Ce qu'il subsiste du rire dans notre hypermodernité

Ce qu’il subsiste du rire dans notre hypermodernité

par Pierre LE VIGAN

L’humour n’est pas le rire. C’est parfois même son contraire. Explications. Nous avons complètement perdu le sens de l’humour. Celui-ci suppose de l’intelligence, de la fine connivence, et aussi de la distance.  Ces ingrédients de base sont soit perdus soit n’entrent plus en relation les uns avec les autres. L’humour est menacé par les agelastes (François Rabelais), à savoir « ceux qui ne savent pas rire », mais aussi et surtout il est menacé par le rire contemporain. Car ce rire « à tout bout de champ », ce ricanement plus qu’il n’est un rire est le rire du satisfait de lui-même. C’est le rire du gros contentement de soi.

L’humour a mis longtemps à s’imposer à coté du rire originel, celui de la bonne santé un peu vulgaire qui ricane devant la maladie. Nous assistons à ce retour du « gros rire » originel, il est évidement néo-originel donc plus vulgaire. Il porte la marque du néo-primitivisme contemporain. Et à nouveau, il éclipse l’humour avec ce que ce dernier comporte de distance mais aussi de sollicitude vis-à-vis de l’autre. L’humour est caustique, il n’est pas cruel. Le rire contemporain a beaucoup plus à voir avec le rire cruel de la cour de récréation qui se moque de l’handicapé, du mal habillé, du pauvre, de l’étranger qui s’exprime mal, etc.

La première modernité volontariste mais aussi relativiste, et « humaniste » au sens renaissant du terme, avait permis l’émergence de l’humour.  La seconde modernité, notre hyper-modernité nihiliste tue l’humour. Alain Finkielkraut remarque (entretien dans Le Spectacle du monde, septembre 2009) : « Si “ le rire est le propre de l’homme ’’, pas l’humour. Lui n’est le propre que de l’homme civilisé, ou de l’homme moderne, au sens noble du terme, celui qui met en doute ses propres certitudes. Car la modernité, c’est aussi cela. C’est certes Descartes affirmant sa prétention à la maîtrise, mais c’est aussi Cervantès découvrant la relativité des opinions humaines et la sagesse du principe d’incertitude. À cet égard, l’humour marque une rupture avec le rire originel, lequel n’est que l’expression effrayante de la suffisance barbare de l’homme en bonne santé face à l’homme disgracié, à l’homme différent, à l’homme malade. Nous assistons aujourd’hui, sous couleur de plaisanterie, à un retour à ce rire originel. C’est l’époque d’un réensauvagement du monde par le rire. Ou, pour le dire autrement, c’est une mensongère homonymie que d’évoquer l’humour à propos du rire contemporain. L’humour a disparu dans un gigantesque éclat de rire. Le bouffon du roi est devenu le roi. » Une nouvelle fois, Alain Finkielkraut nous aide à comprendre ce que nous percevons souvent déjà confusément, et il nous le révèle à nous même. Un travail de maïeutique.

Pierre Le Vigan

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Article printed from Europe Maxima: http://www.europemaxima.com

URL to article: http://www.europemaxima.com/?p=1735

 

Il soldato di Jünger è l'uomo-massa in rivolta contro la massificazione, cioè contro se stesso

Il soldato di Jünger è l’uomo-massa in rivolta contro la massificazione, cioè contro se stesso

di Francesco Lamendola

Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]



È altamente significativo il fatto che un evento epocale e lacerante come la prima guerra mondiale abbia trovato, nell’ambito della letteratura, solo pochi scrittori capaci di penetrare l’essenza di ciò che essa aveva in se stessa di nuovo, di tragicamente nuovo, rispetto a tutte le guerre precedenti: vale a dire la massificazione e l’industrializzazione del massacro.
Fra i non molti che se ne resero conto, spicca il nome di Ernst Jünger, uno dei maggiori nella pleiade della cosiddetta “rivoluzione conservatrice” fiorita nei primi decenni del Novecento, che ha rappresentato tale carattere di novità in alcuni libri divenuti giustamente famosi, da «In Stahlgewittern», del 1920 («Nelle tempeste d’acciaio», Parma, Guanda, 1995), a  «Der Kampf als inneres», del 1922 (La lotta come esperienza interiore»); da «Sturm», del 1923 («Il tenente Sturm», Parma, Guanda, 2000), a «Das Waldchen 125», del 1925 («Boschetto 125. Una cronaca delle battaglie in trincea nel 1918», Parma, Guanda, 1999).
Da questi romanzi e saggi emerge con lucidità e prepotenza una nuova figura antropologica, quella del “soldato”, peraltro con caratteristiche radicalmente diverse da quelle “classiche”: più un pirata e un avventuriero, che un disciplinato esecutore di ordini superiori; più un anarca che un borghese, anzi, decisamente un anti-borghese, forgiato dal ferro e dal fuoco e darwinianamente sopravvissuto alle “tempeste d’acciaio” proprio per accendere la fiaccola della rivoluzione nella stagnante società del cosiddetto ordine costituito.
Jünger delinea questa nuova figura con l’entusiasmo e con la compartecipazione di chi ne ha fatto l‘esperienza diretta (fu ufficiale di complemento nelle trincee a partire dal 1915, dopo essersi arruolato romanticamente nella Legione Straniera francese) e, al tempo stesso, con il tono profetico che lo contraddistinguerà, poco dopo - negli anni del primo dopoguerra - quando sposterà le sue simpatie su di una nuova figura antropologica, quella dell’”operaio”; per poi approdare, definitivamente, a quella del “ribelle”, di colui che “passa al bosco” e rifiuta radicalmente le tranquille certezze del mondo borghese, per “vivere pericolosamente” in una sorta di guerra privata contro ogni tentativo di ingabbiarlo, di ammaestrarlo, di ammansirlo e, in ultima analisi, di manipolarlo.
Nemmeno Jünger, però, riesce a sottrarsi alle premesse irrazionalistiche, vitalistiche, confusamente nietzschiane, che fanno velo alla rigorosa imparzialità della sua analisi e finisce per caricare la figura del “soldato” di valenze romantiche, nel senso più ampio del termine, che poco o niente hanno a che fare con la realtà storica della prima guerra mondiale; e, soprattutto, per cercare una scorciatoia ideologica che gli consenta di sottrarre quella figura, a lui così cara, al destino della massificazione e della nullificazione della sua volontà individuale, per restituirle - ma, ahimé, solo in maniera astratta e velleitaria - quella capacità decisionale che contrassegna, per definizione, qualsiasi “eroe” letterario: categoria - quest’ultima - alla quale anche il “soldato” appartiene.
In altre parole, Jünger tenta di delineare la figura di un combattente che, slanciandosi contro le linee nemiche per “sfondarle” o “penetrarle” (psicanalisti freudiani, sbizzarritevi!), con una sorta di furore eroico che è anche, al tempo stesso, decisamente erotico, si fa protagonista di un vero e proprio surrogato dell’atto sessuale.
Sarebbe troppo semplice insistere sul velleitarismo, nonché sulla natura eminentemente letteraria, nel senso di “straniante”, di un simile atteggiamento, che, come nel caso dei Futuristi, celebra la “bellezza” della lotta per se stessa e finisce per cadere in un eccesso di estetismo, vagamente spruzzato di superomismo e, naturalmente, del più crudo darwinismo.
Più interessante, invece, della chiave di lettura psicologica e più fruttuosa come ipotesi di lavoro, ci sembra essere quella specificamente ideologica: non potendo sottrarsi ad una spietata quanto cieca gerarchia,  che lo afferra e lo scaraventa in un sanguinoso, delirante bagno di anonimità, il “soldato” jüngheriano si prende la sua rivincita individualistica, facendo proprio quel modello gerarchico e quella impersonalità tecnologica, ma vivendoli, con orgoglio, dall’interno, illudendosi così di mutare i termini della propria condizione di totale impotenza decisionale e di radicale e assoluta sottomissione ad un tale apparato anonimo e distruttivo.
Eric J. Leed, nel suo pregevole studio «Terra di nessuno. Esperienza bellica e identità personale nella prima guerra mondiale» (titolo originale: «No Man’s Land. Combat and Identity in World War I», Cambridge University Press, 1979; traduzione italiana di Rinaldo Falcioni, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1985, 2004 pp. 200-212 passim), ha colto nel segno, a nostro avviso, allorché ha evidenziato il carattere illusorio e, al tempo stesso, auto-consolatorio, della identificazione jüngheriana fra il “soldato” e la guerra:

«Man mano che gli uomini esperivano la guerra come estraniazione dal proprio “agire”, come perdita di controllo, come svilimento delle loro potenzialità, la loro autonomia smarrita e le loro energie represse furono investite in un’astrazione: “la Guerra”, il meccanismo autonomo di macello. Ma alcuni combattenti, e in prima file Ernst Jünger, non poterono rassegnarsi allo statuto di individui qualsiasi, sofferenti passivi dello strapotere del materiale. Essi tentarono dunque di recuperare la loro potenza perduta tramite un’identificazione proprio con quel meccanismo autonomo della “Guerra” che tiranneggiava le “masse”. Nel caso di Jünger» l’identificazione personale con la tecnologia autonoma divenne fonte di potere e autorità personali; tramite questa identificazione egli fu in grado di acquisire lo statuto di esecutore di un potere sovrapersonale, un potere che concedeva a coloro che si identificavano in esso una rinnovata, anche se “amorale”, capacità d’azione. È in quest’ottica che bisogna leggere l’affermazione di Jünger secondo cui la prima guerra mondiale produsse una nuova “Gestalt”, un “uomo tecnologico” che era tanto “duro”, “insensibile”, e “imperturbabile” quanto la stessa macchina da guerra.
In base a queste identificazioni la guerra in generale, e in particolare l’immagine della guerra come realtà industriale, “tecnologica”, acquista sovente un profondo significato soggettivo. Nei libri di guerra di Jünger è evidente che la “macchina” assomma tutte le altre caratteristiche della figura d’”autorità” in grado d’impartire sofferenze e punizioni, rimanendo ad esse impermeabile – la figura del padre, lo stato, la divinità. La posizione politica post-bellica di Jünger, il suo “conservatorismo radicale”, trae le mosse da un’esperienza di guerra in cui egli apprese, una volta di più, che l’individuo non acquisisce la sua capacità di azione e la sua autonomia tramite la ribellione contro quelle figure, bensì tramite l’identificazione con esse. […]
Per Jünger la guerra fu un’esperienza che liberò i figli della borghesia dalle loro origini sociali, rivoltandoli contro i loro genitori borghesi. […]
Al pari di tutti gli altri, Jünger esperì la guerra autentica come umiliazione, come tremenda rassegnazione; il nemico era scomparso dietro una maschera macchinica che impediva ogni confronto od osservazione. I successivi anni di guerra avrebbero solo intensificato le contraddizioni implicite in questa esperienza iniziale: la guerra non era la prova delle capacità e delle volontà individuali, bensì la soppressione di ogni valore connesso all’individuo. […]
Qui l’offensiva è l’atto che risolve tutte le inibizioni: essa permette a coloro che marciscono nelle trincee e nelle buche di granata di comportarsi finalmente come pirati e tagliaborse svincolati da ogni morale o coscienza.  L’immagine di violenza sistematica nei confronti di un paese pingue e pacifico in compagnia di altri “armati di tutto punto” è necessariamente legata allo strapotere inibitore del fuoco d’artiglieria, al sistema di trincea, alle condizioni di immobilismo della guerra: sono proprio queste realtà, queste condizioni che creano le condizioni immaginarie dello straripamento di una feroce soldatesca in territori vergini. […]
Nei primi lavori di Jünger si può chiaramente cogliere - nell’idea dell’assalto di tipo militare e sociale - la sovrapposizione fra mondo sociale e mondo militare. È evidente che l’esperienza di guerra non è, almeno non a livello mentale, un’esperienza discreta, creatrice di nuove strategie psichiche; piuttosto, con i materiali dell’esperienza di guerra, Jünger semplifica e intensifica un tipo di conflitto  psichico prettamente tradizionale. Da un lato stanno tutte le realtà restrittive e inibitorie - la tecnologia, la borghesia, la figura del padre - che servono a proteggere e a difendere un territorio amico e pacifico; dall’altro stanno le creazioni della realtà e della fantasia - il pirata predone, le truppe d’assalto, gli assassini segreti della coscienza borghese, giovani che erano a un tempo “costretti a sacrificare se stessi” e armati “dei massimi strumenti di potenza”. […]
In tutti questi frangenti, il personaggio del soldato è contrassegnato da un’elevata tensione ormai abituale: in termini patologici, questo carattere è basato su di una stasi, un equilibrio teso, che fomenta in continuazione fantasie di scarica, di liberazione. Qualora si voglia ricostruire il percorso che nell’opera di Jünger lega l’esperienza di guerra ad un’ideologia del tutto ambivalente, che combina totalitarismo e rivoluzione, si deve partire dalla situazione di fatto esistente della guerra di trincea. Proprio da questa situazione in cui le scariche pulsionali e la mobilità dei singoli combattenti erano inibite dalla tecnologia, risultò una mostruosa stasi fisica; ma nel particolare caso di Jünger, questa stasi assunse il carattere di una fissazione sulla tecnologia, approdando quest’ultima allo statuto di genitrice di una generazione intera.»

Se, dunque, la guerra moderna rappresenta l’estremo punto d’arrivo, da un lato, della industrializzazione, della gerarchizzazione e dell’anonimato dei modelli sociali e, dall’altro, della loro mistificazione ideologica (perché solo così si potrebbe ottenere il consenso nei confronti di una macchina di distruzione di tale apocalittico orrore), Jünger ha visto giusto nell’individuarne i legami di contiguità, logica e produttiva, con i meccanismi economici, sociali e politici che caratterizzano la modernità in quanto tale, anche in tempo di “pace”: che altro non è se non la tregua in attesa del riaccendersi d’un conflitto permanente.
Lo provano, fra l’altro, le evidenti analogie, riscontrate già nelle retrovie dei campi di battaglia, fra le nevrosi caratteristiche della società in tempo di pace e quelle che insorgevano nei soldati alle prese con l’esperienza diretta della guerra: nevrosi da gas, nevrosi da trincea, nevrosi da bombardamento e via di seguito.
Perfino la loro ripartizione per classi sociali riproduceva fedelmente la “distribuzione” del disagio mentale in tempo di pace: gli attacchi di ansia generalizzata, infatti, erano più diffusi tra gli ufficiali, provenienti dalle classi superiori; mentre le nevrosi “specifiche”, ad esempio quelle da gas (dopo che ebbe inizio la guerra chimica con l’attacco tedesco ad Ypres, in Belgio, nel 1915, mediante un aggressivo chimico passato alla storia, appunto, con il nome di “iprite”) erano più diffuse fra i soldati di truppa, provenienti dal proletariato.
Non aveva visto giusto, invece, Jünger - a nostro avviso - allorché confondeva lo slancio aggressivo del “soldato” con una forma di affermazione dell’individuo, addirittura dell’individuo eccezionale (al punto da teorizzare che la tattica della cosiddetta “difesa elastica”, adottata dallo Stato Maggiore dell’esercito per limitare il numero delle perdite e per facilitare l’azione manovrata di contrattacco sui fianchi, era contraria allo spirito del soldato, secondo lui naturalmente offensivo), perché non sapeva o non voleva riconoscere il carattere coercitivo della macchina militare da cui il singolo soldato totalmente dipendeva, ridotto in condizioni d’irrimediabile eteronomia.
Perciò la rivolta del “soldato” contro la massificazione era, in fondo, l’inconscia rivolta dell’uomo massificato contro se stesso: contro quella proiezione illusoria di se stesso che vestiva l’uniforme di un altro colore ed era perciò identificata con il “nemico”.
Non seppe o non volle vedere che il soldato, in una guerra moderna, cioè totale, è null’altro che un ingranaggio, anonimo e perciò sostituibile a volontà, della macchina-esercito; così come non saprà o non vorrà vedere che l’operaio, nella società moderna, altro non è che un ingranaggio, altrettanto anonimo e intercambiabile, della macchina-industria.
Molto più lucido e molto più coerente con le sue premesse individualistiche, conservatrici e tuttavia, o proprio per questo, irriducibilmente antiborghesi, è stato, secondo noi, l’ultimo Jünger, quello del Waldgänger, ossia dell’anarca che “passa al bosco” (una rivisitazione, in fondo, del “masnadiere” di schilleriana memoria) e riesce così, pur dovendo vivere nell’era dei Titani, a difendere almeno l’essenziale della propria individualità, del proprio spirito critico, della propria volontà di non sottomettersi ad un sistema omologante, che tutto abbraccia e che tutto livella con l’inesorabile efficienza produttiva della Tecnica.


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La rivincita dell'anti-Sartre: Emil Cioran

La rivincita dell’anti-Sartre: Emil Cioran

di Andrea Rigoni

Fonte: Corriere della Sera [scheda fonte]

Riscoperta trasversale dello scrittore a cento anni dalla nascita

Da quando, verso la metà degli anni Settanta, ho incominciato a frequentare Cioran, dedicandomi anche alla diffusione della sua conoscenza in Italia, mi sono spesso chiesto in che cosa consistesse la sua singolarità e quale fosse il rapporto fra lo scrittore e l’uomo.
La voce di Cioran si era manifestata in Francia, a partire dal 1949 quando apparve il suo Sommario di decomposizione, come una nota del tutto isolata, diversa e dissonante dal concerto intellettuale e culturale dell’epoca, che era universalmente segnato dal dominio delle ideologie e delle utopie: l’opera e l’attività di Sartre ne rappresentavano allora in Francia, e non solo in Francia, una sorta di emblema. Cioran era l’anti-Sartre. Nel celebre filosofo esistenzialista, nell’eroe dell’engagement, egli non vedeva che un «impresario di idee» , secondo l’innominato ma riconoscibile ritratto che ne ha lasciato nel Sommario: un «pensatore senza destino» , nel quale «tutto è notevole, salvo l’autenticità» , «infinitamente vacuo e meravigliosamente ampio» , ma proprio per questo capace, con un’opera che degrada il nulla al rango di una merce intellettuale, di conquistare e soddisfare «il nichilismo da boulevard e l’amarezza degli sfaccendati» . Era dunque naturale che l’opera di Cioran, con la sua lucidità bruciante e solitaria, vissuta come esperienza e forma di un destino, restasse quasi senza eco: il riconoscimento doveva limitarsi al fulgore inusitato dello stile, che balzava agli occhi, se non di tutti, almeno di alcuni, tra i quali i primi lettori del manoscritto del Sommario, che si chiamavano Jules Romains, André Gide, André Maurois, Jean Paulhan, Jules Supervielle, ma certo anche Paul Celan, che poco dopo ne avrebbe fatto la traduzione in tedesco. Tuttavia sappiamo bene che lo stile, la forma, il tono di un’opera non sono l’abito o l’ornamento estrinseco del pensiero, ma il suo corpo, la sua vita, la sua essenza e che dunque essi rappresentano assai più di un indizio... Cioran affrontava i temi capitali dell’esistenza e del mondo col linguaggio più diretto e più chiaro, ripristinando la superba tradizione che si era perduta dopo Schopenhauer e Nietzsche. È ovvio, nello stesso tempo, che egli rimanesse estraneo alle mode culturali che negli anni Settanta e Ottanta furoreggiavano in Francia e in Europa: la linguistica, lo strutturalismo, la semiologia, la psicanalisi, il decostruzionismo, i cui esponenti o seguaci apparivano ai suoi occhi quanto meno segnati dalla superstizione della scienza e dalla maledizione dell’accademia. Ma qual è dunque il tratto fondamentale che distingue lo stile e il pensiero di Cioran, lo scrittore non meno che l’uomo? La ragione di una presa e di un fascino che oggi hanno conquistato una gamma indefinibile e trasversale di lettori, fino al E. M. Cioran nacque a Rasinari (Romania) l’ 8 aprile 1911 e morì a Parigi il 20 giugno 1995. La sua opera è stata tradotta da Adelphi sotto la direzione di Mario Andrea Rigoni che gli fu amico e che, tra il 1983 e il 1991, ne presentò alcuni scritti sul «Corriere» (raccolti in Fascinazione della cenere, Il Notes magico, 2005). Rigoni ha pubblicato in Francia Cioran dans mes souvenirs (P. U. F., 2009). punto di suscitare in molti un’identificazione spontanea e una devozione fanatica? È difficile non trovare ai singoli temi del pensiero di Cioran, come di chiunque altro, un precedente o un analogo nella letteratura antica o moderna; ma è la quintessenza di lucidità di cui si sostanzia costantemente la sua riflessione che non cessa di impressionare e di affascinare. Essa si fonda, a mio parere, sul carattere diretto e personale dell’esperienza, offerta come testimonianza intima e viva di un essere, anziché di una teoria astratta o di un esercizio professionale. Un aforisma dei Sillogismi dell’amarezza asserisce che «tutto ciò che non è diretto è insignificante» . Mi sembra che questo principio o questo imperativo, che Cioran non ha mai smesso di seguire, definisca molti tratti della sua fisionomia intellettuale e letteraria: la ricerca, anzi l’ossessione, di ciò che è l’essenziale, nella metafisica come nella politica o nella letteratura; l’interesse verso i grandi moralisti e i grandi saggi; l’orrore dell’ufficialità e del professionismo; il culto della chiarezza e il rifiuto del gergo; l’amore della brevità e la pratica dell’aforisma; l’attrazione per i generi letterari che recano l’impronta immediata dell’io, come i diari, le confessioni, le memorie, le lettere, le autobiografie. Cioran era interessato assai più alla vita che alla filosofia; più alle cose che alle idee; più agli istinti e alle emozioni che ai concetti. In un’opera cercava soprattutto l’elemento personale: «Guai al libro che si può leggere senza doversi interrogare a ogni momento sull’autore!» . D’altronde la letteratura, nella sua visione, nasce da una ferita esistenziale e da una tara metafisica: «La scrittura è la rivincita della creatura e la sua risposta a una Creazione abborracciata» . È significativo che nell’opera di Tolstoj egli abbia isolato e commentato La morte di Ivan Il’ic; come pure che, nel saggio su Fitzgerald, abbia trascurato i romanzi e i racconti dello scrittore americano per concentrarsi sulla notte dell’anima, sull’ «esperienza pascaliana» del crollo evocato nelle pagine impietose del Crack-Up. Analogamente Cioran amava più i santi e i mistici che i teologi: donde il rapporto contrastato, se non il dissenso, col suo vecchio amico e maestro Eliade, al quale rimproverava di essere non tanto uno spirito religioso quanto un semplice storico delle religioni, un indifferente cronista e archivista della varietà delle fedi. Si capisce che oggi, al culmine del disincanto al quale siamo giunti, molti di noi abbiano trovato in Cioran ciò che raramente si trova in un autore: non solo uno scrittore e un pensatore eccellente, ma uno spirito fraterno, un sodale, un amico, capace di parlare alla carne e all’anima non meno che all’intelletto. Tale egli era nella vita privata: semplice e immediato, partecipe e arguto, sempre sfiorato dall’ala nera della malinconia ma pronto a mitigarne il colpo con le risorse dell’ironia e dell’autoironia, qualche volta con un divertito esercizio di autodemolizione, anch’esso segno di uno spirito superiore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Maître Eckehart et la mystique néerlandaise

Maitre Eckehart et la mystique néerlandaise

Ex: http://marceemans.wordpress.com/

Si l’on en juge par les nombreux témoignages parvenus jusqu’à nous, les doctrines de Maitre Eckehart ont eu une grande répercussion dans les Pays-Bas. Cette influence s’expliquera notamment par le fait que ces contrées ont entretenu durant tout le moyen âge un commerce spirituel des plus intense avec Cologne et les provinces rhénanes.

