnold’s conception of “culture” may no longer be defensible, but his concern for the larger heritage and his notion of culture’s intimate relationship to national behavior, I think, retain a certain relevance.

The Rise of “Culturalism”

The Arnoldian concept of culture is held by few today. By the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties, the anthropological nation of culture that began supplanting the Arnoldian notion in the late nineteenth century had almost everywhere became dominant.

As early as 1949, T.S. Eliot, who succeeded Arnold as the foremost Anglophone defender of the European tradition, had accepted the anthropological concept that defines “culture” as a particular people’s way of life, encompassing all the genres and modes of a people’s experience. In a famous sentence, Eliot stressed the wide compass culture embraces:

It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelve of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wenley-dale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.²⁸

All these things added up not to culture, however, only its multiple elements.

“Just as man is more than the sum of his body parts, culture is more than the assemblage of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs. All these parts act on one another and to fully understood one you have to understand them all.”²⁹

Culture for Eliot is evidently not the cultivation of the individual mind, or even the canon of its great achievements, as Arnold held, but a common way of life embodied in social institutions, involving moral standards and practices with a tradition behind them.

His notion of culture is nevertheless something more than the anthropologist’s “way of life” – because it’s something entirely its own, something which Eliot associated with the religious incarnation of a people’s particular spirit.³⁰

The strictly anthropological concept, by contrast, sever all ties between human biology and culture, seeing the latter as an artificial creation of generalized men in generalized circumstances, as if men were “blank tablets on which the environment inscribes culture.”

Beginning in the late 1880s, when Franz Boas “embarked on his life-long assault on the idea that race was the primary source of the differences in mental or societal capacities of different human groups,” he premised his argument on the supposition that all peoples and he premised his argument on the supposition that all peoples and races are mentally equal.³¹ He extended, in effect, the democratic principle from politics to culture and then from culture to race.

From this allegedly impartial perspective, different peoples, different societies, different forms of social organization, belief, and value are seen as the product of different histories, different experiences, different circumstances, different stages of development, but not the achievement of specific blood lines and races. In a word, group differences were reconceived as cultural rather than biological.

In Max Weber’s eloquent formulation, man is an animal suspended in webs of significance [i.e., culture] which he himself has spun.³² This makes culture sui generis – explainable solely in terms of itself.

Hence, Boas’ contention that cultural and social factors alone, rather than biological or innate ones, explain differences in human behavior. Hence also the anarchistic tendency inherent in the ensuing relativism, where no standard is allowed to judge human behavior except cultural ones, which are self-referential and thus self-legitimating. Hence, finally, the tendency to consider all cultures as inherently equal, as if the “culture” of New Guinea headhunters is comparable to that of the higher civilized cultures, which are products of history and the complex intertwined social worlds they create. Perversely, not a few twentieth-century anthropologists (Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict preeminently) have used their select knowledge of primitive peoples to highlight the failures of modern society and to challenge conservative moral standards – not for the sake of their own culture, but for that of liberal reform and the nonwhites of whom they are so enamored.

The larger point here is that the anthropological concept of culture, as the historian Carl Degler puts it, “made the idea of a hierarchy of human societies based on innate differences . . . no longer tenable; human nature was now a unity, however diverse its expressions.”³³

Boas’s concept, which soon spread to other social science disciplines, was, of course, arrived at not through a disinterested, scientific inquiry, but through a belief in liberalism’s blank-slate ideology (which emphasizes the primacy of learning and environment).

It would be naive, though, to assume that this Jewish anthropologist (however dishonest and conniving) somehow single-handedly undermined the racial foundations of American life. Boas’s culturalist assault on the then existing racial hierarchy was waged in the spirit of liberal modernity and of the American political tradition. Boas’s efforts were indeed linked with the “new social sciences,” the Social Gospel, and Progressivism. For integral to the country’s pragmatic spirit (especially after the War of Secession) was a will to reform society, expand opportunity, and create a more rational social order based on individual achievement rather than on natural ascriptions.³⁴ This was inherent in the liberal creedal principles of individualism and equality undergirding Lincoln’s new constitutional order – an order which Jews and other new immigrants were especially active in combating the country’s equally powerful national heritage.

Despite the previous existence of slavery and the persistence of rigid racial hierarchy, biological or Darwinian determinism jeopardized the environmental principles of America’s postbellum liberal enterprise. For if pathological behavior, poverty, and ignorance were due solely to racial or hereditarian factors, then there could be no hope for reform and progress: you simply could not change the unchangeable.

But if it’s culture and heredity – nurture and nature – that is the source of human difference, then race is incidental to existing social inequities.³⁵ Reform and change are thus possible, which makes modification of educational and environmental factors the key to social development.

Culturalism, as such, rejects race theory on the basis of an unproven assumption: that mental processes are roughly equal in all people and therefore that the body is not a factor affected the mind. But if culturalism assumes that there is no relationship between mind and body, its materialistic mirror image, racial/biological determinism, assumes that the mind is simply another facet of the body, with the body determining the mind (not just in shaping its capacity but also its substance).

Philosophical Anthropology

Though there is more evidence for racial/biological determinism, it is no less disputable, especially in that man in that man is a composite not merely of biological matter, but also of those nebulously named non-bodily substances like intellect, reason, mind, and soul.³⁶

A plant or animal may thus be understood simply in terms of animated matter and instinct (i.e., biologically), but in human beings matter is linked with sentiment and intelligence, and, though in ways not often clear, it is the latter more than the body that plays the leading role – at least to the degree that the body possesses a vitality whose spirit achieves a certain sovereignty.³⁷ The biological or “scientific” idea of race, by reducing man’s spirit to his animal nature (in the sense of making culture not merely dependent on, but synonymous with the disposition for intelligence and creativity bequeathed by genetics),³⁸ is arguably objectionable in the same way that Marxism’s reduction of society and religion to the “superstructure” of the economic “base” is objectionable.³⁹

Biological determinists and cultural anthropologists are quite alike, then, in being equally unqualified to speak on the relationship between culture and race, or on what might be called a variant of the historic mind-body question.

But through natural science in inadequate to the study of this relationship, it doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent. The thinkers most qualified to examine this relationship, which has occupied Western philosophical thought in one form or another since Aristotle, are those belonging to that rarefied, mainly German, discipline known as “philosophical anthropology” – a discipline which aims at bridging the different realms of physical, cultural, and theoretical anthropology in order to develop “a coherent idea of human being.”⁴⁰

From the perspective of philosophical anthropology, it is scientifically legitimate to classify man into “anatomical characteristics regularly and constantly produced by hereditary” (i.e., racial genotypes), but it itself this discloses nothing (or nothing substantial) about the mind’s relationship to its animal body.

The greatest of the philosophical anthropologist to speak to this relationship, Arnold Gehlen, spent much of his career investigating culture’s complex physiological sources and the way the body is linked to the cultural expressions of the mind. This is not the place to repeat what I have said of Gehlen’s work elsewhere.⁴¹ Suffice to mention that Gehlen did not reduce mind to body, but instead saw culture (mind’s spiritual compendium) as a means of compensating for man’s “instinctual deficiency.”

Animals, Gehlen argued, have no need to think of plan how to build a nest, fly south for the winter, or ruffle their feathers to woo a mate. The “not yet determined animal” man, on the other hand, lacks such instincts and head, under the unsheltered sky 40,000 years ago, to rely on his culture – on the learned responses and principles that came from his past, that were continually modified in his encounter with world, and that ultimately took institutional form and became “quasi-automatic habits of thought, feeling, judgment and action” – to cope with the stimulations, impressions, and challenges coming from his environment.⁴²

Culture arose and developed in Gehlen’s view as man’s “second nature” – as something to compensate for his instinctual deficiency and his lack of “environmental specialization.” And somewhat like his genetic heritage, culture, as a “shaping template” of behavior, is transmittable to the next generation, so that the achievements of one era can be passed on to the next. This makes culture a community of thought and achievement, a community of history and tradition, and a community of blood and kin. All these “communities” go into the formulation of a culture, and to stress just one, say body or thought, is reductionist.

Culture, in this view, is bound up with man’s physical nature, but is nevertheless “world open,” able to evolve and adapt and become self-conscious. It is this second nature that enables man “to anticipate himself, fall back upon himself, adjust and reverse his movements, plan – all in order to enhance his survivability.”⁴³ As such, man’s being is caught in an endless exchange between interior forces (intelligence, will, imagination, etc.) and exterior ones (the environment), as the exterior is assimilated into the interior and the interior is manifested in the exterior. Mind – and the culture its creates – are not, then, mere reflections of the body, though they are inseparable from it.

It is thus through mind (and culture) that a specific genotype responds to and influences its larger environment.

Race, in this way, gives rise to a culture that can be seen, to use a term that Gehlen didn’t, as “an extended phenotype.” For if a spider’s web is the extended phenotype of the spider’s genotype, culture in a similar way can be seen as the extended phenotype of a specific human life form. In Louis R. Browning’s formulation: “The ability of persons to deal with, and manipulate, their environments, their interactions with other people, their schooling, their career: all such capabilities that can influence the fitness of a person can be considered part of the individual’s [extended] phenotype.”⁴⁴

Racial behavior in this perspective needs to be seen in terms of tendencies that enhance “fitness,” not fixed inevitabilities, like instincts, for the different cultures that different races create do not actually dictate behavior per se, so much as they provide an orientation that shapes its contours and does so across history’s longue duree, as the generations of the dead impose their hard-won truths on the living. Ultimately, this works to enhance a people’s survivability, as well as its vitality.

In this vein, one of our great anti-liberal historians defines a healthy culture as one which recovers the sources of life. “Why,” he asks,” is a stockbroker less beautiful than a Homeric warrior . . .? Because he is less incorporated with life, he is not inevitable, but accidental, almost parasitic. When a culture has proved its real needs, and organized its vital functions, every office becomes beautiful.”⁴⁵

What then is the relationship between race and culture? Arnold’s notion that every people or race has a distinct personality that can be grasped through a few designated characteristics is probably too simplistic to be of more than literary value. Indeed, every great people (from a historicist rather than a relativist perspective) is probably best viewed in terms of its own standards rather than those of another. Arnold, however, got the most important thing right: that people and culture, blood and heritage, are ultimately one. He thus posited a distinct relationship between race and culture, just as he suspected that the impairment of one would have a negative impact on the other.

This, I think, is key to understanding the relationship between race and culture. But it’s not until we get to Gehlen that we see how culture entails not just all those things that are tied up in a way of life, but also in life itself – in the form of man’s animal body. This relationship is not the simple one-way process that nineteenth-century racialists or contemporary sociobiologists assume – but it nevertheless accepts that a specific genotype (race) gives rise to a corresponding extended phenotype (culture).

Because culture is the second – the spiritual – nature of man, it no more determines the behavior of man’s animal body than the body controls a people’s culture. Rather than “determine,” the word should probably be “express” – for man’s second nature is unlike instinct in being “world open.”

Think of the cultural diversity among peoples of the same stock. Though there are profound similarities between, say, Irish Catholics and Scots-Irish Presbyterians (such as their profoundly conservative morality, the “epigrammatic concision” of their speech, or the intransigence of their nationalism), the sharp differences dividing these long-warring communities, despite their virtually identical DNA, demonstrate that culture is not a mere organic offshoot of the body. History, circumstance, and experience are evidently crucial factors in its production.

Culture and biology, though, are irreparably linked, as Gehlen indicates, and linked in ways that almost alway sustain one another. A white man born into Chinese culture may conceivably become Chinese in language, behavior, even spirit – which means he ceases to be a white man in any way except genotypically – but at the same time he can never become Chinese in blood, which is not the case of Irish Catholics and Presbyterians vis-a-vis each other’s cultures.⁴⁶ The spirit of a Chinese-enculturated white man would consequently always he at odds with the body, and this would inevitably distort his place in the world. Said differently, his genotype acquires an “unfit” or incongruent extended phenotype.

Behavior, if follows, cannot replace biology; culture cannot be separated from its racial source; one cannot become what one is not.

The link between race and culture may therefore be a supple one, but in the last instance it cannot be eliminated without risking a mongrelizing adulteration – based on a callous disregard of man’s specific nature. For though blood inheritance is a paramount importance in determining man’s nature, the spirit that guides his nature, even with the help of contemporary behavioral genetics, cannot be understood outside the culture that situates it.⁴⁷

The body that forms a community or a nation is not, then, the body of biology, the animal body, but rather the mind-perfected body of closely related cultural beings.

When a community or nation defines itself in bodily or racial terms, even its idea of the body is shaped by the mind and its specific culture. For if an individual or a community is essentially grounded in a body, this body-idea shares in the given social or political reality (as the idea of dynasty, blood lineage, enthnonation, or race) and, as such, is always the product of a particular cultural heritage rather than an unmediated reflection of the body. (At the same time, the opposite also holds, for man is never a completely self-enclosed, autonomous individual, either physically or culturally: hereditary capabilities develop only in certain environments, just as their development depends on a genetic predisposition.) Man, in other words, is neither totally a product of race nor of culture, but a biocultural organism whose blood and spirit are inextricably bound.

