jeudi, 01 septembre 2011
La légende de Friedrich Hielscher
La légende de Friedrich Hielscher
Dr. Peter BAHN
La fondation d’une “Église” panenthéiste au XXe siècle et ses fausses interprétations ultérieures
Pendant des décennies, la vie et l’œuvre de l’auteur, philosophe religieux et érudit, le Dr. Friedrich Hielscher (1902-1990) a donné lieu à toutes sortes de fausses interprétations spéculatives. Cela est particulièrement vrai avec le genre de littérature “ésotérique” populaire, dans laquelle Hielscher a sans cesse été le sujet des plus folles spéculations et assertions. Au début des années 60, une “légende Hielscher” extrêmement négative était déjà née, à laquelle des embellissements encore plus hardis ont été régulièrement ajoutés jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Cette légende est, cependant, pratiquement à des années-lumière des véritables actions et intentions de Hielscher, et est dépourvue de toute référence à la réalité.
Pour pouvoir aller au fond de ces spéculations, et pour déterminer leurs sources d’origine, il est d’abord nécessaire d’examiner le cours de la vie de Hielscher. Concernant les années jusqu’en 1954, cela peut être assuré avant tout au moyen de son autobiographie (1). Concernant la période de temps ultérieure, il existe — dans la littérature, du moins — seulement des morceaux fragmentaires et dispersés d’information dont l’accès est difficile (2). Par contre, les archives existantes relatives à Hielscher sont beaucoup plus riches, en particulier sa production littéraire (3) et sa correspondance avec Ernst Jünger, qui dura de 1926 à 1986 (4).
Fils d’un marchand de textiles, Friedrich Hielscher était né le 31 mai 1902 à Plauen, dans le Vogtland, et grandit à Guben, en Niedersaulitz. À l’âge de 17 ans, il sortit diplômé du Lycée Humaniste de Plauen. Immédiatement après ses examens finaux, il rejoignit une unité des Corps Francs qui prit part aux combats de résistance contre les groupes polonais en Haute Silésie (5). Son unité fut plus tard incorporée dans l’armée allemande. En mars 1920, Hielscher refusa de participer au putsch de Kapp, et quitta l’armée (6). Il commença ensuite à étudier le droit à l’Université de Berlin et suivit aussi des cours à la Faculté des Sciences Politiques (7). Ces études de sciences politiques l’amenèrent en étroit contact avec Theodor Heuss, avec qui il se lia d’amitié pour la vie (8). À Berlin, Hielscher rejoignit le corps de duellistes étudiant “Normannia”, et jusqu’aux années 70 il fut une autorité active pour l’histoire du groupe, ainsi qu’un conférencier recherché concernant l’Assemblée de Kosen (9).
Alors que la courte période dans les Corps Francs fut marquée beaucoup plus par des aspirations à l’indépendance et à l’aventure que par des visions politiques concrètes (10), pendant le cours de ses études à Berlin Hielscher devint graduellement plus politisé. Après une affiliation temporaire au Reichsclub du Parti du peuple allemand national-libéral (11), il gravita vers les cercles des “gauchistes de la droite” et des “nouveaux nationalistes”. Ces petits cercles, qui tournaient autour de certains journaux et de projets de publications, cherchaient à combler le fossé entre l’arrière-plan intellectuel du mouvement des travailleurs socialistes et celui du nationalisme traditionnel (12). En même temps, il croisa le chemin de personnalités comme le philosophe culturel Oswald Spengler (13) et la sœur de Nietzsche, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, cette dernière rencontre étant due aux nombreuses visites de Hielscher aux archives de Nietzsche à Weimar du fait de son travail promotionnel (14). En 1926, Hielscher termina son cursus par une thèse intitulée Die Selbstherrlichkeit : Versuch einer Darstellung des deutschen Rechtsgrundbegriffes (La souveraineté : un essai de présentation de la base de la loi allemande), pour laquelle il se vit décerner un double doctorat, summa cum laude, en philosophie du droit et en histoire du droit (15). Mais il trouva que son travail ultérieur, bureaucratique et réglementé, en tant que clerc juridique, était un tel supplice qu’en novembre 1927 il fut déchargé de la fonction publique à sa propre requête (16). Pendant le reste de sa vie, il vécut comme un universitaire — tant bien que mal — avec les bénéfices de publications, de cours et de commissions de recherche occasionnelles.
Hielscher, qui avait entre-temps développé un étroit contact personnel avec Ernst Jünger, fut à partir de 1926 un collaborateur actif aux divers journaux liés au « nouveau nationalisme » national-révolutionnaire. Son premier essai parut à la fin de 1926 dans le magazine Neue Standarte-Arminius : Kampfschrift für deutsche Nationalisten. Avec son titre, Innerlichkeit und Staatskunst (Intériorité et art étatique), il indiqua dès le début qu’il ne se préoccupait pas d’activité politique superficielle, car les choses n’en étaient pas « au commencement d’un nouveau départ, mais plutôt à la fin du vieil effondrement » (17). Cet effondrement ne pouvait être surmonté que par une nouvelle « foi (...) qui portera l’avenir allemand et sans laquelle le nouveau travail ne sera pas commencé » (18).
Avec l’accent mis par ce premier texte sur l’importance fondamentale d’une nouvelle foi, un trait avait déjà émergé dans l’œuvre de Hielscher qui allait rapidement s’intensifier, et qui resterait prédominant jusqu’à la fin de sa vie. Hielscher ne pensait “politiquement” que d’une manière secondaire et transitoire ; il se préoccupait beaucoup plus de tirer un nouvel “art étatique” des concepts religieux. Cela était déjà clair à la fin des années 20 au vu de sa correspondance avec Ernst Jünger. En conséquence, en novembre 1929 il envoya à Jünger une “déclaration de foi” (Bekenntnis) idéologico-religieuse, et dans une autre lettre quelques semaines plus tard il parla de la nécessité de la naissance d’une « Église invisible » qui serait efficace en termes de foi tout comme de politique (19). Vivant à l’époque dans la solitude d’un presbytère de la région de Lausitz, où un ancien ami d’école servait comme pasteur protestant, Hielscher travaillait sur son livre Das Reich, qui fut publié en 1931 (20). Celui-ci fut précédé par les premiers numéros d’un périodique du même titre que Hielscher avait édité depuis septembre 1930. Un cercle d’adeptes, loyal à Hielscher en tant que spiritus rector, se forma progressivement autour du journal et à partir des lecteurs du livre, qui avait provoqué un débat considérable. Jusqu’en 1933 ce cercle fut essentiellement tiré des rangs du Mouvement de la Jeunesse et des groupes de jeunesse nationaux-révolutionnaires (21).
L’unité de foi et de politique postulée par Hielscher, d’« intériorité et art étatique », ne fut pas sans conséquence sur la structure et l’activité de son cercle. Dans les années entre 1932 et 1935, l’association grandit, selon les mots de Hielscher, à la foi « comme une résistance contre la populace, et comme une Église » (22). Hielscher considéra toujours le mouvement national-socialiste comme une « populace », contre qui il se trouvait en opposition diamétrale pour des raisons idéologico-religieuses. En fait, le cercle autour de Hielscher se voyait à la fois comme une « Église embryonnaire » avec les activités rituelles correspondantes, et comme un « État embryonnaire » avec la tâche de résister au national-socialisme (23), bien qu’il soit peu probable que tous les membres politiquement actifs du cercle aient participé avec la même intensité aux aspects religieux du groupe. En tout, le groupe était formé d’environ cinquante personnes, dont les noms peuvent être déterminés à partir des archives relatives à Hielscher (24).
Les activités du cercle, à la fois comme « Église » et comme groupe de résistance, étaient menées sur la base d’un système idéologico-religieux extraordinairement complexe. Ceci n’avait pas été emprunté par Hielscher à d’autres sources sous une forme finie, mais fut développé successivement à partir d’axiomes fondamentaux spécifiques. D’importance centrale était l’idée de la foi comme « base de l’action » incontestable, et donc de leitmotiv essentiel pour toute action humaine (25). À un niveau subordonné à cette signification de la foi en général (c’est-à-dire, d’une foi en tant que telle), Hielscher plaçait sa propre théologie concrète avec sa vision particulière sur Dieu, les dieux, et l’homme — une vision qu’il définissait comme « païenne ».
Le point de départ était la perception panenthéiste de Dieu comme « l’Éternel, en qui tout est contenu » (26). Ainsi, Dieu n’était pas extérieur au monde, mais au contraire le monde était en Lui ; il n’était pas le Créateur, mais plutôt celui qui (à partir de lui-même) crée continuellement. Hielscher reliait cela à diverses notions. De la compréhension du monde par Nietzsche comme “volonté de puissance”, il extrapolait l’idée de devenir un « avec le monde éternellement en devenir » (27). De cela pouvait « être perçue … une conscience de Dieu » (28). En même temps, il revenait spécifiquement à la pensée de l’hérétique et érudit du début du IXe siècle, Jean Scot Erigène, d’après qui, « Dieu est tout ce qui est éternel et tout ce qui est advenu » (29). Erigène décrivait aussi Dieu comme une « unité multiple à l’intérieur de lui-même » (30). Cette idée domina exclusivement et complètement les convictions religieuses de Hielscher et de son cercle jusqu’à la fin des années 30, avant d’être élargie (avec des conceptions qui étaient systématiquement dérivées du penseur susmentionné) pour inclure des « dieux » ou des « messagers célestes », qui en tant que « particularités » (Besonderungen) personnelles du « tout-puissant et seul vrai Dieu » apparaissaient comme médiateurs entre ce dernier et les êtres humains. À cet égard, des éléments polythéistes trouvés dans la pensée classiciste allemande (en particulier dans les œuvres de Gœthe et de Hölderlin) — mais habillés par Hielscher en dieux de la mythologie germanique (« Wode », « Thor », « Loki », « Freya », « Sigyn », etc.) — furent repris et incorporés structurellement (31). En tant qu’« âme », l’être humain aussi n’était rien d’autre que l’une des « particularités » émanant de la plénitude du seul vrai Dieu. Pour Hielscher, cela conduisait en conséquence à un rejet des conceptions occidentales modernes de l’individu autonome : chaque « âme » (c’est-à-dire chaque être humain) reçoit « sa propre essence à tout moment de Dieu » (32).
De ces conceptions de base, à partir du début des années 30 le cercle Hielscher développa un système de croyance qui se différenciait continuellement par de nouvelles manifestations, ainsi que par une pratique liturgique avec des cérémonies pour le cycle de l’année et le cours de la vie. Avec l’inauguration du nouvel appartement de Hielscher à Falkenhain près de Berlin le 27 août 1933 vint la première « observance » (Andacht) officielle de l’« Église ». Celle-ci fut dès lors considérée comme la véritable date de fondation de l’Église, que Hielscher nomma la Unabhängige Freikirche (UFK), l’Église Libre Indépendante (33). Cela fut suivi par des élaborations liturgiques, orientées exclusivement d’après les études folkloriques, mythologiques et historico-religieuses faites par les membres du groupe ; ces études étaient presque exclusivement à diffusion interne. En 1941, ils réussirent à terminer une série annuelle de rituels païens constituée de 24 cérémonies (34). Chaque cérémonie était consacrée à l’un des 12 dieux germaniques, et était combinée (comme Ernst Jünger le laissa entendre dans une entrée de son Journal de Paris en octobre 1943, écrite après une rencontre avec Hielscher) avec diverses correspondances symboliques — signes, arbres, fleurs, animaux, aliments, boissons, « couleurs inhérentes » et « couleurs apparentes » (Wesensfarben und Erscheinungsfarben) (35). En même temps, en tant que chef de l’UFK, Hielscher accomplit aussi des cérémonies de baptême et de mariage pour des membres de son cercle, suivies plus tard par les premières funérailles du groupe (36).
Structurellement, la liturgie des services religieux spécifiques de l’UFK — avec leurs invocations, prières, chants, et lectures — contenait aussi des éléments qui pouvaient clairement être trouvés, de cette manière ou d’une manière similaire, parmi les communautés de la foi chrétienne. Les différences sont essentiellement en termes de contenu, qui dans l’UFK se distinguait par le panthéon des dieux germaniques avec le « seul vrai Dieu » au-dessus de lui. Mais il y avait quelque chose d’autre. Dans son autobiographie, Hielscher se décrivit expressément — traçant une distinction explicite avec Ernst Jünger — comme un « mystique » (37). La signification imprégnant les cérémonies à l’intérieur de l’UFK se trouvait donc dans un contexte très spécifique. Hielscher soulignait en conséquence qu’avec ces cérémonies, « l’Église célébrerait la domination du céleste dans cet espace et dans ce temps » (38) et parlait de « revenir de la cérémonie pour [faire] nos devoirs quotidiens avec une énergie et un pouvoir nouveaux » (39). Cela faisait penser à une compréhension mystique de la religion, voyant l’expérience contemplative intérieure du numineux comme une source d’énergie, particulièrement pour le croyant individuel prenant part aux cérémonies.
Pour Hielscher et son cercle, la résistance contre le national-socialisme se nourrissait à des sources religieuses. C’était beaucoup moins une critique des mesures politiques individuelles prises par le régime NS — bien qu’ici aussi, Hielscher développa diverses positions dissidentes, dont la discussion sort du cadre de cet essai — qu’un rejet de principe. À cause de son manque de connexion transcendantale, le règne NS était vu par le cercle Hielscher comme un niveau décadent d’État, une forme de règne de la populace qui — en particulier à cause de son idéologie raciale biologique — était devenue asservie à la « matière » et à ce qui est purement matériel. Pour Hielscher, l’infiltration et la subversion depuis l’intérieur semblait être un chemin praticable de résistance, bien qu’à la lumière de la faiblesse numérique de son cercle cette stratégie se heurta rapidement à des facteurs limitants. Si des membres du cercle Hielscher parvinrent à occuper des positions de niveau intermédiaire dans l’armée, dans le contre-espionnage, et dans les SA et les SS, très peu de choses — en plus de rassembler des informations et d’offrir occasionnellement une aide à des victimes individuelles de la persécution politique — purent être faites.
Une exception fut l’influence exercée sur l’Ahnenerbe, l’organisation de recherche SS fondée le 31 juillet 1935, et dont Wolfram Sievers, un jeune ami de Hielscher et aussi un membre de l’UFK, parvint à devenir l’administrateur (40). Au-delà de son but originel de faire progresser l’étude de la « préhistoire spirituelle » (Geistesurgeschichte) (41), l’Ahnenerbe, un objet de prestige pour Heinrich Himmler, se subdivisa graduellement en de nouveaux départements de recherche consacrés à l’histoire de l’art, aux sciences naturelles, à la médecine, et même à la technologie (42). En résultat de l’implication ultérieure des départements médicaux dans les expériences humaines barbares conduites par les SS, Sievers, qui en dépit de sa désapprobation religieusement motivée de ces incidents s’était trouvé incapable d’agir ouvertement contre eux, fut condamné à mort au procès de Nuremberg et pendu (43). Hielscher — qui avait même reçu, sous la protection de son ami (44), des commissions de recherche temporaires de l’Ahnenerbe concernant des matières folkloriques et historico-culturelles — tenta sans succès jusqu’à la fin d’obtenir une grâce pour Sievers. Immédiatement avant l’exécution, il rendit visite à Sievers en prison et célébra une cérémonie d’adieu religieuse avec lui, en accord avec les observances de son Église païenne (45). C’est cet événement en particulier qui donna lieu plus tard à un grand nombre de spéculations extravagantes.
Quand c’était faisable, Hielscher tira avantage de ses activités pour l’Ahnenerbe, qui étaient occasionnellement combinées avec des voyages de recherche, pour aider des gens qui étaient politiquement ou racialement persécutés (46), et pour cultiver des contacts avec divers groupes de la résistance antinazie (47). En septembre 1944, il fut arrêté par la Gestapo en liaison avec l’assassinat manqué de Hitler par le comte von Stauffenberg, emprisonné pendant quelques mois, et torturé. Ce fut l’intervention de Sievers à cette époque qui conduisit à sa libération sous « condition de servir au front », et qui lui sauva finalement la vie (48).
Après 1945, le cercle Hielscher cessa toute activité politique et se concentra exclusivement sur des recherches religieuses cadrant avec les paramètres de l’UFK. Basant sa perspective sur une vision cyclique de l’histoire et employant une terminologie saisonnière, Hielscher pensait que l’humanité se trouvait dans un « hiver » historique (qui avait commencé vers 1800 avec la Révolution française et la montée de l’industrialisation) au milieu duquel on devait procéder d’une « impossibilité de l’État » fondamentale, nécessitant une construction conceptuellement nouvelle de l’État. En contraste, « l’Église dans l’hiver » était vue comme la « racine du printemps, et la première étape du Reich » (49), et le nouveau centre de ses recherches apparaissait comme la prochaine étape logique. Pendant des décennies, cela resta le travail de l’UFK. Et tout comme elle l’avait fait durant le Troisième Reich, sous la République Fédérale d’Allemagne l’UFK maintint une isolation presque complète vis-à-vis de l’extérieur. Des années 50 jusqu’aux années 80, l’activité de l’UFK fut caractérisée par des « journées de l’Église » annuelles, des célébrations internes, et l’accumulation d’une masse de compositions internes qui existent sous forme hectographique ; celles-ci traitent surtout de questions de théologie et de philosophie de l’histoire (50). L’âge avancé de ses membres (car des membres nouveaux et plus jeunes pouvaient difficilement être introduits) et 2 crises de l’« Église », en 1969-70 et 1983-84 (51), affaiblirent finalement un cercle qui n’avait jamais été particulièrement fort — à tel point que dans les années précédant la mort de Hielscher en mars 1990, l’UFK était principalement composée de lui-même et de son épouse Gertrud.
En conclusion, on peut souligner que Hielscher, qui sortit du courant national-révolutionnaire politiquement motivé de la période de Weimar, s’était déjà tourné à la fin des années 20 vers des thèmes religieux d’une manière intensifiée, et qu’en résultat de cette tendance il avait créé sa propre Église « païenne ». À première vue, l’UFK semble comparable à de nombreuses autres initiatives religieuses völkisch contemporaines, mais elle différait de celles-ci par sa formulation d’un système théologique strictement axiomatique et par un rejet consécutif de toutes les conceptions raciales-biologiques, et donc matérialistes. Hielscher et son cercle désapprouvèrent le système NS depuis le début, mais tentèrent de faire usage de leurs positions par l’infiltration d’institutions spécifiques (l’Ahnenerbe en particulier), dans le cadre d’un effort de résistance. En faisant cela, Hielscher entra en conflit mortel avec la Gestapo. Après 1945, il se retira presque complètement de la vue du public, et à part ses activités avec la société de duellistes étudiants et la publication de son autobiographie, il s’employa seulement à cultiver les pratiques mystiques-contemplatives de son Église.
À la place de cette histoire exacte, qui peut être vérifiée complètement par les preuves et les archives littéraires, à partir de 1960 une toile de fausses interprétations, de spéculations et de formulations légendaires commença à se développer, qui n’avait plus aucun rapport avec la vie et l’œuvre réelles de Hielscher. Cependant, il est nécessaire d’aborder la question, car une grande partie de ce que le grand public, à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur de l’Allemagne, connut sur Hielscher dans les dernières décennies a été influencée et embrouillée par ces formulations légendaires. Une analyse impartiale de Hielscher — et particulièrement de son système théologique, qui contient quelques éléments très remarquables — peut difficilement avoir lieu tant qu’un roncier de mythes négatifs obstrue l’accès nécessaire.
À l’origine de la formulation légendaire se trouvait le livre Le matin des magiciens, par Louis Pauwels et Jacques Bergier, publié en France en 1960 et bientôt traduit dans diverses langues. L’intention de base des auteurs était de souligner certains aspects de la réalité terrestre qui restent en-dehors de l’actuel modèle d’explication rationaliste et positiviste. Sur cette toile de fond, ils soulignaient — et pas d’une manière détaillée, finalement — divers cotés "obscurs" et "bizarres" de l’histoire intellectuelle du XXe siècle et suggéraient des références historiques (réelles ou spéculatives). L’arrière-plan supposément ésotérique ou « occulte » du national-socialisme était d’un intérêt particulier. Il était inévitable que dans ce contexte, les prédilections de Heinrich Himmler pour la mythologie germanique et pour les rituels des Männerbünde traditionnels, l’histoire des Châteaux de l’Ordre du NS, et les activités de recherche appropriées de l’Ahnenerbe aient aussi été mentionnées (52).
À cause de la cérémonie d’adieu maintenant bien connue avant l’exécution de Wolfram Sievers — absolument pas mentionnée par Hielscher dans son autobiographie —, Hielscher se trouva lui-même dans les vues de Pauwels et Bergier. Ils le présentèrent d’emblée comme le « maître spirituel » de Sievers (53), ce qui avait bien sûr une certaine plausibilité du fait de l’appartenance de Sievers au cercle de résistance à motivation religieuse de Hielscher. Mais devant l’histoire organisationnelle suffisamment documentée de l’Ahnenerbe (54), beaucoup plus aventurée était l’assertion factuelle dans le même paragraphe que la création de son organisation aurait pu en fait procéder d’une « initiative privée » de Hielscher (55), qui avait de plus noué une « amitié mystique » avec l’explorateur suédois Sven Hedin. Ce que nous devons faire de cette « amitié mystique » — qui n’est mentionnée ni dans l’autobiographie de Hielscher (où il parle souvent volontiers et abondamment de ses rencontres et amitiés avec diverses personnalités) ni dans sa production littéraire — est une question que Pauwels et Bergier laissent sans réponse. Néanmoins le détour imaginatif vers les premières explorations de Hedin en Asie Centrale cadrait opportunément avec l’élaboration d’une « doctrine secrète » nationale-socialiste, apparemment influencée par l’Extrême-Orient, dont la genèse et l’établissement étaient supposés avoir été substantiellement influencés par Sven Hedin – et par Hielscher (56).
En fait, Pauwels et Bergier concédaient quelques phrases plus tard que Hielscher ne fut jamais un national-socialiste, mais affirmaient qu’un lien existait à travers sa communauté « avec les doctrines ‘magiques’ des grands maîtres du national-socialisme » (57). Mais c’est précisément par cette attribution d’idées « magiques » à Hielscher que Pauwels et Bergier révélaient en fait combien ils en connaissaient peu sur son système religieux-cosmologique, car Hielscher s’était toujours fermement opposé au concept et à la pratique de la « magie ». Il insistait particulièrement là-dessus dans son autobiographie, qui fut disponible dès 1954 (et qui était donc parfaitement accessible à Pauwels et Bergier). Dans celle-ci, dénotant une différence caractéristique entre sa vision du monde et celle de Ernst Jünger, il qualifiait sa perspective personnelle de mystique, alors que celle de Jünger était magique (58). Et il y avait encore une autre source pour ce rejet de la magie qui était rigoureusement déduit du système religieux-cosmologique de Hielscher, d’après lequel il n’est pas possible pour l’être humain « d’approcher les dieux, de s’attribuer leur bénédiction, de s’élever jusqu’à eux » (59). Le 11 décembre 1956, Hielscher écrivit à Friedrich Georg Jünger, le frère d’Ernst Jünger, que la magie était la « tentative inadaptée, mais toujours coupable, d’utiliser des moyens terrestres, à savoir ceux de la sorcellerie, pour mettre le Céleste à son service ». La magie blanche était encore plus répréhensible que la magie noire, car le magicien « blanc » était coupable de « désirer soumettre un bon esprit », au lieu d’un mauvais esprit, « à sa propre volonté » (60).
Mais Pauwels et Bergier ne s’intéressaient pas à tout cela. Bien éloignés de toute source concernant la vie et l’œuvre de Hielscher, ils lui attribuaient finalement « un rôle important dans l’élaboration de la doctrine secrète [nationale-socialiste] » (61), cette froide et cruelle doctrine supposément transmise par Sven Hedin à partir de l’Asie, qui se trouve derrière les événements politiques et qui selon les auteurs pourrait aussi expliquer les actions des protagonistes du national-socialisme et en particulier des SS. Une conjecture grandiose de ce genre, tirée du néant et diffusée internationalement à travers le livre de Pauwels et Bergier en grandes éditions, établit un sol fertile idéal dans les années suivantes pour des spéculations encore plus hardies et des affirmations de plus en plus téméraires concernant le rôle de Hielscher pendant l’ère NS.
Un exemple typique à cet égard est le livre The Spear of Destiny (La lance du destin) de l’auteur britannique Trevor Ravenscroft, dans lequel Hielscher — bien sûr à nouveau sans l’ombre d’une preuve et en résultat de la « méthode » des racontars sans mesure — est une fois de plus décrit comme ayant été le chef spirituel de l’Ahnenerbe, et « la plus importante figure en Allemagne après Adolf Hitler lui-même » (62). « Le Führer », d’après Ravenscroft, demanda à Hielscher de le conseiller « dans toutes les matières occultes », et dans l’éventualité d’une victoire allemande dans la seconde guerre mondiale, Hielscher « aurait bien pu devenir le Grand Prêtre d’une nouvelle religion mondiale qui aurait remplacé la Croix par le Svastika » (63). Finalement, Ravenscrof imaginait aussi que Hielscher lui-même était celui qui avait développé un mystérieux « rituel de l’air suffoquant » par lequel des membres sélectionnés des SS « prêtaient serment d’allégeance irrévocable aux puissances sataniques » (64). Le fait que même dans la seconde édition révisée de son livre (65), Ravenscroft écrivait encore « Heilscher » au lieu de « Hielscher » est probablement indicatif de la connaissance des faits et des sources par cet auteur et quelques autres de ce genre.
Un autre auteur de langue anglaise, Gerald Suster, approcha le sujet d’une manière similaire. Dans un livre portant le titre sensationnel : Hitler : Black Magician, il se sentit obligé d’écrire que Hielscher avait déjà fondé l’Ahnenerbe en 1933, après quoi elle reçut une reconnaissance « officielle » en 1935 (66). D’après Suster, Hielscher influença les SS en particulier, et à un degré beaucoup plus élevé que ce qu’on en savait généralement » (67). Suster aussi n’avait pas l’ombre d’une preuve pour ces affirmations, sans même parler de sources pouvant être vérifiées par une bibliographie ou par des archives. La bibliographie de son livre de 222 pages tient en moins de 2 pages. Bien que la bibliographie ne contenait ni l’autobiographie de Hielscher ni la littérature spécialisée sur l’Ahnenerbe, l’édition britannique du Matin des magiciens de Pauwels et Bergier, publiée en 1964, se trouve être une fois encore l’une des sources principales (68).
Les mêmes associations spéculatives, faisant pour la plupart des références directes et explicites à Pauwels/Bergier et Ravenscroft, peuvent aussi être trouvées dans le volumineux livre Das Schwarze Reich, signé de l’auteur « E.R. Carmin », manifestement un pseudonyme, ce dernier affirmant révéler l’influence considérable de toutes sortes de sociétés secrètes sur la politique du XXe siècle. Le livre parut en 1994 chez un petit éditeur de Rhénanie, passa d’abord relativement inaperçu, mais connut une large diffusion 3 ans plus tard lorsqu’il fut publié en édition de poche par la célèbre Heyne Verlag de Munich. « Carmin » non seulement reprit les habituelles formulations légendaires de ses antécédents littéraires, comme l’« amitié mystique » entre Hielscher et Sven Hedin, mais prit soin de concocter — comme ingrédient original et additionnel à la florissante légende Hielscher — des liens entre l’Église clandestine de Hielscher (dont, cependant, il ne connaissait pas le nom) et le désir d’Alfred Rosenberg de créer une Église nationale du Reich (69). En passant, « Carmin » décrit aussi le principal ouvrage historico-philosophique de Hielscher, Das Reich, comme un « roman » (70), jetant une lumière révélatrice à tous égards sur ce genre de recherche « historique » contemporaine.
Une contribution complètement unique à la « légende Hielscher » qui non seulement s’inspira de spéculations antérieures mais aussi contribua fortement à celles-ci fut faite par l’auteur chilien et ardent admirateur de Hitler, Miguel Serrano, avec son livre El cordon dorado : Hitlerismo esoterico. Ce dernier parut en espagnol en 1978 et fut publié dans une traduction allemande en 1987. Dans ce livre, Serrano expose en détail une ligne complète de tradition spirituelle, incluant les doctrines de l’hindouisme, de l’alchimie médiévale, des Templiers, des Cathares et des Rosicruciens, qui conduit directement à un national-socialisme interprété d’une manière « ésotérique » dans lequel un Adolf Hitler survivant continue à vivre au Pôle Sud. Au milieu de tout cela, Hielscher, parmi tous les gens respectueusement appelés « les initiés » par Serrano, était placé à la même hauteur que les « chefs supérieurs et inconnus de l’Hitlérisme » et même élevé au niveau d’un « chef spirituel des SS » (71).
L’appendice bibliographique de Serrano manquait lui aussi de toute trace de l’autobiographie de Hielscher, des autres textes publiés par Hielscher, et du matériel approprié qui se trouve dans les archives. Mais le Matin des magiciens se trouve encore une fois parmi les sources données, cette fois-ci dans sa traduction espagnole de 1963 (72). Cela souligne à nouveau le rôle joué par Pauwels et Bergier pendant des décennies comme fournisseurs de slogans pour un genre complet de littérature. Les diverses tentatives de diaboliser la vie et l’œuvre de Hielscher en termes d’un bizarre ésotérisme « noir » (comme dans les ouvrages de Pauwels et Bergier, Ravenscroft, Suster et « Carmin ») recoupent ici la tentative de Serrano de l’utiliser dans le contexte d’un hitlérisme « ésotérique » et « tantrique ».
Complètement négligé était par contre tout examen des positions réelles de Hielscher, et particulièrement des éléments fondamentaux de son système religieux-cosmologique. Au mieux, des fragments et des lambeaux conceptuels furent extraits, volontairement mal interprétés et insérés dans des contextes historiques contemporains auxquels ils étaient en fait diamétralement opposés. Cela est particulièrement vrai dans le cas du peu qui était connu (comme ce qui venait du journal de Ernst Jünger) concernant l’Église libre païenne de Hielscher, et qui fut plus tard interprété avec empressement comme une indication de « rites » satanistes et de « doctrines secrètes ». Le refus strict et permanent de Hielscher de permettre un plus large accès aux dogmes et à la liturgie de son Église était — de son point de vue — logique et bien-fondé. Il était basé sur la supposition que c’était précisément à la lumière des expériences négatives avec le Troisième Reich que le petit cercle de ses fidèles devait être protégé, et qu’en général seules quelques personnes étaient assez mûres en esprit et en caractère pour saisir le système de croyance axiomatiquement construit de l’UFK, intuitivement aussi bien que mentalement.
Involontairement, cependant, cette position clandestine encouragea la croissance illimitée de légendes et se révéla finalement comme contre-productive. C’est seulement après un examen minutieux, basé sur les sources existantes, sur les motivations, les fondements spirituels et les pratiques réelles du cercle de Hielscher — qui existait encore dans les années 80 — que ces formulations légendaires seront écartées et permettront l’étude d’un aspect fertile et très intéressant de l’histoire intellectuelle du XXe siècle.
♦ Peter Bahn (traduit d’allemand en anglais par Michael Moynihan et Gerhard)
• Cet essai est originellement paru sous le titre « Die Hielscher-Legende : Eine panentheistische ‘Kirchen’-Gründung des 20. Jahrhunderts und ihre Fehldeutungen » dans le journal allemand Gnostika, N° 19 (octobre 2001), pp. 63-76. Cette nouvelle version, traduite en anglais et avec des références bibliographiques élargies, est publiée par TYR avec l’aimable autorisation de l’auteur.
NOTES
[1] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre unter Deutschen [Cinquante ans parmi les Allemands], Hambourg, Rowolt 1954.
[2] Ici les articles suivants doivent être mentionnés en particulier : Marcus Beckmann, « Dem anderen Gesetz gehorschen : Zum Tode Friedrich Hielschers », in Fragmente 6 (1990), pp. 4-13 ; Werner Barthold, « Die geistige Leistung Friedrich Hielschers für das Kösener Corpsstudentum », in Einst und Jetzt : Jahrbuch des Vereins für corpsstudentische Geschichtsforschung, vol. 36 (1991), pp. 279-82 ; Karlheinz Weissmann, « Friedrich Hielscher : Eine Art Nachruf », in Criticon 123 (janvier/février 1991), pp. 25-28 ; Peter Bahn, « Glaube–Reich–Widerstand : Zum 10. Todestag Friedrich Hielschers », in Wir selbst : Zeitschrift für nationale Identität, Nos 1-2 (2000), pp. 21-33; Peter Bahn, « Ernst Jünger und Friedrich Hielscher : Eine Freudschaft auf Distanz », in Les Carnets Ernst Jünger, N° 6 (2001), pp. 127-45.
[3] C’est le Dépôt Friedrich Hielscher dans les Archives du District de Schwarzwald-Baar (Willingen-Schwenningen) ; un index électronique des archives est actuellement en préparation. Abrégé SBDA à partir de maintenant.
[4] Celle-ci se trouve parmi les documents Ernst Jünger aux Archives de Littérature Allemande à Marbach ; il y a aussi d’autres lettres de Hielscher dans d’autres collections de papiers non-publiés, comme ceux concernant Friedrich Georg Jünger.
[5] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, pp. 21-29.
[6] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 31.
[7] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, pp. 33-35.
[8] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, pp. 45-47.
[9] Friedrich Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, pp. 35-38, et Barthold, 1991. Concernant les activités de Hielscher dans la société de duellistes, voir aussi Hermann Rink, « Friedrich Hielscher » in Thomas Raveaux et Marcus Beckmann, eds., Veritati : Festschrift für Friedrich Hielscher zum 85. Geburtstag (Würzburg: auto-édition, 1987), pp. 19-22.
[10] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, pp. 21-22.
[11] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, pp. 41-44.
[12] Concernant ce courant en général, et le rôle – partiel et marginal – de Hielscher, Cf. entre autres : Karl O. Paetel, Versuchung oder Chance ? Zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalbolchewismus (Göttingen, Musterschmidt, 1965 ; new ed., Koblenz, Bublies, 2000) ; Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf, Nationalbolchewismus in Deutschland 1918-1933 (Frankfurt/Berlin/ Vienna : Ullstein, 1972) ; Louis Dupeux, Nationalbolchewismus in Deutschland 1918-1933 : Kommunistische Strategie und konservative Dynamik (Munich, Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1985) ; Suzanne Meinl, Nationalsozialisten gegen Hitler : Die nationalrevolutionäre Opposition um Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz (Berlin, Siedler, 2000). Le texte standard biographique/bibliographique sur ce sujet est Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution 1918-1932 : Ein Handbuch, 3ème éd., élargie avec un volume supplémentaire contenant aussi des corrections (Darmstadt : Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989). Hielscher, que Möhler décrit correctement comme « bâtisseur de système » typique parmi les nationaux-révolutionnaires, est détaillé à la p. 450.
[13] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, pp. 82-83.
[14] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 84.
[15] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 105. Sa thèse, qui contenait beaucoup de références à la pensée de Nietzsche et de Spengler, parut sous forme de livre en 1930, publiée par Frundsberg-Verlag, Berlin.
[16] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 111.
