Les guerres se succédèrent, à peine la guerre (161–166) contre les Parthes (Perses) est-elle terminée, que les barbares menacent directement le nord de l’Italie. Il faut plus de cinq années (169–175) à l’empereur pour venir à bout de cette menace. C’est alors qu’une rumeur de la mort de Marc Aurèle conduit Avidius Cassius, gouverneur d’une large partie de l’Orient, à se proclamer empereur. Mais en juillet 175, celui-ci est assassiné et sa tête envoyée à Marc Aurèle. Ce dernier regretta sa mort, sûr de son repentir. Enfin, dès 177, Marc Aurèle doit repartir guerroyer sur la frontière danubienne où il y mourra (180).
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Whatever its contemporary associations, the natural home of political ecology lies on the Right – not the false Right associated with the Republican Party in America, of course, whose conservatism is little more than a desperate and self-destructive attachment to the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, but what Julius Evola has called the True Right: The timeless devotion to order, hierarchy, and justice, entailing implacable hostility against the anarchic and disintegrating principles of the modern age.
However, while a commitment to ecological integrity has long been a mainstay of the European Right, in the United States it is typically regarded as a plank in the progressive political platform – part of its prepackaged offering of open borders, economic redistribution, and amoral individualism. The absence of any broad Right-wing consensus on environmental questions in this country is partially due to the fact that our mainstream conservative party, a tense coalition of Protestant fundamentalists and neoliberal oligarchs, has proven unable (or unwilling) to actually conserve most vestiges of traditional society. This includes the purity, wholeness, and integrity of our native land, which constitute a significant part of the American national heritage. Articulating a Rightist approach to ecology while exposing its subversion by the political Left therefore remains a necessary task, due to its invariably progressive connotations in this country.
My argument for the essential place of ecology in any program of American Restoration, as well as my ideas concerning the form it should take, will differ markedly from other well-known “conservative” approaches. It is not premised merely upon our duty to wisely conserve natural resources for future human use, nor upon the restorative power of natural beauty and recreation, nor is it a patriotic commitment to preserve the heritage of our native land. These have their place, but are subordinate to the ultimate principle of ecology rightly understood: that the natural world and its laws are a primordial expression of the cosmic order and accordingly deserve our respect. Recapturing the metaphysical and ethical outlook of the traditional world, and restoring a society in accordance with it, therefore demands a defense of the natural order from those who would seek to subvert it.
To begin, it is necessary to distinguish between the Right- and Left-wing variants of political ecology, which differ so greatly in their metaphysical foundations and political ramifications as to constitute two wholly separate approaches to ecological preservation.
Leftist or progressive ecology is essentially an outgrowth of Enlightenment ideals of liberty and egalitarianism, extended to the natural world. Progressive ecology comes in two guises. The most well-publicized is the elite, technocratic, internationalist version associated with the European Greens, the American Democratic Party, and myriad NGOs, international agencies, and celebrity advocates across the globe. When it is sincere (and not merely a power grab or a cross upon which to nail ecocidal white patriarchs), this variant of progressive ecology pins its hopes on clean energy, international accords, sustainable development, and humanitarian aid as the necessary means by which to usher in an ecologically sound society. Its symbolic issue is global warming, fault for which is assigned almost exclusively to the developed world and which can be defeated through regulations penalizing these nations for their historic sins.
The other version is more avowedly radical in its political prescriptions, and might best be understood as the ecological arm of the New Left. It finds its army among the adherents of the post-1980s Earth First! and the Earth and Animal Liberation fronts, as well as green anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, and ecofeminists; its tactics are mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, and minor acts of sabotage that are sometimes branded “eco-terrorism.” Activists subscribing to these views tend to reject civilization altogether, and work to combat its many evils – hierarchy, racism, patriarchy, speciesism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, statism, fascism, white privilege, industrial capitalism, and so on – in order to end the exploitation and oppression of all life on Earth. “Total liberation” is their rallying cry. Though drawing upon romantic primitivism and New England Transcendentalism, the philosophical foundations of Leftist ecology can be traced more directly to the ‘60s counter-culture, critical race theory, feminism, and the peace and civil rights movements.
Despite their ostensible commitment to natural preservation, both variants of Leftist ecology (for reasons discussed below) ultimately devolve into a fixation on “environmental justice” and facile humanitarianism, lacking the features of a genuinely holistic, integral ecological worldview. However, despite the apparently monolithic nature of American environmentalism, the progressive understanding of ecology is not the only one to take root in this country.
To many of its earliest prophets, such as the Romantic poets and New England Transcendentalists, as well as nineteenth-century nature philosophers and wilderness advocates, nature mysticism was the contemporary expression of a primordial doctrine, one that emphasizes natural order and a devotion to forces that transcend mankind. For men of the West, this ancient doctrine and its understanding of the cosmos are expressed, symbolically and theoretically, in the traditional Indo-European religions and their philosophical offshoots.
According to some proponents of this tradition, while primordial man – with his unfettered access to divine reality – might have possessed this wisdom in its entirely, when mankind fell from his early state, these ancient teachings receded into distant memory. They are dimly echoed in the traditional religious doctrines of the ancient world, such as the old European paganisms, Vedic Hinduism, and early Buddhism. Philosophical traces of this old wisdom can also be discerned in the metaphysics of the Pythagoreans, Neoplatonists, and Stoics.
While certain strains of Christianity have emphasized a strictly dualistic and anti-natural conception of the cosmos, this is not the only or even the predominant view. The more esoteric Christian theologians and mystics (largely Europeans influenced by their ancestral pantheism or Neoplatonism) have also regarded the natural world as an unfolding of divine reality, expressed in the theology of Franciscan and Rhineland mysticism, as well as the Christian Hermetism of the Renaissance.
