lundi, 22 août 2011
Articles de R. Steuckers sur "centrostudilaruna.it"
Articles de Robert Steuckers sur http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/
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mercredi, 17 août 2011
Knut Hamsun
Knut Hamsun
Kerry Bolton
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Editor’s Note:
This much-expanded version of a previously-published essay on Knut Hamsun is chapter 6 of Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence, forthcoming from Counter-Currents.
Knut Hamsun, 1859–1952, has had a decisive impact on the course of twentieth century literature, both in Europe and America, yet was for decades little discussed let alone honored even in his native Norway.
Ernest Hemingway tried to emulate him as did Henry Miller, who called Hamsun “the Dickens of my generation.” Thomas Mann wrote, “never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one so worthy of it.” Herman Hesse called Hamsun his favorite author. Admired by H. G. Wells, Kafka, and Brecht,[1] Hamsun always enjoyed a great following not only in Germany but particularly in Russia, where he was lauded especially by Maxim Gorky. Even inside the Communist State Hamsun continued to be published despite his politics, and he remained an influence on such Bolshevik luminaries as Aleksandr Kollontai and Illya Ehrenburg.[2]
Origins
Hamsun was born Knut Pedersen of an impoverished peasant family of seven children on August 4th, 1859. His father was a farmer and a tailor; his mother’s lineage was of Viking nobility. Knut had a hard upbringing on his uncle’s farm where he was sent when he was nine. But his uncle also ran the local library, which gave him the chance to begin his self-education.[3]
He left his uncle’s farm in 1873, and over the next few years worked at a variety of jobs, laboring, teaching, and clerical, as he widely journeyed about.[4]
America
At 18 he had published his first novel called The Enigmatic One, a love story.[5] He then paid for the publication of another novel Bjorger.[6] But acknowledgment as a writer was a decade away, as there was then little interest in his peasant tales.
In 1882 Knut traveled to the USA, joining the great Norwegian emigration to that country. Between numerous jobs he was able to get some newspaper articles published and began a series of lectures on authors among the Norwegian community.[7] From this early start, Hamsun wrote as an observer of life. He was the first to develop the novel based on the psychology of characters. Hamsun wrote of what he saw and felt particularly identifying with the workers and the tramps. But he was soon disillusioned with America, despite his initial wonder, and he expressed his disgust for American life in articles for Norwegian newspapers[8] upon his return.[9]
In the first sentence of his first article on America[10] Hamsun described the country as “the Millionaires’ Republic,” a reference to the manner by which elections are based on money,[11] and where the “diseased an degenerate human raw material stream every day from all over the world.” Alluding to principles that are today familiarly called “the American Dream,” Hamsun states that the immigrant is soon disappointed when “the principles do not deliver what they promise.”
He was skeptical about the liberty fetish upon which the American ethos is proclaimed, stating that it is in practice not so much a matter of having “liberty” as “taking liberties.”[12] The purpose of being American is to fulfill a “carnivorous, satiating existence, with the ability to afford intense sensual pleasures . . .”[13]
What now seems particularly prescient, Hamsun, in criticizing the “machinelust” of Americans alludes with a mixture of amazement and abhorrence to having eaten even an egg “from a Brooklyn egg factory” (Hamsun’s emphasis),[14] perhaps something that might have seemed pathological for a youthful Scandinavian of country stock.
Hamsun’s next article for Aftenpost centered on New York, and focused on what can be considered the vulgarity of American city-dwellers in comparison to those in Europe; their loudness and their lack of etiquette.[15] “New Yorkers know little about literature or art.”[16] The theater is popular but the “level of dramatic art is so low.”[17]
Hamsun’s first major literary work came in 1888 when he succeeded in getting published a short story in a magazine, which was to form part of his novel, Hunger. The story gained him access to the literary scene in Copenhagen. Hamsun became a celebrity among the young intellectuals. He was invited to lecture before university audiences.[18]
He was commissioned to write a book on America in 1889 setting aside the completion of Hunger. The result was The Cultural Life of Modern America,[19] based on his second trip to the USA in 1886, which had been prompted by his desire to make a literary mark for himself there.[20]
By 1888 he was so repelled by the USA, that he took to wearing a black ribbon in sympathy with four German anarchist immigrants[21] who had been sentenced to death for the Haymarket bombing in Chicago, 1886.
He left a departing message, giving a two-hour lecture on the cultural vacuity of America.[22]
Despite his destitution upon settling in Copenhagen, he wrote to a friend: “How pleased I am with this country. This is Europe, and I am European—thank God!”[23]
It was two lectures on America at the University of Copenhagen that formed the basis of the aforementioned Cultural Life of Modern America. Nelson remarks of Hamsun’s particular disgust, which might to many readers seem completely relevant to the present time: “In particular he was offended by the exaggerated patriotism of Americans, their continual boasting of themslevs as the freest, most advanced, most intelligent people anywhere–boasting from which the foreigner could not escape.”[24]
Hamsun attacked the crass materialism of the USA. He despised democracy as a form of despotism, abhorring its leveling nature and mob politics. America is a land where the highest morality is money, where the meaning of art is reduced to its cash value. He also expresses his misgivings about the presence of Africans in the USA. The Civil War is described as a war against the aristocracy by northern capitalists. He writes: “Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto stud farm.”
Literary Eminence
Resuming the writing of Hunger after his musings on America, this appeared in 1890. It has been described as one of the great novels of urban alienation. Like much of his writing it is partly autobiographical. It centers on a young budding writer trying to fend off poverty, wandering the streets in rags, but in some odd way enjoying the experiences despite the hardship. Through an act of will the character maintains his identity.
This was perhaps the first novel to make the workings of the mind the central theme. It was a genre he was to continue experimenting with over the next ten years. Contra orthodox psychological theories, Hamsun held that a diversity of separate personality types within the individual is a desirable state of being. He wrote of this in regard to his aim for literature: “I will therefore have contradictions in the inner man considered as a quite natural phenomenon, and I dream of a literature with characters in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic.”[25]
Hamsun’s next great novel was Mysteries,[26] virtually a self-portrait. One reviewer described Hamsun as expressing “the wildest paradoxes,” a hatred of bourgeois academics and of the masses. The principal character, Nagel, is presented in the form of free flowing thought associations and a stream of consciousness.[27]
Here Hamsun identifies himself as “a radical who belongs to no party, but is an individual in the extreme.”[28] The book caused an uproar among literary circles, but it sold well.
Having outraged the literary establishment, Hamsun next set about critiquing the younger coterie of writers as arrogant and talentless wastrels, whom he represents in Shallow Soil[29] as “a festering sore on the social organism of the Norwegian capital,” in the words of Prof. Wiehr.[30]
Here Hanka Tidemand, a liberated and modern woman of the type detested by Hamsun, finds her true nature back with her hard working husband and children, after an affair with an artist. She realizes her mistaken course, on the verge of divorce, when she sees her children. Here Hamsun sets out his constant theme of rediscovering one’s roots in the simple life, in family and, in children. The well-meaning Mr Tidemand has his wife Hanka leave after she is seduced by one of the bohemian parasites.
[Tideman’s] regard for the individual liberty of his wife amounts really to a fault. He fails to see, however, the grave danger which is threatening Hanka and believes to be promoting her true happiness in according her perfect freedom. His devotion to her never ceases, and when she at last repents, he makes reconciliation easy for her. . . .
Hanka is evidently the product of a misdirected striving for emancipation; she seems to acknowledge no duty except the duty to herself. [31]
The Kareno trilogy of plays (At the Gates of the Kingdom, Evening Glow, and The Game of Life)[32] focuses Hamsun’s growing anti-democratic sentiment in the character of Ivar Kareno, a young philosopher who states:
I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.[33]
By now, Hamsun had become a celebrity, cheered in the streets by crowds although he despised the attention, but several decades away from being honored with a Nobel Prize
The Growth of the Soil
The Growth of the Soil is a remarkable book for those who have a yearning for the timeless in a world of the superficial and the transient. Published in 1917, it was the work that was cited when Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.
This is the world of a rough, coarsely-featured farmer Isak, and a woman, Inger, who happened to come by from across the valley, stay with him to sire a children and help Isak work the land, raise goats, potatoes, corn, milk the cows and goats, make cheese, and subsist at one with nature.
Isak and Inger are archetypes of the peasant; the antithesis of the New Yorker and the archetypical “American” described in Hamsun’s essays on the USA.
The sense of a day-by-day part of eternity lived by Isak and Inger is captured, juxtaposing their lives with the grain they sow and the earth they till, as part of a single rhythm that has existed for centuries:
For generations back, into forgotten time, his fathers before him had sowed corn, solemnly, on a still, calm evening, bets with a fall of warm and gentle rain, soon after the grey goose flight. . . .
Isak walked bare headed, in Jesus’ name, a sower. Like a tree stump to look at, but in his heart like a child. Every cast was made with care, in a spirit of kindly resignation. Look! The tiny grains that are to take life and to grow, shoot up into ears, and give more corn again; so it is throughout the earth where corn is sown. Palestine, America, the valleys of Norway itself—a great wide world, and here is Isak, a tiny speck in the midst of it all, a sower. Little showers of corn flung out fanwise form his hand; a kindly clouded sky, with a promise of the faintest little misty rain.[34]
The woman as mother is the highest of peasant values, and indeed of the fulfillment of women, in antithesis to the “liberated woman” that was becoming evident in Hamsun’s time as a symptom of a culture’s decay, a type already described by Hamsun in Shallow Soil and elsewhere.
The rearing of children is the purpose of Being of the wife and mother, as much as that might be sneered at now, but as Spengler noted, there is nothing more important than the continuation of a family lineage, generation-after-generation, and one might add—interestingly—the same values hold as true for the aristocrat as for the peasant; there is no more dread than being the last of a family’s line. Hence, we see something of this feeling described by Hamsun:
She was in full flower, and constantly with child. Isak, himself, her lord and master, was earnest and stolid as ever, but he had got on well, and was content. How he had managed to live until Inger came was a mystery . . . now, he had all that a man can think of in his place in the world.[35]
The feeling is described by Oswald Spengler in The Hour of Decision, which captures the same intent that Hamsun was expressing in drama:
A woman of race[36] does not desire to be a “companion” or a “lover,” but a mother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and a distraction, but of many; the instinct of a strong race speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her the race . . .[37]
This is precisely the type of woman that Inger represents: “She was in full flower, and constantly with child . . .”
A man wants stout sons who will perpetuate his name and his deeds beyond his death into the future and enhance them, just as he has done himself through feeling himself heir to the calling and works of his ancestors.[38]
This organic conception of family, an instinct during the “Spring” and “Summer” epochs of a civilization, becomes atrophied during the “Autumn” and “Winter” epochs, as Spengler aptly terms the morphological cycles of a culture; which is of course the situation today, and was becoming apparent during Hamsun’s time. The culture-problem addressed by Hamsun in Shallow Soil, etc., where the “emancipated woman” leaves her family, is described by Spengler:
The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity, is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future generations. The nation as society, once the organic web of families, threatens to dissolve, from the city outwards, into a sum of private atoms, of which each is intent on extracting form his own and other lives the maximum of amusement–panem et cicenses. The women’s emancipation of Ibsen’s time wanted, not freedom from the husband, but freedom from the child, from the burden of children, just as men’s emancipation in the same period signified freedom from the duties of family, nation, and State.[39]
Hamsun addressed a matter of land ownership and purchase, as it had been the habit of the tillers to simply stake out a plot of land and work it, without thought as to how and where to purchase it. Amidst the cycles of struggle, drought, crop failures, births of children, and crop recovery, and the contentedness of Isak and Inger and their family amidst it all, an official calls upon them one day to enquire as to why Isak never bought the land.
Buy? What should he buy for? The ground was there, the forest was there; he had cleared and tilled, built up a homestead in the midst of a natural wilderness, winning bread for himself and his, asking nothing of any man, but working, and working alone.[40]
The district sheriff’s officer finally calls by, looking at the vast tracts of tilled land, and asking why Isak had never come to him to purchase it. Soon after a bit of verbal sophistry, Isak begins to see how the official must be correct. Asking about “boundaries,” Isak had only thought in terms of how far he could see and what he could work. But the State required “definite boundaries,” “and the greater the extent, the more you will have to pay.” To all of this, Isak, could only acknowledge with “Ay.”[41]
From there, the simple life of Isak and Inger is confronted with a bureaucratic muddle, with questions on the money-value of the land, its waters, the potential for fishing, and the possibility of ores and metals.
Then civilization reaches Isak and Inger in the form of the telegraph (which becomes a metaphor for “civilization”) which is to go through his land, and for which he would be paid to upkeep the lines. [42] Furthermore, there was a copper mine in the hills that was to be bought from Isak.[43] Despite the money that now comes to Isak, he remains always a peasant, still toiling, knowing that is who he is and not wanting to be anything else:
Isak understood his work, his calling. He was a rich man now, with a big farm, but the heavy cash payments that had come to him by a lucky chance he used but poorly; he put the money aside. The land saved him. If he had lived down in the village, maybe the great world would have affected even him; so much gaiety, so many elegant manners and ways; he would have been buying useless trifles, and wearing a red Sunday shirt on weekdays. Here in the wilds he was sheltered from all immoderation; he lived in clear air, washed himself on Sunday mornings, and took a bath when he went up to the lake. Those thousand Daler—well, ’twas a gift from Heaven, to be kept intact. What else should he do? His ordinary outgoings were more than covered by the produce of his fields and stock.[44]
The copper mining, which went to Swedish ownership, began encroached increasingly, much to the distress of the villagers. Elesuesu, Isak and Inger’s eldest son, having spent much time away had returned ruined by civilization, improvident,
Poor Eleseus, all set on end and frittered away. Better, maybe, if he’d worked on the land all the time, but now he’s a man that has learned to write and use letters; no grip in him, no depth. For all that, no pitch-black devil of a man, not in Jove, not ambitious, hardly nothing at all is Eleseus, not even a bad thing of any great dimensions.
Something unfortunate, ill-fated about this young man, as if something were rotting him from within. . . . the child had lost his roothold, and suffered thereby. All that he turns to now leads back to something wanting in him, something dark against the light.[45]
Eleseus represents that type which becomes predominate in the “Winter” cycle of a civilization, when the City and money form the axis of living; where the peasant and the artisan emigrant from the country to the city and become either part of the rootless, alienated proletarian mass or a part of the equally rootless bourgeois. The same contrast that Hamsun dramatized was examined several years later by Spengler in his seminal study of cultural morphology, The Decline of The West:
Beginning and end, a peasant cottage and a tenement block are related to one another[46] as soul and intellect, as blood and stone . . . now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it dies in the midst in the midst of an almost uninhibited waste of country.[47]
Hamsun concludes with Geissler, the district official who had once come on behalf of the State to measure the worth and boundaries of Isak’s land, and then to buy the copper mine from Isak, regretting the impact the mining had had upon the village, offering this observation to Isak’s younger son Sivert who had stayed with the land, which encapsulates Hamsun’s world-view and moral of the story:
Look at you folk at Sellanraa,[48] now; looking up at blue peaks every day of your lives; no new-fangled inventions about that, but fjeld and rocky peaks, rooted deep in the past—but you’ve them for companionship. There you are, living in touch with heaven and earth, one with them, one with all these wide, deep-rooted things. No need of a sword in your hands, you go through life bareheaded, barehanded, in the midst of a great kindliness. Look, Nature’s there, for you and yours to have and enjoy. Man and Nature don’t bombard each other, but agree; they don’t compete, race one against the other, but go together. There’s you Sellanraa folk, in all this, living there. Fjeld and forest, moors and meadow, and sky and stars—oh, ’tis not poor and sparingly counted out, but without measure. Listen to me, Sivert: you be content! You’ve everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to believe in; being born and bringing forth, you are the needful on earth. ’Tis not all that are so, but you are so; needful on earth. ’Tis you that maintain life. Generation to generation, breeding ever anew; and when you die, the new stock goes on. That’s the meaning of eternal life. What do you get out of it? An existence innocently and properly set towards all. What you get out of it? Nothing can put you under orders and lord it over you Sellanraa folk, you’ve peace and authority and this great kindliness all round. That’s what you get for it. You lie at a mother’s breast and suck, and play with a mother’s warm hand. There’s your father now, he’s one of the two-and-thirty thousand. What’s to be said of many another? I’m something, I’m the fog, as it were, here and there, floating around, sometimes coming like rain on dry ground. But the others? There’s my son, the lightning that’s nothing in itself, a flash of barrenness; he can act. My son, ay, he’s the modern type, a man of our time; he believes honestly enough all the age has taught him, all the Jew and the Yankee have taught him; I shake my head at it all. But there’s nothing mythical about me; ’tis only in the family, so to speak, that I’m like a fog. Sit there shaking my head. Tell the truth–I’ve not the power of doing things and not regretting it. If I had, I could be lightning myself. Now I’m a fog.[49]
Hamsun explicitly identified the peasantry as the well-spring of a healthy culture, the embodiment of those ever-relevant values that contrast the values of decay represented by the city, the bourgeois, proletarianization, urbanization and industrialization:
A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day.[50]
In the August Trilogy,[51] as in The Growth of the Soil and elsewhere, Hamsun had taken up the concerns of encroaching mechanization and cosmopolitanism, epitomized by the USA, and instead championed traditional values, such as those of localism and the rural. Nelson remarks that Hamsun was espousing an agrarian, anti-capitalist conservatism that was becoming popular among the literati in both Europe and America.
Quisling and Hitler
With such views forming over the course of decades, and achieving wide acclaim, Hamsun’s support for Quisling and for the German occupation of Norway during World War II, is consistent and principled within his historical and cultural context.
Hamsun disliked the British as much as the “Yankees” and the Bolsheviks. He had been appalled by the British war against the Boers, which he would surely have regarded as a war by a plutocratic power against an entire folk who epitomized a living remnant of the type portrayed by Isak in The Growth of The Soil.[52] He had also alluded to the “Jews”[53] as harbingers of modernism and cosmopolitanism.
In contrast to Britain, the USA and the USSR, National Socialist Germany claimed to champion the peasantry as the eternal well-spring of a healthy culture, very much in keeping with Hamsun’s views in The Growth of The Soil and elsewhere. This is why the National Socialists saw Hamsun as a fellow-traveler.
In 1933 Walther Darré, a widely recognized agricultural expert, had been appointed Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, and also had the title “National Peasant Leader.” Goslar was named the “National Peasant City,” and pageants were held to honor the peasantry. Practical measures to deal with the crisis on the land were enacted immediately, including the Hereditary Farm Law, which protected the peasantry from foreclosure and ensured the family inheritance. [54]
Alfred Rosenberg, the primary National Socialist philosopher in Germany, had already paid tribute to Hamsun in his seminal Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), with specific reference to The Growth of the Soil, as expressing the “mystical-natural will” of the peasant better than any other living artist:
No one knows why, with great effort, the farmer Isak cultivates one piece of land after another in god-forsaken regions, or why his wife has joined him and gives birth to his children. But Isak follows an inexplicable law. He carries on a fruitful quest out of a mystical primal will. At the end of his existence he will certainly look back in astonishment at the harvest of his activity. The Growth of the Soil is the great present day epic of the Nordic will in its eternal primordial form. Nordic man can be heroic even behind the wooden plow.[55]
Such was the background when in 1934 Hamsun wrote an article, “Wait and See,” in which he attacked the opponents of National Socialist Germany and asked if a return of Communists, Jews, and Bruning to Germany were preferable. In 1935 he sent a greeting to Der Norden, the organ of the Nordic Society, supporting the return of the League of Nations mandate, Saarland, to Germany, and from the start supported Germany privately and publicly wherever he felt able.[56] Hamsun and his wife Marie remained particularly close to the Nordic Society, which was avid in promoting Hamsun’s works.[57]
In April 1940 the Germans occupied Norway to secure the sea route, after the British had on several occasions breached Norwegian neutrality, included mining of Norway’s territorial waters, about which the Norwegian Government impotently protested. [58]
In 1933, former Defense Minister Vidkun Quisling had established his own party Nasjonal Samling (National Unification). Hamsun had formed a good impression of Quisling since 1932, and wrote in support of Nasjonal Samling’s electoral appeal in 1936 in the party newspaper Fritt Folk. His wife Marie was the local representative of the party.[59]
Ironically, Quisling, his very name becoming synonymous with “traitor,”[60] was the only politician who had campaigned before the war for a strong defense capability, and was particularly pro-British, having been honored by the British Government for looking after British interests in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, where he had been the principal aide to the celebrated Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, who was directing the European Famine Relief to Russia in 1921, with Quisling serving as Secretary for the Relief Organization.[61]
Quisling sought an alliance of Nordic nations including Germany and Britain, in what he called a “Northern Coalition,” against Communism.[62]
The only strong resistance against the German invasion came from a garrison commanded by an officer who belonged to Quisling’s party. The King and Government quickly fled, leaving Norway without an administration or any voice to negotiate with the Germans.[63] Quisling, like Petain in France, and many other figures throughout Europe who were to be branded and usually executed as “traitors,” stepped in to fill the void as the only political figure willing to try and look after Norwegian interests under the occupation. He declared himself Minister President, but because he was not a pliant tool he did not enjoy the confidence of the German military authorities. He was soon forced to resign in favor of an administrative council under German control, but eventually regained a measure of authority.[64]
Meanwhile, Hamsun urged Norwegians to rally behind Quisling so that some form of sovereignty could be restored. He described Quisling as “more than a politician, he is a thinker, a constructive spirit.”[65]
Hamsun’s longest wartime article appeared in the German language Berlin-Tokyo-Rome periodical in February 1942, where he wrote: “Europe does not want either the Jew or their gold, neither the Americans nor their country.”[66]
Despite Hamsun’s pro-German sentiment, he championed the rights of his countrymen, including those who resisted the German occupation. He attempted in intercede for the writer Ronald Fangen, and many others, who had been arrested by the Gestapo.[67]
In 1943 Hamsun and his wife accepted the invitation of Goebbels to visit Germany. Goebbels wrote of Hamsun as being “the embodiment of what an epic writer should be.” Hamsun was equally impressed with the Reich Minister and sent Goebbels the Nobel medal he had been awarded, which Goebbels accepted as Hamsun’s “expression of solidarity with our battle for a new Europe, and a happy society.”[68]
Whilst en route to Norway from Germany, Hamsun met Hitler, a meeting which did not go well, as Hamsun took the opportunity to condemn the military administration of Norway which had rendered Quisling powerless, and they parted in an unfriendly manner[69]
However, Hamsun continued to support Germany, and expressed his pride when a son, Arild, joined the Norwegian Legion of the Waffen SS.[70]
In 1945 several strokes forced Hamsun to quiet his activities. But with Hitler’s death Hamsun defiantly wrote a tribute for the press:
I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior of mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism, which finally failed him. Thus might the average western European regard Hitler? We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death.[71]
Post-War Persecution
Membership of Quisling’s party was declared a criminal offense and Hamsun’s sons Tore and Arild[72] were among the first of 50,000 Norwegians to be arrested as “Nazis” (sic) or as “collaborators.”[73] Marie and Knut were arrested a few weeks later. Due to his age, at 86, Hamsun was sent to a hospital rather than to a prison, although the stress and treatment struck considerably at his still quite good health. He was defiant and stated to the authorities that he would have assisted the Germans more if he could.[74]
He was sent to an old folks home where he was a popular guest. However, prosecuting Norway’s leading cultural figure, like America’s dealings with Ezra Pound, was an awkward matter. Consequently, Hamsun spent 119 days in a psychiatric clinic. The psychiatrists found in him, as in the characters of his novel’s, a complex interplay of traits, but the most prominent of all they described was his “absolute honesty.” The conclusion was that Hamsun was not insane but that he was mentally impaired. Hence, what Ferguson calls “an embarrassing situation,” given that Hamsun was “first and foremost [Norway’s] great writer, their national pride, a loved and admired and never quite respectable ancient child,” was dealt with by concluding that his support for Germany could be put down to “senility.” This was the party-line taken up by the press throughout the world.[75]
Reading Hamsun’s post-war autobiographical On Overgrown Paths, written amidst the threats of prosecution and the interrogations, shows him to be perfectly lucid. Hamsun, as this last writing shows, although deaf and going blind, retained his mental faculties impressively, along with a certain fatalism and humor.[76]
Although the Attorney General opted not to proceed against Hamsun, the Crown wished to try him as a member of Nasjonal Samling. To Hamsun the action at least meant that he was being officially acknowledged as of sound mind. He was fined 425,000 kroner.[77]
With ruinous fines hanging over them, the Hamsuns returned to their farm Norholm.[78] On appeal the fine was reduced to 325,000 kroner,[79] his persistence and courage in speaking on behalf of imprisoned Norwegians under the German Occupation being a mitigating factor. Tore was also fined, and his brother Arild was jailed until 1949 for his membership of the Norwegian Legion. Marie Hamsun was released from jail in 1948.[80]
On Overgrown Paths was published in 1949 and became an immediate best seller,[81] although Hamsun ended his days in poverty on his farm. He died in his sleep on February 19, 1952.
When the Robert Ferguson’s biography appeared in 1987, he wrote that while Norway is especially keen to honor its writers, “Hamsun’s life remains largely uncommemorated by officialdom.” [82] However, two decades later, in 2009:
In Norway, the 150th birthday of Knut Hamsun will be celebrated by theatrical exhibitions, productions, and an international conference. One of the main squares of Oslo, located just beside the national Opera, will henceforth bear his name. A monument will finally be erected in his honor. One might say that the Norwegians have just discovered the name of their very famous compatriot. Recently, a large number of towns and villages have named squares and streets for him. At the place where he resided, in Hamaroy, a “Knut Hamsun Center” will officially open on August 4th, the day of his birth. On that day, a special postage stamp will be issued. Yet Knut Hamsun was denounced and vilified for decades by the Norwegian establishment.[83]
Hamsun’s defiant commitment to Quisling and to Germany during the war was a logical conclusion to ideas that had been fermenting and widely read and applauded over a period of half a century. Yet when it came time to act on those ideals, of fighting materialism, plutocracy, and communism, for the restoration of rural and peasant values against the encroaching tide of industrialism and money, Hamsun’s fellow-countryman reacted with outrage. Hamsun, unlike some of the pre-war supporters of National Socialism or Fascism, for better or for worse, never did compromise his values.
Notes
[1] Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 300.
[2] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 301.
[3] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 13.
[4] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 21.
[5] Hamsun, The Enigmatic One, 1877.
[6] Hamsun, Bjorger, 1878.
[7] Richard C. Nelson, Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays and Stories: 1885–1949 (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2003), pp. 4–5.
[8] Knut Hamsun, “Letters from America,” Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 7.
[9] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 68.
[10] Hamsun, “The American Character,” Aftenposten, Christiania, Norway, January 21, 1885; Knut Hamsun Remembers America, pp. 17–18.
[11] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 19.
[12] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 14.
[13] Hamusn, “The American Character,” p. 20.
[14] Hamsun, “The American Character,” p. 21.
[15] Hamsun, “New York,” Aftenposten, February 12, 14, 1895; Knut Hamsun Remembers America, pp. 28–29.
[16] Hamsun, “New York,” p. 29.
[17] Hamsun, “New York,” p. 30.
[18] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 101.
[19] Hamsun, The Cultural Life of Modern America, 1889.
[20] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 7.
[21] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 9.
[22] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 9.
[23] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 10.
[24] Knut Hamsun Remembers America, p. 10.
[25] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 124.
[26] Hamsun, Mysteries, 1892.
[27] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 133.
[28] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 138.
[29] Hamsun, Shallow Soil, 1893.
[30] Josef Wiehr, Knut Hamsun: His personality and his outlook upon life (Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 1922), p. 23.
[31] Wiehr, Knut Hamsun, p. 24.
[32] Hamsun, 1895–1896.
[33] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 164.
[34] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil (1920), Book I, Chapter 3. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hamsun/knut/h23g/index.html
[35] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 4.
[36] It needs to be pointed out that by “race” Spengler did not a biological, or “Darwinistic” conception, but an instinct. “Race” means “duration of character,” including “an urge to permanence.” Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, p. 220.
[37] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, p. 220.
[38] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, pp. 220–21.
[39]
[40] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 5.
[41] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 5.
[42] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 9.
[43] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 10.
[44] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Chapter 14.
[45] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 11.
[46] “Related to one another” in the sense that they express the analogous features of a culture in its “Spring” High Culture cycle and its “Winter” Late Civilization cycle respectively.
[47] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West, 1928 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), Vol. 2, p. 102.
[48] The name of Isak’s farm.
[49] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.
[50] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.
[51] Hamsun, August, 1930.
[52] The Boers were–and partly remain–an anomaly in the modern world; the vestige of the bygone era who had to be eliminated as a hindrance to the global economic structure. Hence the recent ideological and economic war against the Afrikaner to destroy his “apartheid” was a continuation of the Boer Wars under other slogans, but with the same aim: to capture the wealth of southern Africa–in the name of “human rights”–for the sake of the same kind of plutocracy which had fought the Afrikaners’ forefathers a century previously.
[53] Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil, Book II, Chapter 12.
[54] Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s Green Party (Buckinghmanshire: The Kensal Press, 1985), p. 91.
[55] Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930 (Torrance, Cal.: The Noontide Press, 1982), p. 268.
[56] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 326.
[57] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 338.
[58] Ralph Hewins, Quisling: Prophet Without Honour (London: W. H. Allen, 1965), p. 201.
[59] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 333.
[60] Hewins, Quilsing, p. 9. Hewins, a wartime journalist, wrote his biography to amend for the part he had played in portraying Quisling as the epitome of “treason” (p. 11).
[61] Hewins, Quisling, p. 55.
[62] Vidkun Quilsing, Russia and Ourselves (London: Hodden and Stoughton, 1931), p. 275.
[63] Hewins, Quisling, p. 208.
[64] Hewins summarizes the situation when writing: “The whole myth of unprovoked aggression by Germany should be abandoned. It is incredible and does grievous injustice to the ‘quislings’ who are quite wrongly alleged to have engineered the German Occupation. There is no truth in this sinister legend” (Hewins, Quisling, p. 198).
[65] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 357.
[66] Hamsun, “Real Brotherhood,” Berlin-Tokyo-Rome, February 1942; Ferguson, Enigma, p. 351.
[67] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 359.
[68] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 369–70.
[69] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 374–75.
[70] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 383.
[71] Hamsun, “Adolf Hitler,” Aftenposten, May 7, 1945, p. 1
[72] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 387.
[73] Hewins, Quisling, pp. 357–58. Hewins notes that these thousands of Norwegians were jailed for years often without charge or trial, interrogated for eight hours a time, subjected to “eeling” (being dragged back and forth across broken stones), and a starvation diet of 800 calories a day. “Many prisoners died of malnutrition or starvation, and limbs swollen from privation were a commonplace. Hundreds, if not thousands, died of dysentery and tuberculosis epidemics. Hundreds more bear the scares of kicking, beating and brutality of their guards” (Hewins, pp. 357–58).
[74] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 387–88.
[75] Ferguson, Enigma, pp. 389–90.
[76] Hamsun, On Overgrown Paths, 1949 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).
[77] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 407.
[78] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 408.
[79] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 409.
[80] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 410.
[81] On Overgrown Paths was also published simultaneously in German and Swedish editions. Ferguson, Enigma, p. 416.
[82] Ferguson, Enigma, p. 421.
[83] Robert Steuckers, “Knut Hamsun: Saved by Stalin?,” Counter Currents, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/knut-hamsun-saved-by-stalin/ The title of the Steuckers article refers to Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister Molotov having intervened in 1945 in favor of Hamsun, stating: “it would be regrettable to see Norway condemning this great writer to the gallows.”
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/knut-hamsun-2/
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mardi, 16 août 2011
Tomislav Sunic on the European New Right
Tomislav Sunic on the European New Right
00:05 Publié dans Entretiens, Nouvelle Droite, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : tomislav sunic, entretiens, nouvelle droite, théorie politique, europe, politologie, sciences politiques, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 13 août 2011
Towards a New World Order: Carl Schmitt's "The LandAppropriation of a New World"
Towards a New World Order: Carl Schmitt's "The Land Appropriation of a New World"
Gary Ulmen
Ex: http://freespeechproject.com/
The end of the Cold War and of the bipolar division of the world has posed again the question of a viable international law grounded in a new world order. This question was already urgent before WWI, given the decline of the ius publicum Europaeum at the end of the 19th century. It resurfaced again after WWII with the defeat of the Third Reich. If the 20th century is defined politically as the period beginning with the "Great War" in 1914 and ending with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, it may be seen as a long interval during which the question of a new world order was suspended primarily because of the confrontation and resulting stalemate between Wilsonianism and Leninism. Far from defining that period, as claimed by the last defenders of Left ideology now reconstituted as "anti-fascism," and despite their devastating impact at the time, within such a context fascism and Nazism end up automatically redimensioned primarily as epiphenomenal reactions of no lasting historical significance. In retrospect, they appear more and more as violent geopolitical answers to Wilsonianism's (and, to a lesser extent, Leninism's) failure to establish a new world order.
Both the League of Nations and the United Nations have sought to reconstitute international law and the nomos of the earth, but neither succeeded. What has passed for international law throughout the 20th century has been largely a transitory semblance rather than a true system of universally accepted rules governing international behavior. The geopolitical paralysis resulting from the unresolved conflict between the two superpowers created a balance of terror that provided the functional equivalent of a stable world order. But this state of affairs merely postponed coming to terms with the consequences of the collapse of the ius publicum Europaeum and the need to constitute a new world order. What is most significant about the end of the Cold War is not so much that it brought about a premature closure of the 20th century or a return to the geopolitical predicament obtaining before WWI, but that it has signaled the end of the modern age--evident in the eclipse of the nation state, the search for new political forms, the explosion of new types of conflicts, and radical changes in the nature of war. Given this state of affairs, today it may be easier to develop a new world order than at any time since the end of the last century.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ernest Nys wrote that the discovery of the New World was historically unprecedented since it not only added an immense area to what Europeans thought the world was but unified the whole globe.(n1) It also resulted in the European equilibrium of land and sea that made possible the ius publicum Europaeum and a viable world order. In his "Introduction" to The Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt observes that another event of this kind, such as the discovery of some new inhabitable planet able to trigger the creation of a new world order, is highly unlikely, which is why thinking "must once again be directed to the elemental orders of concrete terrestrial existence."(n2) Despite all the spatial exploration and the popular obsession with extra-terrestrial life, today there is no event in sight comparable to the discovery of a New World. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has paved the way for the further expansion of capitalism, economic globalization, and massive advances in communication technologies. Yet the imagination of those most concerned with these developments has failed so far to find any new alternatives to the prevailing thinking of the past decades.
