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).

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“

Sebastian Maaß: Kämpfer um ein drittes ReicArthur Moeller van den Bruck und sein Kreis. — 176 Seiten, s/w. Abb., Englische Broschur. 18,95 Euro

 

 

 

 

 

José Ortega y Gasset & Jean Thiriart

 

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

 

Publicado por [e-mail]

 

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.

 

Publicado por [e-mail]

Guillaume FAYE: Why We Fight

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

 

Ex: http://attackthesystem.com/

 

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: [e-mail] 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: [e-mail]

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.

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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: [e-mail]

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: [e-mail]

 

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.

 

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.

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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

The Coming Chinese Superstate

The Coming Chinese Superstate:
Richard Lynn’s Eugenics

Richard HOSTE

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

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

One 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.

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

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

When 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 Status	Number Surveyed	Mean IQ	Number 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

Armin Mohler / Eine politische Biographie

Armin Mohler. Eine politische Biographie

Götz KUBITSCHEK

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Sous haute surveillance politique

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

Comme 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.

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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.

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/

 

Der 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.

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

Most 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.

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)

 

M. Bounan mentionne l’envoi de L’Église à Gallimard en 1929 et y voit la preuve d’un antisémitisme provocateur. Il oublie de dire que Céline avait également proposé Semmelweis à Gallimard. C’est le premier pamphlet de Céline, bien qu’il ne soit pas antisémite, bien qu’il soit même peut-être philosémite, puisqu’on soutient que Semmelweis était d’origine juive. Est-ce le seul intérêt du livre? C’est un livre qui s’en prend à la langue de bois de l’époque, aux abstractions politiques, aux discours médicaux, ceux qui cachent l’impuissance, le mensonge, la tricherie devant l’effort, le génie de vaincre la fatalité de la maladie et de la mort. Un premier texte “situationiste” en quelque sorte. Antisémite ou guignolesque, cet acte III de L’Eglise avec le personnage de Yudenzweck, caricature d’un diplomate international? Les Juifs n’y sont qu’un symbole parmi d’autres, comme le colon, le Russe ou le bourgeois. Yudensweck est plutôt sympathique. C’est son obligation de rationalité, sa soumission à une idéologie, son appartenance à un clan, qui le séparent de Bardamu, ce médecin plus amoureux de la danse que des chiffres, plus confiant dans le microscope que dans les commissions. L’acte III de L’Église tourne surtout la satire contre les grands fonctionnaires d’une administration internationale qui ne voient que l’intérêt politique des choses et qui font passer leurs communications savantes avant l’intérêt des individus, l’écoulement d’un produit sur le marché avant la santé des habitants du pays, et qui écartent les réalités si elles n’entrent pas dans leurs statistiques. Illustration de l’éternel combat de l’individu face à la société, ce texte demeure on ne peut plus actuel, et c’est pourquoi Jean-Louis Martinelli n’a pas craint d’en proposer une mise en scène en 1992 à Lyon et à Nanterre avec un succès surprenant.

M. Bounan évoque les lettres à Garcin, croyant prouver que Céline a fait semblant de s’intéresser à Freud parce qu’il était “à la mode”. C’est oublier que la pensée de Freud alors n’était guère “à la mode”dans le peuple ou chez les bourgeois, que très peu d’intellectuels en fait la connaissaient et s’y intéressaient. Même si “le jeu du délire” était “à la mode” dans le petit groupe des surréalistes, les théories de Freud ne seront vraiment connues en France qu’après la Seconde guerre mondiale, et dans ses interviews de l’époque Céline reprochera d’ailleurs à ses confrères d’avoir ignoré “l’énorme école freudienne”. Dans son Hommage à Zola , il lui rendra encore hommage. M. Bounan a une lecture sélective et une connaissance limitée. Il ne voit pas que Céline “fait le mac” avec Garcin, imite sa gouaille de proxénète. Qu’il en rajoute, se veut plus “jules” que lui, cherche à le bluffer. Qu’il joue à l’affranchi. Qu’il cherche à amuser. Dans chacune de ses lettres, Céline, en musicien, essaie son instrument.

M. Bounan reproche ensuite la bienveillance de Céline envers les arsouilles, les marginaux, les voyous, ne décelant dans cet intérêt provisoire qu’un désir de pouvoir et d’argent pour échapper au monde du travail. C’est oublier que de Villon à Hugo, de Bruant à Rictus, et même Élie Faure, beaucoup se sont intéressés aux marginaux, et pas seulement pour leur langage, mais aussi pour leur refus d’une société à la morale mortifère. Dans le travail de galérien de Céline, dans ses pyramides de dentelles et ses opéras de souffrance, M. Bounan ne voit qu’un désir d’argent facile et de maquereautage. Qui peut croire que Céline, comme médecin et comme écrivain, échappait au monde du travail? M. Bounan souffre peut-être de “la vie innommable” au point qu’il veuille se mesurer à Céline, se croire meilleur médecin et meilleur écrivain que lui. Son opuscule, qui n’innove en rien, n’est guère probant. Il appartient plutôt à la génération des “nouveaux céliniens”, ces thésards qui confondent la compilation et la paraphrase, le détournement, les critères de moralité ou de politique, avec la véritable recherche personnelle, la proposition d’une thèse enrichissante, qui font leur carrière grâce à Céline, en crachant dessus, comme M. Bounan sort de l’anonymat et de l’insignifiance en se servant du nom de Céline. Un ténia qui réclame des purges.

Céline a joué avec sa biographie? La belle histoire! Quelle découverte! Depuis 1963, la revue L’Herne, Marcel Brochard, nous savons tout cela. Qui croit-il surprendre, M. Bounan? Un brelan de benêts qui ne sauraient pas encore que tout art est transposition? Que le réalisme est le pire des mensonges? Que les biographies sont aussi infidèles que les traductions? Depuis Rousseau et Chateaubriand, Cendrars ou Malraux, quel écrivain n’a pas joué avec son histoire, puisque sa véritable vie est dans ses livres? M. Bounan n’a sans doute vu dans le naturalisme de Zola que la tarte à la crème du réalisme. Qu’il retourne au lycée ! Qu’il relise l’Hommage à Zola où Céline traite Hitler de dictateur épileptique et son ministre de sous-gorille, en leur opposant la grandeur du naturalisme.

Quand M. Bounan parle des pamphlets de Céline, il ne précise pas lesquels. Semmelweis ? Voyage ? Mea Culpa ? L’Agité du bocal ? Entretiens ? Féerie ? Ou bien ne compte-t-il comme textes pamphlétaires que ceux qui contiennent certaines pages, certains chapitres contre les Juifs: les deux pamphlets du Front Populaire et celui de l’alliance germano-soviétique? Pourquoi préciser qu’ils sont “violemment” antisémites, alors que l’adjectif suffirait à lui seul, et qu’auparavant Céline fut “violemment” pacifiste, “violemment” anti-capitaliste, “violemment” anti-mandarin, qu’il peignit “violemment” parents et amis après s’être “noirci” lui-même “violemment”.