[17] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, « Innerlichkeit und Staatskunst », in Neue Standarte-Arminius: Kampfschrift für deutsche Nationalisten, numéro du 26 décembre 1926, pp. 6-8. Cité ici et plus bas d’après la réimpression aux pp. 335-38 de Jahrbuch zur Konservative Revolution 1994 (Cologne : Anneliese Thomas, 1994), p. 335.
[18] Cf. Hielscher, 1926 (1994), p. 337.
[19] Cf. les lettres de Hielscher datées du 28 novembre 1929 et du 12 janvier 1930, dans les documents Ernst Jünger aux Archives de Littérature Allemande.
[20] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, Das Reich (Berlin, Das Reich, 1931).
[21] Sur la formation du cercle Hielscher et ses efforts pendant la dictature NS, Cf. Rolf Kluth, « Die Widerstandgruppe Hielscher » in Pusl : Dokumentationschrift zur Jugendbewegung, N° 7 (déc. 1980), pp. 22-27.
[22] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 237.
[23] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, « Die Entwicklung unserer Kirche » [Le développement de notre Église], texte aux SBDA, documents Hielscher, N° 73, p. 1-2.
[24] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, « Bericht über die unterirdische Arbeit gegen den Nationalismus » [Rapport sur le travail souterrain contre le national-socialisme], texte aux SBDA, documents Hielscher, N° 140 (avec index des personnes appartenant au cercle).
[25] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, Die Selbstherrlichkeit : Versuch einer Darstellung des deutschen Rechtsgrundbegriffes (Berlin, Frundsberg, 1930), pp. 63-64.
[26] Cf. lettre de Hielscher datée du 28 novembre 1929, dans les documents Ernst Jünger aux Archives de Littérature Allemande.
[27] Cf. Hielscher, Die Selbstherrlichkeit, 1930, p. 83.
[28] Cf. Hielscher, Die Selbstherrlichkeit, p. 81.
[29] Cf. Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Über die Einteilung der Natur, trad. Par Ludwig Noak (Hambourg, Felix Meiner 1994), p. 325.
[30] Cf. Eriugena, Über die Einteilung der Natur, p. 324.
[31] Cf. « Die 1. Klasse des heidnischen Glaubensunterrichts während der Schule » [La première classe de l’enseignement religieux païen à l’école], texte aux SBDA, documents Hielscher, N° 15 (probablement écrit par Hielscher).
[32] Cf. la lettre de Hielscher à Alfred Schäffer datée du 23 janvier 1931, dans la collection Walter Ehlers aux Archives de Littérature Allemande.
[33] Cf. SBDA, documents Hielscher, N° 81, et le document public du notaire de Triberg daté du 6 juillet 1966 concernant une déclaration sous serment de Hielscher sur la fondation de la « Unabhängige Freikirche » en 1933 (copie en possession de l’auteur).
[34] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, « Die Entwicklung unserer Kirche », p. 2.
[35] Cf. Ernst Jünger, Strahlungen II : Das zweite Pariser Tagebuch, „Kirchhorster Blätter : Die Hütte im Weinberg“, édition de poche (Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag 1988), pp. 172-73 (entrée du 16 octobre 1943). Ernst Jünger lui-même ne fut jamais membre de l’Église de Hielscher, mais fut l’une des quelques personnes extérieures informées de son existence et de son développement par son vieil ami Hielscher. Les diverses lettres et pièces jointes de Hielscher à Jünger jusqu’aux années 1980 doivent être notées à cet égard (Cf. la correspondance Ernst Jünger-Friedrich Hielscher dans les documents Ernst Jünger aux Archives de Littérature Allemande).
[36] Cf. Hielscher, « Die Entwicklung », p. 2.
[37] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 117.
[38] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, « Der Aufbau der Kirche » [La construction de l’Église], texte N° 16 dans les documents Hielscher aux SBDA, p. 18.
[39] Cf. Hielscher, « Der Aufbau », p. 18.
[40] Cf. Michael H. Kater, Das Ahnenerbe der SS 1935-1945 (Stuttgart : Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1974), p. 38.
[41] Cf. Kater, 1974, p. 27. Sur les connotations originelles du nom de l’institution, voir l’article de Joscelyn Godwin sur Hermann Wirth dans ce numéro de TYR.
[42] Cf. Kater, Das Ahnenerbe, p. 215.
[43] Pour une évaluation critique du rôle de Sievers, Cf. Kater, Das Ahnenerbe, pp. 317-19, et la description antérieure plus positive de Sievers dans Alfred Kantorowicz, Deutsches Tagebuch, Pt. 1 (Munich, Kindler, 1959), pp. 496-507.
[44] Cf. Kater, Das Ahnenerbe, p. 323.
[45] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 453-54.
[46] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 444-47.
[47] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, « Die Hielscher-Gruppe 1933-1945: Bericht über die unterirdische Arbeit gegen den Nationalsozialismus », dans Jahrbuch zur Konservative Revolution 1994 (Cologne : Anneliese Thomas, 1994), p. 329-34, ainsi que la description par Kluth (1980).
[48] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 402-26.
[49] Cf. Friedrich Hielscher, « Die Entwicklung », p. 3.
[50] Les textes se trouvent dans les documents Hielscher aux SBDA.
[51] Le matériel sur la cause et le cours des « crises de l’Église » qui furent liées à la scission peut être trouvé en grande quantité sous les mots-clés « 1. Kirchenkrise » et « 2. Kirchenkrise » dans les documents Hielscher aux SBDA. L’« Église Libre », qui fut dissoute dans les années 90, émergea de la « première crise » sous la direction du Dr. Rolf Kluth, directeur temporaire des Bibliothèques d’État et Universitaire de Brême et membre du cercle Hielscher depuis les années 30 ; en comparaison, la « seconde crise » ne conduisit pas à la formation d’un nouveau groupe, mais plutôt à l’implosion de l’UFK.
[52] Louis Pauwels et Jacques Bergier, Aufbruch ins dritte Jahrtausend : Von der Zukunft der phantastischen Vernunft, édition de poche (Munich, Heyne 1982), pp. 379-90. Ce matériel apparaît aux pp. 200-10 de l’édition américaine, publiée sous le titre de The Morning of the Magicians (New York, Stein & Day, 1963).
[53] Cf. Pauwels et Bergier, Aufbruch..., p. 389. Apparaît à la p. 206 de l’édition américaine.
[54] Ici le travail classique de Kater (1974) doit être cité en particulier. Cette histoire bien documentée de l’Ahnenerbe, cependant, est limitée par la large omission d’une analyse des projets de recherche spécifiques menés par l’Ahnenerbe, que ce soit dans le domaine de l’histoire intellectuelle ou dans celui des développements technologiques spécifiques.
[55] Cf. Pauwels et Bergier, Aufbruch , p. 389. Apparaît à la p. 206 de l’édition américaine.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, pp. 115-17.
[59] Cf. Hielscher, Fünfzig Jahre, p. 115.
[60] Lettre dans les documents Friedrich Georg Jünger aux Archives de Littérature Allemande.
[61] Cf. Pauwels et Bergier, Aufbruch..., p. 390. Apparaît à la p. 207 de l’édition américaine.
[62] Cf. Trevor Ravenscroft, Die heilige Lanze : Der Speer von Golgotha, 2° éd. (Munich, Universitas 1996), p. 265. Apparaît à la p. 259 de l’édition américaine de The Spear of Destiny (New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
[63] Ibid.
[64] Ibid.
[65] The Spear of Destiny parut originellement en Grande-Bretagne en 1972 et ne fut pas traduit en allemand avant 1988 !
[66] Cf. Gerald Suster, Hitler : Black Magician, 2° éd. (Londres, Skoob, 1996), p. 182.
[67] Cf. Suster, Hitler, p. 184.
[68] Cf. Suster, Hitler, pp. 211-12.
[69] Cf. E.R. Carmin, Das Schwarze Reich : Geheimgesellschaften und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert, édition de poche (Munich, Heyne 1997), pp. 143, 701.
[70] Cf. Carmin, Das Schwarze Reich, p. 700.
[71] Cf. Miguel Serrano, Das Goldene Band: Esoterischer Hitlerismus, German edition (Wetter, Teut-Verlag 1987), p. 245.
[72] Cf. Serrano, Das Goldene Band, p. 373-98.
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NOUS APPELONS TES LOUPS
Nous appelons tes loups
Et appelons ta lance
Nous appelons les Douze
A descendre du ciel jusqu’à nous.
Avant tout nous t’appelons Toi.
Maintenant vient la chasse sauvage,
Maintenant que la corne retentisse,
Pour que les morts ne se lamentent pas.
L’ennemi est tombé
Avant le lever du jour.
La proie n’a pas de nom,
L’ennemi n’a pas de visage,
La carcasse pas de descendance,
Juste est le tribunal.
La moisson est passée,
La paille est vendue chaque jour,
Les corbeaux maintenant réclament
La part qui leur est due.
La chasse a commencé :
Maintenant, Seigneur, ton salut
Nous soutient !
- Friedrich Hielscher
(traduit de l’allemand en anglais par Gerhard et Michael Moynihan)
Article paru dans la revue américaine « TYR », volume 2, 2003-2004 (publiée par Joshua Buckley et Michael Moynihan ; un numéro par an).
00:08 Publié dans Histoire, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : allemagne, révolution conservatrice, friedrich hielscher | 
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mercredi, 31 août 2011
Armin Mohler, l'homme qui nous désignait l'ennemi!
Thorsten HINZ:
Armin Mohler, l’homme qui nous désignait l’ennemi
Le Dr. Karlheinz Weissmann vient de sortir de presse une biographie d’Armin Mohler, publiciste de la droite allemande et historien de la “révolution conservatrice”
Armin Mohler ne fut jamais l’homme des demies-teintes!
Qui donc Armin Mohler détestait-il? Les libéraux et les tièdes, les petits jardiniers amateurs qui gratouillent le bois mort qui encombre l’humus, c’est-à-dire les nouilles de droite, inoffensives parce que dépouvues de pertinence! Il détestait aussi tous ceux qui s’agrippaient aux concepts et aux tabous que définissait leur propre ennemi. Il considérait que les libéraux étaient bien plus subtils et plus dangereux que les communistes: pour reprendre un bon mot de son ami Robert Hepp: ils nous vantaient l’existence de cent portes de verre qu’ils nous définissaient comme l’Accès, le seul Accès, à la liberté, tout en taisant soigneusement le fait que 99 de ces portes demeuraient toujours fermées. La victoire totale des libéraux a hissé l’hypocrisie en principe ubiquitaire. Les gens sont désormais jugés selon les déclarations de principe qu’ils énoncent sans nécessairement y croire et non pas sur leurs actes et sur les idées qu’ils sont prêts à défendre.
Mohler était était un type “agonal”, un gars qui aimait la lutte: sa bouille carrée de Bâlois l’attestait. Avec la subtilité d’un pluvier qui capte les moindres variations du climat, Mohler repérait les courants souterrains de la politique et de la société. C’était un homme de forte sensibilité mais certainement pas un sentimental. Mohler pensait et écrivait clair quand il abordait la politique: ses mots étaient durs, tranchants, de véritables armes. Il était déjà un “conservateur moderne” ou un “néo-droitiste” avant que la notion n’apparaisse dans les médiats. En 1995, il s’était défini comme un “fasciste au sens où l’entendait José Antonio Primo de Rivera”. Mohler se référait ainsi —mais peu nombreux étaient ceux qui le savaient— au jeune fondateur de la Phalange espagnole, un homme intelligent et cultivé, assassiné par les gauches ibériques et récupéré ensuite par Franco.
Il manquait donc une biographie de ce doyen du conservatisme allemand d’après guerre, mort en 2003. Karlheinz Weissmann était l’homme appelé à combler cette lacune: il connait la personnalité de Mohler et son oeuvre; il est celui qui a actualisé l’ouvrage de référence de Mohler sur la révolution conservatrice.
Pour Mohler seuls comptaient le concret et le réel
La sensibilité toute particulière d’Armin Mohler s’est déployée dans le décor de la ville-frontière suisse de Bâle. Mohler en était natif. Il y avait vu le jour en 1920. En 1938, la lecture d’un livre le marque à jamais: c’est celui de Christoph Steding, “Das Reich und die Krankheit der europäischen Kultur” (“Le Reich et la pathologie de la culture européenne”). Pour Steding, l’Allemagne, jusqu’en 1933, avait couru le risque de subir une “neutralisation politique et spirituelle”, c’est-à-dire une “helvétisation de la pensée allemande”, ce qui aurait conduit à la perte de la souveraineté intérieure et extérieure; l’Allemagne aurait dérogé pour adopter le statut d’un “intermédiaire éclectique”. Les peuples qui tombent dans une telle déchéance sont “privés de destin” et tendent à ne plus produire que des “pharisiens nés”. On voit tout de suite que Steding était intellectuellement proche de Carl Schmitt. Quant à ce dernier, il a pris la peine de recenser personnellement le livre, publié à titre posthume, de cet auteur mort prématurément. Dans ce livre apparaissent certains des traits de pensée qui animeront Mohler, le caractériseront, tout au long de son existence.
L’Allemagne est devenue pour le jeune Mohler “la grande tentation”, tant et si bien qu’il franchit illégalement le frontière suisse en février 1942 “pour aider les Allemands à gagner la guerre”. Cet intermède allemand ne durera toutefois qu’une petite année. Mohler passa quelques mois à Berlin, avec le statut d’étudiant, et s’y occupa des auteurs de la “révolution conservatrice”, à propos desquels il rédigera sa célèbre thèse de doctorat, sous la houlette de Karl Jaspers. Mohler était un rebelle qui s’insurgeait contre la croyance au progrès et à la raison, une croyance qui estime que le monde doit à terme être tout compénétré de raison et que les éléments, qui constituent ce monde, peuvent être combinés les uns aux autres ou isolés les uns des autres à loisir, selon une logique purement arbitraire. Contre cette croyance et cette vision, Mohler voulait opposer les forces élémentaires de l’art et de la culture, de la nationalité et de l’histoire. Ce contre-mouvement, disait-il, et cela le distinguait des tenants de la “vieille droite”, ne visait pas la restauration d’un monde ancré dans le 19ème siècle, mais tenait expressément compte des nouvelles réalités.
Dans un chapitre, intitulé “Du nominalisme”, le Dr. Karlheinz Weissmann explicite les tentatives de Mohler, qui ne furent pas toujours probantes, de systématiser ses idées et ses vues. Il est clair que Mohler rejette toute forme d’universalisme car tout universalisme déduit le particulier d’un ordre spirituel sous-jacent et identitque pour tous, et noie les réalités dans une “mer morte d’abstractions”. Pour le nominaliste Mohler, les concepts avancés par les universalismes ne sont que des dénominations abstraites et arbitraires, inventées a poteriori, et qui n’ont pour effets que de répandre la confusion. Pour Mohler, seuls le concret et le particulier avaient de l’importance, soit le “réel”, qu’il cherchait à saisir par le biais d’images fortes, puissantes et organiques. Par conséquent, ses sympathies personnelles n’étaient pas déterminées par les idées politiques dont se réclamaient ses interlocuteurs mais tenaient d’abord compte de la valeur de l’esprit et du caractère qu’il percevait chez l’autre.
En 1950, Mohler devint le secrétaire d’Ernst Jünger. Ce ne fut pas une époque dépourvue de conflits. Après l’intermède de ce secrétariat, vinrent les années françaises de notre théoricien: il devint en effet le correspondant à Paris du “Tat” suisse et de l’hebdomadaire allemand “Die Zeit”. A partir de 1961, il fut le secrétaire, puis le directeur, de la “Fondation Siemens”. Dans le cadre de cette éminente fonction, il a essayé de contrer la dérive gauchisante de la République fédérale, en organisant des colloques de très haut niveau et en éditant des livres ou des publications remarquables. Parmi les nombreux livres que nous a laissés Mohler, “Nasenring” (= “L’anneau nasal”) est certainement le plus célèbre: il constitue une attaque en règle, qui vise à fustiger l’attitude que les Allemands ont prise vis-à-vis de leur propre histoire (la fameuse “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”). En 1969, Mohler écrivait dans l’hebdomadaire suisse “Weltwoche”: “Le ‘Républiquefédéralien’ est tout occupé, à la meilleure manière des méthodes ‘do-it-yourself’, à se faire la guerre à lui-même. Il n’y a pas que lui: tout le monde occidental semble avoir honte de descendre d’hommes de bonne trempe; tout un chacun voudrait devenir un névrosé car seul cet état, désormais, est considéré comme ‘humain’”.
En France, Mohler était un adepte critique de Charles de Gaulle. Il estimait que l’Europe des patries, proposée par le Général, aurait été capable de faire du Vieux Continent une “Troisième Force” entre les Etats-Unis et l’Union Soviétique. Dans les années 60, certaines ouvertures semblaient possibles pour Mohler: peut-être pourrait-il gagner en influence politique via le Président de la CSU bavaroise, Franz-Josef Strauss? Il entra à son service comme “nègre”. Ce fut un échec: Strauss, systématiquement, modifiait les ébauches de discours que Mohler avait truffées de références gaulliennes et les traduisait en un langage “atlantiste”. De la part de Strauss, était-ce de la faiblesse ou était-ce le regard sans illusions du pragmatique qui ne jure que par le “réalisable”? Quoi qu’il en soit, on perçoit ici l’un des conflits fondamentaux qui ont divisé les conservateurs après la guerre: la plupart des hommes de droite se contentaient d’une République fédérale sous protectorat américain (sans s’apercevoir qu’à long terme, ils provoquaient leur propre disparition), tandis que Mohler voulait une Allemagne européenne et libre.
Le conflit entre européistes et atlantistes provoqua également l’échec de la revue “Die Republik”, que l’éditeur Axel Springer voulait publier pour en faire le forum des hommes de droite hors partis et autres ancrages politiciens: Mohler décrit très bien cette péripétie dans “Nasenring”.
Il semble donc bien que ce soit sa qualité de Suisse qui l’ait sauvé de cette terrible affliction que constitue la perte d’imagination chez la plupart des conservateurs allemands de l’après-guerre. Par ailleurs, le camp de la droite établie a fini par le houspiller dans l’isolement. Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing lui a certes ouvert les colonnes de “Criticon”, qui furent pour lui une bonne tribune, mais les autres éditeurs de revues lui claquèrent successivement la porte au nez; malgré son titre de doctorat, il n’a pas davantage pu mener une carrière universitaire. La réunification n’a pas changé grand chose à sa situation: les avantages pour lui furent superficiels et éphémères.
La cadre historique, dans lequel nous nous débattions du temps de Mohler, et dans lequel s’est déployée sa carrière étonnante, freinée uniquement par des forces extérieures, aurait pu gagner quelques contours tranchés et précis. On peut discerner aujourd’hui la grandeur de Mohler. On devrait aussi pouvoir mesurer la tragédie qu’il a incarnée. Weissmann constate qu’il existait encore jusqu’au milieu des années 80 une certaine marge de manoeuvre pour la droite intellectuelle en Allemagne mais que cet espace potentiel s’est rétréci parce que la gauche n’a jamais accepté le dialogue ou n’a jamais rien voulu apprendre du réel. Le lecteur se demande alors spontanément: pourquoi la gauche aurait-elle donc dialogué puisque le rapport de force objectif était en sa faveur?
Weissmann a donc résussi un tour de force: il a écrit une véritable “biographie politique” d’Armin Mohler. Son livre deviendra un classique.
Thorsten HINZ.
(article paru dans “Junge Freiheit”, Berlin, n°31/32-2011; http://www.jugefreiheit.de/ ).
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lundi, 22 août 2011
Articles de R. Steuckers sur "centrostudilaruna.it"
Articles de Robert Steuckers sur http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/
00:05 Publié dans Nouvelle Droite, Révolution conservatrice, Synergies européennes | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : nouvelle droite, synergies européennes, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 17 août 2011
Knut Hamsun
Knut Hamsun
Kerry Bolton
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Editor’s Note:
This much-expanded version of a previously-published essay on Knut Hamsun is chapter 6 of Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence, forthcoming from Counter-Currents.
Knut Hamsun, 1859–1952, has had a decisive impact on the course of twentieth century literature, both in Europe and America, yet was for decades little discussed let alone honored even in his native Norway.
Ernest Hemingway tried to emulate him as did Henry Miller, who called Hamsun “the Dickens of my generation.” Thomas Mann wrote, “never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one so worthy of it.” Herman Hesse called Hamsun his favorite author. Admired by H. G. Wells, Kafka, and Brecht,[1] Hamsun always enjoyed a great following not only in Germany but particularly in Russia, where he was lauded especially by Maxim Gorky. Even inside the Communist State Hamsun continued to be published despite his politics, and he remained an influence on such Bolshevik luminaries as Aleksandr Kollontai and Illya Ehrenburg.[2]
Origins
Hamsun was born Knut Pedersen of an impoverished peasant family of seven children on August 4th, 1859. His father was a farmer and a tailor; his mother’s lineage was of Viking nobility. Knut had a hard upbringing on his uncle’s farm where he was sent when he was nine. But his uncle also ran the local library, which gave him the chance to begin his self-education.[3]
He left his uncle’s farm in 1873, and over the next few years worked at a variety of jobs, laboring, teaching, and clerical, as he widely journeyed about.[4]
America
At 18 he had published his first novel called The Enigmatic One, a love story.[5] He then paid for the publication of another novel Bjorger.[6] But acknowledgment as a writer was a decade away, as there was then little interest in his peasant tales.
In 1882 Knut traveled to the USA, joining the great Norwegian emigration to that country. Between numerous jobs he was able to get some newspaper articles published and began a series of lectures on authors among the Norwegian community.[7] From this early start, Hamsun wrote as an observer of life. He was the first to develop the novel based on the psychology of characters. Hamsun wrote of what he saw and felt particularly identifying with the workers and the tramps. But he was soon disillusioned with America, despite his initial wonder, and he expressed his disgust for American life in articles for Norwegian newspapers[8] upon his return.[9]
In the first sentence of his first article on America[10] Hamsun described the country as “the Millionaires’ Republic,” a reference to the manner by which elections are based on money,[11] and where the “diseased an degenerate human raw material stream every day from all over the world.” Alluding to principles that are today familiarly called “the American Dream,” Hamsun states that the immigrant is soon disappointed when “the principles do not deliver what they promise.”
He was skeptical about the liberty fetish upon which the American ethos is proclaimed, stating that it is in practice not so much a matter of having “liberty” as “taking liberties.”[12] The purpose of being American is to fulfill a “carnivorous, satiating existence, with the ability to afford intense sensual pleasures . . .”[13]
What now seems particularly prescient, Hamsun, in criticizing the “machinelust” of Americans alludes with a mixture of amazement and abhorrence to having eaten even an egg “from a Brooklyn egg factory” (Hamsun’s emphasis),[14] perhaps something that might have seemed pathological for a youthful Scandinavian of country stock.
Hamsun’s next article for Aftenpost centered on New York, and focused on what can be considered the vulgarity of American city-dwellers in comparison to those in Europe; their loudness and their lack of etiquette.[15] “New Yorkers know little about literature or art.”[16] The theater is popular but the “level of dramatic art is so low.”[17]
Hamsun’s first major literary work came in 1888 when he succeeded in getting published a short story in a magazine, which was to form part of his novel, Hunger. The story gained him access to the literary scene in Copenhagen. Hamsun became a celebrity among the young intellectuals. He was invited to lecture before university audiences.[18]
He was commissioned to write a book on America in 1889 setting aside the completion of Hunger. The result was The Cultural Life of Modern America,[19] based on his second trip to the USA in 1886, which had been prompted by his desire to make a literary mark for himself there.[20]
By 1888 he was so repelled by the USA, that he took to wearing a black ribbon in sympathy with four German anarchist immigrants[21] who had been sentenced to death for the Haymarket bombing in Chicago, 1886.
He left a departing message, giving a two-hour lecture on the cultural vacuity of America.[22]
Despite his destitution upon settling in Copenhagen, he wrote to a friend: “How pleased I am with this country. This is Europe, and I am European—thank God!”[23]
It was two lectures on America at the University of Copenhagen that formed the basis of the aforementioned Cultural Life of Modern America. Nelson remarks of Hamsun’s particular disgust, which might to many readers seem completely relevant to the present time: “In particular he was offended by the exaggerated patriotism of Americans, their continual boasting of themslevs as the freest, most advanced, most intelligent people anywhere–boasting from which the foreigner could not escape.”[24]
Hamsun attacked the crass materialism of the USA. He despised democracy as a form of despotism, abhorring its leveling nature and mob politics. America is a land where the highest morality is money, where the meaning of art is reduced to its cash value. He also expresses his misgivings about the presence of Africans in the USA. The Civil War is described as a war against the aristocracy by northern capitalists. He writes: “Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto stud farm.”
Literary Eminence
Resuming the writing of Hunger after his musings on America, this appeared in 1890. It has been described as one of the great novels of urban alienation. Like much of his writing it is partly autobiographical. It centers on a young budding writer trying to fend off poverty, wandering the streets in rags, but in some odd way enjoying the experiences despite the hardship. Through an act of will the character maintains his identity.
This was perhaps the first novel to make the workings of the mind the central theme. It was a genre he was to continue experimenting with over the next ten years. Contra orthodox psychological theories, Hamsun held that a diversity of separate personality types within the individual is a desirable state of being. He wrote of this in regard to his aim for literature: “I will therefore have contradictions in the inner man considered as a quite natural phenomenon, and I dream of a literature with characters in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic.”[25]
Hamsun’s next great novel was Mysteries,[26] virtually a self-portrait. One reviewer described Hamsun as expressing “the wildest paradoxes,” a hatred of bourgeois academics and of the masses. The principal character, Nagel, is presented in the form of free flowing thought associations and a stream of consciousness.[27]
Here Hamsun identifies himself as “a radical who belongs to no party, but is an individual in the extreme.”[28] The book caused an uproar among literary circles, but it sold well.
Having outraged the literary establishment, Hamsun next set about critiquing the younger coterie of writers as arrogant and talentless wastrels, whom he represents in Shallow Soil[29] as “a festering sore on the social organism of the Norwegian capital,” in the words of Prof. Wiehr.[30]
Here Hanka Tidemand, a liberated and modern woman of the type detested by Hamsun, finds her true nature back with her hard working husband and children, after an affair with an artist. She realizes her mistaken course, on the verge of divorce, when she sees her children. Here Hamsun sets out his constant theme of rediscovering one’s roots in the simple life, in family and, in children. The well-meaning Mr Tidemand has his wife Hanka leave after she is seduced by one of the bohemian parasites.
[Tideman’s] regard for the individual liberty of his wife amounts really to a fault. He fails to see, however, the grave danger which is threatening Hanka and believes to be promoting her true happiness in according her perfect freedom. His devotion to her never ceases, and when she at last repents, he makes reconciliation easy for her. . . .
Hanka is evidently the product of a misdirected striving for emancipation; she seems to acknowledge no duty except the duty to herself. [31]
The Kareno trilogy of plays (At the Gates of the Kingdom, Evening Glow, and The Game of Life)[32] focuses Hamsun’s growing anti-democratic sentiment in the character of Ivar Kareno, a young philosopher who states:
I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.[33]
By now, Hamsun had become a celebrity, cheered in the streets by crowds although he despised the attention, but several decades away from being honored with a Nobel Prize
The Growth of the Soil
The Growth of the Soil is a remarkable book for those who have a yearning for the timeless in a world of the superficial and the transient. Published in 1917, it was the work that was cited when Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.
This is the world of a rough, coarsely-featured farmer Isak, and a woman, Inger, who happened to come by from across the valley, stay with him to sire a children and help Isak work the land, raise goats, potatoes, corn, milk the cows and goats, make cheese, and subsist at one with nature.
Isak and Inger are archetypes of the peasant; the antithesis of the New Yorker and the archetypical “American” described in Hamsun’s essays on the USA.
The sense of a day-by-day part of eternity lived by Isak and Inger is captured, juxtaposing their lives with the grain they sow and the earth they till, as part of a single rhythm that has existed for centuries:
For generations back, into forgotten time, his fathers before him had sowed corn, solemnly, on a still, calm evening, bets with a fall of warm and gentle rain, soon after the grey goose flight. . . .
Isak walked bare headed, in Jesus’ name, a sower. Like a tree stump to look at, but in his heart like a child. Every cast was made with care, in a spirit of kindly resignation. Look! The tiny grains that are to take life and to grow, shoot up into ears, and give more corn again; so it is throughout the earth where corn is sown. Palestine, America, the valleys of Norway itself—a great wide world, and here is Isak, a tiny speck in the midst of it all, a sower. Little showers of corn flung out fanwise form his hand; a kindly clouded sky, with a promise of the faintest little misty rain.[34]
The woman as mother is the highest of peasant values, and indeed of the fulfillment of women, in antithesis to the “liberated woman” that was becoming evident in Hamsun’s time as a symptom of a culture’s decay, a type already described by Hamsun in Shallow Soil and elsewhere.
The rearing of children is the purpose of Being of the wife and mother, as much as that might be sneered at now, but as Spengler noted, there is nothing more important than the continuation of a family lineage, generation-after-generation, and one might add—interestingly—the same values hold as true for the aristocrat as for the peasant; there is no more dread than being the last of a family’s line. Hence, we see something of this feeling described by Hamsun:
She was in full flower, and constantly with child. Isak, himself, her lord and master, was earnest and stolid as ever, but he had got on well, and was content. How he had managed to live until Inger came was a mystery . . . now, he had all that a man can think of in his place in the world.[35]
The feeling is described by Oswald Spengler in The Hour of Decision, which captures the same intent that Hamsun was expressing in drama:
A woman of race[36] does not desire to be a “companion” or a “lover,” but a mother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and a distraction, but of many; the instinct of a strong race speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her the race . . .[37]
This is precisely the type of woman that Inger represents: “She was in full flower, and constantly with child . . .”
A man wants stout sons who will perpetuate his name and his deeds beyond his death into the future and enhance them, just as he has done himself through feeling himself heir to the calling and works of his ancestors.[38]
This organic conception of family, an instinct during the “Spring” and “Summer” epochs of a civilization, becomes atrophied during the “Autumn” and “Winter” epochs, as Spengler aptly terms the morphological cycles of a culture; which is of course the situation today, and was becoming apparent during Hamsun’s time. The culture-problem addressed by Hamsun in Shallow Soil, etc., where the “emancipated woman” leaves her family, is described by Spengler:
The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity, is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future generations. The nation as society, once the organic web of families, threatens to dissolve, from the city outwards, into a sum of private atoms, of which each is intent on extracting form his own and other lives the maximum of amusement–panem et cicenses. The women’s emancipation of Ibsen’s time wanted, not freedom from the husband, but freedom from the child, from the burden of children, just as men’s emancipation in the same period signified freedom from the duties of family, nation, and State.[39]
Hamsun addressed a matter of land ownership and purchase, as it had been the habit of the tillers to simply stake out a plot of land and work it, without thought as to how and where to purchase it. Amidst the cycles of struggle, drought, crop failures, births of children, and crop recovery, and the contentedness of Isak and Inger and their family amidst it all, an official calls upon them one day to enquire as to why Isak never bought the land.
Buy? What should he buy for? The ground was there, the forest was there; he had cleared and tilled, built up a homestead in the midst of a natural wilderness, winning bread for himself and his, asking nothing of any man, but working, and working alone.[40]
The district sheriff’s officer finally calls by, looking at the vast tracts of tilled land, and asking why Isak had never come to him to purchase it. Soon after a bit of verbal sophistry, Isak begins to see how the official must be correct. Asking about “boundaries,” Isak had only thought in terms of how far he could see and what he could work. But the State required “definite boundaries,” “and the greater the extent, the more you will have to pay.” To all of this, Isak, could only acknowledge with “Ay.”[41]
From there, the simple life of Isak and Inger is confronted with a bureaucratic muddle, with questions on the money-value of the land, its waters, the potential for fishing, and the possibility of ores and metals.
Then civilization reaches Isak and Inger in the form of the telegraph (which becomes a metaphor for “civilization”) which is to go through his land, and for which he would be paid to upkeep the lines. [42] Furthermore, there was a copper mine in the hills that was to be bought from Isak.[43] Despite the money that now comes to Isak, he remains always a peasant, still toiling, knowing that is who he is and not wanting to be anything else:
Isak understood his work, his calling. He was a rich man now, with a big farm, but the heavy cash payments that had come to him by a lucky chance he used but poorly; he put the money aside. The land saved him. If he had lived down in the village, maybe the great world would have affected even him; so much gaiety, so many elegant manners and ways; he would have been buying useless trifles, and wearing a red Sunday shirt on weekdays. Here in the wilds he was sheltered from all immoderation; he lived in clear air, washed himself on Sunday mornings, and took a bath when he went up to the lake. Those thousand Daler—well, ’twas a gift from Heaven, to be kept intact. What else should he do? His ordinary outgoings were more than covered by the produce of his fields and stock.[44]
The copper mining, which went to Swedish ownership, began encroached increasingly, much to the distress of the villagers. Elesuesu, Isak and Inger’s eldest son, having spent much time away had returned ruined by civilization, improvident,
Poor Eleseus, all set on end and frittered away. Better, maybe, if he’d worked on the land all the time, but now he’s a man that has learned to write and use letters; no grip in him, no depth. For all that, no pitch-black devil of a man, not in Jove, not ambitious, hardly nothing at all is Eleseus, not even a bad thing of any great dimensions.
Something unfortunate, ill-fated about this young man, as if something were rotting him from within. . . . the child had lost his roothold, and suffered thereby. All that he turns to now leads back to something wanting in him, something dark against the light.[45]
Eleseus represents that type which becomes predominate in the “Winter” cycle of a civilization, when the City and money form the axis of living; where the peasant and the artisan emigrant from the country to the city and become either part of the rootless, alienated proletarian mass or a part of the equally rootless bourgeois. The same contrast that Hamsun dramatized was examined several years later by Spengler in his seminal study of cultural morphology, The Decline of The West:
Beginning and end, a peasant cottage and a tenement block are related to one another[46] as soul and intellect, as blood and stone . . . now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it dies in the midst in the midst of an almost uninhibited waste of country.[47]
Hamsun concludes with Geissler, the district official who had once come on behalf of the State to measure the worth and boundaries of Isak’s land, and then to buy the copper mine from Isak, regretting the impact the mining had had upon the village, offering this observation to Isak’s younger son Sivert who had stayed with the land, which encapsulates Hamsun’s world-view and moral of the story:
Look at you folk at Sellanraa,[48] now; looking up at blue peaks every day of your lives; no new-fangled inventions about that, but fjeld and rocky peaks, rooted deep in the past—but you’ve them for companionship. There you are, living in touch with heaven and earth, one with them, one with all these wide, deep-rooted things. No need of a sword in your hands, you go through life bareheaded, barehanded, in the midst of a great kindliness. Look, Nature’s there, for you and yours to have and enjoy. Man and Nature don’t bombard each other, but agree; they don’t compete, race one against the other, but go together. There’s you Sellanraa folk, in all this, living there. Fjeld and forest, moors and meadow, and sky and stars—oh, ’tis not poor and sparingly counted out, but without measure. Listen to me, Sivert: you be content! You’ve everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to believe in; being born and bringing forth, you are the needful on earth. ’Tis not all that are so, but you are so; needful on earth. ’Tis you that maintain life. Generation to generation, breeding ever anew; and when you die, the new stock goes on. That’s the meaning of eternal life. What do you get out of it? An existence innocently and properly set towards all. What you get out of it? Nothing can put you under orders and lord it over you Sellanraa folk, you’ve peace and authority and this great kindliness all round. That’s what you get for it. You lie at a mother’s breast and suck, and play with a mother’s warm hand. There’s your father now, he’s one of the two-and-thirty thousand. What’s to be said of many another? I’m something, I’m the fog, as it were, here and there, floating around, sometimes coming like rain on dry ground. But the others? There’s my son, the lightning that’s nothing in itself, a flash of barrenness; he can act. My son, ay, he’s the modern type, a man of our time; he believes honestly enough all the age has taught him, all the Jew and the Yankee have taught him; I shake my head at it all. But there’s nothing mythical about me; ’tis only in the family, so to speak, that I’m like a fog. Sit there shaking my head. Tell the truth–I’ve not the power of doing things and not regretting it. If I had, I could be lightning myself. Now I’m a fog.[49]
Hamsun explicitly identified the peasantry as the well-spring of a healthy culture, the embodiment of those ever-relevant values that contrast the values of decay represented by the city, the bourgeois, proletarianization, urbanization and industrialization:
A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day.[50]
In the August Trilogy,[51] as in The Growth of the Soil and elsewhere, Hamsun had taken up the concerns of encroaching mechanization and cosmopolitanism, epitomized by the USA, and instead championed traditional values, such as those of localism and the rural. Nelson remarks that Hamsun was espousing an agrarian, anti-capitalist conservatism that was becoming popular among the literati in both Europe and America.