Cependant, si l’histoire du mysticisme occidental nous apprend que les mystiques néerlandais ont fréquenté les foyers spirituels de la Rhénanie, il est certain, d’autre part, que les mystiques allemands sont venus de leur côté s’initier aux sources de la spiritualité néerlandaise. Mais si les voyages d’un Tauler ou d’un Suso en Néerlande sont chose généralement admise, l’influence de la mystique néerlandaise du XIIIe siècle sur un maître Eckehart, par exemple, semble encore relever du domaine des thèses hardies et peu défendables. L’analyse philologique de certains teImes eckehardiens à laquelle s’est livrée le R.P. Van Mierlo nous conduira cependant à admettre que l’infuence de la mystique néerlandaise sur Eckehart est possible, voire même certaine.

D’après le témoignage de Lamprecht von Regensburg (1) toute une littérature mystique du plus haut intérêt aurait fleuri dans les Pays-Bas avant l’année 1250. jusqu’ici deux noms à peine ont survécu à la perte des écrits de cette époque: Hadewych (2) et Béatrice de Nazareth. Mais à eux deux, ces noms suffisent pour situer la beauté de cette efflorescence mystique. Tout ce qui caractérisera un j~ur l’ori~inalité de la Mystique germanique se trouve déjà lllscrlt dans 1 oeuvre de ces femmes exceptionnelles. Et l’apparition de Eckehart au lieu de les inaugurer ne fera que confirmer les tendances spéculatives de cette mystique germanique, née dans les Pays-Bas près de la mer … Mais son génie créateur conduira ces tendances à leur suprême accomplissement, de telle manière que le maître de Hochheim peut être considéré à juste titre comme le véritable père de la «Deutschen Speculation». C’est chez lui que pour la première fois se dessine en toute sa magnificence ce grandiose édifice de la mystique germanique, et des matériaux épars dans les écrits spirituels de la Néerlande et de la Rhénanie il construira cette somme mystique qui domine encore le mysticisme allemand.

Nous n’entrerons pas ici dans les détails qui caractérisent le message du maître de Hochheim, mais nous essayerons de déceler son importance quant à l’orientation définitive de la mystique néerlandaise du XIVe siécle, telle qu’elle se précisera dans l’oeuvre de Ruusbroec l’Admirable et de ses disciples.

Ici encore nous pouvons dire, sans peur d’être contredit, que l’influence de Eckehart sur le sage de Groenendael est beaucoup moins évidente que l’on ne se plait généralement à l’affirmer. L’ignorance de la plupart des historiens du mysticisme occidental quant au développement parallèle des mystiques rhénane et néerlandaise a ainsi conduit à des conclusions par trop hâtives qui nous ont longtemps fait croire que les doctrines de Ruusbroec devaient tout à celles de Eckehart. N’a-t-on pas été jusqu’à affirmer que la terminologie de Ruusbroec était en grande partie tributaire de celle du grand créateur de «néologismes mystiques», quand la plupart de ces « néologismes» étaient depuis près d’un demi siècle le bien commun des mystiques Néerlandais et rhénans?

Comme nous le montrerons plus loin, ce n’est que dans les dernières oeuvres de Ruusbroec que l’on peut déceler d’une manière certaine que le mystique brabançon a pris connaissance de certaines thèses de Eckehart, mais alors encore pour les refuser et les attaquer comme les· pires des hérésies, cela après leur condamnation à Rome. Il est donc vraisemblable que seul le grand bruit fait autour des 17 thèses hérétiques du fougueux dominicain ait attiré l’attention du solitaire de Groenendaal sur l’oeuvre de Eckebart. Dès lors, l’affirmation d’un Van Olterloo, selon laquelle Ruusbroec aurait suivi pendant un certain temps l’enseignement de Eckehart à Cologne nous semble devenir peu défendable.

Quoique lui-mêine ait été soupçonné d ‘hérésie par certains maîtres en théologi.è, l’on peut dire qu’une importante partie de l’activité de Ruusbroec a été consacrée à combattre les hérésies de son temps (3), Selon le témoignage de son biographe Pomerius, Ruusbroec aurait même entrepris cette sainte croisade dès les premières années de sa prêtrise en s’attaquant à J’une des plus célèbres et des plus mystérieuses hérétiques de son temps: la Bloemardinne (4).

Dès sa première oeuvre, «LE LIVRE DU ROYAUME DES AMANTS DE DIEU», Ruusbroec fait allusion aux hérésies si «pernicieuses pour: la vraie foi» et dans son énumération de ceu?, qui sont incapables de suivre le chemin surnaturel vers Dieu, il citera dans le même chapitre les mécréants et les hérétiques, Plus loin il citera les quatre principales raisons d’hérésie en indiquant les moyens de les éviter. Dans tous ses autres écrits également Ruusbroec trouvera moyen de faire allusion aux divers aspects d’hérésie. Il en va ainsi dans «L’ANNEAU OU LA PIERRE BRILLANTE» au chapitre des «cinq sortes de Pécheurs» ; dans son «LIVRE DES QUATRE TENTATIONS» qui toutes sont évidemment à l’origine des errements de la foi : dans son «LIVRE DU TABERNACLE SPIRITUEL», où l’hérésie est cependant moins explicitement attaquée: dans son «LIVRE DES SEPT CLOTURES» où la cinquiè me clôture, celle de la fausse vacuité est décrite avec force détails qui nous montrent combien proche celle-ci se trouve du panthéïsme.

Dans «LES SEPT DEGRES DE L’ECHELLE D’AMOUR SPIRITUEL» nous trouvons également au chapitre XI une description de ceux qui se croient grands et élevés devant Dieu. Dans «LE MIROIR DU SALUT ETERNEL» Ruusbroec parle longuement de cette sorte de gens qui ne peuvent approcher de la Sainte Table et parmi lesquels les hérétiques prennent une place d ‘exception, parce qu’ils ne croient pas que le Christ se trouve en chair et en sang dans le Saint Sacrement, ou parce qu’ils affirment qu’ils sont -eux-mêmes Dieu et le Christ, leur main ayant créé le ciel et la terre, etc. etc… En d’autres endroits encore du même livre,Ruusbroec s’attaque à ces mêmes hérétiques en les vouant aux pires supplices.

Quant à son « LIVRE DE LA PLUS HAUTE VERITE» il y résume au chapitre IV tout ce qu’il a dit précédemment contre l’hérésie; nous y trouvons ainsi une véritable synthèse de la croisade idéologique de Ruusbroec contre les errements de son temps, synthèse qu’il lui suffira de reprendre dans son « LIVRE DES DOUZE BEGUINES» pour y dresser un réquisitoire définitif contre toutes les hérésies qui portent atteinte à la vraie foi.

Les hérésies que Ruusbroec combat dans ses premiers livres sont manifestement celles des Beggards et des Béguines, telles qu’elles f”rent condamnées par le Concile de Vienne de 1311, et dont il suffirait de reprendre. les différentes thèses latines pour en retrouver un écho direct, en langue populaire! dans les divers ouvrages de Ruusbroec.

Ce n’est qu’à partir des « SEPT CLOTURES» et des «DOUZE BEGUINES» que Ruusbroec s’attaque directement aux tendances de l’hérésie panthéïstique, et c’est ici que l’on retrouve clairement et pour la première fois certaines alluSions aux thèses condamnées de Eckehart et de ses disciples.

Sans que le nom d’Eckehart soit cité une seule fois dans les «DOUZE BEGUINES» plusieurs errements eckehardiens y sont explicitement réfutés. Ici encore l’on peut se demander si Ruusbroec: s’en est bien référé directement aux oeuvres du savant dominicain, ca’r il est plus vraisemblable de croire que Ruusbroec s’en est tenu aux «Errores Eckardi » telles qu’elles sont relatées dans la Bulle «In Agro Dominico » de Jean XXII, du 27 mars 1329 (5).

Certaines tournures de phrase du texte de Ruusbroec font cependant croire que celui-ci a également eu connaissance de quelque rédaction allemande des thèses hérétiques de Eckehart, mais alors encore a-t-il pu les trouver dans certaines variantes respectant plus ou moins fidèlement la pensée du maitre. C’est ce qui pourrait expliquer le gauchissement imprimé à certaines phrases citées par Ruusbroec, pour être immédiatement passées au crible. Après une analyse minutieuse des textes ruusbroeciens l’on en arrive à conclure que l’information de Ruusbroec quant aux doctrines eckehardiennes. Ne semblerait être que de seconde main, ce qui nous conduit en définitive bien loin d’une dépendance immédiate du solitaire de Groenendael à l’égard du Père de la « Deutschen Speculation » (6).

Un disciple de Ruusbroec, Jan Van Leeuw, reprenant les arguments de son maitre contre les doctrines de Eckehart, s’élève dans un de ses livres avec une rare violence contre les erreurs qu’elles comportent (7), Ne ménageant point ses mots, le bonus cocus reprochera à Eckehart d’être un homme diabolique, plein de morgue, qui ne songerait qu’à entrainer ses semblables en Enfer, Le feu de la polémique entraina cependant trop loin le brave cuisinier mystique qui, dans un écrit ultérieur, a dû faire amende honorable (8), Dans deux chapitres de ce manuscrit il justifie ses attaques, en se défendant à son tour d’avoir écrit des choses hérétiques: «Si j’ai pu écrire faussement, dira-t-il fort humblement, j’en demande pardon auprès de Dieu et de mes lecteurs». Cela n’empêche qu’il essayera de prouver son innocence en reconnaissant que Eckehart a abjuré toutes les hérésies qu’il lui reprochait. Il va même jusqu’à dire que « si Eckehart se trouve actuellement au Ciel – comme il l’espère – celui-ci doit non seulement approuver la chaleur avec laquelle lui, Jan van Leeuw, a pu l’attaquer dans ses hérésies, mais que si cela était en son pouvoir, celui-ci les attaquerait lui-même avec plus de violence encore … ».

Les répliques de Ruusbroec et de son disciple aux thèses hérétiques de Eckehart laissent supposer que, quoi que condamnées en haut lieu, celles .. ci devaient avoir une répercussion certaine, en séduisant les âmes pieuses, pout les entrainer dans les voies du panthéisme.

Les très nombreux manuscrits thiois de Maître Eckehart retrouvés dans les principales bibliothèques d’Europe laissent supposer que ses doctrines doivent avoir eu un grand retentissement dans les Pays-Bas. Si l’on songe qu’un manuscrit devait passer de main en main et faire J’objet de lectures à haute voix devant ‘un auditoire choisi, l’on peut dire que c’est par centaines, si pas par milliers que devaient s’y recruter les amis de Eckehart.

Un des plus curieux témoignages de l’influence de Eckehart est ce dialogue entre «Meester Eggaert» et de laïc anonyme (9), Ce texte se compose de 80 pages in-folio, de quatre colonnes chacune. Il est un véritable essai de vulgarisation de la doctrine eckehardienne. Il se présente sous forme de questions et réponses et fut probablement écrit dans le courant du XIVe siècle, bien que le seul manuscrit que nous connaissions soit du XVIe siècle.

Dans l’ensemble, ce texte ne nous apprend rien de nouveau sur Eckehart, mais le fait d’avoir été écrit sous forme de questions ~t de réponses lui confère la valeur d’un véritable catéchisme mystique à l’usage des âmes simples qui « ne connaissent assez de latin que pour dire « Pater»…

Que ce manuscrit ait encore été recopié au XVIe siècle nous prouvera d’autre part la persistance de J’influence eckehardienne dans les Pays-Bas.

Sans doute est-ce parce que la pensée de Eckehart se prêtait facilement à une interprétation panthéistique qu’elle joue un rôle si prépondérant dans J’évolution de certaines sectes dont la plus célèbre est celle des frères du «Libre Esprit».

Très réputée en Rhénanie, cette secte était dirigée au XIVe siècle par le néerlandais Walter de Hollande, dont les relations avec les Pays-Bas furent fréquentes et fécondes. C’est surtout par J’entremise de son école que les «hérésies panthéistes» de Eckehart furent anonymement répandues dans ces contrées.

Ruusbroec et ses disciples immédiats ne furent d’ailleurs pas les seuls à combattre tes hérésies; d’autres auteurs mystiques de son école, tel ce Gerhard Zerbold de Zutphen, auquel on attribue le «DE LIBRIS TEUTONICALIBUS». L’interprête autorisé de la doctrine des «Frères de la Vie Commune» s’y élève avec violence contre les «hérésies» sous prétexte qu’elles sont «valde nocipi et periculosi».

Cependant, l’interprétation hérétique du message eckehardien était trop séduisante pour que les anathèmes des esprits orthodoxes l’atteignent profondément. Durant le XIVe et jusque fort avant dans le XVe siècJe les sectes hérétiques connurent un rayonnement prodigieux et cela malgré Jes persécutions les plus tragiques.

Dire l’histoire de ces sectes, établir leurs doctrines et leurs filiations serait chose bien tentante; hélas. nous ne sommes renseignés à leur sujet que par le témoignage indirect de ceux-là mêmes qui les combattirent et qui ont du facilement fausser leur pensée exacte. Quant aux écrits mêmes des hérétiques. ils furent la proie des bûchers.

Il est impossible, dans de telles conditions d’établir l’influence réelle des doctrines de Eckehart sur ces hérésies, tout comme il est malaisé de déceler l’influence de celles-ci sur son système. Quant à la mystique orthodoxe, c’est surtout par les voies de ses disciples Tauler et Suso que Eckehart a pu avoir une influence positive et indirecte sur les mystiques néerlandais. Mais chez ces auteurs également il est bien difficile de déceler ce qui appartient en propre à la mystique rhénance, ces deux auteurs ayant séjournés également dans les centres spirituels des Pays-Bas.

Pour suivre les thèses du R. P. Van Mierlo quant aux relations entre la mystique des Pays-Bas et celle de la Rhénanie, nous dirons qu’en vérité il ne peut être question que d’interférences dont l’état actuel de la science ne peut établir les courbes exactes. Trop de documents perdus nous empêchent de retrouver les chaînons qui nous permettraient de parler valablement de cet aspect complexe de la spiritualité occidentale.

Dès maintenant une: conclusions s’impose cependant, c’est que mystiques néerlandaise et rhénane se confondent constamment et bien souvent ne font qu’une.

Marc. EEMANS

(1) Lamprecht von Regensburg : « DIE TOCHTER SIONS ».

(2) Les affinités évidentes entre la mystique de Hadewych et les doctrines de Eckehart ont conduit A. E. Bouman, dans une étude parue dans la revue Néo-Philgus (8e année) a affirmer non sans quelque légèreté que Hadewych était tributaire de Eckehart… La gratuité de cette thèse apparaîtra immédiatement si l’on songe que les oeuvres de Hadewych ont été écrites près d’un demi siècle avant celles de Eckehart. Nous n’en concluons cependant point que c’est Eckehart qui est tributaire de Hadewych, nous pourrons affirmer tout au plus que l’un

et l’autre ont puisé à une tradition commune et que l’interaction des mystiques néerlandaise et rhénane donnent à ces deux écoles de spiritualité une évidente parenté. Notons également en passant qu’une Sainte Hildegarde que l’on situe généralement à l’origine de 1a mystique germanique ne présente encore aucune des caractéristiques de cette école, mais participe encore entièrement de la tradition des Pères de l’Eglise.

(3) Voir notamment le R. P. Van Mierlo: « RUUSBROEC’S BESTRIJDING DER KETTERIJ « Ons Geeslelijk Erf. Oct. 1932. (N° Ruusbroec).

(4) Le R. P. Van Mierlo a analysé av,ec son érudition coutumière le cas de la Bloemardinne dans son étude

« OVER DE KETTERIN BLOEMARDINNE » dans Verslagen en Mededeelingen der Kon. VI. Académie, 1927.

(5) Voir p. 70 de ce numéro. Pour de plus amples détails consulter également G. Théry O. P. « EDITION CRITIQUE DES PIECES RELATIVES AU PROOES D’ECKHART CONTENUES DANS LE MANUSCRIT 33b DE LA BIBLIOTHEQUE DE SOEST », l. c. Paris, 1929.

(6) Ruusbroec et son entourage devaient cependant connaître les textes des Sermons XV et LXXXVII. Voir la traduction de ces deux sermons dans le présent numêro. Voir aussi Walther Dolch : DIE VERBREITUNG OBERLANDISCHER MYSTIKERWERKE IM NIEDERLANDISCHEN, Teil I. Diss, Leipzig 1909,

(7) Voir notre traduction page 91.

(8) Ms. 667 de la Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, à Bruxelles.

(9) Ms. Biblio, Royale de Belgique, N° 888.890.

Liberalism is the cause of inequality

Liberalism is the cause of inequality

by Brett Stevens 

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/

One of the pitfalls of being human is the many perceptual traps that can ensnare us. Spotting an object in water is difficult because of refraction; our ability to estimate the lengths of lines is hampered by nearby objects. Colors surrounding an object affect how we perceive it.

For the past five hundred years, a perceptual trap has gained momentum. This trap starts simply: we see civilization around us, and that it provides for us, and we assume that it will always be that way, even if we make changes. So greedily we demand as much as possible for ourselves and ignore the consequences of those acts.

More than a political movement, this is a social movement based on the wishful thinking of people who are not engaged in maintaining the civilization itself. They view society as like a supermarket: you take what you want, pay your money, and worry about nothing else.

In the USA and Europe, a resistance movement has awakened to resist this perceptual trap. We resist it both as an economic doctrine (socialism/liberalism) and as a philosophy of civilization (narcissism). We don’t want it in any form because it is the opposite of a healthy attitude toward life, and its results are correspondingly bad.

A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244. – MJ

The good liberals over at MotherJones.com, who provided us the above quotation and several informative charts, have stepped into a perceptual trap. They assume that individual equality exists, therefore that if inequality exists, something must be wrong.

They point out an interesting fact, however: the average income in the USA is dropping, while the incomes of the “super-rich” are rising, which is symptomatic of a third-world population. However, what they forget is that liberalism caused this vast inequality by undermining the middle class:

• Spreading the wealth. The agenda of liberalism is equality, which becomes filtered through the socialist notion of redistributing the wealth from rich to poor; if we’re all equal, the rich have that wealth unfairly, they think. The problem is that in doing this they take money away from those who are more competent, and who will use it to make more money, and spread it to people who are by definition less able to make competent financial decisions.
• Importing voters. A favorite liberal tactic since 1965 has been to import voters from third-world nations. The problem with this is that it skews the population demographic toward low-income low-skilled workers. This cheapens our cost of basic labor-oriented tasks, but in turn, forces the same amount of value to go to more people and ensures that any given task requires more people. The result is a dissipation of value, so that even if the number values remain the same, quality declines, as we’ve seen happen in American construction, poultry/meat and manufacturing since the 1990s.
• Fast money. Bill Clinton effected an economic miracle by making money easy and quick to borrow. While this provided a great stimulus to business in the short-term, in the long-term it shifted profitability from production of value-adding goods to the shuffling of paper and reselling of financial instruments. This produced an economy that while “profitable” existed entirely on paper. This not only creates a new class of super-rich manipulators, but also devalues the currency as investors worry about its actual value.
• Red tape. Affirmative action, H1-B visas, anti-discrimination legislation, Obamacare, environmental regulations, extensive safety rules and a Byzantine tax code afflict our businesses with miles of red tape. This in turn makes them less competitive, which they compensate for by cutting corners, which in turn reduces the value of their goods relative to those who have fewer obligations. Even more, this tempts them to outsource, where they don’t have to pay these costs.
• Unions. Unions combine the worst of all of the above: they spread money to the wrong people, including organized crime; they create violent social polarization between classes; they support and encourage immigration; they generate miles of red tape; they spread the wealth from those who make more wealth to those who sit in offices and pore over books of rules. In addition, unions wreck our competitiveness by creating more internal communication over non-productive issues, having more rules and more people to buy in on any compromise. If unions were biological we’d call them cancers.
• Allegiance. Removing the more organic questions of culture, heritage and ability, the liberal Utopia promotes people based on their allegiance to political concepts. Whether Viet Cong recruits reciting Mao, or Bono from U2 having the “right opinions,” we make a new elite for political motives. Surely Barack Obama, with his missing dissertation and questionable accomplishments, serves as a vanguard for this new political ueber-class.