Finally, to counter the development of Enlightenment liberalism, socialism, scientific materialism, and industrialism in the modern era, Romanticism and German Idealism offered a new artistic and philosophical iteration of the ancient holistic worldview, which later achieved its most radical expression in the anti-anthropocentrism of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Robinson Jeffers.
Of course it would be an exaggeration to claim that all of these thinkers were proto-ecologists or, for that matter, even remotely concerned with the preservation of wild nature. The point is rather to understand how they all offer, in languages and concepts adapted to different cultures and epochs, a particular way of approaching one primordial truth: that the cosmos is an interconnected, organic whole, a natural order which demands our submission.
The fundamental metaphysical orientation of the traditional world, and therefore of the True Right, might be technically described as “panentheistic emanationism.” Simply put, there is an ultimate reality, a silent ground that contains and transcends all that is, known variously as God, Brahman, the Absolute, the Tao, the One, or Being. All that exists is an unfolding or emanation of this primordial oneness, from the highest deities and angels to material elements in the bowels of the Earth. While there is a hierarchy of being, all that exists has dignity insofar as it participates in this divine unfolding. Everything in the cosmos is an emanation of this transcendent reality, including all things on Earth and in heaven: the animals, the plants, the mountains, the rivers and seas, and weather patterns, as well as the biological, chemical, and ecosystemic processes that give them order and being.
This includes the race of man, which occupies a unique station in the cosmic hierarchy. Into the primordial oneness, the seamless garment that linked all other known creatures in their unbroken fealty to the natural law, human self-consciousness arose. Though partaking of the material form of other animals and “lower” orders of creation, mankind also possesses reason and self-will, introducing multiplicity into the divine unity. We find ourselves between Earth and Heaven, as it were.
On the one hand, this renders us capable of transcending the limitations of the material world and obtaining insight into higher levels of being, thereby functioning as an aspect of “nature reflecting on itself.” By the same token, unique among other known emanations of the Godhead, we are capable of acting out of self-will, violating natural law and setting ourselves and our own intelligence up as rivals to the Absolute. In addition, given our self-will, artificial desires, and unnaturally efficient means of obtaining them, humans cannot in good conscience pursue the purely natural ends of propagation, hedonism, and survival at any costs. To truly achieve his nature, to reintegrate himself into that primordial oneness from which he is presently alienated, man must transcend the merely human and align his will with that of the Absolute. Certain humans are capable of approaching this state: These are the natural aristocrats, the arhats, the saints, the Übermenschen.
Of course, given our flawed and fallen nature, most humans will remain attached to their self-will and material interests. Thus, while the religion of egalitarianism proposes a basic anthropocentrism whereby all humans are equal simply by virtue of being human, in the traditional doctrine this is negated by the fact of human inequality. As Savitri Devi observed, a beautiful lion is of greater worth than a degenerate human, given the lion’s greater conformity to the natural order and divine Eidos. For this reason, both traditional metaphysics and an ecology viewed from the Right require that we reject the sentimental humanitarianism of the modern Left, according to which each and every human life (or, indeed, non-human life, in the case of animal rights) has equal value.
An additional implication of this view is that, humans being unequal in their ability to approach the divine and to exercise power justly, social arrangements must ensure rule by the higher type. This is the essence of the tripartite Indo-European social structure; the caste system of priest, warrior, and merchant/artisan that formed the basis of traditional societies. The regression of castes characteristic of the modern world, the collapse of all traditional social structures and the enshrinement of democratic rule, does not truly mean we are self-ruled. It merely means that instead of being ruled by priestly (spiritual) or kingly (noble) values, we are ruled at best by bourgeois (economic) or at worst by plebeian (anarchic) values. The values of the bourgeois and the plebeian are invariably oriented towards comfort, pleasure, and acquisition, rather than transcendence or honor. The tripartite organization is therefore necessary in order to place a check on humanity’s most profane and destructive impulses, towards itself and towards the natural world.
The corollary to this outlook is a suspicion of the philosophical underpinnings of late modernity, with its unbridled reductionism, atomism, and purely instrumental view of man. Other sociopolitical implications follow.
Rightist ecology entails a rejection of both Marxist-Communist and neoliberal economics, the former for its egalitarian leveling and both for their reduction of man to a purely economic being. In addition to its toxicity for the human spirit, this tyranny of economics leads humans to regard the world not as the garment of God but as a mere standing reserve, a collection of resources for the satisfaction of human desires.
While advocating for technology that genuinely improves human life and lessens human impact on other species, the Right-wing ecologist rejects technology which encourages ugliness, hedonism, weakness, and feckless destruction.
While understanding the importance of cities as centers of culture and commerce, the Right-wing ecologist prefers the Italian hill town, attuned to the contours of the land, with a cathedral standing at its highest point, over the inhuman modernist metropolis or manufactured suburb.
This ecology also entails an opposition to excessive human population growth, which threatens spiritual solitude, the beauty of the wilderness, and the space needed for speciation to continue. Quality and quantity are mutually exclusive.
Additionally, contrary to the “totalitarian” slur often employed against it, the True Right believes that difference and variety is a gift from God. Rather than viewing this as a categorical imperative to bring as much diversity as possible into one place, the right seeks to preserve cultural, ethnic, and racial distinctions. It should therefore also strive to preserve the world’s distinct ecosystems and species, as well as human diversity of race and culture, against feckless destruction by human actors (unavoidable natural catastrophes are another matter). As the world of mankind sinks into greater corruption, the natural world remains as a reflection of eternal, higher values, a unified whole unfolding in accordance with the divine order.
A possible objection bears discussion. All Indo-European beliefs, and indeed most traditional doctrines the world over, posit an inevitable end to this world. Whether it comes to a close with the Age of Iron, the Second Coming, the Age of the Wolf, or the Kali Yuga, most teach that this cosmic cycle must end in order to make way for a new one. This generally entails the destruction of the Earth and everything on it. How can this be reconciled with a Right-wing ecology, which posits a duty to preserve those vestiges of pure nature most reflective of the divine order? What, indeed, is the point, if it is all destined to be destroyed anyway?
First of all, this apocalyptic scenario is also a dogma of modern science, inescapably implied by its theories of cosmic evolution. Life on Earth will be destroyed, if not by some anthropogenic insanity then by the expansion of the Sun or the heat death of the universe. The difference is that the progressive ecologist has no abiding, objective reason to preserve the pristine and the authentic in nature beyond personal taste; no escape, in fact, from the jaws of complete subjectivity and nihilism. This is why progressive ecology typically devolves into a concern with social justice, when it is not merely a personal preference for pretty scenery or outdoor recreational opportunities.
For the ecologist of the Right, however, the end of all things human is no argument against living with honor and fighting dispassionately against the forces of disintegration and chaos. The Man Against Time may, in the long run, be destined to fail in his earthly endeavors, but that does not lessen his resolve. This is because he acts out of a sense of noble detachment – the karma yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, Lao-tzu’s wu-wei, or Meister Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit – whereby action flows from the purity of his being and his role in the cosmos rather than from utilitarian calculus or willful striving. Upholding the natural order demands that we defend its purest expressions: the holy, innocent, and noble among mankind, as well as the trees and wolves and rocks that were here before us, which abide in an unconscious harmony with the cosmic order to which man can only aspire.
In his commitment to live in conformity with the natural order and to uphold it against the arrogance of modern man, the Right-wing ecologist accepts the role of detached violence. Most environmentalist rhetoric one hears nowadays is couched in the effete verbiage of contemporary Leftism: rights, equality, anti-oppression, “ethics of care,” and so forth. In addition to its stronger metaphysical bent, the ecology of the Right also offers a more virile ecology, a creed of iron which disdains the technologization and overpopulation of the world because it leads to the diminishment of all life; which upholds the iron laws of nature, of blood and sacrifice, of order and hierarchy; and which is contemptuous of human hubris because of its very pettiness. It is an ecology that loves the wolf, the bear, the warrior, as well as the thunderstorm and the forest fire, for the role they play in maintaining the natural order; that wants to keep large tracts of the Earth wild and free, that cannot bear to see it rationalized, mechanized, and domesticated. It is ecology that disdains softness, ease, sentimentalism, and weakness.
The ecologist of the Right knows that “life in accordance with nature” is no Rousseauian idyll or neo-hipster imperative to “let it all hang out,” but demands stoicism, hardness, and conformity to a thousand stern laws in the pursuit of strength and beauty. This is a virile religiosity, an ascesis of action rather than mere personal salvation or extinction.
Seen in this light, ecology is a necessary feature in the restoration of traditional society. By “traditional” we mean not the free-market, family values, flag-waving fundamentalist zealotry that the term implies in twenty-first century America, but rather an outlook that is grounded upon the divine and natural order, which dictates that all things abide in their proper place. With respect to man and nature, this means that mankind must acknowledge his place in the cosmic order and his role as the guardian and self-awareness of the whole, rather than seeing himself as its tyrannical overlord. It demands the wisdom and introspection necessary to understand our role in the divine plan and to perform our duties well. It demands authenticity, recognizing the cultural and historical soil from which we emerged, and preserving the traditions and memory of our forefathers. This reverence towards the cosmic order demands that we respect its manifestation in the rocks, trees, and sky, whose beauty and power continually serve to remind us of the transcendent wisdom of the whole.
An earlier draft of this essay was published in Social Matter Magazine.
La deuxième partie de l'ouvrage est consacrée aux textes proprement dits de Carl Schmitt mais il faut attendre la page 157 de l'ouvrage, dans une étude intitulée Catholicisme romain et forme politique datant de 1923, pour que le nom de Cortés apparaisse, d'ailleurs de façon tout à fait anecdotique. Cette étude, plus ample que la première, intitulée Visibilité de l’Église et qui ne nous intéresse que par sa mention d'une paradoxale quoique rigoureuse légalité du Diable (4), mentionne donc le nom de l'essayiste espagnol et, ô surprise, celui d'Ernest Hello (cf. p. 180) mais, plus qu'une approche de Cortés, elle s'intéresse à l'absence de toute forme de représentation symbolique dans le monde technico-économique contemporain, à la différence de ce qui se produisait dans la société occidentale du Moyen Âge. Alors, la représentation, ce que nous pourrions sans trop de mal je crois appeler la visibilité au sens que Schmitt donne à ce mot, conférait «à la personne du représentant une dignité propre, car le représentant d'une valeur élevée ne [pouvait] être dénué de valeur» tandis que, désormais, «on ne peut pas représenter devant des automates ou des machines, aussi peu qu'eux-mêmes ne peuvent représenter ou être représentés» car, si l’État «est devenu Léviathan, c'est qu'il a disparu du monde du représentatif». Carl Schmitt fait ainsi remarquer que «l'absence d'image et de représentation de l'entreprise moderne va chercher ses symboles dans une autre époque, car la machine est sans tradition, et elle est si peu capable d'images que même la République russe des soviets n'a pas trouvé d'autre symbole», pour l'illustration de ce que nous pourrions considérer comme étant ses armoiries, «que la faucille et le marteau» (p. 170). Suit une très belle analyse de la rhétorique de Bossuet, qualifiée de «discours représentatif» qui «ne passe pas son temps à discuter et à raisonner» et qui est plus que de la musique : «elle est une dignité humaine rendue visible par la rationalité du langage qui se forme», ce qui suppose «une hiérarchie, car la résonance spirituelle de la grande rhétorique procède de la foi en la représentation que revendique l'orateur» (p. 172), autrement dit un monde supérieur garant de celui où faire triompher un discours qui s'ente lui-même sur la Parole. Le décisionnisme, vu de cette manière, pourrait n'être qu'un pis-aller, une tentative, sans doute désespérée, de fonder ex abrupto une légitimité en prenant de vitesse l'ennemi qui, lui, n'aura pas su ou voulu tirer les conséquences de la mort de Dieu dans l'hic et nunc d'un monde quadrillé et soumis par la Machine, fruit tavelé d'une Raison devenue folle et tournant à vide. Il y a donc quelque chose de prométhéen dans la décision radicale de celui qui décide d'imposer sa vision du monde, dictateur ou empereur-Dieu régnant sur le désert qu'est la réalité profonde du monde moderne.
