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> Aanvankelijk bestudeerde Mudde het rechts-extremisme van de jaren tachtig en
> 'Voor een deel is populisme geen probleem. Kritiek is goed. Het is goed dat
Despite only having been in the United States for a few years, Cas Mudde can rattle off recent election results with the finesse of a network news correspondent. It helps that Mudde, the Nancy Schaenen Visiting Scholar in Ethics and visiting associate professor of political science, is an expert on right-wing politics, especially during the hard-to-starboard shift of the 2010 American midterms.
Recentemente la Fondazione Julius Evola ha curato la seconda edizione (dopo quella del 1983) dell’antologia di testi evoliani dedicati alla civiltà statunitense, a cura di Alberto Lombardo, intitolata «Civiltà americana».
![OneDollar_NovusOrdoSeclorum[1].jpg](http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/media/00/00/3044936868.jpg)
Il suo nome ai più non dirà molto. Ma Niccolò Giani fu uno dei più importanti, radicali e oltranzisti esponenti del Fascismo rivoluzionario. Fu, infatti, tra i fondatori, nonché uno dei massimi rappresentanti, della Scuola di Mistica Fascista (SMF). Vissuto il suo ideale fino all’ultimo respiro, morì combattendo sul fronte greco nel 1941, ricevendo, per l’esempio offerto, la medaglia d’oro al valore. Tutto questo, mentre molti “fascisti” – le virgolette sono d’obbligo – s’imboscavano in patria, nascondendosi dietro la retorica di vuoti slogan e sterili parole d’ordine. Quegli stessi che, dopo il 1945, seppero bene in che direzione riciclarsi.
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Similar things happen in the United States too: an alienated, bookish radical right-winger takes up weight-lifting and martial arts, creates a private militia, dreams of overthrowing the government, then dies in a spectacular, suicidal, and apparently pointless confrontation with the state. In the United States, however, such people are easily dismissed as “kooks” and “losers.” However, when it happened in Japan, the protagonist, Yukio Mishima, was one of the nation’s most famous and respected novelists.
Director Paul Schrader’s 1985 movie, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Paul Schrader, of German Calvinist descent, is famous as the writer or co-writer of the screenplays of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver
Mishima, however, is Schrader’s best film. He also co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Leonard. (The score, moreover, is the best thing ever written by Philip Glass
The narrative frame of the movie is Mishima’s last day, which is filmed in realistic color. The story of his life is told in black and white flashbacks, inter-cut with dramatizations of parts of three of Mishima’s novels, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Yukio Mishima was a very, very, very sensitive child. Born Kimitake Hiraoke in 1925 to an upper middle class family with Samurai ancestry, he was taken from his mother by his grandmother, who kept him indoors, told him that he was physically fragile, prevented him from playing with other boys, and made him her factotum until she died when he was twelve. Then he returned to his parents.
Highly intelligent and convinced of his physical frailty, Mishima became bookish and introverted: a reader and a writer, a poet and a dreamer. He wrote his first short stories at age 12. Denied an outlet for healthy, boyish aggression, be became a masochist. He was also homosexual.
Imbued with Samurai tradition, he longed to fight in the Second World War and die for the emperor, but he was rejected as physically unfit for duty, a source of life-long self-reproach. He had a cold when he reported for his physical, and he later claimed that out of cowardice he exaggerated his symptoms so the doctor thought he had tuberculosis.
Mishima’s first book was published when he 19. He wrote at least 100 books—40 novels, 20 collections of short stories, 20 plays (including a screenplay and an opera libretto), and 20-odd book-length essays and collections of essays—before his death at age 45. He also dabbled in acting and directing.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Schrader’s dramatization of Mishima’s 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
But sickly organisms have will to power too. They affirm themselves by positing values based on their natures, values that cast them in a positive light and cast healthy organisms in a negative light. This is the origin of ascetic and “spiritual” values, as well as the Christian values of the Sermon on the Mount, which Nietzsche calls “slave morality.”
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Mizoguchi’s clubfooted friend Kashiwagi tries to teach Mizoguchi to use is disabilities to arouse women’s pity and exploit it to get sex. Kashiwagi can use his disability because he lacks pride and will to power. Mizoguchi, however, cannot enjoy beauty by means of self-abasement. He cannot own his imperfections. The vision of the Golden Pavilion prevents him. He can like himself only if the Golden Pavilion is destroyed, thus he sets it ablaze.
In Nietzsche’s terms, the destruction of the Golden Pavilion is an act of transvaluation. The beauty that oppresses Mizoguchi must be destroyed. For Nietzsche, this act of destruction serves to create a space for new values that will allow him to affirm his disability, just as the destruction of aristocratic values creates a space for slave morality.
Schrader includes this dramatization of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Self-Transformation
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Mishima documented his physical transformation with a very un-Japanese exhibitionism. He posed frequently for photographers, producing a book, Ordeal by Roses
In 1958, his body and self-confidence transformed, Mishima married Yoko Sugiyama. It was an arranged marriage. They had two children. (Among Mishima’s requirements for a wife was that she have no interest in his work and that she be shorter than him. As an indication of his social circles, Mishima had earlier considered Michiko Shōda as a possible bride. She went on to marry Crown Prince Akihito and is now Empress of Japan.)
In 1959, Mishima built a house in an entirely Western style. Following the Nietzschean principle that every authentic culture has an integrity and unity of style, Mishima rejected multiculturalism, including mixing Japanese and Western lifestyles. Since he could not live in an entirely Japanese house, he chose to live in an entirely Western one, where he could “sit on rococo furniture wearing Levis and an aloha shirt.”
Kyoko’s House
The second Mishima novel Schrader dramatizes is Kyoko’s House (1959), which cries out for an English translation. According to the literature, Kyoko’s House is an exploration of Mishima’s own psyche, aspects of which are concretized in the four main characters: a boxer, who represents Mishima’s new-found athleticism; a painter, who represents his creative side; a businessman, who lives an outwardly conventional life but rejects postwar Japanese society; and an actor, who represents his narcissism.
Schrader focuses only on the story of the actor, who takes up bodybuilding when humiliated by a gangster sent to intimidate his mother, who was in debt to loan-sharks. The moneylender turns out to be a woman. She offers to cancel the loan if the actor sells himself to her.
The narcissist, whose sense of reality is based on the impression he makes in the eyes of others, realizes that even his newly acquired muscles are not real to him. The realization comes when his lover, on a sadistic whim, cuts his skin with a razor. In physical pain, he finds a sense of reality otherwise unavailable due to his personality disorder. Their sexual relationship takes a sadomasochistic turn that culminates in a suicide pact—foreshadowing Mishima’s own end.
Having put so much of himself into Kyoko’s House, Mishima was deeply wounded by its commercial and critical failure. Schrader had first wanted to dramatize Mishima’s Forbidden Colors
Schrader did not dramatize the story of the boxer in Kyoko’s House, but it also foreshadows Mishima’s life as well. After one of his hands is shattered in a fight, the boxer becomes involved in right-wing politics. Mishima makes it quite clear that the boxer’s political commitment is not based on ideology, but on a physically ruined man’s desire for an experience of self-transcendence and sublimity.
The businessman’s outlook is also important for understanding Mishima’s life and outlook. He thinks postwar Japan is a spiritual void in which prosperity, materialism, peace, and resolute amnesia about the war years have sapped life of authenticity, which requires that one face death, something that was omnipresent during the war.
Authenticity through awareness of death, pain as an encounter with reality, and right wing politics as a form of self-transcendence (or therapy): Kyoko’s House maps out the trajectory of the rest of Mishima’s life.
Mishima’s Political Turn
Mishima, like many Western right-wingers, saw tradition as a third way between capitalism and socialism, which are essentially identical in their materialistic ends and their scientific and technological means. He always had right-wing tendencies, but his writings in the 1940s and 1950s were absorbed (self-absorbed, truth be told) with personal moral and psychological issues.
Like many Japanese, however, Mishima became increasingly alarmed by the corruptions of postwar consumer society. He saw the Samurai tradition as an aristocratic alternative to massification, a spiritual alternative to materialism. He saw the Japanese military and the emperor as guardians of this tradition. But these guardians had already made too many compromises with modernity. Mishima was particularly critical of the emperor’s renunciation of divinity at the end of the Second World War. In his writings and actions in the last decade of his life, Mishima sought to call the emperor and the military back to their mission as guardians of Japanese tradition.
In the fall of 1960, Mishima wrote “Patriotism
Mishima’s story focuses on Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama and his young wife, Reiko. The Lieutenant did not take part in the coup but was friends with the participants. He is ordered to help suppress it. Torn between loyalty to the emperor and loyalty to his friends, he chooses to commit suicide by self-disembowelment after a night of love-making. Reiko joins him in death.
