De onlusten in Londen en andere Engelse steden zijn een dubbelzinnig eerbetoon aan de apathie, de morele lafheid, de onbekwaamheid en het carrièrezuchtige opportunisme van de Britse politieke en intellectuele klassen. Op de ene of andere manier zijn zij erin geslaagd niet te zien wat evident is voor iedereen die een wandelingetje maakt in een drukke Britse straat: dat een grote proportie van de jonge bevolking van het land, lelijk, agressief, gemeen, slecht opgevoed en onbeschoft is en misdadige neigingen heeft. Die jeugd heeft geen enkel zelfrespect, wel veel eigendunk. Ze vindt dat ze recht heeft op een hoog levenspeil en op andere dingen, zonder daar ook maar de minste inspanning voor te doen.
Denk even na over het volgende: hoewel Groot-Brittannië een zeer hoge jeugdwerkloosheid kent – ongeveer 20 procent van de jongeren onder de 25 jaar heeft geen baan – moet het land al jaren jonge werkkrachten uit het buitenland importeren, zelfs voor ongeschoolde banen in de dienstensector. De verklaring van die paradox ligt voor de hand voor iedereen die de jonge Britten kent.
Geen enkele zinnige werkgever in de dienstensector zal een jonge Brit kiezen als hij een jonge Pool kan krijgen. De jonge Pool zal waarschijnlijk niet alleen hard werken en welgemanierd zijn, maar ook nog kunnen tellen. En de kans is groot – de ultieme vernedering – dat hij zelfs beter Engels zal spreken dan de Brit, als we het over de standaardvariant van de taal hebben. Zijn Engels zal misschien minder vloeiend maar wel correcter zijn, zijn accent gemakkelijker te begrijpen.
Occasioneel schoolbezoek
Ik overdrijf niet. Na verplicht onderwijs – misschien noem ik het beter occasioneel schoolbezoek – tot de leeftijd van zestien jaar, met een prijskaartje van 80.000 pond per hoofd, kan ongeveer een kwart van de Britse kinderen niet vlot lezen of eenvoudige rekensommen maken. Het maakt je trots dat je een Britse belastingbetaler bent.
Ik denk dat ik met vrij grote zekerheid kan zeggen, uit mijn ervaring als arts in een van de wijken waar net een politiekantoor afgebrand is, dat de helft van de relschoppers op de vraag ‘Ben je goed in wiskunde?' zou antwoorden ‘Wat is wiskunde?'.
De Britse jongeren voeren de westerse wereld aan in vrijwel alle aspecten van de sociale pathologie, van tienerzwangerschappen tot drugsgebruik, van dronkenschap tot geweldmisdrijven. Er bestaat geen vorm van wangedrag die onze versie van de welvaartsstaat niet heeft opgespoord en gesubsidieerd.
Televisie in slaapkamer
Britse kinderen hebben veel meer kans op een televisie in hun slaapkamer dan op een vader in huis. Een derde van onze kinderen eet nooit aan tafel met een ander lid van het huishouden – het woord ‘gezin' zou misplaatst zijn voor de sociale regelingen in de wijken waaruit de meeste relschoppers afkomstig zijn. Ze zijn dan ook radicaal ongesocialiseerd en diep egoïstisch. Hun visie op relaties met andere mensen is die van Lenin: wie doet wat met wie. Tegen hun volwassenheid zijn ze voorbestemd om niet alleen werkloos maar ook totaal ongeschikt voor de arbeidsmarkt te zijn.
Afhankelijk zijn van de overheid is voor veel Britse jonge vrouwen geen afhankelijkheid maar net het omgekeerde: onafhankelijkheid. Afhankelijkheid betekent elke vorm van vertrouwen op de mannen die hen zwanger maken en die hun uitkering van de overheid als zakgeld beschouwen, om aan te vullen met een beetje drugshandel. (Mark Duggan, wiens dood door toedoen van de waarschijnlijk incompetente politie de rellen zou hebben uitgelokt, deed volgens zijn eigen broer ‘zaakjes'; welke zaakjes dat waren, werd met de mantel der liefde bedekt).
Het deel van de maatschappij dat rellen schopt is relatief arm, maar bezit toch alle elektronische apparatuur die nodig is voor wat echt telt in het leven: het entertainment van de populaire cultuur. En wat is de Britse populaire cultuur geweldig. Misschien was Amy Winehouse haar mooiste parel en haar meest authentieke vertegenwoordiger, met haar militante, ideologische vulgariteit, haar domme smaak, haar walgelijke persoonlijke gedrag en haar absurde zelfmedelijden.
Haar vunzige leven was een lang bad in braaksel, zowel letterlijk als metaforisch, dat verontschuldigd noch verklaard kan worden door haar hoogst middelmatige talent. Maar toch liet onze intellectuele klasse niet het minste afkeurende geluidje horen toen ze na haar dood bijna heilig werd verklaard. Die klasse heeft sinds lang de ruggengraat van een weekdier.
Bespottelijke straffen
Misdaad wordt in Engeland nog nauwelijks bestraft. Een opperrechter vond inbraak een lichte overtreding die geen gevangenisstraf verdiende en de volgende opperrechter gaf hem gelijk. Tegen de tijd dat hij twaalf is, heeft een modale jongere uit een achterstandswijk geleerd dat hij niets te vrezen heeft van de wet en dat hij alleen op zijn hoede moet zijn voor mensen die sterker of gewetenlozer zijn dan hij. De straffen zijn bespottelijk. De politie gedraagt zich intimiderend maar tegelijkertijd ineffectief en incompetent en gaat steeds vaker gekleed in uitrusting die meer geschikt lijkt voor de bezetters van Afghanistan. De mensen die nu het bangst zijn voor onze politie zijn de onschuldigen.
Dat alles doet geen afbreuk aan de persoonlijke verantwoordelijkheid van de relschoppers. Maar deze onlusten zijn symptomatisch voor een maatschappij die snel uiteenvalt, voor een volk dat geen leiders en geen volgelingen telt maar enkel nog egoïsten.
lundi, 15 août 2011
De generatie van Amy Winehouse
De generatie van Amy Winehouse
Rellen in Verenigd Koninkrijk
Theodore DALRYMPLE
Ex: http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=JH3DRJO3
00:14 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes, Réflexions personnelles | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : angleterre, grande-bretagne, émeutes, violence, violences urbaines, europe, affaires européennes, politique internationale, actualité, réflexions personnelles, theodore dalrymple | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
White Riot: Assimilation & Cultural Death in England
White Riot:
Assimilation & Cultural Death in England
By Francis Alexander
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
As an ethnocentric white man, well aware that the mainstream media do not report the racial character of non-white violence, I closely examined photographs of the recent riots that have occurred in England. To my dismay I saw new numerous white youths participating in the violence. Most of the rioter’s faces were concealed, making it difficult to determine their race, and though they were most probably a minority, the number of white rioters was sizable.
This is something many racialist writers have ignored, reacted on instinct, and attributed sole responsibility to the Negro colony. What I am writing is not to let the blacks of the hook but use this as a way of objectively analyzing the shortcomings of my own people, to illustrate the scale of our tasks in regenerating them. If you do not believe in my basic premise, take a look at these pictures http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2024120/London-riots-2011-suspects-Photos-released-know-looters.html [2]
How did this come to be? The sort of looting that occurred is normally something only done by Negroes. The simple answer is that a substantial proportion of English white working class youth have adopted Negro folkways in a very thorough and total manner. In the US the closest equivalent is the Wigger phenomena. This differs in that Wiggers are simply young whites who act black and do so as a youthful and foolish idiosyncracy, something they grow out of, because a grown man looks stupid with his baggy jeans round round his knees and a backward baseball cap.
We don’t have Wiggers in the UK, we have instead, chavs: alternatively known as rude boys, pikeys, townies, hoodies, or feral youths. For them, Negro speech, attitudes, dress, musical tastes, and disorganized criminality come to them completely naturally and spontaneously, and are a badge of social station and identity. They are not even conscious of imitating aliens. There is no affectation there; their negrification is deep-set. Can one imagine your typical middle-class American wigger joining a Negro riot?
I thought not, and that is the difference.
How is all this even possible? Well, one of the advantages of being primitive is that blacks have a natural and intuitive understanding of ethnocentrism. They refer to blacks who act white as “Bounties,” after the coconut-chocolate bar that is black on the outside and, white in the inside. These feral white youths on the other hand, are like a sandwich full of excrement: white on the outside and black on the inside. To put it in Evolian terms their race of the body is white, their race of the soul is Negro, and their like almost every one else in our society incoherently nihilistic.
All of this proves the point made by Guillaume Faye that assimilation is cultural death, which results not only in African and Asians being superficially Westernized but also in European culture being Africanized and Islamified.
Assimilation has done its work too well in England. Most middle-class English people have non-white friends, and I myself have met privately educated Asians with manner and outlook identical to native rahs (rah being slang for the tattered and plutocratic remnants of the English gentry). If worse is better, then better (i.e. “successful” assimilation) is also definitely worse.
One of the reasons that the British National Party has failed to enjoy the sort of breakthroughs that other national-populist parties have is that race relations in the UK are simply somewhat “better” than they are in the rest of Europe, i.e. less tense and therefore less likely to produce racial awakening. In turn, one of the reasons they emphasize Islam so much is that they are the one group to remain culturally as well as racially alien, and even many of them have been integrated into a basically bourgeois life style
There are number of reasons why this is the case.
The first of all is that the English, are still quite culturally confident in a sort of effortless way. Unlike Scandinavians or White Americans, they are not ashamed of who they are; white guilt is probably as uncommon as white pride. The English are too reserved for either to really resonate.
Despite this, they are unfortunately lacking in the aggressive ethnocentrism of the French, Italians, or Flems, which angers and humiliates the colonizing population, thereby further provoking a backlash from an already hostile population. The English are too polite.
A further factor is the strength of the class system, which results in non-whites being happy to imitate the manner of whatever class they belong to, for Blacks this is the feral underclass, whose manners they have changed in turn, for Asians either the lower or upper- middle classes depending upon whether they are Muslims or from one of the higher IQ groups.
A final factor is that much of the non-white population is dispersed in penny packets. There is no equivalent of America’s inner cities and France’s banlieus, which provide the territory needed to form strong non-white identities. Thus loyalty in the underclass is to soil rather than blood; specifically to whatever estate they live on. They refer to it as their “ends,” what Americans would call a housing project. The idea of multi-racial looters loyal to some ghastly warren of sub-Corbussian architecture may seem fantastical to Americans, but such is the poisoned fruit of our ever so successful assimilation.
In persuading the English people to put race before economic class, and blood before money; to persuade them to vote for a party willing to deport their non-white personal friends and acquaintances, in all these things English nationalists face an uphill task. Regardless, they must persevere or the English people will be dispossessed without resistance and go quietly into the night convinced that their Afro-Asian colonizers and future masters, are in fact, just like them: English.
We must therefore emphasize more than ever that a people is defined not by shared customs or legal status but by ancestry, continuous identity and a sense of a sacred presence. To appeal solely to culture or customs is to be disarmed, given that docile and intelligent non-white immigrants can absorb our culture, while stupid and surly ones can drag the lowest elements of our people down with them, to their convulsive and chthonic depths of post-modern urban ferality.
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/white-riot/
00:07 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : actualité, londres, angleterre, grande-bretagne, europe, affaires européennes, politique internationale, émeutes, violence, violences urbaines | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
Londres dans la tempête anthropotechnique
Londres dans la tempête anthropotechnique
par Jean-Paul BAQUIAST
Pourquoi employer, pour désigner les émeutes qui se produisent en ce moment dans certains quartiers londoniens, un terme apparemment obscur, celui de tempête anthropotechnique, plutôt que parler de simples émeutes des banlieues, semblables à celles s'étant produites en France il y a quelques années?
Pourquoi, plus banalement encore, ne pas parler de simples scènes de pillage, comme l'on en voit partout dans le monde? Parce que s'il s'agit d'un phénomène sans doute classique, la révolte de minorités non assimilées par le système de pouvoirs dominants et par conséquent marginalisées, il prend des formes nouvelles, l'émergence de modèles de destruction de l'ordre social en place particulièrement visibles et exemplaires. Ces modèles sont « virtuels », sous la forme d'images et de commentaires se réverbérant en écho. Mais ils naissent d'actions concrètes sur le terrain et donnent à ces actions une force d'exemple quasiment illimitée. De nouveaux acteurs jusque là passifs sont incités à prendre des initiatives. Les troubles semblent alors se générer et se répandre spontanément, sur le mode viral.
Inévitablement les sociétés attaquées génèrent des réactions de défense dont les modèles se répandent à leur tour à travers les réseaux. Ces réactions, constructives ou destructrices selon le point de vue des observateurs politiques, sont d'abord classiques, sur le mode de la répression policière traditionnelle. Mais devant l'échec de cette forme de défense, les pouvoirs inventent des solutions reposant le plus souvent sur le contrôle des activités à travers les outils technologiques fournis par les réseaux et l'intelligence artificielle. Ces solutions paraissent émerger elles-aussi spontanément. Ceci tient en partie à la capacité d'adaptation rapide des technologies utilisées et des humains faisant appel à elles. Il est aujourd'hui difficile de prévoir le type de société qui résultera des affrontements à prévoir entre les forces agonistes et antagonistes en présence. D'où l'intérêt d'essayer de rafraichir en permanence les outils d'analyse.
Le facteur technologique
Le premier facteur à prendre en compte est la puissance du facteur technologique aujourd'hui en action, que nous venons de résumer rapidement. La capacité des réseaux sociaux et des images virtuelles à fédérer les oppositions a été découverte à l'occasion des révoltes arabes. Aujourd'hui, il semble que le pouvoir de Bachar El Hassad, malgré ses centaines de chars, sera obligé à la longue de s'incliner devant la mobilisation en profondeur provoquée par la diffusion des images, aussi rares et réprimées que soient celles-ci. Le pouvoir chinois est lui-aussi dans l'expectative face à la naissance d'oppositions de ce type.
Ce facteur technologique est désormais bien connu. Il comporte le volet des médias, la télévision et internet, qui propagent dans le monde entier des symboles d'une grande puissance contagieuse, servant pour beaucoup de spectateurs d'exemples à suivre. La mémétique a décrit ce mode de propagation, les acteurs se copiant les uns les autres tout en diversifiant par mutation la nature de leurs initiatives. Il faut actualiser les modèles mémétiques déjà anciens pour tenir compte de la puissance des nouveaux modes de production et de diffusion des contenus propres aux sociétés urbaines. On voit se généraliser des outils de communication instantanée entre individus et petits groupes qui les rendent en cas de confrontation plus mobiles et réactifs que les forces de l'ordre n'employant que des moyens traditionnels de communication. Il s'agit pourrait-on dire alors de superorganismes en reconstitution permanente.
Un point méritera d'être précisé. La généralisation de la société en réseau a depuis les origines favorisé l'apparition apparemment spontanée et quasiment irrépressible d'agents internes de destruction d'autant plus efficaces qu'ils s'attaquent spontanément aux systèmes complexes, comme si la complexité les stimulaient. Il s'agit des virus informatiques et en associations avec eux, des humains, pirates ou hackers. Beaucoup semblent motivés, non pour des raisons politiques ou économiques, mais par le désir très puissant de se montrer supérieurs, fut-ce anonymement, aux barrières qui leur sont opposées. Dans notre terminologie, il s'agit typiquement d'agents de type anthropotechniques, associant des technologies de type proliférant et des humains (anthropos) tourmentés par un besoin de sortir de la norme. Cela peut prendre une forme ludique mais aussi déboucher sur des actions qui seront qualifiées de criminelles.
Or dans le cas des émeutes urbaines, on voit systématiquement apparaître des groupes dits de casseurs qui ne se bornent pas à piller mais, semble-t-il, à détruire pour détruire. On a parlé de jeu ou de sport. Médiatisés sur les réseaux, de tels comportements se répandent et se diversifient sur le mode mémétique viral. On peut s'interroger sur les raisons de leur succès reproductif, déploré par les responsables de l'ordre. S'agit-il d'une propension séculaire des sociétés organisées à générer des comportements destructifs externes de la part de ceux que cette organisation rejette? Faut-il alors intensifier les mesures répressives classiques? S'agit-il au contraire de formes d'auto-destruction internes qui seront de plus en plus nombreuses et agressives au fur et à mesure que les sociétés en réseau se complexifieront? Quels rapports entretiendront ces auto-destructions avec les actions de contestation plus pacifiques s'exprimant à travers des manifestations médiatisées, sur le mode des campements de la place Tahrir au Caire. Ces dernières en souffriront-elles ou en tireront-elles profit? Des analyses systémiques semblent s'imposer, si l'on ne veut pas s'enfermer dans la vieille dialectique du « surveiller et punir » illustrée par Michel Foucault.
Le facteur anthropologique
En état de co-activation avec ce facteur technologique se trouve le facteur que nous nommons ici anthropologique. Il faut pas à cet égard se cacher derrière les non-dits bien pensants, qui ne trompent plus personne aujourd'hui. Les insurgés des banlieues européennes conjuguent le refus de l'exploitation propre à tous prolétariats ou minorités exploitées ou rejetées par le secteur productif avec des composantes ethniques. La Grande Bretagne, pour ce qui la concerne, dans la suite d'une histoire coloniale et industrielle dont les hauts-faits inspirent encore l'imagination des classes dirigeantes, a cru pouvoir faire venir sur son territoire, pratiquement sans contraintes, les représentants de populations et de religions qui se livraient chez elles à des conflits incessants. Elle espérait apparemment pouvoir les réconcilier autour des bonnes moeurs de la gentry, tout en continuant à exploiter leur force de travail sans offrir de perspective d'emplois sérieux et de promotion. Des aides à l'assimilation avaient été mises en place sous les gouvernements travaillistes, mais elles viennent d'être supprimées.
Il n'y a rien d'étonnant à ce que, la crise économique et politique actuelle aidant, ce soit dans le pot-pourri de nationalités provenant principalement de l'ancien Empire, que se recrutent - fussent-ils naturalisés depuis plusieurs générations, les individus les plus activistes. Certes, les affrontements de la décenie précédente opposants protestants et catholiques en Irlande avaient rappelé que les Européens peuvent à tout moment prendre les armes les uns contre les autres, comme ils l'ont fait tout au long du 20e siècle. Reste qu'aujourd'hui les images des combats de rue véhiculent l'image détestable de conflits ethniques, même si comme d'habitude les premières victimes des destructions sont des famlles fraichement immigrées. Il peut s'agir d'une véritable dynamite. Parler comme le fait aujourd'hui le gouvernement Cameron de comportements relevant du banditisme classique ne suffit donc pas à prendre la mesure anthropologique du problème.
En France ou dans les autres pays européens, il paraît évident que des facteurs voisins sont à l'oeuvre qui nourriront si rien n'est fait des révoltes également destructrices. Mais pour le moment il nous semble que le maillon faible face à de telles révoltes risque bien d'être le Royaume Uni. Pourquoi? La société britannique, bien qu'indéniablement profondément démocratique en termes politiques, est aussi profondément inégalitaire en termes sociaux. De plus elle a depuis des décennies perdu la capacité de faire appel au secteur public et à de véritables mesures économiques où l'Etat et les organisations syndicales pourraient faire un contrepoids aux oligarchies financières. C'est ainsi que la majorité libérale conservatrice a embouché sans aucunes précautions les trompettes du FMI et de Wall Street en démantelant la police, les universités et les services sociaux, entre autres barrages possibles aux revendications de la rue. S'est ajoutée à cela la corruption profonde générée par le système médiatique, où même l'austère Scotland Yard a perdu sa respectabilité.
Face aux mouvements de rue, le gouvernement se trouve un peu dans la situation de Bachar El Assad: devoir durcir encore la répression ou démissionner. Certains parlent de faire appel à l'armée. Cela fera peut-être taire un moment les manifestants. Mais ne fera qu'aggraver les difficultés à terme. Il faudrait pensons-nous proposer aux minorités ethniques en réseau des perspectives à plus long terme qui réinséreraient les manifestants les plus désireux de s'intégrer au sein d'autres réseaux offrant des perspectives d'activités technologiques motivantes. C'est la question évoquée dans notre éditorial du 27 juillet, « L'avenir de la Grèce est aussi le nôtre ». Mais cette perspective supposerait un véritable changement de système politique et économique. Rien ne prouve pour le moment que la peur générée par les émeutes fasse progresser, en Grande Bretagne comme ailleurs en Europe, la prise au sérieux du besoin d'un tel changement.
Jean-Paul Baquiast
Europe solidaire
09/08/2011
Correspondance Polémia – 12/08/2011
00:05 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes, Sociologie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : europe, affaires européennes, actualité, londres, angleterre, grande-bretagne, émeutes, violence, violences urbaines, politique internationale, sociologie, problèmes contemporains, théorie politique, sciences politiques, politologie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 12 août 2011
Schluss mit kunterbunt!
Schluß mit kunterbunt!
„Farbige legen Tottenham in Schutt und Asche“ – so oder ähnlich hätten die Schlagzeilen unserer Medien lauten müssen. Stattdessen verschwiegen sie politisch korrekt die Herkunft der überwiegenden Mehrheit der Gewalttäter. Ein Polizist sprach, am ersten Tag laut „Telegraph“, von einem 80%igen Anteil Schwarzer, der Rest sei hauptsächlich mit Osteuropäern und anderen Ethnien durchmischt, so derselbe. Doch was bringt eine österreichische Zeitung auf der Titelseite? Einen europäisch aussehenden Chaoten, wahrscheinlich Trittbrettfahrer. Bewußte Irreführung!
Was sich in London und in der Folge in weiteren Städten Englands abspielte und weiter zu eskalieren droht , ist in erster Linie die Frucht einer verantwortungslosen Einwanderungspolitik (113 Volksgruppen allein in South-Tottenham!) und, in der Folge, eines Kopf-in-den-Sand-Verhaltens wie es auch in Frankreich, den Benelux-Staaten oder auch in deutschen Landen üblich geworden ist.
Es ist aber nicht zuletzt auch ein Ergebnis jener von Linken und Liberalen gepflogenen und von unpolitischen Spießbürgern mitgetragenen politischen Korrektheit, die geistig und politisch alles einzuebnen und Unterschiede zu ignorieren versucht. Eine Denk- und Verhaltensweise die wider die Realität, nicht zuletzt auch wider die Naturgesetze bestehen will, am Ende aber nur gefährliche gesellschaftliche Spannungen erzeugt und im Multikultichaos (South Tottenham: 190 Sprachen!) endet. Was nicht allen Inländern gefällt. In England nicht, bei uns nicht.
Um die empörten und frustrierten Bürger nun niederzuhalten wird – von Seiten der linksliberalen, meist rot-grünen Gutmenschen und Heuchler in Staat und Gesellschaft – permanenter Gesinnungsterror (Wer gegen Überfremdung und Multikulti ist, wird zum „Nazi“ gestempelt) gegen die Mehrheitsbevölkerung ausgeübt. Typisch für diese politisch Korrekten ist ja auch, wie im jüngsten Anlaßfall , der Versuch, alle möglichen Ausreden und Entschuldigungen für die Gewalttaten der überwiegend Farbigen zu konstruieren, wobei natürlich die soziale Lage oder die familiäre Situation in den Vordergrund geschoben werden.
Alleinseligmachende Milieutheorie, eh klar. Nur hält diese halt nur zum Teil, was sie verspricht, da entgegen dem Wunschdenken vieler, Rasse und Glaube bei solchen Unruhen sehr wohl hintergründig eine Rolle spielen. Armut kann deshalb sowenig alleinige Rechtfertigung für solche Gewalttaten sein wie ein anderer kultureller Hintergrund. Bekannt ist ja auch , daß bei einigen Zuwanderergruppen das Aggressionspotential nicht zu übersehen ist.
Über importierte Brutalität und Skrupellosigkeit wissen aber auch wir im gemütlicheren Mitteleuropa bereits Bescheid. Und, ob Messerstecherei vor einer Disco in Wien oder brutale Attacken durch ausländische Jugendliche in Villach, meistens wird auch hierzulande die Herkunft der Täter verschwiegen. Wenn einmal nicht, dann eben u. a. – wie in England oder Deutschland auch – mit deren anderen kulturellen Tradition oder sozialen Lage und ähnlichen von den Erst-Ursachen ablenkenden Argumenten quasi gerechtfertigt. Was bestenfalls nur zur zeitlichen Verlagerung des Problems beiträgt, nicht zu dessen Lösung.
Das englische Beispiel steht für eine Reihe weiterer, die allesamt das Scheitern einer gefährlichen Illusion oder auch schon politischen Strategie in allzu realistischer Weise symbolisieren. Multikulti, das beliebige Spielchen mit Menschen, ist gescheitert, meinte sogar eine nach Wählern schielende Frau Merkel.
Es genügt jetzt aber nicht mehr, es nur einzusehen, es gilt jetzt zu handeln, ehe im Zuge auch einer sich verschlechternden wirtschaftlichen Lage halb Europa in Brand gesetzt wird. Der Funke kann jederzeit auch auf Deutschland oder Österreich überspringen. An gewaltbereiten frustrierten Ausländern wird es da wie dort so wenig mangeln wie an einheimischen Chaoten-Hilfstruppen.
Angesichts der uns unter Umständen drohenden Gefahren sollte, wie bei jeder Zweierbeziehung, auch bei zerrüttetem von Mißtrauen und Abneigung geprägtem Zusammenleben unterschiedlicher Ethnien und Kulturen, eine Scheidung möglich sein. Eine „Entkolonialisierung“ Europas und dessen Wiedereroberung wäre eine nationalrevolutionäre europäische Aufgabe.
00:10 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes, Manipulations médiatiques | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : manipulations médiatiques, affaires européennes, europe, grande-bretagne, angleterre, londres, émeutes, violence, violences urbaines | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
jeudi, 11 août 2011
London: Die britische Regierung hilflos!
London: Die britische Regierung reagiert auf die Unruhen hilflos wie der gestürzte Diktator Mubarak
Udo Ulfkotte
Zwanzigtausend Londoner (20.000!) haben in der vergangenen Nacht den Notruf gewählt und die Polizei um Hilfe vor Gewalttätern gebeten. In den wenigsten Fällen konnte die Polizei helfen. Viele Briten rannten vor den Migrantengangs um ihr Leben. Die Gefängnisse in London sind jetzt bis auf den letzten Platz gefüllt. Und die britische Regierung reagiert jetzt hilflos wie der gestürzte ägyptische Diktator Mubarak: Sie will die Massenproteste niederschlagen und die sozialen Netzwerke und Massenkommunikationsmittel vorübergehend abschalten lassen. Und 16.000 Polizisten sollen die Gewaltorgie junger Migranten beenden. Der EU-Politiker Gerard Batten fordert die Londoner Regierung auf, die Gewaltorgie durch Truppen niederschlagen zu lassen.
Die jüngsten Ereignisse in Norwegen und in Großbritannien läuten das Ende unserer Freiheiten ein. Denn die Politik wird nun alles dransetzen, um unter dem Mantel des Schutzes der Bevölkerung den totalen EU-Überwachungsstaat auszubauen. Die Chinesen erwarten das von uns vor den Olympischen Spielen 2012.
Die Migrantenunruhen in Großbritannien tragen bizarre Züge: Da stehen bewaffnete Afrikaner bewaffneten Türken gegenüber, die ihre Geschäfte vor dem plündernden Mob verteidigen und den Afrikanern zubrüllen: »Dies ist unser Stadtviertel«. Wo die Polizei keine Chance mehr hat, da ziehen nun Bürgerwehren auf. London erlebt auf einen Schlag die multikulturelle Realität. Besonders schlimm muss es für jene Journalisten sein, die nach den Attentaten von Norwegen vor der großen neuen potenziellen Gefahr von rechts warnten: Europäer, die mit der wachsenden Zuwanderung nicht einverstanden sind.
MEHR: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/europa/udo-ulfkotte/london-die-britische-regierung-reagiert-auf-die-unruhen-hilflos-wie-der-gestuerzte-diktator-mubarak.html
00:20 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : angleterre, grande-bretagne, londres, europe, affaires européennes, émeutes, violence, violences urbaines, actualité, politique internationale | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 10 août 2011
Britische Geheimdienste: Viele der Randalierer gehören zu kriminellen Familien
Britische Geheimdienste: Viele der Randalierer gehören zu kriminellen Familien
Udo Ulfkotte
Der technische britische Geheimdienst GCHQ mit Sitz in Cheltenham hat im Auftrag des Premierministers und in Zusammenarbeit mit Scotland Yard einen ersten Teil jener BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) Nachrichten ausgewertet, mit denen die Plünderungen und Brandschatzungen in London im Hintergrund koordiniert wurden. Nach offiziellen Angaben handelt es sich bei den Hintermännern der Unruhen in der ersten Nacht demnach keinesfalls um »sozial unzufriedene Jugendliche«, sondern um den Sicherheitsbehörden bestens bekannte Mitglieder krimineller Familien.
BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) Nachrichten sind verschlüsselt und lassen sich für die »normalen« Strafverfolgungsbehörden nicht zur Telefonnummer des Absenders zurückverfolgen. Doch der GCHQ hat den erforderlichen Krypto-Schlüssel. Mehrere Hundert Mitglieder krimineller Gangs, die sich an den ersten Plünderungen beteiligt haben und entsprechende BBM an Bandenmitglieder gesendet hatten, wurden mittlerweise vom GCHQ identifiziert.
Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/europa/udo-ulfkotte/britische-geheimdienste-viele-der-randalierer-gehoeren-zu-kriminellen-familien.html
17:57 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes, criminologie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : angleterre, grande-bretagne, émeutes, violence, violences urbaines, europe, affaires européennes, politique internationale | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
Jonathan Bowden on Thomas Carlyle
Jonathan Bowden on Thomas Carlyle
00:06 Publié dans Littérature, Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : thomas carlyle, angleterre, littérature anglaise, lettres anglaises, littérature, lettres, philosophie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 09 août 2011
Tottenham und die Angst der Medien
Tottenham und die Angst der Medien
Auch die Süddeutsche Zeitung hat über das „Outing“ des norwegischen Bloggers Fjordman alias Peder Jensen berichtet, mit der typischen Hilflosigkeit der Liberalen, wenn sie mit Gedanken jenseits ihrer Weltbildblase konfrontiert werden. Der Autor kann beispielsweise kaum fassen, wieso jemand eine solche Wut auf „Politiker und Medien“ haben kann, „die ein friedliches Nebeneinander der Kulturen befürworteten“, ganz so, als ob das „friedliche Nebeneinander“ durch die gute Absicht allein schon gewährleistet sei.
Diese Hilflosigkeit zeigt sich im Wollknäuelscharfsinn von Absätzen wie diesen:
Jensen hat Medienwissenschaften in Oslo studiert und Arabisch an der American University in Kairo. Seine 2004 eingereichte Magisterarbeit handelt von der Blogger-Szene in Iran. Er hatte also Kontakt zu der ihm verhassten Kultur. Eine Erfahrung, die er mit manchen Islamisten gemein hat: So haben viele der Attentäter vom 11. September im Westen studiert.
Das kommt davon, wenn man nicht zu verstehen versucht, sondern stattdessen die erstbesten Assoziationen rausbrettert, die man mal eben in seinem Hirn vorfindet. Dann ergeben sich auch drollige küchenpsychologische Spekulationen wie diese:
Wo Jensens Wut herkommt, ist schwer zu ergründen. Möglicherweise spielt gekränkte Eitelkeit eine Rolle. Er habe versucht, seine Ansichten in Leserbriefspalten unterzubringen, sei aber „zensiert“ worden, klagt er im Interview. Bei Seiten wie „Gates of Vienna“ fand er dagegen Bestätigung.
Na klar, das wird’s gewesen sein, was denn sonst könnte so eine Wut hervorrufen! Die geistige Harmlosigkeit der Liberalen, die aus solchen Zeilen spricht, ist immer wieder verblüffend. Sie können wohl nicht anders, als von ihren schlichten Gemütern auf andere zu schließen.
„Wo Jensens Wut herkommt“, wird man indessen wohl besser verstehen, wenn man den Aufsatz zur Gänze liest, aus dem die SZ einen Satz inkriminiert hat. Dieser geht von der sich verschärfenden Lage in Großbritannien aus:
Im Jahr 2009 ist herausgekommen, dass die regierende Labour-Partei, ohne die Bürger zu befragen, Britannien absichtlich mit mehreren Millionen Immigranten überflutet hat, um in einem Akt des social engineering ein „wirklich multikulturelles“ Land zu konstruieren. Demnach war das riesige Ansteigen der Migrantenzahlen im vorausgegangenen Jahrzehnt zumindest teilweise auf den politisch motivierten Versuch zurückzuführen, das Land radikal zu verändern und „die Nasen der Rechten in (ethnische) Verschiedenheit zu stoßen“, so Andrew Neather, ein ehemaliger Berater des Premierministers Tony Blair. Er sagte, die Masseneinwanderung sei das Resultat eines absichtlichen Planes, aber die Minister möchten nicht so gern darüber sprechen, weil sie befürchten, dass ihnen dies den „Kern ihrer Wählerschaft, die Arbeiterklasse“, entfremden könne.
Lord Glasman – ein persönlicher Freund des Labour-Führers – hat 2011 festgestellt, dass „Labour die Leute über das Ausmass der Einwanderung belogen hat … und dass es einen massiven Vertrauensbruch gegeben habe“. Er hat zugegeben, dass die Labour Party sich zuweilen wirklich feindlich gegenüber den einheimischen Weißen verhalten hat. Im besonderen habe es die Sichtweise gegeben, dass die Wähler aus der weißen Arbeiterklasse „ein Hindernis für den Fortschritt“ seien.
(…)
m Juni 2007 hat sich der damalige britische Premierminister Tony Blair, zusammen mit dem Schatzkanzler (und Möchte-gern-Premier) Gordon Brown und dem Parteiführer (und ebenfalls künftigem Premier) David Cameron, mit Moslem-Führern auf einer vom Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme organisierten Konferenz getroffen. In seinen Eröffnungswortenverteidigte er den Islam als eine Religion „der Mäßigung und der Modernität“ und kündigte einen Regierungsfond an, der das Lehren des Islams und die Ausbildung der Imame unterstützen solle, und bezeichnete islamische Studien als von „strategischer Wichtigkeit“ für das Interesse der britischen Nation. Timothy Winter, ein Dozent für Islamische Studien an der Universität Cambridge, sagte, „die Frage, die sich der britischen Gesellschaft – und nicht nur dieser – stellt, ist nicht, wie man Minderheiten ermutigen kann, sich auf die westlichen Gesellschaften einzulassen, sondern wie diese Gesellschaften sich als eine Collage verschiedener religiöser Kulturen definieren“.
Dies sind Informationen, die öffentlich zugänglich und für jedermann einsehbar sind. Die politischen Tendenzen und Absichten, die sich darin ausdrücken, sind in eine Sprache verpackt, die letztlich nichts anderes meint, als dies:
In anderen Worten: Britannien, Deutschland, Frankreich, die Niederlande, Italien, Schweden, Irland, Spanien und andere westliche Länder mit weißen Mehrheiten sind keine Länder mit einem spezifischen Erbe mehr, nur noch zufällige Gebiete auf der Landkarte, die darauf warten, mit „Collagen verschiedener Kulturen“ aufgefüllt zu werden.
Das wird, versehen mit seitenverkehrter Wertung, jeder Multikulturalist unterschreiben, und das ist es, was sich hinter der Phrase vom „friedlichen Nebeneinander“ (oder war es nicht doch einmal ein „Miteinander“, das man irgendwann fallen lassen mußte, liebe SZ?) verbirgt. Allerdings ist eine Tatsache, daß dieses „Nebeneinander“ alles andere als immer friedlich verläuft, ja, daß es zunehmend immer weniger friedlich verläuft, und das ist mit Garantie nicht die Schuld jener, die so frei sind, diese Tatsache zu benennen.
Besonders Großbritannien hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten in eine wahre Hölle aus multiplen ethnischen und kulturellen Spannungen, Überfremdung, Alltagsgewalt, organisiertem Verbrechen und dschihadistischer Unterwanderung verwandelt. Die Tendenz ist rapide ansteigend. Fjordmans Hausseite „Gates of Vienna“ bietet dazu reichlich Material. Als „Crash-Kurs“ reicht ein Artikel von Paul Weston mit dem Titel „Eine Woche im Tod Großbritanniens“ aus. Ich begnüge mich an dieser Stelle mit dem Hinweis. Auch Weston präsentiert öffentlich zugängliche Fakten. All dies nun im Zusammenhang mit der oben zitierten expliziten multikulturalistischen Agenda der Neather, Blair, Straw et al, die keinerlei Verpflichtung und Solidarität gegenüber dem eigenen Volk mehr kennen wollen. Wer hier nicht die Augen aufmachen will, dem ist nicht zu helfen.
Und es gibt viele, die nicht nur die eigenen Augen verschlossen halten, sondern auch noch die anderer zu verschließen versuchen. Zur Zeit geht die Meldung von Krawallen im Stadtteil Tottenham in London durch die Medien. Wir erleben wieder einmal das übliche Schauspiel, daß ein Massenblatt wie der Spiegel, der in eigener politischer Sache gar nicht hemmungslos genug sein kann, plötzlich ganz zaghaft wird, das Kind beim Namen zu nennen.
Plünderungen, brennende Autos, verletzte Beamte: In der Nacht zu Sonntag hat London die schwersten Ausschreitungen seit 25 Jahren erlebt – und noch immer dauern die Krawalle an. Auslöser für die Unruhen ist der Tod eines Mannes, der am Donnerstag bei einem Polizeieinsatz erschossen worden war.
London erinnerte in der Nacht zu Sonntag an ein Bürgerkriegsszenario: Eine aufgebrachte Menschenmenge setzte mehrere Polizeifahrzeuge, einen Doppeldeckerbus sowie mehrere Gebäude in Brand. Polizisten wurden mit Molotow-Cocktails und Ziegelsteinen beworfen, acht von ihnen wurden verletzt, einer schwer am Kopf.
Zentrum der Krawalle war der Stadtteil Tottenham. Hier versammelten sich rund 200 Menschen vor einer Polizeiwache. Spezialeinheiten versuchten in der Nacht, die Lage wieder unter Kontrolle zu bringen. Sperren wurden errichtet, berittene Beamte versuchten, die Menge auseinanderzutreiben.
Aufgebrachte Bewohner setzten in der Nacht zum Sonntag mindestens zwei Polizeiwagen, einen Doppeldeckerbus sowie ein Gebäude in Brand. Schaufenster wurden eingeschlagen und Geschäfte geplündert. Die Sicherheitskräfte forderten Verstärkung an, in vielen Teilen der Stadt waren Polizeisirenen zu hören.
Der BBC zufolge dauerten die Krawalle auch im Tageslicht an. „Es sieht wirklich schlimm aus“, sagte der 46-jährige Anwohner David Akinsanya. „Da brennen zwei Polizeiautos, ich fühle mich unsicher.“ In den Straßen machten sich Plünderer mit Einkaufswagen voller gestohlener Sachen davon.
Auslöser der gewalttätigen Auseinandersetzungen war ein noch nicht vollständig aufgeklärter Polizeieinsatz am Donnerstag, an dessen Ende ein 29-Jähriger von einer Polizeikugel getötet worden war. Nach Darstellung der Polizei hatte der vierfache Vater zuerst geschossen. Ein Polizist überlebte demnach nur durch Glück, weil die Kugel des in einem Taxi sitzenden Schützen vom Funkgerät des Beamten aufgehalten worden war. Wie die Londoner Polizei mitgeteilt hat, habe es sich um einen Einsatz bei Ermittlungen in der organisierten Bandenkriminalität gehandelt.
Ein „Bürgerkriegs“-Szenario, lieber Spiegel? Du hast wirklich „Bürgerkrieg“ geschrieben? Sag bloß! Das ist doch der bestimmt der „Bürgerkrieg“, den dieser Carl Schmitt (oder war es Popper?) ausgerufen hat, wie uns neulich Volker Weiß so kenntnisreich aufgeklärt hat. Und wer steht denn da nun auf welcher Seite dieses „Bürgerkriegs“, wo verlaufen seine Fronten, wer sind seine Kombattanten, und warum??
Wenn dem Spiegel, der sich neulich gleich in der Titelzeile an der Blauäugigkeit und Blondigkeit des Attentäters von Oslo so innig geweidet hat, wirklich so sehr an Aufklärung gelegen ist, fragt sich nur, warum der Artikel erst nach etwa 500 Wörtern, ganz am Schluß erst und quasi en passant, einen dezenten Hinweis darauf bringt, was ohnehin jedem Leser schon bei der Schlagzeile klar ist.
Etwas mehr als zehn Kilometer von der Londoner Innenstadt entfernt, zählt Tottenham zu den ärmsten Gegenden Großbritanniens. Fast die Hälfte aller Kinder lebt hier Untersuchungen zufolge in Armut. Der Anteil der Ausländer zählt zu den höchsten im ganzen Land.
„Ausländer“ heißt hier, daß Tottenham heute fast vollständig von afro-karibischen Einwanderern bevölkert wird. „Tottenham und andere von Schwarzen dominierte Gegenden sind de facto unabhängige Kleinstaaten, deren hauptsächliche Verbindung mit der weiteren britischen Gesellschaft in ihrer Rolle als Wohlfahrtsempfänger und Deponien für schlecht verteilte Drogen besteht.“
Der Spiegel steht mit dieser Verschleierungstaktik nicht alleine da. Stichprobenartig: die Welt, die exakt denselben Reuters-Text reproduziert, schweigt, der Stern schweigt, die Financial Times schweigt und natürlich die Süddeutsche, deren Autoren wohl noch fleißig am Kopfkratzen sind, wieso man denn etwas gegen ein „friedliches Nebeneinander“ haben kann. Besonderen Sinn für Humor beweist die taz mit der (ernst, nicht sarkastisch gemeinten) Titelzeile „Vorbildlicher Wandel“, nämlich seit den Krawallen von 1985:
Nach den Krawallen blieb das Viertel monatelang von der Polizei besetzt. Doch dann investierte der Staat 33 Millionen Pfund in die Verbesserung der Wohnqualität, der Infrastruktur und der Sicherheit. Heute leben in Broadwater Farm rund 4.000 Menschen mit 39 verschiedenen Nationalitäten. Wollte man früher die Leute schnellstmöglich umsiedeln, ist der Andrang der Wohnungssuchenden heute groß. Broadwater Farm ist eins der sichersten urbanen Viertel weltweit.
Gab es in den drei Monaten vor den Krawallen 1985 noch 875 Einbrüche, 50 Raubüberfälle und 50 tätliche Angriffe, so sind diese Delikte weitgehend unbekannt. Die Krawalle von Samstagnacht in unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft von Broadwater Farm trafen die Polizei deshalb unvorbereitet.
Wenn das alles wirklich so ist (was ich indessen stark bezweifle), was lernen wir daraus, liebe taz?
Es kann letztlich nur einen Grund geben für diese an die Desinformation grenzende Unaufrichtigkeit, ja Verlogenheit: eine Angst, eine Scheißangst vor der Wahrheit über die in ganz Europa gestopften Pulverfässer. Ja, die Liberalen ahnen das Platzen ihrer Blasen, sie ahnen es dumpf, und sie haben Angst. Daher rührt auch ihre Aggressivität gegen diejenigen, die ihnen widersprechen. Ihre Angst ist so groß, daß sie sich stattdessen lieber einreden, daß Warner wie Fjordman nur deswegen so zornig sind, weil sie irgendwann mal einen Leserbrief zensiert bekommen hätten.
Neulich habe ich in diesem Blog den norwegischen Multikulturalismus-Ideologen Thomas Hylland Eriksen zitiert, der es als seine dringlichste Aufgabe sieht, „die Mehrheit… so gründlich (zu) dekonstruieren, daß sie sich nicht mehr als die Mehrheit bezeichnen kann.“ Dieser schrieb anläßlich der Causa Breivik die verräterrischen Sätze:
Jedes Land braucht eine gewissen Grad an Zusammenhalt. Wie viel davon nötig ist, ist eine legitime Streitfrage. Manche glauben, daß der kulturelle Pluralismus ein Rezept für Fragmentierung und den Verlust des Vertrauen ist. Das mag sein, aber nicht notwendigerweise. So lange die öffentlichen Institutionen für jedermann gleichermaßen funktionieren – Bildung, Wohnungswesen, Arbeit und so weiter –, solange kann eine Gesellschaft mit einem beträchtlichen Maß an Diversität leben.
Das ist ein bemerkenswerter Optimismus angesichts eines derart bemerkenswert dünnen Sozialkitts. Wenn die bisher einigermaßen befriedend wirkenden europäischen Sozialsysteme, die heute fast schon den Charakter von Schutzgelderpressungen angenommen haben, infolge der anrollenden Währungs- und Finanzkrisen zusammenbrechen werden, wird sich der soziale Konflikt unweigerlich zum ethnischen Konflikt ausweiten.
Dann wird man wieder an die bittere Prophezeiung Enoch Powells aus dem Jahr 1968 denken, der die Masseneinwanderung als „buchstäblichen Wahnsinn“ bezeichnete.
Es ist, als sähe man einer Nation zu, wie sie sich ihren eigenen Scheiterhaufen errichtet. (…) Wenn ich in die Zukunft blicke, erfüllen mich düstere Vorahnungen. Gleich dem Römer (eine Anspielung auf Vergils „Äneis“), scheint es mir, als sähe ich den „Tiber schäumen voller Blut“.
Er schloß die Rede, seit der 43 Jahre vergangen sind, mit den Worten:
Nur entschlossenes und schnelles Handeln kann dies noch abwenden. Ob es den öffentlichen Willen gibt, dieses Handeln zu verlangen und durchzuführen, weiß ich ich nicht. Alles was ich weiß, ist, daß zu sehen, aber nicht zu sprechen, großer Verrat wäre.
Es scheint in der Tat so, als ob heute unter den politischen und medialen Eliten Europas der Verrat zur Norm geworden ist. Und diejenigen, die nicht sehen können oder wollen, und all jene, die sehen, aber absichtlich schweigen, wie unsere Kollegen vom Spiegel bis zur Süddeutschen Zeitung, werden bald keine Entschuldigungen und Ausreden mehr für ihr Handeln haben.
Darum: laßt uns sehen, und laßt uns sprechen, solange dies noch möglich ist, solange Sehen und Sprechen das Schlimmste noch abwenden kann.
12:52 Publié dans Actualité, Affaires européennes | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : émeutes, immigration, violence, europe, affaires européennes, grande-bretagne, londres, angleterre, politique internationale, multiculturalisme, société multiculturelle | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 17 juillet 2011
J. P. Arteault / F. Sainz: les racines anglo-saxonnes du mondialisme
J. P. Arteault / F. Sainz: Les racines anglo-saxonnes du mondialisme
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00:10 Publié dans Actualité, Entretiens, Histoire, Nouvelle Droite, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : entretiens, terre & peuple, nouvelle droite, grande-bretagne, empire britannique, angleterre, etats-unis, monde anglo-saxon, mondialisme, globalisme | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 10 mai 2011
New Books by Troy Southgate
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00:18 Publié dans Livre | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, angleterre, nationalisme révolutionnaire, julius evola, otto strasser | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 01 mai 2011
A Arte de Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
00:05 Publié dans art | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : art, peinture, arts plastiques, angleterre, 19ème siècle | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 17 avril 2011
A Arte de Lord Frederick Leighton
00:06 Publié dans art | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : art, arts plastiques, peinture, angleterre, 19ème siècle | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 29 mars 2011
La guerra anglo-boera
di Angelo Cani
Fonte: Conflitti e strategie [scheda fonte]
Due guerre, quella degli Stati Uniti del 1898 contro la Spagna, per la conquista di Cuba e delle Filippine, e quella intrapresa dall’Inghilterra, contro le due piccole repubbliche boere: il Transvaal e lo Stato libero d’Orange, segnarono l’inizio di una nuova epoca, l’epoca dell’imperialismo e del dominio del capitale finanziario.
Nella storia del passato si erano combattute molte guerre, allo scopo di estendere il commercio e i possedimenti delle potenze imperialistiche, ma mai gli interessi del capitale monopolistico e finanziario avevano avuto un ruolo così decisivo e determinante.
La guerra anglo-boera, scoppiata nel 1899, è stata la prima guerra imperialistica.
La piccola repubblica del Transvaal, fondata nel 1837 dai discendenti dei contadini olandesi, che erano emigrati al Capo di Buona Speranza alla metà del XVII secolo, aveva goduto di una relativa pace fino al 1886, anno della scoperta dei giacimenti d’oro.
Dei 300 mila kg. d’oro, che a quei tempi si estraevano ogni mese in tutto il pianeta, 80 mila provenivano dalla piccola Repubblica. La sola Inghilterra, ogni mese, estraeva dalle proprie colonie 80 mila kg. e se si Fosse impadronita della repubblica boera, come era sua intenzione, sarebbe diventata padrona di più della metà della produzione mondiale di oro. Per questa ragione i dirigenti inglesi, subito dopo la scoperta del metallo prezioso, si attivarono per la conquista della Repubblica del Transvaal. L’impresa venne affidata a Cecil Rodes, fondatore e direttore della “Chartered Company”, capo del potente sindacato “de Beers”, che forniva il 90% della produzione diamantifera mondiale, primo ministro della Repubblica del Capo e padrone della Rhodesia. Egli preparò, molto accuratamente, un grandioso piano per creare un impero inglese che avrebbe dovuto estendersi da Città del Capo fino al Cairo. La conquista della Repubblica boera faceva parte di questo piano. I mezzi per raggiungere tale obiettivo furono i più svariati. In primo luogo, in base a un trattato imposto ai boeri nel 1884, l’Inghilterra aveva il diritto di esercitare il controllo sui rapporti di questa Repubblica con l’estero. In secondo luogo essi potevano esercitare una costante pressione sul governo boero agendo sugli immigrati inglesi che avevano ottenuto la cittadinanza della piccola Repubblica e speravano di prevalere sui boeri. In terzo luogo l’Inghilterra aveva cercato di accerchiare e isolare il Transvaal con i suoi possedimenti. Quest’ultimo tentativo fallì perché la Repubblica boera si era unita direttamente con una ferrovia con il porto portoghese Laurenco Marques situato sulla costa della baia di Delagoa. Il tentativo di conquistare, da parte del governo inglese, il controllo di questo porto e della ferrovia fallì per l’opposizione del governo portoghese dietro il quale agiva attivamente la diplomazia e il capitale tedesco che aveva già costruito la ferrovia che collegava Pretoria direttamente al mare. Inoltre per dimostrare il suo appoggio a Pretoria e per dissuadere gli inglesi il governo tedesco, nel gennaio del 1895, mandò dimostrativamente a Delagoa due navi da guerra. Sempre in questo periodo l’influenza economica, la penetrazione dei capitali e delle merci tedesche nella Repubblica boera si sviluppò considerevolmente. L’industria meccanica tedesca, i trusts elettrotecnici, le grandi ditte di costruzioni, la Società per l’industria dell’acciaio di Bochum, la fabbrica di vagoni Deutzer di Colonia, la Krupp e la Siemens trovarono in questo paese lo sbocco per la propria produzione.
Le banche tedesche non si limitavano a partecipare alla banca del Transvaal, ma di fatto la controllavano. Nell’ottobre del 1895 la Dresdner Bank aprì a Pretoria una succursale e grande interesse mostrò anche la Deutsche Bank. Il capitale tedesco investito in Transvaal raggiungeva in questo periodo la somma di 500 milioni di marchi.
Attratti dai fantastici guadagni, accorsero nella Repubblica boera numerosi avventurieri, commercianti e industriali tedeschi. Solo nella città di Johannesburg i tedeschi immigrati erano 15000. Questi immigrati si consideravano il nucleo della nuova grande Germania nell’Africa meridionale. Il loro progetto era quello di instaurare sul Transvaal il protettorato della Germania e per questo era necessario eliminare il pericolo di un protettorato inglese. I circoli tedeschi dichiararono unanimi la loro disponibilità a difendere i boeri da un’eventuale attacco inglese.
Nell’aprile 1895 i tedeschi riuscirono, d’accordo con il Portogallo, a strappare agli inglesi il controllo sul servizio postale lungo la costa sudorientale dell’Africa. La reazione dell’Inghilterra non si fece attendere. Il 30 dicembre, con il benestare del governo, bande della “Chartered Company”, forti di oltre 800 uomini, armate di cannoni e mitragliatrici, al comando di Jamenson, stretto collaboratore di Rhodes, entrano nel territorio del Transvaal e marciano verso Johannesburg, dove si attendeva da un momento all’altro l’insurrezione organizzata da tempo sempre da Rhodes.
Il giorno dopo la notizia arriva a Berlino. Il governo reagisce: rompe le relazioni diplomatiche con l’Inghilterra, invia una unità militare a Pretoria, ordina al comandante dell’incrociatore “Seeadler”, dislocato nelle acque della baia di Delagoa, di sbarcare un reparto di fanteria marina e di inviarlo nel Transvaal. Ma quando la tensione tra Londra e Berlino sta ormai per raggiungere un punto di non ritorno sono gli avvenimenti del giorno dopo a far allentare la tensione.
Le bande di Jamenson vengono circondate dai boeri e catturate assieme al loro capo. Anche il complotto organizzato a Johannesburg Fallisce miseramente. L’incursione delle bande inglesi smascherano Rhodes di fronte alla popolazione e al governo del Transvaal che, pur contando sull’aiuto tedesco, comincia ad armarsi per potersi difendere autonomamente. Buona parte delle armi vengono acquistate in Germania. La ditta Krupp riceve, proprio in questo periodo, grandi ordinazioni di cannoni e la ditta berlinese Lewe trae grandi guadagni dalla vendita di un gran numero di fucili Mauser.
I boeri, con l’acquisto di armi belghe, fecero guadagnare molto denaro anche ad alcune ditte commerciali inglesi, le quali erano a conoscenza che tali armi sarebbero state usate contro i soldati inglesi. Ma furono soprattutto le ditte tedesche a trarre i massimi guadagni fornendo ai boeri armi per la guerra contro l’Inghilterra e contemporaneamente fornendo all’esercito inglese armi e munizioni per la guerra contro i boeri. Interesse di queste ditte era quindi quello di mantenere il più a lungo possibile lo stato di tensione nei rapporti tra inglesi e boeri.
Dopo la crisi del 1895-96 possiamo notare un graduale cambiamento del governo tedesco per quanto riguarda i rapporti anglo- boeri. Le ragioni del mutamento politico vanno ricercate nei diversi interessi del capitale tedesco.
Nella Repubblica boera oltre ai circoli della Deutsche Bank e della Darmstadt Bank, che deteneva un grosso pacco di azioni delle ferrovie del Transvaal, avevano grossi interessi anche le acciaierie Krupp, gli armatori di Amburgo e altri esportatori. Un ruolo importantissimo veniva svolto da uno dei più grandi gruppi del capitale finanziario tedesco: la Disconto – Gesellschaft. Soprattutto il capo di questa banca, il banchiere Hansemann, s’interessava proprio in questo momento della costruzione di una ferrovia che doveva collegare l’Africa orientale tedesca con l’Africa sud – occidentale tedesca. Il progetto prevedeva che la ferrovia attraversasse ilterritorio del Transvaal.
La Lega pangermanica, appoggiata dalla Disconto, si affrettò, attraverso la stampa, a sostenere tale progetto. Era però chiaro, fin dall’inizio, che questa banca da sola non avrebbe potuto assicurare il finanziamento di un’impresa così grandiosa. Il tentativo di avere l’appoggio della Deutsche Bank fallì, lo stesso avvenne con la City di Londra che era interessata alla realizzazione della linea ferroviaria, che da Città del Capo arrivava al Cairo, progettata da Rhodes.
Hansemann assieme ad una parte dei commercianti anseatici, della compagnia navale Werman e altri grandi circoli finanziari chiedeva al governo tedesco di svolgere una politica più attiva nell’Africa del sud e una lotta più incisiva per avere un peso più determinate nel Transvaal. Ma per quanto questo gruppo fosse influente, il governo tedesco doveva tener conto anche degli interessi di un altro gruppo finanziario alla cui testa si trovava la Deutsche Bank: anche questo gruppo chiedeva al governo un impegno maggiore e una politica più attiva nella Repubblica boera, ma i suoi dirigenti, molto informati sugli interessi dell’imperialismo inglese e sull’atteggiamento dei boeri, avevano cominciato ad elaborare vasti piani verso l’Impero ottomano, l’Asia sud-occidentale e la Cina. Al centro di questo grandioso piano espansionistico stava il progetto della costruzione della ferrovia, che partendo dal Bosforo passava per Bagdad e giungeva fino al Golfo Persico.
Questi circoli legati alla Deutsche Bank, dopo aver ottenuto la concessione dal governo turco per la costruzione della ferrovia, avevano incominciato, per l’impossibilità di fermare la crescente pressione dei capitalisti inglesi, a disinteressarsi degli affari del Transvaal. Infatti Siemens e gli altri dirigenti della Deutsche Bank si erano resi conto che sarebbe stato più conveniente, per il capitale tedesco, rinunciare alle mire
espansionistiche nel sud Africa e sfruttare le posizioni politiche ed economiche di cui disponevano in quella zona, per costringere l’Inghilterra a scendere a patti. Essi rivendicavano, in cambio di un loro disinteresse sulla piccola Repubblica del Transvaal, grossi compensi finanziari e coloniali. Fu così che in questi gruppi del capitale finanziario cominciò a prendere forma una linea di ritirata invece di una linea di politica attiva nella Repubblica boera. Questa politica coincideva con gli interessi delle classi dominanti: borghesia e junker.
Nella lotta tra i due gruppi del capitale finanziario tedesco, uno capeggiato dalla Deutsche e l’altro dalla Disconto, prevalse, grazie all’appoggio del governo, la tendenza che considerava più conveniente alimentare e accentuare la tensione nei rapporti tra l’imperialismo inglese e i boeri. Da un lato i circoli della lega pangermanica facevano credere ai boeri che la Germania non gli avrebbe mai abbandonati. Dall’altro lato, il Kaiser, il capo del governo von Bulow e l’ambasciatore tedesco a Londra, non rinunciavano a sondare il terreno presso il ministro inglese Salisbury , sui compensi per l’amicizia che la Germania avrebbe potuto concedere, a determinate condizioni, all’Inghilterra.
Nell’estate del 1898, la diplomazia tedesca venuta a conoscenza che il governo inglese si accingeva ad approfittare della difficile situazione finanziaria in cui era venuto a trovarsi il Portogallo per mettere le mani sui suoi possedimenti coloniali, pretese dall’Inghilterra la propria parte, cioè avere libero accesso alla spartizione delle colonie portoghesi. Per rendere più convincente la sua richiesta il governo tedesco minacciò di intervenire a fianco dei boeri, di allearsi con la Russia e altre potenze rivali dell’Inghilterra, ma in realtà questo era solo un ricatto per poter aumentare le proprie pretese.
Alla fine, dopo lunghi contrasti e mercanteggiamenti, arrivano ad un accordo per la spartizione delle colonie portoghesi. Tutti i partiti dominanti accettarono tale accordo, eccezion fatta per la lega pangermanica, che aveva a cuore gli interessi della Disconto, che lo qualificò come tradimento a danno dei boeri.
Nel marzo 1899 Cecil Rhodes, per assicurarsi della neutralità dei circoli tedeschi in caso di guerra contro il Transvaal, si recò a Berlino e si impegnò: ad esercitare pressioni sulle alte sfere inglesi per strappare concessioni coloniali, particolarmente nelle isole Samoa, che i circoli della marina tedesca consideravano una importante base strategica nell’Oceania, favorire la Germania nella costruzione della linea telegrafica e della ferrovia transafricana e appoggiare la Deutsche Bank nell’Asia sud – occidentale.
La linea politica, del non intervento, del governo tedesco poggiava sul sostegno della Deutsche Bank perché vi vedeva la condizione per il successo per la sua espansione sia verso l’Asia sud-occidentale, sia verso la Cina. I circoli collegati con la Disconto -Gesellschaft non erano entusiasti, ma aspettavano anche loro i grossi vantaggi, promessi da Rhodes, per la costruzione della ferrovia africana. I Krupp e gli altri grandi magnati dell’industria bellica avevano già ottenuto grossi profitti prima della guerra e se ne aspettavano altri ancora maggiori in caso di inizio guerra .
Il 22 settembre il governo inglese, dopo essersi assicurato la neutralità della Germania, proclamò la mobilitazione di un corpo d’armata. Alcuni giorni dopo una parte considerevole venne mandata in Africa del sud.
Il 9 ottobre il presidente del Transvaal, Kruger, presentò l’ultimatum al governo inglese chiedendo di ritirare le truppe a ridosso della frontiera. Il governo inglese le respinse. Kruger, dopo aver avuto l’appoggio del presidente della Repubblica d’Orange, prese l’iniziativa e occupò il Natal. La guerra era cominciata.
La guerra inizialmente fù sfavorevole per gli inglesi. I boeri in tre distinte battaglie sconfissero le truppe britanniche. E per tre anni, prima di essere sconfitti dal potente esercito inglese nel 1902, inflissero dure perdite alle forze britanniche.