All of the above are liberal darlings because the above support the liberal agenda of equality through wealth distribution and fragmentation of any majority group (who could possibly be more equal than the rest of us). In addition, the American left gets most of its funding from unions and associated concerns.

Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party. – Washington Examiner

If you want to know why your money is decreasing in value, and thus inequality is increasing, it is because of the liberal left’s attempts to make inequality disappear.

Before the left took over, the philosophy of Europe and the United States was that we would provide opportunity and reward those who were more competent. This natural philosophy, a lot like natural selection, enabled us to grow and challenge ourselves and produce an elite of smart, capable, dedicated people.

As the fight over the federal budget gathers pace, we will also see big confrontations between the reformers and the hostages to the status quo in Washington. Democrats are salivating over a possible backlash against Republican lawmakers if they force a government shutdown in early March by insisting on spending cuts. And complacent Republicans are dreading that very possibility in the face of the onslaught from the more energetic House Republican freshmen who recently passed that bold measure to reduce the federal budget by $61 billion.

The United States has been getting away with surreal levels of debt for far too long. If the dollar were not the world’s reserve currency, a major debt crisis would have exploded by now. The total outstanding federal debt has reached $14.1 trillion, almost the equivalent of what the economy produces in a year. Meanwhile, the annual deficit, a major source of that ever-mounting debt, stands at more than $1.6 trillion for 2011. It represents almost 11 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — which compares pitifully even with Greece, whose deficit in 2010 amounted to 8 percent of that country’s economy.

As a result of these imbalances, and of the illusion that unemployment can be brought down with government spending, the Federal Reserve has been printing dollars like crazy — half of them to purchase Treasury bonds. The policy of easy money has contributed to skyrocketing commodity prices, whose ugly political, social and economic consequences we are only beginning to see around the world. – Real Clear Politics

As the left got more popular, it introduced the perceptual trap: why can’t we all just be equal, spread the wealth, be pacifists, and live in tolerance of each other. The problem is that wealth redistribution penalizes the competent and responsible, and replaces them with a few vicious controllers and vast clueless masses who do not care about social problems they cannot understand.

There’s a major difference between the US aristocracy and the meritocracy though. Aristocrats like Henry Chauncey, bred at Saint Grottlesex boarding schools and the Ivy League, were conscious of their privilege and social responsibility, and focused on developing the character and leadership skills necessary for public service. Many of today’s meritocrats, in contrast, don’t believe it’s a rigged game in their favour, and commit themselves to winning it at all costs, which means stepping on everyone else. As a result, too many lack self-reflection or self-criticism skills, meaning even those who are grossly overpaid give themselves outrageous bonuses.

…

But as long as the global elite is armed with and shielded by the belief that they are a genuine meritocracy they’d find it morally repulsive to make the necessary compromises. Whether American or Chinese, individuals who focus too much on ‘achievement,’ and who believe the illusion that they’ve achieved everything simply through their own honest hard work, often think very little of everyone else as a result.

That’s the ultimate irony of the otherwise admirable efforts of Conant and Chauncey to create a fairer world: in giving opportunities for the bright and able (regardless of whether they are rich or poor), they’ve created a selfish and utilitarian elite from which no Conant or Chauncey will be likely to appear from in the future. – The Diplomat

Liberal policies create inequality. By enforcing an equality of political means, instead of practical ones, they create a false elite. This false elite then takes from the middle class, and funnels that wealth into a cancerous government and a new “elite” fashioned out of those who benefit from gaming the system. These aren’t innovators and trailblazers; they’re people who have learned to manipulate society for their benefit.

In addition, much like the Soviet Union and the ill-fated Southern European socialist states, these entitlement states spread the wealth too thin and re-direct it from growth areas into dead-ends, resulting in not only bankruptcy but a delusional population who, when the money runs out, won’t stop their own benefits in order to get everyone through the trouble. A nation that is disunified like that isn’t a nation; it’s a supermarket.

Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited amount of good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft; they must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy, rather than admiration of success, reigns.

In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different, ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if he was left to his own talents, and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better-off. – National Review

The psychology of hating inequality produces greater inequality. Where natural inequality may seem unfair, it works to produce “more equal” people who rise above the rest and, through their competence, give to the rest of us a functional society with profitable industries. Artificial equality on the other hand forces us all to the same level of poverty, leaving a few cultural/political elites to rule us, as is the case in most third-world nations.

The choice is upon us: first-world inequality, or third-world equality? The battle in Wisconsin is symbolic more than it is a choice of Wisconsin as a place particularly in need of fixing; it’s a battle over the philosophy that will define us, and decide which of these two societies we pick.

Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political

Greg Johnson

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

“Why can’t we all get along?”–Rodney King

Carl Schmitt’s short book The Concept of the Political (1932) is one of the most important works of 20th century political philosophy.

The aim of The Concept of the Political is the defense of politics from utopian aspirations to abolish politics. Anti-political utopianism includes all forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short, all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished.

In ordinary speech, of course, liberalism, international socialism, etc. are political movements, not anti-political ones. So it is clear that Schmitt is using “political” in a particular way. For Schmitt, the political is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy. Utopianism is anti-political insofar as it attempts to abolish that distinction, to root out all enmity and conflict in the world.

Schmitt’s defense of the political is not a defense of enmity and conflict as good things. Schmitt fully recognizes their destructiveness and the necessity of managing and mitigating them. But Schmitt believes that enmity is best controlled by adopting a realistic understanding of its nature. So Schmitt does not defend conflict, but realism about conflict. Indeed, Schmitt believes that the best way to contain conflict is first to abandon all unrealistic notions that one can do away with it entirely.

Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity. There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish perpetual peace.

Us and Them

What does the distinction between friend and enemy mean?

First, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy is collective. He is talking about “us versus them” not “one individual versus another.”

Schmitt introduces the Latin distinction between hostis (a collective or public enemy, the root of “hostile”) and inimicus (an individual and private adversary, the root of “inimical”). The political is founded on the distinction between friend (those on one’s side) and hostis (those on the other side). Private adversaries are not public enemies.

Second, the distinction between friend and enemy is polemical. The friend/enemy distinction is always connected with the abiding potential for violence. One does not need to actually fight one’s enemy, but the potential must always be there. The sole purpose of politics is not group conflict; the sole content of politics is not group conflict; but the abiding possibility of group conflict is what creates the political dimension of human social existence.

Third, the distinction between friend and enemy is existentially serious. Violent conflict is more serious than other forms of conflict, because when things get violent people die.

Fourth, the distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to any other distinction. For instance, it is not reducible to the distinction between good and evil. The “good guys” are just as much enemies to the “bad guys” as the “bad guys” are enemies to the “good guys.” Enmity is relative, but morality—we hope—is not.

Fifth, although the friend/enemy distinction is not reducible to other distinctions and differences—religious, economic, philosophical, etc.—all differences can become political if they generate the friend/enemy opposition.

In sum, the ultimate root of the political is the capacity of human groups to take their differences so seriously that they will kill or die for them.

It is important to note that Schmitt’s concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics. The rivalries of politicians and parties, provided they stay within legal parameters, do not constitute enmity in Schmitt’s sense. Schmitt’s notion of politics applies primarily to foreign relations — the relations between sovereign states and peoples — rather than domestic relations within a society. The only time when domestic relations become political in Schmitt’s sense is during a revolution or a civil war.

 

Sovereignty

 

If the political arises from the abiding possibility of collective life or death conflict, the political rules over all other areas of social life because of its existential seriousness, the fact that it has recourse to the ultimate sanction.

For Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the person who makes that decision.

If a sovereign declares an enemy, and individuals or groups within his society reject that declaration, the society is in a state of undeclared civil war or revolution. To refuse the sovereign’s choice of enemy is one step away from the sovereign act of choosing one’s own enemies. Thus Schmitt’s analysis supports the saying that, “War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”

 

Philosophical Parallels

The root of the political as Schmitt understands it is what Plato and Aristotle call “thumos,” the middle part of the soul that is neither theoretical reason nor physical desire, but is rather the capacity for passionate attachment. Thumos is the root of the political because it is the source of attachments to (a) groups, and politics is collective, and (b) life-transcending and life-negating values, i.e., things that are worth killing and dying for, like the defense of personal or collective honor, one’s culture or way of life, religious and philosophical convictions, etc. Such values make possible mortal conflict between groups.

The abolition of the political, therefore, requires the abolition of the human capacity for passionate, existentially serious, life and death attachments. The apolitical man is, therefore, the apathetic man, the man who lacks commitment and intensity. He is what Nietzsche called “the last man,” the man for whom there is nothing higher than himself, nothing that might require that he risk the continuation of his physical existence. The apolitical utopia is a spiritual “boneless chicken ranch” of doped up, dumbed down, self-absorbed producer-consumers.

Schmitt’s notion of the political is consistent with Hegel’s notion of history. For Hegel, history is a record of individual and collective struggles to the death over images or interpretations of who we are. These interpretations consist of the whole realm of culture: worldviews and the ways of life that are their concrete manifestations.

There are, of course, many interpretations of who we are. But there is only one truth, and according to Hegel the truth is that man is free. Just as philosophical dialectic works through a plurality of conflicting viewpoints to get to the one truth, so the dialectic of history is a war of conflicting worldviews and ways of life that will come to an end when the correct worldview and way of life are established. The concept of human freedom must become concretely realized in a way of life that recognizes freedom. Then history as Hegel understands it—and politics as Schmitt understands it—will come to an end.

Hegel’s notion of the ideal post-historical state is pretty much everything a 20th (or 21st) century fascist could desire. But later interpreters of Hegel like Alexandre Kojève and his follower Francis Fukuyama, interpret the end of history as a “universal homogeneous state” that sounds a lot like the globalist utopianism that Schmitt wished to combat.

Why the Political Cannot be Abolished

If the political is rooted in human nature, then it cannot be abolished. Even if the entire planet could be turned into a boneless chicken ranch, all it would take is two serious men to start politics—and history—all over again.

But the utopians will never even get that far. Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peace- and love-mongers have enemies too, namely “haters” like us.

Thus the abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about politics. But dishonesty is the least of the utopians’ vices. For in the name of peace and love, they persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness that make good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison.

Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might, for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in scope and duration. And since it is a mere conflict of interest—in which both sides, really, are right—rather than a moral or religious crusade between good and evil, light and darkness, ultimately both sides can strike a deal with each other to cease hostilities.

But when war is wedded to a universalist utopianism—global communism or democracy, the end of “terror” or, more risibly, “evil”—it becomes universal in scope and endless in duration. It is universal, because it proposes to represent all of humanity. It is endless, of course, because it is a war with human nature itself.

Furthermore, when war is declared in the name of “humanity,” its prosecution becomes maximally inhuman, since anything is fair against the enemies of humanity, who deserve nothing short of unconditional surrender or annihilation, since one cannot strike a bargain with evil incarnate. The road to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was paved with love: universalistic, utopian, humanistic, liberal love.

Liberalism

 

Liberalism seeks to reduce the friend/enemy distinction to differences of opinion or economic interests. The liberal utopia is one in which all disputes can be resolved bloodlessly by reasoning or bargaining. But the opposition between liberalism and anti-liberalism cannot be resolved by liberal means. It is perforce political. Liberal anti-politics cannot triumph, therefore, without the political elimination of anti-liberalism.

The abolition of the political requires the abolition of all differences, so there is nothing to fight over, or the abolition of all seriousness, so that differences make no difference. The abolition of difference is accomplished by violence and cultural assimilation. The abolition of seriousness is accomplished by the promotion of spiritual apathy through consumerism and indoctrination in relativism, individualism, tolerance, and diversity worship—the multicult.

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists, they are just less capable of honesty.

Liberalism, however, generally prefers to kill us softly. The old-fashioned version of liberalism prefers the soft dissolution of differences through cultural assimilation, but that preference was reversed when an unassimilable minority rose to power in the United States, at which time multiculturalism and diversity became the watchwords, and the potential conflicts between different groups were to be managed through spiritual corruption. Today’s liberals make a fetish of the preservation of pluralism and diversity, as long as none of it is taken seriously.

 

Multicultural utopianism is doomed, because multiculturalism is very successful at increasing diversity, but, in the long run, it cannot manage the conflicts that come with it.

The drug of consumerism cannot be relied upon because economic crises cannot be eliminated. Furthermore, there are absolute ecological limits to the globalization of consumerism.

As for the drugs of relativism, individualism, tolerance, and the multi-cult: only whites are susceptible to their effects, and since these ideas systematically disadvantage whites in ethnic competition, ultimately those whites who accept them will be destroyed (which is the point, really) and those whites who survive will reject them. Then whites will start taking our own side, ethnic competition will get political, and, one way or another, racially and ethnically homogeneous states will emerge.

Lessons for White Nationalists

To become a White Nationalist is to choose one’s friends and one’s enemies for oneself. To choose new friends means to choose a new nation. Our nation is our race. Our enemies are the enemies of our race, of whatever race they may be. By choosing our friends and enemies for ourselves, White Nationalists have constituted ourselves as a sovereign people—a sovereign people that does not have a sovereign homeland, yet—and rejected the sovereignty of those who rule us. This puts us in an implicitly revolutionary position vis-à-vis all existing regimes.

The conservatives among us do not see it yet. They still wish to cling to America’s corpse and suckle from her poisoned tit. But the enemy understands us better than some of us understand ourselves. We may not wish to choose an enemy, but sometimes the enemy chooses us. Thus “mainstreamers” will be denied entry and forced to choose either to abandon White Nationalism or to explicitly embrace its revolutionary destiny.

It may be too late for mainstream politics, but it is still too early for White Nationalist politics. We simply do not have the power to win a political struggle. We lack manpower, money, and leadership. But the present system, like all things old and dissolute, will pass. And our community, like all things young and healthy, will grow in size and strength. Thus today our task is metapolitical: to raise consciousness and cultivate the community from which our kingdom—or republic—will come.

When that day comes, Carl Schmitt will be numbered among our spiritual Founding Fathers.

The Culture of Critique & the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

Michael O'Meara

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Reinhart Koselleck
Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988

La politique, c’est le destin. — Napoleon

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Absolutist Origins of the Modern State

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The Culture of Critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The Crisis of the Old Order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Modern Pathogenesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: TOQ Online, Dec. 24, 25, & 26 2009

Plato & Indo-European Tripartition

Plato & Indo-European Tripartition

Edouard RIX

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Translated by Greg Johnson

In 1938, Georges Dumézil discovered, the existence of a veritable Indo-European “ideology,” a specific mental structure manifesting a common conception of the world. He writes:

According to this conception, which can be reconstructed through the comparison of documents from the majority of ancient Indo-European societies, any organization, from the cosmos to any human group, requires for its existence three hierarchical types of action, that I propose to call the three fundamental functions: (1) mastery of the sacred and knowledge and the form of temporal power founded upon it, (2) physical force and warlike valor, and (3) fruitfulness and abundance with their conditions and consequences.[1]

On the social plane, one finds this tripartition in the whole Indo-European realm, from India to Ireland, the three functions corresponding schematically to the priest-kings, the warriors, and finally to the producers, peasants, and craftsmen. In traditional India, the Brahmins correspond to the first function, the Kshatriyas to the second, and the Vaishyas to the third. According to Julius Caesar, in the extreme west of the Indo-European realm, Celtic society was composed of Druids, of Equites or Knights, and Plebs, the people.

In ancient Greece, however, there had been a tendency quite early on to eliminate any trace of the trifunctional ideology. According to Dumézil, “Greece is not helpful to our case. Mr. Bernard Sergent made a critical assessment of the expressions of the trifunctional structure, isolated most of the time in the process of fossilization, that one might recognize there: it is next to nothing compared with the wealth offered by India and Italy.”[2] However, an attentive reader of the works of Plato can find proof there of the survival of functional tripartition in traditional Greece.

The Platonic Ideal City

In the Republic, Plato discusses the ideal city, affirming that “the classes that exist in the City are the very same ones that exist in the soul of each individual.”[3] According to Plato’s analysis of human nature, the human soul has three parts: reason, located in the head, which enables us to think; feeling, located in the heart, that enables us to love; and desire, located in the belly, that drives us to sustain ourselves and reproduce. Each part of the soul has its own specific virtue or excellence: wisdom, courage, and temperance. Justice is the proper relationship of the three parts. According to Plato, the constitution of the city is merely the constitution of the soul writ large.

Concretely, the philosopher distinguishes three functions within the city. First, “those who watch over the City as a whole, enemies outside as well as friends within,”[4] the guardians, who correspond to the head, seat of intelligence and reason, the Logos. Then, the “auxiliaries and assistants of the decisions of the rulers,”[5] who correspond to the heart, seat of courage, Thymos. Finally the producers, craftsmen and peasants, who correspond to the belly, seat of the appetites. “You who belong to the City,” Plato explains, “are all brothers, but the god, in creating those among you able to govern, mixed gold in their material; this is why they are the most valuable. He mixed silver into those who are able to be auxiliaries, and as for the rest, the farmers and craftsmen, he mixed in iron and bronze.”[6]

Plato emphasizes that, “A city seems to be just precisely when each of the three natural groups present in it performs its own task.”[7] Indeed, just as an individual must subject his stomach to his heart, and his heart to his reason, the crafts must be subjected to the art of the warriors, who themselves must be subjected to the magistrates, i.e., to politics—this last being inseparable from philosophy, for the magistrates must become philosophers.

Plato also distinguishes three kinds of political regimes, each of which is related to the one of the functions of the city and by extension with one of the parts or faculties of the human soul. Regimes ruled by reason include monarchy, government by one man, and aristocracy, or government by the best. “Timocracy” is Plato’s term for government by warriors, which is ordered by the noble passions of the heart. Regimes ruled by the lowest passions of the human soul and material appetites include oligarchy, or rule by the rich; democracy, or rule by the majority; and tyranny, the rule of one man who follows appetite, not reason.

Without a doubt, this Platonic ideal city resting on three strictly hierarchical classes, reproduces the traditional Indo-European tri-functional organization of society. Indeed, in Greece which completely seems to have forgotten tripartition, Plato entrusts the political life of the city to philosopher-kings, the guardians, assisted by a military caste, the auxiliaries, who reign over the lower classes, the producers.

Plato is convinced that only the guardians, i.e., the sages, have the capacity to use reason equitably for the community good, whereas ordinary men cannot rise above their personal passions and interests. On the other hand, the members of the ruling caste must lead an entirely communal life, without private property or family, as well as many elements of egoistic temptation, division, and, ultimately, corruption. “Among them, no good will be private property, except the basic necessities,” decrees the philosopher, who recommends, moreover, “that they live communally, as on a military expedition,” and who among the inhabitants of the city “they are the only ones who have no right to have money or gold, or even to touch them; they are the only ones forbidden to enter private homes, wear ornaments, or drink from silver and gold containers.”[8]

“Because,” he adds, “as soon as they privately own land, a dwelling, and money, they will become administrators of their goods, cultivators instead of being the guardians of the city, and instead of being the defenders of the other citizens, they will become their tyrants and enemies, hated and hating in turn, and they will pass their lives conspiring against the others and will become the objects of conspiracy, and they will often be more afraid of their interior enemies than those outside, bringing themselves and the whole city to ruin.”[9] Moreover, their children will be removed at birth in order to receive a collective military education.

This “Platonic communism,” a virile and ascetic communism that has nothing to do with the Messianic nightmares of Marx and Trotsky, is not unrelated to the national communitarianism of Sparta.  As Montesquieu put it with some justice, “Plato’s politics is nothing more than an idealized version of Sparta’s.”

Notes

1. G. Dumézil, L’oubli de l’homme et l’honneur des dieux et autres essais. Vingt-cinq esquisses de mythologies (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 94.

2. Ibid, p.13.

3. Platon, La République (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), p. 262.

4. Ibid, p. 199.

5. Ibid, p. 200.

6. Ibid, p. 201.

7. Ibid, p. 245.

8. Ibid, p. 205.

9. Ibid, pp. 205–206.

Source: Réfléchir & Agir, Winter 2009, no. 31.

Principes stratégiques fondamentaux

 

Principes stratégiques fondamentaux

Edouard RIX

Ex: http://tpprovence.wordpress.com/ 

Si l’on estime, comme Spengler, que « la politique n’est qu’un substitut à la guerre utilisant des armes plus intellectuelles » (1), appliquer la grille de raisonnement propre à la stratégie militaire au combat politique peut s’avérer fécond.

 

Les grands principes en matière de stratégie militaire, sont au nombre de cinq. Le 1er, la concentration des forces, consiste à frapper avec le maximum de puissance l’ennemi, en un point choisi comme étant le plus faible de son dispositif, pour obtenir soit une percée, soit sa destruction totale. En effet, seule l’attaque du fort au faible est payante, l’attaque du fort au fort ne conduisant qu’au carnage, comme l’Histoire l’a montré. Tel fut le cas de Gettysburg en 1863, qui coûta 23 000 hommes aux Nordistes et 28 000 aux Confédérés, soit un tiers de leurs troupes. Même résultat tragique pour l’offensive anglaise de la  Somme, en juillet 1916, qui entraîna des pertes ahurissantes, la résistance allemande n’ayant pas été entamée par les tirs d’artillerie préalables : 19 240 morts le 1er jour, et plus de 600 000 jusqu’en novembre ! A noter que la concentration des forces implique la maximisation de la puissance de feu : il faut impérativement concentrer son feu pour s’assurer la destruction de l’ennemi, plutôt que de le disperser sur plusieurs cibles…

2ème grande règle, l’économie des forces, qui consiste à privilégier un objectif principal sans s’attarder sur des objectifs secondaires. La défense cherche à disperser l’attaquant, alors que ce dernier doit se concentrer sur son objectif.

3ème principe, la surprise, l’un des éléments les plus importants de la stratégie militaire. On distingue deux niveaux : la surprise stratégique, qui consiste à cacher son plan de campagne, ses objectifs et ses manœuvres; la surprise tactique qui consiste à dissimuler la marche ou la position de ses armées, un nouveau matériel ou une supériorité technique. Pour profiter pleinement de la surprise, il importe que celle-ci débouche sur un avantage décisif : on revient à la concentration des forces, car il faut à tout prix « tirer pour tuer ».