Beyond the Cold War
The two most prominent recent attempts to prefigure a new world order adequate to contemporary political realities have been made by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington.(n3) Fukuyama thinks the West has not only won the Cold War but also brought about the end of history, while Huntington retreats to a kind of "bunker mentality" in view of an alleged decline of the West.(n4) While the one suffers from excessive optimism and the other from excessive pessimism, both fail primarily because they do not deal with the "elemental orders of concrete terrestrial existence" and troth remain trapped in an updated version of Wilsonianism assuming liberal democracy to be the highest achievement of Western culture. While Fukuyama wants to universalize liberal democracy in the global marketplace, If Huntington identifies liberalism with Western civilization. But Huntington is somewhat more realistic than Fukuyama. He not only acknowledges the impossibility of universalizing liberalism but exposes its particularistic nature. Thus he opts for a defense of Western civilization within an international helium omnium contra omnes. In the process, however, he invents an "American national identity" and extrapolates from the decline of liberal democracy to the decline of the West.
Fukuyama's thesis is derived from Alexandre Kojeve's Heideggerian reading of Hegel and supports the dubious notion that the last stage in human history will be a universal and homogeneous state of affairs satisfying all human needs. This prospect is predicated on the arbitrary assumption of the primacy of thymos--the desire for recognition--which both Kojeve and Fukuyama regard as the most fundamental human longing. Ultimately, according to Fukuyama, "Kojeve's claim that we are at the end of history . . . stands or falls on the strength of the assertion that the recognition provided by the contemporary liberal democratic state adequately satisfies the human desire for recognition."(n5) Fukuyama's own claim thus stands or falls on his assumption that at the end of history "there are no serious ideological competitors to liberal democracy."(n6) This conclusion is based on a whole series of highly dubious ideological assumptions, such as that "the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism"(n7) and that the desire for recognition "is the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics."(n8)
According to Fukuyama, the 20th century has turned everyone into "historical pessimists."(n9) To reverse this state of affairs, he challenges "the pessimistic view of international relations . . . that goes variously under the titles 'realism,' realpolitik, or 'power politics'."(n10) He is apparently unaware of the difference between a pessimistic view of human nature, on which political realism is based, and a pessimistic view of international relations, never held by political realists such as Niccolo Machiavelli or Hans Morgenthau--two thinkers Fukuyama "analyzes" in order to "understand the impact of spreading democracy on international politics." As a "prescriptive doctrine," he finds the realist perspective on international relations still relevant. As a "descriptive model," however, it leaves much to be desired because: "There was no 'objective' national interest that provided a common thread to the behavior of states in different times and places, but a plurality of national interests defined by the principle of legitimacy in play and the individuals who interpreted it." This betrays a misunderstanding of political realism or, more plausibly, a deliberate attempt to misrepresent it in order to appear original. Although he draws different and even antithetical conclusions, Fukuyama's claim is not inconsistent with political realism.(n11)
Following this ploy, Fukuyama reiterates his main argument that: "Peace will arise instead out of the specific nature of democratic legitimacy, and its ability to satisfy the human longings for recognition."(n12) He is apparently unaware of the distinction between legality and legitimacy, and of the tendency within liberal democracies for legality to become its own mode of legitimation.(n13) Even in countries in which legality remains determined independently by a democratic legislative body, there is no reason to believe it will be concerned primarily or at all with satisfying any "human longing for recognition"; rather, it will pursue whatever goals the predominant culture deems desirable. Consequently, it does not necessarily follow that, were democratic legitimacy to become universalized with the end of the Cold War, international conflict would also end and history along with it. Even Fukuyama admits that: "For the foreseeable future, the world will be divided between a post-historical part, and a part that is still stuck in history. Within the post-historical part, the chief axis of interaction between states would be economic, and the old rules of power politics would have decreasing relevance."(n14)
This is nothing more than the reconfiguration of a standard liberal argument in a new metaphysical guise: the old historical world determined by politics will be displaced by the new post-historical world determined by economics. Schmitt rejected this argument in the 1920s: according to liberals, the "concept of the state should be determined by political means, the concept of society (in essence nonpolitical) by economic means," but this distinction is prejudiced by the liberal aversion to politics understood as a domain of domination and corruption resulting in the privileging of economics understood as "reciprocity of production and consumption, therefore mutuality, equality, justice, and freedom, and finally, nothing less than the spiritual union of fellowship, brotherhood, and justice."(n15) In effect, Fukuyama is simply recycling traditional liberal efforts to eliminate the political(n16)--a maneuver essential for his thesis of the arrival of "the end of history" with the end of the Cold War. Accordingly: "The United States and other liberal democracies will have to come to grips with the fact that, with the collapse of the communist world, the world in which they live is less and less the old one of geopolitics, and that the rules and methods of the historical world are not appropriate to life in the post-historical one. For the latter, the major issues will be economic."(n17) Responding to Walter Rathenau's claim in the 1920s that the destiny then was not politics but economics, Schmitt said "what has occurred is that economics has become political and thereby the destiny."(n18)
For Fukuyama, the old historical world is none other than the European world: "Imperialism and war were historically the product of aristocratic societies. If liberal democracy abolished the class distinction between masters and slaves by making the slaves their own masters, then it too should eventually abolish imperialism."(n19) This inference is based on a faulty analogy between social and international relations. Not surprisingly, Fukuyama really believes that "international law is merely domestic law writ large."(n20) Compounded with an uncritical belief in the theory of progress and teleological history, this leads him to generalize his own and Kojeve's questionable interpretation of the master-slave dialectic (understood as the logic of all social relations) to include international relations: "If the advent of the universal and homogeneous state means the establishment of rational recognition on the level of individuals living within one society, and the abolition of the relationship of lordship and bondage between them, then the spread of that type of state throughout the international system of states should imply the end of relationships of lordship and bondage between nations as well--i.e., the end of imperialism, and with it, a decrease in the likelihood of wars based on imperialism."(n21) Even if a "universal and homogeneous state" were possible today, in an age when all nation-states are becoming ethnically, racially, linguistically and culturally heterogeneous, it is unclear why domestic and international relations should be isomorphic. Rather, the opposite may very well be the case: increasing domestic heterogeneity is matched by an increasingly heterogeneous international scene where "the other" is not regarded as an equal but as "a paper tiger," "the Great Satan," "religious fanatics," etc.
At any rate, imperialism for Fukuyama is not a particular historical phenomenon which came about because of the discovery of the New World at the beginning of the age of exploration by the European powers. Rather, it is seen as the result of some metaphysical ahistorical "struggle for recognition among states."(n22) It "arises directly out of the aristocratic master's desire to be recognized as superior--his megalothymia."(n23) Ergo: "The persistence of imperialism and war after the great bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is therefore due not only to the survival of an atavistic warrior ethos, but also to the fact that the master's megalothymia was incompletely sublimated into economic activity."(n24) Thus the formal market relation between buyer and seller, both reduced to the level of the hyper-rational and calculating homo oeconomicus, comes to displace the master-slave dialectic whereby, miraculously, the interaction between these economic abstractions generates as much recognition as anyone would want, rendering conflict obsolete and putting an end to history.
In terms of Fukuyama's own formulation, the real end of history, as he understands it, is not even close. In his scenario, since there are still a lot of unresolved conflicts between the historical and the post-historical worlds, there will be a whole series of "world order" problems and "many post-historical countries will formulate an abstract interest in preventing the spread of certain technologies to the historical world, on the grounds that world will be most prone to conflict and violence."(n25) Although the failure of the League of Nations and the UN has led to the general discrediting of "Kantian internationalism and international law," in the final analysis, despite his Heideggerian Hegelianism, Fukuyama does not find the answer to the end of history in Hegel, Nietzsche or even Kojeve,(n26) but rather in Kant, who argued that the gains realized when man moved from the state of nature to civilization were largely nullified by wars between nations. According to Fukuyama, what has not been understood is that "the actual incarnations of the Kantian idea have been seriously flawed from the start by not following Kant's own precepts," by which he means that states based on republican principles are less likely than despotisms to accept the costs of war and that an international federation is only viable if it is based on liberal principles.
Although Huntington has a much better grasp of international relations than Fukuyama, his decline of the West scenario is equally unconvincing. The central theme of his book is that "culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world."(n27) But whereas Fukuyama couches his thesis in terms of a universal desire for recognition, Huntington couches his thesis in terms of a global search for identity: "Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we?"(n28) The result is a "multipolar and multi-civilizational" world within which the West should abandon its presumed universalism and defend its own particular identity: "In the clash of civilizations, Europe and America will hang together or hang separately. In the greater clash, the global 'real clash,' between Civilization and barbarism, the worlds great civilizations . . . will also hang together or hang separately. In the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war."(n29)
In Huntington's new world, "societies sharing civilizational affinities cooperate with each other."(n30) Leaving aside his cavalier blurring of the differences between cultures, civilizations and societies, what does Huntington regard as the essence of Western particularism? Here he is ambiguous: he first mentions Christianity, then some secular residues of Christianity, but when he adds up the civilizational core of the West it turns out to be none other than liberalism. As Stephen Holmes points out, it is "the same old ideology, plucked inexplicably from the waste-bin of history that once united the West against Soviet Communism."(n31) But Huntington also claims that the West had a distinct identity long before it was modern (since he insists that modernization is distinct from Westernization, so that non-Western societies can modernize without Westernizing, thus retaining their civilizational distinctiveness). In this case, however, the West cannot really be identified with liberalism, nor can its heritage be equated sic et nunc with "American national identity." While liberalism may very well be declining, this need not translate into a decline of the West as such. Similarly, if "American national identity" is threatened by "multiculturalism,"(n32) it need not signal the arrival of barbarians at the gates but may only mark another stage in the statist involution of liberalism. Huntington's fears of a decline of the West at a time when it is actually at the acme of its power and vigor is the result of the unwarranted identification of Western civilization with liberalism and what he understands by "American national identity." Today liberalism has degenerated into an opportunistic statist program of "a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists," and "American national identity" into a fiction invented as part of a failed project after the War between the States to reconfigure the American federation into a nation-state.(n33)
According to Huntington? the assumption of the universality of Western culture is: false, because others civilizations have other ideals and norms; immoral, because "imperialism is the logical result of universalism"; and dangerous, because it could lead to major civilizational wars.(n34) His equation of universalism and imperialism, however, misses the point of both it misunderstands the philosophical foundations of Western culture and the historical roots of Western imperialism. Other civilizations do have their own ideals and norms, but only Western civilization has an outlook broad enough to embrace all other cultures, which explains why it can readily sponsor and accommodate even confused and counterproductive projects such as "multiculturalism." Of course, Europeans set forth on their journeys of discovery and conquest not only in order to bring Christianity and "civilization" to the world but also to plunder whatever riches they could find. But whatever the reasons, Europeans were the ones who opened the world to global consciousness and what Schmitt called "awakened occidental rationalism."
Until recently, largely because of American cultural hegemony and technological supremacy, the goal of the rest of the world has been "Westernization," which has come to be regarded as synonymous with modernization. In Huntington's "realist" view, however: "A universal civilization requires universal power. Roman power created a near universal civilization within the limited confines of the Classical world. Western power in the form of European colonialism in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth century extended Western culture throughout much of the contemporary world. European colonialism is over; American hegemony is receding."(n35) The real question is whether continued American world hegemony is primarily a function of the persistence of colonialism. Despite his emphasis on culture and civilization, Huntington does not appreciate the importance of cultural hegemony.? Had he not restricted the Western tradition to late 20th century liberalism, he may have appreciated the extent to which the rest of the world is becoming increasingly more, rather than less dependent on the US--in communication technologies, financial matters and even aesthetic forms. Today the Internet is potentially a more formidable agency of cultural domination and control than was the British Navy at the peak of the Empire. Here McNeill is right: Huntington's gloomy perception of the decline of the West may merely mistake growing pains for death throes.
If Huntington's salon Spenglerianism were not bad enough, he also adopts a kind of simplistic Schmittianism (without ever mentioning Schmitt). Complementing his "birds of a feather flock together" concept of civilizations --with "core states" assuming a dominant position in relation to "fault line" states--he pictures an "us versus them" type of friend/enemy relations based on ethnic and religious identities. But Schmitt's friend/enemy antithesis is concerned with relations between political groups: first and foremost, states. Accordingly, any organized group that can distinguish between friends and enemies in an existential sense becomes thereby political. Unlike Huntington (or Kojeve, who also explicitly drew geopolitical lines primarily along religious lines(n36), Schmitt did not think in terms of ethnic or religious categories but rather territorial and geopolitical concepts. For Schmitt, the state was the greatest achievement of Western civilization because, as the main agency of secularization, it ended the religious civil wars of the Middle Ages by limiting war to a conflict between states.(n37) In view of the decline of the state, Schmitt analyzed political realities and provided a prognosis of possible future territorial aggregations and new types of political forms.
Huntington finds the "realist" school of international affairs "a highly useful starting point," but then proceeds to criticize a straw man version of it, according to which "all states perceive their interests in the same way and act in the same way." Against it, not only power but also "values, culture, and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests.... In the post-Cold War world, states increasingly define their interests in civilizational terms."(n38) Had Huntington paid more careful attention to hans Morgenthau, George Kennan or other reputable political realists, he would have concluded that their concept of power is not as limited as his caricature of it. In particular, had he read Schmitt more closely he would not have claimed that nation-states "are and will remain the most important actors in world affairs"(n39)--at a time when economic globalization has severely eroded their former sovereignty and they are practically everywhere threatened with internal disintegration and new geopolitical organizations. At any rate, political realism has been concerned primarily with the behavior of states because they were the main subjects of political life for the past three centuries.(n40) If and when they are displaced by other political forms, political realism then shifts its focus accordingly.
Huntington attempts to think beyond the Cold War. But since he cannot think beyond the nation-state, he cannot conceive of new political forms. When he writes that cultural commonality "legitimates the leadership and order-imposing role of the core state for both member states and for the external powers and institutions,"(n41) he seems to have in mind something akin to the concept of GroBraum.(n42) But Schmitt's model was the American Monroe Doctrine excluding European meddling in the Western Hemisphere. At that time (and well into the 20th century), the US was not a nation-state in the European sense, although it assumed some of these trappings thereafter. Thus it generally followed George Washington's policy--because of the "detached and distant situation" of the US, it should avoid entangling alliances with foreign (primarily European) powers. The Monroe Doctrine simply expanded on the reality and advantages of this situation. Schmitt rightly saw the global line of the Western Hemisphere drawn by the Monroe Doctrine as the first major challenge to the international law of the ius publicum Europaeum.
Given the current understanding of national sovereignty, it is difficult to see what Huntington means by "core state." Despite the title of his book, he has no concept of international law or of world order. Not only does he abandon hope for global regulations governing the behavior of states and civilizations, but he reverts to a kind of anthropological primitivism: "Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale."(n43) All he can suggest for avoiding major inter-civilizational wars is the "abstention rule" (core states abstain from conflicts in other civilizations), and the "mediation rule" (core states negotiate with each other to halt fault line wars).(n44) Huntington's vision is thus surprisingly conformist--it merely cautions the US from becoming embroiled in the Realpolitik of countries belonging to other civilizational blocs while defending a contrived liberal notion of"Western" civilization.
Anti-Colonialism and Appropriation
The anti-colonialism of both Fukuyama and Huntington is consistent with the predominant 20th century ideology directed primarily against Europe. Anti-colonialism is more historically significant than either anti-fascism and anti-communism. As Schmitt pointed out in 1962: "Both in theory and practice, anti-colonialism has an ideological objective. Above all, it is propaganda--more specifically, anti-European propaganda. Most of the history of propaganda consists of propaganda campaigns which, unfortunately, began as internal European squabbles. First there was France's and England's anti-Spanish propaganda--the leyenda negra of the 15th and 16th centuries. Then this propaganda became generalized during the 18th century. Finally, in the historical view of Arnold Toynbee, a UN consultant, the whole of Europe is indicted as a world aggressor."(n45) Thus it is not surprising that the 500th anniversary of the "discovery" of America was greeted with more condemnation than celebration.(n46)
Anti-colonialism is primarily anti-European propaganda because it unduly castigates the European powers for having sponsored colonialism.(n47) Given that there was no international law forbidding the appropriation of the newly discovered lands--in fact, European international and ecclesiastical law made it legal and established rules for doing so--the moral and legal basis for this judgment is unclear. On closer analysis, however, it turns out to be none other than the West's own universalistic pretenses. Only by ontologizing their particular Western humanist morality--various versions of secularized Christianity--as universally valid for all times and all places can Western intellectuals indict colonialism after the fact as an international "crime." Worse yet, this indictment eventually turns into a wholesale condemnation of Western culture (branded as "Eurocentrism") from an abstract, deterritorialized and deracinated humanist perspective hypostatized to the level of a universally binding absolute morality. Thus the original impulse to vindicate the particularity and otherness of the victims of colonialism turns full circle by subsuming all within a foreign Western frame-work, thereby obliterating the otherness of the original victims. The ideology of anti-colonialism is thus not only anti-European propaganda but an invention of Europeans themselves, although it has been appropriated wholesale and politically customized by the rest of the world.
As for world order, this propaganda has even more fundamental roots: "The odium of colonialism, which today confronts all Europeans, is the odium of appropriation,"(n48) since now everything understood as nomos is allegedly concerned only with distribution and production, even though appropriation remains one of its fundamental, if not the most fundamental, attributes. As Schmitt notes: "World history is a history of progress in the means and methods of appropriation: from land appropriations of nomadic and agricultural-feudal times, to sea appropriations of the 16th and 17th centuries, to the industrial appropriations of the industrial-technical age and its distinction between developed and undeveloped areas, to the present day appropriations of air and space."(n49) More to the point, however, is that "until now, things have somehow been appropriated, distributed and produced. Prior to every legal, economic and social order, prior to every legal, economic or social theory, there is the simple question: Where and how was it appropriated? Where and how was it divided? Where and how was it produced ? But the sequence of these processes is the major problem. It has often changed in accordance with how appropriation, distribution and production are emphasized and evaluated practically and morally in human consciousness. The sequence and evaluation follow changes in historical situations and general world history, methods of production and manufacture--even the image human beings have of themselves, of their world and of their historical situation."(n50) Thus the odium of appropriation exemplified by the rise of anti-colonialism is symptomatic of a changed world situation and changed attitudes. But this state of affairs should not prevent our understanding of what occurred in the past or what is occurring in the present.
In order to dispel the "fog of this anti-European ideology," Schmitt recalls that "everything that can be called international law has for centuries been European international law. . . [and that] all the classical concepts of existing international law are those of European international law, the ius publicum Europaeum. In particular, these are the concepts of war and peace. as well as two fundamental conceptual distinctions: first, the distinction between war and peace, i.e., the exclusion of an in-between situation of neither war nor peace so characteristic of the Cold War; and second, the conceptual distinction between enemy and criminal, i.e. exclusion of the discrimination and criminalization of the opponent so characteristic of revolutionary war--a war closely tied to the Cold War."(n51) But Schmitt was more concerned with the "spatial" aspect of the phenomenon: "What remains of the classical ideas of international law has its roots in a purely Eurocentric spatial order. Anti-colonialism is a phenomenon related to its destruction.... Aside from ... the criminalization of European nations, it has not generated one single idea about a new order. Still rooted, if only negatively, in a spatial idea, it cannot positively propose even the beginning of a new spatial order."(n52)
Having discovered the world as a globe, Europeans also developed the Law of Nations. Hugo Grotius is usually credited with establishing this new discipline with his De lure belli ac pacts (Paris: 1625), since he was the first to deal with the subject as a whole (although various European scholars had dealt at length with themes such as the justice of war, the right of plunder, the treatment of captives, etc.). Nys writes: ". . . from the I 1th to the 1 2th century the genius of Europe developed an association of republics, principalities and kingdoms, which was the beginning of the society of nations. Undoubtedly, some elements of it had been borrowed from Greek and Roman antiquity, from Byzantine institutions, from the Arabo-Berber sultanates on the coast of Africa and from the Moorish kingdoms of Spain. But at the time new sentiments developed, longing for political liberty. The members of this association were united by religious bonds; they had the same faith; they were not widely separated by speech and, at any rate, they had access to Latin, the language of the Church; they admitted a certain equality or at least none of them claimed the right to dominate and rule over the others. A formula came into use to describe this state of affairs: respublica a Christiana, res Christina."(n53)
Steeped in Roman law, 1 3th and 1 4th century jurists opposed any "Law of Nations" recognizing political distinctions between different peoples. In the Roman system, different peoples were only "parts of the Roman Empire." Thus, in a wider sense, ius gentium extended to all civilized peoples and included both public and private law. In a narrower sense, however, it also dealt with the rules governing relations between Romans and foreigners. Understood in this narrower sense, ius gentium promoted the constitution of distinct peoples and consequently kingdoms, intercourse and conflicts between different political communities, and ultimately wars. For this reason, those who still believed in the viability of the Holy Roman Empire thought that this interpretation of ius gentium led to disintegration. This is why the Law of Nations--European public law and international law--did not become a distinct "science" until the Middle Ages.
Spanish theologians first articulated the theoretical and practical problems of ius gentium understood as the Law of Nations. Chief among them was Francisco de Vitoria, whose Relectiones theologicae on the Indians and the right of a "just war" have become classics.(n54) In his lectures, Vitoria invokes the Law of Nations--the ius gentium. At the beginning of the third section of his account of the Spaniards' relations with the aborigines in the New World, he treats them as one people among others, and therefore subject to ius gentium: "The Spaniards have a right to travel into the lands in question and to sojourn there, provided they do no harm to the natives, and the natives may not prevent them. Proof of this may in the first place be derived from the law of nations (ius gentium), which either is natural law or is derived from natural law."(n55) That he understands peoples in the sense of "nations" becomes even more clear when he speaks about gentes nationes. He distinguishes between the political community--the respublica--and the private individual. The latter may defend his person and his property, but he may not avenge wrongs or retake goods after the passage of time. This is the respublica's prerogative--it alone has authority to defend itself and its members. Here Vitoria identifies the prince's authority with that of the state: "The prince is the issue of the election made by the respublica.... The state, properly so called, is a perfect community, that is to say, a community which forms a whole in itself, which, in other words, is not a part of another community, but which possesses its own laws, its own council, its own magistrates."(n56)
Clearly, what developed in Europe from antiquity to the respublica Christiana, from the origin of the sovereign state and ius publicum Europaeum to the Enlightenment and beyond, was as unique and significant as the discovery of the "New World." Yet, given today's predominant ideology, European culture has almost become the truth that dare not speak its name. Not only is Columbus demonized, but the whole Age of Discovery and all of European (Western) culture is dismissed as "imperialistic," "racist?" "sexist," etc. The Nomos of the Earth is a much needed antidote to this anti-European propaganda, which is only a symptom of the crisis of European identity and consciousness.(n57) All the major themes of Schmitt's book are either implicit or explicit in "The Land Appropriation of a New World": the origin and significance of the European and Eurocentric epoch of world history; the discovery of the New World and the American challenge to the European order; the search for a new nomos of the earth; the critique of the discriminatory concept of war; the critique of universalism and the danger of total relativism.
The Conquest of America and the Concept of a "Just War"
In the 20th century, the ideology of anti-colonialism was articulated most prominently by Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin, signaling the end of European domination in world history. Now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism, some American intellectuals have turned this anti-European propaganda against the US, seemingly unaware that their critique is possible only within the orbit of the European culture they otherwise castigate and dismiss. To attack European culture is tantamount to attacking American culture as well, since the latter is but a special case of the former, which is precisely why it has been able to accept and absorb peoples and influences not only from the Western hemisphere but from all over the world. American universalism is but an extension of that same Christian universalism which for centuries has defined European identity. As Schmitt emphasized, the European equilibrium of the ius publicum Europaeum presupposed a seemingly homogeneous Christian Europe, which lasted well into the 19th century. The American project has always been a fundamentally heterogeneous undertaking and Americans have always come from the most diverse ethnic, racial, religious and linguistic backgrounds. But if there had not been some homogeneous culture to unity this diversity, there would have been no distinct American culture which, unfortunately, today many educated Europeans and Americans no longer understand and therefore have come to despise.
A paradigmatic example of this general anti-European syndrome is Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America. In an effort to vindicate the particularity of "the other," the author ends up castigating West European culture as a whole by deploying a secularized version of Christian universalism. Openly acknowledging the moralistic objectives and "mythological" character of his account,(n58) Todorov develops a "politically correct" postmodern interpretation of the Spanish conquista not to understand its historical significance but to show how it has shaped today's Western imperialist identity--one allegedly still unable to come to terms with "the other" and therefore inherently racist, ethnocentric, etc. The book closes with a discussion of "Las Casas' Prophesy" concerning the wrath that "God will vent" not only upon Spain but all of Western Europe because of its "impious, criminal and ignominious deeds perpetrated so unjustly, tyrannically and barbarously."(n59)
Todorov overlooks not only the generally religious framework of Las Casas' prophesy, but also the idiosyncratically Western concept of justice the Dominican bishop deployed. Having ontologized a humanism derived from the Western axiological patrimony, he does not realize the extent to which his postmodernism has already reduced "the other" to "the same," precisely in his effort to vindicate its particularity.(n60) Worse yet, inhibited by his "politically correct" moralism, he not only provides a ridiculous, if academically fashionable, explanation for the Spaniards' success,(n61) but he manages to subvert his own arguments with the very evidence he adduces to support them. He claims that the "present" is more important to him than the past, but in defining genocide he makes no reference whatsoever to either the Armenians or the Holocaust as reference points. Consequently, his claim that "the sixteenth century perpetuated the greatest genocide in human history"(n62) remains not only unsubstantiated but falsified. By his own account, most of the victims died of diseases and other indirect causes: "The Spaniards did not undertake a direct extermination of these millions of Indians, nor could they have done so." The main causes were three, and "the Spaniards responsibility is inversely proportional to the number of victims deriving from each of them: 1. By direct murder, during wars or outside them: a high number, nonetheless relatively small; direct responsibility. 2. By consequence of bad treatment: a high number; a (barely) less direct responsibility. 3. By diseases, by `microbe shock': the majority of the population; an indirect and diffused responsibility."(n63)
Todorov does acknowledge that Columbus was motivated by the "universal victory of Christianity" and that it was Columbus' medieval mentality that led him "to discover America and inaugurate the modern era."(n64) His greatest infraction, however, was that he conquered land rather than people, i.e., he was more interested in nature than in the Indians, which he is treated as "the other", "Columbus summary perception of the Indians [is] a mixture of authoritarianism and condescension . . . In Columus' hermeneutics human beings have no particular place."(n65) Had Todorov set aside his abstract moralizing, he may have realized that the conquest of the New World was primarily a land appropriation. It is not surprising, therefore, that the conquerors thought they were bringing "civilization" to those they conquered--something probably also true of the Mongols who invaded and colonized China, Russia and a few other which, by contrast, had higher than thier own.
The ideological slant of The Conquest of America is by no means unusual. Long before, Schmitt noted that non-European peoples who have undertaken conquest, land appropriations, etc. were not being tarred with the same brush as Europeans.(n66) Unlike Todorov's moralistic tirade, The Nomos of the Earth is dressed to historians and jurists. In no ways does Schmitt excuse the atrocities committed by the Spanish, but rather explains how they were possible in the given circumstances. "The Land Appropriation of a New World" begins with a discussion of the lines drawn by the European powers to divide the world. In this connection, Schmitt discusses the meaning of "beyond the line," which meant beyondn the reach of European law: " At this`line' Europe ended and `New World' began. At any rate, European law -- `European public law' -- ended. Consequently, so did the bracketing of war achieved by the former European international law, meaning the struggle for land appropriations knew no bounds. Beyond the line was an `overseas' zone in which, for want of any legal limits to war, only, the law of the stronger applied."n(67) For Todorov, it is a much simpler explanation: "Far from central government, far from royal law, all prohibitions give way, the social link, already loosened, snaps, revealing not a primitive nature, the beast sleeping in each of us, but a modern being? one with a great future in fact, restrained by no morality and inflicting death because and when he pleases."(n68) The Spaniards are simply racist, ethno-centric, ruthless exploiters, etc., i.e., modern -- they already exhibited traits Todorov claims are characteristic of Western identity.
Of particular interest here are Todorov's comments on Vitoria and the concept of a "just war," since most of Schmitt's chapter is devoted to these subjects. By his own admission, Todorov mixes (in fact, confuses) medieval and modern categories. This is particularly true in the case of Vitoria. Todorov observes that: "Vitoria demolishes the contemporary justifications of the wars waged in America, but nonetheless conceives that `just wars' are possible."(n69) More to the point: "We are accustomed to seeing Vitoria as a defender of the Indians; but if we question, not the subject's intentions, hut the impact of his discourses, it is clear that . . . under the cover of an international law based on reciprocity, he in reality supplies a legal basis to the wars of colonization which had hitherto had none (none which, in any case, might withstand serious consideration)."(n70) But there was no "international law based on reciprocity." Here Todorov is simply transposing modern categories to medieval matters for his own ideological purposes.
Unlike Todorov, Schmitt places the problem in perspective: "For 400 years, from the 16th to the 20th century, the structure of European international law was determined by a fundamental course of events the conquest of the New World. Then, as later, there were numerous positions taken with respect to the justice or injustice of the conquista. Nevertheless, the fundamental problem the justification of European land appropriations as a whole -- was seldom addressed in any systematic way outside moral and legal questions. In fact, only one monograph deals with this problem systematically and confronts it squarely in terms of international law.... It is the famous relectiones of Francisco de Vitoria."(n71) Vitoria rejected the contrary opinions of other theologians and treated Christians and non-Christians alike. He did not even accept discovery, which was the recognized basis of legal title from the 1 6th to the 1 8th century, as legitimate. More to the point, he considered global lines beyond which the distinction between justice and injustice was suspended not only a sin but an appalling crime. However: "Vitoria's view of the conquista was ultimately altogether positive. Most significant for him was the fait accompli of Christianization. . . . The positive conclusion is reached only by means of general concepts and with the aid of objective arguments in support of a just war.... If barbarians opposed the right of free passage and free missions, of liberum commercium and free propaganda, then they would violate the existing rights of the Spanish according to ius gentium; if the peaceful treaties of the Spanish were of no avail, then they had grounds for a just war."(n72)
The papal missionary mandate was the legal foundation of the conquista. This was not only the pope's position but also that of the Catholic rulers of Spain. Vitoria's arguments were entirely consistent with the spatial order and the international law of the respublica Christiana. One cannot apply modern categories to a medieval context without distorting both: "In the Middle Ages, a just war could he a just war of aggression. Clearly, the formal structure of the two concepts of justice are completely different. As far as the substance of medieval justice is concerned, however, it should be remembered that Vitoria's doctrine of a just war is argued on the basis of a missionary mandate issued by a potestas spiritualis that was not only institutionally stable but intellectually self-evident. The right of liberum commercium as well as the ius peregrinandi are to facilitate the work of Christian missions and the execution of the papal missionary mandate.... Here we are interested only in the justification of land appropriation--a question Vitoria reduced to the general problem of a just war. All significant questions of an order based on international law ultimately meet in the concept of a just war."(n73)
The Question of a New Nomos of the Earth
Following chapters on "The Land Appropriation of a New World" and "The Ius Publicum Europaeum," Schmitt concludes his book with a chapter titled "The Question of a New Nomos of the Earth, which is concerned primarily with the transformation of the concept of war. Clearly, this problem was uppermost in Schmitt's mind following Germany's total defeat in WWII and the final destruction of the European system of states. But he had already devoted a treatise to the development of a discriminatory concept of war following WWI,(n74) and in 1945 he wrote a legal opinion on the criminality of aggressive war.(n75) Despite whatever self-serving motives he may have had in writing these works,(n76) they are consistent with the historical and juridical structure of international law during the respublica Christiana, the ius publicum Europaeum, and what remains of international law today.
This progression can be put into perspective by following Schmitt's discussion of Vitoria's legacy: "Vitoria was in no sense one of the `forerunners of modern lawyers dealing with constitutional questions.'. . . Abstracted entirely from spatial viewpoints, Vitoria's ahistorical method generalizes many European historical concepts specific to the ius gentium of the Middle Ages (such as yolk prince and war) and thereby strips them of their historical particularity."(n77) In this context, Schmitt mentions the works of Ernest Nys, which paved the way for the popularization of Vitoria's ideas after WWI but who, because of his belief in humanitarian progress, also contributed to the criminalization of aggressive war. This was also true of James Brown Scott, the leading American expert on international law, who blatantly instrumentalized Vitoria's doctrines concerning free trade (liberum commercium, the freedom of propaganda, and a just war) to justify American economic imperialism. Schmitt sums up Sctott's argument as follows: "War should cease to be simply a legally recognized matter or only one of legal indifference; rather, it should again become a just war in which the aggressor as such is declared a felon in the full criminal sense of the word. The former right to neutrality, grounded in the international law of the ius publicum Europaeum and based on the equivalence of just and unjust war, should also and accordingly be eliminated."(n78)
Here then is the crux of the matter. Vitoria's thinking is based on the international law obtaining during the Christian Middle Ages rather than on the international law between states established with the ius publicum Europaeum. Moreover, as Schmitt points out, Vitoria was not a jurist but a theologian: "Based on relations between states, post-medieval international law from the 1 6th to the 20th century sought to repress the iusta causa. The formal reference point for the determination of a just war was no longer the authority of the Church in international law but rather the equal sovereignty of states. Instead of iusta causa, the order of international law between states was based on iustus hostis; any war between states, between equal sovereigns, was legitimate. On the basis of this juridical formalization, a rationalization and humanization--a bracketing--of war was achieved for 200 years." The turn to "the modern age in the history of international law was accomplished by a dual division of two lines of thought that were inseparable in the Middle Ages -- the definitive separation of moral-theological from juridical-political arguments and the equally important separation of the question of iusta causa, grounded in moral arguments and natural law," from the juridical question of iustus hostis, distinguished from the criminal, i.e., from object of punitive action."(n79)
With the end of the ius publicum Europaeum, the concept of war changed once again: moralistic (rather than theologically-based) arguments became confused with political arguments, and the iusta causa displaced the just enemy (iustus hostis). Accordingly, war became a crime and the aggressor a criminal, which means that the current distinction between just and unjust war lacks any relation to Vitoria and does not even attempt to determine the iusta causa.(n80) According to Schmitt: "If today some formulas of the doctrine of a just war rooted in the concrete order of the medieval respublica Christiana are utilized in modern and global formulas, this does not signify a return to, but rather a fundamental transformation of concepts of enemy, war, concrete order and justice presupposed in medieval doctrine."(n81) This transformation is crucial to any consideration of a new nomos of the earth because these concepts must be rooted in a concrete order. Lacking such an order or nomos, these free-floating concepts do not constitute institutional standards but have only the value of ideological slogans.
