Julius Evola

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Brussels Journal, March 29, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georges Valois, 1878–1945

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thierry Maulnier, 1908–1988

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J. R. R. Tolkein, 1892 - 1973

Despite the universal derision of the literary establishment, which could never comprehend its inherently noble spirit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was recently voted the greatest work of fiction of the twentieth century by thousands of Waterstones’ customers. The accolade is well-deserved, for Tolkien’s masterpiece is a classic of heroic romance. Drawing inspiration from traditional European mythology and from his love for the English countryside, Tolkien created an imaginary world and invented mythology which have proved timeless in their appeal.

First published in 1956, Tolkien’s Ring Saga is composed of three books, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. Although the late Walt Disney planned to produce a grand, animated film of the entire trilogy, which would probably have done the mammoth work justice, the film rights were unfortunately acquired by a hyphenated ‘Hungarian’ film producer. He tore the story to ribbons and totally lost the plot, even portraying Tolkien’s white Elvish tribes as Mexicans with Oriental features. It seems that a worthwhile film version of the great work will therefore have to wait until the political victory of British Nationalism unleashes a fresh wave of culturally sound artistic energy. [This essay was written before Peter Jackson directed his The Lord of the Rings movies.--Ed.]  In the meantime, fortunately, we still have the books.

National Myth

John Ronald Reul Tolkien, ex-soldier, expert philologist and Professor of Anglo-Saxon by the time he was just 33, claimed that he wrote his novels to fulfill an inner desire to “create a myth for England.” To that end he constructed a highly complex and intricate world of his own, modeled somewhat on Northern mythology and Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen. The fantasy world, Middle Earth, was inhabited by various races of men, elves, dwarfs, Orcs, goblins, trolls, and Hobbits. The author devised complete alphabets and languages, such as ‘Elvish’, created calendars, and drew detailed maps of the various kingdoms and homelands of Middle Earth.

Although Tolkien disliked allegory, his Middle Earth is in many ways like our own, and ethnic realities play an important part in the lives of its inhabitants. For instance, the Numenoreans were an aristocratic race of men, “. . . fair of face and tall, and the span of their lives was thrice that of other men of Middle Earth. These were the Numenoreans, the Kings of Men, whom the Elves called the Dunedain.”

But three great evils endangered the Numenorians: plague; invasions by hordes of alien Wainriders from the lands of the East; and racial intermixture:

After the return of Eldacar, the blood of the kingly house and other houses of the Dunedain became more mingled with that of lesser men. For many of the great had been slain in the Kin-strife. This mingling did not at first hasten the waning of the Dunedain, as had been feared, but the waning still proceeded, little by little, as it had before . . .

For the high men of Gondor already looked askance at the men among them, and it was a thing unheard of before that the heir of the crown, or any son of the King, should wed one of lesser and alien race . . .

Now the descendants of the kings had become few. Their numbers had been greatly diminished in the Kin-strife . . . while others had renounced their lineage and taken wives not of Numenorean blood. So it was that no claimant to the crown could be found who was of pure blood . . .  and all feared the memory of the Kin-strife, knowing that if any such dissension arose again, then Gondor would perish.

Comparable to the advanced, highly gifted and intelligent European peoples in our own world, the Dunedain were great pioneers, administrators, leaders and empire-builders, despite making up only small proportion of the total population of Middle Earth:

All told, the Dunedain were thus from the beginning far fewer in number than the lesser men among whom they dwelt and whom they ruled, being lords of long life and great power and wisdom.

Yet the Dunedain’s special qualities and attributes were gradually lost over years of degeneracy, diluted and bred out by mixing with other types, so that their nobility and longevity, bestowed upon them by their Creator, the ‘All-father of the Universe’, was brought down to the level of their inferiors.

Evil

The “evil of mixing,” as Tolkien describes it, is a major theme of his writing, and is naturally of much interest to those who wish to see the various racial groups of humanity preserved, rather than being destroyed forever through the intermingling of blood.

As he wrote his epic, Tolkien would mail out each completed chapter to his son, Christopher, who was serving in the RAF in South Africa between 1944 – 1950. Coincidentally, this was at precisely the time when that self-governing Dominion of the British Empire was instituting a policy of separate development for different racial groups.

In total contrast to the Numenorians, Northmen, Elves, Hobbits, and Dwarfs are the Orcs, a green skinned, ignorant race of giant goblins who, according to Tolkien, spoke ‘snaga-speech’.

Orc is the form of the name that other races had for this foul people, as it was in the language of Rohan. The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power in the North in the Elder Days. It is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues, and perverted it to their own liking, yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse. And these creatures, being filled with malice, hating even their own kind, quickly developed as many barbarous dialects as there were groups or settlements of their race, so that their Orkish speech was of little use to them in intercourse between different tribes.

The Orcs were generally shambling, clumsy brutes, savages created by the sorcerers Margoth and the Dark Lord, Sauron, as war fodder. They were needed to help him to gather the Rings of Power, the means by which he would be able to bring about an evil world empire, and the enslavement of all the peoples of Middle Earth.

Usury and Manipulation

Tolkien’s last book, The Silmarillion, published in the 1970s, took this theme even further. Universally panned by the literary world, it tells of an evil, scheming, underground race, which lurks in the shadows, operates usury, dabbles in necromancy and hordes gold and jewels, manipulating events from behind the scenes.

Though civilization, freedom, life, honor, and beauty seem doomed by the evil forces arrayed against the ‘White Council’ of Aragorn and Gondor in The Lord of the Rings, the mannish, dwarvish, and elvish armies finally turn the tide with a famous victory at The Battle of Pelennor Fields:

East rode the knights of Dol Amroth, driving the enemy before them: troll-men and Variags, and orcs that hated the sunlight. South strode Eomer . . . and they were caught between the hammer and the anvil. For now men leapt from the ships to the quays of the Harlond and swept north like a storm . . . . But before all went Aragorn with the Flame of the West, Anduril, like a new fire kindled . . . .