4 ème règle de base à respecter : l’unité de commandement, qui garantit la rapidité de réaction et l’intégrité du plan initialement mis en œuvre. Elle doit être entendue comme unité de pensée, que se soit entre les armes (Terre, Air, Mer) ou entre les conceptions stratégiques. Mais ce principe est rarement atteint, même au sein d’une armée nationale, encore moins entre des commandements alliés de plusieurs nations. Les Américains ont toujours su unifier leur direction, que ce soit pendant la guerre de Sécession, celle du Pacifique, ou en Europe avec Eisenhower. Le commandement interallié de Foch, nommé commandant en chef du Front de l’Ouest en mars 1918 est un autre exemple de commandement unifié voulu par les Alliés. A l’inverse, les Allemands ont, au cours des deux guerres mondiales, totalement échoué à mettre en place cette unité de commandement, que ce soit au niveau des stratégies nationales ou des armes (Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Waffen SS).

Dernier élément, l’initiative des opérations : c’est le but essentiel de la manœuvre, qui découle de la maîtrise des autres principes stratégiques. Le camp qui dispose de l’initiative bénéficie d’un avantage moral considérable. Mais celui qui déclenche les hostilités n’est pas forcément celui qui engage les opérations : en 1939, si les Alliés surprennent Hitler en lui déclarant la guerre, ils restent sur leurs positions, abandonnant toute initiative stratégique au führer.

UN EXEMPLE DE MAITRISE DES PRINCIPES STRATÉGIQUES : AUSTERLITZ

La bataille d’Austerlitz, menée de main de maître par Napoléon, est le meilleur exemple d’une stratégie réussie.

Apprenant la formation de la 3^ème coalition, Napoléon exécute un retournement complet de son armée massée à Boulogne, qu’il envoie à Ulm battre l’Autriche, s’emparant de l’initiative stratégique. Face aux Russes et aux restes de l’armée autrichienne, il étudie soigneusement la carte de Moravie et sélectionne le site d’Austerlitz, imposant le champ de bataille aux Coalisés.

Le commandement est unitaire chez les Français. Clausewitz, fortement influencé par Napoléon, retiendra le principe du « généralissime ». A l’inverse, le conseil de guerre coalisé est bicéphale (Autriche-Russie), et le plan finalement adopté est un compromis boiteux entre les deux alliés.

Le plan de bataille français est simple et expliqué la veille aux soldats par Napoléon : il consiste à attirer l’aile gauche coalisée dans un piège en faisant reculer l’aile droite française, afin de prendre le plateau de Pratzen avec le gros des forces et, à partir de cette brèche, effectuer une manœuvre en tenaille. Au contraire, le plan des Coalisés est compliqué, exposé lors d’un interminable conseil de guerre où le maréchal Koutouzov s’endort ! Pis : les ordres sont donnés aux officiers russes au dernier moment et en allemand !

Les Français pratiquent la concentration des forces avec comme objectif principal le plateau de Pratzen. Les Coalisés se donnent plusieurs objectifs, d’où une dispersion de leurs forces qui sont battues en détail. Résultat : l’emploi des grands principes stratégiques offre sa plus grande victoire à Napoléon.

LA BATAILLE DE FRANCE DE MAI 40

Autre exemple parlant, la campagne de France de 1940. L’avantage de l’initiative stratégique est perdu par les Alliés lors de l’invasion allemande de la Pologne, et ils ne la retrouveront plus.

L’état-major allemand fait preuve de flexibilité en changeant son plan sous l’impulsion d’Hitler. La réédition du plan Schlieffen de 1914 initialement prévu (poussée massive vers le nord de la France à travers la Belgique) est abandonné. Alors que le plan français prévoit une avance du gros des forces alliées pour contrer l’avance ennemie, les allemands attaquent la Belgique et la Hollande tandis que leurs blindés percent à Sedan, dans les Ardennes, un endroit considéré par la doctrine française comme infranchissable par les chars (cours d’eau plus massif forestier). Les Allemands exploitent à fond la surprise.

Sur l’objectif principal, Hitler concentre 7 divisions blindées, face à 7 divisions d’infanterie et 2 divisions de cavalerie légère françaises. Le principe de l’attaque du fort contre le faible est respecté, les Allemands cherchant à réaliser la percée à un point précis, le Schwerponkt, point de rupture, en l’occurrence à Sedan. Grâce à la mobilité de leurs divisions blindées, ils foncent vers la Mer du Nord et isolent le gros de l’armée alliée en Belgique par un « coup de faux ».

PRINCIPES STRATÉGIQUES ET COMBAT POLITIQUE

Ces principes stratégiques ne visant qu’un but, la victoire, il semble donc pertinent de les appliquer aussi sur un plan politique.

Incontournables, la concentration et l’économie des forces, qui consistent à frapper avec le maximum de force militante le point faible de l’adversaire politique. En 1968, Alain Robert créera le GUD en partant du constat qu’un noyau dur de militants concentrés sur un bastion universitaire valait mieux que des centaines d’adhérents éparpillés (cf Occident). Le nid de résistance, véritable Nanterre à l’envers, ne pouvait qu’être Assas, plus favorable sociologiquement. Si l’on excepte Jean-Marie Le Pen, candidat gyrovague (Paris, Auray, Marseille, Nice), tous les dirigeants du FN se sont efforcés de constituer un fief électoral inexpugnable : le couple Stirbois à Dreux, Bruno Mégret à Vitrolles, Marine Le Pen à Hénin-Beaumont. A chaque fois, l’on retrouve les mêmes ingrédients qui assurent la victoire finale : concentration des forces vives du parti sur un point faible de l’ennemi – en l’occurrence, une mairie socialiste gangrénée par l’insécurité, l’immigration et les scandales -, et au final percée électorale décisive qui ouvre une brèche dans le mur du silence politico-médiatique.

Sur le plan idéologique aussi, il s’agit de frapper du fort au faible, et sur un nombre limité d’ «objectifs ». Pour percer, un mouvement politique doit se limiter à quelques idées simples et porteuses. L’émergence du FN dans les années 80 s’explique ainsi par « la règle des trois I » : Immigration, Insécurité, Impôts. Lorsque Le Pen reniera ce triptyque, en 2007, il obtiendra son pire score présidentiel. En revanche, l’attaque du faible au fort, c’est-à-dire sur des thèmes totalement verrouillés par le Système – antisémitisme, révisionnisme – déclenche immédiatement un violent tir de barrage médiatique et relève du grand suicide politique… Lancer l’offensive sur ces forteresses puissamment défendues par 50 ans de terrorisme intellectuel, c’est faire bien peu de cas de l’élément primordial de toute stratégie : la surprise.

Autre principe à ne pas ignorer, l’unité de commandement. L’expérience a montré la supériorité du principe du chef (qui a parlé de « führerprinzip » ?…) sur une direction collégiale. Initiative nationale, mensuel du Parti des forces nouvelles, présentait deux photos, l’une de Le Pen, l’autre du bureau politique du PFN, ainsi sous-titrées : « Face à face : Président (…) et Bureau Politique. Deux conceptions de l’action » (2). L’histoire a tranché entre un leader charismatique et une direction multiple et, au final, acéphale. Alors que Le Pen persévéra dans la dénonciation du giscardisme et de la « fausse droite », les jeunes gens du PFN multiplieront les stratégies les plus variées, passant d’un soutien à VGE en 1974, à un ralliement à Chirac en 1977, puis au lancement de l’Eurodroite avec le MSI néo-fasciste !

Ces principes stratégiques théorisés par les auteurs classiques suivent ce que l’historien de l’Antiquité gréco-latine Victor D. Hanson a appelé Le modèle occidental de la guerre (3), qui repose entièrement sur la recherche de la bataille décisive, chère à Clausewitz – bataille qui doit conduire à l’écrasement de l’adversaire -, ignorant d’autres formes de guerre, comme la guerre assymétrique.

Edouard Rix, Réfléchir & Agir, automne 2010, n°36.

NOTES

(1) O. Spengler, L’Homme et la technique, Gallimard, 1969, p. 120.

(2) Initiative nationale, novembre 1977, n°22, pp. 18-19.

(3) Victor D. Hanson, Le modèle occidental de la guerre, Les Belles Lettres, 2001, 298 p.

 

Le désenchantement du monde (de Marcel Gauchet)

Le désenchantement du monde (M. Gauchet)

Ex: http://www.scriptoblog.com/

Gauchet reprend l’expression de « désenchantement du monde », utilisée par Max Weber pour décrire l’élimination du magique dans la construction du Salut, mais ce qu’il désigne par là va au-delà de l’objet désigné par Weber. Pour Marcel Gauchet, le religieux en tant que principe extérieur au social, et qui modèle le social depuis l’extérieur, c’est fini. Et l’originalité de l’Occident aura consisté, précisément, à opérer cette incorporation totale, dans le social, des fonctions traditionnellement allouées au religieux.

Le « désenchantement du monde », version Gauchet, ce n’est donc pas seulement l’élimination du magique dans le religieux, c’est bien encore la disparition du religieux en tant qu’espace collectif structurant et autonome.

Il s’agit donc ici de comprendre pourquoi le christianisme aura été, historiquement, la religion de la sortie de la religion. L’enjeu de cette histoire politique de la religion : comprendre, au-delà des naïvetés laïcardes, quelles fonctions la religion tenait dans les sociétés traditionnelles, et donc si d’autres moyens permettront de les maintenir.

 

*

 

Commençons par résumer « l’histoire politique de la religion », vue par Marcel Gauchet. C’est, après tout, pratiquement devenu un classique – un des très rares grands textes produits par la pensée française de la fin du XX° siècle.

Le fait est que jusqu’ici, le religieux a existé dans toutes les sociétés, à toutes les époques connues. Qu’il ait tenu une fonction dans chaque société, à chaque époque, n’est guère douteux. Une première question est de savoir si cette fonction fut constamment la même, et, dans le cas contraire, comment elle a évolué.

Pour Gauchet, il faut mettre à jour une structure anthropologique sous-jacente dont le religieux fut l’armature visible à un certain stade du développement historique. Cette structure fondamentale, c’est ce qu’il appelle : « L’homme contre lui-même ». Il entend par là la codification par l’homme d’un espace mental organisé autour du refus de la nature (celle du sujet, celle des autres hommes, celle de l’univers), afin de rendre possible un contrepoids salvateur, le « refus du refus » (qui permet d’accepter les autres hommes au nom du refus du sujet auto référant, d’accepter le sujet au nom de son refus, et finalement d’accepter la nature de l’univers au nom du refus général appliqué à la possibilité de la refuser). Le religieux a été, pour Marcel Gauchet, la forme prise, à un certain moment de l’histoire de l’humanité, par une nécessité incontournable induite par la capacité de refus propre à l’esprit humain : l’organisation du refus du refus, de la négation de la négation – bref, du ressort de la pensée même.

Gauchet renverse ici la conception classique, qui voit dans la religion un obstacle à la perspective historique. Faux, dit-il : la religion a eu pour mission de rendre possible l’entrée de l’humanité dans l’histoire, précisément en organisant une entrée « à reculons ». L’humanité ne voulait pas, n’a jamais voulu être historique. L’historicité lui enseigne une mortalité qu’elle redoute, qu’elle abhorre. La religion, en organisant le refus dans l’ordre symbolique, a été la ruse par laquelle l’humanité, tournant le dos à son avenir, pouvait aller vers lui sans le voir. Une méthode de gestion psychologique collective, en somme : en refusant dans l’ordre symbolique, on rend possible l’acceptation muette du mouvement permanent qu’on opère, par ailleurs, dans l’ordre réel, à un rythme si lent qu’on peut maintenir l’illusion d’une relative stabilité.

Sous cet angle, la « progression du religieux » peut être vue comme son oblitération progressive, au fur et à mesure que l’humanité accepte de regarder en face son inscription dans l’histoire, et d’assumer, donc, son refus de la nature. Des religions primitives au christianisme, on assiste ainsi à une lente réappropriation du fondement du religieux par l’homme, jusqu’à ce que « Dieu se fasse homme ».

C’est un long trajet car, au départ, dans la religion primitive, les Dieux sont radicalement étrangers à l’homme. Leur puissance le surpasse infiniment. Les succès humains ne peuvent être dus qu’à la faveur divine, les échecs à la colère (forcément juste) des divinités offensées. Voilà toute la religion primitive. Elle est étroitement associée à un système politique de chefferie, où l’opposition pouvoir-société est neutralisée par l’insignifiance (réelle) du premier, rendue possible par l’insignifiance (volontairement exagérée) de la seconde. La création d’une instance symbolique de régulation au-delà de la compétence humaine a d’abord été, pendant des millénaires, une manière de limiter la compétence des régulateurs humains. Le holisme fondamental des sociétés religieuses, nous dit Gauchet, ne doit pas être vu comme le contraire de notre individualisme, mais comme une autre manière de penser le social : un social qui n’était pas, et n’avait pas besoin d’être, un « social-historique ». C’était un social « non historique », où la Règle était immuable, étrangère au monde humain, impossible à contester.

Cette altérité du fondement de la règle, propre aux religions des sociétés primitives, est, pour Gauchet, « le religieux à l’état pur ». En ce sens, l’émergence progressive des « grandes religions » ne doit pas être pensée comme un approfondissement, un enrichissement du religieux, mais au contraire comme sa déconstruction : plus la religion va entrer dans l’histoire, moins elle sera extérieure au social-historique, et moins, au fond, elle sera religieuse.

Cette remise en cause du religieux s’est faite par étapes.

D’abord, il y eut l’émergence de l’Etat. En créant une instance de régulation mondaine susceptible de se réformer, elle a rendu possible le questionnement de la régulation. Il a donc fallu codifier un processus de mise en mouvement de « l’avant » créateur de règles. Les dieux se sont mis à bouger ; jusque là, ils vivaient hors du temps, et soudain, ils ont été inscrits dans une succession d’évènements. L’intemporel s’est doté de sa temporalité propre. Enjeu : définir, par la mythologie, une grille de cautionnement de la domination politique, ancrée dans un récit fondateur. La hiérarchie des dieux impose la hiérarchie des hommes à travers la subordination des hommes aux dieux, subordination rendue possible par le début de l’effacement de la magie (où le magicien maîtrise les forces surnaturelles) et l’affirmation du cultuel (où le prêtre sert des forces qui le dépassent). Le processus de domination mentale (des prêtres par les dieux, des hommes par les prêtres) devient ainsi l’auxiliaire du processus d’assimilation/englobement par l’Etat, donc de la conquête. Ce processus s’est accompli progressivement, en gros entre -800 et -200, dans toute l’Eurasie.

Le contrecoup de ce mécanisme, inéluctablement, fut le tout début de l’émergence de l’individu. Le pôle étatique définit un universel ; dès lors, le particulier devient pensable non par opposition aux autres particuliers, mais par opposition à l’universel. L’individu commence alors  à être perçu comme une intériorité. Et du coup, l’Autre lui-même est perçu dans son intériorité.

D’où, encore, l’invention de  l’Outre-Monde. Pour un primitif, le surnaturel fait partie du monde. Il n’existe pas de rupture entre le naturel et le surnaturel, entre l’immanent et le transcendant. Au fond, il n’existe pas d’opposition esprit/matière : tout est esprit, ou tout est matière, ou plutôt tout est esprit-matière, « souffle ».

Et d’où, enfin, le mouvement interne du christianisme occidental.

 

*

 

Progressivement, dans le christianisme, la dynamique religieuse se déplace pour s’installer à l’intérieur de l’individu. Le temps collectif étant historique, le temps religieux devient le temps individuel. Ce déplacement de la dynamique religieuse est, pour Gauchet, le mouvement interne spécifique du christianisme occidental.

Les autres mondes sont restés longtemps bloqués au niveau de la religion-Etat, du temps historique religieux ; seul le monde chrétien, surtout occidental, a totalement abandonné le temps collectif à l’Histoire, pour offrir à la religion un terrain de compensation, le temps individuel. Gauchet écrit : « Avec le même substrat théologique qui a porté l’avènement de l’univers capitaliste-rationnel-démocratique, la civilisation chrétienne eût pu rejoindre la torpeur et les lenteurs de l’Orient. Il eût suffi centralement d’une chose pour laquelle toutes les conditions étaient réunies : la re-hiérarchisation du principe dé-hiérarchisant inscrit dans la division christique du divin et de l’humain. »

Il n’en est pas allé ainsi. L’Occident est devenu une exception, et sa dynamique religieuse est allée jusqu’à son terme.

Il en est découlé, dans notre civilisation et au départ seulement dans notre civilisation, un accroissement des ambitions et de l’Histoire, et de la religion.

Jusque là, les deux termes étaient limités l’un par l’autre. De leur séparation découle la disparition de leurs limitations. L’Histoire peut théoriquement se prolonger jusqu’à sa fin. Elle a cessé d’être cyclique. La religion, de son côté, peut poursuivre la réunification de l’Etre à l’intérieur de la conscience humaine.

L’adossement de ces deux termes ouvre la porte à une conception du monde nouvelle, dans laquelle l’homme est son co-rédempteur, à travers la Foi (qui élève son esprit jusqu’à l’intelligence divine) et les œuvres (qui le font participer d’une révélation, à travers l’Histoire). Seul le christianisme, explique Gauchet, a défini cette architecture spécifique – et plus particulièrement le christianisme occidental.

Progressivement, à travers le premier millénaire, d’abord très lentement, le christianisme élabore cette architecture. Avec la réforme grégorienne et, ensuite, l’émergence des Etats français et anglais, l’Occident commence à en déduire des conclusions révolutionnaires mais logiques. Le pouvoir politique et le pouvoir spirituel se distinguent de plus en plus clairement.  La grandeur divine accessible par la conscience devient étrangère à la hiérarchie temporelle, elle lui échappe et fonde un ordre autonomisé à l’égard du politique. En retour, le politique se conçoit de plus en plus comme un produit de l’immanence. Le souverain, jadis pont entre le ciel et la terre, devient la personne symbolique d’une souveraineté collective, issue des réalités matérielles et consacrée avant tout à leur administration. Avec la Réforme, l’évolution est parachevée : l’Etat et l’Eglise sont non seulement distincts, mais progressivement séparés.

Les catégories de la « sortie de la religion », c'est-à-dire le social-historique dans le temps collectif, le libre examen dans le temps individuel, sont issues directement de cette évolution. Ici réside sans doute un des plus importants enseignements de Gauchet, une idée qui prend à revers toute la critique classique en France : notre moderne appréhension du monde en termes de nécessité objective n’est pas antagoniste de la conception chrétienne de l’absolu-divin personnel : au contraire, elle en est un pur produit.

 

*

 

La conclusion de Gauchet est que la « sortie de la religion » ouvre la porte non à une disparition du religieux, mais à sa réduction au temps individuel (une évolution particulièrement nette aux USA, où la religion est surpuissante comme force modelant les individus, mais quasi-inexistante comme puissance sociale réelle). Et d’ajouter qu’avec l’émergence puis la dissolution des idéologies, nous avons tout simplement assisté à la fin des religions collectives, qui sont d’abord retombées dans le temps historique à travers la politique, et s’y sont abîmées définitivement.

Sous-entendu : voici venir un temps où il va falloir se débrouiller sans la moindre religion collective, et faire avec, dans un cadre en quelque sorte purement structuraliste, en nous résignant à être des sujets, sans opium sacral pour atténuer la douleur de nos désirs. Car c’est à peu près là, au fond, la seule fonction du religieux qui, aux yeux de Gauchet, ne peut pas être assurée par le social radicalement exempt de la religion.

En quoi, à notre avis, Gauchet se trompe…

L’expulsion du religieux, retiré totalement du temps collectif, implique que ce temps-là, le temps collectif, ne peut plus être pensé en fonction de la moindre ligne de fuite. S’il n’y a plus du tout de religieux dans le temps collectif, alors la mort des générations en marque les bornes. Et donc, il n’y a plus de pensée collective sur le long terme, au-delà de la génération qui programme, qui dirige, qui décide (aujourd’hui : la génération du baby-boom).

Eh bien, n’en déplaise à Marcel Gauchet et sans nier que le structuralisme soit une idée à creuser, il nous semble, quant à nous, que les ennuis de l’Occident commencent là, dans cette désorientation  du temps collectif. Tant que le religieux se retirait du temps collectif, il continuait à l’imprégner d’une représentation du très long terme, et aspirait en quelque sorte le politique vers cette représentation : ce fut la formule de pensée qui assura l’expansion de l’Occident, le retrait du religieux ouvrant un espace de développement accru au politique, à l’économique, au scientifique, tous lancés secrètement à la poursuite du religieux qui s’éloignait. MAIS à partir du moment où le religieux s’est retiré, l’espace qu’il abandonne est déstructuré, et il n’y a plus de ligne de fuite pour construire une représentation à long terme.

La dynamique spirituelle de la chrétienté occidentale a suscité des forces énormes aussi longtemps qu’elle était mouvement ; dès l’instant où elle parvient à son aboutissement, elle débouche sur une anomie complète. Oserons-nous confesser que le vague « structuralisme » de Gauchet, conclusion mollassonne d’un exposé par ailleurs remarquable, nous apparaît, à la réflexion, comme une posture de fuite, et une manière pour lui de ne pas tirer les conclusions logiques de sa propre, brillante et tout à fait involontaire enquête sur la décadence occidentale ?

 

Democracy Needs Aristocracy

Democracy Needs Aristocracy, by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne

by Brett Stevens

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/ 

Democracy Needs Aristocracy
by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
221 pages, Harper Collins, $15.

In the early pages of Democracy Needs Aristocracy the author mentions Alexis de Toqueville and his groundbreaking Democracy in America and not surprisingly, the newer work continues in the footsteps of that classic with a broad-reaching thesis on the nature of government that sides with the organic over the mechanistic.