Quisling and Hitler
With such views forming over the course of decades, and achieving wide acclaim, Hamsun’s support for Quisling and for the German occupation of Norway during World War II, is consistent and principled within his historical and cultural context.
Hamsun disliked the British as much as the “Yankees” and the Bolsheviks. He had been appalled by the British war against the Boers, which he would surely have regarded as a war by a plutocratic power against an entire folk who epitomized a living remnant of the type portrayed by Isak in The Growth of The Soil.[52] He had also alluded to the “Jews”[53] as harbingers of modernism and cosmopolitanism.
In contrast to Britain, the USA and the USSR, National Socialist Germany claimed to champion the peasantry as the eternal well-spring of a healthy culture, very much in keeping with Hamsun’s views in The Growth of The Soil and elsewhere. This is why the National Socialists saw Hamsun as a fellow-traveler.
In 1933 Walther Darré, a widely recognized agricultural expert, had been appointed Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, and also had the title “National Peasant Leader.” Goslar was named the “National Peasant City,” and pageants were held to honor the peasantry. Practical measures to deal with the crisis on the land were enacted immediately, including the Hereditary Farm Law, which protected the peasantry from foreclosure and ensured the family inheritance. [54]
Alfred Rosenberg, the primary National Socialist philosopher in Germany, had already paid tribute to Hamsun in his seminal Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), with specific reference to The Growth of the Soil, as expressing the “mystical-natural will” of the peasant better than any other living artist:
No one knows why, with great effort, the farmer Isak cultivates one piece of land after another in god-forsaken regions, or why his wife has joined him and gives birth to his children. But Isak follows an inexplicable law. He carries on a fruitful quest out of a mystical primal will. At the end of his existence he will certainly look back in astonishment at the harvest of his activity. The Growth of the Soil is the great present day epic of the Nordic will in its eternal primordial form. Nordic man can be heroic even behind the wooden plow.[55]
Such was the background when in 1934 Hamsun wrote an article, “Wait and See,” in which he attacked the opponents of National Socialist Germany and asked if a return of Communists, Jews, and Bruning to Germany were preferable. In 1935 he sent a greeting to Der Norden, the organ of the Nordic Society, supporting the return of the League of Nations mandate, Saarland, to Germany, and from the start supported Germany privately and publicly wherever he felt able.[56] Hamsun and his wife Marie remained particularly close to the Nordic Society, which was avid in promoting Hamsun’s works.[57]
In April 1940 the Germans occupied Norway to secure the sea route, after the British had on several occasions breached Norwegian neutrality, included mining of Norway’s territorial waters, about which the Norwegian Government impotently protested. [58]
In 1933, former Defense Minister Vidkun Quisling had established his own party Nasjonal Samling (National Unification). Hamsun had formed a good impression of Quisling since 1932, and wrote in support of Nasjonal Samling’s electoral appeal in 1936 in the party newspaper Fritt Folk. His wife Marie was the local representative of the party.[59]
Ironically, Quisling, his very name becoming synonymous with “traitor,”[60] was the only politician who had campaigned before the war for a strong defense capability, and was particularly pro-British, having been honored by the British Government for looking after British interests in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, where he had been the principal aide to the celebrated Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, who was directing the European Famine Relief to Russia in 1921, with Quisling serving as Secretary for the Relief Organization.[61]
Quisling sought an alliance of Nordic nations including Germany and Britain, in what he called a “Northern Coalition,” against Communism.[62]
The only strong resistance against the German invasion came from a garrison commanded by an officer who belonged to Quisling’s party. The King and Government quickly fled, leaving Norway without an administration or any voice to negotiate with the Germans.[63] Quisling, like Petain in France, and many other figures throughout Europe who were to be branded and usually executed as “traitors,” stepped in to fill the void as the only political figure willing to try and look after Norwegian interests under the occupation. He declared himself Minister President, but because he was not a pliant tool he did not enjoy the confidence of the German military authorities. He was soon forced to resign in favor of an administrative council under German control, but eventually regained a measure of authority.[64]
Meanwhile, Hamsun urged Norwegians to rally behind Quisling so that some form of sovereignty could be restored. He described Quisling as “more than a politician, he is a thinker, a constructive spirit.”[65]
Hamsun’s longest wartime article appeared in the German language Berlin-Tokyo-Rome periodical in February 1942, where he wrote: “Europe does not want either the Jew or their gold, neither the Americans nor their country.”[66]
Despite Hamsun’s pro-German sentiment, he championed the rights of his countrymen, including those who resisted the German occupation. He attempted in intercede for the writer Ronald Fangen, and many others, who had been arrested by the Gestapo.[67]
In 1943 Hamsun and his wife accepted the invitation of Goebbels to visit Germany. Goebbels wrote of Hamsun as being “the embodiment of what an epic writer should be.” Hamsun was equally impressed with the Reich Minister and sent Goebbels the Nobel medal he had been awarded, which Goebbels accepted as Hamsun’s “expression of solidarity with our battle for a new Europe, and a happy society.”[68]
Whilst en route to Norway from Germany, Hamsun met Hitler, a meeting which did not go well, as Hamsun took the opportunity to condemn the military administration of Norway which had rendered Quisling powerless, and they parted in an unfriendly manner[69]
However, Hamsun continued to support Germany, and expressed his pride when a son, Arild, joined the Norwegian Legion of the Waffen SS.[70]
In 1945 several strokes forced Hamsun to quiet his activities. But with Hitler’s death Hamsun defiantly wrote a tribute for the press:
I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior of mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism, which finally failed him. Thus might the average western European regard Hitler? We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death.[71]
Post-War Persecution
Membership of Quisling’s party was declared a criminal offense and Hamsun’s sons Tore and Arild[72] were among the first of 50,000 Norwegians to be arrested as “Nazis” (sic) or as “collaborators.”[73] Marie and Knut were arrested a few weeks later. Due to his age, at 86, Hamsun was sent to a hospital rather than to a prison, although the stress and treatment struck considerably at his still quite good health. He was defiant and stated to the authorities that he would have assisted the Germans more if he could.[74]
He was sent to an old folks home where he was a popular guest. However, prosecuting Norway’s leading cultural figure, like America’s dealings with Ezra Pound, was an awkward matter. Consequently, Hamsun spent 119 days in a psychiatric clinic. The psychiatrists found in him, as in the characters of his novel’s, a complex interplay of traits, but the most prominent of all they described was his “absolute honesty.” The conclusion was that Hamsun was not insane but that he was mentally impaired. Hence, what Ferguson calls “an embarrassing situation,” given that Hamsun was “first and foremost [Norway’s] great writer, their national pride, a loved and admired and never quite respectable ancient child,” was dealt with by concluding that his support for Germany could be put down to “senility.” This was the party-line taken up by the press throughout the world.[75]
Reading Hamsun’s post-war autobiographical On Overgrown Paths, written amidst the threats of prosecution and the interrogations, shows him to be perfectly lucid. Hamsun, as this last writing shows, although deaf and going blind, retained his mental faculties impressively, along with a certain fatalism and humor.[76]
Although the Attorney General opted not to proceed against Hamsun, the Crown wished to try him as a member of Nasjonal Samling. To Hamsun the action at least meant that he was being officially acknowledged as of sound mind. He was fined 425,000 kroner.[77]
With ruinous fines hanging over them, the Hamsuns returned to their farm Norholm.[78] On appeal the fine was reduced to 325,000 kroner,[79] his persistence and courage in speaking on behalf of imprisoned Norwegians under the German Occupation being a mitigating factor. Tore was also fined, and his brother Arild was jailed until 1949 for his membership of the Norwegian Legion. Marie Hamsun was released from jail in 1948.[80]
On Overgrown Paths was published in 1949 and became an immediate best seller,[81] although Hamsun ended his days in poverty on his farm. He died in his sleep on February 19, 1952.
When the Robert Ferguson’s biography appeared in 1987, he wrote that while Norway is especially keen to honor its writers, “Hamsun’s life remains largely uncommemorated by officialdom.” [82] However, two decades later, in 2009:
In Norway, the 150th birthday of Knut Hamsun will be celebrated by theatrical exhibitions, productions, and an international conference. One of the main squares of Oslo, located just beside the national Opera, will henceforth bear his name. A monument will finally be erected in his honor. One might say that the Norwegians have just discovered the name of their very famous compatriot. Recently, a large number of towns and villages have named squares and streets for him. At the place where he resided, in Hamaroy, a “Knut Hamsun Center” will officially open on August 4th, the day of his birth. On that day, a special postage stamp will be issued. Yet Knut Hamsun was denounced and vilified for decades by the Norwegian establishment.[83]
Hamsun’s defiant commitment to Quisling and to Germany during the war was a logical conclusion to ideas that had been fermenting and widely read and applauded over a period of half a century. Yet when it came time to act on those ideals, of fighting materialism, plutocracy, and communism, for the restoration of rural and peasant values against the encroaching tide of industrialism and money, Hamsun’s fellow-countryman reacted with outrage. Hamsun, unlike some of the pre-war supporters of National Socialism or Fascism, for better or for worse, never did compromise his values.
Notes
[1] Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 300.
[2] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 301.
[3] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 13.
[4] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 21.
[5] Hamsun, The Enigmatic One, 1877.
[6] Hamsun, Bjorger, 1878.
[7] Richard C. Nelson, Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays and Stories: 1885–1949 (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2003), pp. 4–5.
[8] Knut Hamsun, “Letters from America,” Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 7.
[9] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 68.
[10] Hamsun, “The American Character,” Aftenposten, Christiania, Norway, January 21, 1885; Knut Hamsun Remembers America, pp. 17–18.
[11] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 19.
[12] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 14.
[13] Hamusn, “The American Character,” p. 20.
[14] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 21.
[15] Hamsun, “New York,” Aftenposten, February 12, 14, 1895; Knut Hamsun Remembers America, pp. 28–29.
[16] Hamsun, “New York,” p. 29.
[17] Hamsun, “New York,” p. 30.
[18] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 101.
[19] Hamsun, The Cultural Life of Modern America, 1889.
[20] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 7.
[21] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 9.
[22] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 9.
[23] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 10.
[24] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 10.
[25] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 124.
[26] Hamsun, Mysteries, 1892.
[27] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 133.
[28] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 138.
[29] Hamsun, Shallow Soil, 1893.
[30] Josef Wiehr, Knut Hamsun: His personality and his outlook upon life (Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 1922), p. 23.
[31] Wiehr, Knut Hamsun, p. 24.
[32] Hamsun, 1895–1896.
[33] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 164.
[34] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil (1920), Book I, Chapter 3. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hamsun/knut/h23g/index.html
[35] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 4.
[36] It needs to be pointed out that by “race” Spengler did not a biological, or “Darwinistic” conception, but an instinct. “Race” means “duration of character,” including “an urge to permanence.” Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, p. 220.
[37] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, p. 220.
[38] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, pp. 220–21.
[39]
[40] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 5.
[41] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 5.
[42] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 9.
[43] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 10.
[44] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 14.
[45] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 11.
[46] “Related to one another” in the sense that they express the analogous features of a culture in its “Spring” High Culture cycle and its “Winter” Late Civilization cycle respectively.
[47] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West, 1928 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), Vol. 2, p. 102.
[48] The name of Isak’s farm.
[49] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.
[50] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.
[51] Hamsun, August, 1930.
[52] The Boers were–and partly remain–an anomaly in the modern world; the vestige of the bygone era who had to be eliminated as a hindrance to the global economic structure. Hence the recent ideological and economic war against the Afrikaner to destroy his “apartheid” was a continuation of the Boer Wars under other slogans, but with the same aim: to capture the wealth of southern Africa–in the name of “human rights”–for the sake of the same kind of plutocracy which had fought the Afrikaners’ forefathers a century previously.
[53] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.
[54] Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s Green Party (Buckinghmanshire: The Kensal Press, 1985), p. 91.
[55] Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930 (Torrance, Cal.: The Noontide Press, 1982), p. 268.
[56] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 326.
[57] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 338.
[58] Ralph Hewins, Quisling: Prophet Without Honour (London: W. H. Allen, 1965), p. 201.
[59] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 333.
[60] Hewins, Quilsing, p. 9. Hewins, a wartime journalist, wrote his biography to amend for the part he had played in portraying Quisling as the epitome of “treason” (p. 11).
[61] Hewins, Quisling, p. 55.
[62] Vidkun Quilsing, Russia and Ourselves (London: Hodden and Stoughton, 1931), p. 275.
[63] Hewins, Quisling, p. 208.
[64] Hewins summarizes the situation when writing: “The whole myth of unprovoked aggression by Germany should be abandoned. It is incredible and does grievous injustice to the ‘quislings’ who are quite wrongly alleged to have engineered the German Occupation. There is no truth in this sinister legend” (Hewins, Quisling, p. 198).
[65] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 357.
[66] Hamsun, “Real Brotherhood,” Berlin-Tokyo-Rome, February 1942; Ferguson, Enigma, p. 351.
[67] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 359.
[68] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 369–70.
[69] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 374–75.
[70] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 383.
[71] Hamsun, “Adolf Hitler,” Aftenposten, May 7, 1945, p. 1
[72] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 387.
[73] Hewins, Quisling, pp. 357–58. Hewins notes that these thousands of Norwegians were jailed for years often without charge or trial, interrogated for eight hours a time, subjected to “eeling” (being dragged back and forth across broken stones), and a starvation diet of 800 calories a day. “Many prisoners died of malnutrition or starvation, and limbs swollen from privation were a commonplace. Hundreds, if not thousands, died of dysentery and tuberculosis epidemics. Hundreds more bear the scares of kicking, beating and brutality of their guards” (Hewins, pp. 357–58).
[74] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 387–88.
[75] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 389–90.
[76] Hamsun, On Overgrown Paths, 1949 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).
[77] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 407.
[78] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 408.
[79] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 409.
[80] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 410.
[81] On Overgrown Paths was also published simultaneously in German and Swedish editions. Ferguson, Enigma, p. 416.
[82] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 421.
[83] Robert Steuckers, “Knut Hamsun: Saved by Stalin?,” Counter Currents, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/knut-hamsun-saved-by-stalin/ The title of the Steuckers article refers to Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister Molotov having intervened in 1945 in favor of Hamsun, stating: “it would be regrettable to see Norway condemning this great writer to the gallows.”
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/knut-hamsun-2/
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samedi, 13 août 2011
Towards a New World Order: Carl Schmitt's "The LandAppropriation of a New World"
Towards a New World Order: Carl Schmitt's "The Land Appropriation of a New World"
Gary Ulmen
Ex: http://freespeechproject.com/
The end of the Cold War and of the bipolar division of the world has posed again the question of a viable international law grounded in a new world order. This question was already urgent before WWI, given the decline of the ius publicum Europaeum at the end of the 19th century. It resurfaced again after WWII with the defeat of the Third Reich. If the 20th century is defined politically as the period beginning with the "Great War" in 1914 and ending with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, it may be seen as a long interval during which the question of a new world order was suspended primarily because of the confrontation and resulting stalemate between Wilsonianism and Leninism. Far from defining that period, as claimed by the last defenders of Left ideology now reconstituted as "anti-fascism," and despite their devastating impact at the time, within such a context fascism and Nazism end up automatically redimensioned primarily as epiphenomenal reactions of no lasting historical significance. In retrospect, they appear more and more as violent geopolitical answers to Wilsonianism's (and, to a lesser extent, Leninism's) failure to establish a new world order.
Both the League of Nations and the United Nations have sought to reconstitute international law and the nomos of the earth, but neither succeeded. What has passed for international law throughout the 20th century has been largely a transitory semblance rather than a true system of universally accepted rules governing international behavior. The geopolitical paralysis resulting from the unresolved conflict between the two superpowers created a balance of terror that provided the functional equivalent of a stable world order. But this state of affairs merely postponed coming to terms with the consequences of the collapse of the ius publicum Europaeum and the need to constitute a new world order. What is most significant about the end of the Cold War is not so much that it brought about a premature closure of the 20th century or a return to the geopolitical predicament obtaining before WWI, but that it has signaled the end of the modern age--evident in the eclipse of the nation state, the search for new political forms, the explosion of new types of conflicts, and radical changes in the nature of war. Given this state of affairs, today it may be easier to develop a new world order than at any time since the end of the last century.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ernest Nys wrote that the discovery of the New World was historically unprecedented since it not only added an immense area to what Europeans thought the world was but unified the whole globe.(n1) It also resulted in the European equilibrium of land and sea that made possible the ius publicum Europaeum and a viable world order. In his "Introduction" to The Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt observes that another event of this kind, such as the discovery of some new inhabitable planet able to trigger the creation of a new world order, is highly unlikely, which is why thinking "must once again be directed to the elemental orders of concrete terrestrial existence."(n2) Despite all the spatial exploration and the popular obsession with extra-terrestrial life, today there is no event in sight comparable to the discovery of a New World. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has paved the way for the further expansion of capitalism, economic globalization, and massive advances in communication technologies. Yet the imagination of those most concerned with these developments has failed so far to find any new alternatives to the prevailing thinking of the past decades.
Beyond the Cold War
The two most prominent recent attempts to prefigure a new world order adequate to contemporary political realities have been made by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington.(n3) Fukuyama thinks the West has not only won the Cold War but also brought about the end of history, while Huntington retreats to a kind of "bunker mentality" in view of an alleged decline of the West.(n4) While the one suffers from excessive optimism and the other from excessive pessimism, both fail primarily because they do not deal with the "elemental orders of concrete terrestrial existence" and troth remain trapped in an updated version of Wilsonianism assuming liberal democracy to be the highest achievement of Western culture. While Fukuyama wants to universalize liberal democracy in the global marketplace, If Huntington identifies liberalism with Western civilization. But Huntington is somewhat more realistic than Fukuyama. He not only acknowledges the impossibility of universalizing liberalism but exposes its particularistic nature. Thus he opts for a defense of Western civilization within an international helium omnium contra omnes. In the process, however, he invents an "American national identity" and extrapolates from the decline of liberal democracy to the decline of the West.
Fukuyama's thesis is derived from Alexandre Kojeve's Heideggerian reading of Hegel and supports the dubious notion that the last stage in human history will be a universal and homogeneous state of affairs satisfying all human needs. This prospect is predicated on the arbitrary assumption of the primacy of thymos--the desire for recognition--which both Kojeve and Fukuyama regard as the most fundamental human longing. Ultimately, according to Fukuyama, "Kojeve's claim that we are at the end of history . . . stands or falls on the strength of the assertion that the recognition provided by the contemporary liberal democratic state adequately satisfies the human desire for recognition."(n5) Fukuyama's own claim thus stands or falls on his assumption that at the end of history "there are no serious ideological competitors to liberal democracy."(n6) This conclusion is based on a whole series of highly dubious ideological assumptions, such as that "the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism"(n7) and that the desire for recognition "is the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics."(n8)
According to Fukuyama, the 20th century has turned everyone into "historical pessimists."(n9) To reverse this state of affairs, he challenges "the pessimistic view of international relations . . . that goes variously under the titles 'realism,' realpolitik, or 'power politics'."(n10) He is apparently unaware of the difference between a pessimistic view of human nature, on which political realism is based, and a pessimistic view of international relations, never held by political realists such as Niccolo Machiavelli or Hans Morgenthau--two thinkers Fukuyama "analyzes" in order to "understand the impact of spreading democracy on international politics." As a "prescriptive doctrine," he finds the realist perspective on international relations still relevant. As a "descriptive model," however, it leaves much to be desired because: "There was no 'objective' national interest that provided a common thread to the behavior of states in different times and places, but a plurality of national interests defined by the principle of legitimacy in play and the individuals who interpreted it." This betrays a misunderstanding of political realism or, more plausibly, a deliberate attempt to misrepresent it in order to appear original. Although he draws different and even antithetical conclusions, Fukuyama's claim is not inconsistent with political realism.(n11)
Following this ploy, Fukuyama reiterates his main argument that: "Peace will arise instead out of the specific nature of democratic legitimacy, and its ability to satisfy the human longings for recognition."(n12) He is apparently unaware of the distinction between legality and legitimacy, and of the tendency within liberal democracies for legality to become its own mode of legitimation.(n13) Even in countries in which legality remains determined independently by a democratic legislative body, there is no reason to believe it will be concerned primarily or at all with satisfying any "human longing for recognition"; rather, it will pursue whatever goals the predominant culture deems desirable. Consequently, it does not necessarily follow that, were democratic legitimacy to become universalized with the end of the Cold War, international conflict would also end and history along with it. Even Fukuyama admits that: "For the foreseeable future, the world will be divided between a post-historical part, and a part that is still stuck in history. Within the post-historical part, the chief axis of interaction between states would be economic, and the old rules of power politics would have decreasing relevance."(n14)
This is nothing more than the reconfiguration of a standard liberal argument in a new metaphysical guise: the old historical world determined by politics will be displaced by the new post-historical world determined by economics. Schmitt rejected this argument in the 1920s: according to liberals, the "concept of the state should be determined by political means, the concept of society (in essence nonpolitical) by economic means," but this distinction is prejudiced by the liberal aversion to politics understood as a domain of domination and corruption resulting in the privileging of economics understood as "reciprocity of production and consumption, therefore mutuality, equality, justice, and freedom, and finally, nothing less than the spiritual union of fellowship, brotherhood, and justice."(n15) In effect, Fukuyama is simply recycling traditional liberal efforts to eliminate the political(n16)--a maneuver essential for his thesis of the arrival of "the end of history" with the end of the Cold War. Accordingly: "The United States and other liberal democracies will have to come to grips with the fact that, with the collapse of the communist world, the world in which they live is less and less the old one of geopolitics, and that the rules and methods of the historical world are not appropriate to life in the post-historical one. For the latter, the major issues will be economic."(n17) Responding to Walter Rathenau's claim in the 1920s that the destiny then was not politics but economics, Schmitt said "what has occurred is that economics has become political and thereby the destiny."(n18)
For Fukuyama, the old historical world is none other than the European world: "Imperialism and war were historically the product of aristocratic societies. If liberal democracy abolished the class distinction between masters and slaves by making the slaves their own masters, then it too should eventually abolish imperialism."(n19) This inference is based on a faulty analogy between social and international relations. Not surprisingly, Fukuyama really believes that "international law is merely domestic law writ large."(n20) Compounded with an uncritical belief in the theory of progress and teleological history, this leads him to generalize his own and Kojeve's questionable interpretation of the master-slave dialectic (understood as the logic of all social relations) to include international relations: "If the advent of the universal and homogeneous state means the establishment of rational recognition on the level of individuals living within one society, and the abolition of the relationship of lordship and bondage between them, then the spread of that type of state throughout the international system of states should imply the end of relationships of lordship and bondage between nations as well--i.e., the end of imperialism, and with it, a decrease in the likelihood of wars based on imperialism."(n21) Even if a "universal and homogeneous state" were possible today, in an age when all nation-states are becoming ethnically, racially, linguistically and culturally heterogeneous, it is unclear why domestic and international relations should be isomorphic. Rather, the opposite may very well be the case: increasing domestic heterogeneity is matched by an increasingly heterogeneous international scene where "the other" is not regarded as an equal but as "a paper tiger," "the Great Satan," "religious fanatics," etc.
At any rate, imperialism for Fukuyama is not a particular historical phenomenon which came about because of the discovery of the New World at the beginning of the age of exploration by the European powers. Rather, it is seen as the result of some metaphysical ahistorical "struggle for recognition among states."(n22) It "arises directly out of the aristocratic master's desire to be recognized as superior--his megalothymia."(n23) Ergo: "The persistence of imperialism and war after the great bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is therefore due not only to the survival of an atavistic warrior ethos, but also to the fact that the master's megalothymia was incompletely sublimated into economic activity."(n24) Thus the formal market relation between buyer and seller, both reduced to the level of the hyper-rational and calculating homo oeconomicus, comes to displace the master-slave dialectic whereby, miraculously, the interaction between these economic abstractions generates as much recognition as anyone would want, rendering conflict obsolete and putting an end to history.
In terms of Fukuyama's own formulation, the real end of history, as he understands it, is not even close. In his scenario, since there are still a lot of unresolved conflicts between the historical and the post-historical worlds, there will be a whole series of "world order" problems and "many post-historical countries will formulate an abstract interest in preventing the spread of certain technologies to the historical world, on the grounds that world will be most prone to conflict and violence."(n25) Although the failure of the League of Nations and the UN has led to the general discrediting of "Kantian internationalism and international law," in the final analysis, despite his Heideggerian Hegelianism, Fukuyama does not find the answer to the end of history in Hegel, Nietzsche or even Kojeve,(n26) but rather in Kant, who argued that the gains realized when man moved from the state of nature to civilization were largely nullified by wars between nations. According to Fukuyama, what has not been understood is that "the actual incarnations of the Kantian idea have been seriously flawed from the start by not following Kant's own precepts," by which he means that states based on republican principles are less likely than despotisms to accept the costs of war and that an international federation is only viable if it is based on liberal principles.
Although Huntington has a much better grasp of international relations than Fukuyama, his decline of the West scenario is equally unconvincing. The central theme of his book is that "culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world."(n27) But whereas Fukuyama couches his thesis in terms of a universal desire for recognition, Huntington couches his thesis in terms of a global search for identity: "Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we?"(n28) The result is a "multipolar and multi-civilizational" world within which the West should abandon its presumed universalism and defend its own particular identity: "In the clash of civilizations, Europe and America will hang together or hang separately. In the greater clash, the global 'real clash,' between Civilization and barbarism, the worlds great civilizations . . . will also hang together or hang separately. In the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war."(n29)
In Huntington's new world, "societies sharing civilizational affinities cooperate with each other."(n30) Leaving aside his cavalier blurring of the differences between cultures, civilizations and societies, what does Huntington regard as the essence of Western particularism? Here he is ambiguous: he first mentions Christianity, then some secular residues of Christianity, but when he adds up the civilizational core of the West it turns out to be none other than liberalism. As Stephen Holmes points out, it is "the same old ideology, plucked inexplicably from the waste-bin of history that once united the West against Soviet Communism."(n31) But Huntington also claims that the West had a distinct identity long before it was modern (since he insists that modernization is distinct from Westernization, so that non-Western societies can modernize without Westernizing, thus retaining their civilizational distinctiveness). In this case, however, the West cannot really be identified with liberalism, nor can its heritage be equated sic et nunc with "American national identity." While liberalism may very well be declining, this need not translate into a decline of the West as such. Similarly, if "American national identity" is threatened by "multiculturalism,"(n32) it need not signal the arrival of barbarians at the gates but may only mark another stage in the statist involution of liberalism. Huntington's fears of a decline of the West at a time when it is actually at the acme of its power and vigor is the result of the unwarranted identification of Western civilization with liberalism and what he understands by "American national identity." Today liberalism has degenerated into an opportunistic statist program of "a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists," and "American national identity" into a fiction invented as part of a failed project after the War between the States to reconfigure the American federation into a nation-state.(n33)
According to Huntington? the assumption of the universality of Western culture is: false, because others civilizations have other ideals and norms; immoral, because "imperialism is the logical result of universalism"; and dangerous, because it could lead to major civilizational wars.(n34) His equation of universalism and imperialism, however, misses the point of both it misunderstands the philosophical foundations of Western culture and the historical roots of Western imperialism. Other civilizations do have their own ideals and norms, but only Western civilization has an outlook broad enough to embrace all other cultures, which explains why it can readily sponsor and accommodate even confused and counterproductive projects such as "multiculturalism." Of course, Europeans set forth on their journeys of discovery and conquest not only in order to bring Christianity and "civilization" to the world but also to plunder whatever riches they could find. But whatever the reasons, Europeans were the ones who opened the world to global consciousness and what Schmitt called "awakened occidental rationalism."
Until recently, largely because of American cultural hegemony and technological supremacy, the goal of the rest of the world has been "Westernization," which has come to be regarded as synonymous with modernization. In Huntington's "realist" view, however: "A universal civilization requires universal power. Roman power created a near universal civilization within the limited confines of the Classical world. Western power in the form of European colonialism in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth century extended Western culture throughout much of the contemporary world. European colonialism is over; American hegemony is receding."(n35) The real question is whether continued American world hegemony is primarily a function of the persistence of colonialism. Despite his emphasis on culture and civilization, Huntington does not appreciate the importance of cultural hegemony.? Had he not restricted the Western tradition to late 20th century liberalism, he may have appreciated the extent to which the rest of the world is becoming increasingly more, rather than less dependent on the US--in communication technologies, financial matters and even aesthetic forms. Today the Internet is potentially a more formidable agency of cultural domination and control than was the British Navy at the peak of the Empire. Here McNeill is right: Huntington's gloomy perception of the decline of the West may merely mistake growing pains for death throes.
If Huntington's salon Spenglerianism were not bad enough, he also adopts a kind of simplistic Schmittianism (without ever mentioning Schmitt). Complementing his "birds of a feather flock together" concept of civilizations --with "core states" assuming a dominant position in relation to "fault line" states--he pictures an "us versus them" type of friend/enemy relations based on ethnic and religious identities. But Schmitt's friend/enemy antithesis is concerned with relations between political groups: first and foremost, states. Accordingly, any organized group that can distinguish between friends and enemies in an existential sense becomes thereby political. Unlike Huntington (or Kojeve, who also explicitly drew geopolitical lines primarily along religious lines(n36), Schmitt did not think in terms of ethnic or religious categories but rather territorial and geopolitical concepts. For Schmitt, the state was the greatest achievement of Western civilization because, as the main agency of secularization, it ended the religious civil wars of the Middle Ages by limiting war to a conflict between states.(n37) In view of the decline of the state, Schmitt analyzed political realities and provided a prognosis of possible future territorial aggregations and new types of political forms.
Huntington finds the "realist" school of international affairs "a highly useful starting point," but then proceeds to criticize a straw man version of it, according to which "all states perceive their interests in the same way and act in the same way." Against it, not only power but also "values, culture, and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests.... In the post-Cold War world, states increasingly define their interests in civilizational terms."(n38) Had Huntington paid more careful attention to hans Morgenthau, George Kennan or other reputable political realists, he would have concluded that their concept of power is not as limited as his caricature of it. In particular, had he read Schmitt more closely he would not have claimed that nation-states "are and will remain the most important actors in world affairs"(n39)--at a time when economic globalization has severely eroded their former sovereignty and they are practically everywhere threatened with internal disintegration and new geopolitical organizations. At any rate, political realism has been concerned primarily with the behavior of states because they were the main subjects of political life for the past three centuries.(n40) If and when they are displaced by other political forms, political realism then shifts its focus accordingly.
Huntington attempts to think beyond the Cold War. But since he cannot think beyond the nation-state, he cannot conceive of new political forms. When he writes that cultural commonality "legitimates the leadership and order-imposing role of the core state for both member states and for the external powers and institutions,"(n41) he seems to have in mind something akin to the concept of GroBraum.(n42) But Schmitt's model was the American Monroe Doctrine excluding European meddling in the Western Hemisphere. At that time (and well into the 20th century), the US was not a nation-state in the European sense, although it assumed some of these trappings thereafter. Thus it generally followed George Washington's policy--because of the "detached and distant situation" of the US, it should avoid entangling alliances with foreign (primarily European) powers. The Monroe Doctrine simply expanded on the reality and advantages of this situation. Schmitt rightly saw the global line of the Western Hemisphere drawn by the Monroe Doctrine as the first major challenge to the international law of the ius publicum Europaeum.
Given the current understanding of national sovereignty, it is difficult to see what Huntington means by "core state." Despite the title of his book, he has no concept of international law or of world order. Not only does he abandon hope for global regulations governing the behavior of states and civilizations, but he reverts to a kind of anthropological primitivism: "Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale."(n43) All he can suggest for avoiding major inter-civilizational wars is the "abstention rule" (core states abstain from conflicts in other civilizations), and the "mediation rule" (core states negotiate with each other to halt fault line wars).(n44) Huntington's vision is thus surprisingly conformist--it merely cautions the US from becoming embroiled in the Realpolitik of countries belonging to other civilizational blocs while defending a contrived liberal notion of"Western" civilization.
Anti-Colonialism and Appropriation
The anti-colonialism of both Fukuyama and Huntington is consistent with the predominant 20th century ideology directed primarily against Europe. Anti-colonialism is more historically significant than either anti-fascism and anti-communism. As Schmitt pointed out in 1962: "Both in theory and practice, anti-colonialism has an ideological objective. Above all, it is propaganda--more specifically, anti-European propaganda. Most of the history of propaganda consists of propaganda campaigns which, unfortunately, began as internal European squabbles. First there was France's and England's anti-Spanish propaganda--the leyenda negra of the 15th and 16th centuries. Then this propaganda became generalized during the 18th century. Finally, in the historical view of Arnold Toynbee, a UN consultant, the whole of Europe is indicted as a world aggressor."(n45) Thus it is not surprising that the 500th anniversary of the "discovery" of America was greeted with more condemnation than celebration.(n46)
Anti-colonialism is primarily anti-European propaganda because it unduly castigates the European powers for having sponsored colonialism.(n47) Given that there was no international law forbidding the appropriation of the newly discovered lands--in fact, European international and ecclesiastical law made it legal and established rules for doing so--the moral and legal basis for this judgment is unclear. On closer analysis, however, it turns out to be none other than the West's own universalistic pretenses. Only by ontologizing their particular Western humanist morality--various versions of secularized Christianity--as universally valid for all times and all places can Western intellectuals indict colonialism after the fact as an international "crime." Worse yet, this indictment eventually turns into a wholesale condemnation of Western culture (branded as "Eurocentrism") from an abstract, deterritorialized and deracinated humanist perspective hypostatized to the level of a universally binding absolute morality. Thus the original impulse to vindicate the particularity and otherness of the victims of colonialism turns full circle by subsuming all within a foreign Western frame-work, thereby obliterating the otherness of the original victims. The ideology of anti-colonialism is thus not only anti-European propaganda but an invention of Europeans themselves, although it has been appropriated wholesale and politically customized by the rest of the world.
