Nietzsche also espouses this sentiment in The Birth of Tragedy where he describes culture as the “most basic foundation of the life of a people”.6 The modern nation however has become increasingly complex and the more it grows, the weaker the ties to the people and the concept of Being in the nation becomes. Familiarity is essential in creating communal bonds, but the very size of the nation renders this difficult, and micro-communities are therefore formed which ultimately serve to de-stabilize the larger power structure of the government. This is not only bad for the nation, but also for those who govern the nation, because it creates a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and this perceived disparity dissolves the foundation of collective identity within the nation. As such, the elected representatives of modern democracies immediately find themselves juxtaposed with a large group of disgruntled citizens who have no true loyalty to the nation, and are instead controlled by purely by legislative force alone. In the worst case scenario, this leads to both ressentiment and revolution.
In regards to music and its effect on politics and culture, another figure connected to Nietzsche who cannot be ignored is the ever-present specter of Richard Wagner. Ultimately the friendship of the two was not based purely on passion for music, but also the use of mythology, something with Richard Wagner indisputably drew upon in his operas. Wagner wrote in Deutsche Kunst and Deutsche Politik on the social and political meaning of such aesthetic theories: “Modern life, Wagner wrote, [shall be] reorganized by the rebirth of art, and especially by a new theater whose life-giving function shall be equal to that of ancient Greek drama”.17 Although Nietzsche would eventually separate himself from Wagner due to the musician’s anti-Semitism, Nietzsche also explored the uses of myth during his period of friendship with Wagner. “The legend of Prometheus”, Nietzsche writes,
This is Nietzshe’s Geisterkrieg – a war of ideas that is to fought at the academic and intellectual level to control the flow of ideas, culture, and the politics that emerge from it. This is similar to the modern idea of “metapolitics”. The Geisterkrieg however, “cuts right through the absurd arbitrariness that are peoples, class, race, profession, education, culture,” a war instead “between ascending and declining, between will-to-live and the desire for revenge on life”.29 In the context of the Geisterkrieg and Grosse Politik, the artists and the philosophers become the creators of all future governments and orders – for as Nietzsche tells us, “The artist and philosopher […] strike only a few and should strike all”.30 This means that they have not yet realized their ability to create cultural changes. Only the artists and philosophers are capable of launching Nietzsche’s Geisterkrieg, the war of ideas. However, due to the current dominance of capitalism and production based society over democracy (across both the Left and Right) the influence of artists and philosophers are severely impaired. And because of this, their rule continues unchallenged because Nietzsche’s Geisterkrieg, if successful, would end all petty nationalism and party specific squabbles. Partisan based politics would no longer exist, replaced instead by leaders who embody thymos the most as is stated here,
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On peut bien sûr me rétorquer : « Attention ! Les gens ne se laisseront pas faire ! ». Mais que feront-ils ? On peut imaginer qu’ils émigreront sous d’autres cieux. Cependant, il faut savoir que l’émigrant est un type particulier d’humain, comme l’étaient par exemple mes parents, personnes de nature aventureuse. Or la plupart des Allemands contemporains ne sont pas des types d’aventuriers. Ils veulent faire tranquillement leur boulot, élever leurs enfants et partir en vacances.
Editor’s Note:
This is the transcript by V. S. of Richard Spencer’s Vanguard Podcast interview of Jonathan Bowden about Oswald Spengler. You can listen to the podcast here [2].
Richard Spencer: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard! And welcome back as well, Jonathan Bowden! How are you, Jonathan?
Jonathan Bowden: Yes, hello! I’m very well. Thanks for having me on again.
RS: Quite good. Today we’re going to talk about the philosophy of Oswald Spengler. In these podcasts we’ve talked quite a bit about philosophers who are of interest to the New Right or the Alternative Right or White Nationalists or whatever you want to call us. And we’ve talked about Nietzsche in particular. Nietzsche is an interesting case in the sense that, despite the fact that he has quite a few unfashionable ideas from the standpoint of our enlightened modern age, nevertheless he is still quite popular. Libraries and bookstores are well-stocked with titles on Nietzsche.
Spengler, on the other hand, who equaled or surpassed Nietzsche’s popularity in Central Europe in his own time, has gone down the memory hole in a way. It’s hard to find a book by Spengler at your local bookstore, even a large one. Though I think people have heard about him or they have some general notion that he was a pessimistic German or something like this, they don’t really know a lot about the man and his philosophy. We hope we can increase the level of understanding, certainly, with this discussion today.
Jonathan, the way I wanted to start out this talk about Spengler and the philosophy of history is at a very basic level of understanding. I was thinking before we started this conversation that this idea of linear history is one that is really powerful for people and it also has something to do with Christianity in a way, but it’s also something that’s survived well into the post-Christian West. What I mean by linear history is what maybe could be described in just a simple phrase like “It keeps getting better all the time,” this notion that we’re the next step in history, and this history leads to greater freedom, greater liberation, greater understanding, greater technology, so on and so forth and that, yes, there might be some bad things that happen along the way but those are kind of speed bumps along this highway towards utopia or something like that.
I think if we look at the world from the standpoint of technology perhaps that is true. We’ve had the creation of medicines, from the automobile to the iPhone. Obviously, there’s a way that things have been getting better. They’ve been slowly perfected.
But, of course, culture and civilization, these are two very different things than technology.
Jonathan, maybe we can talk just a little about that just to get this conversation started and to get our listeners’ minds’ wheels turning, so to speak, about the philosophy of history. Think about that powerful assumption. Just that it seems like something that everyone in the modern West, maybe even the modern world, Left and Right, all have and that is of linear history and how Spengler is really challenging that. What do you think about that idea, Jonathan?
JB: Yes, I think that’s a good way in. Spengler is a cosmologist of history. He’s a botanist of history, in a way. He sees human cultures and their attendant civilizations very much like geological strata or the morphology of plant life in that they have a natural cycle, even a diurnal, seasonal one. They have a brief flowering and they have a spring, they have a summer, they have an autumnal phase, and then they have a winter of the soul, and then they die. They literally atrophy and die. His belief in the death of great cultures, that cultures could be seen to come to an end, or they can lie silent for enormously long periods prior to some renaissance or kickstart, is deeply troubling to the modern mind which is addicted to the idea of progress and progressivism whatever its standpoint.
Spengler’s emotional register was profoundly melancholic and pessimistic. He once famously in Man and Technics said that “optimism is cowardice.” There is a degree to which his view of history, which is these radial circles which overlap with each other rather like a Venn diagram in mathematics, a science with which he was familiar, accords very much with his own view that things are cyclic and circular and turn back upon themselves, and cultures go through various stages which are inevitable, and each stage follows from the other one and has the seeds of death in its own mouth in the sense that the thing will turn full circle on itself. He turned cultural decline away from merely being of archival and archeological interest.