Experienced writer Peregrine Worsthorne mixes his far-reaching thesis with personal narrative and precise examples in the form of contradictions that eliminate exceptions to his arguments. He writes in a hybrid style somewhere between relaxed academia and vivid popular non-fiction but with the logical thoroughness of a legal brief. Like the topic of the book itself, his style spans a vast breadth of knowledge and distills it into a single voice, like condensation turning mist to rain.

As a consequence, Democracy Needs Aristocracy is both one of those books that zooms by at light speed as massive ideas thrust the reader across time and space, and is also like a textbook an exacting read that requires the full attention of the reader. Each chapter drops important pieces into our understanding of history and how we arrived at the present time, not all of them controversial assertions so much as forgotten and decontextualized ones.

The style is not circular so much as it returns to core concepts after breaking them apart, bringing the forgotten but necessary counterpart to deconstruction, re-integration, to the reading process. As a result reading this book is like peeling an onion, with each layer revealing more of the big picture. It offers what few books can manage anymore: a vertiginous sense of discovery and concepts dropping into place that can explain the subtle mysteries of our present political climate.

Worsthorne’s thesis suggests that aristocracy, or an organic social order of the most qualified who enforce a balance that linear-thinking government cannot, not only arises naturally but if well-selected, provides an elite who are dedicated to public service more than themselves. It succeeds because it is decidedly non-mechanistic: he delights in the social aspects of an elite dedicated to stewardship, and illustrates how civility as a guiding principle ensures politics do not become abandoned to abstractions unrelated to life itself.

Finally, he contrasts society under rule by aristocracy, whose members are secure in their position and steeped in its tradition, with the “meritocratic” rise of the “classless society,” and points out in detail how the classless society fails to achieve its objectives and may achieve instead the inverse. As both an aristocrat and a journalist, Worsthorne describes the view from both sides of the bench on this issue.

A good part of the book addresses the necessary conditions of his thesis, including the most difficult to define parts such as “civility” and the notion of an organic, non-governmental caste who nonetheless provide the backbone to all governmental activities. For moderns, understanding caste is like trying to understand the use of a pressure cooker inside a black hole; Worsthorne elaborates slowly, but works up to his point:

“Aristocracy, however, is different because the bonds forged at birth and maintained at every subsequent stage in life, create a degree of loyalty between members as strong as, if not stronger than, those that bind together the members of a nation. The Old Etonian George Orwell tried to escape them but never wholly succeeded, concluding sadly, at the end of his life, that it was easier to change your party than change your class. Speaking personally, I cannot imagine life without class, which is not a passive condition but one that provides you with a general culture, a network to which you naturally belong, a stream of history in which you feel free and safe — almost a collective individuality.” (86)

In his retelling of history, the UK survived the time of the French Revolution because unlike the French, the English did not centralize their power into a single agency, but made government less efficient and instead cultivated a class of experts, united by a code of civility or “gentlemanly” conduct, such that they could conduct the appropriate circumventions of authority in smoke-stained lounges over glasses of cognac.

In this Worsthorne’s view is a hybridization of elitism and anarchy, in which the purpose of aristocracy is to avoid a powerful central government and its Boolean rules, and instead to cultivate a pool of talent that can organically and covertly address problems that are beyond the understanding of the electorate. His appeal to civility, the mode of aristocracy, is a call for a moral renovation to the modern state.

“For as a result of this method of selection, Britain’s political class had inherited enough in-built authority — honed over three centuries — and enough ancestral wisdom — acquired over the same period — to dare to defy both the arrogance of intellectuals from above and the emotions of the masses from below; to dare to resist the entrepreneurial imperative; to dare to try to raise the level of public conversation; to dare to put the public interest before private interests; to dare to try to shape the nation’s will and curb its appetites.” (50)

Bureaucracies, which he describes as the “natural enemies” of aristocrats, rely on rigid rules of a binary nature. When triggered, they must follow through blindly, causing periodic outrages so ludicrous they remind us of the rote actions of a machine out of control. In contrast, Worsthorne advocates the reliance on a class of people he describes as devoted to public duty, and their ability to intervene in place of blind rules.

As he reminds us, good leadership is unpopular because it does not pander to the arrogant intellectuals or emotional masses. In fact, it avoids special interests so that the nation as a whole can thrive. He describes it with a metaphor from his boarding school:

“I wanted the best of both worlds: authority figures who at one and the same time both protected me and left me alone; who came to my aid in emergencies but otherwise allowed me to mind my own business. Officious busybody prefects who kept an eye on one all the time were more a liability than an asset. But unofficious prefects who noticed what was going on from a corner of the eye were the opposite. Even more to be desired were the few older boys who turned down the office of prefect but were natural authority figures on the side of justice and order requiring, by virtue of strong individual character, no official badge of office.” (22)

This winding book, arcane like an ancient castle yet refreshing like finally finding the answer to your research in a footnote in the last book even tangential to your “official” topic, provides many such challenging ideas. Underlying every part of it is a distrust in the idea of a government that unites its public and private faces and thus is manipulable by special interests; Worsthorne argues for an older yet, if you look at it critically, more mature form of government, where rule by quality of people predominates under rule by book of rules.

Democracy Needs Aristocracy is a challenging and engrossing read, and even for those hostile to aristocracy, provides a thorough exploration of where our current systems of government fail. His thesis is flexible, and deliberately written from a liberal-friendly position, to show that democracy becomes anti-elitist mob rule without some mediating elite to keep anti-egalitarianism from becoming crowd revenge. As such, it is every bit as eternal as de Toqueville, and presents a vision of government that none can afford to fully ignore today.

You can find this book at Amazon for $15 or from Harper Collins UK for £9.

Multiculturalism is Dead - Where Do We Bury the Body?

Multiculturalism is Dead – Where Do We Bury the Body?

By Jim GOAD

Ex: http://takimag.com/

I’ll never forget a painting I saw at a West Berlin youth hostel in 1985. The background depicted bombed-out ruins, presumably Dresden after the Allied firestorm. In the foreground were two women, their backs to us as they faced the charred, blown-out buildings. One woman was starting to lift her arm in a Sieg Heil salute, while the other rushed to grab her arm and stop her.

What a weird image it was, mixing national pride with national defeat and national self-loathing.

After World War II ended, no nation on Earth has been force-fed as many Guilt Sandwiches as the Germans, despite the fact that they’d lost seven to nine million of their own Volk in that conflict. One never hears about “the nine million.” It’s nearly verboten to even mention them.

When I saw that painting in 1985, Germany had already endured four decades of post-WWII shaming. Despite all that, I knew that sooner or later, that one lady would tire of holding down the other lady’s arm.

Sixty-five years after World War II’s end, Germany is finally becoming OK with being German again. On October 16 while addressing her Christian Democratic Union party, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said:

In Frankfurt am Main, two out of three children under the age of five have an immigrant background.…This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other, this approach has failed, utterly failed.

Loud applause greeted that last sentence.

For five years running, the stout, doughy Merkel has been Nummer Eins on Forbes magazine’s list of “The World’s Most Powerful Women,” so her statement is no small potatoes. But only a month earlier, Merkel was telling Germans that they should get used to seeing more mosques in their country. She was also condemning Thilo Sarrazin’s “absurd, insane opinions” as expressed in his shockingly popular book Germany Abolishes Itself.

It’s unclear why Merkel has suddenly shifted her ample hips rightward. She could be responding to recent polls showing that six in ten Germans would like to see Islam restricted, three in ten say they feel their country is “overrun by foreigners,” seventeen percent say that Jews have an undue influence over German affairs [oops!], and thirteen percent say they’d welcome a new Führer [now hold it right there!].

There go those pesky Germans again, refusing to hate themselves. How dare a German say anything besides “I’m sorry” for the next thousand years?

I don’t see the upside to our newer, more multicultural America. The only thing we share is the currency, and maybe that was the point all along.

Everyone expected the Germans to get an attitude sooner or later—after all, they’re the Germans. What seems more troubling, at least to the sworn enemies of All Things European, is that all of Europe seems to be getting the same attitude simultaneously.

What one might refer to as indigenous Europeans—you know, the palefaces, the Ice People, the Ghost Men, the Evil Aryans, the Abominable Snowmen—are beginning to chafe at the iron rainbow to which they’ve been yoked since World War II. Geert Wilders has blossomed into a political force solely by promising to protect Dutch culture from Islamofascism. An anti-immigration party just placed twenty anti-immigration asses into the Swedish Parliament’s seats. France is goin’ wild banning burqas and sending the Roma packing. The Swiss have flipped the bird at minarets. Putin’s brand of post-Soviet Russian nationalism is insanely popular, at least among insane Russians.

Even in the self-loathing, culturally obsequious, crushed-and-bleeding former empire that is the UK, comments in response to Merkel’s proclamation were lopsidedly in favor of what she said. Most of the anonymous online whisperers, presumably British nationals, agreed that multiculturalism was a colossal failure in their country as well.

Reading the comments, I saw parallels between Europe’s brand of “multiculturalism” and the American product. Both hither and yon, there’s anger about racial job quotas, oppressive speech codes, and double standards regarding who’s allowed to show ethnic pride.

What’s important is the way multikulti has unfolded and where. You don’t see such sensitivity training being forced upon anyone in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or South America. You don’t hear China, Japan, or Israel being lectured to swing open their doors to foreigners. Almost exclusively, multiculturalism is a psychological marketing program designed for majority-white countries. Often, it is sold with the idea that whites are paying a historic debt, are reaping what they’ve sown, that what goes around comes around, that the wheel has turned full-circle, the chickens are coming home to roost, and that it’s time to pay the swarthy piper his due.

Country by country, continent by continent, there’s a sense that the newer, darker arrivals are receiving preferential treatment over those who’ve been there for generations. In the UK, it’s called “Positive Discrimination.” In America, it’s called “affirmative action” and “amnesty.” And across every border where whites are a majority, there’s a creeping sense that politicians don’t give a fuck about how they feel. They never asked for these new waves of immigrants, and they had no choice in this odd social-engineering experiment that’s demolishing whatever they used to share as a common culture.

Suddenly, this doesn’t seem so much like a celebration of all cultures as it does punishment of a specific culture. And that doesn’t sound like such a swell recipe for having everyone get along.

We’ll be continually reminded that European satellite nations such as Canada, the USA, and Australia were settled atop indigenous skulls, so the land-grabbing descendants of those race-murderers have no right to whine about being gradually wiped out themselves by newcomers.

Once again, for Christ’s sake, whether he’s dead or alive: Two wrongs don’t make a right. If colonialism was wrong then, it’s wrong now. Multiculturalism is merely colonialism with a prettier name. I realize and concede the fact that it awards us with a dazzling array of ethnic restaurants unparalleled in their tastiness.

Under multiculturalism, we have a wider selection of food…and no one talks to anyone anymore. Many of us now speak different languages and wouldn’t even know how to talk to one another. Rather than erasing borders, multiculturalism has merely created new borders within borders. Rather than destroying nationalism, it creates mini-nations within nations.

If we’re going to push multiculturalism’s glories, shouldn’t we point out where has it worked in the past? If diversity is a strength, why did stretched-too-thin empires such as ancient Rome and the Soviet Union eventually fall from the weight of their own diversity?

Stop calling me a racist and shoot some believable answers at me. I really want to hear them.

As always, the “chattering classes” are working out their postcolonial guilt complexes at the lower classes’ expense. Either they’ve known what they were doing all along or they haven’t, and I’m not sure which is worse.

It’s dangerous to ignore the fact that all the technology in the world, the ceaseless multicultural brainwashing that’s been laser-beamed into our eyeballs over the past 65 years, has not eradicated the basic human tendency to be tribal. If they didn’t fully murder such instincts in the Germans—and God fucking knows they tried hard with the Germans—maybe such instincts can’t be killed.

Yes, I realize we’re all human. If that’s your point, you’ve already made it—and, I might add, at a tremendous expense. What you fail to realize is that humans tend to be tribal. And if you get too many tribes, you don’t have a nation anymore.

I guess we should celebrate the fact that even though no one speaks to one another anymore, at least the people who aren’t speaking to one another are more “multicultural” than they used to be back when people actually spoke to one another.

What kind of newly enriched and suddenly empowered American culture do I see when I drive on the highway near my house? I see Wal-Mart, Chili’s, Motel 6, Wendy’s, and Home Depot. It could be Indianapolis. It could be Omaha. It could be Seattle. It could be anywhere in America. It happens to be Stone Mountain, GA, but you’d have no idea you were even in the South. In 2010, the only cultural landscape we share consists of familiar corporate logos. There’s no local flavor, no sense of indigenous culture. Things don’t seem richer, livelier, and more colorful; they’re empty, listless, and dead.

At least that’s how it feels to me. I don’t feel as if there’s any glue, cohesion, or sense of belonging in this society anymore. I’m feeling the anomie something awful. I don’t see the upside to our newer, more multicultural America. The only thing we share is the currency, and maybe that was the point all along.

Multiculturalism has failed, but it has only begun to fail. Now what? After constant states of flux, our society now seems fluxed-up beyond repair. How do we sort out the mess while avoiding more Trails of Tears?

Multiculturalism is dead, sure, but what do we do with the body? I’ve yet to hear a good burial plan, and I fear we may need one.

And what makes me most nervous is that I’m not even sure who “we” are.

Kein Kulturrelativismus!

 

Kein Kulturrelativismus!

Götz KUBITSCHEK - http://www.sezession.de/

In der FAZ von heute warnt die Soziologin Necla Kelek zwei Zeitungsspalten lang vor dem Kulturrelativismus der Justizministerin Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. Sie biedere sich den Muslimverbänden auf doppelte Weise an:

Zum einen wiederhole sie den alten Zopf, daß alle Religionen dieselben universellen Prinzipien verträten, und zwar ungeachtet ihrer institutionellen und somit geschichtlichen Entwicklung. Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger ignoriere dadurch etwa die Tatsache, daß der Islam bisher nirgendwo bereit sei, Religion und Politik zu trennen: Die Politik sei selbst nach gemäßigter islamischer Auffassung weiterhin den Glaubenssätzen untergeordnet. Das Christentum hingegen habe im Vergleich dazu seine Säkularisierung längst hinter sich.

Der Kulturrelativismus werde, so Kelek, noch deutlicher, wo die Justizministerin den Eindruck vermittle, „Grundgesetz und Scharia seinen nur unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten, Recht zu sprechen“ (wobei Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger das „vorurteilsbeladene“ Wort Scharia konsequent vermeide). Es gibt da also keine Wertung, keine Ablehnung einer den Deutschen wesensfremden und ihrem geschichtlichen Weg nicht angemessenen Religion und religiösen Praxis und Rechtssprechung: Stattdessen Relativierung als Ausdruck einer  — Kapitulation vor der Macht des Faktischen? Oder als Ausfluß einer tiefen inneren Ablehnung des Eigenen, des So-Seins? Einer Hoffnung auf Befreiung vom Wir?

Joschka Fischer hat solches in seinem Buch Risiko Deutschland ja schon vor zehn Jahren programmatisch auf den Punkt gebracht: Deutschland müsse von außen eingehegt und von innen durch Zustrom heterogenisiert, quasi „verdünnt“ werden. Leutheusser-Schnarrenbergers Kulturrelativismus ist – nach der bereits erfolgten Bevölkerungsheterogenisierung – ein Meilenstein auf dem Weg einer Rechts- und Institutionenheterogenisierung.

Das ist ein Angriff auf so ziemlich das letzte, was noch „Mark in den Knochen“ hat: Wo wir nämlich der Willens- und Schicksalsgemeinschaft schon seit langem entbehren, haben wir doch noch eine Rechtsgemeinschaft. Das ist eine Schwundstufe zwar im Vergleich zu dem, was einmal war, aber es ist viel, wenn man sich die Alternbativen ausmalte: uns nicht gemäßes Recht.

Im Zusammenhang mit Keleks Artikel in der heutigen FAZ sei auf das Themenheft „Islam“ der Sezession verwiesen, es sollte heute und morgen bei den Abonnenten eintreffen. Von Kulturrelativismus findet sich darin nicht viel, einiges aber vom Selbstbewußtsein, mit dem man der ebenso religiös wie institutionell dämmernden Überfremdung entgegentreten kann.

Den Inhalt des Heftes kann man hier einsehen.

Veröffentlicht: Dienstag, 15. Februar 2011

Naiveté

Naiveté

by Brett STEVENS

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/

Our modern society is based on a simple principle: in the name of everyone else’s rights, shove them aside and assert your perfect and immutable right to do whatever you want. It’s like a shopping mall with a moral justification attached.

Part of the fallout from this little deception is that we all become naive in our inability to see the actual motivations of the people around us. For starters, it’s not polite. In addition, it makes us a target. Finally, it forces us to see our own entrenchment in this scam.

We are oblivious to it normally because of our society’s insistence on reversed thinking. Normally, you think from cause to effect. Socialization makes you think from effect to “intent,” a nebulous cause attributed to the desires of others, and ignore any effects but the one you saw first.

Our naivete manifests itself in such mundane ways that we come to accept it like a tapeworm, ignoring the squirming after every meal, because it doesn’t act like a threat. It only undermines everything we do.

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan is recovering in an American hospital this week after being sexually assaulted and beaten by a mob in Egypt’s Tahrir Square late on Friday.

The same day that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, Logan was surveying the mood of anti-Mubarak protesters for a “60 Minutes” story when she and her team “were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration,” CBS said in a statement Tuesday. The network said that a group of 200 people were then “whipped into a frenzy,” pulling Logan away from her crew and attacking her until a group of women and Egyptian soldiers intervened. – LAT

As my able colleagues at In Mala Fide and Dissention have pointed out, there may be cause for doubting her narrative.

But there is also a bigger picture: our naiveté makes us think that any revolution is the act of benevolent, educated, restrained, good-natured and helpful people. Our media says these people are freedom fighters, so they can’t be a large discontented mob of semi-criminals who want to see the world burn. And so we treat them as if they were Western intellectuals calmly discussing politics in one of our comfy American suburbs.

In the modern industrialized world, we are committed to thinking the best of each other and to equality. Equality means that every point of view is valid. That means we reverse our thinking, and stop wondering what people are trying to achieve, and start muddling our minds by fitting their intent into a narrow range of acceptable thoughts.

In this emasculated thinking, Somali pirates are “forced” to steal because they’re poor; they can’t simply be murdering bastards in a country where 99% of the population are not pirates. From our naive view, any revolution is an ideological quest for the equality of all, not a power grab by a hungry group who turn out to be murdering bastards:

Moaz Abdel Karim, an affable 29-year-old who was among a handful of young activists who plotted the recent protests here, is the newest face of the Muslim Brotherhood. His political views on women’s rights, religious freedom and political pluralism mesh with Western democratic values. He is focused on the fight for democracy and human rights in Egypt.

A different face of the Brotherhood is that of Mohamed Badi, 66-year-old veterinarian from the Brotherhood’s conservative wing who has been the group’s Supreme Guide since last January. He recently pledged the Brotherhood would “continue to raise the banner of jihad” against the Jews, which he called the group’s “first and foremost enemies.” He has railed against American imperialism, and calls for the establishment of an Islamic state. – WSJ

They must be laughing all the way to the bank. Trot our your most innocent-sounding members, seize power, and then do whatever it was you really wanted to do. On a purely military level, that would be replacing the relatively stable Mubarak regime with an Egypt geared up to impoverish itself trying to invade technologically superior Israel.

More naiveté:

Interviews by NBC News with some of the plaintiffs in the case reveal disturbing and previously unreported allegations of sexual abuse in the military, including some in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, one of the plaintiffs, identified as a naval aviator, charges in the lawsuit that she was drugged and gang-raped by two of her colleagues while serving at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma just two months ago.

Mary Gallagher, a former sergeant in the Air National Guard, says that within weeks of being deployed to an air base outside of Baghdad in 2009 she was brutally assaulted by a fellow sergeant who burst into the ladies’ room, pushed her up against the wall, pulled her pants and underwear down and ground his genitals against her, talking the whole time how much he was enjoying it.

“I thought he was going to kill me that night,” Gallagher told NBC in an interview. “I felt completely isolated and alone and really scared. Here I was, in the middle of a foreign country in the middle of a war.” – MSN

It’s as if these people just got hit in the head with the frying pan of life. Soldiers, geared up for aggression and under great stress, with a few bad apples in the crop, raping women? It could happen, you know. But we want to keep sleepwalking ahead with the idea of equality, and so we’re going to assume every viewpoint is valid and everyone is benevolent.

We in the West are walking chumps who seem to invite others to victimize us because of our naivete. Whether that’s stumbling into a third world country and picking as the new leader the first bloodstained warlord who claims he likes capitalism, or believing desperate defectors who tell us what we want to hear, or even thinking that we can have government debt that exceeds our economy and still turn out OK. It’s like no one is driving our reckless bus in its mad dash down the road, but it doesn’t matter, because as individuals we’re all partying it up in here.

Amy Sullivan, senior editor of Time magazine, was at a security checkpoint in Miami Airport on Tuesday when she opted out of passing through a backscatter scanning device – described by experts as a ‘virtual strip search’.

When she went through a metal detector instead and was searched by a woman, a male Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official is alleged to have said: ‘Hey, I thought she was mine – I was going to do her!’

Ms Sullivan’s claims follow those of Eliana Sutherland, who was flying from Orlando Airport last November and said security workers picked her out for further screening because of the size of her breasts. – Daily Mail

Our comfortable lifestyles make us oblivious to everything but the obvious. We stagger in circles, denying the underlying truths, and then when they hit us in the face (like a rake left lying in the grass), we turn around and make excuses, talk a lot about rights and equality, and hope that fixes the problem somehow.

If you wonder why worldwide we’re getting less respect suddenly, it’s because as our economy bankrupts itself and we let politics take precedence over reality in our leadership, we’re increasingly revealing why we’re naive — it’s not because we’re “nice,” but because we’re completely in denial.