As for world order, this propaganda has even more fundamental roots: "The odium of colonialism, which today confronts all Europeans, is the odium of appropriation,"(n48) since now everything understood as nomos is allegedly concerned only with distribution and production, even though appropriation remains one of its fundamental, if not the most fundamental, attributes. As Schmitt notes: "World history is a history of progress in the means and methods of appropriation: from land appropriations of nomadic and agricultural-feudal times, to sea appropriations of the 16th and 17th centuries, to the industrial appropriations of the industrial-technical age and its distinction between developed and undeveloped areas, to the present day appropriations of air and space."(n49) More to the point, however, is that "until now, things have somehow been appropriated, distributed and produced. Prior to every legal, economic and social order, prior to every legal, economic or social theory, there is the simple question: Where and how was it appropriated? Where and how was it divided? Where and how was it produced ? But the sequence of these processes is the major problem. It has often changed in accordance with how appropriation, distribution and production are emphasized and evaluated practically and morally in human consciousness. The sequence and evaluation follow changes in historical situations and general world history, methods of production and manufacture--even the image human beings have of themselves, of their world and of their historical situation."(n50) Thus the odium of appropriation exemplified by the rise of anti-colonialism is symptomatic of a changed world situation and changed attitudes. But this state of affairs should not prevent our understanding of what occurred in the past or what is occurring in the present.
In order to dispel the "fog of this anti-European ideology," Schmitt recalls that "everything that can be called international law has for centuries been European international law. . . [and that] all the classical concepts of existing international law are those of European international law, the ius publicum Europaeum. In particular, these are the concepts of war and peace. as well as two fundamental conceptual distinctions: first, the distinction between war and peace, i.e., the exclusion of an in-between situation of neither war nor peace so characteristic of the Cold War; and second, the conceptual distinction between enemy and criminal, i.e. exclusion of the discrimination and criminalization of the opponent so characteristic of revolutionary war--a war closely tied to the Cold War."(n51) But Schmitt was more concerned with the "spatial" aspect of the phenomenon: "What remains of the classical ideas of international law has its roots in a purely Eurocentric spatial order. Anti-colonialism is a phenomenon related to its destruction.... Aside from ... the criminalization of European nations, it has not generated one single idea about a new order. Still rooted, if only negatively, in a spatial idea, it cannot positively propose even the beginning of a new spatial order."(n52)
Having discovered the world as a globe, Europeans also developed the Law of Nations. Hugo Grotius is usually credited with establishing this new discipline with his De lure belli ac pacts (Paris: 1625), since he was the first to deal with the subject as a whole (although various European scholars had dealt at length with themes such as the justice of war, the right of plunder, the treatment of captives, etc.). Nys writes: ". . . from the I 1th to the 1 2th century the genius of Europe developed an association of republics, principalities and kingdoms, which was the beginning of the society of nations. Undoubtedly, some elements of it had been borrowed from Greek and Roman antiquity, from Byzantine institutions, from the Arabo-Berber sultanates on the coast of Africa and from the Moorish kingdoms of Spain. But at the time new sentiments developed, longing for political liberty. The members of this association were united by religious bonds; they had the same faith; they were not widely separated by speech and, at any rate, they had access to Latin, the language of the Church; they admitted a certain equality or at least none of them claimed the right to dominate and rule over the others. A formula came into use to describe this state of affairs: respublica a Christiana, res Christina."(n53)
Steeped in Roman law, 1 3th and 1 4th century jurists opposed any "Law of Nations" recognizing political distinctions between different peoples. In the Roman system, different peoples were only "parts of the Roman Empire." Thus, in a wider sense, ius gentium extended to all civilized peoples and included both public and private law. In a narrower sense, however, it also dealt with the rules governing relations between Romans and foreigners. Understood in this narrower sense, ius gentium promoted the constitution of distinct peoples and consequently kingdoms, intercourse and conflicts between different political communities, and ultimately wars. For this reason, those who still believed in the viability of the Holy Roman Empire thought that this interpretation of ius gentium led to disintegration. This is why the Law of Nations--European public law and international law--did not become a distinct "science" until the Middle Ages.
Spanish theologians first articulated the theoretical and practical problems of ius gentium understood as the Law of Nations. Chief among them was Francisco de Vitoria, whose Relectiones theologicae on the Indians and the right of a "just war" have become classics.(n54) In his lectures, Vitoria invokes the Law of Nations--the ius gentium. At the beginning of the third section of his account of the Spaniards' relations with the aborigines in the New World, he treats them as one people among others, and therefore subject to ius gentium: "The Spaniards have a right to travel into the lands in question and to sojourn there, provided they do no harm to the natives, and the natives may not prevent them. Proof of this may in the first place be derived from the law of nations (ius gentium), which either is natural law or is derived from natural law."(n55) That he understands peoples in the sense of "nations" becomes even more clear when he speaks about gentes nationes. He distinguishes between the political community--the respublica--and the private individual. The latter may defend his person and his property, but he may not avenge wrongs or retake goods after the passage of time. This is the respublica's prerogative--it alone has authority to defend itself and its members. Here Vitoria identifies the prince's authority with that of the state: "The prince is the issue of the election made by the respublica.... The state, properly so called, is a perfect community, that is to say, a community which forms a whole in itself, which, in other words, is not a part of another community, but which possesses its own laws, its own council, its own magistrates."(n56)
Clearly, what developed in Europe from antiquity to the respublica Christiana, from the origin of the sovereign state and ius publicum Europaeum to the Enlightenment and beyond, was as unique and significant as the discovery of the "New World." Yet, given today's predominant ideology, European culture has almost become the truth that dare not speak its name. Not only is Columbus demonized, but the whole Age of Discovery and all of European (Western) culture is dismissed as "imperialistic," "racist?" "sexist," etc. The Nomos of the Earth is a much needed antidote to this anti-European propaganda, which is only a symptom of the crisis of European identity and consciousness.(n57) All the major themes of Schmitt's book are either implicit or explicit in "The Land Appropriation of a New World": the origin and significance of the European and Eurocentric epoch of world history; the discovery of the New World and the American challenge to the European order; the search for a new nomos of the earth; the critique of the discriminatory concept of war; the critique of universalism and the danger of total relativism.
The Conquest of America and the Concept of a "Just War"
In the 20th century, the ideology of anti-colonialism was articulated most prominently by Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin, signaling the end of European domination in world history. Now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism, some American intellectuals have turned this anti-European propaganda against the US, seemingly unaware that their critique is possible only within the orbit of the European culture they otherwise castigate and dismiss. To attack European culture is tantamount to attacking American culture as well, since the latter is but a special case of the former, which is precisely why it has been able to accept and absorb peoples and influences not only from the Western hemisphere but from all over the world. American universalism is but an extension of that same Christian universalism which for centuries has defined European identity. As Schmitt emphasized, the European equilibrium of the ius publicum Europaeum presupposed a seemingly homogeneous Christian Europe, which lasted well into the 19th century. The American project has always been a fundamentally heterogeneous undertaking and Americans have always come from the most diverse ethnic, racial, religious and linguistic backgrounds. But if there had not been some homogeneous culture to unity this diversity, there would have been no distinct American culture which, unfortunately, today many educated Europeans and Americans no longer understand and therefore have come to despise.
A paradigmatic example of this general anti-European syndrome is Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America. In an effort to vindicate the particularity of "the other," the author ends up castigating West European culture as a whole by deploying a secularized version of Christian universalism. Openly acknowledging the moralistic objectives and "mythological" character of his account,(n58) Todorov develops a "politically correct" postmodern interpretation of the Spanish conquista not to understand its historical significance but to show how it has shaped today's Western imperialist identity--one allegedly still unable to come to terms with "the other" and therefore inherently racist, ethnocentric, etc. The book closes with a discussion of "Las Casas' Prophesy" concerning the wrath that "God will vent" not only upon Spain but all of Western Europe because of its "impious, criminal and ignominious deeds perpetrated so unjustly, tyrannically and barbarously."(n59)
Todorov overlooks not only the generally religious framework of Las Casas' prophesy, but also the idiosyncratically Western concept of justice the Dominican bishop deployed. Having ontologized a humanism derived from the Western axiological patrimony, he does not realize the extent to which his postmodernism has already reduced "the other" to "the same," precisely in his effort to vindicate its particularity.(n60) Worse yet, inhibited by his "politically correct" moralism, he not only provides a ridiculous, if academically fashionable, explanation for the Spaniards' success,(n61) but he manages to subvert his own arguments with the very evidence he adduces to support them. He claims that the "present" is more important to him than the past, but in defining genocide he makes no reference whatsoever to either the Armenians or the Holocaust as reference points. Consequently, his claim that "the sixteenth century perpetuated the greatest genocide in human history"(n62) remains not only unsubstantiated but falsified. By his own account, most of the victims died of diseases and other indirect causes: "The Spaniards did not undertake a direct extermination of these millions of Indians, nor could they have done so." The main causes were three, and "the Spaniards responsibility is inversely proportional to the number of victims deriving from each of them: 1. By direct murder, during wars or outside them: a high number, nonetheless relatively small; direct responsibility. 2. By consequence of bad treatment: a high number; a (barely) less direct responsibility. 3. By diseases, by `microbe shock': the majority of the population; an indirect and diffused responsibility."(n63)
Todorov does acknowledge that Columbus was motivated by the "universal victory of Christianity" and that it was Columbus' medieval mentality that led him "to discover America and inaugurate the modern era."(n64) His greatest infraction, however, was that he conquered land rather than people, i.e., he was more interested in nature than in the Indians, which he is treated as "the other", "Columbus summary perception of the Indians [is] a mixture of authoritarianism and condescension . . . In Columus' hermeneutics human beings have no particular place."(n65) Had Todorov set aside his abstract moralizing, he may have realized that the conquest of the New World was primarily a land appropriation. It is not surprising, therefore, that the conquerors thought they were bringing "civilization" to those they conquered--something probably also true of the Mongols who invaded and colonized China, Russia and a few other which, by contrast, had higher than thier own.
The ideological slant of The Conquest of America is by no means unusual. Long before, Schmitt noted that non-European peoples who have undertaken conquest, land appropriations, etc. were not being tarred with the same brush as Europeans.(n66) Unlike Todorov's moralistic tirade, The Nomos of the Earth is dressed to historians and jurists. In no ways does Schmitt excuse the atrocities committed by the Spanish, but rather explains how they were possible in the given circumstances. "The Land Appropriation of a New World" begins with a discussion of the lines drawn by the European powers to divide the world. In this connection, Schmitt discusses the meaning of "beyond the line," which meant beyondn the reach of European law: " At this`line' Europe ended and `New World' began. At any rate, European law -- `European public law' -- ended. Consequently, so did the bracketing of war achieved by the former European international law, meaning the struggle for land appropriations knew no bounds. Beyond the line was an `overseas' zone in which, for want of any legal limits to war, only, the law of the stronger applied."n(67) For Todorov, it is a much simpler explanation: "Far from central government, far from royal law, all prohibitions give way, the social link, already loosened, snaps, revealing not a primitive nature, the beast sleeping in each of us, but a modern being? one with a great future in fact, restrained by no morality and inflicting death because and when he pleases."(n68) The Spaniards are simply racist, ethno-centric, ruthless exploiters, etc., i.e., modern -- they already exhibited traits Todorov claims are characteristic of Western identity.
Of particular interest here are Todorov's comments on Vitoria and the concept of a "just war," since most of Schmitt's chapter is devoted to these subjects. By his own admission, Todorov mixes (in fact, confuses) medieval and modern categories. This is particularly true in the case of Vitoria. Todorov observes that: "Vitoria demolishes the contemporary justifications of the wars waged in America, but nonetheless conceives that `just wars' are possible."(n69) More to the point: "We are accustomed to seeing Vitoria as a defender of the Indians; but if we question, not the subject's intentions, hut the impact of his discourses, it is clear that . . . under the cover of an international law based on reciprocity, he in reality supplies a legal basis to the wars of colonization which had hitherto had none (none which, in any case, might withstand serious consideration)."(n70) But there was no "international law based on reciprocity." Here Todorov is simply transposing modern categories to medieval matters for his own ideological purposes.
Unlike Todorov, Schmitt places the problem in perspective: "For 400 years, from the 16th to the 20th century, the structure of European international law was determined by a fundamental course of events the conquest of the New World. Then, as later, there were numerous positions taken with respect to the justice or injustice of the conquista. Nevertheless, the fundamental problem the justification of European land appropriations as a whole -- was seldom addressed in any systematic way outside moral and legal questions. In fact, only one monograph deals with this problem systematically and confronts it squarely in terms of international law.... It is the famous relectiones of Francisco de Vitoria."(n71) Vitoria rejected the contrary opinions of other theologians and treated Christians and non-Christians alike. He did not even accept discovery, which was the recognized basis of legal title from the 1 6th to the 1 8th century, as legitimate. More to the point, he considered global lines beyond which the distinction between justice and injustice was suspended not only a sin but an appalling crime. However: "Vitoria's view of the conquista was ultimately altogether positive. Most significant for him was the fait accompli of Christianization. . . . The positive conclusion is reached only by means of general concepts and with the aid of objective arguments in support of a just war.... If barbarians opposed the right of free passage and free missions, of liberum commercium and free propaganda, then they would violate the existing rights of the Spanish according to ius gentium; if the peaceful treaties of the Spanish were of no avail, then they had grounds for a just war."(n72)
The papal missionary mandate was the legal foundation of the conquista. This was not only the pope's position but also that of the Catholic rulers of Spain. Vitoria's arguments were entirely consistent with the spatial order and the international law of the respublica Christiana. One cannot apply modern categories to a medieval context without distorting both: "In the Middle Ages, a just war could he a just war of aggression. Clearly, the formal structure of the two concepts of justice are completely different. As far as the substance of medieval justice is concerned, however, it should be remembered that Vitoria's doctrine of a just war is argued on the basis of a missionary mandate issued by a potestas spiritualis that was not only institutionally stable but intellectually self-evident. The right of liberum commercium as well as the ius peregrinandi are to facilitate the work of Christian missions and the execution of the papal missionary mandate.... Here we are interested only in the justification of land appropriation--a question Vitoria reduced to the general problem of a just war. All significant questions of an order based on international law ultimately meet in the concept of a just war."(n73)
The Question of a New Nomos of the Earth
Following chapters on "The Land Appropriation of a New World" and "The Ius Publicum Europaeum," Schmitt concludes his book with a chapter titled "The Question of a New Nomos of the Earth, which is concerned primarily with the transformation of the concept of war. Clearly, this problem was uppermost in Schmitt's mind following Germany's total defeat in WWII and the final destruction of the European system of states. But he had already devoted a treatise to the development of a discriminatory concept of war following WWI,(n74) and in 1945 he wrote a legal opinion on the criminality of aggressive war.(n75) Despite whatever self-serving motives he may have had in writing these works,(n76) they are consistent with the historical and juridical structure of international law during the respublica Christiana, the ius publicum Europaeum, and what remains of international law today.
This progression can be put into perspective by following Schmitt's discussion of Vitoria's legacy: "Vitoria was in no sense one of the `forerunners of modern lawyers dealing with constitutional questions.'. . . Abstracted entirely from spatial viewpoints, Vitoria's ahistorical method generalizes many European historical concepts specific to the ius gentium of the Middle Ages (such as yolk prince and war) and thereby strips them of their historical particularity."(n77) In this context, Schmitt mentions the works of Ernest Nys, which paved the way for the popularization of Vitoria's ideas after WWI but who, because of his belief in humanitarian progress, also contributed to the criminalization of aggressive war. This was also true of James Brown Scott, the leading American expert on international law, who blatantly instrumentalized Vitoria's doctrines concerning free trade (liberum commercium, the freedom of propaganda, and a just war) to justify American economic imperialism. Schmitt sums up Sctott's argument as follows: "War should cease to be simply a legally recognized matter or only one of legal indifference; rather, it should again become a just war in which the aggressor as such is declared a felon in the full criminal sense of the word. The former right to neutrality, grounded in the international law of the ius publicum Europaeum and based on the equivalence of just and unjust war, should also and accordingly be eliminated."(n78)
Here then is the crux of the matter. Vitoria's thinking is based on the international law obtaining during the Christian Middle Ages rather than on the international law between states established with the ius publicum Europaeum. Moreover, as Schmitt points out, Vitoria was not a jurist but a theologian: "Based on relations between states, post-medieval international law from the 1 6th to the 20th century sought to repress the iusta causa. The formal reference point for the determination of a just war was no longer the authority of the Church in international law but rather the equal sovereignty of states. Instead of iusta causa, the order of international law between states was based on iustus hostis; any war between states, between equal sovereigns, was legitimate. On the basis of this juridical formalization, a rationalization and humanization--a bracketing--of war was achieved for 200 years." The turn to "the modern age in the history of international law was accomplished by a dual division of two lines of thought that were inseparable in the Middle Ages -- the definitive separation of moral-theological from juridical-political arguments and the equally important separation of the question of iusta causa, grounded in moral arguments and natural law," from the juridical question of iustus hostis, distinguished from the criminal, i.e., from object of punitive action."(n79)
With the end of the ius publicum Europaeum, the concept of war changed once again: moralistic (rather than theologically-based) arguments became confused with political arguments, and the iusta causa displaced the just enemy (iustus hostis). Accordingly, war became a crime and the aggressor a criminal, which means that the current distinction between just and unjust war lacks any relation to Vitoria and does not even attempt to determine the iusta causa.(n80) According to Schmitt: "If today some formulas of the doctrine of a just war rooted in the concrete order of the medieval respublica Christiana are utilized in modern and global formulas, this does not signify a return to, but rather a fundamental transformation of concepts of enemy, war, concrete order and justice presupposed in medieval doctrine."(n81) This transformation is crucial to any consideration of a new nomos of the earth because these concepts must be rooted in a concrete order. Lacking such an order or nomos, these free-floating concepts do not constitute institutional standards but have only the value of ideological slogans.
Unimpressed with the duration of the Cold War and its mixture of neither war nor peace, Schmitt speculated on the possibility of the eventual development of what he called GroBetaraume(n82) -- larger spatial entities, similar to but not synonymous with federations or blocs --displacing states and constituting a new nomos.(n83) Since his death in 1985 and the subsequent collapse of communism, the likelihood of his diagnosis and prognosis has increased. While the international situation remains confused and leading intellectuals such as Fukuyama and Huntington, unable to think behind predominant liberal democratic categories, can only recycle new versions of the old Wilsonianism, Schmitt's vision of a world of GroBetaraume as a new geopolitical configuration may well be in the process of being realized.
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, weimar, années 20, années 30, années 40, théorie politique, carl schmitt, politologie, sciences politiques | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 12 août 2011
Carl Schmitt's Decisionism
Carl Schmitt's Decisionism
Paul Hirst
Ex: http://freespeechproject.com/
Since 1945 Western nations have witnessed a dramatic reduction in the variety of positions in political theory and jurisprudence. Political argument has been virtually reduced to contests within liberal-democratic theory. Even radicals now take representative democracy as their unquestioned point of departure. There are, of course, some benefits following from this restriction of political debate. Fascist, Nazi and Stalinist political ideologies are now beyond the pale. But the hegemony of liberal-democratic political agreement tends to obscure the fact that we are thinking in terms which were already obsolete at the end of the nineteenth century.
Nazism and Stalinism frightened Western politicians into a strict adherence to liberal democracy. Political discussion remains excessively rigid, even though the liberal-democratic view of politics is grossly at odds with our political condition. Conservative theorists like Hayek try to re-create idealized political conditions of the mid nineteenth century. In so doing, they lend themselves to some of the most unsavoury interests of the late twentieth century - those determined to exploit the present undemocratic political condition. Social-democratic theorists also avoid the central question of how to ensure public accountability of big government. Many radicals see liberal democracy as a means to reform, rather than as what needs to be reformed. They attempt to extend governmental action, without devising new means of controlling governmental agencies. New Right thinkers have reinforced the situation by pitting classical liberalism against democracy, individual rights against an interventionist state. There are no challenges to representative democracy, only attempts to restrict its functions. The democratic state continues to be seen as a sovereign public power able to assure public peace.
The terms of debate have not always been so restricted. In the first three decades of this century, liberal-democratic theory and the notion of popular sovereignty through representative government were widely challenged by many groups. Much of this challenge, of course, was demagogic rhetoric presented on behalf of absurd doctrines of social reorganization. The anti-liberal criticism of Sorel, Maurras or Mussolini may be occassionally intriguing, but their alternatives are poisonous and fortunately, no longer have a place in contemporary political discussion. The same can be said of much of the ultra-leftist and communist political theory of this period.
Other arguments are dismissed only at a cost. The one I will consider here - Carl Schmitt's 'decisionism' - challenges the liberal-democratic theory of sovereignty in a way that throws considerable light on contemporary political conditions. His political theory before the Nazi seizure of power shared some assumptions with fascist political doctrine and he did attempt to become the 'crown jurist' of the new Nazi state. Nevertheless, Schmitt's work asks hard questions and points to aspects of political life too uncomfortable to ignore. Because his thinking about concrete political situations is not governed by any dogmatic political alternative, it exhibits a peculiar objectivity.
Schmitt's situational judgement stems from his view of politics or, more correctly, from his view of the political as 'friend-enemy' relations, which explains how he could change suddenly from contempt for Hitler to endorsing Nazism. If it is nihilistic to lack substantial ethical standards beyond politics, then Schmitt is a nihilist. In this, however, he is in the company of many modern political thinkers. What led him to collaborate with the Nazis from March 1933 to December 1936 was not, however, ethical nihilism, but above all concern with order. Along with many German conservatives, Schmitt saw the choice as either Hitler or chaos. As it turned out, he saved his life but lost his reputation. He lived in disrepute in the later years of the Third Reich, and died in ignominy in the Federal Republic. But political thought should not be evaluated on the basis of the authors' personal political judgements. Thus the value of Schmitt's work is not diminished by the choices he made.
Schmitt's main targets are the liberal-constitutional theory of the state and the parliamentarist conception of politics. In the former, the state is subordinated to law; it becomes the executor of purposes determined by a representative legislative assembly. In the latter, politics is dominated by 'discussion,' by the free deliberation of representatives in the assembly. Schmitt considers nineteenth-century liberal democracy anti-political and rendered impotent by a rule-bound legalism, a rationalistic concept of political debate, and the desire that individual citizens enjoy a legally guaranteed 'private' sphere protected from the state. The political is none of these things. Its essence is struggle.
In The Concept of the Political Schmitt argues that the differentia specifica of the political, which separates it from other spheres of life, such as religion or economics, is friend-enemy relations. The political comes into being when groups are placed in a relation of emnity, where each comes to perceive the other as an irreconcilable adversary to be fought and, if possible, defeated. Such relations exhibit an existential logic which overrides the motives which may have brought groups to this point. Each group now faces an opponent, and must take account of that fact: 'Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms itself into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friends and enemy.' The political consists not in war or armed conflict as such, but precisely in the relation of emnity: not competition but confrontation. It is bound by no law: it is prior to no law.
For Schmitt: 'The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.' States arise as a means of continuing, organizing and channeling political struggle. It is political struggle which gives rise to political order. Any entity involved in friend-enemy relations is by definition political, whatever its origin or the origin of the differences leading to emnity: 'A religious community which wages wars against members of others religious communities or engages in other wars is already more than a religious community; it is a political entity.' The political condition arises from the struggle of groups; internal order is imposed to pursue external conflict. To view the state as the settled and orderly administration of a territory, concerned with the organization of its affairs according to law, is to see only the stabilized results of conflict. It is also to ignore the fact that the state stands in a relation of emnity to other states, that it holds its territory by means of armed force and that, on this basis of a monopoly of force, it can make claims to be the lawful government of that territory. The peaceful, legalistic, liberal bourgeoisie is sitting on a volcano and ignoring the fact. Their world depends on a relative stabilization of conflict within the state, and on the state's ability to keep at bay other potentially hostile states.
For Hobbes, the political state arises from a contract to submit to a sovereign who will put an end to the war of all against all which must otherwise prevail in a state of nature - an exchange of obediance for protection. Schmitt starts where Hobbes leaves off - with the natural condition between organized and competing groups or states. No amount of discussion, compromise or exhortation can settle issues between enemies. There can be no genuine agreement, because in the end there is nothing to agree about. Dominated as it is by the friend-enemy alternative, the political requires not discussion but decision. No amount of reflection can change an issue which is so existentially primitive that it precludes it. Speeches and motions in assemblies should not be contraposed to blood and iron but with the moral force of the decision, because vacillating parliamentarians can also cause considerable bloodshed.
In Schmitt's view, parliamentarism and liberalism existed in a particular historical epoch between the 'absolute' state of the seventeenth century and the 'total state' of the twentieth century. Parliamentary discussion and a liberal 'private sphere' presupposed the depoliticization of a large area of social, economic and cultural life. The state provided a legally codified order within which social customs, economic competition, religious beliefs, and so on, could be pursued without becoming 'political.' 'Politics' as such ceases to be exclusively the atter of the state when 'state and society penetrate each other.' The modern 'total state' breaks down the depoliticization on which such a narrow view of politics could rest:
Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains - religion, culture, education, the economy - then cease to be neutral. . . Against such neutralizations and depoliticizations of important domains appears the total state, which potentially embraces every domain. This results in the identity of the state and society. In such a state. . . everything is at least potentially political, and in referring to the state it is no longer possible to assert for it a specifically political characteristic.
Democracy and liberalism are fundamentally antagonistic. Democracy does away with the depoliticizations characteristic of rule by a narrow bourgeois stratum insulated from popular demands. Mass politics means a broadening of the agenda to include the affairs of all society - everything is potentially political. Mass politics also threatens existing forms of legal order. The politicization of all domains increases pressure on the state by multiplying the competing interests demanding action; at the same time, the function of the liberal legal framework - the regulating of the 'private sphere' - become inadequate. Once all social affairs become political, the existing constitutional framework threatens the social order: politics becomes a contest of organized parties seeking to prevail rather than to acheive reconciliation. The result is a state bound by law to allow every party an 'equal chance' for power: a weak state threatened with dissolution.
Schmitt may be an authoritarian conservative. But his diagnosis of the defects of parliamentarism and liberalism is an objective analysis rather than a mere restatement of value preferences. His concept of 'sovereignty' is challenging because it forces us to think very carefully about the conjuring trick which is 'law.' Liberalism tries to make the state subject to law. Laws are lawful if properly enacted according to set procedures; hence the 'rule of law.' In much liberal-democratic constitutional doctrine the legislature is held to be 'sovereign': it derives its law-making power from the will of the people expressed through their 'representatives.' Liberalism relies on a constituting political moment in order that the 'sovereignty' implied in democratic legislatures be unable to modify at will not only specific laws but also law-making processes. It is therefore threatened by a condition of politics which converts the 'rule of law' into a merely formal doctrine. If this 'rule of law' is simply the people's will expressed through their representatives, then it has no determinate content and the state is no longer substantially bound by law in its actions.
Classical liberalism implies a highly conservative version of the rule of law and a sovereignty limited by a constitutive political act beyond the reach of normal politics. Democracy threatens the parliamentary-constitutional regime with a boundless sovereign power claimed in the name of the 'people.' This reveals that all legal orders have an 'outside'; they rest on a political condition which is prior to and not bound by the law. A constitution can survive only if the constituting political act is upheld by some political power. The 'people' exist only in the claims of that tiny minority (their 'representatives') which functions as a 'majority' in the legislative assembly. 'Sovereignty' is thus not a matter of formal constitutional doctrine or essentially hypocritical references to the 'people'; it is a matter of determining which particular agency has the capacity - outside of law - to impose an order which, because it is political, can become legal.
Schmitt's analysis cuts through three hundred years of political theory and public law doctrine to define sovereignty in a way that renders irrelevant the endless debates about principles of political organization or the formal constitutional powers of different bodies.
From a practical or theoretical perspective, it really does not matter whether an abstract scheme advanced to define sovereignty (namely, that sovereignty is the highest power, not a derived power) is acceptable. About an abstract concept there will be no argument. . . What is argued about is the concrete application, and that means who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes the public interest or interest of the state, public safety and order, le salut public, and so on. The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like, but it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law.
Brutally put: ' Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' The sovereign is a definite agency capable of making a decision, not a legitimating category (the 'people') or a purely formal definition (plentitude of power, etc.). Sovereignty is outside the law, since the actions of the sovereign in the state of exception cannot be bound by laws since laws presuppose a normal situation. To claim that this is anti-legal is to ignore the fact that all laws have an outside, that they exist because of a substantiated claim on the part of some agency to be the dominant source of binding rules within a territory. The sovereign determines the possibility of the 'rule of law' by deciding on the exception: 'For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.'
Schmitt's concept of the exception is neither nihilistic nor anarchistic, it is concerned with the preservation of the state and the defence of legitimately constituted government and the stable institutions of society. He argues that ' the exception is different from anarchy and chaos.' It is an attempt to restore order in a political sense. While the state of exception can know no norms, the actions of the sovereign within the state must be governed by what is prudent to restore order. Barbaric excess and pure arbitrary power are not Schmitt's objecty. power is limited by a prudent concern for the social order; in the exception, 'order in the juristic sense still prevails, even if it is not of the ordinary kind.' Schmitt may be a relativist with regard to ultimate values in politics. But he is certainly a conservative concerned with defending a political framework in which the 'concrete orders' of society can be preserved, which distinguishes his thinking from both fascism and Nazism in their subordination of all social institutions to such idealized entities as the Leader and the People. For Schmitt, the exception is never the rule, as it is with fascism and Nazism. If he persists in demonstrating how law depends on politics, the norm on the exception, stability on struggle, he points up the contrary illusions of fascism and Nazism. In fact, Schmitt's work can be used as a critique of both. The ruthless logic in his analsysis of the political, the nature of soveriegnty, and the exception demonstrates the irrationality of fascism and Nazism. The exception cannot be made the rule in the 'total state' without reducing society to such a disorder through the political actions of the mass party that the very survival of the state is threatened. The Nazi state sought war as the highest goal in politics, but conducted its affairs in such a chaotic way that its war-making capacity was undermined and its war aims became fatally overextended. Schmitt's friend-enemy thesis is concerned with avoiding the danger that the logic of the political will reach its conclusion in unlimited war.
Schmitt modernizes the absolutist doctrines of Bodin and Hobbes. His jurisprudence restores - in the exception rather than the norm - the sovereign as uncommanded commander. For Hobbes, lawas are orders given by those with authority - authoritas non veritas facit legem. Confronted with complex systems of procedural limitation in public law and with the formalization of law into a system, laws become far more complex than orders. Modern legal positivism could point to a normal liberal-parliamentary legal order which did and still does appear to contradict Hobbes. Even in the somewhat modernized form of John Austin, the Hobbesian view of sovereignty is rejected on all sides. Schmitt shared neither the simplistic view of Hobbes that this implies, nor the indifference of modern legal positivism to the political foundation of law. He founded his jurisprudence neither on the normal workings of the legal order nor on the formal niceties of constitutional doctrine, but on a condition quite alien to them. 'Normalcy' rests not on legal or constitutional conditions but on a certain balance of political forces, a certain capacity of the state to impose order by force should the need arise. This is especially true of liberal-parliamentary regimes, whose public law requires stablization of political conflicts and considerable police and war powers even to begin to have the slightest chance of functioning at all. Law cannot itself form a completely rational and lawful system; the analysis of the state must make reference to those agencies which have the capacity to decide on the state of exception and not merely a formal plentitude of power.
In Political Theology Schmitt claims that the concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts. This is obvious in the case of the concept of sovereignty, wherein the omnipotent lawgiver is a mundane version of an all-powerful God. He argues that liberalism and parliamentarism correspond to deist views of God's action through constant and general natural laws. His own view is a form of fundamentalism in which the exception plays the same role in relation to the state as the miracles of Jesus do in confirming the Gospel. The exception reveals the legally unlimited capacity of whoever is sovereign within the state. In conventional, liberal-democratic doctrine the people are sovereign; their will is expressed through representatives. Schmitt argues that modern democracy is a form of populism in that the people are mobilized by propaganda and organized interests. Such a democracy bases legitimacy on the people's will. Thus parliament exists on the sufferance of political parties, propaganda agencies and organized interest which compete for popular 'consent.' When parliamentary forms and the rule of 'law' become inadequate to the political situation, they will be dispensed with in the name of the people: 'No other constitutional institution can withstand the sole criterion of the people's will, however it is expressed.'
Schmitt thus accepts the logic of Weber's view of plebiscitarian democracy and the rise of bureaucratic mass parties, which utterly destroy the old parliamentary notables. He uses the nineteenth-century conservatives Juan Donoso Cortes to set the essential dilemma in Political Theology: either a boundless democracy of plebiscitarian populism which will carry us wherever it will (i.e. to Marxist or fascist domination) or a dictatorship. Schmitt advocates a very specific form of dictatorship in a state of exception - a "commissarial' dictatorship, which acts to restore social stability, to preserve the concrete orders of society and restore the constitution. The dictator has a constitutional office. He acts in the name of the constitution, but takes such measures as are necessary to preserve order. these measures are not bound by law; they are extralegal.
Schmitt's doctrine thus involves a paradox. For all its stress on friend-enemy relations, on decisive political action, its core, its aim, is the maintenance of stability and order. It is founded on a political non-law, but not in the interest of lawlessness. Schmitt insists that the constitution must be capable of meeting the challenge of the exception, and of allowing those measures necessary to preserve order. He is anti-liberal because he claims that liberalism cannot cope with the reality of the political; it can only insist on a legal formalism which is useless in the exceptional case. He argues that only those parties which are bound to uphold the constitution should be allowed an 'equal chance' to struggle for power. Parties which threaten the existing order and use constitutional means to challenge the constitution should be subject to rigorous control.
Schmitt's relentless attack on 'discussion' makes most democrats and radicals extremely hostile to his views. He is a determined critic of the Enlightenment. Habermas's 'ideal speech situation', in which we communicate without distortion to discover a common 'emancipatory interest', would appear to Schmitt as a trivial philosophical restatement of Guizot's view that in representative government, ' through discussion the powers-that-be are obliged to seek truth in common." Schmitt is probably right. Enemies have nothing to discuss and we can never attain a situation in which the friend-enemy distinction is abolished. Liberalism does tend to ignore the exception and the more resolute forms of political struggle.
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, décisionisme, carl schmitt, révolution conservatrice, catholicisme, allemagne, weimar, années 20, années 30, années 40, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
jeudi, 11 août 2011
Keith Preston: Understanding Carl Schmitt
Keith Preston: Understanding Carl Schmitt
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : carl schmit, philosophie, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, weimar, années 20, années 30, années 40, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 07 août 2011
Sommerakademie zur Konservativen Revolution
Sommerakademie zur Konservativen Revolution
Seit dem verheerenden Attentat in Norwegen haben bestimmte Kausalketten wieder Konjunktur. Beispielsweise wenn Volker Weiß bei Spiegelonline irgendein Zitat Oswald Spenglers für die Tat verantwortlich macht. Treffen will Weiß damit die ganze sogenannnte Konservative Revolution und möglichst auch jede Art von Demokratiekritik, die nicht von links kommt.