Nous n’employons pas les mêmes dictionnaires ni les même méthodes de lecture. Quand M. Bounan (p.56) nous dit avoir lu chez Céline (sans nous préciser où) “luxez le Juif au poteau ”, il transforme d’abord l’infinitif des Beaux Draps (p.197) en impératif, et l’extrait de son contexte pour feindre de comprendre “attachez et tuez le Juif au poteau”, comme un Indien ou un cow-boy dans un western. Restituons la phrase dans son chapitre: “Le communisme Labiche ou la mort! Voilà comme je cause ! Et pas dans vingt ans, mais tout de suite! Si on n’en n’arrange pas un nous, un communisme à notre manière, qui convienne à nos genres d’esprit, les juifs nous imposeront le leur, ils attendent que ça (...) Vinaigre! Luxer le juif au poteau! y a plus une seconde à perdre! C’est pour ainsi dire couru! ça serait un miracle qu’on le coiffe! une demi-tête!... un oiseau!...” Ou M. Bounan ne sait pas lire, ou il recopie des ouvrages de seconde main, ou il est de mauvaise foi. Il n’aurait pas dû ignorer que l’expression “luxer au poteau”, en argot parisien des champs de courses, voulait dire “battre au poteau”, “gagner” , “dépasser”, en parlant de chevaux. C’est ce sens là que l’expression a dans le texte. Cela me semble clair. Je n’interprète pas. Le Larousse des argots (Esnault, 1965) précise que “luxer”, en argot médical, veut dire “remplacer quelqu’un”. Céline poussait les Français à se montrer plus révolutionnaires que les juifs du Front populaire ne l’avaient été dans leur programme d’égalité sociale: “Abolition des privilèges! un 89 jusqu’au bout!” L’hyperbole des injures, la cruauté des portraits, rendent certains passages aujourd’hui difficiles, car les images atroces de l’Histoire ont dénaturé la charge caricaturale admise à l’époque, mais dans aucun de ses livres Céline ne réclame un “pogrom”, contrairement à ce que M. Bounan prétend (p.57). “Luxer au poteau” est d’ailleurs la seule expression qu’il ait trouvée. C’est peu sur les 906 pages des trois pamphlets incriminés. Pour recourir à un détournement et à une exploitation, aussi malhonnêtes, faut-il manquer d’arguments et de probité!

Quand j’ouvre au hasard un livre de Céline, ce n’est pas pour y prendre une leçon d’anarchisme, de nazisme ou d’antisémitisme. Je laisse cela aux masochistes et aux sadiques. Je prends Céline comme j’ouvre La Fontaine, Voltaire, Chateaubriand ou Baudelaire, qui eux aussi avaient certainement des idées politiques et sociales, mais qu’on ne lit pas pour approuver ou réfuter une idéologie. On les lit pour le plaisir, la poésie, le lyrisme, la langue, la drôlerie, la musique, la verve, le mensonge, la cruauté. Quand je relis Villon, quand je regarde un Caravage, quand j’écoute du Gesualdo, qu’ils fussent des assassins n’entrave pas mon plaisir, et je ne me sens pas coupable de complicité. Quand j’écoute La Flûte enchantée, si j’en connais le livret et en ai étudié les symboles, je me soucie peu alors de son “message” , et si je m’intéresse à la franc-maçonnerie, c’est ailleurs que je me renseigne. Quand Voltaire s’en prend aux Jésuites, je ne le tiens pas pour l’instigateur des massacres de bonnes soeurs pendant la Révolution. Quand je lis Pauvre Belgique de Baudelaire, je ne me demande pas s’il a inspiré les massacres de Belges par les Allemands ou par les Congolais. Quand je lis Rousseau, Vallès ou Zola, je ne le les tiens pas pour responsables des millions de morts en Russie, et quand j’écoute un poème d’Aragon, je ne pense pas au Guépéou, à Staline et au Goulag. J’avoue que la littérature ou la poésie l’emportent à ce moment- là sur la politique et sur l’histoire. Ce n’est pas que je lise ces auteurs pour leur style seulement, leurs idées m’intéressent, mais je ne vais pas les partager ou y adhérer forcément.

Les pages de Bagatelles qui retiennent l’attention de M. Bounan ne sont pas les mêmes que celles qui m’attirent. Je lui laisse les phrases illisibles, aujourd’hui encore plus qu’hier; qu’il me laisse les phrases qui parlent d’esthétique. Elles sont plus nombreuses que les siennes. Qu’il me laisse les pages, si prophétiques hélas, si poétiques aussi, sur la Russie. Qu’il me laisse les ballets sans paroles. Qu’il me laisse les idées sur le lyrisme, la littérature, le cinéma, la danse, idées tellement importantes que Céline dut les reprendre dans Entretiens. Cela suffit au génie de Céline, et à mon plaisir personnel. M. Bounan et moi, nous ne lisons pas le même Céline, et chacun a le sien, et jusque dans un même ouvrage, ce qui prouve la richesse de ce poète. Je laisse son Céline aux historiens, aux sociologues, à l’ homo politicus, et je plains M. Bounan de s’ infliger tel supplice à sa lecture.

M. Bounan fait de Céline un “dénonciateur” de Juifs pendant l’Occupation, ce qui serait impardonnable, mais ce qui est pure diffamation, fondée sur les démêlées de Céline avec Rouquès, Mackiewicz, Desnos, Cocteau, Lifar. Je ne sais pas si le premier était juif, mais il était bien connu des Allemands pour son engagement politique, et Céline ne pouvait donc rien leur apprendre. Les autres n’étaient pas juifs. Les deux derniers cités étaient festoyés par l’occupant et ne couraient aucun risque. Aucune de ces “dénonciations” n’eut le moindre effet. M. Bounan suggère pourtant que Desnos est mort en déportation à cause de Céline. Couronnement de la calomnie! Desnos, qui n’était pas juif mais breton depuis Saint Louis, écrivait dans Aujourd’hui, un journal “résistant dans la collaboration”, quand il traita Céline d’alcoolique, alors qu’il le connaissait. Etre comparé à Henry Bordeaux, passe encore, mais être accusé de chercher dans l’alcool son inspiration! Et par qui? quel bouffon? C’était trop! Céline demanda à ce journaleux apointé d’afficher sa carte du Parti, sa photo de face et de profil, sa tête d’alcoolique, au lieu de se cacher sous une signature. Ceci se passait le 3 mars1941, bien avant la rupture du pacte germano-soviétique. Desnos ne fut inquiété qu’en 1944 et, selon le témoignage de sa veuve, fut arrêté à cause d’un tract qu’Aragon lui avait donné.

M. Bounan suggère encore que le témoignage de Chamfleury est d’une “aimable” complaisance, sans aucune preuve à l’appui, ce qui l’ autorise à remettre en doute l’honnêteté de ce témoin. Chamfleury n’est pas le seul résistant à avoir témoigné en faveur de Céline. Je ne connais pas l’âge de M. Bounan. Peut-être est-il bardé de médailles, d’exploits dans la Résistance. Mais il y a aussi les témoignages du Dr Tuset, de Pétrovitch, qui ont risqué cent fois leur peau pour que des gens comme M. Bounan puissent écrire aujourd’hui en français. Il parle également de l’amitié de Tixier-Vigancour (sans ”t” final, ce serait mieux!) avec Céline, qu’il n’a vu que deux fois, et il passe sous silence la défense de Maître Albert Naud, sans doute parce qu’il était résistant. Le livre de M. Bounan, pour finir, ressemble fort à un pamphlet, dans le genre Kaminsky, actualisé, moins moscoutaire (c’est démodé), mais n’apprend rien au célinien et déçoit le chercheur. Non le pamphlet de haute graisse, de grand style, mais le pamphlet de style mesquin et insidieux. Qu’il se rassure ! Son pamphlet aura du succès auprès des lecteurs pour qui Céline est le salaud intégral de la littérature française. Formés dans des livres de classe mitonnés par des sorbonnagres, les lecteurs ne manquent pas, pour se gaver de 40 francs de jalousie chafouine.
Dans son chapitre intitulé “Histoire d’une reconquête”, M. Bounan rejoint, ne lui déplaise, ce que pensait Céline sur bien des points. Les véritables responsables des massacres qui ont ensanglanté notre XXe siècle se sont toujours cachés derrière les guignols qu’on propose à la foule pour l’empêcher de réfléchir aux véritables causes des misères. Relire Mea Culpa. Je me perds totalement dans le chapitre sur le “révisionnisme” où M. Bounan évoque des déclarations, des querelles, des reniements, dont j’ignore tout. M. Bounan règle des comptes avec l’équipe de la librairie La Vieille Taupe. J’ai longtemps habité en face, rue des Fossés Saint-Jacques. J’y avais acheté un Céline en chemise noire de Kaminsky. Je m’étais demandé si ce n’étaient pas les mêmes barbus qui avaient publié en 1984 une édition pirate de Mea Culpa, préfacé par un texte “situationniste” qui reprochait à Céline son “anti-humanisme”, au nom de l’Internationale des dépossédés. Est-ce bien intéressant? Ces histoires de groupuscules soixante-huitards nous semblent bien dépassées. L’énorme calèche emballée de l’Histoire a renversé dans les ornières tous les postillons qui rêvaient d’en être le cocher.