Mishima published “Patriotism
Schrader shows bits of the filming of Patriotism
Runaway Horses
Isao’s plot is clearly based on the Ni Ni Roku Incident of 1936. The novel also tells the story of the Samurai insurrection in Kunamoto in 1876. But it would be a mistake to conclude that Mishima put his hope in a successful military coup as the most likely path to a renewal of Japanese tradition. Mishima’s focus was on the ritual suicides of the defeated rebels.
The Way of the Samurai
Japan had 300 years of peace under the Tokugawa Shogunate. Conflict had been outlawed; history in the Hegelian sense had been ended. Yet the arts and culture flourished, and the Japanese had not been reduced to a mass of dehumanized and degraded producer-consumers. The cause of this was the persistence of the Samurai ethic.
The Samurai, of course, like all aristocrats, prefer death to dishonor, and when prevented from demonstrating this on the battlefield, they demonstrated it instead through ritual suicide. They also demonstrated their contempt of material necessity through the cultivation of luxury and refinement. The cultural supremacy of the ideal of the honor suicide served as a bulwark protecting high culture against degeneration into bourgeois consumer culture, which springs from an opposing hierarchy of values that prizes life, comfort, and security over honor.
Mishima’s cultural-political project makes the most sense if we view it not as an attempt to return to militarism, but as an attempt to uphold or revive the Samurai ethic in postwar Japan so that it could play the same conservative role as it did under the 300-year peace of the Shogunate. (Mishima’s outlook would then be very similar to that of Alexandre Kojève, who in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Mishima produced a spate of political books and essays in the 1960s, most of which have remained untranslated. Two of the most important, however, are available in English. In 1967, Mishima published The Way of the Samurai
Mishima the Activist
But Mishima did more than write about action. He acted. In 1967, Mishima enlisted in the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) and underwent basic training. In 1968, Mishima formed the Tatenokai (Shield Society—Mishima was pleased that the English initials were SS), a private militia composed primarily of right-wing university students who studied martial arts and swore to protect Japanese tradition against the forces of modernization, left or right.
In 1968 and 1969, when leftist student agitators had the universities in chaos, Mishima participated in debates and teach-ins, criticizing Marxism and arguing that Japanese nationalism, symbolized by loyalty to the Emperor, should come before all other political commitments.
On November 25, 1970, after a year of planning, Mishima and four members of the Shield Society visited the Icigaya Barracks of the Japanese Self-Defense force and took the commander hostage. Mishima demanded that the troops be assembled so he could address them. He had alerted the press in advance. He stepped out onto a balcony in his uniform to harangue the assembled troops, calling them to reject American imposed materialism and to return to the role of guardians of Japanese tradition.
The speech was largely drowned out by circling helicopters, and the soldiers jeered. Mishima returned to the commander’s office, where he and one of his followers, Masakatsu Morita, committed seppuku, a ritual suicide involving self-disembowelment with a dagger followed by decapitation with a sword wielded by one’s second.
Mishima’s stunt is often referred to as a “coup-attempt,” but this is stupid. Mishima had been talking about, writing about, rehearsing, and preparing for suicide for years. He had no intention of surviving, much less taking power. His death was an attempt to inspire a revival of Samurai tradition. In Samurai fashion, he wanted a death that mattered, a death of his choosing, a death that he staged with consummate dramatic skill.
Mishima also wished to avoid the decay of old age. Having come to physical health so late in life, he had no intention of experiencing its progressive loss. (His last novel, The Decay of the Angel
Schrader’s depiction of Mishima’s suicide is far less graphic than Patriotism but every bit as powerful. He saves the climaxes of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, and Runaway Horses to the very end, inter-cutting them with Mishima’s own suicide, to shattering effect.
This is a great movie, which will leave a lasting impression.
Mishima’s Legacy
In the end, though, what did Mishima’s death mean? What did it matter? What did it accomplish?
It would be all too easy to dismiss Mishima as a neurotic and a narcissist who engaged in politics as a kind of therapy. Right wing politics is crawling with such people (none of them with Mishima’s talents, unfortunately), and we would be better off without them. If a white equivalent of Mishima wished to write for Counter-Currents/North American New Right, we would welcome his work (as we would welcome translations of Mishima’s works!). But we would also keep him at arm’s length. Such people should be locked in a room with a computer and fed through a slot in the door. They should not be put in positions of trust and responsibility.
But Mishima is safely dead, and the meaning of his death cannot be measured in terms of crass political “deliverables.” Indeed, it is a repudiation of the whole calculus of interests that lies at the foundation of modern politics.
