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mercredi, 21 février 2018

Qu’est-ce qu’un Autochtone européen ?

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Qu’est-ce qu’un Autochtone européen?

par Antonin Campana

Ex: http://www.autochtonisme.com

Selon le Larousse, un Autochtone est quelqu’un qui est « originaire par voie ancestrale du pays qu’il habite ». Cette définition a l’avantage de poser correctement ce qui fonde l’autochtonie : la fusion d’une  lignée et d’un lieu. Cependant, le mot « pays » manque ici singulièrement de précision et peut prêter à confusion.
 

Qu’est-ce qu’un « pays » ? On comprend bien qu’il s’agit d’un territoire, mais de quel territoire parle-t-on : celui d’un village avec ses environs, d’une province, d’un Etat, d’un continent ? Un Franc-Comtois résidant en Dauphiné est-il un Autochtone ? On dira sans doute qu’il est un Autochtone de France. Mais est-ce vrai dans la mesure où la lignée ancestrale de ce Franc-Comtois s’enracine dans une province qui n’est pas française avant 1678 ? Et puis la France elle-même, avec ses frontières changeantes, a-t-elle toujours existé ? Et si la France est une création récente, comment une lignée qui plonge son origine dans la nuit des temps pourrait-elle s’y enraciner ? Les frontières conventionnelles et l’autochtonicité n’évoluent pas dans la même durée. D’une manière générale, les limites tracées par l’homme  (administratives, politiques, provinciales, nationales, étatiques…) sont trop aléatoires, mouvantes, passagères, confuses et récentes pour que l’autochtonicité puisse en dépendre véritablement. Un Alsacien, par exemple, est un Autochtone de l’empire romain en 212, un Autochtone du royaume d’Austrasie au VIe siècle, un Autochtone de France à partir de 1648, un Autochtone de l’Empire allemand en 1871, un Autochtone de France en 1919, un Autochtone d’Allemagne en 1940, et de nouveau un Autochtone  de France en 1945 ! De quel « pays » sera-t-il l’Autochtone dans un siècle ou deux ? Cela n’a aucun sens.

Pour surmonter cette difficulté, il faut substituer à la notion de « pays », la notion de « terre ancestrale ». Le « pays » est le produit des vicissitudes de l’histoire. Au contraire, la « terre ancestrale » est le territoire où a vécu la lignée, quels que soient les aléas historiques qui changent le nom de ce territoire, qui le divisent, ou qui le rattachent à telle ou telle possession étatique. Peu importe que des frontières étatiques variables morcellent « accidentellement » la terre où vécurent les ancêtres : la terre ancestrale existe en soi comme un tout indivisible indépendamment de la volonté des hommes. Dès lors, si l’on fait abstraction des frontières posées par l’histoire et si l’on tient compte des grandes migrations intra-européennes (qui ont toujours plus ou moins existé), la terre ancestrale d’un Européen quel qu’il soit, ne peut être, de mémoire d’homme, que l’Europe. L’Europe est le patrimoine commun de tous les ethnoeuropéens. Et ceux-ci, avant d’être par les hasards de l’histoire des Autochtones de France, d’Allemagne ou de Russie, sont par nature des Autochtones européens. Nous posons donc la définition suivante : « Un Autochtone est une personne originaire par voie ancestrale des terres ancestrales qu’il habite ».

Est-ce à dire qu’il n’y a aujourd’hui aucune différence entre les peuples européens ? Bien sûr que non. Nous soulignons simplement que le continent européen est pour tous les peuples européens leur terre ancestrale,  leur terre des pères à tous, leur patrie commune (patrie : du latin patria : « terre des aïeux »). Cela est d’autant plus nécessaire à rappeler que les frontières extérieures des pays européens sont effacées sous les coups du mondialisme et que des frontières intérieures (ethniques, notamment) les fractionnent désormais. Se dire Autochtones de « pays » qui n’en sont plus vraiment, et qui ne l’ont pas toujours été, affaiblit sans doute la notion d’enracinement autochtone. Au contraire, il est bien plus juste et solide de se dire Autochtone européen de tel ou tel pays (la France, l’Italie…) : la notion d’Autochtonie repose alors sur les terres ancestrales européennes (le continent européen) , terres qui se confondent avec le Grand Peuple européen les habitant, de mémoire d’homme, depuis toujours.