Carl Schmitt nannte solche Konstrukte „irreale Bedingungssätze“: Wenn Oswald Spengler nicht gelebt hätte, wäre Breivik nicht zum Mörder geworden. So einfach (in doppelter Hinsicht) kann Geistesgeschichte sein. Wir wollen Weiß auf seinen simplen Pfaden nicht folgen, sondern uns grundsätzlich mit dem Phänomen „Konservative Revolution“ auseinandersetzen, das immer wieder in einen Ruf gerät, der in einem so merkwürdigen Widerspruch zu seiner tatsächlichen Wirkungslosigkeit steht.
Die 12.Sommerakademie des IfS wird sich daher vom 16. bis 18. September 2011 dem Thema „Konservative Revolution“ widmen. Dabei geht es nicht um das Herunterbeten der fünf Mohlerschen Hauptgruppen, sondern um die gegenwärtig gültigen Gedanken dieser Geistesrichtung. Daher wird es nach einer ausführlichen Einleitung durch Karlheinz Weißmann u.a. um folgende Themen gehen: den Zusammenhang von Politik und Lebensreform, den Gedanken einer schöpferischen Restauration, um Heideggers konservative Revolution der Philosophie, um das Verhältnis von Deutschtum und Christentum…
Wie immer: 40 Teilnehmerplätze, sieben Vorträge, Film, Diskussionen, Sport: Wenn Sie 35 Jahre oder jünger sind, können und sollten Sie teilnehmen! Die 11. Winterakademie wird nicht in Schnellroda stattfinden, sondern in der Region zwischen Hannover und Kassel! Der Ausweichort ist gut mit der Bahn erreichbar. Genaue Informationen gibt es nach der Anmeldung. Die Hörerbeiträge sind nicht hoch, wer Geld verdient, bezahlt für zwei Übernachtungen, Vollpension und alle Vorträge 80,00 €, alle anderen bezahlen 35,00 €. Und: Keiner sollte wegen finanzieller Engpässe fernbleiben. Rufen Sie uns an, falls es knapp wird!
Tagungsfolge und Antwortbogen.
00:05 Publié dans Evénement, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : événement, allemagne, révolution conservatrice, histoire | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 02 août 2011
Arnolt Bronnen: Entre o Communismo e o Nacional-Socialismo
Arnolt Bronnen: Entre o Comunismo e o Nacional-Socialismo
00:08 Publié dans Histoire, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : allemagne, weimar, communisme, national-socialisme, années 30, années 40 | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 27 juillet 2011
Oswald Spengler ed il senso metapolitico del declino occidentale
Oswald Spengler ed il senso metapolitico del declino occidentale
Luca Valentini
Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/
La crisi morale, oltre che economica e finanziaria, che attualmente attanaglia l’Italia, le farsesche vicende dell’attuale cricca di potere al governo, spesso conducono anche i più acuti osservatori a smarrire quella visione d’insieme e di lontani orizzonti che dovrebbe sempre caratterizzare una visione del mondo e della vita autenticamente tradizionale, cioè fondata e determinata su principi dall’Alto.
E’ importante tale precisazione, perché, al di là delle giuste analisi sociologico-politiche, delle doverose battaglie per il benessere del Popolo Italiano, mai si dovrebbe dimenticare che l’ampiezza della crisi va ben oltre il nostro Paese e che le radici sono ben più profonde di ciò che ai nostri occhi si manifesta, essendo il piano finanziario solamente una risultante di un processo degenerativo, che interessa, nelle sue profondità abissali, i caratteri più interni dell’intera civilizzazione occidentale, nel suo spirito, nella sua moderna involuzione, nelle imboscate e nei tradimenti che essa ha subito.
Riferirsi a Oswald Spengler ed a ciò che ha espresso nelle sue opere, particolarmente nel Il Tramonto dell’Occidente, come noi faremo sinteticamente in questo articolo, ha proprio la determinata volontà di mettere in risalto codesto piano d’osservazione, un orizzonte che va ben oltre la semplice narrazione storicistica o i lineari ed apparentemente confusi e contradditori accadimenti del quotidiano, ma che vuole riaprire una riflessione, un ragionamento all’interno della nostra comunità sull’essenzialità di un approfondimento metapolitico che è e deve essere un approfondimento sulla nostra civiltà, sulla decadenza secolare che la caratterizza, nel rapporto della Tradizione Europea – che dal nostro punto di vista è essenzialmente Tradizione elleno-romano-germanica – con la sfera del Sacro, con l’esplicitazione nell’istituzione statuale, fino alle più ramificate e secondarie sezioni dello sviluppo produttivo e sociale: “Le civiltà sono degli organismi. La storia mondiale è la loro biografia complessiva” (da Il Tramonto dell’Occidente).
Un’analisi che valorizzi e ridesti il senso nascosto, occulto, quella terza dimensione della storia che molti smarriscono, insieme con quei punti di riferimento che unici possono stabilire un preciso quanto indispensabile percorso di autoriconoscimento identitario per la nostra comunità, per chi ricerca nell’impegno politico e culturale l’Uomo Nuovo e Differenziato dalla modernità, dalla pandemia inarrestabile che conduce oramai da diversi secoli l’intero Occidente – e con esso tutto il resto del mondo – verso un baratro di cui non si riescono a vedere vie d’uscita o possibilità di risalita. Per riferirci direttamente a Oswald Spengler, si rammenti come affermasse esserci un ciclo vitale per ogni singola civiltà, quasi fosse la stessa un vero e proprio ente animico, con una precisa contezza di se stesso. In riferimento all’Occidente sarebbe esistita prima la civiltà greco-romana, sorta grazie alle migrazioni indoeuropee in Grecia e nella penisola italica, che lo stesso ha definito “apollinea”, seguita da una civiltà germanica o detta “faustiana”. Entrambe queste Kultur hanno in sé un simbolo esprimente il proprio spirito vitale: Apollo, divinità della forma e della misura, dell’equilibrio interno, spirituale ed estetico; Faust, il personaggio creato da Goethe, come aspirazione perpetua che tenta di colmare lo iato tra l’esistenza parziale e limitata dell’Uomo e le altezze metafisiche della Divinità Trascendente. L’odierna società, pertanto, è il prodotto dell’esaurimento di tale forza originaria, di tale spirito ancestrale, lo spegnimento progressivo di ogni slancio oltre l’umano, di ogni classica forma interna: “Ognuna ha la sua fanciullezza, la sua gioventù, la sua età virile e la sua senilità (da Il Tramonto dell’Occidente)”.
A tal punto, partendo proprio da questa presa di coscienza, che dovrà risultare quanto più profonda e lucidamente attiva, si può accennare a ciò può e deve essere il senso di una militanza, di un impegno politico-culturale. Nella fase finale di questo ciclo, in questa umanità parodistica, l’unica via da percorrere è quella che conduce alla fedeltà nel proprio essere, alla costruzione di una comunità di uomini e di donne, conscia delle proprie radici e fiera della propria diversità dal resto del mondo. La lotta interna per la nascita di uomo che tragga da sé la legge da osservare, che sia impassibile ed inattaccabile di fronte alla marea che tutto corrompe, un uomo che con il suo essere sia esempio e trasmissione di Tradizione, questa la via d’onore che i nostri cuori hanno il diritto di percorrere. Il nostro ed unico scopo è quello, pertanto, anche grazie a questo giornale, di mettere a disposizione di quanti possano e vogliano le nostre umili conoscenze di studio e di ricerca tradizionali, per “fare ciò che deve essere fatto”, come Evola ci ricorda, e per rimanere fedeli all’Idea, che può essere valorosamente servita solo se da Spengler si assume la consapevolezza del mondo in cui siamo stati destinati a vivere: “…civiltà crepuscolare che è – scrive su La Vita italiana Evola riferendosi agli scritti di Spengler – una civiltà delle masse, civiltà antiqualitativa, inorganica, urbanistica, livellatrice, intimamente anarchica, demagogica, antitradizionale”.
* * *
Pubblicato sul periodico d’informazione politica Il Megafono, anno 2011.
Luca Valentini
00:05 Publié dans Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : oswald spengler, allemagne, philosophie, déclin, décadence, weimar, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 23 juillet 2011
Carl Schmitt: Total Enemy, Total State & Total War
Total Enemy, Total State, & Total War
Carl SCHMITT
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Translated by Simona Draghici
Editor’s Note:
The following translation from Carl Schmitt appears online for the first time in commemoration of Schmitt’s birth on July 11, 1888. The translation originally appeared in Carl Schmitt, Four Essays, 1931–1938, ed. and trans. Simona Draghici (Washington, D.C.: Plutarch Press, 1999).
I
In a certain sense, there have been total wars at all times; a theory of the total war, however, presumably dates only from the time of Clausewitz who would talk of “abstract” and “absolute” wars.”[1] Later on, under the impact of the experiences of the last Great War, the formula of total war has acquired a specific meaning and a particular effectiveness. Since 1920, it has become the prevailing catchword. It was first brought out in sharp relief in the French literature, in book titles like La guerre totale. Afterwards, between 1926 and 1928, it found its way into the language of the proceedings of the disarmament committee at Geneva. In concepts such as “war potential” (potentiel de guerre), “moral disarmament” (désarmement moral) and “total disarmament” (désarmement total). The fascist doctrine of the “total state” came to it by way of the state; the association yielded the conceptual pair: total state, total war. In Germany, the publication of the Concept of the Political has since 1927 expanded the pair of totalities to a set of three: total enemy, total war, total state. Ernst Jünger’s book of 1930 Total Mobilization made the formula part of the general consciousness. Nonetheless, it was only Ludendorff’s 1936 booklet entitled Der Totale Krieg (The Total War) that lent it an irresistible force and caused its dissemination beyond all bounds.
The formula is omnipresent; it forces into view a truth whose horrors the general consciousness would rather shun. Such formulas, however, are always in danger of becoming widespread nationally and internationally and of being degraded to summary slogans, to mere gramophone records of the publicity mill. Hence some clarifications may be appropriate.
(a) A war may be total in the sense of summoning up one’s strength to the limit, and of the commitment of everything to the last reserves.[2] It may also be called total in the sense of the unsparing use of war means of annihilation. When the well-known English author J. F. C. Fuller writes in a recent article, entitled “The First of the League Wars, Its Lessons and Omens,” that the Italian campaign in Abyssinia was a modern total war, he only refers to the use of efficacious weapons (airplanes and gas), whereas looked at from another vantage point, Abyssinia in fact was not capable of waging a modern total war nor did Italy use its reserves to the limit, reach the highest intensity, and lead to an oil blockade or to the closing of the Suez Canal, because of the pressure exerted through the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations.
(b) A war may be total either on both sides or on one side only. It may also be deliberately limited, rationed and measured out, because of the geographical situation, the war technique in use, and also the predominant political principles of both sides. The typical 18th-century war, the so-called “cabinet war,” was essentially and deliberately a partial war. It rested on the clear segregation of the soldiers participating in the war from the non-participant inhabitants and non-combatants. Nevertheless, the Seven Years War of Frederick the Great was relatively total, on Prussia’s side, when compared with the other powers’ mobilization of forces. A situation, typical of Germany, showed itself readily in that case: the adversity of geographical conditions and the foreign coalitions compelled a German state to mobilize its forces to a higher degree than its more affluent and fortunate bigger neighbors.[3]
(c) The character of the war may change during the belligerent showdown. The will to fight may grow limp or it may intensify, as it happened in the 1914–1918 world war, when the war trend on the German side towards the mobilization of all the economic and industrial reserves soon forced the English side to introduce general conscription.
(d) Finally, some other methods of confrontation and trial of strength, which are not total, always develop within the totality of war. Thus for a time, everyone seeks to avoid a total war which naturally carries a total risk. In this way, after the world war, there were the so-called military reprisals (the 1923 Corfu Conflict, Japan-China in 1932), followed by the attempts at non-military, economic sanctions, according to Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (against Italy, autumn 1935), and finally, certain methods of power testing on foreign soil (Spain 1936–1937) emerged in a way that could be correctly interpreted only in close connection with the total character of modern warfare. They are intermediate and transitional forms between open war and true peace; they derive their meaning from the fact that total war looms large in the background as a possibility, and an understandable caution recommends itself in the delineation of the conflictual spaces. Likewise, it is only from this point of view that they can be grasped by the science of international law.
II
The core of the matter lies in warfare. From the nature of the total war one may grasp the character and the whole aspect of state totality; from the special character of the decisive weapons one may deduce the peculiar character and aspect of the totality of war. But it is the total enemy that gives the total war its meaning.[4]
The different services and types of warfare, land warfare, sea warfare, air warfare, they each experience the totality of war in a particular way. A corresponding world of notions and ideas piles on each of these types of warfare. The traditional notions of “levée en masse” (levy), “nation armée” (nation in arms), and “Volk in Waffen” (the people in arms) belong to land warfare.[5] Out of these notions emerged the continental doctrine of total war, essentially as a doctrine of land warfare, and that thanks mainly to Clausewitz. Sea warfare, on the other hand, has its own strategic and tactical methods and criteria; moreover, until recently, it has been first and foremost a war against the opponent’s trade and economy, whence a war against non-combatants, an economic war, which by its laws of blockade, contraband, and prizes, drew neutral trade into the hostilities, as well. Air warfare has not so far built up a similar fully-fledged and independent system of its own. There is no doctrine of air warfare yet that would correspond to the world of notions and concepts accumulated with regard to land and sea warfare. Nonetheless, as a consequence of air warfare, the overall configuration sways in the main towards a three-dimensional total war.
The “if” of a total war is beyond any doubt today. The “how” may vary. The totality is perceptible from opposite vantage points. Hence the standard type of guide and leader in a total war is necessarily different. It would be too simple an equation to accept that the soldier will step into the centre of this totality as the prevailing type in a total war to the same extent as in other kinds of wars previously.[6] If, as it has been said, total mobilization abolishes the separation of the soldier from the civilian, it may very well happen that the soldier changes into a civilian as the civilian changes into a soldier, or both may change into something new, a third alternative. In reality, it all depends on the general character of the war. A real war of religion turns the soldiers into the tools of priests or preachers. A total war that is waged on behalf of the economy becomes the tool of economic power groups. There are other forms in which the soldier himself is the typical model and the ascending expression of the character of the people. Geographical conditions, racial and social peculiarities of all kinds, are factors that determine the type of warfare waged by great nations. Even today it is unlikely that a nation could engage in all the three kinds of warfare to a degree equal to the three-dimensional total war. It is probable that the centre of gravity in the deployment of forces will always rest with one or the other of the three kinds of warfare and the doctrine of total war will draw on it.[7]
Until now the history of the European peoples has been dominated by the contrast of the English sea warfare with the Continental land warfare. It is not a matter of “traders and heroes” or that sort of thing, but rather the recognition that any of the various kinds of warfare may become total, and out of its own characteristics generate a special world of notions and ideals as its own doctrine and also relevant to international and constitutional law, particularly in the assessment of the soldier’s worth and of his position in the general body of the people. It would be a mistake to regard the English sea warfare of the last three centuries in the light of the total land warfare of Clausewitz’s theory, essentially as mere trade and economic but not total warfare, and to misinterpret it as unconnected with and markedly different from totality. It is the English sea warfare that generated the kernel of a total world view.[8]
The English sea warfare is total in its capacity for total enmity. It knows how to mobilize religious, ideological, spiritual, and moral forces as only few of the great wars in world history have done. The English sea warfare against Spain was a world-wide combat of the Germanic and Romance peoples, between Protestantism and Catholicism, Calvinism and Jesuitism, and there are few instances of such outbursts of enmity as intense and final as Cromwell’s against the Spaniards. The English war against Napoleon likewise changed from a sea war into a “crusade.” In the war against Germany between 1914 and 1918, the world-wide English propaganda knew how to whip up enormous moral and spiritual energies in the name of civilization and humanity, of democracy and freedom, against the Prussian-German “militarism.” The English mind had also proved its ability to interpret the industrial-technical upsurge of the 19th century in the terms of the English worldview. Herbert Spencer drew an extremely effective picture of history that was disseminated all over the world, in countless works of popularization, the propagandistic force of which proved its worth in the 1914–1918 World War. It was the philosophy of mankind’s progress, presented as an evolution from feudalism to trade and industry, from the political to the economic, from soldiers to industrialists, from war to peace. It portrayed the soldier essentially as Prussian-German, eo ipso “feudal reactionary,” a “medieval” figure standing in the way of progress and peace. Moreover, out of its specificity, the English sea warfare evolved a full, self-contained system of international law. It asserted itself and its own concepts held on their own against the corresponding concepts of Continental international law throughout the 19th century. There is an Anglo-Saxon concept of enemy, which in essence rejects the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants, and an Anglo-Saxon conception of war that incorporates the so-called economic war. In short, the fundamental concepts and norms of this English international law are total as such and certainly indicative of an ideology in itself total.
Finally, the English constitutional regulations turned the subordination of the soldiers to the civilians into an ideological principle and imposed it upon the Continent during the liberal 19th century. By those standards, civilization lies in the rule of the bourgeois, civilian ideal which is essentially unsoldierly. Accordingly, the constitution is always but a civil-bourgeois system in which, as Clemenceau put it, the soldier’s only raison d’être is to defend the civilian bourgeois society, while basically he is subject to civilian command. The Prussian soldier state carried on a century-long political struggle on the home front against this bourgeois constitutional ideal. It succumbed to it in the Autumn of 1918. The history of Prussian Germany’s home politics from 1848 to 1918 was a ceaseless conflict between the army and parliament, an uninterrupted battle which the government had to fight with the parliament over the structure of the army, and the army budget necessary to make ready for an unavoidable war, that were determined not by the necessities of foreign policy but rather by compromises regarding internal policy. The dictate of Versailles, which stipulated the army’s organization and its equipment to the smallest detail, in an agreement of foreign policy, was preceded by half a century of periodical agreements of internal policy between the Prussian-German soldier state and its internal policy opponents, in which all the details of the organization and the equipment of the army had been decided by the internal policy. The conflict between bourgeois society and the Prussian soldier state led to an unnatural isolation of the War Office from the power of command and to many other separations, consistently rooted in the opposition between a bourgeois constitutional ideal imported from England either directly or through France and Belgium, on the one hand, and the older constitutional ideal of the German soldiery, on the other.[9]
Today Germany has surmounted that division and achieved a close integration of its soldier force.[10] Indeed, attempts will not fail to be made to describe it as militarism, in the manner of earlier propaganda methods, and to hold Germany guilty of the advent of total war. Such questions of guilt too belong to the totality of the ideological wrangles. Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes (spiritual combat is as brutal as the battles of men). Nonetheless, before nations stagger into a total war once more, one must raise the question whether a total enmity truly exists among the European nations nowadays. War and enmity belong to the history of nations. But the worst misfortune only occurs wherever the enmity is generated by the war itself, as in the 1914–1918 war, and not as it would be right and sensible, namely that an older, unswayed enmity, true and total to the Day of Judgment, should led to a total war.
Translator’s Notes
Originally published in Völkerbund und Völkerrecht, vol. 4, 1937, this essay was reproduced in Posirionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Gent-Versailles, 1929–1939, (Hamburg, 1940), pp. 235–239.
1. General Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) is best known for his book Vom Kriege, never finished and published posthumously, which incidentally has been translated into English under the title On War. There are numerous versions available in print.
2. Carl Schmitt’s own political principles of “will” and “energy,” components of his qualitative concept of total state, derive from this characteristic feature of “total war”: collective determination to assume a cause considered worthwhile and unreserved commitment to its fulfillment. As a generalized rallying around and enthusiasm for a cause and a particular course of action, it is a frequent phenomenon of social psychology, yet its usually ephemeral character makes it unfit as a durable basis of any social structure. I remember the enthusiasm with which in 1982, to a man, the Argentines, for instance, rallied to the idea of going to war to free the Maldives and hurried to put it into practice, and the accompanying hatred which grew against the British. The enthusiasm cooled off quickly, but not the hatred, which lingered on. To perpetuate the enthusiasm, a plethora of other factors have to be brought in, of which, in the case of Germany at the beginning of the ’thirties, Carl Schmitt actually had not a clue.
3. The “lesson” is in keeping with the Hitlerite Frederician cult and legitimating tradition and does not claim to be historically accurate. Although a digression that seems out of place, it has a certain significance for the time it was made. In the autumn of 1936, Hitler circulated a memorandum revealing his expansionist intentions. Then in 1937, the organization of the nation to serve those intentions began, a process which coincided with the rise of the SS state. In November of the same year the German media were ordered to keep silent about the preparations for a “total war.” Bearing all that in mind, Schmitt’s short digression reads more as a warning of danger than a point of military strategy.
4 . What is interesting here is his insistence on the existential essence of the phenomenon, which is consonant with his earlier definition of the political and at the same time renders the distinction between the professional soldier and the civilian meaningless. Moreover, total enmity with its implicit elimination of the adversary excludes any prospect of a peace treaty, as the war is to go on until one of the belligerents is annihilated.
5. Das Volk in Waffen (The Nation in Arms) happens to be the title of a work on total war by Colmar von der Goltz (1843–1916), published in 1883, and which is an important stepping stone in the reflection on modern warfare that led to Ludendorff’s book.
6. At the beginning of February 1938, Adolf Hitler became commander in chief of the German armed forces, appointing General Keitel his assistant at the head of the High Command of the Armed Forces, as the War Ministry was dissolved.
7. Eventually only the Soviet Union came closest to Carl Schmitt’s expectations, while the United States waged a fully-fledged three-dimensional war, dictated by its geographical position and sustained by its vast economic and technical resources most of which remained outside the battle zone.
8. For a broader treatment of the subject-matter see Carl Schmitt’s Land und Meer, which as Land and Sea is available in an English translation (Washington, D.C.: Plutarch Press, 1997).
9. The conflict between the civil society and the military in Germany was the subject-matter of a longer essay by Carl Schmitt, published in Hamburg in 1934 under the title Staatsgefüge und Zusammenbruch des Zweites Reiches. Der Sieg des Burgers über den Soldaten (The State Structure and the Collapse of the Second Reich. The Burghers’ Victory Over the Soldiers).
10. Röhm, the ideological soldier, had been eliminated in 1934, at the same time as the political soldiers, the Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow. Furthermore, as already mentioned in note 6 above, the War Ministry ceased to exist at the beginning of 1938, while the Commander in Chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg was removed from his post for having compromised himself by marrying a “lady with a past,” and his prospective successor, General von Fritsch was forced to resign on a trumped-up Charge of homosexuality. At the same time, sixteen other generals were retired and forty-four were transferred. Göring who had been very active in carrying out this “integration” got for it only the title of field marshal, as Hitler kept for himself the supreme military command.
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/07/total-enemy-total-state-and-total-war/
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Polémologie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : carl schmitt, guerre, politique, politologie, théorie politique, sciences politiques, philosophie, allemagne, révolution conservatrice, weimar, années 20, années 30 | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 15 juillet 2011
Herman Wirth en de Indo-Europese voorgeschiedenis
Herman Wirth en de Indo-Europese voorgeschiedenis
door Marc. EEMANS
Ex: http://marceemans.wordpress.com/
Toen het Derde Rijk ineengestort was hebben heel wat gezellen van het eerste uur gepoogd zich – met min of meer sukses – als slachtoffers van het nationaal-socialisme voor te doen. Anderzijds had de regelrechte nazi-jacht die de overwinnaars ontketenden tot gevolg dat een aantal persoonlijkheden die tot de konservatieve revolutie behoorden en vanaf het begin duidelijk afstand hadden genomen van Hitler, toch werden verdacht, vervolgd en soms zelfs gedood.
Dat was onder meer het geval met de jurist Carl Schmitt, de schrijvers Ernst en Georg Jünger en Ernst von Salomon, de wijsgeren Martin Heidegger en Hermann von Keyserling, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, een der meest eminente leden der Thule-Gesellschaft, of nog de geleerden Friedrich Hielscher en Herman Wirth.
Ernst Jünger bracht de oorlog door te Parijs, als Duits officier. Hij had kennis van het tegen Hitler gerichte komplot van 20 juli 1944, maar was een van de weinige, zoniet de enige samenzweerder die werd gespaard. Hoe Heidegger vervolgd werd door de fanatici van het regime hebben wij hier reeds beschreven (zie: Martin Heidegger en de traditie van het Westers denken, in TK&S afl. 12, november 1980, pag. 150/11-20). Met opmerkelijke waardigheid en een stoïcisme dat dat der Oudheid evenaart, verdroeg hij zowel deze vervolging als, na 1945, die door linksen van allerlei pluimage.
Men kent Ernst von Salomons boek Der Fragebogen (1951), waarin hij de soms lachwekkende, maar altijd hatelijke aard van de “denazifikatie-riten” aanklaagt. In feite trad von Salomon nooit tot het nationaal-socialisme toe, dat hij – net als o.m. Julius Evola – zijn demagogische en plebeïsche aard verweet. Zijn vriend uit de dagen van de Brigade Ehrhardt, Hartmut Plaas, werd in 1944 omgebracht in het KZ Ravensbrück.
Datzelfde misprijzen vinden we bij Hermann von Keyserling, stichter van de School der Wijsheid, die echter toch, na de anarchie van de Weimar-republiek, de opkomst van het nationaal-socialisme begroette als een zegen voor Duitsland, maar zich dan weer plots uit alle politieke aktiviteit terugtrekt.
Rudolf von Sebottendorf kreeg last met de nazi-autoriteiten na de publikatie van zijn boek Bevor Hitler kam: het werd meteen verboden en bijna alle beschikbare eksemplaren vernietigd. Maar ook na 1945 blééf het door de Geallieerden verboden, zodat dit boek, dat voor de genesis van het nationaal-socialisme van kapitaal belang is, omzeggens onvindbaar werd, vermits het nooit heruitgegeven of vertaald werd. (1) De schrijver zelf verliet Duitsland en verdronk in 1945 in de Bosporus, in geheimzinnige omstandigheden.
Een geheimzinnig personage is ook Friedrich Hielscher. Men kent zijn naam doorgaans nog enkel omdat hij Wolfram Sievers, sekretaris-generaal van het wetenschappelijk instituut Ahnenerbe bijstond, toen die op 2 juni 1948 als “oorlogsmisdadiger” in Landsberg werd opgehangen. Hielscher zélf werd door de denazificeerders niet verontrust. Men beweerde dat hij lid zou zijn geweest van de Thule-Gesellschaft, maar in de ledenlijst van dit genootschap (opgesteld door Rudolf von Sebottendorf en door René Alleau gepubliceerd in zijn Hitler et les sociétés secrètes, Grasset, Parijs, 1969) vinden we zijn naam niet terug.
Ernst Jünger, die hem goed moet hebben gekend, noteert in zijn Parijs’ dagboek op 14 oktober 1943 “Hielscher bevestigde het vermoeden – dat ik al lang koesterde – dat hij een Kerk zou gesticht hebben. De dogmatiek is hij al voorbij en in de liturgie is hij ver gevorderd. Hij heeft mij een reeks gezangen getoond en een cyclus feesten, het heidens jaar, die een ganse ordening godheden, kleuren, dieren, spijzen, edelstenen, planten … omvat.” De konfrontatie Hielscher-Sievers, tijdens diens laatste ogenblikken, lijkt de thesis “Hielscher, kerkstichter” te bevestigen, als men tenminste geloof mag hechten aan hen die Wolfram Sievers’ martelgang beschreven. Jean-Claude Frère schrijft in zijn boek Nazisme et sociétés secrètes (Grasset, Parijs, 1974): “Toen Sievers zijn vonnis vernam, vroeg hij in zijn laatste ogenblikken te worden bijgestaan door Hielscher. Dit werd hem toegestaan; en toen kon men, aan de voet van de galg, het verbazend, krankzinnig schouwspel beleven van twee mannen die een onbekende ritus voltrokken, onbegrijpelijke formules spraken, en alle aanwezigen – tot de beul toe – zenuwachtig maakten. Tenslotte drukte Hielscher Sievers tegen zich aan, de veroordeelde trad achteruit, boog voor zijn meester en leverde zich dan, onbewogen, aan de beul over.”
In het spoor van de studie der geschiedenis van onze voorouders zullen we straks Herman Wirth ontmoeten, maar blijven we nog even bij Friedrich Hielscher stilstaan. Hij werd geboren in 1902, studeerde rechten en bewoog zich in de jaren twintig in zgn. nationaalrevolutionaire kringen, op een behoorlijke afstand van het nationaal-socialisme. Hij schreef diverse boeken, waaronder Das Reich (1931) en raakte bevriend met Sievers, die hem het werk leerde kennen van Herman Wirth, wiens leerlingen ze beide werden. Hun wegen liepen echter weldra sterk uiteen: terwijl Sievers het nationaal-socialisme vervoegde ging Hielscher in de oppositie. Das Reich werd verboden en hij kreeg bij herhaling last met de nazi-autoriteiten. Hij werd de ‘ideoloog’ van een verzetsgroep die men best als Widerstandsgruppe Hielscher kan aanduiden. Toch bleef hij met Sievers bevriend, werkte aan de rand van het Ahnenerbe met hem mee en zou hem zelfs in zijn verzetsaktiviteiten hebben betrokken – wat hij tevergeefs, om Sievers van de strop te redden, voor het Nürnbergtribunaal trachtte te bewijzen.
Carl Schmitt werd er door zijn tegenstanders van beticht te hebben meegewerkt aan het opstellen van wetten, ten tijde van het Derde Rijk: ongetwijfeld deed hij dat ook. Vanaf 1935 werd hij echter de schietschijf van een aantal aan het nazi-regime onderworpen juristen en een aanval tegen hem in het officiële SS-blad Das schwarze Korps bracht hem ertoe zich volledig terug te trekken uit het openbare leven. Na 1945 hield een geallieerde onderzoekskommissie zich met hem bezig, klasseerde de aantijgingen “zonder gevolg” en rehabiliteerde hem.
Alvorens we nu de idee en het werk van de protohistoricus Herman Wirth behandelen, schetsen we eerst zijn levensloop. Herman Wirth Roeper Bosch, Nederlander, werd in 1885 te Utrecht geboren, als zoon van een turnleraar. Hij studeerde Germaanse filologie, volkskunde, geschiedenis en muziekwetenschap aan de universiteiten van Utrecht, Leipzig en Bazel. In 1910 doktoreert hij op de thesis De ondergang van het Nederlandse Volkslied, die een jaar later in Den Haag als boek verscheen. In 1909 was hij al tot lektor benoemd aan de universiteit van Berlijn, voor het vakgebied Nederlandse filologie.
Hij meldt zich in 1914 als oorlogsvrijwilliger in het Pruissische leger en wordt kort daarop verbindingsofficier te Brussel. Hij onderhield de kontakten met de groep Jong Vlaanderen, die de motor was van het aktivisme, en nam ook aktief deel aan de proklamatie van de Raad van Vlaanderen in 1917 en de kortstondige Vlaamse zelfstandigheid , die in 1918 met de nederlaag van het Duitse keizerrijk ter ziele ging (2). Intussen was hij, in 1916, aan de Berlijnse universiteit tot professor benoemd.
ln 1920 probeerde Wirth in Nederland onder de benaming Dietse Trekvogels een jeugdbeweging van de grond te krijgen, naar het model van de Wandervogel in Duitsland en de Blauwvoeterie in Vlaanderen. In 1923 vestigt hij zich dan in Marburg an der Lahn, als zelfstandig ethnograaf en begint met zijn diepgaand onderzoek naar de Europese pre historie. In 1925 werd hij lid van de N.S.D.A.P., maar in juli 1926 stapt hij er weer uit. In 1928 laat hij bij Diederichs in Jena zijn bekend werk Der Aufgang der Menschheit verschijnen. In die periode behoorden Friedrich Hielscher en Wolfram Sievers tot zijn trouwste leerlingen. Net ais Wirth zelf werkten ze, op diverse vlakken, aan Ahnenerbe mee, ook al was alleen Sievers een partijman. Wirth was trouwens een van de oprichters van Ahnenerbe en moet er één der invloedrijke leden van zijn geweest, vermits hem meteen de sektie Studie van voorhistorisch schrift en symbolen werd toevertrouwd. In 1935 en 1936 was hij vele maanden op studiereis in Skandinavië. In 1938 brak hij met Ahnenerbe, wei onder de dubbele druk van de vakhistorici, die hem voor een dilettant hielden, en van de nazi•ideologen die hem hoogst kwalijk namen dat hij niet ophield te proklameren dat elke Führerkultus historisch gezien een vervalverschijnsel is…
De eerste bekende anti-Wirth brochure was van de hand van Prof. Dr. Paul Hambruch en droeg de alleszins niet dubbelzinnige titel: Die Irrtumer und Phantasien des Prof. Dr. Herman Wirth/Marburg, Verfasser von “Der Aufgang der Menschheit” und “Was heisst deutsch”. Dit denunciërende geschrift werd dan nog uitgerekend door het Deutscher Polizeiverlag uitgegeven (Lübeck, 1931). De latere Berlijnse n.s.-rektor Alfred Baeumler, bekend o.m. om zijn even perfide als doldrieste aanvallen tegen Heidegger, volgde weldra met het boekje Was bedeutet Herman Wirth für die Wissenschaft? (1932).
ln datzelfde jaar volgde van de geoloog Prof. Dr. Fritz Wiegers Herman Wirth und die deutsche Wissenschaft, waarin Wirth openlijk van dilettantisme werd aangeklaagd: “De geschriften van deze ethnoloog vormen slechts een weefsel van valse besluiten, van onbewezen beweringen en van ontkenningen van wetenschappelijke evidenties” … En verder: “De ‘ontdekkingen’ van Wirth zijn niets meer dan de fantazieën van een door de religieuze gedachte geobsedeerde geest”. In 1934 verscheen dan van Rudolf Glaser een brochure die Herman Wirth kategorisch verwierp, ditmaal niet in naam van de wetenschap, maar in naam van het nationaal-socialisme: Wer ist Herman Wirth? Volkstümliche Aufsatze über die Forschungen Herman Wirth’s von Rudolf Glaser. In de bibliografie vindt men al 62 pro- en contra-Wirth geschriften.
Natuurlijk verschenen er ook artikels en werken die van sympathie en belangstelling getuigden, maar de (tegen)partij had een veel grotere invloed, vooral toen Prof. Dr. Wiegers het argument hanteerde dat Wirth nog in 1932 relaties onderhield met de vrijmetselarij en Bolko Freiherr von Richthofen, de voorzitter van de Beroepsvereniging der Duitse Prehistorici, de aandacht trok op Wirth’s vriendschappelijke betrekkingen met bepaalde Joden… In een brief aan Prof. Hans F.K. Günther schreef Richthofen dat hij “niet begreep waarom men Wirth zou moeten ontzien omwille van taktische en humanitaire redenen” en op 16 januari 1934 liet hij aan Ministerialrat Sunkel weten: “Herr Wirth weiss genau, dass ihm führend besonders kiimpferische Nationalsozialisten gegenüberstehen. Mit Heil Hitler und deutschem Gruss, Ihr ergebenster gez. B. Frhr. v. Richthofen”.
