“The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.’”

— University sociologist

A culture is the achievement of a particular blood line.

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

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 16th 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 18th 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 19th 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 culture 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 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, then, is just as fixed as is its anatomic properties.  Indeed, race so defined often served 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 in 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: Ernest, energetic, morally serious, and world-creating.  Everything else, he held, rested on these “sterling” qualities.

But Arnold also believed the “Saxons’” moral earnestness, 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 Arnold’s age.  The third quarter of the 19th century (Arnold was 37 in 1859 when Darwin published his Origin of the 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 origins).  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 son (born of a Cornish mother), had, revealingly, a good deal of Irish blood in his veins.  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 inspire 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 a word, 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 Amédée 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 archeological and historical evidence contradicted the prevailing belief that the earlier Germanic invaders had either 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 descendent 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 been 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]

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

Hebraism versus Hellenism

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 also, Arnold saw, “narrow, harsh, unintelligent and unattractive.”  The prevailing coarseness and vulgarity of the evangelicals reflected, moreover, a deeper ailment associated with Jewish self-righteousness: Der Engländer, 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 had closed off a broader, more accurate view.  As a result, Arnold argued that the Jew’s 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 no unum necessarium frees human being 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 that those of the unum necessarium felt little need of.

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 19th 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 even-handed 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, in effect, to be divesting itself of the heritage native to 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 criteria 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 disfiguring English society.

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 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 it might even further the moral designs of Hebraism, for its Puritan distillation had made a gross 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 the 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 Göring allegedly did — by reaching for their holster.[22]

No concept, in fact, has so often been used in the 20th century to deny racial difference 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 or domesticated herds — and was thus initially associated with agriculture.  During the 18th 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 the 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 not just the anthropological definition it would acquire in the 20th century, it was still not 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 sense is self-culture: That is, it’s 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 the 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.

Culture, as such, 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 treating culture as the preserve of a narrow minority and thus associating it with a standoffish sense of superiority and refinement, 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 defence 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 his industrial society).[27]

The Rise of “Culturalism”

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 Arnoldian concept of culture, however, is held by few today.  By the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties, the anthropological notion of culture that began supplanting the Arnoldian notion in the late 19th century had almost everywhere become 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, Wenleydale 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 understand 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, severs 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 social capacities of different human groups,” 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 differences

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 20th-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’ 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 upholding against the country’s equally powerful nativist heritage.

Despite the previous existence of slavery and the persistence of a rigid racial hierarchy, biological or Darwinian determinism jeopardized the environmentalist 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 not hereditary — nurture not 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 affecting the mind.  But if culturalism assumes that there is no relationship between mind and body, then racial/biological determinism, occupying the pendulum opposite of the argument, 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’s more evidence for this materialist assumption, it is no less disputable, especially 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 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 though natural science is 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, disciple 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 in 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 it 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 or 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 had, 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 the world, and that ultimately took institutional form and became “quasi-automatic habits of thought, feeling, judgement 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 formation 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 it creates — are not, then, the automatic reflect 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 durée, 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 19th-century racialists or contemporary sociobiologists assume — but it nevertheless accepts that a specific genotype (race) gives rise to a corresponding 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 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 always 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-à-vis each others’ culture.[46]  The spirit of a Chinese-enculturated white man would consequently always be at odds with his body and this would inevitably distort his place in the world.  Said differently, his genotype acquires an “unfit” or incongruent phenotype.

Behavior, it 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 of 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-permeated body of closely related cultural beings.

When a community or nation defines itself in bodily or racial terms, even then 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, ethnonation, or race) and, as such, is always the product of a particular cultural heritage rather than an unmediated reflect 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 history and identity — indeed, it affects whether or not it is to have such a history — 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 genetic heritage is only a facet of his 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 established 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.  Its trunk root stems from the idea that (I think) was first developed by Friedrich von Schelling — the idea that a people emerges from its myths insofar as the “community of consciousness” a shared myth forges is what grounds and unites a people as a people.[50]  Every understanding of the ethnogenic process that creates races and nations starts, I believe, from this idea.

Race, Culture, and America

The American case is the preeminent example of this sort of relationship.  When transplanted Englishmen in 17th-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, Frenchmen, 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 of “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 with the native Anglo-Protestants (though 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 shape — but 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 divulged from his genotype, to the point where the former is now, arguably, no longer an extension but an 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 all 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 multiracialism.  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 rent 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 foxes cut off their tail.[58]

The dissenters were also wont to dissent among themselves, setting off 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 Englishmen 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, he thought, 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 and feelings,” he could take that which the larger culture commended, leaving himself free to develop his other sides.  A national culture centered in an established church offered thus innumerably more avenues for self-development and realization, suggesting “new sides and sympathies in us to cultivate; and, by saving us from having to invent and fight 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 chose 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 19th century, just as the latter would qualitatively differ from the America of the late 20th 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 materialist 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 low-church, plebeian 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 ostensively atomized individuals to one another).  The result is a picture not quite as balanced as it could 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 19th 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 European 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 conflictual, just as local and regional cultures surrendered to urbanizing, commercial, and technological forces that drew America’s increasingly deracinated masses into a “culture industry” based on newspapers, vaudeville, touring theater companies, and then, in the 20th 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 20th 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 judgement 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 and 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.

Once white American identity is no longer defined by the symbols, beliefs, and destiny dictated by its past and by its regulative tradition, but by the programmed contrivances of an alien culture industry, Americans 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 bounded” 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 seeking 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.

The Occidental Quarterly 9:2 (Summer 2009)

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.

Nevertheless, the logic of Cold War civil rights had already taken hold of the government, propelling it ever closer toward the racial chaos we know today.

Though no racist, Eisenhower wasn’t keen on civil rights. Under his administration, blacks lost the easy access to the White House that they had acquired under Truman; only once, late in his presidency did he ever meet with civil rights leaders. Moreover, as a former soldier who had spent a good part of his career in the South, he had developed a real sympathy for Southern life (as “open-minded” Yankees do).

If civil rights were to be introduced (and he felt that some symbolic changes ought, perhaps, to be made for the sake of “national security”), he was convinced that it should be done slowly and moderately.

A few weeks before the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, which put the Constitution on the side of desegregation, he is reputed to have told Earl Warren that “segregationists are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside big overgrown Negroes.”

His was a generational attitude that was less and less shared by New Class elites. Thus, even though introduced by the Truman administration, the Republican National Committee was quick to take credit for Brown, portraying it as “the Eisenhower administration’s many-frontal attack on global Communism” — however unenthusiastic Eisenhower may have actually been.

Brown, indeed, provided the US government with a powerful counter to Soviet propaganda. The USIF went into overdrive to publicize it throughout the world, where it got largely favorable reviews.

Brown’s radical judicial assault on American race relations would, in fact, signal the beginning of the end for Jim Crow.

Buoyed up on the court’s decision, as well as the escalating struggle for decolonization in Africa and the Third World, the NAACP at this point sensed that the tide had at last turned in its favor.

In December 1955 it waged a year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which would mark the advent of mass civil rights organizing. M.L. King described the boycott as part of a global process in which “the oppressed peoples of the world” had risen up against colonialism, imperialism, and racism.

This new stage in the civil movement can hardly be understood without the backdrop of the Cold War and the type of world it was creating.

Many, though, wanted no part of this world.

Unlike their counterparts today, Southern whites refused to passively accept this assault on their traditional way of life.

This was especially evident in September 1957 at Little Rock’s Central High School, where the first major challenge to Brown was made, as thousands of belligerent whites, supported by their governor, Orval Faubus, and the state National Guard, prepared to resist the court-mandated admission of nine Negroes to their all-white institution.

Not merely the Jewish controlled media in the United States, but the media worldwide carried vivid images of jeering white crowds threatening the nine neatly dressed and apparently well-mannered black teens, who, in braving the “mobs,” sought, simply, “to sit in the same classroom with white boys and girls.”

The Soviets, who would humiliate the US during the crisis by putting the first man-made satellite into orbit, offered the world numerous commentaries on this “racist” form of “American barbarism” — commentaries that were reprinted and circulated throughout the Third World.

At the same time, US embassies abroad deluged Washington with information on Little Rock’s unfavorable international impact and John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, warned that both the UN and the nonaligned Third World was watching to see if the US was really committed to civil rights.

With the impending threat of violence in the streets and the plummeting of US prestige aboard, Eisenhower finally acted, sending in the 101st Airborne Division in order to stop, among other things, “the disservice . . . that has been done to the nation in the eyes of the world” — as “our enemies . . . gloat over the incident and use it everywhere to misrepresent our nation.”

As the first president since Reconstruction to mobilize the army in defense of black civil rights, Eisenhower had not wanted to intervene, but the breakdown of law and the continuing Soviet propaganda binge about US “racial terror” had forced his hand.

He acted, revealingly, more to uphold federal authority and repair the country’s international image than he did to promote racial equality. In a national televised address, he said “it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world.” In a word, Little Rock’s resistance to desegregation was a threat to national security.

At this point, the Cold War logic of civil rights became nearly irreversible.

***

The ensuing Kennedy and Johnson administrations would finalize Jim Crow’s demise.

Unlike the Democratic presidents preceding and succeeding him, John F. Kennedy entered the White House without strong feelings about civil rights.

The only Negro he had actually ever encountered up to then was his valet.

While in the Senate, he did, admittedly, take up the cause of African independence, but this was mainly a gentrified gesture of his Irish heritage rather than any genuine commitment to Negro nationalism.

Kennedy’s defining identity as a politician (if an American politician can be said to have an identity unrelated to electoral considerations) was anti-Communism (this wretched liberal ideology dear to both the American right and left, as well as to not a few WN), which he had inherited from the great Joseph McCarthy. Indeed, his fierce anti-Communism made his administration the most dangerous in the history of the Cold War.

Like other Democrats of the period, he paid formal lip service to a moderate version of civil rights, though he had a poor record of support for it in the Senate. His main concern was that both segregationists and desegregationalists seemed almost indifferent to the issue of Communism.

For the first two and a half years of his administration he accordingly refused to offer any real leadership on the issue of civil rights.

The accelerating conflict in the South, however, would not long allow this inaction.

There was something ironic in this.

Kennedy’s election had signalled not only a generational turn in American politics, it was widely felt as if it had ushered in a new spirit in American life. His “youth and charisma,” combined with the fact that he was the first Catholic to hold the office, seemed to herald the advent of a new era. Though the “Sixties,” as a distinct political-cultural period, did not actually begin until about 1964 or 1965, his election was its prelude.

This was especially evident in the gathering momentum of the civil rights movement, which was beginning to move out of the courts and into the streets.

In Eisenhower’s last year in office, civil rights organizations had staged sit-ins, with great fanfare, at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, inaugurating the age of mass civil disobedience. By August 1961, over 70,000 people are estimated to have participated in these sit-ins, which were expanded to include various other segregated public facilities.

Then in May 1961, “Freedom Riders” started challenging discrimination in interstate transit, which the courts had earlier rule to be unconstitutional. Given the violence, demonstrations, and TV coverage that accompanied the Freedom Riders, they proved to be a distinct embarrassment to the new administration.

Kennedy, who was planning to meet Khrushchev in Vienna, also feared they were making him look weak and vulnerable in the international media. He condemned the Freedom Riders as “unpatriotic,” tarnishing the nation’s image at the very moment when he was about to make an entrance on the world stage.

His problems with the burgeoning civil rights movement were, however, just beginning.

In September 1962 he faced another major racial crisis, this time at the University of Mississippi, where large crowds of angry whites sought to prevent the court-ordered admission of the Negro James Meredith.

With the campus beset with riots, violence, death, and gun fire, Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, was forced to intervene. He sent in several hundred federal marshals and then federalized the Mississippi National Guard — ultimately, to stop the TV images and the unfavorable international coverage.

Then, in May 1963, the impact of race on US international politics came to a head in Birmingham, Alabama, where Bull Connor (who would inspire Hollywood’s image of the pudgy, brutal Southern sheriff) turned high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on a thousand black civil rights’ marchers.

The vivid images of “peaceful blacks” being assaulted by “Nazi-like” police made for spectacular television. The Soviets had a field day and global opinion turned hostile.

A few weeks later, George Wallace — whose earlier campaign slogan was “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” — also defied the federal government, preventing the integration of the University of Alabama, creating, in the process, another worldwide TV spectacle.

Kennedy again sent in federal marshals, but at this point he decided that something needed to be done to get these embarrassing protests out of the streets and back into the courts, where they could be controlled. The result was his decision in June 1963 to submit a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress that would outlaw all public forms of segregation.

Passed after his assassination, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would mark the impending demise of Jim Crow.

Zeskind notes that there has been an increase in discussion of secession and racial partition. He mentions the creation of Harold Covington’s Northwest Front, but predicts nothing will come of it because of Covington’s controversial past.

Zeskind also mentions TOQ and our “Secession and Racial Nationalism” essay contest:

The Occidental Quarterly, with half a dozen PhDs on its advisory board, has emerged as the central address for the most advanced strategic thinking among intellectual antisemites, scientific racists and anti-immigrant white nationalists.

Zeskind then mentions Michael O’Meara’s prize essay “Toward the White Republic.”

I have been editing our special issue on Secession and Racial nationalism, and I have been again impressed by the quality of the entries. Dr. O’Meara’s prize essay was the best, but the best in a crowded and highly competitive field. Of the 19 entries, nine will be published in TOQ, including the prize essay, and a tenth has already been published on TOQ Online.

The purpose of TOQ‘s essay competitions is precisely to solidify our position as “the central address for the most advanced strategic thinking among intellectual antisemites, scientific racists and anti-immigrant white nationalists” by encouraging the best minds in our movement to apply themselves to issues of vital importance to our people’s survival and flourishing.

Click here for details on our next essay contest, on “Libertarianism and Racial Nationalism.”

For reviews of Zeskind’s Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, click here and here.

In this struggle, racial equality and civil rights inevitably became an integral facet of the larger ideological struggle.

This was due to the fact that “the world [was] no longer white.”

Once Europe had been reduced to rubble, its prestige in, as well as its hold on its overseas empire was everywhere weakened. The nonwhites of these former European governed lands became, as such, a “constituency” to be won by rival liberal or Communist cold warriors.

In 1947, India, the world’s second largest “nation,” achieved independence, soon followed Indonesia. By the end of Truman’s administration (March 1953), most of Asia and the Middle East had freed itself of European domination. Africa would follow in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

In this new era, to maintain America’s leadership of the non-Communist “free world,” Americans could no longer ignore (or control) the world’s nonwhite majority.

The Cold War, as a consequence, would be fought largely for the hearts and minds of the former colonial world (what a French journalist in 1955 called the “Third World”).

Truman, like most of the early cold warriors, was not exactly a racial egalitarian. As a Missourian, whose heritage was more Southern than Midwestern, he was not without racial “prejudice,” though in the course of his Senate career, he came to support anti-lynching legislation and the abolition of poll taxes. It was Cold War imperatives, however, that made him into a forthright proponent of “civil rights.”

Most of Truman’s top advisers, including the “Wise Men” who helped him create the Cold War state, came from the old WASP elite and tended to be racial conservatives (contemptuous not only of Negroes, but of Jews). Though at times sympathetic to Southern concerns and with no particular affection for “the poor Negro” of liberal imagination, they too would be forced to embrace the cause of civil rights — linked, as it was, to the Cold War.

In this anti-Communist war it waged, the United States was now obliged to demonstrate that historic white racism was not part of its international anti-Communist coalition.

Anti-racism, as a result, became almost as important to US international interests as anti-Communism.

This was especially the case since the Soviets were adept at making hay out of American racial practices. In 1946, for example, when Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes, denounced Communists for denying certain East Europeans voting rights, they retorted that Negroes in Byrnes’ home state of South Carolina, as well as throughout the rest of the American South, were similarly and less justifiably denied voting rights.

This would not be the only time that Byrnes was made to look like a fool.

Then, as the machinery of the Cold War was put in place, the Soviets’ anti-US rhetoric increasingly made American racial practice the centerpiece of their propaganda, which put the US on the defensive.

This would again be the case, when later, as US bombing runs over North Korea and then North Vietnam killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the Soviets linked “the American way of waging war” to the “oppression of colored people in the US,” (which, of course, ignored the fact that Anglo-American bombers had earlier killed 900,000 German civilians, as well as many tens of thousands of French, Belgium, Dutch, Italian, and other European civilians — often doing so intentionally, striving to kill the largest possible number of innocents).

Given US claims to the mantle of the “Free World’s” leadership and the nonwhite world’s new definition of itself in terms hostile to the white man’s former attitude to it, the American color bar would henceforth be subject to unprecedented international scrutiny. Every headline reporting a lynching or another Southern effort to shore up Jim Crow took, as a consequence, a toll on America’s international standing.

One US ambassador described the country’s race problem as its “Achilles’ heel,” another called it “the greatest propaganda gift that could be given to the Kremlin,” and a third asked: “How can we persuade these Africans and Asians . . . that we believe in human dignity when we deny our own citizens the right to this basic dignity on the basis of skin color?”

In this struggle between the “Communist East” and the “liberal West,” Truman’s cold warriors had now to keep the nonwhite “South” allied with the white “North.”

US foreign relations, it followed, would no longer be insulated from the nation’s race relations.

Numerous propaganda agencies were specifically created to counter Soviet propaganda and to tell a “story” not of racial equality (which evidently didn’t exist), but of on-going racial progress. The United States Information Agency (USIF) — with its vast array of radio stations, printed materials, and foreign-based “America Houses” — endeavored, thus, to put a different spin on US race relations.

Propaganda, however, was not enough.

***

All the major US Cold War initiatives of the late 1940s — the Truman Doctrine (1947), the Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), NSC 68 (1950) — emerged against mounting demands for racial equality, in the US and abroad.

Truman, accordingly, would be the first president to make civil rights a concern of his administration.

In 1946, he formed a President’s Committee on Civil Rights, staffed with liberals, which reported that a major reform in race relations was needed to fight the Cold War, that on-going discrimination was undermining US diplomacy, and that the US had to take account of what “the world thinks of us and our record.”

He also urged Congress to enact civil rights laws to establish a permanent committee on civil rights, to outlaw lynching, and to protect the right to vote.

Because Southerners stymied him in Congress, he turned to executive orders to promote reforms and, at the same time, involved his Justice Department in various desegregation litigations.

His most important civil rights’ “accomplishment” was, unquestionably, his executive order of June 1948 to desegregate the army and the civil service.

It wasn’t until the Korea War, however, when manpower shortages compelled commanders to actively implement it, that the army actually began to desegregate and not until 1955 that the process was completed. It was nevertheless the most consequential step toward racial equality yet taken.

As a politician sensitive to the negative electoral implications of civil rights, he, of course, didn’t want to alienate the Southern base of the Democratic Party. But here he failed. Rather naively, he thought the introduction of a pro-civil rights plank in the Democratic Party program wouldn’t upset the party’s Southern wing (given that party programs are usually forgotten the moment the votes are counted). He was wrong: The Dixiecrats bolted and formed a States’ Rights Party (the first step toward the South’s eventual abandonment of the Democratic Party).

But once he was free of the Dixiecrats, he could openly court the black northern vote. During the campaign, he was not particularly outspoken on civil rights, knowing that northern whites weren’t much different than Southerners in this respect.

But he did become the first president to address a national convention of the NAACP and the first to campaign in Harlem, where he said: “Democracy’s answer to the challenges of [Communist] totalitarianism is its promise of equal rights and equal opportunities for all mankind” (not mentioning, of course, that such rights and opportunities were meaningful only among peoples of similar natural endowment).

In November 1948, in winning the vast majority of the black vote, he captured the White House with the narrowest of margins.

Given Congress’ on-going resistance to civil rights reform, Truman increasingly looked to the courts, especially the Supreme Court, which had already ruled against segregated interstate transportation (1946) and showed a willingness to play a role in the Cold War of ideas.

In 1948 Truman’s Justice Department filed amicus curiae briefs in the Shelley v. Kraemer case that struck down housing covenants. In 1949 it intervened in Henderson v. United States to prohibit segregation in railroad transportation. In the same year it participated in cases challenging school desegregation — McLaurin v. Oklahoma and Sweatt v. Painter. Finally, in December 1952, it intervened in the Brown v. Board of Education case (resolved in 1954).

In each of these cases, Truman’s State Department stressed their national security implications, an argument for which the court had already shown sympathy.

By the time the little cold warrior left office, Jim Crow’s days were numbered: The military had been desegregated, the Democratic Party had gone on record for racial equality, and judicial interventions had begun to lower the legal barriers to discrimination.

Selling the Cold War: A Racially-Integrated America Menaced by White Russian Communists

“The world is white no longer.”
– James Baldwin

For white nationalists — whose cyber-based “movement” is still in its infancy — simple explanations tend to be the rule.

The reductionist “anti-Semitism” that dominates WN ranks and serves as a catch-all explanation for the predicament white people find themselves in today, to cite the most prominent example, is wont to attribute every assault on white life to Jewish perfidy.

There is, certainly, no disputing the existence of this “perfidy,” for no other group — not the browns or blacks, not the former powers of international Communism, not anyone or anything — is or has been so disposed to breaching the color line, undermining America’s traditional racial hierarchy, or propelling the processes responsible for the present dispossession of the country’s white majority.

To think, however, that Organized Jewry has been the alpha and omega of this dispossession is not just simple-minded, it’s dishonorable.

It’s simple-minded because it understands complex historical processes in Kindergarten terms. It ignores other, no less culpable factors.

More fundamentally, it ignores or conflates the differences between structural imperatives and conspiratorial designs, between concrete objective forces and the subjective influences of interest and conscience.

History, as such, offers few cases where monocausal explanations suffice, for the confluence of fortune, structure, and subject (fortuna, necessita, virtu) undergirding the historical process means that significant historical changes are almost always the consequence of a combination of forces unique to their specific time and place.

By the same reasoning, monocausal explanations focusing exclusively on a demonized “other” are dishonorable because they spare whites all responsibility for their misfortunes, refuse to acknowledge the dysgenic and self-destructive forces indigenous to modern society, and ignore the numerous, inherently Jewish facets of the American project.

In criticizing this, I do so not to absolve the Jews, but to preface the subject of this essay — the anti-white consequences of the Cold War — which offers a somewhat broader explanation of white dispossession (though there are at least a couple of others that can also be made).

***

The Second World War was a watershed event in both American and world history.

It changed not only America’s relationship with the rest of the world, it fundamentally changed America.

Thomas Hart Benton, "Negro Soldier," 1942

The struggle against National Socialist Germany (despite the racial character of the Pacific War against the “Japs”) was ideologically waged as a war against fascism and racism.

As the unadmirable Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944, “In fighting fascism and racism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial tolerance and . . . racial equality.”

Its international crusade for liberal ideals stood, though, in obvious contradiction to the exclusion of various colored peoples, blacks particularly, who were denied a place in the country’s political and social firmament — denied because whites wanted a white nation, like other Europeans.

Myrdal called this supposed contradiction between its ideals and practices the “American Dilemma.”

It would become especially conspicuous after 1945, when America’s newly assumed international role left it with numerous, new obligations that drew attention to its so-called “dilemma” (which, in actuality, was a dilemma of American liberalism).

The war, moreover, changed not just the prevailing Zeitgeist.

The colossal undertaking to put 13 million men in uniform, to arm them (and the allies), and to fight on several different fronts in distant parts of the world required a national mobilization of unprecedented scope.

The war, it followed, brought great dislocations, disrupting traditional social relations and forcing the alteration of many traditional attitudes.

America’s democratic crusade against “German racism” also brought millions of blacks north to work in defense plants. This had a major impact on housing and employment. It also heightened black self-confidence, freed them from the older Southern forms of race relations, and emboldened their challenge to white supremacy. This became especially evident in 1943, when 200 race riots flared up in more than forty-five American cities, anticipating the contentious racial battles of the postwar era, especially those of the 1960s and ’70s.

At the same time, a million negroes were drafted into the military.

Though the army remained segregated, it quickly discovered the inefficiency and expense of maintaining separate facilities. It was even forced, whenever the exhausted, ill-supplied, and depleted forces of the Wehrmacht beat back the unheroic GIs, to bypass its segregated practices and throw in blacks troops to support decimated or beleaguered white units.

Black veterans, relatedly, provided many of the shock troops that would assault Jim Crow after 1945.

These developments — combined with the retreat of “scientific racism” in the 1930s, the wartime expansion of the New Deal state, the defeat and demonization of German anti-liberalism, and the Cold War’s ensuing crusade for democracy and equality — would together undermine much of the legitimacy of traditional American racial practices.

As one Alabama governor (Frank Dixon) rather tendentiously put it (and only a Southerner could make this argument with a straight face), “The Huns have wrecked the theory of the master race.”

***

Following the war, American power in the world was supreme, unchallenged, except by the Soviet Union, which, after having lost 27 million Russians in the course of the war (compared to 250,000 US combat deaths), was not actually in a position to defy the new superpower, though its unwillingness to submit to Washington’s tutelage would automatically cast it as a potential rival.

At this pivotal historical moment, when the whole world lay prostrate before them, American leaders felt as if they had been granted the Mandate of Heaven.

Inspired by the biblical Zionism of their Puritan heritage and encouraged by the economic self-interests of the great corporations, these leaders would reshape the international arena to reflect and serve the interests of American democracy and capitalism (each the economic or ideological mirror of the other).

Before even the war’s end, New Deal planners had developed the programs and trained the personnel who would occupy Germany, Italy, and (they thought) France and integrate them into the new American-led Atlantic “coalition”; Britain had earlier been deprived of its sovereignty and integrated. At the same time, a host of American-created international organizations — especially the United Nations, whose 1945 Charter committed its members to opposing racial discrimination — were designed to ensure the American governance of this new international order.

It was left, thought, to the administration of Harry S. Truman, the architect of the Cold War, to mould the exact contours of this order.

***

Russian-Americans relations had soured in the closing phase of the war, as political differences became more important than strategic ones. By 1946 they were engaged in a war of words, with the Soviets countering American claims of tyranny by pointing to lynchings, poll taxes, and other facets of Jim Crow to expose the fraudulence of America’s democratic-egalitarian ideology.

By 1947, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine to fight the international forces of Communist subversion, a Cold War, which would last until 1989, was implicitly declared.

In many respects, this was a phony war.

A severely exhausted and crippled Soviet Union posed no threat to the US.

But this phony war had become a political necessity for US leaders.

The New Deal, which arose in response to the breakdown of liberal capitalism in 1929, had failed (unlike Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany) to fix the depressed economy. It was only with the advent of “Defense Preparations” in 1939 and the war economy after 1941 that the American economy began to rebound.

The most pressing concern of liberal democrats after 1945 was thus avoiding another economic collapse — which meant on-going defense preparations and continued government intervention in the economy.

To justify this New-Deal created “Pentagon capitalism,” as well as a National Security State to oversee it, it was necessary, however, “to scare the hell out of the American people.”

Hence the ensuing transformation of good old “Uncle Joe” (Stalin) into the great bogeyman bent on enslaving the world.

To be continued . . .

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

3. The Crisis of the Old Order

“When and whenever [men] are subjects without being citizens, they inevitably endow other concerns and pursuits—economic, social, cultural—with an independent and hence rival authority.” This was the great failing of Absolutism.

In such a situation, the voluntary associations of the bourgeoisie—Masonic lodges, salons, clubs, coffee-houses, academies, sociétés de pensées, the “Republic of Letters”—became rival centers of moral authority and eventually rival models of political authority.

The criticism of these bourgeois organs sought to “test” the validity or truth of its subject, making reason a factor of judgement in its process of pro and con.

Bourgeois judgements critical of the political system set off, in turn, a crisis threatening the existing State.

As scientific materialists, armed with a naive analytic-empiricist epistemology, such bourgeois critics waged their subversive campaign with no appreciation of existing political realities or the imperatives and limits these realities imposed. This would make their moral crusade unrealistic, Utopian, unconcerned with the “contingency, conflict, and compulsion” that occupies and defines the political field.

Their Utopian proposals (their anti-political politics) constituted, as such, no actual political alternative, based as they were on a purely formal, abstract understanding of the political realm, which it subjected to the individual’s moral conscience.

But once the private moral realm started to impinge on the political sphere of the Absolutist State, the State itself was again called into question.

First unconsciously and then increasingly consciously, the bourgeois Enlightenment applied its Utopian and ultimately hypocritical standards to the State, whose political imperatives were ignored rather than recognized for what they were—so as not to complicate its own geometrical schemes of reform.

The Enlightenment, it followed, was wont to see itself in moral terms, not political—not even metapolitical—ones.

This self-deceiving politics could only end in ideological excess and terror—for the sole way to realize its Utopian political theology would be by forcing others to accept and submit to it.

The result, Koselleck concludes, was the advent of the modern condition—this “sense that we are being sucked into an open and unknown future, the pace of which has kept us in a constant state of breathelessness ever since the dissolution of the traditional ständische societies.”

The turbulent “tribune of reason” bequeathed by the Enlightenment aimed, moreover, at every sphere of human endeavor—not just the Absolutist State, traditional Catholic Christianity, or the numerous corporate restraints inhibiting the market.

Everything historically given was, as such, to be re-conceived as a historical process that had to be re-directed, reformed, and re-planned, as the dictates of fate gave way to the rationalist obliteration of political aporia (i.e., the impasses or challenges posed by exceptional situations determined only by the sovereign).

Through its Règne de la Critique, the bourgeoisie (as prosecutor, judge, and jury) subjected the State to an enlightened conscience that debunked its “rationality” and increasingly advocated, or implied, its replacement.

With this rationalist critique of Absolutism came an unfolding philosophy of history—which promised a victory that was to be gained without struggle or war, that applied to all mankind, and that would bring about a better, more rational, and peaceful future—if only “reason” (i.e., bourgeois interests) was allowed to rule.

Through this critique, politics—the tough decisions fundamental to human existence—was dissolved into an Utopian project indifferent to the historical given. Everything, it followed, was subject to criticism, nothing was taboo—not the “order of human things,” not even life itself would be spared the alienation that came with the critic’s unpolitical reason.

Then, as the critic assumed the right to subject the whole world to his verdict, acting as “the king of kings,” criticism was “transformed into a maelstrom that sucks the present from under the feet of the critic”—for his criticisms amounted to an endless assault on the present in the name of a far-off, but allegedly enlightened future.

4. Modern Pathogenesis

At the highest level, Koselleck offers “a generic theory of the modern world”—one that seeks to explain something of our age to us.

In his view, criticism engendered crisis, calling the future into question.

The Enlightenment’s culture of critique could, however, only culminate in revolution—a revolution whose new order would privilege the rich and powerful (and, in time, the Jews).

By subordinating law to morality, ignoring the differences that divide men over the great questions of existence, the liberal State born of Enlightenment culture stripped sovereignty of its power.

Henceforth bourgeois morality became the invisible framework of the State, as sovereign authority was changed into an act of persuasion and reason—and the essence of politics (no longer the polemic over fundamental problems of human existence) became the non-political rule of a discursive bourgeoisie indifferent to matters of faith and desirous of a fate-less society without a sovereign State.

As social and political realities were indiscriminately mixed and subjected to the invisible opinion of the bourgeois public, based on an ostensively objective reason, everything failing to accord with that opinion became an injustice, subject to reform.

Society here assumed the right to abrogate whatever laws it wished, inadvertently establishing a reign of permanent revolution.

Refusing to recognize the State’s amoral (rather than immoral) character, the emerging bourgeois political system—with its culpablizing, but “value free” politics and its civil ideal taken as the universal destiny of all humanity—not infrequently had to resort to naked force to realize its Utopia: the terror and mass killings that followed 1789, the nuclear holocaust inherent in the Cold War, the on-going, unrelenting destructuration of the local and global today.

The consequence has been liberalism’s non-political State (whether in its 19th-century guise as a Night Watchman State or in its 20th-century Nanny State form). This State replaced politics with morality, tradition with planning, disagreements with a cold indifference to all that matters. It became thus a legal order, a Rechtsstaat, supposedly unattached to any constituting system of ascription or belief, and thus beyond any “exception” that might make visible the actual basis of bourgeois rule.

In this situation, where politics were negated and political problems were reduced to “organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks,” the world was emptied of “seriousness” and turned into a vast realm of entertainment, where the bourgeois was allowed to enjoy the fruits of his acquisitions.

With liberalism, then, politics ceases to be a destiny and becomes a technique hostile to all who refuse its philistine philosophy of history—for the linear notion of progress inherent in this philosophy undermines and “reforms” everything that has historically ensured the integrity of white life.

Read Part 1 here.

2. The Culture of Critique

It was the failure to comprehend the nature of the Absolutist State system (its avoidance of divisive political questions of faith and belief) that gave rise to the Enlightenment and its culture of critique.

For once the religious wars came to an end and authority was secularized, European society “took off.”

By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, the bourgeoisie, formerly an important but subordinate stratum of medieval European society, had become the chief economic power of an 18th-century society more and more dependent on its economic prowess. Made up of “merchants, bankers, tax lessees, and other businessmen” who had acquired great wealth and social prestige, this rising class (whose deism and materialism took “political” form in liberalism’s scientistic ideology) was nevertheless kept from State power and powerlessly suffered monarchical infringements on its monied wealth.

Resentful of State authority, the intelligentsia of this rising class took its stand in the private moral realm, which the Absolutist State had set aside for the subject and his moral conscience.

Through this breech between the public and the private, the chief ideologue of this rising bourgeoisie, John Locke, would step. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding – “the Holy Scripture of the modern bourgeoisie” — helped blur the boundary between moral and State law, as the former assumed a new authority and the distinction between the two diminished.

Pace Hobbes, Locke argued that bourgeois moral laws (now divorced from religion and anchored in rationalist notions of self-interest devoid of transcendental reference) had arisen in the human conscience, which the State had exempt from interference. As such, the citizen had a right to pass moral judgements on the State.

Such judgements, whatever the motive, eventually made State law dependent on the consent or rejection — the rule, in effect — of the bourgeoisie’s allegedly “objective” opinion.

In this situation, the bourgeois view of virtue and vice — its “religion of technicity” — took on a political charge, superseding the realm of private individual opinion, as it became “public opinion.”

At the same time, bourgeois critics favored the risk-free sphere of the unpolitical private realm, where they sought to dictate policy. Instead, then, of forthrightly challenging the underlying metaphysical principles of the Absolutist order, they framed their defining metaphysical identity (matters of faith — in this case their godless theology) in moral and economic terms devoid of political responsibility.

Bourgeois morality, not the State’s “reason,” proceeded in this way to take hold of the public — society — and set the standard for the “moral value of human action.”

This opened the way to a reconfiguration of the Absolutist relationship between morality and politics.

The public realm in Locke’s bourgeois philosophy was accordingly re-conceived as a social realm of individual consciences and this realm’s opinion as the “law” that was to bind the public.

Bourgeois morality, as such, not only entered, but soon conquered society, as its private views rose to that of public opinion.

Few, moreover, would be able to resist the pressure of its judgment.

“Reasons of State” were henceforth subject to the secular, calculating “reason” of the bourgeoisie — as “reason” ceased to be the avoidance of civil war and became the self-interest of the rationalist acting individual.

This made society increasingly independent of the State, just as State laws were increasingly subject to the “empowering” moral (and economic) judgments of society.

In the course of the 18th century, the bourgeois as citizen would assume, through his culture of critique, the “rank of a supreme tribunal” — ultimately passing judgment on the State (though doing so safely removed from the day-to-day imperatives of the political realm).

In England, following the oh-so Glorious Revolution of 1688 (a terrible, fateful year, with more to follow, in Irish history), the Whig bourgeoisie, through Parliament, became dominant, entering into an alliance with the constitutionally-bound monarch (William of Orange).

On the more religiously polarized continent, where Absolutist States had a greater role to play, the antithesis between State legislation and bourgeois secular morality (rooted in Protestantism’s critical essence) assumed a different, more antagonistic character.

This continental polarization of morals and politics — compounded by the growing social weight of the bourgeoisie and the discontent generated by its political disenfranchisement — grew in the course of the 18th century, as the bourgeoisie increasingly assumed the leadership of “society.”

Its moral critique of the State and of the ancien régime — a critique posed in secular and rationalist, rather than Christian terms — is what is known as the “Enlightenment,” that metapolitical “culture of critique,” whose light allegedly emanated from the bourgeoisie’s rational conscience (which was modeled in many ways on that of the Jews, for it was based on the dictates of money and its unpolitical affirmation of the private).

Read Part 3 here.

La politique, c’est le destin. — Napoleon

Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis (1959) is one of the great dissertations of the 20th-century German university system.

It cast new light not just on the past it re-presented, but on the present, whose own light informed its re-presentation.

This was especially the case with the potentially cataclysmic standoff between American liberalism and Russian Communism and the perspective it gave to Koselleck’s study of the Enlightenment origins of the Modern World.

How was it, he asked, that these two Cold War super-powers seemed bent on turning Europe, especially Germany, into a nuclear wasteland?

The answer, he suspected, had something to do with the moralizing Utopianism of 18th-century rationalism, whose heritage ideologically animated each hegemon.

1. The Absolutist Origins of the Modern State

Koselleck was one of Carl Schmitt’s postwar “students” and his work is indebted to Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938).

Like his mentor, Koselleck saw modern ideologies, despite their atheistic rejection of faith, as forms of “political theology” that spoke to the faith-based heart that decides how one is to live.

In this sense, the self-proclaimed Enlightenment of the 18th century was a philosophical rebuttal to political Absolutism, whose institutional response to the breakdown of medieval Christendom occurred in ways that frustrated the liberal aspirations of the rising bourgeoisie.

In the century-long blood-letting that had followed the Protestant critique of medieval Catholicism, Europe’s ecclesiastical unity and its traditional social supports were everywhere shattered.

As the old estates broke down and old ties and loyalties were severed, there followed a period of anarchy, in which Catholics and Protestants zealously shed each others blood in the name of their contending truths.

In this sectarian strife — this bellum omnium contra omnes — where ecclesiastical authority ceased to exist and each man was thrown back upon his individual conscience, morality became a banner of war and the public observance of morality a justification for murdering Europeans with dissenting beliefs.

It was the advent of the Absolutist State system, philosophically anticipated in Hobbes’ Leviathan, that brought these bloody religious conflicts to a halt, establishing a peaceful basis to European life — by “privatizing” morality, secularizing authority, and depriving individual mentalities of political effect.

The neutralization of religious belief that came with the Absolutist secularization of the State would secure conditions requisite to the citizen’s peaceful pursuit of his private will or gain, as private ideals ceased to be obligatory duties and the State became “the artifact of atomized individuals.”

Absolutist regimes succeeded in this way in “reducing measures of contingency, conflict, and compulsion” to the status of differences of opinion — bare, in effect, of religious significance, as “external compulsion” imposed restraints on the individual’s “inner freedom.”

The historians’ designated Age of Absolutism and Enlightenment begins, then, with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought not just the Thirty Years War in the German-speaking lands, but all Europe’s religious wars to an end (except on the borderlands of Ireland and the Balkans) — and ends only with the advent of another European civil war, which opened with the liberal revolutions of 1776/1789 and closed with the English triumph over Napoleon in 1814.

History, though, rarely conforms to the tidy categories scholars make of it.

Unlike the Continent, England went from religious war to Absolutism and then to bourgeois revolution and finally to a bourgeois Restoration all in the course of a half-century (c. 1642 – 1688), experiencing an intense though only brief period of Absolutism.

England’s expanding maritime power, opened to all the world it dominated, had, in fact, merely a transitional need of Absolutism, for it would soon become the first implicitly liberal of the “modern” regimes.

Koselleck focuses on the longer, more pronounced Continental developments, treating England as a variant of the larger trend.

In his depiction, the Absolutist State system emerging after the Treaty of Westphalia was based on a transformation of political authority — which divided the “public sphere” into two sharply separate domains: That of political authority proper (the sovereign State) and that of society, conceived as a subaltern realm of individual “subjects.”

The subject’s moral conscience in this system was subordinated to the requirements of political necessity — what Hobbes called “reason.”  This restricted morality to the social realm of private opinion, depriving it of political effect.

With Absolutism, the public interest, about which the sovereign alone had the right to decide, ceased to lay under the jurisdiction of the individual’s moral conscience.

The Continent’s new monarchical States — with Louis XIV’s France the model of the others — would govern according to a raison d’état (Staatsräson), which made no reference to religious considerations.

Law here was severed from special interests and religious factions, becoming part of a domain whose political decisions — ideally — transcended “Church, estate, and party.”

“To traditional moral doctrines, [Hobbes] opposes one whose theme is political reason.”

Persecuting churches and religiously bound social fractions were hereby forced to give way to the sovereign authority of the Absolutist monarch, who recognized no higher authority than God Himself.

As Absolutist peace took priority to faith, the individual subject — previously situated in a loose medieval hierarchy, imbued with certain corporate rights and responsibilities — was transformed into an apolitical subject.

He had, as such, to submerge his conscience to reasons of State — to reasons necessary for maintaining the peace.

This privatization of morality dictated by the State’s secularization was not directed against religion per se, but against a religious conscience whose political claims, in a period of general breakdown, threatened war.

What the Absolutist State did — and what Hobbes theoretically legitimated in the Leviathan — was to transform the individual’s conscience into a matter of “opinion,” of subjective belief, separate from politics — and thus from the political reasons of the State.

This was accomplished by making the public interest the prerogative of the sovereign, not that of the individual’s religious conscience, for the latter inevitably led to religious strife.

In this secular political system, State policy and laws became the sole concern of the sovereign monarch, who stood above religion, anchoring his laws not in a higher transcendence, but in State imperatives.

In Hobbes’ famous formulation: “Laws are made by authority, not by truth.”

Hereafter, State policy and laws would be legislated by reasons of State — not the moral conscience and not self-interest and faction.  For the State could fulfill its function of securing peace and maintaining order only if individuals ceded their rights to the sovereign, who was to embody their larger welfare.

Contested issues were thereby reduced to differences of opinion that could be resolved by reasons of State.

Through Absolute sovereignty, it was possible again to create an internal realm of peace, separate from other Absolutist State systems, each of which possessed a similar peaceful interior, where the individual was free to believe whatever he wished as long as no effort was made to impose his “private” belief on the public, whether Catholic or Protestant.

This would keep religious fanaticism from trespassing on domestic tranquility and, at the same time, guarantee the State’s integrity.

Among Absolutist States, relations remained, of course, that of “a state of nature” — for each upheld and pursued policies based on their own rational sense of self-interest (raison d’état).

Conflict and war between Absolutist States were nevertheless minimized — not just by the fact that they accepted the integrity of the other’s moral conscience — but also by a sense of sharing the same Christian civilization, the same standards of significance and style, the same general, interrelated history that distinguished them from non-Europeans.

On this basis, the community of European States after 1648 grew into a family of sovereign powers, each respectful of the others’ domestic integrity, each of whose kings or queens shared the blood of other royal families, each of whose wars with other Europeans was governed by a jus publicum europaeum.

Read Part 2 here.

White nationalists have embarked on a daunting mission, perhaps the most daunting of the last 30,000 years. This mission is to ensure the survival of the white race — the survival of the culture that is its spiritual embodiment and of the unique genotype that is its biological achievement. They bear all this as their mission, along with a seemingly awkward political designation.

For like historic “nationalism,” the notion of “white nationalism”lacks theoretical rigor, even coherence. But what its critics don’t understand is that this distracts not in the least from its significance or truth. The problems associated with its usage tend, in fact, to be less semantic than practical, for it is less a theory or an ideology than a spirit, a heroic sentiment, a movement embodying the will to power of an oppressed people. Just, then, as nationalism’s unclear definition did not prevent it from playing a pivotal role in the last two centuries of world history, for similar reasons white nationalism is likely to play an analogous role in the 21st century.

When I was a child the men I first admired were James Connolly and Patrick Pearse. Working-class Ireland’s most gifted son, Connolly spent a lifetime organizing against the money-grubbing world of the 19th-century bourgeoisie (a world already infused with the Jews’ predatory spirit), along with everything in it that had left working people powerless before the alien interlopers; Pearse, by contrast, was the poet-dreamer, the myth maker, who realized — first in words, then in deeds — that only through a blood sacrifice would Ireland achieve nationhood. These two men, the poet and the worker-warrior, are the fathers of the modern Irish nation and their nationalism is the origin of my white nationalism.

Others have since entered my Pantheon, but Connolly and Pearse continue to occupy a special place. The cause for which they fought — the cause of Holy Mother Ireland and of my own mother, whose homeland I’ve always put before the benighted one of my birth — remains for me the most sacred cause of all. How could it be otherwise? They sacrificed their lives for the most primordial of things: family, freedom, heritage, destiny, duty, courage.

But this Ireland of her bravest sons, it hurts me to write, is once more threatened by an even greater menace that promises to destroy not just the larger civilizational heritage of which she is a part, but the peoples and nations who are her closest blood kin. In this larger sense, I cannot but feel that my family is again under attack, this time not by Albion, but by the race-mixing, spirit-killing forces of the Global Moloch that seeks to reorder the world according to the most debauched criterion of all: the Holy Writ of the Jews, money.

Since 1945 the international forces of subversion — led by the American imperium and supported, backhandedly, in the East by Soviet Communism — have sought to reduce all world politics to the political-economic rivalries of the Cold War blocs. The ensuing ideological polarization entailed not just a united-nation of alliances, but the demotion of traditional authorities, the severance of ties based on blood and history, and the stripping away of genetic interests. Fidelity to the two bloodless political-economic blocs required, thus, the demotion (and ultimately the repression) of national institutions and national sentiment. As the Jewish-American war criminal, General Wesley Clark, put it: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states.”

As might be expected, denationalization went furthest in Germany, where an entire people — whose courage and achievement in asserting their nationalist project were unparalleled in history — was henceforth marked with the sign of Cain. The ethno-suicidal cosmopolitanism that has come to grip the rest of the white homelands is not, though, simply ideological or political in form, but undergirded by free markets and transnational organizations, electronic media and sophisticated conditioning technologies that usurp the sovereignty of the nation-state and erode its historic culture. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, these tendencies have gotten even worse, as the UN, the EU, NAFTA, NATO, the World Bank, the IMF, the International Court of Justice, NGOs, and other globalist organizations encroach on the last vestiges of the nation’s traditional jurisdiction.

As our lives are forced to succumb to Washington’s anti-white dominion, principles of cosmopolitanism and universalism, economism, rootlessness, and egalitarian homogenization, all premised on an implicit hatred of white life, dictate a totalitarian reorganization of our world. For only by leveling everything down, uprooting Europe’s historic nations, standardizing its cultures, and dominating its institutions can whites be properly “herded, milked, sheared, and slaughtered” in the interests of the system’s pecuniary appetites. The final stage of this subversion has already gotten underway, as the bearers of our race and culture try to survive the demographic tsunami of millions and millions of invading Third Worlders, who are to provide the coolie labor, the indiscriminate materialism, and the thoughtless beliefs upon which America’s Judeo-oligarchy depends.

Historically, white nationalism grew out of what Yockey called the 19th century’s petty-state nationalism. This nationalism was itself an outgrowth of earlier, more localized allegiances, as kinsman and clansmen grew into the men of Cork and Connacht, and then, in the modern period, into Irishmen (not unlike the way Bretons and Gascons, Alsatians and Burgundians arose from earlier formations to become Frenchmen; or Swabians, Rhinelanders, and Prussians became Germans).

The loyalties and affections rooted in these earlier attachments no longer, though, influence the state, which has distanced itself from all notion of national allegiance and especially from the people that once were its flesh and spirit.

In a globalized world, where capital, goods, and colored peoples constantly move into and through our lands and where the political system is increasingly less autonomous and less national, “we Irish” need to rethink the idea of nationality. For to defend our homelands from the new invaders, it is necessary today to stand with Germans, Slavs, Latins, even (maybe especially) Englishmen to form a bulwark against the anti-white forces threatening us.

Given, therefore, that the nation-state has been supplanted by a bloodless economy-driven system oriented to the oligarchs’ transnational agenda and that the existence of the white race-nation is now endangered, national struggle is obliged to follow the globalizing process and assume a posture appropriate to it. In the largest scheme, this means that nationalists must defend not merely their immediate family, but their great family, the one born of the seven daughters of Eve, comprising the descendants of the Cro Magnons and the Aryans who inhabited the Western, North Mediterranean, East European, and Trans-Siberian regions of primordial Eurasia. If they fail to do so, if they let the narrower national concerns that occupied them in the past turn them away from the bio-civilizational pincers set in motion by the Judeo-oligarchic powers, if they don’t form the most solid and impenetrable front against the invaders and their domestic agents, they will cease to have a future, either as Irishmen or white men.

Kathleen ni Houlihan, Marianne, John Bull, and Saint Vladimir may still hold special meaning for us, but our political loyalties can no longer belong solely to those of the people or nation closest to us: the lion’s share of our loyalties must henceforth go to the race, the Borean race, that is our great mother and that groups us in ways that unite us against the enemies of our spirit and unique genetic heritage. This sort of racial nationalism clashes, of course, with the inertia of earlier nationalisms and entails the development of a new consciousness and identity. A white nationalist identity and consciousness are, though, already implicit in who we are. Indeed, it is the traditional attachments that come from family, community, province, and nation that undergird our larger attachments to the white race.

For in an age when national borders have been breached and the state no longer serves the nation, the nationalist slogan of Irishmen, Frenchmen, Americans, and all peoples of European descent can only be: OUR RACE IS OUR NATION. The provincial identities and local communities that constituted the major part of the historic nation’s background are in no way denied or demoted in this, for they too constitute a major part of the meta-nation’s background. White nationalists may therefore differ with their forefathers in the scale, scope and nature of the tasks they set for themselves, but they too fight for the survival and rebirth of their people. In this elementary sense, the struggle they wage against the genocidal forces threatening them is simply an extension of their ancestors’ struggle, though one taken to the higher stage dictated by contemporary international developments.

What, finally, is this “nation”? The best definition in my view is that of Walker Connor: “the largest grouping characterized by a myth of common ancestry.” This definition implies a genetically-specific line of descent and a “community of destiny.” It is essentially a racial definition. Magnified and adapted to the global age, this definition is no less applicable to the white nationalist concept of race. (It seems hardly coincidental that the word “race” was once synonymous with “nation.”)

In its ethno-historical manifestation, historic nationalism divided the world into nations, each with a distinct character and destiny; it made national loyalty primary; and it championed the nation’s self-realization and autonomy. White nationalists see the world in an analogous way, insofar as they see it divided into distinct and competing races, make loyalty to the white race their foremost concern, and seek to enhance the freedom, unity, and identity of white people worldwide (which implies, among other things, separation from other races and cultures). The race-nation of white nationalists is thus that species of man whose genetically-related peoples were the first to occupy the northern and western extremities of the Eurasian landmass, whose root languages were Latin and Greek and before that proto-Indo-European, and whose cultural legacy stems from Ancient Greece and Rome and from what Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and other European peoples brought to it.

Historic and white nationalists also share a kindred fate. Earlier forms of nationalisms arose from small bands of poets and dreamers whose nature enabled them to see beyond the multitude of common daily concerns to discern the collective dictates of their people’s destiny. Rarely were their initial reception anything other than one of scorn and ridicule. But their dreams and poems spoke to First Things. In time, especially times of crisis, when state and society grew alienated and it became possible to glimpse certain, usually veiled realities, others flocked to their ranks. Racial nationalists who uphold their race’s 30,000 year old heritage are likewise scorned and ridiculed. All the considerable forces of the existing system of subversion, in fact, are ready, if need be, to be arrayed against them. While the incommensurability of the opposed camps indicates the severe disparity of the struggle, it neither refutes the justice of the nationalist cause nor its inevitability. This also was the way it was for historic nationalism.

When Pearse and Connolly seized the GPO on Easter Monday 1916 no one thought these dreamers, supported by a few hundred, then a few thousand armed men, had a chance of defeating the British Empire. But these skeptics were wrong. The empire rested on a bloodless cosmopolitanism, was obsessed with a low-minded materialism, and beholden to liberal values, all of which made it no match for a nation violently awakened to its destiny.

Everything in this transitional period may stand against the cause of white nationalism, but the weight of history, culture, and nature nevertheless conspires in its favor. Given, then, that it upholds the most primordial interests of white people in a period when whites faces extinction, that it opposes a system favoring the miscegenation and ultimate destruction of the white race, and that it is indeed the only alternative to extinction — for all these reasons, the white nationalist movement, no matter how meager its present ranks, is likely to play the leading role in the struggles of fire and steel that lie ahead.

In the United States, the closest thing to Europe’s “new revolutionary nationalism” — which designates liberalism’s cosmopolitan plutocracy as Europe’s chief enemy, resists the de-Europeanization of its capital, population, and territory, and identifies with a biocultural vision of Magna Europa rather than the 19th-century nation-state — is “White nationalism.” Though a marginal force on the American political scene (theoretically deficient, fragmented into scores of tiny organizations, and with a greater presence in cyberspace than in the public sphere), it nevertheless wages the same fight as its European counterpart and, on the most decisive issue, race, is considerably more advanced. In this spirit, it takes its stand with the “Old America” that is the counter-part to Bush’s “Old Europe,” it considers its people part of Europe’s biosphere, and opposes not just the present Hebraisized administration in Washington, but the anti-White impetus of “the American century.”

Fundamental to White nationalism is the understanding that, historically, America was not a melting pot, but a settler nation: hence a European transplant. Its original settlers (all of whom were Protestant, but not exclusively Puritan or Calvinist) may have had an ambivalent attitude to the Europe they left behind, but they had no intention of shedding their European being for the sake of mixing with races and cultures unlike their own. Their identity as such was rooted in distinctly European life forms, which were opposed to those of the country’s aboriginals and to its imported Black slaves. Specifically, this identity was an Anglo-Protestant one adapted to the nativist environment of colonial America. At the time of the revolution, 80 percent of the population was of Anglo-Protestant descent. Of the remaining 20 percent, most were Dutch, German, and Swede, all of whom were Protestant and easily assimilated into the original core population. Only one percent of its people, mainly of French Canadian and Irish origin, was Catholic. The country’s institutions were accordingly reflective of the values and beliefs of its transplanted Anglo-Protestant settlers, just as the state’s republican ideology and the producerist ideology of its popular classes were in harmony with its specific ethnic disposition.

At the time of revolution, the country’s national identity was still an embryonic one. The loyalties of the revolutionary generation were more to the individual colonies that had become states, such as Virginia and Massachusetts, than to the federal republic established in 1789. But despite the absence of a strong state, informed by tradition and aristocracy, the American polity was not simply the cultureless, economic enterprise that certain Nouvelles Droitistes make it out to be and it was certainly not the “nation of nations,” “the first universal nation,” or “the proposition nation” that our virtualist-minded anti-White elites insist on.

Even in this early period there existed an American national identity, buttressed by several hundred years of history; and by the development of specifically American institutions based on instincts of racial superiority and self-reliance; by conflicts with the British crown, which caused its people to see itself as a transplanted nation of Anglo-Protestant descent (though one imbued with freedoms Englishmen had allegedly lost during the Norman Conquest); but above all by an ethnic or biocultural identity rooted in the North European, specifically British (that is, Celt, Norse, and Saxon) stocks of the country’s settlers. America, thus, may have lacked Europe’s ancient genealogy, cultural legacy, rooted, territorial sense, and distinct ethnic consciousness, but its people spoke a European language, practiced a European religion, had a history informed by European symbols and themes, represented a fusion of European racial stocks, and felt their North European identity to be the defining part of their individual and collective identity. Until quite recently, as Jared Taylor argues, “America was a self consciously European, majority-white nation.”

Accordingly, the Americanized Englishmen who declared their political independence in the late 18th century did not simultaneously declare their autonomy from Europe’s ethnoracial identity. The liberal ideals of the revolutionary generation, in any case, were soon superseded by a Romantic emphasis on the particularisms and “special inner characteristics” of its people — a Romanticism that betrayed the new republic’s rationalist or Enlightenment premises. To these Indian-fighters, slavers, borderland Celts, and Texas revolutionaries, whose physical proximity to non-Whites had a powerful effect in enhancing their racial identity, it was obvious that the world’s peoples lacked the innate capacity to share in “the free government, power, and prosperity of the United States.”

What Tocqueville called the “Anglo-Americans” had not the slightest intention of extending their liberties to Indians or negroes, nor even to those Whitemen whose (Catholic) religion and (Irish clannish) temperament seemed to disqualify them for republican government. America’s founding liberal principles were, in fact, little more than the ideological gloss of the country’s Anglo-Protestant life forms. Despite the Calvinist conceit of believing itself “chosen,” America’s political principles had universal import only in the most vacuous theoretical sense. For example, the Puritan vision of America was less a call to world reform than an affirmation of its uniqueness and superiority. And though the principles of American republicanism have since been re-interpreted to justify the present de-Europeanization, this was neither the intention of the Founders nor that of the country’s settlers, for their republic was preeminently a Herrenvolk democracy — germane not to humanity, but to the “historical humanity” that was White America. In this vein, the US Constitution, which contemporary liberals have re-interpreted for the sake of their multiracial utopia, defended the institution of slavery and posited that a Black’s worth was only 60 percent of a White. The first Congress (1790) voted that only Whites could be naturalized as citizens. And even after the Civil War, the granting of basic civil rights to former negro slaves, as Sam Francis points out, had “nothing to do with voting, holding political office, sitting on juries, intermarriage, getting a job or being promoted . . . which is what civil rights have come to mean today.”