De ce qui précède, nous pouvons dire que l’expression « Autochtones de France » est contestable, même si nous l’employons parfois par facilité. Il faudrait dire, pour être plus exact : « Autochtones européens de France » (c’est-à-dire : « Autochtones européens habitant les 551 500 km2 circonscrivant temporairement le territoire temporairement nommé France »). De ce point de vue, un Espagnol habitant la France est autant « Autochtone européen de France » qu’un  « Français de souche » (de même qu’un Français en Espagne est un « Autochtone européen d’Espagne »). Attention : cela ne signifie pas qu’un Espagnol est un Français ou que l’hispanité est la francité !

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De la même manière, il nous semble préférable de substituer l’expression « Français de souche européenne » à celle de « Français de souche ». L’expression « Français de souche européenne » correspond mieux aux réalités historiques et neutralise l’argument-Système clé, selon lequel les Français « descendent tous d'immigrants à un certain horizon temporel » (Herve Le Bras). L’affirmation est juste à condition de définir l’immigrant par rapport aux frontières actuelles, par définition temporaires et accidentelles. De ce point de vue arbitraire, un jeune ramoneur savoyard serait classé comme « immigrant » si la Savoie n’avait pas été rattachée à la France en 1860. A contrario, les Wallons venus travailler en France à la fin du XIXe siècle ne seraient pas classés comme « immigrants » si la Belgique était restée à la France après 1815. Tout cela n’a bien sûr aucun sens. L’important n’est pas l’appartenance juridico-administrative à un moment donné, mais l’appartenance lignagère et identitaire. Au-delà d’un « certain horizon temporel » (ces 50 dernières années) les « immigrants » sont tous, ou peu s’en faut, des Autochtones européens, membres du Grand Peuple européen, disposant du  même fond identitaire européen que les Français et c’est en raison de cela que le « vivre-ensemble » a été possible. Faire reposer l’Autochtonie sur un « pays » incontestable (le continent européen) et sur une voie ancestrale incontestable (la lignée européenne) serait plus juste et neutraliserait par avance de nombreux sophismes voulant justifier le Grand Remplacement. Ajoutons que cela unirait des Européens confrontés aux mêmes défi du Grand Remplacement et leur restituerait dans le même mouvement une patrie véritable, bien qu’à reconquérir.

Les Etats-nations sont devenus des réceptacles où se déverse le monde (des « creusets »). Les patries d’autrefois (la « France », « l’Allemagne », le « Royaume-Uni »…) font maintenant partie de l’ancien monde. L’autochtonicité européenne, quant à elle, s’annonce déjà comme un référent identitaire puissant et incontournable. Expression du droit à l’existence des peuples européens, en même temps que socle sur lequel les peuples européens peuvent vivre leur diversité, l’autochtonicité européenne fonde une nouvelle patrie et révèle un peuple jusque là caché par les soubresauts de l’Histoire : le Grand Peuple européen.

Car si tous les Autochtones européens ont reçu en héritage la même « terre des pères », alors ils sont tous frères.

Antonin Campana

Aveu de l’ancien directeur de la CIA: les Etats-Unis se mêlent des élections à l’étranger

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Aveu de l’ancien directeur de la CIA: les Etats-Unis se mêlent des élections à l’étranger

Bernhard Tomaschitz

Ce n’était pas un secret ce que James Woolsey a dévoilé sur la chaîne de télévision américaine Fox. Quand on lui a posé la question pour savoir si les Etats-Unis s’immisçaient dans les élections des pays étrangers, cet ancien directeur de la CIA a répondu : « Ben, oui, mais uniquement dans un but très positif, celui de l’intérêt de la démocratie ». Ce « bon but qui va dans l’intérêt de la démocratie » consiste, selon Woolsey, à « éviter que des communistes prennent le pouvoir ».