The horizontally totalitarian future-world

Ex: http://majorityrights.com/

Last February, by way of an introduction, I put up a post about the great German jurist Carl Schmitt.  He is a highly useful guide to the ways of Power.  His elucidation of the theoretics of state power in extraordinary times established the framework employed by many, and probably most, thinkers in this, let’s say, increasingly topical field.  In particular, Schmitt’s concepts of the decision and the state of exception open up the operation of total power for examination like a dead butterfly on a display board.

 

As Tom Sunic wrote in Homo Americanus: child of the postmodern age:-

Carl Schmitt ... realized an age old truth; namely, political concepts acquire their true meanings only when the chief political actor, i.e. the state and its ruling class, find themselves in a sudden and unpredictable state of emergency. Then all former interpretations of “self-evident” truths become obsolete. One could witness that after the terrorist attack of 9/11 in America — an event that was never fully elucidated — the ruling class in America used that opportunity to redefine the legal meaning of the expressions “human rights” and “freedom of speech.” After all, is not the best way to curb real civic rights the adoption of abstract incantations, such as “human rights” and “democracy”?

What just about everyone with a triple-digit IQ understands is that the events of 11th September 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror have been ruthlessly exploited throughout the West to advance a profoundly undemocratic and disturbing domestic security agenda.  Whether a true state of exception ever existed is highly doubtful.  But Power decides what is moral and what is, in a vulgar sense, true.  It has decided that its officers shall usurp the legal code at will, and shall stipulate on their own authority the terms under which its citizens go about their business.

I happen to live under the most abusive of any Western government in this respect.  The UK authorities have the Civil Contingencies Act already, and a growing DNA database to which it is intent upon adding us all, and on top of that it is constructing the complete surveillance society.  But the trend is appearing everywhere.

What this amounts to is an impressively uniform and aggressive war on the defence of civic liberties which have informed Western legal codes for centuries.  Its significance is vast and unmistakable: the foundations are being laid for a different kind of political regime, to be conducted in a permanent state of exception.  The Executive is strengthening and freeing itself as a body empowered, but in no way constrained, by ad hoc procedural law subject only to official decision.

The big question is: what structure of global/local government will emerge out of this new strength and freedom?

In local, day-to-day terms, it will decide for domestic policy blandness and irrelevance - the towering racial injustice of an anti-white MultiCult make that inevitable.  Meanwhile, the moral duty of government and public alike will be directed to far-flung places where “profitable problems” require corporate-military intervention.

To all intents and purposes, this will be a totalitarianism or dictatorship, if only because it must regulate more and more social relations in the interests of racial panmixia in order to resolve the problem of the European natives.  But I can’t see how any form of world-wide imperial police state can emerge from the new dispensation, even given the coming of global economic unity. 

If one assumes, as I do, that this dispensation represents the deepest political convictions of a diverse, internationalist power elite, and not only the will of bankers and mega-corporations, it is apparent that there is no “centre” capable of, or needful of, global government through a totalitarian vertical heirarchy.  Schmitt holds the key.  A permanent, global state of exception and the distribution of decision are enough.  The governing class will operate as it does today, patronised and informed of its obligations by the higher elites without those elites ever comprising a structured global government themselves.

In a word, the deracinated, de-sovereignised, and legally denuded post-nation ...

“There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That is a 19th-century idea, and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.”
Wesley Clark, to a CNN reporter in 1999

“The president believes the world will be a better place if all borders are eliminated—from a trade perspective, from the viewpoint of economic development and in welcoming [the free movement of] people from other cultures and countries.”
Tom Hogan, president of Vignette Corporation, speaking after a convseration with Bill Clinton in Australia in 2001

... can be governed by a structure no different than the one that governs it now.

The future will, then, continue to be plural, and yet will be totalitarian.  Our lives will be free in the ways that we are required to live them, but will be regulated in every other.  We shall have “nothing to fear if we are innocent” from a non-law that is subject wholly to the decision of the, of course, always benign official.

Leviathan will command a near borderless world of super-diversity filled with national symbols.  And we WILL be happy, although it will be as impossible to struggle for happiness as it will for political freedom.

The Multicultural Mystique

The Multicultural Mystique, by Harriet E. Baber

by Brett Stevens

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/ 

The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity
by Harriet E. Baber
Prometheus Books, 246 pages, $27.

This book caught my eye because it contains some of the most insightful and honest critique of multiculturalism I have ever read. On the other hand, its “solution” is to remove culture from the picture entirely, which is so brain-dead I have trouble respecting the book.

Onward to the good, however: this book gives us a working definition of each type of multiculturalism, albeit with hokey postmodern-style metaphors. The kind the author rails against is “salad bowl” multiculturalism, where members of different ethnic groups move to a new land and then stay segregated by ethnicity. The kind the author endorses is assimilation, or everyone giving up on their source culture and joining the new culture. Difficulty: the author admits that such a culture doesn’t exist, and just about goes far enough to admit that diversity kills it, but then launches on a praiseful tirade in favor of individualism and having no higher cultural goals.

The justification used for this course of action comes right out of the early 1990s. Baber distinguishes between “salient,” or components of our social identity, and non-salient attributes to individuals, like ethnicity. No attempt is made to address populations as organic wholes; in fact, that heresy against deconstruction is considered outside the realm of intelligent discourse. Her point is that majority cultures like indigenous whites in Europe and America do not have to notice their race (you can find this sentiment in any publication on “white privilege”) but that anyone else must.

For white Americans, ethnic identification is largely a matter of choice, since whiteness in the United States and Europe is nonsalient and, as it were, transparent. This is, indeed, the fundamental characteristic of “white privilege”: to be white is, in an important sense, to lack racial identity, to be “just regular” as regards race. (10)

At this point, her liberal thinking takes a turn toward the semi-Randian. Having expectations of culture imposed upon you, she says, limits your ability to be individualistic and to make individualistic choices because your ethnic group will enforce them upon you and if they don’t, society at large will project them on you. She uses delightful examples like overachieving black kids getting dinged for “acting white,” or clueless white people politely asking random black people to explain Kwanzaa.

However, ultimately her solution is a dumbed-down modern form of colonialism: import the people to your country, integrate them into your culture, and in a few generations they will have lost whatever origins they had. It is colonial because as she frequency points out, non-majority-ish populations get imported as cheap labor, with the hope and guess that they will depart when the wages go:

The worry that mass immigration will make receiving countries “too diverse” or that it will “thin out” their cultures is a sham. The fear is that immigrants will not remain sufficiently “diverse” to accept second-class jobs, do harsh jobs for low pay, and conveniently disappear when their labor is not needed. (233)

This passage shows the book in microcosm: insightful analysis that reveals the attitudes of Americans toward their imported diverse labor pool, coupled with editorializing that considers a few out of the many factors and plays fast and loose with the concept of ethnicity in contrast to culture.

Profundity and the same old boilerplate wrapped together in an easy package? It’s kind of like honor students who own that one Iron Maiden album so they can, you know, let loose and walk on the wild side every tenth Saturday night. If you write for the liberal establishment, you have to smother any dose of shock with a heaping helping of familiar territory.

Another example:

The relevant moral questions are: to what extent does the cultural self-affirmation of some members of a group have consequences for other members of the group and are those consequences so significant as to override rights to free speech, religious freedom, and self-expression? These rights are not absolute. (165)

Baber hones in on the central issue of modern time, which is whether our individualism is absolute, and comes down in favor of the absolute — without presenting an argument for it. Assumptions exist, and personal histories, but we’re not seeing a cause-effect reason for these assumptions. However, the question needed to be asked, and it’s better in print from a liberal source than from a conservative one which would immediately be dismissed by anyone left of center.

In this chapter, I also address the important question, rarely discussed, of when, if ever, ethnic diversity ends. Do multiculturalists imagine that the salad bowl is forever and that ethnic minorities will maintain distinct cultural identities in perpetuity without coalescing? It is hard to see how such an arrangement could be maintained without the establishment of a virtual millet system of semiautonomous communities maintaining their own schools, institutions, and, perhaps, systems of personal law with the approval and support of the state. (11)

These are very important questions. Baber does not ask what happens when the “majority” population the United States and Europe is in fact worldwide a minority population, and a wealthy one, which means that many more of them want to move here than there are members of the “majority” group. Do they get bred out? Do they have a right to exist as well? You won’t find that in this book.

The Multicultural Mystique may be fun because it is such a mixed bag. Baber brings up the important issues; she then explains them away with stock-in-trade liberal platitudes. Because the liberal modus operandi is to take an individualist position, and passive aggressively react to any assertion of a different viewpoint as if it were straight out of a hostile nation’s propaganda broadcast, she does what most political writers tend to do, which is cherry-pick sources. Why consider multiple factors, when there’s one you need? Why mention the breadth of an issue, when you can take data out of context and imply its relevance? A good deal of the arguments in this book conclude with her asserting an example that might support them, and as if that proof were evident, ending the paragraph.

In style, the book resembles much of the other popular literature from our philosophy departments. Its strength is that it makes its points clearly; its weakness is that it deconstructs so much that the entire document is not a strawman attack, but a strawman discussion, with theoretical beings existing in vacuums without time, place or context batting each other around using absolute concepts like individual rights. Much of it reeks of a lonely white woman alone in a Starbuck’s, writing from a stack of The Atlantic magazines and what she can find with Google, and not bothering to edit for circularity. Around we go again and again; fifty to a hundred pages could have dropped from this book with no loss in meaning.

For all of its faults and biases, however, The Multicultural Mystique won me over because it kicks open the door on several important issues: Assimilate or respect culture? We know this path will destroy culture and replace it with individual desire, right? No one is thinking past the immediate; most people who support diversity do so for low-cost lawn care and social identity points. And last but not least, what is the goal here? Do we want culture, or not, and if not, why? Many of these questions arise from the reading of the book and are not embedded in it, which makes it doubly impressive as a conversation starter.

Your average person will not find this book compelling because it is, without exception, and indulgently so, written in the “philosophical” style of lots of flavor-words for concepts, plenty of comma-separated phrases, with allusions to terms trending in academia. However, for those who are interested in this issue which since 1865 has dominated American and European politics, The Multicultural Mystique provides a good place to start your open-minded research by seeing what the best of the liberal side have to say.

You can find this book on Amazon for $27.

Vizier: Politieke manipulatie corrumpeert taal

http://www.tertio.be/sitepages/index.php?page=archief&...

Vizier: Politieke manipulatie corrumpeert taal

Is het niet vreemd dat op de website van Amnesty International Vlaanderen niets te vinden is over de vervolging van christenen in moslimlanden?
Primeert bij Amnesty Vlaanderen het ideologische verhaal, waardoor de waarheid geweld wordt aangedaan? Die onmiskenbare christenvervolging mag niet langer worden verdoezeld.

Miel Swillens | George Orwell merkte op dat “the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Daarmee bedoelde hij dat je moet
blijven hameren op onmiskenbare waarheden. Zo niet worden die verdoezeld wanneer ze niet passen in het vigerende ideologische denkraam. Orwell wist
waarover hij het had. Hij maakte zelf mee hoe zijn relaas over de Spaanse Burgeroorlog, Homage to Catalonia, werd uitgespuwd door de Britse
intelligentsia, omdat het niet strookte met haar pro-Sovjet en pro-Stalin gezindheid. Om diezelfde reden weigerden linkse uitgeverijen Animal Farm te
publiceren, waarin de auteur onder het mom van een dierenfabel de ontaarding van de Russische Revolutie op de korrel nam. Orwell, een overtuigde maar eigenzinnige socialist, haatte elke orthodoxie, zowel van links als van
rechts. Ideologische taal, zo stelde hij, is ontworpen om de leugen als waarheid te doen klinken, en een schijn van vastheid te geven aan pure wind.

Ik moest aan Orwells afkeer van geprefabriceerde termen en holle frases
denken, toen ik op de website van Amnesty International Vlaanderen
terechtkwam. Eigenlijk was ik op zoek naar informatie over de vervolging van
christenen in moslimlanden. Maar daarover was niets te vinden. Bij
mensenrechten per land wordt noch bij Irak noch bij Egypte melding gemaakt
van vervolgde christenen. Ook als thema komt het niet aan bod. Tik je het
trefwoord ‘kopten’ in, dan krijg je als antwoord: “uw zoekopdracht heeft
geen resultaat opgeleverd”. Tik je daarentegen ‘Guantanamo’ in, dan vind je
niet minder dan 45 items. Ben ik bevooroordeeld wanneer ik de indruk krijg
dat Amnesty Vlaanderen vooral aandacht heeft voor de troetelthema’s van de
linkse intelligentsia?

Cultuurrelativisme

Maar terug naar Orwell en zijn afkeer van geprefabriceerde termen en holle frases. In het jaarrapport 2010 van de mensenrechtenorganisatie wordt België bestempeld alseen land van “willekeurige arrestaties en opsluitingen” en van “buitensporig gebruik van geweld door politie en veiligheidsdiensten”. Is dat een correcte weergave van de Belgische realiteit? België lijkt wel Iran of Zimbabwe. Maar wellicht is dat ook de bedoeling. Een westers land als België mag er blijkbaar niet beter uitkomen dan een derdewereldland. Vandaar de suggestie van morele equivalentie. Wanneer het ideologische verhaal primeert, wordt de waarheid geweld aangedaan.

Soms wordt het taalgebruik ronduit orwelliaans, zoals in het standpunt van Amnesty over een mogelijk boerkaverbod in België: “Amnesty stelt vast dat een algemeen boerkaverbod in strijd is met de godsdienstvrijheid en de vrijheid van meningsuiting. Bovendien beperkt een dergelijke wet het recht van vrouwen op een leven vrij van dwang, intimidatie en discriminatie.” (mijn cursivering). De geperverteerde logica van dat standpunt shockeert. De tekst illustreert hoe de capitulatie van de
mensenrechtenorganisatie voor het cultuurrelativisme haar taalgebruik corrumpeert. Wie Orwells toekomstroman Nineteen Eighty-Four kent, denkt daarbij aan de fameuze Newspeak met slogans zoals “Slavery is freedom”.

Politiek correct

Taal dient om te communiceren over de werkelijkheid, om die zo getrouw mogelijk weer te geven. Ideologieën verdoezelen of ontkennen de werkelijkheid, telkens die botst met hun politieke discours. Dat leidt tot corruptie van de taal. Denk maar aan de vroegere Sovjet-Unie. Correcte taal is een democratische opdracht en ethische plicht. Wellicht moeten ze bij Amnesty Vlaanderen ook maar eens Orwell lezen, zijn essay Politics and the English Language bijvoorbeeld. Daarin staat onder andere het volgende: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”

L'eredità falsata di Martin Heidegger

L’eredità falsata di Martin Heidegger

Luca Leonello Rimbotti

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/

Che Heidegger, con tutto il suo bagaglio filosofico intatto, sia stato catturato dalle sinistre ormai da qualche decennio e venga tenuto prigioniero nelle bibliografie e nelle monografie democratico-giacobine, è ormai un fatto risaputo. Da quando il marxismo si è dimostrato un ferro vecchio inutilizzabile, abbiamo assistito a un accorrere in folla dalle parti dell’ideologia nazionalpopolare europea, per sottrargli idee, concetti, approcci di pensiero, nomi e cognomi. Sulle orme lasciate da Heidegger, in particolare, hanno pestato in parecchi. E sempre con l’aria di aver fatto una scoperta. Su questa appropriazione indebita, in Italia e all’estero, non pochi ci si sono costruite carriere e cattedre di gran lustro.

Il gioco è semplice: basta far finta che Heidegger non sia mai stato davvero nazionalsocialista… in fondo, dopo appena un anno dette le dimissioni da rettore, sì o no?… rimase iscritto al Partito nazista fino al 1945, d’accordo, non ha mai detto una parola di condanna su Auschwitz… è vero anche questo… ma insomma… basta non dirlo troppo ad alta voce… poi si ripete fino alla nausea che il suo pensiero è stato travisato, ecco, è stato strumentalizzato, ma certo… è così evidente… ma per fortuna che ora ci pensano loro, gli intellettuali di sinistra, a dare la giusta lettura… ed ecco che un filosofo della tradizione, della ferrea identità di popolo, del volontarismo vitalistico, uno schietto pangermanista, uno che nelle lezioni su Nietzsche invocava «un nuovo ordine partendo dalle radici», tracciando una bella linea retta da Eraclito al Führer, ecco che dunque il filosofo della Führung diventa all’istante un santino del “pensiero debole”, dell’esistenzialismo universalista, una specie di curatore d’anime mezzo new age e mezzo dialettico… Si tratta di un gioco di prestigio per virtuosi, soltanto i migliori tra gli intellettuali di sinistra sono in grado di rivoltare Heidegger, ma anche Nietzsche o Schmitt, ma anche Marinetti o Gehlen o Jünger o Eliade… e tirarne fuori ottime figure di giacobini mondialisti…

A smascherare questi procedimenti della manipolazione professionale, nel 1988 giunse improvviso un libro di Victor Farìas intitolato Heidegger e il nazismo, pubblicato in Italia da Bollati Boringhieri. Fu una bomba inattesa. Suscitò sbandamento e panico nel campo della sinistra intelligente: Heidegger, dopo centinaia di pagine di uno studio basato su fonti primarie, veniva riconsegnato di brutto al suo destino di pensatore della reazione anti-modernista europea, dimostrando testi alla mano che si trattava di un filosofo accesamente antisemita, nazionalista, forgiatore di una profonda identità tra uomo europeo del XX secolo e uomo dorico dell’antichità. Insomma, un nazista. Uno studioso che parlava di metafisica greca pensando all’esserci storico dei tedeschi degli anni Venti-Trenta, e che elaborava la moderna filosofia ontologica individuandone una concreta realizzazione nelle SA.

Da allora, Farìas – che è stato allievo di Heidegger e di Fink – è diventato la bestia nera di tutti quei mandarini rossi che intasano università, riviste scientifiche, case editrici, forum e circuiti culturali, ma che per campare si erano inventati un Heidegger quasi-marxista. Se Marcuse si era ridotto a una caricatura, si poteva sempre ricorrere a un Heidegger ben limato… Su questa faccenda l’intellighenzia progressista si è da tempo spaccata in due. Da una parte i devoti di Heidegger, in fuga dalle macerie del marxismo; dall’altra parte i demolitori di Heidegger, custodi di una più intransigente ortodossia antifascista. Per dare un’idea, potremmmo dire: sinistra post-marxista e sinistra liberale ai ferri corti intorno alle spoglie di Heidegger.

In queste faide umilianti, tra l’altro, notiamo il tracollo finale di un modo di fare sub-cultura e di essere alla guida della macchina intellettuale, che si riassume nella bancarotta ormai irreversibile del progressismo. Falsificazione, fanatismo, faziosità, delazione, intimidazione… queste le attitudini scientifiche con cui i “filosofi” post-moderni, come nani confusi di fronte a qualcuno molto più grande di loro, arraffano oppure rigettano le posizioni di quello che è stato definito il maggior intellettuale del Novecento. Qualcuno glielo dica: si stanno occupando di un personaggio che non li riguarda in nessun caso.

Oggi Farìas ne fa un’altra delle sue e scarica nuove bordate di militanza democratica, pubblicando un esplicito L’eredità di Heidegger nel neonazismo, nel neofascismo e nel fondamentalismo islamico (Edizioni Medusa). Si prevedono nuovi travasi di bile tra le truppe intellettuali della sinistra heideggeriana, in fase di crescente spaesamento e comandate con qualche difficoltà, qui da noi, da maestri del pensiero del rango di un Gianni Vattimo.

Il discorso di Farìas, ancora una volta, non potrebbe essere più chiaro: Heidegger era nazista dalla testa ai piedi. Lo era perchè amico delle SA, perchè iscritto alla NSDAP fino all’ultimo giorno, perché pubblico elogiatore di Hitler, perché si identificò nel Terzo Reich e nelle sue guerre, perchè ha relativizzato pesantemente la Shoah, ma anche perchè tutto il suo pensiero, i suoi scritti, le sue lezioni universitarie, i suoi stessi concetti e argomenti sono riconoscibili per nazisti, sia prima che – addirittura – dopo il 1945. Poi Farìas va oltre, vuole strafare e, alla maniera dei persecutori “democratici”, quelli che vogliono imporre con le buone o con le cattive il Pensiero Unico, sui due piedi crea il mostro: Heidegger padre spirituale anche del neonazismo e del fondamentalismo islamico. Heidegger padre di tutti gli incubi dell’era globale. Prende Ernst Nolte – non uno qualsiasi, ma probabilmente il massimo storico vivente… ma col difetto di non appartenere alle cosche di sinistra – e lo diffama come agente neonazista. Direte: è uno scherzo? No, non è uno scherzo. Farìas fa sul serio: «Nolte di fatto apre le porte a un neonazismo che conferma tutti i modelli sociali autoritari… Nolte afferma che Heidegger intendeva il nazismo come “socialismo tedesco”… nel suo sforzo di riabilitare Heidegger utile a riabilitare un neonazismo… nella Repubblica Federale tedesca del 1987, Nolte interpreta le lezioni su Hölderlin (1934-1935) assumendo come evidente e accettabile l’ultranazionalismo dell’esegesi heideggeriana…».