Voilà bien ce qui fascine Carl Schmitt lorsqu'il lit la prose de Donoso Cortés, éblouissante de virtuosité comme a pu le remarquer, selon lui et «avec un jugement critique sûr» (p. 217), un Barbey d'Aurevilly : son intransigeance radicale, non pas certes sur les arrangements circonstanciels politiques, car il fut un excellent diplomate, que sur la nécessité, pour le temps qui vient, de prendre les décisions qui s'imposent, aussi dures qu'elles puissent paraître, Carl Schmitt faisant à ce titre remarquer que Donoso Cortés est l'auteur de «la phrase la plus extrême du XIXe siècle : le jour des anéantissements [ou plutôt : des négations] radicaux et des affirmations souveraines arrive», «llega el dia de las negaciones radicales y des las afirmaciones soberanas» (p. 218), une phrase dont chacun des termes est bien évidemment plus que jamais valable à notre époque, mais qui est devenue parfaitement inaudible.
Avant que l’on commence à se lamenter sur les décadences décrites par nos ancêtres romains et jusque par nos auteurs contemporains, et quelle que soit l’appellation qui leur fut attribuée par les critiques modernes, « nationalistes », « identitaires », « traditionalistes de la droite alternative, » « de la droite extrême » et j’en passe, il est essentiel de mentionner deux écrivains modernes qui signalèrent l’arrivée de la décadence bien que leur approche respective de son contenu et de ses causes fut très divergente. Ce sont l’Allemand Oswald Spengler avec son Déclin de l’Occident, écrit au début du XXème siècle, et le Français Arthur de Gobineau avec son gros ouvrage Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, écrit soixante ans plut tôt. Tous deux étaient des écrivains d’une grande culture, tous deux partageaient la même vision apocalyptique de l’Europe à venir, tous deux peuvent être appelés des pessimistes culturels avec un sens du tragique fort raffiné. Or pour le premier de ces auteurs, Spengler, la décadence est le résultat du vieillissement biologique naturel de chaque peuple sur terre, vieillissement qui l’amène à un moment historique à sa mort inévitable. Pour le second, Gobineau, la décadence est due à l’affaiblissement de la conscience raciale qui fait qu’un peuple adopte le faux altruisme tout en ouvrant les portes de la cité aux anciens ennemis, c’est-à-dire aux Autres d’une d’autre race, ce qui le conduit peu à peu à s’adonner au métissage et finalement à accepter sa propre mort. À l’instar de Gobineau, des observations à peu près similaires seront faites par des savants allemands entre les deux guerres. On doit pourtant faire ici une nette distinction entre les causes et les effets de la décadence. Le tedium vitae (fatigue de vivre), la corruption des mœurs, la débauche, l’avarice, ne sont que les effets de la disparition de la conscience raciale et non sa cause. Le mélange des races et le métissage, termes mal vus aujourd’hui par le Système et ses serviteurs, étaient désignés par Gobineau par le terme de « dégénérescence ». Selon lui, celle-ci fonctionne dorénavant, comme une machine à broyer le patrimoine génétique des peuples européens. Voici une courte citation de son livre : « Je pense donc que le mot dégénéré, s’appliquant à un peuple, doit signifier et signifie que ce peuple n’a plus la valeur intrinsèque qu’autrefois il possédait, parce qu’il n’a plus dans ses veines le même sang, dont des alliages successifs ont graduellement modifié la valeur ; autrement dit, qu’avec le même nom, il n’a pas conservé la même race que ses fondateurs ; enfin, que l’homme de la décadence, celui qu’on appelle l’homme dégénéré, est un produit différent, au point de vue ethnique, du héros des grandes époques. » 
L’écrivain Salluste est important à plusieurs titres. Primo, il fut le contemporain de la conjuration de Catilina, un noble romain ambitieux qui avec nombre de ses consorts de la noblesse décadente de Rome faillit renverser la république romaine et imposer la dictature. Salluste fut partisan de Jules César qui était devenu le dictateur auto-proclamé de Rome suite aux interminables guerres civiles qui avaient appauvri le fonds génétique de nombreux patriciens romains à Rome.
Nul doute que la crainte de l’Autre, qu’elle soit réelle ou factice, resserre les rangs d’un peuple, tout en fortifiant son homogénéité raciale et son identité culturelle. En revanche, il y a un effet négatif de la crainte des autres que l’on pouvait observer dans la Rome impériale et qu’on lit dans les écrits de Juvénal. Le sommet de l’amour des autres, ( l’ amor hostilis) ne se verra que vers la fin du XXème siècle en Europe multiculturelle. Suite à l’opulence matérielle et à la dictature du bien-être, accompagnées par la croyance à la fin de l’histoire véhiculée par les dogmes égalitaristes, on commence en Europe, peu à peu, à s’adapter aux mœurs et aux habitudes des Autres. Autrefois c’étaient Phéniciens, Juifs, Berbères, Numides, Parthes et Maghrébins et autres, combattus à l’époque romaine comme des ennemis héréditaires. Aujourd’hui, face aux nouveaux migrants non-européens, l’ancienne peur de l’Autre se manifeste chez les Blancs européens dans le mimétisme de l’altérité négative qui aboutit en règle générale à l’apprentissage du « déni de soi ». Ce déni de soi, on l’observe aujourd’hui dans la classe politique européenne et américaine à la recherche d’un ersatz pour son identité raciale blanche qui est aujourd’hui mal vue. A titre d’exemple cette nouvelle identité négative qu’on observe chez les gouvernants occidentaux modernes se manifeste par un dédoublement imitatif des mœurs des immigrés afro-asiatiques. On est également témoin de l’apprentissage de l’identité négative chez beaucoup de jeunes Blancs en train de mimer différents cultes non-européens. De plus, le renversement de la notion de « metus hostilis » en « amor hostilis » par les gouvernants européens actuels aboutit fatalement à la culture de la pénitence politique. Cette manie nationale-masochiste est surtout visible chez les actuels dirigeants allemands qui se lancent dans de grandes embrassades névrotiques avec des ressortissants afro-asiatiques et musulmans contre lesquels ils avaient mené des guerres meurtrières du VIIIe siècle dans l’Ouest européen et jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle dans l’Est européen.
Les lignes de Juvénal sont écrites en hexamètres dactyliques ce qui veut dire en gros un usage d’échanges rythmiques entre syllabes brèves ou longues qui fournissent à chacune de ses satires une tonalité dramatique et théâtrale qui était très à la mode chez les Anciens y compris chez Homère dans ses épopées. À l’hexamètre latin, le traducteur français a substitué les mètres syllabiques rimés qui ont fort bien capturé le sarcasme désabusé de l’original de Juvénal. On est tenté de qualifier Juvénal de Louis Ferdinand Céline de l‘Antiquité. Dans sa fameuse VIème satire, qui s’intitule Les Femmes, Juvénal décrit la prolifération de charlatans venus à Rome d’Asie et d’Orient et qui introduisent dans les mœurs romaines la mode de la zoophilie et de la pédophilie et d’autres vices. Le langage de Juvénal décrivant les perversions sexuelles importées à Rome par des nouveaux venues asiatiques et africains ferait même honte aux producteurs d’Hollywood aujourd’hui. Voici quelques-uns de ses vers traduits en français, de manière soignés car destinés aujourd’hui au grand public :
1969 promovierte Sander bei Hans-Joachim Schoeps in Erlangen zum Dr. phil. Der Titel seiner Promotionsschrift lautete „Marxistische Ideologie und allgemeine Kunsttheorie“; Sander setzte sich hier insbesondere mit der Kunstkonzeption von Marx und Engels auseinander. Es war wohl insbesondere der Einfluß des Staatsrechtlers Carl Schmitt, mit dem er bis 1981 brieflich in Kontakt stand, der ihn in dieser Zeit mehr und mehr zu rechtskonservativen Auffassungen tendieren ließ. Von 1964–1974 arbeitete er für das Deutschland-Archiv. In dieser Zeit gestaltete er gelegentlich auch Rundfunkfeuilletons für öffentlich-rechtliche Sender. Sanders „Geschichte der Schönen Literatur in der DDR“ (1972) löste eine heftige Kampagne aus, in deren Folge der Verlag das Buch aus dem Vertrieb zog. Sander verlor nun zunehmend an publizistischem Spielraum. Alternativen fand er unter anderem bei Caspar von Schrenck-Notzings Zeitschrift Criticón. 
Sander hat nie einen Hehl daraus gemacht, daß er die Bundesrepublik für nicht reformierbar hielt. Beide deutsche Staaten seien unter Kuratel der Besatzer entstanden, was unter anderem für eine Negativauslese im Hinblick auf die Eliten gesorgt habe. Dennoch sei nichts verloren: Die Deutschen bräuchten „sich nur innerlich aufzuraffen“, so Sander im „Nationalen Imperativ“, „um sich der brüchigen alten Zustände der Innen- und Außenpolitik zu entledigen, wieder auf die überlieferten, immer noch wirkenden Tugenden zu setzen und neue Formen und Ziele zu wagen, die in Richtung auf einen neuen Machtstaat, eine neue Großmacht drängen, die den Nachbarn durchaus zuzumuten wäre, weil durch nichts sonst das schutzbedürftige Europa noch gerettet werden kann.“ Diese Sätze können, in einer Zeit, in der Europa durch die Auswirkungen der „Flüchtlingskrise“ schutzbedürftiger denn je ist, durchaus als Vermächtnis Sanders nicht nur an die Deutschen gelesen werden. 
On parle beaucoup dans le monde antisystème de la chute de l’empire américain. Je m’en mêle peu parce que l’Amérique n’est pour moi pas un empire ; elle est plus que cela, elle est l’anti-civilisation, une matrice matérielle hallucinatoire, un virus mental et moral qui dévore et remplace mentalement l’humanité – musulmans, chinois et russes y compris. Elle est le cancer moral et terminal du monde moderne. Celui qui l’a le mieux montré est le cinéaste John Carpenter dans son chef-d’œuvre des années 80, They Live. Et j’ai déjà parlé de Don Siegel et de son humanité de légumes dans l’invasion des profanateurs, réalisé en 1955, année flamboyante de pamphlets antiaméricains comme La Nuit du Chasseur de Laughton, le Roi à New York de Chaplin, The Big Heat de Fritz Lang.
Témoin donc de la désintégration de l’empire britannique causée par Churchill et Roosevelt, militaire vieille école, Glubb garde cependant une vision pragmatique et synthétique des raisons de nos décadences. 
