En poursuivant votre navigation sur ce site, vous acceptez l'utilisation de cookies. Ces derniers assurent le bon fonctionnement de nos services. En savoir plus.
Une grande perte pour nos libertés: Udo Ulfkotte est mort
Par Damien Urbinet
Mouvement Identitaire Démocratique (section de Nivelles)
Né en Rhénanie du Nord en 1960, le Dr. Udo Ulfkotte avait été pendant 17 ans journaliste dans un des plus grands quotidiens d’Allemagne, la Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Il y était correspondant de guerre. Il avait étudié ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la « gestion de la sécurité » (Sicherheitsmanagement) à l’université de Lüneburg. C’était un spécialiste des services secrets, actif au sein de la fameuse Fondation Adenauer et à l’Académie Fédérale pour les questions de sécurité. En cette qualité, il a rédigé de nombreux ouvrages, tous des best-sellers, notamment sur les menées des services secrets occidentaux, sur les réseaux islamistes en Allemagne, sur le politiquement correct et, surtout, très récemment, sur les journalistes achetés. Dans ce dernier ouvrage, il avait démontré, avec force arguments à l’appui, que les journalistes allemands, dans leur grande majorité, étaient vendus à des agences, des fondations américaines qui les obligeaient à répéter les poncifs officiels du Pentagone et, depuis les présidences des Bush, père et fils, les tirades bellicistes des néoconservateurs. Il était devenu l’une des principales chevilles ouvrières de la maison d’édition alternative « Kopp-Verlag », qui éditait ses livres, ainsi qu’un inspirateur occasionnel de la revue et du réseau « Compact » de Jürgen Elsässer, fer de lance d’une opposition sans concession aux dérives politicides de la gestion Merkel. Ces initiatives, particulièrement intéressantes et focalisées exclusivement sur des faits prouvables, ne sont encore guère connue en dehors de l’espace linguistique allemand.
Depuis les années 1990, le Dr. Ulfkotte a publié au moins une bonne quinzaine de livres sur les activités répréhensibles des services secrets des pays occidentaux. En 2001 et en 2003, il a commencé à se pencher sérieusement sur les menées des multiples réseaux islamistes en Allemagne. Si ses enquêtes sur les activités des services secrets lui valaient indéniablement une certaine sympathie à gauche de l’échiquier idéologique et médiatique, la vaste enquête dans les milieux islamistes et salafistes, au contraire, a provoqué chez les bonnes consciences une levée de bouclier inimaginable. Les réseaux salafistes, sans doute soutenu financièrement par certaines pétromonarchies, lui infligent des procès qu’il gagne tous haut la main, au grand dam d’islamologues irénistes et irréalistes, universitaires ou non, qui tenaient tous à perpétuer, ad vitam aeternam, leur vision étriquée de l’islamisme. Ces postures, que l’on ne connait que trop bien, sont dictées par le besoin irrépressible de remplir sa gamelle à ras-bord : les réseaux et les pétromonarchies savent se montrer très généreux pour qui travaille à les flatter et à cautionner leurs délires. Il n’empêche : les hypothèses avancées en 2003 par Ulfkotte se sont avérées exactes, au vu des massacres de Paris, Bruxelles, Nice et Berlin (pour ne citer que les plus spectaculaires). Pourtant, le lien est facile à établir pour tous ceux qui ne croient plus un mot des discours médiatiques : le salafisme/talibanisme armé est au départ un golem des services américains et britanniques. Le golem a servi et sert encore des intérêts géopolitiques et géo-économiques inavouables des puissances occidentales et de leurs alliés pétromonarchistes mais ce golem est trop souvent incontrôlable en ses franges les plus volatiles. Celles-ci commettent alors des attentats spectaculaires sur lesquels on ne peut guère enquêtér car une enquête complète dévoilerait l’origine non salafiste de la fabrication du dit golem. Ulfkotte a donc poursuivi ses enquêtes sur les services secrets et aperçu le lien évident qu’il y avait entre eux et la montée des salafismes armés et de l’islamo-criminalité (mise en évidence en France par Xavier Raufer et Alexandre del Valle). La position de départ d’Ulfkotte n’est donc pas islamophobe (comme les services veulent le faire croire en manipulant les réseaux salafistes) mais est bel et bien une hostilité nettement démocratique aux manigances occultes des services secrets, essentiellement américains. Par voie de conséquence, les hurlements des salafistes officiels, des journalistes-mercenaires et des politiciens vendus ont pour origine des injonctions émises par les dirigeants de ces services qui n’entendent pas abandonner le golem fondamentaliste musulman qui les a si bien servis, ni cesser de puiser des hommes à tout faire dans les prisons où ils peuvent et se reposer et recruter de nouveaux volontaires.
En 2006-2007, le Dr. Ulfkotte adhère à un mouvement, Pax Europa, qui entend, comme son nom l’indique, sauver la paix civile dans tous les pays européens où des conflits internes risquent d’éclater vu l’incontrôlabilité des réseaux salafistes et les désirs inavoués des services américains de voir les concurrents européens plongés dans les affres d’un désordre ingérable. En août 2007, Pax Europa souhaite manifester à Bruxelles devant le Parlement Européen. La manifestation est aussitôt interdite par le politicien bruxellois le plus méprisable de l’histoire de la ville, le bourgmestre Freddy Thielemans, un anticlérical viscéral, qui avait offert du champagne à la galerie au moment où le Pape Jean-Paul II venait de décéder, un pourfendeur frénétique de la fête de Noël qui a, un moment, supprimé le sapin de la Grand Place et débaptisé le « marché de Noël » en « Plaisirs d’hiver ». Ce laïcard, qui cumule toutes les tares de son idéologie abjecte, est un islamophile délirant, prouvant ici les thèses de certains historiens qui parlent d’une alliance pluriséculaire entre puritains anglo-saxons (et hollandais), laïcards maçonniques français et fondamentalistes hanbalites/wahhabites, dont le dénominateur commun est une haine profonde et viscérale de la culture populaire, de l’humanisme classique, de la culture gréco-latine, de la musique européenne et des arts plastiques. L’avocat et sénateur flamand Hugo Coveliers dépose plainte au nom de Ulfkotte contre l’interdiction par l’innommable Thielemans (aujourd’hui dégommé par ses propres copains qui ne valent guère mieux que lui !). Le 30 août 2007, cette plainte est déclarée irrecevable par les tribunaux de Bruxelles, donnant ainsi la preuve que cette magistraille dévoyée est liée aux services d’Outre-Atlantique, aux cénacles laïcards occultes et à la pègre salafiste.
L’action avortée de Pax Europa nous permet aujourd’hui de montrer quelles collusions infâmes structurent les institutions du royaume qui, par ce fait même, sombre lamentablement dans l’impolitisme, donc implose et se dissout. Une semaine avant le décès du Dr. Ulfkotte, les journaleux de cette gazette merdique qu’est le Soir, flanqués de quelques sbires de la Radio-Télévision francophone belge et de sociologues abscons avaient publié les résultats d’une enquête générale sur l’opinion publique en Belgique francophone. Ces raclures sont tombées de haut, faisant ricaner tous les hommes de bien du royaume : 77% des sondés déclaraient que le système belge était bon à jeter, que la démocratie à la belge était une farce, que le pays était gangréné par le salafisme, que les institutions de la sécurité sociale allaient imploser sous les coups du libéralisme, de l’immigration et de l’afflux massif de réfugiés inemployables ; les sondés montraient aussi leur mépris pour les professions médiatiques et juridiques : avocats, magistrats et journalistes sont ouvertement méprisés, considérés comme de la basse engeance. Sans parler du personnel politicien… Le peuple administrait ainsi une gifle retentissante à l’établissement et sanctionnait la faillite d’un barnum politiquement correct qui a coûté des centaines de millions, a déployé des efforts risibles pour faire aimer les salafistes et leurs marottes malsaines et, finalement, n’obtenir que le mépris abyssal des masses. En fait, le peuple belge donnait raison à Ulfkotte sur toute la ligne !
Tournons-nous maintenant vers deux ouvrages du Dr. Ulfkotte. D’abord, l’ouvrage attaqué tous azimuts par les salafistes et leurs alliés, les « foies jaunes ». Il est intitulé Der Krieg in unseren Städten – Wie radikale Islamisten Deutschland unterwandern (« La guerre en nos villes – Comment les islamistes radicaux minent l’Allemagne»), publié en 2003. L’ouvrage démontrait que les réseaux caritatifs salafistes masquaient des financements occultes, pratiquaient le blanchiment d’argent. Ulfkotte accusait principalement les Frères musulmans et le mouvement turc Milli Görüs (qui fut débouté quand il porta plainte contre le livre). Ces réseaux caritatifs, affirmait Ulfkotte, étaient liés à la criminalité organisée. Il déplorait l’inaction de l’Etat allemand, comme nous pouvons déplorer l’inaction des Etats néerlandais, belge et français. Le livre consacré à la nature mercenaire du journalisme allemand, Gekaufte Journalisten – Wie Politiker, Geheimdienste und Hochfinanz Deutschlands Massenmedien lenken (= « Journalistes achetés – Comment le monde politique, les services secrets et la haute finance d’Allemagne manipulent les mass médias ») a été publié en 2014. Il démontre que quasi la totalité des journalistes allemands écrivent sous la dictée de l’ Atlantik-Brücke (« Le pont atlantique », un service dirigé au départ par un ancien de la CIA, spécialiste dans l’organisation de putschs, notamment en Iran, avec l’affaire Mossadegh, et au Chili), de la Commission Trilatérale, de l’American Council on Germany, de l’Aspen Institute, etc. Les articles sont écrits par le personnel de ces officines et paraissent sous la signature de célèbres journalistes allemands, à peine arrangés. Après avoir lu ce livre, écrit son éditeur Kopp, le lecteur ne regardera plus jamais les journaux allemands du même œil, le téléspectateur éteindra son poste et finira par ne plus rien croire de ce qui lui est dit. Ulfkotte concluait que le lavage des cerveaux, but de l’occupation américaine, était complet. Toute voix dissonante était traitée de néonazie, de fasciste ou, plus récemment, de « complotiste ». Le Dr. Ulfkotte n’a pas échappé, ces quelques dernières années, à cette litanie d’insultes, alors que ses origines idéologiques ne se situent nullement dans ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler « l’extrême-droite », alors que sa démarche est éminemment démocratique dans le sens où elle s’insurge contre toute menée occulte, contre toutes les entorses à la transparence. Il est vrai que Carl Schmitt, dans une perspective nettement plus engagée dans un univers mental ultraréactionnaire et catholique, s’insurgeait aussi contre la dissimulation et les intrigues en coulisses. Il voulait la visibilité totale.
Malgré la pertinence des enquêtes d’Ulfkotte et donc leur « incorrection politique » dans un monde orchestré par des cénacles (financiers, stratégiques ou salafistes), pariant sur l’occultation totale de leurs démarches, ses livres étaient toujours mis en exergue par Der Spiegel qui signalait leurs tirages phénoménaux. Cela n’a pas empêché cet hebdomadaire de Hambourg de rédiger une notice nécrologique insultante sur ce militant en faveur de la transparence absolue, décédé le 13 janvier 2017. Un homme qui a travaillé jusqu’à son dernier souffle pour que triomphent nos libertés concrètes, sans compter ses efforts. Il faut continuer son combat. Que chacun d’entre nous y participe. A sa manière, à son rythme mais sans relâche aucune !
Ex: Publié en 1932, La notion de politique est un des ouvrages les plus connus du juriste catholique allemand Carl Schmitt. A l’origine de ce livre, on trouve une conférence de l’auteur, s’inscrivant dans unCYCLE sur les problèmes de la démocratie, à la Grande École Allemande pour la Politique située à Berlin. La conférence a donné ce texte qui a fait l’objet de nombreux débats au sein de l’intelligentsia allemande. Avant la parution de La notion de politique, les intellectuels allemands assimilaient souvent l’État à la politique. C’est face à ce postulat que Schmitt a entendu réagir.
Selon l’auteur, le concept d’État présuppose le concept de politique. L’État se définit, selon l’acception moderne, comme étant le statut politique d’un peuple organisé légalement sur un territoire donné. Pendant longtemps, les juristes n’ont évoqué que les problématiques liées à la théorie générale de l’État sans se soucier du politique. D’après Max Weber, qui fut le professeur de Carl Schmitt, le pouvoir est un élément caractéristique de la politique. L’Allemagne du XIXe siècle a d’abord placé, l’État au-dessus de la société. Ensuite, la conception libérale a primé en introduisant une dialectique État/société à savoir une opposition entre l’État et la société. Enfin, le début du XXesiècle a accouché de l’État total au sens hégélien c’est-à-dire d’un État compétent dans tous lesDOMAINES. Bien entendu, à l’heure actuelle et depuis la deuxième guerre mondiale, la vision libérale de l’État a repris du galon dans le monde occidental.
L’auteur note que dans de nombreuxDOMAINES, il existe un certain dualisme simplificateur : l’opposition beau/laid en esthétique, l’opposition rentable/non rentable en économie, l’opposition bien/mal en morale etc. En politique, c’est le dualisme ami/ennemi ou union/désunion ou association/dissociation qui est le plus pertinent. L’ennemi est l’étranger générant un conflit non réglable par une norme générale ou un tiers impartial. L’État, en tant que communauté d’intérêt et d’action, va décider si l’ennemi, c’est-à-dire son antithèse, menace son existence.
Le Christ et l’Église catholique à sa suite recommandent d’aimer ses ennemis et de prier pour eux et leur salut. Schmitt rappelle à ce sujet la distinction latine entre inimicus (ennemi personnel) auquel l’Évangile fait référence [1] et hostis (ennemi politique). Pour illustrer son propos, il donne l’exemple suivant :
« Dans la lutte millénaire entre le christianisme et I ’Islam, il ne serait venu à l’idée d’aucun chrétien qu’il fallait, par amour pour les Sarrasins ou pour les Turcs, livrer l’Europe à l’Islam au lieu de la défendre. L’ennemi au sens politique du terme n’implique pas une haine personnelle, et c’est dans la sphère de la vie privée seulement que cela a un sens d’aimer son ennemi, c’est-à-dire son adversaire. »
Cette citation brille par son actualité. Face à l’invasion migratoire et à la place de plus en plusIMPORTANTE que prend la religion mahométane en France, l’Église catholique dans la continuité du Concile Vatican II propose aux chrétiens d’accueillir l’autre sans distinguer l’étranger en tant qu’individu de l’étranger en tant que masse politique. Pourtant, si un chrétien doit aider l’étranger en tant qu’individu lorsque ce dernier lui réclame de l’aide, d’un point de vue politique, l’Église et la sphère étatique doivent se prononcer contre cet afflux considérable d’étrangers qui présente une menace pour le bien commun et l’unité du pays (insécurité culturelle, baisse des salaires, danger pour la foi catholique, violences interethniques etc.). Carl Schmitt le confirme d’un point de vue conceptuel : lorsque l’antagonisme extérieur consistant à distinguer les nationaux des étrangers disparaît, l’État peut perdre son unité politique et l’antagonisme risque alors de se situer à l’intérieur de l’État à travers une guerre civile.
La guerre n’est qu’unINSTRUMENT de la politique. Selon le mot de Clausewitz, « La guerre n’est rien d’autre que la continuation des relations politiques avec l’appoint d’autres moyens [2]. » Même le concept de neutralité découle de l’opposition ami/ennemi car il nécessite l’existence d’un conflit entre amis et ennemis pour qu’une position neutre soit prise. Si la guerre disparaît, l’ennemi et le neutre disparaissent corollairement et, par conséquent, aussi la politique. En effet, un monde sans conflictualité, un monde pacifié est un monde sans distinction ami et ennemi et, par là même, un monde sans politique. La guerre moderne a ceci de spécifique qu’elle ajoute à cette dialectique ami/ennemi un élément moral. Dès lors, l’ennemi n’est plus simplement une catégorie politique, il devient aussi une catégorie morale. En conséquence, l’ennemi étant le mal incarné, il convient de le détruire intégralement par tous les moyens (bombardement des populations civiles, armes atomiques, criminalisation de l’ennemi et fin du statut d’ennemi et de ses droits). Mais la guerre ne peut jamais être religieuse, économique ou morale. Ces motifs peuvent devenir politiques quand ils entraînent la mise en place de la configuration amis et ennemis. La guerre n’est alors que l’actualisation ultime de cette conflictualité.
Qui définit cette opposition entre amis et ennemis ? Celui qui est souverain à savoir celui qui est capable de trancher une situation exceptionnelle, celui qui peut déclencher l’état d’urgence. Cette personne peut être le monarque ou l’État lorsqu’il représente l’unité politique du peuple. Dans le monde moderne, cette décision appartient à l’État. Elle suppose un peuple politiquement uni, prêt à se battre pour son existence et son indépendance en choisissant son propre chef ce qui relève de son indépendance et de sa liberté. Lorsqu’un peuple accepte qu’un tiers ou un étranger lui dicte qui est son ennemi, il cesse d’exister politiquement.
La tâche première de l’État est de pacifier l’intérieur car sinon pas de norme possible. Une communauté n’est politique que si elle est en capacité et en volonté de désigner son ennemi. Cette capacité fonde l’unité politique du groupe en-dessous duquel les entités extérieures sont placées par ce dernier. On retrouve la même idée chez les grecs avec la notion de barbares. Dans la conception libérale de l’économie, chaque agent est libre. Il peut donc décider tout seul des causes pour lesquelles il souhaite agir. Aucune entité collective ne peut rien lui imposer. Dans le monde économique, il est facile d’écarter le gêneur sans user de la violence. On peut le racheter ou le laisser mourir. Il en est de même dans le monde culturel : c’est la norme qui entraîne la mort sociale. Mais en ce qui concerne la politique, des hommes peuvent être obligés de tuer d’autres hommes pour des raisons d’existence.
Le monde est une pluralité politique. En effet, une unité politique définit un ennemi qui constitue alors lui aussi une unité politique. Il n’existe pas d’État universel. Le jour où il n’y aurait plus d’ennemis sur terre, il n’y aurait plus non plus de politique et d’État. Sans État, il ne reste plus que l’économie et la technique. L’auteur précise :
« Le concept d’humanité est un instrument idéologique particulièrement utile aux expansions impérialistes, il est un véhicule spécifique de l’impérialisme économique. On peut appliquer à ce cas, avec la modification qui s’impose, un mot de Proudhon : " Qui dit humanité veut tromper ". »
Un ennemi de cette humanité n’est donc plus humain. Il devient alors possible de l’exterminer totalement. La notion d’humanité est apparue au XIXe siècle pour contrer l’ordre ancien et lui substituer des concepts individualistes, comme le droit naturel, applicables à tout le genre humain. La Société des Nations de 1919 n’est ni universelle, ni internationale. L’adjectif international, se définissant comme la négation des barrières étatiques, est à distinguer de l’adjectif interétatique qui suppose des relations entre États sans nier leur délimitation. La Troisième Internationale a une connotation internationale. La Société des Nations serait plutôt une alliance de nations contre d’autres.
Le libéralisme se fonde sur une vision anthropologique optimiste de l’homme : l’homme est bon et sa raison produit la société qui est à opposer à l’État. Pour Schmitt, les vrais penseurs politiques comme Taine, Machiavel, Fichte, Hegel, De Maistre ou Donoso Cortes adoptent une position inverse. Les hommes sont par nature mauvais, l’État les transcende. Hegel définissait le bourgeois comme « cet homme qui refuse de quitter sa sphère privée non-politique, protégé du risque, et qui, établi dans la propriété et dans la justice qui régit la propriété privée, se comporte en individu face au tout, qui trouve une compensation à sa nullité politique dans les fruits de la paix et du négoce, qui la trouve surtout dans la sécurité totale de cette jouissance, qui prétend par conséquent demeuré dispensé de courage et exempt du danger de mort violente ». Dans un monde où les hommes sont bons, il n’est plus besoin de prêtres pour guérir du péché, ni de politiciens pour combattre l’ennemi. La société libérale s’en remet au Droit comme norme supérieure ce qui est illusoire car le Droit n’est que le produit de ceux qui l’établissent et l’appliquent.