These are forbidding and almost totalitarian insights of pessimism which don’t accord easily with the 20th century. If you look at a book like Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World, for example, which is a narrative of the extreme violence in Western and global society in the century of the masses, the 20th century, that’s a mordant book. It’s an apocalyptic book. It’s a book that in some ways is opposed to the idea that things are getting better and better. Yet at the same time, it doesn’t feel emotionally pessimistic despite the fact that it’s brimming, on the whole, with pessimistic criteria. So, Ferguson remains an optimist in a sort of belletrist liberal methodology, the belief that things can get better even if they turn out for the worst at a particular time, which he wishes to express.
Spengler would have no truck with that. Spengler believes that cultures are sort of caged in a way and will wither and die a natural death just as [. . .] beauty in accordance with the rhythm which is close to that of biological life in human affairs.
RS: Before we get into his organic concept of history let’s talk a little bit about his milieu, where he was coming from. I would like to talk about the milieu of his life in Germany at the first quarter, first half of the 20th century.
But before that I think it’s worthwhile going back a little bit to the 19th century and some of the philosophies of history which preceded Spengler’s, and I’m thinking, of course, of Hegel and Kant — probably the two biggest figures in that philosophical school. Maybe you could just mention what are some of the ways that Hegel, probably the most well-known, influenced Spengler. Obviously Hegel had a dialectical view of history which is certainly more complicated than “it’s getting better all the time” linear view, but nevertheless it was a progress view of history. He actually felt that history was coming to an end with the Prussian state and so on and so forth.
So, what do you think about, say, the influence of some of these great German idealist thinkers that came before Spengler and how that impacted his notion of the decline of the West?
JB: Yes, I think that they obviously affected him deeply, because they looked for systematic answers unlike the neo-Kantian school that said there is no time for history and that all attempts to find a time in history are artistic and subjective and therefore historically worthless.
It’s important to realize that for a proportion of critics Spengler’s view is not just anathema, but it’s been fundamentally mysterious, because quite a few philosophical schools believe, whether it’s on the Left with Toynbee or it’s on the Right with Spengler, that it’s utterly pointless to have attempts at historical analysis which are non-linear and which seek for an answer to the conundrum of history, that seeks to elucidate the Sphinx and get it to answer questions about the nature of historical reality. They consider that there is no plan. There is nothing other than linear motion in the spasm of time and any attempt to find a historical plan other than the received wisdom of a work is fruitless. They would consider a work like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon to be perfect in its way because it takes the Roman Empire as its topic where you have an enormous unfolding vista of historical time, and you have the idea that you have many triumphs and many disasters, but the end is partly a projection of the beginning. So, you have almost a biography of a society.
That’s acceptable. What isn’t acceptable from this school of thinking, which is the current one in academic orthodoxy at the present time, is to try to find a key or philosophical agency to history, to interpret history, that history has a meaning in the way that Thomas Carlyle believed it had meaning in the 19th century. Spengler’s addicted to finding the meaning in history, which pulls him to the outside of several of the major historical schools to begin with. There’s also the fact that he was self-taught and was a sort of autodidact and a sort of terribly gifted dilettante, as someone not completely kindly once said. History is an area par excellence which only academics really believe they are entitled to write.
So, in two areas, academicism and the search for an ontology in history — the search for teleology, the belief that there is a prospective future which can be determined, as Marx believed in a different way, and mapped out — those lie outside of Spengler’s purview and yet make marginal his historical essay, his attempt at finding out the meaning of things in his two volume enormous work The Decline of the West published in 1918 and 1923.
So, he draws on the primary idealists like Hegel, but I don’t think there’s much comparison to be frank when you get to the work, because Hegel believes that history will reach its fulcrum and its termination in the idealistic presentation of the Prussian state in history — a sort of being in history — whereas for Spengler the Prussian state, although he wanted Germany and the Germany of his time to dominate Europe, was just a part of the West and a part of the cycle of the West that would be doomed to decline as all of the great civilizations — the Arab, the Eastern Chinese, the Medieval — were doomed to decline in their way.
RS: Before we talk a little bit more about Germany in his time, actually, I think it would be good to lay out some of the basic terms of Spengler’s history. He talked about a series of great or high cultures and these included the Magian culture, which I guess is the Semitic culture, and the Apollonian of Classical culture, and then Western-American culture, which he described as quintessentially Faustian in nature.
So, Jonathan, maybe you could elucidate some of these big ideas for our listeners so they could have an idea of his organic historical sense, just in particular with those three massive cultures. And again, we’re not talking about epochs, because he’s getting away from a sense of time and he’s putting it in terms of a culture and a people, a civilization. So, maybe you could explain those basic concepts and then also just delineate for our listeners what he means by the Magian, Apollonian, and then finally the Faustian culture, which he felt was coming to a close.
JB: Yes. He felt cultures were self-enclosed and were organic and were not time-concentric. He thought they have a period or expanse of time associated with them.
He sees the Middle Eastern culture as essentially magical and somewhat sterile and introverted and flat and a culture of the desert.
He sees Greek culture as proportioned and massive in its architectural and classical relief. He sees it as less dynamic than the Western culture, more staid, more fixed, and had a tendency towards a preternatural order and the specificity of same.
The Western culture, which he is most keen on, he sees as a partly diabolical culture. He sees it as Faustian. He sees it as a mismatch and matching of things that don’t coherently go together in other cultures. He sees it as a culture of advanced restlessness and absence of an inner sense of ease and with an extraordinary desire for self-transcendence, which is a desire to change everything again and again and again to make it new and make it work and make the Western culture the most dynamically aggressive culture on Earth.
RS: So, is he talking about a mindset with this — I hesitate to use this term but — a collective consciousness, so to speak, amongst the people that is expressed most fully in some of the great people of the civilization? Is that a good way to describe what he’s talking about?
JB: Yes, it’s a sort of civilizational construct of culture permeated through an elite as articulated through and by the masses within a particular civics over time. It’s racially-based to an extent, but only partly so, because his positions are sublimated racialisms whereby, although the Semitic mostly goes with the Magian and the Eastern Mediterranean largely goes with the Apollonian, and the Western is made up of most of Europe and ex-Europe in the New World and the far reaches of the world associated with Western imperial conquests and settlements, North America in particular, the notion that they are purely racial is not one that he accedes to.
He has a Nietzschean concept of race which is that race is important, because breeding is the basis of everything, but it’s too rudimentary for reasons of analysis. For analysis, you have to look at the culture and the civics which are created by specific races and intermingled variants of races over time, and pure biology is not enough to describe man’s ascent, if indeed it has been an ascent rather than a withering to death of prior acknowledged cultures of whatever beauty.
So, Spengler’s always an unhappy bedfellow for various people, because he never fits in with people’s preconditions and prior suppositions. There will always be a tension even with the racialist Right with Spengler as there is with the Left over his pessimistic and non-materialist views of history, his intuitionism, his opening to the subjective elements in culture, his belief in the wintering of the soul of a culture and its partial decline over time, his obsession with the coming up to decadence. All of these would not render him attractive to a Left-wing mind at all. But, at the same time, the liberal progressive sees little in him, the man of the center, because he’s too morbid, too mordant, and pessimistic, too professorial, and too linked to a prior theory which cuts against their ingrained optimism, including the idea, as you said at the beginning of this clip, that “things are getting better and better.”
RS: Jonathan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about this organic story of Western or Faustian culture and its origins after the collapse of the Roman Empire and then how he felt that it was declining and ending in his own lifetime? Maybe you could just give us some outlines of Faustian culture’s birth and flowering and then decline. What was he talking about? Obviously, in order to talk about these things you have to paint in really broad strokes, but I think that’s good, particularly with a podcast like this. So, give our listeners a sense of this organic story of Faustian culture.
JB: With the collapse of the Roman Empire I think he thinks that the classical world comes to an end and the medieval world as such begins. The medieval world is a static and closed civilization which is a magical one based upon totem and taboo and based upon a stiff and regulated cosmology that is only unsettled by the return of classical wisdom in what becomes the proto-Renaissance and then the Renaissance.
The Renaissance inflamed the entire civilization mentally and culturally and sends an enormous coursing torrent of energy through it which leads to an unmapping and an unfolding of new visions and new vistas. Whereby, we see the Middle Ages replaced by a post-Medieval Europe that looks back on the classical period but based upon the stolidity and solidity and the transcendental Magianship of the Middle Ages. It’s the Renaissance and the scientific methodology that gives rise to it, which is a return to a particular intellectual inheritance of the Greeks that gives man this diabolical pact element in the Western cosmos. This is the idea that Faust literally would sell his soul to Mephistopheles for knowledge. He would sell his soul for power over given things, for the power of magic almost in the interpretation of physical reality and the ability to hold sway over the physical world with which the sciences are concerned.
Western man begins a transmutation of everything in life, of every science, of every art, of all forms of economic dealing, all forms of culture and civilizational intent. Recalibrated and cast anew through this prism of Faustian fire, and this enables the West to set out as the Athenians had once done in a restricted Grecian compass to conquer much of the known world and to subdue it to their own restless tasking and desire for self-overbecoming at every possible instance. So, the West is seen as in some ways as a culture of the superman, in Nietzschean terms, reaching out across the world, reshaping other cultures and interacting with them in often destructively creative ways to release more energy, to enhance more transcendence, to enhance more creativity, to lead to more Faustian pacts and bargains, and then to become even more enraptured of its own colossal strength and vigor by importing even more energy through even greater and deeper and more resonating Faustian pacts until the thing teeters on the brink of absurdity to a degree, because the West becomes so enamored of its own mettle that it can’t see that it’s beginning, like all cultures, to engage upon ineffable decline.
RS: What creates the decline? What leads to decadence? What turns continual self-overcoming into decadence?
JB: Probably repetition and probably the fact that he believes that everything is pre-programmed like a computer chip to decay over time. You can only go to the well so often. Probably the spread of democratic, liberal humanist, and materialist ideas and the disjunction between the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.
The Renaissance is seen by most Enlightenment thinkers as a precursor of the Enlightenment, but he doubtless sees the Enlightenment as a giving way of the Faustian bargain to decadence to untrammeled ideas about the will of the majority which the people who put them forward, he believes, must know are absurd because the majority of men could never decide any question of any importance amongst themselves. That women would be given the vote and would be allowed into the function hall of the male. The liberal humanism that would increasingly refuse to distinguish between patterns of being and hierarchies in nature as they express themselves in society.
So, really, it’s the Enlightenment and its definition of the West, which is necessary, because in my reading of his codex of history the decline is necessary and therefore is inborn and the forces which are there, rather like illness and death in the individual, are there to permit change in the rule in the future and the ending of a cycle which is natural as it is in the biological world. So, he doesn’t see decadence as a disaster. He sees it as a necessity.
RS: So, are we still living in an enlightened age in a way that that was the turning point, and we’re kind of the last dregs of the Enlightenment?
JB: You could interpret it in that way, although at the end of The Decline of the West, of course, in the second volume, he preaches a new caesarism, that there may be a democratic caesarism, which of course came to be true throughout the latter third of the first quadrant of the 20th century.
His view that democratic niceties would be replaced by a much more Machiavellian and realistic politics, a politics of ruthless Realpolitik associated, even though he never advocated it, with Fascism. Although some of his political sayings are close to that of a fascistic or faschistoid conservative. That’s why, again, he falls between two camps. He’s not fascistic enough for those people who are enamored of those governments, movements, and regimes at a particular time, but nor is he conservative enough not to be associated with them at least through the glamor of nostalgia. So, he’s too quasi-fascistic for many conservatives, particularly now, but he’s also too conservative for thoroughgoing fascistic types. And that was his attitude, of course, to one of the most notorious governments in the Western world which he lived through the early stages of in the 1930s in his own country.
RS: Right. Actually, we talked about that and the Nazi regime banned his book, The Hour of Decision, which, again, I’m sure in the most of the modern mind they would probably just lump someone like Spengler on in there with Hitler as evil Right-wingers, but obviously that’s certainly not the way they saw it at the time.
Let’s put a little more pressure on this, because this is an interesting issue of Spengler’s life in an age which could even be described as “democratic caesarism.” That is, one based on populism, on popular sovereignty, but then one that is harsh and brutal in many ways, enamored with Realpolitik and so on and so forth. I think it’s a very interesting topic of Spengler’s own life.
JB: Yes, there’s always been a liberal qualm here as to why he didn’t support the Nazi regime. He did vote for Hitler against Hindenburg in the presidential election, which of course Hitler lost. Hindenburg retained the presidency until he died in office, and then it was after the Gleichschaltung it was just rolled up and it became one of Hitler’s many offices as he became supreme leader of all elements of the state and the offices of the president and chancellor were amalgamated into that of the Leader figure.
He also put a swastika outside his lodging windows to annoy the neighbors with his sister, saying that if he unfurled it one should always be prepared to pay the price for annoying people.
But, at the same time, he thought of them as irretrievably vulgar and without high culture, very much Ernst Jünger’s snobbish intellectual attitude towards them. He wasn’t so much bothered about the social origins of many of them, which is what convulsed the German old Right with which Spengler would have been more comfortable, but he was concerned about their cultural ignorance, as far as he was concerned, and the greatness and glory of what it was to be German seen in cultural terms.
In some ways, he’s too spare and too stark and too elitist a figure. For him, just to make mouthwatering speeches about Germany and German identity entirely begins it, what you mean by Germany, what you mean by German cultural identity, unless you’re highly educated, civilized, and knowledgeable about what it means to be German, or to be European in extenso, these political remarks are slightly meaningless.