Modern politics is based on the idea that a long and comfortable life is the highest value, to be purchased even at the price of our dignity. Aristocratic politics is based on the idea that honor is the highest value, to be purchased even at the price of our lives.
The spiritual aristocrat, therefore, must be ready to die; he must conquer his fear of death; he even must come to love death, for his ability to choose death before dishonor is what raises him above being a mere clever animal. It is what makes him a free man, a natural master rather than a natural slave. It is ultimately the foundation of all forms of higher culture, which involve the rejection or subordination and stylization of merely animal desire.
A natural slave is someone who is willing to give up his honor to save his life. Thus modern politics, which exalts the long and prosperous life as the highest value, is a form of spiritual slavery, even if the external controls are merely soft commercial and political incentives rather than chains and cages.
Thus Mishima’s eroticization of death is not a mental illness needing medication. By ceasing to fear death, Mishima became free to lead his life, to take risks other men would not have taken. By ceasing to fear death, Mishima could preserve his honor from the compromises of commerce and politics and the ravages of old age. By ceasing to fear death, Mishima entered into the realm of freedom that is the basis of all high culture. By ceasing to fear death, Mishima struck a death-blow at the foundations of the modern world.
In my review of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, I argued that the Joker is Hollywood’s image of a man who is totally free from modern society because he has fundamentally rejected its ruling values—by overcoming the fear of death. An army of such men could bring down the modern world.
Well, Yukio Mishima was a real example of such a man. And, as usual, the truth is stranger than fiction.
Afterword
In my reviews of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, I argued that somebody in Hollywood and the comic book/graphic novel industry must be reading up on Traditionalism, for the super-villains in these movies can be seen as Traditionalists. Since Traditionalism is the most fundamental rejection of the modern world, weaponized Traditionalists make the most dramatically potent foils for liberal, democratic, humanistic superheroes like Hellboy and Batman.
Well, shortly after I wrote that, Savitri Devi’s Impeachment of Man was ordered by someone at one of the major comics companies.
I can see it all now. Somewhere down the line, Hellboy will be squaring off against the Cat Lady of Calcutta and her fleet of Zündelsaucers, and Batman will face his new arch-nemesis . . . a five-foot Samurai with spindly legs in tights.
Dans le cadre de la Contrée de cités, les cités fortifiées se situent à une distance comprise entre 40 et 60 km les unes des autres. Le lieu de construction choisi se révèle toujours sec et plat, surélevé de quelques mètres au-dessus du niveau de l'eau, et délimité sur ses côtés par des fleuves et des pentes naturels. Grâce à des recherches archéologiques récentes et à l'observation de photographies aériennes, il a été possible de reconnaître la succession précise des divers systèmes d'aménagements : les structures de forme ovale sont les plus anciennes, remplacées plus tardivement par des structures en forme de cercle ; enfin, les systèmes de fortification rectangulaires sont les plus récents.
de la Contrée de cités possèdent deux fonctions bien distinctes : utilitaire et sémantique. La poterie, par exemple, est ornée de motifs géométriques qui symbolisent les différentes forces de la nature - cercles, carrés, losanges, triangles, croix gammées - qui se retrouvent également dans l'aspect général des colonies et des constructions tombales. D'autres objets sont également décorés : il s'agit de petites sculptures anthropomorphes et zoomorphes en pierre, de pilons, de coupes en pierre ou de manches d'armes et d'outils.
Les communautés de la Contrée de cités se divisaient de manière tripartite en guerriers, prêtres et artisans, comme c'est typiquement le cas au sein des sociétés indo-européennes. On ne peut toutefois reconnaître l'existence d'un pouvoir détenu par un chef de tribu unique : grâce aux études menées sur les rites funéraires et les sépultures, il a été possible de conclure que la société de la Contrée de cités était en fait hiérarchisée et rassemblée autour d'une élite. L'autorité de ce groupe d'individus n'était pas fondée sur des contraintes économiques mais sur des valeurs religieuses traditionnelles. Les membres de l'élite tenaient le rôle de prêtres et disposaient également d'une position importante dans le domaine militaire. La femme possédait un statut social élevé et la part jouée d'une manière générale par les femmes dans la culture de la Contrée de cités était très développée.
MOSKOU 29/01 (AFP) = De dader van de dodelijke aanslag op de Moskouse luchthaven Domodedovo, waarbij maandag 35 mensen omkwamen, is afkomstig uit de Noordelijke Kaukasus, de onstabiele regio in het zuiden van Rusland. Dat meldt de commissie die instaat voor het onderzoek zaterdag. 