L’essence du libéralisme est antipolitique. Il existe une critique libérale de la politique mais pas de vision libérale de la politique. Le libéralisme suppose un abaissement du rôle de l’État le limitant à concilier les libertés individuelles. Il substitue à l’État et à la politique la morale et l’économie, l’esprit et les affaires, la culture et la richesse. Cette idéologie commence et s’arrête à l’individu. Rien ne peut contraindre un individu à se battre pour le groupe ou pour l’État. Dans l’optique libérale, l’État n’a pour unique but que de permettre l’accomplissement de la liberté humaine mais certainement pas de la contraindre. La lutte politique devient une concurrence économique (les affaires) et une joute verbale (l’esprit). La fixité de la paix et de la guerre est remplacée par l’éternel concurrence des capitaux et des égos. L’État devient la Société vue comme le reflet de l’Humanité. La société correspond à une unité technique et économique d’un système uniforme de production et de communication.
Les libéraux se sont indéniablement trompés. Le monde n’est pas rationalisable, réductible à une formule mathématique et le commerce n’a pas permis la paix. La science et la technique n’ont pas remplacé la violence et le rapport de forces. Hegel avait placé l’État au-dessus de la société. C’est désormais la société qui domine l’État. L’économique et la technique ont pris l’ascendant sur toutes les autres sphères mais rien ne pourra jamais définitivement annihiler le politique.
Carl Schmitt conclut son ouvrage sur le constat suivant :
« Nous sommes à même de percer aujourd’hui le brouillard des noms et des mots qui alimentent la machinerie psychotechnique servant à suggestionner les masses. Nous connaissons jusqu’à la loi secrète de ce vocabulaire et nous savons qu’aujourd’hui c’est toujours au nom de la paix qu’est menée la guerre la plus effroyable, que l’oppression la plus terrible s’exerce au nom de la liberté et l’inhumanité la plus atroce au nom de l’humanité […] Nous reconnaissons le pluralisme de la vie de l’esprit et nous savons que le secteur dominant de notre existence spirituelle ne peut pas être unDOMAINE neutre […] Celui qui ne se connaît d’autre ennemi que la mort […] est plus proche de la mort que de la vie […] Car la vie n’affronte pas la mort, ni l’esprit le néant de l’esprit. L’esprit lutte contre l’esprit et la vie contre la vie, et c’est de la vertu d’un savoir intègre que naît l’ordre des choses humaines. »
A travers cet ouvrage court, exigeant et précis, Carl Schmitt, dans son style habituel, très éloigné de la prose juridique, donne des clés de lecture intéressantes du monde moderne. Sa vision de la politique est utile pour comprendre à quel point notre monde est dépolitisé. De nos jours, les cartes sont brouillées par les dirigeants politiques. L’indistinction généralisée règne. On ne distingue plus l’ami de l’ennemi, le citoyen du migrant, l’homme de la femme, l’homme de l’animal, le catholique du musulman ou du juif ou encore le bien du mal. Face ce délitement de l’État et de la société, lire Carl Schmitt permet de mieux comprendre les dessous conceptuels de l’effondrement du monde contemporain.
Hunderttausende bluten für Napoleons Russlandfeldzug
Preußens Niederlage bei Jena und Auerstedt markierte das vorläufige Ende der Souveränität des Staates, welcher in kurz darauf vollständig von Frankreich besiegt wurde und unter die Herrschaft von Napoleon kam. Nach dem Frieden von Tilsit wurde das Königreich in seiner Ausdehnung kurzerhand halbiert und die Grande Armée marschierte siegreich durch Berlin, während das Königshaus von Preußen den Rückzug in die beschnittenen Gebiete im Osten antreten musste. Die Demütigungen, wie beispielsweise der Diebstahl der Quadriga vom Brandenburger Tor, enden nicht mit symbolischen Akten. Anders als die Rheinstaaten im Rheinbund, welche auf Napoleons Seite standen und dessen Monarchen von ihm profitierten, leistete Preußen lange Widerstand. Sowohl rhetorischen als auch militärischen. Für diese Impertinenz sollte es büßen, so wollte es Bonaparte. Für die nationalen Kräfte in den deutschen Landen war die Unterjochung durch Frankreich nicht hinnehmbar. Heinrich Friedrich Karl von und zum Stein, Carl von Clausewitz, Gerhard von Scharnhorst und andere preußische Reformer, die man den aufklärerischen und nationalen Kräften zuordnen könnte, waren wenig angetan von der Unterordnung unter die französische Kaiserkrone. Es folgte die innere Erneuerung Preußens, sowohl die kulturelle als auch die technologische und zivilgesellschaftliche. Nicht alle Ideen der französischen Revolution wurden östlich des Rheins abgelehnt oder für schlecht befunden. Der springende Punkt war der Frondienst, den man als Deutscher plötzlich zu leisten hatte. Gegenüber einem Staat und Kaiser, den man weder kannte noch liebte. Napoleons Streitkräfte schlugen nach Preußen auch die Österreicher und alsbald wandte er seinen Blick auf das gigantische Russland, welches immer noch als die letzte kontinentale Großmacht gegen Napoleon stand. Wenn Russland besiegt worden wäre, gäbe es keine Macht mehr in Europa die dem französischen Kaiser Paroli hätte bieten können. Das französische Imperium würde dann vom Atlantik bis zum Ural reichen. Oder noch weiter.
Im Jahr 1812 überquerten die Streitkräfte Napoleons die Memel. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt bestehen die Truppen des Kaisers nicht mehr nur aus Franzosen, sondern zur Hälfte aus Polen, Deutschen, Italiener, Balkanvölkern und anderen Hilfstruppen, welche er aus allen eroberten Gebieten zusammengerufen hatte. Die genauen Zahlen sind heute Gegenstand der Debatte. Aber etwa ein Drittel der fast 700.000 Soldaten waren deutschsprachige Landeskinder aus Preußen, Württemberg, Bayern, Sachsen, Österreich, Baden und anderen deutschen Landen, wo die Ablehnung gegenüber Napoleon nicht zuletzt wegen der zehrenden Kampagne im Osten immer größer wurde. Man muss das im historischen Kontext betrachten. Preußen und die meisten anderen europäischen Staaten hatten bereits mehrere Jahre Krieg hinter sich und eine ganze Generation von Männern und auch Frauen war im Rahmen dieser Kriege verletzt, getötet oder anders geschädigt worden. Große Teile der mitteleuropäischen Staaten waren von Schlachten verwüstet und vom Durchmarsch der französischen Armee ausgeplündert worden. Napoleons Truppen bedienten sich auf ihrem Weg durch Europa stets im Umland und erpressten, kauften oder plünderten, um sich zu versorgen. Das war eine gängige Praxis zu dieser Zeit und auch in späteren Kriegen. Viele Familien in den deutschen Staaten hatten mehrere Söhne bereits in den Krieg (egal welchen) gegeben und nicht wenige bliebe auf dem Schlachtfeld. Es ist umso leichter die Ressentiments zu verstehen, wenn das Hinterland das französische Heer weiterhin wirtschaftlich unterstützen muss. Vor allem da es gegen Russland ging, den man eigentlich zu den deutschen Verbündeten zählte. Der preußische König schrieb hierzu am Vorabend des Russlandfeldzuges einen Brief an den Zaren mit dem Inhalt : „Beklagen Sie mich, aber verdammen Sie mich nicht. Vielleicht kommt bald die Zeit, wo wir in engem Bunde vereint handeln werden.“
Auch im preußischen Offizierskorps war die Stimmung eher gedrückt. Als gute und treue Soldaten fühlten sich Offiziere wie Ludwig York von Wartenburg ihrem Eid und Herren verpflichtet. Dieser war der preußische König, von dem jedoch alle wussten, dass dieser nicht Befehle im Interesse der Deutschen oder Preußens gab, sondern reiner Befehlsempfänger Napoleons war. Der Verlust deutscher und preußischer Souveränität war den Männern im Felde also durchaus bewusst. Preußen war dem französischen Kaiser verpflichtet – gegen seinen Willen und gegen den Willen des Volkes, welches sich in den preußischen, aber auch in den westlich der Elbe liegenden anderen deutschen Ländereien immer wieder gegen französische Besatzungstruppen erhob. Die Zeit von 1807-1812 war durchweg geprägt von sporadisch aufflammenden kleinen Konflikten innerhalb des gigantischen, von Napoleon eroberten Europas. Die teils sehr blutigen Auseinandersetzungen waren kein Geheimnis und nie war die Herrschaft über Europa für Napoleon eine besonders solide Angelegenheit. Dieser Zustand verschlimmerte sich nur, als seine Truppen nach der Erreichung des von den Russen in Brand gesteckten Moskaus den Rückzug antreten mussten. Für den russischen Winter war man nicht vorbereitet. Der Zar nutzte diese Chance um die napoleonische Armee immer wieder in kleine und größere Gefechte zu verwickeln und zu schwächen. Für die Männer im Dienst des französischen Kaisers waren die Monate der Rückzugsgefechte und Eiseskälte demoralisierend, wie wir es uns kaum noch vorstellen können. Während Hunderttausende für Napoleon starben, wurde auch den an ihren Diensteid gebundenen preußischen bzw. deutschen Offizieren etwas klar. Wenn nicht gehandelt wird und keine Befreiung von der Führung Napoleons vollzogen wird, könnte dies das Ende für die eigenen Soldaten und auch für die deutschen Lande bedeuten. Die desaströse Situation, in welcher sich die Grande Armée befand, war nicht mehr zu leugnen und um zu verhindern, dass man mit Napoleons Größenwahn untergehe, fassten einige mutige Männer einen skandalösen Entschluss.
Skandalös und doch treu – Die Entscheidung von York und ihre Implikationen
Der deutschstämmige Generalmajor Hans Karl von Diebitsch diente Zar Alexander und der russischen Armee. Unerwähnt möchte ich nicht lassen, dass ein nicht unerheblicher Teil der russischen Soldaten ebenfalls zumindest teilweise deutscher Sprache und Abstammung waren, sodass nicht ignoriert werden kann, wie nah sich deutsches Preußen und Russland über die Jahrhunderte hinweg standen. Von Diebitsch war der General, welcher am 30. Dezember in Poscherun (heute Litauen), den preußischen York empfing. Im Vorfeld und im Hintergrund hatten bereits jene Verschwörergruppen, zu denen auch Clausewitz, Seydlitz und andere gehörten, an einem ungeheuerlichen Akt des Verrates gearbeitet. Zumindest empfand es Napoleon als einen solchen Verrat, als York den Waffenstillstand zwischen preußischen Korps und russischer Armee unterzeichnete. Es ist insofern ungeheuerlich, dass ein hoher Offizier, also ein Staatsdiener, es wagt die Außenpolitik seines Staates zu bestimmen. York war sich der Konsequenzen und der illegalen Natur seines Handelns voll bewusst, rechtfertigte sich jedoch auf für uns nicht uninteressante Art und Weise. Im Vordergrund stand zunächst die Rettung der eigenen Soldaten. Denn gegenüber diesen hatte York als Kommandeur eine Fürsorgepflicht, die missachten würde, wenn er sie weiterhin durch den russischen Winter auf französischer Seite trieb, während russische Truppen die seinen von hinten beschossen. Das Leben der eigenen Soldaten zu retten hatte also Gewicht bei seiner Entscheidungsfindung. Danach kommt die Verantwortung vor dem Staat und dem König. York argumentiert so, dass er im erweiterten Sinne des Königs gehandelt habe, der das Bündnis mit Napoleon zutiefst ablehne, aber jetzt aufgrund der Lage nicht anders handeln könne. Da sich die Lage aber an der Front zum Nachteil für Napoleon entwickelt habe, sei nun der Moment gekommen, das Bündnis aufzukündigen und Preußens Unabhängigkeit wiederherzustellen. Er sagte :
„„Die Armee will den Krieg gegen Frankreich. Das Volk will ihn, der König will ihn, aber der König hat keinen freien Willen. Die Armee muss ihm diesen Willen freimachen.“
Für ihn ist klar, dass wenn Preußen Napoleon weiterhin folgt, seine Auslöschung als politische und unabhängige Einheit bald darauf eintreten könnte. Dass Napoleon verlieren würde, war also absehbar und ebenso, dass die Sieger über Napoleon darüber bestimmen würden, was mit den Besiegten geschah. Hier erkenne ich einen Dienstethos, der sowohl edel, als auch treu ist. York erkennt, dass jeder weitere Kampf gegen Russland sinnlos ist und nur mit dem Tod enden kann. Die Freiheit und das Überleben Preußens und damit auch ein Stück deutsche Souveränität sind ihm wichtig. Seine Loyalität gegenüber Napoleon basiert auf einem Kontrakt, den sein König unter Zwang unterzeichnen musste und welcher nicht im Sinne des deutschen Volkes ist. York beruft sich bei seinem Verrat also darauf, dass er eben kein Verräter ist. Zumindest verrät er nicht seinen eigentlichen Dienstherren, das Volk. Ähnlich wie Friedrich der Große, der sich als Erster Diener des Volkes sah. So ist auch York als Staatsdiener nur dem obersten Diener und seinem Träger, dem Volk, verpflichtet. Die Verpflichtung gegenüber Napoleon, einem Fremdherrscher, ist für ihn damit nichtig. Eine Loyalität sticht also die andere aus. Obwohl Napoleon theoretisch sein oberster Befehlshaber gewesen wäre, erkennt er dessen Autorität nicht an, da sie nicht mit dem Willen des eigenen Volkes im Einklang steht.
Der preußische König ist zunächst überrascht, sogar ein wenig erbost über die Anmaßung Yorks. Aber dieses Wagnis ist es, welches in Preußen und dann in ganz Europa die Mühlen einer neuen Erhebung anwirft. Beim Bekanntwerden dieses ungeheuerlichen und unerwarteten Bündnisses zwischen preußischen und russischen Soldaten bricht in Norddeutschland und in Ostpreußen eine nationale Widerstandsbewegung hervor, die nur auf diesen Moment gewartet hat. Zar Alexander kann dieses historische Momentum nutzen um Napoleons Truppen aus Russland heraus zu drängen und mit dem preußischen König den alten Bündnisvertrag mit neuem Leben zu erfüllen. Ein Jahr später stehen dann deutsche und russische Soldaten Seite an Seite in der schicksalhaften Konfrontation bei Leipzig.
Ein Jahr nach der Kölner Silvesternacht: Die Publizistin Ellen Kositza beklagt in ihrem Buch «Die Einzelfalle» das Weglügen des muslimischen Frauenhasses durch die Medien – und das Versagen des Feminismus.
Es folgen Auszüge aus dem Interview, das Sie vollständig im aktuellen COMPACT-Magazin 01/2017 lesen können. Sie erhalten die Ausgabe im Zeitschriftenhandel. Wer sich den Weg zum Kiosk sparen möchte, kann sie über Online-Bestellung ordern oder via Abo diese und weitere Ausgaben bequem ins Haus gesendet kriegen.
Jürgen Elsässer im Gespräch mit Ellen Kositza
COMPACT: Nach der kurzzeitigen Empörung über den Kölner Sex-Dschihad wurde die Angst der Frauen auf deutschen Straßen nicht mehr breit thematisiert. Hat das Ausmaß der Belästigungen durch Migranten abgenommen – oder wird von den Medien das meiste vertuscht?
Ellen Kositza: Die entsprechenden und quantitativ unverminderten Meldungen in Lokalzeitungen und auf diversen sozialen Netzwerken rauschen ja nur so durch! Dem Medienkonsumenten geht es wohl ein bisschen wie dem Anwohner einer vielbefahrenen Hauptstraße: Man nimmt den Verkehrslärm irgendwann gar nicht mehr richtig wahr. Der gehört halt dazu!
Es gibt keine Schlagzeile mit Ausrufezeichen wegen «ein bisschen Grabscherei» oder einer Vergewaltigung. Was ich krass finde: nicht einmal bei noch Ärgerem! Dass ein Kurde in Hameln seine Frau gerade ans Auto gehängt und halb totgeschleift hat, konnte man als Meldung zwar kaum unterdrücken. Schauen Sie aber mal nach auf den Seiten des NDR und anderer Medien: Da ist von einem 38-jährigen Täter und einem 28-jährigen Opfer die Rede. Sonst noch irgendwelche Merkmale? Nö, was auch? Opfer wie Täter waren «deutsche Staatsbürger». So geht das!
Für ähnlich schlimme, meist tödliche Fälle gibt es die Seite ehrenmord.de, die ich auch deshalb empfehle, weil sie erstens durch und durch seriös ist und weil zweitens die Macherin Uta Glaubitz keinesfalls unter «rechts»-Verdacht zu stellen ist. Nehmen wir aus den dort akribisch dokumentierten Fällen nur mal den November 2016: Da wäre Aysha, 50 Jahre alt, in Hamburg durch ihren türkischen Ehemann tödlich verbrüht; Tina, 36, in hochschwangerem Zustand von ihrem iranischen Ehemann erschossen; Roya, 41, in Bergen auf Rügen von ihrem syrischen Mann getötet; Asma, 27, Mutter von fünf Kindern, in Senftenberg von ihrem Mann ums Leben gebracht. Nur eine Auswahl! Aus einem Monat! Haben Sie auch nur von einem dieser schrecklichen Fälle in der Tagesschau gehört? Oder sonstwo in den Hauptnachrichten? Nein, oder? Dieses Verschweigen und Kleinhalten hat natürlich System.
COMPACT: Alice Schwarzer hat nach den Kölner Vorkommnissen vehement vor dem Frauenhass der Muslime gewarnt. War das ein Einzelfall – oder deutet sich angesichts der islamischen Bedrohung eine Spaltung des Feminismus oder der ganzen Political Correctness an?
Ellen Kositza: Die feministischen Kreise sind in dieser Hinsicht längst gespalten. Die Schwarzer hat ja das Etikett «Rassistin» schon lange vorher angeklebt bekommen! Der Neofeminismus – größtenteils von Mädels getragen, die sich vor allem mit einer großen Klappe profilieren, aber nichts Wirkliches aufgebaut haben – lebt und agitiert in einer ziemlich abgespaceten Filterblase ohne Kontakt zum «Bodenpersonal». Und was den Werdegang der Political Correctness allgemein angeht: Mit einigem Entzücken nehme ich wahr, dass sie mittlerweile weniger als respektgebietende Norm betrachtet wird, die es einzuhalten gilt, sondern mehr und mehr als Schmähund Ulkwort gilt. Ich glaube, es gibt so eine Art Grundregel: Je mehr einer (oder eine!) im wirklichen Leben steht, desto stärker nimmt derjenige den Islam als Gefahr wahr. Im schicken In-Kiez oder vom Professorensessel aus kann man dagegen die Bedrohung ausklammern und sich die Sachen schönreden. So blind sind die ganz normalen Leute nicht mehr.
(…)
COMPACT: Justizminister Heiko Maas und sein Anhang wollen das Problem sexueller Übergriffe mit neuen Gesetzen in den Griff bekommen: «No means no» zielt gegen alle potentiellen Vergewaltiger, auch die inländischen. Kann das was werden?
Ellen Kositza: Ach je! Diese Leute sind nicht imstande oder nicht willens, die äußeren Grenzen zu sichern, darum infiltrieren sie jetzt die Schlafzimmer von Herrn Müller und Frau Schmidt… Das Gesetz über «Vergewaltigung in der Ehe», anno 1997, war bereits so ein Paragraph, mittels dessen höchstrichterlich über intimste Zustände befunden wurde. «Nein heißt nein» ist lächerlich und ein reines Einfallstor für private Schlammschlachten. Krass gesagt, beruht ein Gutteil der erotischen abendländischen Geschichte auf einem gehauchten «Oh nein…»! Wer will das «Nein» oder das «Jein» überhaupt nachweisen? Es ekelt mich direkt. Die gesamte Erotik auf verbriefte und vertraglich abgesicherte Jas und Neins festzulegen, hieße, sie auf Eis zu legen. Also bitte!
COMPACT: Sind Sie als Rechte irgendwie nicht auch Feministin? Eigentlich müsste das ja zusammenpassen, denn die ursprünglichen Feministinnen – jedenfalls die von Ihnen erwähnten «Differenzialistinnen» – vertreten doch eine Form biologisch fundierter Identitätspolitik und damit das genaue Gegenteil der biologieverleugnenden Gender-Mainstream-Agenda.
Ellen Kositza: Nö. Der Feminismus-Pool ist mir einfach zu verkeimt. Der tonangebende Feminismus hat sich vor hundert Jahren von einer biologisch fundierten Identitätspolitik verabschiedet – also auch von meinen eigenen Positionen und meinem selbst gewählten, heute schier mittelalterlich wirkenden Leben als siebenfache Mutter mit eigenem Kopf und Lebensprogramm. Das mit dem Feminismus ist wie mit einem T-Shirt, das eigentlich gut passt und echt nett ausschaut. Aber gucken wir mal auf die Zusammensetzung! Unter welchen Bedingungen wurde der Stoff geerntet, gewoben, verarbeitet? Da stecken verkehrte Arbeitsbedingungen drin, Pestizide und am Ende ein Markt, an dem ich nicht teilhaben will. Vorhin habe ich gesagt, wir könnten kaum hinter die Forderungen der linken Frauenbewegung um die Jahrhundertwende zurück: Gleiche Rechte, gleiche Chancen, unbedingt, ja! Aber keine Bevorzugung, kein Sonderröllchen, kein Hätte-Wollte-Könnte. Damals wäre das eine feministische Position gewesen. Heute gilt das als reaktionär – na und! Insofern bin ich strikt antifeministisch.
Trump, Aleppo und der "Stiefelabdruck der Globalisten"
Die jüngste Personalie des designierten US-Präsidenten Donald Trump, nämlich Rex Tillerson für das Amt des Außenministers auszuwählen, hat bei europäischen Diplomaten, vor allem aber bei bundesdeutschen Mainstream-Medien erhebliche Ängste ausgelöst.
Türkische Behörden verbieten Weihnachten an deutscher Auslandsschule
Deutschland schickt Dutzende Lehrer an Schulen in der Türkei. Das Ziel: die Vermittlung deutscher Kultur. An einer dieser Schulen haben die Behörden ein Stück deutsche Kultur nun untersagt.
Mittlerweile verdient jeder fünfte Beschäftigte in Deutschland weniger als zehn Euro in der Stunde. Neue Zahlen aus dem Arbeitsministerium zeigen einen klaren Trend.
Warum wählen Menschen in Europa populistische Parteien und was treibt sie zu Politikern, die ihnen einfache Lösungen versprechen? Diesen Fragen ging die Bertelsmann-Stiftung in einer europaweiten Umfrage nach. Das Ergebnis: Eine wesentliche Rolle spielt die Angst vor der Globalisierung - doch auch das Familienbild ist von Belang.
Der Populismus triumphiert – und ist schon tausendfach analysiert worden. Aber was folgt daraus? Nach der Wahl Donald Trumps ist die Frage: Lässt sich eine neue politische Kultur überhaupt aufhalten? Ein Kommentar.
Der Erfolg der AfD ist eng verbunden mit dem Internet. Soziale Medien helfen der Partei in den offenen Auseinandersetzungen mit traditionellen Medien. Keine Partei hat mehr Anhänger auf Facebook.
(Hipsterbude erteilt Restaurantverbot für AfD-Anhänger…)
"Ich möchte keine AfD-Leute bedienen"
Ende November sorgte das AfD-Verbot im Berliner Restaurant "Nobelhart & Schmutzig" für große Aufregung. Inhaber Billy Wagner äußert sich nun zu den Gründen. Ihm sei die Partei "nicht geheuer".
(Während die bürgerlich-etablierte Presse noch über "Unbekannte" munkelt, bekennt das "Neue Deutschland" zumindest offen, dass es sich um "Linksradikale" handelte…)
Linksradikale greifen neue CSU-Zentrale an
Rauchbomben und Graffiti am Franz-Josef-Strauß-Haus in München / Bundesweite Kampagne bekennt sich laut Plattform zum Anschlag
Am 24. feiern Leute die ein Leben haben mit ihren Lieben Weihnachten. Nicht so die "Antifa".
Sie nutzten den Feiertag um in die Wohnung von Marlis und Richard, zwei IB-Wien Aktivisten einzubrechen. Zumindest versuchten sie es, scheiterten aber an der Tür, an der sie dann ihre kindische Wut ausließen.
Der mutmaßliche Mörder von Maria L. soll schon einmal eine Studentin überfallen und eine Steilküste hinabgeworfen haben. Die Polizei hat wegen entsprechender Hinweise ein Rechtshilfeersuchen gestellt.
(Gutmenschen-Demo mit Durchhalteparolen in Berlin)
Breitscheidplatz: Rote Herzen und rechte Parolen
Zwei Tage nach dem Anschlag haben Rechte und Linke in Berlin demonstriert. Am Bahnhof Zoo protestierten die Menschen gegen Rassismus. Die AfD rief zu einer Mahnwache auf.
Künast stellt Strafanzeige wegen Falschnachricht auf Facebook
Die Grünen-Politikerin Renate Künast wehrt sich mit juristischen Mitteln gegen die Verbreitung einer Falschnachricht auf Facebook. Es geht um ein erfundenes Zitat von ihr.
Namenslisten von Stalins Schergen erregen Russland
Auftraggeber, Komplizen, Killer: In Moskau und Tomsk wurden Namenslisten von Stalins Schergen veröffentlicht. Jetzt fürchtet die Politik eine Spaltung des Landes. Die Forscher werden bedroht.
("Anfang des Jahres war Stief mit flüchtlingsfeindlichen Tweets aufgefallen, worauf sich das Kulturdezernat der Stadt Frankfurt von den Äußerungen des Explora-Leiters distanzierte und das Land Hessen dem Museum die Zusammenarbeit mit der Familienkarte Hessen aufkündigte.")
Die neue Fünf-Pfund-Note verärgert Zehntausende Briten: Die jüngst präsentierten Geldscheine enthalten tierisches Fett. 125.000 Menschen unterzeichneten eine Petition gegen die Noten, ein Café verweigert die Annahme.
Ulrike Herrmann ist Bankkauffrau und Journalistin, seit 2000 ist sie Redakteurin bei der taz. Ihr Spezialgebiet ist die Finanz- und Eurokrise, im September 2016 erschien ihr Buch "Kein Kapitalismus ist auch keine Lösung. Was wir heute von Adam Smith, Karl Marx und John Maynard Keynes lernen können".
Am 8.12.2016 trafen sich die AfD Bayern und das AfD-Mittelstandsforum Bayern im Generalkonsulat der Russischen Föderation zu einer weiteren Runde der Münchner konsularischen Gespräche. Der bayerische AfD-Landesvorsitzende Petr Bystron, der Russische Generalkonsul Dr. Sergey Ganzha, der bayerische AfD-Programmkoordinator Klaus Rosenauer und der Bundesvorsitzende des AfD-Mittelstandsforums, Hans-Jörg Müller, diskutierten aktuelle Fragen zur deutsch-russischen Außen- und Wirtschaftspolitik. Hochrangige Vertreter des bayerischen AfD-Landesvorstandes, des bayerischen AfD-Mittelstandsforums und interessierte Mitglieder wie Uli Henkel waren mit von der Partie. Über die Details des Gedankenaustausches wurde Stillschweigen vereinbart.
Hans-Jörg Müller ist seit über 20 Jahren im deutsch-russischen Geschäft tätig – mit dem Schwerpunkt mittelständischer Investitionen im Osten - und gilt zu Recht als führender Russlandexperte in der AfD, wenn es um die wirtschaftspolitische Zusammenarbeit geht. Im Nachgang zu den konsularischen Gesprächen schildert er seine Gedanken, wie es insgesamt um die deutsch-russische Zusammenarbeit in der Wirtschaft bestellt ist und welche Perspektiven sie hat - die NEUE SEIDENSTRASSE als Rückgrat eines einheitlichen Wirtschaftsraumes von Lissabon bis Wladiwostok wird die siechende EU als neue Wachstumsregion ablösen.
Der badische Philosoph Leopold Ziegler (1881–1958) gehört zu den weithin vergessenen konservativen Denkern des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Der Heidelberger Philosoph und Dichter Timo Kölling erinnerte am 7. Juli 2016 in der Bibliothek des Konservatismus an den Gelehrten, den Jüngere wie Edgar Julius Jung, Ernst Jünger, Walter Nigg und Frithjof Schuon als Lehrer verehrten. Obgleich ihm die Habilitation und damit eine klassische akademische Laufbahn verwehrt blieben, entfaltete Ziegler eine beachtliche Wirksamkeit, die 1929 in der Verleihung des Goethepreises der Stadt Frankfurt ihren Ausdruck fand.
Die schwedische Zentralbank will ihrem Ruf als Vorreiter in der Finanzwelt gerecht werden und plant die Einführung einer Digitalwährung. Der Weg für die E-Krone scheint geebnet.
Die Welt trauert um Fidel Castro. Vor allem jener Teil, der dem Sozialismus nahesteht. Die pathetischsten Worte findet der griechische Regierungschef Tsipras. Am meisten irritiert der neu gewählte US-Präsident Trump.
Die Ungewissheit ist beendet: Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel will wieder für den CDU-Vorsitz und das Kanzleramt kandidieren. Geht ihr Plan auf, könnte sie länger regieren als Konrad Adenauer.
Ströbele soll Gauland als Alterspräsident verhindern
Grüne drängen ihren Parteiveteran Ströbele, noch einmal für den Bundestag anzutreten. Seine Mission: AfD-Vize Gauland von der Parlamentseröffnung verdrängen.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: Ein Facebook-Like für die AfD kostet den Ministerjob
Sascha Ott von der CDU wird nicht wie geplant Justizminister. Der Grund: Er hatte auf der Facebook-Seite der AfD Nordwestmecklenburg den Button "Gefällt mir" geklickt.
BND-Gesetz, Vorratsdatenspeicherung, verschlüsselte Dienste wie WhatsApp knacken: In den vergangenen Monaten wurden in Deutschland teils drastische Überwachungsmaßnahmen auf den Weg gebracht.
Knapp 900.000 Flüchtlinge sind im Jahr 2015 nach Deutschland gekommen - überwiegend aus Syrien. In diesem Jahr werden weniger als 300.000 Menschen erwartet, die hierzulande Schutz suchen. Besonders die Städte ächzen unter den damit verbundenen Kosten.
Gauck will mit Schülern über Zusammenleben in Deutschland reden. Der Besuch ist in diesem Jahr schon die zweite hohe Anerkennung für die Integrationsleistung der Stadt.
In Pfaffenhofen sorgen sich Bürger um historische Fassaden in der Altstadt. Sie befürchten, dass der Denkmalschutz gerade am zentralen Platz, dem Hauptplatz, zunehmend unterlaufen werden könnte. Gefährdet sind historische Fassaden, deren Häuser generalsaniert wurden.
Inklusion statt Bildung: Die Schüler in Brandenburg und Sachsen sind am besten, Bremen und Baden-Württemberg bilden das Schlusslicht. In Brandenburg und Sachsen sitzen kaum Kinder von Einwanderern in den Schulen, in Bremen jedes zweite.
Dolce & Gabbana bringt Luxus-Kopftücher für Muslimas auf den Markt. Das Thema schlägt hohe Wellen – haben Modelabels einen neuen Markt gefunden? Noch zeigen sich Fashion-Häuser zögerlich.
Der Regisseur Simon Verhoeven präsentiert in "Willkommen bei den Hartmanns" eine Kinokomödie zur deutschen Flüchtlingskrise - mit viel Krawall und ein paar bizarren Fehlgriffen, aber ehrfurchtgebietendem Mut zur politischen Aktualität.
Schmelzende Eisdecke könnte Schadstoffe aus dem Kalten Krieg freilegen
In den 60er Jahre wurde in Grönland ein militärischer Stützpunkt unter dem Eis aufgegeben. Eine internationale Studie mit Beteiligung der Universität Zürich zeigt nun: Durch den Klimawandel könnten gefährliche Abfallstoffe wieder an die Oberfläche gelangen, die eigentlich als für immer unter dem Eisschild begraben betrachtet wurden.
Berlin - Ungewohntes Terrain für Barbara Meier (30): Das Model hat den Laufsteg gegen die Schiffsplanke und das Abendkleid gegen den Taucheranzug getauscht und alte und kaputte Fischernetze aus der Ostsee geholt.
JF-TV Direkt: Dieter Stein im Gespräch mit Dr. Konrad Adam. "Volksparteien ohne Volk - Thesen zur politischen Lage", am JF-Stand auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse 2016.
The Willful State: Frederick the Great’s Report on the Prussian Government
By Guillaume Durocher Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com
Frederick the Great Exposé du gouvernement prussien, des principes sur lesquels il roule, avec quelques réflexions politiques Berlin, 1775-1776[1]
One often encounters people who have no faith in the ability of a small nation to achieve anything worthwhile.[2] Yet one typically does not have the luxury of choice. One may prefer to live in a large and populous country, but in any event one must work with what one has. Furthermore, the fact is that small states can and do on occasion “punch above their weight” and influence the course of history. In support of the proposition that even the smallest of nations may dare to be ambitious, I give a most powerful example: the Kingdom of Prussia.
When Frederick the Great became King of Prussia in 1740, the population of his little north German realm numbered just over 2 million. This was only a third of the population of England, itself a rather small European power, and Frederick’s kingdom did not enjoy the protection of the English Channel. Instead, Prussia, also a land poor in natural resources, was protected solely by the sheer will to organize all of the little state’s means into the mightiest army possible. The gambles were huge, the threats of annihilation repeated, and yet through it all it was little Prussia which emerged victorious. The machine set in march by Frederick would double in population by the conquest of Silesia and, a century later, give Bismarck the means to unite Germany. Thus Prussia shows how a small principality may become the greatest of European powers.
The lessons of Prussian statecraft are then of interest to all those, be they leaders or citizens of nations great or small, who wish to maximize their potential and fulfill a great project. How did Frederick go about building his machine of state? For this, we may turn to the Great King himself, for he was a prolific writer. In the mid-1770s, he wrote a private[3] Report on the Prussian Government, on the Principles on Which It Operates, with some Political Reflections. The work, as so often with Frederick, is of an admirable lucidity and clarity. I will provide an overview of the Report, which apparently has never been published in English, with translations of substantial passages.
Frederick argues for a unitary state in which all the branches of government — military, budgetary, and political (under which he refers exclusively to foreign policy) — are continuously and harmoniously united towards a single goal. For the insecure Prussia of Frederick’s day, that goal was above all maintaining military preparedness and a “rainy day” war-chest, to both guarantee the state’s security and seize any opportunities which, by the vagaries of international politics, should present themselves. Frederick asserts that the prince must himself give the example, carefully monitoring all aspects of his state’s operation and personally ensuring that military merit is honored above money. Good manners must be promoted among the citizens and fertility encouraged. Above all else, one must concentrate one’s efforts on the decisive, always being thrifty, and not wasting resources on side-projects. The bolder one’s enterprises, the greater the gains.
In short, Frederick’s politics are the antithesis to the bourgeois democratic politics we have grown used to in the postwar era. We may say that Western politics have tended to be ever-more obsessed with materialist consumerism (welfare, purchasing power, GDP; and our politicians even fail to deliver these) and egalitarian “victimocracy” (symbolic and real spoils for various aggrieved groups, namely ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and women). In both cases, individual and sectional interests are taken as the frame reference, rather than the interests of the community as a whole.
Finances: Frugality Above All
Frederick begins: “To have a general idea of this government, one must examine in detail all the government’s branches, and then combine them together.” These branches are finances, the military, and international politics/foreign policy (la politique). Frederick emphasizes the importance of the budget, which he often compares to an organism’s nervous system: “I begin by finances, which are like the sinews of the human body, which move all its members.”[4] Public finances should be as frugal as possible — notwithstanding spending on fortifications, infrastructure, and foreign allies — so as to amass a healthy war chest that can last until peace is signed:
But one must remark that if we draw all extraordinary war funds from the treasury, we will last only four campaigns, which means that by necessity we must take hold of Saxony, husband as best we can the treasury, which must specifically only serve to fill the emptiness of a few provinces invaded by the enemy. Here is the bottom of things, which shows that one must practice the greatest economy to have the last écu[5] in one’s pocket when one negotiates the peace.
Frederick argues that a substantial budget surplus is justified economically because Prussia had a trade surplus twice as big, thus money was still entering circulation. This surplus, which the Germans do seem to have a knack for, was achieved thanks to “establishing many manufactures, and especially with the help of Silesia.” Frederick emphasizes the need for the most careful monitoring of public spending:
This is why one must not lose sight of manufactures: though them, this [trade] balance can still be increased in our current possession by some hundred thousand écus. But what is important above all is to conserve the good order now established in the management of public monies and the supervision of all funds; without which the people pays very much, and the sovereign is robbed.
Thanks to this thriftiness, Prussia then had enough money for four military campaigns and enough grain for three, including purchases from Poland.
Military Affairs: Preparedness & Honor
Frederick’s description of the Prussian army is worth quoting at length. He argues that Prussia’s militarization is warranted given her insecure geographical position and the size of her neighbors. The Prussian army, based (after the conquest of Silesia) on a country of 5.2 million, was by no means large compared to its neighbors’. Frederick argues then that Prussia can only distinguish itself militarily by the quality and discipline of its armed forces. The commander-in-chief himself must personally give the example “or all is lost” for the little country. Frederick strikes a decidedly conservative note, arguing that if aristocratic officers should prove inadequate, “the recourse to commoners, would be the first step towards the decline and fall of the army.”
ON THE ARMY.
The situation of this State forces us to maintain many troops, because our neighbors are Austria, Russia, France, and Sweden. The war-footing numbers 220,000 men, including the freelance battalions and the increase in cavalry. From this number we will be able to campaign with 180,000 men; but as soon as we need to form three armies, it becomes quite apparent that we do not have many compared to our neighbors. I believe that discipline must remain on the current footing, as must the introduced reforms, unless war should change, because then one may only side with adapting to circumstances and to change with them; but to equal our enemies or surpass them, one needs to do so through order and discipline, to encourage the officers to distinguish themselves, so that a noble emulation encourages them to surpass the enemies they must fight. If the sovereign does not himself get involved in military affairs, if he does not give the example, all is lost. If one prefers courtly layabouts [fainéants de cour] to military affairs, one will see that the entire world will prefer this laziness to the strenuous military profession, and then, instead of our officers being nobles, we will have to have recourse to the commoners, which would be the first step towards the decline [décadence] and fall of the army. We have at present only 70 citizens[6] per company; one must not stray from this principle, to husband the country, which, by the increase in population, will be able to furnish resources or recruits, if war makes it necessary. [. . .] Our population counts 5.2 million souls, of which about 90,000 are soldiers. This proportion may suffice; but one must not take from the cantons more than 840 for each infantry regime and 400 for each cavalry regiment.
Foreign Policy: The Art of Opportunity
Frederick then writes very cogently on foreign policy under the heading “la politique.” This puts the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s later famous definition of war as “politics by other means” in an interesting light. In his great work On War, Clausewitz rarely discusses politics as such but it seems he too supported the primacy of foreign policy, which is to say the overriding interest of the state in maintaining its own existence and security, over liberal and constitutional niceties.[7]
Frederick clearly takes an unsentimental view of international relations as Realpolitik. The goal is to ensure the security of the state, this means: maintaining good relations and an alliance with the state which can most harm us (in this case Russia), acquiring more secure borders (by annexing Saxony as buffer territory), and being ever-prepared so as to be able to seize any unforeseeable opportunities to reach this goal. Frederick emphasizes caution however: given the country’s limited resources, war should only be pursued if there really is something to be gained, one must not overextend one’s territory to indefensible borders, and one must use both modesty and secrecy so as to not disturb the European balance of power and stoke general hostility against us.
ON POLITICS.
One of the first principles of politics is to work to ally oneself with whoever among our neighbors can inflict the most dangerous blows against the State. It is for this reason that we are allied with Russia, because it frees up our back concerning Prussia,[8] and that, as long as this relationship lasts, we have need not fear that Sweden will dare to attack in Pomerania. The times may change, the strangeness of circumstances can force us to take other commitments; but never will we find with the other powers the equivalent of the advantages that we find with Russia. The French troops are worth nothing, and the French are used to only feebly assisting their allies; and the English, made for paying subsidies, sacrifice their allies, to the peace, to favor their own interests. I do not speak of the house of Austria, with which it seems almost impossible to form solid bonds. Concerning the political prospects for acquisitions appropriate for this monarchy, the States of Saxony are indisputably those which would be the most appropriate, by rounding it off and forming a barrier by the mountains which separate Saxony from Bohemia, and which would need to be fortified. It is difficult to foresee how this acquisition could be made. The surest way would be to conquer Bohemia and Moravia, and to trade them for Saxony; or finally that this could be done by other trades either of the Rhenish possessions, adding Juliers or Berg, or by any other way that it could be done. This acquisition is an indispensable necessity to give this State the consistency which it lacks. For, as soon as we are at war, the enemy can march directly to Berlin without finding the slightest opposition on his path. I do not speak of the rights of succession in the countries of Ansbach, Juliers and Berg, and Mecklenburg, because these claims are known, and one must wait for their occurrence. As the State is not rich, we must take care above all else to not get involved in wars where there is nothing to be gained, because one exhausts oneself at a pure loss, and when a good opportunity follows, one cannot take advantage of it. All distant acquisitions are a burden to a State. A village on the border is worth more than a principality 60 leagues away. It is a necessary measure to hide as much as possible these schemes of ambition, and, if one can, to awaken Europe’s envy against other powers, on the occasion of which one strikes one’s blow. This can occur, and the house of Austria, whose ambition goes unconcealed, will needlessly attract the envy and jealousy of the great powers. Secrecy is an essential virtue for politics as well as for the art of war.
I note with amusement the statements on the value of a Russian alliance, the unreliability of a French guarantee, and the perfidy of Albion, observations which would no doubt resonate with many people in later centuries. Plus ça change !
Frederick briefly discusses the laws of Prussia[2], describing them as “fairly wisely made.” He argues no changes are needed, but that there must be regular visits to provincial courts to punish malfeasance, for “the parties and the lawyers work to elude the best laws.” There should also be a review every 20 years to ensure the appeals process is not abused through endless trials. These highlight the importance of regular, mindful care for one’s state.
Harmonious Government: All Branches Working Towards the Same Goal
Frederick then discusses finances, the military, and foreign policy as forming the coherent whole which government must be. He again emphasizes frugality and a healthy war chest:
TOTAL COMBINATION OF GOVERNMENT.
Given that the country is poor, and has no resources, it is necessary for the sovereign to always have a well-furnished treasury, to bear at least a few campaigns. The only resources which he may find when in need consist of a loan of 5 million from the Landschaft [a bank decreed by Frederick, made up of noblemen, allowing the state to borrow from the Prussian population itself], and about 4 million which he can draw from the bank; but that is all.
Public money, he says, should be spent on various development projects such as fortresses, manufactures, or infrastructure “in order to make the State’s constitution more solid.”
The sovereign should then be frugal with his subjects’ blood and treasure. He must himself be an example of rectitude, or his subjects will also become wasteful. Frederick emphasizes “especially” the maintenance of good morals, which can only be achieved if the power of money is kept in check. It must be impossible for the wealthy to buy honors, as they do in France. Frederick advocates a muscular natalism in order to produce more citizens and soldiers:
These reasons which I have just put forward demand that this country’s sovereign be economical and a man who maintains the greatest order in his affairs. An equally valid reason as the first is also joined to this: it is that if he gives the example of profusion, his subjects, who are poor, want to imitate him, and ruin themselves. One must especially, to support manners, grant distinctions only according to merit and not for wealth; the poor observation of this principle in France has meant the loss of the of the nation’s manners, which previously knew only the path of honor to achieve glory, and which believes at present that it is enough to be rich to be honored. As the wars are an abyss into which men fall, one must be watchful that this country be as peopled as possible, from which another good results, which is that the countryside is better cultivated and landowners are more at ease.
Frederick denies the utility of a navy for Prussia for this would divide the country’s efforts and anyway be too small to be useful. Instead, one should concentrate one’s efforts on the most decisive point, in this case the army:
I do not believe that this country should ever be persuaded to form a military navy. Here are the reasons. There are in Europe great navies, that is: that of England, those of France, Spain, Denmark, and Russia. Never will we be able to equal them; hence, with a few ships, remaining always inferior to other nations, the expense would be useless. Add to this that, to maintain a fleet, the money this would cost would force us to reform land troops, that this country is not sufficiently populated to provide recruits for the army and sailors for ships, and finally, that sea battles are rarely decisive; from which I conclude that it is better to have the best army in Europe than the worst fleet of the maritime powers.
Frederick argues that policy must “look as far as possible into the future” but recognizes that unforeseen circumstances will always arise. As such, the best one can do is to be ever-prepared so as to be able seize opportunities. Interestingly, Frederick explicitly affirms that political control of the military must serve to radicalize warfare to ensure it reaches the given political objectives: “War itself must be conducted according the principles of policy, to inflict the bloodiest blows against one’s enemies.” Frederick advises great enterprises, even if these are risky, rather than wars for trifling objectives:
Policy must look ahead as far as possible into the future, and judge the circumstances of Europe, either to form alliances, or to counter the projects of one’s enemies. One must not believe that it can bring about events; but when these present themselves, it must seize them to take advantage of them. That is why finances must be in order. It is for this reason that there must be money saved up, so that the government is ready to act as soon as political reasons indicate the moment. War itself must be conducted according the principles of policy, to inflict the bloodiest blows against one’s enemies. It was according to these principles which prince Eugene [of Savoy, an Austrian commander] acted, he who made his name immortal by the march and the battle of Turin, by those of Höchstädt and of Belgrade. These great projects of the campaign do not all succeed; but when they are vast, there always results more advantages than by these little projects where one limits oneself to taking an insignificant town [bicoque] on the border. That is how the count [Maurice] of Saxony [a French commander] gave battle at Rocoux to be able to execute the winter according to his designs upon Brussels, which succeeded.
Frederick stresses that foreign policy, the military, and finances must form a coherent whole. Otherwise they are vain, as in the case of France, which as Europe’s largest state could afford to become flabby and incoherent. Prussia did not have this luxury:
It is obvious that, from all that I have just said, that policy, the military, and finances are branches which are so tightly bound together, that they cannot be separated. One must carry them out all at once, and by their combination, subject to the rules of good policy, there results the greatest advantages for the State. In France, there is a king which manages each branch separately. There is a minister who presides, either to finances, to war, or to foreign affairs. But the rallying point is lacking, and these branches, not being united, diverge, and the ministers are each busy with only the details of their department, without anyone uniting the objects of their works to one fixed goal. If such a thing happened in this State [Prussia], it would be lost, because great monarchies go on despite excesses, and support themselves by their weight and intrinsic strength, and small States are soon crushed, if all in them is not strength, life, and vigor.
Frederick concludes that a small and insecure state such as Prussia must always be led by a watchful prince:
Here are a few reflections and my ideas on the government of this country, which, so long as it has not taken greater consistency and better borders, must be governed by princes who are always watchful, ears pricked, to observe their neighbors, ready to defend themselves from one day to the next against the pernicious projects of their enemies.
Conclusion: Power Through Will
Of Western and European states today, only the United States of America and the Russian Federation can be considered even moderately “big” in a world in which we face China’s 1.4 billion, India’s 1.25 billion, and, in another mode, the endless hordes to come from an Africa destined to number 4 billion this century[3]. Furthermore, any European-American successor states to the current U.S.A. would likely number around 150 million. Frederick’s directives for maximizing the power of small states through a frugal and martial government, characterized above all by a coherent will, are then very relevant to us.
The Greater-European World is made up dozens of states, each of which could, under enlightened leadership, work for the salvation of our people. The means of a small state are necessarily modest, but let no one say that these are worthless. Prussia began as a small enterprise. But by the luck of having successive great princes, a political “germ-cell” was set, the logic of which was favorable to growth, turning a minor principality of 2 million into a Great Power of 5 million, and then into a united Germany preeminent on the Continent, fit for two awesome bids for regional hegemony. The example of Prussia shows that even small states, when armed with unity and will, can maximize their potential and, when the stars align, achieve wonders.
Times have changed since Frederick’s. We, for the most part, do not need to be so mindful of military security as in the past. Indeed, most traditional military conflict in our lands, lamentably, is intra-European. The inherent disorganization of the Third World, nuclear weapons, and the diminishing returns of military occupation in the modern era mean that there are few conventional threats to our security.[9] The Western World’s conflicts with the Arab nations and Iran, far from being motivated by any objective threat, have largely been driven by a hypertrophied U.S. imperial establishment and the malignant influence of the Israel Lobby in Washington, Paris, and London.
The lasting insight in Frederick’s Report on the Prussian Government is the need for a coherent will: that government should concentrate on its core objectives, that all the parts work in harmony towards this, and that this will be steadily maintained over long periods of time. Frederick’s goal was the security of his state and as such he concentrated on maximizing military capability and constant readiness to seize opportunities in foreign affairs. Other objectives may be served by these Prussian virtues: constant mindfulness, frugality, preparation, and setting a good example for one’s citizens.
Frederick emphasizes the importance in politics of encouraging family-formation and maintaining public morals, which is to say shape the society’s culture and enforce positive social norms. The nation and state must always be carefully tended and cultivated that it, like a beautiful garden, flourish and grow. Frederick organized his entire state towards the goal of military power and security. Perhaps we may say that the endangered Europeans of today must similarly organize their states, through systematic cultural and population policies, towards the goals of demographic expansion, genetic quality, and unity within our great family of nations.[10]
Frederick’s patriotic prince can in our times seem something like an alien. We have grown used to living under governments dedicated above all to individual caprice and equalizing victimhood. Our people are so demoralized, that even the idea that our men and women, especially the best of them, should be expected and encouraged to raise children is considered outright offensive by many. Frederick shows that such misguided doctrines do not favor national survival.
We are used to “politics” meaning only more-or-less loathed electoral politicians winning office by publicly pandering to the mob’s bottomless appetite for consumerism and narrow sectional interests, while actually serving the hostile, increasingly post-national oligarchs who finance their political parties and control the mass media who significantly determine the public’s views. In Frederick’s time, the manners of the average citizen, be he farmer, burgher, or nobleman, were shaped by a hard life, national laws, and a state church. Today, besides the general slouching, the education of the youth and the public at large is largely left, to a small, rootless international clique of media moguls, from Carlos Slim and Rupert Murdoch, to Michael Eisner and Sumner Redstone. These men pursue their particular financial, ideological, and ethnic[11] interests, rather than the national good.
This is not inevitable however. At the close of Frederick’s reign, the population of Prussia approached that of England. The two countries in later centuries would enjoy similar rises in power and greatness. We may say that Anglo-America is what northern Europeans tend to when plenty and security afford them the luxury of individualism and egalitarianism. Prussia is what northern Europeans tend to when, driven by poverty and insecurity, they must organize and discipline themselves for collective survival.
The European peoples, we can be sure, will suffer ever-greater insecurity in the twenty-first century with their dwindling numbers, their swamping by outsiders, and the rise of Asia and Africa. By this suffering, the Europeans will painfully learn from their mistakes and again know the true worth of things. No doubt, we will see Prussians again.
In the twentieth century, the logic of Europe and the West had been one of unbridled expansion. From a small appendage of Eurasia, we burst forth and conquered virtually the entire world and multiplied to become a full third of humanity. Since the catastrophic world wars, we have been in headlong decline and, in time, we will have lost not merely our empires, but of even our own historic homelands. By the end of this century, we will be lucky if we still make up 5 percent of humanity. We must arrest our decline by again establishing, by will and discipline, a logic of expansion. The Great King provides us with a powerful model. Every European nation must play its part.
2. On the recurring controversy concerning pan-European political unity: small states’ options and character are indeed, in the long run, generally determined by great geopolitical blocs and empires, often of a continental scale. But it is also true that the larger a polity is, the less cohesive and coherent it is likely to be. In any event, one must not confuse a unitary empire with a multinational and multistatal confederation. The latter is necessarily prone to impotence as each state holds a de facto and/or de jure veto and each nation does not identify with the others. Thus, while a confederation may be a useful thing, one should not place exaggerated hopes in it or believe this to be the critical locus of politics. The locus of politics is always the actual sovereign. Nationalists understand the sovereign acting through the nation-state: mass consciousness is only possible in a nation; political action is only possible through a state. An empire may or may not be preferable, but that is always founded through the spilling of blood, never by signing bits of paper. For the truth of this, I refer you to the history of the United States before Lincoln, of the German Confederation before Bismarck, of Austria-Hungary, Canada, Belgium, and the European Union. (Concerning the latter two, there has been amusing example of paralysis in recent weeks as the region of Wallonia vetoed Belgian support for a major EU-Canada free trade agreement. Thus multinational polities were leading to vetocracy squared: Wallonia vetoed Belgian policy, and Belgium vetoed EU policy. And yet, one finds a thousand people in the political mainstream who believe the permanently paralyzed EU is the primary answer to European decline . . .) I also, again, direct you the very eloquent statements explicating these matters in De Gaulle’s press conferences and Hitler’s Second Book.
3. That it remained unpublished during his lifetime is unsurprising: Frederick is quite frank about his coveting neighboring Saxony in order have more buffer territory on his vulnerable southern border. These ambitions, he insisted, had to remain secret. Prussia would indeed acquire 40 percent of Saxon territory at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
4. I would add that finance and culture can be said to make up an entire society’s nervous system. Which begs the question: what does it mean if a particular ethnic group, especially if hostile to the majority, achieves commanding influence in a society’s financial and cultural institutions?
In the natural world, the principles and examples[5] from which should always be in our minds, we observe Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a parasitic fungus able to hijack ants’ behavioural system and turn them into “zombie ants.” According to Wikipedia:
Infected hosts leave their canopy nests and foraging trails for the forest floor, an area with a temperature and humidity suitable for fungal growth; they then use their mandibles to affix themselves to a major vein on the underside of a leaf, where the host remains until its eventual death. The process leading to mortality takes 4–10 days, and includes a reproductive stage where fruiting bodies grow from the ant’s head, rupturing to release the fungus’s spores.
5. An archaic French currency.
6. Presumably Bürger commoners.
7. Certainly, the continued existence of the state is a sine qua non of any policy, but we as nationalists add: policy must serve the existence and cultivation of the people from which the state derives.
8. Here, presumably meaning East Prussia.
9. There are exceptions obviously: Turkey is a threat to Greece, and China is a threat to Russia. In the long term, we also cannot exclude that Africa’s population explosion will eventually form a conventional military threat. What would a Spain reduced to aged pensioners and effeminate young leftists be able to oppose to a few million Islamized Africans led marching upon Europe, no doubt led, according to their genius, by a new Mahdi or General Butt Naked?
10. I observe one prominent “willful state” active in the world today: the Jewish State of Israel. This country has, through a cross-partisan political and social consensus, consistently pursued policies of demographic and territorial expansion, for the security and power of the Jewish people and against the Arabs, whom Orthodox Jewish consider subhuman. The Jews’ fertility rate in Israel is now well above replacement with over 3 children per woman, equaling the Arab rate. (Admittedly, Israel has been successful in large part thanks to its diplomatic and financial parasitism upon the Western nations, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of European lives, through the tireless efforts of the Jewish-Zionist lobby. But that is but another example successful ethnic activism, only possible because we are not yet ethnically organized.)
11. Unless, obviously, they are of European descent . . .
Robert Stark and co-host Alex von Goldstein talk to Paul Bingham. This show is a continuation of our discussion about Aleister Crowley and Aristocratic Individualism
Topics include:
How Wyndham Lewis, Ernst Jünger, Aleister Crowley, and the Italian Futurist, were individuals who existed outside the liberal reactionary/traditionalist paradigm, and viewed the world in a realist way unbiased by ideology The cult of Positivism Italian Futurism, how it was marginalized due to it’s ties to Mussolini, but made a major impact on the arts How Ayn Rand was influenced by Italian Futurism Robert Stark’s talk with Rabbit about Italian Futurism Wynham Lewis’s Vorticist movement, his magazine Blast, and his Rebel Art Centre The philosophy of the Vortex, which views everything as energy constantly in motion The rivalry between Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, and how Lewis critiqued Italian Futurism for putting to much emphasis on technology Wynham Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled, which made the case that the artist was the best to rule, and that capitalism and liberal democracy suppressed genuine cultural elites How the book addresses Transsexualism, and anthropological findings on the Third Sex Kerry Bolton’s essay on Wyndham Lewis Lewis’s relationship with fascism, how he published the book Hitler (1931), which presented Adolf Hitler as a “man of peace,” but latter wrote an attack on antisemitism: The Jews, are they human?( 1939) The influence of war and violence on Italian Futurism The Manifesto of Futurism The Futurist Cookbook Futurism is about testing what works, and rejecting traditions that don’t work The futurist believed that every generation should create their own city, and futurist Antonio Sant’Elia’s Plan for Città Nuova (“New City”) Paul worked on a book that was never published, “The Motor City and the Zombie Apocalypse,” about how the motor city is incompatible with human nature The effects of global technological materialism on culture, and how technology needs the right people and culture to work Jean Baudrillard point that the Italians have the best symbiosis between culture and technological progress The Transhumanist concept of Cybernetics, which is rewiring the brain, and how the futurist used poetry as a precursor to cybernetics Paul’s point that futurist movements such as cyberpunk, and Neoreaction are more focused on Live action role-playing, but are not serious about pushing the limits The intellectual and transcendental value of LSD and DMT, Ernst Jünger’s experimentation with acid, but they are only effective if the right people use them Paul’s point that the only real futurist are underground, and experimenting in third world countries Aristocratic individualism, and Paul’s opinion that Ernst Jünger is the best example, and Jünger’s concept of the Anarch Ernst Jünger’s science fiction novel The Glass Bees Ernst Jünger’s “The Worker”
Enlightened Patriarchy: Frederick the Great’s Principles of Lawmaking
By Guillaume DurocherEx: http://www.counter-currents.com
Perhaps the most impressive Western tradition of statecraft, at least in the modern era, is that of Prussia. To be sure, the liberal-democratic tradition launched by the United States[2] and France is formidable, and it is not without reason that it today dominates our world. But the greatness of America and France also relied upon a prosaic factor: sheer demographic and geographic size. Little Prussia in contrast accomplished feats with absolutely miserable resources, raising herself up among the great powers and founding the German nation-state through sheer force of will. The Prussian “authoritarian” tradition, with its emphasis on hierarchy, community, and martial prowess, is then a useful counterpoise to the liberal-democratic one we take for granted today. Clausewitz and Carl Schmitt must be read beside Jefferson and Tocqueville[3].[1]
The most illustrious of all the Prussian leaders was Frederick the Great, a great political reformer and military commander who also cultivated a reputation as a philosophical thinker in his own right. Given how rare it is for generals and politicians to be particularly thoughtful, Frederick the Great merits all the more to be read by young Westerners in search of their heritage and a usable past. I propose then a reading of some of Frederick’s quite substantial philosophical and political writings.
Frederick’s Dissertation on the Reasons to Establish or Abrogate the Laws (Dissertation sur les raisons d’établir ou d’abroger les lois, 1750),[2] written after a decade in power and the hard-won conquest of Silesia, is admirably clear in its writing (how rare that can be!) and showcases wide reading and historical knowledge.[3] Many of Frederick’s themes and arguments retain all their relevance to this day. As this text is apparently unavailable in English, I will quote from it at length.[4] Unusually for a reigning monarch, the Dissertation was made public, thus showcasing the King’s philosophical credentials and stirring European debate.
Frederick’s ideal government is an enlightened patriarchy. He notes that “family fathers” have played an enormous role in the law throughout history, both as lawmakers and as legal masters of the household. For Frederick, the laws should serve to shape custom and enforce public morals, with the interests of the community overriding those of individuals. But this firm law must also be humane, rational, and moderate. Social conventions should be examined in this light and reformed accordingly. Frederick concludes with two proposals as examples: ending the stigma of bastardy, so as to prevent illegal abortions leading to the deaths of both the bastard and the mother, and a pan-European ban on dueling, the latter often causing the death of valuable citizens.
To know how to make laws, the practical Frederick advises looking to history:
Those who wish to acquire an exact knowledge of the way in which the laws must be established and abrogated can only look to history. We see there that all nations have had particular laws, that these laws were established in succession, and that much time has always been necessary for men to reach something reasonable. We see there that the legislators whose laws have lasted the longest are those who had as their goal public happiness, and who best knew the genius of the people whose government they regulated.
According to Frederick then, history teaches that the establishment of good laws requires patience, public-spiritedness, and harmony with “the genius of people,” which might also be termed national character. He shows an optimistic faith in reason typical of the Enlightenment: men require time to establish good laws, but once reached, these tend to spread. This accounts for the pervasiveness of Roman law: “These laws were found to be so admirable that after the destruction of the empire, they were embraced by the most civilized peoples.”
Frederick’s Dissertation provides a fairly impressive overview of the evolution of law from ancient to modern times, covering the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and the modern European nations of England, France, and Germany. He draws from numerous sources, mentioned in the marginalia, including Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, and Tacitus for the Ancients and mainly French historians for the Moderns.
Frederick’s highlights from this enormous historical period are obviously not disinterested. These generally could be considered to subtly reinforce his position as an “enlightened despot” and pragmatic reformer, particularly interested in maximizing his state’s population and military power. In addition to “family fathers,” Frederick places a strong emphasis on the role of religion and, interestingly, usury in the development of the law. Hence, he expounds at length on Sparta, a martial state to which Prussia was often compared:
Lycurgus, king of Lacedaemon, used the laws of Minos, to which he added some of Osiris, which he collected himself from a journey he made to Egypt; he banished gold from his republic, silver, all sorts of currencies, and superfluous arts; he equally shared lands among the citizens.
This legislator, who intended to shape warriors, did not want any sort of passion to weaken their courage; he allowed for this effect the community of wives among citizens, which peopled the State, without excessively attaching private citizens to the sweet and tender bonds of marriage; all children were raised at public expense. When parents could prove that their children were born unhealthy, they were permitted to kill them. Lycurgus believed that a man who was not fit to bear arms did not deserve to live.
He ruled that helots, a kind of slave, would cultivate the soils, and that the Spartans would only busy themselves with the exercises which would render them fit for war.
The youth of both sexes wrestled; they exercised completely naked, in the public square.
Meals were regulated, where, without distinction of orders, all citizens ate together.
It was forbidden for foreigners to stay in Sparta, in order that their manners not corrupt those which Lycurgus had introduced.
Incompetent thieves were punished. Lycurgus had the intention of forming a military republic, and he succeeded in this.
The Aim of Law: Good Manners & Public Safety
Frederick asserts that laws should aim to promote “[g]ood manners and public safety.” He is enormously concerned with civil peace, saying French chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital’s efforts to increase tolerance and defuse tensions between Catholics and Protestants during the Wars of Religion “worked for the salvation of the fatherland.” Laws may deal with politics (government), manners (criminal), and civil matters (contracts, usury).
But for Frederick, laws do not merely have the negative goal of suppressing crime and instability, but also the positive one of fostering good habits. Hence the laws have an important cultural role. He says “the laws are dikes against the overflowing of vices, they must be made respected by the terror of punishments,” but these should also be humane. The sovereign must protect “the majesty of the laws” if these are to have any power. This sometimes fails. Under the Roman Republic “the corruption of manners . . . led to an endless multiplication of laws.”
Frederick cites the Twelve Tablets of Rome, inspired by Solon, among the best laws. These had notably legalized posthumous recognition of children (in cases where the alleged father died before birth) and divorce: “These laws, so equitable and so just, restrained citizens’ freedom only in the cases when their abuse of it could harm the calm of families and the security of the republic.”
However, in judging what individual liberty and equal rights citizens should have, Frederick stresses that the aim must always be the public good. Many restrictions on individual liberty and “discriminations” against classes of citizens might at first appear unjust, but are actually upon closer examination found to serve the general welfare. Frederick cites the German practice of primogeniture in this regard:
Whoever has bothered to the examine the laws with a philosophical spirit will have no doubt found many which at first appear contrary to natural equity, and which however are not so. I content myself with citing the right of primogeniture. It seems that nothing is more just than sharing the paternal estate equally among all children. However experience proves that the most powerful inheritances, subdivided into many parts, reduce over time opulent families to indigence; which has led father preferring to disinherit their younger sons rather than prepare their house for a guaranteed decadence. And for the same reason, laws which appear bothersome and harsh with certain individuals are not less wise, so long as they tend towards the entire society’s advantage; this is a whole to which the enlightened legislator will constantly sacrifice the parts.
Thus, discrimination against younger sons, while unfair for those concerned, can be justified by its strengthening of the continuity of the family house. (I note in passing that some have claimed this passing on of the family household to the first-born son has contributed to the strong German tradition of family businesses [the famous Mittelstand]. Conversely, the French Revolution’s egalitarian law of succession overrode the father’s will and equally distributed property among sons. Thus, estates tended to disintegrate over time. Some have blamed the catastrophic and lasting decline of French fertility in this period on these provisions, bourgeois fathers seeking to reduce their offspring to maintain their households.)
Certainly the American and French revolutionaries would not deny the importance of the general welfare, but Frederick is more explicit: the public good must come before the individual interest and narrow “rights.” In this he echoes the wisdom of classical philosophy, as when the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius[4] wrote: “What brings no benefit to the hive brings none to the bee. [. . .] What causes no harm to the city causes no harm to the citizen.”
Patriarchy: A Realistic Ideal
Frederick ascribes an enormous role to the père de famille, the family father, both in the historical foundation of law and in establishing good laws in the present. He begins his historical account as follows:
It seems probably that family fathers were the first legislators: the need to establish order in their houses no doubt forced them to make domestic laws. Since these first times, and when men began to assemble in cities, the laws of these particular jurisdictions were found to be inadequate for a more numerous society. [. . .]
Disorders accrued in the cities, news vices were born, and the family fathers, as those with the greatest interest in repressing them, agreed, for their security, to oppose this excess.
Towards his conclusion, Frederick presents patriarchy as one of the best forms of government given humanity’s imperfect nature. He describes first a utopia in which government and laws would perfectly regulate society like clockwork:
A body of perfect laws would be the masterpiece of the human spirit concerning the government’s policy: one would observe there a unity of plan and rules so exact and proportioned, that a State driven by these laws would resemble a watch, whose springs have been made for one same goal; one would find there a deep knowledge of the human heart and the genius of the nation; punishments would be tempered, so that by maintained good manners, they would be neither light nor harsh, clear and precise rulings would never lead to legal dispute; they would consist in an exquisite choice of all that has been best in civil laws, and in an ingenious and simple application of these laws to the customs of the nation; all would be foreseen, all would be combined, and nothing would be subject to inconveniences: but perfect things do not pertain to humanity.
Human beings being imperfect, Frederick instead offers patriarchy as a realistic regime. Under patriarchy, the government’s public-spiritedness is ensured by a sense of family belonging with the people:
The peoples would have reason to be satisfied, if legislators placed themselves in their regard in the same mental dispositions of these family fathers who gave the first laws: they loved their children; the maxims they prescribed had as their goal only the happiness of their family.
This perspective largely resonates with evolutionary psychology’s later view that feelings of kinship enable in-group altruism and more generally on the centrality of family to human psychology.
Frederick highlights numerous examples throughout history of the importance of the father in law: parricide was so unthinkable to Solon he made no mention of it in his laws, while the Romans made the mere intention of parricide punishable by death. This did not mean the father should enjoy unlimited and tyrannical power, as Frederick also writes:
No laws revolts humanity more than this right of life and death which fathers had over their children in Sparta and Rome. In Greece, a father who was too poor to provide for the needs of a too numerous family allowed the children born in excess to perish; in Sparta and in Rome, if a child came to the world poorly-shaped, this sufficiently authorized the father to deprive him of his life.
It is worth observing here that if the killing of infants was not for an arbitrary individual purpose such as a father’s whim, but rather for a rational public purpose such as eugenics, this might meet Frederick’s criteria for a good law, given his previous assertion of the public good over individual interest.
Frederick’s advocacy of paternal authority is all the more poignant and significant in that his own father, Frederick-William, also known as the Soldier King, had been a harsh one. Frederick-William had often beaten his son and executed before Frederick’s eyes his youthful best friend (and possible lover), Hans von Katte, for “desertion.”
Undivided Authority
Frederick’s apology of patriarchy fits well with his arguing that the sovereign should enjoy undivided authority, free notably from parliaments. This enabled the sovereign to concentrate without distraction and formulate coherent laws. Coming from an absolute monarch, this was obviously not a disinterested position, but it was forcefully argued. Frederick stresses the dissensions between Senate and people which paralyzed the Roman Republic and writes on England:
Although England has many wise laws, it is perhaps the European country where they are the least in effect. Rapin Thoyras [a French historian] remarks very well that, by a vice of government, the power of the King is constantly in opposition to that of the parliament; that they watch each other, either to conserve their authority, or to extend it; which distracts the King and the representatives of the nation from the care which they should expend to maintain justice; and this turbulent and stormy government changes endlessly its laws by acts of parliament, according to whether the current situation and events forces it to do so; hence It follows that England is in the situation of more requiring reform of its jurisprudence than any other kingdom.
Frederick argues elsewhere that laws made by different authors will tend to contradict one another and be incoherent:
When in a State the laws are not assembled in a single body, there must be some who contradict each other; as they are the work of different legislators who did not work on the same scheme, they will lack unity which is so essential and so necessary to all important things.
He notes that nothing is worse for respect for the laws than internal contradiction. Hence, Frederick strongly argues for legal codification, citing many examples, from Justinian through Alfred the Great to Louis IX of France.
Frederick then explicitly rejects any doctrine of divided sovereignty or separation between executive and legislative authority, as found in the writings of Montesquieu and the American Constitution. No doubt Frederick would not be surprised by the often vague and incoherent texts produced by divided sovereigns, whether the representatives in the U.S. Congress or the heads of state of European summits.
To be continued . . .
Notes
1. My ability to directly study the Prussian tradition is sharply limited by my very inadequate knowledge of German. Concerning Frederick however, I am fortunate, as a blessed son of France, for the Great King wrote overwhelmingly in French. This reflected the preeminence of French as the European lingua franca of the eighteenth century and Frederick’s enthusiastic embrace of the French Enlightenment, or les Lumières. On other benefits of learning the French language, see Guillaume Durocher, “Learning French with Jean-Marie Le Pen,”[5]Counter-Currents, November 20, 2015.
3. Montesquieu is a possible but uncertain influence. Frederick makes clear in a letter that he had read Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Greatness and Decadence of the Romans. However, there is no mention of the French writer’s more famous Spirit of the Laws, which were published around the same time as the Dissertation’s writing. There is confirmation that Frederick read the Spirit of the Laws afterwards. Anne Baillot and Brunhilde Wehinger note a number of parallels: on the law as representing the progressive development of human reason (Montesquieu: “The law, in general, is human reason.”), on the need to adapt law to “national genius” and circumstances, on a gentle approach to abortion, and in supporting the ban of torture. Anne Baillot and Brunilde Wehinger, “Frédéric II, Roi-philosophe et législateur,” HAL.archive-ouvertes.fr (2013). https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00788671/document[7]
4. Frederick’s works appears to be largely unavailable online in English. French and German versions of his complete works are available in scanned and text formats from the University of Trier. However, these are only available page-by-page rather than by chapter or book, which make referencing somewhat obnoxious.
Das Wertesystem der Kanzlerin, die Folgen der Flüchtlingspolitik, die Erosion des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols - wie geht es weiter in Deutschland? Historiker Prof. Baberowski im Gespräch mit Joachim Steinhöfel.
„Herr Professor Baberowski, wenn man sie fragt: ‚Für welche drei Dinge steht Angela Merkel als Politikerin ohne Wenn und Aber ein?‘ Was fällt Ihnen dazu ein?“ Die Antwort sollte jeder gehört haben!
Joachim Steinhöfel im Gespräch mit dem Historiker Prof. Dr. Jörg Baberowski über Merkel, die Folgen der Flüchtlingspolitik und die Erosion des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols.
Baberowski glaubt nicht, das sich an der Flüchtlimgspolitik der Regierung etwas ändert. Wenn jedoch in den nächsten Jahren nichts passiert, dann wird es laut Baberowski nicht nur zu einer Staatskrise sondern zu einem Staatszerfall kommen.
World War II was not a struggle between nationalism and globalism. It was a battle between conflicting visions of world order: a deracinating, soulless global marketplace vs. an Indo-European planetary hegemony based on a future pan-Aryan religion. At least, that is how the leader of the Kyoto School saw it.
Despite his claim that the cultural crisis brought on by worldwide technological advancement could not be solved by a wholesale adoption of Eastern traditions such as Zen Buddhism, Martin Heidegger engaged in many conversations with… Japanese scholars throughout his philosophical career. His first and perhaps most significant encounter with the East took place as early as 1919, eight years before the publication of Being and Time. After having attended Heidegger’s 1918 lectures, one of his Japanese students, Tomonobu Imamichi, introduced Heidegger to the concept of “being in the world.” In The Book of Tea (1906), Tomonobu’s teacher, Okakura Kakuzo had used these words to describe an aspect of Zhuangzi’s spiritual vision.
The Book of Tea uses the tea ceremony to explore the wabi-sabi aesthetic experience cultivated in Japanese Zen arts and crafts. The early German translation of The Book of Tea uses the words das-in-der-Welt-sein, which, via Imamichi, found their way into the heart and soul of Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus. Interestingly, Heidegger’s philosophical career not only begins under Japanese influence, it also ends with it. One of the essays in his last work On the Way to Language is “A Dialogue on Language” between “a Japanese and an inquirer” who remain significantly unnamed…
In his “Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism”, Leo Strauss makes much of Heidegger’s ‘Eastern’ response to the crisis of world-enframing technology in the absence of a genuine global society. Strauss observes that modern technology is forcing the material conditions of a World Society upon us, without a common world culture as its basis. It is the unification of mankind on the basis of the lowest common denominator. This leads to “lonely crowds” suffering from a pervasive sense of alienation and anomie. Furthermore, Strauss recognizes that no genuine culture in the world has ever arisen without a religious basis, without addressing man’s need for something noble and great beyond himself. So the world society, being wrought largely as a consequence of apparently valueless technological forces, is ironically one in need, not merely of a universal ethics, but of one world religion. The world religion must emerge out of the deepest reflection on the crisis of cultural relativism, and on the essence of the technological forces bringing it about:
[Heidegger] called it the “night of the world.” It means indeed, as Marx had predicted, the victory of an ever more completely urbanized, ever more completely technological West over the whole planet – complete leveling and uniformity… unity of the human race on the lowest level, complete emptiness of life… How can there be hope? Fundamentally, because there is something in man which cannot be satisfied by the world society: the desire for the genuine, for the noble, for the great. The desire has expressed itself in man’s ideals, but all previous ideals have proved to be related to societies which were not world societies. The old ideals will not enable man to overcome the power, to weaken the power, of technology. We may also say: a world society can be human only if there is a world culture, a culture genuinely uniting all men. But there never has been a high culture without a religious basis: the world society can be human only if all men are genuinely united by a world religion.
Explicating Heidegger, Strauss explains that in order for it to be possible to overcome technology, which is not at all the same as rejecting it, there must be a sphere of thought or contemplation beyond the rationalism developed by the Greeks and forwarded in Western science and technology. This must be an understanding of the world from behind or beneath the will to mathematize all beings with a view to instrumental manipulation of them on demand (bestand). It must understand the difference between Being and beings, and that Being is no-thing that can be mastered. The to be which is always as present at hand, is taken by Rationalism as the standard of being – that which really is, is always present, available, accessible. Instead, Strauss thinks that: “a more adequate understanding of being is intimated by the assertion that to be means to be elusive or to be a mystery.” Strauss claims that “this is the Eastern understanding of Being” and he adds that: “We can hope beyond technological world society, we can hope for a genuine world society, only if we become capable of learning from the East… Heidegger is the only man who has an inkling of the dimensions of the problem of a world society.”
…The thinkers of the Kyoto School of Philosophy were in favor of the war and have been collectively referred to as the “philosophers of nothingness”. Some of them had a constructive vision of how the Buddhist understanding of the void could complement the techno-scientific thinking of the West in order to bring about a new global civilization. Key figures among them, such as Nishida Kitaro, were students of Heidegger as early as the 1920s, and like Heidegger they saw the world war as the means to bring about a global culture that would ground techno-scientific development in a spirituality transcending insular and traditional values.
Remember that the Indian caste system that Nietzsche so admired, and that was based on regimented and hierarchically stratified class divisions, was a function of the Aryan conquest of the native Dravidian population of India. This origin is reflected in the Sanskrit name for the “caste” of the caste system, varna, which literally means “color” so that it was once a color-coding system. The four classes were: the Brahmins – the Vedic priests or scholars (including those who engaged in various proto-scientific practices); the Kshatriyas – the caste of knightly warriors, including feudal lords as chief amongst them; the Vaishyas – the business class, including both farmers and various types of merchants; and the Shudras – menial laborers, usually involved in undignified or hard labor. Finally, there were also “outcaste untouchables” that were relegated to an inhumanly low status. “Prince” Siddhartha Gotama belonged to the Kshatriya class.
The Buddha was a light-skinned blue eyed Aryan whose father was a feudal lord and who was expected to become a knight. In his late writings, Nishida Kitaro explains how it is that “Indian culture”, from which Japan inherited Buddhism (including the symbol of the swastika that is ubiquitous at Japanese temples) and which shares the Aryan or ‘Indo-European’ ethnic roots of European culture, “has evolved as an opposite pole to modern European culture… and may thereby be able to contribute to a global modern culture from its own vantage point.” What is the “global modern culture” that Nishida envisions?
Well, he certainly views it as having a religious basis and he thinks that the world war during which he is writing is a means to achieving it: “And does not the spirit of modern times seek a religion of infinite compassion rather than that of the Lord of ten thousand hosts? It demands reflection in the spirit of Buddhist compassion. This is the spirit which says that the present world war must be for the sake of negating world wars, for the sake of eternal peace.” In every true religion the divine is an absolute love that embraces its opposite, to the extent of even becoming Satan, and this is the meaning of the concept of upaya or shrewdly bringing to bear “skillful means” in Mahayana Buddhism so that “the miracles” of “this world may be said to be… the Buddha’s expedient means.” This all-embracing character of the divine, as that which encompasses what one would take to be its opposite, “is the basic reason why we are beings who can be compassionate to others and who can experience the compassion of others. Compassion always signifies that opposites are one in the dynamic reciprocity of their own contradictory identity.”
A God who is the Lord (Dominus) in the sense of an ultimately transcendent substance cannot be a truly creative God. Creation ex nihilo would be both arbitrary and superfluous; it must be out of love that God or Buddha creatively manifests the world from out of its own self-negation. Nishida believes that the school of Prajnaparamita thought in Mahayana Buddhism, established by Nagarjuna, has a deeper and more adequate understanding of this than pantheistic Western thinkers of dialectical synthesis, such as the Hegelians, who remain within the realm of reason even in their negative theologies. Nishida nevertheless refers to his ontology of the absolute’s self-expression and transformation as “Trinitarian” and compares it to Neo-Platonic thought.
However, Neo-Platonism and all pagan western thought falls short insofar as it fails to see Satan or “absolute evil” as an aspect of God. He adds: “The absolute God must include absolute negation within himself, and must be the God who descends into ultimate evil. The highest form must be one that transforms the lowest matter into itself. Absolute agape must reach even to the absolutely evil man. This is again the paradox of God: God is hidden even within the heart of the absolutely evil man. A God who merely judges the good and the bad is not truly absolute.” In passages such as these we see that Shunyata (in Sanskrit, Mu in Japanese) is not the Nothing of Descartes at all. Quite to the contrary of serving as an entirely distinct polar opposite of a Perfect Being that would exonerate the latter from being the source of any imperfection, this Nothingness is an inner dynamic tension within Being – as expressed in the spectral incompleteness and interdependent interpenetration of all beings. The battle between God and Nothingness in the heart of man, the “dynamic equilibrium” between “is” and “is not”, may be paradoxical but it is also the existential ‘ground’ of the volitional person. “Radical evil” lies ineradicably at the root of our freedom. We are always already “both satanic and divine.” Nishida claims that the Buddha – or any other conception of divinity – outside of one’s own existential potentiality is not the true Buddha:
Only in this existential experience of religious remorse does the self encounter what Rudolf Otto calls the numinous. Subjectively speaking, the encounter is a deep reflection upon the existential depths of the self itself; and as the Buddhists say, it means to see our essential nature, to see the true self. In Buddhism, this seeing means, not to see Buddha objectively outside, but to see into the bottomless depths of one’s own soul. If we see God externally, it is merely magic. …Illusion is the fountainhead of all evil. Illusion arises when we conceive of the objectified self as the true self. The source of illusion is in seeing the self in terms of object logic. It is for this reason that Mahayana Buddhism says that we are saved through enlightenment. But this enlightenment is generally misunderstood. For it does not mean to see anything objectively… It is rather an ultimate seeing of the bottomless nothingness of the self that is simultaneously a seeing of the fountainhead of sin and evil.
In this Zen injunction to kill any conception of a Buddha outside oneself, Nishida does not deny the cycle of birth and death or samsara as an empirical or phenomenological fact, he simply insists that the truly religious consciousness is one that has recognized the identity of samsara and nirvana. On his terms, and according to the sages of the esoteric Buddhist tradition, nirvana does not mean to attain some state distinct from and after samsara but to recognize that in every moment of the cycle of reincarnation the perfection beyond the impurity of karma is already present. This does not mean that the self “transcends its own historical actuality – it does not transcend its own karma – but rather that it realizes the bottomless bottom of its own karma.”
This relatively late Mahayanist view is anathema to the teaching of Siddhartha Gotama and the early Indian Buddhism founded on it. According to the Buddha Dharma, just as there are physical, biological, and psychological laws operative in the cosmos, there is also an ethical law. The law of karma is a lawful relationship between one’s actions, including verbal and unspoken mental acts that express one’s volition (cetana), and both the realm within which one is reborn as well as the conditions of life that one experiences within this realm. The ethical quality of one’s volition is supposed to resonate with the qualitative character of a certain realm of existence, and to tune into this realm, as it were, as a consequence of being on the same wavelength. Within these more general parameters what one experiences within a given realm of existence is conditioned by one’s actions both within the present life and in past lives. The fundamental presupposition here is that even if an action or intention does not appear to bear fruit (phala) presently, it reverberates in ways that one may remain unconscious of until it finally yields some tangible results (vipaka) – possibly later in one’s present life, but perhaps not until a future life.
While psychological research in the wake of the coming spectral revolution in Science might validate certain classes of phenomena associated with Buddhism as genuine natural phenomena, it is likely to reveal significant Buddhist misunderstandings of these very same phenomena and to profoundly challenge Buddhist codes of ethics. This is the case with the Reincarnation research of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson… What would disturb Buddhists most about Stevenson’s apparent validation of one of the central tenants of their religion is that the ethical idea of karma is untenable in light of his scientific research into the reality of Reincarnation as a natural phenomenon. What Stevenson found is that a person’s strong psychic impression of localized bodily injury at the time of a violent death or terrible accident, could affect fetal development of the body to be subsequently inhabited by that person to produce a birthmark or birth defect corresponding to the site of injury and even the shape or type of injury. In other words there are many cases of the following type: an innocent person is attacked and has his arm hacked off by a murderer and while the victim is reborn with that arm badly deformed, the murderer not only gets away scot free in his present incarnation, he also does not suffer any apparent ill effects in his subsequent incarnation.
Nirvana is the goal of the path, the aim of the Buddha Dharma. Yet, it is the most obscure element of Gotama’s teachings and, unlike karma, meditation, and the moral disciplines, it is one of the ideas most unique to his understanding of the Dharma as compared to the various pre-Buddhist forms of Sanatana Dharma (aka. ‘Hinduism). It is referred to at times as an element or a state, a state of supreme bliss, and yet it is supposed to be beyond any conditioned state, whether painful or even pleasurable. At times Siddhartha discusses Nirvana as if it were attainable amidst the present life and at other times it seems like a total annihilation that a perfectly enlightened person can pass into upon the disintegration of what will be his final body. What, then, is the difference between this annihilation and the so-called “annihilationism” that is one of the wrong views most destructive of an ethical life? Is the Buddha Dharma, in its original form, essentially a grand doctrine of suicide? Does it opt out of actual suicide because it will not do any good, since the underlying tendencies of the psyche are still active and will reorganize around a new physical aggregate, so that suicide can only be truly successful by unbinding the threads of this psyche – by disintegrating the soul?
Nirvana means “snuffing out” or “blowing out”, as in putting out a flame or fire. Orthodox Buddhists of the Theravada tradition most directly descended from the teachings of Gotama suggest that the answer to the perplexing question as to who attains Nirvana and where he attains it, namely as to whether a Buddha or arahant exists in Nirvana after death or is annihilated and passes into nothingness, can be simply answered by saying that the perfectly enlightened person simply “goes out” or is “put out.” He was a flame burning with the fire of life, but this fire of ceaseless suffering has been put out. Phew! Can there be a more pessimistic and nihilistic view of life? At least the man who actually commits suicide affirms a life that would be worth living by comparison to his own, which he judges intolerable only as compared to some ideal. He would also be affirming a sense of history wherein the future can be meaningfully different from any past epoch, an understanding of time that warrants a historical struggle – even if not one that he can personally bear to participate in here and now. It is above all in Japan where this early Buddhist nihilism gave way to the world-historical ethos of the fiery forge.
Nishida draws a distinction between physical, biological, and historical life. The teleological irreversibility of time in the course of organic development is key to his distinction between the first two. Whereas the world of biological life forms remains partially spatial and material, in the human world time negates space and the spatialized chronological ‘time’ relevant to inorganic physics. As Nishida puts it: “We can even say that there is no death for a merely biological being. For death entails that a self enter into eternal nothingness. It is because a self enters into eternal nothingness that it is historically irrepeatable, unique, and individual.” Only in the face of this “eternal death” qua nothingness is genuine individuation possible and only the real individual becomes agitated by the religious question. A being who carries out its moral duty for duty’s sake, in other words out of adherence to what Kant frames as the categorical imperative, would have no individuality; religion can have no meaning for such an abstract subject without any concrete will. Groundless nothingness (Shunyata) is the unstable and ghostly horizon of one’s finite existence, and existential awareness of this ultimate and inescapable negation of one’s self is not a merely noetic reflection.
Nishida approvingly attributes to Fyodor Dostoyevsky the “standpoint of freedom” which holds that: “There is nothing at all that determines the self at the very ground of the self.” From the vantage point of his own time, Nishida sees the spirit of Dostoyevsky as the closest point of contact between Japanese spirituality and the West. He admonishes the Japanese for having remained too insular and that the spiritual sense for the ordinary and everyday that Japan shares with Dostoyevsky has hitherto been too superficial. “At this juncture,” he says, “it must come to possess an acute Dostoievskian spirit in an eschatological sense, as the Japanese spirit participating in world history.” Nishida hopes that “in this way” the hybridized Japanese civilization “can become a point of departure for a new global culture.” Nishida sees the way that the Yahweh “folk religion of the Jewish race” evolved into a world religion, and one that served as the basis for a medieval European culture that he clearly admires, as a model for a potential globalizing evolution of Japanese tradition. The “scientific” secularization characteristic of modern Western civilization, wherein “old worlds lose their specific traditions”, is a necessary phase in the formation of “a global humanity.” It is, in a dialectical sense, a negatively determinative moment in “the world’s transformation.” However, it must be recognized that “science is also a form of culture” and that “the world of science may also be said to be religious.” The failure to recognize this has been chiefly responsible for the fact that “such a thing as the decline and fall of the West has been proclaimed.”
Dostoyevsky diagnosed the causes of this decline perspicaciously in Notes From Underground (1864), which is widely considered the first existentialist novel. It is a response to the situation of the Cartesian ego, which… is sadistically enmeshed in murderous machinery over which he takes himself to have no control. The underground man is crippled by his hyperconsciousness. He is unlike the common man of action insofar as he can trace all effects back to ever receding causes such that, for example, he is incapable of mistaking vengeance for justice, since the would-be target of a retributive act is not ultimately responsible for it. He is also unlike people who are cruel only out of stupidity, because he cannot even stop at the egoistic passions that they take to be primary causes. Under a more intensely rational scrutiny, comprehending these passions also dissolves them as any solid basis for action. The underground man challenges the claim that other materialistic rationalists make, to the effect that a person cannot but act in such a way as is to his advantage.
Dostoevsky asks us to suppose that we were able to arrive at a formulation of the laws of nature, including biological and psychological laws, so precise that we could calculate, in every case, what a man will do by knowing what is at that moment to his advantage – not as an individual – but as an organism that microcosmically expresses the survivalist egoism of Nature. A man who became aware of this calculation would spitefully do something else, anything else, just to prove that he was not “a piano key” or an “organ pedal” whose thoughts and passions could in principle be encompassed by a formula, tabulated, and predicted according to statistical probability. Dostoevsky equates the sum total of any comprehensive formula for the laws of nature, of the kind that physicists today are still searching for under the rubric of a theory of everything, with “an endlessly recurring zero” because it nullifies meaningful action.
The underground man would act contrary to his advantage, he would humiliatingly sacrifice himself to others, to be beaten and brutalized, to be impoverished through impossible generosity, and in every other way to fail and suffer in life just so as to demonstrate that life “is not simply extracting square roots.” On the one hand, he knows that “two times two makes four”, in other words the laws of nature cannot be changed and so “there is nothing left for you to do or to understand.” On the other hand, he has a painful awareness that “Consciousness… is infinitely superior to two times two makes four.” The underground man decides that “if you stick to consciousness, even though you attain the same result, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. It may be reactionary, but corporal punishment is still better than nothing.”
If “natural science and mathematics” were able to prove to him that even this reaction were predictable in accordance with some “mathematical formula”, he “would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason” and moreover, he would try to hurl the whole of the world into an abyss of “chaos and darkness and curses.” This is what the underground man is referring to when he admits:
The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground! …But after all, even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself as surely as two times two makes four, that it is not at all underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I long but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
Nishida is in search of what the underground man could not find as a cure to the mechanistic materialism dominating science under the Cartesian paradigm, but what he believed that Dostoevsky himself did find – albeit in an overly Judeo-Christian form that would benefit from a deconstructive encounter with the abyssal void of Zen.
Consciousness always consists of both an extending out over oneself as one’s world and a determination of oneself by that world, so that ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ are abstractions of a creative world-forming process that one can intuit in the abyssal or groundless inner depths of the self prior to the interpretation of it as an ego. Nishida thinks “discovery in the scientific domain exemplifies the same point”, namely “seeing by becoming things and hearing by becoming things.” Nishida goes so far as to proclaim the ontological priority of the religious form of life over both scientific practice and social mores: “Both science and morality have their basis in the religious form of life.” Nishida later repeats this point with respect to scientific practice: “Active intuition is fundamental even for science. Science itself is grounded in the fact that we see by becoming things and hear by becoming things. Active intuition refers to that standpoint which Dogen characterizes as achieving enlightenment ‘by all things advancing.’” According to Nishida, the religious form of life is more fundamental than scientific cognition and the knowledge gained by means of it; the quest for scientific knowledge is a mode of the essentially religious character of our existence:
I hold that even scientific cognition is grounded in this structure of spirituality. Scientific knowledge cannot be grounded in the standpoint of the merely abstract conscious self. As I have said in another place, it rather derives from the standpoint of the embodied self’s own self-awareness. And therefore, as a fundamental fact of human life, the religious form of life is not the exclusive possession of special individuals. The religious mind is present in everyone. One who does not notice this cannot be a philosopher.
Nishida proclaims that, “A new cultural direction has now to be sought. A new mankind must be born… a new global culture.” Although Nishida admits that “the new age must primarily be scientific”, he sees a radicalization of the immanent view of divinity in Dostoyevsky and Russian mysticism in general through an encounter with Japanese Buddhism as playing a key role in defining “the religion of the future.” Yet the Buddhism that contributes to the formation of the religion of the new age, the religion of the global culture, must transcend the racial character of the Japanese: “From the perspective of present-day global history, it will perhaps be Buddhism that contributes to the formation of the new historical age. But if it too is only the conventional Buddhism of bygone days, it will merely be a relic of the past. The universal religions, insofar as they are already crystallized, have distinctive features corresponding to the times and places of the races that formed them.” It is inevitable that our ethos reflects a national character, but “the nation does not save our souls.” A true nation or civilization must be based on a world religion, and not the other way around.
The has been an excerpt from “Kill A Buddha On The Way,” the tenth chapter of Prometheus and Atlas (Arktos, 2016).
In Prometheus & Atlas, Dr. Jorjani endeavors to deconstruct the nihilistic materialism and rootless rationalism of the modern West by showing how it was grounded on a dishonest suppression of the spectral and why it has a parasitic relationship with Abrahamic religious fundamentalism. Rejecting the marginalization of ESP and psychokinesis as “paranormal,” Prometheus & Atlas […]
Eine Podiumsdiskussion mit Rico Albrecht, Daniele Ganser, Michael Friedrich Vogt, Wojna und Thomas Cassan: zum Thema "Manipulation der Massenmedien" in Lustenau.
Am 17.06.2016 waren Dr. Michael Friedrich Vogt, Dr. Daniele Ganser und Rico Albrecht Lustenau. Der fünfte Gast auf der Bühne ist Wojna von der "Bandbreite" http://www.diebandbreite.de/
Am Ende der Impulsvorträge gab es eine kurze, aber recht interessante Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema Manipulation der Massenmedien.
Diskutiert werden beispielsweise Feindbilder die die Mainstremmedien im kollektiven Bewußtsein erfolgreich installieren, die Mechanismen von Trennung und Spaltung, die Destabilisierung Europas mittels der Migrationswaffe und die Machtelite.
Die Podiumsdiskussion widmet sich aber auch den Lösungen zu, also konkreten Vorschlägen und Möglichkeiten was jeder einzelne tun kann.
Veranstalter war die Gruppe "Die Vorarlberger".
http://www.dievorarlberger.at/ "Die Vorarlberger - Verein zur Förderung der Bewusstseinsbildung" Lachenmahd 17a A-6850 Dornbirn info@dievorarlberger.at Telefon: +43 (0)660 78 22 377
Carl Schmitt is Right: Liberal Nations Have Open Borders Because They Have No Concept of the Political
By Ricardo Duchesne Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com
Before World War II liberal rights were understood among Western states in a libertarian and ethno-nationalistic way. Freedom of association, for example, was understood to include the right to refuse to associate with certain members of certain ethnic groups, even the right to discriminate in employment practices. This racial liberalism was still institutionalized right up until the 1960s. The settler nations of Australia, Canada, United States, and New Zealand enjoyed admission and naturalization policies based on race and culture, intended to keep these nations “White.”
This liberal racial ethos was socially accepted with a good conscience throughout Western society. As Robert H. Jackson has observed:
Before the war prevailing public opinion within Western states — including democratic states — did not condemn racial discrimination in domestic social and political life. Nor did it question the ideas and institutions of colonialism. In the minds of most Europeans, equality and democracy could not yet be extended successfully to non-Europeans. In other words, these ideas were not yet considered to be universal human rights divorced from any particular civilization or culture. Indeed, for a century or more race had been widely employed as a concept to explain the scientific and technological achievements of Europeans as compared to non-Europeans and to justify not only racial discrimination within Western states but also Western domination of non-western peoples. Racial distinctions thus served as a brake on the extension of democratic rights to people of non European descent within Western countries as well as in Western colonies. [Robert H. Jackson, “The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations,” In Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change, ed. Goldstein and Keohane, Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 135]
Even in the case of denazified Germany, governments after 1945 endorsed, as a matter of common sense, and well into the 1970s, an ethnic conception of German nationality, accepting migrants only as temporary “guest workers” on the grounds that Germany was “not an immigrant country.” European nations took for granted the ethnic cohesion of their cultures and the necessity of barring the entry and incorporation of people from different cultures categorized as a threat to the “national character.”
Why, then, did the entire Western liberal establishment came to the view that European ethnocentrism was fundamentally at odds with liberal principles a few decades after WWII?
I argued in a paper posted at CEC over a month ago (which I have withdrawn because it was flawed) that a new set of norms (human rights, civic nationalism, race is a construct) with an in-built tendency for further radicalization suddenly came to take a firm hold over Western liberal nations in response to the Nazi experience, and that once these norms were accepted, and actions were taken to implement them institutionally, they came to “entrap” Westerners within a spiral that would push them into ever more radical policies that would eventually create a situation in which Western nations would come to be envisioned as places always intended to be progressing toward a future utopia in which multiple races would co-exist in a state of harmony.
Carl Schmitt
Was there something within the racialist liberalism of the pre-WW II era that made it susceptible to the promulgation of these norms and their rapid radicalization thereafter? Why did Western leaders succumbed to the radicalization of these norms so easily? The answer may be found in Carl Schmitt’s argument[2] that liberal states lack a strong concept of the political. I take this to mean that liberals leaders have an inherent weakness as political beings due to their inability to think of their nation states as a collectivity of people laying sovereignty claim over a territory that distinguishes between friends and enemies, who can belong and who cannot belong in the territory. Liberals believe that their nation states are associations formed by individuals for the purpose of ensuring their natural right to life, liberty, and happiness. They have an imaginary view of their liberal states as associations created by isolated individuals reaching a covenant, a contract or agreement, amongst themselves in abstraction from any prior community. They have a predilection to whitewash the fact that their liberal states, like all states, were forcibly created by a people with a common language, heritage, racial characteristics, religious traditions, and a sense of territorial acquisition involving the derogation of out-groups.
For this reason, in the words of Carl Schmitt, liberals have an undeveloped sense of the political, an inability to think of themselves as members of a political entity that was created with a clear sense of who can belong and who cannot belong in the community. Having a concept of the political presupposes a people with a strong sense of who can be part of their political community, who can be friends of the community and who cannot be because they pose a threat to the existence and the norms of the community.
Liberals tend to deny that man is by nature a social animal, a member of a collective. They think that humans are all alike as individuals in wanting states that afford them with the legal framework that individuals need in the pursuit of liberty and happiness. They hold a conception of human nature according to which humans can avoid deadly conflict through a liberal state which gives everyone the possibility to improve themselves and society through market competition, technological innovation, and humanitarian works, creating an atmosphere in which political differences can be resolved through peaceful consensus by way of open deliberation.
They don’t want to admit openly that all liberal states were created violently by a people with a sense of peoplehood laying sovereign rights over an exclusive territory against other people competing for the same territory. They don’t want to admit that the members of the competing outgroups are potential enemies rather than abstract individuals seeking a universal state that guarantees happiness and security for all regardless of racial and religious identity. Humans are social animals with a natural impulse to identify themselves collectively in terms of ethnic, cultural and racial markers. But today Europeans have wrongly attributed their unique inclination for states with liberal constitutions to non-Europeans. They have forgotten that liberal states were created by a particular people with a particular individualist heritage, beliefs, and religious orientations. They don’t realize that their individualist heritage was made possible within the context of states or territories acquired through force to the exclusion of competitors. They don’t realize that a liberal state if it is to remain liberal must act collectively against the inclusion of non-Europeans with their own in-group ambitions.
Hegel, Hobbes, and Schmitt
But I think that Schmitt should be complemented with Hegel’s appropriation of the ancient Greek concept of “spiritedness.” Our sense of honor comes from our status within our ethnocultural group in our struggle for survival and competition with other groups[4]. This is the source of what the ancient Greeks called “spiritedness,” that is a part of the soul comprising, in Plato’s philosophy, pride, indignation, shame, and the need for recognition. Plato believed that the human soul consisted of three parts:
a physically desiring part that drives humans to seek to satisfy their appetites for food, comfort, and sensual pleasure;
a reasoning part that allows humans to calculate the best way to get the things they desire; and
a “spirited” part that drives humans to seek honor and renown amongst their people.
Liberal theory developed in reaction to the destructive tendency inbuilt into the spirited part which was exemplified with brutal intensity during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and English Civil War 1642-1651). Thomas Hobbes devalued the spirited part of man as just another appetite for power, for riches, and adulation. At the same time, he understood that this appetite was different from the mere natural appetites for food and sensual pleasure, in that they were insatiable and conflict-oriented.
State of nature according to Hobbes
Hobbes emphasized the destructive rather than the heroic character of this aspect of human nature. In the state of nature men are in constant competition with other men for riches and honor, and so enmity is a permanent condition of the state of nature, killing, subduing, and supplanting competitors. However, Hobbes believed that other aspects of human nature, namely, the instinct for self-preservation, fear of death and desire for “commodious living,” were more powerful passions among humans, and that it was these passions, the fear of death in particular, which eventually led men to agree to create a strong central authority that would end the war of competing megalomaniacs, and maintain the peace by monopolizing the means of violence and agreeing to ensure the secure pursuit of commodious living by all. The “insatiable desire and ambition of man” for power and adulation would henceforth be relegated to the international sphere.
But by the second half of the seventeenth century Hobbes’s extreme pessimism about human nature gradually gave way to more moderate accounts in which economic self interest in the market place, love of money, as calculated and contained by reason, would come to be seen as the main passion of humans. The ideal of the spirited hero striving for honor and glory was thoroughly demeaned if not denounced as foolish. By the eighteenth century money making was viewed less as avaricious or selfish and more as a peaceful passion that improves peoples’ manners and “makes for all the gentleness of life.” As Montesquieu worded it, “wherever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle.” Commerce, it was indeed anticipated, would soften the barbaric ways of human nature, their atavistic passions for glorious warfare, transforming competition into a peaceful endeavour conducted by reasonable men who stood to gain more from trade than the violent usurpation of other’s peoples property.
Eventually, liberals came to believe that commerce would, in the words expressed by the Scottish thinker William Robertson in 1769, “wear off those prejudices which maintain distinction and animosity between nations.” By the nineteenth century liberals were not as persuaded by Hobbes’s view that the state of nature would continue permanently in the international relationships between nations. They replaced his pessimistic argument about human nature with a progressive optimism about how humans could be socialized to overcome their turbulent passions and aggressive instincts as they were softened through affluence and greater economic opportunities. With continuous improvements in the standard of living, technology and social organization, there would be no conflicts that could not be resolved through peaceful deliberation and political compromise.
The result of this new image of man and political relations, according to Schmitt, was a failure on the part of liberal nations to understand that what makes a community viable as a political association with sovereign control over a territory is its ability to distinguish between friends and enemies, which is based on the ability to grasp the permanent reality that Hobbes understood about the nature of man, which is that humans (the ones with the strongest passions) have an insatiable craving for power, a passion that can be held in check inside a nation state with a strong Leviathan ruler, but which remains a reality in the relationship between nations. But, whereas for Hobbes the state of nature is a war between individuals; for Schmitt one can speak of a state of war between nations as well as between groups within a nation. Friends and enemies are always groupings of people. In our time of mass multicultural immigration we can see clearly how enemy groups can be formed inside a national collectivity, groups seeking to undermine the values and the ethnic character of the national group. Therefore, to have a concept of the political is to be aware, in our multicultural age, of the possibility that enemy outgroups can emerge within our liberal nations states; it is to be aware that not all humans are equally individualistic, but far more ethnocentric than Europeans, and that a polity which welcomes millions of individuals from collectivist cultures, with a human nature driven by the passions for power and for recognition, constitute a very dangerous situation.
It was Hegel, rather than Hobbes, who spoke of the pursuit of honor instead of the pursuit of riches or power for its own sake, as the spirited part of human nature, which is about seeking recognition from others, a deeply felt desire among men to be conferred rightful honor by their peers. We can bring this Hegelian insight into Schmitt to argue that the spirited part of the soul is intimately tied to one’s sense of belonging to a political community with ethno-cultural markers. Without this spirited part members of a community eventually lose their sense of collective pride, honor, and will to survive as a political people. It is important to understand that honor is all about concern for one’s reputation within the context of a group. It is a matter of honor for immigrants, the males in the group, to affirm their heritage regardless of how successful they may be economically. Immigrants arriving in large numbers are naturally inclined to establish their own ethnic groupings within Western nations rather than disaggregate into individual units, contrary to what liberal theory says.
Non-White ethnic groupings stand as “the other,” “the stranger,” to use Schmitt’s words, in relation to nations where Europeans still constitute the majority. The friend-enemy distinction, certainly “the Us versus Them” distinction, can be applied to the relation between non-White ethnic groupings and European national groupings in the degree to which the collective actions of non-European groups negates the heritage and overall way of life of the majority European population. Ethnic groupings that negate the way of life of European liberal nations must be repulsed if European nations are to preserve their “own form of existence.” To be cognizant of this reality is what it means to have a concept of the political in our current age of mass immigration. It does not mean that alien groupings are posing an immediate physical threat. Enemy groupings may also emerge as a major force through sheer demographic growth in a seemingly peaceful atmosphere, leading to all sorts of differences over voting patterns, accumulation of wealth and resources, ethnic hierarchies, divergent customs and religious practices, that become so pervasive that they come to threaten the way of life of the founding peoples, polarizing the nation into US versus Them.
The Leftist Interpretation of Schmitt is Wrong
But don’t Western liberals have enemies? Don’t they believe, at least many Republicans, that Islamic radicals, and nations openly opposed to “Western values,” are enemies of liberalism, against whom military violence may be used when necessary, even if Republicans negate the political in the sense that they want to bring about a situation in which humans define themselves as economic agents, or as moral crusaders dedicated to “democratic” causes? Don’t multicultural liberals believe that opponents of multiculturalism and mass immigration in Western countries are “deplorable” people who must be totally marginalized as enemies of humanity?
Academics on the left have indeed appropriated Schmitt to argue that right wing liberals have not negated the political but simply produced a highly effective smokescream over the West’s ambition to impose an American-led corporate order in the world nicely wrapped with human rights for everyone. They see Schmitt as someone who can teach us how to remove the smokescream of “democracy,” “human rights,” and “economic liberty” from Western hegemony, exposing the true power-seeking intentions behind the corporate liberal elites.
It seems to me that this appropriation of Schmitt is seriously flawed. Of course, Schmitt did not say that liberal nations as such are utterly devoid of any political existence, and of a concept of the political, since the very existence of a state supposes a sovereign right over a territory. A complete denial of the political would amount to a denial of the existence of one’s state. It is also true that for Schmitt “what has occurred [in liberal nations] is that economics has become political” in the enormous power that capitalist firms have, and in the way liberal states seek to augment, through non-economic means, their market share across the world. More than this, Schmitt emphasized how liberal states have “intensified” the enemy-friend distinction by ostracizing as enemies any state or political group disagreeing with their conception of humanity and conceptualizing liberal aggression against illiberal nations as final wars to end all wars.
There is no question, however, that Schmitt’s central thesis is that liberalism has no concept of the political and that it lacks a capacity to understand the friend-enemy distinction. Liberals believe that the “angelic” side of humans can manifest itself through proper liberal socialization, and that once individuals practice a politics of consensus-seeking and tolerance of differences, both inside their nations and in their relationships with other liberal nations, they will learn to avoid war and instead promote peaceful trade and cultural exchanges through commercial contracts, treaties, and diplomacy. Even though liberal states have not been able to “elude the political,” they have yet to develop theories of the political which apprehend this sphere of human life in terms of its defining aspect, the friend-enemy distinction. Rather, liberal theorists are inclined to think of the state as one pressure group among a plurality of political groups all of which lack a concept of the political in thinking that differences between groups can be handled through institutions that obtain consensus by means of neutral procedures and rational deliberation.
The negation of the political is necessarily implicit in the liberal notion that humans can be defined as individuals with natural rights. It is implicit in the liberal aspiration to create a world in which groups and nations interact through peaceful economic exchanges and consensual politics, and in which, accordingly, the enemy-friend distinction and the possibility of violence between groups is renounced. The negation of the political is implicit in the liberal notion of “humanity.” The goal of liberalism is to get rid of the political, to create societies in which humans see themselves as members of a human community dedicated to the pursuit of security, comfort and happiness. Therefore, we can argue with Schmitt that liberals have ceased to understand the political insomuch as liberal nations and liberal groups have renounced the friend-enemy distinction and the possibility of violence, under the assumption that human groups are not inherently dangerous to each other, but can be socialized gradually to become members of a friendly “humanity” which no longer values the honor of belonging to a group that affirms ethno-cultural existential differences. This is why Schmitt observes that liberal theorists lack a concept of the political, since the political presupposes a view of humans organized in groupings affirming themselves as “existentially different.”
Thus, using Schmitt, we can argue that while Western liberal states had strong ethnic markers before WWII/1960s, with immigration policies excluding ethnic groupings deemed to be an existential threat to their “national character,” they were nevertheless highly susceptible to the enactment of norms promoting the idea of civic identity, renouncing the notion that races are real, romanticizing Third World peoples as liberators, and believing that all liberal rights should be extended to all humans regardless of nationality, because they lacked a concept of the political. The racial or ethnocentric liberalism that prevailed in the West, collectivist as it remained in this respect, was encased within a liberal worldview according to which, to use the words of Schmitt, “trade and industry, technological perfection, freedom, and rationalization . . . are essentially peaceful [and . . .] must necessarily replace the age of wars.”
They believed that their European societies were associations of individuals enjoying the right to life and liberty. The experience of WWII led liberals to the conclusion that the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had finished feudal militarism, and which then led the Allies to fight a world war against the new militarism of fascism, were still “unfinished revolutions.” The liberal bourgeois nations were still not liberal enough, in their division and ranking of individuals along ethnic lines, with many individuals not enjoying the same rights that were “naturally” theirs. The project of the Enlightenment, “the universalist spirit of the political Enlightenment,” in the words of Jürgen Habermas, was not yet completed.
What Western liberals in the 1960s, the ones who dismantled immigration laws that discriminated against non-Whites, and introduce the notion that multiple cultures could co-exist within the same state, did not realize was that their sense of racial identity was the one collectivist norm still holding their liberal nations safely under the concept of the political. Once this last bastion of collectivism was deconstructed, liberal nations would be caught up within a spiral of radicalization wherein liberal nations would find it ever more difficult to decide which racial groups may constitute a threat to their national character, and which groups may be already lurking within their nations ready to play the political with open reigns, ready to promote their own ethnic interests; in fact, ready to play up the universal language of liberalism, against ethnocentric Europeans, so as to promote their own collectivist interests.
Zehntausende deutsche Juden flohen vor den Nazis nach Großbritannien: Als Folge des Brexit besinnen sich nun viele ihrer Wurzeln - und beantragen deutsche Papiere. Leicht fällt das nicht allen.
Ein wichtiger Vertreter kanadischer Ureinwohner hat ein Treffen mit Kate und William platzen lassen - aus Protest. Noch immer würden Anhänger seines Volkes systematisch benachteiligt.
Stellvertretende AfD-Bundessprecher Albrecht Glaser: Kanzlerin stellt sich über das Gesetz, hat mit ihrer Eigensinnigkeit dem Land einen unermesslichen Schaden zugefügt.
Pfeifkonzerte, Sprechchöre, offener Hass: Selten war die Kluft zwischen Politik und Wutbürgern so spürbar wie bei den Einheitsfeiern in Dresden. Im Zentrum des Zorns stand die Kanzlerin.
Seit geraumer Zeit jagt eine Kampagne gegen Sachsen die nächste. Es wird von den „Vorfällen vom Tag der Deutschen Einheit“ gesprochen, als stünden die Meinungsäußerungen, seien sie noch so rüpelhaft, neben den „Vorfällen von der Silvesternacht“ in ihrer Skandalträchtigkeit.
Das Conne Island ist DER linke Szeneschuppen in Leipzig, eine Institution, deutschlandweit bekannt. Auf seiner Homepage veröffentlichte das Plenum des „selbstverwalteten Jugend-Kulturzentrums“ in Leipzig-Connewitz vor wenigen Tagen eine Erklärung, die Sie hier im Original lesen können - und die im Folgenden dokumentiert wird:
Internet-TV für Teens: Onanieren üben und AfD bashen
ARD und ZDF starten mit „Funk“ ein neues Internet-Angebot für junge Leute. Kosten: 45 Millionen Euro pro Jahr. Wir haben uns einmal angeschaut, was mit den Zwangsabgaben angestellt wird. JF-TV im Fokus mit Martin Voigt: What the Funk?
Im April starb ein Mann an einer Kreuzung nahe der Auffahrt zur Autobahn 5. Es kam zur Anklage wegen Totschlags. Lieferten sich die Beteiligten ein illegales Rennen?
Entsorgungsproblem "Sondermüll"-Klassifizierung für Styropor bereitet Probleme
Es ist ein Milliardengeschäft: Seit Jahrzehnten werden Häuser in Polystyrol eingepackt, um die Wärme zu dämmen. Besser bekannt ist das Material unter dem Handelsnamen Styropor. Weil der Kunststoff brennbar ist, enthalten die Platten oft ein bestimmtes Flammschutzmittel. Das wird inzwischen allerdings als giftig eingestuft und muss ab Oktober gesondert entsorgt werden. Das hat Konsequenzen für die Baubranche.
(Zwei Jahre alt, aber noch aktuell… alte Seilschaften)
Lenin-Denkmal: Einer steht noch
Seit "Good Bye, Lenin!" wissen wir: Die Lenin-Statuen sind aus unseren Städten verschwunden. Aus allen Städten? Nein, in Schwerin gibt es das Sowjetführer-Denkmal weiterhin. Und es tobt ein Kampf darum
Le célèbre auteur des Réprouvés, cadet prussien qui racontera sa perception presque romantique de l’histoire des corps-francs d’après-guerre et du terrorisme des groupuscules nationalistes, a également publié en 1951 un livre fameux, Le Questionnaire, que Gallimard a la bonne idée de rééditer.
L’architecture générale du livre s’appuie sur les quelques 130 questions auxquelles les Américains demandèrent aux Allemands de répondre en 1945 afin d’organiser la dénazification du pays, mais en les détournant souvent et prenant à de nombreuses reprises le contre-pied des attentes des vainqueurs. A bien des égards, le livre est ainsi non seulement à contre-courant de la doxa habituelle, mais camoufle également bien des aspects d’une réalité que l’Allemagne de la fin des années 1940 refusait de reconnaître : « Ma conscience devenue très sensible me fait craindre de participer à un acte capable, dans ces circonstances incontrôlables, de nuire sur l’ordre de puissances étrangères à un pays et à un peuple dont je suis irrévocablement ». Certaines questions font l’objet de longs développements, mais presque systématiquement un humour grinçant y est présent, comme lorsqu’il s’agit simplement d’indiquer son lieu de naissance : « Je découvre avec étonnement que, grâce à mon lieu de naissance (Kiel), je peux me considérer comme un homme nordique, et l’idée qu’en comparaison avec ma situation les New-Yorkais doivent passer pour des Méridionaux pleins de tempérament m’amuse beaucoup ». Et à la même question, à propos des manifestations des SA dans la ville avant la prise du pouvoir par les nazis : « Certes, la couleur de leurs uniformes était affreuse, mais on ne regarde pas l’habit d’un homme, on regarde son coeur. On ne savait pas au juste ce que ces gens-là voulaient. Du moins semblaient-ils le vouloir avec fermeté … Ils avaient de l’élan, on était bien obligé de le reconnaître, et ils étaient merveilleusement organisés. Voilà ce qu’il nous fallait : élan et organisation ». Au fil des pages, il revient à plusieurs reprises sur son attachement à la Prusse traditionnelle, retrace l’histoire de sa famille, développe ses relations compliquées avec les religions et les Eglises, évoque des liens avec de nombreuses personnes juives (dont sa femme), donne de longues précisions sur ses motivations à l’époque de l’assassinat de Rathenau, sur son procès ultérieur et sur son séjour en prison. Suivant le fil des questions posées, il détaille son éducation, son cursus scolaire, son engagement dans les mouvements subversifs « secrets », retrace ses activités professionnelles successives avec un détachement qui parfois peu surprendre mais correspond à l’humour un peu grinçant qui irrigue le texte, comme lorsqu’il parle de son éditeur et ami Rowohlt. Il revient bien sûr longuement sur les corps francs entre 1919 et 1923, sur l’impossibilité à laquelle il se heurte au début de la Seconde guerre mondiale pour faire accepter son engagement volontaire, tout en racontant qu’il avait obtenu en 1919 la plus haute de ses neuf décorations en ayant rapporté à son commandant… « un pot de crème fraîche. Il avait tellement envie de manger un poulet à la crème ! ». Toujours ce côté décalé, ce deuxième degré que les Américains n’ont probablement pas compris. La première rencontre avec Hitler, le putsch de 1923, la place des élites bavaroises et leurs rapports avec l’armée de von Seeckt, la propagande électorale à la fin des années 1920, et après l’arrivée au pouvoir du NSDAP les actions (et les doutes) des associations d’anciens combattants et de la SA, sont autant de thèmes abordés au fil des pages, toujours en se présentant et en montrant la situation de l’époque avec détachement, presque éloignement, tout en étant semble-t-il hostile sur le fond et désabusé dans la forme. Les propos qu’il tient au sujet de la nuit des longs couteaux sont parfois étonnants, mais finalement « dans ces circonstances, chaque acte est un crime, la seule chose qui nous reste est l’inaction. C’est en tout cas la seule attitude décente ». Ce n’est finalement qu’en 1944 qu’il lui est demandé de prêter serment au Führer dans le cadre de la montée en puissance du Volkssturm, mais « l’homme qui me demandait le serment exigeait de moi que je défende la patrie. Mais je savais que ce même homme jugeait le peuple allemand indigne de survivre à sa défaite ». Conclusion : défendre la patrie « ne pouvait signifier autre chose que de la préserver de la destruction ». Toujours les paradoxes. Dans la dernière partie, le comportement des Américains vainqueurs est souvent présenté de manière négative, évoque les difficultés quotidiennes dans son petit village de haute Bavière : une façon de presque renvoyer dos-à-dos imbécilité nazie et bêtise alliée… et donc de s’exonérer soi-même.