Ook voor de grote kampagne tegen zijn ideeën en zijn persoon moet Herman Wirth binnen Ahnenerbe wel aanstoot gegeven hebben, door zijn onderzoekingen naar een oerkultuur en een oerreligie, die op een heel andere man-vrouw-relatie steunde, als hoogste godheid een “Almoeder” zou gekend hebben en eerder “demokratisch” van inslag was, in de zin van de latere IJslandse demokratie dan.
Wirth verdedigde de stelling dat de overheersend mannelijke trekken in de late kultuur, met hun overwaardering van het militaire leiderschap, typische dekadentieverschijnselen waren uit een periode van kulturele laagkonjunktuur zoals de tijd van de grote volksverhuizingen en de Vikingerperiode. De pogingen van het nationaal-socialisme om precies met deze periodes terug aan te knopen waren hem dan ook een politieke gruwel én kulturele nonsens.
In zijn studie Die Frage der Frauenberge – eine europäische Gegenwartsfrage (1972) komt Herman Wirth nog eens terug op zijn oude thesis: “De Vrouwenberg bij Cappel, nabij Marburg, is een van de meer dan honderd vrouwenbergen, maagden-, jonkvrouwen- enz. – bergen, -burgen, -stenen van het Duitse taalgebied en volksgebied. Wat hun ontstaan en hun bloeitijd betreft behoren deze Vrouwenbergen tot een bepaalde grote periode van het Avondland, gaande van de periode der grote stenen graven en de rotstekeningen in de Jongsteentijd tot bij het begin van de Volksverhuizingen. Over de geschiedenis en de betekenis van deze “Vrouwenbergen” is niets bekend. Dat er niets over geweten is, dat men niet eens geprobeerd heeft op het vraagstuk van de “Vrouwenbergen” enige vat te krijgen, heeft een tweeledige reden. De eerste reden is van psychologische aard: in een nog altijd mannelijk-ideologisch gericht wetenschapssysteem kan het probleem van een blijkbaar verheven plaats van de vrouw op religieus, kultureel en sociaal vlak geen geschiedkundige betekenis en belangrijkheid worden toegekend. En de tweede reden was dat de “Vrouwenbergen” tot de zgn. voorgeschiedenis behoren, d.w.z. dat er over dit onderwerp geen historische bronnen, geen schriftelijke overlevering (inskripties, berichten) bestaat. Dat er daarover toch een schriftelijke overlevering bestond en bestaat, niet in letterschrift maar in symboolschrift, daarvan hadden en hebben de totnogtoe bevoegde wetenschappen tot op de dag van vandaag geen idee: de prehistorici niet, maar evenmin de volkskundigen, de germanisten, de godsdiensthistorici, de mythologen enz.”
Zijn vriend Dr. Joachim Weitzäcker schrijft: “Na Herman Wirth’s “verwijdering” uit Ahnenerbe, dat hij gesticht had (3), verloor hij in 1938 zijn leerstoel aan de Berlijnse universiteit, omwille van zijn op gewetensbezwaren gegrondveste oppositie en zijn eis tot vrij onderzoek. Hij moest terug naar Marburg en kreeg verbod om nog onderricht te geven, te publiceren en in het openbaar te spreken. Tenslotte leverde de wet van het stilzwijgen zijn naam aan de vergetelheid over…”
Maar Wirth was niét helemaal vergeten: in 1945 namen de Amerikanen zijn bibliotheek en zijn omvangrijke dokumentatie in beslag; hij bleef aan dezelfde verbodsbepalingen onderworpen als tijdens de laatste zeven jaren van het Hitlerregime.
Zonder dokumentatie en bijna zonder bestaansmiddelen, herbegon hij, bijgestaan door zijn echtgenote Margarete Schmitt, en enkele vrienden, met bewonderswaardige moed aan zijn levenswerk. In 1960 verscheen in Wenen Um den Ursinn des Menschseins. Hij stichtte de Europaische Sammlung für religionsgeschichte en, in 1979 begon hij – 94 jaar jong! – in de ruïnes van een oud slot te Lichtenberg nabij Kusel, met de installatie van een museum en van archieven, die al zijn geschriften en zijn verzamelingen zou herbergen.
De allerlaatste jaren, haast volledig verlamd, werkte hij onverdroten verder, geholpen door enkele trouwe vrienden, en in leven gehouden met wat schaarse subsidies. Begin van dit jaar is hij er overleden.
Laat ons nu (noodgedwongen oppervlakkig) onderzoeken, wat Herman Wirth’s werk betekent. In zijn paleo-epigrafische opzoekingen, die de historische rekonstruktie van een oerreligie beogen, waagt Wirth zich in feite erg ver in de voorhistorie. In zijn opvatting zouden de Indo-europeërs slechts de vertegenwoordigers zijn van een erg late, hoogstens protohistorische periode.
Inderdaad, al wat de voorstanders van de “primordiale traditie”, waarvan René Guénon en Julius Evola de meest eminente vertegenwoordigers zijn, als positief d.i. kontroleerbaar kunnen bevestigen, gaat niet verder achteruit dan de eerste geschriften, waarmede volgens hen in feite de geschiedenis begint. Al de rest is slechts gissing, die op – weliswaar konvergerende – tradities steunt … doch het blijven tradities, om niet het woord ‘legenden’ te gebruiken. De meeste van Wirth’s werken moeten ook tot deze konjekturale wetenschap gerekend worden, en al zijn opsommingen van tekens en symbolen, waarvan hij de uitleg geeft, steunen (althans volgens zijn criticus Fritz Wiegers) slechts op vaak vernunftige interpretaties, die niet of moeilijk kontroleerbaar zijn. Dat er naast het “letterschrift” ook een koherent “symboolschrift” bestaat, word t intussen minder betwist dan ten tijde van Wirth’s eerste werken: het probleem ligt op het vlak van de duiding.
Vermelden we terloops dat de klassieke prehistorici wantrouwig staan tegenover elke subjektieve interpretatie. Ze doen opgravingen, ontdekken fossielen of voorwerpen van aile aard, klasseren ze en situeren ze meestal naar gelang de vindplaats. Uit hun ontdekkingen kunnen we afleiden, dat in deze of gene periode de Homo sapiens die of deze stap zette in de langzame opgang der mensheid naar wat we prozaisch “beschaving” noemen. Zo spreekt men over lager-, midden-, en lioger-paleoliticum, mesoliticum, neoliticum, bronstijdperk en ijzertijdperk, mét hun onderverdelingen, die ais “beschavingen” bestempeld worden, en waarvan de recentste die van Hallstatt en die van La Tène zijn. Om die periodes te dateren gebruikt men heden de radio-carbonmethode. Intussen ontdekken de prehistorici aanwijzingen omtrent de religie, de technologie, de begrafenisriten, zonder de eerste kunstuitingen te vergeten.
Onder de resten van een tamelijk geëvolueerde beschaving vermelden we de rotstekeningen van Altamira en Lascaux, die volgens de klassieke prehistorici uit het laag-neoliticum stammen (zowat tussen 35.000 en 10.000 v.o.j.). Vermits ze in een geografische ruimte liggen die zich ver van Noord-Europa bevindt, konden ze noch Wirth, noch de geleerden van Ahnenerbe interesseren, vervuld ais ze waren van die Indo-europese beschaving, waarvan de oudste sporen niet vroeger te situeren zijn dan in het 5de of 4de milennium vóór onze tijdrekening. Eerder zou men van het 3de of zelfs het 2de milennium moeten spreken, wat onze Europese primordiale traditie wei érg dicht bij ons legt. Werkt een kenner van de Indo-europese traditie ais Georges Dumézil trouwens niet bij voorkeur op geschreven bronnen? En nu weten we, dat het schrift van tamelijk recente datum is.
De klassieke prehistorici struikelen nog over raadsels, zoals die van de megalithen. Ze stellen hun bestaan vast, wagen een interpretatie, maar trekken geen besluiten: dat laten ze liever over aan geleerden als Wirth, die ze voor het overige wantrouwen. En wat raadsels ais Atlantis of het verloren kontinent Mu betreft, verkiezen ze er niet aan te raken en laten gissingen omtrent die vraagstukken over aan mensen die ze ais specialisten van “science-fiction” beschouwen.
Wij moeten toegeven dat de klassieke prehistorici al wat wij onze “primordiale Traditie” noemen, ignoreren; het vertrekpunt van deze benaming en van de vraagstukken die er verband mee houden, vindt men in een werk van de Duitse taalkundige Franz Bopp Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Lithauischen, Gotischen und Deutschen, dat uit de jaren 1833-52 stamt. Het vraagstuk van de Indo-europeërs breidde zich vlug uit van de taalkunde naar het probleem van het woongebied der volkeren die Indo-europese talen spraken en schreven, zonder dat de geleerden het eens konden worden over het vertrekpunt en de datering van deze verspreiding. Het zou interessant zijn dit probleem te bestuderen: men zou dan vaststellen dat op dit vlak de grootste verwarring heerst. Wat zeker is: overal waar de Indo-europeërs zich vestigden, overvleugelden ze de bevolking die al in dat gebied woonde, en onderwierpen ze hen (de Dravida’s in Indië b.v.).
Overal, zowel in Europa ais in Azië, vormden ze de twee overheersende kasten, die de geestelijken en die der strijders of ridders.
Om naar Herman Wirth te rug te keren, stellen we vast dat hij, al zat hij dan min of meer in de lijn van Bachofen, de theoreticus van het matriarchaat, toch niet afkerig was van de Odinistische mythologie, die hij uit de graffiti op de rotswanden van Noord-Europa meende te mogen afleiden en die hij poogde in te voegen in zijn konstrukties omtrent een matriarchale godsdienst. Ook de runen horen daar ergens bij, zodat men in zijn theorieën een soort mythisch-godsdienstig synkretisme mag zien, waarvan het “Mutter Erde”-begrip het sluitstuk is. Het is onbetwistbaar (de klassieke prehistorie bévestigt het ons) dat er in het Atlantisch Europa van het derde millenium een “megalitische” godsdienst bestond, met aanbidden van een vruchtbaarheidsgodin, die tegelijk de begrafenis-riten voorzat. Maar even zeker is dat er sinds het neoliticum (wellicht zelfs sinds het paleolitieum) een verering van de vrouwelijke godheid bestond: dit wordt bevestigd door talrijke beelden, als de “Venus” van Savignano (Italië), Gargarino (USSR) en Willendorff (Oostenrijk); of door de vrouwenkoppen van Dolmi Vestaniee (Tsjeehoslovakije) en Brassempuy (Frankrijk), wat ons zéker tot zowat 30.000 jaren vóór onze tijdrekening terugvoert.
Wirth’s onderzoeken waren vooral op Noord-Europa gericht, zoals zijn reizen uit 1935-36 aantonen. Wij moeten er, om met de klassieke prehistorici te spreken, uit besluiten dat zijn onderzoek vooral het zogenaamd mesoliticum betrof, dat aanvangt rond 10.000 v66r onze jaartelling en zich uitstrekt over het neoliticum en de twee metaaltijdperken, tot de eerste eeuwen van onze jaartelling, voor de kerstening van Noord-Europa.
Volgens de primordiale Traditie moet er echter, vóór die tijd, een ander, veel zachter klimaat geheerst hebben, toen Groenland en Spitzbergen groene en vruchtbare gebieden waren , (de naam Groenland wijst er op!). Hoe dit tijdperk situeren ? Laat ons het antwoord afwachten van de geologen, de prehistorici of de historici van de primordiale Traditie. Immers, in welke periode van het Pleistoceen de groene velden van het aloude Ultima Thule situeren ? Wie weet gaat het om een vrij recente periode, uit het zesde tot derde milennium vóór onze jaartelling, en die men in de geologie de Atlantische periode noemt. Toen was het legendarische Mu-gebied allang, rond 12.500 of 12.000 jaar voor onze jaartelling, in de golven verdwenen (4). Waarschijnlijk verdween, tijdens dezelfde natuurramp, Atlantis, dat andere hypothetische land .
Wat er ook van zij, doorheen heel zijn lange loopbaan heeft Wirth niet opgehouden, zijn studies over Europa’s voorgeschiedenis voort te zetten, daarbij vooral de aandacht vestigend op de paleo-epigrafie.
In zijn speurtocht naar al wat de voorhistorische Moeder Aarde-kultus kan bevestigen, heeft hij het onmetelijk belang onderstreept van de pre-Indo-europese beschaving voor het kultureelleven én de religie in Europa. Het magisch-religieuze leven in die periode hield hem voortdurend bezig, en hij bewees dat vóór de stroom Indogermaanse veroveraars, die over heel de antieke wereld van de Atlantische oceaan tot het Nabije- en Verre-Oosten neerstortte, er hier reeds mensen leefden die zich even zeer als de nieuwkomers om geestelijke zaken bekommerden.
Mogelijk zijn Wirth’s werken getekend door een zeker dilettantisme, maar loopt niet iedereen die zich in de kronkelingen van ons oudste verleden waagt, dit risiko ? Hoeveel bewonderaars van dat geheimzinnig verleden goochelen niet met min of meer fantaisistische gevolgtrekkingen en benaderingen, zich tegelijk als “gezaghebbend” voordoend ? Zij weten, wat u, de lezer, niet weet; zij zijn ingewijd en u bent het niet. Zij halen hun ‘wetenschap’, rechtstreeks of onrechtstreeks, bij een of ndere Tibetaanse monnik, of bij een of andere, min of meer geheimzinnige Goeroe, die de sleutel tot een eeuwenoud mysterie bezit…
Laat ons maar toegeven: hoeveel pretentieuze domheden vinden we niet onder de dekmantel van wat onze vrienden van de Traditie, de ‘Primordiale Traditie’ noemen ? René Guénon en Julius Evola hebben zich veel moeite getroost, de kwakzalvers van de – zogezegd – traditionele wetenschappen te ontmaskeren. Desondanks lopen ze nog rond en staan ze voortdurend klaar, u om het even welke valse ‘revelatie’ of welk produkt van hun op hol geslagen verbeelding ook aan te smeren …
Moeten we Herman Wirth bij de kwakzalvers van de Traditie onderbrengen ? Wij zijn overtuigd van niet, maar wél dienen we met omzichtigheid de resultaten van zijn onderzoekingen te beschouwen.
Zo heeft hij zich vér in de zogenaamde Ura Linda-kroniek gewaagd. Is ze een vervalsing, een louter literaire fantasie in de aard van de “Ossian-liederen” ? Is het een laattijdige kompilatie van een mondelinge traditie, ais de “Kalewala” ? De vraag blijft gesteld.
Vergeten we anderzijds ni et dat hij zolang hij persona grata was bij Ahnenerbe, ais groot geleerde op het vlak van de prehistorie werd beschouwd; en dat hij na zijn ongenade, zelfs het recht verbeurde les te geven en in het openbaar te spreken.
Jean Beelen schreef: “De onmetelijke verdienste van Prof. Wirth ligt erin, de oerperiode van het geschrift en de symboliek te hebben dóórgelicht en te hebben bewezen dat de mensen uit die tijd een kosmisch aanvoelen hadden dat aan de basis lag van een volkse godsdienst”. Dat is al héél wat en zo moeten we wei rekening houd en met al wat hij deed, en al wat hij schreef, zelfs al blijven we vrij te redetwisten over zijn – onbetwistbaar belangrijke – aanbreng inzake de voorgeschiedenis van de Westerse wereld.
Marc. EEMANS
(Vert. Roeland Raes)
(1) Het boek van Sebottendorf is niet te verwarren met dat van Dietrich Bronder dat eveneens de titel “Bevor Hitler kam” draagt (Hans Pfeiffer-Verlag, Hannover, 1964). Het essay van R.H. Phelps “Before Hitler came”. Thule Society and German Order” (in het Journal of Modern History, 1963) is géén vertaling maar een zelfstandige studie.
(2) Over Herman Wirth en het aktivisme, over Herman Wirth en het Vlaams-nationalisme, is het laatste woord nog niet gezegd. Willemsen en Elias vermelden hem even in de rand. Heel wat meer gegevens vindt men in een studie van Dr. Lammert Buning over Wirth, verschenen in Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen, 3/74.
(3) In feite medegesticht, samen met Hermann Reischle, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Babel, Georg Ebrecht, Erwin Metzner en Richard Hintmann.
(4) Zie James Churchward: “Mu, le continent perdu.”
00:05 Publié dans archéologie, Révolution conservatrice, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : anthropologie, archéologie, préhistoire, protohistoire, histoire, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, pays-bas | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 12 juillet 2011
Robert Steuckers sur "Méridien Zéro" - Paris 16juin 2011
Robert Steuckers sur "Méridien Zéro"
Paris, 12 juin 2011
00:10 Publié dans Entretiens, Révolution conservatrice, Synergies européennes | Lien permanent | Commentaires (2) | Tags : synergies européennes, nouvelle droite, robert steuckers, réflexions personnelles | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
Interview with "New Antaios"
Interview with "New Antaios"
Who are you? What’s the main purpose of your “New-Antaios” project? And why do you refer to the mythological figure of Antaios? Is it a revival of Jünger’s and Eliade’s Antaios or an English counterpart of the former Antaios journal of the Belgian novelist Christopher Gérard?
I was born in Agram (a German name for the city of Zagreb) in Croatia just over 42 years ago. I have lived in Zagreb during the times while my country was occupied by Yugoslav communist regime led by dictator Josip Broz Tito. There I have studied Political Sciences at the University of Zagreb and later on Philosophy and Psychology at Hrvatski Studiji, University of Zagreb. I have studied as well at Universities in Scandinavia, United Kingdom and Germany. I am coming from a family which is of an ethnic German heritage.
Antaios is uniting Earth and Sea, soil and water without whom both there is no life. Antaios father was Poseidon, the God of Sea and mother Gaia of the Earth. Antaios or Antaeus in Greek means as well ‘’against’’ so in this way ‘’The New Antaios’’ is in cultural and philosophical terms set to make an intellectual bulwark against that what is destroying Our European culture, tradition, heritage, folklore and with that ultimately our roots.
Journal ‘’The New Antaios’’ is the continuation of the original ‘’Antaios’’ Journal of Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger so we can say it is a revival albeit the Journal will/is as well reflecting on all that is happening in these postmodern times. Hence Journal represents what I call ‘’Postmodern European thought’’ and as such serves primarily as an outlet for the postmodern philosophers and thinkers.
I do respect and highly admire Christopher Gerard and his work on Antaios in years from years 1992 to 2001. Like Gerard I dislike New Age teachings and don’t have any interest in TraditionalistSchool. The New Antaios is made of four sections which are making the whole Journal. First part is ‘’Plethon’’ the name I gave after the Byzantine Hellenistic philosopher George Gemistos Plethon and articles in that section are related to Hellenism, Heathenism in a scholarly way. Contributions will be made as well by certain authors from Asatru background. Heathenism and Heithni comes from the Old Norse word heiðni which was used to describe the pre-Christian spiritual beliefs and practices of the Northern European peoples. The word Heithinn (or Heathen) comes from the Old Norse word heiðinn, an adjective to describe the ideals of Heithni (ex. Heithinn ethics - those ethics which conform to Heithni), or as a noun to describe those who live by the ethic and world-view of Heithni (ex. He is Heithinn, those people are Heithnir [plural]). Heiðni also means 'high, pure, clear' in Icelandic language. Word also describes person who is a dweller in place in the nature. Postmodern Heathens are those people who are reviving and revitalizing the tradition through serious study, research and dedication combined with the worship of the Gods and Goddesses or just simply in a way of their thinking without the ritual worship part. Personally I am keen of combining the two in a proper and balanced way. Second section is ‘’Aesthetic Vedanta’’ named after the book by Swami Bhaktivedanta Tripurari Maharaja, Western teacher of ancient tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Aesthetic Vedanta section deals with Hindutva, Hinduism,Vaishnavism and Gaudiya Vaishnavism exclusively. Third section is ‘’Suncovrat’’ a Croatian archaic word for the Solstice and deals with pre-Christian cultures which existed prior to Christianization of what makes nowadays Republic of Croatia. Fourth section is the main section of the Antaios Journal.
I would further like to point out that Christopher Gerard has no input whatsoever and isn’t in any way associated or affiliated with this new Journal. That is why the journal has prefix ‘’The New’’ to clearly mark difference with previous two journals. As far as I know Gerard’s Journal ceased to exist just on the turn of the century hence prefix ‘’The New’’ is completely appropriate here. While it will preserve and retain the original idea and concept with due respect to previous editors and directors of the Journal, it will be updated with short blog style texts, proper academic articles and essays which reflect on and take a critical eye of current state of affairs in different areas of philosophy, politics, culture, art, tradition, science and these postmodern times .
What was the maturation process of your worldview? Has it to do with Croatian politics or not?
I would say that I have spiritual and political Weltanschauung complementing each other. I was brought up in a family whose background is Christian albeit my late grandfather and my late father were both reading authors like Nietzsche and Jünger and considere themselves to be Pagans. I was brought up on stories from ancient Greece and Old Norse and Germanic tales whom my friends in school didn’t even hear about. My own father was a Heathen. He wrote small and up until now unpublished treatise on what he calls ‘’Raan’’. In this book Raan is knowledge of the Gods and Goddesses who once in previous Yugas did visit our planet. In this work he is influenced by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophy.
After spending years at the University in Croatia studying Political sciences in Zagreb I went to become a monk in Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. The reason for that was again in the Family. During the mid to late 80es my family got interested in Gaudiya Vaishnavism so I started reading and studying different books of Vedic knowledge like Upanishads, Puranas and Bhagavad Gita. I have discovered in mid 90es about Traditionalist School, Rene Guenon and Julius Evola. In years to come I have been reading and studying about diverse cultures, traditions of Europe and parallel with that I got initiated in the Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism while travelling to one of my spiritual pilgrimages to India.
Hence as a result, my own spiritual belief system would be Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism, while I permanently study and read about Indo-European beliefs of our ancestors, Ostrogothic pre-Christian beliefs, Old Norse, Hellenic and Germanic pre-Christian belief systems and Mithraism. Vedic knowledge in my opinion is very important key to unlock many secrets of the European tradition itself. In line with that I very much admire Hindutva writers such as Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup, Indian historian Bal Gangadhar Tilak , contemporary scholar from Belgium Dr. Koenraad Elst as well as Alain Danielou who are all big influence. Next influence would be primarily my own teacher Sri Ananta das Babaji Maharaja by whom I was directly initiated in Parivar or Traditional line which goes back many centuries ago, then authors such as: Sri Kunjabihari das Babaji Maharaja (who is the direct teacher of my own teacher Ananta das Babaji Maharaja), Kundali das, Binode Bihari das Babaji and Sripad Bhaktivedanta Tripurari Swami Maharaja whose certain books and teachings are in my opinion the Gaudiya Vaishnava answer to Traditionalist school. There should be veneration of our ancestors together with the firm belief in divine origins of Our Ancestral lines, veneration of Nature and veneration of the Gods and Goddesses which are part of our European Identity. Perhaps it would be the best to quote here another great influence of mine, Dominique Venner: ''To live according to tradition is to conform to the ideal that incarnates, to cultivate excellence according to its standard, to rediscover its roots, to transmit its heritage, to be in solidarity with the people who uphold it. ''
Croatian politics were influential to my worldview and perhaps it would be better to give a bit of background explanation from the not so well known Croatian history. Certain people would like such knowledge to remain hidden as such. In my opinion Croatian people have a unique position in Europe. There are people who label Croatia Western Balkans which is a complete nonsense. According to what I was reading from diverse sources Croats aren’t only just Slavs and are mixture of Slavenized Germanic tribes, Celtic tribes, Illyrians, ancient Romans, ancient Greeks and Indo-Persians. Over the span of more than half a century Croat academics and researchers who were proclaiming such theories were executed or ‘’disappeared’’. Persecutions started in times of the monarchist Yugoslavia up to late 80es of 20th century in the communist regime. Names like Haraqwati and Haraxvati which paleographic expert Dr. Kalyanaraman has found were names of the tribes, etnonymes which clearly show how early we can find about Croatian origins. Places where such names were found were part of Bharata Varsha or what is today India. Archaeologists have found along names emblems and coats of arms which look very much similar to Croatian coat of arms with the twenty - five field "chessboard". In a similar way the remnants and artefacts were also found when those tribes have moved from what is today India to Persia and those names can be found in 6th century before Christ in places like Bagistan and Persepolis and also with ancient peoples like Hurrwuhé. Ancestors of today’s Croats were worshippers of Saraswati Goddess of Vedic India (Goddess of learning, arts and music) and from her name comes originally name Hrvati. Croats are therefore known as Hrvati, Haravaitii, Arachosians or Sarasvatians, descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the Harauti province & the Haravaiti or the Sarasvati River. The recent hravati /hrvati [sic] hence comes from haraxvaiti and earlier spelt as haraquati (arachotos, arachosia, araxes). Sarasvati is the river and Arachosia being the region." Their mention is as well on the legendary inscriptions of Darius the Great. Early Croatian pre-Christian religion was derived from primordial Persian Sun-worship. Even the Croatian word for tie is kravat(a) which is again another connecting word.
Furthermore, the name of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, is related to the Zagros mountain range of Iran. The Dinara mountains in Dalmatia may be connected to Mount Dinar (Dene) of Iran. When the tribes came to what is nowadays Croatia they have mingled with the numerous local Slavic (or Slavenized Germanic tribes) tribes and adopted the Slavic language from them. Meanwhile after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire Croats organized the local Slavs into a state and gave them their national name. Before the invasion of the Avars ca. 560 the White or Western Croats created along with the Antes a great state extending north of the Carpathians from the upper Elbe to the upper Dniester. (35: Niederle, 263-266; Dvornik, The Slavs, 277-297) R. Heinzel is of the opinion that the Carpathians of the old Germanic Hervarsaga took their name from the Croats who called them the Harvate mountains i.e. Croatian mountains. (36: Heinzel, 499; Dvornik, op. cit., 284, sq.)" (Mandic 1970, Ch.1)
There are similarities in folklore as well. "There are old Croatian customs and national poems that have been cited as evidencing lingering traces of the fire and sun worship of the Persians. Fire, the essence of human origin, the sun, and the great boiling cauldron around which the warriors spring in the age old kolo or circle dance, all these are ingredients in the national lore of the Croatian nation. The Croat vilas or fairy witches resemble the peris of Iranian mythology. Then there is the legendary Sviatozov, the personification of strength, a being almost too huge for the earth to bear. He is strongly reminiscent of the "elephant-bodied" Rustum of Persian legend." (Guldescu 1964, pt.1.II) "It should be noted that only the thesis of the Iranian origin of the Croats can explain the name "Horvath", the title of a Croat dignitary Banus, the names "White" and "Red Croatian", and the Bogumile phenomenon (like Cathars in Occitania). According to this theory, the Croats were a branch of the Caucasian Iranians, who lived somewhere in the western Caucasus during the era of the Roman Emperors. The Caucasian Anten were another branch of this group." (Dobrovich 1963)
Research shows clearly everything what I have written and quoted above to be the truth although some oppose that theory as they want to preserve artificial Panslavism , idea of Yugosphere ( the idea for the 3rd united Yugoslavia without Slovenia and with Albania) under the guise of ‘’Western Balkans’’. In Croatian language there is an excellent word I really like: ‘’Samosvojnost’’. Samosvojnost means Identity in Croatian language. In my opinion Croatian identity should and must be preserved only through the independent republic of Croatia or as it is now. Hence Croatia does not need any new unions. Friendship yes, but union definitely not.
Serbia on the other hand would like to establish themselves as a regional leader. They play with naive Croatian government and Croatian president Josipović while behind their back they lobby in EU to make what was once war in ex-Yugoslavia look as a ‘’civil war’’ and accuse Croatia who were defending themselves . They do have some allies and friends in Europe who would like to see them as the leaders in the region. Those allies on the other hand actually don’t consider Serbia as a friend but as a tool for their own means and nothing else. It is a travesty of justice to see Croatian generals such as Gotovina and Markač to be sitting in Hague so just that Croatia can get a green light for EU so that bureaurocrats in EU they can say that ‘’all sides’’ were equally responsible. I would like to ask the question then. What about the people and country of Croatia which was invaded, whose homes are burned and destroyed? According to that ‘’theory’’ Croatians should not have been defending themselves as they were supposed just to sit and wait to be erased from the face of this planet.
Croatia has been suffering since demise of Austria-Hungary. It wasn’t good for Croatians either to be in any previous unions but union with Serbs has proven to be so far the worst one. Union with Austria-Hungary was far from perfect but at least we were in a monarchy which had culture and tradition. Croatian people don’t need anything anymore other than their own independence and peace with the neighbouring nations.
How the time is passing by I am less and less interested in Croatian politics. As a result I won’t be writing in Croatian language anymore since there is no purpose for it. I will rather use and invest my energy, effort and time for something I think will yield certain results than to write constantly for something what will anyway reach just a handful of people or just completely wither away. I have learned that from an example of the members of the ‘’Croatian Historical Revolution’’. Over the years I have read articles by leading Croatian intellectuals and scholars such as Dr. Tomislav Sunić then Dr. Jure Georges Vujić, prof. Amir Riđanović, prof. Petar Bujas (all members of Croatian group similar to G.R.E.C.E. – Arhelinea – www.arhelinea.com ) Dr. Zoran Kravar, then Croat republican conservatives such as: Tomislav Jonjić, Mario Marcos Ostojić, Hrvoje Hitrec, Croatian scientists such as : Dr. Vitomir Belaj, prof. Tomo Vinšćak, Dr. Radoslav Katičić, and prof. Mario Kopić and Dr. Hrvoje Lorković (of whom we can’t hear these days what is a real tragedy since Dr. Lorković is one of Croatian important intellectuals). Croatians should be happy to have such giants of free thinking yet many in Croatia don’t even know about some of them. That is for me completely bizarre. If one is carefully reading articles and books by above mentioned intellectuals and scholars one can only see that many of them are actually disillusioned with the current state of Croatia altogether. That is evident even from their articles. Hence as a result of that Zoran Kravar is not interested in any kind of politics neither he wants to be or get involved (yet he is one of authorities on Ernst Jünger in Croatia) same is with prof. Tomo Vinšćak as well, while others like Mario Kopić and Dr. Tom Sunić are publishing their new books outside of Croatia because there is hardly any interest in their ideas in Croatia. It seems that Dr. Jure Georges Vujić will publish his new books as well outside of Croatia. That is unavoidable since Croatians are lethargic in finding new solutions in political dialogue or any kind of new political ideas. They would rather stick to something what is completely falling apart while thinking that ‘’it would get better’’. I have a best friend in Croatia whose political ideas are in minority and while he wants betterment in any spheres of Croatian life (including politics and his fight against corruption) he doesn’t have as much support as he actually would and should get. It is the apathy and lethargy which are deeply rooted in certain parts of Croatian nation (thankfully not all of it) with its roots in the fear of change and political and historical lower self-esteem (which is really uncalled for, since Croats have such rich history, tradition and culture of whom they should be absolutely proud of) . The question they often ask themselves is: ‘’ What would happen if things change? ‘’ and because of constantly repeating that question they are indeed unable to make any significant change. I believe firmly that in the forthcoming parliamentary elections Croats will elect again some party or coalition of parties which will not bring nothing new to already stagnating Croatian political scene. In the right as well as left and centre there is nobody who could potentially have a quality for the deep changes Croatia needs desperately. In the right side of spectrum and as well on centre and left one can just see political opportunists in Croatia who long for their seat in parliament (called Sabor in Croatia) or certain position. That is their goal before anything else I am afraid, of course my humble bow to those politicians who aren’t like that and are in significant, significant minority.
My own political interests nowadays evolve around Eurocontinentalism and European Identitarian Communitarianism. Even though I do speak Croatian language I consider myself first and foremost an ethnic German with Prussian mentality, after that I am an European.
Eurocontinentalism in this case represents strong continental Europe which stands between USA and Great Britain on one and Russia on the other side. The question of Europe here is not just a matter a blood; it is spiritual, historical and cultural phenomenon.
This further quote actually explains some of my thinking on the matter: ‘’Implicit in this view is the assumption that the body is inseparable from the spirit animating it, that biological difference, as a distinct vitality, is another form of spiritual difference, and that the significance of such differences (given that man is a spiritual being, not merely an animal) is best seen in terms of culture and history rather than nineteenth-century biological science. American "white racialists" with their materialist-technical conceptions of race actually diminish the significance of the Racial Question by reducing it to a simple matter of genes, biology, equations....’’ ( Mladikov – The Phora Forum)
Dominique Venner is in my opinion the greatest influence for the Eurocontinentalism and my own political Weltanschauung with his writings, articles and books. In Croatia some of his books are available as well.
His thoughts describe the best what I think further:
‘’ The idea that is made of love is no more frivolous than the tragic sense of history that characterizes the European spirit. It defines the civilization, its immanent spirit, and each person’s sense of life, in the same way the idea shapes one’s work. Is the sole point of work to make money, as they believe across the Atlantic, or, besides ensuring a just return, is it to realize oneself in a job well done, even in such apparently trivial things as keeping one’s house. This idea urged our ancestors to create beauty in their most humble and most lofty efforts. To be conscious of the idea is to give a metaphysical sense to “memory.”
To cultivate our “memory,” to transmit it in a living way to our children, to contemplate the ordeals that history has imposed on us–this is requisite to any renaissance. Faced with the unprecedented challenges that the catastrophes of the twentieth century have imposed on us and the terrible demoralization it has fostered, we will discover in the reconquest of our racial “memory” the way to respond to these challenges, which were unknown to our ancestors, who lived in a stable, strong, well-defended world.
The consciousness of belonging to Europe, of Europeanness, is far older than the modern concept of Europe. It is apparent under the successive names of Hellenism, Celticness, Romanism, the Frankish Empire, or Christianity. Seen as an immemorial tradition, Europe is the product of a multi-millennial community of culture deriving its distinctness and unity from its constitutive peoples and a spiritual heritage whose supreme expression is the Homeric poems. ‘’
To read further perhaps I would recommend this article (and as well all other articles by Dominique Venner) : http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/06/europe-and-europeanness/#more-881
What were your main sources of inspiration?
I have mentioned some of them above. I would say that Ernst Jünger, Dominique Venner and Nicolás Gómez Dávila are the most significant and important influence for me personally simply because they complement each other perfectly and in my own opinion they represent the true European Tradition which Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Alain Danielou and Koenraad Elst represent in Hindu Tradition. Apart from them other authors, thinkers and philosophers I would say first of all I feel especially close regarding ideas and Weltanschauung are : Croatian thinkers and members of the ‘’Croatian Historical Revolution’’, Classical philosophers such as : Emperor Julian the Apostate, Porphyry, Celsus, Platonis Sallustius, Libanius, Julius Firmicus Maternus, Iamblichus, Gemistus Pletho(n) and other such philosophers, Erik von von Kuehnelt - Leddihn, Croatian philosopher prof. Mario Kopić, prof. Robert Steuckers, certain ideas of Alain de Benoist, certain ideas of Dr. Guillaume Faye, Dr. Georges Dumezil, Dr. Jan Assmann, Mircea Eliade, Emile Cioran, Alain Danielou, German greatest living poet Rolf Schilling, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, German Romanticism period authors and artists, Felix Dahn, Antoine Saint du Exupery, certain ideas of Julius Evola, Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt, composers Arvo Part and Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, postmodern musical projects such as Triarii, Arditi, In Slaughter Natives and new project Winglord, artists such as Ludwig Fahrenkrog, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Fidus, Caspar David Friedrich, Hermann Hendrich, Franz von Stuck, Carl Larsson, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Jean Béraud and others.