White immigrants were assimilated into the founding stock only after they (or their children) shed the cultural-linguistic identities that separated them from native Whites. As late as the Kennedy Administration (1960), the nationally conscious Irish, the first immigrant group, were still not fully assimilated. The so-called “melting pot” (a 20th-century concept invented by a cosmopolitan “Englishmen,” Israel Zangwill) was similarly selective, accepting only White immigrants as possible Americans (though it did mistakenly think that Jews from European countries were European). Moreover, this racially defined identity was the legacy of both the popular classes and the country’s ruling elites. For example, Thomas Jefferson, who in a fit of Enlightenment enthusiasm included the phase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, never — not for a moment — thought of extending equal rights to negroes; Abraham Lincoln, the two faced Whig pioneer of the liberal leviathan, wanted to repatriate Blacks back to Africa; and the great liberal crusader, Woodrow Wilson, was an ardent segregationist who thought his cherished “democracy” inappropriate to all but Whites. Until the postwar period, White Americans of virtually every class and denomination saw themselves not as an amalgam of humanity, but as an American nativist variant of Europe’s white Christian nations. The racial vision of America which White nationalists today defend against the anti-European regimes in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv was actually the prevailing vision for most Americans for most of their history.

The racially selective character of America’s republican, and especially egalitarian, rhetoric, was indisputably evident in the country’s enslavement of negroes, its extermination and/or ethnic cleansing of the aboriginal population, its territorial expansion at the expense of mestizo Mexico, and its effort to prevent Chinese and Japanese immigration. Its racial identity was so deeply rooted in the emerging national consciousness that it imbued Anglo-Americans with the confidence to assimilate different White ethnicities.

In the latter half of the 19th century, as European immigration and intermarriage demoted the prevalence of the British elements and the reigning spirit of American Anglo-Saxonism diminished the immigrants’ attachment to their past, American identity gradually extended beyond its original Anglo-Protestant core to become a European-American Christian identity. Race as such remained primary, for only on the basis of the immigrants’ racial compatibility with Anglo-Americans were they able to assimilate. The later advent of Black nationalism, as Walker Connor argues, testifies to the fact that American nationalism has always been a White nationalism. By the same token, the state’s new-found multicultural ideology inadvertently acknowledges that the historical forms of American identity are incompatible with non-European races and cultures.

From the time of the revolution until the beginning of the Civil Rights revolution (1956), American nationality was articulated almost exclusively in terms of three mutually reinforcing influences: an Anglo-European racial identity, Protestantism, and republicanism. The latter, it needs stressing, owed less to 18th-century liberalism than to the character of Anglo American society, whose small proprietors and farmers defined themselves in terms of self-sufficiency, relative equality, and self-rule.

Though the corporate capitalism and New Class managerialism today stifling this self-sufficiency grew out of the country’s liberal postulates, this was only one (however consequential) of its manifestations, for Anglo Protestant culture also nurtured a conservative, traditionalist, and authoritarian dimension opposed to much of what presently passes for “Americanism,” (just as the feminist, homophile, and ethnomasochistic beliefs of today’s mainstream Protestant denominations would have shocked earlier generations of Protestants). The Reformation heresies that prompted America’s Low Church settlers to accept the Bible’s inerrancy and uphold a literal interpretation of scripture also compelled them to spurn the behavioral, moral, and social principles of a purely materialist society of individualist gratification. Though this type of Protestantism engendered (or expressed) that “spirit of independence, self-reliance, and freedom” which accompanied the rise of capitalism in Northern European and today encourages the cosmopolitan nihilism of the existing order, at the same time its original impetus rejected an indifferent, massifying capitalism destructive of community and morality. In this spirit, it upheld hierarchy, authority, and tradition, opposed modern feudalism (corporate capitalism) and its verso, mob democracy (Communism), privileged the centrality of family, community, and mutuality, and cultivated behaviors and social structures supportive of a communally responsible rather than an atomized individuality.

In a conscious effort to re-engineer the character of the American people, the ruling Judeo-oligarchy has re-christened the republican component of traditional American identity the “American Creed” and made it the sole legitimate basis of American nationality — as if being an American were merely a matter of subscribing to a certain liberal beliefs. Divested of its racial-cultural grounding, and the political responsibilities it once entailed, the liberal, cosmopolitan, and globalist implications of this so-called creed is now used to legitimate the multiracial pluralism that presently assaults the nation’s European heritage. For at least the last two generations, the country’s elites have waged a merciless war on the ethnonational interests of America’s Whites, who are treated with “mingled scorn and apprehension” for hampering the country’s transformation into an economically efficient Brazil.

But if America for racial nationalists is preeminently a European country, it is — admittedly — ”also something less than Europe. As a settler nation, America was founded and remains, to use Georges Dumezil’s term, a country of the “Third Function.” Lacking the warrior and priestly functions of its motherland and centered on the productive/reproductive activities of the lowest order, the American people traditionally immersed themselves in economic and mundane activities devoid of High Cultural possibility. It would be exaggerated, though, to claim, as certain Europeans have, that this emphasis on economics (with its accompanying values of hard work, self reliance, and technical efficiency) made Americans somehow un-European. A middle-class country of the Third Function, America materialistically thrived in the technoeconomic realm. This may have left its culturally-impoverished society of self-made men something less than Europe — but hardly un-European.

While the country’s economic and materialist passions rendered its people vulnerable to the machinations of plutocrats and monopolists, bankers and corporative barons, and, above all, Jewish peddlers and illusionists, this, alas, has been the fate of White people worldwide. In America’s defense it should be emphasized that until the postwar era, when the state and the dominant institutions fell into the hands of corporate managers, social engineers, and alien interests, its popular history was very much a history of struggle against the great economic powers, as these powers endeavored to subordinate the nation to those systemic imperatives threatening the economic self-sufficiency and biocultural identity of its large middle class. This is evident in the history of: Jacksonian producerism, the nativism of the 1840s and ’50s, the Confederate insurgency of the 1860s, the struggle against Chinese immigration in California in the 1870s, the populist revolt of Midwestern and Southern farmers in the 1880s and ’90s, the bitter labor wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rise of the Second Klan in the 1920s, Father Coughlin’s Social Justice movement in the 1930s, etc.

Though lacking an established church and an aristocracy (the First and Second Functions), even here the European racial spirit influenced the formation of the American nation. The yeoman farmers making up the ranks of the Minute Men who bloodied Britain’s imperial troops at Lexington and Concord, the gentlemen warriors like Nathanael Greene, Anthony Wayne, and George Washington who led the revolutionary armies, the Anglo-Celtic frontiersmen and colonists of the Texas Revolution who triumph over massively larger Mexican forces, the gallant Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, even George Patton of World War Two fame, all these figures stand in the tradition of European arms and are tributes not just to America, but to the warrior spirit of their ancestral homeland. Moreover, whatever High Culture Americans have known has been European. Disneyland may be the contemporary emblem of America’s Culture Industry, but its relationship to American life is as contrived as is Hollywood’s. The composers, philosophers, and great artists animating the higher reaches of American life have always been European. The few great men of literary stature they have produced– Edgar Allen Poe, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henry James, Jack London, William Faulkner — belong to Europe’s Pantheon and are recognized as such. Only an intellectual sleight of hand can justify the argument that the American people are not an organic (however culturally hybrid) expression of Europe’s life-world.

Perhaps more to the point, the growth of the American republic ought to be seen as one of the great feats of modern history, for, from its origins as a small outpost on the outer edge of Western Civilization, it grew, in a remarkably short period, into a great power. Given the prominence of its Third Function, much of course was lost in this process, for America lacked the depths of its motherland, retained a weak grasp of history and tradition, and never developed a political class capable of sustaining its political ideals. Yet beyond the shallow, often philistine character this cultural paucity imparted to American life, the European settlement of North America represented an unprecedented manifestation of Nietzsche’s will to power — an untamed life force — that had transformed a vast wilderness into a flourishing extension of the European life world.

Against those transatlantic critics whose grand pronouncements are based on their familiarity with Los Angeles or New York (both of which have ceased to be American cities), it needs stressing that no White nationalist fails to honor Europe or to distinguish himself from its heirs. His opposition to the New Class, war-mongering, and Zionist hegemonism of the country’s deracinated elites stems, in fact, from his commitment to Europe’s biocultural heritage. This heritage, as such, informs virtually every significant facet of the country’s racial nationalism. On the broad historical contours of this heritage, see my essays “Klansmen, Irishmen, and Nativists: The Origins of Racial Nationalism in America” and “White Nationalism and Historic Nationalism.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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