Je ne sais pas grand chose du Situationnisme, même si j’ai rencontré Guy Debord quelques fois au Troumilou, bistrot sympa des bords de Seine. Il cherchait à convertir quelques bouquinistes qui en savaient plus que lui sur l’utopie de l’anarchie ou sur la forfaiture du marxisme. Ils y avaient abandonné bien des désillusions et les avaient plus chèrement payées que notre intellectuel. Gavés du livresque fourgué à bas prix, ils trouvaient ce gros matou de Debord bien bavard et abstrait. Il préférait Machiavel à Dante et Léon Bloy à Céline. Il préférait la politique à la littérature, la religion à la poésie. Cela nous séparait. Comme son besoin d’alcool et mon goût pour le thé. Il prophétisait une guerre en Europe en descendant son litre de beaujolais. Un suicide en public, et un cas médical. Il se croyait suivi, se voyait assassiné. C’était un romantique en fait. J’aimais bien l’écouter, c’était un spectacle. Je suis bon public.
Le dernier chapitre de M. Bounan, son épilogue, si célinien encore, me touche, car ce n’est plus de la parade anti-célinienne, facile, gagnée d’avance auprès de lecteurs pressés. La disparition des baleines est sans doute plus grave que la disparition des Gaulois. A-t-il lu le début de Scandale aux abysses sur le massacre des phoques? Je suis prêt à le suivre sur la catastrophe écologique de la planète pour l’ intérêt de quelques psychopathes. Dommage que M. Bounan n’ait pas osé ou pas pu les nommer précisément comme il dénonce les “vrais” et “seuls” responsables de la Deuxième guerre mondiale. Encore une diversion? Je referme ce livre qui ne m’a rien appris, et je regarde encore une fois la couverture. M. Bounan connaît-il le tarot de Marseille? Son choix de la treizième lame, après tout, s’avère n’être pas si mauvais. C’est à vrai dire ce que le livre présente de mieux. Car la XIIIe lame du Tarot ne symbolise pas tant la noire camarde, la faucheuse blême, la rouge guillotineuse, mais personnifie le travail de deuil, le renoncement à la matière pour accéder à une initiation, par une évolution spirituelle. Carte du dépouillement, du mouvement, de la transformation. En cela donc, très célinienne, très poétique...

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

Michel Bounan, L’art de Céline et son temps, Éd. Allia.

 

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 

 

L’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.

 

Ma 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.

 

La 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

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.

The Art of Manliness

The Art of Manliness

 

Jef COSTELLO

 

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

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.

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.

La revanche de Dieu et du roi

La revanche de Dieu et du roi

par Jean-Gilles MALLIARAKIS

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

On 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

The Culture of Critique & the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

Michael O'Meara

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

Reinhart Koselleck
Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988

La politique, c’est le destin. — Napoleon

Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis (1959) is one of the great dissertations of the 20th-century German university system.

It cast new light not just on the past it re-presented, but on the present, whose own light informed its re-presentation.

This was especially the case with the potentially cataclysmic standoff between American liberalism and Russian Communism and the perspective it gave to Koselleck’s study of the Enlightenment origins of the Modern World.

How was it, he asked, that these two Cold War super-powers seemed bent on turning Europe, especially Germany, into a nuclear wasteland?

The answer, he suspected, had something to do with the moralizing Utopianism of 18th-century rationalism, whose heritage ideologically animated each hegemon.

1. The Absolutist Origins of the Modern State

Koselleck was one of Carl Schmitt’s postwar “students” and his work is indebted to Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938).

Like his mentor, Koselleck saw modern ideologies, despite their atheistic rejection of faith, as forms of “political theology” that spoke to the faith-based heart that decides how one is to live.

In this sense, the self-proclaimed Enlightenment of the 18th century was a philosophical rebuttal to political Absolutism, whose institutional response to the breakdown of medieval Christendom occurred in ways that frustrated the liberal aspirations of the rising bourgeoisie.

In the century-long blood-letting that had followed the Protestant critique of medieval Catholicism, Europe’s ecclesiastical unity and its traditional social supports were everywhere shattered.

As the old estates broke down and old ties and loyalties were severed, there followed a period of anarchy, in which Catholics and Protestants zealously shed each others blood in the name of their contending truths.

In this sectarian strife — this bellum omnium contra omnes — where ecclesiastical authority ceased to exist and each man was thrown back upon his individual conscience, morality became a banner of war and the public observance of morality a justification for murdering Europeans with dissenting beliefs.

It was the advent of the Absolutist State system, philosophically anticipated in Hobbes’ Leviathan, that brought these bloody religious conflicts to a halt, establishing a peaceful basis to European life — by “privatizing” morality, secularizing authority, and depriving individual mentalities of political effect.

The neutralization of religious belief that came with the Absolutist secularization of the State would secure conditions requisite to the citizen’s peaceful pursuit of his private will or gain, as private ideals ceased to be obligatory duties and the State became “the artifact of atomized individuals.”

Absolutist regimes succeeded in this way in “reducing measures of contingency, conflict, and compulsion” to the status of differences of opinion — bare, in effect, of religious significance, as “external compulsion” imposed restraints on the individual’s “inner freedom.”

The historians’ designated Age of Absolutism and Enlightenment begins, then, with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought not just the Thirty Years War in the German-speaking lands, but all Europe’s religious wars to an end (except on the borderlands of Ireland and the Balkans) — and ends only with the advent of another European civil war, which opened with the liberal revolutions of 1776/1789 and closed with the English triumph over Napoleon in 1814.

History, though, rarely conforms to the tidy categories scholars make of it.

Unlike the Continent, England went from religious war to Absolutism and then to bourgeois revolution and finally to a bourgeois Restoration all in the course of a half-century (c. 1642–1688), experiencing an intense though only brief period of Absolutism.

England’s expanding maritime power, opened to all the world it dominated, had, in fact, merely a transitional need of Absolutism, for it would soon become the first implicitly liberal of the “modern” regimes.

Koselleck focuses on the longer, more pronounced Continental developments, treating England as a variant of the larger trend.

In his depiction, the Absolutist State system emerging after the Treaty of Westphalia was based on a transformation of political authority — which divided the “public sphere” into two sharply separate domains: That of political authority proper (the sovereign State) and that of society, conceived as a subaltern realm of individual “subjects.”

The subject’s moral conscience in this system was subordinated to the requirements of political necessity — what Hobbes called “reason.”  This restricted morality to the social realm of private opinion, depriving it of political effect.

With Absolutism, the public interest, about which the sovereign alone had the right to decide, ceased to lay under the jurisdiction of the individual’s moral conscience.

The Continent’s new monarchical States — with Louis XIV’s France the model of the others — would govern according to a raison d’état (Staatsräson), which made no reference to religious considerations.

Law here was severed from special interests and religious factions, becoming part of a domain whose political decisions — ideally — transcended “Church, estate, and party.”

“To traditional moral doctrines, [Hobbes] opposes one whose theme is political reason.”

Persecuting churches and religiously bound social fractions were hereby forced to give way to the sovereign authority of the Absolutist monarch, who recognized no higher authority than God Himself.

As Absolutist peace took priority to faith, the individual subject — previously situated in a loose medieval hierarchy, imbued with certain corporate rights and responsibilities — was transformed into an apolitical subject.

He had, as such, to submerge his conscience to reasons of State — to reasons necessary for maintaining the peace.

This privatization of morality dictated by the State’s secularization was not directed against religion per se, but against a religious conscience whose political claims, in a period of general breakdown, threatened war.

What the Absolutist State did — and what Hobbes theoretically legitimated in the Leviathan — was to transform the individual’s conscience into a matter of “opinion,” of subjective belief, separate from politics — and thus from the political reasons of the State.

This was accomplished by making the public interest the prerogative of the sovereign, not that of the individual’s religious conscience, for the latter inevitably led to religious strife.

In this secular political system, State policy and laws became the sole concern of the sovereign monarch, who stood above religion, anchoring his laws not in a higher transcendence, but in State imperatives.

In Hobbes’ famous formulation: “Laws are made by authority, not by truth.”

Hereafter, State policy and laws would be legislated by reasons of State — not the moral conscience and not self-interest and faction.  For the State could fulfill its function of securing peace and maintaining order only if individuals ceded their rights to the sovereign, who was to embody their larger welfare.

Contested issues were thereby reduced to differences of opinion that could be resolved by reasons of State.

Through Absolute sovereignty, it was possible again to create an internal realm of peace, separate from other Absolutist State systems, each of which possessed a similar peaceful interior, where the individual was free to believe whatever he wished as long as no effort was made to impose his “private” belief on the public, whether Catholic or Protestant.

This would keep religious fanaticism from trespassing on domestic tranquility and, at the same time, guarantee the State’s integrity.

Among Absolutist States, relations remained, of course, that of “a state of nature” — for each upheld and pursued policies based on their own rational sense of self-interest (raison d’état).

Conflict and war between Absolutist States were nevertheless minimized — not just by the fact that they accepted the integrity of the other’s moral conscience — but also by a sense of sharing the same Christian civilization, the same standards of significance and style, the same general, interrelated history that distinguished them from non-Europeans.

On this basis, the community of European States after 1648 grew into a family of sovereign powers, each respectful of the others’ domestic integrity, each of whose kings or queens shared the blood of other royal families, each of whose wars with other Europeans was governed by a jus publicum europaeum.

2. The Culture of Critique

It was the failure to comprehend the nature of the Absolutist State system (its avoidance of divisive political questions of faith and belief) that gave rise to the Enlightenment and its culture of critique.

For once the religious wars came to an end and authority was secularized, European society “took off.”

By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, the bourgeoisie, formerly an important but subordinate stratum of medieval European society, had become the chief economic power of an 18th-century society more and more dependent on its economic prowess. Made up of “merchants, bankers, tax lessees, and other businessmen” who had acquired great wealth and social prestige, this rising class (whose deism and materialism took “political” form in liberalism’s scientistic ideology) was nevertheless kept from State power and powerlessly suffered monarchical infringements on its monied wealth.

Resentful of State authority, the intelligentsia of this rising class took its stand in the private moral realm, which the Absolutist State had set aside for the subject and his moral conscience.

Through this breech between the public and the private, the chief ideologue of this rising bourgeoisie, John Locke, would step. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding – “the Holy Scripture of the modern bourgeoisie” — helped blur the boundary between moral and State law, as the former assumed a new authority and the distinction between the two diminished.

Pace Hobbes, Locke argued that bourgeois moral laws (now divorced from religion and anchored in rationalist notions of self-interest devoid of transcendental reference) had arisen in the human conscience, which the State had exempt from interference. As such, the citizen had a right to pass moral judgements on the State.

Such judgements, whatever the motive, eventually made State law dependent on the consent or rejection — the rule, in effect — of the bourgeoisie’s allegedly “objective” opinion.

In this situation, the bourgeois view of virtue and vice — its “religion of technicity” — took on a political charge, superseding the realm of private individual opinion, as it became “public opinion.”

At the same time, bourgeois critics favored the risk-free sphere of the unpolitical private realm, where they sought to dictate policy. Instead, then, of forthrightly challenging the underlying metaphysical principles of the Absolutist order, they framed their defining metaphysical identity (matters of faith — in this case their godless theology) in moral and economic terms devoid of political responsibility.

Bourgeois morality, not the State’s “reason,” proceeded in this way to take hold of the public — society — and set the standard for the “moral value of human action.”

This opened the way to a reconfiguration of the Absolutist relationship between morality and politics.

The public realm in Locke’s bourgeois philosophy was accordingly re-conceived as a social realm of individual consciences and this realm’s opinion as the “law” that was to bind the public.

Bourgeois morality, as such, not only entered, but soon conquered society, as its private views rose to that of public opinion.

Few, moreover, would be able to resist the pressure of its judgment.

“Reasons of State” were henceforth subject to the secular, calculating “reason” of the bourgeoisie — as “reason” ceased to be the avoidance of civil war and became the self-interest of the rationalist acting individual.

This made society increasingly independent of the State, just as State laws were increasingly subject to the “empowering” moral (and economic) judgments of society.

In the course of the 18th century, the bourgeois as citizen would assume, through his culture of critique, the “rank of a supreme tribunal” — ultimately passing judgment on the State (though doing so safely removed from the day-to-day imperatives of the political realm).

In England, following the oh-so Glorious Revolution of 1688 (a terrible, fateful year, with more to follow, in Irish history), the Whig bourgeoisie, through Parliament, became dominant, entering into an alliance with the constitutionally-bound monarch (William of Orange).

On the more religiously polarized continent, where Absolutist States had a greater role to play, the antithesis between State legislation and bourgeois secular morality (rooted in Protestantism’s critical essence) assumed a different, more antagonistic character.

This continental polarization of morals and politics — compounded by the growing social weight of the bourgeoisie and the discontent generated by its political disenfranchisement — grew in the course of the 18th century, as the bourgeoisie increasingly assumed the leadership of “society.”

Its moral critique of the State and of the ancien régime — a critique posed in secular and rationalist, rather than Christian terms — is what is known as the “Enlightenment,” that metapolitical “culture of critique,” whose light allegedly emanated from the bourgeoisie’s rational conscience (which was modeled in many ways on that of the Jews, for it was based on the dictates of money and its unpolitical affirmation of the private).

3. The Crisis of the Old Order

“When and whenever [men] are subjects without being citizens, they inevitably endow other concerns and pursuits—economic, social, cultural—with an independent and hence rival authority.” This was the great failing of Absolutism.

In such a situation, the voluntary associations of the bourgeoisie—Masonic lodges, salons, clubs, coffee-houses, academies, sociétés de pensées, the “Republic of Letters”—became rival centers of moral authority and eventually rival models of political authority.

The criticism of these bourgeois organs sought to “test” the validity or truth of its subject, making reason a factor of judgement in its process of pro and con.

Bourgeois judgements critical of the political system set off, in turn, a crisis threatening the existing State.

As scientific materialists, armed with a naive analytic-empiricist epistemology, such bourgeois critics waged their subversive campaign with no appreciation of existing political realities or the imperatives and limits these realities imposed. This would make their moral crusade unrealistic, Utopian, unconcerned with the “contingency, conflict, and compulsion” that occupies and defines the political field.

Their Utopian proposals (their anti-political politics) constituted, as such, no actual political alternative, based as they were on a purely formal, abstract understanding of the political realm, which it subjected to the individual’s moral conscience.

But once the private moral realm started to impinge on the political sphere of the Absolutist State, the State itself was again called into question.

First unconsciously and then increasingly consciously, the bourgeois Enlightenment applied its Utopian and ultimately hypocritical standards to the State, whose political imperatives were ignored rather than recognized for what they were—so as not to complicate its own geometrical schemes of reform.

The Enlightenment, it followed, was wont to see itself in moral terms, not political—not even metapolitical—ones.

This self-deceiving politics could only end in ideological excess and terror—for the sole way to realize its Utopian political theology would be by forcing others to accept and submit to it.

The result, Koselleck concludes, was the advent of the modern condition—this “sense that we are being sucked into an open and unknown future, the pace of which has kept us in a constant state of breathelessness ever since the dissolution of the traditional ständische societies.”

The turbulent “tribune of reason” bequeathed by the Enlightenment aimed, moreover, at every sphere of human endeavor—not just the Absolutist State, traditional Catholic Christianity, or the numerous corporate restraints inhibiting the market.

Everything historically given was, as such, to be re-conceived as a historical process that had to be re-directed, reformed, and re-planned, as the dictates of fate gave way to the rationalist obliteration of political aporia (i.e., the impasses or challenges posed by exceptional situations determined only by the sovereign).

Through its Règne de la Critique, the bourgeoisie (as prosecutor, judge, and jury) subjected the State to an enlightened conscience that debunked its “rationality” and increasingly advocated, or implied, its replacement.

With this rationalist critique of Absolutism came an unfolding philosophy of history—which promised a victory that was to be gained without struggle or war, that applied to all mankind, and that would bring about a better, more rational, and peaceful future—if only “reason” (i.e., bourgeois interests) was allowed to rule.

Through this critique, politics—the tough decisions fundamental to human existence—was dissolved into an Utopian project indifferent to the historical given. Everything, it followed, was subject to criticism, nothing was taboo—not the “order of human things,” not even life itself would be spared the alienation that came with the critic’s unpolitical reason.

Then, as the critic assumed the right to subject the whole world to his verdict, acting as “the king of kings,” criticism was “transformed into a maelstrom that sucks the present from under the feet of the critic”—for his criticisms amounted to an endless assault on the present in the name of a far-off, but allegedly enlightened future.

4. Modern Pathogenesis

At the highest level, Koselleck offers “a generic theory of the modern world”—one that seeks to explain something of our age to us.

In his view, criticism engendered crisis, calling the future into question.

The Enlightenment’s culture of critique could, however, only culminate in revolution—a revolution whose new order would privilege the rich and powerful (and, in time, the Jews).

By subordinating law to morality, ignoring the differences that divide men over the great questions of existence, the liberal State born of Enlightenment culture stripped sovereignty of its power.

Henceforth bourgeois morality became the invisible framework of the State, as sovereign authority was changed into an act of persuasion and reason—and the essence of politics (no longer the polemic over fundamental problems of human existence) became the non-political rule of a discursive bourgeoisie indifferent to matters of faith and desirous of a fate-less society without a sovereign State.

As social and political realities were indiscriminately mixed and subjected to the invisible opinion of the bourgeois public, based on an ostensively objective reason, everything failing to accord with that opinion became an injustice, subject to reform.

Society here assumed the right to abrogate whatever laws it wished, inadvertently establishing a reign of permanent revolution.

Refusing to recognize the State’s amoral (rather than immoral) character, the emerging bourgeois political system—with its culpablizing, but “value free” politics and its civil ideal taken as the universal destiny of all humanity—not infrequently had to resort to naked force to realize its Utopia: the terror and mass killings that followed 1789, the nuclear holocaust inherent in the Cold War, the on-going, unrelenting destructuration of the local and global today.

The consequence has been liberalism’s non-political State (whether in its 19th-century guise as a Night Watchman State or in its 20th-century Nanny State form). This State replaced politics with morality, tradition with planning, disagreements with a cold indifference to all that matters. It became thus a legal order, a Rechtsstaat, supposedly unattached to any constituting system of ascription or belief, and thus beyond any “exception” that might make visible the actual basis of bourgeois rule.

In this situation, where politics were negated and political problems were reduced to “organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks,” the world was emptied of “seriousness” and turned into a vast realm of entertainment, where the bourgeois was allowed to enjoy the fruits of his acquisitions.

With liberalism, then, politics ceases to be a destiny and becomes a technique hostile to all who refuse its philistine philosophy of history—for the linear notion of progress inherent in this philosophy undermines and “reforms” everything that has historically ensured the integrity of white life.

Source: TOQ Online, Dec. 24, 25, & 26 2009

Eurofaschismus und bürgerliche Decadenz

Benedikt Kaiser: Eurofaschismus und bürgerliche Dekadenz

Europakonzeption und Gesellschaftskritik bei Pierre Drieu la Rochelle Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893–1945) schied im März 1945 durch Freitod aus dem Leben. Fluchtofferten ins befreundete Ausland lehnte der französische Intellektuelle, der im Zweiten Weltkrieg mit der deutschen Besatzungsmacht kollaboriert hatte, kategorisch ab. „Man muß Verantwortung auf sich nehmen“, schrieb er kurz vor dem Suizid in seinem Geheimen Bericht. Drieu la Rochelle war nicht nur ein gefeierter Romancier von Weltrang, er galt auch seinen Zeitgenossen als Ausnahme-intellektueller. In seinen Romanen, besonders in Die Unzulänglichen, kritisierte Drieu die Dekadenz des von ihm so verachteten Bürgertums. Parallel zum Reifungsprozeß seiner Romanprotagonisten entwickelte sich auch Drieu zum Mann der „Tat“, der „direkten Aktion“... zum Faschisten. Die Kollaboration Drieus mit der deutschen Besatzungsmacht in Frankreich war keine Kapitulation vor dem Feinde, sondern vielmehr der Versuch, eine ideologische Front zu schmieden. Der wahre Feind sei nicht der boche, der „Deutsche“, sondern der bourgeois, der „Bürger“. Gegen die Dekadenz könne, so glaubte Drieu, nur gemeinsam vorgegangen werden: einzig ein im Faschismus geeintes Europa habe die Kraft, sich innerer Dekadenz und äußerer Feinde zu erwehren und genuin europäisch zu bleiben. Die vorliegende Studie erkennt in Drieu la Rochelle einen modernen Europäer, der den Nationalismus hinter sich gelassen hatte. Benedikt Kaiser bettet den französischen Intellektuellen und sein Werk in den historischen Kontext der diversen europäischen Faschismen ein. Im Anhang findet sich ein Auszug aus Drieu la Rochelles Geheimem Bericht, der sein politisches Testament darstellt und das Handeln des Denkers nicht entschuldigen will, sondern es in einem letzten Akt bekräftigt. Mit einem Vorwort von Günter Maschke!   Inhaltsübersicht: Vorwort von Günter Maschke 1. Zum Anliegen der Arbeit 1.1 Fragestellung und Methodik 1.2 Forschungsstand und Quellenkritik 2. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle und die politische Theorienbildung 2.1 Politische Biographie 2.2 Ein früher Begleiter: der „Lehrmeister“ Friedrich Nietzsche 2.3 Ideengeber Georges Sorels: décadence, Mythos, Gewalt 2.4 Charles Maurras und der integrale Nationalismus 3. Gesellschaftskritik im schriftstellerischen Werk Drieu la Rochelles 3.1 Der Frauenmann 3.2 Verträumte Bourgeoisie (Revêuse bourgeoisie) 3.3 Die Unzulänglichen (Gilles) 4. Drieus Position in der faschistischen Ideologie Frankreichs 4.1 Drieu la Rochelle und die Action Française 4.2 Verhältnis zum Partei-Faschismus: Der PPF und Jacques Doriot 5. Zwischen Engagement und Enthaltung: Drieu la Rochelle und die französischen Intellektuellen 5.1 „Feindliche Brüder“? – Die antifaschistischen Schriftsteller 5.2 Versuchung Faschismus: Von Paul Marion bis Lucien Rebatet 5.3 Die Selbstwahrnehmung Drieu la Rochelles 6. Der faschistische Traum von Europa 6.1 Eurofaschismus? Begriffsklärung eines Phänomens 6.2 Eurofaschismus unter Waffen: Der Weg Léon Degrelles 6.3 „Europe a Nation!“ – Wesen und Wollen Sir Oswald Mosleys 6.4 Europakonzeption bei Pierre Drieu la Rochelle 7. Zusammenfassung 8. Appendix 9. Literaturverzeichnis 9.1 Sekundärliteratur 9.2 Quellen 10. Abkürzungen 11. Namens- und Sachregister   In der Reihe KIGS sind des weiteren erschienen: Kämpfer um ein drittes Reich: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und sein Kreis (KIGS 2).  Dritter Weg und wahrer Staat: Othmar Spann – Ideengeber der Konservativen Revolution (KIGS 3).  Autor: Benedikt Kaiser Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011 Verlag: REGIN-VERLAG Reihe: Kieler ideengeschichtliche Studien, Band 5 Seitenzahl: 160 Abbildungen: s/w. Bindeart: engl. Broschur (Klappenbroschur) im Großformat (14,5 x 22,5 cm) Preis: 18,95 Euro

The Radical Tradition

The Radical Tradition

Troy Southgate has a new book coming out from Primordial Traditions, who publish some of the most interesting work these days in that liminal zone where philosophy, religion, history and politics intersect.

• TOMISLAV SUNIC – History and Decadence: Spengler’s Cultural Pessimism Today
•  
• JONATHAN BOWDEN – A Polyp Devours Its Feed, Paracelsus Unzipped: An Analysis of F.W. Murnau’s Film, Nosferatu
• TROY SOUTHGATE – Heidegger: The Application of Meaning in An Increasingly Transient World
•  
• WAYNE JOHN STURGEON – Anarcho-National-Syndicalist: Some Reflections on Being Shot by Both Sides
•  
• ALEX KURTAGIC – Lessons From the Music Industry

BRETT STEVENS – The Civilisation Cycle and its Implications for the Individual

MAXIM BOROZENEC – An Introduction to Intertraditionale

DR. K.R. BOLTON – The Art of Rootless Cosmopolitanism: America’s Offensive Against Civilisation

VINCE YNZUNZA – The Manifesto of the Psychedelic Conservative

TROY SOUTHGATE – Schopenhauer and Suffering: Eternal Pessimist or Prophet for our Times?

WAYNE JOHN STURGEON – Anarcho-Gnosticism: Golgotha of the Absolute Mind 

SEAN JOBST – Towards a Sufi Anarch: The Role of Islamic Mysticism Against Modernist Decay

BEN CRAVEN – Are Human Rights a Fiction of Modern, Western Liberal Democracies That Bring Us No Closer to a Shared Ethical Framework?

TONY GLAISTER – 50 Years On: Notes on the New Right

WAYNE JOHN STURGEON – The Impossible Dream: An Introduction to Christian Anarchism

KEITH PRESTON – The Nietzschean Prophecies: Two Hundred Years of Nihilism and the Coming Crisis of Western Civilization

TROY SOUTHGATE – Transcending the Beyond: Third Position to National-Anarchism

GWENDOLYN TOYNTON – Reforming the Modern World: Addressing the Issue of Cultural Identity

You may recognize some of these names from around here. We’re looking forward to this interesting release which takes politics from beyond the narrow linear confines of self-interest into a concept of human life as more than the sum of its parts.

Available in March 2011 from Primordial Traditions.

Democracy Needs Aristocracy

Democracy Needs Aristocracy, by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne

by Brett Stevens

Ex: http://www.amerika.org/ 

Democracy Needs Aristocracy
by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
221 pages, Harper Collins, $15.

In the early pages of Democracy Needs Aristocracy the author mentions Alexis de Toqueville and his groundbreaking Democracy in America and not surprisingly, the newer work continues in the footsteps of that classic with a broad-reaching thesis on the nature of government that sides with the organic over the mechanistic.

Experienced writer Peregrine Worsthorne mixes his far-reaching thesis with personal narrative and precise examples in the form of contradictions that eliminate exceptions to his arguments. He writes in a hybrid style somewhere between relaxed academia and vivid popular non-fiction but with the logical thoroughness of a legal brief. Like the topic of the book itself, his style spans a vast breadth of knowledge and distills it into a single voice, like condensation turning mist to rain.

As a consequence, Democracy Needs Aristocracy is both one of those books that zooms by at light speed as massive ideas thrust the reader across time and space, and is also like a textbook an exacting read that requires the full attention of the reader. Each chapter drops important pieces into our understanding of history and how we arrived at the present time, not all of them controversial assertions so much as forgotten and decontextualized ones.

The style is not circular so much as it returns to core concepts after breaking them apart, bringing the forgotten but necessary counterpart to deconstruction, re-integration, to the reading process. As a result reading this book is like peeling an onion, with each layer revealing more of the big picture. It offers what few books can manage anymore: a vertiginous sense of discovery and concepts dropping into place that can explain the subtle mysteries of our present political climate.

Worsthorne’s thesis suggests that aristocracy, or an organic social order of the most qualified who enforce a balance that linear-thinking government cannot, not only arises naturally but if well-selected, provides an elite who are dedicated to public service more than themselves. It succeeds because it is decidedly non-mechanistic: he delights in the social aspects of an elite dedicated to stewardship, and illustrates how civility as a guiding principle ensures politics do not become abandoned to abstractions unrelated to life itself.

Finally, he contrasts society under rule by aristocracy, whose members are secure in their position and steeped in its tradition, with the “meritocratic” rise of the “classless society,” and points out in detail how the classless society fails to achieve its objectives and may achieve instead the inverse. As both an aristocrat and a journalist, Worsthorne describes the view from both sides of the bench on this issue.

A good part of the book addresses the necessary conditions of his thesis, including the most difficult to define parts such as “civility” and the notion of an organic, non-governmental caste who nonetheless provide the backbone to all governmental activities. For moderns, understanding caste is like trying to understand the use of a pressure cooker inside a black hole; Worsthorne elaborates slowly, but works up to his point:

“Aristocracy, however, is different because the bonds forged at birth and maintained at every subsequent stage in life, create a degree of loyalty between members as strong as, if not stronger than, those that bind together the members of a nation. The Old Etonian George Orwell tried to escape them but never wholly succeeded, concluding sadly, at the end of his life, that it was easier to change your party than change your class. Speaking personally, I cannot imagine life without class, which is not a passive condition but one that provides you with a general culture, a network to which you naturally belong, a stream of history in which you feel free and safe — almost a collective individuality.” (86)

In his retelling of history, the UK survived the time of the French Revolution because unlike the French, the English did not centralize their power into a single agency, but made government less efficient and instead cultivated a class of experts, united by a code of civility or “gentlemanly” conduct, such that they could conduct the appropriate circumventions of authority in smoke-stained lounges over glasses of cognac.

In this Worsthorne’s view is a hybridization of elitism and anarchy, in which the purpose of aristocracy is to avoid a powerful central government and its Boolean rules, and instead to cultivate a pool of talent that can organically and covertly address problems that are beyond the understanding of the electorate. His appeal to civility, the mode of aristocracy, is a call for a moral renovation to the modern state.

“For as a result of this method of selection, Britain’s political class had inherited enough in-built authority — honed over three centuries — and enough ancestral wisdom — acquired over the same period — to dare to defy both the arrogance of intellectuals from above and the emotions of the masses from below; to dare to resist the entrepreneurial imperative; to dare to try to raise the level of public conversation; to dare to put the public interest before private interests; to dare to try to shape the nation’s will and curb its appetites.” (50)

Bureaucracies, which he describes as the “natural enemies” of aristocrats, rely on rigid rules of a binary nature. When triggered, they must follow through blindly, causing periodic outrages so ludicrous they remind us of the rote actions of a machine out of control. In contrast, Worsthorne advocates the reliance on a class of people he describes as devoted to public duty, and their ability to intervene in place of blind rules.