La fine della guerra anglo-boera non pose fine ai contrasti coloniali tra le potenze europee e la Germania, anzi, dopo l’accordo tra Francia e Inghilterra, firmato nel 1904, per la spartizione dell’Africa settentrionale, divennero irreversibili. Con questo accordo la Francia rinunciò alle pretese egemoniche nei confronti dell’Egitto e ne riconobbe l’influenza Inglese. l’Inghilterra si dichiarò a sua volta favorevole ad un ampliamento del dominio francese in Tunisia, Algeria e Marocco. Ma proprio in quest’ultimo paese le banche e le grosse imprese tedesche, già da tempo, avevano intrapreso una intensa e redditizia attività commerciale e non erano per niente disposte a farsi da parte. La Germania per superare i contrasti e far valere le proprie ragioni promosse una conferenza internazionale che si tenne nella città spagnola di Algesiras nel 1906.
L’incontro non eliminò nessun contrasto, anzi l’unico effetto che sortì fu l’isolamento politico e l’indebolimento economico dell’Impero tedesco. Ad esasperare ulteriormente i contrasti fu la crisi di sovrapproduzione industriale, incominciata 1907, che interessò tutti i paesi capitalistici, in particolar modo la Germania.
Nel luglio del 1911 le speranze tedesche di sfruttare i giacimenti di ferro, di piombo e manganese, in Marocco, vennero cancellate definitivamente con l’occupazione militare da parte della Francia. Venuta meno questa possibilità le industrie e le banche tedesche rivolsero l’attenzione all’area balcanica e al Medio Oriente. La Disconto fornì alla Romania, Grecia e Bulgaria prestiti per completare le loro reti ferroviarie ed elettriche mediante acquisti di materiale dalle industrie tedesche. Sempre la Disconto riescì ad ottenere la concessione per lo sfruttamento dei giacimenti di petrolio di Ploesti, vendendo in Germania tutto il petrolio estratto.
La Deutsche Bank portò avanti lo sfruttamento dei giacimenti di cromonell’Asia Minore e il collegamento ferroviario tra Istambul e Bagdad. L’ascesa al potere in Turchia dei “giovani Turchi” nel 1908 accentuò il legame con la Germania e le banche concessero grossi prestiti per rinnovare il suo armamentario con acquisti di materiale bellico dall’industria tedesca e in particolar modo dalla Krupp. Negli ambienti capitalistici tedeschi si fece strada l’idea di poter superare la crisi economica facendo di tutta l’area balcanica e medio-orientale un vasto mercato in grado di dare uno sbocco all’industria pesante tedesca e al contempo fornirle a basso costo le materie prime necessarie. Questo disegno del capitalismo tedesco creò però sempre più gravi tensioni internazionali.
L’Inghilterra premeva sul governo persiano per non permettere il passaggio della ferrovia nel suo territorio. La Francia cercava con tutti i mezzi di ridurre l’influenza tedesca in Serbia, Grecia, Bulgaria e Romania.
Le due guerre combattute nel 1912/13 che hanno interessato i paesi dell’area balcanica (passate alla storia come guerra balcaniche) avevano portato sull’orlo della bancarotta le nazioni che vi avevano partecipato.
Alla fine del conflitto la Serbia si rivolse per un grosso prestito alle banche tedesche, che non disponevano, per ragioni storiche, di capitali liquidi e quindi non erano in grado di concedere alcun prestito. La Serbia si rivolse allora alla Francia che, grazie alla disponibilità di capitali liquidi, non aveva difficoltà a concedere il prestito, ponendo, però, come condizione l’acquisto di merci francesi.
Anche la Romania chiese un prestito alle banche tedesche ottenendo, come la Serbia, lo stesso risultato negativo. L’unica strada percorribile, per la grande disponibilità di liquidità, era quella francese, che concesse il prestito, ma ponendo come condizione il controllo dei pozzi petroliferi già controllati dai tedeschi.
La stessa dinamica si svolse in Turchia che prima chiese alle banche tedesche il denaro per riarmare il proprio esercito e costruire le fortificazioni nei Dardanelli, ma non avendolo ottenuto si rivolse alla Francia che pone anche in questo caso come condizione l’acquisto di armi dalle proprie industrie. A questo punto l’unico sbocco alle incessanti
contraddizioni che la crisi capitalistica aveva generato, coinvolgendo tutte le potenze industrializzate, e in particolar modo la Germania che aveva l’esercito più potente del mondo, non poteva essere che la guerra.
Tante altre notizie su www.ariannaeditrice.it
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mardi, 08 février 2011
Churchill: More Myth than Legend
Churchill: More Myth than Legend
by Patrick Foy
Last week a country-club Republican friend in Palm Beach gave me a copy of The Weekly Standard and urged me to read “A World in Crisis: What the thirties tell us about today” by opinion editor Matthew Continetti. The article would have the reader believe that the universe’s fate hinged upon a little-known 1931 Manhattan traffic accident involving Winston Churchill.
Churchill was crossing Fifth Avenue at 76th Street in the late evening of December 13th, 1931 on his way to Bernard Baruch’s apartment for a powwow when he looked the wrong way, crossed against the light, and was sideswiped by a car going 30MPH. The hapless statesman spent over a week in Lenox Hill Hospital recovering from a sprained shoulder, facial lacerations, and a mild concussion, all of which required a doctor’s prescription for “alcoholic spirits especially at meal times.” Continetti mentions “the granularity of history,” whatever that means: “If the car had been traveling just a little bit faster, the history of the twentieth century would have been irrevocably altered.” True enough, but for the better or the worse?
Continetti would argue that this chance mishap worked out for the best. His premise is that the 1930s were dangerous times much like our own, and it took the astute Winston Churchill to come to humanity’s rescue and make things right: “A few people in December 1931 recognized the growing danger. The patient at Lenox Hill Hospital was one.” Oh, dear. What bilge.
The Weekly Standard, as well as National Review Online and Commentary Magazine, all belong to the same faux-conservative neocon fraternity which hijacked Washington starting with H. W. Bush in the Cold War’s aftermath and has demolished any hope of a “peace dividend” ever since.
Fighting fire with gasoline is not generally a good idea, and Islamic extremism is a logical byproduct of the Tel Aviv-Washington alliance. Hence, the slow-motion downfall of the world’s “indispensable nation” is now upon us. It reminds me of the sad state of Little England in WWII’s aftermath, all thanks to Sir Winston’s myopic leadership.
Neocon opportunists have grabbed Churchill as one of their own. He is always linked to the presumed “good war” and has been glorified to the skies as a result. But what if that car had been traveling faster down Fifth Avenue in 1931 and knocked the British bulldog into the next world? Could the Second World War have been avoided altogether?
The “good war” resulted in approximately fifty million fatalities worldwide, left Europe a starved and blasted continent, destroyed the far-flung British and French empires, brought the Soviets into Europe’s heart for more than forty years, and handed China over to Mao Tse-tung.
Churchill actively participated in making World War II a global conflict. He promoted war’s outbreak in Europe in the summer of 1939, utilizing the Versailles Treaty’s last unresolved issue: Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Prime Minister Chamberlain gave Poland a blanket guarantee of the status quo, terminating a negotiated settlement and making war between Berlin and Warsaw inevitable.
In 1941, Churchill withheld vital information from the Hawaiian commanders about an imminent outbreak of hostilities. London’s Far East code-breakers had cracked the Japanese naval code, JN-25, and Churchill had access to it. The “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor turned the European conflict into a truly global war. It was Pearl Harbor that saved Churchill’s backside and rescued the Roosevelt presidency.
Churchill had some surprisingly positive things to say about Hitler prior to the invasion of Poland. In Francis Neilson’s The Churchill Legend Neilson quotes what Churchill wrote about the German leader in a letter to himself dated September 17th, 1937 and included in Step by Step, published in 1939:
“One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we would find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”
Along the same lines, Neilson cites the 1937 book Great Contemporaries, in which Churchill states that Hitler’s life’s story “cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome, all the authorities or resistances which barred his path.”
I’m now wondering about pre-1931. If the twentieth century could have been “irrevocably altered” by Churchill’s brush with death in a traffic accident between the World Wars, what if Churchill had never been engaged in politics in the first place? For the answer, one has only to get a copy of The Churchill Legend and read it. Francis Neilson, who was a member of Parliament at the outbreak of the Great War, claimed to have known Churchill longer than anyone alive.
The list of disasters Churchill presided over prior to the Second World War includes the fiasco at Gallipoli, the Lusitania’s sinking (when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty), and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 by the British War Cabinet, which opened a Pandora’s box from which has sprung endless injustice and bloodshed in the Middle East. Not that Churchill deserves the sole credit for these disasters, but his fingerprints are there. He was certainly involved at the highest level. Both the sinking of the Lusitania and the Balfour Declaration were the byproducts of a desperate strategy to drag America into the Great War.
One gets the impression from reading Neilson that Churchill’s entire public career—grounded in both World Wars—shows indisputable evidence of incompetence, opportunism, ruthlessness, mendacity, and bad judgment. Yes, history is repeating itself.
00:05 Publié dans Histoire | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : histoire, churchill, angleterre, grande-bretagne, seconde guerre mondiale, première guerre mondiale, deuxième guerre mondiale, années 20, années 30, années 40, empire britannique | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 17 décembre 2010
D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women
D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women
Derek HAWTHORNE
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
1. Love and Strife
In a 1913 letter D. H. Lawrence writes that “it is the problem of to-day, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women.” Lawrence’s views about relations between the sexes, and about sex differences are perhaps his most controversial – and they have frequently been misrepresented. But before we delve into those views, let us ask why it should be the case that establishing a new relation between men and women is “the problem of to-day.” The reason is fairly obvious. The species divides itself into male and female, reproduces itself thereby, and the overwhelming majority of human beings seek their fulfillment in a relationship to the opposite sex. If relations between the sexes have somehow been crippled—as Lawrence believes they have been—then this is a catastrophe. It is hard to imagine a greater, more pressing problem.
Lawrence came to relations with women bearing serious doubts about his own manhood, and with the conviction that his nature was fundamentally androgynous. Throughout his life, but especially as a boy, it was easier for him to relate to women and to form close bonds with them. Thus, when Lawrence discusses the nature of woman he draws not only upon his experiences with women, but also upon his understanding of his own nature. One of the questions we must examine is whether, in doing so, Lawrence was led astray. After all, Lawrence eventually came to repudiate the idea of any sort of fundamental androgyny and to claim that men and women are radically different. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he writes, “We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes.” Lawrence wrote this in 1921 intending it to be provocative, but it is surely much more controversial in today’s world, where it has become a dogma in some circles to insist that sex differences (now called “gender differences”) are “socially constructed.” Lawrence continues: “There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse, men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.”
Lawrence saw relations between the sexes as essentially a war. He tells us in his essay “Love” that all love between men and women is “dual, a love which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness, and a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual gratification of being burnt down, burnt into separate clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness.” The love between men and women is a fusing—or a will to fusing—but one that never fully takes place because the relation is also fundamentally frictional. Again and again Lawrence emphasizes the idea that men and women are metaphysically different. In other words, they have different, and even opposed ways of being in the world. They are not just anatomically different; they have different ways of thinking and feeling, and achieve satisfaction and fulfillment in life through different means.
Lawrence’s view of the difference between the sexes can be fruitfully compared to the Chinese theory of yin and yang. These concepts are of great antiquity, but the way in which they are generally understood today is the product of an ambitious intellectual synthesis that took place under the early Han dynasty (207 B.C.–9 A.D.). According to this philosophy, the universe is shot through with an ultimate principle or power known as the Tao. However, the Tao divides itself into two opposing principles, yin and yang. These oppose yet complement each other. Yang manifests itself in maleness, hardness, harshness, dominance, heat, light, and the sun, amongst other things. Yin manifests itself in femaleness, softness, gentleness, yielding, cold, darkness, the moon, etc.
Contrary to the impression these lists might give, however, yang is not regarded as “superior” to yin; hardness is not superior to softness, nor is dominance superior to yielding. Each requires the other and cannot exist without the other. In certain situations a yang approach or condition is to be preferred, in others a yin approach. On occasion, yang may predominate to the point where it becomes harmful, and it must be counterbalanced by yin, or vice versa. (These principles are of central importance, for example, in traditional Chinese medicine.) The Tao Te Ching, a work written by a man chiefly for men extols the virtues of yin, and continually advises one to choose yin ways over yang. Lao-Tzu tells us over and over that it is “best to be like water,” that “those who control, fail. Those who grasp, lose,” and that “soft and weak overcome stiff and strong.”
Like the Taoists, Lawrence regards maleness and femaleness as opposed, yet complementary. It is not the case that the male, or the male way of being, is superior to the female, or vice versa. In a sense the sexes are equal, yet equality does not mean sameness. The error of male chauvinism is in thinking that one way, the male way, is superior; that dominance and hardness are just “obviously” superior to their opposites.
Yet the same error is committed by some who call themselves feminists. Tacitly, they assume that the male or yang characteristics are superior, and enjoin women to seek fulfillment in life through cultivating those traits in themselves. To those who might wonder whether such a program is possible, to say nothing of desirable, the theory of the “social construction of gender” is today being offered as support. According to this view, the only inherent differences between men and women are anatomical, and all of the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral characteristics attributed to the sexes throughout history have actually been the product of culture and environment. (And so “yin and yang,” according to this view, is really a rather naïve philosophy which confuses nurture with nature.) Clearly, Lawrence would reject this theory. In doing so, he is on very solid ground.
It would, of course, be foolish not to recognize that some “masculine” and “feminine” traits are culturally conditioned. An obvious example would be the prevailing view in American culture that a truly “masculine” man is unable, without the help of women or gay men, to color-coordinate his wardrobe. However, when one sees certain traits in men and women displaying themselves consistently in all cultures and throughout all of human history it makes sense to speak of masculine and feminine natures. It is plausible to argue that a trait is culturally conditioned only if it shows up in some cultures but not in others. Unfortunately, the “social construction of gender” thesis has achieved the status of a dogma in academic circles. And, in truth, ultimately it has to be asserted as dogma since believing in it requires that we ignore the evidence of human history, profound philosophies such as Taoism, and most of the scientific research into sex differences that has taken place over the last one hundred years.
I said earlier that Lawrence believes men and women to be “metaphysically different,” and in his essay “A Study of Thomas Hardy” he does indeed write as if he believes they actually see the world with a different metaphysics in mind:
It were a male conception to see God with a manifold Being, even though He be One God. For man is ever keenly aware of the multiplicity of things, and their diversity. But woman, issuing from the other end of infinity, coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation, is obsessed by the oneness of things, the One Being, undifferentiated. Man, on the other hand, coming forth as the desire to single out one thing from another, to reduce each thing to its intrinsic self by process of elimination, cannot but be possessed by the infinite diversity and contrariety in life, by a passionate sense of isolation, and a poignant yearning to be at one.
So, men seek or are preoccupied with multiplicity, and women with unity. What are we to make of such a bizarre claim? First of all, it seems to run counter to the Greek tradition, especially that of the Pythagoreans, which tended to identify the One with the masculine, and the Many with the feminine. However, if one looks to Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher Lawrence was particularly keen on, one finds a different story. Empedocles posits two fundamental forces which are responsible for all change in the universe: Love and Strife. Love, at the purely physical level, is a force of attraction. It draws things together, and without the intervention of Strife it would result in a monistic universe in which only one being existed. Strife breaks up and divides. It is a force of repulsion and separation. Now, Empedocles seems to identify Love with Aphrodite, and we may infer, though he does not say so, that Strife is Ares. In other words, he identifies his two forces with the archetypal female and male. This can offer us a clue as to what Lawrence is up to.
In Lawrence’s view, it is the female who wants to draw things, especially people, together. It is the female who yearns to heal divisions, to break down barriers. “Coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation” she seeks to overcome separateness through feeling, primarily through love. In the family situation, it is the female who tries to unite and overcome discord through love, whereas it is the male, typically, who frustrates this through the insistence on rules and distinctions. The ideal of universal love and an end to strife and division is fundamentally feminine—one which men, throughout history, have continually frustrated. It is characteristic of men to make war, and characteristic of women, no matter what cause or principle is involved, to object and to call for peace and unity.
Now the male, as Lawrence puts it, suffers from a sense of isolation, and a “yearning to be one.” He yearns for oneness, in fact, as the male yearns for the female. Yet his entire being disposes him to see the world in terms of its distinctness, and, indeed, to make a world rife with distinctions. Lawrence implies that polytheism is a “male” religion, and monotheism a “female” one. It is easy to see the logic involved in this. Polytheism sees the divine being that permeates the world as many because the world is itself many. Further, societies with polytheistic religions have always been keenly aware of ethnic and social differences, differences within the society (as in the Indian caste system), and between societies. Monotheism, on the other hand, tends toward universalism. Christianity especially, however it has actually been practiced, declares all men equal in the sight of God and calls for peace and unity in the world. (Lawrence, as we shall see later on, does indeed regard Christianity as a “feminine” religion, and blames it, in part, for feminizing Western men.)
This fundamental, metaphysical difference has the consequence that men and women do, in a real sense, live in different worlds. But perhaps such a formulation reflects a male bias towards differentiation. It is equally correct to say, in a more “feminine” formulation, that it is the same world seen in two, complementary ways. Indeed, it may be the case that it is difficult to see, from a male perspective, how the two sexes and their different ways of thinking and perceiving can achieve a rapprochement. Lawrence believes, of course, that they can live together, and that their opposite tendencies can be harmonized. In this way he is like Heraclitus, Lawrence’s favorite pre-Socratic, when he says “what is opposed brings together; the finest harmony is composed of things at variance, and everything comes to be in accordance with strife.” Heraclitus also tells us that “They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it [the Logos] agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and lyre.” In order to make a lyre or a bow, the two opposite ends of a piece of wood must be bent towards each other, never meeting, but held in tension. Their tension and opposition makes possible beautiful music, in the case of the lyre, and the propulsion of an arrow, in the case of the bow. Both involve a harmony through opposition.
In a 1923 newspaper interview Lawrence is quoted as saying “If men were left to themselves, they would rush off . . . into destruction. But women keep life back at its own center. They pull the men back. Women have enormous passive strength, the strength of inertia.” Here Lawrence uses an image he was very fond of: women are at the center, the hub. This is because they are closer to “the source” than men are.
In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence tells us “The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can stay at the source. Nor even make a goal of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.” Lawrence believes that men yearn for purposive, creative activity, which involves moving away from the source. However, the energy and inspiration for purposive activity is drawn from the source, and so there is a complementary movement back towards it.
In The Rainbow, Lawrence describes how Tom Brangwen, besotted with his wife, seems to lose himself in a sensual obsession with her, and with knowing her sexually. But gradually,
Brangwen began to find himself free to attend to the outside life as well. His intimate life was so violently active, that it set another man in him free. And this new man turned with interest to public life, to see what part he could take in it. This would give him scope for new activity, activity of a kind for which he was now created and released. He wanted to be unanimous with the whole of purposive mankind.
Sex is one means of contacting the source. Men contact the source through women. This does not mean, of course, that blood-consciousness is in women but not in men. Rather, it means that in most men the blood-consciousness in them is “activated” primarily through their relationship to women. Second, in women blood-consciousness is more dominant than it is in men. Women are more intuitive than men; they operate more on the basis of feeling than intellect. It should not be necessary to point out that whereas such an observation might, in another author, be taken as a denigration of women, in Lawrence it is actually high praise. Women are also much more in tune with their bodies and bodily cycles than men are. Men tend to see their bodies as adversaries that must be whipped into shape.
When Lawrence continually tells us that we must find a way to reawaken the blood-consciousness in us, he is writing primarily for men. Women are already there—or, at least, they can get there with less effort. There is an old adage: “Women are, but men must become.” To be feminine is a constant state that a woman has as her birthright. Masculinity, on the other hand, is something men must achieve and prove. Rousseau in Emile states “The male is male only at certain moments, the female is female all of her life, or at least all her youth.” We exhort boys to “be a man,” but never does one hear girls told to “be a woman.” One can compliment a man simply by saying “he’s a man,” whereas “she’s a woman” seems mere statement of fact. The psychological difference between masculinity and femininity mirrors the biological fact that all fetuses begin as female; something must happen to them in order to make them male. It also articulates what is behind the strange conviction many men have had, including many great poets and artists, that woman is somehow the keeper of life’s mysteries; the one closest to the well-spring of nature.
In “A Study of Thomas Hardy,” Lawrence states that “in a man’s life, the female is the swivel and centre on which he turns closely, producing his movement.” Goethe tells us “Das ewig Weiblich zieht uns hinan” (“The Eternal Feminine draws us onwards”). The female, the male’s source of the source, stands at the center of his life. The woman as personification of the life mystery entices him to come together with her, and through their coupling the life mystery perpetuates itself. But he is not, ultimately, satisfied by this coupling. He goes forth into the world, his body renewed by his contact with the woman, but full of desire to know this mystery more adequately, and to be its vehicle through creative expression.
Without a woman, a man feels unmoored and ungrounded, for without a woman he has no center in his life. A man—a heterosexual man—can never feel fulfilled and can never reach his full potential without a woman to whom he can turn. As to homosexual men, it is a well-known fact that many cultivate in themselves characteristics that have been traditionally usually associated with woman: refined taste in clothing and decoration, cooking, gardening, etc. What these characteristics have in common is connectedness to the pleasures of the moment, and to the rhythms and necessities of life. Men are normally purpose-driven and future-oriented. They tend to overlook those aspects of life that please, but lack any greater purpose other than pleasing. They tend, therefore, to be somewhat insensitive to their surroundings, to color, to texture, to odor, to taste. They tend, in short, to be so focused upon doing, that they miss out on being. Heterosexual men look to women to ground them, and to provide these ingredients to life—ingredients which, in truth, make life livable. Homosexual men must make a woman within themselves, in order to be grounded. (This does not mean, however, that they must become effeminate – see my review essay of Jack Donovan’s Androphilia for more details.)
Homosexual men are, of course, the exception not the rule. Lawrence writes, of the typical man, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” And what of the woman? What does she desire? Lawrence tells us that “the vital desire of every woman is that she shall be clasped as axle to the hub of the man, that his motion shall portray her motionlessness, convey her static being into movement, complete and radiating out into infinity, starting from her stable eternality, and reaching eternity again, after having covered the whole of time.” Man is the “doer,” the actor, whereas woman need do nothing. Just by being woman she becomes the center of a man’s universe.
The dark side of this, in Lawrence’s view, is a tendency in women towards possessiveness, and towards wanting to make themselves not just the center of a man’s life but his sole concern. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s describes at length Rupert Birkin’s process of wrestling with this aspect of femininity:
But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.
Birkin sees these qualities in Ursula, with whom he is in love. “She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended.” He feels she wants, in a way, to worship him, but “to worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.”
Woman’s possessiveness is understandable given that the man is necessary to her well-being: she is only happy if she is center to the orbit and activity of some man. Again, for Lawrence, such a claim does not denigrate women, for he has already as much as said that a man is nothing without a woman. Nevertheless, some will see in this view of men and woman a sexism that places the man above the woman. From Lawrence’s perspective, this is illusory. It is true that the man is “doer,” but his perpetual need to act and to do stands in stark contrast to the woman, who need do nothing in order be who she is. It is true, further, that men’s ambition has given them power in the world, but it is a power that is nothing compared to that of the woman, who exercises her power without having to do anything. She reigns, without ruling. The man does what he does, but must return to the woman, and is “like a loose speck blown at random without her” – and he knows this. Much of misogyny may have to do with this. From the man’s perspective, the woman is all-powerful, and the source of her power a mystery.
Many modern feminists, however, conceive of power in an entirely male way, as the active power of doing. Lawrence recognized that in trying to cultivate this male power within themselves, women do not rise in the estimation of most men. Instead they are diminished, for men’s respect for and fascination with women springs entirely from the fact that unlike themselves women do not have to chase after an ideal of who they ought to be; they do not have to get caught up in the rat race in order to respect themselves. They can simply be; they can live, and take joy just in living.
One can make a rough distinction between two types of feminism. The most familiar type is what one might call the “woman on the street feminism,” which one encounters from average, working women, and which they imbibe from television, films, and magazines. This feminism essentially has as its aim claiming for women all that which formerly had been the province of men—including not only traditionally male jobs, but even male ways of speaking, moving, dressing, bonding, exercising, and displaying sexual interest. Ironically, this form of feminism is at root a form of masculinism, which makes traditionally masculine traits the hallmarks of the “liberated” or self-actualized human being.
The other type of feminism is usually to be found only in academia, though not all academic feminists subscribe to it. It insists that women have their own ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. Feminist philosophers have written of woman’s “ways of knowing” as distinct from men’s, and have even put forward the idea that women approach ethical decision-making in a markedly different way. It is this form of feminism to which Lawrence is closest. Lawrence’s writings are concerned with liberating both men and women from the tyranny of a modern civilization which cuts them off from their true natures. Liberation for modern women cannot mean becoming like modern men, for modern men are living in a condition of spiritual (as well as wage) slavery. In an essay on feminism, Wendell Berry writes
It is easy enough to see why women came to object to the role of [the comic strip character] Blondie, a mostly decorative custodian of a degraded, consumptive modern household, preoccupied with clothes, shopping, gossip, and outwitting her husband. But are we to assume that one may fittingly cease to be Blondie by becoming Dagwood? Is the life of a corporate underling—even acknowledging that corporate underlings are well paid—an acceptable end to our quest for human dignity and worth? . . . How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? [Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 69–70.]
I will return to this issue later.
Having now characterized, in broad strokes, Lawrence’s views on the differences between men and woman, I now turn to a more detailed discussion of each.
2. The Nature of Man
As we have seen, Lawrence believes that men (most men) need to have a woman in their lives. Their relationship to a woman serves to ground their lives, and to provide the man not only with a respite from the woes of the world, but with energy and inspiration. However, this is not the same thing as saying that the man makes the woman, or his relationship to her, the purpose of his life. In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child, the great centre of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair.” This is because Lawrence believes that true satisfaction for men can come only from some form of creative, purposive activity outside the family.
Having a woman is therefore a necessary but not a sufficient condition for male happiness. In addition to a woman, he must have a purpose. Women, on the other hand, do not require a purpose beyond the home and the family in order to be happy. This is another of those claims that will rankle some, so let us consider two important points about what Lawrence has said. First, he is speaking of what he believes the typical woman is like, just as he is speaking of the typical man. There are at least a few exceptions to just about every generalization. Second, we must ask an absolutely crucial question of those who regard such claims as demeaning women: why is being occupied with home and family lesser than having a purpose (e.g., a career) outside the home? The argument could be made—and I think Lawrence would be sympathetic to this—that the traditional female role of making a home and raising children is just as important and possibly more important than the male activities pursued outside the home. Again, much of contemporary feminism sees things from a typically male point of view, and denigrates women who choose motherhood rather than one of the many meaningless, ulcer-producing careers that have long been the province of men.
Lawrence writes, “Primarily and supremely man is always the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers.” Lawrence’s male bias creeps in here a bit, as he romanticizes the “dauntless” male soul. Men and women always believe, in their heart of hearts, that their ways are superior. Nevertheless, Lawrence is not here relegating women to an inferior position. Half of life is spent in the evening and night. Day belongs to the man, night to the woman. It is a division of labor. Lawrence is drawing here, as he frequently does, on traditional mythological themes: the man is solar, the woman lunar.
Lawrence characterizes the man’s pioneering activity as follows: “It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not ‘to build a world for you, dear’; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.” In other words, the man’s primary purpose is not having or doing any of the “practical” things that a wife and a family require. And when he acts on a larger scale—Lawrence gives building the Panama Canal as an example—it is not with the end in mind of making a world in which wives and babes can be more comfortable and secure (“a world for you, dear”). He seeks to make his mark on the world; to bring something glorious into existence. And so men create culture: games, religions, rituals, dances, artworks, poetry, music, and philosophy. Wars are fought, ultimately, for the same reason. It is probably true, as is often asserted, that every war has some kind of economic motivation. However, it is probably also true to assert that in the case of just about every actual war there was another, more cost-effective alternative. Men make war for the same reason they climb mountains, jump out of airplanes, race cars, and run with the bulls: for the challenge, and the fame and glory and exhilaration that goes with meeting the challenge. It is an aspect of male psychology that most women find baffling, and even contemptible.
Now, curiously, Lawrence refers to this “impractical,” purposive motive of the male as an “essentially religious or creative motive.” What can he mean by this? Specifically, why does he characterize it as a religious motive?
It is religious because it involves the pursuit of something that is beyond the ordinary and the familiar. It is a leap into the unknown. The man has to follow what Lawrence frequently calls the “Holy Ghost” within himself and to try to make something within the world. He yearns always for the yet-to-be, the yet-to-be-realized, and always has his eye on the future, on what is in process of coming to be. Yet there seems to be, at least on the surface, a strange inconsistency in Lawrence’s characterization of the man’s motive as religious. After all, for Lawrence the life mystery, the source of being is religious object—and women are closer to this source. Man is entranced by woman, and with her he helps to propagate this power in the world through sex, but his sense of “purpose” causes him to move away from the source. So why isn’t it the woman whose “motives” are religious, and the man who is, in effect, irreligious?
The answer is that religion is not being at the source: it is directedness toward the source. Religion is possible only because of a lack or an absence in the human soul. Religion is ultimately a desire to put oneself at-one with the source. But this is possible only if one is not, originally or most of the time, at one with it. In a way, the woman is not fundamentally religious because she is the goddess, the source herself. The sexual longing of the man for the woman, and his utter inability ever to fully satisfy his desire and to resolve the mystery that is woman, are a kind of small-scale allegory for man’s large-scale, religious relationship to the source of being itself. He is, as I have said, renewed by his relations with women and, for a time, satisfied. But then he goes forth into the world with a desire for something, something. He creates, and when he does he is acting to exalt the life mystery (religion and art), to understand it (philosophy and science), or to further it (invention and production).
Lawrence speaks of how a man must put his wife “under the spell of his fulfilled decision.” Woman, who rules over the night, draws man to her and they become one through sex. Man, who rules the day, draws woman into his purpose, his aim in life, and through this they become one in another fashion. The man’s purpose does not become the woman’s purpose. He pursues this alone. But if the woman simply believes in him and what he aims to do, she becomes a tremendous source of support for the man, and she gives herself a reason for being. The man needs the woman as center, as hub of his life, and the woman needs to play this role for some man. Without a mate, though a man may set all sorts of purposes before him, ultimately they seem meaningless. He feels a sense of hollow emptiness, and drifts into despair. He lets his appearance go, and lives in squalor. He may become an alcoholic and a misogynist. He dies much sooner than his married friends, often by his own hand. As to the woman, without a man who has set himself some purpose that she can believe in, she assumes the male role and tries to find fulfillment through some kind of busy activity in the world. But as she pursues this, she feels increasingly bitter and hard, and a terrific rage begins to seethe beneath her placid surface. She becomes a troublemaker and a prude. Increasingly angry at men, she makes a virtue of necessity and declares herself emancipated from them. She collects pets.
In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence writes:
As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force. She can’t help herself. A woman is almost always vulnerable to pity. She can’t bear to see anything physically hurt. But let a woman loose from the bounds and restraints of man’s fierce belief, in his gods and in himself, and she becomes a gentle devil.
If a woman is to be the hub in the life a man, and derive satisfaction from that, everything depends on the spirit of the man. A few lines later in the same text Lawrence states, “Unless a man believes in himself and his gods, genuinely: unless he fiercely obeys his own Holy Ghost; his woman will destroy him. Woman is the nemesis of doubting man.” In order for the woman to believe in a man, the man must believe in himself and his purpose. If he is filled with self-doubt, the woman will doubt him. If he lacks the strength to command himself, he cannot command her respect and devotion. And the trouble with modern men is that they are filled with self-doubt and lack the courage of their convictions.
Lawrence, following Nietzsche, in part blames Christianity for weakening modern, Western men. Men are potent—sexually and otherwise—to the extent they are in tune with the life force. But Christianity has “spiritualized” men. It has filled their heads with hatred of the body, and of strength, instinct, and vitality. It has infected them with what Lawrence calls the “love ideal,” which demands, counter to every natural impulse, that men love everyone and regard everyone as their equal.
Frequently in his fiction Lawrence depicts relationships in which the woman has turned against the man because he is, in effect, spiritually emasculated. The most dramatic and symbolically obvious example of this is the relationship of Clifford and Connie in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Clifford returns from the First World War paralyzed from the waist down. But like the malady of the Grail King in Wolfram’s Parzival, this is only (literarily speaking) an outward, physical expression of an inward, psychic emasculation. Clifford is far too sensible a man to allow himself to be overcome by any great passion, so the loss of his sexual powers is not so dear. He has a keen, cynical wit and believes that he has seen through passion and found it not as great a thing as poets say that it is. It is his spiritual condition that drives Connie away from him, not so much his physical one. And so she wanders into the game preserve on their estate (representing the small space of “wildness” that still can rise up within civilization) and into the arms of Mellors, the gamekeeper. Their subsequent relationship becomes a hot, corporeal refutation of Clifford’s philosophy.
In Women in Love, Gerald Crich, the industrial magnate, is destroyed by Gudrun essentially because he does not believe in himself. Outwardly, he is “the God of the machine.” But his mastery of the material world is meaningless busywork, and he knows it. Gudrun is drawn to him because of this outward appearance of power, but when she finds that it is an illusion she hates him, and ultimately drives him to his death. For Lawrence, this is an allegory of the modern relationship between the sexes. Men today are masters of the material universe as they have never been before, but inside they are anxious and empty. The reason is that these “materialists” are profoundly afraid of and hostile to matter and nature, especially their own. Their intellect and “will to power” has cut them off from the life force and they are, in their deepest selves, impotent. The women know this, and scorn them.
In The Rainbow, Winifred Inger is Ursula’s teacher (with whom she has a brief affair), and an early feminist. She tells Ursula at one point,
The men will do no more,–they have lost the capacity for doing. . . . They fuss and talk, but they are really inane. They make everything fit into an old, inert idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don’t come to one and love one, they come to an idea, and they say “You are my idea,” so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man’s idea! As if I exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be able to act; they are all impotent, they can’t take a woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that. They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry.”
In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled.”
It is important to understand here that the issue is not one of power. Lawrence’s point not that men must dominate or control their wives. In fact, in a late essay entitled “Matriarchy” (originally published as “If Women Were Supreme”) Lawrence actually advocates rule by women, at least in the home, because he believes it would liberate men. He assumes the truth of the claim—now in disrepute—that early man had lived in matriarchal societies and writes, “the men seem to have been lively sorts, hunting and dancing and fighting, while the woman did the drudgery and minded the brats. . . . A woman deserves to possess her own children and have them called by her name. As to the household furniture and the bit of money in the bank, it seems naturally hers.” The man, in such a situation, is not the slave of the woman because the man is “first and foremost an active, religious member of the tribe.” The man’s real life is not in the household, but in creative activity, and religious activity:
The real life of the man is not spent in his own little home, daddy in the bosom of the family, wheeling the perambulator on Sundays. His life is passed mainly in the khiva, the great underground religious meeting-house where only the males assemble, where the sacred practices of the tribe are carried on; then also he is away hunting, or performing the sacred rites on the mountains, or he works in the fields.
Men, Lawrence tells us, have social and religious needs which can only be satisfied apart from women. The disaster of modern marriage is that men not only think they have to rule the roost, but they accept the woman’s insistence that he have no needs or desires that cannot be satisfied through his relationship to her. He becomes master of his household, and slave to it at the same time:
Now [man’s] activity is all of the domestic order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, and the reborn of woman. . . . Instead of being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings—nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original role of woman.
Ironically, in accepting such a situation without a fight, he only earns the woman’s contempt: “Almost invariably a [modern] married woman, as she passes the age of thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt, of her husband, or a pity which is near to contempt. Particularly if he is a good husband, a true modern.”
3. The Nature of Woman
In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “Women will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other’s game, but they will remain apart.” But what is meant by “feeling” here? Lawrence is referring again to his belief that women live, to a greater extent than men, from the primal self. In the case of most men today, “mind-consciousness” and reason are dominant—to the point where they are frequently detached from “blood-consciousness” and feeling.
In describing the nature of woman Lawrence once again draws on perennial symbols: “Woman is really polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull.” The sun represents man, and the moon woman. Day belongs to him, and night to her. However, another set of mythic images associates the earth with woman and the sky with man. The “pull” in women is towards the earth, and this means several things. First, the earth is the source of chthonic powers, and so, as poetic metaphor, it represents the primal, pre-mental, animal aspect in human beings. In a literal sense, however, Lawrence believes that women are more in tune than men with chthonic powers: with the rhythms of nature and the cycle of seasons. Further, the “downward flow” refers to Lawrence’s belief that the lower “centres” of the body are, in a sense, more primitive, more instinctual than the upper, and that women tend to live and act from these centers more than men do. Lawrence writes, “Her deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. . . . The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet.”
Finally, to be “polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth” means to have one’s life, one’s vital being fixed in reference to a central point. If Lawrence intends us to assume that man is polarized upwards then we may ask, toward what? If woman is oriented towards the center of the earth, then–following the logic of the mythic categories–is man oriented toward the center of the sky? But the sky has no center. Man is less fixed than woman; he is a wanderer. He is a hunter, a seeker, a pioneer, an adventurer. Woman, on the other hand, lives from the axis of the world. Mircea Eliade writes that “the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World.” Woman is at the center. Man begins there, then goes off. He returns again and again, the phallic power in him rising in response to the chthonic power of the woman. And his religious response is an ongoing effort to bring his daytime self into line with the life force he experiences when in the arms of the woman.
Woman, Lawrence tells us, “is a flow, a river of life,” and this flow is fundamentally different from the man’s river. However, “The woman is like an idol, or a marionette, always forced to play one role or another: sweetheart, mistress, wife, mother.” The mind of the male is built to analyze and categorize. But the nature of woman, like the nature of nature itself, defies categorization. Even before Bacon, man’s response to nature was to force it to yield up its secrets, to bend it to the human will, or to see it only within the narrow parameters of whatever theory was fashionable at the moment. The male mind attempts to do this to woman as well–and the woman, to a great extent, cooperates. She fits herself into the roles expected of her by authority figures, whether it is dutiful daughter-sister-wife-mother, or dutiful feminist and career-woman.
Lawrence writes, “The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done.” Two opposing wills exist in women, Lawrence believes: a will to conform or to submit, and a will to reject all boundaries and be free. In Women in Love, Birkin compares women to horses:
“And of course,” he said to Gerald, “horses haven’t got a complete will, like human beings. A horse has no one will. Every horse, strictly, has two wills. With one will, it wants to put itself in the human power completely—and with the other, it wants to be free, wild. The two wills sometimes lock—you know that, if ever you’ve felt a horse bolt, while you’ve been driving it. . . . And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”
Ursula, who is present at this exchange, laughs and responds “Then I’m a bolter.” The trouble is that she is not.
Lawrence’s fiction is filled with vivid portrayals of women (arguably much more vivid and well-drawn than his portrayals of men). The central characters in several of his novels are women (The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). All of Lawrence’s major female characters exhibit these two wills, but frequently he presents pairs of women each of whom represents one of the wills. This is the case in Women in Love. Ultimately, in Ursula’s character the will to surrender emerges as dominant. In her sister Gudrun the will to be free and wild dominates, with tragic results. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie Chatterley exhibits the will to surrender, and her sister Hilda the will to be free. The two lesbians in Lawrence’s novella The Fox are cut from the same cloth. Similar pairs of women also crop up in Lawrence’s short stories. In each case, one woman learns the joys of submitting, not to a man but to the earth, to nature, to the life mystery within her. The man is a means to this, however. The best example of this in Lawrence’s fiction is probably Connie Chatterley’s journey to awakening. In John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence has Connie speak of the significance of her lover and of his penis: “I know it was the penis which really put the evening stars into my inside self. I used to look at the evening star, and think how lovely and wonderful it was. But now it’s in me as well as outside me, and I need hardly look at it. I am it. I don’t care what you say, it was penis gave it me.” As to the other woman in Lawrence’s fiction, she tends to be horrified by the primal self in her, and its call to surrender. She lives from the ego. She rages against anything in her nature that is unchosen, and against anything else that would hem her in, especially any man. She views herself as “realistic” and hardheaded, but the general impression she gives is of being hardhearted and sterile.
In his portrayals of the latter type of woman, Lawrence is partly depicting what he believes to be a perennial aspect of the female character, and partly depicting what he regards as the quintessential “modern” woman. It is in the nature of woman to counterbalance the will to submit with an opposing will that “bolts,” and kicks against all that which limits her, including her own nature. Lawrence believes that modern womanhood and all the problems of women today arise from the over-development of that will to freedom.
A “will to freedom” sounds like a good thing, so it is important to realize that essentially what Lawrence means by this is a negative will which tries either to control, or to destroy all that which it cannot control. Lawrence’s critique of modernity is a major topic in itself, but suffice it say that he believes that in the modern period a disavowal of the primal self takes place on a mass, cultural scale. The seeds of this disavowal were sown by Christianity, and reaped by modern scientism, which becomes the avowed enemy of the religion that helped foster it. Individuals live their lives from the standpoint of ego and mental-consciousness, and distrust the blood-consciousness. The negative will in women seizes upon reason and ego-dominance as a means to free herself from the influence of her dark, chthonic self, and from the influence of the men that this dark, chthonic self draws her to. The will to negate, using the mind as its tool, thus becomes the path to “liberation.”
Lawrence writes in Apocalypse:
Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold. A strange ‘spiritual’ creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape and be herself.
And in an essay he writes, “Woman is truly less free today than ever she has been since time began, in the womanly sense of freedom.” This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what is asserted by most pundits today, when they speak of the progress made by woman in the modern era. Why does Lawrence believe that woman is now so unfree? The answer is implied in the quotation from Apocalypse: she is not allowed to be herself.
In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence tells us
Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.
And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.
What Lawrence says here is applicable to both men and women. “To be oneself” in the true sense means to answer to the call of the deepest self. We can only achieve our “fullness of being” if we do so. The mind invents all manner of goals and projects and ideals to be pursued, but ultimately all that we do produces only frustration and emptiness if we act in a way that does not fundamentally satisfy the needs of our deepest, pre-mental, bodily nature.
Lawrence writes further in Apocalypse: “The evil Logos says she must be ‘significant,’ she must ‘make something worth while’ of her life. So on and on she goes, making something worth while, piling up the evil forms of our civilization higher and higher, and never for a second escaping to be wrapped in the brilliant fluid folds of the new green dragon.” Earlier in the same text, Lawrence tells us that “The long green dragon with which we are so familiar on Chinese things is the dragon in his good aspect of life-bringer, life-giver, life-maker, vivifier.” In short, the “green dragon” represents the life force, the source of all, the Pan power. Lawrence is saying that modern woman, in search of something “significant” to do with her life, falls in with all the corrupt (largely, money-driven) pursuits that have brought men nothing but ulcers, emptiness, and early death. “All our present life-forms are evil,” he writes. “But with a persistence that would be angelic if it were not devilish woman insists on the best in life, by which she means the best of our evil life-forms, unable to realize that the best of evil life-forms are the most evil.” Like men, she loses touch with the natural both within herself and in the world surrounding her. Lawrence’s dragon symbolizes both of these: primal nature as such, and the primal nature within me. It is this dragon which Lawrence seeks to awake in himself, and in his readers. The tragedy of modern woman is that she has renounced the dragon, whereas she would be better off being devoured by it.
In John Thomas and Lady Jane Lawrence also links the ideal of fulfilled womanhood to the dragon. Following Connie Chatterley’s musings on the meaning of the phallus (which I quoted earlier), Lawrence writes:
The only thing which had taken her quite away from fear, if only for a night, was the strange gallant phallus looking round in its odd bright godhead, and now the arm of flesh around her, the socket of the hand against her breast, the slow, sleeping thud of the man’s heart against her body. It was all one thing—the mysterious phallic godhead. Now she knew that the worst had happened. This dragon had enfolded her, and its folds were pure gentleness and safety.
Make no mistake, Lawrence believes that women can adopt the ways of men; he believes that they can succeed at traditionally male work. But he believes that they do this at great cost to themselves. “Of all things, the most fatal to a woman is to have an aim,” Lawrence tells us. In general, he believes that the ultimate aim of life is simply living, and that we set a trap for ourselves when we declare that some goal or some ideal shall be the end of life, and believe that this will make life “meaningful.” This applies to men, but even more so to women. Why? Because, again, women are so much closer to the source that men tend to regard women as the life force embodied (“Mother Nature”). For a woman to live for something other than living is to pervert her nature, and her gift. Again, Lawrence’s position is not that a woman is incapable of doing the work of a man, but ultimately she will find it deadening: “The moment woman has got man’s ideals and tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly world—there’s an end of it. She’s had enough. She’s had more than enough. She hates the thing she has embraced.”
In our age, many women who have forgone marriage and children in order to pursue a career are discovering this. The body has its own needs and ends, and the organism as a whole cannot flourish and achieve satisfaction unless these needs and ends are satisfied. With some exceptions, women who have chosen not to have children regret it, and suffer in other ways as well (for example, they are at higher risk for developing ovarian cancer than women who have given birth). The same goes for men, many of whom spend a great many “productive” years without feeling a need to reproduce–then are suddenly hit by that need and launch themselves on a frantic, sometimes worldwide search for a suitable mate able to father them a child. Lawrence wrote the following, prophetic words in one of his final essays:
It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse. And when it has collapsed, and she looks at the eggs she has laid, votes, or miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency—suddenly, because she is a hen and not a cock, all she has done will turn into pure nothingness to her. Suddenly it all falls out of relation to her basic henny self, and she realizes she has lost her life. The lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every female, has been denied her: she had never had it. Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!
This quote suggests that Lawrence believes that the woman, the hen, ruins herself by taking up the ways appropriate and natural for the cock – but this is not exactly what he means. In Lawrence’s view, the modern ways of the cock are destroying the cock as well, but they are doubly bad for the hen. What’s bad for the gander is worse for the goose. Lawrence believes that in order to achieve satisfaction in life, we must get in touch with that primal self that the woman is fortunate enough always to be closer to.
4. A New Relation Between Man and Woman
So what is to be done? How are we to repair the damage that has been done in the modern world to the relation between the sexes? How are we to make men into men again, and women into women?
Lawrence has a great deal to say on this subject, but one of his oft-repeated recommendations essentially amounts to saying that relations between the sexes should be severed. By this he means that in order for men and women to come to each other as authentic men and women, they must stop trying to be “pals” with each other. In a 1925 letter he writes, “Friendship between a man and a woman, as a thing of first importance to either, is impossible: and I know it. We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual—and each half is as important as the other. Any relation based on the one half—say the delicate spiritual half alone—inevitably brings revulsion and betrayal.”
In order for men and women to be friends, they must deliberately put aside or suppress their sexual identities and their very different natures. They must actively ignore the fact that they are men and women. They relate to each other, in effect, as neutered, sexless beings. They can never truly relax around each other, for they must continually monitor the way that they look at each other or (more problematic) touch each other. Sitting in too close proximity could awaken feelings that neither wants awakened. If, with respect to their “daytime selves,” men and women are forced to relate to each other in this way regularly, it has the potential of wrecking the ability of the “nighttime self” to relate to the opposite sex in a natural, sensual manner. Once accustomed to the daily routine of suppressing thoughts and feelings, and taking great care never to show a sexual side to their nature, these habits carry over into the realm of the romantic and sexual. Dating and courtship become fraught with tension, each party unsure of the “appropriateness” of this or that display of sexual interest or simple affection. The man, in short, becomes afraid to be a man, and the woman to be a woman. “On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being ‘pals,’ they lose their own male and female integrity.” Writing of the modern marriage, Wendell Berry states
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.
If we must suppress our masculine and feminine natures in order to be friends with the opposite sex, in what way then do we actually relate to each other? We relate almost entirely through the intellect. Lawrence writes, “Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are ‘pals.’” And: “We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer.” Modern men and women begin their relationships as sexless things who relate through ideas and speech. The man looks for a woman, or the woman for a man who thinks and talks as they do; who “knows where they are coming from,” and has “similar values.” They might as well not have bodies at all, or conduct the initial stages of their relationships by telephone or email. Indeed, that is exactly the way many modern relationships are now beginning. But the primary way men and women are built to relate to each other is through the body and the signals of the body; through the subtle, sexual “vibrations” that each gives off, through the sexual gaze (different in the male and in the female), and through touch. No real, romantic relationship can be forged without these, and without feeling through these non-mental means that the two are “right” for each other. We cannot start with “mental agreement” and then construct a sexual relationship around it.
Lawrence, like Rousseau, had a good deal to say about education, and in fact much of what he says is Rousseauian. His ideas on the subject are expressed chiefly in Fantasia of the Unconscious and in a long essay, “The Education of the People.”
In Fantasia of the Unconscious, in a chapter entitled “First Steps in Education,” Lawrence lays out a new program for educating girls and boys: “All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition, attend at one workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art. . . . All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labour, or of technical industry, or of art.” The difference between how boys and girls are to be educated (at least initially) is that whereas both are required to attend a “domestic workshop,” only boys are required to attend a “workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art.” Keep in mind that Lawrence is laying down the rules for education in his ideal society. He anticipates that whereas all males will work outside the home (in some fashion or other), not all females will. His system is not designed to force women into the role of homemakers, for he leaves it open that girls may, if they choose, learn the same skills as boys. As to higher education, Lawrence leaves this open: “Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over fourteen years of age. Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture degree.” The system is designed in such a way that individuals are drawn to pursue certain avenues based on their personalities and natural temperaments. Unlike our present society, in Lawrence’s world there would be no universal pressure to attend university: only individuals with certain natural gifts and inclinations would go in that direction. Similarly, the system leaves open the possibility that some women will pursue the same path as men, but only if that is their natural inclination. The intent of Lawrence’s program is not to force individuals into certain roles, but to cultivate their natural, innate characteristics. And as we have seen, Lawrence believes that males and females are innately different.
Lawrence makes it clear elsewhere that in the early years education will be sex-segregated. This is intended to facilitate the development of each student’s character and talents. Males, especially early in life, relate more easily to other males and are better able to devote themselves to their studies in the absence of females. The same thing applies to females. Sex-segregated education in the early years also has the advantage, Lawrence believes, of promoting a healthier interaction between males and females later on. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he states, “boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each has to offer the other, finally.” After all, “You don’t find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky.”
But this is, of course, all in the realm of fantasy. Lawrence’s system would be practical, if modern society could be entirely restructured, and he is aware that this is not likely to occur anytime soon. So what are we to do in the meantime? Here we encounter some of Lawrence’s most controversial ideas, and most inflammatory prose. He writes, “men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes.” It is this sort of thing that has made Lawrence a bête noire of feminists. Yet, in the next sentence, he adds “Wives, do the same to your husbands.” Lawrence’s intention, as always, is to destroy the ego-centredness in both husband and wife; to destroy the modern tendency for men and women to relate to each other, and to themselves, through ideas and ideals.
As a man and a husband, however, he writes primarily from that standpoint: “Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she’s stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her, Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying.” Does he mean any of this literally? Is he advocating that husbands beat their wives? Perhaps. Lawrence and Frieda were famous for their quarrels, which often came to blows, though the blows were struck by both. Lawrence states the purpose of such “beatings” (whether literal or figurative) as follows: “Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp on the self that she’s got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back into her own true unconscious.”
As we have already seen, Lawrence believes that healthy relations between a man and a woman depend largely on the man’s ability to make the woman believe in him, and the purpose he has set for himself in life. Sex unites the “nighttime self” of men and women, but the daytime self can only be united, for Lawrence, through the man’s devotion to something outside the marriage, and the woman’s belief in the man. This is just the same thing as saying that what unites the lives of men and women (as opposed to their sexual natures) is the woman’s belief in the man and his purpose. And so Lawrence writes:
You’ve got to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You’ll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your day goal. . . . She’ll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She’ll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark. . . . Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she believes in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. . . . And you feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification of her embrace. That’s what it is to have a wife.
Friends of Lawrence must have smiled when they read these words, for he was hardly giving an accurate description of his own marriage. As I have mentioned, Lawrence and Frieda frequently fell into violent quarrels, and she would often demean and humiliate him, and he her. Yet, ultimately, Frieda believed in Lawrence’s abilities and his mission in life; he knew it and derived strength from it. Those who may think that Lawrence’s prescriptions for marriage require an extraordinarily submissive and even unintelligent wife should take note of the sort of woman Lawrence himself chose.
Now, some might respond to Lawrence’s description of marriage by asking, understandably, “Where is love in all of this? What has become of love between man and wife?” Yet Lawrence speaks again and again, especially in Women in Love, of love between man and wife as a means to wholeness, as a way to transcend the false, ego-centered self. In a 1914 letter he tells a male correspondent:
You mustn’t think that your desire or your fundamental need is to make a good career, or to fill your life with activity, or even to provide for your family materially. It isn’t. Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit. Then you will have peace and inner security, no matter how many things go wrong. And this peace and security will leave you free to act and to produce your own work, a real independent workman.
Initially in these remarks Lawrence seems to be taking a position different from the one he expressed in the later Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he asserts that the man derives his chief fulfillment from purpose, not from the home and family. But Lawrence’s position is complex. He believes that the man requires a relationship to a woman in order to be strengthened in the pursuit of his purpose. Recall the lines I quoted earlier, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” Man fulfills himself through having a purpose beyond the home, but he must have a home and a wife to support him. Through romantic love (which always involves a strong sexual component) the man comes to his primal self, and emerges from the encounter with the strength to carry on in the world. Lawrence is telling his correspondent—and this becomes clear in the last lines of the passage quoted—that in order to accomplish anything meaningful he must first submerge himself, body and soul, into love for his wife.
Of course, this makes it sound as if Lawrence regards married love merely as a means to an end: merely as a means to pursuing a male “purpose.” Elsewhere, however, he speaks of it as if it were an end in itself. This is particularly the case in Women in Love. Early in the novel Birkin tells Gerald, “I find . . . that one needs some one really pure single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. . . . The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.” Again, Lawrence is seeking a way to get beyond idealism, and all the corrupt apparatus of modern, ego-driven life. To get beyond this, to what? To the true self, and to relationships based upon blood-consciousness and honest, uncorrupted sentiment. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s plan for achieving this involves a “perfect union” with a woman (and, as he states in the same novel, “the additional perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage”).
Birkin wants to achieve this with Ursula, but he keeps insisting over and over (much to her bewilderment and anger) that he means something more than mere “love.” The reason for this is that Birkin and Lawrence associate “love” with an ideal that is drummed into the heads of people in the modern, post-Christian world. We are issued with the baffling injunction to “love thy neighbor,” where thy neighbor means all of humanity. Any intelligent person can see that to love everyone means to love no one in particular. And any psychologically healthy person would find valueless the “love” of someone who claimed also to love all the rest of humanity. Lawrence is reacting also against the lovey-dovey, white lace, sanitized, billing and cooing sort of “love” that society encourages in married couples. Lawrence’s disgust for this sort of thing is expressed in his short story “In Love.” The main character, Hester, is repulsed by the “love” her fiancé, Joe, shows for her. They had been friends prior to their engagement and got on well
But now, alas, since she had promised to marry him, he had made the wretched mistake of falling “in love” with her. He had never been that way before. And if she had known he would get this way now, she would have said decidedly: Let us remain friends, Joe, for this sort of thing is a come-down. Once he started cuddling and petting, she couldn’t stand him. Yet she felt she ought to. She imagined she even ought to like it. Though where the ought came from, she could not see.
Birkin (like Lawrence) wants to avoid at all costs falling into this sort of scripted, stereotyped love relationship, but Ursula has a great deal of difficulty understanding what it is that he does want. He tries his best to explain it to her:
“There is,” he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, “a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.”
The “final me and you” refers to the primal self. “The old ideals are dead as nails” and so is modern civilization. Birkin does not want his relationship to Ursula to “fit” into the modern social scheme, to become conventional or “safe.” He also fears and abhors the impress of society on his conscious, mental self. He does not want to come together with Ursula “though the ego,” as it were. He wants them to come together through their primal selves and to forge a relationship that is based on something deeper and far stronger than what the overly socialized creatures around him call “love.” Yet, at the same time, one could simply say that what he wants is a truer, deeper love, and that what passes for love with other people is usually not the genuine article. They are doing what one “ought” to do, even when in bed together.
In The Rainbow (to which Women in Love forms the “sequel”), Tom Brangwen offers his views on love and marriage in a famous passage:
“There’s very little else, on earth, but marriage. You can talk about making money, or saving souls. You can save your own soul seven times over, and you may have a mint of money, but your soul goes gnawin’, gnawin’, gnawin’, and it says there’s something it must have. In heaven there is no marriage. But on earth there is marriage, else heaven drops out, and there’s no bottom to it. . . . If we’ve got to be Angels . . . and if there is no such thing as a man or a woman among them, then it seems to me as a married couple makes one Angel. . . . [An] Angel can’t be less than a human being. And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than a human being. . . . An Angel’s got to be more than a human being. . . . So I say, an Angel is the soul of a man and a woman in one: they rise united at the Judgment Day, as one angel. . . . If I am to become an Angel, it’ll be my married soul, and not my single soul.”
À la Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, men and women form two halves of a complete human being. Human nature divides itself into two, complementary aspects: masculinity and femininity. A complete human being is made when a man and a woman are joined together. But they cannot be joined—not really—through the mental, social self, but only through the unconscious, primal self.
In Women in Love, this view returns but in a modified form. Now Birkin tells us, “One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other—for ever. But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star.” And Lawrence tells us of Birkin, “he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.” Tom Brangwen’s view implies that men and women, considered separately, do not have complete souls, and that a complete soul is made only when they join together in marriage. There is a suggestion in what he says that the “individuality” of single men and women is false, and that only a married couple constitutes a true individual. Birkin’s ideal, on the other hand, involves the man and the woman each preserving their selfhood and individuality and “balancing” each other.
Despite the fact that Birkin frequently, and transparently, speaks for Lawrence we cannot take him as speaking for Lawrence here. I believe that it is Brangwen’s position that is closest to Lawrence’s own. When Women in Love opens, Birkin is in a relationship with Hermione, who Lawrence portrays as a woman living entirely from out of her head, without any naturalness or spontaneity. Yet there is a bit of this in Birkin as well, which is perhaps why he reacts against it so violently when he sees it in Hermione. After the passage just quoted from Women in Love, Lawrence writes of Birkin, “He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. . . . And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.” Lawrence then goes on to describe Birkin’s fear and loathing of women’s “clutching.” Birkin is a conflicted character. He wants to lose himself in a relationship with a woman, but fears it at the same time. He wants Ursula, and talks on and on about spontaneity and the evil of ideals, yet he is continually preaching to Ursula about his ideal relationship which, conveniently, is one in which he can unite with her yet preserve his ego intact. This at first bewilders then infuriates Ursula, who never understands what it is that he wants. In the end, the problem resolves itself, probably just as it would in real life. Drawn to Ursula by a power stronger than his conscious ego, Birkin eventually drops all of his talk, surrenders his will, and settles into a married bliss that is marred only by his continued desire for the love of a man.
Ultimately, Lawrence believes that the “establishment of a new relation” between men and women depends upon a return to the oldest of relationships, and that this is possible only through a recovery of the oldest part of the self. We must, he believes, drop our ideal of the unisex society and be alive again to the fundamental, natural differences between men and women. Men and woman do not naturally desire to enjoy each other’s society at all times. We must not only educate men and women apart, but re-establish “spaces” within civilized society where men can be with men, and women with women. We must not force men and women together and command them to forget that they are men and women. Education and, indeed, much else in society must work to cultivate and to affirm the natural, masculine qualities and virtues in men, and the feminine qualities and virtues in women. Having become true men and women and having awakened, through their apartness, to the mystery and the allure that is the opposite sex, they will then come together and forge romantic alliances that are not based upon talk and “common values” but upon the “pull” between man and woman. Lawrence is not referring here simply to lust. A sexual element is, of course, involved, but what he means is the mysterious, ineffable attraction between an individual man and a woman, what we often call “chemistry,” which has nothing to do with the words they utter or the ideals they pay lip service to. And once this attraction is established, if the two desire to become bound to each other, then they must surrender themselves to the relationship. They must overcome their fear of the loss of ego boundaries. They must drop all talk of “rights” and not fall into the trap of treating the marriage as if it were a business partnership. For both, it is a leap into the unknown but in this case the unknown is the natural. When we plant a seed we must close the earth over it and go off and wait in anticipation. But we know that nature, being what it is, will produce as it has before. If all goes well, in that spot will grow the plant we were expecting. Similarly, marriage is not a human invention but something that grows naturally between a man and woman if its seed is planted in the fertile soil of the primal selves of each.
09:16 Publié dans Littérature | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : grande-bretagne, littérature, littérature anglaise, lettres, lettres anglaises, d. h. lawrence, david herbert lawrence, sexualité, psychologie, philosophie, masculinisme, féminisme, angleterre | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
lundi, 29 novembre 2010
The Doctrine of Higher Forms
The Doctrine of Higher Forms
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Since the war I have stressed altogether five main objectives. The true union of Europe; the union of government with science; the power of government to act rapidly and decisively, subject to parliamentary control; the effective leadership of government to solve the economic problem by use of the wage-price mechanism at the two key-points of the modern industrial world; and a clearly defined purpose for a movement of humanity to ever higher forms.
It is strange that in this last sphere of almost abstract thought my ideas have more attracted some of the young minds I value than my practical proposals in economics and politics. The reason is perhaps that people seek the ideal rather than the practical during a period in which such action is not felt to be necessary. This is encouraging for an ultimate future, in which through science the world can become free from the gnawing anxiety of material things and can turn to thinking which elevates and to beauty which inspires, but the hard fact is that many practical problems and menacing dangers must first be faced and overcome.
The thesis of higher forms was preceded by a fundamental challenge to the widely accepted claim of the communists that history is on their side. On the contrary, they are permanent prisoners of a transient phase in the human advance which modern science has rendered entirely obsolete. Not only is the primitive brutality of their method only possible in a backward country, but their whole thinking is only applicable to a primitive community. Both their economic thinking and their materialist conception of history belong exclusively to the nineteenth century. This thinking, still imprisoned in a temporary limitation, we challenge with thinking derived from the whole of European history and from the yet longer trend revealed by modern science. We challenge the idea of the nineteenth century with the idea of the twentieth century.
Communism is still held fast by the long obsolete doctrine of its origin, precisely because it is a material creed which recognizes nothing beyond such motives and the urge to satisfy such needs. Yet modern man has surpassed that condition as surely as the jet aircraft in action has overcome the natural law of gravity which Newton discovered. The same urge of man’s spiritual nature served by his continually developing science can inspire him to ever greater achievement and raise him to ever further heights.
The challenge to communist materialism was stated as follows in Europe: Faith and Plan:
What then, is the purpose of it all? Is it just material achievement? Will the whole urge be satisfied when everyone has plenty to eat and drink, every possible assurance against sickness and old age, a house, a television set, and a long seaside holiday each year? What other end can a communist civilization hold in prospect except this, which modern science can so easily satisfy within the next few years?
If you begin with the belief that all history can be interpreted only in material terms, and that any spiritual purpose is a trick and a delusion, which has the simple object of distracting the workers from their material aim of improving their conditions—the only reality—what end can there be even after every conceivable success, except the satisfaction of further material desires? When all the basic needs and wants are sated by the output of the new science, what further aim can there be but the devising of ever more fantastic amusements to titillate material appetites? If Soviet civilization achieves its furthest ambitions, is the end to be sputnik races round the stars to relieve the tedium of being a communist?
Communism is a limited creed, and its limitations are inevitable. If the original impulse is envy, malice, and hatred against someone who has something you have not got, you are inevitably limited by the whole impulse to which you owe the origin of your faith and movement. That initial emotion may be well founded, may be based on justice, on indignation against the vile treatment of the workers in the early days of the industrial revolution. But if you hold that creed, you carry within yourself your own prison walls, because any escape from that origin seems to lead towards the hated shape of the man who once had something you had not got; anything above or beyond yourself is bad. In reality, he may be far from being a higher form; he may be a most decadent product of an easy living which he was incapable of using even for self-development, an ignoble example of missed opportunity. But if the first impulse be envy and hatred of him, you are inhibited from any movement beyond yourself for fear of becoming like him, the man who had something which you had not got.
Thus your ideal becomes not something beyond yourself, still less beyond anything which now exists, but rather, the petrified, fossilized shape of that section of the community which was most oppressed, suffering, and limited by every material circumstance in the middle of the nineteenth century. The real urge is then to drag everything down toward the lowest level of life, rather than the attempt to raise everything towards the highest level of life which has yet been attained, and finally to move beyond even that. In all things this system of values seeks what is low instead of what is high.
So communism has no longer any deep appeal to the sane, sensible mass of the European workers who, in entire contradiction of Marxian belief in their increasing “immiseration,” have moved by the effort of their own trade unions and by political action to at least a partial participation in the plenty which the new science is beginning to bring, and towards a way of living and an outlook in which they do not recognize themselves at all as the miserable and oppressed figures of communism’s original workers.
The ideal is no longer the martyred form of the oppressed, but the beginning of a higher form. Men are beginning not to look down, but to look up. And it is precisely at this point that a new way of political thinking can give definite shape to what many are beginning to feel is a new forward urge of humanity. It becomes an impulse of nature itself directly man is free from the stifling oppression of dire, primitive need.
The ideal of creating a higher form on earth can now rise before men with the power of a spiritual purpose, which is not simply a philosophic abstraction but a concrete expression of a deep human desire. All men want their children to live better than they have lived, just as they have tried by their own exertions to lift themselves beyond the level of their fathers whose affection and sacrifice often gave them the chance to do it. This is a right and natural urge in mankind, and, when fully understood, becomes a spiritual purpose.
This purpose I described as the doctrine of higher forms. The idea of a continual movement of humanity from the amoeba to modern man and on to ever higher forms has interested me since my prison days, when I first became acutely aware of the relationship between modern science and Greek philosophy. Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thesis which gives it strength; mankind moving from the primitive beginning which modern science reveals to the present stage of evolution and continuing in this long ascent to heights beyond our present vision, if the urge of nature and the purpose of life are to be fulfilled. While simple to the point of the obvious, in detailed analysis it is the exact opposite of prevailing values. Most great impulses of life are in essence simple, however complex their origin. An idea may be derived from three thousand years of European thought and action, and yet be stated in a way that all men can understand.
My thinking on this subject was finally reduced to the extreme of simplicity in the conclusion of Europe, Faith and Plan:
To believe that the purpose of life is a movement from lower to higher forms is to record an observable fact. If we reject that fact, we reject every finding of modern science, as well as the evidence of our own eyes. . . . It is necessary to believe that this is the purpose of life, because we can observe that this is the way the world works, whether we believe in divine purpose or not. And once we believe this is the way the world works, and deduce from the long record that it is the only way it can work, this becomes a purpose because it is the only means by which the world is likely to work in future. If the purpose fails, the world fails.
The purpose so far has achieved the most incredible results—incredible to anyone who had been told in advance what was going to happen—by working from the most primitive life forms to the relative heights of present human development. Purpose becomes, therefore, quite clearly in the light of modern knowledge a movement from lower to higher forms. And if purpose in this way has moved so far and achieved so much, it is only reasonable to assume that it will so continue if it continues at all; if the world lasts. Therefore, if we desire to sustain human existence, if we believe in mankind’s origin which science now makes clear, and in his destiny which a continuance of the same progress makes possible, we must desire to aid rather than to impede the discernible purpose. That means we should serve the purpose which moves from lower to higher forms; this becomes our creed of life. Our life is dedicated to the purpose.
In practical terms this surely indicates that we should not tell men to be content with themselves as they are, but should urge them to strive to become something beyond themselves. . . . To assure men that we have no need to surpass ourselves, and thereby to imply that men are perfect, is surely the extreme of arrogant presumption. It is also a most dangerous folly, because it is rapidly becoming clear that if mankind’s moral nature and spiritual stature cannot increase more commensurately with his material achievements, we risk the death of the world. . . .
We must learn to live, as well as to do. We must restore harmony with life, and recognize the purpose in life. Man has released the forces of nature just as he has become separated from nature; this is a mortal danger, and is reflected in the neurosis of the age. We cannot stay just where we are; it is an uneasy, perilous and impossible situation. Man must either reach beyond his present self, or fail; and if he fails this time, the failure is final. That is the basic difference between this age and all previous periods. It was never before possible for this failure of men to bring the world to an end.
It is not only a reasonable aim to strive for a higher form among men; it is a creed with the strength of a religious conviction. It is not only a plain necessity of the new age of science which the genius of man’s mind has brought; it is in accordance with the long process of nature within which we may read the purpose of the world. And it is no small and selfish aim, for we work not only for ourselves but for a time to come. The long striving of our lives can not only save our present civilization, but can also enable others more fully to realize and to enjoy the great beauty of this world, not only in peace and happiness, but in an ever unfolding wisdom and rising consciousness of the mission of man.
The doctrine of higher forms may have appealed to some in a generation acutely aware of the divorce between religion and science because it was an attempted synthesis of these two impulses of the human movement. I went so far as to say that higher forms could have the force of a science and a religion, in the secular sense, since it derived both from the evolutionary process first recognized in the last century, and from the philosophy, perhaps the mysticism, well described as the ‘eternal becoming’, which Hellenism first gave to Europe as an original and continuing movement still represented in the thinking, architecture and music of the main European tradition.
To simplify and synthesize are the chief gifts which clear thought can bring, and never have they been so deeply needed as in this age. A healing synthesis is required, a union of Hellenism’s calm but radiant embrace of the beauty and wonder of life with the Gothic impulse of new discoveries urging man to reach beyond his presently precarious balance until sanity itself is threatened. The genius of Hellas can still give back to Europe the life equilibrium, the firm foundation from which science can grasp the stars. He who can combine within himself this sanity and this dynamism becomes thereby a higher form, and beyond him can be an ascent revealing always a further wisdom and beauty. It is a personal ideal for which all can try to live, a purpose in life.
We can thus resume the journey to further summits of the human spirit with measure and moderation won from the struggle and tribulation of these years. We may even in this time of folly and sequent adversity gain the balance of maturity which alone can make us worthy of the treasures, capable of using the miraculous endowment, and also of averting the tempestuous dangers, of modern science. We may at last acquire the adult mind, without which the world cannot survive, and learn to use with wisdom and decision the wonders of this age.
I hope that this record of my own small part in these great affairs and still greater possibilities has at least shown that I have ‘the repugnance to mean and cruel dealings’ which the wise old man ascribed to me so long ago, and yet have attempted by some union of mind and will to combine thought and deed; that I have stood with consistency for the construction of a worthy dwelling for humanity, and at all cost against the rage and folly of insensate and purposeless destruction; that I have followed the truth as I saw it, wherever that service led me, and have ventured to look and strive through the dark to a future that can make all worth while.
Source: http://www.oswaldmosley.com/higher-forms.htm
00:05 Publié dans Histoire, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : histoire, théorie politique, grande-bretagne, angleterre, sir oswald mosley, fascisme, fascisme britannique, blackshirts, philosophie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 19 novembre 2010
Croquis étrusques de D. H. Lawrence
Croquis étrusques de D. H. Lawrence
Ex: http://stalker.hautetfort.com/
C’est à la fin du VIIe siècle avant la naissance du Christ qu’apparaît en Toscane une population que les Latins appelleront Tusci ou Etrusci, dont les origines continuent de rester énigmatiques. On suggère aujourd’hui que la culture étrusque est née d’un ancien substrat local qui s’est lentement modifié au cours des différentes vagues de population s’installant en Italie, tandis que l’hypothèse qui prévalait au début du siècle passé rejoignait le récit d’Hérodote, d’après lequel ce peuple serait venu par la mer de Lydie.
Après un essor spectaculaire, la civilisation étrusque est entrée, à partir du Ve siècle, dans une phase d’affaiblissement notable jusqu’à sa soumission à Rome aux IVe et IIIe siècles.
Pourtant, au milieu du VIIe siècle, ce peuple fascinant de Toscane à la vocation maritime, avait commencé à se poser en rival sérieux des Grecs pour l’hégémonie méditerranéenne. Ainsi, allié à Carthage, il avait accepté la pénétration punique en Sardaigne alors que, dès le milieu du VIe siècle, il dut affronter les Hellènes désireux de coloniser l’Italie méridionale.
Cette période de guerres et d’alliances s’acheva en 474 par une défaite étrusque face à la coalition maritime que menèrent Cumes et Syracuse.
Cette date marque le début de l’effondrement du système confédéral instauré par Tarchon et regroupant, selon la tradition, douze cités ou groupes urbains dirigés par un lucumon, dans la région située entre l’Arno et le Tibre. C’est ce même Tarchon qui, selon la légende, fut le premier à fonder douze villes dans le nord de l’Italie, franchit ensuite les Apennins pour fonder la ville de Mantoue puis onze autres villes, redoublant ainsi la ligue originelle, villes qui s’unirent en une ligue appelée par les Latins Duodecim Populi Etruriae. Tarquinia était la plus ancienne des douze premières cités-États. Il y avait aussi Vulci, Vetulonia, Cerveteri, Arezzo, Chiusi, Roselle, Volterra, Cortona, Perugia, Volsinii, Populonia, certaines d’entre elles constituant les titres des chapitres du livre de Lawrence.
Après la défaite devant Cumes, les comptoirs commerciaux étrusques s’effondrèrent les uns après les autres sous la pression des Oscques et des Sabelliens qui prennent Capoue en 430.
Quoi qu’il en soit, durant les premiers siècles de l’histoire romaine, l’Étrurie sut conserver une relative indépendance, les Étrusques ayant obtenu le droit à la citoyenneté romaine en 89 avant Jésus-Christ, alors que l’Étrurie devient, elle, dans la division administrative de l’Italie conçue par Auguste, la septième région. Élie Faure évoque bellement l’appétit insatiable de conquêtes, secrètement conforté par l’Étrurie soumise devenue le cœur de l’Empire, qui fut celui de Rome : «Dès ses débuts, Rome est elle-même. Elle détourne à son profit les sources morales du vieux monde, comme elle détournait les eaux dans les montagnes pour les amener dans ses murs. Une fois la source captée, son avidité l’épuise, elle va plus loin pour en capter une autre.Dès le commencement du IIIe siècle l’Étrurie, broyée par Rome, cimente de son sang, de ses nerfs, avec le sang et les nerfs des Latins, des Sabins, le bloc où Rome s’appuiera pour se répandre sur la terre, en cercles concentriques, dans un effort profond» (in Histoire de l’art. L’art antique, Gallimard, coll. Folio Essais, 1988, pp. 305-6). Lawrence, parfois, fort rarement à vrai dire, croit découvrir sur les visages de certains hommes et femmes croisés lors de son périple les traits caractéristiques qu’il prête aux anciens Étrusques. De même, il constatera que de très anciens édifices construits par ce peuple disparu ont été restaurés, plus ou moins fidèlement à son goût, par son implacable conquérant romain.
La langue étrusque fut tout d’abord parlée en Toscane. Nous en avons conservé plus de dix mille inscriptions ainsi qu’un texte manuscrit de mille cinq cents mots environs, inscrits sur les bandelettes de lin enveloppant une momie. Les autres textes connus à caractère votif ou funéraire n’expriment guère que le nom du fidèle ou du défunt. L’alphabet a été emprunté au grec, probablement autour de 700 avant Jésus-Christ, sous l’influence des colonies grecques des îles Pithécuses. Elle demeure indéchiffrable pour Lawrence et, bien sûr, d’autant plus poétique.
La religion des Étrusques, sur laquelle notre auteur écrira de belles et étranges pages, a fait l’objet de maints commentaires de la part des Anciens. Peut-être d’origine orientale, sa «révélation» avait été consignée dans des livres sacrés dépositaires de la théologie et des rites inspirés par le génie Tagès et la nymphe Végoia, aux antipodes du paganisme gréco-romain.
C’est chargé d’un immense savoir livresque qu’il ne manquera pas de moquer dans son propre livre, c’est après avoir accumulé les lectures des ouvrages savants de Mommsen, Weege, Ducati ou encore Fell (1), que D. H. Lawrence commence son périple au milieu des ruines des anciennes villes étrusques, qu’il a projeté de visiter dès la fin mars 1926. Lawrence connaît aussi bien qu’il l’aime l’Italie qui ne «juge pas» (2), à ses yeux, à la différence de pays fatigués comme l’Angleterre et l’Allemagne, où la morale a remplacé la belle vitalité des peuples jeunes. Pour ce qui concerne la civilisation étrusque, l’écrivain semble avoir été frappé, assez tôt (en 1908) par sa lecture de La Peau de chagrin de Balzac, roman publié en 1831, dans lequel, dès le début du livre, le héros observe un vase étrusque qui le fascine : «Ah ! Qui n’aurait souri comme lui de voir sur un fond rouge la jeune fille brune dansant dans la fine argile d’un vase étrusque devant le Dieu Priape qu’elle saluait d’un air joyeux». En 1915, c’est la lecture du chapitre IX (intitulé Le culte des arbres) du célèbre Rameau d’or de Frazer qui frappe l’esprit de Lawrence comme il a durablement frappé celui de tant d’autres écrivains (comme T. S. Eliot), chapitre où sont mentionnés l’Étrurie centrale et ses «champs fertiles».
Ce savoir que D. H. Lawrence accumula pourtant consciencieusement durant les années de lente maturation de son projet de livre ne lui fut que d’un maigre secours au moment de rédiger ce dernier et même, au moment où il fut lu et critiqué par ses premiers lecteurs professionnels (cf. pp. 272-278 de notre ouvrage). Plusieurs critiques reprochèrent en effet à l’écrivain son manque de sérieux scientifique, alors que Lawrence, de son côté, avait plusieurs fois émis des doutes, dans les lettres adressées à ses amis et éditeurs, sur la capacité réelle des foules à apprécier et goûter son œuvre qui, pour réellement exister, devait à son goût se détacher du savoir pulvérulent et sans grâce des gros livres savants et inutiles mais, tout autant, se frayer un chemin difficile vers le cœur de lecteurs ne sachant plus vraiment lire.
Quoi qu’il en soit, ce dépouillement nécessaire était finalement dans la logique même des différents croquis que Lawrence consacra aux tombes étrusques ornées de fresques magnifiques. Car c’est tout compte fait peu dire que, au travers de la découverte puis de la description de ces chefs-d’œuvre picturaux des anciens âges, l’unique sujet de l’écrivain est l’opposition entre le fourmillement plein de vie du passé et l’étiolement bavard dans lequel nos sociétés modernes sont tombées. Pénétrant dans les ténèbres des caveaux étrusques, Lawrence est un homme qui semble se dépouiller de sa très vieille peau occidentale comme un serpent qui ferait sa mue, et se remplir, a contrario, d’un savoir paradoxal qui irrigue son être tout entier, comme la religion des Anciens, selon l’écrivain, a irrigué les danseurs dont il contemple les représentations sur les murs des tombeaux : «Comme le disait l’antique auteur païen, écrit ainsi Lawrence : Il n’est partie vivante de nous ou de nos corps qui ne ressente la religion; dès lors, qu’aucune chanson ne manque à l’âme, et qu’aux genoux et au cœur abondent le bond et la danse; car tous autant qu’ils sont connaissent les dieux…» (p. 109). Nous ne les connaissons plus, puisqu’il est vrai que nous ne dansons ou même ne savons plus danser, comme Lawrence d’ailleurs le remarque, en accomplissant des gestes scellant la magique entente des hommes et du monde qui les porte.
L’Italie elle-même, du moins dans sa partie qui conserve quelques antiques traces du peuple disparu, paraît pour Lawrence (mais qu’en est-il de nos jours ?) s’être salutairement éloignée du foyer de contagion : la vie moderne qui corrompt le vivant de façon irrémédiable. Ainsi, dès le tout premier texte des Croquis étrusques, Cerveteri, décrivant le visage d’un des habitants de la peu riante région qu’il traverse avec son ami, nous pouvons lire sous la plume de Lawrence : «Il est probable que, quand je retournerai dans le Sud, il aura disparu. Ils ne peuvent survivre, ces hommes à visage de faune au profil si pur, avec ce calme étrange qui est le leur, éloigné de toute morale. Seuls survivent les visages déflorés» (p. 24).
C’est dire en somme que la civilisation étrusque, insouciante, légère, aérienne comme les oiseaux qui ornent les fresques de ses tombeaux, était condamnée à disparaître dans un monde qui, au fil des siècles, s’est figé dans la lourdeur sans vie des peuples sérieux qui ont oublié la danse, le rire et les chants célébrant l’harmonie rejouée par chaque nouvelle célébration. Finalement encore, notre époque consacre le triomphe des visages flétris, comme, sous couvert de respect d’une morale aussi ridicule que contraignante (sans compter qu’elle est mensongère), notre société magnifie le comble de la dégénérescence, les portraits de milliers de Dorian Gray qui, devenus trop compliqués, exclusivement cérébraux, ont perdu tout contact réel avec la «verte primitivité» chère à Kierkegaard qui est à l’œuvre, selon D. H. Lawrence, dans l’ensemble des témoignages que la civilisation étrusque nous a légués. Vitalité des premiers jours de l’homme. Immobilité, en dépit même du mythe du progrès qui lance ses milliers de tentacules dans toutes les directions, de l’homme moderne. Art de l’aube des peuples, «émerveillement des matinées humaines» comme dit le poète, science véritable de la vie quotidienne contre psychologie des «ignorantins» que nous sommes devenus (cf. p. 127).
L’écrivain poursuit, contemplant cette fois les visages féminins, porteurs d’un secret évident, qui se tient à portée de regard ou plutôt, pour l’auteur de L’Amant de lady Chatterley, à portée de toucher (au sens de communication physique et pré-mentale que Mellors, dans le roman le plus célèbre de Lawrence, développera) : «Ce sont de belles femmes, issues d’un monde ancien, en qui se mêlent ce silence et cette réserve qui les rendent si attirantes et qui sans doute étaient leur apanage, dans le passé. Comme si, au profond de chaque femme, il y avait encore quelque chose à chercher que l’œil jamais n’est en mesure de déceler. Quelque chose qui peut être perdu, et qui jamais ne peut être retrouvé» (p. 26). C’est dire que la femme est toujours du côté du passé, précieux puits originel d’où sortent les hommes hagards, presque immédiatement nostalgiques de ce qu’ils ont conscience d’avoir perdu d’une façon irrémédiable et qu’ils tenteront, leur vie durant, de reconquérir de mille et mille façons, par la guerre, l’art, l’écriture, la déchéance même, surtout si elle devient un dérèglement systématique de tous les sens. Et ce qu’ils ont perdu, ce que chaque homme perd en venant au monde, ce sont la beauté, la sécurité, une forme souveraine d’harmonie inconsciente, primitive, primesautière, pas moins reliée à toute la chaîne des vivants et à l’univers tout entier, le secret éternellement rejoué à chaque nouvelle naissance de l’être et de ses manifestations, que D. H. Lawrence ira chercher au plus profond de l’obscurité gardienne d’un peu de poussière qui autrefois fut femme et homme.
Ce secret de la spontanéité et de la fraîcheur de la vie, Lawrence les surprend ainsi dans les fresques splendides qui ornent les dernières demeures de riches Étrusques : «Aux formes et mouvements des murs et volumes souterrains s’attache une simplicité jointe à une spontanéité, un naturel dépoitraillé tout à fait particulier qui, immédiatement, réconforte l’esprit. Les Grecs cherchaient à faire impression, et le gothique bien plus encore vise à frapper l’esprit. Les Étrusques, non. Ce qu’ils réalisaient, en ces siècles insouciants où ils vécurent, apparaît aussi simple et naturel que la respiration. Ils laissent la poitrine respirer librement, aspirer sans effort une certaine abondance de vie» (p. 38).
Belle, audacieuse image bien que je ne pense pas que nous puissions véritablement parler de «siècles insouciants» à propos des âges de rapines et de violences de toute sorte qui furent ceux des anciens peuples ayant colonisé l’Italie. Élie Faure a raison de distendre l’ombre inquiétante qui est celle des personnages si joyeux de vivre que Lawrence croit contempler de son regard grisé, creusant la naïveté des dessins étrusques d’une profondeur qui, à vrai dire, n’est absolument pas étrangère au texte de Lawrence lui-même, surtout lorsqu’il contemple, pris de vertige, l’abîme des siècles et des millénaires : «Le prêtre règne. Les formes sont enfermées dans les tombeaux. La sculpture des sarcophages où deux figures étranges, le bas du corps cassé, le haut secret et souriant s’accoudent avec la raideur et l’expression mécaniques que tous les archaïsmes ont connues, les fresques des chambres funéraires qui racontent des sacrifices et des égorgements, tout leur art est fanatique, superstitieux et tourmenté» (op. cit., p. 305). Je crois que Lawrence tente en fait de magnifier en estompant plus qu’en effaçant toutes ses ombres une époque de non-réflexivité absolue pour ainsi dire, où les femmes et les hommes préféraient de très loin vivre plutôt que se voir vivre, agir plutôt que bavarder comme il en va, selon l’écrivain, à notre époque anémiée.
Nous retrouvons ici la thématique si chère à Lawrence de la «conscience phallique» que nous pourrions caractériser comme l’aspiration naïve de la vie vers son expansion maximale et, surtout, libérée de toute contrainte d’ordre moral ou religieux (3) : «C’est la beauté de proportion naturelle de la conscience phallique, qui vient s’opposer aux proportions plus recherchées ou plus extatiques de la conscience mentale et spirituelle à laquelle nous sommes habitués» (p. 35). C’est dans L’Amant de lady Chatterley que Lawrence évoquera, tout comme il a fait du toucher un de ses thèmes centraux, cette «conscience phallique», écrivant de son livre qu’il est un : «roman phallique, tendre et délicat – pas un roman érotique au sens propre […]. Je crois sincèrement qu’il faut restaurer, ajoute-t-il, une conscience phallique dans nos vies, parce qu’elle est à la source de toute vraie beauté et de toute vraie douceur» (4).
La simplicité que Lawrence voit à l’œuvre dans l’art funéraire étrusque est encore décrit comme un «naturel confinant à la platitude» et, plus loin, comme un véritable secret dont la clé a été perdue : «C’est là presque toujours présent dans les objets étrusques, ce naturel confinant à la platitude, mais qui en général l’évite, et qui, bien souvent, atteint à une originalité si spontanée, si hardie et si fraîche que nous, amoureux des conventions et des expressions «ramenées à une norme», en venons à qualifier cet art de bâtard et de banal» (p. 79).
Lawrence, suivant en cela la leçon d’un nombre incalculable d’auteurs mais sans toutefois tomber dans le délire de certains qui, comme Keyserling, fonda à Darmstadt en 1920 une École de la Sagesse dénonçant les limites de la culture occidentale et puisant son enseignement de pacotille dans une Inde fantasmée, confère au monde ancien une vertu éminente : au contraire de ce que nous pouvons constater à notre époque de spécialistes qui poussent de grands cris dès qu’un esprit un peu audacieux essaie de créer des passerelles entre plusieurs domaines de savoir, le monde ancien ne craignait pas d’établir des parentés symboliques, donc réelles, entre les êtres vivants et les choses, reliés par un flux souterrain de sang (5). «Merveilleux monde, écrit ainsi Lawrence, qu’était sans doute ce monde ancien où toutes choses semblaient vivantes, luisantes dans l’ombre crépusculaire du contact qui les faisait se toucher, un monde où chaque chose n’était pas seulement une individualité isolée prise au piège de la lumière diurne; où chaque chose apparaissait en son clair contour, visuellement, mais qui du sein de sa clarté même était reliée par des affinités émotionnelles ou vitales à d’autres choses étranges, une chose surgissant d’une autre, mentalement contradictoires qui fusionnaient dans l’émotion, si bien qu’un lion pouvait au même instant être aussi une chèvre, et ne pas être une chèvre [Lawrence a évoqué précédemment la chimère en bronze d’Arezzo, conservée au musée de Florence et qui fut en partie restaurée par Benvenuto Cellini)» (p. 142).
Plus même, puisque Lawrence, tirant finalement les conséquences logiques du mythe de l’Âge d’or, ayant même peut-être lu Vico qui associait naissance du langage et chant dans une même étreinte poétique de l’univers, affirme que les anciens dont il contemple les œuvres d’art étaient de véritables enfants : «Les anciens voyaient consciemment ce que les enfants voient inconsciemment : l’éternelle merveille des choses. Dans le monde antique, les trois émotions cardinales devaient être l’émerveillement, la crainte et l’admiration – l’admiration au sens latin du mot comme dans notre acception présente, et la crainte dans sa signification la plus large, qui inclut la répulsion, l’épouvante et la haine» (p. 143). Puisque les Étrusques incarnaient merveilleusement les vertus de l’aube (l’insouciance, la légèreté, la spontanéité, la fraîcheur, la joie), ils ne pouvaient être que de véritables enfants, et non point de ridicules adultes qui singeraient l’enfance. Leur caractère enfantin plutôt qu’infantile provenait du fait qu’ils ne séparaient point les êtres qu’ils considéraient de la grande chaîne reliant toutes les choses, tous les êtres créés. L’esprit d’abstraction, au sens propre du terme, leur était inconnu. Ils ne connaissaient que l’esprit procédant par association symbolique, qui est sans doute le seul qui soit capable de révéler la vérité profonde des êtres. Lawrence emploie, à propos de cette vérité profonde, une magnifique expression (que je souligne), écrivant : «C’est en étant capable de voir le qui-vive de toutes choses au cœur partout ramifié de la grande signification, toute palpitante de passion, que les anciens maintenaient vivants l’émerveillement et la délectation, mais aussi bien l’effroi et la répugnance. Ils étaient comme les enfants – mais ils avaient la force, la puissance et la connaissance sensuelle des vrais adultes» (pp. 143-4).
Et l’auteur de tirer toutes les conséquences de cette idée selon laquelle l’homme a perdu la grâce de ses premiers gestes. La religion elle-même, selon Lawrence, a vu sa nature profonde s’infléchir pour n’être plus qu’un vil instrument dont l’homme se sert. Tout le délire mécaniciste moderne semble pour Lawrence sorti du culte grec de la raison et du génie bâtisseur romain : «L’ancienne religion, qui voulait que l’homme assidûment tente de s’harmoniser avec la nature, tienne ferme sur ses pieds et s’épanouisse en fleur dans le grand bouillonnement de la vie, s’est transformée avec les Grecs et les Romains en un désir de résister à la nature, de développer la ruse mentale et la force mécanique susceptibles de surpasser la nature en intelligence et de l’enchaîner complètement, complètement au point qu’il ne subsiste plus aucune liberté en cette nature et que tout soit contrôlé, domestiqué et asservi aux pouvoirs mesquins de l’homme» (p. 158).
C’est dans un chapitre inachevé, resté à l’état de manuscrit et qui, peut-être, eût pu servir à Lawrence de conclusion pour ses Croquis étrusques, intitulé Le musée de Florence, que l’auteur va systématiser ses intuitions sur le thème d’une déperdition, au travers des siècles, d’une force rayonnante qui s’échappe désormais inéluctablement des œuvres des hommes. Ainsi, selon Lawrence, nous devons bien comprendre que les religions elles-mêmes de nos ancêtres les plus magnifiques, comme le sont, à ses yeux, les Étrusques, ne sont que des bribes d’un savoir immémorial ayant précédé les plus anciennes civilisations : «Ce qu’il nous faut saisir lorsque nous contemplons des œuvres étrusques, c’est que celles-ci nous révèlent les derniers feux d’une conscience cosmique humaine – disons, la tentative d’hommes aspirant à la conscience cosmique – différente de la nôtre. L’idée qui veut que notre histoire soit issue des cavernes ou de précaires habitats lacustres est puérile. Notre histoire prend corps à l’achèvement d’une phase précédente de l’histoire humaine, une phase prodigieuse et comparable à la nôtre. Il est bien plus vraisemblable que le singe descende de nous que nous du singe» (p. 225). Renversement de perspective qui a dû faire bondir les esprits scientistes ou chagrins, c’est tout un, qui lurent les Croquis étrusques lorsqu’ils furent publiés ! On se demande même comment l’auteur n’a semble-t-il pas été traité de réactionnaire. Il l’a peut-être été, à la réflexion, tout comme on n’a pas manqué de lui reprocher son manque de sérieux scientifique (cf. la réception du livre, pp. 272-278). Citons donc longuement ce très beau passage, toujours extrait du même texte qui ne fut pas recueilli en livre par Lawrence, où il semble sérieusement douter de la théorie de l’évolution, l’homme ayant toujours été un homme, l’homme ne provenant pas du singe comme nous l’avons vu mais l’homme, pourtant, depuis qu’il s’est coupé de ses plus profondes racines de savoir symbolique, paraissant en revanche devoir dégénérer, dévoluer : «Les civilisations apparaissent comme des vagues, et comme des vagues elles s’évanouissent. Tant que la science, ou l’art, n’aura pu saisir le sens dernier de ces symboles flottant sur l’ultime vague de la période préhistorique, c’est-à-dire cette période qui précède la nôtre, nous ne serons pas en mesure d’instituer la juste relation avec l’homme en ce qu’il est, en ce qu’il fut, en ce que toujours il sera.
Aux temps d’avant Homère, les hommes vivant en Europe n’étaient pas de simples brutes, des sauvages ou des monstres prognathes; ce n’étaient pas non plus de grands enfants stupides. Les hommes restent des hommes, et bien que l’intelligence puisse prendre diverses formes, les hommes sont toujours intelligents : ce ne sont pas des imbéciles mal dégrossis, des crétins en masse.
Ces symboles qui nous parviennent à la crête des dernières vagues de la culture préhistorique constituent le reliquat d’une immense et très ancienne tentative de l’humanité de se former une conception de l’univers. Cette conception s’est exténuée, elle a volé en éclats au moment même où elle reprenait vie, en Égypte. Elle a connu un nouvel essor dans la Chine ancienne, en Inde, en Babylonie et en Asie Mineure, chez les Druides, chez les Teutons, chez les Aztèques et les Mayas de l’Amérique, chez les Noirs même. Mais à chaque fois cet essor était plus faible, la vague se mourait, le flux de conscience peu à peu se transformait en un autre flux traversé de multiples courants contradictoires» (p. 226, l’auteur souligne).
Je parlais plus haut de secret. Lawrence écrit, opposant une nouvelle fois le passé magnifié d’un débordement d’énergie et de candeur et le présent se mourant par son excès de normes et de réflexion : «C’est comme si un courant puissant venu de quelque vie différente les traversait de part en part, sans rien de commun avec le courant superficiel qui nous anime aujourd’hui; comme si les Étrusques tiraient leur vitalité de profondeurs inconnues dont l’accès nous est désormais refusé» (p. 111).
Citons d’ailleurs, extrait des Tombes peintes de Tarquinia, I, ce long passage, très intéressant, où se découvre le mépris de Lawrence à l’égard d’un peuple, celui composé par ses contemporains, considéré comme étant un immense lecteur aveugle, incapable de goûter la beauté secrète d’une œuvre. Ce thème est très présent dans la correspondance de l’écrivain, y compris même durant les mois qui précèdent la rédaction de ses Croquis étrusques dont Lawrence doute fortement qu’ils soient appréciés d’un public de plus en plus grossier et inculte. L’ésotérisme, par essence, ne peut être réservé qu’à une élite puisque, de fait, il ne peut être séparé non point seulement d’une révélation mais d’une pratique, dont ne peut absolument rien dire celui qui ne l’a point vécue. Dans ce même passage, l’auteur affirme que notre époque n’est plus même reliée à son prestigieux passé par un filet de savoir secret (6), alors que, inversement, c’est la maigreur même de ce savoir transmis depuis les âges les plus anciens qui entretient son insurpassable bavardage : «Les peuples ne sont pas initiés aux cosmogonies, ni ne se voient révéler le chemin vers cet état d’éveil où palpite la conscience aiguisée. Quoi que vous puissiez faire, jamais la masse des hommes n’atteindra cette vibration de la pleine conscience. Il ne leur est pas possible d’aller au-delà d’un soupçon de conscience.en foi de quoi il faut leur donner des symboles, des rituels et des signes qui empliront leur corps de vie jusqu’à la mesure qu’ils peuvent contenir. Plus leur serait fatal. C’est la raison pour laquelle il convient de les tenir à l’écart du vrai savoir, de crainte que, connaissant les formules sans avoir jamais traversé les expériences qui y correspondent, ils deviennent insolents et impies, croyant avoir atteint le grand tout quand ils ne maîtrisent en réalité qu’un verbiage creux. La connaissance ésotérique sera toujours ésotérique, car la connaissance est une expérience, non une formule. Par ailleurs, il est stupide de galvauder les formules. Même un petit savoir est chose dangereuse. Aucune époque ne l’a mieux montré que la nôtre. Le verbiage est, en définitive, ce qu’il y a de plus désastreux» (pp. 114-5, l’auteur souligne).
D’une autre façon, Lawrence raillera la science muséographique, invoquant le prétexte que la plongée réelle dans le passé ne peut être qu’une expérience poétique : «Mais quel intérêt présentent ces leçons de choses concernant des races évanouies ? Ce que l’on cherche, c’est un contact. Les Étrusques ne sont ni une théorie ni une thèse. Ils sont, d’abord et avant tout, une expérience» (p. 218, l’auteur souligne). Et l’écrivain d’enfoncer le clou : «Et c’est une expérience toujours ratée. Des musées, encore des musées, toujours des musées, des leçons de choses bricolées n’importe comment en vue d’illustrer les théories insanes des archéologues, tentatives insensées de coordonner et ajuster en un ordre intangible cela qui échappe à tout agencement définitif et se refuse à toute coordination !» (Ibid.) (7).
Le savoir est et ne peut être qu’expérience véritable, non point accumulation de thèses mortes avant même que d’avoir été publiées, pour la raison qu’elles ne peuvent en aucun cas délivrer un savoir autre que livresque, les livres évoquant d’autres livres dans une régression infinie qui est synonyme de mort spirituelle et morale des hommes. Celui qui sait se tait (8), vérité de la plus immémoriale ancienneté que D. H. Lawrence aura redécouverte (9) en s’enfonçant dans les tombes abandonnées, pillées, parfois très endommagées, des Étrusques dont la force véritable, spirituelle, est aussi fragile que celle d’une plante mais n’en a pas moins prodigué son suc dans les membres de l’immense corps de l’empire romain, selon la loi que commente Élie Faure : «Asservi matériellement, un peuple de culture supérieure asservit moralement le peuple qui l’a vaincu» (op. cit., p. 309).
Et ce sont pourtant cette plante (une pâquerette, précise Lawrence) ou ce rossignol (10), manifestations les plus humbles de la vie qui, plus durables qu’une altière pyramide qui finira par se désagréger au fil des millénaires, témoigneront d’une force dont les fresques étrusques gardent et révèlent le magnifique et bouleversant secret.
Notes
(1) Lawrence, avant de se rendre sur le terrain, a beaucoup lu sur la question, éminemment débattue à son époque, de la civilisation étrusque. Par exemple Theodor Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, que Lawrence connaissait dans sa traduction anglaise réalisée en 1861 (revue et corrigée en 1894), par W. P. Dickson, sous le titre The History of Rome. Fritz Weege, Etruskische Malerei (Halle, 1920-1921). Pericle Ducati, Etruria Antica (Turin, 1925). Roland Arthur Lonsdale Fell enfin, Etruria and Rome, Cambridge, 1924.
(2) The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (édition établie par James T. Boulton, Cambridge, 1979), I, p. 544, citées par Simonetta de Filippis dans la Notice aux Croquis étrusques, p. 250 de notre ouvrage.
(3) Voir cette curieuse image : «Si nous n’aimons pas les asphodèles, c’est à mon sens parce que nous rejetons tout ce qui est fier et jaillissant» (p. 28).
(4) In Letters of D. H. Lawrence, op. cit., tome VI, p. 328.
(5) «Le monde vivant, nous ne le connaîtrons jamais que symboliquement. Pourtant, chaque conscience – la rage du lion et le venin du serpent – est, donc elle est divine. Tout provient du cercle ininterrompu et de son noyau, le germe, l’Un, le Dieu, s’il vous plaît de l’appeler ainsi. Et l’homme qui apparaît, avec son âme et sa personnalité, est éternellement relié à l’ensemble. Le fleuve de sang est un, il est ininterrompu, mais il bouillonne d’oppositions et de contradictions» (p. 143).
(6) «C’est comme si un courant puissant venu de quelque vie différente les traversait de part en part, sans rien de commun avec le courant superficiel qui nous anime aujourd’hui; comme si les Étrusques tiraient leur vitalité de profondeurs inconnues dont l’accès nous est désormais refusé» (p. 111).
(7) C’est le sens des moqueries que D. H. Lawrence adresse à l’un des personnages qu’il a rencontrés lors de son voyage : «Mais le jeune Allemand ne veut rien entendre à tout cela. C’est un moderne, pour qui n’existent véritablement que les seules évidences. Un lion à tête de chèvre, en plus de sa propre tête, est une chose impensable. Et ce qui est impensable n’existe pas, n’est rien. Raison pour laquelle tous les symboles étrusques n’ont pour lui aucune réalité et ne témoignent que d’une grossière incapacité à penser. Il ne gaspillera pas une minute de son temps à y réfléchir. Ces symboles ne sont que le produit de l’impuissance mentale, par conséquent négligeables» (p. 139).
(8) «L’air du dehors nous paraît immense, blême, et de quelque façon vide. Nous ne percevons plus aucun des deux mondes, ni celui, souterrain, des Étrusques, ni celui du jour banal qui est le nôtre. Silencieux, épuisés, nous revenons vers la ville environnés de vent, le vieux chien stoïquement sur nos talons – et le guide nous promet de nous montrer les autres tombes dès le lendemain» (p. 110).
(9) La quête d’une vérité originelle semble avoir fasciné Lawrence qui écrit ainsi que les dieux personnels des Grecs «ne sont que les avatars décadents d’une religion cosmique antérieure», les «mythes grecs» n’étant pour leur part que «les représentations grossières de certaines conceptions ésotériques très anciennes et fort précises, qui sont bien plus âgées que les mythes – ou les Grecs» (p. 138).
(10) Voir cette image aussi étonnante que belle : «La force brute écrase de nombreuses plantes. Et pourtant ces plantes repoussent. Les pyramides ne durent qu’un instant, comparées à la pâquerette. Avant que Bouddha ou Jésus aient commencé de parler le rossignol chantait, et bien après que les paroles de Jésus ou de Bouddha seront tombées dans l’oubli, le rossignol continuera de chanter. Point de prêche ni d’enseignement, ni de commandement ou d’intimidation : juste le chant. Au commencement n’était pas le Verbe, mais le pépiement» (p. 71). Remarquons encore que Lawrence oppose l’antique religion des Étrusques qui «s’intéresse à l’ensemble des puissances et des forces physiques et créatrices en tant qu’elles participent à la construction et à la destruction de l’âme» à la religion du Verbe qui, étrange vue, n’accorderait aucune réalité au monde physique, Verbe qui «est martelé dru jusqu’à le rendre mince et permettre, comme une dorure, de recouvrir et dissimuler toutes choses» (p. 139).
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jeudi, 23 septembre 2010
Scruton over de Natiestaat, Nation-Building en Wagner
Scruton over de Natiestaat, Nation-Building en Wagner
Op vrijdag 23 juni jl. gaf de conservatieve filosoof Roger Scruton een lezing over de crisis die het multiculturele dogma in onze samenleving heeft veroorzaakt. Net voor de lezing had ik een kort gesprek met Scruton over de natiestaat, nation-building in Irak en de opvoering van Wagners Ring-cyclus door de Vlaamse opera.
U noemt de natiestaat de grootste Europese verwezenlijking. De Europese Unie heeft dat erfgoed weggegooid. Waarom gelooft u niet dat economische samenwerking conflicten tussen Europese naties zal voorkomen?
Economische samenwerking heeft nooit conflicten voorkomen in het verleden, nietwaar? Natuurlijk is economische samenwerking een goede zaak op zich, maar conflicten hebben hun oorsprong in allerlei rivaliteiten die niets met economie hebben te zien: immigratie en emigratie, bedreigde grenzen, taalverschillen, religieuze verschillen, enz. Het volstaat niet om te zeggen dat we mensen gaan aanmoedigen om handel te drijven met elkaar. Samenwerking tussen a en b is enkel mogelijk indien a zich onderscheidt van b. Indien het onderscheid van de natiestaat verloren gaat, verlies je ook ondernemingen.
Uw verdediging van de natiestaat wordt bekritiseerd door diegenen die menen dat de geschiedenis van de Europese natiestaat samenvalt met de donkerste periode van de Westerse beschaving: kolonialisme, imperialisme, fascisme en nationaal-socialisme. Wat zegt u daarop?
Eerst en vooral, wat is er verkeerd met kolonialisme en imperialisme? Wat is de Europese Unie, als het geen imperialisme is? Empire is een natuurlijk iets voor mensen en het is een manier om conflicten te overwinnen. Over fascisme zou ik zeggen dat het uiteraard gaat om een verminkte vorm van de natiestaat. De natiestaat bestaat in Engeland op zijn minst sinds Shakespeare’s verheerlijking ervan. En de donkerste periode in de Europese geschiedenis werd veroorzaakt door een pathologische vorm van Duits nationalisme, niet door de natiestaat.
Menig islamitisch immigrant kent geen territoriale loyaliteit welke een voorwaarde is voor burgerschap in de natiestaat. Wat te doen met diegenen die niet willen assimileren?
Het correcte beleid tegenover diegenen die niet willen assimileren is hen de optie te geven om elders te gaan waar ze dat wel kunnen, zoals bijvoorbeeld, waar ze vandaan komen.
Er wordt nu veel gepraat over een Amerikaans imperium. Hoe kijkt u daar tegen aan?
Het gaat niet om imperialisme van de oude stempel. Natuurlijk gebruiken de Amerikanen hun macht om – in hun overtuiging – overal ter wereld democratische regeringen te stichten omdat zij denken dat democratie de enige weg naar stabiliteit is. Welke andere vorm van stabiliteit is er in deze moderne wereld? Ik zeg niet dat de Amerikanen het recht hebben om hun macht op deze wijze te gebruiken. Niettemin, dat is hoe ze het doen. Het is niet hetzelfde als imperialisme. Integendeel, het is een poging om onafhankelijke staten te creëren door dictators te verwijderen.
Irak is met zijn met artificiële grenzen een product van het kolonialisme. Zijn de Amerikanen niet gedoemd om te falen in hun nation-building aldaar?
Ik hoop het niet maar het is wel waarschijnlijk voor de redenen waarnaar je verwijst. Irak is een volkomen artificiële staat net zoals België. In een regio die de natiestaat niet heeft gekend is het zeer onwaarschijnlijk om te slagen. Mijn eigen mening is dat de correcte benadering tegenover Irak is om het op te splitsen in een Koerdisch, Sjiitisch en Soennitisch gedeelte.
U bent Wagner-kenner. De Vlaamse Opera gaat Wagners ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ (de Ring-cyclus) opvoeren. Momenteel wordt Das Rheingold vertoond. De regisseur heeft echter de context van de Germaanse mythologie overboord gegooid en plaats de opera in een geglobaliseerde internetgemeenschap. Wat denkt u van zo’n interpretatie?
De gewoonte om de opera’s van Wagner te verminken is nu zodanig diep in onze cultuur verankerd dat men niet kan hopen dat ze vertoond zullen worden zoals hij het bedoeld heeft. Indien men de Ring-cyclus ontdoet van de openbaring van de natuur, de jager-verzamelaar gemeenschap, de akkerbouw en de rol van de goden daarin, dan neem je de structuur van het muziekdrama weg. De Ring-cyclus heeft vele betekenissen maar het heeft deze omdat het ook een letterlijke betekenis heeft. Als je de letterlijke betekenis vernietigt, vernietig je ook al de andere.
De regisseur [Ivo Van Hove] zal zich waarschijnlijk verdedigen door te stellen dat hij Wagner vertaalt naar de moderne wereld van vandaag.
De Ring-cyclus is een schitterend portret van de moderne wereld, net omdat het gesitueerd is in mythische tijden. Door deze mythische tijden te creëren maakt Wagner het mogelijk om onze eigen toestand te zien. Als je het vastpint op het huidige moment van de internetcultuur, dan verlies je die mythische tijd en verlies je die eerste moderne betekenis zodat het morgen al verouderd zal zijn.
Scruton in het Nederlands:
Roger Scruton heeft een uitzonderlijk hoogstaand oeuvre van meer dan 30 boeken geschreven waarbij hij diepgang combineert met breedte: of hij nu schrijft over de dreiging van de islam, over Westerse filosofie, over het conservatisme, over esthetica, over moderne cultuur en zelfs over seksuele begeerte, het is steeds met een professionalisme dat de specialist versteld doet staan.
De betekenis van het conservatisme (Edmund Burke Lezing I, Aspekt, 2001)
Voor de Edmund Burke Stichting sprak Scruton over zijn eigen conservatieve overtuiging en zijn ervaring met mei ’68. Een ideale inleiding met bibliografie.
Het Westen en de islam – Over globalisering en terrorisme (Houtekiet, 2003)
De botsing met de islam dwingt ons, aldus Scruton, om grondig na te denken over de fundamenten van onze politieke ordening.
Moderne cultuur – Een gids voor kritische mensen (Agora, 2003)
Tegenover de richtingloze moderne cultuur plaatst Scruton het spirituele houvast dat onze traditie biedt en houdt hij een warm pleidooi voor ‘hoge cultuur’.
Andere: Filosofisch denken – Een handleiding voor nieuwsgierige mensen (Bijleveld, 2000). In de reeks ‘Kopstukken Filosofie’ verschenen tevens vertalingen van zijn werken over Spinoza en Kant (Lemniscaat, 2000).
Meer informatie op Scrutons website.
00:15 Publié dans Philosophie, Réflexions personnelles, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : théorie politique, grande-bretagne, angleterre, conservatisme, nationalisme, europe, affaires européennes | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
lundi, 30 août 2010
Roy Campbell
Roy Campbell
Roy Campbell was born in October 1902 in the Natal District of South Africa. He enjoyed an idyllic childhood, growing up in South Africa and being imbued as much with Zulu traditions and language as with his Scottish heritage. He showed early talent as an artist but an interest in literature including poetry soon became predominant.
In 1918 he traveled to England to attend Oxford where by this time he was an agnostic with a love for the Elizabethan literature. Campbell’s friendship with the composer William Walton at Oxford brought him into contact with the literati including T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells and Wyndham Lewis. He was by now reading Freud, Darwin and Nietzsche, and had a distaste for Anglo-Saxonism and the ‘drabness of England’ and found an affinity with the Celts. He also identified with the Futurist movement in the arts. Campbell writes at this time in a manner suggesting the Classicism of Hulme, Lewis, Pound, and the Vorticists.
Art is not developed by a lot of long-haired fools in velvet jackets. It develops itself and pulls those fools wherever it wants them to go . . . Futurism is the reaction caused by the faintness, the morbid wistfulness of the symbolists. It is hard, cruel and glaring, but always robust and healthy.
Campbell continues by describing the new art in Nietzschean and Darwinian terms of struggle, survival and victory, but also suggesting something of his own colonial character:
It is art pulling itself together for another tremendous fight against annihilation. It is wild, distorted, and ugly, like a wrestler coming back for a last tussle against his opponent. The muscles are contorted and rugged, the eyes bulge, and the legs stagger. But there it is, and it has won the victory.
Campbell escaped from England’s ‘drabness’ to Provence where he worked on fishing boats and picked grapes. Despite his agnosticism he was impressed by the simple faith of the peasants, and started writing poems of a religious nature such as Saint Peter of the Candles—the Fisher’s Prayer, which took ten years to complete and portrays Campbell’s spiritual odyssey He returned to London in 1921, married Mary Garman, and became highly regarded among the Bloomsbury coterie who were impressed with his rough manners and hard drinking.
His wife inspired his first epic poem The Flaming Terrapin, written while the couple lived for over a year at a remote Welsh village where their first daughter was born. T. E. Lawrence was immediately impressed with the poem and took it to Jonathan Cape for publication. This established Campbell’s reputation as a poet.
Nietzsche, Christ, & the Heroic Poet
The Flaming Terrapin is a combination of Christianity and Nietzsche. In a letter to his parents Campbell sought to explain the symbolism as being founded on Christ’s statement: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is, hewn down and cast into fire,” and “Ye are the salt of the earth but if that salt shall have lost its savor it shall he scattered abroad and trodden under the feet of men.”
Campbell now realized that Christ, was the first to “proclaim the doctrine of heredity and survival of the fittest,” and that his “aristocratic outlook” was misunderstood by Nietzsche as being a religion of the weak. World War I had destroyed the best breeding stock and demoralized humanity. The Russians for example had succumbed to Bolshevism. But Campbell hoped that a portion might have become ennobled from the suffering.
He continued to explain that the deluge in The Flaming Terrapin represents the World War, and that the Noah family represents “the survival of the fittest,” triumphing over the terrors of the storm to colonize the earth. The terrapin in eastern tradition is the tortoise that represents “strength, longevity, endurance and courage” and is the symbol of the universe. It is this “flaming terrapin” that tows the Ark, and wherever he crawls upon the earth creation blossoms forth. He is “masculine energy” and where his voice roars man springs forth from the soil. His acts of creation are born from “action and flesh in one clean fusion.”
The poem published in 1924 in Britain and the USA received critical acclaim from the press as a fresh and youthful breath, as breaking free from both the banalities of the past and from the skeptical nihilism of the new generation. Campbell and his family returned to South Africa where he was welcomed as a celebrity. Here Campbell lectured on Nietzsche, and praised Nietzsche’s condemnation of the meanness of modern democracy. In this lecture Campbell also attacked the ascendancy of technology, stating that the rush to progress and enthronement of science during the previous century has outpaced mans’ mental and moral faculties and that man has becoming suddenly “lost.”
All those useful mechanical toys which man primarily invented for his own convenience have begun to tyrannize every moment of his life.
This was a theme that concerned Campbell throughout his life. In a poem written a year later entailed The Serf, Campbell proclaimed the tiller of the soil as “timeless” as he “plows down palaces and thrones and towers.” The tiller of the soil, states a hopeful Campbell, endures through eternity while the cycles of history rise and fall around him. This gives a sense of permanence in a constantly shifting world.
His poem in honor to his wife Dedication to Mary Campbell is Nietzschean in theme but also a criticism of his fellow South Africa, referring to the poet as “living by sterner laws,” as not concerned with their commerce, and as worshiping a god “superbly stronger than their own.”
Estranged from South Africans
In 1925 he became editor of Voorslag and was closely associated with William Plomer whose first novel Turbott Wolfe involves inter-racial marriage. However, despite their friendship and Campbell’s disdain for the racial situation in South Africa he reviewed Plomer’s novel and found it having “a very strong bias against the white colonists.” Nevertheless, Campbell was not impressed by what he considered as white South Africa, “reclining blissfully in a grocer’s paradise on the labor of the natives.”
Campbell resigned from editorship after the publisher’s interference. Some of Campbell’s best poems written in South Africa at this time are considered to be among his best. To a Pet Cobra returns to Nietzschean themes, describing poets in heroic terms, the Zarathustrian solitary atop the mountain peaks.
There shines upon the topmost peak of peril
There is not joy like them who fight alone
And in their solitude a tower of pride
Bloomsbury & Provence
On their return to Britain Campbell and his wife were introduced to the Bloomsbury coterie, including the poetess Vita Sackville-West her husband the novelist Harold Nicolson, Virginia and Leonard Wolfe, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, et al. The robust Campbell found their refined manners, pervasive homosexuality, and pretentiousness sickening, writing in Some Thoughts on Bloomsbury that his own voice is the only one he likes to hear when around all the “clever people.” Several years later in The Georgiad he satirizes the dinner parties of Bloomsbury where wishing to stop the ‘din’ of his ‘dizzy’; head he imagines stuffing his ears with meat and bread, and wishes the diners would choke on their food that their chattering would be halted.
In 1928 the Campbells returned to Provence. The atmosphere was altogether different from England and the wealthy socialist intelligentsia from which he sought escape. The Campbells fully involved themselves in the community, celebrated the harvest feasts, and welcomed the local folk into their home. Campbell became a celebrated figure in the dangerous sport of “water jousting.” He also assisted in the ring at bullfights. Campbell found in the customs and culture of the Provencal villagers stability and permanence in a changing world obsessed by science and “progress.” His own aesthetics, at the basis of his rejection of liberalism and socialism, was a synthesis of the romanticism of Provence and the Classicism of the Graeco-Roman. He admired Caesar and the stoicism and martial ethos of the ancients. His ideal was a combination of aesthete and athlete.
In Taurine Provence, published in 1932 Campbell writes of this:
So men in whom the heroic principle works will be driven by their very excess of vitality to flaunt their defiance in the face of death or danger, as in the modern arena.
Campbell, freed from the English intelligentsia, now renewed his attack with fury. Writing in 1928 in Scrutinies by Various Writers, he states that the dominant philosophy of the contemporary writer is dictated by “fear of discomfort, excitement or pain than by love of life.” His attack on the “sex-socialism” of Bloomsbury as being flabby and effete is contrasted with his own robust nature that could not fit in with the simpering and decadent atmosphere of the intellectual. Following on from Wyndham Lewis’ scathing attack on Bloomsbury, The Apes of God, which Campbell enjoyed immensely, Campbell wrote The Georgiad in 1931, as his own broadside. This would bring against him the mixture of condemnation and silence that the intellectual coterie had been using against Wyndham Lewis.
The Georgiad expresses Campbell’s disdain for the way Bloomsbury makes sickly everything it touches. Campbell compares his own ‘hate’ with that of their “dribbles.”
Like lukewarm bilge out of a running leak
Scented with lavender and stale cologne
Lest by its true effluvium should be known
The stagnant depth of envy that you swim in,
Who hate like gigolos and fight like women.
Bulwark of Christendom
In 1933 the Campbells left Provence for Spain due to financial hardship, despite the success of Campbell’s acclaimed volume of poems Adamastor, published in both the USA and England. This was the final work to be well-received from the Bloomsbury crowd, while his Georgiad received what The Times Literary Supplement was to recall in 1950 as a “conspiracy of silence.”
The Campbells arrived at Barcelona where a right-wing electoral victory resulted in strikes and violence by the anarchists and where machine guns were much in evidence on the streets. However, the Campbells were greatly impressed by the traditional Catholic culture.
Campbell described himself for the first time as a “Catholic” in his 1933 autobiography Broken Record, attacking both English Protestantism as “a cowardly form of atheism” and the Freudianism that pervaded the Bloomsbury progressives. He contrasted this with the “traditional human values” that continued to form the basis of Spanish culture. Broken Record was a break with modernism, but still lacked a coherent philosophy.
Despite the reference to Catholicism, Campbell had not yet converted, but spiritual questions had long occupied him, with an interest in Mithraism emerging in Provence. This cult was still to be seen in the shrines of Provence. That it was the religion most favored by the Roman legions, with its strong martial ethos, together with the mythos of the bull, appealed to Campbell.
However, he had also been strongly impressed with the faith and traditionalism of the fishermen and farmers among whom he had been so popular in Provence. His Mithraic Sonnets are a reflection of Campbell’s own spiritual odyssey beginning with Mithras and ending with the triumph of Christ, a mixture of the two religions. The Mithraic conquering sun. Sol Invictus, the byword of the Roman legions, becomes transmogrified as the Sun of the Son of God, “the shining orb” reflecting as a mirrored shield the image of Christ. It is with these vague feelings towards Christianity and Catholic culture that the Campbells moved south to the rural village of Altea in 1934.
Campbell continued to sing the song of Catholicism in martial terms, of the solar Christ as “captain” winning the battle of faith. Spain breathes its Catholic tradition and in The Fight Campbell writes again with a martial flavor, an aerial dog-fight for Campbell’s soul; his “red self” of atheism shot down by the “white self” of the Solar Christ, “the unknown pilot.” At Altea, Campbell was again impressed with the “freshness, bravery and reverence” of the people Under such an impress the whole Campbell family, actually at the initiative of his wife, converted in 1935, received by the village priest Father Gregorio.
His daughter Anna related many years later, that for Campbell, Spain was the last country left in Europe that was still a pastoral society while much of the rest had become industrialized under the impress of Protestantism. Such was Campbell’s aversion to machinery that he never learnt to drive or even used a typewriter.
At this time Campbell wrote Rust. The rust of time that brings ruin to the intentions of those who would industrialize and modernize:
So there, and there it gnaws, the Rust,
Shall grind their pylons into dust . . .
Lackeys of Capitalism
Campbell’s political outlook becomes coherent with his religious conversion. An article published in 1935 in the South African magazine The Critic shows just how clear Campbell’s knowledge of politics now was:
The artist as romantic ‘rebel’ is the tamest mule imaginable. He dates from the industrial era and has been politicized to play into the hands of the great syndicates and cartels. First by dogmatizing immorality, breaking up the “Family,” that one definitive unit that have withstood the whole effort of centuries to enslave, dehumanize and mechanize the individual, thereby cheapening and multiplying labor. It is the “Intellectual” which had been chiefly politicized into selling his fellow mates to capitalism, whether the capitalism be disguised as a vast inhuman state [as in the USSR under communism] or whether a gang of individuals. The last century has seen more class-wars, and wars between generations, than any other period. They have been deliberately fostered by capitalism, of which bolshevism is merely an anonymous form. Divide and rule, said Cicero: encourage your slaves to quarrel and your authority will be supreme. A thousand artists and reformers with the highest ideals have leaped ignorantly and romantically into these rackets, and by means of causing hate between man and woman, father and son, class and class, white and black, almost irretrievably embroiled the human individual in profitless, exhausting struggles which leave him at the mercy of the unscrupulous few.
In 1936 Campbell met British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, at the suggestion of Wyndham Lewis. Although Campbell declined to join Mosley as British Fascism’s official poet, his poetry was to appear in Mosley’s magazines both before and after the War.
Toledo, the Sacred City
The Campbells next moved to Toldeo, which had been Spain’s capital under Charles V during the Holy Roman Empire. The city was isolated and timeless, medieval, full of churches, monasteries, convents, and shrines. The old Fortress, the Alcazar, designed to play a pivotal role in the defense of Christendom against Bolshevism, served as a military academy. The city was full of priests, nuns, monks, and soldiers, a combination of the religious, the military, and the traditional that prompted Campbell to call Toldeo the “sacred city of the mind.”
The assumption to power of the Left-wing Popular Front resulted in the release of communist and anarchist revolutionaries from gaol amidst increasing political violence in Madrid and Barcelona and street fighting between Left-wing and Right-wing factions. Churches were now being desecrated and destroyed throughout Spain. The violence reached Toledo where priests and monks were attacked and a church set ablaze.
The Campbells sheltered several Carmelite monks in their home. Campbell, well known for his anti-Bolshevik views and for his faith, was severely beaten by Government “red” guards and paraded through the streets to police headquarters. His gypsy friend, with whom he was riding at the time of his capture, “Mosquito” Bargas, was murdered at the time of the arrest. Campbell was probably spared this fate by being a foreigner. In his tribute to his friend In Memoriam of Mosquito, Campbell writes with typical stoicism and faith when beaten bloody and dragged through Toledo:
I never felt such glory
As handcuffs on my wrists.
My body stunned and gory
With tooth marks on my wrists . . .
While Spain was on the verge of civil war the Campbells were confirmed into the Church by Cardinal Goma, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, in a secret ceremony.
In July 1938 the Government’s red guards killed parliamentary opposition leader Calvo Sotel, the leader of the monarchists. Four days later the military under General Franco revolted against the Government to restore order and liberty of worship. With the Alcazar being a military academy, Toldeo was easily taken by Nationalist troops, and peasants from the surrounding countryside fled to the city for refuge. The Government militia from Madrid prepared to attack Toledo, and the Alcazar was bombed and shelled. The Campbells hid the archives of the Carmelite monks at their home for the duration of the civil war.
Seventeen Carmelite monks were herded into the streets by the red forces and shot. Among them was the Campbell’s father confessor who died with a smile and the shout of “Long live Christ’ Long live Spain!” (Father Easebio who had received the Campbells into the Church was also killed).
In Campbell’s excursion into the city he came across the Carmelites lying in the street and found the bodies of the Marista monks. Smeared in their blood on a wall was: “Thus strike and Cheka,” a reference to the Soviet secret police. In the city square religious artifacts from churches and private homes were tossed onto bonfires.
In the besieged Alaczar were 1000 soldiers and 700 civilians, mostly women and children. Under the Command of Colonel Moscardo they held out, even as the Colonel’s 24-year-old son Louis, captured by the Red forces, was compelled to telephone his father and say that he would be shot unless Alcazar was surrendered. In an epic of heroism and martyrdom that helped make Alcazar a shrine to this day the Colonel replied to his son: “Commend your soul to God, shout ‘Viva Espana!’ And die like a hero. The Alcazar will never surrender.”
The Campbells left Spain and returned to London. They felt isolated in England where most of the literati supported the “Left” in the Spanish civil war. The family soon moved to a fishing village in Portugal, a nation that retained the same spirit of faith and tradition as Spain.
Campbell returned to Spain as a correspondent for the British Catholic newspaper The Tablet and was given safe conduct to the Madrid front. His desire to enlist in the Nationalist forces was unsuccessful as the Nationalist authorities were insistent that he could do more good for the cause as a writer. He was decorated for saving life under fire on multiple occasions, met Franco, and was present at the Nationalist victory parade in Madrid.
The Civil War was to result in the murder of 12 bishops. 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks, and around 300 nuns. George Orwell who had gone to Spain along with others of the literati to fight with the Reds, was to remark that, “Churches were pillaged everywhere as a matter of course in six months in Spain I only saw two undamaged churches” (Homage to Catalonia).
Flowering Rifle
Campbell’s epic saga Flowering Rifle is a detailed explanation of his poetical credo, a tribute to his Catholicism, to Spain’s faith and martyrdom and also a condemnation of the British intelligentsia. It his introductory note Campbell explains that “humanitarianism” is the “ruling passion” of the British intelligentsia which
sides automatically with the Dog against the Man, the Jew against the Christian, the black against the white, the servant against the master, the criminal against the judge.
As a form of “moral perversion” it was natural that such humanitarians sided with Bolshevik mass murderers. The poem begins with a description of the (fascist) salute, the “opening palm, of victory” the sign, of “palms triumphant foresting the day.” By contrast is the clenched fist of communism, “a Life-constricting tetanus of fingers,” the sign of an “outworn age” under which “all must starve under the lowest Caste.” The Bloomsbury intelligentsia represents the connection between capitalism and communism. Behind these stand “the Yiddisher’s convulsive gold”: one of many allusions to the prominent role played by Jews in Communism and in the International Brigades.
Spain is heralded as a resurrected nation that might show the rest of Europe the path to regeneration and stand against Bolshevism “which no godless democracy could quell.” The martyrs of the Nationalist cause are described in mystical terms, each death “a splinter of the Cross,” each body building a Cathedral to the sky. Nobility is achieved through suffering and sacrifice, as Christ, the “Captain” suffered. But when suffering and sacrifice are eliminated from life mankind is “shunned by the angels as effete baboons.”
Primo de Rivera, the charismatic young leader of the Falangists who had been shot without trial while in the custody of the Leftist Government, was similarly eulogized:
Whose phoenix blood in generous libation
With fiery zest rejuvenates the nation . . .
The Marxist deaths on the other hand were vacuous, for their gods are economics, science, gold, and sex, and as exponents of abortion and birth control they are the essence of anti-life. But capitalism, is just as much a debasement of man, as communism:
To cheapen thus for slavery and hire
The racket of the Invert and the Jew
Which is through art and science to subdue.
Humiliate, and to pulp reduce
The Human Spirit for industrial use
Whether by Capital or by Communism
It’s all the same despite their seeming schisms
Those who are debased the most are, under democracy, elevated to positions of honor and state, elected by the voting masses who are mesmerized by the media and the literati, the politicians hang about the League of Nations
That sheeny club of communists and masons
He bombs the Arabs, when his Jews invade.
Britannia’s trident had become a “graveyard spade” while condemning Germany and Italy. “Who from the dead have raised more vital forces…” Franco, Mussolini, and Portugal’s Salazar had “muzzled up the soul destroying lie” of communism, and as Spain had shown, victory would come through nationhood, not League sanctions, wealth or arms. Meanwhile Britain shunned its unbought men, such as Campbell who brings “the tidings that Democracy is dead.”
When the Campbells traveled to Italy in 1938 the exiled Spanish king Alfonso XIII, who was greatly impressed with Flowering Rifle, cordially greeted them. Of course the British literati were outraged, and even some Catholics felt the poem lacked “charity.”
War Service
Campbell and his wife returned to Toledo in 1939, the Nationalists having triumphed. But there was now widespread famine. Mary opened a soup kitchen and refurbished the damaged chapel, and both literally gave their clothes away to help the distressed inhabitants. As the world war approached Campbell considered that there would be two great contending forces: Fascism and Communism. With the exception of what he considered to be a pagan orientation in Germany, the Fascist states were eminently Christian and allowed Christians the right to live, whereas Bolshevism simply killed and degraded everything, being the enemy of every form of religion.
However, despite his antagonism to the English bourgeoisie and democratic Britain, Campbell always had an admiration for the heroic spirit of the British Empire and a feeling for those Britons facing an enemy. He sought to enlist, although under no illusions about the justice of the Allied cause. His animosity by this time was against all systems, fascism, democracy, and bolshevism, which he dubbed as Fascidemoshevism.
His ideal was not the cumbersome state of any of these systems but that of small, self-reliant and co-operating, family based communities, like those he had experienced in Provence, Spain, and Portugal.
In the Moon of Short Rations Campbell considered the Allied cause to be that of both socialism and the multi-national corporations, twin figures of a universal sameness. He saw that the post-war world would be ever more depersonalized and mechanical. Campbell could not sit still or take a soft option as a number of his pro-war Left-wing intellectual accusers were doing while Britons marched to war. He lampooned these hypocrites such as Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis who had a job in the Ministry of Information, when they attacked his “fascism,” and he wrote The Volunteer’s Reply to the Poet stating:
It will be the same, but a bloody sight worse . . .
Since you have a hand in the game . . .
You coin us the catchwords and phrases
For which to be slaughtered . . .
However, because of his age and a bad hip Campbell, had to be content with the home guard until 1942 when he was recruited into the Army Intelligence Corps due to his skills in languages. Britain in wartime had in Campbell’s view awakened from its “drabness” to become again a “warrior nation.” Campbell was popular with the troops as a “grandfatherly” figure, and was stationed in East Africa. Contracting malaria and with a deteriorating hip condition necessitating the use of a cane, he was discharged with an “excellent military record”
The Post-War World
The England of the post-war years returned to its drab routine and worse still for Campbell, the prospects of an all-consuming welfare state. Campbell soon went back into fighting mode against the Left-wing poets with The Talking Bronco (a name that Spender had applied to him). Even Vita Sackville-West, calling Campbell “one of our most considerable living poets” acclaimed this volume. Desmond McCarthy writing in The Sunday Times regarded Campbell as “the most democratic poet,” not politically, but in his feeling for the common man and for the common soldier. Others were of course outraged. Cecil Day-Lewis believed Campbell should be sacked as a “fascist” from the job he now had as producer of the BBC talk programs, since he was not fit to “direct any civilized form of cultural expression.”
Campbell was horrified by the Allied victory that had placed half of Europe under the USSR. However, he was equally horrified by the rest of the world falling under the dominion of the multinational corporations and their creed of global consumerism, or what we today call globalization. For Campbell the Cold War was a contention between two equally internationalist forces.
His daughter Anna wrote in 1999 that Campbell admired all types of ethnic civilization as opposed to the mass conformity of Marxism and the globalization of the likes of MacDonalds and Coca-Cola. His concern was in “everything becoming the same.” He would have been “horrified by what the world has become now” she wrote.
Despite Campbell’s sensitivity to being called a “fascist,” he was unapologetically a man of the “Right,” of tradition and nationalism, and continued to forthrightly expound this position after the war in his poetry and essays. Writing in “A Decade in Retrospect” in the Jesuit journal The Month May 1950, he refers to the “Gaderene stampede” of progress for the want of two sensible standbys (a brake and a steering wheel). In “Tradition and Reaction,” he writes: “A body without reactions is a corpse. So is a Society without Tradition.”
In 1949 Campbell left his job with the BBC to take over the editorship of The Catacomb, founded by his close friend the poet Rob Lyie as a defense of Catholic and Classical traditions against socialism and secularism.
The Catacomb stopped publication in 1951. In 1952 the family moved to Portugal. Before leaving England, Campbell got together with a number of South African literary friends and signed an open letter to the South African Government protesting voting restrictions on the colored population. However, Campbell’s misgivings about the South African situation were not prompted by the liberal desire for a democratic, monocultural state. He feared that antagonism between the races would result in Bolshevism and the destruction of his rustic ideal. With the advent of Black rule, free market capitalism was ushered in on the wings of Marxism and revolution. Today the ANC today calls globalization and trade liberalization the “correct path to Marxism-Leninism.”
In 1954 his views on his native land were given when accepting an honorary doctorate from Natal. In an off the cuff speech, much to the embarrassment of the liberal audience, he defended South Africa against England’s condemnation of apartheid, ridiculing Churchill and Roosevelt, who had sold “two hundred million natives of Europe” to the far worse slavery of bolshevism.
While in the USA on a speaking tour he praised “the two greatest Yanks” Senator McCarthy and General MacArthur.
In April 1957 returning from Spain, Campbell and his wife had a motor accident. Campbell’s neck was broken, and he died at the scene. Mary survived him by 22 years.
Edith Sitwell who converted to Catholicism through the example of the Campbells, remarked: “He died as he had lived, like a flash of lightning.”
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lundi, 23 août 2010
Paganismo y filosofia de la vida en Knut Hamsun y D. H. Lawrence
Paganismo y filosofía de la vida en Knut Hamsun y D.H. Lawrence
Robert STEUCKERS
Robert Steuckers*
El filólogo húngaro Akos Doma, formado en Alemania y los Estados Unidos, acaba de publicar una obra de exégesis literaria, en el que hace un paralelismo entre las obras de Hamsun y Lawrence. El punto en común es una “crítica de la civilización”. Concepto que, obviamente, debemos aprehender en su contexto. En efecto, la civilización sería un proceso positivo desde el punto de vista de los “progresistas”, que entienden la historia de forma lineal. En efecto, los partidarios de la filosofía del Aufklärung y los adeptos incondicionales de una cierta modernidad tienden a la simplificación, la geometrización y la “cerebrización”. Sin embargo, la civilización se nos muestra como un desarrollo negativo para todos aquellos que pretenden conservar la fecundidad inconmensurable de los veneros culturales, para quienes constatan, sin escandalizarse por ello, que el tiempo es plurimorfo; es decir, que el tiempo para una cultura no coincide con el de otra, en contraposición a los iluministas quienes se afirman en la creencia de un tiempo monomorfo y aplicable a todos los pueblos y culturas del planeta. Cada pueblo tiene su propio tiempo. Si la modernidad rechaza esta pluralidad de formas del tiempo, entonces entramos irremisiblemente en el terreno de lo ilusorio.
Desde un cierto punto de vista, explica Akos Doma, Hamsun y Lawrence son herederos de Rousseau. Pero, ¿de qué Rousseau? ¿Quién que ha sido estigmatizado por la tradición maurrasiana (Maurras, Lasserre, Muret) o aquél otro que critica radicalmente el Aufklärung sin que ello comporte defensa alguna del Antiguo Régimen? Para el Rousseau crítico con el iluminismo, la ideología moderna es, precisamente, el opuesto real del concepto ideal en su concepción de la política: aquél es antiigualitario y hostil a la libertad, aunque reivindique la igualdad y la libertad. Antes de la irrupción de la modernidad a lo largo del siglo XVIII, para Rousseau y sus seguidores prerrománticos, existiría una “comunidad sana”, la convivencia reinaría entre los hombres y la gente sería “buena” porque la naturaleza es “buena”. Más tarde, entre los románticos que, en el terreno político, son conservadores, esta noción de “bondad” seguirá estando presente, aunque en la actualidad tal característica se considere en exclusiva patrimonio de los activistas o pensadores revolucionarios. La idea de “bondad” ha estado presente tanto en la “derecha” como en “izquierda”.
Sin embargo, para el poeta romántico inglés Wordsworth, la naturaleza es “el marco de toda experiencia auténtica”, en la medida en que el hombre se enfrenta de una manera real e inmediatamente con los elementos, lo que implícitamente nos conduce más allá del bien y del mal. Wordsworth es, en cierta forma, un “perfectibilista”: el hombre fruto de su visión poética alcanza lo excelso, la perfección; pero dicho hombre, contrariamente a lo que pensaban e imponían los partidarios de las Luces, no se perfecciona sólo con el desarrollo de las facultades de su intelecto. La perfección humana requiere sobre todo pasar por la prueba de lo elemental natural. Para Novalis, la naturaleza es “el espacio de la experiencia mística, que nos permite ver más allá de las contingencias de la vida urbana y artificial”. Para Eichendorff, la naturaleza es la libertad y, en cierto sentido, una trascendencia, pues permite escapar a los corsés de las convenciones e instituciones.
Con Wordsworth, Novalis y Eichendorff, las cuestiones de lo inmediato, de la experiencia vital, del rechazo de las contingencias surgidas de la artificialidad de los convencionalismos, adquieren un importante papel. A partir del romanticismo se desarrolla en Europa, sobre todo en Europa septentrional, un movimiento hostil hacia toda forma moderna de vida social y económica. Carlyle, por ejemplo, cantará el heroísmo y denigrará a la “cash flow society”. Aparece la primera crítica contra el reino del dinero. John Ruskin, con sus proyectos de arquitectura orgánica junto a la concepción de ciudades-jardín, tratará de embellecer las ciudades y reparar los daños sociales y urbanísticos de un racionalismo que ha desembocado en puro manchesterismo. Tolstoi propone una naturalismo optimista que no tiene como punto de referencia a Dostoievski, brillante observador este último de los peores perfiles del alma humana. Gauguin transplantará su ideal de la bondad humana a la Polinesia, a Tahití, en plena naturaleza.
Hamsun y Lawrence, contrariamente a Tolstoi o a Gauguin, desarrollarán una visión de la naturaleza carente de teología, sin “buen fin”, sin espacios paradisiacos marginales: han asimilado la doble lección del pesimismo de Dostoievski y Nietzsche. La naturaleza en éstos no es un espacio idílico propicio para excursiones tal y como sucede con los poetas ingleses del Lake District. La naturaleza no sólo no es un espacio necesariamente peligroso o violento, sino que es considerado apriorísticamente como tal. La naturaleza humana en Hamsun y Lawrence es, antes de nada, interioridad que conforma los resortes interiores, su disposición y su mentalidad (tripas y cerebro inextricablemente unidos y confundidos). Tanto en Hamsun como en Lawrence, la naturaleza humana no es ni intelectualidad ni demonismo. Es, antes de nada, expresión de la realidad, realidad traducción inmediata de la tierra, Gaia; realidad en tanto que fuente de vida.
Frente a este manantial, la alienación moderna conlleva dos actitudes humanas opuestas: 1.º necesidad de la tierra, fuente de vitalidad, y 2.º zozobra en la alienación, causa de enfermedades y esclerosis. Es precisamente en esa bipolaridad donde cabe ubicar las dos grandes obras de Hamsun y de Lawrence: Bendición de la tierra, para el noruego, y El arcoiris del inglés.
En Bendición de la tierra de Hamsun, la naturaleza constituye el espacio el trabajo existencial donde el hombre opera con total independencia para alimentarse y perpetuarse. No se trata de una naturaleza idílica, como sucede en ciertos utopistas bucólicos, y además el trabajo no ha sido abolido. La naturaleza es inabarcable, conforma el destino, y es parte de la propia humanidad de tal forma que su pérdida comportaría deshumanización. El protagonista principal, el campesino Isak, es feo y desgarbado, es tosco y simple, pero inquebrantable, un ser limitado, pero no exento de voluntad. El espacio natural, la Wildnis, es ese ámbito que tarde o temprano ha de llevar la huella del hombre; no se trata del espacio o el reino del hombre convencional o, más exactamente, el acotado por los relojes, sino el del ritmo de las estaciones, con sus ciclos periódicos. En dicho espacio, en dicho tiempo, no existen interrogantes, se sobrevive para participar al socaire de un ritmo que nos desborda. Ese destino es duro. Incluso llega a ser muy duro. Pero a cambio ofrece independencia, autonomía, permite una relación directa con el trabajo. Otorga sentido, porque tiene sentido. En El arcoiris, de Lawrence, una familia vive de forma independiente de la tierra con el único beneficio de sus cosechas.
Hamsun y Lawrence, en estas dos novelas, nos legan la visión de un hombre unido al terruño (ein beheimateter Mensch), de un hombre anclado a un territorio limitado. El beheimateter Mensch ignora el saber libresco, no tiene necesidad de las prédicas de los medios informativos, su sabiduría práctica le es suficiente; gracias a ella, sus actos tienen sentido, incluso cuando fantasea o da rienda suelta a los sentimientos. Ese saber inmediato, además, le procura unidad con los otros seres.
Desde una óptica tal, la alienación, cuestión fundamental en el siglo XIX, adquiere otra perspectiva. Generalmente se aborda el problema de la alienación desde tres puntos de vista doctrinales:
1.º Según el punto de vista marxista e historicista, la alienación se localizaría únicamente en la esfera social, mientras que para Hamsun o Lawrence, se sitúa en la naturaleza interior del hombre, independientemente de su posición social o de su riqueza material.
2.º La alienación abordada a partir de la teología o la antropología.
3.º La alienación percibida como una anomalía social.
En Hegel, y más tarde en Marx, la alienación de los pueblos o de las masas es una etapa necesaria en el proceso de adecuación gradual entre la realidad y el absoluto. En Hamsun y Lawrence, la alienación es un concepto todavía más categórico; sus causas no residen en las estructuras socioeconómicas o políticas, sino en el distanciamiento con respecto a las raíces de la naturaleza (que no es, en consecuencia, una “buena” naturaleza). No desaparecerá la alienación con la simple instauración de un nuevo orden socioeconómico. En Hamsun y Lawrence, señala Doma, es el problema de la desconexión, de la cesura, el que tiene un rango esencial. La vida social ha devenido uniforme, desemboca en la uniformidad, la automatización, la funcionalización a ultranza, mientras que la naturaleza y el trabajo integrado en el ciclo de la vida no son uniformes y requieren en todo momento la movilización de energías vitales. Existe inmediatez, mientras que en la vida urbana, industrial y moderna todo está mediatizado, filtrado. Hamsun y Lawrence se rebelan contra dichos filtros.
Para Hamsun y, en menor medida, Lawrence las fuerzas interiores cuentan para la “naturaleza”. Con la llegada de la modernidad, los hombres están determinados por factores exteriores a ellos, como son los convencionalismos, la lucha política y la opinión pública, que ofrecen una suerte de ilusión por la libertad, cuando en realidad conforman el escenario ideal para todo tipo de manipulaciones. En un contexto tal, las comunidades acaba por desvertebrarse: cada individuo queda reducido a una esfera de actividad autónoma y en concurrencia con otros individuos. Todo ello acaba por derivar en debilidad, aislamiento y hostilidad de todos contra todos.
Los síntomas de esta debilidad son la pasión por las cosas superficiales, los vestidos refinados (Hamsun), signo de una fascinación detestable por lo externo; esto es, formas de dependencia, signos de vacío interior. El hombre quiebra por efecto de presiones exteriores. Indicios, al fin y a la postre, de la pérdida de vitalidad que conlleva la alienación.
En el marco de esta quiebra que supone la vida urbana, el hombre no encuentra estabilidad, pues la vida en las ciudades, en las metrópolis, es hostil a cualquier forma de estabilidad. El hombre alienado ya no puede retornar a su comunidad, a sus raíces familiares. Así Lawrence, con un lenguaje menos áspero pero acaso más incisivo, escribe: “He was the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his own life he would have no drama” (“Era la audiencia eterna, el coro, el espectador del drama; pero en su propia vida, no había drama alguno”); “He scarcely existed except through other people” (“Apenas existía, salvo en medio de otras personas”); “He had come to a stability of nullification” (“Había llegado a una estabilidad que lo había anulado”).
En Hamsun y Lawrence, el Ent-wurzelung y el Unbehaustheit, el desarraigo y la carencia de hogar, esa forma de vivir sin fuego, constituye la gran tragedia de la humanidad de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX. Para Hamsun el hogar es vital para el hombre. El hombre debe tener hogar. El hogar de su existencia. No se puede prescindir del hogar sin autoprovocarse una profunda mutilación. Mutilación de carácter psíquico, que conduce a la histeria, al nerviosismo, al desequilibro. Hamsun es, al fin y al cabo, un psicólogo. Y nos dice: la conciencia de sí es a menudo un síntoma de alienación. Schiller, en su ensayo Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, señalaba que la concordancia entre sentir y pensar era tangible, real e interior en el hombre natural, al contrario que en el hombre cultivado que es ideal y exterior (“La concordancia entre sensaciones y pensamiento existía antaño, pero en la actualidad sólo reside en el plano ideal. Esta concordancia no reside en el hombre, sino que existe exteriormente a él; se trata de una idea que debe ser realizada, no un hecho de su vida”).
Schiller aboga por una Überwindung (superación) de dicha quiebra a través de una movilización total del individuo. El romanticismo, por su parte, considerará la reconciliación entre Ser (Sein) y conciencia (Bewußtsein) como la forma de combatir el reduccionismo que trata de arrinconar la conciencia bajo los corsés de entendimiento racional. El romanticismo valorará, e incluso sobrevalorará, al “otro” con relación a la razón (das Andere der Vernunft): percepción sensual, instinto, intuición, experiencia mística, infancia, sueño, vida bucólica. Wordsworth, romántico inglés, representante “rosa” de dicha voluntad de reconciliación entre Ser y conciencia, defenderá la presencia de “un corazón que observe y apruebe”. Dostoievski no compartirá dicha visión “rosa” y desarrollará una concepción “negra”, donde el intelecto es siempre causa de mal, y el “poseso” un ser que tenderá a matar o a suicidarse. En el plano filosófico, tanto Klages como Lessing retomarán por su cuenta esta visión “negra” del intelecto, profundizando, no obstante, en la veta del romanticismo naturalista: para Klages, el espíritu es enemigo del alma; para Lessing, el espíritu es la contrapartida de la vida, que surge de la necesidad (“Geist ist das notgeborene Gegenspiel des Lebens”).
Lawrence, fiel en cierto sentido a la tradición romántica inglesa de Wordsworth, cree en una nueva adecuación del Ser y la conciencia. Hamsun, más pesimista, más dostoievskiano (de ahí su acogida en Rusia y su influencia en los autores llamados ruralistas, como Vasili Belov y Valentín Rasputín), nunca dejará de pensar que desde que hay conciencia, hay alienación. Desde que el hombre comienza a reflexionar sobre sí mismo, se desliga de la continuidad que confiere la naturaleza y a la cual debiera estar siempre sujeto. En los ensayos de Hamsun, encontramos reflexiones sobre la modernidad literaria. La vida moderna, ha escrito, influye, transforma, lleva al hombre a arrancarlo de su destino, a apartarlo de su punto de llegada, de sus instintos, más allá del bien y del mal. La evolución literaria del siglo XIX muestra una fiebre, un desequilibrio, un nerviosismo, una complicación extrema de la psicología humana. “El nerviosismo general (ambiente) se ha adueñado de nuestro ser fundamental y se ha fijado en nuestra vida sentimental”. El escritor se nos muestra así, al estilo de un Zola, como un “médico social” encargado de diagnosticar los males sociales con objeto de erradicar el mal. El escritor, el intelectual, se embarca en una tarea misionera que trata de llegar a una “corrección política”.
Frente a esta visión intelectual del escritor, el reproche de Hamsun señala la imposibilidad de definir objetivamente la realidad humana, pues un “hombre objetivo” es, en sí mismo, una monstruosidad (ein Unding), un ser construido como si de un mecano se tratase. No podemos reducir al hombre a un compendio de características, pues el hombre es evolución, ambigüedad. El mismo criterio encontramos en Lawrence: “Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part” (“Bien, yo niego absoluta y francamente ser un alma, o un cuerpo, o un espíritu, o una inteligencia, o un cerebro, o un sistema nervioso, o un conjunto de glándulas, o cualquier otra parte de mí mismo. El todo es más grande que las partes”). Hamsun y Lawrence ilustran en sus obras la imposibilidad de teorizar o absolutizar una visión diáfana del hombre. El hombre no puede ser vehículo de ideas preconcebidas. Hamsun y Lawrence confirman que los progresos en la conciencia de uno mismo no conllevan procesos de emancipación espiritual, sino pérdidas, despilfarro de la vitalidad, del tono vital. En sus novelas, son las figuras firmes (esto es, las que están arraigadas a la tierra) las que logran mantenerse, las que triunfan más allá de los golpes de suerte o las circunstancias desgraciadas.
No se trata, en absoluto, repetimos, de vidas bucólicas o idílicas. Los protagonistas de las novelas de Hamsun y Lawrence son penetrados o atraídos por la modernidad, los cuales, pese a su irreductible complejidad, pueden sucumbir, sufren, padecen un proceso de alienación, pero también pueden triunfar. Y es precisamente aquí donde intervienen la ironía de Hamsun o la idea del “Fénix” de Lawrence. La ironía de Hamsun taladra los ideales abstractos de las ideologías modernas. En Lawrence, la recurrente idea del “Fénix” supone una cierta dosis de esperanza: habrá resurrección. Es la idea de Ave Fénix, que renace de sus propias cenizas.
El paganismo de Hamsun y Lawrence
Si dicha voluntad de retorno a una ontología natural es fruto de un rechazo del intelectualismo racionalista, ello implica al mismo tiempo una contestación de calado al mensaje cristiano.
En Hamsun, se ve con claridad el rechazo del puritanismo familiar (concretado en la figura de su tío Han Olsen) y el rechazo al culto protestante por los libros sagrados; esto es, el rechazo explícito de un sistema de pensamiento religioso que prima el saber libresco frente a la experiencia existencial (particularmente la del campesino autosuficiente, el Odalsbond de los campos noruegos). El anticristianismo de Hamsun es, fundamentalmente, un acristianismo: no se plantea dudas religiosas a lo Kierkegaard. Para Hamsun, el moralismo del protestantismo de la era victoriana (de la era oscariana, diríamos para Escandinavia) es simple y llanamente pérdida de vitalidad. Hamsun no apuesta por experiencia mística alguna.
Lawrence, por su parte, percibe la ruptura de toda relación con los misterios cósmicos. El cristianismo vendría a reforzar dicha ruptura, impediría su cura, imposibilitaría su cicatrización. En este sentido, la religiosidad europea aún conservaría un poso de dicho culto al misterio cósmico: el año litúrgico, el ciclo litúrgico (Pascua, Pentecostés, Fuego de San Juan, Todos los Santos, Navidad, Fiesta de los Reyes Magos). Pero incluso éste ha sido aherrojado como consecuencia de un proceso de desencantamiento y desacralización, cuyo comienzo arranca en el momento mismo de la llegada de la Iglesia cristiana primitiva y que se reforzará con los puritanismos y los jansenismos segregados por la Reforma. Los primeros cristianos se plantearon como objetivo apartar al hombre de sus ciclos cósmicos. La Iglesia medieval, por el contrario, quiso adecuarse, pero las Iglesias protestantes y conciliares posteriores han expresado con claridad su voluntad de regresar al anticosmicismo del cristianismo primitivo. En este sentido, Lawrence escribe: “But now, after almost three thousand years, now that we are almost abstracted entirely from the rhythmic life of the seasons, birth and death and fruition, now we realize that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia” (“Pero hoy, después de tres mil años, después que estamos casi completamente abstraídos de la vida rítmica de las estaciones, del nacimiento, de la muerte y de la fecundidad, comprendemos al fin que tal abstracción no es ni una bendición ni una liberación, sino pura nada. No nos aporta otra cosa que inercia”). Esta ruptura es consustancial al cristianismo de las civilizaciones urbanas, donde no hay apertura alguna hacia el cosmos. Cristo no es un Cristo cósmico, sino un Cristo rebajado al papel de asistente social. Mircea Eliade, por su parte, se ha referido a un “hombre cósmico”, abierto a la inmensidad del cosmos, pilar de todas las grandes religiones. En la perspectiva de Eliade, lo sagrado es lo real, el poder, la fuente de vida y de la fertilidad. Eliade nos ha dejado escrito: “El deseo del hombre religioso de vivir una vida en el ámbito de lo sagrado es el deseo de vivir en la realidad objetiva”.
La lección ideológica y política de Hamsun y Lawrence
En el plano ideológico y político, en el plano de la Weltanschauung, las obras de Hamsun y de Lawrence han tenido un impacto bastante considerable. Hamsun ha sido leído por todos, más allá de la polaridad comunismo/fascismo. Lawrence ha sido etiquetado como “fascista” a título póstumo, entre otros por Bertrand Russell que llegó incluso a referirses a su “madness”: “Lawrence was a suitable exponent of the Nazi cult of insanity” (“Lawrence fue un exponente típico del culto nazi a la locura”). Frase tan lapidaria como simplista. Las obras de Hamsun y de Lawrence, sgún Akos Doma, se inscriben en un cuádruple contexto: el de la filosofía de la vida, el de los avatares del individualismo, el de la tradición filosófica vitalista, y el del antiutopismo y el irracionalismo.