Who are the main Croatian thinkers according to you and that are completely ignored in the rest of the world? How could we discover them?
Main and most influential Croatian thinkers were: Dr. Milan von Šufflay, Dr. Ivo Pilar, Dr. Vinko Krišković, Dr. Filip Lukas, Dr. Julije (Julius) von Makanec, Dr. Stjepan Buć and authors involved with journal ‘’Spremnost’’ : prof. Tias Mortigjija, Dr. Milivoj Magdić, Dr. Ante Ciliga & Dr. Vilko Rieger (Dr. George W. Cesarich) . Influential are also early works of prof. Ivan Oršanić, Dr. Ivo Korsky, then author Ivan Softa (Croatian Knut Hamsun), national poet Jerko Skračić and a few others. It is very hard for somebody in Europe to discover them as their works were burned, destroyed and left to be forgotten by Yugoslavian and Serbian communist regime. Back in 1970es of 20th century for just reading the works of these authors, philosophers and thinkers one could get a lengthy prison term and that would be of course if you did find their books somewhere. I am collecting their works wherever I can find them and that is in most cases extremely hard and on top of that some of their books command very high prices. Situation is not like with authors of Conservative Revolution whose works remain saved and translated to many languages now. Most of the above mentioned people were brutally murdered by either Serbian Monarchist regime who ruled the first Yugoslavia or by communist regime who ruled Yugoslavia and occupied Croatia after the year 1945.
At this point in time there is no translated literature in any of other languages except the book ‘’Southslav question’’ written by Dr. Ivo Pilar (under pseudonym Dr. Leon v. Südland) which was printed at the beginning of the 20th century in Vienna originally in German language. Book was never reprinted again either in German or English (or any other foreign language) and was translated in Croatian language and has since been in print only twice. Copies of both editions are virtually impossible to find. Books of other authors are not being reprinted at all. I really don’t know if that is because of the economic crisis in Croatia since many members of Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) turned out to be crooks and thieves who were stealing money from their own country and country’s resources. It has been going on like that for a long time and no government (even the coalition of liberals and social democrats which lasted for 4 years) didn’t make situation any better or because there is no interest in those books and those authors at all. It is partially because of many Croatians were killed and murdered from 1944 to early 1950es by communist regime (and in years after that up to 1990 just prior to war in Croatia) and because of the mentality which became a norm since 1918, after Croats lost the war as part of Austria-Hungary. Dr. Ivo Pilar did warn Croatians about those kinds of problems especially in two of his books. One of those books was above mentioned ‘’Southslav question’’.
I am afraid that the only way to discover them will be through book I am currently writing and subsequently I will translate some of the most important works by Šufflay, Pilar, Lukas, Krišković, Makanec, Mortigjija and Magdić. I will start with works of Dr. Ivo Pilar and Dr. Milivoj Magdić whose works I am collecting at the present time. I am putting together Dr. Milivoj Magdić’s and dr. Ivo Pilar’s articles and smaller important works and will include one very informative article about Milivoj Magdić’s life done by one Croatian historian. Dr. Pilar’s book ‘’Southslav question’’ will be most likely the first one to surface followed by Dr. Magdić’s collected works. It is very interesting to mention that Dr. Ivo Pilar and Dr. Milivoj Magdić had both the biggest private libraries in the city of Zagreb and most likely in Croatia at that time. I have heard that currently Alain de Benoist has one of the biggest private libraries.
So we can talk about a genuine Croatian “Conservative Revolution”?
Croatian Historical Revolution was a German Conservative Revolution’s and France’s Ordre Nouveau’s counterpart. It strikes me how there wasn’t anybody in Croatia trying to compare German Conservative Revolution with all these authors we have had. My guess is that certain levels of academia in Croatia have some sort of inferiority complex and lower self-esteem. Except post modern Croatian intellectuals and academics I have mentioned above (and most in this group were living, studying and teaching for some time outside of Croatia) other Croatian intellectuals constantly behave in a way which has ruined indescribably reputation of Croatia. Members of Croatian Historical revolution were totally opposite. Partially that is because they grew up in Austria- Hungary and partially because up until year 1918 influence of Balkan ‘’culture’’ wasn’t predominant in Croatia and our gene pool wasn’t almost destroyed as it is the case today (holocaust of Croats and ethnic Germans from years 1944 -1950es). Most of the people who today want any kind of communism to be back in Croatia are leftovers of previous regime and they are not even Croats by their genes or in spirit.
Members of CHR (Croatian Historical Revolution) have had experience with different ideologies and transformations as the ones in Germany. They rallied for the Croatia as an integral part of Europe and how some of them called it at the time ‘’Bieli Zapad’’ (White West). Like authors in German counterpart they have produced diverse works such as philosophical treatises, political journalism, manifestoes which have outlined their ideas for the transformation of Croatia and role of Croatia in Central Europe and Europe altogether. They were strongly opposing liberalism and even liberal democracy and they have rejected despiritualization and commercial culture. They advocated new conservative thought which was inspired by Croatian national patriotism. I find their ideal very much connected with ideals of German Conservative Revolution members and nowadays with prof. Dominique Venner.
How could we connect Croatian authors with their other European counterparts? Who are the Croatian authors that should be read together, beyond every language barrier?
My opinion is that all the works of the above mentioned members of the Croatian Historical revolution are very much worth exploring, studying and reading. They all do come highly recommended albeit due to totalitarian and primitive backwards communist regime headed by Josip Broz Tito and his blind followers lots of original writings are lost , destroyed or are very rare to that extent that only Croatian National Library may have only one copy or original of each of the original works of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution. None of those works were translated in any languages (as I have mentioned above) except Dr. Pilar’s ‘’Southslav question’’ which was originally written in German and then translated to Croatian. Dr. Ivo Pilar was speaking and writing as Dr. Milan v. Šufflay and many other members of CHR, in several languages. In those times after the I WW it was quite normal for people of Croatia to speak German as a second and in many cases as their mother language together with Croatian language. Hopefully in time through my own ‘’ Hyperborea Press’’ which is the part of Somnium Media all the main works of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution will surface and be translated in English language. As always one has to be realistic, as with any of such efforts good will isn’t enough, I will have to invest money and time into this project in a balanced manner.
Do you see original viewpoints or bias by these Croatian authors that you cannot find back in the works of their other European counterparts?
I know that I risk now sounding a bit vague but most of their viewpoints are similar or identical with their German and French counterparts, although one of their main focal points or focus was naturally fight against the repressive Serbian monarchist regime and its imperialistic hegemony. I have written recently some articles about this topic. I believe that I will answer much broader to this question in my book about Croatian Historical Revolution.
What are your projects for the near future?
The New Antaios Journal’s further development is my priority and alongside with TNAJ there is ‘’Eurocontinentalism Journal’’ and my own ‘’Somnium Media’’ website which offers music, merchandise and books which are serving as an alternative to world of mass consumerism we live in. Great help in that effort is my dear friend mr. Zvonimir Tosic who is an editor in chief and managing webmaster of The New Antaios Journal and Somnium websites. The New Antaios and Eurocontinentalism Journal will both have some interesting interviews and articles in months to come. Somnium Media imprint ‘’Hyperborea Press’’ will publish most significant works of members of the Croatian Historical revolution and hopefully some works by Nicolas Gomez Davila.
Further related to ‘’Hyperborea Press’’ I have plans for the three books and three translations. First one is above already mentioned book about Croatian Historical Revolution and its members and it will be an overview of the significance of Croatian Historical Revolution and works of its members and authors not only for Croatia but for Europe and European thought as well. Another book is ‘’ Gaudiya Vaishnavism - The Living and Timeless Tradition ‘’ which will explain how important Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism is (a belief in Hinduism) not only for Hinduism but for the resurgence of Indo – European thought in general. I know that Dr. Alexander Jacob has written extensively on the topic of resurgence of Indo-European thought but his emphasis is not like in authors such as Georges Dumezil , Jan de Vries, or Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel and Alain Danielou in Hinduism or ancestral pre-christian beliefs. Rather he uses as an example for restoration of Indo –European thought resurgence of European Medieval Christian noble spirit of ‘’archaic and brave’’ and Prussian noble spirit. In my own opinion the best starting point for such study would be a Saxon epic ‘’Heliand’’.
Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnava thought in this book will serve as an alternative for the Traditionalist thought which was espoused by Guenon, Schuon and other Traditionalists. Third book deals with Croatian pre-Christian and pre-Slavic legends and it delves in times of the heroic Croatian past. I have contacted one still living Croatian author who gave me information on stories and its characters which obviously have roots in pre-Christian and pre-Slavic times of Croatia. It is quite a work and a huge challenge to reconstruct those tales and to find out and connect certain characters. Some shortened versions of those stories I will be presenting at certain Storytelling Fairs in Ireland during the summer. Three translations will be my most likely first translation work on the new book by Dr. Jure Georges Vujic (which will be his first book in English language) followed by translations of two books of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution, Dr. Ivo Pilar’s ‘’Southslav question’’ and Dr. Milivoj Magdić’s best and collected works complete with my own explanations and commentaries. I will also continue writing for Brett Stevens's Journal on line www.amerika.org which is with Europa Synergon one of the most interesting journals to be found on line.
Thank you very much Robert for the opportunity you gave me with this interview and as well thank you for your influence on my own thought which is indispensable and very important. I would also like to thank to anybody who has read this interview and found it interesting or just thought provoking.
(interview taken by Robert Steuckers, late spring 2011).
00:05 Publié dans Entretiens, Révolution conservatrice, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : tradition, traditionalisme, croatie, entretiens, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 03 juin 2011
Urkultur 15: Moeller van den Bruck, conservadurismo revolucionario
Ex: http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/
URKULTUR Nº 15.
MOELLER VAN DEN BRUCK:
CONSERVADURISMO REVOLUCIONARIO.
REVISTA ELECTRÓNICA:
Enlace con issuu.com
SUMARIO.
Editorial.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck y la Nouvelle Droite
Sebastian J. Lorenz
Moeller van den Bruck: un rebelde conservador
Luca Leonello Rimbotti
Moeller van den Bruck: ¿un “precursor póstumo”?
Denis Goedel
Moeller y Dostoievski
Robert Steuckers
Moeller y la Kulturpessimismus de Weimar
Ferran Gallego
Moeller y los Jungkonservativen
Erik Norling
Moeller y Spengler
Ernesto Milá
Moeller y la Konservative Revolution
Keith Bullivant
Moeller van den Bruck
Alain de Benoist
00:10 Publié dans Nouvelle Droite, Révolution conservatrice, Revue | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : revue, allemagne, révolution conservatrice, weimar, années 20, philosophie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 31 mai 2011
Wertvollzug
WertvollzugCarl Schmitt, Die Tyrannei der Werte, 1960.
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : carl schmitt, philosophie, théorie politique, sciences politiques, politologie, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 28 mai 2011
Gottfried Benn
Gottfried Benn in Interview (1956)
Gottfried Benn liest aus "Kunst und Drittes Reich"
00:05 Publié dans Littérature, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : allemagne, littérature, lettres, lettrs allemandes, littérature allemande, gottfried benn, révolution conservatrice, immigration intérieure, années 20, années 30, années 40, années 50 | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 25 mai 2011
Ortega y Gasset: un européiste critique de la révolte des masses et de la désertion des élites
Ortega y Gasset : un européiste critique de la révolte des masses et de la désertion des élites
par Arnaud IMATZ
« “Avant moi le néant, après moi le déluge” semble être devenu la devise préférée d’une nouvelle classe dirigeante dont le style de vie est marqué par le rejet des valeurs communautaires, le mépris des traditions populaires, la fascination pour le marché, la tyrannie de la mode, le nomadisme, l'insatisfaction assouvie dans la consommation de la marchandise, l'obsession de l'apparence physique, le culte du spectacle, du succès et de la renommée. Ortega disait que la désertion des minorités n'est que l'envers de la révolte des masses. »
Polémia livre à ses lecteurs une belle analyse critique d’Arnaud Imatz consacrée à Ortega y Gasset et à la « Révolte des masses ». Nos lecteurs trouveront ci dessous la critique de l’œuvre maitresse d’Ortega y Gasset et en PDF (voir en fin d’article) l’intégralité de l’article d’Arnaud Imatz.
Polémia
La révolte des masses : une vision aristocratique de la société
Dans La rebelión de las masas Ortega soutient que la société, organisation hiérarchique normale et spontanée de la vie humaine, est fondée sur l'inégalité psycho-vitale des membres qui la composent. La société est toujours aristocratique parce que l'aristocratie n'est pas un État ou une classe mais un principe spirituel, indestructible par nature, qui agit dans le monde sous différente forme. « Une société sans aristocratie, sans minorité éminente, n'est pas une société ». L'homme exemplaire n'est pas un homme né avec des privilèges et des droits refusés aux autres, c'est simplement l'homme capable d'une plus grande vision et d'un plus grand effort que le reste du genre humain. C'est celui qui rejette les croyances et usages insatisfaisants, qui se rebelle pour construire et non pas pour détruire.
Avec une pléiade d'auteurs traditionalistes, nationalistes, conservateurs-révolutionnaires, anarcho-syndicalistes, libéraux et socialistes élitistes, Ortega partage une même confiance en la vertu des minorité « éclairées », « éminentes » ou « sélectives ». « Contrairement à ce que l'on croit habituellement, écrit-il, c'est l'être d'élite et non la masse qui vit "essentiellement" dans la servitude. Sa vie lui paraît sans but s'il ne la consacre au service de quelques obligations supérieures. Aussi la nécessité de servir ne lui apparaît-elle pas comme une oppression, mais au contraire, lorsque cette nécessité lui fait défaut, il se sent inquiet et invente de nouvelles règles plus difficiles, plus exigeantes qui l'oppriment ». La liberté c’est au fond la possibilité de choisir ses chaînes.
Pour Ortega, le nivellement par le bas à partir de l'élimination des meilleurs n'a rien à voir avec la démocratie. Il ne reflète au contraire que hargne et ressentiment. L'idée que l´égalité politique doit s'accompagner d'égalité dans tout le reste de la vie sociale est erronée et dangereuse. Une société vraiment démocratique doit tenir compte des différences individuelles pour ne pas sombrer dans le règne de la vulgarité et de la médiocrité.
L’homme masse
Selon Ortega, l'Europe traverse la plus grave crise que les nations, les peuples et les cultures puissent pâtir: la révolte des masses. L'homme-masse est un type d'homme qui apparait dans toutes les classes d'une société. Il représente à la fois le triomphe et l'échec de l'ethos bourgeois. C'est l'individu qui refuse toute forme de supériorité et se sent le droit inné d'exiger toutes sortes de commodités ou d'avantages de la part d'un monde auquel il n'estime ne rien devoir. Il ne se croit pas meilleur que les autres, mais il nie que les autres soient meilleurs que lui. C'est l'« homme moyen », qui « n'a que des appétits », « ne se suppose que des droits » et « ne se croit pas d'obligations ». C'est « l'homme sans la noblesse qui oblige ». C'est l'homme en qui « manque tout simplement la morale, laquelle est toujours, par essence, un sentiment de soumission à quelque chose, la conscience de servir et d'avoir des obligations ». A l'opposé de l'homme masse, Ortega affirme que l'homme noble ou exemplaire vit au service d'un idéal. Il est celui qui exige d'abord tout de lui même. « L'homme d'élite, dit-il, n'est pas le prétentieux qui se croit supérieur aux autres, mais bien celui qui est plus exigeant pour lui que pour les autres, même lorsqu'il ne parvient pas à réaliser en lui ses aspirations supérieures ».
Indiscipline des masses, démission des élites
Venons en enfin à son diagnostic de la crise historique que l'altération de la hiérarchie des valeurs et le désordre de la structure sociale manifestent. La raison en est double: d'une part, l'indiscipline des masses, d'autre part, la démission des élites. C'est parce que les minorités échouent dans leurs tâches d'orientation, d'éducation, de découverte et de direction que les masses se rebellent ou refusent toute responsabilité historique. Tôt ou tard l’aristocratie engendre une philosophie de l'égalité et la philosophie de l'égalité conduit au règne de nouveaux seigneurs.
Publié au début des années trente du siècle passé, La révolte des masses contient une étonnante et « prophétique » défense de l’Europe unie, communauté de destin dans laquelle les diverses nations peuvent fusionner sans perdre leurs traditions et leurs cultures. Ortega voit dans l’union de l’Europe la seule possibilité d’éviter la décadence, car le vieux continent a perdu son hégémonie historique au bénéfice des États-Unis et de l’URSS. Homogénéité et diversité sont, selon lui, les deux faces de la société européenne. L’Europe est à l’évidence une société plurielle, elle est une pluralité de peuples et de nations, non pas du fait d’inévitables flux migratoires, comme on le dit aujourd’hui, mais en raison de racines historico-culturelles. Pour Ortega, les racines européennes sont avant tout gréco-latines, chrétiennes et germaniques.
De la révolte des masses à la révolte des élites
Plus de soixante ans après la première publication de La révolte des masses, l'historien et politologue américain Christopher Lasch a complété et renouvelé la thèse d'Ortega y Gasset. Dans un ouvrage fondamental, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (La révolte des élites et la trahison de la démocratie) (1994), Lasch a montré que les attitudes mentales de l'homme masse sont désormais plus caractéristiques des classes supérieures que des classes moyennes et basses.(*) « Avant moi le néant, après moi le déluge » semble être devenu la devise préférée d’une nouvelle classe dirigeante dont le style de vie est marqué par le rejet des valeurs communautaires, le mépris des traditions populaires, la fascination pour le marché, la tyrannie de la mode, le nomadisme, l'insatisfaction assouvie dans la consommation de la marchandise, l'obsession de l'apparence physique, le culte du spectacle, du succès et de la renommée. Ortega disait que la désertion des minorités n'est que l'envers de la révolte des masses.
Arnaud Imatz
12/03/2011
(*) Le livre de Christopher Lasch a été traduit et publié en France en 1996 (voir : La révolte des élites et la trahison de la démocratie, Avant-propos de Jean-Claude Michéa, Castelnau-le-Lez, Climats, 1996).
Voir le texte intégral de l’analyse d’Arnaud Imatz :
Ortega y Gasset : un européiste critique de la révolte des masses et de la désertion des élites, en PDF en cliquant ici.
00:10 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : ortega y gasset, philosophie, espagne, révolte des masses, masses, élites, théorie politique, sciences politiques, politologie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 21 mai 2011
Evola e il mondo di lingua tedesca
Evola e il mondo di lingua tedesca
Alberto Lombardo
Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/
La Germania e in genere il mondo di cultura tedesca ebbero per Evola un’importanza centrale. Sin da giovanissimo questi apprese il tedesco per avvicinarsi alle opere della filosofia idealistica; la sua dottrina filosofica deve molto all’idealismo, ma ancor più a Nietzsche, Weininger e Spengler. Nel 1933 compì il suo primo viaggio in Austria ; per tutti gli Anni ’30 e ’40 continuò a tenersi aggiornato leggendo saggî scientifici in lingua tedesca sui diversi argomenti dei quali si occupava: dalla romanità antica (Altheim) alla preistoria (Wirth, Günther), dall’alchimia (Böhme) alle razze (Clauß, ancora Günther), dalla teoria politica (Spann, Heinrich) all’economia (Sombart) e via dicendo. In generale, considerando gli apparati di note, i riferimenti culturali e in un bilancio che tenga conto di tutti gli apporti non mi sembra affatto di esagerare sostenendo che il peso degli studi pubblicati in tedesco sia nell’opera complessiva di Evola almeno pari a quello di quelli italiani.
Tutto questo è già assai indicativo dell’influenza della cultura tedesca sull’opera di Evola. Vanno aggiunti però altri dati: richiamando qui quanto accennato in sede biografica nel capitolo primo, ricordo i lunghi soggiorni di Evola in Austria e Germania, le numerose conferenze ivi tenute, i rapporti con esponenti della tradizione aristocratica e conservatrice mitteleuropea e della Konservative Revolution etc . Inoltre nei paesi di lingua tedesca Evola godette, almeno sino alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale, di una notorietà diversa da quella che ebbe in Italia, poiché vi fu accolto quasi come l’esponente di una particolare corrente di pensiero italiana, e ciò sin dal 1933, anno della pubblicazione di Heidnischer Imperialismus . Questo il giudizio in merito di Adriano Romualdi: «L’azione di Evola in Germania non fu politica, anche se contribuì a dissipare molti equivoci e a preparare un’intesa tra Fascismo e Nazionalsocialismo. Essa investì il significato di quelle tradizioni cui in Italia e in Germania si richiamavano i regimi, il simbolo romano e il mito nordico, il significato di classicismo e romanticismo, o di contrapposizioni artificiose, come quella tra romanità e germanesimo» .
Dal 1934 Evola tiene conferenze in Germania: in un’università di Berlino, al secondo nordisches Thing a Brema, e all’Herrenklub di Heinrich von Gleichen, rappresentante dell’aristocrazia tedesca (era barone) col quale stabilì una «cordiale e feconda amicizia» . Così Evola ricordò nel 1970 quest’importante esperienza: «ogni settimana si invitava una personalità tedesca o internazionale in quel circolo di Junkers. Devo dire peraltro che, se ci fossimo aspettati di vedere dei giganti biondi con gli occhi azzurri la delusione sarebbe stata grande, poiché per la maggior parte erano piccoli e panciuti. Dopo la cena e il rituale dei toasts, l’invitato doveva tenere una conferenza. Mentre questi signori fumavano il loro sigaro e sorseggiavano il loro bicchiere di birra, io parlavo. Fu allora che Himmler sentì parlare di me» .
È effettivamente assai verosimile che l’attenzione da parte degli ambienti ufficiali per Evola sia nata in seguito alle prime conferenze in Germania. I suoi rapporti col nazionalsocialismo furono di collaborazione esterna, e specialmente con diversi settori delle SS tra cui l’Ahnenerbe ; Evola espresse nei confronti dell’“ordine” guidato da Himmler parole assai positive , anche nel dopoguerra , che da una parte gli valsero i prevedibili (e fors’anche scontati) strali dei suoi detrattori, dall’altra determinarono una rilettura – in seno alla storiografia e allo stesso “sentimento del mondo” della Destra Radicale del dopoguerra – del nazionalsocialismo come di un movimento popolare guidato da un’élite ascetico-guerriera . Dagli ormai numerosi dati d’archivio pubblicati, risulta un quadro di Evola tenuto in considerazione ma sempre osservato con cura dagli ambienti ufficiali tedeschi .
Dopo il conflitto mondiale la notorietà di Evola nei paesi di lingua tedesca andò scemando; la sua immobilità fisica pare che gli impedì, tra l’altro, ulteriori viaggi all’estero. Solo negli ultimi decenni Evola è stato fatto oggetto di una sorta di riscoperta, per merito soprattutto di Hans Thomas Hansen, che ne ha tradotto (e ritradotto) la buona parte delle opere, con il consenso dello stesso Evola quando questi era ancora in vita, e che viene giustamente considerato uno dei massimi conoscitori del pensiero e della vita di Evola. Oltre alla rivista da questi fondata e animata, «Gnostika» (che come suggerisce il titolo ha interessi prevalentemente esoterici), negli ultimissimi anni stanno nascendo diverse attività che si ispirano in vario modo all’opera di Evola, tra le quali meritano una menzione le riviste tedesche «Elemente» e «Renovatio Imperii» e soprattutto l’austriaca «Kshatriya», diretta da Martin Schwarz (autore della più ampia bibliografia evoliana sino a oggi stilata ), di più marcata impronta “evoliana ortodossa”. A margine di ciò, si stanno iniziando a tenere convegni sul pensatore e a tradurre sue ulteriori opere. Inoltre il centenario della nascita di Evola, nel 1998, è stato occasione per varie testate tedesche per ricordarlo con ampi articoli, tra cui quelli apparsi sulla storica «Nation & Europa» (che esce ormai da mezzo secolo, e cui nei primi Anni ’50 lo stesso Evola collaborò), «Criticn» e la prestigiosa «Zeitschrift für Ganzheitforschung», altra rivista cui Evola collaborò (nei primi Anni ’60) e che fu fondata e lungamente diretta da Walter Heinrich (sino alla morte di questi, avvenuta nel 1984), che era in grande amicizia con Evola. Come curiosità, segnaliamo che per l’occasione numerosi complessi e gruppi musicali tedeschi e austriaci hanno dedicato nel centenario allo scrittore tradizionalista un disco, intitolato Cavalcare la tigre.
* * *
Sebbene alcuni elementi politici della storia d’Italia e di quella tedesca appaiano affini, (il processo di unificazione nazionale avvenuto nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento, la comune partecipazione alla Triplice Alleanza, l’Asse Roma-Berlino), Evola individua nella “tradizione germanica” dei tratti che differenziano nettamente – in senso positivo – i paesi di lingua tedesca dall’Italia. Così anzitutto «può dirsi che in Germania il nazionalismo democratico di massa di tipo moderno non fece che una fuggevole apparizione. […]. Il nazionalismo in tal senso, con un fondo democratico, non andò oltre il fugace fenomeno del parlamento di Francoforte del 1848, in connessione con i moti rivoluzionari che in quel periodo imperversavano in tutta l’Europa (è significativo che il re di Prussia Federico Guglielmo IV rifiutò l’offerta, fattagli da quel parlamento, di mettersi a capo di tutta la Germania perché accettandola egli avrebbe anche accettato il principio democratico – il potere conferito da una rappresentanza popolare – rinunciando al suo diritto legittimistico, sia pure ristretto alla sola Prussia). E Bismarck, creando il secondo Reich, non gli diede affatto una base “nazionale”, vedendo nella corrispondente ideologia il principio di pericolosi disordini anche dell’ordine europeo, mentre i conservatori della Kreuzzeitung accusarono nel nazionalismo un fenomeno “naturalistico” e regressivo, estraneo ad una più alta tradizione e concezione dello Stato» . Estranei a questa forma “naturalistica” di nazionalismo, i paesi di lingua tedesca cullarono un diverso spirito, quello del Volk, che animò lo spirito pangermanico. La corrente völkish, che un notevole peso ebbe anche nella genesi del nazionalsocialismo, affondava le sue radici nei Discorsi alla nazione tedesca di Fichte, in Arndt, Jahn e Lange e soprattutto nel Deutschbund e nella deutsche Bewegung . In questa diversità di retroterra si ha la prima divaricazione tra Italia e Germania.
Ma le differenze di ambiente sono assai più nette. Nel suo saggio sul Terzo Reich, delineando le correnti culturali complesse e spesso irriducibili che cooperarono nella sua genesi, Evola scrive: «Dopo la prima guerra mondiale in Germania la situazione era sensibilmente diversa da quella dell’Italia. […] Mussolini dovette creare quasi dal nulla, nel senso che nel punto di combattere la sovversione rossa e di rimettere in piedi lo Stato non poteva rifarsi ad una tradizione nel senso più alto del termine. Tutto sommato, ad essere minacciato era solo il prolungamento dell’Italietta democratica ottocentesca, con un retaggio risorgimentale risentente delle ideologie della Rivoluzione Francese, con una monarchia che regnava ma non governava e senza salde articolazioni sociali. In Germania le cose stavano altrimenti. Anche dopo il crollo militare e la rivoluzione del 1918 e malgrado il marasma sociale sussistevano resti aventi radici profonde in quel mondo gerarchico, talvolta ancora feudale, incentrato nei valori dello Stato e della sua autorità, facenti parte della precedente tradizione, in particolare del prussianesimo. […]. In effetti, nell’Europa centrale le idee della Rivoluzione Francese non presero mai tanto piede quanto nei restanti paesi europei» .
In un’occasione Evola cita la teoria giuridica di Carl Schmitt dell’international law . Il filosofo della politica tedesco aveva espresso l’idea della caduta del diritto internazionale europeo consuetudinario avvenuta, all’incirca, dopo il 1890, e la conseguente affermazione di un diritto internazionale più o meno ufficializzato. «Noi però qui non siamo interamente del parere dello Schmitt», scrive Evola, spiegando che «di contro all’opinione di molti, nei riguardi dell’azione svolta da Bismarck, sia all’interno della Germania che in Europa, non tutte le cose sono “in ordine”. […]. Più che Bismarck, a noi sembra che, se mai, Metternich sia stato l’ultimo “Europeo”, vale a dire l’ultimo uomo politico che seppe sentire la necessità di una solidarietà delle nazioni europee non astratta, o dettata solo da ragioni di politica “realistica” e da interessi materiali, ma rifacentesi anche a delle idee e alla volontà di mantenere il migliore retaggio tradizionale dell’Europa» . Contrariamente a quanto sostenuto da Baillet , Evola fu dunque piuttosto critico nei confronti di Bismarck, che non ebbe, secondo la visione tradizionale evoliana, il coraggio di opporsi in modo sistematico e rigoroso al mondo moderno e della sovversione (nella sua forma economico-capitalistica), ma dovette in alcuni casi venire a patti con esso.
La stessa Germania federiciana e poi guglielmina, seppur conservante le strutture e l’ordine di uno stato tradizionale, nel quale la stessa burocrazia e l’apparato statale apparivano quasi come corpi di un ordine, conteneva i germi della dissoluzione, dovuti alle idee illuministe che avevano iniziato a filtrare – in modo più larvato che altrove – presso le varie corti. Se il giudizio evoliano nei confronti del codice federiciano conservante l’ordinamento diviso negli Stände è positivo, ciò è poiché, per l’epoca in cui sorse, quel codice conservava meglio d’ogni altro le strutture feudali e gerarchiche precedenti. Esse, tramite la tradizione prussiana, affondavano nell’Ordine dei cavalieri teutonici e nella loro riconquista delle terre baltiche: un ordine ascetico-cavalleresco formato da una disciplina e da una severa organizzazione gerarchica. Così, sin da giovanissimo Evola intuì l’assurdità della “guerra civile europea” che, come ufficiale, egli andava a combattere sulla frontiera carsica: l’Italia si schierava cioè contro ciò che restava della migliore tradizione europea. «Nel 1914 gli Imperi Centrali rappresentavano ancora un resto dell’Europa feudale e aristocratica nel mondo occidentale, malgrado innegabili aspetti di egemonismo militaristico ed alcune alleanze sospette col capitalismo presenti soprattutto nella Germania guglielmina. La coalizione contro di essi fu dichiaratamente una coalizione del Terzo Stato contro le forze residue del Secondo Stato […]. Come in poche altre della storia, la guerra del 1914-1918 presenta tutti i tratti di un conflitto non fra Stati e nazioni, ma fra le ideologie di diverse caste. Di essa, i risultati diretti e voluti furono la distruzione della Germania monarchica e dell’Austria cattolica, quelli indiretti il crollo dell’impero degli Czar, la rivoluzione comunista e la creazione, in Europa, di una situazione politico-sociale talmente caotica e contraddittoria, da contenere tutte le premesse per una nuova conflagrazione. E questa fu la seconda guerra mondiale» .
Come accennato, anche nei confronti della tradizione dell’Austria Evola espresse un giudizio marcatamente positivo. La stessa linea dinastica degli Asburgo ebbe un ruolo di rilievo in questa valutazione (Evola si era espresso in termini molto positivi nei confronti di Massimiliano I) ; nel periodo in cui visse a Vienna Evola respirò ciò che restava dell’atmosfera antica dell’Austria felix, e venne in contatto con quella temperie culturale e spirituale e soprattutto con uomini in cui, per usare le parole di Ernst Jünger, «la catastrofe aveva certo lasciato le sue ombre […], ma si era limitata a distruggerne la serenità innata senza distruggerla. A tratti scorgevamo […] una patina di quella sofferenza che potremmo definire austriaca e che è comune a tanti vecchi sudditi dell’ultima vera monarchia. Con essa venne distrutta una forma del piacere di vivere che negli altri paesi europei già da generazioni era diventata inimmaginabile, e le tracce di questa distruzione si avvertono ancora nei singoli individui. […]. Da noi nel Reich, se si prescinde dal generale esaurimento delle forze, si incominciava a notare tutt’al più la disparità degli strati sociali; qui invece si erano aperte, come voragini, le differenze tra le varie etnie» . In questo humus storico degli anni compresi tra le due guerre, in cui ancora forti erano i legami sentimentali ed etici di molti con la precedente tradizione imperiale – la monarchia asburgica d’Austria aveva almeno formalmente conservato, sino al Congresso di Vienna, la titolarità del Sacro Romano Impero – Evola ebbe anche modo di percepire direttamente l’attaccamento diffuso a livello popolare alla monarchia , e lo spiegò in questi termini: «Senza riesumare forme anacronistiche, invece di una propaganda che “umanizzi” il sovrano per accattivare la massa, quasi sulla stessa linea della propaganda elettorale presidenziale americana, si dovrebbe vedere fino a che punto possano avere un’azione profonda i tratti di una figura caratterizzata da una certa innata superiorità e dignità, in un quadro adeguato. Una specie di ascesi e di liturgia della potenza qui potrebbero avere una loro parte. Proprio questi tratti, mentre rafforzeranno il prestigio di chi incarna un simbolo, dovrebbero poter esercitare sull’uomo non volgare una forza d’attrazione, perfino un orgoglio nel suddito. Del resto, anche in tempi abbastanza recenti si è avuto l’esempio dell’imperatore Francesco Giuseppe che, pur frapponendo fra sé e i sudditi l’antico severo cerimoniale, pur non imitando per nulla i re “democratici” dei piccoli Stati nordici, godette di una particolare, non volgare popolarità» . In questo stesso senso nel 1935, scrivendo a proposito della possibilità di una restaurazione regale in Austria, Evola riferisce ciò che gli esponenti del pensiero conservatore e monarchico in quel paese sostenevano: «La premessa, intanto, è quella a cui ogni mente non ingombra di pregiudizî può anche aderire, cioè che il regime monarchico, in generale, è quello che più può garantire un ordine, un equilibrio e una pacificazione interna, senza dover ricorrere al rimedio estremo della dittatura e dello Stato centralizzato, sempreché nei singoli sussista la sensibilità spirituale richiesta da ogni lealismo. Questa condizione, secondo dette personalità, sarebbe presente nella gran parte della popolazione austriaca, se non altro, per la forza di una tradizione e di uno stile di vita pluricentenario» .