It seems no accident that the starting point of most systems of human racial classification begin not with the “natural” or “pure” races found in primitive societies, but with “historical races” – entities pertaining as much to mind (history) as to nature. Instead, then, of being understood as distinct groupings based exclusively on physical traits, human races must also be seen, given that man is a composite, in terms of his unity of being – in terms, that is, of the inner principle that pervades his component parts.⁴⁸

From this perspective it can be claimed that races come into existence and develop not according to strict biological laws, but under the influence of the mind.⁴⁹ This is not to say that mind determines genotype, but rather that the mind’s social-cultural exteriorization affects a people’s racial istory and identity – and thus determines if a particular genotype will arise or not. There is, as a result, no distinct racial or national type without a correspondingly distinct cultural type.

I am not proposing a “culturalist” notion of race. The race I defend is the European race based on a specific gene pool, genetic cluster, breeding population, stock, or whatever term you want to use to speak of race in the zoological sense. Our genetic heritage is primary and cannot be compromised. But race as a biological category applied to human beings refers only to man’s animal nature, not his whole being. His animal nature may provide the disposition or capacity for specific European life forms and therefore cannot be dispensed with, but the European’s distinct heritage is only a facet of life, inseparable from everything else that contributes to it. Thus, however much race in the biological sense is requisite to everything else, in itself it has little explanatory power – because man’s being, even in the physical sense, is above all affected by the mind.

To take one’s stand simply in the animal sphere, then, not only confuses the part with the whole, it leaves us defenseless in all those higher realms where our life is manifested and sustained. A purely “scientific” (better said, “scientistic”) notion of race cannot, as a result, but leave all the other ramparts supporting our specific expression of human life undefended – and it is at these other ramparts (call them culture, society, religion, etc.) where the enemy has been most successful in destroying the basis of white life. For once the white man’s culture is destroyed, then the significance and purpose of white life is also destroyed – first ontologically, then physically. It’s imperative for this reason to take our stand not in natural science alone, but in all the multiple realms of human being.

There are several roots to the idea I’m suggesting here. The deepest, perhaps, is Friedrich von Schelling’s idea that a people emerges from its myths insofar as the “community of consciousness” forged by a shared myth is what grounds and unites a people as a people.⁵⁰ Every understanding of the ethnogenetic process that creates races and nations starts from this idea.

Race, Culture, and America

The American case is the preeminent example of this conception of the connection between race and culture. When transplanted Englishmen in seventeenth-century Virginia began identifying themselves as “white,” in opposition to their black slaves – who were seen as more beast than man – they made “white skin” the basis of what later became the core of the American’s national identity. “White” here wasn’t just a biological marker that put whites at the high end of the human chain of being. It also implied all those things associated with their racial kinsmen in Europe (such as their cultural heritage, religious beliefs, standards of beauty, etc.) Other European whites (Scots-Irish, Dutchmen, Swedes, Germans, French, etc.) would consequently be accepted as Americans on the basis of their cultural and biological kinship with the larger European family of nations. Entry into American society was based thus largely on ethnic invisibility and racial origin – which made white skin color “the most important single determinant in their human relations.”

With the arrival of the Irish in the 1830s and ’40s, the religious (Protestant) and social (bourgeois) components of America’s white identity were culturally challenged by the Catholic, tribal character “the mud-splattered, shillelagh-wielding salpeen” with the imputed simian features.”⁵¹ In time, though, as the Irish were acculturated and Americans became more religiously indifferent, they were gradually accepted as Americans on the basis of their racial kinship wit the native Anglo-Protestants. But it should be added that Irish-Americans, however loyal to their new homeland, “had no intention of abandoning their religion, disguising their ancestry, or detaching themselves from the struggles of their native land.”⁵² Indeed, it was from their fierce devotion to Mother Eire that came their equally unyielding devotion to America. The Irish, as such, were acculturated into American culture, which they also helped to shape – they were not “melted” into a mongrel mass.

The “assimilation” of Irish and other Europeans ethnics, however, could never happen with blacks, for implicit in the American way of life was the understanding that race – not just white skin, but all that was associated with their Old World origins – was primary. Their European origins, in fact, were requisite to everything that made the American an American. The assumption here was not just that black skin belonged to another physical type of man than those with white skin, but that the black spirit – culture, soul, essence – was a different order of spirit than the white man’s. These differences were not accomodatable because they were fundamentally alien to one another, as alien as the drum-beating percussions of the African jungle were to the counterpoint of Bach’s Kunst der Fuge. An Irishman could change his religion, lose his brogue, or embrace American norms, but nothing could turn black into white.

Then as now, blue-nose reformers would insist that race was no more an obstacle to assimilation than religion, social rank, or national origin. But no matter how deficient Americans may have been in their high cultural accomplishment, they nevertheless retained their identity as Europeans – as whites – whose singularity was defined in opposition to non-Europeans. Cultural assimilation, in a word, was based on and conditioned by racial criteria.⁵³

Only after 1945, under assault from the new National Security State and a largely Jewish-controlled “culture industry,” would the racial basis of American identity (and hence culture) be subverted and refounded on the basis of purely creedal/ideological criteria. Accordingly, the new nonracial identity of the postwar era led directly to a multiracial atomization destructive of the American’s former racial identity – as his expanded phenotype more and more diverged from his genotype, to the point where the former is now, arguably, no longer an extension but adulteration of the latter.

A backhanded affirmation of the inherent link between race and culture is particularly evident today in the ideology of multiculturalism. At the root of this liberal pluralistic dogma is the “anti-racist” contention that the biological entities once commonly referred to as “races” do not exist – but are rather mere “social constructs.” This makes “race” a totally subjective category based on an allegedly flawed, bigoted, or self-interested perception. But if race as a biological fact is a matter of perception, and if perception of biological (racial) differences is an expression of racism, as multiculturalists hold, this doesn’t mean that the socially constructed fact of race is to be ignored, for it has supposedly become pivotal to the dominant system of social control. Thus, no sooner do anti-racists deny race as a biological essence than they turn around and call for measures favoring the so-called nonwhite “social construct” – and, just as contradictory, they advocate not assimilation into the larger (white) American culture but a recognition and validation of their nonwhite cultures.

As one egalitarian critic of multiculturalism explains: “Treating race as a social fact amounts to nothing more than acknowledging that we were mistaken to think of it as a biological fact and then insisting that we ought to keep making the mistake.⁵⁴

Culture in this multiculturalist optic becomes a surrogate for the biological notion of race, and the celebration of cultural differences (”diversity”) becomes a celebration of racial differences. Multiculturalism serves in this way as the proxy of multiculturalism. This doesn’t mean, of course, that race and culture are equivalent terms – only that among anti-racists there is a certain assumption about the inherent relationship between race and culture.

And on this one point I think these enemies of our people get it right.

Culture and Post-American Anarchy

In Arnold’s most famous poem, “Dover Beach” (1867), he depicted England’s troubled culture in all its deep-seated spiritual anarchy:

… for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams …
[Is but] a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This is the England of Culture and Anarchy, whose disordering chaos lay not just in increased incidents of social violence and political agitation, but in the country’s

hideous sprawling industrial cities, its loud-voice assertion of personal liberty, its dismal, stuffy, and cantankerous forms of Christianity, its worship of size and numbers and wealth and machinery generally, its state-blindness, and its belief in collision (collision of parties, of sects, of firms) as the only way to salvation.⁵⁵

Arnold thought the root of this growing anarchy was cultural. As a child of the Reformation, England had been home to that “Dissidence of Dissent and [that] Protestantism of the Protestant religion” called Puritanism.⁵⁶ Puritanism, Arnold granted, may have been necessary to develop “the moral fiber of the English race . . . to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination over men’s minds, and to prepare the way for freedom of thought.”⁵⁷ But its notion of moral perfection had nothing to do with spiritual perfection, and its narrow, individualistic spirit was a threat to the nation’s unity.

Given that the chief bearer of Puritan dissent was the English middle class and that this class was dominant not only in the economy, but increasingly in society, Arnold feared its Hebraising effects would rend the nation’s communal fabric. For the Puritan’s highly developed individual conscience posited that every man was on his own in matters of religion, as well as in matters of business and personal conduct. The norms embodied in the established church were thus ignored, as was the cultural heritage that once animated the English people. Like Jacobinism, utilitarianism, and liberalism, Puritanism had no patience with the legacy of the past and was disposed to radical schemes subversive of established hierarchies. In its opposition to the Church of England, it proposed, for example, “placing all good men alike in a condition of religious equality.” Arnold called this the solution of the “tailless foxes,” who advocated that all foxed cut off their tails.⁵⁸ The endless cycles of sectarian strife that isolated their mitotic churches in “holes and corners,” further fragmenting the nation. By rejecting any corporate or collective authority that might compromise their conscience and insisting that every Englishman had the right to do whatever he pleased, the dissenters’ individualism, Arnold feared, was leading, quite literally, to anarchy.

This is why he championed the cause of culture, which he called “the most resolute enemy of anarchy.”⁵⁹ If the whole nation would learn self-discipline through a unified culture of “right reason, ideas, and light,” it might be possible “to cure the narrowness of Puritanism” and bring it “into the main current of national life.” A man reared in the “totality” of the established church had no need, he claimed, to struggle to find a private form of self-expression: imbued with “a sense of the historical life of the human spirit, outside and beyond [his[ own fancies laving himself free to develop his other sides. A national culture centered in an established church thus offered innumerably more avenues for self-development and realization, suggesting "new sides and sympathies for our own forms of religion, gives us the leisure and calm to steady out our view of religion itself."⁶⁰

"In a serious people, where everyone has to choose and strive for his own order and discipline of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his [whole] mind.”⁶¹ Relatedly, all the great works of art, literature, and science “came not from nonconformists, but from men of the Establishment – or at least men trained by the Establishment.” The greatest Puritans – Milton, Baxter, Wesley – had, accordingly, been formed within the Establishment’s pale. “A generation or two outside the Establishment and Puritanism produces men of national mark no more.”⁶² Against the Puritans’ deforming morality, Arnold defended the sweetness and light that came from the Anglo-European heritage.

Arnold’s cultural antidote to the centrifugal forces of modern liberal society pertained, though, not just to Victorian England, but to the Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States.

The America Arnold knew was very different from the America that began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, just as the latter qualitatively would differ from the America of the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, much of what he said about this new country retains its significance in illuminating the country’s subsequent cultural trajectory. Basic to his view is the contention that America was essentially “a province of England,” with roughly the same admixture of Saxons and Celts. Yet unlike England, America had a small reading class, few men of letters, no intellectual center, and a people oriented more to material than cultural matters. Also, unlike England, America lacked both an aristocracy and a peasantry, which meant it was almost entirely a middle-class country, affected by the same Philistine and Hebraising tendencies he criticized in the English middle class.⁶³

Influenced by the sectarianism of its evangelical Protestantism (”without great men and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity”),⁶⁴ American energy was funneled into money-making or, when it took spiritual form, into doctrines of moral uplift, such as those promoted by the reforming mania of the Social Gospel.

In Arnold’s view, the “unintelligence” of English nonconformists almost totally dominated the United States. He rhetorically asked in one of his articles:

Do not tell me only … of the magnitude of your industry and commerce; of the beneficence of your institutions, your freedom, your equality … tell me also if your civilization – which is the grand name you give to all this development – tell me if your civilization is interesting.⁶⁵

And he answered himself in the negative, for America in his eyes lacked distinction, having, despite its vast economic achievement, failed to develop “the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners, as well as the great power of conduct and religion.”⁶⁶

Like many European critics of America’s plebian civilization, Arnold was overly quick in applying his European standards to American life, failing to grasp many of its defining features (such as the cult of republicanism and producerism inscribed in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Populist tradition, which in some ways served as a national “church,” or the personal trust and mutual interest that bound these ostensibly atomized individuals to one another.) The result is a picture not quite as balanced as it should have been. Arnold also didn’t fully understand that a totally middle-class country, based on an idea of “personal aggrandizement” and having no Church, nobility, or army to anchor its established values, was a country dominated not just by individualist market principles, but by state and social structures indifferent, if not hostile to nation and culture.

Nevertheless, his basic point – that America’s Philistine, middle-class culture, with its materialist and individualist slant, was corrosive of community and thus a force of anarchy – retains, I think, a certain pertinence, even if he failed to see what it implied in terms of larger structural or institutional developments.

More generally, the postbellum America Arnold knew was in the process of succumbing to forces that exacerbated the atomistic tendencies of its middle-class culture, as the country fell into the hands of a rapacious plutocracy indifferent to its diverse population and incapable of developing a national culture around which to assimilate its different European stocks.

The divisive, potentially anarchistic tendencies that have since colonized its culture with the prerogatives of the market have not merely continued into the present, but have been accelerated by other, more centrifugal forces.

In the late nineteenth century the country’s massive industrialization began to overwhelm the small-town, rural character of American life, replacing it with sprawling, smoke-stacked metropolises that radically transformed the social-scape, as the earlier agrarian America gave way to a new business civilization dominated by giant corporate entities.⁶⁷ The peasant masses from Eastern and Southern Europe who came to fill the new factories helped undermine the largely British/North-European character of the population. Linguistic, cultural, and ethnic identities became more complex and conflicted, just as local and regional cultures surrendered its urbanizing, commercial, and technological forces.