As he reminds us, good leadership is unpopular because it does not pander to the arrogant intellectuals or emotional masses. In fact, it avoids special interests so that the nation as a whole can thrive. He describes it with a metaphor from his boarding school:

“I wanted the best of both worlds: authority figures who at one and the same time both protected me and left me alone; who came to my aid in emergencies but otherwise allowed me to mind my own business. Officious busybody prefects who kept an eye on one all the time were more a liability than an asset. But unofficious prefects who noticed what was going on from a corner of the eye were the opposite. Even more to be desired were the few older boys who turned down the office of prefect but were natural authority figures on the side of justice and order requiring, by virtue of strong individual character, no official badge of office.” (22)

This winding book, arcane like an ancient castle yet refreshing like finally finding the answer to your research in a footnote in the last book even tangential to your “official” topic, provides many such challenging ideas. Underlying every part of it is a distrust in the idea of a government that unites its public and private faces and thus is manipulable by special interests; Worsthorne argues for an older yet, if you look at it critically, more mature form of government, where rule by quality of people predominates under rule by book of rules.

Democracy Needs Aristocracy is a challenging and engrossing read, and even for those hostile to aristocracy, provides a thorough exploration of where our current systems of government fail. His thesis is flexible, and deliberately written from a liberal-friendly position, to show that democracy becomes anti-elitist mob rule without some mediating elite to keep anti-egalitarianism from becoming crowd revenge. As such, it is every bit as eternal as de Toqueville, and presents a vision of government that none can afford to fully ignore today.

You can find this book at Amazon for $15 or from Harper Collins UK for £9.

"Le Camp des saints", une réalité en 2050?

 "Le camp des saints", une réalité en 2050?

 

Par Bruno de Cessole

Valeurs actuelles

 

Assortie d'une préface inédite, la seconde réédition du roman prophétique de Jean Raspail s'inscrit au coeur des débats récents sur l'identité et le devenir de la France. 

 

Le 17 février 2001, un cargo vétuste s’échouait volontairement sur les rochers côtiers, non loin de Saint- Raphaël. À son bord, un millier d’immigrants kurdes, dont près de la moitié étaient des enfants. « Cette pointe rocheuse, écrit Jean Raspail au début de sa préface, faisait partie de mon paysage. Certes, ils n’étaient pas un million, ainsi que je les avais imaginés, à bord d’une armada hors d’âge, mais ils n’en avaient pas moins débarqué chez moi, en plein décor du Camp des saints, pour y jouer l’acte I. Le rapport radio de l’hélicoptère de la gendarmerie diffusé par l’AFP semble extrait, mot pour mot, des trois premiers paragraphes du livre. La presse souligna la coïncidence, laquelle apparut, à certains, et à moi, comme ne relevant pas du seul hasard. »

 

Dans le Critique en tant qu’artiste, Oscar Wilde avait soutenu et démontré, longtemps avant, que ce n’est pas la fiction qui imite la réalité, mais la réalité qui imite l’art. À preuve.

 

Depuis sa parution, en 1973, le Camp des saints n’a cessé de susciter la controverse et de conquérir de nouveaux lecteurs, de tous milieux, de toutes opinions, de tous âges, les un anonymes, les autres connus ou haut placés, de François Mitterrand à Raymond Barre, d’André Malraux à Maurice Schumann, de Robert Badinter à Jean Anouilh, de Jean-Pierre Chevènement à Lionel Jospin, d’Alfred Sauvy à Denis Olivennes et même de Samuel Huntington au président Ronald Reagan… Cette troisième édition élargira-t-elle encore son audience ? Tel est le souhait de l’auteur (lire notre entretien avec Jean Raspail), pour qui le livre n’a pas terminé sa mission : ouvrir les yeux des Français sur la désinformation qui gangrène la vie publique, désabuser les esprits crédules qui se sont laissé contaminer par un humanisme dévoyé. Et témoigner, bien sûr, pour la liberté de pensée et d’expression, qui, depuis trente-deux ans (loi Pleven), s’est singulièrement rétrécie.

 

À telle enseigne que ce roman, susceptible de poursuites judiciaires pour un minimum de 87 motifs, serait aujourd’hui impubliable en son état. Les lois n’étant pas encore rétroactives, Jean Raspail n’y a pas changé un iota. En revanche, il l’a fait précéder d’une longue préface (lire les extraits dans "Valeurs actuelles") qui, loin de tempérer le propos du livre, “aggrave son cas” en développant les conséquences probables de la situation exposée dans le roman.

 

L’intrigue est simple. Sur les côtes du midi de la France viennent s’échouer délibérément des centaines de navires en provenance du sous-continent indien. À leur bord, un million de déshérités fuyant la misère de leur pays d’origine, en quête de la Terre promise occidentale, de ses richesses gaspillées, de ses espaces sous-peuplés et de sa tradition d’hospitalité… Cette invasion pacifique, forte de sa faiblesse et de son nombre, a été encouragée et préparée par une poignée d’agitateurs : religieux idéalistes, philosophes athées, écrivains catholiques renégats, médecins missionnaires, moins animés par un humanisme perverti que par la mauvaise conscience occidentale, ce "sanglot de l’homme blanc" dénoncé naguère par Pascal Bruckner, le désir de repentance et, sur tout, le ressentiment, le nihilisme honteux du "dernier homme" jadis explicité par Nietzsche. Deux scènes primordiales du livre illustrent cette confrontation entre les ultimes et rares mainteneurs des va leurs occidentales et la troupe plus nombreuse des renégats.

 

En Inde, le consul de Belgique, qui a refusé d’augmenter les procédures d’adoption et qui, fidèle à ses convictions, mourra pour l’exemple en s’opposant symboliquement à la prise d’assaut des navires par la marée humaine, déclare à la poignée de manipulateurs occidentaux qui a mis en oeuvre cette immigration sauvage : « La pitié ! La déplorable, l’exécrable pitié, la haïssable pitié ! Vous l’appelez : charité, solidarité, conscience universelle, mais lorsque je vous regarde, je ne distingue en chacun de vous que le mépris de vous-mêmes et de ce que vous représentez. […] En pariant sur la sensibilité, que vous avez dévoyée, des braves gens de chez nous, en leur inculquant je ne sais quel remords pour plier la charité chrétienne à vos étranges volontés, en accablant nos classes moyennes prospères de complexes dégradants […], vous avez créé de toutes pièces au coeur de notre monde blanc un problème racial qui le détruira, et c’est là votre but. »

 

La seconde scène oppose un vieux professeur de français à la retraite, habitant un village de la côte, dans une maison appartenant à sa famille depuis trois siècles, et un jeune pillard européen venu accueillir sa famille d’élection : « Me voilà avec un million de frères, de sœurs, de pères, de mères et de fiancées. Je ferai un enfant à la première qui s’offrira, un enfant sombre, après quoi je ne me reconnaîtrai plus dans personne... » Au professeur qui s’efforce de comprendre ses motivations, il réplique : « Je vous hais. Et c’est chez vous que je conduirai les plus misérables, demain. Ils ne savent rien de ce que vous êtes, de ce que vous représentez. Votre univers n’a aucune signification pour eux. Ils ne chercheront pas à comprendre. […] Chacun de vos objets perdra le sens que vous lui attachiez, le beau ne sera plus le beau, l’utile deviendra dérisoire et l’inutile, absurde. Plus rien n’aura de valeur profonde. Cela va être formidable ! Foutez le camp ! »

 

Le vieil homme rentre chez lui, en ressort avec un fusil et, avant de tirer sur l’intrus, justifie son acte : « Le monde qui est le mien ne vivra peut être pas au-delà de demain matin et j’ai l’intention de profiter intensément de ses derniers instants. […] Vous, vous n’êtes pas mon semblable. Vous êtes mon contraire. Je ne veux pas gâcher cette nuit essentielle en compagnie de mon contraire. Je vais donc vous tuer. » Un peu plus tard, le professeur rejoindra la dizaine de combattants qui auront choisi de renouveler Camerone et se feront tous enterrer sous les bombes d’une escadrille française, les plus hautes autorités du pays ayant capitulé devant l’invasion.