Au final, un livre qui doit être lu, car au-delà même de ce qu’il raconte de von Salomon et de l’entre-deux-guerres, il est également très éclairant sur la façon dont une partie non négligeable de la population allemande s’est en quelque sorte « auto-protégée » en 1945.
Sander Carollo interviewt Dirk Rochtus over zijn nieuw boek van Reich tot Republik, te verkrijgen in de betere boekhandel of te bestellen via http://www.doorbraakboeken.be
Den Lauf der Welt hält das nicht auf. Aber die Veränderungen kommen aus Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Staatsparteien und Berufspolitiker vollziehen nur verspätet nach, was dort lautlos längst entschieden ist. Der Primat der Politik ist eine Schimäre.
Die Parteien wirken bei der politischen Willensbildung des Volkes mit. Setzt Artikel 21 des Grundgesetzes als SOLL. Der von den Parteien in Besitz genommene Staat behindert als Parteienstaat die politische Willensbildung des Volkes – beschreibt die politische Wirklichkeit des IST. So simpel diese politische Buchhaltung klingen mag, sie stimmt auf Punkt und Komma.
Das Parteiensystem
Bei den Grünen schreibt einer ihrer mittleren Funktionäre über seinen Austritt:
Mit dem Wahlerfolg der Grünen in Baden-Württemberg im März ist etwas ins Rutschen geraten, was sich nicht mehr aufhalten lässt. Ich sehe mich nicht mehr dazu in der Lage, den eingeschlagenen Weg der Partei in den liberal-konservativen Mainstream der Republik mit meinem Namen zu vertreten. Der „Point of no Return“ zur Abänderung dieses Kurses ist personell, strukturell und in der faktisch verfolgten Politik jetzt endgültig überschritten.
Sinngemäße Aussagen von Zeitgenossen, die aus anderen Parteien nach langer Mitgliedschaft, nach kleinen, mittleren und großen Parteikarrieren ausgetreten sind, gibt es ohne Zahl. Sie sagen im Kern alle: Meine frühere Partei ist verwechselbar geworden, es unterscheidet sie in entscheidenden Fragen nichts von den anderen.
Das DDR-Wort Blockparteien verwenden im Internet immer mehr als Bezeichnung der Bundestagsparteien, DDR-Kenner variieren es mit der damals offiziell und real existierenden Nationalen Front, der Sammlungsbewegung aller Parteien, Massenorganisationen und Verbände in der DDR.
System war für die Nationalsozialisten das Schimpfwort für die Weimarer Republik, Systempartei, Systempolitiker, Systembeamter und Systempresse gehörten zum Vokabular der NS-Zeit. Systempartei und Systempresse habe ich im Internet vereinzelt auch schon gesehen.
Im Vergleich dazu sind die Begriffe Altparteien (etwas unklar, seit wann es den gibt), etablierte Parteien und Mainstream-Parteien recht sachlich. (Dass die meisten Journalisten ihre Medien nicht Mainstream-Medien genannt wissen wollen, ist angesichts einer umfangreichen angelsächsischen Wissenschaftsliteratur wohl dem deutschen Provinzialismus verdankt.)
Es ist noch nicht so lange her, dass sich die schärfsten Wortmeldungen mit den letztgenannten Worten begnügten, wenn sie ihre Ablehnung der schon lange existierenden demokratischen Parteien zum Ausdruck bringen wollten. Inzwischen ist Blockparteien mit und ohne Gänsefüßchen tagtäglich im Einsatz. Die Feindschaft den alten Parteien gegenüber hat einen Höhepunkt erreicht, der kaum noch zu überbieten ist. Und das Wort Staatsversagen verwenden Medien fast schon inflationär.
Der Angleichungsgrad der Bundestagsparteien (einschließlich FDP) hat allerdings auch einen Höhepunkt erreicht, der selbst kaum noch zu überbieten ist. Du musst schon ein eingefleischter Berufsparteigänger sein, wenn du noch glaubst, dass es bei den tatsächlichen politischen Entscheidungen noch einen ernsthaften Unterschied gibt. Solche Unterschiede zelebrieren die Medien nur noch als Personenkonflikte: mehr Show als alles andere. Trump gegen Hillary ist nur das hierzulande (noch) nicht gewohnte Crash & Trash, welches die Tatsache völlig ausklammert, dass für die tatsächliche Politik der USA nahezu irrelevant ist, wie der Präsident heißt: Der politisch-mediale Komplex verkauft öffentlich mit irreführenden Botschaften, was der industriell-militärische Komplex will, aber nicht ausspricht.
Der Normalbürger hat sich schon vor sehr langer Zeit abgewandt. Was wir im Internet sofort sehen, ist die Minderheit der überwiegend eindeutigen Parteigänger des Regierungslagers (die loyale, nur noch formale Opposition eingeschlossen) auf der einen und ihrer Gegner auf der anderen Seite. Die schweigende Mehrheit dazwischen stellt auch im Internet die Mehrheit, aber du musst sehr genau hinschauen, um sie überhaupt zu entdecken, denn sie halten sich bedeckt. Ihre Themen sind von Katzen bis Reisen und so weiter politisch harmlos. Aber ab und zu entgleitet ihnen doch ein like. Einfach nur Schönes, Interessantes, Anrührendes und Witziges teilen sie gerne – von politisch Pointiertem halten sie sich fern.
Parteileben und Personenauslese
Das Innenleben der Parteien hat sich in all den Jahrzehnten der anhaltenden Verschlechterung des Images der Parteien und der Politiker nicht verändert. Die Zahl der Mitglieder von Parteien, vor allem der Volksparteien, hat dramatisch abgenommen, die Zahl der ehrenamtlich Aktiven viel weniger, auch wenn immer mehr Parteiarbeit von bezahlten Mitarbeitern gemacht wird. Ohne die “Wahlkreismitarbeiter” der Bundestags-Abgeordneten ginge vielerorts nicht mehr viel. Dieser Hinweis auf eine schleichende Verlagerung der Parteienfinanzierung hin zu den Fraktionen ist nur die Spitze des Eisbergs.
Die Einschleifmühle Parteiensystem beginnt mit dem Zwang des Parteiengesetzes zu viel Formalismus. Nicht wer politische Ideen hat, setzt sich auf Parteitagen aller Ebenen durch, sondern wer ein Virtuose der Geschäftsordnung ist. Den größten Formalisierungsschub und damit viel Entpolitisierung brachten die Sitten der 68er in den 1970er Jahren. Parteitagsanträge werden seitdem mit numerierten Zeilen bis in den letzen Spiegelstrich in unzähligen Änderungsanträgen abgestimmt, eine politische Erbsenzählerei, die jede Debatte über politische Richtungsentscheidungen so lange zerlegt, bis sie keine mehr ist.
Verwaltungen und Bürokratien allgemein, staatlich wie privat, stellten Studien schon vor...
In den 80ern witzelte ich, diese kleine Lücke zwischen BaföG und Rente kriegten wir auch noch geschlossen. Inzwischen ist der Student als Mitarbeiter des Abgeordneten als Eingangsstufe zur eigenen Abgeordnetenkarriere eher die Regel als die Ausnahme. Dass es mit den Funktionärskarrieren in den Gewerkschaften auch so ist, macht’s nicht besser, sondern schlechter. Stellt es doch hier wie dort sicher, dass Funktionäre vom wirklichen Leben in der zugigen Luft der Wirtschaft, dort wo das Geld verdient wird, von dessen Steuern sie leben, nie etwas mitkriegen.
Natürlich starten auch heute noch Mitglieder in Parteien, die ihre politische Sicht der Dinge, ihre Überzeugungen dort verwirklichen wollen. Die Einschleifmühle Partei sortiert sie aus, sobald sie das längere Zeit ernsthaft versuchen. Die Parteien waren am Anfang ihrer Geschichte Wahlvereine. Die richtige Meinung brachte man mit. In der Partei ging es nicht um Diskussion und Meinungsbildung, sondern um die Gewinnung von Wählern, um Wahlkampf permanent. In den 1970ern schwappte die 68er-Welle noch in ihrer unverfälschten Form über alle Parteien herein. Die Mitglieder wollten bestimmen. Heiner Geißler machte aus dem Kanzlerwahlverein CDU eine veritable Mitgliederpartei. Innerparteiliche Debatten spielten für ein, zwei Dekaden mehr Rolle als außerparteiliche. Unter Helmut Kohl setzte die Rückkehr zum Kanzlerwahlverein ein. Angela Merkel vervollständigt diese Entwicklung. Und die Medien sind in ihrer großen Mehrheit bei der Hofberichterstattung der 1950er angekommen – mit dem Unterschied, dass es keinen neuen SPIEGEL wie damals einen von Rudolf Augstein gibt.
Parteienstaat und Staatsparteien
Das Gesamtgefüge Parteiengesetz, Parteienfinanzierungsgesetz, die Bestimmungen über die Bezahlung von Abgeordneten, ihre Ausstattung mit Personal und vielen anderen sichtbaren und unsichtbaren Privilegien haben ein dichtes Geflecht gewoben – von der Gemeindeebene nach Brüssel und zurück. Da kommt keine politische und personelle Erneuerung mehr durch. Es begann in der Bonner Republik, in der Berliner Republik ist der Parteienstaat unreformierbar geworden. Die Parteien sind Staatsparteien, getragen von den Mandarinen und Eunuchen der Demokratie, den Berufspolitikern: Politik ist für sie zweitrangig, Karriere zählt. Wer sich nicht dran hält, ist eine Zeit lang nützlicher Hofnarr und dann raus.
Die Parteien haben vom Staat Besitz ergriffen, der Staat von ihnen. Parteienstaat und Staatsparteien sind zwei Seiten derselben Münze.
Den Lauf der Welt hält das nicht auf. Aber die Veränderungen kommen aus Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Staatsparteien und Berufspolitiker vollziehen nur verspätet nach, was dort weitgehend lautlos längst entschieden ist. Der oft beschworene Primat der Politik ist eine Schimäre.
Des communautés alternatives centenaires : Sol Veritas Lux
Ex: http://rebellion-sre.fr
Les mouvances alternatives des années 1970 à 2010 n’ont rien inventé. A l’aube du 20ème siècle, la modernisation de l’Europe sous les coups de l’industrialisation et du capitalisme faisait naître des expériences culturelles et communautaires très particulières. ( article paru dans le Rébellion 42 de juin 2010 )
Des anarchistes illégalistes, buveurs d’eau et végétariens
En France, les milieux anarchistes individualistes menaient campagne pour une vie saine, avec la nécessité affirmée de suivre une éthique de vie basée sur la lutte contre l’alcoolisme (véritable fléau social qui garantit au Capital la passivité de la classe ouvrière), la promotion de l’alimentation végétarienne, le refus des règles de l’ordre bourgeois et la mise en place d’une éducation populaire émancipatrice.
A Paris, avant la Grande Guerre, des associations et des foyers anarchistes (mais aussi syndicalistes et socialistes révolutionnaires) développent de manière pratique ce mode d’existence qui se veut en dehors du système. C’est une affirmation radicale du refus de « participer » aux règles de la société qui trouve un écho particulier chez les anciens partisans de la « propagande par le fait » (c’est-à-dire les anarchistes qui utilisaient le terrorisme et la « reprise individuelle » comme moyen d’action). Militant révolutionnaire accusé par la police d’être un complice de la « bande à Bonnot », Louis Rimbault (1877-1949) fut une farouche figure de cette mouvance. Léo Malet, le meilleur auteur de polar français, connu ce genre de foyer dans les années 1930 et l’évoque dans les aventures de Nestor Burma, son personnage d’ ancien anar reconverti en détective privé.
Ombres et lumières de Monte Verità
En Allemagne, le mouvement de « réforme de la vie » prônait la fuite des villes, le retour à la nature comme solution à la crise causée par le mercantilisme grandissant, le végétarisme, le refus de l’alcool et du tabac, le nudisme, les médecines naturelles (notamment les débuts de l’homéopathie), la liberté sexuelle, le mysticisme et la découvertes des spiritualités orientales.
Cas emblématique, qui à lui seul incarne les richesses et les ambiguïtés de ce genre d’expérience, la colonie de Monte Verità fut fondée par un groupe issus de la bohème bavaroise. Dans le cadre naturel magnifique du Tessin suisse, une petite communauté d’hommes et de femmes s’installe pour fonder une communauté idéale et libre. Le fils d’un industriel belge, Henri Oedenkoven finance les travaux de création d’une sorte de sanatorium végétarien. Sa femme, Ida Hofmann, professeur de piano, wagnérienne et féministe aura un rôle central dans l’expérience.
Il s’agissait de créer ce qui était voulu comme un lieu de renaissance et de régénération, de jeter les fondements d’une « nouvelle vie » hors de la structure corrompue du monde en édification. Vie communautaire, alimentation végétarienne et frugale, séances d’héliothérapie (en quelque sorte des bains de soleil, les « colons » vouaient un véritable culte à l’astre solaire) et de gymnastique : Monte Verità fut une apogée du culte du corps retrouvé. Une compagnie de danse séjourna de manière régulière dans les installations de la communauté.
Très vite, Monte Verità fut un point de rencontre pour des naturistes, des réformateurs sociaux, des militants révolutionnaires (dont beaucoup feront partis des activistes des conseils ouvriers de Bavière après la défaite de 1918), des artistes, des anthroposophes et autres théosophes de toutes les nationalités. Des dissensions se produisirent assez rapidement entre le couple des fondateurs (qui voulait développer l’image de marque de la communauté et créer un centre hôtelier de remise en forme avant l’heure) et la frange la plus radicale de la communauté. Les frères Graser reprochaient les compromis passés avec le système pour faire vivre financièrement le projet. Gusto Graser mènera la fronde et se retira dans une caverne en ermite avec sa femme Jenny Hofmann (sœur d’Ida). Sous l’influence des religions et philosophies orientales, il devient un prophète ambulant d’un panthéisme pacifique. L’écrivain allemand, Hermann Hesse fut très lié à Graser et lui rend hommage dans son œuvre la plus importante, Demian.
Le choc de la Grande Guerre devait anéantir ses tentatives alternatives, mais d’autres devaient naitre sur les ruines de notre continent. L’expérience révolutionnaire et poétique de Fiume en 1917 sera une autre forme de cette recherche d’une communauté idéale. Mais cela est déjà une autre histoire.
A lire sur le sujet :
Nous avons repris pour l’écriture de cet article la mine d’informations représentée par les deux numéros de la revue (DIS)CONTINUITE. Ces deux volumes contiennent plus de 400 pages chacun de textes du courant anarchiste naturien.
Naturiens, végétariens, végétaliens et crudivégétaliens dans le mouvement anarchiste français (1895-1938), juillet 1993, 485 p. 16, 80 euros
Communautés, naturiens, végétariens, végétaliens et crudivégétaliens dans le mouvement anarchiste français ; février 1994, 485p. 21,30 euros.
Disponible auprès de François Bochet, Moulin des Chapelles, 87800 Janailhac
Sur les divers dimensions et aspects du culte solaire, nous conseillons vivement la lecture de la revue Solaria. Publication traitant de la solarité autant du côté scientifique que spirituel, elle est une référence dans le domaine. Abonnent : 2 numéros ( un an ): 12€.
Contact : Jean-christophe Mathelin, 7 rue Christian Dewet 75012 Paris
Frankfurt, Germany – Most Europeans are quietly horrified watching Donald Trump torn to pieces by political piranhas while Wall Street’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, appears to be pushing for a war with Russia. She blames everything on that wicked Vlad Putin. How long before she will claim Monica Lewinsky was one of Putin’s famed KGB seductress agents (I’ve met a few) known as ‘swallows?’
Europeans, whose male political leaders all seem to have mistresses, would laugh off Trump’s awkward gropes and the outrage they caused as adolescent. Better gropes than a possible war with Russia over Syria. But Trump looks like a mastodon stuck in a primeval tar pit, ambushed by Democratic hunters.
Does anyone remember the Democrat’s young god, Jack Kennedy, who used to drag women into the White House linen closet, smoke a joint, and give them a presidential quickie? Lyndon Johnson’s Texas rough-riding, or Nelson Rockefeller’s too young girlfriends that did him in?
Bad as things are in the US, they are not much better in Europe. The foolish flight of racist Britain from the European Union has deflated its outrageously inflated pound sterling and spread panic among fat cat bankers and property developers. The last rags of Britain’s imperial pretensions have been ripped away.
Things are so bad right now that the odious Tony Blair, who seduced the wife of his patron, Rupert Murdoch, is trying to slither back into political life.
Here in Germany, Europe’s bulwark, the political ground is shaking. Chancellor Angela Merkel has been a cautious, capable leader. Her courageous admission of 1.1 million Mideast and Afghan refugees was the right thing to do morally but a political disaster for her center-right party.
In fact, Merkel’s long tenure in office may be nearing its end. Younger Germans are tired of bland ‘Mama Merkel’ and their nation’s kowtowing to Washington. Germany remains in some ways the defeated, occupied nation of 1945.
Many Germans call for stronger government action over the foundering Deutsche Bank. Located here in Frankfurt, this dummkopf bank has lost huge amounts of money and run onto the rocks due to unconstrained greed and managerial ineptitude. Deutsche’s real problem is that it tried to be like a rapacious American bank rather than like a conventional, conservative German bank. How could Germans be so stupid?
The Berlin government will probably have to rescue Deutsche Bank sometime soon, or at least engineer a takeover. It does not help that the US may fine Deutsche up to $14 billion for peddling rotten real estate bonds in the US before 2008. Or that the bank may be in hock for a staggering $46 billion in mysterious derivatives few understand. All this is pure casino capitalism. Maybe they should rename the bank, Die Bank Trump!
Deutsche Bank’s collapse could bring a Lehmann Brothers-type panic to Europe’s already deeply stressed financial system.
Italian banks are in terrible shape, up to their tortellini in bad debts. Their depositors are likely to be hard hit in any bail-out or bail-in. However, the rule remains: save the banks first, then women and children.
Meanwhile, across the Rhine, France’s political landscape is shaking. The wretched President Holland, who has the charisma of a wet croissant, is now the most unpopular leader since Robespierre – maybe even more so.
Like the US Republican rats abandoning their sinking electoral ship, France’s center-left wants to ditch albatross Holland but can’t find any candidate popular enough to replace him.
Presidential elections are due in April and May, 2017. The opposition Republicans have a so-so candidate in Nicholas Sarkozy and a good one in Alain Juppé. Sarkozy is still under investigation for taking campaign cash from Libya’s late Muammar Khadaffi – who was bumped off in what looks like a French-engineered murder.
Behind them looms the specter of National Front Leader Marine le Pen. Her effort to ditch the EU and NATO, kick out the Arabs, and adopt economic nationalism makes her a French version of Trump. But she is a far more adept politician and a gifted speaker.
Like America’s Republican oligarchy facing Trump, France’s political elite trembles before Le Pen. So does the rest of Europe as her radical thinking enflames rightwing parties across the continent. The Front National could replace France’s venerable Socialists as the nation’s second party and main opposition.
Spain is in political paralysis, unable to elect a government. In Brussels, the EU is trying to reshape its role after Brexit and find a new ‘raison d’etre.’ At least it will no longer put up with British sabotage. It’s what Trump would call ‘a disaster.’