Hard fighting and long labor they had still, for the Southrons were bold men and grim, and fierce in despair, and the Easterlings were strong and war-hardened and asked for no quarter. And so in this place and that, by burned homestead or barn, upon hillock or mound, under wall or on field, still they gathered and rallied and fought until the day wore away.

Then the Sun went at last behind Mindolluin and filled all the sky with a great burning, so that the hills and the mountains were dyed as with blood; fired glowed in the river, and the grass of the Pelennor lay red in the nightfall. And in that hour the great Battle of the Field of Gondor was over, and not one living foe was left within the circuit of the Rammas. All were slain, save those who fled to die, or to drown in the red foam of the river.

This is the first victory for the armies of the White Council in a very long war. The men of Middle Earth want only to live in peace and plenty among their womenfolk, families, and loved ones, yet they fully realize that it is their sacred duty to take up arms against an enemy who seeks to enslave them. Their war is heroic and just: the pale-skinned mannish, elvish, and dwarfish allies are never cruel or mistreat their prisoners, unlike the Orcs, who think nothing of beheading prisoners for fun.

The fate of a warrior is in his own hands. Wielding his sword and shield he has at least a chance to live, or die, through his own fighting prowess.

It is clear from Tolkien’s personal diaries that he deeply detested modern warfare, especially the aerial mass bombing of civilians in Britain and Germany during World War Two. He regarded the dropping of bombs on defenseless babies, women, and old men from thousands of feet above the ground, by those who could not see the devastation they wrought, as repugnant and uncivilized, unworthy of European civilization.

British patriot

Tolkien was no pacifist, but he believed that British soldiers should only be called to fight for Britain and her Empire, not in foreign quarrels which were none of our business. The hypocrisy of declaring war upon Nazi Germany, but not on Bolshevik Russia, which had also invaded Poland in 1939, was not lost on Tolkien. Like another British literary genius of the Thirties, Tarka the Otter author Henry Williamson, he believed in 1939 that another fratricidal war between European nations would be a “total disaster.” Later in his life he described the bloody conflict which followed as “five years of darkness.”

In the foreword to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote that:

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead . . . . The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in the days when motor cars were rare objects.

Parallel to his dislike of modern, impersonal warfare, Tolkien increasingly began to reject and actively oppose the encroachment of mechanization, automation and the urbanization of traditional country life. He was one of the first pro-countryside campaigners!

Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favorite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skillful with tools.

Tolkien’s vision was of a Britain of family farms, villages, and small towns, with cities of traditional architecture, where scientists would develop the power of technology, producing new sources of energy which did not pollute the environment. Undoubtedly, he would have been horrified by the extent of urban over-development on greenfield sites today.

Nobility and freedom

There is much with which nationalists can identify in J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings: the nobility of ancient and self-reliant peoples; the neighborliness, comradeship, and community spirit of The Shire, with its clean air and green landscape; the heroic life or death struggle for a great cause, between the forces of light, freedom, and racial survival, against the conspiracy of corruption and tyranny.

Tolkien undoubtedly lit a beacon of inspiration in the imagination and hearts of many of his fellow Britons, and indeed among kindred folk worldwide. The Lord of the Rings in particular continues to touch a nerve deep in our racial psyche, which clearly worries the twisted champions of genocide through integration. Any popular literature which has ethnic identity, and the necessity of struggle to protect it, as its theme must inevitably arouse the hostility of the cosmopolitan arts and literary critics network, just as it must deserve our attention.

Tolkien’s healthy, moral and idealistic tales of valour and truth therefore make particularly good Christmas and birthday presents for the children of nationalist families. The Hobbit is ideal for younger children, while The Lord of the Rings will delight teenagers and adults alike. Here there is no perversion, no degeneracy, and no political correctness. Take a look for yourself!

From Spearhead, July 1998

Author’s Note:

One.

The starting point for all discussions of white preservation must begin with the realization that we have entered an Interregnum, a period of unprecedented danger during which we are destined to experience a great transformation.  The most conspicuous sign of this came in November 2008, with the advent of the blackest night, symbol not of sleep but of death.

The question that now faces us is: Will it be our death as a people or the death in us of all those things that have led to this most desperate stage of our history?

Two.

The historical antecedents of white nationalism are many: Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party, the First and Second Klans, various state’s rights and segregationist movements of the 1940s and ’50s, perhaps George Wallace’s American Independent Party, as well as a horde of smaller, more sectarian organizations.

For the past generation, however, the racialist movement defending our way of life has ceased to be political and become largely a race-realist affair — which was to be expected, given that the race realists presently dominating white discourse are the heirs of the prewar “scientific racists,” who saw their task in essentially educational terms.

Three.

Scientific racists in the early twentieth century indeed played an important intellectual role in defending the existing system of racial relations.

But that role bears no relationship to the one facing white Americans in this period, however much race realism remains a crucial part of the white-nationalist arsenal.

Then, when scientific racists commanded the center stage of public opinion, America was still a white man’s country, it had a well delineated color line, an established racial hierarchy (which most whites unconsciously accepted), and twice it succeeded in imposing immigration restrictions on a reluctant government (against Asians in the early 1880s and against non-”Nordics” between 1921 and ’24).

In this context, scientific racists — who came mainly from the upper classes and were often academics or intellectuals — merely needed to popularize their findings to defend the pro-white status quo.

Today, their race realist successors have continued in this tradition, trying to re-educate whites in the knowledge of what their great grandparents once knew.

This knowledge, moreover, is mainly of a scientific kind and aimed primarily at informing elites and influencing public policy — typical Enlightenment forms of metapolitics.  Not coincidentally, such metapolitics accepts the liberal supposition that man’s world revolves around the objectively-defined self-interest of rational individuals, whose identities are rooted in materialist considerations rather than in the infinitely less quantifiable ones of history, culture, and kin.

Four.

As Rome burns, the question inevitably arises of how reasonable it is to continue writing cookbooks amidst the flames devouring us.  This, though, is what race realists will end up doing if our racially conscious community does not soon break with its naive scientism and assume the shape of a political-metapolitical front to represent the higher collective interests of European America.