His one intervention into politics, when he was attempting to get the power for a German on Ludendorff’s general staff during the First World War, General von Schacht I think, didn’t really go anywhere, because his view of practical politics as a man of the study was rather probably overly conspiratorial and sort of overly rarefied. Like a lot of academic intellectuals, he wouldn’t make a good politician.
But, at the same time, although he despised the Weimar Republic and regarded it as an unnecessary appendage, he looked at the glory of the German Empire which had preceded it. He was actually not particularly enamored of the Germans, partly because he believed they were too hostile to other European peoples, and he believed that the coming battles were civilizational and there should be alliances with other European nation-states against the hordes of Asia and Africa and the Far East who would be the real enemies in the future.
RS: So, he had an almost Nietzschean “Good European” sense or one that was almost similar to maybe even Lothrop Stoddard and some of the other people in that general time period.
JB: That’s right. To a Leftist’s mind, he’s almost as Right-wing as Hitler, but he doesn’t agree with his views, just as there are an enormous number of Left-wing intellectuals who, of course, didn’t agree with Stalin. So, there’s a degree to which he also didn’t entirely agree with the aggressive technological features in the Third Reich, which was Romantic and realist and agrarian at one level and yet embraced motorways and rockets and high technology at another, because he believed that technology had become a part of the enslavement of modern man. Very much prefiguring Heidegger’s thinking in this regard.
Also, of course, he didn’t share the anti-Semitism either, particularly. While in no sense being philo-Semitic, like Nietzsche, he didn’t share the crude Jew-baiting, beer hall attitudes that swirled around the German Right. It’s not civilizationally part of the way he perceived reality, because he didn’t view the world conspiratorially or metaphysically conspiratorially. He viewed the world in terms of these great overarching abstractions of cultural civilizations of which Germany was only a part.
He also was a pessimist and didn’t share the extreme and rather myopic optimism of that regime that was very shrill, particularly on its own behalf.
RS: So, Jonathan, what kind of ideas did Spengler have for the future and did he see the rise of a new civilization?
This past weekend I attended the American Renaissance conference, and Dr. Richard Lynn was there and he gave a very enjoyable and informative talk about eugenics, actually, but he ended by talking about the world of the 21st and probably 22nd, maybe 23rd century being that of the East and China in particular.
Did Spengler talk about any of this? Or did he believe that a new civilization would arise, that an Oriental civilization might have a new rebirth? Did he talk about this? Maybe you could even speculate on it yourself.
JB: Yes, he didn’t really speak of it. He sounded the death knell of an ever present West that was exhausted at the end of the Great War. His thesis was misunderstood and tens of thousands of copies that made him from a sort of penniless, living in genteel poverty intellectual into a sort of major cultural figure throughout Germany and the West, was based on a misnomer.
The mass of the cultured people, of course we’re talking in terms of hundreds of thousands and not the millions, who bought his enormous book and some of the others, which made him moderately wealthy as a consequence and able to live independently, they interpreted the book as an explanation for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and because it put it into world-historical and cosmological terms it exonerated Germany from its personal defeat. It also seemed scholarly and well-wrought and was not propagandistic. It was not the “stab in the back” mythology. It was not the fact that they’d been let down by forces at home, nor was it the normative liberal view that they’d just run out of men, run out of material, run out of resources and been defeated in that way.
So, people stuck to his book really on the misnomer, because what he was saying was that Germany’s defeat was part of a pattern of defeats that were going on within the civilization at a particular time.
He posited the idea that these defeats could be arrested for a time by democratic caesarism and various forms of populism for which he had a distaste actually, but which he believed to be necessary at this time in the cycle. In Man and Technics, for example, there’s a quite ruthless extolling of the virtues of some of these sorts of regimes up to a point. But he never thought that they were the be all and end all for culture. So, his belief was that the West would continue to decline throughout the 20th century. One of Spengler’s offshoots, of course, is the doctrine of the “clash of civilizations,” which was made famous by that book, The Clash of Civilizations.
RS: Right. By Samuel Huntington.
JB: Yes, written about what? Fifteen years ago now?
RS: Or so, yeah.
JB: Now, that’s a Spenglerian thesis, which he may not like to admit to be influenced by Spengler, some people don’t choose to. You have all sorts of people like the Beats on the Left, or metacultural Left — let’s put it that way — like Burroughs and Ginsberg and Kerouac, who openly admitted being strongly influenced by Spengler, but other people are very reluctant to even admit the fact that he’s come anywhere hear them and their thinking at all.
Nevertheless, the idea that other civilizations will rise, particularly in the Far East, and will challenge the West’s hegemony later in the last century — don’t forget he died in 1936 — is indisputable from the nature of his work, but he doesn’t go on to specify it very much. The second volume of The Decline of the West basically closes on the turnaround of democratic caesarism and the fact that the West is, nevertheless, going into an autumnal and wintry stage and leaves it at that.
But lots of people, of course, take up the mantle. Yockey’s views are strongly Spenglerian even though he fills in Spengler’s work by essentially giving it a National Socialist register. In some ways, Yockey is a Nazified Spengler, because Spengler was never a whole-hogger as far as they were concerned and actually had a different viewpoint. That’s why Yockey’s book tends to be two books in one. Eighty percent of it is a Spenglerian exercise and then at the end there’s the 20% where he basically adopts a Fourth Reich/Third Reich viewpoint, which is his own grafting onto the Spenglerian architecture of a sort of neo-National Socialist Proclamation of London opinion or editorial.
RS: One question that was coming to my mind was we are witnessing, experiencing the winter of Faustian Western culture. Do you think that if there were a rebirth amongst European peoples that it would be something different than Faustian culture? Would it be a kind of revival of the West as we’ve known it, or would there actually be a different paradigm that would be adopted by European peoples?
JB: Well, that’s very broad. I, personally, think that if there is to be a revival it would probably have to be more Classical than anything else and has to be a sort of classicism and has to be a return to the verities of the Greco-Roman world as at least a cultural basis and a starting point for thinking, because that provides you with a pre-Christian as well as a post-Christian dynamic. It’s rational. All of Western high culture had the Hellenic stamp upon it filtered through Rome and the Holy Roman Empire, Christianized and Germanicized, that came after it. And in some ways it’s a common appeal to the inner tensions in Western man that can be resolved classically. So, that’s the inner reason for GRECE, de Benoist’s outfit, calling itself the Group for Research and Study of European Civilization and culture. They want to go back to Greece with modern technology and with the hallmark of a new West and they want a new Right rather than an old Right to carry that project forward even though there are at least five currents of the New Right now separated even from de Benoist.
RS: Right. That’s certainly true. Well, Jonathan, this has been a fascinating discussion and I’m just going to put a bookmark in it because I think we could return to Spengler later on. As with so many of our podcasts, we only scratch the surface on these ideas and — I’m sure I speak for a lot of the listeners — I’m waiting for more. So, we should do it again. Thanks for being on the show again and speaking to us about Spengler, and we’ll talk to you soon.
JB: Thanks very much! All the best.Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
La liste comprend, en plus des Fondations Open Society de Soros, la Stiftung Mercator, une organisation liée aussi à Soros et l’organisation Robert Bosch Stiftung. La Commission européenne est aussi un des bailleurs de fonds de I’ISE. Puis, assez curieusement, la liste des bailleurs de fonds pour le plan Merkel comprend également une organisation au nom orwellien, l’Institut de la paix des États-Unis.
Angela Merkel est atteinte, à son tour du syndrome de la Castafiore : "Ah ! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir !". Chaleureusement félicitée, l’autre jour, par Barack Obama pour sa politique migratoire, voilà la chancelière allemande qui s’enhardit dans ses prêches moraux contre les populistes. Mardi, au lycée français de Berlin, elle a répondu ceci, à une question d’un élève qui l’interrogeait sur la montée du FN : "Je vais essayer de contribuer à ce qu’évidemment d’autres forces soient plus fortes que le Front national, pour autant qu’on puisse le faire de l’étranger". Sur la montée de l’afD dans son propre pays, elle a dit : "Nous avons assez de bons arguments pour nous confronter" à eux "sans avoir l’écume à la bouche". La Belle contre la Bête. Le problème est que Merkel, persuadée de représenter le Bien au point de s’ingérer dans la politique intérieure française, ne voit pas qu’elle est elle-même à la source, avec d’autres "humanistes" fascinés par l’Autre, de ce qu’elle dénonce. Le populisme n’est, en effet, que la réponse des peuples abandonnés par leurs élites aveuglées. Comme le démontre efficacement l’universitaire Jean-Louis Harouel (1) : "Le programme de la haine de soi et de son pays est aujourd’hui devenu la pensée officielle, imposée par le politiquement correct de la religion des droits de l’homme.". Or Harrouel l’assure, avec raison : "Les droits de l’homme, inventés par l’Occident pour protéger ses citoyens contre les risques d’arbitraire du pouvoir, sont devenus depuis un demi-siècle une religion séculière suicidaire pour les Occidentaux".
Radio Bremen
Soeben ist der achte Band unserer Schriftenreihe BN-Anstoß erschienen: „Aufstand des Geistes. Konservative Revolutionäre im Profil“ vereint zehn Portraits über Denker, die wir wiederentdecken müssen.
Le second chapitre est une batterie de lois qui criminalisent le commerce avec les États sous embargo américain. Certaines de ces lois sont bien connues, telles les lois Helms-Burton et D’Amato qui sanctionnent les entreprises commerçant avec l’Iran, Cuba, la Libye, le Soudan etc. (au total il y aura 70 embargos américains à travers le monde). En 2006, un banquier britannique, un des dirigeants de la Standard Chartered, dira : « Putains d’Américains, qui êtes-vous pour nous dire et pour dire au reste du monde que nous ne devons pas travailler avec les Iraniens ? ». Quelques années plus tard la Standard Chartered devra payer 700 millions de dollars d’amende pour avoir commercé avec l’Iran.
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Auf der einen Seite stehen hier die Eurokraten und ihre Claqueure, die selbst dort, wo sie die Fehler ihre Baus erkennen, keine Korrektur im Blick haben, auf der anderen Seite die Europakritiker, die entweder zu achtundzwanzig einzelnen Nationalstaaten zurückwollen – immer noch die realistischste Nicht-Lösung; oder aber sich in die Charles de Gaulle zugeschriebene Formulierung eines „Europas der Vaterländer“ flüchten, von dem keiner weiß, wie es aussehen, noch weniger was es zusammenhalten soll.
Es bleibt die Frage der „Reichfähigkeit“ der Deutschen. Dass wir in der Lage sind über den eigenen Tellerrand hinauszublicken und ganz Europa im Blick zu haben, dies haben wir in unserer Geschichte mehrfach bewiesen, zuletzt ironischerweise unter Angela Merkel in der Eurokrise, während der es den Deutschen als einzigen nicht nur um kurzfristige Eigeninteressen ging. Zusammen mit unserer Mittellage und unserer relativen Macht betrachtet, ist Sander daher uneingeschränkt beizupflichten, dass eine europäische Ordnung nur von Deutschland ausgehen und um Deutschland herum gestaltet werden kann.
I believe it makes sense to start our quest to settle this age-old question by looking at the works of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), the German philosopher who is considered the father of modern philosophy. In 1784 he wrote the following about Enlightenment:
The Frankfurt School claimed that its Critical Theory is the theory of truth. The occidental philosophy, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Kant, as well as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, and Goethe, should, therefore, be summarily dismissed and replaced by their own dogmatic set of rules and guidelines for “thinking right”. Critical Theory in sociology and political philosophy went beyond interpretation and understanding of society, it sought to overcome and destroy all barriers that, in their view, entrapped society in systems of domination, oppression, and dependency.
Pour le dire en quelques mots simples, la Russie actuelle cherche à retrouver la cohérence du règne d’Alexandre II, qui avait tiré les conclusions de la Guerre de Crimée lorsqu’il avait accédé au trône à 37 ans, en 1855, alors que cette guerre n’était pas encore terminée. La Russie de Poutine et de Lavrov rejette en fait les facteurs, toujours présents, toujours activables, des fragilités russes du temps de Nicolas II et de la présidence d’Eltsine, période de la fin du XXe siècle que les Russes assimilent à une nouvelle « Smuta », soit à une époque de déliquescence au début du XVIIe siècle. L’idée de « smuta », de déchéance politique totale, est une hantise des Russes et des Chinois (leur XIXe siècle, après les guerres de l’opium) : pour les Européens de l’Ouest, la « smuta » première, c’est l’époque des « rois fainéants », des mérovingiens tardifs et les historiens, dans un avenir proche, considèreront sans nul doute l’Europe des Hollande, Merkel, Juncker, etc., comme une Europe affligée d’une « smuta » dont les générations futures auront profondément honte. 
Comme le danger allemand devient aux yeux des Britannique plus préoccupant que le danger russe, -parce que la nouvelle puissance industrielle germanique risque de débouler dans l’Egée et en Egypte grâce à son alliance avec l’Empire ottoman moribond- l’Empire de Nicolas II est attiré dans l’alliance franco-anglaise, dans l’Entente, à partir de 1904. Stolypine, partisan et artisan d’une modernisation de la société russe pour faire face aux nouveaux défis planétaires, aurait sans doute déconstruit progressivement et habilement le corset qu’impliquait cette alliance, au nom d’un pacifisme de bon aloi, mais il est assassiné par un fanatique social-révolutionnaire en 1911 (les spéculations sont ouvertes : qui a armé le bras de ce tueur fou ?). Stolypine, qui aurait pu, comme Jaurès, être un frein aux multiples bellicismes qui animaient la scène européenne avant la Grande Guerre, disparaît du monde politique sans avoir pu parachever son œuvre de redressement et de modernisation. La voie est libre pour les bellicistes russes qui joindront leurs efforts à ceux de France et d’Angleterre. Ce qui fait dire à quelques observateurs actuels que Poutine est en somme un Stolypine qui a réussi. 