Il problema dell’Anschluss, dell’annessione dell’Austria alla Germania naizonalsocialista, fu negli anni che lo precedettero al centro di un ampio dibattito internazionale. Giuristi e politici lo affrontarono da diversi punti di vista; Evola non fu in concordanza di vedute, su questo tema, con l’amico Othmar Spann, che, scriveva Evola, per la coraggiosa coerenza delle sue idee non era ben visto né in Austria né in Germania. Scrivendo sul sociologo viennese, Evola affermava: «gli Austriaci non perdonano le sue simpatie per la Germania, mentre i Tedeschi non gli perdonano le critiche da lui mosse al materialismo razzista» . Ampliando alla scuola organicistica viennese e al mondo culturale austriaco il suo sguardo, Evola ne esponeva in questi termini le vedute: «Non ci si può rassegnare a far scendere una nazione, che ha la tradizione che l’Austria ha avuto, al livello di un piccolo Stato balcanico. Qui non si fa quistione della mera autonomia politica, si fa essenzialmente quistione di cultura e di tradizione. Storicamente, la civiltà austriaca è indisgiungibile da quella germanica. Non è possibile che oggi l’Austria a tale riguardo si emancipi e cominci a far da sé. Proprio perché essa è stata menomata, ridotta ad un’ombra di quel che essa fu precedentemente, le si impone di connettersi nel modo più stretto alla Germania, appoggiarsi ad essa, trarre da essa gli elementi che possono garantire l’integrità della sua eredità tedesca». Proseguiva Evola sostenendo che dal lato positivo l’Austria avrebbe avuto molto a sua volta da trasmettere alla Germania sotto il profilo della tradizione culturale. Ma di là dal piano squisitamente intellettuale, «Nel dominio delle tradizioni politiche l’antitesi è ancor più visibile. Vi sarebbe infatti da chiedere a questi intellettuali germanofili che cosa essi pensino quando parlano di tradizione austro-tedesca. La tradizione austriaca era una tradizione imperiale. Erede del Sacro Romano Impero, il Reich austriaco, formalmente almeno, non poteva dirsi tedesco. Di diritto, era supernazionale, e di fatto esso sovrastava un gruppo di popoli assai diversi come razza, costumi e tradizioni, gruppo nel quale l’elemento tedesco non figurava che come parte. Nemmeno giova dire che purtuttavia la direzione dell’impero austriaco era intonata in senso tedesco e faceva capo ad una dinastia tedesca. Dal punto di vista dei principî ciò conta così poco quanto il fatto che i rappresentanti del principio supernazionale della Chiesa Romana siano stati in larga misura italiani. Se si deve parlare di tradizione austriaca», concludeva Evola, «è ad una tradizione imperiale che bisogna riferirsi. Ora, che cosa può avere a che fare una tale tradizione con la Germania, se Germania oggi vuol dire nazionalsocialismo?» . Francesco Germinario ha scritto a tale proposito che per Evola «un’Austria legata alle radici cattoliche, e in cui, soprattutto, rimaneva ancora vivo il ricordo degli Asburgo, era molto più vicina ai valori della Tradizione rispetto a una Germania travolta dalla nuova ondata di modernizzazione promossa dal nazismo» .
Si esprimevano in questi termini già nel 1935 le posizioni critiche di Evola nei confronti del nazismo, di cui il filosofo tradizionalista accusava gli eccessi populistici, sociali e di sinistra. Il tono in questo caso è particolarmente critico perché il raffronto è con l’Austria, nella quale Evola vedeva appunto l’erede spirituale della più alta tradizione europea. D’altronde, si tratta di una linea interpretativa e storiografica apprezzabile, e che Evola mantenne anche nel dopoguerra, tendendo a separare i diversi elementi e le varie correnti che operarono nel nazionalsocialismo per giudicarli separatamente . Concludeva dunque la sua lettura politica della situazione internazionale affermando: «Se non ci si vuole rassegnare alla perdita dell’antica tradizione supernazionale centro-europea, l’Austria più che verso la Germania dovrebbe volgere i suoi sguardi verso gli Stati successori, nel senso di vedere fino a che punto è possibile ricostruire una comune coscienza centro-europea come base non solo della soluzione di importantissimi problemi economici e commerciali ma eventualmente […] anche della formulazione di un nuovo principio politico unitario di tipo tradizionale» .
Nei confronti della seconda guerra mondiale, il cui esito indubbiamente Evola vedeva come l’ultima fase del crollo epocale della civiltà europea, lo scrittore tradizionalista denunciava le colpe morali delle potenze occidentali: «a Himmler si deve un tentativo di salvataggio in extremis (considerato da Hitler come un tradimento). Pel tramite del Conte Bernadotte egli tramise una proposta di pace separata agli Alleati occidentali per poter continuare la guerra soltanto contro l’Unione Sovietica e il comunismo. Si sa che tale proposta, la quale, se accettata, forse avrebbe potuto assicurare all’Europa un diverso destino, evitando la successiva “guerra fredda” e la comunisticizzazione dell’Europa di là dalla “cortina di ferro”, fu nettamente respinta in base ad un cieco radicalismo ideologico, come era stata respinta, per un non diverso radicalismo, l’offerta di pace fatta da Hitler di sua iniziativa all’Inghilterra in termini ragionevoli in un famoso discorso dell’estate del 1940 quando i Tedeschi erano la parte vincente» .
Anche dopo la seconda guerra mondiale Evola mantenne un occhio di riguardo nei confronti dei paesi di lingua tedesca. La sua visione fu di ammirazione nei confronti della nuova resurrezione economica operata dai Tedeschi dopo la distruzione del secondo dopoguerra («questa nazione ha saputo completamente rialzarsi di là da distruzioni senza nome. Perfino in regime di occupazione essa ha sopravvanzato le stesse nazioni vincitrici sul piano industriale ed economico riprendendo il suo posto di grande potenza produttrice») , e per il coraggio col quale la Repubblica federale aveva bandito il pericolo comunista dalla sua politica («I Tedeschi fanno sempre le cose con coerenza. Così anche nel giuoco di osservanza democratica. Essi hanno messo su una democrazia-modello come un sistema “neutro” – diremmo quasi amministrativo, più che politico – equilibrato ed energico a un tempo. A differenza dell’Italia, la Germania proprio dal punto di vista di una democrazia coerente ha messo al bando il comunismo. La Corte Costituzionale tedesca ha statuito ciò che corrisponde all’evidenza stessa delle cose, ossia che un partito che, come quello comunista, segue le regole democratiche soltanto in funzione puramente tattica e di copertura, per scopo finale dichiarato avendo invece la soppressione di ogni contrastante corrente politica e la dittatura assoluta del proletariato, non può essere tollerato da uno Stato democratico che non voglia scavare la fossa a sé stesso») . Ma, ciò nonostante, la guerra aveva ormai prodotto un vacuum, un vuoto spirituale non più colmato: «Di contro a tutto ciò, stupisce, nella Repubblica Federale, la mancanza di qualsiasi idea, di qualsiasi “mito”, di qualsiasi superiore visione del mondo, di qualsiasi continuità con la precedente Germania» . Anche nel campo della cultura, Evola ravvisa un generale franamento, una sorta di generale “venire meno” alle posizioni coraggiose e d’avanguardia tenute dall’intellettualità tedesca negli anni – ad avviso di Evola, assai floridi e proficui sotto il profilo culturale – del Reich nazionalsocialista. Nel suo giudizio negativo Evola prende come esempio di questo crollo Gottfried Benn ed Ernst Jünger (cadendo con ciò in errori di veduta piuttosto grossolani ).
* * *
Da Vie della Tradizione 125 (2002), pp. 37-50.
Il presente articolo è stato ripubblicato privo delle note a pié pagina.
00:05 Publié dans Révolution conservatrice, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : tradition, traditions, traditionalisme, julius evola, italie, allemagne, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 14 mai 2011
Othmar Spann / Jungkonservativ
pdf der Druckfassung aus Sezession 41 / April 2011
Sebastian Maaß: Dritter Weg und wahrer Staat. Othmar Spann – Ideengeber der Konservativen Revolution
(= Kieler Ideengeschichtliche Studien, Bd. 3), Kiel: Regin-Verlag 2010. 174 S., 18.95 € (hier bestellen).
Die »Kieler Ideengeschichtlichen Studien« gewinnen mit
Band III an Konturen.
Den vorausgehenden Monographien über Edgar Julius Jung und Arthur Moeller van den Bruck steuert Sebastian Maaß mit der Studie zu Othmar Spann ein weiteres Puzzleteil in der Darstellung der »profiliertesten Vertreter der jungkonservativen Richtung der Konservativen Revolution« bei.
Als Fraktion mit gemäßigten Strukturelementen nahm der Jungkonservatismus eine Mittelstellung zwischen Völkischen und Nationalrevolutionären ein und konnte sowohl in der Weimarer Republik (Regierung von Papens) als auch der Ersten Republik Österreichs (Heimwehrbewegung) in die realpolitischen Auseinandersetzungen der Zeit eingreifen. Die Kontextualisierung in die ideengeschichtliche Umwelt der KR unternimmt Maaß einerseits über das Aufzeigen dezidiert jungkonservativer Positionen (ständestaatliche Konzeption, mittelalterliche Reichsidee, christliche Bezugspunkte, ganzheitlicher Ansatz) in Abgrenzung zu anderen Gruppierungen der KR, andererseits mittels Bezugnahme auf die charakteristischen Analogien (Mythos der »Ewigen Wiederkehr«, Antiliberalismus und -marxismus) von Jungkonservatismus und restlichen konservativ-revolutionären Strömungen. Dem Vorwort des Spann-Kenners Hanns Pichler, der die von Maaß vorgenommene Fokussierung auf Gesellschafts- und Staatslehre Spanns als klugen Ansatz für eine einführende Darstellung bezeichnet und gerade den in dessen frühen Schriften ausgebreiteten »ganzheitlichen« gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Ansatz als erkenntnisleitend für diesen Rahmen betrachtet, folgt ein biographischer Überblick. Anschließend widmet sich Maaß den Spann-Schülern Jakob Baxa und Walter Heinrich, die maßgeblichen Anteil an der akademischen Verbreitung der universalistischen Lehre Spanns besaßen, Heinrich versuchte darüber hinaus die ganzheitliche Lehre Spanns in reale Politik (Heimwehrbewegung in Österreich; Kameradschaftsbund für volks- und sozialpolitische Bildung im Sudetenland; Institut für Ständewesen in Düsseldorf) umzusetzen.
Anschließend behandelt Maaß »Philosophie und Religion als Grundlagen der Ganzheitslehre«, um über die Darlegung der »Kategorienlehre« und der politischen Publizistik (Der wahre Staat; Vom Wesen des Volkstums) den Aufbau des Spannschen »organischen« Staatswesens zu rekonstruieren. Indem der Verfasser das Wirken des Wiener Kreises um Spann sowohl in Österreich als auch dem deutschsprachigen Kulturraum analysiert, wird die meta- und realpolitische Bedeutung dieses Dritten Weges deutlich, der mit seiner machtpolitischen Ausprägung in Österreich um 1930 eine ernsthafte historische Alternative zu den »dritten Wegen« des Nationalsozialismus und des Faschismus darstellte. Das im Untertitel verwandte Konstrukt »Ideengeber der Konservativen Revolution« stellt – aufgrund der überschaubaren Rezeption von Spanns Universalismus in der Weimarer Republik – einen einzelnen Kritikpunkt an dieser soliden Monographie dar.
00:05 Publié dans Livre, Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, philosophie, othmar spann, sociologie, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques, révolution conservatrice, autriche | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
Spengler - Zu seinem 75. Todestag
Spengler – Zu seinem 75. Todestag
Karlheinz Weissmann
Gestern fand am Grab Oswald Spenglers auf dem Münchener Nordfriedhof ein Gedenken zu dessen 75. Todestag statt. Die Einladung war durch das Institut für Staatspolitik (IfS) ergangen, das auch einen Kranz niederlegen ließ.
In der Ansprache am Grab hieß es:
Wir gedenken heute eines Mannes, den man noch in der jüngeren Vergangenheit selbstverständlich zu den großen Deutschen rechnete. Damit ist es heute vorbei. Der Name Spenglers sagt nur noch wenigen etwas. Zu denen rechnen wir uns, die wir heute hier zusammen gekommen sind.
Der 75. Todestag Oswald Spenglers ist für uns Anlaß, an einen Mann zu erinnern, der zu den bedeutenden Geschichtsdenkern des 20. Jahrhunderts gehört. Dabei ist die Rede vom `Propheten des Untergangs´ eine unzulässige Verkürzung, vorschnelle Ableitung aus dem Titel seines Hauptwerks Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Es wäre aber ein Irrtum, in Spengler den Verkünder der Schicksalsergebenheit zu sehen. Er forderte das amor fati, die Liebe zum Schicksal. Vor allem aber und zuerst war er ein unbestechlicher Beobachter und Analytiker, der weder vor dem großen Entwurf und der Gesamtschau, noch vor den notwendigen Schlußfolgerungen zurückscheute, – auch wenn die das Ende der eigenen, der abendländischen Kultur bedeuteten.
Spengler hat zu sehen gelehrt, daß auch die Kultur, wie jedes Lebewesen, den Gesetzen von Werden und Vergehen, Geburt, Wachstum und Tod unterliegt. Er war darin nicht der erste. Aber kein anderer hat wie er, trotz der bitteren Einsicht, gefordert, die Resignation zu meiden, tapfer auszuharren und den Posten nicht zu räumen.
Der Name Spenglers steht für Wirklichkeitssinn. Das allein könnte schon genügen. Wir gedenken seiner als eines Großen unseres Volkes.
Im Anschluß an das Gedenken fand noch eine Zusammenkunft statt, in deren Rahmen mehrere kurze Vorträge zu Leben, Werk und Bedeutung Spenglers gehalten wurden.
Article printed from Sezession im Netz: http://www.sezession.de
URL to article: http://www.sezession.de/24726/spengler-zu-seinem-75-todestag.html
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : oswald spengler, révolution conservatirce, philosophie, allemagne, hommage | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 13 mai 2011
Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner is overleden
“Conservatisme is een ‘elitaire’, men kan ook zeggen ‘esoterische’ aangelegenheid (…). Het misverstand als zou de conservatief een theorielozen, een onfilosofische, ja, zelfs antifilosofische pragmaticus zijn, lijkt onuitroeibaar. Ik heb nochtans met veel kracht en overtuiging aangetoond dat het een misverstand is, toen ik het over die domeinen had, die man als ‘conservatieve mystiek’ zou kunnen omschrijven (…). Een zekere zin voor de onoplosbare complexiteit van de werkelijkheid, de erkenning van het feit dat men over het leven slechts brokstukgewijs rationeel kunnen spreken, de aandacht voor de tegenstelling, voor het tragische en voor het gedeeltelijk demonische dat door de geschiedenis waart, een constitutionele scepsis tegenover de ‘grote oplossingen’”. Woorden van Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner, een grote Oostenrijkse mijnheer, die bij menig jonge Europeaan de grondvesten van een degelijke conservatieve ideeënwereld heeft gelegd.Kaltenbrunner werd in 1939 in Wenen geboren, maar na zijn studies in de Rechten in 1962 trok hij naar Duitsland en werkte er bij uitgeverijen als lektor. In 1972 publiceerde hij een verzamelwerk Rekonstruktion des Konservatismus, en ontwierp hiermee, enkele jaren na 1968, de basis voor een conservatieve tegenactie. Hij ging in het werk uit van de idee dat het conservatisme eerst de hegemonie op het geestelijke vlak moet veroveren, vooraleer politieke consequenties te trekken.
Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner wou niet zomaar ‘conserveren’: hij was er veeleer op uit het ‘moderne’ conservatieve denken mee gestalte te geven – met daarin natuurlijk dat wat eeuwig een Europese waarde had. De door hem opgezette en gepubliceerde Herderbücherei Initiative - een reeks die liep van 1974 tot 1988 – bracht op een hoog niveau conservatieve auteurs, wetenschappers, onderzoekers en andere bijeen, die rond bepaalde thema’s (soms) baanbrekende bijdragen brachten. Interessante titels waren (en zijn): Die Zukunft der Vergangenheid (1975), Plädoyer für die Vernunft: Signale einer Tendenzwende (1974). Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner legde ook een bijzondere ijver aan de dag om de bronnen voor het conservatieve denken open en toegankelijk te houden. Hij publiceerde een driedelig werk Europa. Seine geistigen Quellen in Porträts aus zwei Jahrtausenden (1981-1985). Ook het werk Vom Geist Europas heeft niets van zijn waarde verloren en verdient het zeker op opnieuw gelezen te worden.
Hierna werd het stil rond Kaltenbrunner. Hij trok zich – na de ontgoocheling over het uitblijven van een échte conservatieve wende – terug als een lekenmonnik in Kandern, afgesneden van alle moderne communicatiemiddelen. Hij trok ook voorgoed een streep onder het metapolitieke werk. Nochtans loont het de moeite, zeker in deze tijden van ideeënarmoede ter linker en rechter zijde de moeite om de stijl en de onderwerpen die Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner nauw aan het hart lagen, te bestuderen. Met TeKoS hebben wij in elk geval niet op het overlijden van deze bescheiden, overtuigdconservatieve intellectueel gewacht om bijdragen van hem te publiceren. In ons nummer 127 brachten wij een vertaling van Elite. Erziehung für den Ernstfall, in het Nederlands: Zonder Elite gaat het niet. Wij groeten u met bijzondere veel respect, meester Kaltenbrunner!
(Peter Logghe)
00:25 Publié dans Hommages, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : hommage, gerd-klaus kaltenbrunner, allemagne, conservatisme, révolution conservatrice, droite, philosophie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 08 mai 2011
Ernst Moritz Arndt, jacobin romantique
Ernest Moritz Arndt, jacobin romantique
par Guy CLAES
Ernst Moritz Arndt est la figure essentielle du nationalisme romantique allemand. « Je suis né dans le petit peuple proche de la glèbe », écrivait-il en 1819. À son propos, l'éminent historien Diwald (Cf. Vouloir n°8) disait : « Au contraire de presque tous les autres romantiques, le romantique Arndt est issu de ce terreau populaire, de cette glèbe que les ruraux travaillent ; il s'est hissé à l'esprit du romantisme et n'a pas suivi la voie inverse comme les Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis qui sont, eux, partis de l'intellect et de l'esprit pour découvrir les merveilles de la forêt et la joie des fêtes de la moisson ». Arndt est effectivement né d'une famille de paysans poméraniens de l'Ile de Rügen, en 1769, la même année que Napoléon.
Aucun de ses ancêtres n'était libre. Son père fut affranchi par son seigneur puis devint inspecteur de ses terres et, enfin, métayer. Son père acquiert suffisamment de moyens pour lui payer un précepteur et l'envoyer au gymnasium de Stralsund. Après avoir quitté cet établissement sur un coup de tête et par dégoût pour l'étroitesse d'esprit petite-bourgeoise rencontrée chez ses condisciples, il étudie la théologie aux universités de Greifswald et d'Iéna. Après cette pose studieuse, il reprend sa vie errante, traverse et visite toute l'Europe, poussé par une soif de connaître la diversité des peuples et des mœurs. Cette vie vagabonde lui donne conscience de son identité d'Allemand et le récit de ses expériences vécues sera codifié dans son Geist der Zeit (= L'esprit du temps) dont l'impact, dans la société, fut finalement plus important que le Discours à la Nation Allemande du philosophe Fichte. Dans cet ouvrage fait de plusieurs volumes, sans prétention philosophique, il y a "flammes et enthousiasme".
Sa prise de conscience identitaire l'oblige à choisir son camp : il sera pour la Prusse de Gneisenau et de Clausewitz et Napoléon sera l'ennemi, le "Satan à la tête de ses troupes de bandits". Il sera l'ennemi mais aussi le modèle à suivre : il faudra faire de l'Allemagne une nation aussi solide que la France, et lui donner une constitution moderne calquée sur les acquis positifs de la Révolution française, acquis revus et corrigés par le Baron von Stein. Arndt sera un "jacobin allemand", un "jacobin romantique", les deux termes n'étant pas antinomiques dans le contexte de son époque et de sa patrie.
En 1818, Arndt, le paysan voyageur, devient professeur d'histoire à Bonn. Son esprit farouchement contestataire lui cause ennui sur ennui. Accusé de "démagogie", il est emprisonné, chassé de sa chaire, relâché sans explications, jamais jugé. À partir de 1822, il ne cessera d'écrire, notamment sur le problème de l'indépendance belge (nous y reviendrons). En 1848, il siège à l'Assemblée Nationale de Francfort pour en être chassé en mai 1849. En 1860, il meurt âgé de 90 ans et un mois.
Ces 90 années d'une vie dûment remplie et mise entièrement au service de la cause de son peuple, ont permis à Arndt d'élaborer, avec un vocabulaire clair et limpide que les Français croient rare en Allemagne, la théorie du "jacobinisme romantique". L'anthologie que nous offre la Faksimile-Verlag nous permet de saisir les piliers de cette vision (c'est à coup sûr davantage une vision qu'une théorie sèche et ardue) et de comprendre les racines du nationalisme populaire, non seulement allemand mais propre à tous les pays continentaux de langue germanique. Le Mouvement Flamand en a été fortement influencé et, dans l'élaboration de son corpus culturel, a tenu compte des écrits enthousiastes d'Arndt à propos de nos provinces, écrits qui ont précédé ceux de Hoffmann von Fallersleben (ajoutons ici qu'Arndt distinguait Wallons, Flamands et Luxembourgeois par la langue mais englobait les trois ethnies dans la sphère des mœurs sociales germaniques).
Né sujet du roi de Suède, Arndt a voulu favoriser l'union des Allemands au sein d'un même État. Son modèle initial fut le modèle suédois. Les Suédois constituaient, disait-il, un vrai peuple ("ein echtes Volk"), conscient, depuis Gustav Adolf, de la valeur des vertus politiques et de la nécessité de protéger le peuple par une structure étatique solide. L'anthologie de la Faksimile-Verlag nous dévoile le système d’Arndt : les rouages de sa conception du "Volk", les lois vitales du peuple, le peuple et l'État dans la perspective d'un double combat contre la réaction féodale et le révolutionnarisme de 1789 et les projets pour la constitution d'un État "völkisch".
L'idée de "Volk" repose sur trois batteries de définitions : empiriques, métaphysiques et politiques. Sur le plan empirique, tout observateur décèlera l'existence tangible et concrète de spécificités ethno-culturelles, de folklores immémoriaux, de réseaux de liens communautaires, d'us et de coutumes ancestrales. Sur le plan métaphysique, le "Volk" est le réceptacle d'une unicité idéelle, d'une religiosité particulière que rien ni personne ne saurait rendre interchangeable. Sur le plan politique, le "Volk" est une volonté. La volonté de demeurer dans l'histoire est une force redoutable : les Anglais et les Suédois ont tenu tête ou se sont imposés à des voisins plus puissants quantitativement parce qu'ils avaient une conscience très nette de leur identité et refusaient de se laisser guider par l'arbitraire de leurs gouvernants. Les peuples libres (et Arndt regrette ici que le peuple allemand n'en fasse pas partie) ont une claire conscience de leur honneur (Ehre) et de leur honte (Schande).
Arndt distingue la notion de "Volk" de celles de "Menge" (= masse, foule) et "Pöbel" (= populace). "Menge" est la masse "neutre", sans opinions clairement définies ; elle est cette "majorité silencieuse" que tous réclament comme clientèle. Le "Pöbel" est l'ensemble des éléments déracinés, incapables de discipliner leurs comportements parce que dépouillés de toute norme ancestrale, de toute pesanteur stabilisatrice. La Révolution française, par son individualisme (manifeste notamment dans les lois qu'elle édicte contre les corporations et contre le droit de coalition), a hissé au pouvoir le "Pöbel" qui a mené la "Menge" dans l'aventure révolutionnaire et napoléonienne. Le "Pöbel" s'est imposé en "maître", en despote sur une "Menge" d'esclaves. La collusion des "despotes" et des "esclaves" ne donne pas un "Volk". Pour que "Volk" il y ait, il faut une circulation des élites, une égalité des chances et une adhésion spontanée et non contrainte à un même ensemble de valeurs et à une même vision de l'histoire.
Pour Arndt, le peuple est un tout organique d'où jaillit une Urkraft (force originelle) qu'il convient de reconnaître, de canaliser et de faire fructifier. Sans ce travail d'attention constant, le "Volk" dégénère, subit l'aliénation (qui deviendra concept-clef du socialisme), sort de l'histoire. Arndt, poète, compare le "Volk" à un volcan, à un Vésuve que les despotes veulent maintenir éteint. Les éruptions sont pourtant inévitables.
Pour accéder à l'idée d'État, le peuple doit mener une double lutte contre la "réaction" et la "révolution". Cette lutte doit d'abord se concentrer contre la conception mécaniste de l'État, issue à la fois de l'absolutisme et de la Révolution française. L'enthousiasme créatif part d'un enracinement, d'une terre (Heidegger nous systématisera cette vision) où vit encore une dimension historique et non des belles et vibrantes rhétoriques abstraites que les premières heures de la Révolution française avaient connues et diffusées par la presse à travers l'Europe. Arndt, dès les séminaires de Stralsund, ressent un malaise inexplicable à l'écoute des discours parisiens contre l'absolutisme et la monarchie. Son "bon sens" paysan perçoit et dénonce la mascarade lexicale des clubs jacobins. Ce sentiment confus d'antipathie, Arndt le retrouvera lors d'une conversation en Haute-Italie en 1799 avec un officier républicain français qui s'enivrait de trop belles paroles à propos de la liberté (au nom de laquelle, expliquait-il, on venait de fusiller deux députés plus ou moins responsables de l'assassinat d'un tribun). Ces paroles sonnaient faux dans l'oreille d'Arndt et la légèreté avec laquelle beaucoup d'adeptes de la terreur envisageaient fusillades et "guillotinades" l'effrayait. La "force tranquille" de l'organicité se passait de tels débordements.
L'idée d'État née lors de la Révolution de 1789 est inorganique. Elle est "constructiviste" et néglige l'évolution lente qui a germé dans les inconscients collectifs. Malgré ce jugement sévère, partagé par Burke, par certains contre-révolutionnaires français ou par les romantiques traditionalistes (dits parfois réactionnaires) allemands, Arndt reconnaît les aspects, les éléments positifs de la Révolution. Les Allemands doivent beaucoup à cette Révolution : elle a permis leur prise de conscience nationale. Elle a accéléré le processus de décomposition amorcé déjà sous l'Ancien Régime. Elle nous a appris que les peuples ne commettaient, ni en intention ni en pratique, de crime contre les rois en voulant être gouvernés par des lois qu'ils connaissent et reconnaissent, qui sont le fruit d'une sagesse trempée dans l'expérience des générations antérieures. Il a manqué à la France révolutionnaire cette sagesse organique et le torrent révolutionnaire a débouché sur la Terreur puis sur un nouvel absolutisme ; ce qui fermait la boucle et ne résolvait rien. Les Princes allemands ont trahi leur peuple en se comportant comme des "grands mogols" ou des "khans tatars". C'est à cela que mène l'irrespect des liens organiques et de la faculté d'écouter qu'ils impliquent.
Arndt critique le droit romain, destructeur du droit coutumier (il préfigure ici von Savigny) et voit dans une paysannerie sainement politisée, le fondement de l'État völkisch (cette idée, Spengler, Spann et bien d'autres la reprendront à leur compte). Enfin, il nous expose les raisons pour lesquelles il ne croit pas en une Pan-Europe qui se ferait au-delà, par-delà les peuples. Cette Europe ne serait qu'une panacée insipide dépourvue de cette organicité stabilisante que cherchent, au fond, tous les peuples depuis l'effondrement de l'Ancien Régime. Cette anthologie est une lecture impérative pour tous ceux qui veulent comprendre l'Allemagne du XIXème siècle, la genèse des socialismes et les idéaux des acteurs du 1848 allemand.
G.C.
Ernst Moritz ARNDT, Deutsche Volkswerdung : Arndts politisches Vermächtnis an die Gegenwart, Bremen, Faksimile Verlag (Adresse : Postfach 10 14 20, D2800 Bremen 1, RFA), 160 pages avec un portrait d'Arndt et une courte biographie, DM 15.
00:05 Publié dans Histoire, Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, théorie politique, allemagne, sciences politiques, politologie, 19ème siècle, romantisme | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 04 mai 2011
Armin Mohler / Eine politische Biographie
Armin Mohler. Eine politische Biographie
Götz KUBITSCHEK
Heute wäre Armin Mohler 91 Jahre alt geworden. Ich konnte ihn Mitte der neunziger Jahre noch kennenlernen und habe meinen Verlag nicht zuletzt gegründet, weil Ellen Kositza, Karlheinz Weißmann und ich im Jahre 2000 Mohler zum 80. eine Festschrift überreichen wollten. Es wird keinem Antaios-Leser unbemerkt geblieben sein, daß das Erbe Mohlers und sein besonderer Ton in Schnellroda auffindbar und virulent gehalten werden.
Nun hat Karlheinz Weißmann jahrelange Arbeiten in Form gebracht und legt Armin Mohler. Eine politische Biographie vor (hier subskribieren!). Weißmann ist der beste Kenner des Werks und der Denkweise Mohlers, hat auch Teile von dessen Nachlaß übernehmen können und in vielen persönlichen Gesprächen Details erfahren und Zusammenhänge notiert, die nirgends schriftlich niedergelegt sind.
Weißmanns Arbeit ist eine politische Biographie, weil Mohler ein politisch denkender, strategisch und taktisch im Sinne einer modernen deutschen Rechten agierender Kopf war. Man liest von der Nähe zur Macht (im Umfeld Josef Strauß‘), erfährt, was in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren an Debatten noch alles möglich war und verneigt sich vor der Prinzipientreue Mohlers, der Respekt nie mit Undeutlichkeit oder einer Schleimspur verwechselte.
Dies zeigt sich deutlich in den Großkapiteln über Mohlers Zeit als Sekretär von Ernst Jünger und über die Kontakte mit Carl Schmitt: In keinem Fall war er so etwas wie Goethes Eckermann (am Kaffeetisch sitzend und glühend vor Glück die Gespräche notierend), sondern ein Gesprächs- und Briefpartner auf Augenhöhe, der sich ja zuletzt nicht scheute, Jüngers Frühwerk gegen den Autor öffentlich zu verteidigen (was zum Bruch mit Jünger führte).
Dies alles breitet Weißmann in seiner Biographie aus, und natürlich auch all die anderen, für uns bis heute so wichtgen Aspekte: Mohler rettete das Erbe der Konservativen Revolution, sezierte die Mechanismen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung, verfaßte elektrisierende Essays – wir pflegen sein Erbe zurecht, und zurecht sind viele, die sich – dem Zeitgeist folgend – über ihn erhoben und über ihn urteilten heute so richtig und ganz und gar vergessen …
+ Weißmanns Mohler-Biographie kann man hier für 19 € subskribieren (bis zum 30. April). Später kostet sie 22 €, erscheinen wird sie Mitte, Ende Mai.
+ Von der dreibändigen Mohler-Ausgabe, die wir 2001 und 2002 aufgelegt haben, sind Reste der Bände 1 und 2 noch erhältlich. Wir bieten sie günstig im Doppelpack für 24 € an (in Einzelbänden: 44 €). Bestellen Sie hier.
+ Mohlers Essay Gegen die Liberalen (mit einem Nachwort von Martin Lichtmesz) wird derzeit in 2. Auflage gedruckt. Informationen und eine Bestellmöglichkeit gibts hier.
00:15 Publié dans Livre, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, suisse, droite, conservatisme, conservatisme allemand | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 03 mai 2011
G.-K. Kaltenbrunner ist verstorben
Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner ist verstorben
Götz Kubitschek
Gestern ist – wie ich eben erfahren habe – Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner verstorben. Daß ich zuletzt einen seiner Essays in der reihe kaplaken nachdrucken konnte, ist nur eine Marginalie im Leben dieses für eine gewisse Zeitspanne wichtigsten Publizisten der deutschen Nachkriegsrechten.
Ich hatte zu Kaltenbrunners 70. Geburtstag vor zwei Jahren einen Beitrag veröffentlicht (Sezession 28/ Februar 2009). Online ist er hier zu finden.
Und im Oktoberheft 2010 der Sezession (Nr. 38) hatten wir in einer Personenreihe unter dem Titel „Konservative Intelligenz“ selbstverständlich auch einen Eintrag zu Kaltenbrunner veröffentlicht. Im Gedenken an ihn veröffentlichen wir diese Vita hier noch einmal:
Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner wurde 1939 in Wien geboren, übersiedelte nach einem Studium der Rechtswissenschaft 1962 nach Deutschland und arbeitete zunächst für verschiedene Verlage als Lektor. Noch in dieser Eigenschaft gab er den Sammelband Rekonstruktion des Konservatismus (1972) heraus und konnte damit wenige Jahre nach ’68 die Grundlagen für einen möglichen politischen Gegenentwurf liefern. Kaltenbrunner ging dabei von der Einsicht aus, daß der Konservatismus zunächst die Hegemonie im Geistigen erlangen müsse, bevor politische Konsequenzen durchsetzbar seien. Im Hintergrund stand seine Überzeugung, daß die »ökonomischen Verhältnisse« nur den Rahmen für die entscheidenden Ereignisse abgeben: Ideen und Utopien siegen demnach einfach dadurch, »daß sich genügend ›Verrückte‹ finden, die bereit sind, dafür zu kämpfen und sich, wenn’s sein muß, auch töten zu lassen«. Kaltenbrunner sah seine Aufgabe im Bewahren der Tradition des Konservatismus sowie im gegenwartsbezogenen Weiterdenken. Die von ihm initiierte und herausgegebene Taschenbuchreihe Herderbücherei Initiative (1974–1988) diente diesem Ziel. Auf hohem Niveau wurden aktuelle Fragen von verschiedenen Autoren auf dem Hintergrund der konservativen Tradition bearbeitet.
Kaltenbrunners Einleitungen wurden dabei lagerübergreifend als scharfsinnig und bedenkenswert gelobt. Die schönen, oft mehrdeutigen Titel der einzelnen Bände prägten sich ein: Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit (1975), Tragik der Abtrünnigen (1980), Unser Epigonen-Schicksal (1980). Bereits der erste Titel Plädoyer für die Vernunft: Signale einer Tendenzwende (1974) wurde als »Tendenzwende« zu einem Schlagwort unter Konservativen und Rechten. Parallel zu den aktuellen Analysen kümmerte sich Kaltenbrunner weiterhin um die Quellen des Konservatismus. Sein dreibändiges Werk Europa. Seine geistigen Quellen in Portraits aus zwei Jahrtausenden (1981–1985) und die Fortsetzung Vom Geist Europas (1987–1992) sind hier zu nennen. Mit dem Begriff Konservatismus war auch Kaltenbrunner nicht glücklich: Mit der Weltbewahrung allein wäre es nicht getan und geborene Konservative gebe es im Zeitalter des Fortschritts nicht mehr. Kaltenbrunner bemühte sich deshalb um eine konservative Theorie. Nach dem 75. Band wurde die Initiative-Reihe eingestellt. Kaltenbrunner beschäftigt sich seither mit Biographien zur Geschichte des frühen Christentums. Seine letzten Veröffentlichungen tragen esoterischen Charakter: Johannes ist sein Name (1993) Dionysius vom Areopag (1996). Kaltenbrunner lebt zurückgezogen im Schwarzwald und publiziert nicht mehr.
00:10 Publié dans Hommages, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : allemagne, hommage, conservatisme, conservatisme allemand | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook