Ok

En poursuivant votre navigation sur ce site, vous acceptez l'utilisation de cookies. Ces derniers assurent le bon fonctionnement de nos services. En savoir plus.

vendredi, 08 juillet 2011

Psychopathologie: une introduction phénoménologique

Psychopathologie : une introduction phénoménologique

par Pierre LE VIGAN

Auteur d’un ouvrage de référence sur les personnalités hystériques, Georges Charbonneau, psychiatre, est aussi éditeur et animateur de la revue Le Cercle herméneutique. Il vient de publier un livre qui condense ses travaux et réflexions – et ceux de l’école de phénoménologie psychopathologique – depuis plus de vingt ans. Cette école, parfois aussi appelé psychothérapie existentielle, reste marquée par les noms d’Eugène Minkowski (Traité de psychopathologie), Ludwig Binswanger (Mélancolie et manie, Trois formes manquées de la présence humaine), Hubertus Tellenbach (La mélancolie), Wolfgang Blankenburg (La perte de l’évidence naturelle), Arthur Tatossian (La phénoménologie des psychoses) et quelques autres. En toile de fond c’est le Martin Heidegger d’Être et temps (1927) dont les hypothèses sont sollicitées et en quelque sorte remises au travail.

C’est une entreprise ambitieuse et féconde. Le premier tome de l’ouvrage de Charbonneau est essentiellement consacré aux névroses. Il concerne aussi les personnalités pathologiques. Le second tome est consacré aux psychoses : délire et paranoïa. Il aborde donc les crises du Soi, ce qu’on appelle l’ipséité. L’ouvrage remplit pour l’essentiel son cahier des charges : ouvrir un tableau articulé et dialectique des manifestations psychopathologiques et de leurs significations comme déformation, ou altération, de la présence humaine. Certes, le plan traduit quelques flottements : les dépressions non mélancoliques donc non psychotiques sont ainsi traitées dans le tome II essentiellement consacré aux psychoses; elles eussent été plus à leur place dans le tome I, à côté du chapitre sur la fatigue et ses différentes formes. Sans doute aussi, l’usage répété de certains termes « bricolés » (ruptivité, nostrité, mienneté, chacunité, sienneté…) peut agacer : la ressource de la langue française offre bien des possibilités et c’est la grandeur d’intellectuels généralistes comme Alain Finkielkraut, Luc Ferry ou André Comte-Sponville (ou Ludovic Maubreuil ou Éric Werner) d’énoncer des choses subtiles avec les mots de tout le monde et dans une langue compréhensible par tout homme de bonne volonté. L’usage de mots complexes ou pseudo-innovants vise bien souvent à créer une barrière artificielle, qui n’est autre qu’une barrière sociale de distinction au sens de Pierre Bourdieu, et crée une désagréable atmosphère d’élitisme autoproclamé.

Il n’en reste pas moins que le lecteur aurait tort d’en rester à ce possible et légitime agacement, non plus qu’au fait que le numéro de Krisis sur la psychologie n’est pas cité alors que les proximités de certaines des analyses développées avec celles du livre de Charbonneau sont évidentes et connues de l’auteur. Qu’importe. Krisis veut justement dire jugement. Et ce sont les idées qu’il faut juger. Or, dans le présent ouvrage, l’analyse des malaises dans l’homme, des délires, des décrochages existentiels, des ruptures d’avec le monde commun, de l’hystérie en termes de position dans l’espace, des pathologies de la personnalité en termes d’expérience du monde, et en termes d’analyse de l’humeur  c’est-à-dire le thymique, constituent de vrais points d’appui pour chacun d’entre nous, confronté à notre fragilité d’être-jeté-dans-le-monde. Par ailleurs, des développements de concepts sont bienvenus, tels l’historialité, l’auroréal et le vespéral (ou, pour le dire plus simplement, le matinal et le couchant) qui, pour avoir déjà été analysées (souvent par la sémiotique, avec notamment Jacques Fontanille et Claude Zilberberg) avaient rarement été synthétisés de manière aussi complète et dans une perspective unificatrice. Un livre indispensable pour mieux se comprendre, soi-même et les autres, soi-même avec les autres, soi même jamais tout à fait comme les autres.

Pierre Le Vigan

Georges Charbonneau, Introduction à la psychopathologie phénoménologique, MJWf éditions, diffusion Vrin, tome I, 236 p., 20 €, tome II, 215 p., 20 €.


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

URL to article: http://www.europemaxima.com/?p=1991

vendredi, 10 juin 2011

J. P. Fuss: Erdogan, Meister der Täuschung

Jürgen P. Fuß,

Erdogan - ein Meister der Täuschung

Was Europa von der Türkei wirklich zu erwarten hat

ISBN 978-3937820-16-3 - Verlag Siegfried Bublies

278 Seiten, gebunden, Hardcover, 19,80 euro

Erscheinungstermin: 15 Juni 2011

Mehr als sechs Jahre haben Jürgen P. Fuß und seine Frau in der Türkei gelebt und dabei Land und Leute kennen gelernt. Im April 2004 gründeten sie die erste deutschsprachige Wochenzeitung für die Türkei. In insgesamt 222 Ausgaben berichtete die „Aktuelle Türkei Rundschau" über die Türkei und kommentierte die politischen Ereignisse. Als Herausgeber und Chefredakteure konnten Fuß und seine Frau hautnah miterleben, wie Recep Tayyip Erdogan den Einfluss der islamisch-konservativen AKP (deutsch: Partei für Gerechtigkeit und Entwicklung) immer weiter festigte. Gleichzeitig gelang es Erdogan, seine Machtposition innerhalb und außerhalb der Partei so stark auszubauen, dass er mit einigen ihm treu ergebenen Weggefährten mittlerweile alle Fäden des türkischen Staates in der Hand hält.

Jürgen P. Fuß liefert mit „Erdogan – ein Meister der Täuschung" eine umfassende Biografie des türkischen Machtpolitikers und eine entlarvende Analyse seiner politischen Aktivitäten als Parteivorsitzender der AKP und Ministerpräsident der Türkei.

Bereits 1998 wurde der frühere Istanbuler Bürgermeister Erdogan wegen öffentlichen Zitierens der folgenden Verse zu einer Gefängnisstrafe verurteilt: Die Demokratie ist nur der Zug, auf den wir aufsteigen, bis wir am Ziel sind. Die Minarette sind unsere Bajonette... die Moscheen sind unsere Kasernen." Erst nach einer Verfassungsänderung konnte Erdogan für das türkische Parlament kandidieren und am 11. März 2003 Ministerpräsident werden. Seit dieser Zeit beherrscht Erdogan die hohe Kunst des Verstellens, Verschleierns und Täuschens als erfolgreiche Methode eines schleichenden Machterwerbs. Fuß’ faktenreiche und auf intimer Kenntnis der türkischen Verhältnisse basierende Arbeit zeigt: Erdogan, der aus der radikal-islamischen und autoritären Milli Görüs-Bewegung Erbakans kommt, strebt für die Türkei eine Führungsrolle in Europa, Vorderasien und im Nahen Osten an. Und der Islam soll die alle Lebensbereiche beherrschende Religion werden. Für Fuß gibt es deshalb nur eine zwingende politische Schlußfolgerung: Die Türkei darf nicht Mitglied im europäischen Staatenverbund werden.

Zum Autor:

Jürgen P. Fuß, geboren 1946, studierte Elektrotechnik, Abschluß als Diplom-Ingenieur. Von 1979 bis 2009 Dozent für Betriebswirtschaft an einer Fachhochschule. Herausgeber und Chefredakteur der einzigen deutschsprachigen Wochenzeitung in der Türkei in den Jahren 2004 bis 2009.

Im Februar 2009 verließen Jürgen P. Fuß und seine Frau die Türkei, weil sie nicht länger in einem Land leben wollten, das Recep Tayyip Erdogan nach seinen islamisch-konservativen Vorstellungen umbaut. Hinzu kam, dass das Risiko, ins Visier der Polizei oder der Justiz zu geraten, für die Herausgeber und Chefredakteure der „Aktuellen Türkei Rundschau" immer größer wurde. Eine verantwortungsvolle journalistische Arbeit war nicht mehr möglich. Mittlerweile leben sie an verschiedenen Orten in Europa.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Vorwort

1 Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Kindheit, Jugend, Lehrmeister)
1.1 Erdogan – von ganz unten nach ganz oben
1.2 Erdogans Vorbilder und Lehrer
1.2.1 Wer hat Erdogans Weltbild geprägt?
1.2.2 Milli-Görüs - Meinungsbildung in jungen Jahren
1.2.3 Fazit: Wie Milli-Görüs Erdogan geprägt hat
1.2.4 Said Nursi - Islamischer Vordenker wirkt bis heute
1.2.5 Nursis Kritik an der muslimischen Gemeinschaft
1.2.6 Fethullah Gülen - geistiger Lehrmeister oder mehr?
1.2.7 Erbakans politischer Weg - Lehrstück mit nachhaltiger Wirkung
1.2.8 Erdogans Motive - eine erste Zwischenbilanz

2 Erdogans Weg zur Macht (1994 bis 2002)
2.1 Erdogans erste politischen Schritte (1975 bis 1998)
2.2 Türkei im Aufbruch (1997 bis 2001)
2.3 Die AKP wird Regierungspartei (2001 bis 2002)
2.4 Erdogan wird Regierungschef (2003)
2.5 Regierungsantritt der AKP - ein Sieg der Demokratie?
2.6 Erdogan festigt seine Position
2.7 Keine Frage: Die AKP steht und fällt mit Erdogan

3 Erdogan weckt hohe Erwartungen (2003 bis 2010)
3.1 Wahlversprechen 2002: Alles soll besser werden
3.2 Erdogan verspricht: Wirtschaftlicher Aufschwung
3.2.1 Bruttoinlandsprodukt seit 2002 gestiegen
3.2.2 Inflationsrate weit über dem europäischen Niveau
3.2.3 Grundlegende Probleme des türkischen Arbeitsmarktes nicht gelöst
3.2.4 Bilanz: Türkei wäre wirtschaftlich betrachtet ein schwaches Mitglied in der EU
3.3 Erdogan verspricht: Mehr Demokratie
3.3.1 Rückblick auf sechs Jahrzehnte Demokratie in der Türkei
3.3.2 Das türkische Wahlrecht verzerrt das Wahlergebnis
3.3.3 Stärkt die AKP die Demokratie in der Türkei?
3.4 Erdogan verspricht: Mehr Meinungs- und Pressefreiheit
3.4.1 Die Lage vor dem Regierungswechsel 2002
3.4.2 AKP-Regierung schafft vorübergehend Verbesserungen
3.4.3 Erdogan verändert die Medienlandschaft
3.4.4 Bilanz: Keine Fortschritte, sondern Rückwärtsgang im Medienbereich
3.5 Erdogan verspricht: Rechtsreform und bessere Justiz
3.5.1 Neues Strafvollzugsgesetz - ein Stück Etikettenschwindel
3.5.2 4.000 neue Staatsanwälte und Richter - Justizreform oder: mehr Einfluss für die AKP?
3.5.3 Türkisches Anti-Terrorgesetz – Mehr Rechte für Militär und Polizei
3.5.4 Justizreform führt zu mehr Einfluss durch die Politik
3.6 Bilanz: Hohe Erwartungen kaum erfüllt

4 Erdogans wahre Pläne (ab 2008)
4.1 Will Erdogan eine Türkei nach europäischem Muster?
4.2 Erdogans "Schöne Neue Welt"
4.2.1 Erdogans 1. Plan: Die Entmachtung des türkischen Militärs
4.2.2 Erdogans 2. Plan: Türkische Kolonie Europa
4.2.3 Erdogans 3. Plan: Türkei eine der zehn größten Volkswirtschaften
4.2.4 Erdogans 4. Plan: Weltmacht Türkei
4.2.5 Erdogan auf den Weg zum zweiten Atatürk?
4.2.6 Statt einer Bilanz - Versuch einer Prognose 2023

5 Resümee: Was Europa von der Türkei wirklich zu erwarten hat


Literaturverzeichnis

dimanche, 22 mai 2011

Präventivschlag Barbarossa

Präventivkrieg Barbarossa Stefan Scheil
Präventivkrieg Barbarossa
Fragen, Fakten, Antworten
                
Band 26 der Reihe
Kaplaken.
96 Seiten, kartoniert, fadengeheftet, 8.50 €

ISBN: 978-3-935063-96-8
8,50 EUR
incl. 7 % UST exkl. Versandkosten

Der Historiker Stefan Scheil ist einer der besten Kenner der Diplomatiegeschichte zwischen 1918 und 1945. In mehreren Büchern hat er Entfesselung und Eskalation des II. Weltkriegs analysiert und der platten These widersprochen, Deutschland sei alleinverantwortlich für dessen Ausbruch und Ausweitung. Im vorliegenden kaplaken faßt Scheil seine Studien zum deutschen Angriff auf die Sowjetunion im Jahr 1941 zusammen. Er stellt und beantwortet die Frage, ob es sich um einen Überfall oder einen Präventivkrieg gehandelt habe. Scheil geht in seiner Argumentation von vier Bedingungen aus, die jeden Präventivkrieg grundsätzlich kennzeichnen, und legt sie als Maßstab an das „Unternehmen Barbarossa“ an.

 

 

Scheils Untersuchung mündet in über 50 Fragen, die jeder aufmerksame Leser selbst beantworten kann, bevor Scheil die Antwort gibt. Wer die Argumentation nachvollzieht, wer die Äußerungen und Planungen von sowjetischer Seite liest und den geheimen Aufmarsch der Roten Armee an der Westgrenze Rußlands zur Kenntnis nimmt, kann zuletzt Scheils Fazit nur zustimmen: „Wenn das Unternehmen Barbarossa nicht als Präventivkrieg eingestuft werden kann, hat der Begriff Präventivkrieg seinen Sinn überhaupt verloren.“

 

 

mardi, 17 mai 2011

Le patron, le footballeur et le smicard...

Le patron, le footballeur et le smicard...

http://metapoinfos.hautetfort.com/

"[...]Une partie importante des gens qui travaillent ne vit plus décemment. 30 % de la population active gagne le Smic ou moins. Et, à l’autre extrémité de la société, des patrons touchent des sommes énormes sans justification réelle. Il faut quand même savoir qu’entre 2000 et 2010, l’indice du Cac 40 a été quasiment divisé par deux alors que les rémunérations des grands patrons ont été multipliées par 2,5 !"

 Philippe Villemus, économiste et ancien dirigeant d'entreprise lance le débat sur la juste rémunération du travail dans un essai intitulé Le patron, le footballeur et le smicard, publié aux éditions dialogues. Un sujet de réflexion passionnant à l'heure où les classes moyennes sombrent lentement mais sûrement dans la précarisation...

 

patron - footballeur - smicard.png

 

"Quelle est la juste valeur du travail ? Autrement dit, qu’est-ce qu’une juste rémunération ?
  Comment se forment les revenus du travail ? Les patrons des grands groupes sont-ils justement rémunérés ? Les footballeurs méritent-ils leurs salaires ? Pourquoi sont-ils mieux payés qu’une infirmière, un instituteur ou un paysan ? Le salaire d’un seul homme peut-il valoir celui de mille smicards ?
 Ce livre, vif et original, tente de répondre avec rigueur à ces questions essentielles en explorant la pyramide des rémunérations françaises.
 Cette déroutante exploration, riche en surprises, révèle l’absurdité d’un système où la rareté l’emporte sur l’utilité, la valeur économique et financière sur la valeur sociale et morale, l’intérêt particulier sur l’intérêt général, le copinage sur le mérite. Elle montre que la valeur du travail se déprécie dans la masse des travailleurs pauvres ou précaires qui observent avec dégoût les gains phénoménaux et vulgaires accumulés par les grands patrons et les vedettes du sport ou du spectacle."

 

 

00:10 Publié dans Actualité, Livre, Sociologie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, smic, patronat, football | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

dimanche, 15 mai 2011

G. Faye: Why we fight

Why We Fight

whywesmall_1_1.jpgGuillaume Faye
Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance
Translated by Michael O’Meara
Arktos Media, 2011

People

An ethnic ensemble — biological, historical, cultural — with a territory, its fatherland, in which it is rooted.

‘The people’ — the very term is suspect to the cosmopolitan Left, which sees it as bordering on the politically incorrect — is not any statistical ‘population’; it’s an organic community embracing a transcendent body made up of ancestors, the living, and their heirs. Though marked with a certain spirituality, a people is diachronically rooted in the past and projects itself into the future — it’s submerged in biological and genetic matter, but at the same time it’s a historical, and spiritual, reality.

It’s belonging to a specific people that distinguishes a man and makes him human. Though modern Western egalitarian doctrines reduce peoples to indifferent socioeconomic aggregates, peoples actually constitute the organic bases of the human race; similarly, such doctrines conceive of the ideal man as an individual ‘emancipated’ from his organic attachments — like an undifferentiated cell in a human magma.

It’s necessary to recall, especially for certain Christians, that a people’s attachment is incompatible with Christianity’s present cosmopolitanism. The claim, for example, that ‘I am closer to an African Catholic than I am to a non-Christian European’ is a universalistic claim that relegates a people’s nation to something of secondary significance. This is, indeed, the great drama of European Christianity, marked as it is by Pauline universalism. A Catholic attached to his people and conscious of the biological and cultural dangers threatening them might instead say, ‘I respect all the Christians of the world, but hic et nunc I fight for my people above all, whatever their religion’.

The Jesuit spirit might resolve the contradiction in reference to the Old Testament’s Hebraic tradition: ‘Babel — the mélange of disparate peoples — is a punishment from God, Who wants His peoples to be separate and diverse — humanity is one in Heaven, but multiple on Earth’.

Arab Islam has no difficulty reconciling the notion of people (the ‘Arab nation’) with that of its universalism. The Jews, on their side, have similarly reconciled a ferocious defence of their ethnicity — their singularity — with their religion, however theoretically monotheistic and universalist it may be. At no moment have Judaism and Islam, unlike the Christian Churches today, engaged in doubting, guiltstroking diatribes against ‘xenophobia’ and ethnocentrism. They are not masochistic . . .

* * *

Like every anthropological notion, ‘people’ lacks mathematical rigour. A people doesn’t define itself as a homogeneous biocultural totality, but as a relationship. It’s the product of an organic alchemy that brings various ‘sub-peoples’ together. The Bretons, Catalans, Scots, etc., can be seen thus as the sub-peoples of a larger people — the Europeans.

* * *

We ought to highlight the ambiguity that touches the notion of the people. The universalist ideology of the French Revolution confused the idea of the people with that of an ‘ensemble of inhabitants who jurisdictionally possess nationality’, whatever their origin. Given the facts of mass immigration and naturalisation, the notion of the French people has been greatly diluted (as have the British or German peoples, for the same reason). This is why (without broaching the unresolvable issue of what constitutes a ‘regional people’ or a ‘national people’), it’s advisable to dialectically transcend semantic problems — and affirm the historic legitimacy of a single, European people, historically bound, whose different national families resemble one another in having, for thousands of years, the same ethnocultural and historical origins. Despite national, linguistic, or tribal differences, haven’t African Blacks, even in Europe, been called on by Nelson Mandela or the Senegalese Mamadou Diop to ‘think like one people’? From Nasser to al-Qadhafi, by way of Arafat, haven’t Arabs been urged to see themselves as an Arab people? Why don’t Europeans have the same right to see themselves as a people?

As for ‘regional peoples’, it’s necessary to oppose Left-wing regionalists, self-professed anti-Jacobins and anti-globalists, who unhesitatingly accept the concept of French or American jus soli — who confuse citizens and residents, and who recognise as Bretons, Alsatians, Corsicans, etc., anyone (even of non-European origin) who lives in these regions and chooses to accept such an identity.

* * *

In belonging to a people, its members are emotionally inclined to define themselves as such, which implies political affiliation. For this reason, we say that a people exists at that point where biological, territorial, cultural, and political imperatives come together. But in no case does mere cultural or linguistic attachment suffice in making a people, if they have no common biological roots. Alien immigrants from people X who are installed on the territory of people Y — even if they adopt cultural elements of their host people — are not a part of Y. As De Gaulle thought, there might be minor exceptions for small numbers of compatible (White) minorities, capable of being assimilated, but this could never be the case for, say, French West Indians.

Similarly, in defining the notion of a people, territorial or geopolitical considerations must also be taken into account. A people is not a diaspora: the Jews felt obliged to reconquer Palestine as their ‘promised land’ because, as Theodor Herzl argued, ‘without a promised land, the Jews are just a religious diaspora, a culture, a union, but not a people’.

There’s a good deal of talk today, on the Left and the Right, about people being ‘deterritorialised’. In reality, there’s nothing of the kind. Every healthy people, even if they possess an important diaspora (Chinese, Arabs, Indians, etc.), maintains close relations with its fatherland.

* * *

Modernist gurus have long claimed that the future belongs not to peoples, but to humanity conceived as a single people. Again, there’ll be nothing of the kind. Despite globalisation and in reaction to it, the Twenty-first century will more than ever be a century of distinct peoples. Only Europeans, submerged in the illusions of their decadence, imagine that blood-based peoples will disappear, to be replaced by a miscegenated ‘world citizen’. In reality what is at risk of disappearing are Europeans. Tomorrow will be no twilight of peoples.

On the other hand, the twilight of several peoples is already possible. One often forgets that Amerindians or Egyptians have disappeared — hollowed out internally and overrun. For history is a cemetery of peoples — of weak peoples — exhausted and resigned.

* * *

A caution is necessary here: Right and Left-wing theoreticians of ‘ethnopluralism’, opposed to humanity’s homogenisation, speak of ‘the cause of peoples [3]’, as if every people must be conserved. In reality, the system that destroys peoples — the title of one of my books that was misunderstood by certain intellectuals — only threatens unfit peoples, i.e., present-day Europeans. It also threatens those residu peoples, whose fate is of interest only to museum-keepers. It seems perfectly stupid and utopian to believe that every people can be conserved in history’s formaldehyde. What a pacifistic egalitarian vision.

The main threat to the identity and existence of great peoples occurs, in contrast, through the conjunction of deculturation and the colonising invasion of alien peoples — which we’re presently experiencing. The Western globalist ‘system’ will never threaten strong peoples. Are Arabs, Chinese, or Indians threatened? On the contrary. It reinforces their identity and their desire to conquer, by provoking their reaction to it.

The people in danger — largely because of its own failings — is our people, for reasons as much biological as cultural and strategic. That’s why it’s necessary to replace the egalitarian ideology of ‘the cause of peoples’ with the ‘cause of our people’.

* * *

There are three possible positions: first, peoples don’t exist, or no longer exist — it’s an obsolete category — only humanity counts (the thesis of universalistic egalitarianism); second, all peoples ought to exist and be conserved (the utopian — also egalitarian — ethnopluralist position — completely inapplicable to our age); and third, only strong, wilful peoples can subsist for long historical periods — periods of selection in which only the most apt survive (the voluntarist, realist, inegalitarian thesis). We obviously support the third position.

What’s essential is reappropriating the term ‘people’ and progressively extending it to the entire Eurosiberian Continent. The present understanding of ‘European’ by the reigning ideology at Brussels is inspired by French Jacobin ideology. This ideology makes no reference to an ethno-historical Great European people, only to a mass of disparate residents inhabiting European territory. This tendency needs to be radically replaced.We propose that European peoples become historical subjects again and cease being historical objects. In the tragic century that’s coming, it’s especially crucial that Europeans become conscious of the common dangers they face and that, henceforth, they form a selfconscious community of destiny. This is well and truly a matter of forging a ‘new alliance’ that — through resurrection, metamorphosis, and historical transfiguration — will lead to a refounding of a Great European people and, in the midst of decline, succeed — not without pain, of course — in giving birth again to the phoenix.

Available from Arktos Media [4]


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

samedi, 14 mai 2011

D. Venner's "Le siècle de 1914"

Foundations of the Twenty-First Century: Dominique Venner's Le Siècle de 1914.

by Michael O'Meara

Ex: http://www.wermodandwermod.com/ 

A White Nationalist Reading of . . .

Dominique Venner
Le Siècle de 1914: Utopies, guerres et révolutions en Europe au XXe siècle
Paris: Pygmalion, 2006

“To recreate a new aristocracy is the eternal task of every revolutionary project.” –Guillaume Faye

At the beginning of twentieth century, peoples of European descent ruled the world. They made up a third of its population, occupied half its landmass, controlled Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and parts of coastal China; their industry and technology, along with their philosophy, science, and art, had no rival; the world was theirs and theirs alone.

A century later, all was changed: Peoples of European descent had fallen to less than 9 percent of the world’s population; their lands were everywhere inundated by non-Whites; their industry and technology outsourced to potential enemies; their state, social system, and media taken over by parasitic aliens; and, in the deepest demographic sense, they faced the not-too-distant prospect of biological extinction.

To understand this catastrophic inversion requires some understanding of the period responsible for it. We’re fortunate that after a lifetime studying its key movements, Dominique Venner, our greatest identitarian historian, has set out to chart its biopolitical contours.

Before the Deluge

As a historical (rather than a chronological) period, the twentieth century begins in 1914, with the onset of the First World War, whose devastating assault on European existence shook the continent in every one of its foundations, destroying not just its ancien régime, but ushering in what Ernst Nolte calls the “European Civil War” of 1917-45 or what some call the “Thirty Years War” of 1914-45. For amidst its storms of fire and steel, there emerged four rival ideologies — American liberalism, Russian Communism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism — each of whose ambition was to reshape the postwar order according to its own scheme for collective salvation. Our world, Venner argues, is a product of these contentious ambitions and of the ideological system — liberalism — that prevailed over its rivals.

Before the war of 1914 political ideologies lacked the “religious” fervor of their twentieth-century counterparts. Europe then was more than a geographic assortment of different peoples and states identified with different political creeds. It constituted a single biocivilization (a Race-Nation), whose ethnonational variants embodied alternative facets of the genetic-spiritual legacy bequeathed by the Greeks, the Aryans, and the Cro Magnons. Not a single great phenomenon experienced by any one European people, it followed, was not also experienced by the others: From the megalithic culture of the stone age, to medieval chivalry, to the rise of nationalism. In the modern period, the ties of blood and spirit linking the different European nations took institutional form in the Westphalian state system of 1648, which, with the exception of the revolutionary period (1789-1815), limited their numerous wars and conflicts to family disputes.

The greatest casualty of what contemporaries called the Great War would be the destruction of this system — and of the aristocratic elites who were its incarnation.

On the war’s eve, the aristocracy still represented that historic body whose function was to command, to fight, and to defend. In fact, in one form or another, it had always dominated European life — at least since the Aryans, that offshoot of the White race whose existence was premised on the rule of the “noble.” Though property-based and attached to the permanences of family, tradition, and rank, the pre-war aristocracy bore little resemblance to the decadent hereditary ruling class of liberal historiography. For Venner, it was, as an ideal type, an ever-renewing estate infused with the spirit of honor, duty, and loyalty to what was highest in White existence. As such, it typified its people’s essence, associating nobility with those who put their people’s interests before their own.

Except for republican France and Switzerland, all of Europe’s pre-war monarchical and imperial states were governed by aristocrats, whose Prussian spirit exalted simplicity, austerity, duty, and political incorruptibility. Against the leveling aspersions cast by liberals and democrats, Venner emphasizes the aristocracy’s dynamic, modernist, and genial character — opposed in essence to bourgeois democratic societies, which subordinate everyone to money (the realm of the Jews).

Cataclysm

No one in 1914 quite understood the type of the war they had gotten into. All the general staffs anticipated a short, decisive engagement like the “cabinet wars” of the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries — not realizing it might resemble the American War of Succession, whose closing stages anticipated the “Second-Generation War” of 1914 (a generation of war based on massed firepower, where “artillery conquers, infantry occupies”).

Though a traditional conflict between rival states at the start, by 1917, once the United States entered it, the war had been transformed not just into an industrial and social mobilization of unprecedented scope, but into an ideological crusade between democratic and authoritarian regimes. Worse, the democratic crusaders wouldn’t let the war end the way previous European wars had ended, when the jus publicum europaeum of the Westphalian system mitigated White strife and ensured the integrity of rival states. In the absence of this noble restraint, Europe was mutilated at its core: Nine million combatants were killed, the Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, and Romanov empires shattered, and an even greater hecatomb prepared for the next generation.

In the glow of this holocaust, Woodrow Wilson, the American champion of an anti-aristocratic, anti-European “democratism,” stepped upon the Old World’s stage to proclaim a new order based on liberal governance, free markets, and the egalitarian principle that the sovereign individual takes precedence over community, culture, history, and (in time) race — an order whose underlying principle rested on the rule of money — and, though Venner doesn’t say it, on money’s Chosen Ones.

The untenable Wilsonian settlement of 1918-19 collapsed soon enough, but it was hastened, in some cases provoked, by its ideological rivals. For Wilson’s plutocratic democracy did not go unopposed. In Russia, Communists proposed a more radically egalitarian version of his liberal utopia, a version whose methods differed from America’s market principles, but nevertheless upheld the same raceless materialist commitments born of Enlightenment liberalism. In Germany and Italy, a defensive Europeanism gave rise to more forthrightly anti-liberal ideologies to challenge the anti-Aryan or Jewish ethic of American capitalism and Russian Communism.

In this spirit, Mussolini’s Fascists called for a strong state exalting “authority, order, and justice” to unite Italian producers and soldiers in a national destiny free of the community-killing forces of liberal individualism and Communist collectivism. In a different way, Hitler’s National Socialists fought for a racial order, a Volksgemeinschaft, to overturn the Diktat of the Wilsonian peace, beat back the liberals’ assault on the body and spirit of the nation, and return Germany to its rightful place on the world stage. Both these movements opposing the anti-White subversions of the Wilsonians and Leninists did so, despite their plebeian-Caesarian politics, in a spirit akin to Europe’s ancient warrior aristocracies, whose tradition exalted personal power and regalian purpose.

Wilson’s Democratism

The focus of Venner’s history is the interwar struggle between liberalism, Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism. The focus in this reading is Wilson’s liberal democratism, whose “mission” it was to champion the plutocratic democracy of American capitalist enterprise, as it endeavored to wipe the historical slate clean of its European (especially its German and Catholic) accouterments.

Wilson’s crusading democratism stemmed from the dominant Puritan strain of America’s national tradition. Having settled their New Israel far from the morally compromised Europe they had fled and having identified their election with economic success, the Puritans defined themselves not in terms of their ancestor’s blood and heritage, but (once the spirit of capitalism overwhelmed their Protestant ethic) in terms of the Lockean “pursuit of happiness” — the very notion of which was alien to any sense of history and destiny. Such a Hebraic form of Christianity imbued the Wilsonians with the belief that their system was not only more virtuous than that of other peoples, but that it made them immune to their failings. (Though formally a Southerner, Wilson’s approach to Europe followed in the steps of earlier Northeastern Yankee elites, whose secularized Puritanism, in the form of Unitarian/Social Gospel humanism, motivated their century long assault on the religious and racial practices of the American South.)

The clash between aristocratic and democratic values — between Europe and America — reflected, of course, a more profound clash. Venner explains it in terms of Oswald Spengler’s Prussianism and Socialism (1919), which argues that the sixteenth-century Reformation produced two opposed visions of Protestant Christianity — the Calvinism of the English and the Lutheran Pietism of the Germans. The German vision rejected the primacy of wealth, comfort, and happiness, exalting the soldier’s aristocratic spirit and the probity this spirit nurtured in Prussian officialdom. English Protestants, by contrast, privileged wealth (a sign of election) and the external freedoms necessary to its pursuit. This made it a secularizing, individualistic, and above all economic “religion,” with each individual having the right to interpret the Book in his own light and thus to justify whatever it took to succeed.

Given England’s influence on America’s formation, Venner sees an analogous process at work in the United States. In the twentieth century, this process took the form of a money-driven variant of Calvinism, whose impetus has been to enfranchise those Puritan/Jewish/liberal/New Class projects that have been such a bane to white existence in the twentieth century: Those projects proposing a rupture with the past, the destruction of historic identities, and the creation of a new world where everything was possible — a new world where Jerusalem takes precedent over Athens, where the Brotherhood of Man is proclaimed with ethnocidal conviction, and America is celebrated as an anti-Europe.

So armed, the Wilsonians set out to destroy Europe’s ancient empires and aristocracies.

The New World

The war’s Wilsonian settlement (premised on the lie of German war guilt) left the traditional order in ruins, but, of even greater consequence, it prepared Europeans for future catastrophes, preeminently the Second World War (1939-45) — which would subject them to Soviet and American occupation and to a Judeo-corporate system intent on de-Europeanizing them by re-programming their morals and mentalities, deconstructing their thought and art, decolonizing their Asian and African empires, and eventually opening their gates to the Third World. The destruction of Europe’s aristocratic heritage had, in effect, been prelude to the ensuing assault on its blood and spirit.

Before the US entered the new world war set off by the failures of the Wilsonian peace, the promulgation of the Atlantic Charter (August 1941) called for another liberal crusade. In this spirit, the Charter’s democratic principles envisioned a postwar order based on monied interests, Anglo-American commerce, and liberal democracy — the foundations of which have become the present anti-White system. As an alliance combining the democratists’ most starry-eyed ideals and hard-headed interests, the US led coalition (the “United Nations”) aimed at destroying not just German Nazism, but the German nation, whose Prussian spirit rebuked everything the Wilsonians represented.

Eisenhower’s “Crusade in Europe” was accordingly waged with a ferocity unknown in European history. The two extra-European powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were thus each ideologically committed to uprooting whatever remained of Europe’s living heritage. Their “anti-fascist” crusade was especially intent on criminalizing the Entente powers and the European values they embodied. The Nuremberg trials following the war would be the most conspicuous example of this crusading anti-Europeanism, but so too was the Allies’ effort to hunt down, silence, or kill their wartime opponents and to level Europe’s inherently anti-egalitarian order. (In France alone, 600,000 people were imprisoned following the “Liberation” and more than 40,000 summarily executed.)

Broken, demoralized, occupied, Europe in 1945 was ripe for re-education. The occupying powers’ culpablizing crusade would be especially effective in overcoming resistance to the new liberal utopia, even after the former allies embarked on their so-called Cold War (1947-89). Revealingly, American democratists were qualitatively more subversive than their more racially-conscious Russian counterparts. In the western half of the postwar’s US-SU Condominium, the culpabilitization of defeated Germany was extended to all of Western and Central Europe. (In the language of our little black brothers and sisters, original sin now became “a white thing.”) Europeans were henceforth expected to do penance for having once been powerful and creative, for having founded empires, for privileging rank, nobility, and valor, but above all for having been White and favored their own interests at the expense of Jews and other non-Europeans. The very idea of a White or European identity would, in fact, be treated hereafter as a pathology.

Japan, by contrast, suffered no such culpabilitization — not only because it experienced less of it, but also because Japanese culture refused to accept the victors’ image of itself. The culpabilitization of Europeans was so effective not simply because of the occupiers’ unchallenged power, but because it converged with a secularizing Christianity (a Judeo-Christianity?), whose Concordant with Caesar’s realm now sought to turn Europe’s former self-confidence into a form of self-loathing. The “irony” of this culpability (if irony is the word) was that the Europeans’ alleged guilt was a fraud: They had had no monopoly on so-called “crimes against humanity.” (The Anglo-American carpet bombing of civilians and the indiscriminate destruction of Europe’s great cities, the mass population transfers, the organized starvation campaigns, the unprecedented horrors associated with Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki — nothing of this affected the anti-European balance of Allied justice or brought Russian, English, or American war criminals into the dockets).

The Iron Cage

Following the Cold War, in which Europeans were mere spectators, a new view of history was programmed for popular consumption: The view that saw the history of twentieth-century Europe in terms of its struggle for the cause of Holy Democracy, with its market utopia of general prosperity, the limitless liberties of its private life, the glories of its occupiers’ Semitically fabricated mass culture, and its rainbow mixture of diverse races and cultures.

Accordingly, the Soviets’ command economy and totalitarian controlled society gave way after 1989 not to utopia, but to a system animated by the forces of consumption, bureaucracy, spectacle, and sex. For though the democratists’ methods differed from those of the Communists, they too aspired to a raceless economic paradise and, to that end, now resort to totalitarian measures to criminalize, demonize, or pathologize whoever opposes their subversions.

In 1920, in his most famous book, Max Weber pointed out that a modernity subject solely to the market’s economic criteria engenders a ruthless rationalization of human life — what he called “the iron cage.” Venner argues that since 1945 Washington has imposed its version of the iron cage on Europe.

This has especially been the case in the European Union (EU). Though the idea of unification was an old one, Wilson’s heirs favored a model geared not just to Europe’s democratic re-education, but to its transformation into a US economic protectorate, closely integrated into the transnational super-structures which Washington and New York set in place during the course of the Cold War. The Marshall Plan, for example, dictated greater economic cooperation and integration centered on US regulated international trade, while Jean Monnet, the principal architect of the “common market,” was a Wall Street insider, friend to New York Jewish banking interests. Then, after America’s cat paw, Britain, entered the EU in 1972, Europe’s homegrown democratists (”the American Party” which has governed Europe since 1945) gave themselves over entirely to the liberal project, turning Europe into a free-trade zone subject to purely economic consideration. In this spirit, they now define Europe in anti-political (i.e., liberal) terms indifferent to all those historic, traditionalist, and national barriers obstructing the race-mixing imperatives of their monetary reign.

Venner calls the global order born of post-1945 Wilsonianism a “cosmocracy.” The cosmopolitan plutocracy of this cosmocracy, which became globally hegemonic after Communism’s collapse, makes the nation state obsolete, denationalizes its elites, and racially mixes incompatible peoples and cultures in the name of an abstract, quantitatively-defined Humanity indifferent to the survival of European peoples. Heir to liberalism’s inherent cosmopolitanism, as well as to Communist internationalism and the Judeo-Christian distortion of White identity, the collective culpabilitization that has been used since 1945 to manipulate the European conscience remains one of the cosmocracy’s most important supports. For to deflect criticism and squelch resistance, liberals and ex-Communists (whose chief distinction is their indifference to race, breeding, and every qualitative ascriptions resistant to the Judeo-liberal conception of democracy) need only appeal to their “anti-hate” laws and “human rights” to silence whoever challenges their inquisitional reign.

 

 

Having been guilty of the Holocaust, colonialism, and other so-called forms of racism, Europeans are now expected to open their arms to the refuse of the overpopulated Third World. The colored invasion now transforming Europe is gradually compelling Europeans to awake to what is happening to them and to take steps, however tentative at this point, toward the Reconquest of their imperiled homeland. But no one in their “democratic” ruling elites — these bloodless executors of that transnational super structure whose Hebraic spirit champions the interests of the Bilderbergers and Trilaterals, the established parties, the MSM, the NGOs, and the universities, whose guiding arm is the Jewish dominated banking system headquartered in New York, and whose principal geopolitical orientation is the Washington-London-Tel Aviv axis — no one in these elites has the slightest understanding of what is happening under their very noses, seemingly oblivious or indifferent to what the importation of millions of Africans and Asians means to Europe.

Fortunately for Europe’s scattered remnant (and it was a remnant that reconquered Spain), the cosmocracy is creating a crisis of such massive proportion that it is likely to provoke a catastrophic collapse that will give Whites one last chance to regain control of their destiny.

The Beginning that Stands Before Us

Europeans after 1945 fell into dormition, losing all consciousness of who they were as a people. Like Germans after the original Thirty Years Wars (1618-48), their thirty-year blood expenditure left them totally depleted, forcing them off the historical stage and into the arms of everything that today threatens their existence.

Dormition, though, is not death. This seems especially the case in that the democratists’ utopia has come to rest on increasingly uncertain foundations. Its objective failures, I think it is fair to argue, are more and more imposing themselves on the collective consciousness, while, subjectively, Europe’s once cowed and beaten nations are gradually beginning to reject the democratists’ cosmopolitan agenda, as national-populist parties snip away at the authority of the established regime. The rebellion of May 2005, in which the French, then the Dutch electorates, rejected the proposed EU constitution — and did so against all the concerted forces of the existing system — was a revenge of sorts on May 1945 and on the Judeo-liberal vision of a Europe indifferent to its own genetic-cultural heritage. Other, more meaningful rebellions have also begun to stir.

Bad as things have become, there is thus still reason for hope. Venner stresses that history never ends — wars are never decisively won. Fukuyama had no sooner proclaimed “the end of history” — the undisputed triumph of Wilson’s market model of world order — than Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations predicted that the end of the Cold War’s ideological strife would lead to even more apocalyptic conflicts.

Few defeats, then, are irredeemable, but only as long as the defeated remain heroic: For our vision of the past (our vision of who we were) inevitably shapes what we are to become. Venner’s study is cause, though, not for optimism, but for caution and circumspection. Every European of good stock, he claims, cannot but admire the reckless heroism of Homer’s Achilles, but the greatest Homeric hero is Ulysses — Ulysses of the thousand guises, who used all his patience and cunning to regain his home.

Historically, resistance, reconquest, and renaissance are the Ulyssean work of small groups bound by the asceticism of ancient military orders and inspired by a will for action, thought, and decision. Not coincidentally, the struggles such groups wage create new aristocracies, for war is the most merciless of the selective forces. Only this, Venner believes, will enable us to regain our lands and all that we once were.

As Europeans enter the twenty-first century, one thing alone seems clear: The future will not resemble the present. The unimaginable is already waiting in the wings. But though history is full of the unforeseeable, the forces of culture, race, and history never cease to weight on a people’s destiny, as they intersect with present circumstance to affect the future’s course. In this Venner finds hope. For his Europe (which has existed for 30,000 years) is the Europe whose spirit struggles for all that is noble.

Source: VNN, 21 June 2007.

Othmar Spann / Jungkonservativ

 

Jungkonservativ

 

pdf der Druckfassung aus Sezession 41 / April 2011

 

Sebastian Maaß: Dritter Weg und wahrer Staat. Othmar Spann – Ideengeber der Konservativen Revolution
(= Kieler Ideengeschichtliche Studien, Bd. 3)
,  Kiel: Regin-Verlag 2010. 174 S., 18.95 €  (hier bestellen).

 

spann01.jpgDie »Kieler Ideengeschichtlichen Studien« gewinnen mit
Band III an Konturen.

 

Den vorausgehenden Monographien über Edgar Julius Jung und Arthur Moeller van den Bruck steuert Sebastian Maaß mit der Studie zu Othmar Spann ein weiteres Puzzleteil in der Darstellung der »profiliertesten Vertreter der jungkonservativen Richtung der Konservativen Revolution« bei.

 

Als Fraktion mit gemäßigten Strukturelementen nahm der Jungkonservatismus eine Mittelstellung zwischen Völkischen und Nationalrevolutionären ein und konnte sowohl in der Weimarer Republik (Regierung von Papens) als auch der Ersten Republik Österreichs (Heimwehrbewegung) in die realpolitischen Auseinandersetzungen der Zeit eingreifen. Die Kontextualisierung in die ideengeschichtliche Umwelt der KR unternimmt Maaß einerseits über das Aufzeigen dezidiert jungkonservativer Positionen (ständestaatliche Konzeption, mittelalterliche Reichsidee, christliche Bezugspunkte, ganzheitlicher Ansatz) in Abgrenzung zu anderen Gruppierungen der KR, andererseits mittels Bezugnahme auf die charakteristischen Analogien (Mythos der »Ewigen Wiederkehr«, Antiliberalismus und -marxismus) von Jungkonservatismus und restlichen konservativ-revolutionären Strömungen. Dem Vorwort des Spann-Kenners Hanns Pichler, der die von Maaß vorgenommene Fokussierung auf Gesellschafts- und Staatslehre Spanns als klugen Ansatz für eine einführende Darstellung bezeichnet und gerade den in dessen frühen Schriften ausgebreiteten »ganzheitlichen« gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Ansatz als erkenntnisleitend für diesen Rahmen betrachtet, folgt ein biographischer Überblick. Anschließend widmet sich Maaß den Spann-Schülern Jakob Baxa und Walter Heinrich, die maßgeblichen Anteil an der akademischen Verbreitung der universalistischen Lehre Spanns besaßen, Heinrich versuchte darüber hinaus die ganzheitliche Lehre Spanns in reale Politik (Heimwehrbewegung in Österreich; Kameradschaftsbund für volks- und sozialpolitische Bildung im Sudetenland; Institut für Ständewesen in Düsseldorf) umzusetzen.

 

spann02.jpgAnschließend behandelt Maaß »Philosophie und Religion als Grundlagen der Ganzheitslehre«, um über die Darlegung der »Kategorienlehre« und der politischen Publizistik (Der wahre Staat; Vom Wesen des Volkstums) den Aufbau des Spannschen »organischen« Staatswesens zu rekonstruieren. Indem der Verfasser das Wirken des Wiener Kreises um Spann sowohl in Österreich als auch dem deutschsprachigen Kulturraum analysiert, wird die meta- und realpolitische Bedeutung dieses Dritten Weges deutlich, der mit seiner machtpolitischen Ausprägung in Österreich um 1930 eine ernsthafte historische Alternative zu den »dritten Wegen« des Nationalsozialismus und des Faschismus darstellte. Das im Untertitel verwandte Konstrukt »Ideengeber der Konservativen Revolution« stellt – aufgrund der überschaubaren Rezeption von Spanns Universalismus in der Weimarer Republik – einen einzelnen Kritikpunkt an dieser soliden Monographie dar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Farbportrait_Maaß.jpg

 

 

Sebastian Maaß M. A. (geb. 1981) studierte Politik, Geschichte und Erziehungswissenschaft an den Universitäten Konstanz und Tübingen, Studienschwerpunkte waren Neuere Ideen- und Philosophiegeschichte sowie Altertumswissenschaften, umfassende Forschungstätigkeit insbesondere zum Themenkomplex der Konservativen Revolution (KR). Maaß' Studie über Leben und Werk von Edgar Julius Jungist einer zentralen und wirkmächtigen Gestalt der KR gewidmet und erscheint nun als Monographie in der akademischen Reihe „Kieler ideengeschichtliche Studien“

 

 

 

 

 

mercredi, 11 mai 2011

José Ortega y Gasset & Jean Thiriart

 

Urkultur+Ortega+filosof%C3%ADa.jpg

LA IDEA DE FILOSOFÍA EN ORTEGA Y GASSET

Ex.: http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/

 
LA IDEA DE FILOSOFÍA EN ORTEGA Y GASSET

Jesús Ruiz Fernández

Tesis Doctoral dirigida por José Luis Abellán García


LIBRO ELECTRÓNICO:

Enlace con issuu.com

Enlace con scribd.com
 
 

URKULTUR Nº 12. JEAN THIRIART Y EL NACIONAL-COMUNITARISMO EUROPEO

 

URKULTUR Nº 12.

JEAN THIRIART
Y EL NACIONAL-COMUNITARISMO EUROPEO.

REVISTA ELECTRÓNICA: Enlace con issuu.com
[Enlace con el documento en pdf para imprimir, arriba a la derecha de este blog]

Sumario.-

TEXTOS SOBRE JEAN THIRIART.-

Biografía de Jean Thiriart.

Homenaje a Jean Thiriart (1922-1992).
Robert Steuckers

Jean Thiriart, teórico de la Revolución europea.
Christian Bouchet

Jean Thiriart, el Lenin de la Revolución europea.
René Pellisier

Jean Thiriart, el Maquiavelo de la Nación europea.
Edouard Rix

Por una Europa libre. Relectura de la “Gran Nación”, de Jean Thiriart.
Adriano Scianca

El nacionalismo europeo y sus límites.
Ernesto Milá

Jean Thiriart, un maestro para Alain de Benoist.
Diego L. Sanromán

TEXTOS DE JEAN THIRIART.-

Europa hasta Valdivostok.
Jean Thiriart

La Europa de las Patrias.
Jean Thiriart

La Europa-Estado y la Europa-Nación se harán contra los USA.
Jean Thiriart

ENTREVISTA A JEAN THIRIART.-

La Comunidad Nacional Europea.
Bernardo Gil Mugarza.
 

00:15 Publié dans Livre | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : jean thiriart, josé ortega y gasset, livre | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

mardi, 10 mai 2011

Guillaume FAYE: Why We Fight

Winglord
English translation
of "Pourquoi nous combattons" and "Wofür wir kämpfen"
Now available !

Product Description

Identitarians and others making up the European resistance lack a doctrine that truly serves as a political and ideological synthesis of who they are - a doctrine that speaks above parties and sects, above rival sensibilities and wounded feelings, that brings the resistance together around clear ideas and objectives, uniting them in opposition to the Europeans' dramatic decline.
Our people today face the gravest peril in their entire history: demographic collapse, submission to an alien colonisation and to Islam, the bastardisation of the European Union, prostration before American hegemony, the forgetting of our cultural roots, and so on. In the form of an introductory text and a dictionary of 177 key words, Guillaume Faye, one of the most creative writers of the European 'Right', makes a diagnosis of the present situation and proposes a program of resistance, reconquest, and regeneration. He holds out the prospect of a racial and revolutionary alternative to the present decayed civilisation.


The manifesto's principal objective is thus to unify the resistance by developing a common doctrine that unites everyone and every tendency seeking to constitute a European network of resistance - a doctrine that goes beyond the old sectarian quarrels and superficial divisions. All relevant subjects, including politics, economics, geopolitics, demographics, and biology are broached. As it was for the Nineteenth-century Left with Marx's Communist Manifesto, Why We Fight is destined to become the key work for Twenty-first century identitarians. This edition of Why We Fight contains the complete text of the original French edition, as well as additional material that was added for the German edition. Also included is an original Foreword by translator Michael O'Meara, author of New Culture, New Right, as well as a Foreword by Dr. Pierre Krebs, Chairman of the Thule-Seminar in Germany.

Additional Information

Author Guillaume Faye
Full Title Why We Fight: Manifesto for the European Resistance
Binding Softcover
Publisher Arktos
Pages 278
ISBN 978-1-907166-18-1
Language English
Short Description Guillaume Faye's manifesto and ideological dictionary, aimed at the 'European Resistance'. Radical, thought provoking and at times extremely controversial. A book that can't be read without forming an opinion about it.
Table of Contents FOREWORDS
Prophet of the Fourth Age (Dr. Michael O’Meara)
It’s About The Primordial Fire (Dr. Pierre Krebs)
A Note from the Editor

1. PREFACE AND PRECAUTION
Unite on the Basis of Clear Ideas Against the Common Enemy
Beware of False Friends

2. PRELIMINARY ELEMENTS
The Logic of Decline
-Ethnic Colonisation
-The Blocked Society
France or Europe?
Economic Principles
-For Nuclear, Not Petroleum Energy
-The Imposture of the ‘New Economy’
-Toward a Planetary Economic Crisis?

3. STRATEGIC PRINCIPLES
America and Islam Against Europe
The Dangers of European ‘Disarmament’
Notions of the ‘Menace from the South’ and the ‘Domestic Front’
Toward a Eurosiberian Strategic Doctrine: The ‘Giant Hedgehog’ 

4. METAPOLITICAL DICTIONARY
From Aesthetics to Xenophilia

5. CONCLUSION
Why Are We Fighting?

INDEX
About the Author With a doctorate in political science from Paris' Institute of Political Science, the essayist Guillaume Faye was one of the principal theoreticians of the French Nouvelle Droite in the 1970s and '80s prior to his growing sympathy for the identitarian movement. He has also been a journalist at Figaro-Magazine, Paris-Match, Magazine-Hebdo, Valeurs Actuelles, and a radio commentator. For several years he was the editor of J'ai tout compris (I Understood Everything), a private newsletter.

New Books by Troy Southgate

 

New Books by Troy Southgate from Black Front Press

 

 
Copies of EVOLA: THOUGHTS & PERSPECTIVES, VOLUME ONE are now available to preorder. The book is over 400 pages in length and costs just £24 (UK), £26 (Europe) & £27 (America/Rest of World). All prices include postage and the Paypal address is: arktoslondon@yahoo.co.uk More details below.
JULIUS Evola is one of the more intriguing and controversial figures in the Traditionalist milieu and this unique collection of essays, the first of its kind in English, looks at various aspects of the Italian philosopher’s work. Ranging fr…om Art, Sex, Feminism and Economics right through to Race, Politics, Islam and the Occult, this book will serve as a detailed and scholarly guide to one of Europe’s most vehement critics of the modern epoch. Contributors include Professor Roger Griffin, Professor Tomislav Sunic, Troy Southgate, Gwendolyn Toynton, K.R. Bolton, Keith Preston, Sean Jobst, Mariella Shearer, Brett Stevens and Christopher Pankhurst.
————————————————————————————
SPECIAL OFFER: Buy two books from Black Front Press and get a third book absolutely free. This offer applies to three titles only: (i) FURTHER WRITINGS: ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, HISTORY & POLITICS, (ii) ADVENTURES IN COUNTER-CULTURE: POLITICS, MUSIC, FILM & LITERATURE and (iii) OTTO STRASSER: THE LIFE & TIMES OF A GERMAN SOCIALIST. For more information about each title, please see below.
You can now copies of my new 300-page book, FURTHER WRITINGS: ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, HISTORY & POLITICS, which costs just £20 (UK), £22 (Europe) & £24 (America/Rest of World). All prices include postage and the Paypal address is: arktoslondon@yahoo.co.uk
MOUNTING to thirty-five detailed chapters, Troy Southgate’s latest offering explores some of the more intriguing aspects of human civilisation. From an in-depth study of history’s prominent thinkers, ideologues and theologians right throug…h to a dissection of the world’s most fascinating empires, wars and revolutions, you will find this knowledgeable and erudite collection of essays both informative and thought-provoking.
————————————————————————————
Signed copies of my 368-page book, ADVENTURES IN COUNTER-CULTURE: POLITICS, MUSIC, FILM AND LITERATURE, costs just £22 (UK), £24 (Europe) & £25 (America/Rest of World). All prices include postage and the Paypal address is: arktoslondon@yahoo.co.uk
Including key interviews with important political figures like Robert Steuckers, Martin Schwarz and Jonathan Bowden, as well as interesting musicians such as Richard Leviathan (Ostara), Christopher Walton (Endura), Puissance and Turbund Stu…rmwerk, Troy Southgate’s ten-year foray into the political and musical underground has managed to yield some very interesting results. This 368-page book also includes numerous reviews centred on concerts and releases by a remarkable variety of Industrial, Metal, Gothic, Neofolk and Experimental projects, and includes much in-depth analysis based around the world of film and literature.
————————————————————————————————
My biography, OTTO STRASSER: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A GERMAN SOCIALIST, is 200 pages in length & contains world-exclusive plates featuring family photographs supplied by Strasser’s own son. Signed copies – including postage – cost just £17 (UK), £19 (Europe) & £21 (America/Rest of World). Paypal address: arktoslondon@yahoo.co.uk

 

PRIOR to the outbreak of the Second World War, Otto Strasser was a leading activist in the National-Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Distancing himself from the prevailing ideologies of both capitalism and communism, Strasser famousl…y accused Adolf Hitler of betraying the socio-economic principles of the original Nazi programme and went on to become a leading opponent of the Third Reich. Along with his brother, Gregor, he believed that a form of German Socialism could provide an alternative future for the nation’s long-suffering workers and peasants. As a result, he was ruthlessly pursued across several countries by Gestapo agents and became embroiled in a series of thrilling adventures. This is the story of how a Bavarian man with a sense of national freedom and social justice became one of the world’s most intriguing revolutionary ideologues.

 

lundi, 09 mai 2011

A Handbook of Traditional Living

A Handbook of Traditional Living:
Theory & Practice

Review by Greg JOHNSON

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

A Handbook of Traditional Living: Theory and Practice [2]
Trans. S. K.
Ed. John B. Morgan
Atktos Media, 2010

A Handbook of Traditional Living is a slender volume (just under 100 pages) comprising two essays published in Italian in 1997 and 1998 by the Raido Cultural Association. The author or authors are anonymous. The first essay, “The World of Tradition,” is a somewhat dry summary of Julius Evola’s version of Traditionalism especially as expressed in his magnum opus, Revolt Against the Modern World [3].

I wish to focus here on the second essay, “The Front of Tradition,” which deals with how one might organize in the light of Tradition to struggle against the modern world. This essay is most strongly influenced by Corneliu Codreanu’s Iron Guard. The organization that is proposed is an initiatic, hierarchical spiritual-militant order. Its structure and aims are essentially that of the Iron Guard, but its spiritual content and foundation is Evolian Traditionalism, not the Iron Guard’s Romanian Orthodox Christianity.

The underlying assumption of “The Front of Tradition” is that the modern world is declining of its own accord, in keeping with the downward thrust of history according to Traditional doctrine. We live in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, which is the most hostile to the principles of Tradition and the most removed from the Golden Age that inaugurated our present historical cycle. But the furthest remove from the last Golden Age is the closest proximity to the commencement of the next one. And, as the current Dark Age advances deeper into decadence and chaos, there will come a point when objective conditions will permit a fighting vanguard of Traditionalists to intervene successfully in events and contribute to the inauguration of the next Golden Age. But Traditionalists must be prepared to act effectively when eternal conditions align. Sadly, there is no evidence that any serious Traditionalists are even close to being prepared.

“The Front of Tradition” proposes a hierarchical order that assigns rank based on merit and accomplishment not seniority. The assumption is that true order and authority flow from above, thus nobody can associate with the order who is not oriented toward what is above and interested in finding those genuine superiors who can bring him closer to the transcendent principle. Each individual is also duty-bound to pass down what he knows to his inferiors who look to him for guidance. But the primary orientation of each individual has to be upwards, toward the transcendent. It is an attitude of receptivity to Tradition. It is characterized by humility, by the recognition of one’s imperfection and need of completion from above.

Any orientation downwards, toward followers, is only secondary, and a matter of duty rather than inclination. It is an attitude that must be characterized by detachment and impersonality, since one is a teacher not by virtue of one’s personality but simply by virtue of one’s place in a chain of initiation. What one teaches, moreover, is merely the transcendent truth passed on from above, not a product of one’s own ego.

The great destroyer to be avoided is “egoism,” which seems pretty much synonymous with narcissism. The genuine Traditionalist is oriented first and foremost toward reality. Because of this orientation, he enters into relations with others, specifically into an initiatic hierarchical organization. The genuine Traditionalist has a strong and substantial ego; he knows who he is; he had a deep and abiding sense of worth. Because of this, he is capable of setting aside his ego and devoting himself to eternal truth and disinterested, impersonal action in the service of great collective aims.

The egoist, by contrast, is oriented first and foremost toward himself. He is psychologically needy, and to satisfy these needs, he interacts with others. Reality places a distant third in his priorities. Indeed, since egoists are primarily concerned to satisfy their psychological needs though interactions with others, they are often practiced liars and manipulators.

The Right wing is swarming with egoists of this type. They are characterized first and foremost by a neurotic need for attention. Generally, they like to set themselves up as leaders of little grouplets by claiming to have knowledge, expertise, or money they often do not possess, or do not possess to the degree required by their ambitions.

Since the purpose of these groups is the psychological gratification of their leaders, they seldom accomplish anything in the real world. They tend to be “virtual” groups, existing through websites, Facebook, and press releases. Since these groups do not aim at disinterested action, they are consumed with personal rivalries and schisms. Since these groups are not based in unchanging truth but instead are all about playing to the fickle crowd, they are constantly changing their views, activities, and alliances. Anything to keep the spotlight on them.

The best way to avoid egoists is the establishment of a genuinely hierarchical, initiatic order with objective criteria for membership and advancement. The egoist cannot survive in such an environment. He is primarily motivated by the desire to reign over others. He wants to be on top and therefore rejects the need or possibility of completion from above. Instead of seeking out his superiors, he fears them and tries to keep them away. (Most egoists are oblivious to genuinely superior people, whom they often patronize and seek to manipulate. For the superior individual, this often presents an amusing albeit grotesque spectacle, rather like having one’s leg humped by a dog. Egoists are generally more concerned with fighting off the challenges of other egoists, whom they recognize instinctively.)

A Traditionalist order obviously must contain a significant component of indoctrination in the Tradition itself. But indoctrination is only the beginning. The goal is not merely to inform the mind, but to cultivate the character of the student. One cannot just understand Tradition in the abstract, it must sink in and dye the core of one’s character. It must become second nature, so that one perceives and judges the world instantaneously and effortlessly in the light of Tradition. One must also learn prudence, the ability to apply universal principles to unique and shifting concrete circumstances. Tradition is not an ideology, which is a body of abstract ideas that can never be truly internalized and unified with one’s inner self. A lifestyle that is both unique and Traditionalist emerges spontaneously and organically from a truly cultivated individual.

The essay on “The Front of Tradition” is rather skimpy on concrete advice for the cultivation of the individual in the light of Tradition. One appealing notion is the use of discussion. A group that aims at the perfection of its members and their transformation into a vanguard fighting for great impersonal goals cannot allow individuals to hide their flaws and reservations behind bourgeois notions of privacy. Thus a Traditionalist society must practice group discussion in which individuals strive for openness. The goal is not merely the forgiveness of the confessional but the creation of trust and camaraderie that fuses individuals into a higher unity.

But openness about one’s doubts and flaws is merely a prelude to collective criticism and striving, again with the assistance of the group, to overcome oneself. This process of self-disclosure and group criticism and reform is not personal one-upsmanship and back-biting. Indeed, it is the highest form of friendship. The ancients distinguished flatterers from friends. A flatterer tells you what you want to hear. A friend tells you what you need to hear for your own good, even if it might be personally painful, because self-knowledge is necessary for self-improvement.

My main objection to the idea of an order that combines spiritual initiation and militant struggle is that excellence in these two functions are seldom combined in the same individual. The greatest initiate will seldom be the same person as the greatest warrior. Therefore, in establishing a hierarchy, one would have to choose to subordinate one function to another or to follow a leader who combines both functions, but who is inferior to the specialized warrior or the specialized initiate. The first option introduces internal conflict. The second option places leadership in the hands of an inferior individual. Both options lead to an organization that is inferior to one in which spiritual and military functions are distinct.

Overall, A Handbook of Traditional Living is more suggestive than definitive. The purpose of a handbook is not to be “deep” but to be superficial in an exhaustive manner. “Depth” for such a work is a matter of discerning what is essential. Yet there is much here that seems vague and inessential. But I still found this Handbook valuable as a starting point and stimulant for thinking about how some elements of a North American New Right might be organized.


Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/04/a-handbook-of-traditional-living-theory-practice/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/a-handbook-of-traditional-living-theory-and-practive-book_1.jpg

[2] A Handbook of Traditional Living: Theory and Practice: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1907166068/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=countecurrenp-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=1907166068

[3] Revolt Against the Modern World: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/089281506X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=countecurrenp-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=089281506X

00:15 Publié dans Livre, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, tradition, traditionalisme, julius evola | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

vendredi, 06 mai 2011

The Coming Chinese Superstate

Richard HOSTE

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

Review: Richard Lynn
Eugenics: A Reassessment
Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers 2001

eugenics.jpgOne of the only valid points made by the critics of Bell Curve was that if the science was accepted, then eugenics, which Hernstein and Murray refused to endorse, becomes the rational solution to society’s ills. Steven Pinker, the next major public thinker associated with the hereditarian position, likewise refused to follow his own logic far enough. One scholar who doesn’t flinch is psychologist Richard Lynn. Eugenics is not only right, but we have a duty to increase the frequency of genes for positive traits and reduce the frequency of genes for negative traits. Once you determine that something is a genetic problem it cries out for a genetic solution. Eugenics: A Reassessment looks at the history of eugenics, the ethical case for it and its future. Here Lynn goes beyond his role as a psychologist and gives us his own theory of the coming end of history.

The Rise and Fall of Eugenics

Eugenic ideas existed long before the publications of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. In The Republic, Plato pictured a society where rulers, soldiers, and workers would be bred on the same principles of the breeding of plants and livestock, about which much must have been known in 380 B.C. Still, it was the discovery of evolution that was the catalyst of these ideas taking off in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Biologist, statistician, and psychologist Sir Francis Galton was the main prophet of eugenics. He spent his life forming organizations, writing, and spreading the word about humanity’s potential for improvement. He carried out the first studies that showed nature to be more important than nurture in determining intelligence and character.

By the early 1900s eugenics was endorsed by practically all biologists and geneticists, politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill, and thinkers across the political spectrum, including Bertrand Russell, H. L. Mencken, and George Bernard Shaw. Lynn makes the distinction between positive eugenics, encouragement given to society’s best to produce children, and negative eugenics, trying to set limits on the breeding of the inferior. It was the latter that was easier to legislate on.

The first American sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907 “to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.” By 1913 similar acts had been passed in 12 states and a further 19 had laws on the books by 1931. The constitutionality of these laws was challenged in court and in 1927 Buck v. Bell went to the supreme court. The case centered around a mentally retarded woman who was born to a mentally retarded mother and gave birth to yet another retard. Her hospital applied to have her sterilized, and Christian groups protested. The court ruled 8-1 in favor of sterilization. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the following in the famous decision.

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices . . . in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute the degenerate offspring of crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit for continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccinations is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Unfortunately, over the twentieth century only about 60,000 American sterilizations would take place, which amounted to less than 0.1 percent of mentally retarded and psychopathic people. Sweden did a little better, sterilizing the same amount, totaling one percent of the entire population. In Japan, 16,520 women met the same fate until their law was repealed in 1996. In Denmark, a third of all retards over a ten year span. Unsurprisingly, the all-time champions of sterilization were the Germans, who sterilized 300,000 people after their sterilization law was passed in 1933.

As Lynn points out, it’s not all that unusual for a scientific theory to be accepted and then rejected. What makes eugenics unique is that it’s a rejected theory that turned out to be true. While the importance of heredity in determining individual and group traits is well-established, by the end of the twentieth century to call something eugenic was to condemn it. The author blames horror at the crimes of Nazi Germany and the increasing value given to individual over social rights. In recent years courts in the US and Britain have said that parents can have retarded women in their care sterilized, ruling against civil liberties organizations who’ve joined with Christian groups in arguing that all people have a right to as many children as they can produce. While these legal decisions aren’t made on eugenic grounds, we should be thankful for the effect.

The arguments against eugenics don’t hold up. First is the claim that we can’t decide what positive and negative traits are. It’s hard to argue with Galton’s original three characteristics of intelligence, health, and character (close enough to conscientiousness in modern psychology) being desirable. Who would argue that disease could be preferable to health or stupidity to genius? It’s a case of moral relativism taken to the extreme.

Lynn looks at other characteristics we may select for but doesn’t find any beyond Galton’s original three. Society needs a wide range of people on the continuum of extraverted/introverted and neurotic/relaxed in a way that it doesn’t need a wide range of propensity to break the law or catch diseases. He also says that beauty provides no social good, and people have different definitions of it. Here is the only place I part ways with the author. Among environmentalists (people who care about the environment, not anti-hereditarians), beauty is seen as a legitimate reason to preserve certain forests and trees that provide no economic good. It’s why we save redwood trees but not swamps. As far as the lack of a universal standard, Peter Frost demolishes that as a PC myth. Even if everyone didn’t agree that blue eyes and white skin were the most beautiful, every race could select based on their own standards.

The idea that eugenics wouldn’t work is also answered here. If we determined that it wouldn’t be possible to select for certain traits in living organisms, then not only eugenics but horticulture, animal domestication and even evolution itself would all have to be rejected too. As a matter of fact, heritability of running speed among horses has been found to be between 15 and 35 percent heritable, lower than the lowest estimates for intelligence or psychopathy among humans. Any trait that is passed on genetically can be made more or less common or enhanced among a population.

Classical Eugenics

Lynn differentiates between classical eugenics and new eugenics, the use of biotechnology. A section is given to each.

The only country to practice classical positive eugenics in the modern world has been Singapore, under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew. Higher earners were given tax breaks for children and a government unit was set up to bring college graduates together in social settings like dances and cruises to encourage relationships and procreation. In three short years, the results were impressive.

Births in Singapore

 

Education Level of Mother 1987   1990  
  Number Percent Number Percent
Below Secondary 26,719 61.3 26,718 52.3
Secondary and above 16,012 36.7 24,411 47.7

Between 1987 and 1990, births to college educated women went from 36.7 percent of all births to 47.7. Obviously, it’s not hopeless, and the problem of dysgenics can be corrected if a government sets its mind to it. In Nazi Germany, loans were given to couples determined to be of good genetic stock. For each child they produced, 25 percent of the loan would be written off. Whether such things can be done in a democracy, especially a multi-racial one, is a different question.

The biggest victory for negative eugenics has been the liberalization of abortion laws. Although justified as based on a “woman’s right to choose,” those who have unintended pregnancies are usually of low intelligence and those with anti-social tendencies. Thus, increasing the availability of abortion is eugenic. Those who are concerned about good breeding should support causes traditionally associated with the left like abortion on demand and making birth control freely available.

The Promise of Biotechnology

The most exciting part of this book is the section on the new eugenics, and how biotechnology may make all the questions raised here obsolete. Prenatal diagnosis can now screen for some of the most common genetic diseases, and the fetuses can be aborted. In the 1990s, this was estimated to reduce incidences of genetic disorders at birth by 5 percent. As the technology becomes better and more widely available we can expect the rate of genetic disease to drop. It’s a matter of time before embryos can be screened for other traits like beauty and intelligence.

Gene therapy is the attempt to help an individual by inserting genes for positive traits. These genes are then passed on to offspring. In the 1980s, this technology was used on mice to treat a heredity disease and by the 1990s was used to treat human disorders. Like prenatal screening, it’s only a matter of time before this technology can be used for the selection of whatever parents desire.

Embryo selection consists of taking a number of eggs from a woman, fertilizing them with the sperm of a partner in vitro, testing each for desirable traits and inserting the best embryo. The second, third, and fourth best can be saved for possible future use and the rest discarded. When Lynn’s book was written in 2001, it was possible to test for sex and thousands of genetic diseases.

In the twenty-first century it will become possible to test embryos for the presence of genes affecting numerous other characteristics, including late-onset diseases and disorders; intelligence; special cognitive abilities, such as mathematical, linguistic, and musical aptitudes; personality traits; athletic abilities; height; body build; and physical appearance. It will then be possible for couples to examine the genetic printouts of a number of embryos and select for implantation the ones they regard as having the most desirable genetic characteristics.

Before this happens some technical issues need to be addressed, such as identifying the desirable genes. That’s going to happen over the next few decades. Right now it’s possible to hormonally stimulate a woman to produce around 25 embryos at one time. With this technology, even parents of poor stock will be able to produce at least average children. Couples can be expected to produce embryos within a range of 30 IQ points; 15 over the parents‘ average to 15 below. With embryo selection the IQ of a population will have the potential to be raised 15 points in a single generation. Average intelligence can be expected to keep increasing until we hit our limit and new mutations pop up, the way average speed among thoroughbreds has been rising without the fastest times doing so in decades. In 2001, in vitro fertilization cost between $40,000 and $200,000 in the US and $3,000 to $4,000 in Britain, due to lower health care costs in general. Today, it’s a fraction of that. Like all technology, the quality can be expected to improve and the price to drop.

Western governments may outlaw all these technologies, but they will be legal somewhere, and as these options became cheaper and better known more couples will travel to take advantage of them. The situation will be similar to when abortion was only available in certain US states or European countries, and women desiring to have one would simply take a bus.

Not everybody will be able to afford biotechnology, and some ethicists reject it on those grounds. Of course, there are all kinds of things that rich people can afford that the poor can’t; we don’t outlaw them all. Lynn optimistically points out that no technology that can help humanity has ever been successfully suppressed. The inherent quality gap between the genetically engineered upper class and the ‘natural’ lower class will continue to grow until the former decides to sterilize the latter or forces them to use biotechnology themselves.

Why China is the Future

In 1994 China passed the Eugenic Law. All pregnant women were required to undergo embryo screening and abort fetuses with genetic disorders. This was a follow-up to the famous one-child policy introduced in 1979 that brought the birth rate down to 1.9 per woman.

Attitudes of elites and those who work in the relevant fields are likely to determine what technologies are accepted and how liberally they’ll be used. A survey was conducted between 1994 and 1996 asking geneticists and physicians around the world whether they agreed with the statement “An important goal of genetic counseling is to reduce the number of deleterious genes in the population.”

Country Percentage of Geneticists and Physicians Agreeing with Eugenic Goals
China 100
India 87
Turkey 73
Peru 71
Spain 67
Poland 66
Russia 58
Greece 58
Cuba 57
Mexico 52
Major 

 

Western

Democracies

<33

In addition to the negative attitudes of the elites towards anything eugenic, other reasons we can expect these ideas not to win fast acceptance in the West are the value placed on individual rights, democracy, and the existence of low IQ minorities who would be disproportionately affected by any measures aimed at improving the genetic quality of the population. While many countries in the third world might feel positively about eugenic measures, the attitudes in China are the most favorable and when that is combined with the advantages of an authoritarian government, a lack of dysgenic immigration, and a high IQ starting point it’s not hard to believe that the Chinese will continue to be the most enthusiastic and efficient users of biotechnology.

So how will this nation of a billion people treat the rest of the world after it’s raised its IQ to 150+? Lynn might be too optimistic here. He believes the Chinese will colonize the world and try to improve the IQs and living standards of their subjects. The Europeans will be kept around for their biological uniqueness and admired for their cultural accomplishments, the way that the Romans subjugated the Greeks but appreciated their philosophy and art. If the Chinese decide that the Europeans should be preserved they’d be doing more for them than whites are currently doing for themselves. A global eugenic superstate led by by the Chinese will be the “end of history.”

Lynn’s forecasts the next 100 years with a stone-cold detachment. The first government to utilize the power of biotechnology will take over the world. Thanks to third world immigration and egalitarianism, the decline of the West seems inevitable and eugenic policies unlikely. The future of humanity being in the hands of the dictators in Beijing may not be the most comforting idea in the world, but at least the reader of Eugenics may be convinced that intelligence and civilization will continue somewhere.

For a review of Richard Lynn’s Dysgenics see here.

jeudi, 05 mai 2011

The Fall of Man: Richard Lynn's "Dysgenics"

Richard HOSTE

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

Review: Richard Lynn (photo)
Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations
Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1996

rlynn-2s-300x282.jpgWhen it comes to population, quality matters more than quantity. While educated Westerners never tire of sprinkling their conversations with the word “overpopulation,” voicing concern about population worth is taboo. Put it this way: you have to spend the rest of your life in a city filled with Nigerians or Japanese. You can either pick the ethnic makeup or the amount of people in the city. Which would you choose? As it’s settled that genes influence character and intelligence, could these traits be declining in some or all populations? Has it to some extent? Anecdotes exist about single educated women and fertile welfare queens, but hard data is needed.

While support for eugenics has been around since the time of Plato, the first person to worry about genetic deterioration was French physician Benedict August Morel. He’s an obscure figure today and much better known is the more important Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics in 1883. He thought that more genes for lower intelligence and poor character were concentrated in the lower classes, whose higher fertility would lead to a decline in genetic quality. Galton spent his life working to reverse the trend. He eventually convinced Darwin himself of the danger. Biologist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote:

In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play and the fittest did not survive.

It wasn’t until 1974 that Nobel prize winning physicist William Shockley called the process dysgenics. Darwin went on to despair over the excessive breeding of “the scum.” Data has always been needed on whether his fears had been justified. Richard Lynn brings together studies and data from the last 200 years dealing with the connection between fertility and intelligence/socioeconomic status from all over the world. How afraid should we be?

Selection throughout Time

The conditions that hunter-gatherers lived in insured an upkeep of genetic quality. Usually there was a chief who had to have a certain amount of intelligence to acquire and maintain his position. He had the most access to females, there would be relatively high ranking men who had one wife and many of the unfit never bred. Mutations that popped up which adversely affected health would be weeded out. Early nation-states continued with polygamy.

With Western man’s transition to civilization selection was weakened but not eliminated. The higher social classes enjoyed better nutrition so had better health and children more likely to survive into adulthood. Christianity struck a blow against the Western gene pool by enforcing celibacy among the priesthood but probably more than made up for it by prohibitions against adultery. Most who have children out of wed-lock then and now have/had lower intelligence and less self-control. Overall, the years 1500-1800 were good for Europe’s gene pool. In England from 1620-1624 the middle classes reported 4.4 children per woman compared to 2.1 for the working class. Part of the reason why is life expectancy. In Berlin from 1710-1799 the average life expectancy for the upper class was 29.8 years compared to 20.3 for the lower class. The numbers for Geneva, Rouen and Neuruppin in the 18th century are similarly tilted towards the former. This didn’t mean that everybody died when they were 20-30 years old but that more of the lower classes were dying in childhood before they could mate.

Lynn understands that for these numbers to mean anything it would have to be shown that there was social mobility. If everybody was stuck in their own class with no opportunity to rise or fall then we would expect different social classes to be similar and not worry about differences in fertility. Pitrim Sorokin looked at a wide range of societies and found that there has never been one with no social mobility at all. The closest thing has been the caste system in India, but even these classes weren’t absolutely closed. Economist historian S.J. Payling concluded that there was significant social mobility in Europe from at least the 14th century on.

Natural Selection Breaks Down: Health and Intelligence

Mutations occasionally pop up in any population. Since the vast majority are adverse, stable fertility for an entire population still means deterioration. The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit. The results of the slacking of selection in our modern world is apparent in disease. Today, almost 1% of children born have a mutation for a common genetic disorder. Due to carriers of bad genes surviving and new mutations, it’s estimated that the rates of hemophilia, cystic fibrosis and phenylketonuria are increasing every generation by 26%, 120%, and 300% respectively. Humanity requires that we save children that can be saved but breeding for those with diseased genes needs to be restricted. Lynn hints that better genetic screening and selective abortion can offset some of the consequences of modern medicine.

American psychologist Theodore Lentz was the first to devise a method for finding the relationship between intelligence and fertility. He tested the IQs of children and found out how many siblings they had. Assuming that children have the same IQ as their parents, if those with lower IQs had more brothers and sisters than children with high IQs then it could be determined that dysgenics is happening. In 1927 Lentz calculated an IQ drop of 4 points per generation. Calculations in Britain found a drop of about 2 points per generation. These surveys didn’t include the childless but since they are disproportionately those with higher IQs the studies actually underestimate the extent of dysgenic fertility. Reviewing various studies and using findings from twin and adoption cases showing that IQ is 82% heritable, Lynn calculates a genotypic IQ decline of 5 points in Britain from 1890-1980. In the US he calculates a drop of 2.5 IQ points for whites and 6.2 for blacks over three generations. Interestingly, women are shown to universally have more dysgenic fertility than men. This is partly because low IQ men probably have a harder time finding mates than low IQ women.

The Fall of Greece

Greece is a particularly interesting example. Papavassiliou (1954) looked at IQ, socioeconomic status and fertitlity for men and came up with the following results.

Intelligence and Fertility in Greece, 1950s

Socioeconomic StatusNumber SurveyedMean IQNumber of Children
Professionals 41 117.2 1.78
Skilled Workers 80 100.9 2.66
Semi-skilled Workers 27 91 4
Unskilled Workers 67 82.2 5.56

My calculations give an IQ of 96.9 for the parent generation and an IQ drop of 4.9. Using a heritability of .82 for IQ puts the IQ of the children’s generation at 92.9 (IQ of parent generation – .82 x 4.9). Lynn has found elsewhere that the IQ of Greece is 95. This low (for Europe) figure is surprising considering the country’s historical accomplishments. Papavassiliou’s data may solve the puzzle.

Does the Flynn Effect Disprove Eugenics?

While science has shown that traits for IQ and socioeconomic status are heritable and those with poor genes are outbreeding those with good genes, actual performance on IQ tests in the industrialized world has risen over the last century. How can this be? This seeming paradox is called the Flynn effect, after the scientist who estimated IQ gains of about 3-4 points per decade over the 20th century.

We can rule out the effect of increased familiarity with written tests or better education because these gains are present in children as young as two years old. It is doubtful that it is due to increased stimulation because adoption studies show that the effect of shared environment is negligible; two biologically unrelated people raised in the same house are no more alike than any two random strangers. Lynn’s explanation is that the Flynn effect is due to better nutrition. This seems like the best explanation, as over the same time period height and brain size have increased by one standard deviation: the same as the increase in IQ.

So while genotypic intelligence, which can be seen as underlying genetic quality, has decreased, actual performance, phenotypic intelligence, has seen an increase. This increase can’t last forever and the evidence shows that in the developed world, with even the poorest suffering from obesity, the Flynn effect has hit its ceiling. We can now expect a decrease in observed intelligence in the developed even discounting low IQ third world immigration.

The Case of Character

Francis Galton and the early eugenicists weren’t only concerned with the decline in intelligence and health but what they called character: a moral sense, ability to delay gratification and work towards long term goals and sense of duty. Modern psychologists call this conscientiousness and Lynn gives a working estimate for it being 66% heritable. The news here is even worse than the data on intelligence.

Looking at criminals and psychopaths and their number of siblings yields a decline in consciousness that is twice the rate of the decline in intelligence. This has had real life consequences

The straightforward prediction is that the high fertility of criminals has led to an increase in the number of genes in the population responsible for crime and this will show up in increasing crime rates. These increasing crime rates have certainly occurred in most of the economically developed nations during the second half of the twentieth century. In the United States, crime rates approximately tripled between 1960 and 1990; in Britain they quadrupled, and similar increases have occurred in many other countries.

Rates of out-of-wedlock births tell a similar story. Western populations are morally worse than ever and we can expect the modern welfare state to continue to accelerate the decline. Unfortunately, most social scientists and policy makers are too steeped in the environmentalist dogma to deal with these problems.

Does the Universality of the Problem Mean It’s Hopeless?

While there are no direct studies for IQ and fertility in the third world we can check to see how socioeconomic status and education, both correlated with IQ, relate to number of children. Lynn calls the birth rate of the lowest class over the birth rate of the highest class the dysgenic ratio. For example, if those in the lowest class have 3 children per woman and the higher class have 2, the dysgenic ratio is 3/2 = 1.5. Anything over 1 indicates dysgenic fertility and anything under 1 indicates eugenic fertility. While a number over 2 is high for modern Western nations, ratios have been calculated at 3.1 for Columbia, 2.6 for Guatemala, 2.7 for Mexico and 3.1 for Brazil. Muslim and African countries have lower ratios, but only because even the highest classes have large numbers of children. In a worldwide survey the only exceptions are Bangladesh, Fiji and Indonesia who have ratios of 1.01, 0.93, and 0.86 respectively. The developing world can be expected to remain “developing” indefinitely.

So dysgenic fertility is found everywhere: among rich and poor and every race. Does that mean it’s hopeless? We won’t know until we at least acknowledge and try to deal with the problem. Communism once controlled half the planet and today its equivalent is globalization and the supposed triumph of liberal democracy. While communists can say that true communism “has never been tried” and continue to be liberals, the legacy of Nazism poisons the eugenics movement. Of course, blaming the ideas behind eugenics for the crimes of the Nazis is as silly as blaming the ideology of the welfare state for Soviet labor camps. So there is no rational reason why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago. While the facts of differential fertility may discomfort our feminized elites we must never stop repeating that the cost of doing nothing is the end of civilization. There’s no virtue in ignoring that.

Source: HBD Books

mercredi, 04 mai 2011

Armin Mohler / Eine politische Biographie

Armin Mohler. Eine politische Biographie

Götz KUBITSCHEK

Ex: http://www.sezession.de/

 

mohlereinband 121x200 Armin Mohler. Eine politische BiographieHeute wäre Armin Mohler 91 Jahre alt geworden. Ich konnte ihn Mitte der neunziger Jahre noch kennenlernen und habe meinen Verlag nicht zuletzt gegründet, weil Ellen Kositza, Karlheinz Weißmann und ich im Jahre 2000 Mohler zum 80. eine Festschrift überreichen wollten. Es wird keinem Antaios-Leser unbemerkt geblieben sein, daß das Erbe Mohlers und sein besonderer Ton in Schnellroda auffindbar und virulent gehalten werden.

Nun hat Karlheinz Weißmann jahrelange Arbeiten in Form gebracht und legt Armin Mohler. Eine politische Biographie vor (hier subskribieren!). Weißmann ist der beste Kenner des Werks und der Denkweise Mohlers, hat auch Teile von dessen Nachlaß übernehmen können und in vielen persönlichen Gesprächen Details erfahren und Zusammenhänge notiert, die nirgends schriftlich niedergelegt sind.

Weißmanns Arbeit ist eine politische Biographie, weil Mohler ein politisch denkender, strategisch und taktisch im Sinne einer modernen deutschen Rechten agierender Kopf war. Man liest von der Nähe zur Macht (im Umfeld Josef Strauß‘), erfährt, was in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren an Debatten noch alles möglich war und verneigt sich vor der Prinzipientreue Mohlers, der Respekt nie mit Undeutlichkeit oder einer Schleimspur verwechselte.

Dies zeigt sich deutlich in den Großkapiteln über Mohlers Zeit als Sekretär von Ernst Jünger und über die Kontakte mit Carl Schmitt: In keinem Fall war er so etwas wie Goethes Eckermann (am Kaffeetisch sitzend und glühend vor Glück die Gespräche notierend), sondern ein Gesprächs- und Briefpartner auf Augenhöhe, der sich ja zuletzt nicht scheute, Jüngers Frühwerk gegen den Autor öffentlich zu verteidigen (was zum Bruch mit Jünger führte).

Dies alles breitet Weißmann in seiner Biographie aus, und natürlich auch all die anderen, für uns bis heute so wichtgen Aspekte: Mohler rettete das Erbe der Konservativen Revolution, sezierte die Mechanismen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung, verfaßte elektrisierende Essays – wir pflegen sein Erbe zurecht, und zurecht sind viele, die sich – dem Zeitgeist folgend – über ihn erhoben und über ihn urteilten heute so richtig und ganz und gar vergessen …

+ Weißmanns Mohler-Biographie kann man hier für 19 € subskribieren (bis zum 30. April). Später kostet sie 22 €, erscheinen wird sie Mitte, Ende Mai.
+ Von der dreibändigen Mohler-Ausgabe, die wir 2001 und 2002 aufgelegt haben, sind Reste der Bände 1 und 2 noch erhältlich. Wir bieten sie günstig im Doppelpack für 24 € an (in Einzelbänden: 44 €). Bestellen Sie hier.
+ Mohlers Essay Gegen die Liberalen (mit einem Nachwort von Martin Lichtmesz) wird derzeit in 2. Auflage gedruckt. Informationen und eine Bestellmöglichkeit gibts hier.

lundi, 11 avril 2011

Il manifesto antimoderno di Luigi Iannone

Il manifesto antimoderno di Luigi Iannone

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

Nelle settimane passate ho letto un saggio interessante di Luigi Iannone intitolato Manifesto antimoderno (Rubbettino). Per la varietà dei temi trattati e la densità delle considerazioni e dei rimandi che racchiude (in poco più di centosessanta pagine) è difficile, o quasi impossibile, tentarne una recensione esaustiva, che dia cioè conto di tutte le questioni sollevate. Mi limito quindi, più modestamente, ad alcune considerazioni sorte dalla mia lettura.

Come rivela il titolo, oggetto del libro è la modernità. Effettivamente l’autore attua una critica serrata ai fondamenti filosofici, storici, materiali e spirituali del moderno, tanto nella sua totalità quanto nei suoi elementi costitutivi; ma parte dalla consapevolezza che è impraticabile ogni passatismo. Questa è un’impostazione condivisibile: la semplice riproposizione di schemi ormai travolti da nuove idee vittoriose è tragicamente destinata alla sconfitta, e ancor più ogni forma di mitificazione di un passato puramente astratto e ideale, secondo il modello rousseauviano variamente declinato. È però anche vero che la ripresa del passato in chiave mitica è stata operata tante e tante volte nella storia, sin da epoche molto remote. Ancora in età imperiale avanzata era diffusa tra i Romani una (ri-e)vocazione dell’epoca repubblicana che, in forme assai diverse, avrebbe costituito la cifra anche del Rinascimento, poi dell’arte neoclassica e, ancora successivamente, persino della tendenza predominante nell’architettura di alcuni regimi totalitari; e gli esempi si potrebbero moltiplicare con molti altri riferimenti, anche extraeuropei. Forse sarà nuovamente concepito un legame ideale con il passato, magari arcaico, capace di spingerci, con una forma definita, nell’avvenire.

Il libro si costituisce di quattro capitoli, dedicati al disagio della realtà, alla morte della bellezza, a tempo e storia e alla Tecnica. Forse l’ultimo dei temi è il primo per rilevanza, come viene riconosciuto da tanti filosofi contemporanei, e come venne messo in luce da alcune tra le menti più acute della Rivoluzione conservatrice tedesca, cui Iannone ha dedicato lunghi studi (Jünger, Schmitt, Heidegger, Spengler ecc.). Dai tempi dell’Operaio jüngeriano la Tecnica sembra però aver mutato volto, o meglio aver mutato il volto del mondo da essa mobilitato; lo Stato mondiale che sta affermandosi in modo (almeno apparentemente) inesorabile è speculare a quello preconizzato da Jünger, essendo a tutti gli effetti un matriarcato – come “valori”, estetica e visione del mondo. La Tecnica ha cioè effettivamente forgiato una nuova Figura, ma più che di Operaio sembra trattarsi di Consumatore.

A proposito di Figure, sono molto interessanti le considerazioni di Iannone sul Partigiano schmittiano, che pare divenuta la caratteristica fondamentale dei conflitti contemporanei. L’inimicizia totale che ne è la caratteristica, con il conseguente travolgimento di quei limiti che caratterizzavano le guerre normate dallo jus publicum europaeum, ha invaso ogni angolo del mondo, con risultati di ferocia abissale divenuti ormai quotidiani; e persino il dilagare di episodi aberranti di cronaca nera sembra inserirsi in questa stessa logica.

Anche riguardo l’eclissi del sacro, su cui Iannone si sofferma, potrebbe valere la considerazione che non ha senso tentare di rianimare i cadaveri. Ma d’altra parte appare probabile che il sacro torni comunque a manifestarsi con impeto, se è vera la considerazione di Mircea Eliade che il sacro è condizione della stessa esistenza umana: solo la totale de-umanizzazione potrebbe portare alla perdita completa del sacro (ma, a mio avviso, dovrebbe trattarsi di una de-umanizzazione in senso completamente regressivo e animalesco). E’ vano tentare di preconizzare quali forme il sacro possa assumere in futuro; è però verosimile che un’enorme crisi spirituale, come l’attuale, possa propiziarne la riaffermazione.

Il lettore del Manifesto antimoderno si troverà ad osservare i problemi caratteristici della modernità in maniera particolarmente cruda e radicale, e talvolta ancor più di quanto non fosse già portato a fare per indole o formazione: già questo è sufficiente a consigliarne la lettura. A ciò si deve però aggiungere che l’autore ha un’eccezionale capacità di analisi, una grande forza espressiva e arricchisce il suo testo con innumerevoli rimandi e consigli di approfondimento più o meno impliciti: chi osservi il mondo con autentico interesse troverà quindi in questo libro un riferimento tanto prezioso quanto raro nell’editoria odierna.

00:10 Publié dans Livre, Politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : italie, livre, antimodernisme, monde moderne, luigi iannone | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

samedi, 09 avril 2011

Sous haute surveillance politique

Préface de Pierre le Vigan au livre “ Sous haute surveillance politique” de Philippe Randa
(Chroniques barbares VIII – Éditions Dualpha)

Le_ViganRanda_2.gifComme adjectif, le mot « chronique » désigne quelque chose qui dure longtemps. Comme une maladie, ou comme l’avenir dont chacun sait, au moins depuis Althusser, qu’il dure longtemps puisque sous ce titre il publia un livre. Précisément, les chroniques de Philippe Randa, dont il nous livre le hui­tième volume, concernent une maladie durable. C’est celle de notre pays. Comment nommer ce mal ?
Comme toutes les maladies graves, elle a plusieurs aspects. Elle atteint le corps et l’âme. Elle vient à la fois du corps et de l’âme.
C’est la maladie d’un pays qui vit à crédit, mais c’est aussi et surtout la maladie d’un pays qui ne se respecte plus, c’est la maladie d’un pays qui accepte une immigration de peuplement et de remplacement, mais aussi qui dévalorise le travail manuel, c’est la maladie d’un pays qui donne des leçons de morale au monde entier et ne montre pourtant que l’exemple de l’assujétissement volontaire aux États-Unis, d’un pays ubuesque qui prétend réduire la criminalité tout en licenciant des compagnies de CRS, dont les gouvernants ont affiché la proposition de « travailler plus pour gagner plus », alors qu’ils n’ont en réalité su que faire venir plus d’étrangers pour faire baisser plus encore les salaires.
C’est le drame d’un pays où les collusions entre les « élites », de droite comme de gauche et les grandes entreprises n’ont jamais été aussi flagrantes, jusqu’à devenir caricaturales.
Bref, notre pays est schizophrène et il accepte d’être dirigé par des imposteurs. Il grogne contre ceux qui lui mentent et ne se donne pas les moyens de les sortir du jeu politique. Notre pays ne veut pas prendre de risque. Aussi, il reconduit au pouvoir la vieille droite et la vieille gauche et il prend tout simplement le risque de mourir. Il est vrai que tout est mis en œuvre par les élites pour développer les faux choix. Si vous êtes anticapitalistes, l’ultragauche vous propose de rejoindre son combat, mais vous im­pose plus d’immigrés et des régularisations automatiques des sans papiers. Si le déclin du sens des responsabilités vous insupporte, la droite vous propose son prêt-à penser pro-américain, la collaboration à des expéditions néo-coloniales en Afghanistan, et un anti-islamisme instrumentalisé pour accréditer la thèse du choc des civilisations et vous solidariser avec toutes les entreprises atlantistes présentes et à venir. Comme peut-être, demain, une croisa­de contre l’Iran. Au nom de la « liberté » et des « droits de l’homme » bien sûr.
Et peut-être, demain encore, le choix électoral en France sera-t-il : Sarkozy ou Strauss-Kahn ? Et, pour les penseurs, pourquoi pas : Jacques Attali ou Alain Minc ? Au plan politique, le « système », comme disait Jean Maze (auteur de L’anti-système, 1960), met en place de faux choix pour que « tout bouge sans que rien ne change. »
C’est une entreprise scélérate qui, jusqu’ici, a plutôt bien marché et a fait sortir notre pays de l’histoire jusqu’à lui supprimer toute conscience de soi. On comprend pourquoi, comme l’écrit Philippe Randa, la nouvelle disposition juridique sur le référendum dit d’initiative populaire est tellement encadrée, est tellement mise « sous haute surveillance politique » – c’est le titre de son livre – que ce référendum ne risque guère d’être le moyen d’un réveil du peu­ple, si celui-ci était frappé d’un éclair de lucidité et sortait de la dépolitisation soigneusement orchestrée pour que les « élites » continuent de jouir du pouvoir sans être dérangées. Il est vrai qu’il y a aussi l’anesthésie que Philippe Randa appelle fort bien « l’information du vide » : 20 mn consacrée à la météo, « attention il fait froid, couvrez vous » ou bien « attention, il va faire chaud, buvez. »
Et pourtant, ce pays, je l’aime et Philippe Randa l’aime aussi. C’est pourquoi il en parle tant, avec ironie, sans illusions excessives, mais avec quelque tendresse aussi. Car notre pays fut grand et se porta haut et loin.
Un pays est une porte vers l’universel. Si on refuse de passer la porte, on reste tout le temps chez soi. Si la porte est tout le temps ouverte, ce n’est plus une porte et la maison se délabre et à terme s’effondre. C’est pourquoi l’éloge des frontières que fait Régis Debray dans son récent livre n’est pas l’éloge de l’enfermement, c’est l’éloge des différences, ce qui est tout autre chose.
C’est pourquoi l’accueil de quelque 200 000 étrangers supplémentaires (au bas mot et hors les clandestins) tous les ans en France est une folie.
« Derrière la disparition apparente des identités, écrit de son coté Hervé Juvin, derrière la disparition apparente de tous ce qui sépare les hommes, nous sommes en fait en train d’assister à un régime de séparation infiniment plus rigoureux que les autres, sauf qu’il est fondé sur une chose et une seule chose, votre utilité économique, et, pour le dire ainsi, votre patrimoine et votre pouvoir d’achat. »
Oui, ces chroniques de l’année 2010, qui portent sur des événements que nous avons tous en mémoire, nous restituent un climat, une ambiance, celle d’une France qui s’oublie, qui oublie les rapports de force dans le monde, qui oublie la différence des civilisations, qui n’est pas forcément leur choc, mais qui est leur altérité, et qui est l’altérité même des hommes et des communautés, même les plus petites ou les plus spécifiques, telles que Michel Maffesoli en fait l’analyse depuis des années.
Hervé Juvin le dit encore : « La demande identitaire, comme le retour au politique et à la frontière, sont les éléments centraux de la sortie de la crise mondiale. » Le localisme comme échelon du sociétal et de l’économique, le national comme échelon du politique, la civilisation européenne comme échelon du projet, du mode d’être-ensemble et voie vers un universel différencié, telles sont les moyens, à notre portée, d’un ordre nouveau et impérial. Tout le contraire de l’impérialisme du nouvel ordre mondial.

Pierre Le Vigan est un collaborateur d’Éléments et de de Flash Infos magazine depuis sa création. Il est également l’auteur de plusieurs livres.

Vous pouvez acquérir Sous haute surveillance politique par correspondance :

BON DE COMMANDE

Je souhaite recevoir :
… ex. Sous haute surveillance politique au prix de 23 euros.
Participation aux frais d’envoi :
Destination France :
5 euros (1 livre) 6 euros (2 livres) 7 euros (3 livres ou plus)
Destination à l’Étranger :
10 euros (1 livre) 15 euros (2 livres) 20 euros (3 livres ou plus)
À partir de 200 euros d’achat, frais de port gratuits
(pour envoi en colissimo recommandé + 5 euros)

Pour toute commande, je recevrai gratuitement le cadeau choisi ci-dessous :
• Un ancien numéro de Flash.
Nom : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prénom : . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Adresse : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Code postal : . . . . . . . . Ville : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pays : . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tel : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Adresse internet : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Veuillez trouver ci-joint mon règlement mon règlement de …… euros à l’ordre de Primatice par :
– Chèque bancaire ou postal
– Carte bancaire n° /__/__/__/__/ /__/__/__/__/ /__/__/__/__/ /__/__/__/__/
Expire fin /__/__/__/__/ 3 n° verso carte : .....…
Signature : .................................
à renvoyer à : Primatice - 10, rue Primatice 75013 Paris Librairie - comptoir de vente éditeur
Primatice
10 rue Primatice 75013 Paris
Tél. 01 42 17 00 48 - Fax 01 42 17 01 21
Mél. primatice@francephi.com
www.dualpha.com
www.librad.com

La rue Primatice est juste derrière la Mairie du XIIIe
Métro : Place d’Italie

00:20 Publié dans Livre | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, réflexions personnelles, politique, france, philippe randa | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

D'un Céline l'autre

 
Vient de paraître:
 
D'un Céline l'autre
 
de David Alliot
 
Présentation de l'éditeur
Les 200 témoignages que regroupe D’un Céline l’autre jalonnent l’itinéraire d’une vie entière : celle de l’écrivain Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961), depuis sa jeunesse passage Choiseul jusqu’à sa mort à Meudon. Un portrait inédit de Céline émerge ainsi à travers le regard de ceux qui l’ont connu : famille de l’écrivain, amis intimes, admirateurs ou adversaires. La nature des témoignages est d’une grande variété : correspondances, journaux intimes, mémoires, etc. S’ils proviennent généralement de la sphère française, quelques voix étrangères résonnent : les danoises, qui dévoilent le Céline de l’exil entre 1945 à 1951, les allemandes, qui dévisagent le Céline de l’Occupation. Certains textes tiennent en une ligne, d’autres s’étendent sur plusieurs dizaines de pages. Chaque témoignage est minutieusement introduit à la compréhension du lecteur à travers un appareil critique très exhaustif : notice biographique du témoin, origine du texte, contexte dans lequel il a été écrit. Enfin, l’ensemble du livre contient des annotations de nature à éclairer certains aspects de la vie de Céline. Un tiers des témoignages est connu du grand public. Un deuxième tiers ne lui était pas accessible jusqu’ici. Le dernier tiers est totalement inédit. En effet, tantôt les témoignages ont été recueillis par l’auteur auprès des derniers témoins encore en vie, tantôt ils ont été découverts dans des archives encore inexplorées. D’un Céline l’autre est préfacé par Me François Gibault, biographe de Céline, avocat et homme de confiance de Mme Lucette Destouches, veuve de l’écrivain, qui a apporté son soutien au projet. Le livre s’accompagne également d’une biographie synthétique de la vie de Céline, écrite par David Alliot, afin de livrer quelques repères au lecteur profane. Enfin, différentes annexes (chronologie, bibliographie et deux cartes) viennent compléter le contenu du livre.

David Alliot, D'un Céline l'autre, R.Laffont, 2011.
Commande possible sur Amazon.fr.

vendredi, 01 avril 2011

Ehre ist, was Du daraus machst...

Ehre ist, was Du daraus machst: Schopenhauer und "Die Kunst, sich Respekt zu verschaffen"

     

Geschrieben von: Alexander Röhlig   

Ex: http://www.blauenarzisse.de/

 

SchopenhauerDer 2009 verstorbene Philosoph Franco Volpi hatte bereits einige kleine Textsammlungen zu Arthur Schopenhauer herausgegeben, darunter Die Kunst, glücklich zu sein. Nun ist ein weiterer Band dieser Reihe erschienen. Die Kunst, sich Respekt zu verschaffen ist eine heitere Lektüre, die gegen einen Aberglauben über die Ehre ankämpft.

Was ist Ehre?

Schopenhauer verfolgte nicht die Klärung des Begriffs Ehre. Er wollte praktische Tipps für das Leben geben, wie Volpi in seiner Einleitung richtig festhält. Schopenhauer griff somit ein Thema auf, das wohl jeden beschäftigt. Damit aber dürfte er die meisten verblüffen.

Es ist typisch für Schopenhauer, dass er als falsch brandmarkt, was er dafür hält. Sein scharfer Ton missfällt vielen, erlaubt ihm jedoch, zum Kern eines Problems zu kommen: Ehre, das sei die Meinung anderer von uns. Als solche sei sie für uns ohne Bedeutung. Wir sollen uns um uns selbst kümmern und nicht um die Meinung anderer. Diese bürgerliche Ehre habe jeder und nur durch eigene Handlungen werde sie beeinflusst.

Verwerflicher Gegensatz zur bürgerlichen Ehre: Die Ritterehre

Dagegen sei die ritterliche Ehre ein großes Übel. Denn sie gehe davon aus, dass unsere Ehre allein in der geäußerten Meinung anderer über uns bestehe. So erklärt Schopenhauer, warum Menschen häufig beleidigt seien – und woher das Duellwesen komme. Denn die Ehre „kann, wenn sie verletzt ist, recht bald und vollkommen wiederhergestellt werden, durch ein einziges Universal-Mittel, das Duell.“

Dieser Text ist ein Vergnügen, denn Schopenhauers Ironie zieht sich durch den ganzen Text. Zugleich aber will er sich nicht nur über andere belustigen, sondern ein Ratgeber sein. Einige Tipps sind heute noch hilfreich. Volpi hat aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlass Schopenhauers eine schöne Ergänzung zu dem vierten Kapitel aus den Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit publiziert. Man wünscht sich nur, Ernst Ziegler hätte den Anmerkungsteil etwas besser gestaltet. Manchmal ist es schwer auseinanderzuhalten, von wem welche Textpassage stammt.

Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Kunst, sich Respekt zu verschaffen, hrsg. von Franco Volpi und Ernst Ziegler. München: C.H.Beck 2011. 108 Seiten. 8,95 Euro.

00:11 Publié dans Livre, Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, honneur, arthur schopenhauer, livre | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

jeudi, 24 mars 2011

Feminism & the Destruction of the West

Feminism & the Destruction of the West:
Steve Moxon’s The Woman Racket

Richard HOSTE

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

Steve Moxon
The Woman Racket: The New Science Explaining How the Sexes Relate at Work, at Play and in Society
Charlottesville, Va.: Imprint Academic, 2008

womanracket.jpgMost of my readers would agree that the West’s modern political correctness regarding race and gender is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has given any thought to human nature and its evolutionary source. So the triumph of the PC ideology needs an explanation. With regards to feminism, Steve Moxon thinks he has an answer. In The Woman Racket, he looks to evolutionary psychology to shed light on our prejudices and documents how they lead to misperceptions about the sexes and how that in turn leads to failed policy.

The Hatred of the Beta Male

First, there was asexual reproduction. One day, mother nature brought two proto-gametes together, and they (how?) ended up mixing. This process gave an advantage to the offspring by diluting replication errors (the majority of mutations are harmful). The two gametes were not exactly the same size and by natural selection eventually became polarized. The larger ones, being less numerous and harder to produce, became the “limiting factor” in reproduction. The proto-sperms, on the other hand, became numerous, competitive with one another for proto-eggs and “cheaper.”

This far-fetched story of the origins of sex explains gender differences. Little boys, like little sperm in abiogenesis, wrestle and compete in sports. As adults, mating with a female that has unfit genes costs less (or did, before the government or at least culture stepped in) than the equivalent mistake would for a female so they are less picky sexually. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. That’s why we’re most horrified when women and children, the most genetically valuable, are killed in war.

The story gets even more interesting than that. For the species to survive, nature still wants those with the best genes to reproduce. Since the male world is where competition is, males have a wider distribution of talents. In numerous traits, the male bell curve has wider tails while females are clustered near the middle. People want the males who are at the bottom, or even the vast majority that aren’t alpha, out of the gene pool, and we have a subconscious contempt for them. Cultural norms enforce this hierarchy. There’s a Saturday Night Live skit where the difference between a man who gets a date and one who gets charged with sexual harassment is looks and charm. The male hierarchy is rigorously enforced by both sexes. This “good of the species (or at least race)” explanation goes further than Dawkins’s more simplistic selfish gene model in explaining why for example humans are so ready to submit to hierarchies even against their interests. The result is that while just about any woman can be sure to find male attention somewhere, there is no such consolation for low-ranking males.

Moxon challenges conventional wisdom that says it is women that are and have been historically disadvantaged. He wonders why men being the only ones allowed to engage in work, which for most of history was much more hellacious than the worst jobs today, is seen as an advantage. And even if being able to work is an advantage, up until the present era it was necessary for one person to stay home to manage the household. This is nature’s division of labor and the basis of primate life. In pre-historic times things were even worse for men. In some groups of hunter-gatherers 50% or more would be killed in violent combat while all women who were healthy enough could expect to survive to adulthood.

To ask whether men or women are “advantaged” is as meaningless as wondering if infants are advantaged relative to their grandparents. The sexes live in different worlds, and each is happier living a life more congruent with its respective nature. Trying to bridge them has been a disaster. In Britain the percentage of women engaged in full-time permanent work is no greater than it was 150 years ago. Moxon provides evidence that this is due to women’s choices rather than discrimination. In fact, in 1996 Riach and Rich sent out similar résumés to employers with only the sex of the applicant being different. ‘Emma’ got four times as many job offers as ‘Phillip.’ Women being less inclined to work is predicted from an evolutionary perspective. Since a woman’s mate value is based on her youth and beauty rather than status, working for any reason beyond getting the bare essentials for life is pointless.

Perception and Reality: Rape and Domestic Violence

There are two chapters in this book at the start of which the author makes extraordinary claims. The reader is eventually shocked to find that the evidence is there. First, false claims of rape are at least as common as the real thing. The Home Office in England investigated rape claims in 1999 and found that 45% were false charges; the woman retracted completely. This is only a low end number of rape charges that are false, since one would have to think that not every woman who lied eventually admitted it. Investigations in the UK, New Zealand, and the US show that police officers with experiences in rape cases believe that 50-80% of claims are false. Compare the media attention given to women who are raped compared to men who are wrongly convicted.

Studies show that the number of rapes in US male prisons dwarfs all cases on the outside. Yet, it’s a joke in our society, and some even see it as criminals getting their just desserts. It’s really a grotesque thing to laugh at, considering the AIDS epidemic in US prisons making a stint of any duration in jail a possible death sentence. Evolutionary psychology tells us why male rape is funny while a person making a joke about female rape is banished from respectable society. A man who rapes a woman is violating the rules of the male hierarchy by gaining a mate that his genes don’t merit, and our nature makes this objectionable to us.

The second shocking claim is that the majority of instances of domestic violence, even the serious stuff, is female on male. Men who aren’t psychopaths have a natural aversion to hitting women, while women have no aversion to hitting men. They can do so knowing that the man won’t hit back and that when the cops come they’ll be the ones believed no matter what. The cultural Marxists and feminists use our natural favoritism towards women to make men into an oppressor class. Reality says that so-called violence towards women isn’t part of some “patriarchy,” but largely a myth.

The War on the Family

Feminists demand “equality” only when it’s convenient for women. They complain about the lack of women CEOs and political leaders but never about the lack of female mechanics or plumbers. Women demand equal pay but after divorce should get 50% of what the man earns. All that aside, the government’s intrusion into family life in the name of feminism has been the greatest disaster of all. Moxon focuses on his native England but the same story could be told of any Western country.

In 2007, former Labor minister for welfare reform Frank Field calculated that a woman with two children working 16 hours a week for minimum wage receives after tax credit as much as she would if she was living with a man and they worked 116 hours a week between them. With these kinds of incentives for reckless and irresponsible behavior it’s not a wonder why the number of out-of-wedlock births in Western societies has multiplied in the last few decades but why most white children still end up in two parent households. Moxon says that human nature can’t be changed, but he’s too optimistic. Harpending and Cochran’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution shows us that evolution in civilized societies can happen very quickly. Each generation of Westerners is going to be less intelligent, less responsible, and less moral the longer the welfare state and feminism survive.

Family courts show the same bias against men that the rest of modern political life does. Women initiate 80-90% of divorces (with the financial incentives no doubt playing a part in the decision), but men are assumed to be the guilty party. The latter are responsible for paying child support but have no guarantee of seeing their own children. All of a sudden, equality goes out the window, and men are required to be providers for women who no longer want them. Judges have even ruled that men may be forced to pay for children that aren’t even theirs. In the US a man can at least get a prenuptial agreement, but in England they aren’t even enforceable in court. It bears repeating: after reading The Woman Racket and investigating feminism’s influence on the law and culture the reader won’t wonder why the modern family has been breaking apart but how it even survives at all.

Another White Man’s Disease

Moxon’s theory of women being favored, like many things, makes sense in the Western world but not universally. He says about Middle Eastern culture

The very different experience of Muslim and Hebraic cultures–where social practices are derived primarily from canonical text rather than the codification of biological imperatives–is the exception that proves the rule. Indeed a plausible argument could be made that the ‘patriarchal’ moral and legal codes deriving from the ‘religions of the book’ are an attempt to redress the imbalance revealed by the practice of ‘natural’ societies.

But doesn’t that seem backwards? Wouldn’t we expect that culture and religion would work with a group’s nature instead of “fixing imbalances?” Kevin MacDonald makes the case in his paper “What Makes Western Culture Unique?” that inherent racial differences are reflected in and reinforced by religious and cultural practices. Like with the question of race and IQ, it is more reasonable to assume differences than similarity in the kinds of societies we expect different groups to create. I wonder if Moxon really believes that Afghans or Saudis are inherently just as likely to fall for “The Woman Racket” and adopt society destroying feminism as Swedes are.

Racial differences can also help explain why no group of whites has reacted to incentives for irresponsibility the way black Americans have. In 2007 the black out-of-wedlock birth rate hit an all-time high of 72%. Africans are not only looser sexually but have different ideas about the obligations of men and women. Steve Sailer writes that in the West “feminists complain that men lock women out of the world of work. But in Africa, men have always ceded most of the world of work to women.” We see the same thing with regards to out-of-wedlock birth rate to a lesser extent with America’s growing Latino population. East Asians may have birth rates as low as the West, but you still don’t see Western style feminism or rampant anti-men discrimination. We all share certain qualities going back to the primordial ooze, but different environments have had plenty of time to tweak our differences since then. While there are pluses and minuses to each system, feminism seems to be like racial masochism: a curse that only affects whites.

Moxon may have been smart to avoid the racial issue here. For a mainstream book you have to pick your battles. It’s easier to get people to accept gender differences than it is to accept ones having to do with race. After all, many of us don’t have much contact with other races but we all have at least some experience with the opposite sex. We don’t know what the future holds but what’s certain is that the current system can’t last. With the IQ and productivity of nations falling due to immigration and differential birthrates and the rapid spread of inferior genes due to relaxation of selection and government subsidies the question isn’t if the collapse is coming but how soon.

Originally published at HBD Books, June 3, 2009.

00:10 Publié dans Livre, Sociologie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, sociologie, féminisme, etats-unis, steve moxon | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook

Céline sous la faucheuse situationniste

Céline sous la faucheuse situationniste

par Eric Mazet

Ex: http://lepetitcelinien.blogspot.com/

Tous les lâches sont romanesques et romantiques, ils s’inventent des vies à reculons...”
Féerie pour une autre fois.

Je pensais ne plus écrire sur Céline avant quelque temps, mais un éditeur m’envoie un livre avec ses compliments: L’Art de Céline et son temps, d’un certain Michel Bounan que je ne connais pas. Dans la même collection, dont la qualité de finition m’avait séduit, M. Bounan a déjà publié Incitation à l’autodéfense, titre quelque peu inquiétant par sa brutalité paranoïaque. N’étant pas un de ces céliniens médiatiques, mais plutôt un chercheur de dates pour notules, la courtoisie de l’envoi me flatte. Je me dois d’y répondre. Et puis la couverture, avec la lame XIII du tarot de Marseille, celle de la mort en marche, éveille mon attention. La première lame, celle du Bateleur, moins morbide, plus célinienne, aurait aussi bien présenté ce livre, puisqu’elle évoque autant Bagatelles que Mort à crédit, comme la lame nommée “Le Mat”, avec son fou en marche, canne à la main et baluchon sur l’épaule, accompagné d’un chat ou d’un chien, peut aussi bien illustrer Voyage, D’un château l’autre ou Rigodon.
La quatrième de couverture aguiche le lecteur ignorant: “La bonne question n’est pas de savoir comment un libertaire en vient à s’acoquiner avec des nazis, mais pourquoi ce genre de personnage croit bon de se déguiser en libertaire”. Je suis d’accord avec M. Bounan: si Céline était un nazi, alors, à la poubelle ! Qu’on n’en parle plus. Et M. Bounan le premier. J’ai autant de répulsion que lui, j’imagine, quand on me montre le visage du nazisme ou du racisme au cinéma. La vie quotidienne, fort heureusement, m’en préserve. Je me suis toujours méfié des majorités; sinon je ne serais pas venu à Céline. Mais je n’ai jamais cessé de prêcher les vertus de la tolérance, du respect des plus faibles, par simple souci d’équité. Nous sommes sans doute, M. Bounan et moi, d’accord là-dessus. Ce n’est déjà pas mal.
Pour le reste, je vais paraître à M. Bounan bien désuet, décevant, arriéré. Tous les prêcheurs politiques m’ennuient. D’où qu’ils viennent, les politiciens sont des charlatans, attachés à gamelle. Mais écoutons M. Bounan. Sa thèse est simple. Céline n’est qu’un prétexte, un appât, à peine un exemple. M. Bounan est un “situationniste” qui explique les origines de la Seconde guerre mondiale par le financement d’une secte, les nazis, par des entreprises capitalistes. Des provocateurs, nervis de ces banquiers, ont désigné les Juifs comme fauteurs de guerre, à seule fin de faire diversion. Céline est de ceux-là. Après-guerre, les mêmes responsables ont gardé le pouvoir, sont devenus les juges de leurs anciens nervis, et financent derechef des courants antisémites pour occulter leurs nouveaux crimes contre l’humanité. Céline ne fut qu’un agent provocateur à leur solde, par appât du gain, et les céliniens d’aujourd’hui sont tous suspects d’antisémitisme ou de révisionnisme. C’est un résumé de notre sombre XXe siècle, ficelé par un “situationniste” qui a choisi Céline comme marque commerciale, afin d’attirer le chaland.
Plus inspiré par la musique, la peinture et la poésie que par la politique, je trouve ce discours bien mécanique, abstrait, fallacieux. La logique paranoïaque est toujours impeccable, aussi attrayante que les poupées russes qui s’emboîtent. Je ne sais si M. Bounan est infirmier psychiatrique ou psychanalyste situationniste. Il est surtout du genre homo politicus. Dès lors, en littérature nos goûts et nos lectures divergent . Pour moi, Céline n’est pas plus libertaire qu’il n’est nazi. Son apport à la littérature, son défi, sa gageure, ne se situent pas à ce niveau. Donc, la question initiale, de mon point de vue, est caduque. Et comme M. Bounan l’a écrit page 61: “Une question fausse ne peut recevoir que des réponses absurdes”. Pour lui, Céline n’est qu’un provocateur antisémite, du début à la fin. Un écrivain politique, un menteur, un tricheur, obnubilé par l’argent. La thèse n’est pas nouvelle. On y retrouve Alméras, Bellosta, Dauphin, lus comme nouveaux évangélistes. Citations non contrôlées, lectures de seconde main, diffamations répétées.
M. Bounan croit-il vraiment qu’on quitte la sinécure d’une clinique à Rennes, et puis d’un poste international à la SDN, pour faire fortune dans un dispensaire de banlieue en se lançant dans un énorme roman? Le risque était grand... M. Bounan ne voit que recettes à la mode dans Voyage et dans Mort à crédit. Croit-il qu’un écrivain, uniquement motivé par l’appât du gain, passerait quatre années à écrire un premier roman, puis quatre années encore pour écrire le second, en offrant une révolution esthétique digne des plus grandes révolutions littéraires des siècles passés? On ne devient pas l’égal de Rabelais ou de Victor Hugo avec des recettes de bistrot.
M. Bounan s’encolère, congestionne, du fait que le docteur Destouches, dans son étude sur “L’Organisation sanitaire aux usines Ford” , recommande en 1929 aux mutilés ou aux malades de ne pas s’exclure de la société, de refuser d’être des chômeurs, de ne pas devenir des assistés, mais de continuer à travailler dans la mesure de leurs possibilités, aidés par une médecine préventive, sociale, adaptée, et non intimidante, sanctionnante, mandarine. M. Bounan s’oppose-t-il aujourd’hui à la réinsertion des handicapés dans le monde du travail? Cela le révolte encore quand Louis Destouches demande la création d’une “vaste police médicale”. Sans doute le mot “police” n’évoque-t-il pour M. Bounan que le slogan “CRS-SS”, slogan que Cohn-Bendit lui-même trouve aujourd’hui ridicule. M. Bounan qui a écrit un livre sur Le Temps du sida doit savoir que les plus menacés ont dû créer leur propre “police”, changer d’habitudes, de mentalité et d’attitude vis-à-vis de la sexualité. Lorsque Céline affirme dans Les Assurances sociales que “l’assuré doit travailler le plus possible, avec le moins d’interruption possible pour cause de maladie” , M. Bounan oublie de mentionner que Céline n’envisage cette phase qu’après une lutte plus efficace contre les maladies par une refonte de la médecine. Céline devançait par là les thèses de “l’anti-psychiatrie” qui choisit d’insérer le “malade” dans la société au lieu de l’exclure. Avec M. Bounan, on croirait lire le petit catéchisme d’un homéopathe fanatique vitupérant les généralistes ou les chirurgiens ayant parcouru l’Afrique comme le fit le Dr Destouches. Notre situationniste oublie que Clichy, à l’époque, c’était le tiers-monde. Que pour sortir du fatalisme de la maladie et de la misère, de l’alcoolisme et de la syphilis, il fallait se livrer à une “entreprise patiente de correction et de rectification intellectuelle”. Médicale, humaniste, sociale, évidemment, comme le souhaitait le docteur Destouches, et non pas répressive, policière, punitive, comme l’insinue M. Bounan. Ce texte a d’ailleurs été approuvé et défendu en 1928 devant la Société de médecine de Paris - et M. Bounan passe ce fait sous silence - par le Dr Georges Rosenthal qu’on a du mal à imaginer nazi.
Il faut se rappeler qu’en 1918 les Américains avaient envoyé en Bretagne la Mission Rockefeller pour lutter contre la tuberculose qui faisait cent cinquante mille morts par jour dans le monde. C’est là que Louis Destouches, embrigadé dans cette croisade, cette “éducation populaire”, apprit, devant un public d’ouvriers, à condamner l’alcoolisme, “principal pourvoyeur de la tuberculose”, et non chez on ne sait quel folliculaire antisémite dont les attaques seront tantôt dirigées contre l’alcool, tantôt contre les Juifs. Était-ce vouloir enrégimenter les poilus de 14 dans un monde totalitaire que de vouloir leur épargner un deuxième fléau mortel en 1918 en appelant à la création d’écoles d’ infirmières visiteuses qui se rendraient chez les malades? Tous ces projets avaient été formés outre-atlantique par les professeurs Alexander Bruno et Selskar Gunn, médecins de la mission Rockefeller. Était-ce tenir des discours policiers ou nazis que de demander la construction de dispensaires anti-tuberculeux, et de parler en 1919 “au nom de la Patrie si réprouvée, au nom de l’Avenir de notre race” comme le faisait alors le comité de la mission? C’était le langage d’une génération formée aux études latines. Ni dans les tranchées de Verdun ni dans les livres d’histoire, on n’usait des codes “politiquement correct”qui pallient l’inculture de nos critiques.

La suite très prochainement...

Eric MAZET
Le Bulletin célinien, n° 175, avril 1997, pp. 15-22.

Michel Bounan, L’art de Céline et son temps, Éd. Allia.
 
Céline sous la faucheuse situationniste (II)

 

 

lundi, 21 mars 2011

Ocampo e Drieu la Rochelle, quando l'amore è troppo intelligente

Ocampo e Drieu La Rochelle, quando l’amore è troppo intelligente

 Articolo di Stenio Solinas

Da il Giornale del 10 marzo 2011
 
Dalla corrispondenza, durata quindici anni, fra la Ocampo e Drieu La Rochelle emergono due mondi, due culture, due caratteri. Così il sentimento che li legò fu qualcosa di più e di meno di una vera passione 
 
vic3_medio_a.gifL’anno in cui si incontrarono, il 1928, Victoria Ocampo era una bella e ricca argentina non ancora quarantenne, sposata, ma di fatto separata e con un unico grande amore alle spalle, e Pierre Drieu La Rochelle un brillante trentacinquenne senza lavoro fisso, al secondo e già fallito matrimonio, con molte avventure sentimentali dietro di lui. Che cosa spingesse l’una nelle braccia dell’altro e viceversa non è facile dire: negli scrittori Victoria cercava gli uomini, anche se pur sempre come intesa di anime, più che di corpi; quanto a Drieu, la sua attrazione era figlia della prevenzione, il fascino esercitato da una donna intelligente, ovvero ai suoi occhi un controsenso, se non un elemento contro natura.
 
Come che sia, furono amanti, restarono amici, si scrissero, viaggiarono insieme, polemizzarono anche duramente, ma senza che questo incidesse sulla stima e l’affetto reciproci. La Ocampo fu l’unica donna alla quale La Rochelle lasciò scritte, in busta chiusa, le ragioni del suo suicidio, e nel lungo tempo che lei gli sopravvisse quel ricordo sentimentale e intellettuale non venne mai meno, il restare comunque fedele a chi era stato sconfitto dalla politica e dalla storia. Adesso la casa editrice Archinto pubblica, a cura di Julien Hervier, Amarti non è stato un errore (pagg. 218, euro 17, traduzione di Enrico Badellino), la corrispondenza fra loro intercorsa dal ’29 al ’44, e da essa viene una luce particolare a illuminare le due figure e un’epoca, quella fra le due guerre, così drammatica.
 
8772.jpgMa chi era veramente Victoria Ocampo, al di là dell’eco di un nome che oggi, escluso qualche specialista, evoca pallide frequentazioni letterarie fra le due sponde dell’Oceano Atlantico, il nome di una rivista, Sur, e di un collaboratore d’eccezione, Borges?
 
La più grande di sei figli, Victoria apparteneva a una delle famiglie più facoltose e antiche dell’aristocrazia bairense. Fra i suoi antenati c’erano un paggio di Isabella di Castiglia, un governatore del Perù, un candidato alla presidenza della repubblica argentina. Fra i suoi parenti lo scrittore José Fernandez, l’autore del Martin Fierro, il poema epico di una nazione. La sua casa modernista sul Mar del Plata era stata costruita sul modello di Gropius, quella di Buenos Aires secondo i dettami dell’architetto Alberto Presbich, allievo di Le Corbusier. Ricchezze immense, dunque, al servizio di un’educazione squisitamente europea, l’idea di un’Argentina appendice e insieme avamposto del Vecchio Continente che Drieu, ossessionato dalla decadenza di quest’ultimo, non tarderà a rimproverargli: «Mi avevi detto che l’Argentina era piena di vita, di forza, eccetera. No, io non vi ho trovato che la tua vita di donna e un certo fermento in profondità che c’è anche a Parigi nei suo rigagnoli. C’è forza nel popolo argentino, come in ogni popolo, ma questa forza è imprigionata dallo schema formato da La Nación, dalla “Società”, dai circoli intellettuali e da Sur e che non serve una causa organica, ma quella della letteratura in generale».
 
Per una giovane bene di quell’Argentina primo ’900, dove la donna sposata ha ancora lo status giuridico di una minorenne e deve sottostare all’autorità del marito, la strada è apparentemente obbligata: un matrimonio all’altezza del patrimonio, una vita di agi, lussi, viaggi, la cura e l’educazione dei figli. Ma se la Ocampo si sposa a ventidue anni, nel 1912, con Luis Bernardo de Estrada che conosce da quando è adolescente, già un anno dopo l’unione non funziona più, lui troppo geloso e brutale, «il mostro triste» che considera le donne puledre da domare e da cavalcare, lei che ha seguito alla Sorbona corsi su Dante e Nietzsche, che è andata al Collège de France ad ascoltare le lezioni di Bergson... Vivranno sotto lo stesso tetto, ma non nello stesso letto per circa un decennio, poi, nel ’26, la legislazione argentina consente alle donne sposate l’esercizio di una professione e il poter disporre del proprio denaro, e Victoria, che da quattro anni è comunque andata a vivere da sola, ha intanto cominciato a farsi un nome letterario e non si è negata lo scandalo, più o meno soffocato, di una relazione con Julián Martínez, un diplomatico ricco e playboy che vanta fra le sue conquiste Coco Chanel. È ancora legata a lui, anche se l’amore si è ormai spento ed è rimasta della tenerezza, quando nell’estate del ’28 incontra Drieu a Parigi.
 
Va detto che Victoria ha una passione per gli uomini d’ingegno e di fama, il che può prestarsi all’equivoco di una sorta di ricca collezionista di celebrità. È un errore che farà il filosofo tedesco Hermann von Keyserling, è un errore che farà il filosofo spagnolo Orytega y Gasset: entrambi ne scambiano l’entusiasmo, la passionalità, l’amore verso ciò che dicono, scrivono e pensano, per qualcosa di fisico che lei invece non prova. È un’epoca ancora in gran parte misogina, in cui l’uomo è abituato a essere ammirato e si aspetta che la donna si conceda senza troppe storie. Di qui incomprensioni, scambi di accuse, rotture di rapporti.
 
Con Drieu, però, scatta qualcosa di diverso. Certo, è misogino anche lui, e lo è al massimo grado, ma in modo diverso dalla brutalità e in fondo dalla volgarità di quei due illustri pensatori: lo è con tenerezza e con rispetto, quasi scusandosi. È un animo delicato che capisce subito come dietro la maschera della donna indipendente e a proprio agio in ogni situazione ci sia l’insicurezza e l’infelicità di chi è costretta a recitare un ruolo, vorrebbe lasciarsi andare, ma l’educazione, la società glielo impediscono. Victoria ha tutto ciò che a Drieu piace, ma anche tutto ciò che Drieu detesta. Una casa nell’VIII arrondissement, abiti di Chanel, quadri di Picasso, Léger, Mirò alle pareti, soggiorni al Savoy di Londra o al Normandy di Deauville, e insomma quell’idea del lusso, delle cose belle, della pigrizia e dell’ozio che egli coltiva in modo quasi maniacale proprio perché non è alla portata dei suoi mezzi. L’idea di essere mantenuto da «mecenati femminili» da un lato ne solletica l’orgoglio maschile, e dall’altro gli ripugna perché proietta su di sé l’ombra di un padre vanesio, fallito e seduttore, incapace di amare e fonte di sofferenza per sua madre.
Anche come tipo femminile Victoria è per Drieu il concentrato di sentimenti contrastanti. Fisicamente è alta, ben fatta, matura, e questo si accorda con chi non si è mai innamorato di fanciulle in fiore e non si è mai visto nel ruolo del pigmalione-corruttore di anime giovani e caste. E però stride con la sua preferenza verso le donne anti-intellettuali, dirette, le uniche che egli possa sopportare perché non lo obbligano a pensare, perché non invadono la sua intimità. Victoria è «tutto quello che nell’altro sesso lui vuole ignorare», quell’elemento di cultura che può scuotere il suo senso di superiorità, che può costringerlo a discutere, a rivedere una posizione, a interrogarsi sulla bontà di una scelta. È insomma il fascino che nasce da un pericolo, laddove la passione per le donne semplici, se non per le prostitute che nemmeno fanno domande, è sotto il segno della sicurezza. Il primo è alla lunga stressante, la seconda alla lunga è noiosa.
 
E Victoria? Che cosa trova in Drieu Victoria? È un intellettuale, ma non di quelli libreschi. Ha una modernità che ne fa il termometro culturale di quella Francia fra le due guerre, in grado di cogliere la novità delle avanguardie, ma anche spesso la loro sterilità. È aitante, e il suo narcisismo masochista non riesce a nascondere il coraggio fisico e una tensione morale incapace di compromessi. Rispetto alla media dei suoi confratelli, ha più buon gusto, pulizia, charme, e ciò colpisce chi, come lei, sotto questo aspetto ha poco da imparare e molto da insegnare... Infine, nel gioco psicologico Drieu è uno che non si nega e questo rende lo scambio più interessante per una mente femminile... Come molte donne, Victoria vorrebbe salvarlo dal suo lato nero, pessimista, malinconico, come molte donne pensa e spera di dargli quella fiducia nei propri mezzi in grado di condurlo a grandi cose.
 
madame-1.jpgLa distanza, le differenze di opinioni politiche, la stanchezza che si insinua in ogni legame sentimentale, allenteranno nel tempo i rapporti, senza mai però reciderli. Negli anni ’30, un ciclo di conferenze in Argentina organizzato dalla Ocampo sarà per Drieu l’occasione per mettere a fuoco ideologie e scelte di campo: «È stato lì che ho capito che la vita del mondo occidentale stava uscendo dal suo torpore e che si apprestava ad essere lacerata dal dilemma fascismo-comunismo. Da quel momento, ho camminato rapidamente verso la caduta in un destino politico». La summa di tutto questo sarà, nel 1943, L’uomo a cavallo, storia di un dittatore boliviano che sogna l’unità del continente latino-americano e la riconciliazione delle classi sociali. Camilla, l’eroina del romanzo, è in realtà Victoria Ocampo, e naturalmente il loro è un amore destinato al fallimento. «Sarebbe ora che tu capissi che le donne sono anche esseri umani» gli aveva rimproverato un giorno... Perché Ocampo sapeva che «nella sua maniera di amare la Francia riconosco il suo modo di amare le donne che gli ho spesso rimproverato e che era poi così irritante, ma non meschino. Se Drieu è per una politica che non ci piace, non lo è per ragioni inconfessabili, basse o interessate. Un giorno gli dissi: Tu sei Pietro, e su questa pietra non costruirò la mia chiesa. Ma la mia tenerezza gli resta fedele, incurabilmente fedele».
 
Stenio Solinas

Manning Up

Manning Up

Amanda Bradley

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

Kay S. Hymowitz
Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys
New York: Basic Books, 2011

I expected this book to be a diatribe against the often-discussed “loser” men—those who, not having any marketable skill, are still living off their parents into mid-life. Manning Up actually is about a new demographic, the SYM (single young male), its female counterpart, and what factors led to the decline in marriage and number of children in the Western world. Simply having a job is not enough to be a man in the author’s view; true adulthood means being married and having children. Most young men and women are what she calls “preadults.”

 Kay S. Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has written extensively on issues of marriage, the sexes, class, and race, and she appears to be genuinely concerned about the declining rates in marriage childbirth. Her stance is slanted in favor of women, but she is sympathetic to the plight of men today. She mentions that boys are often discriminated against and ignored in favor of women. While funds pour in to increase girls’ math and science scores, boys are not given special treatment to improve their reading scores. She cites a BusinessWeek story that explains today’s young men as a “payback generation” intended to “compensate for the advantages given to males in the past.”

The Shift to the Feminine, Knowledge Economy

Scholars attribute women’s entry into the workforce largely to innovations in science and technology in the twentieth century. With no need to can food, make bread, weave, or sew, women were not “needed” at home the way they were in every generation past. They were having fewer children, too, due to birth control: In the early 1800s, white women had an average of seven children. By 1900, it was 3.56. When the birth control pill was introduced in the 1960s, state laws “kept the drug away from unmarried women.” Economist Martha Baily showed that when a state changed its law, there was a decline in the percentage of young women who gave birth by age 22, and an increase in the number of young women in the labor force and the hours they worked.

The number of working women (ages 33 to 45) went from 25 percent in 1950, to 46 percent in 1970, to about 60 percent since 1995. But in the 1950s to ’70s, women tended to work to help pay the bills, often as secretaries, waitresses, nurses, teachers, and librarians. Today’s young women set out in the world to find their “passion” not in a husband, but in a career.

The shift from secretary to major player in corporate America, Hymowitz explains, was largely due to a shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy. By the 1980s, the economy was booming as manufacturing jobs decreased and millions of positions opened in fields like public relations, health, and law. Women, too weak physically to participate much in the industrial economy, could do almost any job in the knowledge economy.

One example given is design. As technology advanced, designers transitioned from working with their hands (and making lasting work as is found in Bauhaus and Art Nouveau) to being hands-off fashion designers, who no longer needed to learn drafting, typesetting, drawing, or how to use heavy equipment. Using cheap labor overseas meant many more products, and thus a greater need for marketing and advertising. Women now make up 60 percent of design students, once a male-dominated field.

New industries sprouted up, too, as increased wealth and leisure time demanded workers at yoga centers, spas, travel companies, and more marketing and ad agencies for these specialty industries—all areas in which women participate as easily as men. Working women had new needs and money to spend, so more industries sprouted up to create feminine business suits, trendy lunch spots, meal “helpers,” stylish computer bags, $400 work pumps, $5 lattes, spa treatments and scented candles to help women unwind, houses with bathrooms the size of our grandparents’ bedrooms, a variety of products in the color pink, and right-hand rings for women who want to buy themselves a diamond. Other women entered the design arena through boutique companies: making jewelry, crafts, or custom stationary.

Nation-building and culture-building thus fell out of the workforce, replaced by sales, marketing, and fashion.

Today, men outnumber women in fields like construction (88 percent), while women make up 51 percent of management and professionals, particularly in fields like Human Resources, Public Relations, and finance. Women make up 77 percent of workers in education and health services. Women are more likely to work at the numerous new nonprofits, and make up 78 percent of psychology majors, 61 percent of humanities majors, and 60 percent of social and behavioral science doctorates. Publishing has long had high numbers of women workers, but now women have moved from what Hymowitz calls the “ladies’ magazines ghettos” to political commentary.

While women moved into the knowledge economy, men remained in behind-the-scenes fields that required more technical skill: jobs like writing code and IT. Some men flocked to jobs at ESPN, Cartoon Network, microbreweries, and video game design firms. Other men knew that even in the midst of feminism, their wives would still want the option to stay home and raise children (so long as men didn’t tell them they had to), and concentrated on high-paying jobs rather than following their bliss.

In the early nineteenth century, most men worked for themselves, as farmers, small merchants, or tradesmen. But by the end of the nineteenth century, two-thirds were working for “the man.” Some experts believe that it’s women who will soon be “running the place,” since the knowledge economy workplace “requires a more feminine style of leadership.” Employers will increasingly placate women, who are not solely concerned with the bottom line as a measure of their career success, but also want a job where they “help others,” enjoy relationships with colleagues, get recognition, have flexibility, and are in an environment of “collaboration and teamwork.” More women in the workplace means that it is more genteel and less of a man’s club: Swearing and spitting are forbidden, and men are now in a domesticated atmosphere both at home and at work. The popularity of psychoanalysis means that men and women alike are trained to listen sympathetically, be sensitive to emotions, and control their anger.

To explain the dynamics of the knowledge economy, Hymowitz references a 2002 paper by Harvard economist Brian Jacob called “Where the Boys Aren’t.” He found that girls are better at noncognitive tasks, such as keeping track of homework, working well with others, and organization, and suggests that such skills may explain the gender gap in high school grades and college admissions (women have higher GPAs and are 58 percent of college graduates, but they lag behind men in math SAT scores). These cognitive skills also are important for success in today’s feminized workplace.

Though not mentioned in Manning Up, these skills are also ones for which men have traditionally relied on women: organizing the home, keeping track of appointments, and being the family PR rep and social coordinator. Today’s women benefit in the career-world, as more jobs require good communication skills and “EQ” (emotional intelligence), while men are left with lower paying jobs and the added disadvantage of no wife at home.

SYMs: The New Demographic

In 1970, 80 percent of men aged 25–29 were married, compared to 40 percent in 2007. In 1970, 85 percent of men aged 30–34 were married, compared to 60 percent in 2007.

This new single-young-male demographic used to be called “elusive,” since it was a difficult advertising target. Then Maxim arrived in America in 1997, and seemed to have the answers to what SYMs wanted. Its readership reached 2.5 million in 2009, more than the combined circulation of GQ, Men’s Journal, and Esquire. Hymowitz says other magazines, like Playboy and Esquire, tried to project the “image of an intelligent, cultured, and au courant sort of man.” Even though Playboy promoted the image of the eternal bachelor, he was at least an intelligent and sophisticated bachelor. (Hugh Hefner wrote that his readers enjoyed “inviting a female acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”) Maxim, however, catered to the man who didn’t want to grow up.

Hymowitz doesn’t buy into the idea that the masses of men are moved by the media (or an inner party seeking to destroy them, let alone any subversive forces dominant in the Kali Yuga). She instead posits that products like Maxim were developed for an existing market.

Regardless of the reason, a number of TV shows were created with the SYM in mind, starting with The Simpsons. Comedy Central brought out South Park and The Man Show, while the Cartoon Network promoted cartoons for grown men. More films featured SYM stars like Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey, and Jack Black, and movies like 2003’s Old School (30-somethings who start a fraternity) were popular. American men ages 18–34 are now the biggest users of video games, with 48.2 percent owning a console and playing an average of 2 hours and 43 minutes per day. That doesn’t include online games like World of Warcraft.

Hymowitz recounts the numerous silly Adam Sandler movies, in which he plays a stereotypical young adult, male loser. Meanwhile, the media’s counter-image for women is the well-heeled, single young female:

If she is ambitious, he is a slacker. If she is hyper-organized and self-directed, he tends toward passivity and vagueness. If she is preternaturally mature, he is happily not. Their opposition is stylistic as well: she drinks sophisticated cocktails in mirrored bars, he burps up beer on ratty sofas. She spends her hard-earned money on mani-pedi outings, his goes toward World of Warcraft and gadgets.

It’s in this chapter that Hymowitz’s double-standard for men and women is most apparent, and annoying. She seems to think that when single women spend money for clothes and pedicures, it’s women’s empowerment, but single men who spend money on guy-flicks and video games are childish. Both cases seem to me examples of adults who, instead of having children, make themselves into the child: men by continuing all the games and comic books of their youth, and women by playing Barbie doll with themselves.

So if simply cutting the financial apron strings doesn’t make one a man, what does? Hymowitz answers by looking to masculine virtues throughout all cultures: “strength, courage, resolve, and sexual potency,” but that one line is about the extent of the analysis. She is careful to distinguish between having sex (which single men do a lot these days) and “manning up” by being married and becoming the head of a family.

But even when men do settle down, the roles they play as fathers have changed. Rather than being a strong father figure, today’s father often relates to his children by “accentuating his own immaturity,” according to Gary Cross, author of Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity. Whether they want to or not, middle-class men are often “expected to bring home a spirit of playfulness that would have scandalized their own patriarchal fathers.” The middle-class home has became more child-centric, even with fewer children in it, and both sexes are expected to project “warmth, nurturing, and gentleness.”

With high divorce rates, many young men today were raised in matriarchal family environments, which may be one contributing factor to the “unmanliness” of some of today’s men. Instead of having their own families, some men instead play the role of the “fun uncle,” like men in matriarchal, non-white societies.

A Different Dating World

After college, all of these single young people embark on a journey more confusing than if they started a family: modern dating, now with websites that describe the etiquette for one-night stands (it’s “leave quickly”).

Men and women are both confused by the new rituals, and the lack thereof. A man who inadvertently insults a girl by not opening her car door may have been chastised by his last girlfriend for doing just that. Women sometimes “pick up” guys (whether at bars, or actually driving to pick them up for dates), and there is ambiguity about who pays for dates when SYFs outearn SYMs in the majority of large cities. Men experience the nice-guy conundrum when they see girls dating jerks. Meanwhile, women practice a Zen-like nonattachment when dating, since bringing up marriage before a year of sex seems to turn men off.

Hymowitz recounts a number of events from the childhood of young women that play into their behavior as adults: Today’s SYFs were often told by their mothers that they shouldn’t need a man to be happy. They were likely raised in the 1990s, in the midst of a tween-based advertising frenzy that marketed make-up, thong underwear, and high-heeled clogs to preteens, while at the same time trying to “save the self-esteem” of young girls. Popular TV shows for girls were based on the female warrior type: The Powerpuff Girls, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These women try to convince themselves for years that they shouldn’t “need” a child or husband, then end up debating whether to become a “choice mother” (the new term for a woman who uses sperm bank).

 

* * *

 

Manning Up might be a good “beach book” for women readers of Counter-Currents, but I have trouble imagining men enjoying it, though they would find some insights into the mind of the typical woman. I found it interesting for its wealth of statistics about marriage rates and ages, men and women in the workplace and universities, and summaries of various causes that contributed to the (mostly white) single and childless young men and women today.

There have been numerous debates on Counter-Currents and other websites about what exactly has caused the decline in marriage and childbirth. Manning Up does a good job of touching on some of the contributing forces, but never addresses any of the larger forces.

The good news from Manning Up is that the majority of young men and women still want to get married and have children. In addition, while women in their early 20s are “hot commodities,” by the time they reach 30, they are beginning to get desperate and may “settle for Mr. Good Enough” as the subtitle of the book Marry Him advises. More good news lies in the fact that young people today are scrambling for any advice whatsoever about how to successfully date and marry, revealing a large market for New Righters and Traditionalists to step into to help young people successfully navigate through the increasingly unsatisfying modern world.

jeudi, 17 mars 2011

The Art of Manliness

Brett and Kate McKay
The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man
Cincinnati: How Books, 2009

It’s hard not to like this book. However, it’s really the idea of the book that I like, rather than the book itself. In fact, I almost hesitate to write this review (which will not be wholly positive) because I think the authors have their hearts in the right place, and because I like their website http://artofmanliness.com/

When I showed this book to a young friend of mine he was incredulous: “Do we really need a manual on being a man?” he asked. Well, yes it appears we do. As the authors say in their introduction “something happened in the last fifty years to cause . . . positive manly virtues and skills to disappear from the current generations of men.” They don’t really tell us what they think that something is, but two paragraphs later they remark: “Many people have argued that we need to reinvent what manliness means in the twenty-first century. Usually this means stripping manliness of its masculinity and replacing it with more sensitive feminine qualities. We argue that masculinity doesn’t need to be reinvented.”

I wanted to let out a cheer at this point, but I was sitting in the American Film Academy Café in Greenwich Village, surrounded by young white male geldings and their Asian girlfriends. So I kept my mouth shut and noted to myself that the McKays are clearly not PC, though there are minor nods to political correctness here are there. One gets the feeling that they know more than they are letting on in this book. And one gets the feeling they are employing a simple and sound strategy: to seduce male readers with the natural appeal of traditional manliness – while revealing just-so-much of their political incorrectness so as not to completely alienate their over-socialized readers.

Still, the McKays are pretty socialized themselves, and one sees this immediately on opening the book and finding that it is dedicated to two members of “the greatest generation.” Ugh. Yes, I do think there’s much to admire about my grandfather’s generation, but I long ago came to detest the conventional-minded romanticism about America’s great crusade in WWII. And the very use of the phrase “greatest generation” has become a cliché.

However, the real trouble begins after the introduction, when one finds that the first section of the book is devoted to how to get fitted for a suit. Then we are instructed in how to tie a tie. For some unaccountable reason the tying of the Windsor knot is included here. (Like Ian Fleming, I have always regarded the Windsor knot as a mark of a vain and unserious man.) This is followed by sections on how to select a hat, how to iron a shirt, how to shave, and how not to be a slob at the dinner table. So far so good: I know all this stuff, so I guess I’m pretty manly. Of course, the problem here is that this is all in the realm of appearance. To be fair, the McKays do go on to include much in their book about character, but one must wade through a lot of inessential stuff to get there.

At one point we are instructed in how to deliver a baby. The McKays’ core piece of advice here is “get professional help!” Curiously, this is also the central tenet of their brief lectures on dealing with a snakebite and landing a plane. The baby having been delivered, the reader will find further instructions on how to change a diaper and how to braid your daughter’s hair. (This is what happens when you co-author a book with your wife.) The McKays’ advice on raising children is sound. They advise us not to try and be our child’s best friend.

Once you have tended to your daughter’s snakebite and braided her hair (in that order, please), you can turn to manlier things like how to win a fight, how to break down a door, how to change a flat tire, how to jump start a car, how to go camping, how to navigate by the stars, and how to tie knots. Then it will be Miller time, and you will want some manly friends to hang out with.

The section on male friendship, in fact, is one of the best parts of the book. The McKays remind us that in ancient times “men viewed male friendship as the most fulfilling relationship a person [i.e., a man] could have.” They attribute this, however, to the fact that men saw women as inferior. This is at best a half-truth. The real reason men saw male friendship as more fulfilling than relations with women is because it is. There are vast differences between men and women, and while they may be able to have close, loving relationships they never really understand each other, and their values clash.

Women are primarily concerned with the perpetuation of the species. They are the peacemakers, who just want us all to get along, because their main concern is what Bill Clinton called “the children.” By contrast, men find their greatest fulfillment in achieving something outside the home: they are only fully alive when they are fighting for some kind of value. A man can only be truly understood by another man.

Thus was born what the McKays refer to as “the heroic friendship”: “The heroic friendship was a friendship between two men that was intense on an emotional and intellectual level. Heroic friends felt bound to protect one another from danger.” The McKays devote some discussion to the decline of close male friendships, and they have a lot to say about the disappearance of affection among male friends.

A while back I found myself in a bookstore flipping through a book of photographs from WWII. Many of them depicted soldiers, sailors, and marines relaxing or goofing around. What was remarkable about many of these pictures was the affection the men displayed for one another. There was one photo, for example, of a sailor asleep with his head in another sailor’s lap. This is the sort of thing that would be impossible today, because of fear of being thought “gay.” The McKays mention this problem. As George Will once said, the love that dare not speak its name just can’t seem to shut up lately. And it has ruined male bonding. Thus was born the “man hug” with the three slaps on the back that say I’M (THUMP) NOT (THUMP) GAY (THUMP). (Yes, the McKays instruct us on how to perform the man hug in both its American and international versions.)

Another thing that has ruined male friendships is women, but in a number of different ways. First of all, as every man knows, women have now invaded countless previously all-male areas in life. This usually results in ruining them for men. Second, many women resent it when their husbands or partners want to spend time with their male friends. In earlier times, men would spend a significant amount of time away from their wives working or playing with male peers. But no longer. Now women expect to be their husband’s “best friend,” and men today passively go along with this. The result is that they often become completely isolated from their male friends. It is quite common today, in fact, for men to expect that marriage means the end of their friendship with another man. Please note that all of the above problems have only been made possible by the cooperation of men – by their not being manly enough to say “no” to women.

Eventually, one finds the McKays dealing with matters having to do with manly character, such as their discussion of the characteristics of good leadership. A lot of what they have to say is sound advice, but it is not without its problems. At one point they invoke old Ben Franklin and his homey list of virtues. Anyone interested in this topic should read D. H. Lawrence’s hilarious demolition of Franklin in Studies in Classic American Literature. Franklin is the archetypal American, extolling (among other things) temperance, frugality, industry, and cleanliness. This is setting our sights very low, and it’s not the least bit manly. If I’m going to take lessons in manliness from an American I’d much rather get them from Charles Manson.

There are other problems I could go on about, such as the McKays advising us to give up porn because it “objectifies women” (“But that’s the whole point!” a friend of mine responded when I told him this). However, as I said earlier, their heart is in the right place. Whatever its flaws, this book is a celebration of traditional manhood and an honest, well-intentioned attempt to improve men.

Still, there is something undeniably creepy and postmodern about this book. If you follow all of its instructions you won’t be a traditional manly man, you’ll be an incredible, life-like simulation of one. The reason is that everything they talk about came naturally to our forebears. It flowed from their characters, and their characters flowed from their life experience. But their life experience was quite different from ours. They were not constantly shielded from danger and from risk taking. They had myriad ways open to them to express and refine their manly spirit. They had manly rites of passage. Their spirits were not crushed by decades of PC propagandizing. They had been tested by wars, famines, depressions. They were tough sons of bitches, and nobody needed to tell them how to win a fight. And if you tried to tell them how to braid their daughters’ hair you’d better be ready for a fight.

True manliness is not the result of acquiring the sort of “how to” knowledge the McKays try to provide us with. Manliness is not an art, not a techne – but it’s inevitable that we moderns, even good moderns like the McKays, would think that it is. Manliness is a way of being forged through trials and tribulations. In a world without trials and tribulations, in the “safe” and “nice” modern, industrial, liberal, democratic world it’s not at all clear that true manliness is possible anymore. Except, perhaps, through rejecting that world. The subtext to The Art of Manliness is anti-modern. But the achievement (or resurrection) of manliness has to raise that anti-modernism out from between the lines and make it the central point.

At its root, modernity is the suppression of manly virtues and manly values. This is the key to understanding the nature of the modern world and our dissatisfaction with it. Manliness today can only be truly asserted through revolt against all the forces arrayed against manliness – through revolt against the modern world.

dimanche, 13 mars 2011

Jean Fontenoy est Tintin à la Wehrmacht

Jean Fontenoy est Tintin à la Wehrmacht

Ex: http://lepetitcelinien.blogspot.com/

 

Du communisme au fascisme, de Shanghai à Berlin, Jean Fontenoy a vécu en aventurier. Gérard Guégan retrace le parcours de cet oublié des lettres françaises.

Jean Fontenoy, c'est Tintin qui aurait viré fasciste. Il commence comme petit reporter chez les Soviets puis en Chine - Hergé lui rend même hommage, dans Le Lotus bleu, en dessinant une fausse Une du Journal de Shanghai, que Fontenoy avait créé là-bas - et termine dans les pages de Bagatelles pour un massacre, ce brûlot de Louis-Ferdinand Céline que notre ministre de la Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, a dû "relire" pour s'aviser qu'il était affreusement antisémite. Ce grand écart dit tout de cet inconnu des lettres françaises que Gérard Guégan a eu la bonne idée de ressusciter dans une biographie attachante et documentée.

Jean Fontenoy (1899-1945) aura été un aventurier, dans tous les sens du terme. "Drogué, gangster intellectuel, deux fois suicidé", résumera cruellement Maurice Martin du Gard. Emergeant par miracle d'une famille qui tire le diable par la queue, son amour pour la révolution bolchevique - tendance Trotski-Maïakovski - le mène jusqu'à Moscou, où il sera le correspondant de l'ancêtre de l'AFP. Puis c'est Shanghai, où il finit conseiller de Tchang Kaï-chek et, hélas, opiomane invétéré - Le Lotus bleu, toujours... Il traverse ce début des années 1930 entre amitiés surréalistes, flirt avec la NRF (son ami de toujours sera Brice Parain, éminence grise de Gaston Gallimard), paquebots transatlantiques et jolies femmes - une mystérieuse danseuse roumaine, puis une intrépide aviatrice...

Soudain, en 1937, la bascule et l'adhésion au Parti populaire français de Jacques Doriot. Comme pour Céline et l'antisémitisme, difficile de déterminer avec certitude ce qui fait plonger Fontenoy du côté du fascisme. Officiellement, ce serait en réaction aux purges staliniennes : il prend sa carte au PPF le jour de la condamnation du maréchal Toukhatchevski. La réalité est plus contrastée, mélange diffus de haine des riches et d'amour pour le whisky, de hantise d'une impuissance sexuelle et d'échecs littéraires. Qui, aujourd'hui, serait capable de citer un seul livre de Fontenoy ? il y eut pourtant - notez le sens des titres - Shanghai secret, L'Ecole du renégat ou Frontière rouge, frontière d'enfer...

A partir de là, si l'on excepte quelques gestes d'héroïsme - en 1940, prêt à mourir pour Helsinki, il s'engage dans l'armée finlandaise et part combattre l'Armée rouge par - 40 °C -, il semble se complaire dans une certaine abjection. Le voilà qui parade en uniforme de la Wehrmacht au Café de Flore, en 1942 ; un peu plus tard, il demande au sinistre Darquier de Pellepoix de lui dénicher un appartement saisi à des juifs ; évidemment, on retrouve sa signature dans Je suis partout et Révolution nationale, qu'il dirigea même un temps. Il semble fait pour naviguer dans les eaux troubles de la collaboration, entre conjurations, subsides de l'ambassade du Reich et officines cagoulardes. "Fontenoy me touche par une espèce de pureté confuse", écrira pourtant Cocteau.

Ce "renégat" fait partie de ces personnalités foncièrement faibles qui se rassurent par des engagements forts. Ses derniers jours ressemblent à sa propre caricature : Oberleutnant de la Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchevisme sur le front de l'Est, fuite à Sigmaringen ("La bronzette, terminé !" lui lance, ironique, Céline) et suicide effroyablement romanesque dans les ruines de Berlin, en avril 1945. Son corps ne sera jamais retrouvé.

Gérard Guégan, lui, a su retrouver l'esprit de ce second couteau des lettres, sorte de métaphore parfaite des errements intellectuels d'un demi-siècle. Certes, son Fontenoy ne reviendra plus aurait pu, peut-être, faire l'économie d'une centaine de pages sur près de 500. Après tout, l'auteur de Shanghai secret n'a eu ni la vie de Malraux ni l'oeuvre de Céline. Il n'empêche : avec ce livre, on peut dire que Fontenoy est revenu.

Jérôme DUPUIS
L'Express.fr, 25/02/2011


Gérard Guégan, Fontenoy ne reviendra plus, Ed. Stock, 2011.
Commande possible sur Amazon.fr.

mercredi, 02 mars 2011

La revanche de Dieu et du roi

La revanche de Dieu et du roi

par Jean-Gilles MALLIARAKIS

Ex: http://www.insolent.fr/

110226On doit se féliciter des trois césars récompensant ce 25 février le travail de Xavier Beauvois et de son équipe (1). Deux importantes émotions cinématographiques ont, en effet, sollicité les Français ces derniers mois : "Des Hommes et des Dieux", qui retrace la marche au martyre des moines trappistes de Tibhérrine et, dans un registre bien différent, "Le Discours d'un roi". Ce dernier film évoque le destin du duc d'York, qui deviendra George VI d'Angleterre.

On peut regarder ces œuvres de plusieurs manières, bien évidemment. On leur trouvera telles qualités, tels défauts.

Si l'on se passionne par exemple pour le personnage du frère aîné, l'énigmatique et éphémère Édouard VIII, lequel ne régnera que de janvier à décembre 1936, pour sa liaison avec Wallis Simpson, jugée scandaleuse à l'époque, on trouvera peut-être un peu caricaturale la présentation du personnage. Ce prince, dans la réalité historique, s'est montré d'abord un fort courageux soldat de la première guerre mondiale. Proche du peuple, attaché à la paix, il refusera toujours, après son abdication, de servir en quoi que ce soit, les desseins des ennemis de son pays. Celle qui devint la duchesse de Windsor lui demeura fidèle, jusqu'au bout, dans l'exil.

S'il s'agit, pour le premier film, de disserter une fois de plus sur le rapport à l'islam, à l'islamisme, à l'islamo-terrorisme, pas sûr du tout qu'il faille s'aligner, du point de vue étroitement politique, sur la logique du rôle occupé, et remarquablement incarné, par Lambert Wilson.

La question qui nous préoccupe aujourd'hui tient à tout autre chose. Le succès, légitime, des deux films que je viens de citer doit certes beaucoup au talent des réalisateurs et des acteurs. Mais il correspond aussi aux questions profondes qui touchent le public. Il suggère une réhabilitation diffuse, implicite et non dite, de tout ce que le Grand Orient de France s'attache à détruire depuis le XVIIIe siècle.

Ne nous dissimulons pas en effet que, sous le nom [en partie usurpé] (2) de "francs-maçons" une secte, ouvertement athée depuis 1877, travaille à déchristianiser la France comme elle s'est employée à détruire la royauté, symbole de l'unité véritable et fédérateur de l'identité française (3).

Ce pauvre pays répond assez exactement à l'image poétique d'Ezra Pound : "Ce corps décapité qui cherche la Lumière". Certes, en deux siècles, les opérations de substitution, les ersatz de monarchie, bonapartisme et gaullisme, les faux semblants de sacré, les prétendus suppléments d'âme se sont succédés. Sans succès. La dernière incarnation du présidentialisme émané du suffrage universel pourvoit suffisamment elle-même à sa propre caricature. Inutile d'épiloguer. Victor Hugo appelait cela "les Châtiments"

L'affreuse marche des laïcards et de leur république est explicitée dans le livre d'Alfred Vigneau par un dialogue qui remonte à 1933 entre l'auteur et le grand maître de la Grande Loge de France :

« — Mon Frère Vigneau, déclarera le Grand-Maître, vous ne connaissez pas les grands secrets de la Franc-Maçonnerie : n’oubliez pas que, c’est un 33e, membre du Suprême Conseil qui vous parle ; a-t-il besoin de vous apprendre que les buts secrets de la Franc-Maçonnerie sont la déchristianisation de la France. »
Le Grand-Maître rappela que la Franc-Maçonnerie avait trois buts principaux :
«1° Venger la mort des Templiers ; mission de laquelle sont chargés les Chevaliers Kadosch, 30e grade, qui doivent exercer cette vengeance sur l’Église Catholique.
2° Abattre les frontières pour établir la République universelle, mission de laquelle sont chargés les Sublimes Princes du Royal Secret, 32e.
3° Supprimer la Famille traditionnelle pour émanciper les enfants et l’épouse selon la bonne morale laïque, buts vers lesquels tendent les Souverains Grands inspecteurs Généraux, 33e. »

Vigneau quittera la maçonnerie et publia son livre (4) l'année suivante, en 1934, où l'affaire Stavisky montre non seulement l'utilisation des réseaux de l'Ordre par des escrocs de bas étage, mais aussi l'impunité largement assurée à ceux-ci, contrairement aux lois et contrairement à toutes les règles morales.

Pour Dieu et le Roi, nous disons donc aujourd'hui "revanche", mais contrairement aux jacobins des loges maçonniques, et d'ailleurs, nous ne crierons jamais "vengeance".

JG Malliarakis

Apostilles

  1. Nominée dans 11 catégories, l'évocation de la marche au martyre des moines de Tibéhirine, assassinés dans l'Algérie de 1996, a obtenu, d'un jury politiquement et culturellement très correct, 3 récompenses dont celle du Meilleur Film.
  2. Dans son livre "La Voie substituée" Jean Baylot, lui-même dirigeant de la maçonnerie "traditionnelle et régulière", retrace les étapes de cette prise de pouvoir au sein des principales obédiences françaises par les adeptes du jacobinisme, en contradiction absolue avec les "constitutions d'Anderson" adoptées au début du XVIIIe siècle par la grande loge unie d'Angleterre.
  3. Dans son petit livre sur "La Franc-maçonnerie dans la révolution française" Maurice Talmeyr souligne la part des loges dans la préparation et la symbolique du séisme.
  4. cf. "La Loge maçonnique", qui vient d'être réédité.

Vous pouvez entendre l'enregistrement de notre chronique
sur le site de Lumière 101