Toutes ces causes se cumulent aujourd’hui en occident. Glubb écrit à l’époque des Rolling stones et on comprend qu’il ait été traumatisé, une kommandantur de programmation culturelle (l’institut Tavistock ?!) ayant projeté l’Angleterre dans une décadence morale, intellectuelle et matérielle à cette époque abjecte. C’est l’effarante conquête du cool dont parle le journaliste Thomas Frank. En quelques années, explique Frank notre nation (US) n’était plus la même. Idem pour la France du gaullisme, qui rompait avec le schéma guerrier, traditionnel et initiatique de la quatrième république et nous fit rentrer dans l’ère de la télé, de la consommation, des supermarchés, de salut les copains, sans oublier mai 68. Je ne suis gaulliste que géopolitiquement, pour le reste, merci… Revoyez Godard, Tati, Etaix, pour reprendre la mesure du problème gaulliste.
Détail chic pour raviver ma marotte du présent permanent, Glubb retrouve même trace des Beatles chez les califes !
According to Swiss-German historian Armin Mohler, who introduced this formula in a prolific albeit debatable study “Conservative Revolution in Germany: 1918–1932” [80] to describe an intellectual milieu hostile to the “ideas of 1789,” CR, as a cultural and political current, has taken shape in the interwar Germany, but its conceptual relevance transcends these temporal and geographic boundaries. Although later metaphysical discussions of Nietzscheanism
More precisely, this interwar German movement, which has always been escaping strict definitions, owes its reputation of the “ideocratic,” “metapolitical,” “neither right-wing, nor left-wing” Third Way precisely to embracing Nietzscheanism as a means of Weberian “re-enchantment of the world” [63]. Indeed, in social sciences and humanities, it was no sooner than Nietzsche put forward the event of the “death of god” that ideological and, basically, purely modern perplexities of the Left and Right have become a low priority compared to transhistorical (epochal) interplay of modernism and antimodernism, broader, the progressive and regressive vector. The latter were partially grasped by derivative intuitions of reactionary modernism [38], organological supermodern [63, 109; 40], archeofuturism [10], etc. in reference to Nietzsche-inspired phenomenon of CR.
Indeed, so far, attempts to convert Nietzsche into politics have been mostly associated with the Nietzsche-Archiv’s destiny in the service of National Socialist ideology thanks to its ardent supporter Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, philosopher’s sister. However, the same destiny largely befell the work of conservative-revolutionary Nietzscheans, the brightest example being “The Third Empire”
On the other hand, according to Ernst Troeltsch, German philosopher of history, theologian and, along with Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the first promoters of the term “CR” [107, 454], only after the First World War, through “war experience,” Nietzsche’s thought was purified of its “sickly and exaggerated elements and thus had set ‘new aims’” [106, 75, quoted after 64, 48] for the German people. Jürgen Habermas confirms that Nietzsche reached the peak of popularity in Germany’s interwar period, when “the ideas of 1914” were confronted with “the ideas of 1789,” noting that “thinkers as various as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, and even Arnold Gehlen show affinity with this background” [18, 209]. 
Key works by Locchi for our study, “The Meaning of History” (1971), “Wagner, Nietzsche and the Myth of Suprahumanism” (1982), “Martin Heidegger and Conservative Revolution” (1988), also published in response to “Heidegger’s case,” etc., reveal a threefold structure of history “unlocked” by initiators of the discontinuity with the tradition of preceding two thousand years [13, 211] and founders of the suprahumanist myth: Richard Wagner, above all, as an author of “The Ring of the Nibelung” and Friedrich Nietzsche reconciled with him and portrayed as his disciple. Having paralleled Wagner’s “aristocratic socialism” with CR, Locchi criticizes not only Lukács but also Adorno’s take on Wagner along with the entire Frankfurt School. According to him, suprahumanism, inspired by Johann Fichte’s discovery of Germania
It is Heidegger’s disciple Karl Löwith (“Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence” and “From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in 19th Century Thought”)
Yet Old Gunpowder-Head, as Jünger used to call Nietzsche [51], provided conservative-revolutionary luminaries like him not only with recipes for social change. For historians of philosophy, connections between Nietzsche’s legacy and CR (which is the subject matter of the study) are of a special interest given that the famous “turn” of Heidegger towards a conservative criticism of technology and final abandonment of transcendentalism and voluntarism was triggered namely by his familiarization with Jünger’s conservative-revolutionary classic: “Total Mobilization” (1930) and “The Worker. Domination and Gestalt” (1932) [11, 718]. 
Nietzsche as the philosopher who, in Habermas’ words, “entrusted the overcoming of nihilism to the aesthetically revived Dionysian myth” [19, 99] was explored in-depth by Friedrich Georg Jünger. In his eponymous book “Nietzsche” (1949) [60], as well as famous trilogy “Greek myths” (1947) comprised of “The Greek Gods,” “The Titans” and “The Heroes” [59], he paid a special attention to Pan as an epitome of the wild and Dionysus as a redeemer from the misery of time. Both motifs, as well as F. G. Jünger’s book “The Perfection of Technology” (written in 1939 and translated to English as “The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without Purpose” [61]), intersect with the late Heidegger’s criticism of instrumental rationality as “machination,” yet this time he considered Nietzsche’s philosophy the endpoint of Western metaphysics rather than the salvation [see 112]. 
Finally, in the most frequently quoted excerpt from “The Adventurous Heart,” as if Nietzschean prophecy of the “twilight of the idols” has come true, Jünger comments on a sinister reputation gained at that time by his generation. To wit, they were said to have been capable of destroying the temples. Far from denying it, Jünger, in fact, objected that such a sentence simply bore no significance in the futile epoch producing nothing but museums [53, 112]. 