1.º La filosofía de la vida (Lebensphilosophie) es un concepto de lucha, que opone la “vivacidad de la vida real” a la rigidez de los convencionalismos, a los fuegos de artificio inventados por la civilización urbana para tratar de orientar la vida hacia un mundo desencantado. La filosofía de la vida se manifiesta bajo múltiples rostos en el contexto del pensamiento europeo y toma realmente cuerpo a partir de la reflexiones de Nietzsche sobre la Leiblichkeit (corporeidad).
2.º El individualismo. La antropología hamsuniana postula la absoluta unidad de cada individuo, de cada persona, pero rechaza el aislamiento de ese individuo o persona de todo contexto comunitario, familiar o carnal: sitúa a la persona de una manera interactiva, en un lugar preciso. La ausencia de introspección especulativa, de conciencia y de intelectualismo abstracto hacen incompatible el individualismo hamsuniano con la antropología segregada por el Iluminismo. Para Hamsun, sin embargo, no se combate el individualismo iluminista sermoneando sobre un colectivismo de contornos ideológicos. El renacimiento del hombre auténtico pasa por una reactivación de los resortes más profundos de su alma y de su cuerpo. La suma cuantitativa y mecánica es una insuficiencia calamitosa. En consecuencia, la acusación de “fascismo” hacia Lawrence y Hamsun no se sostiene en pie.
3.º El vitalismo tiene en cuenta todos los acontecimientos de la vida y excluye cualquier jerarquización de base racial, social, etc. Las oposiciones propias del vitalismo son: afirmación de la vida / negación de la vida; sano / enfermo; orgánico / mecánico. De ahí, que no se pueda reconducirlas a categorías sociales, a categorías políticas convencionales, etc. La vida es una categoría fundamental apolítica, pues todos los hombres sin distinción están sometidos a ella.
4.º El “irracionalismo” reprochado a Hamsun y Lawrence, igual que su antiutopismo, tienen su base en una revuelta contra la “viabilidad” (feasibility; Machbarkeit), contra la idea de perfectibilidad infinita (que encontramos también bajo una forma “orgánica” en los románticos ingleses de la primera generación). La idea de viabilidad choca directamente con la esencia biológica de la naturaleza. De hecho, la idea de viabilidad es la esencia del nihilismo, como ha apuntado el filósofo italiano Emanuele Severino. Para Severino, la viabilidad deriva de una voluntad de completar el mundo aprehendiéndolo como un devenir (pero no como un devenir orgánico incontrolable). Una vez el proceso de “acabamiento” ha concluido, el devenir detiene bruscamente su curso. Una estabilidad general se impone en la Tierra y esta estabilidad forzada es descrita como un “bien absoluto”. Desde la literatura, Hamsun y Lawrence, han precedido así a filósofos contemporáneos como el citado Emanuele Severino, Robert Spaemann (con su crítica del funcionalismo), Ernst Behler (con su crítica de la “perfectibilidad infinita”) o Peter Koslowski. Estos filósofos, fuera de Alemania o Italia, son muy poco conocidos por el gran público. Su crítica a fondo de los fundamentos de las ideologías dominantes, provoca inevitablemente el rechazo de la solapada inquisición que ejerce su dominio en París.
Nietzsche, Hamsun y Lawrence, los filósofos vitalistas o, si se prefiere, “antiviabilistas”, al insistir sobre el carácter ontológico de la biología humana, se opusieron a la idea occidental y nihilista de la viabilidad absoluta de cualquier cosa; esto es, de la inexistencia ontológica de todas las cosas, de cualquier realidad. Buen número de ellos —Hamsun y Lawrence incluidos— nos llaman la atención sobre el presente eterno de nuestros cuerpos, sobre nuestra propia corporeidad (Leiblichkeit), pues nosotros no podemos conformar nuestros cuerpos, en contraposición a esas voces que nos quieren convencer de las bondades de la ciencia-ficción.
La viabilidad es, pues, el “hybris” que ha llegado a su techo y que conduce a la fiebre, la vacuidad, la ligereza, el solipsismo y el aislamiento. De Heidegger a Severino, la filosofía europea se ha ocupado sobre la catástrofe que ha supuesto la desacralización del Ser y el desencantamiento del mundo. Si los resortes profundos y misteriosos de la Tierra o del hombre son considerados como imperfecciones indignas del interés del teólogo o del filósofo, si todo aquello que ha sido pensado de manera abstracta o fabricado más allá de los resortes (ontológicos) se encuentra sobrevalorado, entonces, efectivamente, no puede extrañarnos que el mundo pierda toda sacralidad, todo valor. Hamsun y Lawrence han sido los escritores que nos han hecho vivir con intensidad dicha constante, por encima incluso de algunos filósofos que también han deplorado la falsa ruta emprendida por el pensamiento occidental desde hace siglos. Heidegger y Severino en el marco de la filosofía, Hamsun y Lawrence en el de la creación literaria, han tratado de restituir la sacralidad en el mundo y revalorizar las fuerzas que se esconden en el interior del hombre: desde ese punto de vista, estamos ante pensadores ecológicos en la más profunda acepción del término. El oikos nos abre las puertas de lo sagrado, de las fuerzas misteriosas e incontrolables, sin fatalismos y sin falsa humildad. Hamsun y Lawrence, en definitiva, anunciaron la dimensión geofilosófica del pensamiento que nos ha ocupado durante toda esta universidad de verano. Una aproximación sucinta a sus obras se hacía absolutamente necesaria en el temario de 1996.
________________
* Comentario al libro de Akos Doma, Die andere Moderne. Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence und die lebensphilosophische Strömung des literarischen Modernismus (Bouvier, Bonn, 1995), leído como conferencia en Lombardía, en julio de 1996. Traducción de Juan C. García Morcillo.
[Tomo el artículo del archivo de su fuente primera, la asociación Sinergias Europeas, que editaba el boletín InfoEuropa. Ya no cabalgan.]
00:10 Publié dans Littérature, Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : littérature, lettres, lettres norvégiennes, lettres scandinaves, lettres anglaises, littérature anglaise, littérature norvégienne, littérature scandinave, norvège, angleterre, scandinavie, paganisme, philosophie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 20 juin 2010
Londres, avril 2008
00:10 Publié dans Photos | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : photos, photographies, londres, angleterre | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 15 juin 2010
D. H. Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence |
Ex: http://www.oswaldmosley.com/ D.H. Lawrence 1885-1930 is acknowledged as one of the most influential novelists of the 20th Century. He wrote novels and poetry as acts of polemic and prophecy. For Lawrence saw himself as both a prophet and the harbinger of a New Dawn and as a leader-saviour who would sacrificially accept the tremendous responsibilities of political power as a dictator so that humanity could be free to get back to being human. Much of Lawrence's outlook is reminiscent of Jung and Nietzsche but, although he was acquainted with the works of both, his philosophy developed independently. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, a coal-mining town near Nottingham, into a family of colliers. His father was a heavy drinker, and his mother's commitment to Christianity imbued the house with continual tension between the parents. At college, he was an agnostic and determined to become a poet and an author. Having rejected the faith of his mother, Lawrence also rejected the counter-faith of science, democracy, industrialisation and the mechanisation of man. LOVE, POWER AND THE "DARK LORD" For Lawrence capitalism destroyed the soul and the mystery of life, as did democracy and equality. He devoted most of his life to finding a new-yet-old religion that will return the mystery to life and reconnect humanity to the cosmos. Love and power are the two "threat vibrations" which hold individuals together, and emanate unconsciously from the leadership class. With power, there is trust, fear and obedience. With love, there is "protection" and "the sense of safety". Lawrence considers that most leaders have been out of balance with one or the other. That is the message of his novel Kangaroo. Here the Englishman Richard Lovat Somers although attracted to the fascist ideology of "Kangaroo" and his Diggers movement, ultimately rejects it as representing the same type of enervating love as Christianity, the love of the masses, and pursues his own individuality. The question for Somers is that of accepting his own dark master (Jung's Shadow of the repressed unconscious). Until that returns no human lordship can be accepted: "He did not yet submit to the fact of what he HALF knew: that before mankind would accept any man for a king. Before Harriet would ever accept him, Richard Lovat as a lord and master he, this self-same Richard who was strong on kingship, must open the doors of his soul and let in a dark lord and master for himself, the dark god he had sensed outside the door. Let him once truly submit to the dark majesty, creaking open his doors to this fearful god who is master, and entering us from below, the lower doors; let himself once admit a master, the unspeakable god: the rest would happen." What is required, once the dark lord has returned to men's souls in place of undifferentiated 'love' is a social order based on a hierarchical pyramid culminating in a dictator. The dictator would relieve the masses of the burden of democracy. This new social order would be based on the balance of power and love, something of a return to the medieval ideal of protection and obedience. The ordinary folk would gain a new worth by giving obedience to the leader, who would in turn assume an awesome responsibility and would lead by virtue of his being "circuited" to the cosmos. Through such a redeeming philosopher-king individuals could reconnect cosmically and assume Heroic proportions through obedience to Heroes. "Give homage and allegiance to a hero, and you become yourself heroic, it is the law of man." HEROIC VITALISM In 1921 he wrote: "I don't believe in either liberty or democracy. I believe in actual, sacred, inspired authority." It is mere intellect, soulless and mechanistic, which is at the root of our problems; it restrains the passions and kills the natural. His essay on Lady Chatterley's Lover deals with the social question. It is the mechanistic, arising from pure intellect, devoid of emotion, passion and all that is implied in the blood (instinct) that has caused the ills of modern society. "This again is the tragedy of social Itfe today. In the old England, the curious blood connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant violent, bullying and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood stream. We feel it in Defoe or Fielding. And then in the mean Jane Austen, it is gone...So, in Lady Chatterley's Lover we have a man, Sir Clifford, who is purely a personality, having lost entirely all connection with his fellow men and women, except those of usage. All warmth is gone entirely, the hearth is cold the heart does not humanly exist. He is a pure product of our civilisation, but he is the death of the great humanity of the world." Against this pallid intellectualism, the product the late cycle of a civilisation, writing in 1913 Lawrence posited: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, as the flesh being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds but what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true." The great cultural figures of our time, including Lawrence, Yeats, Pound and Hamsun, were Thinkers of the Blood, men of instinct, which has permanence and eternity. Rightly, the term intellectual became synonymous since the 1930s with the "Left", but these intellectuals were products of their time and the century before. They are detached from tradition, uprooted, alienated bereft of instinct and feeling. The first 'Thinkers of the Blood' championed excellence and nobility, influenced greatly by Nietzsche, and were suspicious, if not terrified of the mass levelling results of democracy and its offspring communism. In democracy and communism, they saw the destruction of culture as the pursuit of the sublime. Their opposite numbers, the intellectuals of the Left, celebrated the rise of mass-man in a perverse manner that would, if communism were universally triumphant, mean the destruction of their own liberty to create above and beyond the state commissariats. Lawrence believed that socialistic agitation and unrest would create the climate, in which he would be able to gather around him "a choice minority, more fierce and aristocratic in spirit" to take over authority in a fascist like coup, "then I shall come into my own." Lawrence's rebellion is against that late or winter phase of civilisation, which the West has entered as, described by Spengler. It is marked by the rise of the city over the village, of money over blood connections. Like Spengler, Lawrence's conception of history is cyclic, and his idea of society organic. The great cultural figures of our time, including Lawrence, Yeats, Pound and Hamsun, were Thinkers of the Blood, men of instinct, which has permanence and eternity. Rightly, the term intellectual became synonymous since the 1930s with the "Left", but these intellectuals were products of their time and the century before. They are detached from tradition, uprooted, alienated bereft of instinct and feeling. The first 'Thinkers of the Blood' championed excellence and nobility, influenced greatly by Nietzsche, and were suspicious, if not terrified of the mass levelling results of democracy and its offspring communism. In democracy and communism, they saw the destruction of culture as the pursuit of the sublime. Their opposite numbers, the intellectuals of the Left, celebrated the rise of mass-man in a perverse manner that would, if communism were universally triumphant, mean the destruction of their own liberty to create above and beyond the state commissariats. Lawrence believed that socialistic agitation and unrest would create the climate, in which he would be able to gather around him "a choice minority, more fierce and aristocratic in spirit" to take over authority in a fascist like coup, "then I shall come into my own." Lawrence's rebellion is against that late or winter phase of civilisation, which the West has entered as, described by Spengler. It is marked by the rise of the city over the village, of money over blood connections. Like Spengler, Lawrence's conception of history is cyclic, and his idea of society organic. RELIGION OLD AND NEW It was in Mexico that he encountered the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, of the Aztecs. Through a revival of this deity and the reawakening of the long repressed primal urges, Lawrence thought that Europe might be renewed. To the USA, he advised that it should look to the land before the Spaniards and the Pilgrim Fathers and embrace the 'black demon of savage America'. This 'demon' is akin to Jung's concept of the Shadow, (and its embodiment in what Jung called the "Devil archetype"), and bringing it to consciousness is required for true wholeness or individuation. Turn to "the unresolved, the rejected", Lawrence advised the Americans (Phoenix). He regarded his novel The Plumed Serpent as his most important; the story of a white women who becomes immersed in a social and religious movement of national regeneration among the Mexicans, based on a revival of the worship of Quetzalcoatl. Looking about Europe for such a heritage, he found it among the Etruscans and the Druids. Yet although finding his way back to the spirituality that had once been part of Europe, Lawrence does not advocate a mimicing of ancient ways for the present time; nor the adoption of alien spirituality for the European West, as is the fetish among many alienated souls today who look at every culture and heritage except their own. He wishes to return to the substance, to the awe before the mystery of life. "My way is my own, old red father: I can't cluster at the drum anymore", he writes in his essay Indians and an Englishman. Yet what he found among the Indians was a far off innermost place at the human core, the ever present as he describes the way Kate is affected by the ritual she witnesses among the followers of Quetzalcoatl. In The Woman Who Rode Away the wife of a mine owner tired of her life leaves to find a remote Indian hill tribe who are said to preserve the rituals of the old gods. She is told that the whites have captured the sun and she is to be the messenger to tell them to return him. She is sacrificed to the sun... It is a sacrifice of a product of the mechanistic society for a reconnection with the cosmos. For Lawrence the most value is to be had in "the life that arises from the blood" THE LION, THE UNICORN AND THE CROWN The problems Lawrence brought under consideration have become ever more acute as our late cycle of Western civilisation draws to a close, dominated by money and the machine. Lawrence, like Yeats, Hamsun, Williamson and others, sought a return to the Eternal, by reconnecting that part of ourselves that has been deeply repressed by the "loathsome spirit of the age".
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vendredi, 30 avril 2010
1812: les Etats-Unis face à l'Angleterre
Mansur KHAN:
1812: les Etats-Unis face à l’Angleterre
La guerre anglo-américaine de 1812 a eu notamment pour cause l’avancée continue de nouveaux colons américains dans la région située entre l’Ohio et le Mississippi. Ce territoire était contesté entre les deux puissances : Britanniques et Américains le convoitaient. Le Président Jefferson avait déjà formulé des menaces en 1807 : « Si l’Angleterre ne nous donne pas satisfaction, comme nous le souhaitons, nous prendrons le Canada qui pourra alors entrer dans l’Union » (1). La clique gouvernementale au pouvoir à Washington à l’époque prévoyait déjà, en cas de guerre avec l’Angleterre, de prendre possession de la Floride orientale et occidentale qui appartenaient encore à l’Espagne (2).
Lorsque la guerre de 1812 fut ultérieurement soumise à une analyse objective, Henry Adams découvrit « … que Timothy Pickering et que les éléments les plus radicaux du parti fédéraliste hostile à la guerre jouèrent un rôle clef dans le scénario, en encourageant les Anglais à poursuivre leur politique commerciale agressive, laquelle, par ricochet, permit aux fauteurs de guerre américains, les « warhawks », les faucons, de mener le pays au conflit ouvert : ils ont manipulé et interprété la politique commerciale et maritime de Jefferson d’une manière perverse et traîtresse … Irving Brant a montré dans sa remarquable biographie de Madison que celui-ci n’avait pas été poussé à la guerre contre ses vues personnelles par Clay, Calhoun et les « warhawks » mais qu’il en avait pris la décision sur base de ses convictions propres » (3).
Les bellicistes ont justifié leur engagement à l’époque par l’argument suivant : il fallait favoriser les exportations de tabac, de coton et d’autres surplus de la production. Mais Washington ne s’est pas contenté dans l’histoire d’écouler ses seuls surplus…
Mansur KHAN.
NOTES :
(1) Gert RAITHEL, Geschichte der Nordamerikanischen Kultur – Vom Puritanismus bis zum Bürgerkrieg 1600-1870, Bd. 1, Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M., 1997, p. 264.
(2) Mansur KHAN, Die Geheime Geschichte der amerikanischen Kriege. Verschwörung und Krieg in der US-Aussenpolitik, Grabert, Tübingen, 2003 (3ième éd.), pp. 1994-223.
(3) Harry Elmer BARNES (éd.), Entlarvte Heuchelei (Ewig Krieg für Ewigen Frieden) – Revision der amerikanischen Geschichtsschreibung, Karl Priester, Wiesbaden, 1961, p. 2 ss.
00:10 Publié dans Histoire | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : histoire, etats-unis, angleterre, grande-bretagne, océan atlantique, 19ème siècle | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 24 mars 2010
Die Islamisierung Grossbritanniens und der Widerstand
Die Islamisierung Großbritanniens und der Widerstand |
Geschrieben von: Nils Hermann |
Europa im Jahre 2010 ist ein Europa der Fronten, die sich langsam aber sicher bilden. In allen europäischen Ländern gibt es große Parallelgesellschaften. In fast allen dieser Länder hat sich aber auch nennenswerter Widerstand gebildet. Ob liberal, konservativ, sozialistisch, regionalistisch oder faschistisch, alle diese Formen treten auf und erzeugen unterschiedliche Wirkungen. In Großbritannien stellen sich vornehmlich drei Parteien dem Problem der Islamisierung. Nach dem Zusammenbruch des Empires wanderten viele Muslime nach Großbritannien aus |
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mercredi, 17 mars 2010
L'oeuvre géopolitique de Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947)
Archives de SYNERGIES EUROPEENNES - 1986
L'oeuvre géopolitique de Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947)
Qui était le géopoliticien britannique Mackinder, génial concepteur de l'opposition entre thalassocraties et puissances océaniques? Un livre a tenté de répondre à cette question: Mackinder, Geography as an Aid to Statecraft, par W.H. Parker. Né dans le Lin-colnshire en 1861, Sir Halford John Mackinder s'est interessé aux voyages, à l'histoire et aux grands événements internationaux dès son enfance. Plus tard, à Oxford, il étu-diera l'histoire et la géologie. Ensuite, il entamera une brillante carrière universitaire au cours de laquelle il deviendra l'impulseur principal d'institutions d'enseignement de la géographie. De 1900 à 1947, il vivra à Londres, au coeur de l'Empire Britannique. Sa préoccupation essentielle était le salut et la préservation de cet Empire face à la montée de l'Allemagne, de la Russie et des Etats-Unis. Au cours de ces cinq décennies, Mackinder sera très proche du monde poli-tique britannique; il dispensera ses conseils d'abord aux "Libéraux-Impérialistes" (les "Limps") de Rosebery, Haldane, Grey et Asquith, ensuite aux Conservateurs regroupés derrière Chamberlain et décidés à aban-donner le principe du libre échange au profit des tarifs préférentiels au sein de l'Empire. La Grande-Bretagne choisissait une économie en circuit fermé, tentait de construire une économie autarcique à l'échelle de l'Empire. Dès 1903, Mackinder classe ses notes de cours, fait confectionner des cartes historiques et stratégiques sur verre destinées à être projetées sur écran. Une oeuvre magistrale naissait.
Une idée fondamentale traversera toute l'oeuvre de Mackinder: celle de la confrontation permanente entre la "Terre du Milieu" (Heartland) et l'"Ile du Monde" (World Island). Cette confrontation incessante est en fait la toile de fond de tous les événe-ments politiques, stratégiques, militaires et économiques majeurs de ce siècle. Pour son biographe Parker, Mackinder, souvent cité avec les autres géopoliticiens américains et européens tels Mahan, Kjellen, Ratzel, Spykman et de Seversky, a, comme eux, appliqué les théories darwiniennes à la géographie politique. Doit-on de ce fait rejetter les thèses géopolitiques parce que "fatalistes"? Pour Parker, elles ne sont nullement fatalistes car elles détiennent un aspect franchement subjectif: en effet, elles justifient des actions précises ou attaquent des prises de position adverses en proposant des alternatives. Elles appellent ainsi les vo-lontés à modifier les statu quo et à refuser les déterminismes.
L'intérêt qu'a porté Mackinder aux questions géopolitiques date de 1887, année où il pro-nonça une allocution devant un auditoire de la Royal Geographical Society qui contenait notamment la phrase prémonitoire suivante: "Il y a aujourd'hui deux types de conqué-rants: les loups de terre et les loups de mer". Cette allégorie avait pour arrière-plan historique concret la rivalité anglo-russe en Asie Centrale. Mais le théoricien de l'anta-gonisme Terre/Mer se révélera pleinement en 1904, lors de la parution d'un papier inti-tulé "The Geographical Pivot of History" (= le pivot géographique de l'histoire). Pour Mackinder, à cette époque, l'Europe vivait la fin de l'Age Colombien, qui avait vu l'ex-pansion européenne généralisée sans résistan-ce de la part des autres peuples. A cette ère d'expansion succédera l'Age Postcolom-bien, caractérisé par un monde fait d'un système politique fermé dans lequel "chaque explosion de forces sociales, au lieu d'être dissipée dans un circuit périphérique d'espa-ces inconnus, marqués du chaos du barba-risme, se répercutera avec violence depuis les coins les plus reculés du globe et les éléments les plus faibles au sein des orga-nismes politiques du monde seront ébranlés en conséquence". Ce jugement de Mackinder est proche finalement des prophéties énoncées par Toynbee dans sa monumentale "Stu-dy of History". Comme Toynbee et Spengler, Mackinder demandait à ses lecteurs de se débarrasser de leur européocentrisme et de considérer que toute l'histoire européenne dépendait de l'histoire des immensités conti-nentales asiatiques. La perspective historique de demain, écrivait-il, sera "eurasienne" et non plus confinée à la seule histoire des espaces carolingien et britannique.
Pour étayer son argumentation, Mackinder esquisse une géographie physique de la Rus-sie et raisonne une fois de plus comme Toynbee: l'histoire russe est déterminée, écrit-il, par deux types de végétations, la steppe et la forêt. Les Slaves ont élu domi-cile dans les forêts tandis que des peuples de cavaliers nomades règnaient sur les espa-ces déboisés des steppes centre-asiatiques. A cette mobilité des cavaliers, se déployant sur un axe est-ouest, s'ajoute une mobilité nord-sud, prenant pour pivots les fleuves de la Russie dite d'Europe. Ces fleuves seront empruntés par les guerriers et les marchands scandinaves qui créeront l'Empire russe et donneront leur nom au pays. La steppe cen-tre-asiatique, matrice des mouvements des peuples-cavaliers, est la "terre du milieu", entourée de deux zones en "croissant": le croissant intérieur qui la jouxte territo-rialement et le croissant extérieur, constitué d'îles de diverses grandeurs. Ces "croissants" sont caractérisés par une forte densité de population, au contraire de la Terre du Mi-lieu. L'Inde, la Chine, le Japon et l'Europe sont des parties du croissant intérieur qui, à certains moments de l'histoire, subissent la pression des nomades cavaliers venus des steppes de la Terre du Milieu. Telle a été la dynamique de l'histoire eurasienne à l'ère pré-colombienne et partiellement aussi à l'ère colombienne où les Russes ont pro-gressé en Asie Centrale.
Cette dynamique perd de sa vigueur au moment où les peuples européens se dotent d'une mobilité navale, inaugurant ainsi la période proprement "colombienne". Les ter-res des peuples insulaires comme les Anglais et les Japonais et celles des peuples des "nouvelles Europes" d'Amérique, d'Afrique Australe et d'Australie deviennent des bastions de la puissance navale inaccessibles aux coups des cavaliers de la steppe. Deux mobilités vont dès lors s'affronter, mais pas immédiatement: en effet, au moment où l'Angleterre, sous les Tudor, amorce la con-quête des océans, la Russie s'étend inexo-rablement en Sibérie. A cause des diffé-rences entre ces deux mouvements, un fossé idéologique et technologique va se creuser entre l'Est et l'Ouest, dit Mackinder. Son jugement rejoint sous bien des aspects celui de Dostoïevsky, de Niekisch et de Moeller van den Bruck. Il écrit: "C'est sans doute l'une des coïncidences les plus frappantes de l'histoire européenne, que la double expansion continentale et maritime de cette Europe recoupe, en un certain sens, l'antique opposition entre Rome et la Grèce... Le Germain a été civilisé et christianisé par le Romain; le Slave l'a été principalement par le Grec. Le Romano-Germain, plus tard, s'est embarqué sur l'océan; le Greco-Slave, lui, a parcouru les steppes à cheval et a conquis le pays touranien. En conséquence, la puissance continentale moderne diffère de la puissance maritime non seulement sur le plan de ses idéaux mais aussi sur le plan matériel, celui des moyens de mobilité".
Pour Mackinder, l'histoire européenne est bel et bien un avatar du schisme entre l'Empire d'Occident et l'Empire d'Orient (an 395), ré-pété en 1054 lors du Grand Schisme op-posant Rome et Byzance. La dernière croi-sade fut menée contre Constantinople et non contre le Turc. Quand celui-ci s'empare en 1453 de Constantinople, Moscou reprend le flambeau de la chrétienté orthodoxe. De là, l'anti-occidentalisme des Russes. Dès le XVIIème siècle, un certain Kridjanitch glo-rifie l'âme russe supérieure à l'âme cor-rompue des Occidentaux et rappelle avec beaucoup d'insistance que jamais la Russie n'a courbé le chef devant les aigles ro-maines. Cet antagonisme religieux fera pla-ce, au XXème siècle, à l'antagonisme entre capitalisme et communisme. La Russie opte-ra pour le communisme car cette doctrine correspond à la notion orthodoxe de fra-ternité qui s'est exprimée dans le "mir", la communauté villageoise du paysannat slave. L'Occident était prédestiné, ajoute Mac-kinder, à choisir le capitalisme car ses reli-gions évoquent sans cesse le salut individuel (un autre Britannique, Tawney, présentera également une typologie semblable).
Le chemin de fer accélerera le transport sur terre, écrit Mackinder, et permettra à la Russie, maîtresse de la Terre du Milieu si-bérienne, de développer un empire industriel entièrement autonome, fermé au commerce des nations thalassocratiques. L'antagonisme Terre/Mer, héritier de l'antagonisme reli-gieux et philosophique entre Rome et Byzan-ce, risque alors de basculer en faveur de la Terre, russe en l'occurence. Quand Staline annonce la mise en chantier de son plan quinquennal en 1928, Mackinder croit voir que sa prédiction se réalise. Depuis la Révo-lution d'Octobre, les Soviétiques ont en ef-fet construit plus de 70.000 km de voies ferrées et ont en projet la construction du BAM, train à voie large et à grande vitesse. Depuis 70 ans, la problématique reste identi-que. Les diplomaties occidentales (et surtout anglo-saxonnes) savent pertinemment bien que toute autonomisation économique de l'espace centre-asiatique impliquerait auto-matiquement une fermeture de cet espace au commerce américain et susciterait une réorganisation des flux d'échanges, le "crois-sant interne" ou "rimland" constitué de la Chine, de l'Inde et de l'Europe ayant intérêt alors à maximiser ses relations commerciales avec le centre (la "Terre du Milieu" proprement dite). Le monde assisterait à un quasi retour de la situation pré-colombienne, avec une mise entre parenthèses du Nouveau Monde.
Pour Mackinder, cette évolution historique était inéluctable. Si Russes et Allemands conjuguaient leurs efforts d'une part, Chinois et Japonais les leurs d'autre part, cela signifierait la fin de l'Empire Britannique et la marginalisation politique des Etats-Unis. Pourtant, Mackinder agira politiquement dans le sens contraire de ce qu'il croyait être la fatalité historique. Pendant la guerre civile russe et au moment de Rapallo (1922), il soutiendra Denikine et l'obligera à concéder l'indépendance aux marges occidentales de l'Empire des Tsars en pleine dissolution; puis, avec Lord Curzon, il tentera de construire un cordon sanitaire, regroupé au-tour de la Pologne qui, avec l'aide française (Weygand), venait de repousser les armées de Trotsky. Ce cordon sanitaire poursuivait deux objectifs: séparer au maximum les Allemands des Russes, de façon à ce qu'ils ne puissent unir leurs efforts et limiter la puissance de l'URSS, détentrice incontestée des masses continentales centre-asiatiques. Corollaire de ce second projet: affaiblir le potentiel russe de façon à ce qu'il ne puisse pas exercer une trop forte pression sur la Perse et sur les Indes, clef de voûte du système impérial britannique. Cette stratégie d'affaiblissement envisageait l'indépendance de l'Ukraine, de manière à soustraire les zones industrielles du Don et du Donetz et les greniers à blé au nouveau pouvoir bolchévique, résolument anti-occidental.
Plus tard, Mackinder se rendra compte que le cordon sanitaire ne constituait nullement un barrage contre l'URSS ou contre l'ex-pansion économique allemande et que son idée première, l'inéluctabilité de l'unité eurasienne (sous n'importe quel régime ou mode juridique, centralisé ou confédératif), était la bonne. Le cordon sanitaire polono-centré ne fut finalement qu'un vide, où Allemands et Russes se sont engouffrés en septembre 1939, avant de s'en disputer les reliefs. Les Russes ont eu le dessus et ont absorbé le cordon pour en faire un glacis protecteur. Mackinder est incontestablement l'artisan d'une diplomatie occidentale et conservatrice, mais il a toujours agi sans illusions. Ses successeurs reprendront ses ca-tégories pour élaborer la stratégie du "con-tainment", concrétisée par la constitution d'alliances sur les "rimlands" (OTAN, OTASE, CENTO, ANZUS).
En Allemagne, Haushofer, contre la volonté d'Hitler, avait suggéré inlassablement le rapprochement entre Japonais, Chinois, Rus-ses et Allemands, de façon à faire pièce aux thalassocraties anglo-saxonnes. Pour étayer son plaidoyer, Haushofer avait repris les arguments de Mackinder mais avait inversé sa praxis. La postérité intellectuelle de Mackinder, décédé en 1947, n'a guère été "médiatisée". Si la stratégie du "contain-ment", reprise depuis 1980 par Reagan avec davantage de publicité, est directement inspirée de ses écrits, de ceux de l'Amiral Mahan et de son disciple Spykman, les journaux, revues, radios et télévision n'ont guère honoré sa mémoire et le grand public cultivé ignore largement son nom... C'est là une situation orwellienne: on semble tenir les évidences sous le boisseau. La vérité serait-elle l'erreur?
Robert STEUCKERS.
W.H. PARKER, Mackinder. Geography as an Aid to Statecraft, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982, 295 p., £ 17.50.
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