Farìas, che è una punta di diamante della lobby mondialista liberal-libertaria di matrice cattolica, odia Nolte, che è un nazionalconservatore, di un odio da Inquisizione. Non elabora la possibilità che vi sia qualcuno che non la pensa come lui. E ne ha per tutti. Vede un mondo di neonazisti. Dalla “Nuova Destra” tedesca – un tranquillo ambiente di intellettuali alla Stefan George, dove si fa cultura di nicchia – al figlio di Heidegger, Hermann, accusato di voler insinuare un pernicioso “neo-heideggerismo”… fino a certi contatti culturali tra frange della destra e della sinistra tedesche: e, ad esempio, il loro anti-americanismo, attinto da Heidegger, diventa subito un sinistro “nazionalbolscevismo”. Attacca a testa bassa la “Nouvelle Droite” francese e infama de Benoist o Guillaume Faye tacciandoli coi soliti stereotipi di pericolosità neopagana e fascistoide: e sin qui nulla di nuovo. Ma subito li mette in collegamento con certe derive da lui astutamente individuate nel pensiero “corretto”: dice che Lacan o Baudrillart erano vicini a Céline e alla Rivoluzione Conservatrice, rivela che Foucault ammirava la «spiritualità politica» dei khomeinisti iraniani, giudica Steuckers un nocivo teorico “eurocentrista” e stende un verbale delle riviste cui collabora (comprendendoci anche quelle di Marco Tarchi…), poi descrive il nuovo ecologismo (e ci mette dentro anche quello di Eduardo Zarelli…) come un nido di eredi di Klages e del Blut und Boden… e ribatte ancora che l’heideggerismo del GRECE è stato un vaso d’infusione per il peggiore degli abomini, il razzismo: «de Benoist, come Heidegger, basa le gerarchie che fondano la discriminazione non come i razzisti “volgari” e zoologisti, bensì nello “spirito”…». Da questo poderoso concentrato di aria fritta, Farìas trae le sue conclusioni, rivelando al mondo l’esistenza di una perversa congiura metapolitica, al di là della destra e della sinistra: «Così, non sorprende che in Francia il matrimonio – impensabile fino a poco tempo fa – tra il sotterraneo fascismo heideggeriano e il neomarxismo militante sia oggi una realtà».

Subito dopo, Farìas si volge da un’altra parte del suo vasto spettro di nemici e ne individua uno tra i più temibili: l’islamismo heideggeriano. E ci informa che tra un tale Sayyd Qutb morto nel ‘66 e Heidegger esisteva una grande somiglianza di concezioni anti-americane… e che l’iraniano Ahmadinejad non sarebbe altro che «un militante “heideggeriano”». Infine si dice convinto che esista una nazi-connection mondiale che unifica tutti questi ambienti al «neofascismo militarista di Chàvez», dipinto come un Caudillo antisemita, a lungo ammaestrato dal defunto politologo péronista-revisionista Norberto Ceresole, a sua volta heideggeriano di ferro e perno ideologico del complotto neonazista… Insomma, è come leggere I Protocolli dei Savi di Sion… ma all’incontrario… e con l’uguale spessore scientifico pari a zero.

Farìas è uno dei più zelanti poliziotti a difesa del Pensiero Unico. Recita alla perfezione la parte del sacerdote che veglia sull’ortodossia totalitaria e che denuncia l’eretico, indicando la forca sulla quale farlo salire. Farìas lavora come pochi per le ragioni del mondialismo censendo pensieri, parole ed opere di quanti si ostinino ancora a usare la loro testa. Segnala ambienti, rivela retroscena, denuncia frasi che a forza sottolinea come pericolose, addita libri, uomini, associazioni come letali focolai di camuffamento neonazista sub specie heideggeriana. Uno afflitto da una simile sindrome, lo direste uno studioso… o piuttosto un delatore?

Noi imparziali e inattuali vogliamo dire la nostra: Farìas fa bene quando contribuisce a rettificare le cose, tornando a collocare Heidegger in modo documentato nella tradizione di pensiero che gli compete, quella anti-progressista e radicalmente identitaria. Del resto, Farìas è soltanto più rumoroso di altri: infatti, anche prima di lui, svariati studiosi, da Hugo Ott a Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe a Bernd Martin, per citarne solo alcuni, già tra l’87 e l’88, rimisero Heidegger al suo posto, dimostrandone i nessi biografici e filosofici col Nazionalsocialismo, senza per questo mandarne al capestro la memoria. E nessuno di loro intese recitare la parte fanatica del militante antifascista a tutti costi e fuori tempo massimo. Farìas fa infatti cattiva letteratura quando, da propagandista schierato e da terrorista intellettuale, fa sibilare la frusta dell’inquisitore “democratico”, evocando ad ogni passo la reazione in agguato, il neofascismo che dilaga, il Quarto Reich alle porte… e altri simili spropositi.

* * *

Tratto da Linea del 30 gennaio 2009.

Mircea Eliade über Carl Schmitt und René Guénon

Mircea Eliade über Carl Schmitt und René Guénon

Ex: http://traditionundmetaphgysik.wordpress.com/

Er [Carl Schmitt] sagt mir, er sei ein Optimist in Bezug auf die Zukunft Europas. Nationalismus wie Internationalismus sind gleichermaßen überholte Modelle.
(Eintrag vom Mai 1944, S. 108)

Die State University of New York Press hat die englische Übersetzung des „portugiesischen Tagebuchs“ (Jurnalul portughez) von Mircea Eliade – er war von 1941-45 rumänischer Botschafter in Lissabon – veröffentlicht:

Mircea Eliade: The Portugal Journal. Translated with a preface and notes by Mac Linscott Ricketts. SUNY Press, 296 Seiten, Hardcover/Paperback, Neu-York 2010.
(Rumänische Ausgaben:

Ernst Jünger hatte in den „Strahlungen“, seinem Kriegstagebuch, Carl Schmitts Bericht von Eliades Besuch in Berlin wiedergegeben (Eintrag vom 15.11.1942, über Jüngers Gespräch mit Schmitt über Eliade wird dieser wiederum am 27.12.1942 informiert, siehe S. 54). In Eliades Tagebuch findet sich nun sein Bericht über die Begegnung, demzufolge Eliade von Schmitts Werk nur „Die romantische Politik“ [recte: Politische Romantik] kenne, die in Rumänien großen Einfluß auf Nae Ionescu und dessen Kreis ausgeübt habe. Aber Schmitt zeigt kein Interesse, das Gespräch in diese Richtung lenken zu lassen, lieber spricht er über die Politik der Regierung Salazars. Allerdings noch mehr lebt Schmitt zu dieser Zeit im symbolischen Gehalt des „Leviathan“ auf (vier Jahre nach Erscheinen des Buches, aber sicher vor allem auch im Hinblick auf die im Jahr 1942 erscheinende weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung „Land und Meer“), erwähnt selbstverständlich „Moby Dick“ und wünscht sich von Eliade entsprechende Literatur über Mythen und Symbolik, insbesondere „Zalmoxis“. Und nun unsere Übersetzung des restlichen Eintrags, der nur auf „Berlin, September [1942]“ datiert ist:

Was mich an Schmitt beeindruckt, ist sein metaphysischer Mut, sein Nonkonformismus, die Weite seiner Sicht. Er bietet uns eine Flasche Rheinwein an und bedauert, daß ich morgen bereits nach Madrid abreise. Er sagt, der interessanteste lebende Mensch ist René Guénon (und er ist erfreut, daß ich ihm zustimme).
(S. 32)

In „Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes. Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen Symbols“ (1938, Nachdruck Köln 1982) erwähnt Schmitt bekanntlich Guénons „La crise de la monde moderne“ aus dem Jahr 1927 in einer Fußnote auf S. 44 mit dessen Feststellung daß

„die Schnelligkeit, mit der die ganze mittelalterliche Zivilisation dem Vorstoß des 17. Jahrhunderts unterlag, unbegreiflich sei, ohne Annahme einer rätselhaften, im Hintergrund bleibenden ‘volonté directrice’ und eine ‘idée préconçue’.“

Die von Schmitt zitierte Stelle lautet in der deutschen Übersetzung „Die Krisis der Neuzeit“ (Köln 1950), S. 33:

Wir wollen uns hier nicht unterfangen, den gewiß sehr verwickelten Beweggründen nachzugehen, die sich zu diesem Wandel vereinigten. So grundstürzend war er, daß schwerlich anzunehmen ist, er habe ganz von selbst eintreten können ohne das Eingreifen einer lenkenden Willensmacht, deren wahres Wesen notwendigerweise rätselhaft genug bleibt. Es gibt da Umstände, die im Hinblick darauf doch recht sonderbar sind: Dinge, die in Wirklichkeit längst bekannt waren, werden zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt der Allgemeinheit zugänglich gemacht und dabei als neu entdeckte hingestellt; bis dahin waren sie um gewisser ihrer Nachteile willen, die ihre Vorteile aufzuheben drohten, in der Öffentlichkeit unbekannt geblieben.

Schmitt erwähnt dies im Zusammenhang mit den rosenkreuzerischen Verbindungen des offiziellen Vaters der Neuzeit, René Descartes. Interessanterweise hat Schmitt gerade, wie wir seit Mehrings Biographie wissen, in dem Jahr der Enstehung des „Leviathan“ häufiger Julius Evola getroffen (ebenso Johann von Leers, der eine Besprechung des „Leviathan“ für den „Weltkampf“ verfaßt und ironischerweise in den Fünfziger Jahren – wie Guénon – nach Kairo übersiedeln und sich zum Islam bekennen wird.)

Evola hat 1942 „Il filosofo mascherato“, die Besprechung eines Buches von Maxime Leroy über Descartes’ deviantes Rosenkreuzertum und seine Rolle im Rahmen der Gegeninitiation, in „La Vita Italiana“ veröffentlicht. (Deutsche Übersetzung: Der Philosoph mit der Maske, in: Kshatriya-Rundbrief, Nr. 7, 2000) Schmitts „Leviathan“ besprach Evola bereits 1938 in „La Vita Italiana“ (nachgedruckt in zwei weiteren wichtigen italienischen Zeitschriften). Evola kommt im übrigen in Eliades Tagebuch laut Index nicht vor.

Am 17. Februar 1943 trifft Eliade jedenfalls den Pariser Korrespondenten der „Kölnischen Rundschau“, Dr. Mário, der einst für den „Cuvântul“ geschrieben hat und sich als Freund von Nae Ionescu bezeichnet.

Wir sprachen eine lange Zeit. Er ist gerade aus Paris gekommen. Er scheint kein großer Anhänger von Hitler zu sein. Er ist der Überzeugung, daß René Guénon die interessanteste Person unserer Zeit sei. (Ich glaube das nicht immer, tue es aber oft. Obwohl ich Aurobindo Ghose für „verwirklichter“ halte.)
(…) Ich berichte ihm über mein Gespräch mit Carl Schmitt im Sommer vergangenen Jahres. Er ist überrascht, daß Schmitt Guénon schätzt.
(S.37)

Selbstverständlich finden sich in Eliades Tagebuch zahlreiche Eintragungen über Nae Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, und im Westen weniger bekannte Vertreter dieses Kreises, und auch über den eigenständigen Religionsphilosophen Lucian Blaga (in dessen Raumkonzeption Schmitt interessante Aspekte zu finden hoffte, den er aber in Bukarest nicht treffen konnte, S. 108).

Zum Kontext des Kreises der „Generaţia nouă“ um ihren Lehrer Nae Ionescu und „Cuvântul“ siehe:

Corneliu Codreanu und die „Federn“ des Erzengels
Constantin Noica, der letzte große Metaphysiker

Cristiano Grottanelli hat das Gespräch Eliade/Schmitt über den abwesenden Guénon bereits zum Thema eines Aufsatzes gemacht:

Mircea Eliade, Carl Schmitt, René Guénon, 1942.

Jurnalul portughez si alte scrieri, Bukarest 2006, Jurnalul portughez, Bukarest 2010)

Vor 100 Jahren starb Carlo Michelstaedter

Vor 100 Jahren starb Carlo Michelstaedter

Ex: http://traditionundmetaphysik.wordpress.com/

„Carlo ist das empfindsame Bewußtsein des Jahrhunderts, und der Tod hat keine Macht über die Konjugation des Seins, nur über das Haben.“ (Claudio Magris, S. 46)

Am 17. Oktober 1910 tötete sich der Görzer Philosophiestudent Carlo Michelstaedter im Alter von 23 Jahren mit einer Pistole, die ihm ein Freund überlassen hatte, nach einer Auseinandersetzung mit seiner Mutter an deren Geburtstag. Die Mutter sollte drei Jahrzehnte später im Alter von 89 Jahren im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz ums Leben kommen. Der Freund Enrico Mreule war zwei Jahre zuvor nach Argentinien abgereist um dem Wehrdienst zu entgehen, die Pistole hatte er nicht mit aufs Schiff nehmen dürfen. Die Isolation, in die der junge Maler, Poet und Philosoph nach diesem entfernungsbedingten Verlust des engen Freundes und durch zwei Selbstmorde – seines Bruders Gino in Neu-York zur gleichen Zeit und einer Freundin zwei Jahre zuvor – geraten war, dürfte wesentlich zur impulsiven Tat, der kein schriftlicher Abschied vorausgegangen war, beigetragen haben. Manche wollen in der gerade für die Universität Florenz fertiggestellten philosophischen Dissertation „Überzeugung und Rhetorik“ einen solchen Abschied vor einem „metaphysischen Selbstmord“ sehen. Dies ist aber nicht zwingend, vielleicht war es eher die Anstrengung und Erschöpfung der intellektuellen Leistung als der Inhalt, der zu der Tat beigetragen hat. Zehn Tage vor dem Tod hatte er auch seine zweite wichtige philosophische Arbeit, den „Dialog über die Gesundheit“ fertiggestellt. Beigesetzt ist Michelstaedter auf dem hebräischen Friedhof, der heute im slowenisch annektierten Teil von Görz, „Nova Gorica“, liegt. (Eine aktuelle Abbildung des Grabsteins: La tomba di Carlo Michelstaedter al cimitero ebraico di Gorizia (Nova Gorica)

Der „Buddha des Westens“

Carlo Michelstaedter, geboren am 3. Juni 1887, der in den Schulregistern noch als Karl Michlstädter geführt worden war, entstammte einer deutsch-jüdischen Familie, die im österreichischen Görz, einer multikulturellen – italienisch-slowenisch-deutschen -Stadt eine Heimat gefunden hatte. Der jüdische Aspekt der Familiengeschichte hat im Leben von Carlo Michelstaedter praktisch keine Rolle gespielt. Carlos Vater, ein Direktor eines Versicherungsinstitus, war als Positivist der jüdischen Religion völlig entfremdet. Carlo durchschaute die Rhetorik der wissenschaftliche Zivilisation und des bürgerlichen Lebens, beschäftigte sich mit dem Judentum aber kaum, mit der Ausnahme eines gewissen Interesses für einen entfernten Verwandten, Isacco Samuele Reggio, der als Verfechter der Übereinstimmung des jüdischen Gesetzes mit der –aufklärerischen – Philosophie in Görz im 19. Jahrhundert von Bedeutung gewesen war. Carlos hauptsächlichen intellektuellen Bezugspunkte waren aber die griechische Antike und die deutsche Philosophie: Homer, Platon, Aristoteles, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, dazu die Literatur von Leopardi, Ibsen und Tolstoj. Die Lehren Christi und Buddhas übten wie die Veden und Upanishaden ebenfalls einen Einfluß aus, der aber durch das platonisch-schopenhauerische Prisma gebrochen war. Im Gymnasium wurde Michelstaedter von einem bemerkenswerten Mann unterrichtet: Richard von Schubert-Soldern, der von seinem Lehrstuhl an der Universität Leipzig an das Görzer Gymnasium gekommen war, Vertreter eines erkenntnistheoretischen gnoseologischen Solipsismus oder Immanentismus (Verneinung der – erkenntnismäßigen, nicht praktischen – Transzendenz der Außenwelt.)

Ein abgebrochenes Studium der Mathematik in Wien, das den künstlerischen Neigungen weichen mußte, ergänzt noch das Bild eines vielseitig begabten Mannes, „der gelehrt hatte, daß Philosophie – die Liebe zur ungeteilten Wahrheit – bedeutet, ferne Dinge zu sehen, als wären sie nah, und das brennende Verlangen auszulöschen, sie zu ergreifen, denn sie sind einfach da, in der tiefen Stille des Seins.“ So der italienische Germanist Claudio Magris in seinem Roman „Ein anderes Meer“, der die Geschichte von Carlos Freund Enrico, beginnend mit der Überfahrt nach Argentinien bis zu seiner Rückkehr nach Görz und die darauffolgenden Jahre des Faschismus und der jugoslawisch-kommunistischen Annexion, aus dessen Perspektive schildert. Die eigentliche Hauptfigur ist jedoch der abwesende Carlo, der „Buddha des Westens“. Enrico wie auch die anderen engeren Freunde und Familienmitglieder läßt die zeitlich so kurze Bekanntschaft mit Carlo und die von ihm auf Dauer ausgehende Herausforderung nie mehr aus dem Bann. Es „war etwas Einfaches und Endgültiges geschehen, war eine unwiderrufliche Aufforderung ergangen.“ Eine Aufforderung zur Eigentlichkeit des Lebens, wie man mit Heidegger sagen könnte, dessen Existenzphilosophie Michelstaedter nach der Auffassung von manchen vorweggenommen hat. Michelstaedter spricht nicht von Eigentlichkeit sondern von „Überzeugung“, die er in einem Kommentar zu Aristoteles „Rhetorik“ als Gegenbegriff, mehr noch als Gegenwelt zur „Rhetorik“ entwickelt. Magris erläutert:

„Die Überzeugung, sagt Carlo, ist der Besitz des eigenen Lebens und der eigenen Person in der Gegenwart, die Fähigkeit, ganz den Augenblick zu leben, ohne ihn einer Sache zu opfern, die noch kommen muß und von der man hofft, daß sie so schnell wie möglich eintritt, denn so wird das Leben mit der Erwartung zerstört, daß es so schnell wie möglich vorbeigehen möge. Doch Zivilisation ist die Geschichte von Menschen, die unfähig sind, überzeugt zu leben, die die kolossale Mauer der Rhetorik errichten, die soziale Organisation des Wissens und Handelns, um den Anblick und das Bewußtsein ihrer Leere vor sich selbst zu verbergen.“

Julius Evola und Carlo Michelstaedter

„Überzeugung und Rhetorik“ wurde bereits 1913 herausgegeben. Giovanni Papini und der Kreis der Triester Zeitschrift „La Voce“ gehören zu den ersten, die den Ruhm des früh verstorbenen Genies begründen und erweisen daß die „unwiderrufliche Aufforderung“ auch auf Menschen übergehen kann, die Michelstaedter nicht persönlich gekannt haben. So wird auch Julius Evola von ihm erfahren haben, er war jedoch auch mit einem Cousin Carlos bekannt und hatte dadurch Zugang zu nicht publizierten Informationen. In seinen „Saggi sull’ Idealismo magico“ hat er schließlich 1925 Carlo Michelstaedter als ersten von fünf in die Richtung des „magischen Idealismus“ führenden Persönlichkeiten gewürdigt, neben Otto Braun, Giovanni Gentile, Octave Hamelin und Hermann Keyserling.
Evola sieht den Weg zu dem „magischen Idealismus“, den er in seinen drei philosophischen Werken dargelegt hat, als logische Konsequenz in Michelstaedters philosophischem Hauptwerk bereits angelegt. Michelstaedters „Weg der Überzeugung“ reduziere die Möglichkeiten der menschlichen Existenz irrtümlich auf das Aufgehen in der (endlichen) Vielheit (der Ablenkung von der eigenen Leere, der Verfallenheit) und die – letztlich ebenfalls leere – absolute (unendliche) Reinheit der Negierung. Wie Evola betont, sind Endlichkeit und Unendlichkeit aber als zwei Weisen des Seins beide unabhängig von irgendeinem Objekt oder irgendeiner Aktion. Was Evola als Macht bezeichnet und schließlich später mit der Initiation und der Tradition zu verbinden versucht, ist das Sein oder das Handeln (diese Unterscheidung verschwindet in der reinen Aktion) ohne Begierde und ohne Gewalt. Das „absolute Individuum“ ist der Mensch als Macht – wie auch sein ebenfalls 1925 erschienenes Buch über den Tantrismus heißt – , als Einheit von Sein und Handeln, von Negation und Affirmation. Ob der Anspruch Evolas die innere Logik Michelstaedters zu Ende zu denken, zu Recht besteht, ist umstritten, denn Michelstaedters anspruchsvolles Hauptwerk wird durchaus unterschiedlich verstanden. Der von uns zitierte Claudio Magris präsentiert eine schophenhauer-buddhistische Variante der Auflösung des Willens im Augenblick der (selbst-)negierenden Präsenz. Evolas Verständnis des Buddhas des Ostens, wie er es in „La dottrina del Risveglio“ (1943) entwickelt hat, steht mit seiner Philosophie der Macht, des absoluten Individuums, im Einklang. Seine Begegnung mit dem „Buddha des Westens“ hat jedenfalls Evolas gesamte denkerisch-existenzielle Bahn geprägt. Diesen Einfluß hat Evola in der 1963 erschienen Quasi-Autobiographie „Il Cammino del Cinabro“ bekannt, auch die Wiederaufnahme des Michelstaedter-Abschnitts aus den „Saggi“ (die zu Lebzeiten Evolas keine Neuauflage erfahren durften) in das im Todesjahr erschienene Buch „Ricognizioni. Uomini e problemi“ spricht eine deutliche Sprache. Letztlich verhält es sich mit Michelstaedter wie mit jedem wirklichen Meister: er ist für den Schüler keine Kopiervorlage, sondern ein Spiegel mit dessen Hilfe er sein eigenes Selbst sehen kann.

Literaturangaben:
Julius Evola, Saggi sull’ idealismo magico, Opere di Julius Evola, Roma 2006.
Claudio Magris, Ein anderes Meer, München / Wien 1992.
Carlo Michelstaedter, Überzeugung und Rhetorik, Frankfurt am Main 1999.
Robert W. Th. Lamers, Richard von Schubert-Solderns Philosophie des erkenntnistheoretischen Solipsismus, Frankfurt am Main 1990.

De lo politico en el pensamiento de Carl Schmitt

 

De lo político en el pensamiento de Carl Schmitt

Dick Tonsmann Vásquez

Ex: http://la-coalicion.blogspot.com/

Vamos a comenzar esta parte con la definición de Schmitt de lo político. Como se verá, se trata de un concepto sustancialista asociado al origen de las naciones y a la posibilidad de la guerra. En esta marco, hablaremos del sentido o sinsentido que tendría hablar de una guerra contra la humanidad y, sobre ello, nos referiremos al ‘enemigo absoluto’ desde la distinción entre régimen y Estado. Y esto nos llevará finalmente hacia algunas conclusiones del tipo de la filosofía práctica para los sucesos contemporáneos de la política peruana.