Washington consolidait ainsi son hégémonisme planétaire et unipolaire : De Gaulle était mort, l’Allemagne et l’Europe toujours divisées, les stratégistes américains planifiaient déjà la chute du Shah, coupable d’avoir soutenu les revendications des pays producteurs de pétrole et de développer une puissance régionale sérieuse, appuyée par des forces aériennes et navales efficaces, dans une zone hautement stratégique. Pour le monde musulman, 1979, année de la prise du pouvoir par Khomeiny, appuyé par les services américains, britanniques et israéliens dans un premier temps, sera l’année-charnière car, dès ce moment, il sera travaillé par des forces hostiles à l’ordre du monde de type « westphalien », ce qui nous conduira au chaos non maîtrisable que nous connaissons aujourd’hui. Avec ce désordre anti-westphalien sur son flanc sud, Poutine cherche tout simplement un pôle de stabilité alternative, permettant un développement normal de la Fédération de Russie dans un cadre impérial cohérent, combinant in fine les acquis d’Alexandre II -qui avait déclenché le « Grand Jeu »- et la sécurité stratégique obtenue par l’URSS après la seconde guerre mondiale et surtout à l’époque entre 1949 et 1972, quand la Chine ne dépendait en aucune façon des Etats-Unis et de leurs alliances sur les rimlands d’Eurasie. Cette sécurité, offrant la stabilité, doit aussi se refléter sur les plans religieux et idéologique : la pluralité des confessions ou des approches idéologiques ou, encore, des politiques économiques, ne doit pas nécessairement provoquer des dynamiques centrifuges. Au-delà de tous les clivages établis par l’histoire sur la masse continentale centre-asiatique, la politique générale doit être convergente et ne plus admettre les divergences qui conduisent inexorablement à une « smuta ». Cette volonté de convergence devrait valoir aussi pour l’Europe, au sens le plus strict du terme : cette idée était déjà présente chez le Tsar Alexandre I qui, après les troubles de l’ère révolutionnaire et napoléonienne, avait envisagé une convergence religieuse en Europe, une fusion de l’orthodoxie, du catholicisme et du protestantisme, pour consolider la première ébauche d’union eurasienne qu’était la Sainte-Alliance. 
Si la submersion de l’Allemagne a pour but essentiel de briser les potentialités immenses d’un tandem germano-russe, elle vise aussi, bien sûr, à ruiner les bonnes relations économiques entre l’Allemagne et la Chine, d’autant plus que les chemins de fer allemands, la Deutsche Bundesbahn, sont partie prenante dans la construction des voies de trains à grande vitesse entre Hambourg et Shanghai. L’Allemagne et, partant, les pays du Benelux, sont fortement dépendants du commerce avec la Chine. Le but de l’hegemon est donc de briser à tout prix ces synergies et ces convergences. Affirmer cela n’est pas l’expression d’un complotisme découlant d’une mentalité obsidionale mais bel et bien un constat, tiré d’une analyse de l’histoire contemporaine : la réalisation du Transsibérien russe sous l’impulsion du ministre Witte a entraîné la théorisation et la mise en pratique de la stratégie de l’endiguement par Halford John Mackinder d’abord, par son disciple hollando-américain Nicholas Spykman ensuite. Sans Mackinder et Spykman, les Etats-Unis n’auraient sans doute jamais élaboré leur géostratégie planétaire visant à rassembler des alliances hétéroclites, parfois composées d’ennemis héréditaires, sur les franges du grand continent eurasien, avec l’OTAN de l’Islande à la frontière perse, le CENTO du Bosphore à l’Indus et l’OTASE en Asie du Sud-Est. 
La « Doctrine de Monroe » est donc un rejet de l’Europe et des vieilles civilisations qu’elle représentait, de même qu’un rejet malsain et pervers de toute civilisation ancienne, quelle qu’elle soit, et, surtout, de toute grande profondeur temporelle : là, les délires puritains des sectes protestantes farfelues hostiles à la culture classique gréco-latine de l’Europe catholique ou même anglicane-élisabéthaine, rejoignait les folies de certains avatars incontrôlés de l’idéologie des Lumières. La conjonction de ces deux formes de folie et de nuisance idéologique, qui sévit toujours aujourd’hui, génère un fantasme criminel de destruction systématique d’acquis positifs et de legs historiques. 
Ma démonstration, ici, que j’annonçais d’emblée « succincte » et incomplète, ne peut donc prétendre à l’exhaustivité. Mais elle ne saurait omettre d’évoquer l’Inde dans ce survol des convergences eurasiatiques. Depuis son indépendance en 1947, l’Inde est traditionnellement alliée à la Russie, hostile à la Chine, contre laquelle elle a mené une guerre sur les hauteurs de l’Himalaya. La volonté de convergence eurasiatique s’occupe de gommer ce conflit. Les régions himalayennes contestées permettraient, une fois pacifiées, un passage entre l’Inde et les territoires anciennement soviétiques et entre l’Inde et la Chine. L’affaire se corse parce que la Chine, du temps de son conflit avec l’Inde, avait soutenu le Pakistan pour obtenir un port sur l’Océan Indien et des voies de communications entre ces installations portuaires avec la région chinoise de Kachgar, via le tracé en montagne dit de « Karakoroum », partant d’Islamabad pour rejoindre le poste-frontière d’Aliabad au Cachemire. Le gros problème est que l’Inde revendique cette partie du Cachemire pour avoir un lien avec le Tadjikistan ex-soviétique. Par ailleurs, comme le soulignent deux historiens insignes des faits indiens, le Britannique Ian Morris et l’Indien Pankaj Mishra, l’Inde souhaite consolider la cohésion du commerce entre le Golfe et la Mer Rouge d’une part, le Golfe du Bengale et les eaux de l’Asie du Sud-Est, d’autre part. L’objectif géopolitique de l’Inde est d’affirmer sa présence dans l’Océan Indien, surtout dans l’archipel d’Andaman et dans les Iles Nicobar, face aux côtes thaïlandaises. Cette volonté entend créer un chapelet de relais entre la Mer Rouge et l’Insulinde, le même que celui voulu par la Chine, qui le prolongerait jusqu’à ses propres ports du Pacifique, ce qui explique le conflit actuel pour les îles et îlots, naturels ou artificiels, dans la Mer de Chine du Sud. La consolidation de ce chapelet de relais maritimes, sans possibilité de le couper ou de le fragmenter, rendrait à l’ensemble des Etats d’Eurasie une autonomie commerciale et navale sur son flanc sud, tandis que la Russie rétablirait les communications par l’Arctique, de Hambourg au Japon. Une Egypte militaire, débarrassée du danger que représentent les Frères musulmans et les autres adversaires des syncrétismes féconds, ouvrirait, par Suez, l’espace méditerranéen au commerce eurasien, réalisant du même coup le vœu des Génois et des Vénitiens de notre moyen-âge, tout en isolant la Turquie, du moins si cette dernière entend encore jouer le rôle d’un verrou et non pas d’un pont, comme le souhaitent les Chinois qui leur proposent la construction, entre l’Iran et l’Egée, d’un chemin de fer les liant tout à la fois à l’Asie et à l’Europe. Erdogan se trouve devant un choix : abandonner les « otâneries » et les sottises fondamentalistes ou renouer avec un laïcisme et un syncrétisme turcs qui n’apporteraient que des bienfaits. 
Pirincçi: Ich bin als Künstler aus dem deutschen Kulturleben ausgelöscht und ausradiert worden. Meine Bücher werden nicht mehr verkauft und sogar aus Bibliotheken verbannt, selbst meine Katzenkrimis. Da hat sich 
Le satiriste allemand Jan Böhmermann (photos) avait, lors d’une émission diffusée par la chaîne publique ZDF-neo, traité le président turc de pédophile et de zoophile. Ankara exige à présent que des poursuites pénales soient engagées contre le comédien.
INNENPOLITISCHES / GESELLSCHAFT / VERGANGENHEITSPOLITIK
LINKE / KAMPF GEGEN RECHTS / ANTIFASCHISMUS / RECHTE
La lettre de lecteur de Tania Kambouri fut très bien accueillie par ses collègues, ce qui l’incita à décrire ses expériences professionnelles dans un livre intitulé «Deutschland im Blaulicht – Notruf einer Polizistin» [L’Allemagne et les gyrophares – Appel d’urgence d’une policière]. Prenant des situations quotidiennes vécues dans son travail de policière sur le terrain, par exemple les parcages non autorisés, des disputes, des prises aux mains ou des contrôles d’identités, cette femme de 33 ans constate que les règles fondamentales d’un ordre libéral et démocratique sont de moins en moins respectées et cela particulièrement par des groupes de migrants. Ces gens ne reconnaissent pas la police comme représentante de la force publique mais y voient leurs ennemis. De ce fait, les policiers sont de plus en plus empêchés d’accomplir leurs missions et doivent craindre d’être victimes de violences. Il n’est plus question d’imposer le droit. Du coup, on observe des espaces de non-droit dans lesquels ce ne sont plus les lois qui régissent, mais la loi du plus fort.
La complessa produzione di Carl Schmitt, tanto affascinante quanto labirintica, ha dato un contributo fondamentale alla comprensione del nichilismo e ai processi di secolarizzazione e neutralizzazione che l’hanno provocato. Spinto da un’inesorabile volontà di esorcizzare la crisi e la negatività in cui stava precipitando la decadente Europa d’inizio Novecento, il giurista tedesco si confronta impavidamente con la “potenza del Niente” – esperienza cruciale per la comprensione di quell’epoca e per restare dentro alla filosofia, come ammonivano Jünger ed Heidegger in Oltre la linea –, tentando di opporre all’horror vacui soluzioni di volta in volta sempre più solide, concrete ed elementari, nel corso di un itinerario intellettuale lungo, tortuoso e per certi aspetti contraddittorio.
Di qui la necessità avvertita dal giurista esperto del mondo classico di recuperare l’etimologia autentica del termine νεμειν, che si articola in tre significati: “prendere, conquistare” (da cui i concetti di Landnahme e Seenahme, sviluppati in Terra e mare nel ’42); “dividere, spartire”, ad indicare la suddivisione del terreno e la conseguente nascita di un ordinamento proprietario su di esso; “pascolare”, quindi utilizzare, valorizzare, consumare. Soffermandosi sulla genesi della parola nomos Schmitt vuole restituirle la “forza e grandezza primitiva” salvandola dalla cattiva interpretazione datale dai contemporanei, che l’hanno “ridotta a designare, in maniera generica e priva di sostanza, ogni tipo di regolamentazione o disposizione normativistica”, come afferma polemicamente ne Il nomos della terra, pubblicato nel 1950 e summa del suo pensiero giuridico e politico. L’uso linguistico di “un’epoca decadente che non sa più collegarsi alle proprie origini” funzionalizza il nomos alla legge, non distinguendo tra diritto fondamentale e atti di posizione e facendo scomparire il legame con l’atto costitutivo dell’ordinamento spaziale.
L’irrazionalità della guerra viene dunque confinata nelle amity lines del mare mentre sul suolo continentale, a mo’ di razionalizzazione effettiva del sacrificio, resta la guerre en forme tra Stati che si riconoscono reciprocamente come sovrani e che non mirano all’annichilimento o alla criminalizzazione del nemico. Una delle maggiori conquiste del diritto pubblico europeo è stata infatti la limitazione della guerra (Hegung des Krieges) e la trasformazione dal bellum iustum delle guerre civili di religione in conflitti “giusti” tra pari, tra hostes aequaliter iusti. Quest’atto di contenimento non è stato frutto delle ideologie razionalistiche, bensì della particolare condizione di equilibrio di cui l’Europa moderna ha goduto fino al 1914. Un assetto fondato non solo sulla dialettica vecchio/nuovo mondo – strumentalizzata da Schmitt, secondo alcuni, per difendere l’imperialismo e il colonialismo europeo -, ma anche sul rapporto tra terraferma e libertà del mare che ha fatto in primis le fortune dell’Inghilterra, che ha scelto di diventarne “figlia” trasformando la propria essenza storico-politica ed arrivando a dominare lo spazio liscio e uniforme.
Mais ce qui fait de Jünger un « nationaliste » dans les années 1920, c’est la lecture de Maurice Barrès. Pourquoi ? Avant la Grande Guerre, on était conservateur (mais non révolutionnaire !). Désormais, avec le mythe du sang, chanté par Barrès, on devient un révolutionnaire nationaliste. Le vocable, plutôt nouveau aux débuts de la république de Weimar, indique une radicalisation politique et esthétique qui rompt avec les droites conventionnelles. L’Allemagne, entre 1918 et 1923, est dans la même situation désastreuse que la France après 1871. Le modèle revanchiste barrésien est donc transposable dans l’Allemagne vaincue et humiliée. Ensuite, peu enclin à accepter un travail politique conventionnel, Jünger est séduit, comme Barrès avant lui, par le Général Boulanger, l’homme qui, écrit-il, « ouvre énergiquement la fenêtre, jette dehors les bavards et laisse entrer l’air pur ». Chez Barrès, Ernst Jünger ne retrouve pas seulement les clefs d’une métapolitique de la revanche ou un idéal de purification violente de la vie politique, façon Boulanger. Il y a derrière cette réception de Barrès une dimension mystique, concentrée dans un ouvrage qu’Ernst Jünger avait déjà lu au Lycée : Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort. Il en retient la nécessité d’une ivresse orgiaque, qui ne craint pas le sang, dans toute démarche politique saine, c’est-à-dire dans le contexte de l’époque, de toute démarche politique non libérale, non bourgeoise. 