Five.

Since state policy has turned against white Americans and come to pose a direct threat to their continuity, our tasks today is a matter of ensuring our collective survival as a people, which means it is a matter of forming organizations and movements to struggle on our behalf.

Six.

To this end, white nationalists will need to break with the exclusively academic/scientific orientation of race realists and start building a nationalist vanguard to lead their people.  The question is: How?

This is the question that needs to be addressed and addressed not as an epistemological issue (i.e., as an issue of knowledge), but politically, culturally, socially, and in other ways that intersect our experiences in the  world.

Seven.

Science (which too is infused with myth and ideology) is for academic debate, myth and ideology are for popular social movements.  There is, though, no hard and fast division between them.  Those seeking to make the epistemological difference between them primary seem not fully conscious of the great historical tasks facing white men in the twenty-first century, just as their dismissal of popular political mobilizations as a “misty and idealistic totemism” seems to reflect the typical liberal propensity to avoid engagements that might involve them in real world activity.

Context here is all important.  If I need a cancerous growth removed from my body, I’m not going to have a student of myth do it, just as if I want to learn about José Antonio Primo de Rivera, I would prefer to ask a Spanish historian rather than a geneticist.

Similarly, if I want to build a nationalist movement, I know it’s going to take something more than the virtues of Frank Salter to convince whites to abandon their individualistic and materialistic lives (which, incidentally, are usually led under the sign of self-interest) — it will take something bigger and grander that touches them at the core of their being.

That something can only be found in myth, culture, history, and blood — in all those things that transcend the individual, that link him to a higher destiny, and that refuse the safe, sanitized detachment of modernity’s privatized realm.

Eight.

Myth is not “mystification,” even if our naive empiricists assume it to be; it is simply another way (and at times a more powerful way) of apprehending and communicating a truth.

In one situation it is obviously appropriate, in another situation science is.

A mythic figure like Jeanne d’Arc touches a Frenchman more profoundly than the vast intellectual heritage of Cartesianism because St. Joan evokes a hundred defining emotions lodged in a Frenchman’s heart, doing so in ways that the elegant, yet bloodless postulates of Descartes’ scientific rationalism cannot.

The Cartesians’ powerful heritage is not, as a consequence, unimportant to France; it simply has little role to play in defending the nation from those who seek its destruction.  Relatedly, in the numerous assertions of France’s nationalist movement, St. Joan is omnipresent because of all she represents, while Descartes rarely has anything to add, except perhaps in keeping debates at the conceptual level orderly and logical.

If you want, then, to engage in discussions about race and racial differences, you bring in the geneticists and Darwinists.  But if you want to build a nationalist movement to ensure the continuity of white America, you appeal to Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, to the Battle of the Alamo and Kearney’s Workingmen, to the Stars and Bars and the sustaining voices of those quintessential representatives of America’s white culture, the Carter family.

Those who think that IQ, JQ, EGI, GSS, HBD, etc., are somehow more important in mobilizing a people than appeals to their spirit or destiny do not seem to know, “empiricists” that they claim to be, anything of history, especially the history of the nationalist and labor movements that shaped much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A preference for scientific demonstration rather than political mobilization is, moreover, the strategy of middle-class intellectuals, whose world is defined by the classroom, the computer monitor, and tedious faculty meetings.  Political appeals to a people’s cultural and mythic paradigms, on the other hand, are the meat and drink of militants who associate with workers and soldiers, organize local cells and demonstrations, and, when the time comes, raise barricades in the street — to defend their neighborhood from marauders, or perhaps to do what used to be done, in front of Paris’ Hôtel de Ville.

Nine.

The world is not a debating society.

It’s hardly coincidental that Carl Schmitt characterized the liberal, whose ideology distorts his perception of the real, as someone who thinks debate alone in politics suffices.

The politics of the friend/enemy dichotomy is accordingly irrelevant to the liberal, who prefers to reason with the enemy, as he tries to buy him off.

Life/Death, Friend/Enemy: This primordial polarization poses the great political question — the question that brings us to the point where we are compelled to ask ourselves: How are we going to defeat the enemy who threatens our existence?

Contrary to the contention of certain cyber pundits, this is not a matter of deciding who is more intelligent or who commits the most crimes. My commitment to the white nation wouldn’t change even if we were the least intelligent of the races or the most criminally prone.

To defeat the enemy is, rather, a question of deciding what political options are available to us: Will it be a Great Trek to a new homeland; will it be a matter of reviving the heritage of the Borderland Celts, who settled the Indian-occupied frontier and defended the Alamo with rifle in hand; will it involve parliamentary or extraparliamentary actions that mobilize our people; or will it simply be a waiting game, to see how well we can prepare ourselves for the coming crash, when the wolves will be allowed into the very bosom of the city.

Who knows what course awaits us?

The one thing, though, that I hope we can all agree on at this point is the importance of making ourselves ready — by being as independent as possible, by keeping in good physical and mental shape, by ensuring that we are well-located, by knowing who we are and what we stand for — but above all by doing something, anything, in the real world to prefigure what will become the White Nation.

Very little of this, I’m afraid, will have anything to do with marshaling evidence from biological texts — that’s a diversion better left to the liberal modernity whose racial horrors we seek to escape.

I don’t see how this in anyway undermines O’Meara’s position. If the reigning liberal understanding of human nature is ultimately exposed as an elaborate myth, which it most certainly is, then that would only provide further evidence of the power of mythization in Western culture. The Left will respond to the new science by either (1) attempting to suppress its findings (as in the case of sociobiology) or (2) adapting the facts to service their own narrative. The Right (in all of its manifestations) will act in the same opportunistic way.

There is an element of self-deception involved in presenting old fashioned British nationalism as  based on the latest cutting edge developments in neuroscience, sociobiology or political theory. Like any other version of nationalism, the mythic ideal (and the discourse surrounding it) existed long before Salterism and the like appeared on the scene. The heartfelt desire of British nationalists to return to traditional mores really isn’t based on any collection of data points.

I don’t think there is a scientific argument to be made for, say, enjoying the experience of consuming an English breakfast, preserving and cultivating the English language, or feeling a sense of rootedness in a particular place. This has more to do with one’s aethestic sensibilities than empiricism.

In the US, there is no shortage of empirical commentators on race relations. Anyone who wants to parse GSS data or review racial differences in intelligence or crime statistics can easily find ample resources that address this subject matter. The other road is a less travelled one.

From Occidental Dissent, August 29, 2009

Michael O’Meara has responded to GuessedWorker. I was going to post my two cents over there, but the brief comment grew into a blog entry.

The most persuasive case for the efficacy of myths is the debate over “scientific racism” itself: the manner in which “progressives” will twist themselves into a pretzel to avoid even the most obvious facts (racial differences exist, at least in morphology). These people will undoubtedly respond to Salterism in the same Foucaultian manner in which they dismiss all of racial science (it’s a power grab by the white man, a discourse that justifies his domination over us!).

The myth of the colorblind society overpowers the facts cited by the race realists time and again. I’ve lost count of how many times I have seen it happen. The most notorious case that comes to mind is Robert Lindsay, a progressive blogger, who is honest enough to admit that the race realists are usually right on their facts. He has studied the IQ data and racial crime statistics at length (going into international comparisons), knows the score, but isn’t moved by raw data.

He says openly that he wants to believe the progressive line on race. It is too comforting of an illusion. In Lindsay’s case, which is about the best we can hope for out of a progressive, the myth of the colorblind society is powerful enough to override facts, self-interest, and critical thinking. It is always this way with these people. Their vision of  “social justice” (or whatever they call it) drives their behavior. It is primary; data points are secondary, and are molded and interpreted to fit the preconceived conclusion.

Here’s another angle to the race realist/human biodiversity community: the nerd factor. The Sailersphere tends to disproportionately attract a certain type of individual, the sort of people who really are driven by data points, or “nerds” as we colloquially call them. Sometimes when you see them parsing GSS data, you can almost hear Skolnick, Poindexter, and Wormser chortling behind their computers in the background. You can imagine a pin up calender of “Asian babes” hanging on the wall. I have long suspected that their defense of the Jews, attacks on White Nationalists and “Nazis,” their obsession and crowing about IQ might have more to do with nerd solidarity (social class) than anything else. I’m skeptical that HBD/RR [Human Bio-Diversity/Race Realism--ed.] will ever rise above being a nerd subculture.

Americans are not analytical/empirical/objective. I have mentioned elsewhere that Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies. Even within academia, the progressive mythos dominates entire disciplines, especially in the culture sensitive humanities. I just can’t see an appeal to science winning out (without substantial culture wind behind it); look what happened to James Watson (with all his prestige) when he stepped across the line of political correctness. Geneticists bend over backwards to avoid using the word “race” in lieu of Watson’s fall from grace. Most try to avoid it altogether (smart career move there). They bend to popular opinion and the progressive party line. Remember all that talk about how the Human Genome Project had discredited racialism? That and God talk has done wonders for Francis Collins’ career.

What can be said for self-interest? In our current political environment, it reinforces the LDC [Liberal-Democratic Capitalist--Ed.] system. The career-minded, family-minded selfish individual prefers to go along with the flow. He is content to live in his whitebread suburb, shop at the Big Box stores for plasma televisions, pull the (R) lever at the ballot box in November. The first rule of conservative politics: Number One always comes first, second, and last. If such an individual is feeling really brave, he might go teabagging or do something really radical like visit a paleo website.

Just think about it: the tide of self-interest against us is so strong that White Nationalists have to cheer for a national catastrophe like a Second Great Depression, Hurricane Katrina or Kunstler’s Long Emergency to disrupt the status quo. Self-interest will come into play whenever our success appears plausible (think of the NSDAP) or catastrophic circumstances intervene. That’s when the opportunists and conservatives will flock into our ranks.

Looking at our situation objectively, even with the eye of an analytical empiricist (a bent of mind I share with GuessedWorker), what is needed right now (in the embryonic stage) is fanaticism. There are few incentives to join our movement. Racially conscious Whites are the most despised minority in America. I’m willing to wager we are hated even more than the atheists.

We need myths that are powerful enough to move a vanguard beyond their own rational self-interest. An alluring vision is needed comparable to the colorblind utopia that animates the left. It has to be expressed in art, literature, music and film; vehicles more accessible to the masses than academic texts. I have in mind the role played by the hippies and beatniks (and rock music) in the socialization of the counterculture’s cosmopolitan/expressivist mythos in the 1950s and 1960s. This is a task for artists, not intellectuals.

As for EGI [Ethnic Genetic Interests--Ed.], that ship will sail in the scientific community (only) when the headwinds of a popular movement are behind it. Myth, facts, self-interest — in that order, a mass movement progresses from infancy to maturity.

From Occidental Dissent, August 20, 2009

Nevertheless, around the margins of this discussion and in a few genuine flashes of insight buried under the rubble of meandering commentary, certain signs suggest that white racial consciousness in the English-speaking world may be in the process, however slowly, of changing, as white nationalists challenge the hegemony of the race realists.

I say this, of course, based on my particular understanding of white nationalism — which is mine alone — and not that of any group, least of all that of a conservative outfit like The Occidental Quarterly.

My sense of this changing consciousness is perhaps exaggerated by the fact that the prospects of white nationalism at last finding its way into the political arena seems a bit brighter now that the black Jesus is losing his magic touch, that the still too comfortable white middle class is already up in arms over his proposed Big Brother state (which they will have to pay for), and that the impending economic tsunami is about to sweep away the materialist illusions that have misguided whites for the last half century or so.

A great cleansing could be coming — probably won’t, but could.

Influenced by Heidegger and Evola, I’ve long believed that the “malaise” afflicting the white man is profound, traceable in part to the advent of modernity, which introduced certain civilizational and ontological principles inimical to European life.