Apparemment, Woolsey, qui était directeur de la CIA sous la présidence de Bill Clinton, faisait référence aux élections présidentielles russes de 1996, où les Etats-Unis ont mis tout en œuvre pour aider Eltsine, miné par l’alcoolisme, à se faire réélire. Le 15 juillet 1996, la couverture du magazine Time présentait une caricature d’Eltsine, qui tenait en main un drapeau américain. La narration principale du magazine portait pour titre «Histoire secrète : comment des conseillers américains ont aidé Eltsine à gagner ».

On sait donc désormais que les Etats-Unis s’arrogent le droit de manipuler les élections à l’étranger, tout en s’insurgeant, sans preuves, du fait que les Russes se seraient mêler des élections présidentielles américaines de 2016. Le 17 février 2018, le New York Times confirme cette tradition américaine à influencer les élections ailleurs dans le monde. « Il n’y a pas que la Russie qui s’immisce dans les élections », titrait ce journal. Et il poursuit : « Des sacs plein d’argent liquide ont été donnés à Rome dans un hôtel pour un candidat italien qui plaisait à Washington. Pour influencer des élections au Nicaragua, des scandales ont été révélés par une presse étrangère au pays. Des millions de dépliants, d’affiches et d’autocollants ont été imprimés pour vaincre un élu en Serbie ».

Article paru sur le site : http://www.zurzeit.at  

L’Autriche se branche sur la “nouvelle route de la Soie”: la voie ferrée russe à large écartement arrivera jusqu’à Vienne

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L’Autriche se branche sur la “nouvelle route de la Soie”: la voie ferrée russe à large écartement arrivera jusqu’à Vienne

Vienne/Moscou – A l’ombre des sanctions de l’UE contre la Russie, le nouveau gouvernement autrichien opte pour une politique originale et prouve par là sa vision à long terme. Le ministre autrichien des communications, Hofer (FPÖ) négocie avec son homologue russe Sokolov la prolongation d’une voie ferrée à large écartement. Celle-ci permettra de relier l’Autriche au Transibérien et, via celui-ci, à la Chine. La petite république alpine aura ainsi accès à la « nouvelle route de la Soie », pour l’essentiel promue par la Chine.

Les négociations entre Hofer et Sokolov indiquent qu’il y a désormais un rapprochement politique entre Vienne et Moscou, en dépit des sanctions systématiques qu’impose l’UE à la Russie, sanctions que l’on critique avec véhémence en Autriche depuis quelques années déjà.

Concrètement, il s’agit de réaliser des plans qui sont dans les tiroirs depuis plusieurs années, notamment celui visant à prolonger jusqu’à Vienne la voie à large écartement du Transibérien qui arrive en Europe dans l’Est de la Slovaquie. Le projet envisage la construction d’une gare à conteneurs pour les frets arrivant d’Asie en Europe. Elle se situerait soit à Parndorf ou près du Kittsee dans le Burgenland.

Le ministère autrichien des communications prépare d’ores et déjà l’étape suivante : calculer et choisir le modèle économique et financier approprié pour ce projet estimé à 6,5 milliards d’euros. Après cette mise au point, les consultations commenceront avec les pays partenaires ; ensuite, on mettra cette politique au diapason avec la Commission européenne et on entamera tous les processus nécessaires pour obtenir les autorisations requises.

Article paru sur: http://www.zuerst.de  

Greek Biopolitics and Its Unfortunate Demise in Western Thinking

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Greek Biopolitics and Its Unfortunate Demise in Western Thinking

Guillaume Durocher

Ex: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net

greek-origins-of-biopolitics.jpgMika Ojakangas, On the Origins of Greek Biopolitics: A Reinterpretation of the History of Biopower
London and New York: Routledge, 2016

Mika Ojakangas is a professor of political theory, teaching at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He has written a succinct and fairly comprehensive overview of ancient Greek thought on population policies and eugenics, or what he terms “biopolitics.” Ojakangas says:

In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics (sexual intercourse, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, public health, education, birthrate, migration, immigration, economy, and so forth) from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. At issue is not only a politics for which “the idea of governing people” is the leading idea but also a politics for which the question how “to organize life” (tou zên paraskeuên) (Plato, Statesman, 307e) is the most important question. (6)