Para comenzar, la definición de Schmitt sobre lo político se basa en el criterio de distinción amigo – enemigo, de la misma forma que la moral requiere de la distinción entre el bien y el mal, y la estética posee el criterio de la distinción entre lo bello y lo feo. Una comparación analógica que no debe significar en ningún caso una equiparación entre lo bueno y el amigo o entre lo malo y el enemigo, de la misma manera que lo bello tampoco puede identificarse ni con lo bueno ni con el amigo. Además, es importante indicar que lo político no se reduce a una identificación con lo estatal, pues en las sociedades democráticas contemporáneas el Estado no tiene el monopolio de lo político sino que ámbitos tales como la religión, la cultura o la economía misma, que son instancias sociales, dejan de ser neutrales y se vuelven potencialmente políticas. Así, el Estado tal y como lo conocemos ya no puede ser considerado como un ámbito distintivo de lo que llamamos precisamente ‘lo político’.

Las razones de un conflicto pueden ser religiosas, culturales o económicas, pero lo que las hace eminentemente políticas es el carácter mismo de conflicto que subyace a la lucha política en cuanto tal. Esto significa que la autonomía de tal criterio no supone necesariamente una independencia en la realidad pero sí supone un diferente modo de ser constitutivo de lo humano. Lo que ocurre es que la manifestación del conflicto en esas otras áreas es sólo la expresión de una naturaleza más originaria del hombre y del Estado. Así, esta concepción esencialista de la política subyace al origen de las naciones cuya naturaleza es entendida desde una perspectiva romántica en tanto que apela a la idea de una especie de sentimientos originarios puros. Desde esta perspectiva es que se afirma que los pueblos se definen en tanto que se agrupan como amigos y por negación de sus enemigos.

Ahora bien, el surgimiento de las nacionalidades y de los Estados – nación es un hecho que, generalmente, tendemos a ubicar en la Reforma Luterana. Sin embargo, el carácter conflictivo de la naturaleza política en su sentido óntico parecería estar inscrito en todo individuo si nos ceñimos a la concepción sustancialista de Schmitt. Por lo tanto, los Estados – nación que conocemos no serían sino una de las últimas expresiones de este concepto de lo político. Estados que, incluso, al ser invadidos por la sociedad civil, como se ha señalado, no suponen ya una identificación simple con el hecho político.

De la misma forma, este carácter esencial de la distinción amigo – enemigo también se puede referir a las diferencias partidarias que se producen en el interior de un Estado. Así, no se entienden como simples discusiones sino que la “lucha partidaria” conlleva necesariamente la idea de “lucha hostil”, entendida ésta como posibilidad eventual siempre presente dada su naturaleza existencial. Por ello, desde esta perspectiva, el nivel máximo de la enemistad encuentra su cumplimiento en la guerra, ya sea como guerra externa o como guerra civil. Esto no hay que entenderlo en el sentido de Clausewitz, para quien la guerra no era sino la continuación de la política por otros medios. Sino que ha de comprenderse en el sentido de que la guerra es el presupuesto de la política en tanto que es una posibilidad real siempre presente a partir de la cual se origina la misma conducta política.

Así, se puede considerar que Schmitt no tiene propiamente un discurso belicista mi militarista pues asume que, incluso, una actuación políticamente correcta en contra de la guerra presupondría la distinción amigo – enemigo. También la neutralidad conlleva la posibilidad de que el Estado neutral pueda aliarse con otro Estado como amigo en contra de otro que considera como enemigo. Esto significa un concepto esencialista de la política pero que no resulta determinante de una realidad concreta sino que permite diversas formas de realización existencial. Aunque la definición de Schmitt de lo político no significa por sí mismo un criterio valorativo, puede permitir pensar de manera valorativa la acción política. Una tal valoración a posteriori no anula la descripción a priori ni viceversa. Tampoco debemos entender el principio sustancial de la relación amistad – enemistad como un principio zoológico a la manera de Hobbes, quien repetía la famosa sentencia homo homini lupus, sino que la determinación existencial sobre quién en concreto es el amigo y quién el enemigo procede invariablemente de la libertad del hombre que le es consustancial. Por lo cual, la sentencia latina antes señalada resulta ser cambiada por la afirmación de que “el hombre es el hombre para el hombre”.

Aunque la definición del enemigo depende del ejercicio de dicha libertad en el marco de las agrupaciones políticas, tal libertad no puede llegar razonablemente al punto en que se pueda pensar en una lucha de la humanidad toda en su conjunto pues, entonces, ¿quién sería el enemigo? Ni siquiera el enemigo deja de ser hombre de modo que no hay aquí ninguna distinción específica”.

Si pensamos en la humanidad como el conjunto de todos los seres humanos es imposible pensar en un enemigo de tal humanidad de forma que toda ella pueda agruparse frente a un enemigo común en el sentido de otra agrupación o pueblo de hombres.

Sería posible pensar en un enemigo de la humanidad en el sentido de alguien que desee exterminar la raza humana por considerarse un ser superior más que humano. Sin embargo, Schmitt podría responder que esta última disquisición no tiene que ver con su criterio teórico en tanto que principio distintivo de carácter óntico, sino que podría explicarse como una retórica política que pretende justificar una guerra apelando a un conjunto de nociones alteradas de la idea propia de humanidad. En ese sentido, también aquellos que actuarían en las guerras posteriores bajo la idea de que están defendiendo tal humanidad, lo que en realidad hacen, por contrapartida, es convertir al enemigo en un ser inhumano por razones morales y proclamar su necesario aniquilamiento. Se trata, en este último caso, de la utilización de un criterio moral en un área distinta de la suya, subsumiendo lo político de tal forma que el enemigo termina siendo degradado a la condición de criminal. Una intromisión de discursos que, en realidad, se podría entender como una manipulación del discurso moral para justificar una agresión de carácter hegemónico o en pro de un imperialismo económico. De esta manera, el concepto de humanidad no sólo se impondría acríticamente eliminando el significado de lo político mismo, sino que, además, se convierte en uno de los tantos conceptos ideológicos antifaz hechos para justificar lo injustificable.

Si pensamos estrictamente en una reducción de lo político a categorías morales tal como lo entiende Schmitt, se ha convertido al enemigo en criminal de guerra. Pero habría que diferenciar si se trata de una ideologización previa (como cuando Bush hablaba de la “libertad infinita”), con lo cual la intromisión de lo moral en lo político resulta ser simplemente tendenciosa e hipócrita; o si se trata de la consecuencia de la violación de los usos de la guerra del Derecho Internacional establecido. Una cosa es un gobierno genocida y otra cosa es una unidad política cuya existencia va más allá de un régimen eventual y pasajero. No era lo mismo combatir a los nazis que luchar contra Alemania ¿o acaso correspondió el holocausto con una forma de ser de la unidad política alemana? Por consiguiente, la criminalización del enemigo no puede significar la criminalización de todo un país o una nación. Una absolutización del concepto de enemigo que sí ha ocurrido en la retórica del caso de Irak con la estigmatización del Islam y, en consecuencia, con la criminalización de tal religión.

Por otro lado, en la obra El concepto de lo político, redactada en el período de entreguerras, se criticaba a la liga existente en aquellos años por confundir lo interestatal con lo internacional. El primero de estos conceptos se refiere a la garantía del status quo de las fronteras nacionales por parte de la Liga. Pero el concepto de internacional, como en el caso de la Internacional Socialista, supone una sociedad universal despolitizada al responder a la tendencia imprecisa de buscar el Estado único como un postulado ideal. Para Schmitt queda claro que sólo un Estado ideal apolítico, es capaz de dar tal paso y convertir el enemigo en un criminal.

Sin embargo, tal Estado es para Schmitt una imposibilidad práctica, aunque se preconice teóricamente. Las tendencias hacia esta situación vienen del lado de un liberalismo individualista que, buscando eliminar todo lo que puede coaccionar su libertad (incluyendo el propio Estado y su correspondiente monopolio organizado de la violencia legítima), termina por entronizar el imperio de lo económico y poniendo el aspecto ético – espiritual en la dinámica de una eterna discusión. Precisamente por el lado de lo económico es que tal Estado único resulta ser tan sólo una ficción pues lo que ocurre, en realidad, es que la economía se vuelve en un hecho político al desarrollar nuevos tipos de oposición que llevarían claramente a la guerra, aunque ésta no deba ser entendida necesariamente en el sentido de la lucha de clases marxista. Lo mismo ocurre bajo la idea de declarar una “guerra contra la guerra”, pues ello haría dividir la humanidad entre dos agrupaciones políticas y el criterio amigo – enemigo seguiría siendo la distinción específica de lo político. Ningún autoproclamado Estado universal podría anular lo que es una naturaleza de carácter óntico. Sólo podrá haber el intento de una agrupación de países de apropiarse del derecho a la guerra estructurando el Derecho Internacional bajo sus propios intereses. Así se entiende a la ley positiva como la búsqueda de la legitimación de una situación en la que los interesados sólo pretenderían encontrar estabilidad para su ventaja económica y poder político aunque lo disfracen de discursos moralistas.

Para Schmitt, a pesar de la voluntad de los juristas internacionales de que esto no sea así, ningún sistema de leyes puede evitar la diferenciación sustancial entre enemigos que presupone la guerra. Esto no significa que no se deba trabajar en beneficio de un nuevo orden que establezca “nuevas líneas de amistad” entre los pueblos, al margen de la eficacia o ineficacia de la actual ONU. Para Schmitt, el error está en que el organismo surgido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial fue una construcción de los vencedores que creyeron que su victoria era la victoria definitiva y ello los incapacitaba para poder plantear nuevas respuestas a los Challenges de la historia. ¿No son los sucesos contemporáneos, además de un nuevo Challenge, una nueva llamada de atención sobre la futilidad de un modelo liberal de carácter monista? Schmitt vislumbró que el orden futuro del mundo se convertiría en un pluralismo multipolar y que, aquello que marcará el desarrollo de los grandes espacios, dependerá de la fuerza en que una agrupación de pueblos o de naciones puede mantener el proceso de desarrollo industrial siendo fieles a sí mismos y no sacrificando su identidad por el carácter tecnológico de dicho desarrollo, “no solamente por la técnica, sino también por la sustancia espiritual de los hombres que colaboraron en su desarrollo, por su religión y su raza, su cultura e idioma y por la fuerza viviente de su herencia nacional”.

En otras palabras, que el orden del globo dependerá de un comunitarismo amplio de mundos de la vida fuertes ante toda racionalización sistémica dominante de la techne y el progreso.

Ahora bien, las consecuencias de esta reflexión para la comprensión de los sucesos políticos contemporáneos que nos impelen directamente deberían ser más que evidentes. Tanto si hablamos de los sucesos de Bagua, como de la situación del VRAE o de las relaciones entre el Perú y los demás Estados en los momentos de una aparente carrera armamentista. Una vez que el Estado peruano ha sido invadido por la Sociedad Civil, se pierde paulatinamente el principio del monopolio de la violencia. ONGs, movimientos políticos de naturaleza anarquista con características delictivas, así como partidos de carácter revanchista que estigmatizan al Estado colaboran para la destrucción de cualquier tipo de unidad sustancial o espiritual nacional que debería personalizar nuestro sistema político. Así se termina haciéndole el juego al liberalismo económico y político internacional cuyo resultado no puede ser otro que la crisis mundial.

El ideal de nuestro Estado ha de ser que las formas políticas expresen nuestra herencia cultural y ello no parece haber ocurrido precisamente a lo largo de nuestra república en todo sentido. El desprecio por comunidades andinas o del oriente peruano de parte de un régimen que, por ejemplo, se dedica principalmente a Tratados de Libre Comercio, significa, a la larga, una destrucción física y moral que justificaría una lucha constante contra este sistema. Ello, por supuesto con las salvedades apropiadas: no se justifica ninguna intervención extranjera ni tampoco el terrorismo indiscriminado porque eso precisamente destruye las comunidades que pretendemos defender.

Por otra parte, así como las Convenciones por sí solas no son suficientes para evaluar la justicia en la Guerra, la terquedad en aferrarse a leyes positivas es una ingenuidad jurídica, además de ser un abandono de las experiencias humanas morales que están a la base de cualquier sistema de Derecho. Las relaciones entre personas son más primigenias que las relaciones jurídicas y esto es algo que se ha olvidado tanto en el ámbito internacional como en el ámbito de nuestro país. Asimismo las políticas de la amistad no pueden ser tan ingenuas como para creer que no va a haber conflicto porque nos sometemos a los Tratados

Es en esta línea en que se debe plantear la cuestión de los Derechos. Tan malo es una imposición jurídica de Derechos entendidos en sentido liberal moderno a la manera norteamericana, como el desprecio por la vida y la libertad. Así, la defensa de la comunidad debe verse como defensa de la riqueza cultural, alimentada por la naturaleza material propia. Ni la salvaguarda de un modelo liberal ni la repetición de rebeliones de países vecinos resulta auténtica.

Bagua, el VRAE o lo que se venga en las relaciones internacionales es y será precisamente el resultado de este conflicto irresoluble sintéticamente entre la globalización y la defensa de la comunidad. Así, hemos asistido, y probablemente seguiremos asistiendo, a conflictos sociales con el peligro de que devengan en cosas mayores; y todo es y será el resultado tanto del eterno y dinosáurico paternalismo económico que, no solo está fuera de nuestras fronteras, sino que está dentro y que, incluso, nos gobierna, así como de la marginación y el caos burocrático. Razón que nos lleva a repetir una vez más, junto con las encíclicas sociales de la Iglesia Católica que “No habrá paz sin una verdadera justicia social”.

 

Alexander Dugin talks about the Conservative Revolution at Moscow State University

Alexander Dugin talks about the Conservative Revolution at Moscow State University

Alexander Dugin on the failure of Russian philosophy

Alexander Dugin on the failure of Russian philosophy

The Eldritch Evola

James J. O'Meara

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom. — E. A. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. — H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds . . . — Algernon Blackwood

A little while ago, I decided to use up more of my enforced leisure by reading Part Two of Baron Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, or at least the first few chapters, with an eye towards once and for all getting a straight picture of the various ‘ages’ and ‘races’ that constitute his take on Tradition, filtering Guénon’s model through the more historically oriented work of Wirth and Co. (See Evola’s “My Explorations of Origins and Tradition” in his The Path of Cinnabar.)

Damned if I didn’t start coming all over with fear and dread, and not just in my attic (if I had one), not unlike those that prevented me from reading completely through Guénon’s Reign of Quantity until several false starts over 25 years.

This time I decided to try and analyze what this dread consisted in, and I think I’ve got it:

By the time one reaches the farthest limits of recorded, or even archeologically validated history, the worst has already happened, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And is this not indeed the theme of “horror” fiction?

Now, I’ve never paid attention to the occasional ‘smart’ comments about Traditionalism as reading like “science fiction,” based largely on supposed borrowing from Theosophy. In fact, I agree with this guy, who makes a modus tollens out of the mockers’ modus ponens:

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. — Thomas F. Bertonneau, “Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s ‘Traditionalist’ Critique of Modernity“

I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read more than one C. A. S. story, and that years ago in some Lovecraft Mythos anthology, but I’m more inclined anyway to take this back to the Master himself, Lovecraft. How much does Lovecraft resemble Evola, and moreover, is this superficial, or is there a reason?

The answer may lie here:

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.– H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

In a 1927 letter to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, Lovecraft writes: “I consider the touch of cosmic outsideness–of dim, shadowy non-terrestrial hints–to be the characteristic feature of my writing.”

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. — H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

Lovecraft takes fear as his theme, and he knows that the greatest fear is inspired not by ghoulies and gore but by the dread of nameless eons. Nameless eons are the stock in trade of Traditionalist cyclical cosmology.

It’s no surprise that today’s Prince of Nihilism gets it:

The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. — Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1999).

But surely Evola and Co. are not frivolous entertainers, but serious initiates. If Lovecraft seeks to inspire fear, does Evola, and if so, how is that connected to initiation?

We could try this: if Evola inspires new respect for the Lovecraftians, then what if we read Lovecraft as if he were Evola?

It was Alisdair Clarke who called my attention to Polaria: The Gift of the White Stone by W. H. Muller. I’ve never seen more than a couple other references to it (such as this amused and bemused review by one Julianus here) and copies of the barely 200 page paperback seem to have become quite rare, fetching over $200.00 on Amazon.

Muller takes off, with all apparent sincerity, from the preposterous thesis that H. P. Lovecraft “was a Practicing Occultist and that the Lovecraft Circle was a group of High Adepts,” despite overwhelming evidence, found in literally dozens of volumes of letters and innumerable personal reminiscences, to say nothing of S. T. Joshi’s many works, of being a cast-iron materialist of the village atheist ilk. As Julianus says:

The book itself is a Vast Muddle of Mystical Verbiage that draws on Sufism, Theosophy, Rene Guenon, Robert Graves, and others to create a bizarre Syncretic Symbolism from “Phonetic Encodings” in Lovecraft’s work. The Linguistic Fog is comparable only to the work of Kenneth Grant, and it is truly strange that Herr Muller nowhere acknowledges his debt to the Typhonian Titan.

Actually, in its preposterous thesis defended with po-faced sincerity by means of vast scholarship and word and letter mumbo-jumbo, as well as its overall atmosphere of occult doom, I was more put in mind of such works of Ariosophic fascism as Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels’ Theozoology.

Never the less, there are some good bits, relevant to our theme; if Lovecraft‘s tales can be given an initiatic spin, then the connection with Evola becomes clearer:

Lovecraft cloaked his profound esoteric insight in an imagery of horror. . . . Thus it was given a subtle but clear initiatory nature. Many feel attracted by Lovecraft’s forceful imagery, but only a very few know the reason. Only those with a preparedness and already drawn toward the Threshold would be ready to delve into Lovecraft’s work and recover from its depths the eonian Polar message.

Remember, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”

For Fear read “initiation via experiencing the death of the ego and its world.”

Both ego-less animal existence and man’s ego, which is but matrical sensory cognition, originate in the same Matrix of Dream. This must be transcended. It is Polar insight, the inward-looking way that leads out of this cyclic Matrix. However, the man’s ego, being the man-god, fears mystical dissolution, because it fears its “death”. Only if “death” is realized as illusion by experiencing it mystically in life, [perhaps by reading some 'weird tales'] can essencification and spiritual unity be achieved. The ego fears “death” because it does not know that there is none. ‘Fear’ is the sword the ego wields, yet its iron melts away in the black heat of Wisdom.

In Lovecraft’s stories the elements of decay and death prevail. These are the emotional patterns of one approaching the seventh plane of the Threshold. The transformative Way across the Bridge of Fog, from animal-man to god-man, is painful. Everyone claiming the contrary, is speaking with a Minotaurian voice. [Man-animals? Ruh-roh, here comes that Theozoology again!]

The Way leads through the Tomb of the Individual toward the Emergence of the Entity. The same is applicable to humanity. Saturn is throwing its charnel light toward this planet. But the Pilgrim must know that Saturn is but the Threshold, not the Destination. — W. H. Muller, Polaria, p.113

“The Minotaurian voice that Muller refers to is the voice that asserts the supremacy of the ego. It is the animal-man trapped in the labyrinth of ordinary, uninspired consciousness.” — A. Clarke, “Ego Death, Destiny and Serpents in Germanic Mythology“

Both Evola and Lovecraft also drew the same or similar immediate political conclusions, both under the influence of cycles, those of Guénon and Spengler, respectively:

Lovecraft saw cultural decline as a slow process that spans 500 to 1000 years. He sought a system that could overcome the cyclical laws of decay, which was also the motivation of Fascism. Lovecraft believed it was possible to re-establish a new “equilibrium” over the course of 50 to 100 years, stating: “There is no need of worrying about civilization so long as the language and the general art tradition survives.” — Kerry Bolton, “Lovecraft’s Fascism“

(For the Fascist theme of regeneration or palingenesis, see Roger Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism, reviewed here by Alisdair Clarke.)

Continuing that somewhat optimistic note, perhaps even ego death may not be so bad; In “Calling Cthulhu,” Erik Davis described the then-nascent cult of pop-Cthulhu, and noted that Lovecraft’s “dread” and “horror” seemed to belong to a 19th century materialist confronting vast new vistas opened up by science, not unlike those opened by drugs; as he describes it in a more recent article on Cthulu porn:

In this tangy bon-bon of nihilistic materialism, Lovecraft anticipates a peculiarly modern experience of dread, one conjured not by irrational fears of the dark but rather by the speculative realism of reason itself, staring into the cosmic void. . . . This terror before the empty and ultimately unknowable universe of scientific materialism is what gives the cosmic edge to the cosmic horror that Lovecraft, more than any other writer, injected into the modern imagination (though props must be given up as well to Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, and, in the closing chapters of The Time Machine at least, H. G. Wells). While many secular people proclaim an almost childlike wonder at the mind-melting prospect of the incomprehensibly vast universe sketched out by astrophysics and bodied forth by doctored Hubble shots, Lovecraft would say that we have not really swallowed the implication of this inhuman immensity—that we have not, in other words, correlated our contents. — Erik Davis, “Cthulhu is not cute!”

By contrast, we in the 20th (now 21st) century have actually come to welcome such derangement of the senses, like teenagers love glue huffing.

This seems discount the value of the fear and terror aspect itself, but it’s more soundly based on the real Lovecraft, cowering in his attic, than the “alchemical master” postulated by Muller.

But maybe the kids do have something to teach us:

Cthulhu Turning Dreams into Nightmares – Click here for more home videos

For those who need a quick refresher:

Editor’s Note: For more imaginative Lovecraft tributes and parodies, see Under Vhoorl’s Shadow: http://www.3×6.net/vhoorl/

Dr. Rolf Kosiek - Mai 68 und die Frankfurter Schule

Dr. Rolf Kosiek

Mai 68 und die Frankfurter Schule