America’s increasingly deracinated masses were drawn into a “culture industry” based on newspapers, vaudeville, touring theater companies, and then, in the twentieth century, on automobiles, urban night life, professional sports, movies, radio, TV, and other mass entertainments lacking the “sweetness and light” characteristic of traditional European culture. Worse, this consumer-driven, commercial culture, instead of rejecting the outward materialism, fully succumbed to it. Not the best that had been thought and said, this mass culture appealed to what Henry James called “the new, the simple, the common, the commercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly.”⁶⁸

The late twentieth century then introduced forces that were qualitatively more anarchistic. The most radical of these, of course, was Third World immigration, which is changing not just the ethnic but the racial character of the population, breaking down the country’s last remaining European remnant.

It seems hardly fortuitous that America’s present Affenkultur is tied to the racially alien forces of hip-hop and Hollywood – and to a spirit, institutionalized in Marxisant cultural studies departments, which treats all forms of discrimination, taste, and value judgment as illegitimate.

This cultural process of ethnoracial dissolution has been compounded by a communication and digital revolution, whose programmed images create a “virtual reality” unmoored from the realities it represents and whose representations are both medium and message;⁶⁹ by a globalization of economic exchanges in which national imperatives give way to world market interests and those of the global “superclass”;⁷⁰ by a “new class” elite increasingly nonwhite, “counter-cultural,” and indifferent to all former standards of social distinction and taste;⁷¹ by “entertainment values” and visual media that corrupt the way we think;⁷² and by an educational system, which has produced what is arguably the dumbest and most infantile generation of students in American history.⁷³

Behind these developments that have become integral parts of America’s consumer society that seek to turn Americans into a faceless mass of coffee-colored consumers lies the destruction of all that connects genotype and extended phenotype, as the organic ties linking America’s European race and its nativist variant of the larger European culture are severed.

As long, then, as white American identity is not defined by the symbols, beliefs, and destiny dictated by our past and by our regulative tradition, but by the programmed contrivances of an alien culture industry, we cease to exist as a people. For without the memories and myths that make a people a people, white Americans are only “so many politically bound” people.⁷⁴

Conclusion

To the extent that the white-nationalist project endeavors to raise the consciousness of the country’s European-descended population, it is largely a cultural project to heighten white identity by anchoring it in a body of beliefs and practices – a culture – whose consciousness defies the racial anarchy presently threatening whites. It thus consciously or unconsciously accepts that culture is neither the democratic smorgasbord for all tastes that multiculturalists claim nor is it something fixed in an academic canon for all time, as our Jewish-trained conservatives would have it. Rather, as suggested above, it is the spirit engendered by the blood that created the European life world and the people who inhabit it – it is the extended phenotype of the white genotype.

Culture as such is an organic growth, inseparable from the people who live it and make it grow. At the highest level it is indistinguishable from race and nation, being the spiritual manifestation of a people’s distinct life form. To separate race and culture – not just through the introduction of Hebraising practices, but through a concerted assault on the institutional relationship between whites and their heritage – is to destroy, then, both race and culture, for one cannot exist without the other.

Michael O’Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, Ind.: 1st Books, 2004).

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¹ “No other foreign critics, and perhaps few native ones, have acquired such a reputation and exercised such palpable influence on American culture.” John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 1.
² Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J.D. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 1960), 68
³ O.D. Edwards, “Matthew Arnold’s Fight for Ireland,” in R. Giddings, ed., Matthew Arnold: Between Two Worlds (London: Vision Press, 1986)
⁴ Quoated in Robert A. Hutterback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies 1830-1910 (Illinois: Cornell University Press, 1976), 17.
⁵ Frederic E. Faverty, Matthew Arnold the Ethnologist (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1951), 18. (This is the key work on Arnold’s “racialism,” and my essay is much indebted to it.) The Celts, like the Teutons, were a “North European” people. To see either as a distinct race is misleading, as they are perhaps best viewed as different cultural-linguistic offshoots of the same racial stock. E. Estyn Evans, The Personality of Ireland: Habit, Heritage and History (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992), 43-45
⁶ Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (Sioux Falls, S.D.: NuVision Publications, 2008), 22.
⁷ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 53. On English superstitions about the Celt, see G.B. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904) (various editions). Although the English saw themselves as descendants of the Angle and Saxon invaders, they are actually, in the vast majority – as a long tradition from Thomas Huxley to Sir Arthur Keith to Brian Sykes has scientifically demonstrated – descended from the old Britons – Celts! English Cymric (or Cumbri) Celts had their language and institutions Germanized by the Anglo-Saxon and later Norman invaders, while Ireland’s Gaelic Celts managed to naturalize the Germanizing influences of its Viking, Norman, and Anglo-Irish invaders. Despite the successive waves of invaders, there has, in fact, been no significant genetic variation in the population of the British Isles over the last several thousand years. See Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (New York: Norton, 2006); more generally, John Morris, The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).
⁸ Edwards, “Matthew Arnold’s Fight for Ireland.”
⁹ This is the subject of George Meredith’s 1910 novel, Celt and Saxon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922)
¹⁰ Matthew Arnold, “Ecce, Convertium ad Gentes,” in Irish Essays and Other Essays (New York: AMS Press, 1970). Ernst Renan made a similar observation about the lack of “general intelligence” in the US, which he referred to as la dure inintelligence des Américains du Nord. Intelligence, however, is different from character, and the latter is arguably the greater force for change and action.
¹¹ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 11.
¹² Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 150.
¹³ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 14.
¹⁴ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 53.
¹⁵ The oppression, dispossession, and garrison state that were the basis of English rule in Ireland didn’t exactly convince the Irish of English morality. The notion of “perfidious Albion” is similarly embedded in Continental culture. This suggests not only how subjective Arnold’s method was, but how subjective all such ethnoracial characterizations are. Gustav Le Bon’s Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (Paris, 1894) [English trans., The Psychology of Peoples], which represents one of the best treatments of what might be called the characterological analysis of race, drew – revealingly – the exact opposition conclusion, with Le Bon seeing the English and Americans as sturdy, self-reliant, enterprising peoples and the “Latin” races, despite their greater intellectual and artistic gifts, as being inherently “subservient” – i.e., dependent more on the central state than themselves.
¹⁶ A. O. T. Cockshut, “Matthew Arnold, Conservative Revolutionary,” in D.J. Laura, ed., Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973).
¹⁷ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 11.
¹⁸ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 102.
¹⁹ Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1960, 106.
²⁰ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 141.
²¹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 154.
²² It was actually the German playwright Hanns Johst who said: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.”
²³ Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76-82.
²⁴ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 43.
²⁵ The emergence of the modern notion of culture in this period was both representative of the great changes then transforming Europe and of the changing consciousness of European peoples. In the following potent sentence, Martin Heidegger captures something of the essence of this new consciousness: “The connection of the concept of culture with the idea of historicality – the formation of culture as a historical process – makes intelligible the conceptual domination of the concept of culture at the end of the nineteenth century, [for] only where historical consciousness is awake can the idea of culture as a process of formation and formative aim of human creative life penetrate into reflective consciousness.” Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2008), 101.
²⁶ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 6.
²⁷ Kevin MacDonald, “American Transcedentalism: An Indigenous Culture of Critique,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol.8, no.1 (Spring 2008).
²⁸ T.S. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), 104.
²⁹ Eliot, “The Unity of European Culture,” in Christianity and Culture.
³⁰ Eliot, Notes toward the Definition of Culture,” 100.
³¹ Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6.
³² Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
³³ Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 104.
³⁴ According to Julius Evola, the vision of man that stands behinds the American concept of individualism is one in which “everyone can become whatever he wants to, within the limits of the technological means at his disposal . . . if he knows how to train himself.” “American Civilization” (1945), http://feastofhateandfear.com/archives/jevola3.html.
³⁵ A variation of the anthropological concept of culture is the economic concept of “human capital,” seen in terms of the requirements for economic life – e.g., specific skills, work habits, attitudes to education, enterprise, etc. See Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
³⁶ In saying this, let it be clear that the supposition here is that man’s blood inheritance is of paramount importance and that man’s mental and social achievements are premised on what his specific genotype bequeaths.
³⁷ Michael O’Meara, “Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 6, no.3 (Fall 2006).
³⁸ For example, Mark Graubard, “The Biological Foundation of Culture,” in Alan McGregor, ed., Race, Evolution, Creative Intelligence, and Inter-Group Competition (Washington D.C.: Mankind Quarterly Monograph, n.d.).
³⁹ The conceptually lax Arnold sometimes saw racial traits as constant and sometimes as alterable by culture. The point here is that man is both mind and body. A strictly idealist, like a strictly materialist, understanding confuses a fact of man’s being with his entirety.
⁴⁰ Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. H. Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).
⁴¹ Michael O’Meara, “World Openness and Will to Power,” http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/20070/07/16/world-openness-and-and-will-to-power.html.
⁴² Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. C. McMillan and K. Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 70-73.
⁴³ Gehlen, Man, 55.
⁴⁴ The notion of culture as a phenotype is developed in Louis R. Browning, “Bioculture: A New Paradigm for the Evolution of Western Populations,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol.4, no.1 (Spring 2004). The strictly biological notion of the “extended phenotype” comes from Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
⁴⁵ Christopher Dawson, Dynamics of World History, ed. J.J. Mulloy (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2002), 69.
⁴⁶ Donald A. Akenson, Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922 (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1988).
⁴⁷ Argued in different terms, this is the point Sam Francis makes in “Why Race Matters” (1994), Essential Writings on Race, Jared Taylor, ed. (Oakton Va: New Century Foundation, 2007).
⁴⁸ Even Darwin held that “race was outside [biological] evolution.” Nancy Stephen, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 54-55.
⁴⁹ Sir Arthur Keith: “No matter what racial mixtures have entered into the composition of a people, that mixture is welded into a new race under the working of a common national spirit.” Ethnos (London: Keagan Paul, 1931), 37. Though Keith (probably the most nationalist/racialist of modern evolutionary anthropologists) saw national formation as part of a group evolutionary process and treated mind and spirit as instruments of nature’s evolutionary impetus, it was, however, man’s mind that either abetted or hindered nature and determined the way men organize themselves in the world. He thus argued, especially in reference to the Jews, that “the primary marks of race are psychological” – an argument premised on purely Darwinian postulates that led to conclusions not unlike Arnold’s “characterological” notion of race. Arthur Keith, A New Theory of Evolution (1947) (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1968), 377.
⁵⁰ Friedrich von Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Myth (1842), trans. M. Richey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
⁵¹ Elite aversion to Irish Catholics (especially before the “Hungry Forties”) wasn’t much different from its aversion to Scots-Irish Protestants. Catholic or Protestant, both were called simply “Irish”; Andrew Jackson was thus “the Irish President.” More than the usual ethnocentrism, this aversion stemmed from long-standing class antagonisms, with the dispossessed “Irish” occupying the radical wing of popular democracy. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitutions to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984), 335.
⁵² Peter Quinn Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2007), 226.
⁵³ It’s the denial of this concept that animates the various imperialist ventures of America’s transnational ruling class, for it assumes that the particularlistic distillation of America’s market culture can be universally imposed on the rest of the world.
⁵⁴ Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 39.
⁵⁵ J.D. Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy.
⁵⁶ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 57-58.
⁵⁷ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 61.
⁵⁸ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 32.
⁵⁹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 204.
⁶⁰ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 20-21.
⁶¹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 20-21.
⁶² Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 13.
⁶³ Mathew Arnold, “A Word About America” (1882), in R.H. Super, ed., The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), vol. X.
⁶⁴ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 22.
⁶⁵ Quoted in L. Mazzeno and A. Lefcowitz, “Arnold and Bryce: The Problem of American Democracy and Culture,” in Machann and Burts, eds., Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours.
⁶⁶ Arnold, “A Word About America.”
⁶⁷ Richard Weaver, “Orbis Americarum” (1948), In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1965, ed. Ted J. Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000).
⁶⁸ Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 173.
⁶⁹ Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss et. al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 2000).
⁷⁰ David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).
⁷¹ Avrom Fleishman, New Class Culture: How an Emergent Class in Transforming American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).
⁷² Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985.)
⁷³ Mark Baurelein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher, 2008); Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
⁷⁴ Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 2.

Carl Schmitt

Note: The following short synthesis of Schmitt’s classic essay The Concept of the Political stems, in part, from a recent discussion with the Bay Area Nationalist Book Club.

However it is posed, the question of the political is always about the most important issue facing every people.

The political, though, is not to be confused with “politics” or “party-politics,” which speaks to individual or special interest in parliamentary gas houses.

“Politics” is tied to rationalism, materialism, economism, and the rule of Mammon, all of which undermine authority, tradition, and the imperatives of the “political.”

One.

The political addresses the state in its highest manifestation as the agent of its inner peace and outer security.

Only after liberal society reformed the state — to enable private individuals to maneuver for positions of power and influence, once particular interests superseded the polity’s collective interest — did politics and the political begin to diverge.  (In the Unites States, the first liberal state, politics was a business from the very beginning).