The idea of regulating and cultivating human life, just as one would animal and plant life, is then not a Darwinian, eugenic, or Nazi modern innovation, but, as I have argued concerning Plato’s Republic, can be found in a highly developed form at the dawn of Western civilization. As Ojakangas says:

The idea of politics as control and regulation of the living in the name of the security, well-being and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as Western political thought itself, originating in classical Greece. Greek political thought, as I will demonstrate in this book, is biopolitical to the bone. (1)

Greek thought had nothing to do with the modern obsessions with supposed “human rights” or “social contracts,” but took the good to mean the flourishing of the community, and of individuals as part of that community, as an actualization of the species’ potential: “In this biopolitical power-knowledge focusing on the living, to repeat, the point of departure is neither law, nor free will, nor a contract, or even a natural law, meaning an immutable moral rule. The point of departure is the natural life (phusis) of individuals and populations” (6). Okajangas notes: “for Plato and Aristotle politics was essentially biopolitics” (141).

In Ojakangas’ telling, Western biopolitical thought gradually declined in the ancient and medieval period. Whereas Aristotle and perhaps Plato had thought of natural law and the good as pertaining to a particular organism, the Stoics, Christians, and liberals posited a kind of a disembodied natural law:

This history is marked by several ruptures understood as obstacles preventing the adoption and diffusion of the Platonic-Aristotelian biopolitical model of politics – despite the influence these philosophers have otherwise had on Roman and Christian thought. Among these ruptures, we may include: the legalization of politics in the Roman Republic and the privatization of everyday life in the Roman Empire, but particularly the end of birth control, hostility towards the body, the sanctification of law, and the emergence of an entirely new kind of attitude to politics and earthly government in early Christianity. (7)

mika.ojakangas.jpgOjakangas’ book has served to confirm my impression that, from an evolutionary point of view, the most relevant Western thinkers are found among the ancient Greeks, with a long sleep during the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, a slow revival during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and a great climax heralded by Darwin, before being shut down again in 1945. The periods in which Western thought was eminently biopolitical — the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and 1865 to 1945 — are perhaps surprisingly short in the grand scheme of things, having been swept away by pious Europeans’ recurring penchant for egalitarian and cosmopolitan ideologies. Okajangas also admirably puts ancient biopolitics in the wider context of Western thought, citing Spinoza, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger, and others, as well as recent academic literature.

At the core of the work is a critique of Michel Foucault’s claim that biopolitics is a strictly modern phenomenon growing out of “Christian pastoral power.” Ojakangas, while sympathetic to Foucault, says the latter’s argument is “vague” (33) and unsubstantiated. Indeed, historically at least, Catholic countries with strong pastoral power tended precisely to be those in which eugenics was less popular, in contrast with Protestant ones.

It must be said that postmodernist pioneer Foucault is a strange starting point on the topic of biopolitics. As Ojakangas suggests, Foucault’s 1979 and 1980 lecture courses The Birth of Biopolitics and On the Government of the Living do not deal mainly with biopolitics at all, despite their titles (34–35). Indeed, Foucault actually lost rapidly lost interest in the topic.

Okajangas also criticizes Hannah Arendt for claiming that Aristotle posited a separation between the familial/natural life of the household (oikos) and that of the polis. In fact: “The Greek city-state was, to use Carl Schmitt’s infamous formulation, a total state — a state that intervenes, if it so wishes, in all possible matters, in economy and in all the other spheres of human existence” (17). Okajangas goes into some detail citing, contra Arendt and Foucault, ancient Greek uses of household-management and shepherding as analogies for political rule.