 

La véritable cible du livre : les “belles âmes” occidentales

 

Récit allégorique, « impétueux, furieux, tonique, presque joyeux dans sa détresse, mais sauvage, parfois brutal et révulsif » où il se tient des propos « consensuellement inadmissibles », de l’aveu de son auteur, le Camp des saints concentre en un jour un phénomène réparti sur des années. En aucune façon, cependant, il ne s’agit, comme de belles âmes l’ont clamé avec indignation, d’un livre raciste.

 

La véritable cible du roman, ce ne sont pas les hordes d’immigrants sauvages du tiers-monde, mais les élites, politiques, religieuses, médiatiques, intellectuelles, du pays qui, par lâcheté devant la faiblesse, trahissent leurs racines, leurs traditions et les valeurs de leur civilisation. En fourriers d’une apocalypse dont ils seront les premières victimes. Chantre des causes désespérées et des peuples en voie de disparition, comme son œuvre ultérieure en témoigne, Jean Raspail a, dans ce grand livre d’anticipation, incité non pas à la haine et à la discrimination, mais à la lucidité et au courage. Dans deux générations, on saura si la réalité avait imité la fiction.

 

Le Camp des saints, précédé de Big Other, de Jean Raspail, Robert Laffont, 392 pages, 22 €.

 

Source cliquez ici

Aalin Cotta: le règne des oligarchies

Alain Cotta : " Nulle part aujourd’hui il n'existe de démocratie directe, pas plus que représentative."

Ex: http://www.scriptoblog.com/

 

Alain Cotta, grand pourfendeur de l'euro devant l'Eternel, sort un nouvel ouvrage Le règne des oligarchies (éditions Plon).

Il accorde un bref entretien à Scripto sur ce sujet fondamental.

Entretien réalisé par Maurice Gendre

1- Pouvez-vous nommer les principales oligarchies qui dominent le monde ?

L’oligarchie des USA, celle de la Chine et, en 3ème rang le Royaume Uni.

2- Où ces oligarques se réunissent-ils, où vivent-ils ? Où sont situés les épicentres de leur pouvoir ?

L’oligarchie est un groupe d’individus dont les lieux de réunion varient en fonction de leur situation économique et sociale ainsi que les circonstances auxquelles ils doivent faire face. Comme il s’agit d’un ensemble d’individus tenant de la meute de loups ou du nuage d’étourneaux il ne possède pas de chef attitré pas plus que d’épicentre fixe.

3- Des ponts existent-ils entre ces différentes oligarchies, comment cela se traduit-il ?

Entre ces différentes oligarchies il existe plusieurs ponts, d’abord ceux qui concernent les membres ayant même profession. Les militaires de toutes nations communiquent ensemble à travers leurs exercices de stimulation guerrière et leurs écoles de formation. Les dirigeants des grandes entreprises se rencontrent de façon officielle et officieuse ce qui constitue la vie organisée des oligopoles mondiaux des grands produits et des matières premières. Les politiques se rencontrent lors des réunions, elles aussi, officielles G6, 8, G20 et plus secrètes. Quant aux super riches, ils ont leurs lieux de rencontre bien connus, Davos, Saint Barth et autres lieux de villégiature agréables. Entre ces quatre ponts plusieurs passerelles, de l’appartenance à ces réseaux organisés (Opus Dei, franc-maçonnerie, services secrets).

4- En parallèle, des tensions et des dissensions semblent de plus en plus se faire jour entre elles, quelles formes et quelles tournures peuvent prendre ces désaccords ?

Les tensions et dissensions sont intimement liées à l’affrontement des pouvoirs nationaux qui eux-mêmes constituent désormais la vie d’une espèce humaine mondialisée. Des accords et désaccords traversent la géo-politique purement nationale. Toutes les grandes entreprises quelque soit leur appartenance nationale ont en commun leur volonté d’accroître leur réactivité et leur pouvoir ; les politiques d’affirmer l’autorité des nations qu’ils représentent, et les super riches de vivre le plus tranquillement possible. A tout cela il faut ajouter l’importance que représente pour de nombreuses personnes leur appartenance à des religions qui ne sont pas toujours tentées par l’œcuménisme.

5- Y a-t-il un voire plusieurs points communs fondamentaux entre ces différentes oligarchies, à tel point que l'on puisse dire que ces oligarchies forment l'Oligarchie ?

Les différents points d’accords entre certaines oligarchies nationales et les éléments communs à chacune d’entre elles (dirigeants d’entreprise, politiques…) ne sont pas tels que l’ont puisse parler d’oligarchie mondiale. Ce qui n’empêche point de pouvoir imaginer qu’elle existera un jour et de s’interroger aujourd’hui sur les modalités de sa formation et peut-être même de considérer que cette naissance constitue la raison d’être de la mondialisation.

6- Sur quelles armes s'appuient ces oligarchies pour asseoir leur domination sur le monde ?

Essentiellement sur l’arme économique et militaire, qui avec l’argent et le sexe constitue l’une des trois forces structurantes de l’espèce humaine.

7- Comment ces oligarchies se protègent-elles de la vindicte des peuples ?

Elles disposent de plusieurs moyens de protection : la réussite économique, la corruption et les moyens de détourner de l’attention des masses, désormais très efficaces : Internet, Twitter, facebook et plus généralement tous les médias de communication. Ajoutons que la complexité croissante des problèmes posés aux différentes collectivités nationales écarte naturellement la participation d’un très grand nombre d’individus à cause soit de leur incompétence, soit de leur indifférence à l’égard de solution qui ont peu d’influence sur leur vie quotidienne.

8- Tout processus de changement, en apparence assuré par le peuple et d'inspiration démocratique, est-il condamné à n'être en réalité que le cache-sexe des intérêts d'une faction de l'Oligarchie contre une autre faction de cette même Oligarchie à un moment donné de l'Histoire ? Pour dire les choses plus brutalement : un soulèvement populaire a-t-il la possibilité de ne pas être téléguidé par des puissances extérieures et/ou supérieures ?

Les processus de changements d’inspiration démocratiques  ne peuvent aujourd’hui dissimuler leur rôle effectif. Nulle part aujourd’hui il n'existe de démocratie directe, pas plus que représentative. Partout où le pouvoir est exercé par des oligarchies qui ne sont pas représentatives, mais qui reçoivent en fait une délégation de pouvoir. L’évolution de toutes les techniques et la mondialisation de l’espace installent désormais les oligarchies comme le pouvoir dirigeant de toutes les organisations humaines : nation, famille, entreprise et religion.

L’inspiration démocratique a deux fondements. Le premier purement psychologique s’explique en ce que tout individu préfère croire qu’il est en démocratie plutôt que d’être lucide (« blessure la plus rapprochée du soleil » selon René Char) sur sa dépendance à l’égard d’une oligarchie. La seconde, plus sérieuse, consiste à invoquer la démocratie pour se prémunir des oligarchies attirées par un pouvoir personnel, proche des dictatures de fait, ainsi que le montre les mouvements actuels dans les pays arabes. En cette occurrence il s’agira, à notre avis, beaucoup plus d’un changement d’oligarchie que d’un quelconque établissement de la démocratie.

9- Quelles sont les plus graves menaces que ces oligarchies font peser sur le monde ? Comment s'en prémunir ?

L’oligarchie est devenu le mode naturel et général de l’exercice du pouvoir. Elle ne constitue pas d’autres menaces que celles tenant à l’usage exorbitant de son pouvoir.

Propos recueillis par Maurice Gendre