L’abandon des positions tranchées des années 1918-1933 provient certes de l’âge : Ernst Jünger a 50 ans quand le III° Reich s’effondre dans l’horreur. Il vient aussi du choc terrible que fut la mort au combat de son fils Ernstl dans les carrières de marbre de Carrare en Italie. Au moment d’écrire La Paix, Ernst Jünger, amer comme la plupart de ses compatriotes au moment de la défaite, constate : « Après une défaite pareille, on ne se relève pas comme on a pu se relever après Iéna ou Sedan. Une défaite de cette ampleur signifie un tournant dans la vie de tout peuple qui la subit ; dans cette phase de transition non seulement d’innombrables êtres humains disparaissent mais aussi et surtout beaucoup de choses qui nous mouvaient au plus profond de nous-mêmes ». Contrairement aux guerres précédentes, la deuxième guerre mondiale a porté la puissance de destruction des belligérants à son paroxysme, à des dimensions qu’Ernst Jünger qualifie de « cosmiques », surtout après l’atomisation des villes japonaises d’Hiroshima et de Nagasaki. Notre auteur prend conscience que cette démesure destructrice n’est plus appréhendable par les catégories politiques usuelles : de ce fait, nous entrons dans l’ère de la posthistoire. La défaite du III° Reich et la victoire des alliés (anglo-saxons et soviétiques) ont rendu impossible la poursuite des trajectoires historiques héritées du passé. Les moyens techniques de donner la mort en masse, de détruire des villes entières en quelques minutes sinon en quelques secondes prouvent que la civilisation moderne, écrit le biographe Schwilk, « tend irrémédiablement à détruire tout ce qui relève de l’autochtonité, des traditions, des faits de vie organiques ». C’est l’âge posthistorique des « polytechniciens de la puissance » qui commencent partout, et surtout dans l’Europe ravagée, à formater le monde selon leurs critères. 
C’est évidemment une rupture non pas tant avec la RC (qui connait trop de facettes pour pouvoir être rejetée entièrement) mais avec ses propres postures nationales-révolutionnaires. Armin Mohler avait écrit le premier article louangeur sur Ernst Jünger dans Weltwoche en 1946. En septembre 1949, il devient le secrétaire d’Ernst Jünger avec pour première tâche de publier en Suisse une partie des journaux de guerre. Armin Mohler avait déjà achevé sa fameuse thèse sur la Révolution conservatrice, sous la supervision du philosophe existentialiste (modéré) et protestant Karl Jaspers, dont il avait retenu une idée cardinale : celle de « période axiale » de l’histoire. Une période axiale fonde les valeurs pérennes d’une civilisation ou d’un grand espace géoreligieux. Pour Armin Mohler, très idéaliste, la RC, en rejetant les idées de 1789, du manchestérisme anglais et de toutes les autres idées libérales, posait les bases, à la suite de l’idée d’amor fati formulée par Nietzsche, d’une nouvelle batterie de valeurs appelées, moyennant les efforts d’élites audacieuses, à régénérer le monde, à lui donner de nouvelles assises solides. Les idées exprimées par Ernst Jünger dans les revues nationales-révolutionnaires des années 20 et dans le Travailleur de 1932 étant les plus « pures », les plus épurées de tout ballast passéiste et de toutes compromissions avec l’un ou l’autre aspect du panlibéralisme du « stupide XIX° siècle » (Daudet !), il fallait qu’elles triomphent dans la posthistoire et qu’elles ramènent les peuples européens dans les dynamismes ressuscités de leur histoire. La pérennité de ces idées fondatrices de nouvelles tables de valeurs balaierait les idées boiteuses des vainqueurs soviétiques et anglo-saxons et dépasserait les idées trop caricaturales des nationaux-socialistes. 
Armin Mohler veut convaincre le maître de reprendre la lutte. Mais Jünger vient de publier Le Mur du Temps, dont la thèse centrale est que l’ère de l’humanité historique, plongée dans l’histoire et agissant en son sein, est définitivement révolue. Dans La Paix, Ernst Jünger évoquait encore une Europe réunifiée dans la douleur et la réconciliation. Au seuil d’une nouvelle décennie, en 1960, les « empires nationaux » et l’idée d’une Europe unie ne l’enthousiasment plus. Il n’y a plus d’autres perspectives que celle d’un « Etat universel », titre d’un nouvel ouvrage. L’humanité moderne est livrée aux forces matérielles, à l’accélération sans frein de processus qui visent à se saisir de la Terre entière. Cette fluidité planétaire, critiquée aussi par Carl Schmitt, dissout toutes les catégories historiques, toutes les stabilités apaisantes. Les réactiver n’a donc aucune chance d’aboutir à un résultat quelconque. Pour parfaire un programme national-révolutionnaire, comme les frères Jünger en avaient imaginé, il faut que les volontés citoyennes et soldatiques soient libres. Or cette liberté s’est évanouie dans tous les régimes du globe. Elle est remplacée par des instincts obtus, lourds, pareils à ceux qui animent les colonies d’insectes. ![AM_mohler-j-nger-briefe52a2b554d7f4d_720x600[1]_600x600.jpg](http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/media/02/00/3993534085.jpg)
La ND française émerge sur la scène politico-culturelle parisienne à la fin des années 60. Ernst Jünger y apparait d’abord sous la forme d’une plaquette du GRECE due à la plume de Marcel Decombis. La RC, plus précisément la thèse de Mohler, est évoquée par Giorgio Locchi dans le n°23 de Nouvelle école. A partir de ces textes éclot une réception diverse et hétéroclite : les textes de guerre pour les amateurs de militaria ; les textes nationaux-révolutionnaires par bribes et morceaux (peu connus et peu traduits !) chez les plus jeunes et les plus nietzschéens ; les journaux chez les anarques silencieux, etc. De Mohler, la ND hérite l’idée d’une alliance planétaire entre l’Europe et les ennemis du duopole de Yalta d’abord, de l’unipolarité américaine ensuite. C’est là un héritage direct des politiques et alliances alternatives suggérées sous la République de Weimar, notamment avec le monde arabo-musulman, la Chine et l’Inde. Par ailleurs, Armin Mohler réhabilite Georges Sorel de manière beaucoup plus explicite et profonde que la ND française. En Allemagne, Mohler reçoit un tiers de la surface de la revue Criticon, dirigée à Munich par le très sage et très regretté Baron Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing. Aujourd’hui, cet héritage mohlerien est assumé par la maison d’édition Antaios et la revue Sezession, dirigées par Götz Kubitschek et son épouse Ellen Kositza.