This malaise has taken a toll no less on the racially conscious community, which upholds not a few of the same principles that are today responsible for the impending demise of white America: especially principles associated with the disembedded individualism of Adam Smith, the scientism of capitalism’s technoeconomic order, and the nihilism that seeks to disenfranchise religion, morality, and the significance of culture.

Part of this is due, I suspect, to the fact that the “racially conscious community” has long been dominated by the idealism of “race realists” or what, before 1945, was called “scientific racism,” a school associated with Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, along with such scientists as Charles Davenport.

The tasks of “scientific racism” were considerably different than the tasks we now face. The largely scientific orientation of realists upholding their truths was appropriate to a society which still had a color-line and kept Negroes out of the public sphere.  Against reformers, Jews, and do-gooders who sought to integrate alien races, race realists simply needed to demonstrate the terrible social and genetic costs of racial integration.

This not the case today, where the issue is a matter of asserting ourselves as a free people, rather than defending an already established status quo.

Though the principles of scientific racism are now clearly beyond the pale of respectability, science itself nevertheless remains the conceptual bedrock upon which modern liberal society rests.

Ideologically, liberalism emerged in the eighteenth century, as proponents of scientific rationalism endeavored to apply their principles to society and state.  All traditions, beliefs, customs, and affiliations — that is, all the qualitative facets of life that are the source of meaning — were thus forced to give way to the quantitative, materialist, abstract, and inherently alienating imperatives of a scientific instrumentalism that sought to impose its bloodless order on the white world for the sake of homo oecomicus.

This emphasis on the materialist and quantitative has resulted in the comforts of our consumer society, as well as the less than comforting realities of its consummate meaninglessness.  We may, as a consequence, be materially richer — yet spiritually, and in other ways, we’ve become the most desperate of the poor.  A truly enriching life, as tradition holds, depends less on the means of existence than on its meaning.

It is only when the world is no longer experienced as a sacred whole and knowledge is fragmented into narrow scientific disciplines that man becomes a social atom regulated by purely rationalist principles detached from superior ideals and subjected to subpersonal, collectivist, and naturalist criteria, whose inevitable culmination is the present decadence.

To think, then, that a popularization of Salter’s Ethnic Genetic Interests, a revival of Darwinian biology (with its propensity to see organic life in terms of self-regulating market principles), or the privileging of a (philosophically naive) analytic-empiricism has any role to play in saving us from the menacing forces arrayed against white life — well, to be kind, it’s too absurd to refute.

Science simply does not understand human being, just as its truths cannot defend us from the forces favoring our extinction.

Heidegger says “science does not think” — it only enunciates the facts, which it has no means to interpret or evaluate — because that would mean appealing to normative, hence unscientific standards.  Understanding is the work of culture — the work of accumulated legacies that imagine, populate, and make meaningful man’s world.

Science, as such, can’t tell us why a handful of men, armed only with a will and a goal, would think they could defeat the greatest empire in history or why my favorite aunt is the one who defends her country’s honor with a German accent.

As much as we nationalists respect the authority of science, we consider it secondary, say, to the extraordinary authority of Homer, who gave birth (in his myth-making) to the Greeks and the Greeks to all the rests of us.

What’s important, here, is to realize that the truths of the Iliad, or those of Mendelian genetics, are born of the imagination, not of some natural illumination, and that their significance pertains not to “the thing itself,” but to what lies in us, as a people rooted in time and being, with a destiny distinct to who we are.

One historian of the ancient Greeks, Paul Veyne, argues that: Men do not find the truth, they create it, as they create their history.

Thus it was that whenever the Greeks criticized the fictitious stories that had grown up around their myths, it was not to reject myth, but to uncover the deeper, more truthful basis — the authentic tradition — which they took as the ideal representation of who they were.  For myth — this “constitutive imagination of their tribe” — is what gave them a meaning, a vocation, and a destiny — which is something quite simply beyond science’s capacity.

This is not to say that science is the opposite of poetic myth, in the way truth is the opposite of error, but simply that it is a different and by no means superior way, to know the world — at least the physical world in its quantitative and materialist expressions.

It is imagination, not the analytical formulations of science, that gives us access to the real in the world.

The notion that truth can be presented stripped of myth is itself a myth.  Nietzsche argues that there are no facts, only interpretations.  This doesn’t mean that the real doesn’t exist, only that it’s impossible to apprehend without some interpretative faculty, analytic or artistic, that rests on mythic foundations.

Myth, not coincidentally, undergirds the foundation of our culture.  It operates still in the highest reaches of scientific speculation.  It speaks to us as a collective solidarity, not an individual conscience; it expresses a determination to act; it is beyond dispute; it cannot be defeated; it speaks the language to which all human beings are most responsive; it transmits the defining experiences of authority and ultimacy, the source of sacredness.

For myth, the world is not a product of rational calculation, but rather a primordial legacy imbued with the weight of tradition, spirit, and blood.

It is the poet, relatedly, who creates nations, not the scientist.  (Creativity, need it be added, is hardly born of analytical reason — if such a disembodied thing ever existed.  The great scientific breakthroughs [as Kuhn with his "paradigms," Bachelard with his "epistomological ruptures," and Foucault with his "epistemes" explain] are rarely the product of a scientific reason applied to neutral source materials or facts, but rather come from something else entirely — something more akin to the creative side of the artist’s sensibility).

Novalis said that “poetry is the base of society” — for without poetry, there is no myth, and without myth, there is no culture — and hence no means of creating a people.

When white nationalists appeal to a mobilizing myth, it’s not because they dismiss discursive reason or the authority of evidence and experience.  Rather, they simply assume it to be the more elemental and galvanizing form of our understanding.

As Sorel, Le Bon, Pareto, Weber, Mosca, and others have shown, the success of an idea depends less on its logical virtues and demonstrative capacities than on its mythic representation of certain collective impulses.

If man were a machine, rationality alone would suffice.  But man’s “rationality” is rooted in the irrationality of his collective consciousness, in the mythic postulates of his culture, in the norms and values of his communal existence, and in the strange, occasional stirrings of his blood.

White nationalists pay homage to race realists less for validating the significance of racial differences and highlighting the dangers of miscegenation (whose obviousness needs no scientific elaboration), but for their often gallant effort to keep America white.

Today, however, in this miscegenating age indifferent to the scientific implications of race differences, our task is not to defend a no longer existing racial hierarchy, but to save what remains of white America.  The white nationalist struggle, as such, is about freeing whites from the anti-racist order threatening them — not about carrying out the sort of educational campaigns that occupied the scientific racists.

Race realism, moreover, is only a part of what defines white nationalism — no matter how primordial blood may be.  The racial truths of the biological sciences are indeed meaningful only in the context of our people’s life.  For they, not the material world of science, are what makes these truths significant.

In favoring an independent white homeland and assuming, rather than privileging, the postulates of race realism, white nationalists hold that the world is not a marketplace of ideas and that the best ideas rarely get the best market price.  No matter how primordial blood may be, the white nationalist struggle is more about the soul and spirit that blood brings forth.

More crucially, white nationalists are not so naive as to believe that their America will be saved by facts or scientific demonstrations.  Rather, they believe that only by acting as other oppressed and threatened nations have had to act to insure their survival will their America survive: That is, only by struggling to become a sovereign nation, free of the forces opposing them as a people, will their kind have a future (aspiring to do this, of course, in strict adherence to the legal provisions of the US Constitution).

White nationalists, as a consequence, assume that the defense and rebirth of white life in North America will have little to do with science or truth or justice or any other grand abstraction (so fond to the language of liberalism), but only with the struggle for power — a struggle old as the ages — one which, even in our dumbed-down information society, is not about issues related to science — but about the politics of imposing our cosmos (order) on the prevailing (and encroaching) chaos — above all, a political struggle in the Schmittian sense of determining who our real enemy is and of knowing that the ultimate goal is not about abstract truths, but about white survival.

La politique, Napoleon said, c’est le destin.

The political in this sense opposes scientific rationality, whose calculating and determining materialism drags man down to his animal side, and instead favors all that lifts man above and beyond himself, as a destining being.

Every distinct people is indeed a destiny forged by common values expressed in certain basic myths.  Without those myths, there are no collective values and without collective values there are no common destiny — and no people.

This makes the struggle for nationhood a matter of political, cultural, and social struggle, not science.

The change I see affecting the racially conscious community is related to what may be an emerging understanding of the need now, if we are serious about guaranteeing a future for white children, to go beyond race realism and to start thinking like a nationalist vanguard, which sees itself as the kernel of a future White Nation — born from the desperation of the decayed and increasingly tyrannical system of the powers that be.

The historical course offered by myth, in contrast to the inherently passive determinism of scientific rationalism, is a choice for heroes, not bookworms or computer hobbyists, for it opens the future to those tiny grains of sand that inevitably bring the great machines to a grinding halt.

In the struggle we’ll need to wage if we are to survive, myth is not simply a more appropriate and powerful way to understand what needs to be done.  It taps those primal forces that will empower us to reject the devitalizing forces of liberal modernity and to assert ourselves in a re-enchanted world with a destining project distinct to who we are, as New World Europeans refusing to accept our programmed extinction.

If there are odd individuals here or there who can or do respond solely on the basis of self-interest alone, that’s fine — but they are more likely to end up in the race realist rather than the white nationalist camp.

One final point: Besides promising to free us and ensure our continuity, the mythic imperatives of white nationalism offers us another chance to expiate our “sins” — to do the penance that will make us better men, more like our great grandfathers, as Harold Covington says — degenerate and characterless types that we have since become.  For it’s not just that whites have been hoodwinked and manipulated by their new masters, as many would like to believe.  From an Aryan perspective, they have all too readily abandoned almost everything that once made them such a world-forming race.

To undo all that has alienated us from our innermost spirit (and that’s a great deal), we no longer need to keep harping on the teachings of race science, which whites have been conditioned to resist.  Instead, our task today is to recover the values and traditions that made our ancestors strong.

To do this we need, in imitation of those who have gone before and in anticipation of those who will follow, to struggle, sword in hand, to be what our myths have destined us to be.

The sword is white nationalism.

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, a myth is …

1.) a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon

2.) a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone; especially : one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society; an unfounded or false notion

3.) a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence

I searched through several other dictionaries; all of them reiterated in so many words the same definition of the term, which was the sense in which I was using it.

“Manifest Destiny” meets all of the conditions of a myth. It was a “popular belief” or a “traditional story” that Americans told to explain their worldview and justify their national expansion across the North American continent. It clearly embodied the “ideals and institutions” of American culture. The notion that Americans were a “chosen people” and that the United States had a special destiny to stretch “from sea to shining sea” meets the third criterion of having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence.

In Myth and Self-Interest, I cited the work of Reginald Horsman and Eric Kaufmann to show that Americans conceived of their national identity in mythic terms. Horsman and Kaufmann cite other scholars that go into the specifics of the mythization process: the origins and duration of the Anglo-American myth complex, the depth of its penetration, its power and appeal, the role it played in national expansion and the maintenance of white supremacy. My conclusions rest on the edifice of their work (which GuessedWorker does not address).

Specifically, the Anglo-American myth was the belief that Americans were a chosen people (like the ancient Israelites), a branch of the innately superior Caucasian race with a peculiar love of freedom, who had a racial destiny to “bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to the American continents and to the world.” The unfolding of this process was the work of divine providence. Generations of Americans believed that North America (later the entire Western Hemisphere) was their birthright. Cuba, for instance, was often said to be a “ripe fruit” that was destined to drop from the “decadent Spanish tree” into the lap of the American Republic.

This type of rhetoric colored the public debates on national expansion in nineteenth century. It is difficult to see America’s national expansion as purely the work of rational self-interest: did the sparsely populated United States really need Transappalachia, the Louisiana Territory, the Floridas, Texas, Oregon, California, the Southwest, Canada, Cuba, Alaska, Hawaii, the Phillippines, unchallenged dominion over the Western Hemisphere, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the China market and later the entire world?

Pace GuessedWorker, I don’t think so. In the absence of this Anglo-American myth, American history would have unfolded otherwise, as it has since the 1930’s. A demonization of the American founding has replaced the romantization that once reigned unchallenged in the past. It is clearly a myth like its predecessor: it is an interpretation of history that carries moral and political significance, one that justifies the domination and actions of the Jewish ruling class over the indigenous Anglo-Americans.

This poses a problem for the claim that self-interest, as opposed to myth, is fundamentally operative: the racial masochism of contemporary Whites is obviously not in our collective self-interest, but it reigns unchallenged across the entire West. America doesn’t have any special destiny to “progress” into a colorblind utopian society. This is a complete fiction: an imaginary, unverifiable teleological myth. Yet it emanates from Barack Obama’s White House and the highest circles of power and influence. Those who argue against the power of myth have the burden of explaining the status quo.

In my previous post, I gave other examples of myths at work in American history: the myth of the Lost Cause, the myth of the Ku Klux Klan, the myth of the Old South, the myth of the Civil Rights Movement. These were all “traditional stories” about “ostensibly historical events” that “embodied the ideals and institutions of a society” (white supremacy or egalitarian democracy). I have already pointed out on two occasions how D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation led directly to the formation of the Second Klan (the largest nativist organization of its time with millions of members).

In the Journal of Film and Religion, Robert C. Salter writes:

The Birth of a Nation was one of the most important films of all time, both for its technical and aesthetic achievements and for its enduring legacy of racism.  This paper uses Bruce Lincoln’s approach to myth as a form of discourse and Robert Bellah’s notion of civil religion to show how Birth might be understood as a mythic component of American civil religion.  From this perspective, Birth serves as a paradigmatic story of American origins rooted in ideas of white supremacy.  At the end of the article Oscar Micheaux’s work, Within our Gates, is used to briefly demonstrate filmic strategies for countering Birth as myth.

(The other) Salter spends a lot of time analyzing The Birth of a Nation as a myth. In his words, it was ”a strategic discourse aimed at producing a particular sense of American identity and purpose by presenting as paradigmatically true an idiosyncratic account of America’s origins.” He invokes Bruce Lincoln who holds that “society is a synthetic construct held together primarily by sentiments elicited from discourse.” In other words, our sense of identity is closely bound not only to shared ancestry, but to the stories (or myths) we tell about ourselves and pass down to future generations.

This is why the capture of the media, universities and public schools has been so disastrous for us. Our enemies have used these institutions to brainwash the young with the cosmopolitan/expressivist mythos. They are essentially poisoning our culture. Correspondingly, the triumphant Anglo-American myth of the founding settlers is no longer heard from. Instead, America has been cast as an ideological project (with no ethnic or racial component) in which Anglo-Americans are sentenced to perpetual penance for the racial sins of their ancestors (slavery, white supremacy, segregation, structural and institutional racism, etc).

In Eric P. Kaufmann’s words, “the American myth-symbol complex was purged by the nation’s cultural leaders of its white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant components. With this intellectual backing removed, American dominant ethnicity had only its less educated, traditionalist population to fall back on, a constituency that would decline markedly in the decades ahead.” (The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, 174) At least on this crucial point, Kevin MacDonald agrees with Kaufmann’s historical assessment.

The task before us is plain enough to discern: it is to reintroduce, reconstruct or reinvent the Anglo-American myth, construct an alluring White American ethnic identity around it, build a mass movement, and challenge the status quo. It is no small task. Parsing data points (while helpful in some areas) is the wrong way to go about this. The proof is that the people who spend the most time doing this (RR/HBD) are rarely moved to become White separatists. As I said before, something more is needed.

Admittedly, this is beyond my abilities.  Such a task is for a racialist with a different bent of mind than my own. William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries was a crude effort, but it was nominally successful and a step in the right direction. Harold Covington has written a number of novels about his proposed Northwest Migration (to little effect). I haven’t read them, but Michael O’Meara is a fan. In the past, I have been extremely skeptical of the Northwest Republic. Still, these stories about the future have been very influential within the vanguardist wing of the White Nationalist movement in North America.

We have yet to find our own Thomas Dixon, Jr. I fail to see how this line of work (which is targeted at a different audience) is a threat to those who prefer to discuss the ethnic genetic interests of White Europeans. In the United States, a majority of Americans have yet to accept Darwinism. The myth of Christ is far more influential amongst the masses than the conclusions of natural science. This fact alone suggests that we need more readily accessible vehicles (art, films, literature) to present our ideas than dry academic texts.

From Occidental Dissent, August 18, 2009

"The Dream of Ossian" by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

My ponderous English friend GuessedWorker of Majority Rights has weighed in on Michael O’Meara’s prize winning essay on White Nationalism and my response to it. He inclines toward the view that a materialist account of ethnic genetic interests will prove more persuasive than seductive mythic appeals in any future White racial rejuvenation in North America.

GuessedWorker has spent many years now searching for a philosophy to justify British nationalism. He sees liberalism as something of an ideological straitjacket (a view I happen to share) wrapped around the English mind. Like JW Holiday, who now seems to have disappeared from the blogosphere, GuessedWorker sees in Salterism a potent vehicle to wreck this mental logjam.

In his account of the American West, GuessedWorker sees rational self-interest as being fundamentally operative, not some myth or highly altruistic national purpose; settlers moved West for their own selfish reasons, namely cheap land and freedom from government interference. He doesn’t touch upon the views of American policymakers whose influence was historically decisive.

Thomas Jefferson was undoubtedly the most important. He dreamed of an “empire of liberty” in Transappalachia and the Louisiana Territory. As president, Jefferson’s mythic vision of the sturdy Anglo-Saxon republican yeomary played a decisive role in his acquisition of Louisiana from France. He spoke glowingly of the destiny of Anglo-Americans to spill over and control the North American continent.

In The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric P. Kaufmann wrote extensively about the Anglo-American myth complex, its origins and duration, the depth of its penetration into the American psyche, its power and appeal, decline and eventual eclipse in the 1930s by the cosmopolitan mythos of the Jewish New York Modernists. Reginald Horsman covered the topic in even greater detail in Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. A strong argument can be made that American racial decline tracks exactly the decline of the indigenous Anglo-American mythos.

Generations of Southerners were raised on the myth of the Lost Cause. Southern nationalism emerged after the War Between the States when the heroism and wartime sacrifice of Confederate soldiers and the bitter memories of Reconstruction became an object of myth-making. From Texas to Virginia, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised stone monuments in town squares to honor the fallen dead. It is difficult to find a small town in the South without some form of Civil War memorial. The mythology of the Lost Cause was closely intertwined with Southern identity and the white supremacist ideology of the Jim Crow South.

In the early twentieth century, the myth of the Ku Klux Klan as presented in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation sparked the revival of the defunct organization. As I wrote in the previous thread, the Second Klan swelled to millions of members in the 1920s. It was easily the largest American nativist organization of its time. There can be no doubt about the power of myth to inflame the popular imagination. The arresting image of the Confederate dead rising phoenix-like from the ashes to defend Southern womanhood had a powerful appeal to Anglo-Protestant nationalists in the Midwest who sought to preserve American purity from the corrupting influence of European immigrants.

When Americans look back at the Antebellum South, even today they do so through the prism of Gone With The Wind, one of the most popular novels and films of all time. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin went on to become the best selling novel of the nineteenth century. It colored Northern attitudes towards the Old South for over a hundred years. More recently, the Roots series of 1970s is shown in almost every high school classroom when the subject of slavery is being discussed.

Our enemies have their own myths. In the U.S., the progressive movement is driven less by facts and figures than by a vague notion of racial transcendence. The myth of the colorblind society as articulated by MLK in his I Have a Dream speech is at the heart of the anti-racist status quo. It has its own martyrs like Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, James Meredith, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; its own demons like Bull Conner, George Wallace, and the Klan. The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is the culmination of the myth of the Civil Rights Movement. From the beginning, the symbolism of the Obama campaign was the story, not his plan for, say, health care reform.

There will always be men who are driven by data points. At the same time, there will always be far more who are driven by art and drama. The common man wants to see and hear about good vs. evil, justice vs. injustice, heroes vs. villains. He doesn’t have the patience or the inclination to grasp complex topics like evolutionary fitness or ethnic genetic interest.

Something more is obviously needed. The academics who spend the most time rehearsing and arguing about racial data points rarely become white separatists. Charles Murray wrote The Bell Curve and Human Accomplishment, but married and reproduced outside his race. Steve Sailer has argued against White Nationalism. Jared Taylor hasn’t endorsed anything beyond repealing the civil rights laws and ending third world immigration. At least from my perspective, the race realism movement has been a disappointment.

In the U.S., publicly embracing White Nationalism often entails career and marital sacrifices. When it is done, racial altruism overrides the narrow pursuit of self-interest. It is much easier to start and raise a family (to maximize one’s EGI) if you go along with the status quo. An incredibly appealing myth is usually needed to overpower the actualization of normal human desires; to inspire someone to go above and beyond his own self interest in pursuit of a collective goal.

In the early twentieth century, there was no conflict between myth and self interest. The new racial science (Darwinism and Mendelian genetics) complemented the mythic-inspired nativist movement. Both will undoubtedly be needed for White Nationalism to ever triumph in North America.

From Occidental Dissent, August 12, 2009. Be sure to scroll down and read the comments.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780 - 1867), "The Dream of Ossian," watercolor study

Michael O’Meara has a great article on secession at The Occidental Quarterly. I see that many regulars here have already found it. This is one of the few occasions in recent weeks where I find nothing to argue with in a piece. There is no quibbling around the edges of the race debate. Instead, O’Meara tackles the central issues head on, and gets right to the point.

White Nationalists are animated by two powerful myths: the myth of White regeneration, and the myth of the White Republic. Objectively, the plight of racialists in the United States has never been worse, but it is precisely in such perilous times that the formative core of great social movements are sown. Dry recitation of facts and figures has never moved the masses. Myths powerful enough to capture the imagination of millions change the course of history. They have the virtue of being immune to rational criticism.

Prerational human instincts are the taproot of White Nationalism: tribalism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, kin selection, altruism. These instincts (which give rise to emotions) are then filtered through the lens of American history (racial conflict between Whites and non-Whites) and combined with the myths mentioned above to reach the final product. The rational arguments that racialists make to justify separatism are secondary considerations. Shorn of their prerational foundations, say, a healthy love of kin, they rarely lead to the desired mythic conclusion.

Myths should not be evaluated on the basis of their truth or falsehood. Instead, they should be analyzed on whether or not they are adaptive. They are works of art, not logical propositions. Does the myth in question lead to the survival and propagation of our group in future generations? If a myth suits us, why savage it with criticism?

More time should be spent articulating the myths of White Nationalism in film and literature. In the early twentieth century, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation singlehandedly inspired a renaissance of the Ku Klux Klan. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the Second Klan had swollen to 5 million members, about 15% of the nation’s eligible population. It dominated entire states. More recently, William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries inspired a wave of underground White Nationalism in the 1980’s.

This generation has no shortage of material to work with. Unfortunately, no one seems to making 2042, the movie. Why is that?

From Occidental Dissent, August 4, 2009. Be sure to scroll down and look at the comments as well.

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

One.

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

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

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

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

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

Two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five.

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

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

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

Six.

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

But that’s the way all great movements begin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven.

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

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

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

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

But Sam was wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight.

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

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

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

Nine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://www.toqonline.com/blog/toward-the-white-republic/feed/ 31 http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-myth-of-our-regeneration/ http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-myth-of-our-regeneration/#comments Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:11:21 +0000 Michael O'Meara http://www.toqonline.com/?p=2849 Editor’s Note: This is the text of a talk delivered on June 19, 2009 at a TOQ Editor’s Dinner in San Francisco.

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

Georges Sorel, 1847 - 1922

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

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

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

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

What is “metapolitics”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other possible myths probably exist or will come to exist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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