The political for Schmitt is thus not about what is conventionally thought of as politics, but rather about those situations, where the state (”the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit”) is separate from and above society, especially in situations when it is threatened with destruction by a superpersonal movement or entity and must therefore act to defend itself and the community it is dedicated to defending.

Two.

The polar categories defining the political are, as such, those of the friend-enemy distinction — a distinction implying the possibility of physical killing between rival states. This distinction is based on antithetical categories distinct to the political — distinct in the way that the categories of good and evil are specific to morality, the beautiful and the ugly to aesthetics, the profitable or unprofitable to economics, etc.

Three.

Who is the enemy? For Schmitt, it is the superpersonal other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility and readiness for combat threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it.

The enemy is thus designated not on the basis of personal feelings or moral judgments (inimicus), but only in face of an intensely hostile power (hostis), which menaces the state’s existence.

An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one fighting-collectivity poses an existential threat to another collectivity.

In order to identify the enemy, it is necessary to experience it as a live-threat — in a way no rational analysis, no discursive logic, no objective judgment, no normative standard can possibly anticipate — for this experience is of a people, which knowingly senses whenever its existence is endangered.

The enemy here is defined in terms of criteria, not content or substance — which means it takes the form of something that is always specific and concrete and very intense — not being, then, just something symbolic or metaphorical.

“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict.”

Usually the enemy is the alien “other,” whose threat comes from the exterior.

But the enemy can also emerge from internal differences, such as when domestic social, religious, sectional, etc., differences become so antagonistic that they weaken the unity of the state and the common identity of the citizenry, polarizing them into friends and enemies — i.e., into a state of civil war, as internal politics become primary.

Another, rarer example of an enemy situated in the interior (an example distinct to the United States,) is found whenever foreign culture elements take control of the state at its citizens’ expense (becoming what Yockey called “an inner enemy”).

Four.

Friends, by contrast, share a commitment to a way of life that binds them together, that gives them a sense of solidarity, a sense transcending matters of economics or morality, something that resembles a shared, homogenous identity reaching beyond the imperatives of private life — even if these “friends” do not know one another.

Friendship — the condition of amity between those making up a large socially or communally cohesive association — is always prior to enmity.  For it is impossible to have a life-threatening “them” without first having a life-affirming “us.”

Indeed, it is only in face of the death and destruction posed by an enemy that “we” become fully conscious of who we are and learn what is truly “rational” for us.

This friendship implies that the “particular” trumps the “universal” and that a compromised convergence of interest, based on qualities shared with the enemy, is inconceivable.

Five.

The political is ultimately, then, a question of life or death — a question that presupposes the existence of an enemy — an enemy comprehended independent of other antitheses (e.g., the moral antitheses of good v. evil) and with conceptually autonomous categories of thought.

In presupposing the political, the state in the Schmittian sense orients to external threats rather than to internal structures of government or social-economic activity (the realms of party politics).  The state anchors itself, instead, in its willingness to defend — with arms, if necessary — its distinct existence.

This gives the state the “right,” in exerting its jus belli authority, to call on its individual members to kill and to risk being killed.

Such an authority makes the state “superior” to all other associations, for it alone compels its members to kill and risk being killed.

Weak peoples afraid of the “trials and risks” that come with the political inevitably disappear from history

It is this determination, implying life or death, that specifically constitutes what Schmitt sees as the essence of the political.

Whoever, moreover, makes this determination, deciding whether an enemy is to be fought or not, possesses the decisive, authoritative political power: Sovereign power.

When the imminent threat of war subsides, so too does the political.

This doesn’t mean that war in itself is the “aim, purpose, or content” of the political, only that the “mode of behavior” — the individual responsibility — the sovereign exercise of authority — that perceives the danger and decides to resist it — constitutes the political.

To be political in Schmitt’s sense requires, then, not just a prior commitment to domestic relations of friendship and the social solidarity it engenders, but also to a particular form of life in which group identity is valued, in the last instance, above physical existence.

Six.

The political, which “neither favors nor opposes war,” is thus not necessarily a function solely of war (the highest expression of the friend-enemy polarity) nor can it be said that it is per se a bellicose nihilism. Rather it is more like something determined by the possibility of armed enmity — even in cases where the parties belligérantes legitimate their belligerency in the name of freedom, justice, or some other abstraction.

War is simply an “ever present possibility,” which Schmitt recognized and designated as the core of the political sphere.

But if war for Schmitt is, above all, a reaction to an external threat, not a sought-after aggression, what does this imply existentially? (On the surface, at least, it suggests a rejection of l’esprit de conquête and the will to power, which one comrade thought was a liberal vestige in Schmitt’s thought and I thought was a Catholic moral one. In any case, Schmitt never actually came to terms with Nietzsche.)

Seven.

Liberalism cannot distinguish between friend and enemy because its individualist, universalist, and pluralist ideology (”conceived in liberty and dedicated to the [abstract] proposition that all men are created equal”) denies that such a designation is conceivable in a world understood in market or moralist terms, where there are only competitors and moral entities, with whom one negotiates or reasons on the basis of universal rights and interests.

Compromise, not conflict, is accordingly the principal aim of the liberal state. Hence, its propensity for exchange, negotiation, and business.

But however it may try, liberalism cannot elude the “political.”

In cases where it is forced to designate an enemy, it is conceived as being outside “humanity” and thus something not simply to be defeated, but ruthlessly annihilated — for, by definition, the liberal’s enemy is non-human.

Eight.

Because it sees the state as essentially an instrument of society and economy, dedicated to the greatest happiness (material well-being) of the greatest number, liberalism lacks a political theory – having, in effect, only a critique of the political.

Indeed, liberal individualism and universalism negate the very possibility of the political, at least in principle. For nothing in its view should compel an individual to die for the sake of the state, which it understands in economic and ethical, instead of political terms.

Such a compulsion, it holds, would not only violate the individual’s freedom, it would make his nation/state association primary — whereas liberalism, in its humanism and rationalism, irrationally and inhumanely claims that only individualistic matters of ethics and economics are primary.

The liberal state, as such, is ethically committed to the rights and interests of individuals seen as self-contained units, whose sum is humanity — and economically, committed to untrammeled production and trade.

In practice, this has meant that the old ordered estates, along with the “prerogatives” of tradition, were forced to bow to the wishes of formless, manipulable masses, as quantity trumped quality and money overthrew the divine right of kings — a right, incidentally, that subsequently passed to the money men, this ethnic minority whose rule has proven to be more devastating than that of any former tyrant.

It has also meant that the usurer could evoke property rights to dispossess farmers of their land; that the personal interests represented by politicians takes priority over the nation’s Destiny; and that the brotherhood of man entails the greatest, most violent, and vigilant of wars to stifle expressions of political polarity.

Nine.

The political, though, cannot be done away with or evaded — it is immune to depoliticizing procedure — it is the essence of sovereignty.

In cases of war, the state, as the instrument of the political, is the ultimate authority — above the law — and as long as a state of emergency lasts.

Legal systems are based, in fact, not on legal reason, but on an authority that speaks to an existential/ontological situation needing no justification other than its own existence.

Ten.

“The protego ergo oblige [I protect therefore I oblige] is the cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am] of the state.”

The state, as such, is the highest form of human association, defending the life of its citizens and expecting that they, in turn, prepare to die for it, if necessary.

Protection and obedience, in healthy bondage to one another, are in this way mutually entwined.

Eleven.

Ultimately, the political is an existential matter of the highest degree.

In the face of death, one is forced to take sides and thus to take responsibility for one’s life. The enemy, in this strife, invariably highlights the true significance of friendship.

At the same time, the enemy defines what it means to be human, for only when faced with death do we confront life as a whole.

The political, then, entails Destiny, for it keeps men in historicity and it takes them beyond their private selves, into the realm of great events.

In the liberal’s envisioned one-world state, in a situation where there is only “humanity” and thus no friend-enemy distinctions (except with extra-terrestrials), there would be no political, only competition between individuals, whose highest concern would be self-enrichment, comfort, and entertainment.

Without the political and the state upon which it rests (i.e., without an existential commitment to a shared identity), there would be, as a consequence, no polarity, no opposition, no transcendent reference, and no way to counter the entertainment of modern nihilism.

The first victim of liberal depoliticization is thus always “meaning.”

If Europeans, then, are ever to regain control of their Destiny, it will only come through a political assertion of the identity that distinguishes them from the world’s other peoples.

All else is simply “politics.”

“In the final instance civilization is always saved by a platoon of soldiers.”

–Spengler

We are soldiers who serve the cause of Europe’s Renaissance — a cause as pure, hard, and imperious as our banners.

We are soldiers because we refuse the reformist tinkering of the dominant system, which — through its electoral and party committees, its partisan venalities, and its parliamentary charade — endeavors to ensure the self-regulation and recycling of the corrupt elites controlling the existing plutocratic system.

We are soldiers because we believe that the salvation of Europe’s family of nations depends on the destruction of the present system.

We are soldiers who serve and not merely talk, we reflect and we act.

We serve the cause of politics in the sense of Julien Freund [France's leading Schmittian scholar], knowing that the essence of action is action itself.

Our trifold praxeological, destining, and eschatological understanding of politics transcends the purely operational, pragmatic, and secular policies of modern politics. Going further, we think that propaganda by ideas is a chimera and that ideas come from action and not the reverse.

This is why we embrace the revolutionary dialectic of Carlo Pisacane, Enrico Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, Paul Brousse, and José Antonio, who advocated the propaganda of the deed — the deed pregnant with ideas.

Our soldierly faith and duty is wedded to the national-revolutionary ideal that seeks a new political, aristocratic, hierarchical, anti-democratic, and anti-egalitarian order, situated within a European continental frame, geopolitically self-centered, disconnected from the global economy, independent of our present Atlanticist servitude, and rooted in a Eurocultural concept of civilization based on the values of blood and soil.

We are soldiers because we see history as a clashing dialectic between antagonistic forces, whose constituent elements are peoples and nations.

For conflict and struggle, as the work of Stéphane Lupasco and Max Planck demonstrates, are inherent to every system.

History is thus an endless battle between peoples organized around their distinct cultures and communities, each, consciously or unconsciously, motivated by a desire to expand and dominate.

As soldiers, we fight for the restoration of the poltical principle in the noble sense of politea, imperium, and auctoritas, and in function of Evola’s anagogy, which is capable of impregnating peoples with those specific metapolitical, spiritual, and anti-materialist values that ensure the masses’ spontaneous adhesion.

For us, as for Carl Schmitt, politics is that privileged arena in which the enemy and the friend is clearly designated.

This is why we reject the administrative or managerial concept favored by party politicians, who promote a state sustained by hedonistic frenzies — a state whose subjects are cretinized and emasculated, manipulated by consumer society and the media — subjected in this way to a whoring enterprise which organizes, directs, and patronizes them in order to dissolve all revolutionary effort in the solvent of a fake, hyper-festive order of permanent entertainment.

As soldiers, we advocate the ideal of a “polemological” state charged, above all else, with defending the survival and growth of Europe’s power from assaults by American hegemonism, radical Islam, and the extra-European colonization of our ancient lands.  In this sense, we categorically reject the social-contractual conception of the nation and seek to restore it as that mystical body passed from one generation to another.

The nation for us remains a determinism, a necessity, a force, and a will.

We are soldiers because we believe that war-like activity is the highest degree by which civilizations become complex and by which history’s primordial lever raises motherlands and city-states.

War in this Heraclitian sense has animated international relations from the time of Thucydides and from that of Machiavelli.

War is the highest expression of the state, as Hegel shows; it evokes its greatest consciousness and its greatest efficacy.

The state is and remains above all a war machine and all its other functions are subordinate to it, even if the bourgeois and managerial conception of the dominant democratic state has patched together a certain order from the ruling delinquency and its corrupting prosperity.

The international authority of the state is as great as its ability to inflict harm, and history shows that only those attached to mos majorum (ancestral law) and to a conservative opposition to the centrifugal forces succeed in attaining the aureole sovereignty of military glory.

This is the way it was in the Rome of Augustus and Diocletian, in the Russia of Peter the Great and Lenin, in the Islam of Mehmet Ali and Mustapha Kemal, in the China of Huang-di and Mao Zedong, each of whom won domestic and foreign victories before daring to impose the profound revolutionary transformation in which they believed.

As political soldiers, we seek to restore the ideal of a political vocation that transcends contemporary economism and to re-legitimate the ideal of those exceptional men who articulate and embody an ethic of conviction, responsibility, and duty.

Within the bourgeois democracies governing and offending us, there thrives a class of professional politicians and bureaucrats, of demagogues and opportunists of all sorts, whose mercenary use of high political office is motivated solely by reasons of personal gain or career.

As soldiers, we will make the necessary sweep that sends these impostors, these betrayers of our great European political ideals, to the devil.  And in this we aspire to see emperor and proletarian, animated by the same revolutionary faith, marching shoulder to shoulder: paradigm of a new heroism.

We uphold that there is an essential contingency between the state of exception and the essence of political sovereignty, constituting the point of disequilibrium separating public law from political fact.