Nietzscheanism as “radical aristocratism,” the formula first suggested by Georges Brandes and personally approved by Nietzsche [83, 213], burst into blossom in “Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology” (1918), the most popular book on Nietzsche in Weimar Germany by the Circle’s and Mann’s associate Ernst Bertram, as well as catalyzed Mann’s ideal of the “nobility of the spirit” [72]. Deep connections between Nietzsche, George and Austrian prodigy Hugo von Hofmannsthal who, like Mann, popularized the term “CR” in the field of cultural criticism in his 1927 address to students of the University of Munich “Literature as the Spiritual Space of the Nation,” are also widely known [44; 103]. According to Hofmannsthal, the Age of Enlightenment is nothing but a moment within the unfolding countermovement of CR of a scope unknown to Europe [44, 412–413].
Apart from Hölderlin, Goethe and Nietzsche, George’s vision of the Secret Germany also strongly influenced Hielscher, a friend of Martin Buber and an editor of National-Revolutionary magazines “Der Vormarsch” and “Das Reich” who created a unique panentheistic theology and closely cooperated with Jünger [42, 216–225]. However, it was Jünger who revolutionized detached ideals of Young Conservatives by reinterpreting the Dionysian principle in Nietzsche’s philosophy of culture as the titanic principle of technology that defines the modernity. Returning Heidegger’s reproach that Jünger, employing visual metaphors of the metaphysical transition, was not a “thinker” [36, 263], Jünger claimed that Heidegger lacked a clear political vision and that is why he hoped that National Socialism would bring something new [39, 55]. At the same time, Jünger’s own “clear” vision performed a critical function, for, except for a short period of political involvement as a publicist, he remained “a seismograph of the epoch” [92, 525]. Yet, in contrast with “cultural pessimist” Heidegger who eventually concluded that “only a God could save us” [32], Jünger, in spite of an apparent impact of Heidegger’s and F.G. Jünger’s presumed “technophobia,” was unique in making the transvaluation of all values the programmatic quest of his entire body of work.
That is how the early Jünger’s active nihilism counterbalanced the Young-Conservative fascination with the religious “Russian idea” and Dostoevsky’s “revolution out of conservatism” [109, 355]. Stating the ongoing “geological revolution” [114: 55–58], Jünger refers to the Joachist Age of the Holy Spirit [52, 414] only in “At the Wall of Time” (1959) when, remembering Nietzsche’s formula of the Superman as the conqueror of god and nothing, the pursued self-overcoming of nihilism enters the “creative” phase of challenging the nothing itself. Already in 1934 essay “On Pain” Jünger gives the following assessment of its proceedings: “We conclude, then, that we find ourselves in a last and indeed quite remarkable phase of nihilism, characterized by the broad expansion of new social orders with corresponding values yet to be seen” [55, 46]. In Klemperer’s words, “tough Nietzscheans” Spengler, Jünger and Moeller van den Bruck, in fact, “signed a pact with the devil” when took a risk to follow in Nietzsche’s footsteps and attempted to turn nihilism against itself [64, 153]. 
Meanwhile for the liberal, the reason that the radical displays its creation of the human will which aspire for absolute freedom.
Lisez et relisez les lignes de Guénon sur cette capacité hallucinatoire du monde moderne. Puis pensez à ces jeunes du métro ou du train, logés dans six mètres carrés, et qui passent leur temps sur les centimètres carrés des écrans lumineux de leur smartphone…
Et basculons. Le procès du transport moderne devient le procès des camps d’extermination :
La souveraineté et ses interprètes, Tocqueville, Rousseau et C.Schmitt
Macron, la France et l'Europe
Sous couvert de "raison", dira-t-on, les démocraties de l’Ouest se sont nourries d'une logique de "déraison" qui a théorisé et pratiqué le sens de la démesure et l'extension continue des droits sans devoirs. Cet outrage du "bon sens" a conduit au dépassement des " limites" de l’État, de la Nation, de la famille et de l'anthropologie, et à l'égarement de "l'affectio sociétatis", propres des sociétés homogènes, aboutissant à la "société liquide" de Zygmunt Bauman.
Ainsi le Souverainisme n'est pas un populisme, puisqu'il n'est pas une promesse, mais une volonté ; il n'est pas la critique des élites, mais la revendication d'un destin.
Il affirma, sans risque de se tromper, que: "La liberté de conscience comporte plus de dangers , que l'autorité et le despotisme". Nous dirions que les systèmes ouverts comportent infiniment plus de périls que les systèmes fermés, car ils baignent dans les marécages de la responsabilité, refusée par la plupart des damnés de la "Divine Comédie", ne pouvant s'en sortir que par la terreur de la mort.
« Plus personne n’ignore, en effet, que c’est bien François Mitterrand lui-même (avec la complicité, entre autres, de l’économiste libéral Jacques Attali et de son homme à tout faire de l’époque Jean-Louis Bianco) qui, en 1984, a délibérément organisé depuis l’Elysée (quelques mois seulement, par conséquent, après le fameux “tournant libéral” de 1983) le lancement et le financement de SOS-Racisme, un mouvement “citoyen” officiellement “spontané” (et d’ailleurs aussitôt présenté et encensé comme tel dans le monde du showbiz et des grands médias) mais dont la mission première était en réalité de détourner les fractions de la jeunesse étudiante et lycéenne que ce ralliement au capitalisme auraient pu déstabiliser vers un combat de substitution suffisamment plausible et honorable à leurs yeux. »
To understand why Europeans were the progenitors of the highest accomplishments in history – close to one hundred percent of the great ideas in philosophy, science, anthropology, sociology, economics, geography, geology, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, technology, dance, and music – you must understand the Presocratic self-conscious separation of the knowing “I” from the “not-I.” The Presocratics were the first humans to discover that they have a mind that is the seat of thinking and thus of knowledge, the only agency in the whole realm of nature able to separate itself from everything that is not its own, as well as making itself “a possible object of thought to itself,” as Aristotle would put it in a clear-cut manner later on [On the Soul, Bk. III: Ch. 4, 429b]. The Presocratics were the first men to detach their ego consciousness from the surrounding natural world, establishing their thinking “I” as the cognitive center, the decision-maker as to what makes truthful statements possible, in contradistinction to traditions handed down without reflection, the voices of gods and demons.
Laks brings up studies about the “Orientalizing” aspects of Greek culture, borrowings from the Near East, briefly mentioning Jaspers’ thesis about similar breakthroughs elsewhere in the world from mythology to rationality during the Axial Age period between 800 and 200 BC. He also pays particular attention to J. P. Vernant’s central book, The Origins of Greek Thought (1962), and its claim that there was no “Greek miracle” in the sense that Greek reason did not arise suddenly out of some innate Greek genius but was a product of the democratizing political atmosphere within the city-states, which encouraged debate and a form of rationality that was then extended to the study of nature.
Beginning with Thales’ use of a common noun, water, rather than a mythic name, as the ultimate source of all things, Anaximander (610-546 BC), writing some forty years after his teacher Thales, would try to locate in a precise sequence the increasing distance from the Earth of the Moon, Sun, and stars. Anaximander wrote about heavenly bodies as impersonal forces without any anthropomorphic traits, using a language “keen on processes of abstraction and conceptualization” (41). Even in political thinking, one finds in the works of Solon an emphasis on human responsibility for their own misfortune and a denial of intentionality on the part of gods. Around 500 BC we have Heraclitus describing the universe as a kosmos, an orderly arrangement characterized by regularity without divine influences. She notes the “pointedly polemical character” of Heraclitus’ writing and, indeed, how each Presocratic thinker, from Heraclitus on, proposed a new theory in self-conscious refutation of preceding theories, engaging in “second-order questions” as to why their theoretical approaches were superior to previous assessments. Sassi says that this “self-conscious knowledge” bespeaks of thinkers who were increasingly aware that knowledge flows out of their own knowing minds in competition with other rationalizing minds. She cites Heraclitus’ proclamation, “I went in search of myself,” in order “to stress that he extrapolated the contents of logos from an isolated and highly personal reflection” (73). She notes as well how Heraclitus developed a conception of the psyche as the source of cognition away from the Homeric notion of the psyche as vital breath. Knowledge is the product of the activity of the psyche.
Sassi contrasts as well the “conservation” role of writing in the Near East, which remained religious and was “composed anonymously within a circle of priests and then copied for centuries without any conceptual changes” (75), to the writing of the Greeks, which was open to everyone. She estimates that about thirty percent of male citizens in the polis were able to read and write. The Greeks adopted prose writing in the last decades of the fifth century, she says, in their “search for directness and unambiguousness” and their preference for truths freed from the “restraints of prosody,” and in contradistinction to the texts of Mesopotamia with their “revelations of a preestablished traditional” worldview immune “from authorial interventions” (142). Herodotus’ Histories was the “first extended prose narrative of Greek literature,” followed by Zeno, Melissus, the Pythagoreans, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus. This was a prose “rich in elaborate syntactical structures in unison with a linguistic inquiry that prefers precision over metaphors and evocative expressions” (171).
Johnstone’s account is thus limited in its focus on alphabetic writing as such, which leads him to ponder about other “conditions . . . that incubated the seeds of Western scientific and philosophical thought.” He brings up the city of Miletos, from which the first Presocratics came, as a location at the “crossroads for east and west.” He says that exposure in this city “to a wide variety of mythic traditions and to alternative ways of understanding” somehow produced, in the words of an academic he cites, “a breakthrough in man’s thinking, a shift toward rationalism” (38). Academics love this stuff about diverse cities creating cultural “enrichment.” They never care to ask why the far older cosmopolitan cities of the Near East failed to produce any rationalism and why whites are always the ones responsible for new ideas.
Vamvacas makes the very important point that “Presocratic philosophy is not the culmination of a sudden awakening of the Greek spirit. It is the culminating result of a long development and maturation of the Greek mind” (19). He says little, however, about this long development, apart from noticing that Hesiod’s Theogony goes beyond standard mythological accounts in placing the gods “in a consistent, complete, ordered system,” and posing questions about the beginning of the world, and communicating an interest in “truths.” Vamvacas refers briefly to the “awakening of the personality of the Greek” in early lyric poetry, the fact that such poets as Archilochus, Simonides, and Sappho (writing in the seventh century after Homer, and before the Presocratics) expressed their own “personal values.” But not much else is said. Snell still remains the go-to source for the argument that Greek lyric poets were the first ones to separate the individual self from prescribed expressions and norms. Vamvacas is nevertheless an excellent source for a comprehensive argument about the scientific orientation of the Presocratics. I like the statement that during the Presocratics era “for the first time the human mind focuses on the truth” (20). He does not explain the connection between the discovery of the mind and the pursuit of truth, but it is implicit in his overall argument that there can be no truth-seeking without an inner awareness of the faculty of reason, the only faculty that can legislate for itself principles, concepts, and theories, because, if I may use the words of Aristotle, it is the only faculty that is “able to think itself” [On the Soul, Bk. III: Ch. 4, 429b].
But while alphabetic writing eventually became an indispensable means of communicating truths (during the fourth century BC), beyond poetic recitations about the norms to be valued in a community, I would argue, as Havelock admits in passing, that “there are clear signs in Homer himself that the Greek mind would one day reach out in search of a different kind of experience” beyond poetic recitation. I will not repeat my view that Homer was a transitional figure. It may suffice to point out Havelock’s own recognition that alphabetic writing barely existed before Euripides, by which time the Presocratics had already achieved so much. Havelock knows this: “the Presocratics themselves were essentially oral thinkers . . . but they were trying to device a vocabulary and syntax for a new future, when thought should be expressed in categories organized in a syntax suitable to abstract statement” (x).