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Aristotle appears as a genuine forerunner of modern scientific biopolitics in Ojakangas’ account. Aristotle’s politics was at once highly conventional, really reflecting more widespread Greek assumptions, and his truly groundbreaking work as an empirical scientist, notably in the field of biology. For Aristotle “the aim of politics and state administration is to produce good life by developing the immanent potentialities of natural life and to bring these potentialities to fruition” (17, cf. 107). Ojakangas goes on:

Aristotle was not a legal positivist in the modern sense of the word but rather a representative of sociological naturalism, as for Aristotle there is no fundamental distinction between the natural and the social world: they are both governed by the same principles discovered by empirical research on the nature of things and living beings. (55–56)

And: “although justice is based on nature, at stake in this nature is not an immutable and eternal cosmic nature expressing itself in the law written on the hearts of men and women but nature as it unfolds in a being” (109).

This entailed a notion of justice as synonymous with natural hierarchy. Okajangas notes: “for Plato justice means inequality. Justice takes place when an individual fulfills that function or work (ergon) that is assigned to him by nature in the socio-political hierarchy of the state — and to the extent that everybody does so, the whole city-state is just” (111). Biopolitical justice is when each member of the community is fulfilling the particular role to which he is best suited to enable the species to flourish: “For Plato and Aristotle, in sum, natural justice entails hierarchy, not equality, subordination, not autonomy” (113). Both Plato and Aristotle adhered to a “geometrical” conception of equality between humans, namely, that human beings were not equal, but should be treated in accordance with their worth or merit.

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Plato used the concepts of reason and nature not to comfort convention but to make radical proposals for the biological, cultural, and spiritual perfection of humanity. Okajangas rightly calls the Republic a “bio-meritocratic” utopia (19) and notes that “Platonic biopolitico-pastoral power” was highly innovative (134). I was personally also extremely struck in Plato by his unique and emphatic joining together of the biological and the spiritual. Okajangas says that National Socialist racial theoriar Hans F. K. Günther in his Plato as Protector of Life (1928) had argued  that “a dualistic reading of Plato goes astray: the soul and the body are not separate entities, let alone enemies, for the spiritual purification in the Platonic state takes place only when accompanied with biological selection” (13).[1]

Okajangas succinctly summarizes the decline of biopolitics in the ancient world. Politically this was related to the decline of the intimate and “total” city-state:

It indeed seems that the decline of the classical city-state also entailed a crisis of biopolitical vision of politics. . . . Just like modern biopolitics, which is closely linked to the rise of the modern nation-state, it is quite likely that the decline of biopolitics and biopolitical vision of politics in the classical era is related to the fall of the ethnically homogeneous political organization characteristic of the classical city-states. (118)

The rise of Hellenistic and Roman empires as universal, cultural states naturally entailed a withdrawal of citizens from politics and a decline in self-conscious ethnopolitics.

cicero1.jpgWhile Rome had also been founded as “a biopolitical regime” and had some policies to promote fertility and eugenics (120), this was far less central to Roman than to Greek thought, and gradually declined with the Empire. Political ideology seems to have followed political realities.  The Stoics and Cicero posited a “natural law” not deriving from a particular organism, but as a kind of cosmic, disembodied moral imperative, and tended to emphasize the basic commonality of human beings (e.g. Cicero, Laws, 1.30).

I believe that the apparently unchanging quality of the world and the apparent biological stability of the species led many ancient thinkers to posit an eternal and unchanging disembodied moral law. They did not have our insights on the evolutionary origins of our species and of its potential for upward change in the future. Furthermore, the relative commonality of human beings in the ancient Mediterranean — where the vast majority were Aryan or Semitic Caucasians, with some clinal variation — could lead one to think that biological differences between humans were minor (an impression which Europeans abandoned in the colonial era, when they encountered Sub-Saharan Africans, Amerindians, and East Asians). Missing, in those days before modern science and as White advocate William Pierce has observed, was a progressive vision of human history as an evolutionary process towards ever-greater consciousness and self-actualization.[2]

Many assumptions of late Hellenistic (notably Stoic) philosophy were reflected and sacralized in Christianity, which also posited a universal and timeless moral law deriving from God, rather than the state or the community. As it is said in the Book of Acts (5:29): “We must obey God rather than men.” With Christianity’s emphasis on the dignity of each soul and respect for the will of God, the idea of manipulating reproductive processes through contraception, abortion, or infanticide in order to promote the public good became “taboo” (121). Furthermore: “virginity and celibacy were as a rule regarded as more sacred states than marriage and family life . . . . The dying ascetic replaced the muscular athlete as a role model” (121). These attitudes gradually became reflected in imperial policies:

All the marriage laws of Augustus (including the system of legal rewards for married parents with children and penalties for the unwed and childless) passed from 18 BC onwards were replaced under Constantine and the later Christian emperors — and even those that were not fell into disuse. . . . To this effect, Christian emperors not only made permanent the removal of sanctions on celibates, but began to honor and reward those Christian priests who followed the rule of celibacy: instead of granting privileges to those who contracted a second marriage, Justinian granted privileges to those who did not  (125)

The notion of moral imperatives deriving from a disembodied natural law and the equality of souls gradually led to the modern obsession with natural rights, free will, and social contracts. Contrast Plato and Aristotle’s eudaimonic (i.e., focusing on self-actualization) politics of aristocracy and community to that of seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes:

I know that in the first book of the Politics Aristotle asserts as a foundation of all political knowledge that some men have been made by nature worthy to rule, others to serve, as if Master and slave were distinguished not by agreement among men, but by natural aptitude, i.e. by their knowledge or ignorance. This basic postulate is not only against reason, but contrary to experience. For hardly anyone is so naturally stupid that he does not think it better to rule himself than to let others rule him. … If then men are equal by nature, we must recognize their equality; if they are unequal, since they will struggle for power, the pursuit of peace requires that they are regarded as equal. And therefore the eighth precept of natural law is: everyone should be considered equal to everyone. Contrary to this law is PRIDE. (De Cive, 3.13)

It does seem that, from an evolutionary point of view, the long era of medieval and early modern thought represents an enormous regression as compared with the Ancients, particularly the Greeks. As Ojakangas puts it: “there is an essential rupture in the history of Western political discourse since the decline of the Greek city-states” (134).

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Western biopolitics gradually returned in the modern era and especially with Darwin, who himself had said in The Descent of Man: “The weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”[3] And: “Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.”[4] Okajangas argues that “the Platonic Aristotelian art of government [was] more biopolitical than the modern one,” as they did not have to compromise with other traditions, namely “Roman and Judeo-Christian concepts and assumptions” (137).

Okajangas’ book is useful in seeing the outline of the long tradition of Western biopolitical thinking, despite the relative eclipse of the Middle Ages. He says:

Baruch Spinoza was probably the first modern metaphysician of biopolitics. While Kant’s moral and political thought is still centered on concepts such as law, free will, duty, and obligation, in Spinoza we encounter an entirely different mode of thinking: there are no other laws but causal ones, the human will is absolutely determined by these laws, freedom and happiness consist of adjusting oneself to them, and what is perhaps most essential, the law of nature is the law of a self-expressing body striving to preserve itself (conatus) by affirming itself, this affirmation, this immanent power of life, being nothing less than justice. In the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, this metaphysics of biopolitics is brought to its logical conclusion. The law of life is nothing but life’s will to power, but now this power, still identical with justice, is understood as a process in which the sick and the weak are eradicated by the vital forces of life.

I note in passing that William Pierce had a similar assessment of Spinoza’s pantheism as basically valid, despite the latter’s Jewishness.[5]

The 1930s witnessed the zenith of modern Western biopolitical thinking. The French Nobel Prize winner and biologist Alexis Carrel had argued in his best-selling Man the Unknown for the need for eugenics and the need for “philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity.” Yet, as Okajangas points out, “if we take a look at the very root of all ‘philosophical systems,’ we find a philosophy (albeit perhaps not a system) perfectly in agreement with Carrel’s message: the political philosophy of Plato” (97).

Okajangas furthermore argues that Aristotle’s biocentric naturalist ethics were taken up in 1930s Germany:

Instead of ius naturale, at stake was rather what the modern human sciences since the nineteenth century have called biological, economical, and sociological laws of life and society — or what the early twentieth-century völkisch German philosophers, theologians, jurists, and Hellenists called Lebensgesetz, the law of life expressing the unity of spirit and race immanent to life itself. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, attacked the Roman lex [law] in the name of the Greek nomos [custom/law] — whose “original” meaning, although it had started to deteriorate already in the post-Solonian democracy, can in Schmitt’s view still be detected in Aristotle’s Politics. Cicero had translated nomos as lex, but on Schmitt’s account he did not recognize that unlike the Roman lex, nomos does not denote an enacted statute (positive law) but a “concrete order of life” (eine konkrete Lebensordnung) of the Greek polis — not something that ‘ought to be’ but something that “is”. (56)

Western biopolitical thought was devastated by the outcome of the World War II and has yet to recover, although perhaps we can begin to see glimmers of renewal.

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Okajangas reserves some critical comments for Foucault in his conclusion, arguing that with his erudition he could not have been ignorant of classical philosophy’s biopolitical character. He speculates on Foucault’s motivations for lying: “Was it a tactical move related to certain political ends? Was it even an attempt to blame Christianity and traditional Christian anti-Semitism for the Holocaust?” (142). I am in no position to pronounce on this, other than to point out that Foucault, apparently a gentile, was a life-long leftist, a Communist Party member in the 1950s, a homosexual who eventually died of AIDS, and a man who — from what I can make of his oeuvre — dedicated his life to “problematizing” the state’s policing and regulation of abnormality.

Okajangas’ work is scrupulously neutral in his presentation of ancient biopolitics. He keeps his cards close to his chest. I identified only two rather telling comments:

  1. His claim that “we know today that human races do not exist” (11).
  2. His assertion that “it would be childish to denounce biopolitics as a multi-headed monster to be wiped off the map of politics by every possible means (capitalism without biopolitics would be an unparalleled nightmare)” (143).

The latter’s odd phrasing strikes me as presenting an ostensibly left-wing point to actually make a taboo right-wing point (a technique Slavoj Žižek seems to specialize in).

In any event, I take Ojakangas’ work as a confirmation of the utmost relevance of ancient political philosophy for refounding European civilization on a sound biopolitical basis. The Greek philosophers, I believe, produced the highest biopolitical thought because they could combine the “barbaric” pagan-Aryan values which Greek society took for granted with the logical rigor of Socratic rationalism. The old pagan-Aryan culture, expressed above all in the Homeric poems, extolled the values of kinship, aristocracy, competitiveness, community, and manliness, this having been a culture which was produced by a long, evolutionary struggle for survival among wandering and conquering tribes in the Eurasian steppe. This highly adaptive traditional culture was then, by a uniquely Western contact with rationalist philosophy, rationalized and radicalized by the philosophers, untainted by the sentimentality of later times. Plato and Aristotle are remarkably un-contrived and straightforward in their political methods and goals: the human community must be perfected biologically and culturally; individual and sectoral interests must give way to those of the common good; and these ought to be enforced through pragmatic means, in accord with wisdom, with law where possible, and with ruthlessness when necessary.


[1]Furthermore, on a decidedly spiritual note: “ rather than being a Darwinist of sorts, in Günther’s view it is Plato’s idealism that renders him a predecessor of Nazi ideology, because race is not merely about the body but, as Plato taught, a combination of the mortal body and the immortal soul.” (13)

[2] William Pierce:

The medieval view of the world was that it is a finished creation. Since Darwin, we have come to see the world as undergoing a continuous and unfinished process of creation, of evolution. This evolutionary view of the world is only about 100 years old in terms of being generally accepted. . . . The pantheists, at least most of them, lacked an understanding of the universe as an evolving entity and so their understanding was incomplete. Their static view of the world made it much more difficult for them to arrive at the Cosmotheist truth.

William Pierce, “Cosmotheism: Wave of the Future,” speech delivered in Arlington, Virginia 1977.

[3] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Appleton and Company, 1882), 134.

[4]Ibid., 617. Interestingly, Okajangas points out that Benjamin Isaac, a Jewish scholar writing on Greco-Roman “racism,” believed Plato (Republic 459a-b) had inspired Darwin on this point. Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 128.

[5]Pierce, “Cosmotheism.”