We advocate a state of exception in order to establish the state as the emanation of a new order, as a means of terminating the general anomie and the reigning disorder.

The syntagma “force of law” rests on a long tradition of Roman and medieval law constituted for efficacy and loyalty.

We would like to restore an operational perspective invested with the archetype of the Roman juridical institution — the iustitium – enacted whenever the Roman Senate was informed of a situation that might compromise the Republic — a senatus consultum ultimum dictating measures necessary to ensure the state’s security.

This way of dealing with states of emergency harped back to the ancient concept of sol-stitium: to those instances when the law came to a stop, like the sun at its solstice, [and where the question of sovereignty -- the question of who holds ultimate authority -- was forthrightly posed].

Above all, we are political soldiers because we are militants.

Etymologically, “militants” refer to the theological distinction between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant.

An analogy can be made between the political militant and the believer, whose truths inform all aspects of his being, especially in its essence and totality

The militant fights, attacks, and pays with his person for the triumph of his ideals.

The verb “to militate” comes from the Latin militari, which means “soldiers” (in the plural), to whom belonged a Church (an army) that required a spirit of discipline, self-sacrifice, and abnegation.

This is why militancy is at the heart of our political struggle.

The ideal militant for us must be a revolutionary, capable of dialectically linking his theoretical and practical knowledge to a global understanding of the society in which he lives.  He thus voluntarily submits himself to a disciplined routine, realizing in it a unity of theory and practice.

As political soldiers, we do not believe that evolution is automatic or that revolutions are spontaneous, because there are no fatalities in politics or in economics; the dominant, liberal, capitalist order well knows how to regenerate itself and how to overcome contradictions in order to survive.

The masses too are not solely exploited, they are mentally manipulated and alienated.

There is no revolutionary advance without a process of development, culminating in a struggle between warring peoples (lutte des peuples).

These struggles are manifested in many forms, in sectional or local struggles (at the level of the enterprise, the region, etc.)

They may appear spontaneous but they are linked to a changing consciousness and to the effort of militants who rise from below as they are directed from above.

Rank and file struggles, however exemplary, cannot accomplish a global change of the system, because such struggles address only certain lived particulars, products of the larger social complex, [not the system itself].

Instead, they need to be linked and coordinated in the form of a global, ideological vanguardist action, capable of posing issues from a system-wide perspective. It is necessary, then, to avoid an overly rigid elitism and an unserious reformism — in order to ensure a dialectical liaison between the global struggle and the local struggle, between the political action of the vanguard and the mass movement.

As political soldiers we advocate a revolution that brings about not merely structural change in the economy and the state, but also in the spirit, an ontological change that will lead to the formation a new man, free of bourgeois individualism and egoism.

This “total revolution” will affect the relations and ethics regulating the larger significance of our quotidian life.

The revolution we advocate will be a return to origins, a revolving back, that establishes an authoritarian state-order, a managed economy, and an exclusive conception of identity — a revolution carried out in harmony with the distinct mentality of European peoples and in accord with a principle of homology that purges institutions and mentalities of alien, distorting elements.

As political soldiers, we are irredeemably imbued with a tragic conception of life, knowing, with Alfred Weber, that every superior order ends up perpetuating a certain chaos as it enhances its power.

Tragic because we are conscious of the imponderable grandeur of the universe and the world and of the imperfection and finitude of human nature.

In face of this constant and paradoxical metaphysics, we advocate a re-enchantment of the world and an aestheticization of the state, as envisaged by German romantics like Goethe, Novalis, Schlegel, and Müller — conscious, as we are, that the illuminist ideas of the French Revolution [the liberal revolution of 1789], along with the general process of secularization, has since disenchanted the world in Max Weber’s sense.

We want, like Novalis, our revolution to become an organic, poetical totality in which the new state is the existential and aesthetic embodiment of our ideal of human perfection.

And once we complete this task, we will go somewhere else, farther away, always farther, way over there near our gods.

Source: “Pourquoi sommes-nous des soldats politiques?” (2003)

http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/tag/soldats%20politiques

“Socialisme fasciste” is the title of an essay by Drieu La Rochelle. Fascist socialism, though, has been largely symbolic, since it is more an idea than a record of actual achievement.

At certain points, all fascist movements had to come to terms with socialism. And all took inspiration from it: Hitler’s party was the National Socialist German Workers Party, Mussolini was a socialist school teacher, José-Antonio Primo de Rivera was a symbol of national-syndicalist socialism, Codreanu’s Iron Guard was a movement of students and peasants, Mosley in England had been a Labour Minister, Doriot in France was a former Communist and his PPF emerged from a Communist cell in Saint-Denis.

Historically, fascist movements were liberation movements opposing the confiscation of power by cosmopolitan capitalism and by the inherent dishonesty of democratic regimes, which systematically deprive the people of their right to participate [in government].

With the exception of Peron’s Argentina, circumstances have always been such as to prevent the realization of fascism’s socialist vocation.

Those fascist movements that succeeded in taking power were compelled, thus, to reconstitute an economy ruined by demagogues, to re-establish an order undermined by anarchy, to create ways of overcoming the chaos besetting their lands or to repel external threats. These urgent and indispensable tasks required a total national mobilization and dictated certain priorities.

Circumstances, in a word, everywhere prevented fascists from realizing the synthesis of socialism and nationalism, for their socialist project was necessarily subordinated to the imperative of ensuring the nation’s survival.

These circumstances were further exacerbated by another difficulty: Fascist movements were generally reluctant to destroy the structure of capitalist society.

Given that their enemy was plutocracy, foreign capital, and the usurpers of national sovereignty, the immediate objective of these movements was to put the national interest above capitalist interest and to establish a regalian state capable of protecting the nation, as kings had once done against the feudal powers.

This [fascist] policy of conserving ancient structures may have transformed the prevailing consciousness and shifted power, but it did not entail a revolutionary destruction of the old order.

Fascist nostalgia for the old regime has, indeed, been so profound that it routinely reappears [today] in neo-fascist movements that are national-revolutionary more in word than in deed.

This phenomenon is evident throughout Europe, in Italy and Germany, in Spain, in France . . .

Is it, then, a contradiction distinct to neo-fascism that it has been unable to combine the conservation of hierarchical structures upon which Western Civilization rests with measures specifically socialist?  Or do neo-fascists simply — unconsciously — express the impossibility of grafting measures of social justice onto a civilization profoundly foreign to their ideal . . . ?

We need at this point to turn to [first] principles.

Every new vision of social relations rejecting Marxism rests on a certain number of postulates, which, I believe, are common to all radical oppositional movements.

1. The first of these condemns political and economic liberalism, which is the instrument of plutocratic domination. Only an authoritarian regime can ensure that the nation’s interest is respected.

2. The second postulate rejects class struggle. Class struggle is native to Marxism and [inevitably] leads to the sabotage of the nation’s economy and to a bureaucratic dictatorship, while true prosperity benefits everyone and can be obtained only through a loyal collaboration and a fair distribution.

3. The third protects the nation’s “capital” (understood as the union of capital and labor) and represents all who participate in the productive process . . . It is a function of the [fascist] state, thus to promote labor-capital collaboration and to do so in a way that does not put labor at the mercies of capital.

4. Given that the nation’s economy is a factor crucial to the nation’s independence, it, along with the Army and other national institutions, are to be protected from all forms of foreign interference.

5. Since modern nations have become political-economic enterprises whose power resides in those who control the economy as much as it does in those who make political decisions, the nation must play a leading role in the economic as well as the political systems. The instrument appropriate to such participation in the nation’s life have, however, yet to be invented. . . .

6. Above all, the nation’s interest must take priority over every particular interest. . . .

There is nothing specifically “socialist,” as this term is understood today, in these principles, since contemporary socialism is nothing other than a form of social war whose inevitable culmination is the rule of those bureaucratic entities claiming to represent the workers [i.e., national union federations].

Nevertheless, these principles accord with another conception of socialism — one that favors a fair distribution to all who participate in the productive process. This is not the underlying idea, but the consequence thereof, inspiring our postulates.

A fair distribution, however, will never result from sporadic, recurring struggles challenging the present degradations of money. Instead, it is obtainable only through the authority of a strong state able to impose conditions it considers equitable.

Author’s Note: The following excerpt is from a longer, footnoted article titled “Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent” that appeared in the fall 2006 issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Minor changes have been made for the sake of this format. Thanks to Dave Cooper for the idea.

Since the Cold War’s end, Heidegger has been the target of an on-going campaign of stigmatization and quarantine, for it’s now clear that he was not only an ardent supporter of the National Revolution of 1933, but a convinced (though idiosyncratic) National Socialist.

Surprisingly, though, the inquisitors deconstructing the suspect forces animating Heidegger’s thought stress that there’s “no spoor of biological racism” (George Steiner) in his published works.

It is, in fact, a matter of record that Heidegger opposed what Julius Evola and Francis Parker Yockey, along with Leon Trotsky, called the “zoological materialism” associated with “Nazi racism.”

Like the Italian and American prophets of Europe’s imperium, Heidegger believed the philistine, positivist, even liberal modernist character of so-called “scientific racism” was symptomatic of all the Conservative Revolution of the 1920s (of which National Socialism was an offshoot) had fought against.

Is it contradictory, then, to argue that the Heideggerian concept of freedom has a racial imperative?

Against a good deal of contemporary commentary, it must be insisted that Heidegger’s “anti-biologism” was not that of a nationalist indifferent to race, but rather that of one who subsumed the nation’s spiritual and demographic aspects within a single notion of being — a notion that may have privileged the former at the latter’s expense, but nevertheless one that presupposed the spirit’s manifestation within a specific biocultural community or Volk.

Emphasizing the history, destiny, and line of descent that makes a people a nation, the nationalism latent in Heidegger’s thought is reminiscent of what Walker Connor calls “nationalism in its pristine sense,” in that it designates “a people who believe they are ancestrally [i.e., biologically] related.”

Though a man’s body is subjectable to a purely biological analysis, Heidegger argues that it is never simply biological, but “something essentially other than an animal organism.”

This “other” belongs to man’s Dasein [i.e., to his quality as a situated expression of Being in a particular world at a particular moment in time] and thus has “a fundamentally different way of Being to that of nature.”

“Living, our body bodies forth as a wave in the stream of chaos — it is what comes to know, grasp, and take over the world.”

Biology in this way enters history and becomes historically significant.

Man’s body as such is not equivalent to a plant or animal organism, but part of man’s being-in-the-world, situated in that web of meanings, relationships, and histories which make up his world and which no science can successfully or adequately reduce to an empirical representation or valuation.

For the anti-scientistic Heidegger, the essence of a nation (or Volk) lies not in genetics, but in the destiny born of its collective experience of Being and time — or what in Contributions to Philosophy
he describes as that belongingness to a god who commands a people to go beyond itself to become the being inscribed in its destiny.

A people’s essence lies thus less in its organic manifestations (life) than in the being that makes it what it is (living): It lies in the being that forges blood and spirit into an identity defined by a specific destiny.

A purely biological construal, by contrast, reduces a “race” of men to one of Descartes’ abstract, becomingless objects — to something understandable factually or empirically, as if human races were analogous to those of the lower life forms.

Heidegger doesn’t say so explicitly, but the turn of his thought suggests that though a people’s blood may be basic to its biological formation, its determinants as a people, even genetically, reside elsewhere, outside of biology, in that Being whose inexplicable force molds a body of kindred human beings into a destining entity.

To contemporize a bit, one might say that for Heidegger man’s biological constitution (heredity) disposes him to certain cultural and other potentialities, but the latter are never mere offshoots of nature.

History, he argues, is not biology and culture is not applied zoology — except to a scientistic consciousness oblivious to all that distinguishes man from animal.

Edward Burne-Jones, "The Dream of Lancelot"

An analogy here might help.  One wouldn’t claim the essence of Breker’s The Torchbearer or Burne-Jones’ Dream of Lancelot is the material from which it was sculpted or painted.

The essence of the German Volk — or any of Europe’s nations — is likewise not the DNA constituent of its genotype.

Instead, it is the spirit animating it, making it a people with a history, an origin, and a destiny.

In compelling it to experience the world in a way all its own, this spirit is not the cultural superstructure familiar to the anthropologist or sociologist, but something akin to “the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence.”

It is this spirit that nourishes the soul of a people and infuses its blood with a will to destiny.

Heidegger’s ontological defense of European man may therefore reject the scientific racism of bourgeois materialism, with its abstract, deracinated concept of human being, but he’s hardly indifferent to Europe’s racial heritage, for though emphasizing a Volk’s spiritual or destining character, he also sees that this entails a specific bodily expression of being.

In the historical world of European man, human biology and human being are indeed one, with the biological, the ontic, subsumed to the ontological realm of self-assertion — like the material subsumed in the artist’s vision.

Together, they comprise the Dasein of man and Volk, the blood and heritage of a people. For like the “and” in Being and Time, the “and” in “blood and heritage” is not additive but unitary.  The two differ as terms, standing for different things, but there’s no heritage outside a specific blood group and no blood group without a heritage.

“Everything merely ‘organic’ is foreign to the law of history, as foreign as what is ‘logical’ in reason.”

Arno Breker, "The Great Torchbearer"

Human biology is consequently more ontological than zoological, more a product of Being than a facet of nature.

This is evident in such terms as “descent,” “lineage,” “heritage” — along with related notions of “breeding,” “upbringing,” “development,” “education,” “refinement,” and “culture” — terms evoking not animal instinct or even human consciousness, but rather a specific biocultural transmission of existence.

A people, in this Heideggerian sense, is not an autonomous, self-contained, ahistorical biological object, it’s not even specifically a gene pool, but a way of Being whose origin, history, and particular self-understanding is essential to what it is — even physiologically.

In order not to be misunderstood, let me stress that I’m not challenging the importance or even the primordiality of race as a zoological category, but rather subordinating our understanding of a race’s destining identity to philosophy’s larger ontological appreciation of its significance.

What Heidegger calls the “naturalist conception of human being” (i.e., the purely biological understanding of human race) has been integral to both liberal modernity and the history of the white man’s decline.

The roots of this conception are admittedly ancient.  Aristotle was the first to see man as a special kind of animal — the rational animal (zoon logikon). With the 18th-century Enlightenment and the advent of liberal modernity, when “reason attained its full metaphysical rank,” this “humanist” concept became hegemonic, introducing an era which confused man, a being-outside-himself, with something “present-at-hand” (i.e., with the decontextualized substance of a quantifying science indifferent to a being’s specific qualities).

Arno Breker, "Torchbearer"

As Being in this scientistic conceptualization withdraws from human being, the latter is depleted, reduced to a one-dimensional ontology fit for an animal that moves about on all fours — not for an upright assertion of Being capable of producing Homer, the Greek temples, or the invincible Hoplites.

It’s pertinent here to point out that “scientific racism,” especially its Darwinian distillation, originated as an offshoot of liberal thought and that the zoological “metaphysics” of this racism (in understanding human existence at the animal level) played a not insignificant role in getting us into the predicament that threatens us today.

In this sense, it seems hardly coincidental that the liberals’ understanding of the “highest animal” excludes any understanding that humans differ from animals not just in their reason or consciousness, but in their caring for the Being of their being.

Relatedly, natural science, the inspiration for scientific racism, treats the body abstractly, objectifying, decontextualizing, and uprooting it from human being — for the sake of abstraction and objectification.

Against the naturalist conception, Heidegger holds that the human body is not simply a vehicle of drives and instincts, but something linked to the human assertion of Being.

Science may have the power to manipulate the world’s physical properties, but for Heidegger it ignores man’s “peculiar transposedness into the encompassing contextual ring of living beings.”  It consequently misses what is most distinct and essential to him.

Accordingly, the Dasein of a Volk, like that of an individual, is not manifested in biology (at least not directly), but rather in the decisions it makes and the goals it sets for itself.

How it exists in the world in which it is thrown, how it appropriates the past it is bequeathed, the possibilities it pursues as it approaches the future, the call of destiny it heeds, the death it inevitably faces — these are what make a Volk what it is.

There is, moreover, nothing arbitrary or subjective in this.  Dasein is not only being-there, but being-with (Mitsein). For the most radical individualization of Dasein is always situated within a larger collective context — of history and culture, to be sure, but also of kin, community, and Volk.

“Each man,” Heidegger writes, “is in each instance in dialogue with his forebears and perhaps even more, and in a more hidden manner, with those who come after him.”

Because an individual’s fate, like a nation’s destiny, is shaped by its specific heritage, individual Dasein is invariably a co-happening with a community or people, even if it should rebel against the dominant social trends or disavow its beliefs.

Unlike the quantitative, atomizing impulse of liberal modernity, which separates “I” from “we” and treats the former as if it were a monadic ego shorn of the history and heritage situating and defining it as a distinct way of Being, Heidegger’s approach dissolves individual boundaries.

The individualization of an individual consequently becomes a co-historicizing with a people.

Though potentially a force for conformity, Mitsein is a necessary condition for Dasein’s authentic realization.

Man and nation, Dasein and Mitsein, it follows, are free only to the degree they open themselves to what is inherent in their common heritage — to what constitutes the history of their related experience of Being — to what forms their destiny.

If a Volk exists as a Volk, then blood group, history, and destiny are one, for ontologically they constitute a single, encompassing experience of time and Being.

In this sense, a people’s essence transcends the purely “organic,” as it asserts its Dasein as a distinct destiny.

Otherwise, it ceases “to be” in any meaningful sense.

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

Three.
Race and State

From the above, the reader might conclude that Faye’s Heidegger is a wreck of a book.  And, in large part, it is, as I will discuss in the conclusion.

However, even the most disastrous wrecks (and this one bears the impressive moniker of Yale University Press) usually leave something to be salvaged.  There are, as such, discussions on the subjects of “race” and “the state,” which I thought might interest TOQ readers.

A) Race

National Socialism, especially its Hitlerian distillation, was a racial nationalism.

Yet Heidegger, as even his enemies acknowledge, was contemptuous of what at the time was called “biologism.”

Biologism is the doctrine, still prevalent in white nationalist ranks, that understands human races in purely zoological and materialist terms, as if men were no different from the lower life forms — slabs of meat whose existence is a product of genetics alone.

Quite naturally, Heidegger’s anti-biologism was a problem for Faye, for how was it possible to claim that Heidegger was a “Nazi racist,” if he rejected this seemingly defining aspect of racial thought?

In an earlier piece (”Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent,” TOQ, vol. 6, no. 3), I reconstructed the racial dimension of Heidegger’s thought solely on the basis of his philosophy.

But Faye, who obviously doesn’t put the same credence in Heidegger’s thought, is forced, as an alternative, to historically investigate the different currents of NSDAP racial doctrine.

In his account (which should be taken as suggestive rather than authoritative), the party, in the year after the revolution, divided into two camps vis-à-vis racial matters: the camp of the Nordicists and that of the Germanists.

The Nordicists were led by Hans K. Günther, a former philologist, and had a “biologist” notion of race, based on evolutionary biology, which sought, through eugenics, to enhance the “Nordic blood” in the German population.

By contrast, the Germanists, led by the biologist Fritz Merkenschlager and supported especially by the less Nordic South Germans, held that blood implied spirit and that spirit played the greater role in determining a people’s character.  (This ought not to be confused with Klages’ “psychologism.”)

The Germanists, as such, pointed out that Scandinavians were far more Nordic than Germans, yet their greater racial “purity” did not make them a greater people than the Germans, as Günther’s criteria would lead one to believe.

Rather, it was the Germans’ extraordinary Prussian spirit (this wonder of nature and Being) that made them a great nation.

This is not to say that the Germanists rejected the corporal or biological basis of their Volk — only that they believed their people’s blood could not be separated from their spirit without misunderstanding what makes them a people.

For the Germanists, then, race was not exclusively a matter of biological considerations alone, as Günther held, but rather a matter of blood and spirit.

(As an aside, I might mention that Julius Evola, whose idea of race represents, in my view, the highest point in the development of 20th-century racial thought, was much influenced by this debate, especially by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, whose raciology was a key component of the Germanist conception, emphasizing as it does the fact that one’s idea of race is ultimately determined by one’s conception of human being.)

Faye claims that, in a speech delivered in August 1933, Hitler emphasized the spiritual determinants of race, in language similar to Heidegger’s, and that he thus came down on the side of the Germanists.

The key point here is that, for Faye, the “völkisch racism” of the Germanists was no less “racist” than that of the biological racialists — implying that Heidegger’s Germanism was also as “racist.”

The Germanist conception, I might add, was especially well-suited to a “blubo” (a Blut-und-Boden nationalist) like Heidegger. Seeing man as Dasein (a being-there), situated not only in a specific life world (Umwelt), but in exchange with beings (Mitdasein) specific to his kind, his existence has meaning only in terms of the particularities native to his milieu, (which is why Heidegger rejected universalism and the individualist conception of man as a free-floating consciousness motivated strictly by reason or self-interest).

Darwinian conceptions of race for Heidegger, as they were for other  Germanists in the NSDAP, represented another form of liberalism, based on individualistic and universalist notions of man that reduced him to a disembedded object — refusing to recognize those matters, which, even more than strictly biological differences, make one people unlike another.

Without this recognition, Germanists held that “the Prussian aristocracy was no different from apples on a tree.”

B) The State

As a National Socialist, Faye’s Heidegger was above all concerned with lending legitimacy to the new Führer state.

To this end, Heidegger turned to Carl Schmitt, another of those “Nazi” intellectuals, who, for reasons that are beyond Faye’s ken, is seen by many as a great political thinker.

In his seminar on Hegel, Heidegger, accordingly, begins with the 1933 third edition of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1927).

There Schmitt defines the concept of the state in terms of the political — and the political as those actions and motives that determine who the state’s “friends” and who its “enemies” are.

But though Heidegger begins with Schmitt, he nevertheless tries to go beyond his concept of the political.

Accepting that the “political” constitutes the essence of the state, Heidegger contends that Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction is secondary to the actual historical self-affirmation of a people’s being that goes into founding a state true to the nation.

In Heidegger’s view, Schmitt’s concept presupposes a people’s historical self-affirmation and is thus not fundamental but derivative.

It is worth quoting Heidegger here:

There is only friend and enemy where there is self-affirmation. The affirmation of self [i.e., the Volk] taken in this sense requires a specific conception of the historical being of a people and of the state itself. Because the state is that self-affirmation of the historical being of a people and because the state can be called polis, the political consequently appears as the friend/enemy relation. But that relation is not the political.

Rather, it follows the prior self-affirmation.

For libertarians and anarchists in our ranks, Heidegger’s modification of Schmitt’s proposition is probably beside the point.

But for a statist like myself, who believes a future white homeland in North America is inconceivable without a strong centralized political system to defend it, Heidegger’s modification of the Schmittian concept is a welcome affirmation of the state, seeing it as a necessary stage in a people’s self-assertion.

Four.
Conclusion

From the above, it should be obvious that Faye’s Heidegger is not quite the definitive interpretation that his promoters make it out to be.

Specifically, there is little that is philosophical in his critique of Heidegger’s philosophy and, relying on his moralizing attitude rather than on a philosophical deconstruction of Heidegger’s work, he ends up failing to make the argument he seeks to make.

If Faye’s reading of the seminars of 1933-34 are correct, than Heidegger was quite obviously more of a National Socialist than he let on. But this was already known in 1987-88.

Faye also claims that Heidegger’s pioneering work of the 1920s anticipated the National Socialist ideas he developed in the seminars of 1933-34 and that his postwar work simply continued, in a modified guise, what had begun earlier. This claim, though, is rhetorically asserted rather than demonstrated.

Worse, Faye ends up contradicting what he sets out to accomplish. For his criticism of Heidegger is little more than an ad hominem attack, which assumes that the negative adjectives (”abhorrent,” “appalling,” “monstrous,” “dangerous,” etc) he uses to describe his subject are a substitute for either a proper philosophical critique or a historical analysis.

In thus failing to refute the philosophical basis of Heidegger’s National Socialism, his argument fails, in effect.

But even if his adjectives were just, it doesn’t change the fact that however “immoral” a philosopher may be, he is nevertheless still a philosopher. Faye here makes a “category mistake” that confuses the standards of philosophy with those of morality. Besides, Heidegger was right in terms of his morals.

Faye is also a poor example of the philosophical rationalism that he offers as an alternative to Heidegger’s allegedly “irrational” philosophy — a rationalism whose enlightenment has been evident in the great fortunes that Jews have made from it.

Finally, in insisting that Heidegger be banned because of his fascist politics, Faye commits the “sin” that virtuous anti-fascists always accuse their opponents of committing.

In a word, Faye’s Heidegger is something of a hatchet job that, ultimately, reflects more on its author’s peculiarities than on his subject.

Yet after saying this, let me confess that though Faye makes a shoddy argument that doesn’t prove what he thinks he proves, he is nevertheless probably right in seeing Heidegger as a “Nazi.”  He simply doesn’t know how to make his case — or maybe he simply doesn’t want to spend the years it takes to “master” Heidegger’s thought.

Even more ironic is the scandal of Heidegger’s “Nazism” seen from outside Faye’s liberal paradigm. For in this optic, the scandal is not that Heidegger was a National Socialist — but rather that the most powerful philosophical intelligence of the last century believed in this most demonized of all modern ideologies.

But who sees or cares about this real scandal?

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

Read Part 1 here.

Two.
Faye’s Argument

Heidegger’s seminars of 1933 and 1934, in Emmanuel Faye’s view, expose the “fiction” that separates Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics. For these seminars reveal a brown-shirted fanatic who threw himself into the National Revolution, hoping to become Hitler’s philosophical mentor.

At the same time, Faye argues that Heidegger’s work in the 1920s, particularly his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), was already infected with pre-fascist ideas, just as his postwar work, however much it may have resorted to a slightly different terminology, would continue to propagate National Socialist principles.

Earlier, however, when the young Heidegger was establishing himself in the world of German academic philosophy (the 1920s), there is very little public evidence of racial or anti-Jewish bias in his work. To explain this, Faye quotes Heidegger to the effect that “he wasn’t going to say what he thought until after he became a full professor.” His reticence on these matters was especially necessary given that his “mentor,” Edmund Husserl, was Jewish and that he needed Husserl’s support to replace him at Freiburg.

(For those militant Judeophobes who might think this is somehow compromising, let me point out that Wilhelm Stapel [1882-1954], after also doing a doctorate in Husserlian phenomenology, was a Protestant, nationalist, and anti-Semitic associate of the Conservative Revolution who played an important early role in NSDAP politics.)

Faye nevertheless claims that Heidegger’s early ideas, especially those of Being and Time, were already disposed to themes and principles that were National Socialist in nature.

In Being and Time, for example, Heidegger rejects the Cartesian cogito, Kant’s transcendental analytic, Husserlian phenomenology — along with every other bloodless rationalism dominating Western thought since the 18th century — for the sake of an analysis based on “existentials” (i.e., on man’s being in the world).

Like other intellectual members of Hitler’s party, Heidegger disparaged all forms of universalist thought, dismissing not only notions of man as an individual, but notions of the human spirit as pure intellect and reason.

In repudiating universalist, humanist, and individualist thought associated with liberal modernity, Faye’s Heidegger is seen not as contesting the underlying principles of liberal modernity, which he, as a former Catholic traditionalist, thought responsible for the alienation, rootlessness, and meaninglessness of the contemporary world. Rather he is depicted as preparing the way for the “Nazi” notion of an organic national community (Volksgemeinschaft) based on racial and anti-Jewish criteria.

Revealingly, this is about as far as Faye goes in treating Heidegger’s early thought. In fact, there is very little philosophical analysis at all of Being and Time or any other work in his book. Every damning criticism he makes of Heidegger is based on Heidegger’s so-called affinity with National Socialist themes or ideas — or what a liberal defending a Communist would call guilt by association.

Worse, Faye lacks any historical understanding of National Socialism, failing to see it as part of a larger anti-liberal movement that had emerged before Hitler was even born and which influenced Heidegger long before he had heard of the Führer.

For our crusading anti-fascist professor, however, the anti-liberal, anti-individualist, and anti-modern contours of Heideggerian thought are simply Hitlerian — because of their later association with Hitler’s movement — unrelated to whatever earlier influences that may have affected the development of his thought. Q.E.D.

Faye, though, fails to make the case that Heidegger’s pre-1933 thought was “Nazi,” both because he’s indifferent to Heidegger’s philosophical argument in Being and Time, which he dismisses in a series of rhetorical strokes, and, secondarily, because he doesn’t understand the historical/cultural context in which Heidegger worked out his thought.

More generally, he claims Heidegger negated “the human truths that are the underlying principle of philosophy” simply because whatever doesn’t accord with Faye’s own liberal understanding of philosophy (which, incidentally, rationalizes the radical destructurations that have come with the “Disneyfication, MacDonaldization, and globalization” of our coffee-colored world) is treated as inherently suspect.

Only on the basis of the 1933-34 and ‘34-35 seminars does Faye have a case to make.

For the Winter term of 1933-34 Heidegger led a seminar “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History, and State.” If Faye’s account of the unpublished seminar report is accurate (and it’s hard to say given the endless exaggerations and distortions that run through his book), Heidegger outdid himself in presenting National Socialist doctrines as the philosophical basis for the new relationship that was to develop between the German people and their new state.

Like other National Socialists, Heidegger in this seminar views the “people” in völkisch terms presuming their “unity of blood and stock.”

Faye is particularly scandalized by the fact that Heidegger values the “people” (Volk) more than the “individual” and that the people, as an organic community of blood and spirit, excludes Jews and exalts its own particularity.

In this seminar, Heidegger goes even further, calling for a “Germanic state for the German nation,” extending his racial notion of the people to the political system, as he envisages the “will of the people” as finding embodiment in the will of the state’s leader (Führer).

Faye contends that people and state exist for Heidegger in the same relation as beings exist in relation to Being.

As such, Heidegger links ontology to politics, as the “question of all questions” (the “question of being”) is identified with the question of Germany’s political destiny.

Heidegger’s rejection of the humanist notion of the individual and of Enlightenment universalism in his treatment of Volk and Staat are, Faye thinks, synonymous with Hitlerism.

Though Faye’s argument here is more credible, it might also be pointed out that Heidegger’s privileging of the national community over the interests and freedoms of the individual has a long genealogy in German thought (unlike Anglo-American thought, which privileges the rational individual seeking to maximize his self-interest in the market).

The second seminar, in the Winter term of 1934-35, “On the State: Hegel,” again supports Faye’s case that Heidegger was essentially a “Nazi” propagandist and not a true philosopher. For in this seminar, he affirms the spirit of the new National Socialist state in Hegelian terms, spreading the “racist and human-life destroying conceptions that make up the foundations of Hitlerism.”

In both courses, Faye sees Heidegger associating and merging philosophy with National Socialism.

For this reason, his work ought not to be considered a philosophy at all, but rather a noxious political ideology.

Faye, in fact, cannot understand how Heidegger’s insidious project has managed to “procure a planetary public” or why he is so widely accepted as a great philosopher.

Apparently, Heidegger had the power to seduce the public — though on the basis of Faye’s account, it’s difficult to see how the political hack he describes could have pulled this off.

In any case, Faye warns that if Heidegger isn’t exposed for the political charlatan he is, terrible things are again possible. “Hitlerism and Nazism will continue to germinate through Heidegger’s writings at the risk of spawning new attempts at the complete destruction of thought and the extermination of humankind.”

To be continued . . .

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

National Socialism was defeated on the field of battle, but it wasn’t defeated in the realm of thought.

Indeed, it’s undefeatable there because the only thing its enemies can do to counter its insidious ideas is to ban those thinkers, like Martin Heidegger, whose works might attract those wanting to know why National Socialism is undefeatable and why its world view continues to seduce the incredulous.

Or, at least, so thinks Emmanuel Faye in his recently translated Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).

Why, though, all this alarmed concern about a difficult, some say unreadable, philosopher of the last century?

The reason, Tom Rockmore says, is that he lent “philosophical cover to some of the darkest impulses that later led to Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust.”

One.
The Scandal

Faye’s book is part of a larger publishing phenomenon — in all the major European languages — related to the alleged National Socialism of the great Freiburg philosopher.

Like many prominent German academics of his age, Heidegger joined Hitler’s NSDAP shortly after the National Revolution of 1933.

He was subsequently made rector of the University of Freiburg, partly on the basis of his party affiliation, and in a famous rectorial address — “The Self-Assertion of the German University” — proposed certain reforms that sought to free German universities from “Jewish and modernist influences,” reorienting it in this way to the needs and destiny of the newly liberated Volksgemeinschaft.

Heidegger’s role as a public advocate of National Socialist principles did not, however, last very long.  Within a year of his appointment, he resigned the rectorship.

As he told the de-Nazification tribunal in 1945, his resignation was due to his frustration in preventing state interference in university affairs, a frustration that soon turned him away from all political engagements.

The story he told to the liberal inquisitors (which most Heideggerians accepted up to about 1988) was one in which a politically naive academic, swept up in the revolution’s excitement, had impulsively joined the party, only to become quickly disillusioned.

The story’s “dissimulations and falsehoods” were, indeed, good enough to spare him detention in a Yankee prison — unlike, say, Carl Schmitt who was incarcerated for two years after the war (though the only “Americans” Schmitt ever encountered there were German Jews in the conquerors’ uniform) — but not good enough to avoid a five-year ban on teaching.

In any case, it has always been known that Heidegger had at least a brief “flirtation” with “Nazism.”

Given the so-called “negligibility” of his National Socialism, he was able, after his ban, to resume his position as Germany’s leading philosopher.  By the time of his death (1976), he had become the most influential philosopher in the Western world.  His books have since been translated into all the European languages (and some non-European ones), his ideas have come to dominate contemporary continental thought, and they have even established a beachhead in the stultifying world of the Anglo-American academy, renowned for its indifference to philosophical issues.

Despite Heidegger’s enormous influence as “the century’s greatest philosopher,” he never quite shed the stigma of his early brush with National Socialism.  This was especially the case after 1987 and 1988.

Martin Heidegger, 1889 - 1976

For in late 1987 a little known Chilean-Jewish scholar, Victor Farìas, produced the first book-length examination of Heidegger’s “brush” with National Socialist politics.

His Heidegger and Nazism was not a particularly well-researched work, and there was a good deal of speculation and error in it.

It nevertheless blew apart the story Heidegger had told his American inquisitors in 1945, revealing that he had been a party member between 1933 and 1945; that his National Socialism was something more than the flirtation of a politically naive philosopher; and that his affiliation with the Third Reich was anything but “fleeting, casual, or accidental but [rather] central to his philosophical enterprise.”

This “revelation” — that the greatest philosophical mind of the 20th century had been a devoted Hitlerite — provoked a worldwide scandal.

In the year following Farìas’ work, at least seven books appeared on the subject.

The most impressive of these was by Hugo Ott, a German historian, whose Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (1994) lent a good deal of historically-documented substance to Farìas’ charges.

In the decades since the appearance of Farìas’ and Ott’s work, a “slew” of books and articles (no one is counting any more) have continued to probe the dark recesses of Heidegger’s scandalous politics.

Almost every work in the vast literature devoted to Heideggerian philosophy must now, in testament to the impact of these studies, begin with some sort of “reckoning” with his “Nazism” — a reckoning that usually ends up erecting a wall between his philosophy and his politics.

In this context, Emmanuel Faye’s book is presently being touted as the “best researched and most damaging” work on Heidegger’s National Socialism — one that aims to tear down the wall compartmentalizing his politics and to brand him, once and for all, as an apologist for “the greatest crime of the 20th century.”

It’s fitting that Faye, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, is French, for nowhere else have Heidegger’s ideas been as influential as in France.

Heidegger began appearing in French translation as early as the late 1930s.  The publication in 1943 of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, based on a misreading of Heidegger, gave birth to “existentialism,” which dominated Western thought in the late 1940s and 1950s, helping thus to popularize certain Heideggerian ideas.

At the same time, French thinkers were the first to pursue the issue of Heidegger’s alleged National Socialism.

Karl Löwith, one of the philosopher’s former Jewish students exiled in France, argued in 1946 that Heidegger’s politics was inseparable from his philosophical thought. Others soon joined him in making similar arguments.

Though Löwith’s critique of Heidegger appeared in Les Temps Modernes, Sartre’s famous journal, the ensuing, often quite heated, French controversy was mainly restricted to scholarly journals.  Faye’s father, Jean-Pierre Faye, also a philosopher, figured prominently in these debates during the 1960s.

It was, though, only with Farìas and Ott that the debate over Heidegger’s relationship to the Third Reich spread beyond the academic journals and touched the larger intellectual public.

This debate continues to this day.

Part of the difficulty in determining the exact degree and nature of Heidegger’s political commitment after 1933 is due to the fact that Heidegger’s thought bears on virtually every realm of contemporary European intellectual endeavor, on the right as well as the left, and that there’s been, as a consequence, a thoughtful unwillingness to see Heidegger’s National Socialism as anything other than contingent — and thus without philosophical implication.

This unwillingness has been compounded by the fact that the Heidegger archives at Marbach are under the control of Heidegger’s son, Hermann, who controls scholarly access to them, hindering, supposedly, an authoritative account of Heidegger’s thinking in the period 1933-1945.

Moreover, only eighty of the planned 120 volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe have thus far appeared and, as Faye contends, these are not “complete,” for the family has allegedly prevented the more “compromising” works from being published.

The authority of Faye’s Heidegger — which endeavors to eliminate everything separating his politics from his philosophy — rests on two previously unavailable seminars reports from the key 1933-34 period, as well as certain documents, letters, and other evidence, which have appeared in little known or obscure German publications — evidence he sees as “proving” that Heidegger’s “Nazism” was anything but contingent — and that this “Nazism” was, in fact, not only inseparable from his thought, but formative of its core.

On this basis, along with Heidegger’s collaboration with certain NSDAP thinkers, Faye claims that the philosophy of the famous Swabian is so infused with National Socialist principles that it ought no longer to be treated as philosophy at all, but, instead, banned as “Nazi propaganda.”

To be continued . . .

Lucian Freud, "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping"

Psychanalyse de judaïsme
Hervé Ryssen
Levallois: Éds. Baskerville, 2006

“The Psychoanalysis of Judaism” is Hervé Ryssen’s second book on the Jews.

For Ryssen, who rejects neither the ethnoracial nor the religious designation of Jews, it is their mentality that most distinguishes them from other peoples.

To understand this mentality, his first book, Les Espérances planétariennes (2005), looked at the “planetary ideology” dominating the work of contemporary Jewish intellectuals.

Ryssen’s second work approaches the Jews in a related but somewhat different way — in order to uncover the characterological or psychological foundations of their mentality. (His is not actually a “psychoanalysis” in the Freudian sense).

And like his first work, Psychanalyse de judaïsme is argued through extensive quotations from the various writers who are its subject — quotations which are often pages long and comprise more than half the book. This makes its 400 pages a rather tedious read, especially given that the argument lies buried amidst the endless quotations. (Those enamored of French clarity and eloquence will find this particularly challenging).

I’ve gained, though, a greater patience with his “method.”

For it’s clearer to me now, especially after Greg Johnson’s translation of Ryssen’s Mechanopolis interview, that his “method” is dictated in large part by the political restrictions imposed on his type of “discourse.”

Nearly everywhere in the EU, it is a crime to “incite racial hatred.”

To avoid the inquisitor, Ryssen must proceed carefully.

By extensively quoting and documenting what the Jews say about themselves and their intentions, while implying rather than explicitly stating what he thinks, he is able to publish his incendiary books.

The downside is that this makes them a chore to read and blunts his arguments.

* * *

In his characterological analysis of the Jewish intellectual, Ryssen re-visits the planetary ideology he examined in his first work.

Given the centrality of this ideology to their mentality, Ryssen claims Judaism is as much a political project as it is a religion — a project inspired by the messianic expectations that make up Judaism’s religious core — as Jews endeavor to break down borders, unify the earth, and establish the universal peace announced by their vengeful prophets.

Religious Jews understand this aspiration for a unified, peaceful world order in terms of their millennial longing for the messiah and the restoration of David’s ancient kingdom. Non-religious Jews, Ryssen’s focus, see it in secular terms — as a multiracial planetary Utopia based on Jewish values (assumed to be those of a unified humanity).

Their compulsion to realize this planetary ideology has made the Jews a people preeminently defined by their priests, prophets, and publicists.

Every Jewish intellectual or artistic production aims, as such, to instill planetary expectations in others.

In this spirit, they urge gentiles to deny their race, religion, heritage — in effect, every particularistic identity that divides them from the rest of humanity.

From the Europeans’ most intimate personal relations to the cultural fundament of their civilization — everything particular to them becomes a monstrosity, obstructing the advent of the Jews’ perfectly planned world.

Blood loyalty, tradition, established institutions and practices — in their resistance to globalism’s leveling impetus — are deemed “racist,” designated thus for crucifixion.

The only thing European they have any real appreciation of is the beauty of Europe’s women.

Similarly, their ideology assumes that all men are brothers under the skin — and that the ideal human state is a nomadic one, unattached to anything or any place.

They favor for this reason mass Third World immigration, publicizing it as a “chance” for Europe — to undermine the old ways, mix different populations, and create the coffee-colored world of their Utopian expectations.

Above all, they stand as champions of America’s international order, with its capitalist obsessions, its inherent pluralism and openness, and its profound affinity with the Jewish spirit.

Indeed, anti-Americanism is a kind of anti-Semitism to them.

Yet no matter how inspiring Jewish messianic strivings are to their intellectuals, they remain an illusion that distorts their view of the world, sets them apart from other peoples, and nurtures certain psychological disorders in them.

As such, the Jews’ planetary ideology is both reflective and formative of who they are, shaping their national character, as their ideologues endeavor to re-shape the world in their own image.

* * *

How does Ryssen characterize the cosmopolitans as a people?

First, he sees them as a people full of overweening pride. Having a world-historical mission to unite humanity, they consider themselves not just “chosen,” but superior, imbued with humanity’s highest, most lofty spirit.

This makes them the pivot of all things.

Unable to conceive of the world without themselves and their extraordinary spirit, they are convinced of their self-designated moral superiority, even if others fail to recognize it. They think, in this vein, that nothing compares to Jewish suffering: The tragedy of World War Two’s 50 million dead is hardly commensurate in their eyes to that of the fabled “Six Million.”

Despite the great persecutions they have suffered from all the various peoples amongst whom they have dwelled, these persecutions never seem to have anything to do with who they are or with the way they relate to others. They are always innocent.

When they do fail, their failure is that of “man” in general.

If they suffer “oedipal” feelings or other neurotic sexual neuroses, then it’s something universal, not Jewish; if their culture is misogynist, then all cultures are; if they are money-grubbing, then economics, as Marx held, is everywhere and in every time enthroned.

They can do no wrong — that’s the goy’s specialty.

Having once been what sociologists call “service nomads,” acting as civilizational or religious “go-betweens,” their planetary ideology is linked to their cosmopolitan heritage, just as this heritage enhances the plasticity of their character, enabling them to adapt to new surroundings, while retaining their Jewish identity. In this way, they easily “assimilate” the culture of their host, though they never actually assimilate in the sense of developing an organic attachment to it that demotes the centrality of their Jewish identity.

Rooted solely in themselves, as their great thinker Franz Rosenzweig noted, they lack attachment to exterior things — to a land or a locality, a transcendent reference or a defining folklore.

They are noted for being “mobile, clever, articulate, flexible, and good at being a stranger.” Their thought and behavior are often audacious — stimulating, complex, effervescent, full of chutzpah, but rarely great in its achievements, lacking as they do the well-nourished depth of rooted sentiments and an intrinsic, life-affirming standard of value.

More negatively, the Jewish sense of mission causes their more unstable members to become megalomaniacal in their ethnocentrism.

This makes them prone to grandiose reasoning, exaggerating, dramatizing, even lying without the slightest hesitation.

If this is not enough, they are inclined to pontificate on everything, even those things of which they know nothing, telling us what’s best for us and what we ought to think or do.

They are wont, as the French say, to “drown the fish” (noyer le poisson), overwhelming every situation with contradictory discourses, justifying, as they dissimulate.

They are similarly disposed to inversion (making the noble common and vice versa), to materialism, and to low-mindedness — as they drag everything and everyone down to their veiled, usurious level.

As planetary cultists, they pursue lives of constant agitation, with their existence being a carousel, which revolves around the disturbances, disorders, and irritations they bring to their host, as they plot, scheme, and subvert.

The bad faith they sow inevitably yields hostile reactions, poisoning their relations with gentiles, whose potential violence is an endless source of anxiety to them.

Whenever they bring down persecution on themselves (which they can’t seem to help), they rarely understand why — though they are quick to seek revenge.

They are, relatedly, ridden with fears of separation, expulsion, disaster — seeing monsters everywhere.

Stuck between the grandiose idea they have of themselves and the hostility they inevitably provoke in the real world, Jews have become extremely neurotic about their identity (often going to therapy for years to reconcile themselves with who they are).

Anxiety, paranoia, ambiguity, and a good deal of hatred comes with being “chosen.”

* * *

What does Ryssen make of this complex of specifically Jewish characteristics?

He sees it in terms of the psychological disorder known in French as histrionisme.

In English, this is called (I think) “histrionic personality disorder” or what, up to a few decades ago, was known as “hysteria.”

The hysteria studied by its pioneering student, Jean-Martin Charcot, or discussed in Freud’s early case studies — such as that of emotionally distraught women swooning or losing control of themselves in the period’s Victorian and Viennese salons — is rarely encountered today.

The contemporary definition describes hysteria as a condition marked by excessive emotionality — evident, for example, in those who seek to please others or draw attention to themselves, or in those who try to “seduce” in an “excessive and invading” way. (Hence, its “histrionic” nature).

Hyperemotional, hysterics tend, as a consequence, to the fragile, impulsive, highly subjective, but also to the seductive, egocentric, and exhibitionist — prone as they are to self-engrandizing delusion.  This goes with their extremely “plastic” personalities that bend and form in the presence of others.  Their social activities are accordingly inauthentic and they are usually incapable of imagining the perspectives of others, let alone respecting them.

* * *

Ryssen argues that the “histrionic personality disorder,” though not applicable to all, matches that of many cosmopolitan intellectuals.

He then suggests (sincerely or not, I don’t know) that given the disorder’s severity Jews should start looking in the mirror, to confront who they really are, not what their illusions imagine them to be.

To “cure” themselves and their elites of this debilitating disorder, they must fight, therefore, against the fantasies that keep them in their mental ghetto.

He claims that numerous Jews over the last century have, in fact, preferred to abandon their neuroses and root themselves among European peoples, even if this has taken several generations to complete.

Real assimilation is possible, Ryssen claims, — if Jews are willing to reject their judéité.

* * *

By this reasoning, those who aren’t actually Jews, but who have assimilated their intellectual reflexes, become such, in spirit.

If Judaism, then, is above all “a particular psychic disposition,” as Ryssen contends, it helps to explain why so many white Americans live today under the influence of their planetary expectations and why even some of their most ardent critics bear elements of their distinct “histrionic personality disorder.”

The conclusion I take from this is that the struggle against the cosmopolitans’ anti-white jihad will be as much a struggle against a certain mentality, associated with “Judaization,” as it will be a struggle against Jewish power.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which he shepherded through Congress, would eliminate the remaining legal barriers to racial equality and commit the federal government to its insurance.

His State Department also put its entire weight behind these acts, warning members of Congress that the failure to embrace this legislation would severely hamper America’s Cold War effort.

Johnson then appointed numerous blacks to executive positions in his administration — more than all former presidents combined — and, worse, announced a “War on Poverty” to address black economic grievances.

In October 1965, he pushed through an immigration reform bill to eliminate the “discriminatory” national origins system created in 1924. For once segregation had been outlawed, the old immigration law appeared as an embarrassment to a nation now committed to multiracialism and anti-Communism.

Johnson’s radical reforms were the dramatic climax of the complicated relationship that had existed between race relations and foreign policy since 1945, for it was plainly evident after their passage that the US government was now fully committed to racial equality.

When Johnson left office in 1968, overwhelmed by the social-racial chaos his administration had caused, the series of factors that had earlier promoted the “Cold War on whites” also shifted.

Both decolonization and desegregation had, in effect, been achieved by 1968.

Nixon’s administration would then establish diplomatic relations with China and detente with the Soviet Union, demoting the significance of the Cold War (even though the Soviets continued to link imperialism and the “oppression of American blacks” in their anti-Vietnam rhetoric).

The nature of race relations and the problems associated with them also changed. No sooner had Johnson’s landmark bills been passed than a black rebellion broke out in Watts, leaving thirty-four dead and causing millions of dollars in property damage.

Here was the unwelcome shape of things to come, for racial conflict, it was now clear, was not a purely Southern problem, but no less a national one.

Throughout the remainder of the decade, virtually every major American city would be scared and seared by similar riots/rebellions, as the black masses, signaling their rejection of white liberalism and its gradualist approach to racism and discrimination, took to rioting and looting to promote the “Black Liberation” advocated by “the angry children of Malcolm X.”

Other sorts of protests also emerged — against poverty and war — further overshadowing the struggle against discrimination.

At the same time, increased urban violence and the revolutionary demands of the Black Power movement alienated much of the Establishment and set off a white “backlash” in the electorate, which demanded “law and order” and eventually brought Richard Nixon to power.

Though racial conflict would continue after 1968s and in some cases became more violent and vocal, its effect on US foreign policy seemed to wane.

Part of this was due to the ensuing white backlash, part to the fact that the legal basis of Jim Crow had been dismantled, and part to the Vietnam war, which re-focused international attention away from American race relations and toward American militarism.

Then, as Vietnam eclipsed civil rights as a defining issue of US prestige abroad and as the government continued to introduce domestic programs designed to promote not just black rights, but black employment, housing, and welfare, the linkage between race and foreign relations snapped.

Once it did, a different order of forces — associated with the rise of Jewish influence, the Cultural Revolution, and the new anti-white system of race relations — was mobilized against white interests.

The story of race and equality also became more complicated after 1968, for, internationally, it was now obvious that the US government was committed to eliminating the remaining racial barriers and, domestically, that economic and class problems were as integral to black failure as were legal barriers — economic and class problems that lacked the international resonance of legal segregation.

In such a situation, critics found it increasingly difficult to charge that things hadn’t changed and weren’t continuing to change — as we on the other side well know.

***

The Second World War had thrust the United States into a position of world leadership.

Though race played no part in determining US relations to the Soviet Union or shaping its global capitalist system, it did affect the way they were approached.

The crusade against Europe and the subsequent emergence of various nationalist movements in the Third World after 1945 changed the dynamic of the international arena and compelled the United States to reconsider its traditional system of race relations. This put the US civil rights movement and anti-Communism on parallel tracks.

At the same time, the international projection of US power brought new scrutiny to the character of American society. Racial incidents in the South ceased, thus, to be local events and became potential international headlines, detrimental to US global concerns.

As the boundaries between domestic and foreign affairs blurred, US officials, as was made clear to every president from Truman to Johnson, realized that they would not be able to maintain their world leadership, if American domestic affairs alienated the overwhelming majority of the world’s nonwhite population. Race relations at home were here again linked to US prestige and influence abroad.

The great changes that have reshaped America’s racial hierarchy in the last half-century, especially in subordinating white interests to blacks, are, I would argue, virtually incomprehensible apart from the international context of the Cold War.

One might even argue that, in world historical terms, the destruction of America’s former white-centric racial hierarchy represents a more consequential outcome than the collapse of Soviet Communism. For by the end of the Cold War, European-America had been transformed into a multiracial nation and the very idea of “white supremacy” exiled to the US equivalent of the Gulag.

The result is the present prospect of extinction — not unrelated, of course, to American-Jewish machinations, yet hardly dependent on them.