Unimpressed with the duration of the Cold War and its mixture of neither war nor peace, Schmitt speculated on the possibility of the eventual development of what he called GroBetaraume(n82) -- larger spatial entities, similar to but not synonymous with federations or blocs --displacing states and constituting a new nomos.(n83) Since his death in 1985 and the subsequent collapse of communism, the likelihood of his diagnosis and prognosis has increased. While the international situation remains confused and leading intellectuals such as Fukuyama and Huntington, unable to think behind predominant liberal democratic categories, can only recycle new versions of the old Wilsonianism, Schmitt's vision of a world of GroBetaraume as a new geopolitical configuration may well be in the process of being realized.
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vendredi, 12 août 2011
Carl Schmitt's Decisionism
Carl Schmitt's Decisionism
Paul Hirst
Ex: http://freespeechproject.com/
Since 1945 Western nations have witnessed a dramatic reduction in the variety of positions in political theory and jurisprudence. Political argument has been virtually reduced to contests within liberal-democratic theory. Even radicals now take representative democracy as their unquestioned point of departure. There are, of course, some benefits following from this restriction of political debate. Fascist, Nazi and Stalinist political ideologies are now beyond the pale. But the hegemony of liberal-democratic political agreement tends to obscure the fact that we are thinking in terms which were already obsolete at the end of the nineteenth century.
Nazism and Stalinism frightened Western politicians into a strict adherence to liberal democracy. Political discussion remains excessively rigid, even though the liberal-democratic view of politics is grossly at odds with our political condition. Conservative theorists like Hayek try to re-create idealized political conditions of the mid nineteenth century. In so doing, they lend themselves to some of the most unsavoury interests of the late twentieth century - those determined to exploit the present undemocratic political condition. Social-democratic theorists also avoid the central question of how to ensure public accountability of big government. Many radicals see liberal democracy as a means to reform, rather than as what needs to be reformed. They attempt to extend governmental action, without devising new means of controlling governmental agencies. New Right thinkers have reinforced the situation by pitting classical liberalism against democracy, individual rights against an interventionist state. There are no challenges to representative democracy, only attempts to restrict its functions. The democratic state continues to be seen as a sovereign public power able to assure public peace.
The terms of debate have not always been so restricted. In the first three decades of this century, liberal-democratic theory and the notion of popular sovereignty through representative government were widely challenged by many groups. Much of this challenge, of course, was demagogic rhetoric presented on behalf of absurd doctrines of social reorganization. The anti-liberal criticism of Sorel, Maurras or Mussolini may be occassionally intriguing, but their alternatives are poisonous and fortunately, no longer have a place in contemporary political discussion. The same can be said of much of the ultra-leftist and communist political theory of this period.
Other arguments are dismissed only at a cost. The one I will consider here - Carl Schmitt's 'decisionism' - challenges the liberal-democratic theory of sovereignty in a way that throws considerable light on contemporary political conditions. His political theory before the Nazi seizure of power shared some assumptions with fascist political doctrine and he did attempt to become the 'crown jurist' of the new Nazi state. Nevertheless, Schmitt's work asks hard questions and points to aspects of political life too uncomfortable to ignore. Because his thinking about concrete political situations is not governed by any dogmatic political alternative, it exhibits a peculiar objectivity.
Schmitt's situational judgement stems from his view of politics or, more correctly, from his view of the political as 'friend-enemy' relations, which explains how he could change suddenly from contempt for Hitler to endorsing Nazism. If it is nihilistic to lack substantial ethical standards beyond politics, then Schmitt is a nihilist. In this, however, he is in the company of many modern political thinkers. What led him to collaborate with the Nazis from March 1933 to December 1936 was not, however, ethical nihilism, but above all concern with order. Along with many German conservatives, Schmitt saw the choice as either Hitler or chaos. As it turned out, he saved his life but lost his reputation. He lived in disrepute in the later years of the Third Reich, and died in ignominy in the Federal Republic. But political thought should not be evaluated on the basis of the authors' personal political judgements. Thus the value of Schmitt's work is not diminished by the choices he made.
Schmitt's main targets are the liberal-constitutional theory of the state and the parliamentarist conception of politics. In the former, the state is subordinated to law; it becomes the executor of purposes determined by a representative legislative assembly. In the latter, politics is dominated by 'discussion,' by the free deliberation of representatives in the assembly. Schmitt considers nineteenth-century liberal democracy anti-political and rendered impotent by a rule-bound legalism, a rationalistic concept of political debate, and the desire that individual citizens enjoy a legally guaranteed 'private' sphere protected from the state. The political is none of these things. Its essence is struggle.
In The Concept of the Political Schmitt argues that the differentia specifica of the political, which separates it from other spheres of life, such as religion or economics, is friend-enemy relations. The political comes into being when groups are placed in a relation of emnity, where each comes to perceive the other as an irreconcilable adversary to be fought and, if possible, defeated. Such relations exhibit an existential logic which overrides the motives which may have brought groups to this point. Each group now faces an opponent, and must take account of that fact: 'Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms itself into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friends and enemy.' The political consists not in war or armed conflict as such, but precisely in the relation of emnity: not competition but confrontation. It is bound by no law: it is prior to no law.
For Schmitt: 'The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.' States arise as a means of continuing, organizing and channeling political struggle. It is political struggle which gives rise to political order. Any entity involved in friend-enemy relations is by definition political, whatever its origin or the origin of the differences leading to emnity: 'A religious community which wages wars against members of others religious communities or engages in other wars is already more than a religious community; it is a political entity.' The political condition arises from the struggle of groups; internal order is imposed to pursue external conflict. To view the state as the settled and orderly administration of a territory, concerned with the organization of its affairs according to law, is to see only the stabilized results of conflict. It is also to ignore the fact that the state stands in a relation of emnity to other states, that it holds its territory by means of armed force and that, on this basis of a monopoly of force, it can make claims to be the lawful government of that territory. The peaceful, legalistic, liberal bourgeoisie is sitting on a volcano and ignoring the fact. Their world depends on a relative stabilization of conflict within the state, and on the state's ability to keep at bay other potentially hostile states.
For Hobbes, the political state arises from a contract to submit to a sovereign who will put an end to the war of all against all which must otherwise prevail in a state of nature - an exchange of obediance for protection. Schmitt starts where Hobbes leaves off - with the natural condition between organized and competing groups or states. No amount of discussion, compromise or exhortation can settle issues between enemies. There can be no genuine agreement, because in the end there is nothing to agree about. Dominated as it is by the friend-enemy alternative, the political requires not discussion but decision. No amount of reflection can change an issue which is so existentially primitive that it precludes it. Speeches and motions in assemblies should not be contraposed to blood and iron but with the moral force of the decision, because vacillating parliamentarians can also cause considerable bloodshed.
In Schmitt's view, parliamentarism and liberalism existed in a particular historical epoch between the 'absolute' state of the seventeenth century and the 'total state' of the twentieth century. Parliamentary discussion and a liberal 'private sphere' presupposed the depoliticization of a large area of social, economic and cultural life. The state provided a legally codified order within which social customs, economic competition, religious beliefs, and so on, could be pursued without becoming 'political.' 'Politics' as such ceases to be exclusively the atter of the state when 'state and society penetrate each other.' The modern 'total state' breaks down the depoliticization on which such a narrow view of politics could rest:
Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains - religion, culture, education, the economy - then cease to be neutral. . . Against such neutralizations and depoliticizations of important domains appears the total state, which potentially embraces every domain. This results in the identity of the state and society. In such a state. . . everything is at least potentially political, and in referring to the state it is no longer possible to assert for it a specifically political characteristic.
Democracy and liberalism are fundamentally antagonistic. Democracy does away with the depoliticizations characteristic of rule by a narrow bourgeois stratum insulated from popular demands. Mass politics means a broadening of the agenda to include the affairs of all society - everything is potentially political. Mass politics also threatens existing forms of legal order. The politicization of all domains increases pressure on the state by multiplying the competing interests demanding action; at the same time, the function of the liberal legal framework - the regulating of the 'private sphere' - become inadequate. Once all social affairs become political, the existing constitutional framework threatens the social order: politics becomes a contest of organized parties seeking to prevail rather than to acheive reconciliation. The result is a state bound by law to allow every party an 'equal chance' for power: a weak state threatened with dissolution.
Schmitt may be an authoritarian conservative. But his diagnosis of the defects of parliamentarism and liberalism is an objective analysis rather than a mere restatement of value preferences. His concept of 'sovereignty' is challenging because it forces us to think very carefully about the conjuring trick which is 'law.' Liberalism tries to make the state subject to law. Laws are lawful if properly enacted according to set procedures; hence the 'rule of law.' In much liberal-democratic constitutional doctrine the legislature is held to be 'sovereign': it derives its law-making power from the will of the people expressed through their 'representatives.' Liberalism relies on a constituting political moment in order that the 'sovereignty' implied in democratic legislatures be unable to modify at will not only specific laws but also law-making processes. It is therefore threatened by a condition of politics which converts the 'rule of law' into a merely formal doctrine. If this 'rule of law' is simply the people's will expressed through their representatives, then it has no determinate content and the state is no longer substantially bound by law in its actions.
Classical liberalism implies a highly conservative version of the rule of law and a sovereignty limited by a constitutive political act beyond the reach of normal politics. Democracy threatens the parliamentary-constitutional regime with a boundless sovereign power claimed in the name of the 'people.' This reveals that all legal orders have an 'outside'; they rest on a political condition which is prior to and not bound by the law. A constitution can survive only if the constituting political act is upheld by some political power. The 'people' exist only in the claims of that tiny minority (their 'representatives') which functions as a 'majority' in the legislative assembly. 'Sovereignty' is thus not a matter of formal constitutional doctrine or essentially hypocritical references to the 'people'; it is a matter of determining which particular agency has the capacity - outside of law - to impose an order which, because it is political, can become legal.
Schmitt's analysis cuts through three hundred years of political theory and public law doctrine to define sovereignty in a way that renders irrelevant the endless debates about principles of political organization or the formal constitutional powers of different bodies.
From a practical or theoretical perspective, it really does not matter whether an abstract scheme advanced to define sovereignty (namely, that sovereignty is the highest power, not a derived power) is acceptable. About an abstract concept there will be no argument. . . What is argued about is the concrete application, and that means who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes the public interest or interest of the state, public safety and order, le salut public, and so on. The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like, but it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law.
Brutally put: ' Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' The sovereign is a definite agency capable of making a decision, not a legitimating category (the 'people') or a purely formal definition (plentitude of power, etc.). Sovereignty is outside the law, since the actions of the sovereign in the state of exception cannot be bound by laws since laws presuppose a normal situation. To claim that this is anti-legal is to ignore the fact that all laws have an outside, that they exist because of a substantiated claim on the part of some agency to be the dominant source of binding rules within a territory. The sovereign determines the possibility of the 'rule of law' by deciding on the exception: 'For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.'
Schmitt's concept of the exception is neither nihilistic nor anarchistic, it is concerned with the preservation of the state and the defence of legitimately constituted government and the stable institutions of society. He argues that ' the exception is different from anarchy and chaos.' It is an attempt to restore order in a political sense. While the state of exception can know no norms, the actions of the sovereign within the state must be governed by what is prudent to restore order. Barbaric excess and pure arbitrary power are not Schmitt's objecty. power is limited by a prudent concern for the social order; in the exception, 'order in the juristic sense still prevails, even if it is not of the ordinary kind.' Schmitt may be a relativist with regard to ultimate values in politics. But he is certainly a conservative concerned with defending a political framework in which the 'concrete orders' of society can be preserved, which distinguishes his thinking from both fascism and Nazism in their subordination of all social institutions to such idealized entities as the Leader and the People. For Schmitt, the exception is never the rule, as it is with fascism and Nazism. If he persists in demonstrating how law depends on politics, the norm on the exception, stability on struggle, he points up the contrary illusions of fascism and Nazism. In fact, Schmitt's work can be used as a critique of both. The ruthless logic in his analsysis of the political, the nature of soveriegnty, and the exception demonstrates the irrationality of fascism and Nazism. The exception cannot be made the rule in the 'total state' without reducing society to such a disorder through the political actions of the mass party that the very survival of the state is threatened. The Nazi state sought war as the highest goal in politics, but conducted its affairs in such a chaotic way that its war-making capacity was undermined and its war aims became fatally overextended. Schmitt's friend-enemy thesis is concerned with avoiding the danger that the logic of the political will reach its conclusion in unlimited war.
Schmitt modernizes the absolutist doctrines of Bodin and Hobbes. His jurisprudence restores - in the exception rather than the norm - the sovereign as uncommanded commander. For Hobbes, lawas are orders given by those with authority - authoritas non veritas facit legem. Confronted with complex systems of procedural limitation in public law and with the formalization of law into a system, laws become far more complex than orders. Modern legal positivism could point to a normal liberal-parliamentary legal order which did and still does appear to contradict Hobbes. Even in the somewhat modernized form of John Austin, the Hobbesian view of sovereignty is rejected on all sides. Schmitt shared neither the simplistic view of Hobbes that this implies, nor the indifference of modern legal positivism to the political foundation of law. He founded his jurisprudence neither on the normal workings of the legal order nor on the formal niceties of constitutional doctrine, but on a condition quite alien to them. 'Normalcy' rests not on legal or constitutional conditions but on a certain balance of political forces, a certain capacity of the state to impose order by force should the need arise. This is especially true of liberal-parliamentary regimes, whose public law requires stablization of political conflicts and considerable police and war powers even to begin to have the slightest chance of functioning at all. Law cannot itself form a completely rational and lawful system; the analysis of the state must make reference to those agencies which have the capacity to decide on the state of exception and not merely a formal plentitude of power.
In Political Theology Schmitt claims that the concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts. This is obvious in the case of the concept of sovereignty, wherein the omnipotent lawgiver is a mundane version of an all-powerful God. He argues that liberalism and parliamentarism correspond to deist views of God's action through constant and general natural laws. His own view is a form of fundamentalism in which the exception plays the same role in relation to the state as the miracles of Jesus do in confirming the Gospel. The exception reveals the legally unlimited capacity of whoever is sovereign within the state. In conventional, liberal-democratic doctrine the people are sovereign; their will is expressed through representatives. Schmitt argues that modern democracy is a form of populism in that the people are mobilized by propaganda and organized interests. Such a democracy bases legitimacy on the people's will. Thus parliament exists on the sufferance of political parties, propaganda agencies and organized interest which compete for popular 'consent.' When parliamentary forms and the rule of 'law' become inadequate to the political situation, they will be dispensed with in the name of the people: 'No other constitutional institution can withstand the sole criterion of the people's will, however it is expressed.'
Schmitt thus accepts the logic of Weber's view of plebiscitarian democracy and the rise of bureaucratic mass parties, which utterly destroy the old parliamentary notables. He uses the nineteenth-century conservatives Juan Donoso Cortes to set the essential dilemma in Political Theology: either a boundless democracy of plebiscitarian populism which will carry us wherever it will (i.e. to Marxist or fascist domination) or a dictatorship. Schmitt advocates a very specific form of dictatorship in a state of exception - a "commissarial' dictatorship, which acts to restore social stability, to preserve the concrete orders of society and restore the constitution. The dictator has a constitutional office. He acts in the name of the constitution, but takes such measures as are necessary to preserve order. these measures are not bound by law; they are extralegal.
Schmitt's doctrine thus involves a paradox. For all its stress on friend-enemy relations, on decisive political action, its core, its aim, is the maintenance of stability and order. It is founded on a political non-law, but not in the interest of lawlessness. Schmitt insists that the constitution must be capable of meeting the challenge of the exception, and of allowing those measures necessary to preserve order. He is anti-liberal because he claims that liberalism cannot cope with the reality of the political; it can only insist on a legal formalism which is useless in the exceptional case. He argues that only those parties which are bound to uphold the constitution should be allowed an 'equal chance' to struggle for power. Parties which threaten the existing order and use constitutional means to challenge the constitution should be subject to rigorous control.
Schmitt's relentless attack on 'discussion' makes most democrats and radicals extremely hostile to his views. He is a determined critic of the Enlightenment. Habermas's 'ideal speech situation', in which we communicate without distortion to discover a common 'emancipatory interest', would appear to Schmitt as a trivial philosophical restatement of Guizot's view that in representative government, ' through discussion the powers-that-be are obliged to seek truth in common." Schmitt is probably right. Enemies have nothing to discuss and we can never attain a situation in which the friend-enemy distinction is abolished. Liberalism does tend to ignore the exception and the more resolute forms of political struggle.
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, décisionisme, carl schmitt, révolution conservatrice, catholicisme, allemagne, weimar, années 20, années 30, années 40, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
jeudi, 11 août 2011
Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror
Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror
Richard Wolin
Ex: http://freespeechproject.com/
"Carl Schmitt's polemical discussion of political Romanticism conceals the aestheticizing oscillations of his own political thought. In this respect, too, a kinship of spirit with the fascist intelligentsia reveals itself."
—Jürgen Habermas, "The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English"
"The pinnacle of great politics is the moment in which the enemy comes into view in concrete clarity as the enemy."
—Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1927)
Only months after Hitler's accession to power, the eminently citable political philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt, in the ominously titled work, Staat, Bewegung, Volk, delivered one of his better known dicta. On January 30, 1933, observes Schmitt, "one can say that 'Hegel died.'" In the vast literature on Schmitt's role in the National Socialist conquest of power, one can find many glosses on this one remark, which indeed speaks volumes. But let us at the outset be sure to catch Schmitt's meaning, for Schmitt quickly reminds us what he does not intend by this pronouncement: he does not mean to impugn the hallowed tradition of German étatistme, that is, of German "philosophies of state," among which Schmitt would like to number his own contributions to the annals of political thought. Instead, it is Hegel qua philosopher of the "bureaucratic class" or Beamtenstaat that has been definitely surpassed with Hitler's triumph. For "bureaucracy" (cf. Max Weber's characterization of "legal-bureaucratic domination") is, according to its essence, a bourgeois form of rule. As such, this class of civil servants—which Hegel in the Rechtsphilosophie deems the "universal class"—represents an impermissable drag on the sovereignty of executive authority. For Schmitt, its characteristic mode of functioning, which is based on rules and procedures that are fixed, preestablished, calculable, qualifies it as the very embodiment of bourgeois normalcy—a form of life that Schmitt strove to destroy and transcend in virtually everything he thought and wrote during the 1920s, for the very essence of the bureaucratic conduct of business is reverence for the norm, a standpoint that could not exist in great tension with the doctrines of Carl Schmitt himself, whom we know to be a philosopher of the state of emergency—of the Auhsnamhezustand (literally, the "state of exception"). Thus, in the eyes of Schmitt, Hegel had set an ignominious precedent by according this putative universal class a position of preeminence in his political thought, insofar as the primacy of the bureaucracy tends to diminish or supplant the perogative of sovereign authority.
But behind the critique of Hegel and the provocative claim that Hitler's rise coincides with Hegel's metaphorical death (a claim, that while true, should have offered, pace Schmitt, little cause for celebration) lies a further indictment, for in the remarks cited, Hegel is simultaneously perceived as an advocate of the Rechtsstaat, of "constitutionalism" and "rule of law." Therefore, in the history of German political thought, the doctrines of this very German philosopher prove to be something of a Trojan horse: they represent a primary avenue via which alien bourgeois forms of political life have infiltrated healthy and autochthonous German traditions, one of whose distinguishing features is an rejection of "constitutionalism" and all it implies. The political thought of Hegel thus represents a threat—and now we encounter another one of Schmitt's key terms from the 1920s—to German homogeneity.
Schmitt's poignant observations concerning the relationship between Hegel and Hitler expresses the idea that one tradition in German cultural life—the tradition of German idealism—has come to an end and a new set of principles—based in effect on the category of völkish homogeneity (and all it implies for Germany's political future)—has arisen to take its place. Or, to express the same thought in other terms: a tradition based on the concept of Vernuft or "reason" has given way to a political system whose new raison d'être was the principle of authoritarian decision—whose consummate embodiment was the Führerprinzep, one of the ideological cornerstones of the post-Hegelian state. To be sure, Schmitt's insight remains a source of fascination owing to its uncanny prescience: in a statement of a few words, he manages to express the quintessence of some 100 years of German historical development. At the same time, this remark also remains worthy insofar as it serves as a prism through which the vagaries of Schmitt's own intellectual biography come into unique focues: it represents an unambiguous declaration of his satiety of Germany's prior experiments with constitutional government and of his longing for a total- or Führerstaat in which the ambivalences of the parliamentary system would be abolished once and for all. Above all, however, it suggest how readily Schmitt personally made the transition from intellectual antagonist of Weimar democracy to whole-hearted supporter of National Socialist revolution. Herein lies what one may refer to as the paradox of Carl Schmitt: a man who, in the words of Hannah Arendt, was a "convinced Nazi," yet "whose very ingenious theories about the end of democracy and legal government still make arresting reading."
The focal point of our inquiry will be the distinctive intellectual "habitus" (Bourdieu) that facilitated Schmitt's alacritous transformation from respected Weimar jurist and academician to "crown jurist of the Third Reich." To understand the intellectual basis of Schmitt's political views, one must appreciate his elective affinities with that generation of so-called conservative revolutionary thinkers whose worldview was so decisive in turning the tide of public opinion against the fledgling Weimar republic. As the political theorist Kurt Sontheimer has noted: "It is hardly a matter of controversy today that certain ideological predispositions in German thought generally, but particularly in the intellectual climate of the Weimar Republic, induced a large number of German electors under the Weimar Republic to consider the National Socialist movement as less problematic than it turned out to be." And even though the nationalsocialists and the conservative revolutionaries failed to see eye to eye on many points, their respective plans for a new Germany were sufficiently close that a comparison between them is able to "throw light on the intellectual atmosphere in which, when National Socialism arose, it could seem to be a more or less presentable doctrine." Hence "National Socialism . . . derived considerable profit from thinkers like Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Ernst Jünger," despite their later parting of the ways. One could without much exaggeration label this intellectual movement protofascistic, insofar as its general ideological effect consisted in providing a type of ideological-spiritual preparation for the National Socialist triumph.
Schmitt himself was never an active member of the conservative revolutionary movement, whose best known representatives—Spengler, Jünger, and van den Bruck—have been named by Sontheimer (though one might add Hans Zehrer and Othmar Spann). It would be fair to say that the major differences between Schmitt and his like-minded, influential group of right-wing intellectuals concerned a matter of form rather than substance: unlike Schmitt, most of whose writings appeared in scholarly and professional journals, the conservative revolutionaries were, to a man, nonacademics who made names for themselves as Publizisten—that is, as political writers in that same kaleidoscope and febrile world of Weimar Offentlichkeit that was the object of so much scorn in their work. But Schmitt's status as a fellow traveler in relation to the movement's main journals (such as Zehrer's influential Die Tat, activities, and circles notwithstanding, his profound intellectual affinities with this group of convinced antirepublicans are impossible to deny. In fact, in the secondary literature, it has become more common than not simply to include him as a bona fide member of the group.
The intellectual habitus shared by Schmitt and the conservative revolutionaries is in no small measure of Nietzschean derivation. Both subscribed to the immoderate verdict registered by Nietzsche on the totality of inherited Western values: those values were essentially nihilistic. Liberalism, democracy, utlitarianism, individualism, and Enlightenment rationalism were the characteristic belief structures of the decadent capitalist West; they were manifestations of a superficial Zivilisation, which failed to measure up to the sublimity of German Kultur. In opposition to a bourgeois society viewed as being in an advanced state of decomposition, Schmitt and the conservative revolutionaries counterposed the Nietzschean rites of "active nihilism." In Nietzsche's view, whatever is falling should be given a final push. Thus one of the patented conceptual oppositions proper to the conservative revolutionary habitus was that between the "hero" (or "soldier") and the "bourgeois." Whereas the hero thrives on risk, danger, and uncertainity, the life of bourgeois is devoted to petty calculations of utility and security. This conceptual opposition would occupy center stage in what was perhaps the most influential conservative revolutionary publication of the entire Weimar period, Ernst Jünger's 1932 work, Der Arbeiter (the worker), where it assumes the form of a contrast between "the worker-soldier" and "the bourgeois." If one turns, for example, to what is arguably Schmitt's major work of the 1920s, The Concept of the Political (1927), where the famous "friend-enemy" distinction is codified as the raison d'être of politics, it is difficult to ignore the profound conservative revolutionary resonances of Schmitt's argument. Indeed, it would seem that such resonances permeate, Schmitt's attempt to justify politics primarily in martial terms; that is, in light of the ultimate instance of (or to use Schmitt's own terminology) Ernstfall of battle (Kampf) or war.
Once the conservative revolutionary dimension of Schmitt's thought is brought to light, it will become clear that the continuities in his pre- and post-1933 political philosophy and stronger than the discontinuities. Yet Schmitt's own path of development from arch foe of Weimar democracy to "convinced Nazi" (Arendt) is mediated by a successive series of intellectual transformations that attest to his growing political radicalisation during the 1920s and early 1930s. He follows a route that is both predictable and sui generis: predictable insomuch as it was a route traveled by an entire generation of like-minded German conservative and nationalist intellectuals during the interwar period; sui generis, insofar as there remains an irreducible originality and perspicacity to the various Zeitdiagnosen proffered by Schmitt during the 1920s, in comparison with the at times hackneyed and familar formulations of his conservative revolutionary contemporaries.
The oxymoronic designation "conservative revolutionary" is meant to distinguish the radical turn taken during the interwar period by right-of-center German intellectuals from the stance of their "traditional conservative" counterparts, who longed for a restoration of the imagined glories of earlier German Reichs and generally stressed the desirability of a return to premodern forms of social order (e.g., Tönnies Gemeinschaft) based on aristocratic considerations of rank and privilege. As opposed to the traditional conservatives, the conservative revolutionaries (and this is true of Jünger, van den Bruck, and Schmitt), in their reflections of the German defeat in the Great War, concluded that if Germany were to be successful in the next major European conflagaration, premodern or traditional solutions would not suffice. Instead, what was necessary was "modernization," yet a form of modernization that was at the same time compatible with the (albeit mythologized) traditional German values of heroism, "will" (as opposed to "reason"), Kultur, and hierarchy. In sum, what was desired was a modern community. As Jeffrey Herf has stressed in his informative book on the subject, when one searches for the ideological origins of National Socialism, it is not so much Germany's rejection of modernity that is at issue as its selective embrace of modernity. Thus National Socialist's triumph, far from being characterized by a disdain of modernity simpliciter, was marked simultaneously by an assimilation of technical modernity and a repudiation of Western political modernity: of the values of political liberalism as they emerge from the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. This describes the essence of the German "third way" or Sonderweg: Germany's special path to modernity that is neither Western in the sense of England and France nor Eastern in the sense of Russia or pan-slavism.
Schmitt began his in the 1910s as a traditonal conservative, namely, as a Catholic philosopher of state. As such, his early writings revolved around a version of political authoritarianism in which the idea of a strong state was defended at all costs against the threat of liberal encroachments. In his most significant work of the decade, The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual (1914), the balance between the two central concepts, state and individual, is struck one-sidely in favour of the former term. For Schmitt, the state, in executing its law-promulgating perogatives, cannot countenance any opposition. The uncompromising, antiliberal conclusion he draws from this observation is that "no individual can have full autonomy within the state." Or, as Schmitt unambiguously expresses a similar thought elsewhere in the same work: "the individual" is merely "a means to the essence, the state is what is important." Thus, although Schmitt displayed little inclination for the brand of jingoistic nationalism so prevalent among his German academic mandarin brethern during the war years, as Joseph Bendersky has observed, "it was precisely on the point of authoritarianism vs. liberal individualism that the views of many Catholics [such as Schmitt] and those of non-Catholic conservatives coincided."
But like other German conservatives, it was Schmitt's antipathy to liberal democratic forms of government, coupled with the political turmoil of the Weimar republic, that facilitated his transformation from a traditional conservative to a conservative revolutionary. To be sure, a full account of the intricacies of Schmitt's conservative revolutionary "conversion" would necessitate a year by year account of his political thought during the Weimar period, during which Schmitt's intellectual output was nothing if prolific, (he published virtually a book a year). Instead, for the sake of concision and the sake of fidelity to the leitmotif of the "conservative revolutionary habitus," I have elected to concentrate on three key aspects of Schmitt's intellectual transformation during this period: first, his sympathies with the vitalist (lebensphilosophisch) critique of modern rationalism; second, his philosophy of history during these years; and third, his protofascistic of the conservative revolutionary doctrine of the "total state." All three aspects, moreover, are integrally interrelated.
II.
The vitalist critique of Enlightenment rationalism is of Nietzschean provenance. In opposition to the traditional philosophical image of "man" qua animal rationalis, Nietzsche counterposes his vision of "life [as] will to power." In the course of this "transvaluation of all values," the heretofore marginalized forces of life, will, affect, and passion should reclaim the position of primacy they once enjoyed before the triumph of "Socratism." It is in precisely this spirit that Nietzsche recommends that in the future, we philosophize with our affects instead of with concepts, for in the culture of European nihilism that has triumphed with the Enlightenment, "the essence of life, its will to power, is ignored," argues Nietzsche; "one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions."
It would be difficult to overestimate the power and influence this Nietzschean critique exerted over an entire generation of antidemocratic German intellectuals during the 1920s. The anticivilizational ethos that pervades Spengler's Decline of the West—the defence of "blood and tradition" against the much lamented forces of societal rationalisation—would be unthinkable without that dimension of vitalistic Kulturkritik to which Nietzsche's work gave consummate expression. Nor would it seem that the doctrines of Klages, Geist als Widersacher der Seele (Intellect as the Antagonist of the Soul; 1929-31), would have captured the mood of the times as well as they did had it not been for the irrevocable precedent set by Nietzsche's work, for the central opposition between "life" and "intellect," as articulated by Klages and so many other German "anti-intellectual intellectuals" during the interwar period, represents an unmistakably Nietzschean inheritance.
While the conservative revolutionary components of Schmitt's worldview have been frequently noted, the paramount role played by the "philosophy of life"—above all, by the concept of cultural criticism proper to Lebensphilosophie—on his political thought has escaped the attention of most critics. However, a full understanding of Schmitt's status as a radical conservative intellectual is inseparable from an appreciation of an hitherto neglected aspect of his work.
In point of fact, determinate influences of "philosophy of life"—a movement that would feed directly into the Existenzphilosophie craze of the 1920s (Heidegger, Jaspers, and others)—are really discernable in Schmitt's pre-Weimar writings. Thus, in one of his first published works, Law and Judgment (1912), Schmitt is concerned with demonstrating the impossibility of understanding the legal order in exclusively rationalist terms, that is, as a self-sufficient, complete system of legal norms after the fashion of legal positivism. It is on this basis that Schmitt argues in a particular case, a correct decision cannot be reached solely via a process of deducation or generalisation from existing legal precedents or norms. Instead, he contends, there is always a moment of irreducible particularity to each case that defies subsumption under general principles. It is precisely this aspect of legal judgment that Schmitt finds most interesting and significant. He goes on to coin a phrase for this "extralegal" dimension that proves an inescapable aspect of all legal decision making proper: the moment of "concrete indifference," the dimension of adjudication that transcends the previously established legal norm. In essence, the moment of "concrete indifference" represents for Schmitt a type of vital substrate, an element of "pure life," that forever stands opposed to the formalism of laws as such. Thus at the heart of bourgeois society—its legal system—one finds an element of existential particularity that defies the coherence of rationalist syllogizing or formal reason.
The foregoing account of concrete indifference is a matter of more than passing or academic interest insofar as it proves a crucial harbinger of Schmitt's later decisionistic theory of sovereignty, for its its devaluation of existing legal norms as a basis for judicial decision making, the category of concrete indifference points towards the imperative nature of judicial decision itself as a self-sufficient and irreducible basis of adjudication. The vitalist dimension of Schmitt's early philosophy of law betrays itself in his thoroughgoing denigration of legal normativism—for norms are a product of arid intellectualism (Intelligenz) and, as such, hostile to life (lebensfeindlick)—and the concomitant belief that the decision alone is capable of bridging the gap between the abstractness of law and the fullness of life.
The inchoate vitalist sympathies of Schmitt's early work become full blown in his writings of the 1920s. Here, the key text is Political Theology (1922), in which Schmitt formulates his decisionist theory of politics, or, as he remarks in the work's often cited first sentance: "Sovereign is he who decides the state of exception [Ausnahmezustand]."
It would be tempting to claim from this initial, terse yet lapidry definition of sovereignty, one may deduce the totality of Schmitt's mature political thought, for it contains what we know to the be the two keywords of his political philosophy during these years: decision and the exception. Both in Schmitt's lexicon are far from value-neutral or merely descriptive concepts. Instead, they are both accorded unambiguously positive value in the economy of his thought. Thus one of the hallmarks of Schmitt's political philosophy during the Weimar years will be a privileging of Ausnahmezustand, or state of exception, vis-à-vis political normalcy.
It is my claim that Schmitt's celebration of the state of exception over conditions of political normalcy—which he essentially equates with legal positivism and "parliamentarianism"—has its basis in the vitalist critique of Enlightenment rationalism. In his initial justification of the Ausnahmezustand in Political Theology, Schmitt leaves no doubt concerning the historical pedigree of such concepts. Thus following the well-known definition of sovereignty cited earlier, he immediantly underscores its status as a "borderline concept"—a Grenzbegriff, a concept "pertaining to the outermost sphere." It is precisely this fascination with extreme or "boundry situations" (Grenzsituationen—K. Jaspers—those unique moments of existential peril that become a proving ground of individual "authenticity"—that characterizes Lebensphilosophie's sweeping critique of bourgeois "everydayness." Hence in the Grenzsituationen, Dasein glimpses transcendence and is thereby transformed from possible to real Existenz." In parallel fashion, Schmitt, by according primacy to the "state of exception" as opposed to political normalcy, tries to invest the emergency situation with a higher, existential significance and meaning.
According to the inner logic of this conceptual scheme, the "state of exception" becomes the basis for a politics of authenticity. In contrast to conditions of political normalcy, which represent the unexalted reign of the "average, the "medicore," and the "everyday," the state of exception proves capable of reincorporating a dimension of heroism and greatness that is sorely lacking in routinized, bourgeois conduct of political life.
Consequently, the superiority of the state as the ultimate, decisionistic arbiter over the emergency situation is a matter that, in Schmitt's eyes, need not be argued for, for according to Schmitt, "every rationalist interpretation falsifies the immediacy of life." Instead, in his view, the state represents a fundamental, irrefragable, existential verity, as does the category of "life" in Nietzsche's philosophy, or, as Schmitt remarks with a characteristic pith in Political Theology, "The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority over the validity of the legal norm." Thus "the decision [on the state of exception] becomes instantly independent of argumentative substantiation and receives autonomous value."
But as Franz Neumann observes in Behemoth, given the lack of coherence of National Socialist ideology, the rationales provided for totalitarian practice were often couched specifically in vitalist or existential terms. In Neumann's words,
[Given the incoherence of National Socialist ideology], what is left as justification for the [Grossdeutsche] Reich? Not racism, not the idea of the Holy Roman Empire, and certainly not some democratic nonsense like popular sovereignty or self-determination. Only the Reich itself remains. It is its own justification. The philosophical roots of the argument are to be found in the existential philosophy of Heidegger. Transferred to the realm of politics, exisentialism argues that power and might are true: power is a sufficient theoretical basis for more power.
[Excerpts from The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (2004).]
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : carl schmitt, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, weimar, années 20, années 30, années 40, philosophie, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
Keith Preston: Understanding Carl Schmitt
Keith Preston: Understanding Carl Schmitt
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : carl schmit, philosophie, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, weimar, années 20, années 30, années 40, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 07 août 2011
Sommerakademie zur Konservativen Revolution
Sommerakademie zur Konservativen Revolution
Seit dem verheerenden Attentat in Norwegen haben bestimmte Kausalketten wieder Konjunktur. Beispielsweise wenn Volker Weiß bei Spiegelonline irgendein Zitat Oswald Spenglers für die Tat verantwortlich macht. Treffen will Weiß damit die ganze sogenannnte Konservative Revolution und möglichst auch jede Art von Demokratiekritik, die nicht von links kommt.
Carl Schmitt nannte solche Konstrukte „irreale Bedingungssätze“: Wenn Oswald Spengler nicht gelebt hätte, wäre Breivik nicht zum Mörder geworden. So einfach (in doppelter Hinsicht) kann Geistesgeschichte sein. Wir wollen Weiß auf seinen simplen Pfaden nicht folgen, sondern uns grundsätzlich mit dem Phänomen „Konservative Revolution“ auseinandersetzen, das immer wieder in einen Ruf gerät, der in einem so merkwürdigen Widerspruch zu seiner tatsächlichen Wirkungslosigkeit steht.
Die 12.Sommerakademie des IfS wird sich daher vom 16. bis 18. September 2011 dem Thema „Konservative Revolution“ widmen. Dabei geht es nicht um das Herunterbeten der fünf Mohlerschen Hauptgruppen, sondern um die gegenwärtig gültigen Gedanken dieser Geistesrichtung. Daher wird es nach einer ausführlichen Einleitung durch Karlheinz Weißmann u.a. um folgende Themen gehen: den Zusammenhang von Politik und Lebensreform, den Gedanken einer schöpferischen Restauration, um Heideggers konservative Revolution der Philosophie, um das Verhältnis von Deutschtum und Christentum…
Wie immer: 40 Teilnehmerplätze, sieben Vorträge, Film, Diskussionen, Sport: Wenn Sie 35 Jahre oder jünger sind, können und sollten Sie teilnehmen! Die 11. Winterakademie wird nicht in Schnellroda stattfinden, sondern in der Region zwischen Hannover und Kassel! Der Ausweichort ist gut mit der Bahn erreichbar. Genaue Informationen gibt es nach der Anmeldung. Die Hörerbeiträge sind nicht hoch, wer Geld verdient, bezahlt für zwei Übernachtungen, Vollpension und alle Vorträge 80,00 €, alle anderen bezahlen 35,00 €. Und: Keiner sollte wegen finanzieller Engpässe fernbleiben. Rufen Sie uns an, falls es knapp wird!
Tagungsfolge und Antwortbogen.
00:05 Publié dans Evénement, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : événement, allemagne, révolution conservatrice, histoire | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 27 juillet 2011
Oswald Spengler ed il senso metapolitico del declino occidentale
Oswald Spengler ed il senso metapolitico del declino occidentale
Luca Valentini
Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/
La crisi morale, oltre che economica e finanziaria, che attualmente attanaglia l’Italia, le farsesche vicende dell’attuale cricca di potere al governo, spesso conducono anche i più acuti osservatori a smarrire quella visione d’insieme e di lontani orizzonti che dovrebbe sempre caratterizzare una visione del mondo e della vita autenticamente tradizionale, cioè fondata e determinata su principi dall’Alto.
E’ importante tale precisazione, perché, al di là delle giuste analisi sociologico-politiche, delle doverose battaglie per il benessere del Popolo Italiano, mai si dovrebbe dimenticare che l’ampiezza della crisi va ben oltre il nostro Paese e che le radici sono ben più profonde di ciò che ai nostri occhi si manifesta, essendo il piano finanziario solamente una risultante di un processo degenerativo, che interessa, nelle sue profondità abissali, i caratteri più interni dell’intera civilizzazione occidentale, nel suo spirito, nella sua moderna involuzione, nelle imboscate e nei tradimenti che essa ha subito.
Riferirsi a Oswald Spengler ed a ciò che ha espresso nelle sue opere, particolarmente nel Il Tramonto dell’Occidente, come noi faremo sinteticamente in questo articolo, ha proprio la determinata volontà di mettere in risalto codesto piano d’osservazione, un orizzonte che va ben oltre la semplice narrazione storicistica o i lineari ed apparentemente confusi e contradditori accadimenti del quotidiano, ma che vuole riaprire una riflessione, un ragionamento all’interno della nostra comunità sull’essenzialità di un approfondimento metapolitico che è e deve essere un approfondimento sulla nostra civiltà, sulla decadenza secolare che la caratterizza, nel rapporto della Tradizione Europea – che dal nostro punto di vista è essenzialmente Tradizione elleno-romano-germanica – con la sfera del Sacro, con l’esplicitazione nell’istituzione statuale, fino alle più ramificate e secondarie sezioni dello sviluppo produttivo e sociale: “Le civiltà sono degli organismi. La storia mondiale è la loro biografia complessiva” (da Il Tramonto dell’Occidente).
Un’analisi che valorizzi e ridesti il senso nascosto, occulto, quella terza dimensione della storia che molti smarriscono, insieme con quei punti di riferimento che unici possono stabilire un preciso quanto indispensabile percorso di autoriconoscimento identitario per la nostra comunità, per chi ricerca nell’impegno politico e culturale l’Uomo Nuovo e Differenziato dalla modernità, dalla pandemia inarrestabile che conduce oramai da diversi secoli l’intero Occidente – e con esso tutto il resto del mondo – verso un baratro di cui non si riescono a vedere vie d’uscita o possibilità di risalita. Per riferirci direttamente a Oswald Spengler, si rammenti come affermasse esserci un ciclo vitale per ogni singola civiltà, quasi fosse la stessa un vero e proprio ente animico, con una precisa contezza di se stesso. In riferimento all’Occidente sarebbe esistita prima la civiltà greco-romana, sorta grazie alle migrazioni indoeuropee in Grecia e nella penisola italica, che lo stesso ha definito “apollinea”, seguita da una civiltà germanica o detta “faustiana”. Entrambe queste Kultur hanno in sé un simbolo esprimente il proprio spirito vitale: Apollo, divinità della forma e della misura, dell’equilibrio interno, spirituale ed estetico; Faust, il personaggio creato da Goethe, come aspirazione perpetua che tenta di colmare lo iato tra l’esistenza parziale e limitata dell’Uomo e le altezze metafisiche della Divinità Trascendente. L’odierna società, pertanto, è il prodotto dell’esaurimento di tale forza originaria, di tale spirito ancestrale, lo spegnimento progressivo di ogni slancio oltre l’umano, di ogni classica forma interna: “Ognuna ha la sua fanciullezza, la sua gioventù, la sua età virile e la sua senilità (da Il Tramonto dell’Occidente)”.
A tal punto, partendo proprio da questa presa di coscienza, che dovrà risultare quanto più profonda e lucidamente attiva, si può accennare a ciò può e deve essere il senso di una militanza, di un impegno politico-culturale. Nella fase finale di questo ciclo, in questa umanità parodistica, l’unica via da percorrere è quella che conduce alla fedeltà nel proprio essere, alla costruzione di una comunità di uomini e di donne, conscia delle proprie radici e fiera della propria diversità dal resto del mondo. La lotta interna per la nascita di uomo che tragga da sé la legge da osservare, che sia impassibile ed inattaccabile di fronte alla marea che tutto corrompe, un uomo che con il suo essere sia esempio e trasmissione di Tradizione, questa la via d’onore che i nostri cuori hanno il diritto di percorrere. Il nostro ed unico scopo è quello, pertanto, anche grazie a questo giornale, di mettere a disposizione di quanti possano e vogliano le nostre umili conoscenze di studio e di ricerca tradizionali, per “fare ciò che deve essere fatto”, come Evola ci ricorda, e per rimanere fedeli all’Idea, che può essere valorosamente servita solo se da Spengler si assume la consapevolezza del mondo in cui siamo stati destinati a vivere: “…civiltà crepuscolare che è – scrive su La Vita italiana Evola riferendosi agli scritti di Spengler – una civiltà delle masse, civiltà antiqualitativa, inorganica, urbanistica, livellatrice, intimamente anarchica, demagogica, antitradizionale”.
* * *
Pubblicato sul periodico d’informazione politica Il Megafono, anno 2011.
Luca Valentini
00:05 Publié dans Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : oswald spengler, allemagne, philosophie, déclin, décadence, weimar, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 23 juillet 2011
Carl Schmitt: Total Enemy, Total State & Total War
Total Enemy, Total State, & Total War
Carl SCHMITT
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
Translated by Simona Draghici
Editor’s Note:
The following translation from Carl Schmitt appears online for the first time in commemoration of Schmitt’s birth on July 11, 1888. The translation originally appeared in Carl Schmitt, Four Essays, 1931–1938, ed. and trans. Simona Draghici (Washington, D.C.: Plutarch Press, 1999).
I
In a certain sense, there have been total wars at all times; a theory of the total war, however, presumably dates only from the time of Clausewitz who would talk of “abstract” and “absolute” wars.”[1] Later on, under the impact of the experiences of the last Great War, the formula of total war has acquired a specific meaning and a particular effectiveness. Since 1920, it has become the prevailing catchword. It was first brought out in sharp relief in the French literature, in book titles like La guerre totale. Afterwards, between 1926 and 1928, it found its way into the language of the proceedings of the disarmament committee at Geneva. In concepts such as “war potential” (potentiel de guerre), “moral disarmament” (désarmement moral) and “total disarmament” (désarmement total). The fascist doctrine of the “total state” came to it by way of the state; the association yielded the conceptual pair: total state, total war. In Germany, the publication of the Concept of the Political has since 1927 expanded the pair of totalities to a set of three: total enemy, total war, total state. Ernst Jünger’s book of 1930 Total Mobilization made the formula part of the general consciousness. Nonetheless, it was only Ludendorff’s 1936 booklet entitled Der Totale Krieg (The Total War) that lent it an irresistible force and caused its dissemination beyond all bounds.
The formula is omnipresent; it forces into view a truth whose horrors the general consciousness would rather shun. Such formulas, however, are always in danger of becoming widespread nationally and internationally and of being degraded to summary slogans, to mere gramophone records of the publicity mill. Hence some clarifications may be appropriate.
(a) A war may be total in the sense of summoning up one’s strength to the limit, and of the commitment of everything to the last reserves.[2] It may also be called total in the sense of the unsparing use of war means of annihilation. When the well-known English author J. F. C. Fuller writes in a recent article, entitled “The First of the League Wars, Its Lessons and Omens,” that the Italian campaign in Abyssinia was a modern total war, he only refers to the use of efficacious weapons (airplanes and gas), whereas looked at from another vantage point, Abyssinia in fact was not capable of waging a modern total war nor did Italy use its reserves to the limit, reach the highest intensity, and lead to an oil blockade or to the closing of the Suez Canal, because of the pressure exerted through the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations.
(b) A war may be total either on both sides or on one side only. It may also be deliberately limited, rationed and measured out, because of the geographical situation, the war technique in use, and also the predominant political principles of both sides. The typical 18th-century war, the so-called “cabinet war,” was essentially and deliberately a partial war. It rested on the clear segregation of the soldiers participating in the war from the non-participant inhabitants and non-combatants. Nevertheless, the Seven Years War of Frederick the Great was relatively total, on Prussia’s side, when compared with the other powers’ mobilization of forces. A situation, typical of Germany, showed itself readily in that case: the adversity of geographical conditions and the foreign coalitions compelled a German state to mobilize its forces to a higher degree than its more affluent and fortunate bigger neighbors.[3]
(c) The character of the war may change during the belligerent showdown. The will to fight may grow limp or it may intensify, as it happened in the 1914–1918 world war, when the war trend on the German side towards the mobilization of all the economic and industrial reserves soon forced the English side to introduce general conscription.
(d) Finally, some other methods of confrontation and trial of strength, which are not total, always develop within the totality of war. Thus for a time, everyone seeks to avoid a total war which naturally carries a total risk. In this way, after the world war, there were the so-called military reprisals (the 1923 Corfu Conflict, Japan-China in 1932), followed by the attempts at non-military, economic sanctions, according to Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (against Italy, autumn 1935), and finally, certain methods of power testing on foreign soil (Spain 1936–1937) emerged in a way that could be correctly interpreted only in close connection with the total character of modern warfare. They are intermediate and transitional forms between open war and true peace; they derive their meaning from the fact that total war looms large in the background as a possibility, and an understandable caution recommends itself in the delineation of the conflictual spaces. Likewise, it is only from this point of view that they can be grasped by the science of international law.
II
The core of the matter lies in warfare. From the nature of the total war one may grasp the character and the whole aspect of state totality; from the special character of the decisive weapons one may deduce the peculiar character and aspect of the totality of war. But it is the total enemy that gives the total war its meaning.[4]
The different services and types of warfare, land warfare, sea warfare, air warfare, they each experience the totality of war in a particular way. A corresponding world of notions and ideas piles on each of these types of warfare. The traditional notions of “levée en masse” (levy), “nation armée” (nation in arms), and “Volk in Waffen” (the people in arms) belong to land warfare.[5] Out of these notions emerged the continental doctrine of total war, essentially as a doctrine of land warfare, and that thanks mainly to Clausewitz. Sea warfare, on the other hand, has its own strategic and tactical methods and criteria; moreover, until recently, it has been first and foremost a war against the opponent’s trade and economy, whence a war against non-combatants, an economic war, which by its laws of blockade, contraband, and prizes, drew neutral trade into the hostilities, as well. Air warfare has not so far built up a similar fully-fledged and independent system of its own. There is no doctrine of air warfare yet that would correspond to the world of notions and concepts accumulated with regard to land and sea warfare. Nonetheless, as a consequence of air warfare, the overall configuration sways in the main towards a three-dimensional total war.
The “if” of a total war is beyond any doubt today. The “how” may vary. The totality is perceptible from opposite vantage points. Hence the standard type of guide and leader in a total war is necessarily different. It would be too simple an equation to accept that the soldier will step into the centre of this totality as the prevailing type in a total war to the same extent as in other kinds of wars previously.[6] If, as it has been said, total mobilization abolishes the separation of the soldier from the civilian, it may very well happen that the soldier changes into a civilian as the civilian changes into a soldier, or both may change into something new, a third alternative. In reality, it all depends on the general character of the war. A real war of religion turns the soldiers into the tools of priests or preachers. A total war that is waged on behalf of the economy becomes the tool of economic power groups. There are other forms in which the soldier himself is the typical model and the ascending expression of the character of the people. Geographical conditions, racial and social peculiarities of all kinds, are factors that determine the type of warfare waged by great nations. Even today it is unlikely that a nation could engage in all the three kinds of warfare to a degree equal to the three-dimensional total war. It is probable that the centre of gravity in the deployment of forces will always rest with one or the other of the three kinds of warfare and the doctrine of total war will draw on it.[7]
Until now the history of the European peoples has been dominated by the contrast of the English sea warfare with the Continental land warfare. It is not a matter of “traders and heroes” or that sort of thing, but rather the recognition that any of the various kinds of warfare may become total, and out of its own characteristics generate a special world of notions and ideals as its own doctrine and also relevant to international and constitutional law, particularly in the assessment of the soldier’s worth and of his position in the general body of the people. It would be a mistake to regard the English sea warfare of the last three centuries in the light of the total land warfare of Clausewitz’s theory, essentially as mere trade and economic but not total warfare, and to misinterpret it as unconnected with and markedly different from totality. It is the English sea warfare that generated the kernel of a total world view.[8]
The English sea warfare is total in its capacity for total enmity. It knows how to mobilize religious, ideological, spiritual, and moral forces as only few of the great wars in world history have done. The English sea warfare against Spain was a world-wide combat of the Germanic and Romance peoples, between Protestantism and Catholicism, Calvinism and Jesuitism, and there are few instances of such outbursts of enmity as intense and final as Cromwell’s against the Spaniards. The English war against Napoleon likewise changed from a sea war into a “crusade.” In the war against Germany between 1914 and 1918, the world-wide English propaganda knew how to whip up enormous moral and spiritual energies in the name of civilization and humanity, of democracy and freedom, against the Prussian-German “militarism.” The English mind had also proved its ability to interpret the industrial-technical upsurge of the 19th century in the terms of the English worldview. Herbert Spencer drew an extremely effective picture of history that was disseminated all over the world, in countless works of popularization, the propagandistic force of which proved its worth in the 1914–1918 World War. It was the philosophy of mankind’s progress, presented as an evolution from feudalism to trade and industry, from the political to the economic, from soldiers to industrialists, from war to peace. It portrayed the soldier essentially as Prussian-German, eo ipso “feudal reactionary,” a “medieval” figure standing in the way of progress and peace. Moreover, out of its specificity, the English sea warfare evolved a full, self-contained system of international law. It asserted itself and its own concepts held on their own against the corresponding concepts of Continental international law throughout the 19th century. There is an Anglo-Saxon concept of enemy, which in essence rejects the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants, and an Anglo-Saxon conception of war that incorporates the so-called economic war. In short, the fundamental concepts and norms of this English international law are total as such and certainly indicative of an ideology in itself total.
Finally, the English constitutional regulations turned the subordination of the soldiers to the civilians into an ideological principle and imposed it upon the Continent during the liberal 19th century. By those standards, civilization lies in the rule of the bourgeois, civilian ideal which is essentially unsoldierly. Accordingly, the constitution is always but a civil-bourgeois system in which, as Clemenceau put it, the soldier’s only raison d’être is to defend the civilian bourgeois society, while basically he is subject to civilian command. The Prussian soldier state carried on a century-long political struggle on the home front against this bourgeois constitutional ideal. It succumbed to it in the Autumn of 1918. The history of Prussian Germany’s home politics from 1848 to 1918 was a ceaseless conflict between the army and parliament, an uninterrupted battle which the government had to fight with the parliament over the structure of the army, and the army budget necessary to make ready for an unavoidable war, that were determined not by the necessities of foreign policy but rather by compromises regarding internal policy. The dictate of Versailles, which stipulated the army’s organization and its equipment to the smallest detail, in an agreement of foreign policy, was preceded by half a century of periodical agreements of internal policy between the Prussian-German soldier state and its internal policy opponents, in which all the details of the organization and the equipment of the army had been decided by the internal policy. The conflict between bourgeois society and the Prussian soldier state led to an unnatural isolation of the War Office from the power of command and to many other separations, consistently rooted in the opposition between a bourgeois constitutional ideal imported from England either directly or through France and Belgium, on the one hand, and the older constitutional ideal of the German soldiery, on the other.[9]
Today Germany has surmounted that division and achieved a close integration of its soldier force.[10] Indeed, attempts will not fail to be made to describe it as militarism, in the manner of earlier propaganda methods, and to hold Germany guilty of the advent of total war. Such questions of guilt too belong to the totality of the ideological wrangles. Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes (spiritual combat is as brutal as the battles of men). Nonetheless, before nations stagger into a total war once more, one must raise the question whether a total enmity truly exists among the European nations nowadays. War and enmity belong to the history of nations. But the worst misfortune only occurs wherever the enmity is generated by the war itself, as in the 1914–1918 war, and not as it would be right and sensible, namely that an older, unswayed enmity, true and total to the Day of Judgment, should led to a total war.
Translator’s Notes
Originally published in Völkerbund und Völkerrecht, vol. 4, 1937, this essay was reproduced in Posirionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Gent-Versailles, 1929–1939, (Hamburg, 1940), pp. 235–239.
1. General Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) is best known for his book Vom Kriege, never finished and published posthumously, which incidentally has been translated into English under the title On War. There are numerous versions available in print.
2. Carl Schmitt’s own political principles of “will” and “energy,” components of his qualitative concept of total state, derive from this characteristic feature of “total war”: collective determination to assume a cause considered worthwhile and unreserved commitment to its fulfillment. As a generalized rallying around and enthusiasm for a cause and a particular course of action, it is a frequent phenomenon of social psychology, yet its usually ephemeral character makes it unfit as a durable basis of any social structure. I remember the enthusiasm with which in 1982, to a man, the Argentines, for instance, rallied to the idea of going to war to free the Maldives and hurried to put it into practice, and the accompanying hatred which grew against the British. The enthusiasm cooled off quickly, but not the hatred, which lingered on. To perpetuate the enthusiasm, a plethora of other factors have to be brought in, of which, in the case of Germany at the beginning of the ’thirties, Carl Schmitt actually had not a clue.
3. The “lesson” is in keeping with the Hitlerite Frederician cult and legitimating tradition and does not claim to be historically accurate. Although a digression that seems out of place, it has a certain significance for the time it was made. In the autumn of 1936, Hitler circulated a memorandum revealing his expansionist intentions. Then in 1937, the organization of the nation to serve those intentions began, a process which coincided with the rise of the SS state. In November of the same year the German media were ordered to keep silent about the preparations for a “total war.” Bearing all that in mind, Schmitt’s short digression reads more as a warning of danger than a point of military strategy.
4 . What is interesting here is his insistence on the existential essence of the phenomenon, which is consonant with his earlier definition of the political and at the same time renders the distinction between the professional soldier and the civilian meaningless. Moreover, total enmity with its implicit elimination of the adversary excludes any prospect of a peace treaty, as the war is to go on until one of the belligerents is annihilated.
5. Das Volk in Waffen (The Nation in Arms) happens to be the title of a work on total war by Colmar von der Goltz (1843–1916), published in 1883, and which is an important stepping stone in the reflection on modern warfare that led to Ludendorff’s book.
6. At the beginning of February 1938, Adolf Hitler became commander in chief of the German armed forces, appointing General Keitel his assistant at the head of the High Command of the Armed Forces, as the War Ministry was dissolved.
7. Eventually only the Soviet Union came closest to Carl Schmitt’s expectations, while the United States waged a fully-fledged three-dimensional war, dictated by its geographical position and sustained by its vast economic and technical resources most of which remained outside the battle zone.
8. For a broader treatment of the subject-matter see Carl Schmitt’s Land und Meer, which as Land and Sea is available in an English translation (Washington, D.C.: Plutarch Press, 1997).
9. The conflict between the civil society and the military in Germany was the subject-matter of a longer essay by Carl Schmitt, published in Hamburg in 1934 under the title Staatsgefüge und Zusammenbruch des Zweites Reiches. Der Sieg des Burgers über den Soldaten (The State Structure and the Collapse of the Second Reich. The Burghers’ Victory Over the Soldiers).
10. Röhm, the ideological soldier, had been eliminated in 1934, at the same time as the political soldiers, the Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow. Furthermore, as already mentioned in note 6 above, the War Ministry ceased to exist at the beginning of 1938, while the Commander in Chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg was removed from his post for having compromised himself by marrying a “lady with a past,” and his prospective successor, General von Fritsch was forced to resign on a trumped-up Charge of homosexuality. At the same time, sixteen other generals were retired and forty-four were transferred. Göring who had been very active in carrying out this “integration” got for it only the title of field marshal, as Hitler kept for himself the supreme military command.
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/07/total-enemy-total-state-and-total-war/
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Polémologie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : carl schmitt, guerre, politique, politologie, théorie politique, sciences politiques, philosophie, allemagne, révolution conservatrice, weimar, années 20, années 30 | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 15 juillet 2011
Herman Wirth en de Indo-Europese voorgeschiedenis
Herman Wirth en de Indo-Europese voorgeschiedenis
door Marc. EEMANS
Ex: http://marceemans.wordpress.com/
Toen het Derde Rijk ineengestort was hebben heel wat gezellen van het eerste uur gepoogd zich – met min of meer sukses – als slachtoffers van het nationaal-socialisme voor te doen. Anderzijds had de regelrechte nazi-jacht die de overwinnaars ontketenden tot gevolg dat een aantal persoonlijkheden die tot de konservatieve revolutie behoorden en vanaf het begin duidelijk afstand hadden genomen van Hitler, toch werden verdacht, vervolgd en soms zelfs gedood.
Dat was onder meer het geval met de jurist Carl Schmitt, de schrijvers Ernst en Georg Jünger en Ernst von Salomon, de wijsgeren Martin Heidegger en Hermann von Keyserling, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, een der meest eminente leden der Thule-Gesellschaft, of nog de geleerden Friedrich Hielscher en Herman Wirth.
Ernst Jünger bracht de oorlog door te Parijs, als Duits officier. Hij had kennis van het tegen Hitler gerichte komplot van 20 juli 1944, maar was een van de weinige, zoniet de enige samenzweerder die werd gespaard. Hoe Heidegger vervolgd werd door de fanatici van het regime hebben wij hier reeds beschreven (zie: Martin Heidegger en de traditie van het Westers denken, in TK&S afl. 12, november 1980, pag. 150/11-20). Met opmerkelijke waardigheid en een stoïcisme dat dat der Oudheid evenaart, verdroeg hij zowel deze vervolging als, na 1945, die door linksen van allerlei pluimage.
Men kent Ernst von Salomons boek Der Fragebogen (1951), waarin hij de soms lachwekkende, maar altijd hatelijke aard van de “denazifikatie-riten” aanklaagt. In feite trad von Salomon nooit tot het nationaal-socialisme toe, dat hij – net als o.m. Julius Evola – zijn demagogische en plebeïsche aard verweet. Zijn vriend uit de dagen van de Brigade Ehrhardt, Hartmut Plaas, werd in 1944 omgebracht in het KZ Ravensbrück.
Datzelfde misprijzen vinden we bij Hermann von Keyserling, stichter van de School der Wijsheid, die echter toch, na de anarchie van de Weimar-republiek, de opkomst van het nationaal-socialisme begroette als een zegen voor Duitsland, maar zich dan weer plots uit alle politieke aktiviteit terugtrekt.
Rudolf von Sebottendorf kreeg last met de nazi-autoriteiten na de publikatie van zijn boek Bevor Hitler kam: het werd meteen verboden en bijna alle beschikbare eksemplaren vernietigd. Maar ook na 1945 blééf het door de Geallieerden verboden, zodat dit boek, dat voor de genesis van het nationaal-socialisme van kapitaal belang is, omzeggens onvindbaar werd, vermits het nooit heruitgegeven of vertaald werd. (1) De schrijver zelf verliet Duitsland en verdronk in 1945 in de Bosporus, in geheimzinnige omstandigheden.
Een geheimzinnig personage is ook Friedrich Hielscher. Men kent zijn naam doorgaans nog enkel omdat hij Wolfram Sievers, sekretaris-generaal van het wetenschappelijk instituut Ahnenerbe bijstond, toen die op 2 juni 1948 als “oorlogsmisdadiger” in Landsberg werd opgehangen. Hielscher zélf werd door de denazificeerders niet verontrust. Men beweerde dat hij lid zou zijn geweest van de Thule-Gesellschaft, maar in de ledenlijst van dit genootschap (opgesteld door Rudolf von Sebottendorf en door René Alleau gepubliceerd in zijn Hitler et les sociétés secrètes, Grasset, Parijs, 1969) vinden we zijn naam niet terug.
Ernst Jünger, die hem goed moet hebben gekend, noteert in zijn Parijs’ dagboek op 14 oktober 1943 “Hielscher bevestigde het vermoeden – dat ik al lang koesterde – dat hij een Kerk zou gesticht hebben. De dogmatiek is hij al voorbij en in de liturgie is hij ver gevorderd. Hij heeft mij een reeks gezangen getoond en een cyclus feesten, het heidens jaar, die een ganse ordening godheden, kleuren, dieren, spijzen, edelstenen, planten … omvat.” De konfrontatie Hielscher-Sievers, tijdens diens laatste ogenblikken, lijkt de thesis “Hielscher, kerkstichter” te bevestigen, als men tenminste geloof mag hechten aan hen die Wolfram Sievers’ martelgang beschreven. Jean-Claude Frère schrijft in zijn boek Nazisme et sociétés secrètes (Grasset, Parijs, 1974): “Toen Sievers zijn vonnis vernam, vroeg hij in zijn laatste ogenblikken te worden bijgestaan door Hielscher. Dit werd hem toegestaan; en toen kon men, aan de voet van de galg, het verbazend, krankzinnig schouwspel beleven van twee mannen die een onbekende ritus voltrokken, onbegrijpelijke formules spraken, en alle aanwezigen – tot de beul toe – zenuwachtig maakten. Tenslotte drukte Hielscher Sievers tegen zich aan, de veroordeelde trad achteruit, boog voor zijn meester en leverde zich dan, onbewogen, aan de beul over.”
In het spoor van de studie der geschiedenis van onze voorouders zullen we straks Herman Wirth ontmoeten, maar blijven we nog even bij Friedrich Hielscher stilstaan. Hij werd geboren in 1902, studeerde rechten en bewoog zich in de jaren twintig in zgn. nationaalrevolutionaire kringen, op een behoorlijke afstand van het nationaal-socialisme. Hij schreef diverse boeken, waaronder Das Reich (1931) en raakte bevriend met Sievers, die hem het werk leerde kennen van Herman Wirth, wiens leerlingen ze beide werden. Hun wegen liepen echter weldra sterk uiteen: terwijl Sievers het nationaal-socialisme vervoegde ging Hielscher in de oppositie. Das Reich werd verboden en hij kreeg bij herhaling last met de nazi-autoriteiten. Hij werd de ‘ideoloog’ van een verzetsgroep die men best als Widerstandsgruppe Hielscher kan aanduiden. Toch bleef hij met Sievers bevriend, werkte aan de rand van het Ahnenerbe met hem mee en zou hem zelfs in zijn verzetsaktiviteiten hebben betrokken – wat hij tevergeefs, om Sievers van de strop te redden, voor het Nürnbergtribunaal trachtte te bewijzen.
Carl Schmitt werd er door zijn tegenstanders van beticht te hebben meegewerkt aan het opstellen van wetten, ten tijde van het Derde Rijk: ongetwijfeld deed hij dat ook. Vanaf 1935 werd hij echter de schietschijf van een aantal aan het nazi-regime onderworpen juristen en een aanval tegen hem in het officiële SS-blad Das schwarze Korps bracht hem ertoe zich volledig terug te trekken uit het openbare leven. Na 1945 hield een geallieerde onderzoekskommissie zich met hem bezig, klasseerde de aantijgingen “zonder gevolg” en rehabiliteerde hem.
Alvorens we nu de idee en het werk van de protohistoricus Herman Wirth behandelen, schetsen we eerst zijn levensloop. Herman Wirth Roeper Bosch, Nederlander, werd in 1885 te Utrecht geboren, als zoon van een turnleraar. Hij studeerde Germaanse filologie, volkskunde, geschiedenis en muziekwetenschap aan de universiteiten van Utrecht, Leipzig en Bazel. In 1910 doktoreert hij op de thesis De ondergang van het Nederlandse Volkslied, die een jaar later in Den Haag als boek verscheen. In 1909 was hij al tot lektor benoemd aan de universiteit van Berlijn, voor het vakgebied Nederlandse filologie.
Hij meldt zich in 1914 als oorlogsvrijwilliger in het Pruissische leger en wordt kort daarop verbindingsofficier te Brussel. Hij onderhield de kontakten met de groep Jong Vlaanderen, die de motor was van het aktivisme, en nam ook aktief deel aan de proklamatie van de Raad van Vlaanderen in 1917 en de kortstondige Vlaamse zelfstandigheid , die in 1918 met de nederlaag van het Duitse keizerrijk ter ziele ging (2). Intussen was hij, in 1916, aan de Berlijnse universiteit tot professor benoemd.
ln 1920 probeerde Wirth in Nederland onder de benaming Dietse Trekvogels een jeugdbeweging van de grond te krijgen, naar het model van de Wandervogel in Duitsland en de Blauwvoeterie in Vlaanderen. In 1923 vestigt hij zich dan in Marburg an der Lahn, als zelfstandig ethnograaf en begint met zijn diepgaand onderzoek naar de Europese pre historie. In 1925 werd hij lid van de N.S.D.A.P., maar in juli 1926 stapt hij er weer uit. In 1928 laat hij bij Diederichs in Jena zijn bekend werk Der Aufgang der Menschheit verschijnen. In die periode behoorden Friedrich Hielscher en Wolfram Sievers tot zijn trouwste leerlingen. Net ais Wirth zelf werkten ze, op diverse vlakken, aan Ahnenerbe mee, ook al was alleen Sievers een partijman. Wirth was trouwens een van de oprichters van Ahnenerbe en moet er één der invloedrijke leden van zijn geweest, vermits hem meteen de sektie Studie van voorhistorisch schrift en symbolen werd toevertrouwd. In 1935 en 1936 was hij vele maanden op studiereis in Skandinavië. In 1938 brak hij met Ahnenerbe, wei onder de dubbele druk van de vakhistorici, die hem voor een dilettant hielden, en van de nazi•ideologen die hem hoogst kwalijk namen dat hij niet ophield te proklameren dat elke Führerkultus historisch gezien een vervalverschijnsel is…
De eerste bekende anti-Wirth brochure was van de hand van Prof. Dr. Paul Hambruch en droeg de alleszins niet dubbelzinnige titel: Die Irrtumer und Phantasien des Prof. Dr. Herman Wirth/Marburg, Verfasser von “Der Aufgang der Menschheit” und “Was heisst deutsch”. Dit denunciërende geschrift werd dan nog uitgerekend door het Deutscher Polizeiverlag uitgegeven (Lübeck, 1931). De latere Berlijnse n.s.-rektor Alfred Baeumler, bekend o.m. om zijn even perfide als doldrieste aanvallen tegen Heidegger, volgde weldra met het boekje Was bedeutet Herman Wirth für die Wissenschaft? (1932).
ln datzelfde jaar volgde van de geoloog Prof. Dr. Fritz Wiegers Herman Wirth und die deutsche Wissenschaft, waarin Wirth openlijk van dilettantisme werd aangeklaagd: “De geschriften van deze ethnoloog vormen slechts een weefsel van valse besluiten, van onbewezen beweringen en van ontkenningen van wetenschappelijke evidenties” … En verder: “De ‘ontdekkingen’ van Wirth zijn niets meer dan de fantazieën van een door de religieuze gedachte geobsedeerde geest”. In 1934 verscheen dan van Rudolf Glaser een brochure die Herman Wirth kategorisch verwierp, ditmaal niet in naam van de wetenschap, maar in naam van het nationaal-socialisme: Wer ist Herman Wirth? Volkstümliche Aufsatze über die Forschungen Herman Wirth’s von Rudolf Glaser. In de bibliografie vindt men al 62 pro- en contra-Wirth geschriften.
Natuurlijk verschenen er ook artikels en werken die van sympathie en belangstelling getuigden, maar de (tegen)partij had een veel grotere invloed, vooral toen Prof. Dr. Wiegers het argument hanteerde dat Wirth nog in 1932 relaties onderhield met de vrijmetselarij en Bolko Freiherr von Richthofen, de voorzitter van de Beroepsvereniging der Duitse Prehistorici, de aandacht trok op Wirth’s vriendschappelijke betrekkingen met bepaalde Joden… In een brief aan Prof. Hans F.K. Günther schreef Richthofen dat hij “niet begreep waarom men Wirth zou moeten ontzien omwille van taktische en humanitaire redenen” en op 16 januari 1934 liet hij aan Ministerialrat Sunkel weten: “Herr Wirth weiss genau, dass ihm führend besonders kiimpferische Nationalsozialisten gegenüberstehen. Mit Heil Hitler und deutschem Gruss, Ihr ergebenster gez. B. Frhr. v. Richthofen”.
Ook voor de grote kampagne tegen zijn ideeën en zijn persoon moet Herman Wirth binnen Ahnenerbe wel aanstoot gegeven hebben, door zijn onderzoekingen naar een oerkultuur en een oerreligie, die op een heel andere man-vrouw-relatie steunde, als hoogste godheid een “Almoeder” zou gekend hebben en eerder “demokratisch” van inslag was, in de zin van de latere IJslandse demokratie dan.
Wirth verdedigde de stelling dat de overheersend mannelijke trekken in de late kultuur, met hun overwaardering van het militaire leiderschap, typische dekadentieverschijnselen waren uit een periode van kulturele laagkonjunktuur zoals de tijd van de grote volksverhuizingen en de Vikingerperiode. De pogingen van het nationaal-socialisme om precies met deze periodes terug aan te knopen waren hem dan ook een politieke gruwel én kulturele nonsens.
In zijn studie Die Frage der Frauenberge – eine europäische Gegenwartsfrage (1972) komt Herman Wirth nog eens terug op zijn oude thesis: “De Vrouwenberg bij Cappel, nabij Marburg, is een van de meer dan honderd vrouwenbergen, maagden-, jonkvrouwen- enz. – bergen, -burgen, -stenen van het Duitse taalgebied en volksgebied. Wat hun ontstaan en hun bloeitijd betreft behoren deze Vrouwenbergen tot een bepaalde grote periode van het Avondland, gaande van de periode der grote stenen graven en de rotstekeningen in de Jongsteentijd tot bij het begin van de Volksverhuizingen. Over de geschiedenis en de betekenis van deze “Vrouwenbergen” is niets bekend. Dat er niets over geweten is, dat men niet eens geprobeerd heeft op het vraagstuk van de “Vrouwenbergen” enige vat te krijgen, heeft een tweeledige reden. De eerste reden is van psychologische aard: in een nog altijd mannelijk-ideologisch gericht wetenschapssysteem kan het probleem van een blijkbaar verheven plaats van de vrouw op religieus, kultureel en sociaal vlak geen geschiedkundige betekenis en belangrijkheid worden toegekend. En de tweede reden was dat de “Vrouwenbergen” tot de zgn. voorgeschiedenis behoren, d.w.z. dat er over dit onderwerp geen historische bronnen, geen schriftelijke overlevering (inskripties, berichten) bestaat. Dat er daarover toch een schriftelijke overlevering bestond en bestaat, niet in letterschrift maar in symboolschrift, daarvan hadden en hebben de totnogtoe bevoegde wetenschappen tot op de dag van vandaag geen idee: de prehistorici niet, maar evenmin de volkskundigen, de germanisten, de godsdiensthistorici, de mythologen enz.”
Zijn vriend Dr. Joachim Weitzäcker schrijft: “Na Herman Wirth’s “verwijdering” uit Ahnenerbe, dat hij gesticht had (3), verloor hij in 1938 zijn leerstoel aan de Berlijnse universiteit, omwille van zijn op gewetensbezwaren gegrondveste oppositie en zijn eis tot vrij onderzoek. Hij moest terug naar Marburg en kreeg verbod om nog onderricht te geven, te publiceren en in het openbaar te spreken. Tenslotte leverde de wet van het stilzwijgen zijn naam aan de vergetelheid over…”
Maar Wirth was niét helemaal vergeten: in 1945 namen de Amerikanen zijn bibliotheek en zijn omvangrijke dokumentatie in beslag; hij bleef aan dezelfde verbodsbepalingen onderworpen als tijdens de laatste zeven jaren van het Hitlerregime.
Zonder dokumentatie en bijna zonder bestaansmiddelen, herbegon hij, bijgestaan door zijn echtgenote Margarete Schmitt, en enkele vrienden, met bewonderswaardige moed aan zijn levenswerk. In 1960 verscheen in Wenen Um den Ursinn des Menschseins. Hij stichtte de Europaische Sammlung für religionsgeschichte en, in 1979 begon hij – 94 jaar jong! – in de ruïnes van een oud slot te Lichtenberg nabij Kusel, met de installatie van een museum en van archieven, die al zijn geschriften en zijn verzamelingen zou herbergen.
De allerlaatste jaren, haast volledig verlamd, werkte hij onverdroten verder, geholpen door enkele trouwe vrienden, en in leven gehouden met wat schaarse subsidies. Begin van dit jaar is hij er overleden.
Laat ons nu (noodgedwongen oppervlakkig) onderzoeken, wat Herman Wirth’s werk betekent. In zijn paleo-epigrafische opzoekingen, die de historische rekonstruktie van een oerreligie beogen, waagt Wirth zich in feite erg ver in de voorhistorie. In zijn opvatting zouden de Indo-europeërs slechts de vertegenwoordigers zijn van een erg late, hoogstens protohistorische periode.
Inderdaad, al wat de voorstanders van de “primordiale traditie”, waarvan René Guénon en Julius Evola de meest eminente vertegenwoordigers zijn, als positief d.i. kontroleerbaar kunnen bevestigen, gaat niet verder achteruit dan de eerste geschriften, waarmede volgens hen in feite de geschiedenis begint. Al de rest is slechts gissing, die op – weliswaar konvergerende – tradities steunt … doch het blijven tradities, om niet het woord ‘legenden’ te gebruiken. De meeste van Wirth’s werken moeten ook tot deze konjekturale wetenschap gerekend worden, en al zijn opsommingen van tekens en symbolen, waarvan hij de uitleg geeft, steunen (althans volgens zijn criticus Fritz Wiegers) slechts op vaak vernunftige interpretaties, die niet of moeilijk kontroleerbaar zijn. Dat er naast het “letterschrift” ook een koherent “symboolschrift” bestaat, word t intussen minder betwist dan ten tijde van Wirth’s eerste werken: het probleem ligt op het vlak van de duiding.
Vermelden we terloops dat de klassieke prehistorici wantrouwig staan tegenover elke subjektieve interpretatie. Ze doen opgravingen, ontdekken fossielen of voorwerpen van aile aard, klasseren ze en situeren ze meestal naar gelang de vindplaats. Uit hun ontdekkingen kunnen we afleiden, dat in deze of gene periode de Homo sapiens die of deze stap zette in de langzame opgang der mensheid naar wat we prozaisch “beschaving” noemen. Zo spreekt men over lager-, midden-, en lioger-paleoliticum, mesoliticum, neoliticum, bronstijdperk en ijzertijdperk, mét hun onderverdelingen, die ais “beschavingen” bestempeld worden, en waarvan de recentste die van Hallstatt en die van La Tène zijn. Om die periodes te dateren gebruikt men heden de radio-carbonmethode. Intussen ontdekken de prehistorici aanwijzingen omtrent de religie, de technologie, de begrafenisriten, zonder de eerste kunstuitingen te vergeten.
Onder de resten van een tamelijk geëvolueerde beschaving vermelden we de rotstekeningen van Altamira en Lascaux, die volgens de klassieke prehistorici uit het laag-neoliticum stammen (zowat tussen 35.000 en 10.000 v.o.j.). Vermits ze in een geografische ruimte liggen die zich ver van Noord-Europa bevindt, konden ze noch Wirth, noch de geleerden van Ahnenerbe interesseren, vervuld ais ze waren van die Indo-europese beschaving, waarvan de oudste sporen niet vroeger te situeren zijn dan in het 5de of 4de milennium vóór onze tijdrekening. Eerder zou men van het 3de of zelfs het 2de milennium moeten spreken, wat onze Europese primordiale traditie wei érg dicht bij ons legt. Werkt een kenner van de Indo-europese traditie ais Georges Dumézil trouwens niet bij voorkeur op geschreven bronnen? En nu weten we, dat het schrift van tamelijk recente datum is.
De klassieke prehistorici struikelen nog over raadsels, zoals die van de megalithen. Ze stellen hun bestaan vast, wagen een interpretatie, maar trekken geen besluiten: dat laten ze liever over aan geleerden als Wirth, die ze voor het overige wantrouwen. En wat raadsels ais Atlantis of het verloren kontinent Mu betreft, verkiezen ze er niet aan te raken en laten gissingen omtrent die vraagstukken over aan mensen die ze ais specialisten van “science-fiction” beschouwen.
Wij moeten toegeven dat de klassieke prehistorici al wat wij onze “primordiale Traditie” noemen, ignoreren; het vertrekpunt van deze benaming en van de vraagstukken die er verband mee houden, vindt men in een werk van de Duitse taalkundige Franz Bopp Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Lithauischen, Gotischen und Deutschen, dat uit de jaren 1833-52 stamt. Het vraagstuk van de Indo-europeërs breidde zich vlug uit van de taalkunde naar het probleem van het woongebied der volkeren die Indo-europese talen spraken en schreven, zonder dat de geleerden het eens konden worden over het vertrekpunt en de datering van deze verspreiding. Het zou interessant zijn dit probleem te bestuderen: men zou dan vaststellen dat op dit vlak de grootste verwarring heerst. Wat zeker is: overal waar de Indo-europeërs zich vestigden, overvleugelden ze de bevolking die al in dat gebied woonde, en onderwierpen ze hen (de Dravida’s in Indië b.v.).
Overal, zowel in Europa ais in Azië, vormden ze de twee overheersende kasten, die de geestelijken en die der strijders of ridders.
Om naar Herman Wirth te rug te keren, stellen we vast dat hij, al zat hij dan min of meer in de lijn van Bachofen, de theoreticus van het matriarchaat, toch niet afkerig was van de Odinistische mythologie, die hij uit de graffiti op de rotswanden van Noord-Europa meende te mogen afleiden en die hij poogde in te voegen in zijn konstrukties omtrent een matriarchale godsdienst. Ook de runen horen daar ergens bij, zodat men in zijn theorieën een soort mythisch-godsdienstig synkretisme mag zien, waarvan het “Mutter Erde”-begrip het sluitstuk is. Het is onbetwistbaar (de klassieke prehistorie bévestigt het ons) dat er in het Atlantisch Europa van het derde millenium een “megalitische” godsdienst bestond, met aanbidden van een vruchtbaarheidsgodin, die tegelijk de begrafenis-riten voorzat. Maar even zeker is dat er sinds het neoliticum (wellicht zelfs sinds het paleolitieum) een verering van de vrouwelijke godheid bestond: dit wordt bevestigd door talrijke beelden, als de “Venus” van Savignano (Italië), Gargarino (USSR) en Willendorff (Oostenrijk); of door de vrouwenkoppen van Dolmi Vestaniee (Tsjeehoslovakije) en Brassempuy (Frankrijk), wat ons zéker tot zowat 30.000 jaren vóór onze tijdrekening terugvoert.
Wirth’s onderzoeken waren vooral op Noord-Europa gericht, zoals zijn reizen uit 1935-36 aantonen. Wij moeten er, om met de klassieke prehistorici te spreken, uit besluiten dat zijn onderzoek vooral het zogenaamd mesoliticum betrof, dat aanvangt rond 10.000 v66r onze jaartelling en zich uitstrekt over het neoliticum en de twee metaaltijdperken, tot de eerste eeuwen van onze jaartelling, voor de kerstening van Noord-Europa.
Volgens de primordiale Traditie moet er echter, vóór die tijd, een ander, veel zachter klimaat geheerst hebben, toen Groenland en Spitzbergen groene en vruchtbare gebieden waren , (de naam Groenland wijst er op!). Hoe dit tijdperk situeren ? Laat ons het antwoord afwachten van de geologen, de prehistorici of de historici van de primordiale Traditie. Immers, in welke periode van het Pleistoceen de groene velden van het aloude Ultima Thule situeren ? Wie weet gaat het om een vrij recente periode, uit het zesde tot derde milennium vóór onze jaartelling, en die men in de geologie de Atlantische periode noemt. Toen was het legendarische Mu-gebied allang, rond 12.500 of 12.000 jaar voor onze jaartelling, in de golven verdwenen (4). Waarschijnlijk verdween, tijdens dezelfde natuurramp, Atlantis, dat andere hypothetische land .
Wat er ook van zij, doorheen heel zijn lange loopbaan heeft Wirth niet opgehouden, zijn studies over Europa’s voorgeschiedenis voort te zetten, daarbij vooral de aandacht vestigend op de paleo-epigrafie.
In zijn speurtocht naar al wat de voorhistorische Moeder Aarde-kultus kan bevestigen, heeft hij het onmetelijk belang onderstreept van de pre-Indo-europese beschaving voor het kultureelleven én de religie in Europa. Het magisch-religieuze leven in die periode hield hem voortdurend bezig, en hij bewees dat vóór de stroom Indogermaanse veroveraars, die over heel de antieke wereld van de Atlantische oceaan tot het Nabije- en Verre-Oosten neerstortte, er hier reeds mensen leefden die zich even zeer als de nieuwkomers om geestelijke zaken bekommerden.
Mogelijk zijn Wirth’s werken getekend door een zeker dilettantisme, maar loopt niet iedereen die zich in de kronkelingen van ons oudste verleden waagt, dit risiko ? Hoeveel bewonderaars van dat geheimzinnig verleden goochelen niet met min of meer fantaisistische gevolgtrekkingen en benaderingen, zich tegelijk als “gezaghebbend” voordoend ? Zij weten, wat u, de lezer, niet weet; zij zijn ingewijd en u bent het niet. Zij halen hun ‘wetenschap’, rechtstreeks of onrechtstreeks, bij een of ndere Tibetaanse monnik, of bij een of andere, min of meer geheimzinnige Goeroe, die de sleutel tot een eeuwenoud mysterie bezit…
Laat ons maar toegeven: hoeveel pretentieuze domheden vinden we niet onder de dekmantel van wat onze vrienden van de Traditie, de ‘Primordiale Traditie’ noemen ? René Guénon en Julius Evola hebben zich veel moeite getroost, de kwakzalvers van de – zogezegd – traditionele wetenschappen te ontmaskeren. Desondanks lopen ze nog rond en staan ze voortdurend klaar, u om het even welke valse ‘revelatie’ of welk produkt van hun op hol geslagen verbeelding ook aan te smeren …
Moeten we Herman Wirth bij de kwakzalvers van de Traditie onderbrengen ? Wij zijn overtuigd van niet, maar wél dienen we met omzichtigheid de resultaten van zijn onderzoekingen te beschouwen.
Zo heeft hij zich vér in de zogenaamde Ura Linda-kroniek gewaagd. Is ze een vervalsing, een louter literaire fantasie in de aard van de “Ossian-liederen” ? Is het een laattijdige kompilatie van een mondelinge traditie, ais de “Kalewala” ? De vraag blijft gesteld.
Vergeten we anderzijds ni et dat hij zolang hij persona grata was bij Ahnenerbe, ais groot geleerde op het vlak van de prehistorie werd beschouwd; en dat hij na zijn ongenade, zelfs het recht verbeurde les te geven en in het openbaar te spreken.
Jean Beelen schreef: “De onmetelijke verdienste van Prof. Wirth ligt erin, de oerperiode van het geschrift en de symboliek te hebben dóórgelicht en te hebben bewezen dat de mensen uit die tijd een kosmisch aanvoelen hadden dat aan de basis lag van een volkse godsdienst”. Dat is al héél wat en zo moeten we wei rekening houd en met al wat hij deed, en al wat hij schreef, zelfs al blijven we vrij te redetwisten over zijn – onbetwistbaar belangrijke – aanbreng inzake de voorgeschiedenis van de Westerse wereld.
Marc. EEMANS
(Vert. Roeland Raes)
(1) Het boek van Sebottendorf is niet te verwarren met dat van Dietrich Bronder dat eveneens de titel “Bevor Hitler kam” draagt (Hans Pfeiffer-Verlag, Hannover, 1964). Het essay van R.H. Phelps “Before Hitler came”. Thule Society and German Order” (in het Journal of Modern History, 1963) is géén vertaling maar een zelfstandige studie.
(2) Over Herman Wirth en het aktivisme, over Herman Wirth en het Vlaams-nationalisme, is het laatste woord nog niet gezegd. Willemsen en Elias vermelden hem even in de rand. Heel wat meer gegevens vindt men in een studie van Dr. Lammert Buning over Wirth, verschenen in Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen, 3/74.
(3) In feite medegesticht, samen met Hermann Reischle, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Babel, Georg Ebrecht, Erwin Metzner en Richard Hintmann.
(4) Zie James Churchward: “Mu, le continent perdu.”
00:05 Publié dans archéologie, Révolution conservatrice, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : anthropologie, archéologie, préhistoire, protohistoire, histoire, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, pays-bas | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 12 juillet 2011
Interview with "New Antaios"
Interview with "New Antaios"
Who are you? What’s the main purpose of your “New-Antaios” project? And why do you refer to the mythological figure of Antaios? Is it a revival of Jünger’s and Eliade’s Antaios or an English counterpart of the former Antaios journal of the Belgian novelist Christopher Gérard?
I was born in Agram (a German name for the city of Zagreb) in Croatia just over 42 years ago. I have lived in Zagreb during the times while my country was occupied by Yugoslav communist regime led by dictator Josip Broz Tito. There I have studied Political Sciences at the University of Zagreb and later on Philosophy and Psychology at Hrvatski Studiji, University of Zagreb. I have studied as well at Universities in Scandinavia, United Kingdom and Germany. I am coming from a family which is of an ethnic German heritage.
Antaios is uniting Earth and Sea, soil and water without whom both there is no life. Antaios father was Poseidon, the God of Sea and mother Gaia of the Earth. Antaios or Antaeus in Greek means as well ‘’against’’ so in this way ‘’The New Antaios’’ is in cultural and philosophical terms set to make an intellectual bulwark against that what is destroying Our European culture, tradition, heritage, folklore and with that ultimately our roots.
Journal ‘’The New Antaios’’ is the continuation of the original ‘’Antaios’’ Journal of Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger so we can say it is a revival albeit the Journal will/is as well reflecting on all that is happening in these postmodern times. Hence Journal represents what I call ‘’Postmodern European thought’’ and as such serves primarily as an outlet for the postmodern philosophers and thinkers.
I do respect and highly admire Christopher Gerard and his work on Antaios in years from years 1992 to 2001. Like Gerard I dislike New Age teachings and don’t have any interest in TraditionalistSchool. The New Antaios is made of four sections which are making the whole Journal. First part is ‘’Plethon’’ the name I gave after the Byzantine Hellenistic philosopher George Gemistos Plethon and articles in that section are related to Hellenism, Heathenism in a scholarly way. Contributions will be made as well by certain authors from Asatru background. Heathenism and Heithni comes from the Old Norse word heiðni which was used to describe the pre-Christian spiritual beliefs and practices of the Northern European peoples. The word Heithinn (or Heathen) comes from the Old Norse word heiðinn, an adjective to describe the ideals of Heithni (ex. Heithinn ethics - those ethics which conform to Heithni), or as a noun to describe those who live by the ethic and world-view of Heithni (ex. He is Heithinn, those people are Heithnir [plural]). Heiðni also means 'high, pure, clear' in Icelandic language. Word also describes person who is a dweller in place in the nature. Postmodern Heathens are those people who are reviving and revitalizing the tradition through serious study, research and dedication combined with the worship of the Gods and Goddesses or just simply in a way of their thinking without the ritual worship part. Personally I am keen of combining the two in a proper and balanced way. Second section is ‘’Aesthetic Vedanta’’ named after the book by Swami Bhaktivedanta Tripurari Maharaja, Western teacher of ancient tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Aesthetic Vedanta section deals with Hindutva, Hinduism,Vaishnavism and Gaudiya Vaishnavism exclusively. Third section is ‘’Suncovrat’’ a Croatian archaic word for the Solstice and deals with pre-Christian cultures which existed prior to Christianization of what makes nowadays Republic of Croatia. Fourth section is the main section of the Antaios Journal.
I would further like to point out that Christopher Gerard has no input whatsoever and isn’t in any way associated or affiliated with this new Journal. That is why the journal has prefix ‘’The New’’ to clearly mark difference with previous two journals. As far as I know Gerard’s Journal ceased to exist just on the turn of the century hence prefix ‘’The New’’ is completely appropriate here. While it will preserve and retain the original idea and concept with due respect to previous editors and directors of the Journal, it will be updated with short blog style texts, proper academic articles and essays which reflect on and take a critical eye of current state of affairs in different areas of philosophy, politics, culture, art, tradition, science and these postmodern times .
What was the maturation process of your worldview? Has it to do with Croatian politics or not?
I would say that I have spiritual and political Weltanschauung complementing each other. I was brought up in a family whose background is Christian albeit my late grandfather and my late father were both reading authors like Nietzsche and Jünger and considere themselves to be Pagans. I was brought up on stories from ancient Greece and Old Norse and Germanic tales whom my friends in school didn’t even hear about. My own father was a Heathen. He wrote small and up until now unpublished treatise on what he calls ‘’Raan’’. In this book Raan is knowledge of the Gods and Goddesses who once in previous Yugas did visit our planet. In this work he is influenced by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophy.
After spending years at the University in Croatia studying Political sciences in Zagreb I went to become a monk in Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. The reason for that was again in the Family. During the mid to late 80es my family got interested in Gaudiya Vaishnavism so I started reading and studying different books of Vedic knowledge like Upanishads, Puranas and Bhagavad Gita. I have discovered in mid 90es about Traditionalist School, Rene Guenon and Julius Evola. In years to come I have been reading and studying about diverse cultures, traditions of Europe and parallel with that I got initiated in the Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism while travelling to one of my spiritual pilgrimages to India.
Hence as a result, my own spiritual belief system would be Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism, while I permanently study and read about Indo-European beliefs of our ancestors, Ostrogothic pre-Christian beliefs, Old Norse, Hellenic and Germanic pre-Christian belief systems and Mithraism. Vedic knowledge in my opinion is very important key to unlock many secrets of the European tradition itself. In line with that I very much admire Hindutva writers such as Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup, Indian historian Bal Gangadhar Tilak , contemporary scholar from Belgium Dr. Koenraad Elst as well as Alain Danielou who are all big influence. Next influence would be primarily my own teacher Sri Ananta das Babaji Maharaja by whom I was directly initiated in Parivar or Traditional line which goes back many centuries ago, then authors such as: Sri Kunjabihari das Babaji Maharaja (who is the direct teacher of my own teacher Ananta das Babaji Maharaja), Kundali das, Binode Bihari das Babaji and Sripad Bhaktivedanta Tripurari Swami Maharaja whose certain books and teachings are in my opinion the Gaudiya Vaishnava answer to Traditionalist school. There should be veneration of our ancestors together with the firm belief in divine origins of Our Ancestral lines, veneration of Nature and veneration of the Gods and Goddesses which are part of our European Identity. Perhaps it would be the best to quote here another great influence of mine, Dominique Venner: ''To live according to tradition is to conform to the ideal that incarnates, to cultivate excellence according to its standard, to rediscover its roots, to transmit its heritage, to be in solidarity with the people who uphold it. ''
Croatian politics were influential to my worldview and perhaps it would be better to give a bit of background explanation from the not so well known Croatian history. Certain people would like such knowledge to remain hidden as such. In my opinion Croatian people have a unique position in Europe. There are people who label Croatia Western Balkans which is a complete nonsense. According to what I was reading from diverse sources Croats aren’t only just Slavs and are mixture of Slavenized Germanic tribes, Celtic tribes, Illyrians, ancient Romans, ancient Greeks and Indo-Persians. Over the span of more than half a century Croat academics and researchers who were proclaiming such theories were executed or ‘’disappeared’’. Persecutions started in times of the monarchist Yugoslavia up to late 80es of 20th century in the communist regime. Names like Haraqwati and Haraxvati which paleographic expert Dr. Kalyanaraman has found were names of the tribes, etnonymes which clearly show how early we can find about Croatian origins. Places where such names were found were part of Bharata Varsha or what is today India. Archaeologists have found along names emblems and coats of arms which look very much similar to Croatian coat of arms with the twenty - five field "chessboard". In a similar way the remnants and artefacts were also found when those tribes have moved from what is today India to Persia and those names can be found in 6th century before Christ in places like Bagistan and Persepolis and also with ancient peoples like Hurrwuhé. Ancestors of today’s Croats were worshippers of Saraswati Goddess of Vedic India (Goddess of learning, arts and music) and from her name comes originally name Hrvati. Croats are therefore known as Hrvati, Haravaitii, Arachosians or Sarasvatians, descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the Harauti province & the Haravaiti or the Sarasvati River. The recent hravati /hrvati [sic] hence comes from haraxvaiti and earlier spelt as haraquati (arachotos, arachosia, araxes). Sarasvati is the river and Arachosia being the region." Their mention is as well on the legendary inscriptions of Darius the Great. Early Croatian pre-Christian religion was derived from primordial Persian Sun-worship. Even the Croatian word for tie is kravat(a) which is again another connecting word.
Furthermore, the name of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, is related to the Zagros mountain range of Iran. The Dinara mountains in Dalmatia may be connected to Mount Dinar (Dene) of Iran. When the tribes came to what is nowadays Croatia they have mingled with the numerous local Slavic (or Slavenized Germanic tribes) tribes and adopted the Slavic language from them. Meanwhile after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire Croats organized the local Slavs into a state and gave them their national name. Before the invasion of the Avars ca. 560 the White or Western Croats created along with the Antes a great state extending north of the Carpathians from the upper Elbe to the upper Dniester. (35: Niederle, 263-266; Dvornik, The Slavs, 277-297) R. Heinzel is of the opinion that the Carpathians of the old Germanic Hervarsaga took their name from the Croats who called them the Harvate mountains i.e. Croatian mountains. (36: Heinzel, 499; Dvornik, op. cit., 284, sq.)" (Mandic 1970, Ch.1)
There are similarities in folklore as well. "There are old Croatian customs and national poems that have been cited as evidencing lingering traces of the fire and sun worship of the Persians. Fire, the essence of human origin, the sun, and the great boiling cauldron around which the warriors spring in the age old kolo or circle dance, all these are ingredients in the national lore of the Croatian nation. The Croat vilas or fairy witches resemble the peris of Iranian mythology. Then there is the legendary Sviatozov, the personification of strength, a being almost too huge for the earth to bear. He is strongly reminiscent of the "elephant-bodied" Rustum of Persian legend." (Guldescu 1964, pt.1.II) "It should be noted that only the thesis of the Iranian origin of the Croats can explain the name "Horvath", the title of a Croat dignitary Banus, the names "White" and "Red Croatian", and the Bogumile phenomenon (like Cathars in Occitania). According to this theory, the Croats were a branch of the Caucasian Iranians, who lived somewhere in the western Caucasus during the era of the Roman Emperors. The Caucasian Anten were another branch of this group." (Dobrovich 1963)
Research shows clearly everything what I have written and quoted above to be the truth although some oppose that theory as they want to preserve artificial Panslavism , idea of Yugosphere ( the idea for the 3rd united Yugoslavia without Slovenia and with Albania) under the guise of ‘’Western Balkans’’. In Croatian language there is an excellent word I really like: ‘’Samosvojnost’’. Samosvojnost means Identity in Croatian language. In my opinion Croatian identity should and must be preserved only through the independent republic of Croatia or as it is now. Hence Croatia does not need any new unions. Friendship yes, but union definitely not.
Serbia on the other hand would like to establish themselves as a regional leader. They play with naive Croatian government and Croatian president Josipović while behind their back they lobby in EU to make what was once war in ex-Yugoslavia look as a ‘’civil war’’ and accuse Croatia who were defending themselves . They do have some allies and friends in Europe who would like to see them as the leaders in the region. Those allies on the other hand actually don’t consider Serbia as a friend but as a tool for their own means and nothing else. It is a travesty of justice to see Croatian generals such as Gotovina and Markač to be sitting in Hague so just that Croatia can get a green light for EU so that bureaurocrats in EU they can say that ‘’all sides’’ were equally responsible. I would like to ask the question then. What about the people and country of Croatia which was invaded, whose homes are burned and destroyed? According to that ‘’theory’’ Croatians should not have been defending themselves as they were supposed just to sit and wait to be erased from the face of this planet.
Croatia has been suffering since demise of Austria-Hungary. It wasn’t good for Croatians either to be in any previous unions but union with Serbs has proven to be so far the worst one. Union with Austria-Hungary was far from perfect but at least we were in a monarchy which had culture and tradition. Croatian people don’t need anything anymore other than their own independence and peace with the neighbouring nations.
How the time is passing by I am less and less interested in Croatian politics. As a result I won’t be writing in Croatian language anymore since there is no purpose for it. I will rather use and invest my energy, effort and time for something I think will yield certain results than to write constantly for something what will anyway reach just a handful of people or just completely wither away. I have learned that from an example of the members of the ‘’Croatian Historical Revolution’’. Over the years I have read articles by leading Croatian intellectuals and scholars such as Dr. Tomislav Sunić then Dr. Jure Georges Vujić, prof. Amir Riđanović, prof. Petar Bujas (all members of Croatian group similar to G.R.E.C.E. – Arhelinea – www.arhelinea.com ) Dr. Zoran Kravar, then Croat republican conservatives such as: Tomislav Jonjić, Mario Marcos Ostojić, Hrvoje Hitrec, Croatian scientists such as : Dr. Vitomir Belaj, prof. Tomo Vinšćak, Dr. Radoslav Katičić, and prof. Mario Kopić and Dr. Hrvoje Lorković (of whom we can’t hear these days what is a real tragedy since Dr. Lorković is one of Croatian important intellectuals). Croatians should be happy to have such giants of free thinking yet many in Croatia don’t even know about some of them. That is for me completely bizarre. If one is carefully reading articles and books by above mentioned intellectuals and scholars one can only see that many of them are actually disillusioned with the current state of Croatia altogether. That is evident even from their articles. Hence as a result of that Zoran Kravar is not interested in any kind of politics neither he wants to be or get involved (yet he is one of authorities on Ernst Jünger in Croatia) same is with prof. Tomo Vinšćak as well, while others like Mario Kopić and Dr. Tom Sunić are publishing their new books outside of Croatia because there is hardly any interest in their ideas in Croatia. It seems that Dr. Jure Georges Vujić will publish his new books as well outside of Croatia. That is unavoidable since Croatians are lethargic in finding new solutions in political dialogue or any kind of new political ideas. They would rather stick to something what is completely falling apart while thinking that ‘’it would get better’’. I have a best friend in Croatia whose political ideas are in minority and while he wants betterment in any spheres of Croatian life (including politics and his fight against corruption) he doesn’t have as much support as he actually would and should get. It is the apathy and lethargy which are deeply rooted in certain parts of Croatian nation (thankfully not all of it) with its roots in the fear of change and political and historical lower self-esteem (which is really uncalled for, since Croats have such rich history, tradition and culture of whom they should be absolutely proud of) . The question they often ask themselves is: ‘’ What would happen if things change? ‘’ and because of constantly repeating that question they are indeed unable to make any significant change. I believe firmly that in the forthcoming parliamentary elections Croats will elect again some party or coalition of parties which will not bring nothing new to already stagnating Croatian political scene. In the right as well as left and centre there is nobody who could potentially have a quality for the deep changes Croatia needs desperately. In the right side of spectrum and as well on centre and left one can just see political opportunists in Croatia who long for their seat in parliament (called Sabor in Croatia) or certain position. That is their goal before anything else I am afraid, of course my humble bow to those politicians who aren’t like that and are in significant, significant minority.
My own political interests nowadays evolve around Eurocontinentalism and European Identitarian Communitarianism. Even though I do speak Croatian language I consider myself first and foremost an ethnic German with Prussian mentality, after that I am an European.
Eurocontinentalism in this case represents strong continental Europe which stands between USA and Great Britain on one and Russia on the other side. The question of Europe here is not just a matter a blood; it is spiritual, historical and cultural phenomenon.
This further quote actually explains some of my thinking on the matter: ‘’Implicit in this view is the assumption that the body is inseparable from the spirit animating it, that biological difference, as a distinct vitality, is another form of spiritual difference, and that the significance of such differences (given that man is a spiritual being, not merely an animal) is best seen in terms of culture and history rather than nineteenth-century biological science. American "white racialists" with their materialist-technical conceptions of race actually diminish the significance of the Racial Question by reducing it to a simple matter of genes, biology, equations....’’ ( Mladikov – The Phora Forum)
Dominique Venner is in my opinion the greatest influence for the Eurocontinentalism and my own political Weltanschauung with his writings, articles and books. In Croatia some of his books are available as well.
His thoughts describe the best what I think further:
‘’ The idea that is made of love is no more frivolous than the tragic sense of history that characterizes the European spirit. It defines the civilization, its immanent spirit, and each person’s sense of life, in the same way the idea shapes one’s work. Is the sole point of work to make money, as they believe across the Atlantic, or, besides ensuring a just return, is it to realize oneself in a job well done, even in such apparently trivial things as keeping one’s house. This idea urged our ancestors to create beauty in their most humble and most lofty efforts. To be conscious of the idea is to give a metaphysical sense to “memory.”
To cultivate our “memory,” to transmit it in a living way to our children, to contemplate the ordeals that history has imposed on us–this is requisite to any renaissance. Faced with the unprecedented challenges that the catastrophes of the twentieth century have imposed on us and the terrible demoralization it has fostered, we will discover in the reconquest of our racial “memory” the way to respond to these challenges, which were unknown to our ancestors, who lived in a stable, strong, well-defended world.
The consciousness of belonging to Europe, of Europeanness, is far older than the modern concept of Europe. It is apparent under the successive names of Hellenism, Celticness, Romanism, the Frankish Empire, or Christianity. Seen as an immemorial tradition, Europe is the product of a multi-millennial community of culture deriving its distinctness and unity from its constitutive peoples and a spiritual heritage whose supreme expression is the Homeric poems. ‘’
To read further perhaps I would recommend this article (and as well all other articles by Dominique Venner) : http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/06/europe-and-europeanness/#more-881
What were your main sources of inspiration?
I have mentioned some of them above. I would say that Ernst Jünger, Dominique Venner and Nicolás Gómez Dávila are the most significant and important influence for me personally simply because they complement each other perfectly and in my own opinion they represent the true European Tradition which Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Alain Danielou and Koenraad Elst represent in Hindu Tradition. Apart from them other authors, thinkers and philosophers I would say first of all I feel especially close regarding ideas and Weltanschauung are : Croatian thinkers and members of the ‘’Croatian Historical Revolution’’, Classical philosophers such as : Emperor Julian the Apostate, Porphyry, Celsus, Platonis Sallustius, Libanius, Julius Firmicus Maternus, Iamblichus, Gemistus Pletho(n) and other such philosophers, Erik von von Kuehnelt - Leddihn, Croatian philosopher prof. Mario Kopić, prof. Robert Steuckers, certain ideas of Alain de Benoist, certain ideas of Dr. Guillaume Faye, Dr. Georges Dumezil, Dr. Jan Assmann, Mircea Eliade, Emile Cioran, Alain Danielou, German greatest living poet Rolf Schilling, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, German Romanticism period authors and artists, Felix Dahn, Antoine Saint du Exupery, certain ideas of Julius Evola, Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt, composers Arvo Part and Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, postmodern musical projects such as Triarii, Arditi, In Slaughter Natives and new project Winglord, artists such as Ludwig Fahrenkrog, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Fidus, Caspar David Friedrich, Hermann Hendrich, Franz von Stuck, Carl Larsson, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Jean Béraud and others.
Who are the main Croatian thinkers according to you and that are completely ignored in the rest of the world? How could we discover them?
Main and most influential Croatian thinkers were: Dr. Milan von Šufflay, Dr. Ivo Pilar, Dr. Vinko Krišković, Dr. Filip Lukas, Dr. Julije (Julius) von Makanec, Dr. Stjepan Buć and authors involved with journal ‘’Spremnost’’ : prof. Tias Mortigjija, Dr. Milivoj Magdić, Dr. Ante Ciliga & Dr. Vilko Rieger (Dr. George W. Cesarich) . Influential are also early works of prof. Ivan Oršanić, Dr. Ivo Korsky, then author Ivan Softa (Croatian Knut Hamsun), national poet Jerko Skračić and a few others. It is very hard for somebody in Europe to discover them as their works were burned, destroyed and left to be forgotten by Yugoslavian and Serbian communist regime. Back in 1970es of 20th century for just reading the works of these authors, philosophers and thinkers one could get a lengthy prison term and that would be of course if you did find their books somewhere. I am collecting their works wherever I can find them and that is in most cases extremely hard and on top of that some of their books command very high prices. Situation is not like with authors of Conservative Revolution whose works remain saved and translated to many languages now. Most of the above mentioned people were brutally murdered by either Serbian Monarchist regime who ruled the first Yugoslavia or by communist regime who ruled Yugoslavia and occupied Croatia after the year 1945.
At this point in time there is no translated literature in any of other languages except the book ‘’Southslav question’’ written by Dr. Ivo Pilar (under pseudonym Dr. Leon v. Südland) which was printed at the beginning of the 20th century in Vienna originally in German language. Book was never reprinted again either in German or English (or any other foreign language) and was translated in Croatian language and has since been in print only twice. Copies of both editions are virtually impossible to find. Books of other authors are not being reprinted at all. I really don’t know if that is because of the economic crisis in Croatia since many members of Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) turned out to be crooks and thieves who were stealing money from their own country and country’s resources. It has been going on like that for a long time and no government (even the coalition of liberals and social democrats which lasted for 4 years) didn’t make situation any better or because there is no interest in those books and those authors at all. It is partially because of many Croatians were killed and murdered from 1944 to early 1950es by communist regime (and in years after that up to 1990 just prior to war in Croatia) and because of the mentality which became a norm since 1918, after Croats lost the war as part of Austria-Hungary. Dr. Ivo Pilar did warn Croatians about those kinds of problems especially in two of his books. One of those books was above mentioned ‘’Southslav question’’.
I am afraid that the only way to discover them will be through book I am currently writing and subsequently I will translate some of the most important works by Šufflay, Pilar, Lukas, Krišković, Makanec, Mortigjija and Magdić. I will start with works of Dr. Ivo Pilar and Dr. Milivoj Magdić whose works I am collecting at the present time. I am putting together Dr. Milivoj Magdić’s and dr. Ivo Pilar’s articles and smaller important works and will include one very informative article about Milivoj Magdić’s life done by one Croatian historian. Dr. Pilar’s book ‘’Southslav question’’ will be most likely the first one to surface followed by Dr. Magdić’s collected works. It is very interesting to mention that Dr. Ivo Pilar and Dr. Milivoj Magdić had both the biggest private libraries in the city of Zagreb and most likely in Croatia at that time. I have heard that currently Alain de Benoist has one of the biggest private libraries.
So we can talk about a genuine Croatian “Conservative Revolution”?
Croatian Historical Revolution was a German Conservative Revolution’s and France’s Ordre Nouveau’s counterpart. It strikes me how there wasn’t anybody in Croatia trying to compare German Conservative Revolution with all these authors we have had. My guess is that certain levels of academia in Croatia have some sort of inferiority complex and lower self-esteem. Except post modern Croatian intellectuals and academics I have mentioned above (and most in this group were living, studying and teaching for some time outside of Croatia) other Croatian intellectuals constantly behave in a way which has ruined indescribably reputation of Croatia. Members of Croatian Historical revolution were totally opposite. Partially that is because they grew up in Austria- Hungary and partially because up until year 1918 influence of Balkan ‘’culture’’ wasn’t predominant in Croatia and our gene pool wasn’t almost destroyed as it is the case today (holocaust of Croats and ethnic Germans from years 1944 -1950es). Most of the people who today want any kind of communism to be back in Croatia are leftovers of previous regime and they are not even Croats by their genes or in spirit.
Members of CHR (Croatian Historical Revolution) have had experience with different ideologies and transformations as the ones in Germany. They rallied for the Croatia as an integral part of Europe and how some of them called it at the time ‘’Bieli Zapad’’ (White West). Like authors in German counterpart they have produced diverse works such as philosophical treatises, political journalism, manifestoes which have outlined their ideas for the transformation of Croatia and role of Croatia in Central Europe and Europe altogether. They were strongly opposing liberalism and even liberal democracy and they have rejected despiritualization and commercial culture. They advocated new conservative thought which was inspired by Croatian national patriotism. I find their ideal very much connected with ideals of German Conservative Revolution members and nowadays with prof. Dominique Venner.
How could we connect Croatian authors with their other European counterparts? Who are the Croatian authors that should be read together, beyond every language barrier?
My opinion is that all the works of the above mentioned members of the Croatian Historical revolution are very much worth exploring, studying and reading. They all do come highly recommended albeit due to totalitarian and primitive backwards communist regime headed by Josip Broz Tito and his blind followers lots of original writings are lost , destroyed or are very rare to that extent that only Croatian National Library may have only one copy or original of each of the original works of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution. None of those works were translated in any languages (as I have mentioned above) except Dr. Pilar’s ‘’Southslav question’’ which was originally written in German and then translated to Croatian. Dr. Ivo Pilar was speaking and writing as Dr. Milan v. Šufflay and many other members of CHR, in several languages. In those times after the I WW it was quite normal for people of Croatia to speak German as a second and in many cases as their mother language together with Croatian language. Hopefully in time through my own ‘’ Hyperborea Press’’ which is the part of Somnium Media all the main works of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution will surface and be translated in English language. As always one has to be realistic, as with any of such efforts good will isn’t enough, I will have to invest money and time into this project in a balanced manner.
Do you see original viewpoints or bias by these Croatian authors that you cannot find back in the works of their other European counterparts?
I know that I risk now sounding a bit vague but most of their viewpoints are similar or identical with their German and French counterparts, although one of their main focal points or focus was naturally fight against the repressive Serbian monarchist regime and its imperialistic hegemony. I have written recently some articles about this topic. I believe that I will answer much broader to this question in my book about Croatian Historical Revolution.
What are your projects for the near future?
The New Antaios Journal’s further development is my priority and alongside with TNAJ there is ‘’Eurocontinentalism Journal’’ and my own ‘’Somnium Media’’ website which offers music, merchandise and books which are serving as an alternative to world of mass consumerism we live in. Great help in that effort is my dear friend mr. Zvonimir Tosic who is an editor in chief and managing webmaster of The New Antaios Journal and Somnium websites. The New Antaios and Eurocontinentalism Journal will both have some interesting interviews and articles in months to come. Somnium Media imprint ‘’Hyperborea Press’’ will publish most significant works of members of the Croatian Historical revolution and hopefully some works by Nicolas Gomez Davila.
Further related to ‘’Hyperborea Press’’ I have plans for the three books and three translations. First one is above already mentioned book about Croatian Historical Revolution and its members and it will be an overview of the significance of Croatian Historical Revolution and works of its members and authors not only for Croatia but for Europe and European thought as well. Another book is ‘’ Gaudiya Vaishnavism - The Living and Timeless Tradition ‘’ which will explain how important Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism is (a belief in Hinduism) not only for Hinduism but for the resurgence of Indo – European thought in general. I know that Dr. Alexander Jacob has written extensively on the topic of resurgence of Indo-European thought but his emphasis is not like in authors such as Georges Dumezil , Jan de Vries, or Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel and Alain Danielou in Hinduism or ancestral pre-christian beliefs. Rather he uses as an example for restoration of Indo –European thought resurgence of European Medieval Christian noble spirit of ‘’archaic and brave’’ and Prussian noble spirit. In my own opinion the best starting point for such study would be a Saxon epic ‘’Heliand’’.
Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnava thought in this book will serve as an alternative for the Traditionalist thought which was espoused by Guenon, Schuon and other Traditionalists. Third book deals with Croatian pre-Christian and pre-Slavic legends and it delves in times of the heroic Croatian past. I have contacted one still living Croatian author who gave me information on stories and its characters which obviously have roots in pre-Christian and pre-Slavic times of Croatia. It is quite a work and a huge challenge to reconstruct those tales and to find out and connect certain characters. Some shortened versions of those stories I will be presenting at certain Storytelling Fairs in Ireland during the summer. Three translations will be my most likely first translation work on the new book by Dr. Jure Georges Vujic (which will be his first book in English language) followed by translations of two books of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution, Dr. Ivo Pilar’s ‘’Southslav question’’ and Dr. Milivoj Magdić’s best and collected works complete with my own explanations and commentaries. I will also continue writing for Brett Stevens's Journal on line www.amerika.org which is with Europa Synergon one of the most interesting journals to be found on line.
Thank you very much Robert for the opportunity you gave me with this interview and as well thank you for your influence on my own thought which is indispensable and very important. I would also like to thank to anybody who has read this interview and found it interesting or just thought provoking.
(interview taken by Robert Steuckers, late spring 2011).
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vendredi, 03 juin 2011
Urkultur 15: Moeller van den Bruck, conservadurismo revolucionario
Ex: http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/
URKULTUR Nº 15.
MOELLER VAN DEN BRUCK:
CONSERVADURISMO REVOLUCIONARIO.
REVISTA ELECTRÓNICA:
Enlace con issuu.com
SUMARIO.
Editorial.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck y la Nouvelle Droite
Sebastian J. Lorenz
Moeller van den Bruck: un rebelde conservador
Luca Leonello Rimbotti
Moeller van den Bruck: ¿un “precursor póstumo”?
Denis Goedel
Moeller y Dostoievski
Robert Steuckers
Moeller y la Kulturpessimismus de Weimar
Ferran Gallego
Moeller y los Jungkonservativen
Erik Norling
Moeller y Spengler
Ernesto Milá
Moeller y la Konservative Revolution
Keith Bullivant
Moeller van den Bruck
Alain de Benoist
00:10 Publié dans Nouvelle Droite, Révolution conservatrice, Revue | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : revue, allemagne, révolution conservatrice, weimar, années 20, philosophie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 31 mai 2011
Wertvollzug
WertvollzugCarl Schmitt, Die Tyrannei der Werte, 1960.
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : carl schmitt, philosophie, théorie politique, sciences politiques, politologie, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 28 mai 2011
Gottfried Benn
Gottfried Benn in Interview (1956)
Gottfried Benn liest aus "Kunst und Drittes Reich"
00:05 Publié dans Littérature, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : allemagne, littérature, lettres, lettrs allemandes, littérature allemande, gottfried benn, révolution conservatrice, immigration intérieure, années 20, années 30, années 40, années 50 | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 21 mai 2011
Evola e il mondo di lingua tedesca
Evola e il mondo di lingua tedesca
Alberto Lombardo
Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/
La Germania e in genere il mondo di cultura tedesca ebbero per Evola un’importanza centrale. Sin da giovanissimo questi apprese il tedesco per avvicinarsi alle opere della filosofia idealistica; la sua dottrina filosofica deve molto all’idealismo, ma ancor più a Nietzsche, Weininger e Spengler. Nel 1933 compì il suo primo viaggio in Austria ; per tutti gli Anni ’30 e ’40 continuò a tenersi aggiornato leggendo saggî scientifici in lingua tedesca sui diversi argomenti dei quali si occupava: dalla romanità antica (Altheim) alla preistoria (Wirth, Günther), dall’alchimia (Böhme) alle razze (Clauß, ancora Günther), dalla teoria politica (Spann, Heinrich) all’economia (Sombart) e via dicendo. In generale, considerando gli apparati di note, i riferimenti culturali e in un bilancio che tenga conto di tutti gli apporti non mi sembra affatto di esagerare sostenendo che il peso degli studi pubblicati in tedesco sia nell’opera complessiva di Evola almeno pari a quello di quelli italiani.
Tutto questo è già assai indicativo dell’influenza della cultura tedesca sull’opera di Evola. Vanno aggiunti però altri dati: richiamando qui quanto accennato in sede biografica nel capitolo primo, ricordo i lunghi soggiorni di Evola in Austria e Germania, le numerose conferenze ivi tenute, i rapporti con esponenti della tradizione aristocratica e conservatrice mitteleuropea e della Konservative Revolution etc . Inoltre nei paesi di lingua tedesca Evola godette, almeno sino alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale, di una notorietà diversa da quella che ebbe in Italia, poiché vi fu accolto quasi come l’esponente di una particolare corrente di pensiero italiana, e ciò sin dal 1933, anno della pubblicazione di Heidnischer Imperialismus . Questo il giudizio in merito di Adriano Romualdi: «L’azione di Evola in Germania non fu politica, anche se contribuì a dissipare molti equivoci e a preparare un’intesa tra Fascismo e Nazionalsocialismo. Essa investì il significato di quelle tradizioni cui in Italia e in Germania si richiamavano i regimi, il simbolo romano e il mito nordico, il significato di classicismo e romanticismo, o di contrapposizioni artificiose, come quella tra romanità e germanesimo» .
Dal 1934 Evola tiene conferenze in Germania: in un’università di Berlino, al secondo nordisches Thing a Brema, e all’Herrenklub di Heinrich von Gleichen, rappresentante dell’aristocrazia tedesca (era barone) col quale stabilì una «cordiale e feconda amicizia» . Così Evola ricordò nel 1970 quest’importante esperienza: «ogni settimana si invitava una personalità tedesca o internazionale in quel circolo di Junkers. Devo dire peraltro che, se ci fossimo aspettati di vedere dei giganti biondi con gli occhi azzurri la delusione sarebbe stata grande, poiché per la maggior parte erano piccoli e panciuti. Dopo la cena e il rituale dei toasts, l’invitato doveva tenere una conferenza. Mentre questi signori fumavano il loro sigaro e sorseggiavano il loro bicchiere di birra, io parlavo. Fu allora che Himmler sentì parlare di me» .
È effettivamente assai verosimile che l’attenzione da parte degli ambienti ufficiali per Evola sia nata in seguito alle prime conferenze in Germania. I suoi rapporti col nazionalsocialismo furono di collaborazione esterna, e specialmente con diversi settori delle SS tra cui l’Ahnenerbe ; Evola espresse nei confronti dell’“ordine” guidato da Himmler parole assai positive , anche nel dopoguerra , che da una parte gli valsero i prevedibili (e fors’anche scontati) strali dei suoi detrattori, dall’altra determinarono una rilettura – in seno alla storiografia e allo stesso “sentimento del mondo” della Destra Radicale del dopoguerra – del nazionalsocialismo come di un movimento popolare guidato da un’élite ascetico-guerriera . Dagli ormai numerosi dati d’archivio pubblicati, risulta un quadro di Evola tenuto in considerazione ma sempre osservato con cura dagli ambienti ufficiali tedeschi .
Dopo il conflitto mondiale la notorietà di Evola nei paesi di lingua tedesca andò scemando; la sua immobilità fisica pare che gli impedì, tra l’altro, ulteriori viaggi all’estero. Solo negli ultimi decenni Evola è stato fatto oggetto di una sorta di riscoperta, per merito soprattutto di Hans Thomas Hansen, che ne ha tradotto (e ritradotto) la buona parte delle opere, con il consenso dello stesso Evola quando questi era ancora in vita, e che viene giustamente considerato uno dei massimi conoscitori del pensiero e della vita di Evola. Oltre alla rivista da questi fondata e animata, «Gnostika» (che come suggerisce il titolo ha interessi prevalentemente esoterici), negli ultimissimi anni stanno nascendo diverse attività che si ispirano in vario modo all’opera di Evola, tra le quali meritano una menzione le riviste tedesche «Elemente» e «Renovatio Imperii» e soprattutto l’austriaca «Kshatriya», diretta da Martin Schwarz (autore della più ampia bibliografia evoliana sino a oggi stilata ), di più marcata impronta “evoliana ortodossa”. A margine di ciò, si stanno iniziando a tenere convegni sul pensatore e a tradurre sue ulteriori opere. Inoltre il centenario della nascita di Evola, nel 1998, è stato occasione per varie testate tedesche per ricordarlo con ampi articoli, tra cui quelli apparsi sulla storica «Nation & Europa» (che esce ormai da mezzo secolo, e cui nei primi Anni ’50 lo stesso Evola collaborò), «Criticn» e la prestigiosa «Zeitschrift für Ganzheitforschung», altra rivista cui Evola collaborò (nei primi Anni ’60) e che fu fondata e lungamente diretta da Walter Heinrich (sino alla morte di questi, avvenuta nel 1984), che era in grande amicizia con Evola. Come curiosità, segnaliamo che per l’occasione numerosi complessi e gruppi musicali tedeschi e austriaci hanno dedicato nel centenario allo scrittore tradizionalista un disco, intitolato Cavalcare la tigre.
* * *
Sebbene alcuni elementi politici della storia d’Italia e di quella tedesca appaiano affini, (il processo di unificazione nazionale avvenuto nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento, la comune partecipazione alla Triplice Alleanza, l’Asse Roma-Berlino), Evola individua nella “tradizione germanica” dei tratti che differenziano nettamente – in senso positivo – i paesi di lingua tedesca dall’Italia. Così anzitutto «può dirsi che in Germania il nazionalismo democratico di massa di tipo moderno non fece che una fuggevole apparizione. […]. Il nazionalismo in tal senso, con un fondo democratico, non andò oltre il fugace fenomeno del parlamento di Francoforte del 1848, in connessione con i moti rivoluzionari che in quel periodo imperversavano in tutta l’Europa (è significativo che il re di Prussia Federico Guglielmo IV rifiutò l’offerta, fattagli da quel parlamento, di mettersi a capo di tutta la Germania perché accettandola egli avrebbe anche accettato il principio democratico – il potere conferito da una rappresentanza popolare – rinunciando al suo diritto legittimistico, sia pure ristretto alla sola Prussia). E Bismarck, creando il secondo Reich, non gli diede affatto una base “nazionale”, vedendo nella corrispondente ideologia il principio di pericolosi disordini anche dell’ordine europeo, mentre i conservatori della Kreuzzeitung accusarono nel nazionalismo un fenomeno “naturalistico” e regressivo, estraneo ad una più alta tradizione e concezione dello Stato» . Estranei a questa forma “naturalistica” di nazionalismo, i paesi di lingua tedesca cullarono un diverso spirito, quello del Volk, che animò lo spirito pangermanico. La corrente völkish, che un notevole peso ebbe anche nella genesi del nazionalsocialismo, affondava le sue radici nei Discorsi alla nazione tedesca di Fichte, in Arndt, Jahn e Lange e soprattutto nel Deutschbund e nella deutsche Bewegung . In questa diversità di retroterra si ha la prima divaricazione tra Italia e Germania.
Ma le differenze di ambiente sono assai più nette. Nel suo saggio sul Terzo Reich, delineando le correnti culturali complesse e spesso irriducibili che cooperarono nella sua genesi, Evola scrive: «Dopo la prima guerra mondiale in Germania la situazione era sensibilmente diversa da quella dell’Italia. […] Mussolini dovette creare quasi dal nulla, nel senso che nel punto di combattere la sovversione rossa e di rimettere in piedi lo Stato non poteva rifarsi ad una tradizione nel senso più alto del termine. Tutto sommato, ad essere minacciato era solo il prolungamento dell’Italietta democratica ottocentesca, con un retaggio risorgimentale risentente delle ideologie della Rivoluzione Francese, con una monarchia che regnava ma non governava e senza salde articolazioni sociali. In Germania le cose stavano altrimenti. Anche dopo il crollo militare e la rivoluzione del 1918 e malgrado il marasma sociale sussistevano resti aventi radici profonde in quel mondo gerarchico, talvolta ancora feudale, incentrato nei valori dello Stato e della sua autorità, facenti parte della precedente tradizione, in particolare del prussianesimo. […]. In effetti, nell’Europa centrale le idee della Rivoluzione Francese non presero mai tanto piede quanto nei restanti paesi europei» .
In un’occasione Evola cita la teoria giuridica di Carl Schmitt dell’international law . Il filosofo della politica tedesco aveva espresso l’idea della caduta del diritto internazionale europeo consuetudinario avvenuta, all’incirca, dopo il 1890, e la conseguente affermazione di un diritto internazionale più o meno ufficializzato. «Noi però qui non siamo interamente del parere dello Schmitt», scrive Evola, spiegando che «di contro all’opinione di molti, nei riguardi dell’azione svolta da Bismarck, sia all’interno della Germania che in Europa, non tutte le cose sono “in ordine”. […]. Più che Bismarck, a noi sembra che, se mai, Metternich sia stato l’ultimo “Europeo”, vale a dire l’ultimo uomo politico che seppe sentire la necessità di una solidarietà delle nazioni europee non astratta, o dettata solo da ragioni di politica “realistica” e da interessi materiali, ma rifacentesi anche a delle idee e alla volontà di mantenere il migliore retaggio tradizionale dell’Europa» . Contrariamente a quanto sostenuto da Baillet , Evola fu dunque piuttosto critico nei confronti di Bismarck, che non ebbe, secondo la visione tradizionale evoliana, il coraggio di opporsi in modo sistematico e rigoroso al mondo moderno e della sovversione (nella sua forma economico-capitalistica), ma dovette in alcuni casi venire a patti con esso.
La stessa Germania federiciana e poi guglielmina, seppur conservante le strutture e l’ordine di uno stato tradizionale, nel quale la stessa burocrazia e l’apparato statale apparivano quasi come corpi di un ordine, conteneva i germi della dissoluzione, dovuti alle idee illuministe che avevano iniziato a filtrare – in modo più larvato che altrove – presso le varie corti. Se il giudizio evoliano nei confronti del codice federiciano conservante l’ordinamento diviso negli Stände è positivo, ciò è poiché, per l’epoca in cui sorse, quel codice conservava meglio d’ogni altro le strutture feudali e gerarchiche precedenti. Esse, tramite la tradizione prussiana, affondavano nell’Ordine dei cavalieri teutonici e nella loro riconquista delle terre baltiche: un ordine ascetico-cavalleresco formato da una disciplina e da una severa organizzazione gerarchica. Così, sin da giovanissimo Evola intuì l’assurdità della “guerra civile europea” che, come ufficiale, egli andava a combattere sulla frontiera carsica: l’Italia si schierava cioè contro ciò che restava della migliore tradizione europea. «Nel 1914 gli Imperi Centrali rappresentavano ancora un resto dell’Europa feudale e aristocratica nel mondo occidentale, malgrado innegabili aspetti di egemonismo militaristico ed alcune alleanze sospette col capitalismo presenti soprattutto nella Germania guglielmina. La coalizione contro di essi fu dichiaratamente una coalizione del Terzo Stato contro le forze residue del Secondo Stato […]. Come in poche altre della storia, la guerra del 1914-1918 presenta tutti i tratti di un conflitto non fra Stati e nazioni, ma fra le ideologie di diverse caste. Di essa, i risultati diretti e voluti furono la distruzione della Germania monarchica e dell’Austria cattolica, quelli indiretti il crollo dell’impero degli Czar, la rivoluzione comunista e la creazione, in Europa, di una situazione politico-sociale talmente caotica e contraddittoria, da contenere tutte le premesse per una nuova conflagrazione. E questa fu la seconda guerra mondiale» .
Come accennato, anche nei confronti della tradizione dell’Austria Evola espresse un giudizio marcatamente positivo. La stessa linea dinastica degli Asburgo ebbe un ruolo di rilievo in questa valutazione (Evola si era espresso in termini molto positivi nei confronti di Massimiliano I) ; nel periodo in cui visse a Vienna Evola respirò ciò che restava dell’atmosfera antica dell’Austria felix, e venne in contatto con quella temperie culturale e spirituale e soprattutto con uomini in cui, per usare le parole di Ernst Jünger, «la catastrofe aveva certo lasciato le sue ombre […], ma si era limitata a distruggerne la serenità innata senza distruggerla. A tratti scorgevamo […] una patina di quella sofferenza che potremmo definire austriaca e che è comune a tanti vecchi sudditi dell’ultima vera monarchia. Con essa venne distrutta una forma del piacere di vivere che negli altri paesi europei già da generazioni era diventata inimmaginabile, e le tracce di questa distruzione si avvertono ancora nei singoli individui. […]. Da noi nel Reich, se si prescinde dal generale esaurimento delle forze, si incominciava a notare tutt’al più la disparità degli strati sociali; qui invece si erano aperte, come voragini, le differenze tra le varie etnie» . In questo humus storico degli anni compresi tra le due guerre, in cui ancora forti erano i legami sentimentali ed etici di molti con la precedente tradizione imperiale – la monarchia asburgica d’Austria aveva almeno formalmente conservato, sino al Congresso di Vienna, la titolarità del Sacro Romano Impero – Evola ebbe anche modo di percepire direttamente l’attaccamento diffuso a livello popolare alla monarchia , e lo spiegò in questi termini: «Senza riesumare forme anacronistiche, invece di una propaganda che “umanizzi” il sovrano per accattivare la massa, quasi sulla stessa linea della propaganda elettorale presidenziale americana, si dovrebbe vedere fino a che punto possano avere un’azione profonda i tratti di una figura caratterizzata da una certa innata superiorità e dignità, in un quadro adeguato. Una specie di ascesi e di liturgia della potenza qui potrebbero avere una loro parte. Proprio questi tratti, mentre rafforzeranno il prestigio di chi incarna un simbolo, dovrebbero poter esercitare sull’uomo non volgare una forza d’attrazione, perfino un orgoglio nel suddito. Del resto, anche in tempi abbastanza recenti si è avuto l’esempio dell’imperatore Francesco Giuseppe che, pur frapponendo fra sé e i sudditi l’antico severo cerimoniale, pur non imitando per nulla i re “democratici” dei piccoli Stati nordici, godette di una particolare, non volgare popolarità» . In questo stesso senso nel 1935, scrivendo a proposito della possibilità di una restaurazione regale in Austria, Evola riferisce ciò che gli esponenti del pensiero conservatore e monarchico in quel paese sostenevano: «La premessa, intanto, è quella a cui ogni mente non ingombra di pregiudizî può anche aderire, cioè che il regime monarchico, in generale, è quello che più può garantire un ordine, un equilibrio e una pacificazione interna, senza dover ricorrere al rimedio estremo della dittatura e dello Stato centralizzato, sempreché nei singoli sussista la sensibilità spirituale richiesta da ogni lealismo. Questa condizione, secondo dette personalità, sarebbe presente nella gran parte della popolazione austriaca, se non altro, per la forza di una tradizione e di uno stile di vita pluricentenario» .
Il problema dell’Anschluss, dell’annessione dell’Austria alla Germania naizonalsocialista, fu negli anni che lo precedettero al centro di un ampio dibattito internazionale. Giuristi e politici lo affrontarono da diversi punti di vista; Evola non fu in concordanza di vedute, su questo tema, con l’amico Othmar Spann, che, scriveva Evola, per la coraggiosa coerenza delle sue idee non era ben visto né in Austria né in Germania. Scrivendo sul sociologo viennese, Evola affermava: «gli Austriaci non perdonano le sue simpatie per la Germania, mentre i Tedeschi non gli perdonano le critiche da lui mosse al materialismo razzista» . Ampliando alla scuola organicistica viennese e al mondo culturale austriaco il suo sguardo, Evola ne esponeva in questi termini le vedute: «Non ci si può rassegnare a far scendere una nazione, che ha la tradizione che l’Austria ha avuto, al livello di un piccolo Stato balcanico. Qui non si fa quistione della mera autonomia politica, si fa essenzialmente quistione di cultura e di tradizione. Storicamente, la civiltà austriaca è indisgiungibile da quella germanica. Non è possibile che oggi l’Austria a tale riguardo si emancipi e cominci a far da sé. Proprio perché essa è stata menomata, ridotta ad un’ombra di quel che essa fu precedentemente, le si impone di connettersi nel modo più stretto alla Germania, appoggiarsi ad essa, trarre da essa gli elementi che possono garantire l’integrità della sua eredità tedesca». Proseguiva Evola sostenendo che dal lato positivo l’Austria avrebbe avuto molto a sua volta da trasmettere alla Germania sotto il profilo della tradizione culturale. Ma di là dal piano squisitamente intellettuale, «Nel dominio delle tradizioni politiche l’antitesi è ancor più visibile. Vi sarebbe infatti da chiedere a questi intellettuali germanofili che cosa essi pensino quando parlano di tradizione austro-tedesca. La tradizione austriaca era una tradizione imperiale. Erede del Sacro Romano Impero, il Reich austriaco, formalmente almeno, non poteva dirsi tedesco. Di diritto, era supernazionale, e di fatto esso sovrastava un gruppo di popoli assai diversi come razza, costumi e tradizioni, gruppo nel quale l’elemento tedesco non figurava che come parte. Nemmeno giova dire che purtuttavia la direzione dell’impero austriaco era intonata in senso tedesco e faceva capo ad una dinastia tedesca. Dal punto di vista dei principî ciò conta così poco quanto il fatto che i rappresentanti del principio supernazionale della Chiesa Romana siano stati in larga misura italiani. Se si deve parlare di tradizione austriaca», concludeva Evola, «è ad una tradizione imperiale che bisogna riferirsi. Ora, che cosa può avere a che fare una tale tradizione con la Germania, se Germania oggi vuol dire nazionalsocialismo?» . Francesco Germinario ha scritto a tale proposito che per Evola «un’Austria legata alle radici cattoliche, e in cui, soprattutto, rimaneva ancora vivo il ricordo degli Asburgo, era molto più vicina ai valori della Tradizione rispetto a una Germania travolta dalla nuova ondata di modernizzazione promossa dal nazismo» .
Si esprimevano in questi termini già nel 1935 le posizioni critiche di Evola nei confronti del nazismo, di cui il filosofo tradizionalista accusava gli eccessi populistici, sociali e di sinistra. Il tono in questo caso è particolarmente critico perché il raffronto è con l’Austria, nella quale Evola vedeva appunto l’erede spirituale della più alta tradizione europea. D’altronde, si tratta di una linea interpretativa e storiografica apprezzabile, e che Evola mantenne anche nel dopoguerra, tendendo a separare i diversi elementi e le varie correnti che operarono nel nazionalsocialismo per giudicarli separatamente . Concludeva dunque la sua lettura politica della situazione internazionale affermando: «Se non ci si vuole rassegnare alla perdita dell’antica tradizione supernazionale centro-europea, l’Austria più che verso la Germania dovrebbe volgere i suoi sguardi verso gli Stati successori, nel senso di vedere fino a che punto è possibile ricostruire una comune coscienza centro-europea come base non solo della soluzione di importantissimi problemi economici e commerciali ma eventualmente […] anche della formulazione di un nuovo principio politico unitario di tipo tradizionale» .
Nei confronti della seconda guerra mondiale, il cui esito indubbiamente Evola vedeva come l’ultima fase del crollo epocale della civiltà europea, lo scrittore tradizionalista denunciava le colpe morali delle potenze occidentali: «a Himmler si deve un tentativo di salvataggio in extremis (considerato da Hitler come un tradimento). Pel tramite del Conte Bernadotte egli tramise una proposta di pace separata agli Alleati occidentali per poter continuare la guerra soltanto contro l’Unione Sovietica e il comunismo. Si sa che tale proposta, la quale, se accettata, forse avrebbe potuto assicurare all’Europa un diverso destino, evitando la successiva “guerra fredda” e la comunisticizzazione dell’Europa di là dalla “cortina di ferro”, fu nettamente respinta in base ad un cieco radicalismo ideologico, come era stata respinta, per un non diverso radicalismo, l’offerta di pace fatta da Hitler di sua iniziativa all’Inghilterra in termini ragionevoli in un famoso discorso dell’estate del 1940 quando i Tedeschi erano la parte vincente» .
Anche dopo la seconda guerra mondiale Evola mantenne un occhio di riguardo nei confronti dei paesi di lingua tedesca. La sua visione fu di ammirazione nei confronti della nuova resurrezione economica operata dai Tedeschi dopo la distruzione del secondo dopoguerra («questa nazione ha saputo completamente rialzarsi di là da distruzioni senza nome. Perfino in regime di occupazione essa ha sopravvanzato le stesse nazioni vincitrici sul piano industriale ed economico riprendendo il suo posto di grande potenza produttrice») , e per il coraggio col quale la Repubblica federale aveva bandito il pericolo comunista dalla sua politica («I Tedeschi fanno sempre le cose con coerenza. Così anche nel giuoco di osservanza democratica. Essi hanno messo su una democrazia-modello come un sistema “neutro” – diremmo quasi amministrativo, più che politico – equilibrato ed energico a un tempo. A differenza dell’Italia, la Germania proprio dal punto di vista di una democrazia coerente ha messo al bando il comunismo. La Corte Costituzionale tedesca ha statuito ciò che corrisponde all’evidenza stessa delle cose, ossia che un partito che, come quello comunista, segue le regole democratiche soltanto in funzione puramente tattica e di copertura, per scopo finale dichiarato avendo invece la soppressione di ogni contrastante corrente politica e la dittatura assoluta del proletariato, non può essere tollerato da uno Stato democratico che non voglia scavare la fossa a sé stesso») . Ma, ciò nonostante, la guerra aveva ormai prodotto un vacuum, un vuoto spirituale non più colmato: «Di contro a tutto ciò, stupisce, nella Repubblica Federale, la mancanza di qualsiasi idea, di qualsiasi “mito”, di qualsiasi superiore visione del mondo, di qualsiasi continuità con la precedente Germania» . Anche nel campo della cultura, Evola ravvisa un generale franamento, una sorta di generale “venire meno” alle posizioni coraggiose e d’avanguardia tenute dall’intellettualità tedesca negli anni – ad avviso di Evola, assai floridi e proficui sotto il profilo culturale – del Reich nazionalsocialista. Nel suo giudizio negativo Evola prende come esempio di questo crollo Gottfried Benn ed Ernst Jünger (cadendo con ciò in errori di veduta piuttosto grossolani ).
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Da Vie della Tradizione 125 (2002), pp. 37-50.
Il presente articolo è stato ripubblicato privo delle note a pié pagina.
00:05 Publié dans Révolution conservatrice, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : tradition, traditions, traditionalisme, julius evola, italie, allemagne, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
lundi, 16 mai 2011
Revista de Historia del Fascismo - Julius Evola en Alemania
Revista de Historia del Fascismo
Sumario
REVISIONES
Hitler [no] me ha dicho: Rauschning, un falsario desenmascarado
Durante décadas el libro de Hermann Rauschning Hitler me ha dicho se ha considerado como un pieza fundamental del Caso Hitler. Desde obras “ligeras” como El retorno de los brujos de Louis Pauwels y Jacques Bergier hasta las sesudas obras de historiadores académicos como Trevor-Roper, era frecuente entre los años 50 hasta finales del milenio, recurrir a esta obra para dirimir cómo era la verdadera personalidad del führer. Aun hoy algunos siguen considerando a esta obra como “fuente primaria”… lamentablemente para ellos, desde hace 20 años, está demostrado ad nauseam que la obra de Rauschning no tiene credibilidad sino que es uno de tantos ejemplos de propaganda de guerra.
BIOGRAFIAS
Abate Barruel: el padre de todas las conspiranoias
A finales del siglo XVIII al abate Augustin Barruel consiguió una fama extraordinaria con la publicación de su obra Memorias para servir a la historia del jacobinismo en donde daba una explicación teleológica a todos los episodios que se habían sucedido en Francia a partir de 1780 y que se desencadenaron aquella orgía de sangre que fue la Revolución Francesa. El éxito de Barruel fue tan rutilante como efímero, sin embargo, todavía hoy se le considera como el introductor de la visión conspirativa de la historia y su obra como el “padre” de todas las conspiraciones. Esta es la vida y la obra del abate Barruel…
NEOFASCISMO
L’Uomo Qualunque: un producto de postguerra
En la confusión de la Italia de la postguerra, durante un corto ciclo de apenas tres años, un partido político de nuevo cuño llamó particularmente la atención: el Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque, literalmente el Frente del Hombre Cualquiera (aunque otra traducción alternativa sería “del Pobre Diablo”) entendiendo como tal al ciudadano sin expectativas que sufre las consecuencias de las situaciones adversas generadas por otros. El Uomo Qualunque fue un grito de desesperados que se extinguió pronto ingresando una parte sustancial de sus miembros en el Movimiento Social Italiano que heredó también buena parte de sus votos.
MÍSTICA FASCISTA
Codreanu y su mística guerrera
Nuestro colaborador Eduardo Basurto nos envía este artículo sobre la mística guerrera de Codreanu que supone el primer estudio publicado en la Revista de Historia del Fascismo sobre esta corriente en Rumania. Además de hacer honor al título, el estudio de Eduardo Basurto realiza un repaso a la historia de la varidad rumana del fascismo singularmente preciso.
CINEMATOGRAFÍA
Forces Occultes… El cine francés bajo la ocupación
Hasta hace poco inencontrable y desde que se han puesto en marcha las plataformas de intercambio de archivos Peer to Peer y youTube fácilmente accesibles en la red, Forces Occultes es un película extraña que responde en primer lugar a las exigencias antimasónicas del gobierno francés de Vichy y de la propaganda alemana. Pero nos equivocaríamos si considerásemos que Forces Occultes solamente es “propaganda”. Es mucho más: refleja por primera vez en la historia del cine cómo es una iniciación masónica de la que hasta ese momento el “gran público” no tenía conciencia exacta en qué consistía. Y no hay en ella absolutamente ninguna falsificación. La pesquisa en torno a Forces Occultes nos llevará, por extensión lógica, en la segunda parte de este artículo, a examinar el panorama del cine “colaboracionista” realizado durante la ocupación y terminará con una referencia a la figura de Claude Autant-Lara, fallecido en 2000 después de ser durante un período diputado europeo del Front National.
DOSSIER:
Julius Evola y el III Reich
Las relaciones y los proyectos de Julius Evola en Alemania 1930-1945.
I. Introduccion
II. Julius Evola y la cultura alemanas
III. Contactos en el Reich
- La Comunidad de Trabajo de los nacionalistas
- Con la “revolución conservadora”
- La red del príncipe KarlAnton von Rohan
- Gottfried Benn y el Rivolta
- Del Herrenklub a las SS
- La “defensa de la raza” en Alemania e Italia
- Los objetivos del período 1938-1943
- Evola en el Cuartel General del Führer
Características:
Formato libro 150 x 210 mm
Páginas 216
Tapas en cuatricomía con solapas
Pedidos: eminves@gmail.com
Precio venta al público: 18,00 euros + 3,00 euros de gastos de envío (precios para España, resto mundo, consultar)
Forma e pago: ingreso en cuenta corriente BBVA (al hacer el pedido indicamos el número) o pago a través de pay-pal (ver columna de la derecha)
Suscripción:
6 números: 100 euros
12 números: 200 euros
00:05 Publié dans Histoire, Revue | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : julius evola, histoire, allemagne, révolution conservatrice, codreanu, abbé barruel, fascisme, revue | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 14 mai 2011
Othmar Spann / 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.
00:05 Publié dans Livre, Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, philosophie, othmar spann, sociologie, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques, révolution conservatrice, autriche | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 13 mai 2011
Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner is overleden
“Conservatisme is een ‘elitaire’, men kan ook zeggen ‘esoterische’ aangelegenheid (…). Het misverstand als zou de conservatief een theorielozen, een onfilosofische, ja, zelfs antifilosofische pragmaticus zijn, lijkt onuitroeibaar. Ik heb nochtans met veel kracht en overtuiging aangetoond dat het een misverstand is, toen ik het over die domeinen had, die man als ‘conservatieve mystiek’ zou kunnen omschrijven (…). Een zekere zin voor de onoplosbare complexiteit van de werkelijkheid, de erkenning van het feit dat men over het leven slechts brokstukgewijs rationeel kunnen spreken, de aandacht voor de tegenstelling, voor het tragische en voor het gedeeltelijk demonische dat door de geschiedenis waart, een constitutionele scepsis tegenover de ‘grote oplossingen’”. Woorden van Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner, een grote Oostenrijkse mijnheer, die bij menig jonge Europeaan de grondvesten van een degelijke conservatieve ideeënwereld heeft gelegd.Kaltenbrunner werd in 1939 in Wenen geboren, maar na zijn studies in de Rechten in 1962 trok hij naar Duitsland en werkte er bij uitgeverijen als lektor. In 1972 publiceerde hij een verzamelwerk Rekonstruktion des Konservatismus, en ontwierp hiermee, enkele jaren na 1968, de basis voor een conservatieve tegenactie. Hij ging in het werk uit van de idee dat het conservatisme eerst de hegemonie op het geestelijke vlak moet veroveren, vooraleer politieke consequenties te trekken.
Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner wou niet zomaar ‘conserveren’: hij was er veeleer op uit het ‘moderne’ conservatieve denken mee gestalte te geven – met daarin natuurlijk dat wat eeuwig een Europese waarde had. De door hem opgezette en gepubliceerde Herderbücherei Initiative - een reeks die liep van 1974 tot 1988 – bracht op een hoog niveau conservatieve auteurs, wetenschappers, onderzoekers en andere bijeen, die rond bepaalde thema’s (soms) baanbrekende bijdragen brachten. Interessante titels waren (en zijn): Die Zukunft der Vergangenheid (1975), Plädoyer für die Vernunft: Signale einer Tendenzwende (1974). Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner legde ook een bijzondere ijver aan de dag om de bronnen voor het conservatieve denken open en toegankelijk te houden. Hij publiceerde een driedelig werk Europa. Seine geistigen Quellen in Porträts aus zwei Jahrtausenden (1981-1985). Ook het werk Vom Geist Europas heeft niets van zijn waarde verloren en verdient het zeker op opnieuw gelezen te worden.
Hierna werd het stil rond Kaltenbrunner. Hij trok zich – na de ontgoocheling over het uitblijven van een échte conservatieve wende – terug als een lekenmonnik in Kandern, afgesneden van alle moderne communicatiemiddelen. Hij trok ook voorgoed een streep onder het metapolitieke werk. Nochtans loont het de moeite, zeker in deze tijden van ideeënarmoede ter linker en rechter zijde de moeite om de stijl en de onderwerpen die Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner nauw aan het hart lagen, te bestuderen. Met TeKoS hebben wij in elk geval niet op het overlijden van deze bescheiden, overtuigdconservatieve intellectueel gewacht om bijdragen van hem te publiceren. In ons nummer 127 brachten wij een vertaling van Elite. Erziehung für den Ernstfall, in het Nederlands: Zonder Elite gaat het niet. Wij groeten u met bijzondere veel respect, meester Kaltenbrunner!
(Peter Logghe)
00:25 Publié dans Hommages, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : hommage, gerd-klaus kaltenbrunner, allemagne, conservatisme, révolution conservatrice, droite, philosophie | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
jeudi, 12 mai 2011
Robert Steuckers: Answers given to the Scandinavian Group "Oskorei"
Robert Steuckers:
Answers Given to the Scandinavian Group and Internet Forum “Oskorei / motpol.nu”)
Picture: Walking along Heidegger's path in Todtnauberg, Germany, July 2010 (Photo, copyright: AnaR).
Why did you found « Synergies Européennes » ?
Initially I had no intention to found any group or subgroup in the broad family of New Right clubs and caucuses. But as, for many reasons, cooperation with the French branch around Alain de Benoist seemed to be impossible to resume, I first decided to retire completely and to devote myself to other tasks, such as translations or private teaching. This transition period of disabused withdrawal lasted exactly one month and one week (from December 6th, 1992 to begin January 1993). When friends from Provence phoned me during the first days of 1993 to express their best wishes for the New Year to come and when I told them what kind of decision I had taken, they protested heavily, saying that they preferred to rally under my supervision than under the one of the always mocked “Parisians”. I answered that I had no possibility to rent places or find accommodations in their part of France. One day after, they found a marvellous location to organise a summer course. Other people, such as Gilbert Sincyr, generously supported this initiative, which six months later was a success due to the tireless efforts of Christiane Pigacé, a university teacher in political sciences in Aix-en-Provence, and of a future lawyer in Marseille, Thierry Mudry, who both could obtain the patronage of Prof. Julien Freund. The summer course was a success. But no one had still the idea of founding a new independent think tank. It came only one year later when we had to organise several preparatory meetings in France and Belgium for a next summer course at the same location. Things were decided in April 1994 in Flanders, at least for the Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and French. A German-Austrian team joined in 1995 immediately after a summer course of the German weekly paper “Junge Freiheit”, that organized a short trip to Prague for the participants (including Sunic, the Russian writer Vladimir Wiedemann and myself); people of the initial French team, under the leading of Jean de Bussac, travelled to the Baltic countries, to try to make contacts there. In 1996, Sincyr, de Bussac and Sorel went to Moscow to meet a Russian team lead by Anatoly Ivanov, former Soviet dissident and excellent translator from French and German into Russian, Vladimir Avdeev and Pavel Tulaev. We had also the support of Croatians (Sunic, Martinovic, Vujic) and Serbs (late Dragos Kalajic) despite the war raging in the Balkans between these two peoples. In Latin America we’ve always had the support of Ancient Greek philosophy teacher Alberto Buela, who is also an Argentinian rancher leading a small ranch of 600 cows, and his old fellow Horacio Cagni, an excellent connoisseur of Oswald Spengler, who has been able to translate the heavy German sentences of Spengler himself into a limpid Spanish prose. The meetings and summer courses lasted till 2003 and the magazines were published till 2004. Of course, personal contacts are still held and new friends are starting new initiatives, better adapted to the tastes of younger people. In 2007 we started to blog on the net with “euro-synergies.hautetfort.com” in seven languages with new texts every day and with “vouloir.hautetfort.com” only in French with all the articles in our archives. This latest initiative is due to a rebuilt French section in Paris. These blogging activities bring us more readers and contacts than the old ways of working. Postage costs were in the end too high to let the printed stuff survive. The efforts of our American friend Greg Johnson, excellent translator from French into English, has opened us new horizons in the world, where English is more largely known than other European languages, except Spanish. The translations of Greg can be read on “counter-currents.com”. Tomislav Sunic with all his connections in the New World, in England and Scandinavia has played a key role in this step forward. He will force me to write in English in the next future, just as you do now, and to abandon my habit to write mainly in French and sometimes in German, languages that I master better that English. The next long interview in English will be the one that Pavel Tulaev submitted to me some days ago (January 2011). In fact, when I entered as a full member the New Right groups in September 1980, after having been drilled during a special summer course in Provence in July 1980 in the frame of the so-called “Temistoklès Savas Promotion” (T. Savas was a Greek friend who had just died in a motorbike accident in the Northern Greek mountains), I promised to Prof. Pierre Vial, who was at that time one of the main leaders of the celebrated GRECE-group, to lead a metapolitical battle till my last breath. So things are still going on as they ought to.
The marvellous water bridge of Rocquevafour were formerly the GRECE Summer Courses were given
Now the very purposes of “Synergies Européennes” or “Euro-Synergies” were to enable all people in Europe (and outside Europe) to exchange ideas, books, views, to start personal contacts, to stimulate the necessity of translating a maximum of texts or interviews, in order to accelerate the maturing process leading to the birth of a new European or European-based political think tank. Another purpose was to discover new authors, usually rejected by the dominant thoughts or neglected by old right groups or to interpret them in new perspectives.
“Synergy” means in the Ancient Greek language, “work together” (“syn” = “together” and “ergon” = “to work”); it has a stronger intellectual and political connotation than its Latin equivalent “cooperare” (“co” derived from “cum” = “with”, “together” - and “operare” = “to work”). Translations, meetings and all other ways of cooperating (for conferences, individual speeches or lectures, radio broadcasting or video clips on You Tube, etc.) are the very keys to a successful development of all possible metapolitical initiatives, be they individual, collegial or other. People must be on the move as often as possible, meet each other, eat and drink together, camp under poor soldierly conditions, walk together in beautiful landscapes, taste open-mindedly the local kitchen or liquors, remembering one simple but o so important thing, i. e. that joyfulness must be the core virtue of a good working metapolitical scene. When sometimes things have failed, it was mainly due to humourless, snooty or yellow-bellied guys, who thought they alone could grasp one day the “Truth” and that all others were gannets or cretins. Jean Mabire and Julien Freund, Guillaume Faye and Tomislav Sunic, Alberto Buela and Pavel Tulaev were or are joyful people, who can teach you a lot of very serious things or explain you the most complicated notions without forgetting that joy and gaiety must remain the core virtues of all intellectual work. If there is no joy, you will inevitably be labelled as dull and lose the metapolitical battle. Don’t forget that medieval born initiatives like the German “Burschenschaften” (Students’ Corporations) or the Flemish “Rederijkers Kamers” (“Chambers of Rhetoric”) or the Youth Movements in pre-Nazi Germany were all initiatives where the highest intellectual matters were discussed and, once the seminary closed, followed by joyful songs, drinking parties or dance (Arthur Koestler remembers his time spent at Vienna Jewish Burschenschaft “Unitas” as the best of his youth, despite the fact that the Jewish students of Vienna considered in petto that the habits of the Burschenschaften should be adopted by them as pure mimicking). Humour and irony are also keys to success. A good cartoonist can reach the bull’s eye better than a dry philosopher.
Provence village of Lourmarin where three Summer courses of "Synergies Européennes" were held
How do you view the proper relationship between the national state and the European Community?
Well, it depends which national state you are talking about. Some states have a strong political personality, born out of their own history. Others are remnants of former greater empires, like many states in Central Europe, which once upon a time were parts of the Austrian-Hungarian Habsburgs Empire. France, Britain and Sweden, for instance, have such a well-defined strong personality. Belgium, the country in which I was born, is a more or less artificial state, being a remnant entity of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and of the medieval German Holy Roman Empire but having been strongly under the influence of France due to the use of French language in the Southern part of the kingdom and among the elites, even in Flemish speaking provinces. Croatia has been part of the Hungarian Crown’s Lands within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and still desires to have closer links with Austria, Germany and Italy. Bosnia cultivates both the nostalgia of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and of the Ottoman Empire. The Netherlands has certainly a stronger identity than Belgium or Croatia but this identity has the tendency to develop in two very different directions: a see-oriented direction towards Britain and the United States, or a land-oriented direction towards Germany and Flanders in Belgium. Countries with a weaker identity have the tendency to be more pro-European than the ones that have this strong history born personality I’ve just mentioned. But on the other hand Britain is experimenting nowadays a process of devolution, especially in Scotland and in a lesser extent in Wales. France is still theoretically the embodiment of a strongly centralised state but regional and local identities are flourishing as an alternative to the official universalistic ideology of the “République”, leading to a compelled acceptation of mass immigration imposed to the native populations, that, as a result, instinctively take up local or regional roots, which look more genuine and gentle, being seen as in complete accordance with one’s “deepest heart”.
To theorise the “proper relationship” between the national state and the European Union, you have to look out for a functioning model, in which several types of identities, be they linguistic or confessional, are overlapping and displaying a kind of mosaic patchwork on a smaller scale than Europe, which is obviously such a patchwork, especially in its central continental areas. The only functioning model we have is the Swiss model. This democratic model was born in an intersection area in the middle of the European continent, where three main European languages and one local language meet as well as two different Christian faiths, Protestantism and Catholicism, Swiss Protestantism being once more divided between Lutherans in German speaking Basle and Calvinist in French speaking Geneva, with remnants of Zwingli’s Protestantism around Zurich. Most German speaking Swiss are otherwise Roman Catholics, while most French speaking Swiss are Protestants except in the Canton of Jura. To coordinate optimally all these differences, what could lead to endless conflicts, the Swiss political system invented a form of federalism that allowed people to live in peace while keeping their differences alive. This could be a model for all European states and for regions within these states. The federal level in Switzerland is a “slim” and efficient level. Most matters are left in the hands of local politicians and officials. Moreover the Swiss system foresees the referendum as a decision making instrument at both federal and cantonal levels. The people can introduce a claim at local or national level, leading to the organisation of a referendum for all kind of matters: the building of a bridge, ecological problems, introduction or suppression of a railway or a bus connection, etc. In 2009 and in 2010, two referendums took place at federal level: the first one was introduced by a rightist populist party to forbid the building of minarets in Swiss cities and towns, in accordance to the very old ecological and town-planning laws of the Swiss Confederation, mostly accepted or introduced by leftist “progressive” political forces in former times. In November 2010, also very recently, people voted to expel all criminal foreigners out of the country, avoiding in this way the most painful effects of mass immigration. Such people’s initiatives would be impossible in other European countries, despite the fact that expelling criminals cannot be considered as “racist” (as non criminal foreigners cannot be expelled) or as hostile to particular religious faiths, as no religion tolerates crimes as acceptable patterns of behaviour.
Therefore, the possible adoption of this Swiss model, beyond its latest anti-immigration aspects, would allow other European peoples to vote in order to coin a policy-making decision about actual problems and so to avoid being arrogantly ordained by ukases imagined by the fertile fantasy of Eurocratic eggheads in Brussels. The adoption of the Swiss model implies of course to reduce most of the biggest states in Europe into smaller entities or to adopt a federal system like in Spain, Austria, Belgium or Germany, plus the possibility to organise referendums like in Switzerland, as this is not the case in the otherwise complete federal states I’ve just mentioned. This is a lack of democracy. The main problem would be France, where this kind of federalism and of democracy has never been introduced. Nevertheless, the demand for the referendum system is growing in France, as you can read it on www.polemia.com, where former New Right exponent Yvan Blot is currently resuming all his ideas, suggestions and critics about this topic.
Picture: The Splügenpass at the Italian-Swiss boarder where Synergon's Summer Course 1996 was held (Photo: RS)
The introducing of a general federal system in Europe with broad devolution within the existing states is not accepted everywhere. In Italy, where the federalist Lega Nord is continuously successful in the Northern provinces of the country, partisans of a strong state argue that a balkanization in the disguise of a general federalisation would weaken many state’s instruments that have been firmly settled in former times and enable the present-day state foundations or practices to avoid absorption by globalist American-lead agencies or concerns. This is of course an actual risk. So all the state institutions having been developed in Europe to enhance autarky (self-sufficiency) at whatever level possible must be kept out of any dissolution process implied by any form of devolution.
A policy consisting of introducing a referendum to avoid people being crushed by too centralised states or by eurocrats, of a devolution allowing this genuine form of democracy to be established everywhere and of keeping alive all institutions aiming at self-sufficiency was perhaps the hope of Solzhenitsyn for his dear old Russia. Such a policy ought to be made secure according to historical Russian and Swiss models, but cannot of course be implemented by the current political personnel. Needless to say that such a personnel is corrupt but not only that. It is brainwashed and duped by all kind of silly ready-made ideologies or blueprints, invented mostly in American think tanks, their European counter-parts and the main media agencies. To summarize it, these ideologies aim at weakening the societies by mocking their traditional patterns of behaviour, at generalizing the ideological assets of neo-liberalism in order to let globalization be thoroughly implemented in every corner of the world and at reducing Europe to remain once for ever a disguised colony of the United States.
Therefore, there is the need to replace such a deceiving personnel by new teams in every European country. These new teams cannot be the usual populist alternative parties as they are mostly unaware of the dangers of neo-liberalism, i.e. the new universalistic ideology suggested and imposed by the most dangerous think tanks of the left and of the establishment: from the camouflaged Trotskites within the social-democratic parties to the “new philosophers” in France, who paved the way to a subtle mixture of “political correctness”, apparent libertarianism, an apparently vehement and staunch defence of the human rights, avowed antifascism and anticommunism (communism being the result of a worship of mostly German “thought masters” (“maîtres-à-penser”) like Hegel or Marx). The usual populist parties never managed to develop a discourse about and against this real danger jeopardizing Europe’s future. They were each time trapped by one aspect or another of this subtle mixture, especially all the anticommunist aspects.
A “new team” should give following answer to the now well-established official ideology of the main medias:
- A defence of the social systems in Europe or of an adaptation/modernization of them, erasing the corruptions that deposited during several decades; the model would be of course the partnership existing since the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany between workers and bosses; the investment model called the “Rhine Model” by the French thinker Michel Albert, where the capital is permanently invested in new technologies, in Research & Development, in academic think tanks, etc. The defence of the so-called socialist social systems in Europe aims essentially at preserving the families’ patrimony (especially modest working-class families because it gives them a safe security net in case of recession), at securing the future of the school and academic networks (now disintegrating under the iron heel of the banksters’ neoliberalism) and at securing a free and good functioning medical system in all European countries. It has often been said that the “non merchant sectors” were suffering due to all kind of imposed shortages (in the name of an alleged economic efficiency) and to the poor salaries earned by teaching or medical personnel. The “anti-shopkeeper” mentality of the so-called “right” or “new right” is an old heritage linking us to the ideals of the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle and the American poet Ezra Pound. If we want to translate these core ideas into a political programme, we’ll have to elaborate in each European country a specific defence of the “non merchant sectors”, as a civilization is measured not by material and transient productions but by the excellence of its medical and academic systems. We always were defenders of the primacy of culture against the iron heel of banks and economics.
The Varese Lake, Lombardia, where Synergon's Seminar 1995 and Synergon's Summer Course 2000 was held
- The notion of human rights, as they are propagated by the mainstream medias and by the official American think tanks, is a would-be universalistic ideology, aiming at replacing all the old messianic faiths, be they a religious bias or a Hegelian or Marxist tinted ideology (“the main narratives” of Jean-François Lyotard). But the mainstream notion of human rights are not merely an ideology, it is an instrument fabricated by strategists at the time of President Jimmy Carter, in order to have a constant opportunity to meddle in the affairs of alien countries, in order to weaken them (a strategy already suggested by Sun Tzu). The Chinese could observe very early that drift from a pious reference to human rights towards manipulation and subversion and reacted in arguing that every civilization should be permitted to adapt the notion of human rights to its own core cultural patterns. If the Chinese have the right to adapt, why wouldn’t we Europeans not be entitled to give our own interpretation of human rights within the frame of our own civilization? And above all to be allowed to make a clear distinction, when human rights are evoked, between what is genuine in the true defence of citizens’ rights and obligations and what is the result of an offensive attack perpetrated by an alien “soft power” in order to destabilize our countries’ policy in whatever matters. We should have the courage to denounce every abuse in the manipulating of the human rights’ topic when they are solemnly summoned up only in order to promote any American imperialist project in Europe, as, for instance, the war against Yugoslavia in 1999 was. The justification put forward to start this war was the so-called breach of human rights committed by the Serbian government against the Albanians composing the majority of Kosovo’s population. But in the end it brought to power an infamous gang in this American-backed secessionist province of Kosovo, currently accused of trafficking human organs, weapons and prostitutes. Where are the rights of the people having been bereft of their organs by force or of the poor girls attracted by seducing work contracts in Western Europe, then beaten, locked up in some dreary cellar and finally forced to be on the game? All the media orchestrated humbug about human rights promoted by Carter, Clinton and Albright ended exactly in the worst breaches in common law, that were deleterious for thousands and thousands of victims. The American discourse about human rights is deceitfulness and cant and nothing else. The real purpose was to establish a gigantic military base in Kosovo, namely “Camp Bondsteel”, in order to replace the abandoned bases in Germany after the Cold War and the German reunification and to occupy the Balkans, an area which, since Alexander the Great, allows every audacious conqueror to control Anatolia and all areas beyond it, namely Iraq and Persia. A “new team” in Europe should ceaselessly stigmatize and vilify these abuses and clearly tell the public opinion of their respective countries what are the real purposes behind each American human rights policy. The “new team” should work a bit like Noam Chomsky in the United States, who indefatigably reveals what is Washington’s hidden agenda in every part of the world.
To adopt a Swiss model with referendum at local and national level, to reject vehemently the anti-autarky policies induced by the neo-liberal ideology and economical theory, to reject also the mainstream bias of “political correctness” and to perceive the real geopolitical and strategic intentions hidden behind each American step are not capabilities that the political personnel in Europe can currently display. Therefore you won’t have a proper relationship between the national states (and the people as an ethnic reality) and the highest institutions of the European Union, as long as a fooled political pseudo-elite is ruling these latest. You need “new teams” to induce a “proper relationship”.
What is your analysis of the current European Union and it’s future and potential?
The answer to the question you ask here could be the stuff of a whole book. Indeed to answer it properly and in a complete way, you need to evoke the all story of the European integration process, starting with the founding act of the CECA/EGKS, i.e. the “European Community of Coal and Steel”, in 1951. After that you had the “Treaty of Rome” in 1957, launching the so-called “Common Market” and, later, the “Treaty of Maastricht” and the “Treaty of Lisbon”. It seems useless to resume now the entire history of the European “Eurocratic” institutions, especially at a present time when they are totally degenerated by liberal and neo-liberal ideas that of course weaken them and make them in a certain way superfluous. The core idea at the very beginning was to create an “autonomous market”, leading to a certain autarky, which was absolutely possible when the six founding countries possessed large parts of Africa and could so exploit the most important industrial and mineral resources. The decolonization and the support that the United States provided to the independence movements in Africa bereft Europe of a direct access to the main resources. The core idea of an autarky within a certain “Eurafrican” commonwealth has no real significance anymore. This new situation could already have been foreseen in October 1956 when the United States tolerated (and indirectly supported) the Soviet invasion of Hungary despite the opinion of their main allies in Europe and condemned the French-British intervention in Egypt. The year 1956 announced the fate of Europe: the European powers had no right to intervene within Europe itself, as Hungary had freed itself from Soviet yoke and as the treaties signed after 1945 foresaw the withdrawal of all Soviet troops out of the country after some months. The European powers, including Britain, had no right anymore to intervene in Africa in order to keep order.
The decolonization process left Europe without a necessary “Ergänzungsraum”, i. e. a “complementary space”, that could be administrated from European capitals and give African people the efficiency of well drilled executives, what they lack since then, precipitating the whole Black continent into a terrible misery. But autarky doesn’t mean the direct access to mineral resources: it means first of all “food autarky”. Few European countries are (or were at the end of the 80s, just before the collapse of the Soviet block) really independent at food level or are now able to produce food excesses. Only Sweden, Hungary, France and Denmark were. For the excellent French demographist Gaston Bouthoul Denmark is the best example of a well-balanced agriculture. This small Scandinavian country is able to produce food excesses that make of it an “agricultural superpower” in Europe: one should simply remember that Danish peasants furnished 75% of the food for the German Wehrmacht during WW2. Without the Danish food excesses, Hitler’s armies wouldn’t have resisted so long in Russia, in Northern Africa and in the West (Italy).
Perugia, Umbria (Italy) where the common "New Right" Conference (with Dr. Marco Tarchi, Dr. Alessandro Campi, Alain de Benoist, Michael Walker and Robert Steuckers) was held in February 1991 and where Synergon's Summer Course 1999 took place
The core idea of autarky survived quite long within the European institutions. We should remember the last plan trying to materialise autarky, the so-called “Plan Delors”, proposing a policy of large scaled public works and of favouring telecommunications and public transports within the EU area. The EU has no future if it remains what American economists called “a penetrated system” at the time of the Weimar Republic in Germany when American big business tried a disguised colonisation of the defeated Reich through the Young and Dawes Plans. The EU is now a penetrated system where not only American multinationals are carving important segments of the inner European market but also the new Chinese State’s companies and where the textile industry is now entirely dependant from delocalized factories settled in Turkey or Pakistan. Unemployment reaches astronomical figures in Europe because of delocalisation.
Recently the German weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” has published figures showing that Europe is experimenting now a real decay. More and more European countries are leaving the hit parade of the 20 most important economies on the world. The results of the PISA inquiry about the levels reached by school systems reveals also a general decay of the European standards. University teacher and former student and translator of Carl Schmitt, Julien Freund, thought us in his important book “La fin de la Renaissance” (1981) that decay comes when you begin to hate yourself, to despise what you are and to abhor your own past. The whole “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” not only in Germany but in all European countries, where children and teenagers are subtly induced to loathe themselves and their fatherlands, has repercussions on the general economics of the entire continent. The EU can only survive when it finds its ideological roots again, i. e. the very notion of autarky. Otherwise the process of decay will amplify tremendously and lead to the complete disappearance of the European peoples and civilisation. In this process the EU area may become, as a kind of new “Eurabia” or Euro-Turkey or Afro-Europe, an appendix of a “Transatlantic Union” under US leadership.
Well, let us now turn to the real question, the question that matters. Are we socialists or not? If we are, what’s the difference between us and the conventional socialists or social democrats? What’s the difference between the synergist anti-liberal with his New Right background and the Marxist or Post-Marxist we find in all the parliaments in Europe and of course in the European Parliament where they constitute the second main group after the Christian Democrats of the EPP? Well, the conventional socialists would say that they get their inspiration from their holy icon Marx and from his followers of the 2nd International, even if a born-again Marx would fiercely mock their liberal and permissive bias with the acidity he always used to lash verbally his foes. The problem is that the socialism of the direct heirs of the 2nd International is a type of socialism without a frame, consisting mainly of irresponsible promises emitted by cynical politicians in order to grasp as many mandates or seats as possible. Long before Marx wrote his well-known communist manifesto, there was an economical genius in Germany called Friedrich List, who opposed the free trade ideology of Britain at that time. Free trade meant in the first half of the 19th Century a generalized colonial system in the entire world, where Britain would have been the world only workshop or factory, while the rest would have remained underdeveloped only producing raw materials for the Sheffield or Manchester mills. Included all European countries of course. List asserted that every country had the genuine right to develop its own territorial assets. As the British fleet was the instrument enabling the British Crown to be ubiquitous and reach the harbours on all shores where it could get the raw materials and sell the products of England’s factories, List suggested an inner development of all countries in the world by inner colonization (fertilization and cultivation of all abandoned lands), building of railways and canals in order to boost communications. List inspired the German government under the leading of Bismarck, the small Belgian kingdom which was an economical power having experimented an actual industrial revolution immediately after Britain, the French positivists for the necessity of starting an inner agricultural colonization of the former Gallic mainland and above all the US government that had to face the huge problem of developing the gigantic land space between the Atlantic and the Pacific. List is the intellectual father of the Transcontinental Railway and of the canals linking the Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. He is the real intellectual father of the industrial power of the United States. On the other hand he inspired anti-colonialists in the former Third World, especially India and China: Gandhi, who wanted the Indians to cultivate cotton and weave their own clothes with it, and Dr. Sun Ya Tsen, founder of the Chinese Republic in 1911, were more or less inspired by List’s theories and practical suggestions. The Chinese National-Republican economist Kai Sheng Chen, who theorized the very important notion of “armed economy”, was a pupil of List and of Ludendorff, who adapted the peaceful ideas of List in the context of WW1. Taiwan and South Korea have proved that Kai Sheng Chen’s ideas can be successfully realized.
In the present-day United States the caucus around Lyndon LaRouche has produced an excellent analysis of the opposition between the Free Trade system and List’s practical views of a world of free autarkic areas. You can find a long documentary on the Internet about this dual interpretation given by the LaRouche’s group. Many Europeans would of course object that LaRouche’s vision of the economical history of the Western World during these two last centuries is quite over-simplified. Of course it is. But the core of this interpretation is correct and sound, whereas the over-simplification made of the all corpus a good didactical instrument. There is indeed an opposition between Free Trade (neo-liberalism, reaganomics, thatcherite economics, Chicago Boys, Hayek’s theories, etc.) and List’s idea of a harmonious juxtaposition of autarkies on the world map. The LaRouche caucus never quotes List (as far as I know) and says Lincoln and McKinley were opponents to the Free Trade, a position that, according to Lyndon LaRouche, explains their assassinations. Both were killed after a plot aiming at cancelling all political steps towards a North American autarkist system. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were supporters of the Free Trade system and of a British-American alliance along the lines theorized by an almost forgotten proponent of geopolitics, Homer Lea, author of a key book, “The Day of the Saxons”. Lea, having got a degree in West Point, had been dismissed for medical reasons and turned to pure theory, advocating an eternal alliance of Britain and the United States. We can read in his book today the general principles of a control of the South Asian “rimlands” by both Anglo-Saxon sea powers, especially Afghanistan, and of a control of the Low Countries and Denmark to avoid any push forward of Germany in the direction of the North Sea or any push forward of France in the direction of the harbours of Antwerp and Rotterdam.
The LaRouche caucus aims obviously at emphasizing the role in history of some icon figures of America like Abraham Lincoln of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nevertheless Free Trade and Continental Autarky are truly a couple of opposites that you cannot deny, even if the binary antagonism isn’t certainly so sharp as explained by LaRouche’s team. For instance, it is true that F. D. Roosevelt started his career as a US President by launching the huge project of the “Tennessee Valley”, foreseeing the building of a series of colossal dams to tame the violent waters of the Tennessee, Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The New Deal and the “Tennessee Valley Project” were distinctly continental purposes but they were torpedoed by the proponents of Free Trade, who in the end imposed a new Free Trade policy, an alliance with Britain, despite the fact that Chamberlain tried to create an inner Commonwealth autarky. This shift in Roosevelt’s policy lead to war with Japan and Germany because the failure of the New Deal policy implied to choose for exportations and to abandon the project of developing the inner Northern American market. If you have to prevent other areas in the world to develop their own closed markets, you must destroy them, according to the good old colonial logics, and get them as exportation markets. So the United States were doomed to destroy the European system of the Germans and the “Co-Prosperity Sphere of East Asia” under the leadership of Japan.
To summarize our position, let us remember that Russia developed and came out of underdevelopment under the “Continental Project” of Serguei Witte and Arkady Stolypin, who were either dismissed after a gossip campaign or assassinated by a crazy revolutionist. China after its communist isolation under Mao turned to a form of autarkist model under Deng Xiao Ping, leading the country to an unchallenged economical success. Putin in Russia is trying, with less success, to adopt the same guidelines. But the “Continental Autarkists” are assembling nowadays under the direction of the informal Shanghai Group or of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Europe and the United States will have to adapt in order to avoid complete decay. The key idea to successfully perform this adaptation is the good old project of Friedrich List. And the American can refer to one of his most brilliant students: Lawrence Dennis, who coined a project for “continental autarky”, being influenced by the “continentalist” school of South America, where he lived for a quite long time as a diplomat.
The Flemish village of Munkzwalm where many technical meetings and several Spring Courses were held between 1989 and 1995
Q.: Is it important for the pro-European activist to be familiar with geopolitics?
Of course. If you are a pro-European activist, you should perceive Europe as a geopolitical entity, surrounded by possible foes and having to control militarily its periphery, for instance by preventing the North African states to become sea powers again or to prevent any alien power to provide them sea power tools or missiles able to strike the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. The whole history of Europe is the history of a long defence battle against Barbary Coast pirates and their Ottoman rulers. Once this danger eliminated, Europe could develop and prosper. Nowadays mass immigration within the boarders of European countries replace the external danger of Barbary Coast piracy or of Ottoman threat by introducing parallel economical circuits and mafia systems of drug bosses, the so-called “diaspora mafias”, who weaken the whole social system by literally milking money from the well established European social security system and by earning colossal fortunes from drug dealing (Moroccan cannabis which amounts to 70% of the entire European consumption or Central Asian heroin dispatched by Turkish mafias). The type of danger has changed but comes always from the very next periphery of Europe. Racialist as well as so-called anti-racist arguments are preposterous in such matters, as you don’t need to develop a “racialist argumentation” to criticize mass immigration: you simply have to stress the fact that international authorities like the UNESCO or the UNO have urged the EU to finance alternative crops in Morocco, in order to replace the huge fields of cannabis in the Northern parts of the country by useful plantations. But the money given by the EU has been used to triple the area where cannabis crops are cultivated! So Morocco, the Moroccan citizens or the European citizens of Moroccan origin who trust drugs from the Rif area are lawbreakers in front of the EU, UNESCO and UNO policy. Anti-racist arguments, caucuses and legislations, trying to crush all people criticizing mass immigration, are in fact tools in the hand of the secret lobbies and the drug bosses that try to weaken Europe and to maintain our homelands in a permanent state of debility and decrepitude.
For you Swedes, as fellow countrymen of Rudolf Kjellén and Sven Hedin, geopolitics is of course a genuine part of your political and cultural heritage. Moreover the Russian Yuri Semionov, author of a tremendously interesting book on Siberia, was a refugee in Sweden in the Thirties. In Swedish libraries you must find a lot about the first theories on geopolitics (as it was Kjellén who coined the word), about the travelogues of Hedin, explorer of Central Asia and Tibet, and maybe about Semionov’s works. At the very beginning of the so-called New Right project, geopolitics was still taboo. There was certainly an implicit geopolitics among diplomats or generals, which was not genuinely different from the former geopolitical endeavours of the previous decades, but the very word was taboo. You couldn’t talk about geopolitics without being accused of trying to resume Nazi geopolitics, which had been set once for all as “esoteric”. Karl Haushofer, the German pupil of Kjellén, had been depicted as a crazy mystical mage having disguised his belonging to a so-called secret society of the “Green Dragon” behind a weak discourse about history, geography and international affairs. When you read Haushofer and his excellent “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik” (which survived him under the name of “Geopolitik” in the Fifties), you find comments on current affairs, reasonable reflections about frontiers within and outside Europe, interviews of foreign diplomats and excellent analyses about the Pacific area but no pseudo-Chinese or neo-Teutonic esoteric humbug. At the end of the Seventies, things changed. In the United States, Colin S. Gray decided to break definitively the taboo on geopolitics. As an Anglo-Saxon proponent of geopolitics, Gray was of course a pupil of Sir Halford John MacKinder, of Homer Lea and of their pupil Spykman. But he explained that Haushofer’s geopolitics was a continental reaction against MacKinder’s sea power geopolitics. Haushofer was so rehabilitated and could be studied again as a normal proponent of geopolitics and not as a mystical crackpot.
In the group of students, who followed the works of the New Right groups in Brussels at the end of the Seventies and was lead by late Alain Derriks, we had of course purchased a copy of Gray’s book but, at the same time, we discovered the book of an Italian general, Guido Giannettini, “Dietro la Grande Muraglia” (“Beyond the Great (Chinese) Wall”). This book was extremely well written, offered simultaneously a historical approach and present-day analyses, and opened wide perspectives. Giannettini had observed how the whole international chessboard had been turned upside down in 1972, when Kissinger and Nixon had coined a new implicit alliance with communist China. Formerly, the American lead Western world had faced a giant Eurasian communist block, embracing China and the USSR, even when the relationship between Moscow and Beijing wasn’t optimal anymore or could even become sometimes frankly antagonist (with a clash between both armies along the River Amur in Far Eastern Siberia). After the defeat of Germany in 1945, Europe had been divided, according to the rules settled at Teheran and Yalta, into a Western part dominated by NATO and an Eastern part under the direction of the Warsaw Pact. At that time Euro-nationalists around my fellow countryman Jean Thiriart, rejected both systems and pleaded for an alliance with China and the Arab world (Egypt, Syria and Iraq) in order to loose the choking entanglement of both NATO and Warsaw Pact. In Thiriart’s clearly outlined strategy for his Europe-wide but tiny movement, Chinese and Arabs would have had for task to keep Americans and Soviets busy outside Europe, so that the pressure would be lighter to bear in Europe and lead, if possible, to a successful liberation movement, aiming at restoring Europe’s independence and sovereignty. When Americans and Chinese joined their forces to contain and encircle Soviet Russia, the wished Euro-Chinese alliance to disentangle Yalta’s yoke in Europe became a sheer impossibility. On the other side, the Arabs were too weak and not interested in a European revival, as they feared a come back of the colonial powers in their area, as during the Suez affair in October 1956. Giannettini’s option for a Euro-Russian block became the only possible choice. Thiriart agreed. So did we. But our views about a possible future Euro-Russian alliance were confused at the very beginning: we couldn’t accept the occupation of Eastern Europe and even less the partition of Germany that is, geographically speaking, the core of Europe. On the other hand, the American disguised occupation was also for us an unacceptable situation, especially after De Gaulle’s breach with NATO and the new independent course in international affairs that it induced, according to Dr. Armin Mohler. After the Israeli victory of June 1967 with the help of Mirage III fighters and bombers, France’s new world policy lead to the exportation of Dassault jet fighters in Latin America, South Africa, India and Australia. It could have generated a new European based aeronautical industry, as in 1975 the Scandinavian and Low Countries air forces had the choice between the Mirage IV, the Saab Viggen jet, a new model produced by a future common French-Swedish project, or the American F-16. European independence was only possible if Europe could build an independent aeronautical industry, based on merges between already existing aeronautical companies. The fact that after corruption affairs the Scandinavian and Low Countries armies opted for the American F-16 jet ruined the possibility of a jointed independent European aeronautical industry. It was the purchase of the F-16 jets and the subsequent ruin of a possible French-Swedish fighter project that induces our small group to reject definitively all forms of pendency in front of the Western hegemonic power. But what else if the Iron Curtain seemed to be not removable and if the inner European situation was apparently a stalemate, bound to remain as such eternally?
Other readings helped us to improve our views. I’ll quote here two key books that shifted unequivocally our viewpoints: Prof. Louis Dupeux’ doctor paper on German “national bolshevism” at the time of the Weimar Republic in the Twenties and Prof. Alexander Yanov’s UCLA paper on the Russian “New Right” in the last years of Soviet rule, at the end of Brezhnev’s era and just before Gorbachev’s perestroika. Dupeux helped us to understand the relevancy of the Soviet-German tandem in the Twenties, starting with the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 (between Rathenau and Chicherin). This relevancy could explain us the cause of the ephemeral Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of August 1939. A European-Russian tandem could therefore offer the possibility of independence and Continental-Eurasian strength. But such a tandem was impossible under communist rule. But was communism as monolithic as it was described in the Western press and medias? In his paper Yanov divided Soviet-Russian political thought into two categories and each of these two categories again in two others: the Zapadniki (the Westerners) and the Narodniki (the proponents of Russian identity). You could find dissident Zapadniki in the emigration and pro-regime Zapadniki within the Soviet institutions (i. e. Marxist of the old school as Marxism was a Western importation). You could also find dissident Narodniki in the emigration, such as Solzhenitsyn, and pro-regime Narodniki in the Soviet-Russian academic world, such as the writer Valentin Rasputin, who wrote “rural” novels criticizing the reckless industrialisation and “electrification” of old traditional Russian villages or areas. For Yanov the Russian New Right was incarnated in all the Narodniki, be they dissidents or not, and all Narodniki were of course dangerous compeers and rascals as they challenged dominant Western as well as Soviet principles. So our position, and the one staunchly defended in Germany by former Gulag prisoner Wolfgang Strauss (arrested during the East German riots of June 1953), was to hope for a Narodniki political or metapolitical revolution in Russia and in Eastern Europe, giving the possibility to create an International of Narodniki, from the Atlantic coasts to the Pacific Ocean, challenging the Western hemisphere and its liberal leftist ideology. Meanwhile after Reagan’s election in November 1981 the missile crisis swept all over Europe. The piling up of missiles on both sides of the Iron Curtain risked in case of war to destroy definitively all European countries. The reaction was passionate especially in Germany: more and more puzzled voices required a new neutrality status, to avoid implication in a military system of warmongers, and pleaded for a withdrawal from NATO, as the Treaty’s Organisation was lead by an external hegemonic power, which didn’t care for the safety of Europe and was ready to unleash a horrible nuclear apocalypse upon our countries. A neutrality status, as suggested by General Jochen Löser in Germany (in “Neutralität für Mitteleuropa”), implied also to promote a kind of “Third Way” system, which would have been a synthesis between state socialism and market capitalism. “Wir Selbst” of Siegfried Bublies (Koblenz) was the leading magazine, which backed a policy of NATO withdrawal and Central European neutrality, a “Third Way” (for instance the one theorized by the Slovak economist Ota Sik), a reconciliation with Russia (according to Ernst Niekisch or Karl-Otto Paetel as dissidents both of the Weimar Republic and of the Third Reich), the devolution movements in Western and Eastern Europe, and the new dissidents in the Soviet dominated block. The magazine had been created in 1979 and remained till the very beginning of the 21st Century the main forum for alternative thought with a humanist touch in all Europe. I mean “humanist” in the sense given to this word by the main non Westernized dissidents of Eastern Europe, being no Narodniki in the narrow sense of this expression. The years 1982 and 1983 were determined by the pacifist revolt throughout Europe, especially in Germany around an interesting thinker like air force Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Mechtersheimer, and in the Low Countries but also in Britain, where huge demonstrations were held to prevent the dispatch of American missiles. Our small group supported the pacifist movement against the conventional positions of many other Rightist or even New Right clubs (including de Benoist at that time, who accused us of being the “Trotskites” of the movement, positioning himself as a kind of Stalin-like Big Brother!). The new pacifism and neutralism ceased to thrive when Gorbachev declared he intended to launch a glasnost and perestroika policy to soften the Soviet rule. Once Gorbachev promised a new policy, we could only wait and see, without abandoning all necessary scepticism.
During the second half of the Eighties, we hoped for a new world, in which the Iron Curtain would one day disappear and the dominant systems would gently evolve towards a “Third Way”. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall was suppressed, we all thought very naively that the liberation of Europe and of Russia was imminent. The Gulf War and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Iraq and of Afghanistan proved that Europe was in fact totally unable to take an original decision in front of the world events, with the slight exception of the short French, German and Russian opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, an opposition naively hailed as the new “Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axe” but an Axe that couldn’t of course prevent the unlawful invasion of Saddam Hussein’s country. So we still are in a desolate state of subjugation despite the fact that Europe now counts 27 states in full membership.
Let us come back to geopolitical theory. In 1979, when we discovered Giannettini’s book, I read General Heinrich Jordis von Lohausen’s book “Mut zur Macht”, which was a very good summary and actualisation of Kjellen’s ideas, as well as of all notions formerly defined by Haushofer and his broad team (Walter Pahl, Gustav Fochler-Hauke, Otto Maull, Walter Wüst, R. W. von Keyserlingk, Erich Obst, etc.). I wrote a small paper for my end examination of “International Affairs”, which was read with interest by the teacher, who found Lohausen’s positions interesting but still “dangerous”. Geopolitics in June 1980, date when I passed the examination with brio (18/20! Thank you, dear General von Lohausen!), was still taboo in “poor little Belgium”. It wouldn’t last a long time before this “dangerousness” would definitively belong to the past. The French intellectual world produced successively many excellent geopolitical studies: I’ll only quote here Yves Lacoste’s journal “Hérodote”, the accurate maps of Michel Foucher, the encyclopaedic studies of Hervé Coutau-Bégarie and the courses of Ayméric Chauprade (who, as a teacher in the French High Military Academy, was recently sacked by Sarközy because he couldn’t accept the coming back of France in the commanding structures of NATO as a full member state). In the Anglo-Saxon world, the best books on the matter are those produced by the British publishing house “I. B. Tauris” (London).
You cannot concentrate only on geopolitics as a mean strategic way of thinking. To use the tools properly you need an accurate knowledge in history that the shelves in Anglo-Saxon bookshops offer you in abundance. Then to be a good proponent of geopolitics you need to study lots of maps, especially historical maps. I therefore collect historical atlases since I got the first one in my life, the official one you had to buy when you reached the third year in the secondary school. When I was 15, I bought my very first German book, volume two of the “DTV-Atlas zur Weltgeschichte”, at Brussels’ flea market. The book lies now since about forty years on my desk! Indispensable tools are also the atlases of the British University teacher Colin McEvedy, which were translated into Dutch for Holland’s schools. McEvedy sees history as a regular succession of collisions between “core peoples” (Indo-Europeans, Turkish-Mongolic tribes, Semitic nomads of the Arabic peninsula, etc.), which he perceives as balls moving on a kind of huge billiard table, which is Eurasia with all its highways across the steppes. By reading McEvedy’s comments on the maps he draws we can understand history as permanent systolic and diastolic movements of “core peoples” (together with assimilated alien tribes or vanquished former foes) against each other, in order to control land, highways or sea accesses to them. And what is European history if not a long process of resisting more or less successfully Mongolic or Turkish assaults in the East and Hamito-Semitic incursions in the South? Next to McEvedy, the most interesting historical atlas in my collection is the one that a Swiss professor produced, namely Jacques Bertin’s “Atlas historique universel – Panorama de l’histoire du monde”, where you’ll find even more precise maps than the ones of McEvedy. Also, the German DTV-Atlas (which exists in an English version published at Penguin’s publishing house in Britain), McEvedy’s works and Bertin’s panorama are the tools that I use since many years. They have been my paper companions since I was a teenager.
What is your analysis of the actual and ideal relationship of Europe and Russia, Turkey and the United States?
To answer your question here in a complete and satisfying way, I should rather write a couple of thick books instead of babbling some insufficient explanations! Indeed your question asks me in fact to summarize in some short sentences the whole history of mankind. I suppose that, for historical reasons, Swedes don’t perceive Russia and Turkey as citizens of Central or Western Europe would perceive these countries. Swedes must remember the attempt of King Charles XII to restore what was seen as the “Gothic Link” between the Baltic and the Black Sees by becoming the heir of the Polish-Lithuanian State in decay at his time: therefore he had to wage war against Russia and try to obtain the Turkish alliance. During the Soviet-Finnish war of winter 1939-40, Swedes were terribly worried because the move of Stalin’s Red Army to recuperate Finland as a former Tsarist province implied a future Soviet control of the Baltic See reducing simultaneously Swedish sovereignty and room for manoeuvre in these waters. It was also jeopardizing the fragile independence of the Baltic States.
Vlotho, Low Saxony (Germany) where a lot of meetings, conferences and Summer courses took place
Russia still wants to have access to the Atlantic via the Baltic see routes but in a less aggressive way than in Soviet times, when a messianic ideology was running the agenda. After the disappearing of the Iron Curtain, we are back to the situation we had in 1814. Once Napoleon Bonaparte had been eliminated and together with him the tone-downed Bolshevism of his time, i. e. the blood drenched French revolution ideology, Europe was a more or less united block nicknamed in Ancient Greek language the “Pentarchy” (The “Five Powers”), stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts. We often forget nowadays that Europe was a strategic united block between 1814 and 1830, i. e. only during fifteen years. This unity allowed the pacification of Spain in 1822-23, the Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1828 and later the crushing of Barbary Coast piracy by the landing of French troops in present-day Algeria in 1832. But the “Pentarchy” ceased to be a harmonious symphony of allied traditional powers when Belgium become independent from the King of Holland: indeed, Britain (in order to destroy the sea power of Holland, the industrial capacities in present-day Belgium’s Walloon provinces and the potentialities of the Indonesian colonial realm of the United Low Countries Kingdom) and France (aiming at recuperating Belgium and the harbour of Antwerp as well as a portion of the Mosel Valley in Luxemburg, leading to the very middle of German Rhineland in Koblenz) supported the rather incoherent Belgian independence movement while the other powers (Prussia, Austria and Russia) supported the Dutch King and his United Kingdom of the Low Countries. France, which started in the Thirties of the 19th Century to carve its African Empire not only in Algeria but also in present-day Gabon and Senegal, and Britain, which was already a world empire whose cornerstone was India, became very soon Extra-European realms deriving their power from wealthy colonies and were therefore not more interested in the strategic unity of Europe, as the genuine civilisation area of all the people of our Caucasian kinship. The competition between European powers to get colonies implied that colonial rivalries could perhaps end in inner European conflicts, what happened indeed in 1914. The spirit of 1814 was kept alive by the “Drei Kaisersbund”, the “Alliance of the three Emperors” (United Germany after 1871, Austria-Hungary and Russia), which unfortunately started to disintegrate after Bismarck’s withdrawal in 1891 and due to the French-Russian economical-financial alliance under Tsar Alexander III (cf. the limpid book of Gordon Craig and Alexander L. George, “Zwischen Krieg und Frieden. Konfliktlösung in Geschichte und Gegenwart”, C. H. Beck, Munich, 1984; this book is a history of European diplomacy from the Treaty of Vienna in 1814 to WW1, where the authors describe the gradual disintegration of the “Pentarchy”, leading to the explosion of 1914; both authors remember also that Nixon and Kissinger tried to re-establish a kind of “Pentapolarity”, with China, Japan, the United States, Europe and Soviet Russia, but the attempt failed or was reduced to nought by the new human rights’ diplomacy of Carter. The only possible present-day “Pentapolarity” is represented by the “BRIC”-system, with Brazil, Russia, Iran, India, China and maybe, in a next future, post-Mandela South Africa).
Sababurg Castle, along the "Märchenstrasse" ("Fairy Tales Road"), Hessen (Germany), where the German friends usually held their regular meetings
In the first decade of the 20th Century, the “Entente” was not an obvious option at the very beginning: Russia and Britain were still rivals in Central Asia and on the rimland of South Asia; Britain and France were rivals in Sudan as Britain couldn’t tolerate a French military settlement on the Nile River (the Fashoda incident in 1898), a situation which would have cut the British possessions in the Southern part of Africa from the Egyptian protectorate in the North; we should remember here that Cecil Rhodes’ project was to link Cape Town to Cairo by a British managed Trans-African railway, after the elimination of the German colony of Tanganyka or a possible occupation of Belgian Katanga. Even if already grossly decided in 1904, the French-British-Russian alliance, known as the Entente, was far to be a sure fact before the fatidic year of 1914. The Anglo-Russian dispute in Persia had still to be settled in 1907. Moreover the three Entente powers hadn’t yet shared their part of the pie on the rimlands, as France had to accept first the de facto English protectorate in Egypt. In return for this acceptation, Britain accepted to support France’s interests in Morocco against the will of the German Emperor, who wanted to extend the Reich’s influence to the Sherifan Kingdom in North Africa, threatening to close the Mediterranean and to reduce to nought the key strategic importance of Gibraltar. For all these reasons, it is obviously not sure that Russian efficient ministers as Witte or Stolypin would have waged a war, as Russia was still economically and industrially to weak to sustain a long term war against the so-called Central Powers, i.e. Austria, Germany and the Ottomans, especially as China and Japan could possibly take advantage in the Far East of a debilitated Russia on the European stage.
The problem is that we Europeans cannot escape the necessity of using the Siberian raw materials and the gas and oil of the Caucasian, Central Asian and Russian fields. The weakness of Europe lays in its lack of raw materials (nowadays 90% of the rare earths, indispensable for high tech electronic devices, have to be bought in China). Europe could save itself from the Ottoman entanglement by conquering America and by circumnavigating Africa and arriving in the Indian harbours without having to pass through Islam dominated areas. Europeans aren’t visceral colonialists: they carved colonial empires despite their will, simply to escape an Ottoman-Muslim invasion.
The European-Turkish relationship has always been conflictual and remains today as such. It is not a question of race or even of religion, although both factors ought of course to be taken reasonably into account. Religion played certainly a key role as the Seldjuks had turned Muslim before attacking and beating the Byzantine Empire in 1071 but one forgets too often that at the same time other Turkish tribes, known as the Cumans, attacked Southern Russia and moved in the direction of the Low Danube without having turned Muslim: their faith war still Pagan-Shamanic. They nevertheless coordinated their wide scale action with their Muslim cousins. Muslim and Pagan-Shamanic Turks took the Pontic area (Black Sea as Pontus Euxinus) in a tangle: the Pagan Cumans in the North, the Muslim Seldjuks in the South. It is neither a question of race as present-day Turkey is a mix of all possible neighbouring peoples, tribes and ethnic kinships. It isn’t a joke to say that you have now Turks of all colours, like on an advertisement panel of Benetton! The European Danubian, Balkanic (Bosnians, Greeks, Albanians) and Ukrainian contribution to the ethno-genesis of the present-day Turkish population is really important, as are the parts of converted local Byzantine Greeks or Armenians or as are also the Sunni Indo-European Kurds. The Arab-Syrian influence is also clear in the South. The Turkish danger is that the Turks, whatever their real origin may be, still see themselves as the heirs of all the Hun, Mongolic and Turkish tribes that moved westwards to the Atlantic. Sultan Mehmed, who took Constantinople in 1453, kept in his mind the idea of the general move of Turkish tribes westwards but added to his geopolitical vision the one that moved the Byzantine general Justinian, who wanted at the beginning of the 7th Century to conquer again all the Mediterranean area till the shores of the Atlantic. Mehmed’s vision was also a merge of Turkish and Byzantine geopolitics. In his own eyes, he was the Sultan and the Byzantine Basileus at the same time and wanted to become also Pope and Emperor, once his armies would have taken both Rome (“the Red Apple”) and Vienna (“the Golden Apple”). Mehmed even thought that one day such a shift as a “translatio imperii ad Turcos” could happen, like there had been a “translatio imperii ad Francos” and “ad Germanos”, just after the definitive crumbling down of the Roman Empire.
The idea of moving westwards is still alive among Turks. The strong Turkish desire to become a full member of the EU means the will to pour the Anatolian demographic overpopulation into the demographically declining European states and to transform them in Muslim Turkish dominated countries. This statement of mine is not a mean reflection of an incurable “Turkophobic” obsession but is purely and simply derived from an analysis of Erdogan’s speech in Cologne in February 2008. Erdogan urged the Turkish immigration in Germany and in other European countries not to assimilate, as “assimilation is a crime against mankind” because it would wipe out the “Turkishness” of Turkish people, and urged also to create autonomous Turkish communities within the European states, that would welcome the new immigrants by marriage of by so-called “family gathering”. Later Erdogan and Davutoglu threaten to back the Turkish mafias in Europe, would the authorities of the EU postpone once more the admission of Turkey as a full member state. Every serious political personality in Europe has to reject such a project and to struggle against its possible translation into the everyday European reality. A migration flood of totally uneducated workforces into Europe would lead to high joblessness and let the social security systems collapse definitively. It would mean the end of the European civilisation.
The Turks are plenty aware of the key position their country has on the world map. Would I be a Turk, I would of course staunchly support Erdogan and Davutoglu. But I am not and cannot identify myself to such an alien vision of geopolitics. I wouldn’t care if all the efforts of the new Turkish geopolitics would be directed towards the Near East, as the Near East needs a hegemonic regional power to get rid of the awful chaos in which it is now desperately squiggling. It wouldn’t perhaps not be so easy for the Turks to become again the hegemonic power in an Arab Near East as conflicts were frequent between Ottomans and Arab nationalists, especially since the end of the 19th Century when Sultan Abdulhamid started a centralisation policy, which was achieved by the strongly nationalist Young Turks in power since 1908. Arab liberal nationalists contended this new Young Turkish nationalist rule, which was not more genuinely Islamic, universal and Imperial-Ottoman but strictly Turkish national, stressing the superiority of the Turks within the Ottoman Empire, reducing simultaneously the Arabs to second-class citizens. The challenging Arab nationalists were severely crushed at the eve of WW1 (public hangings of Arab liberal intellectuals were common in Syrian or Lebanese towns at that time). But a renewed Turkish policy in the Near East cannot in principle collide frontally with the vital and paramount European interests, except of course if it would dominate the Suez Canal zone and control this essential portion of the sea route leading from West Europe to the Far East: one should not forget that the Zionist idea, i. e. the idea of settling Jews in the area between Turkish Anatolia and Mehmet Ali’s successful Egypt of the first half of the 19th Century, that was supported by France, was an idea shaped in the late 1830s in the English press and not in the mind of Rabbis in Eastern European ghettos. The idea had already been evoked by Prince Charles de Ligne during the war between the Ottoman Empire and the coalition of Russia and Austria in the 1780s as a means to weaken the Turks and to create a focal point of troubles on another front, far from the Balkans, Crimea and the Caucasus; Napoleon wanted also to settle Jews in Palestine in order to prevent a future Turkish domination in the Suez area, as the French at that time, by supporting the Mameluks of Egypt against their Turkish masters, already had the intention to dig a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Zionism is also not a genuine ideology born in Jewish ghettos but an idea forged artificially by the British to use the Jews as mere puppets. This role of Israel as a simple puppet state explains also why the relationship between Turkey and Israel are worsening now as the renewed Ottoman diplomacy of Davutoglu induces the Turkish state to resume his previous influences in the Arab Near East or Fertile Crescent. This could lead to a complete reverse of alliances in the region: voices in the United States are pleading for a new Iranian-American tandem between Mesopotamia and the Indus River which would fade or dim the usual alliance between Ankara, Washington and Tel Aviv. Such a shift would be as important as the Nixon-Kissinger renewed diplomacy of 1971-72, when suddenly China, the former “rogue state”, turned instantaneously to be the best ally of the States. It would also rule out many oversimplifying ideologists who have opted for cartoonlike pro-Zionist, pro-Palestinian (or pro-Hamas or pro-Hizbollah) or pro-Iranian positions in order to support either a Western Alliance or an Anti-Western/Anti-American coalition on the international chessboard. Things might or even may be completely turned upside down within a single decade. The Anti-American pro-Iranian ideologist of today may become a pro-Zionist Anti-American tomorrow if he wants to remain Anti-American and if he is not turned still crazier by the crumbling down of his too schematic worldview as many Western Maoists did in the 1970s, when their former anti-American anti-imperialist perorations coined on the Chinese model of Mao’s cultural revolution became totally outdated and preposterous once Kissinger had forged an alliance with communist China, that wasn’t ready anymore to support Maoist zealots and puppets in the Western world. Indeed, the United States would better than now contain Russia, China and India in case of a renewed alliance with Teheran. And using the quite wide influence sphere of the “Iranian civilization” (as the former Shah used to say), they could extend more easily their preponderance in Central Asia, in the Fertile Crescent, in Lebanon (with the Shiite minority armed by the Hizbollah) and in the Gulf where Shiite minorities are important. But Iran would then become a too powerful ally, exactly like China, the new ally of 1972, does. And before Iran would become a new China and develop naval capacities in the Gulf and in the Oman Sea, i. e. in one of the main areas of the Indian Ocean, like China wants to control entirely the Southern Chinese Sea in the Pacific, Europe would have to unite with Russia and India to contain a pro-American Iran! Stephen Kinzer, former “New York Times” bureau chief in Turkey, celebrated analyst of Iran’s turmoil in 1953 (the Mossadegh case) and International relations teacher at Boston University, pleads in his very recent book “Reset Middle East” for a general alliance on the Near East, Middle East and South Asian rimlands between Turks, Iranians and Americans (which would include also Pakistan and so re-establish the containing bolt that the Bagdad Treaty formerly was). When you are interested in geopolitics you should have fine observing skills and foresee all possible shifts in alliances that could occur in a very near future. It is also obvious that if Washington continues to treat Teheran as a “rogue state”, the Iranians will be compelled to play the game with Russia that remains nevertheless historically a foe of the Persians. Each Russian-Persian tandem would split in its very middle the rimland’s room that was organised by the Bagdad Treaty of the Fifties and give the Russians indirectly a broad “window” on the Indian Ocean, which is a state of things totally contrary to the principles settled by Homer Lea in 1912 and since then cardinal to all the Anglo-Saxon sea powers.
The relationship with the United States is a quite complex one. Two main ideas must be kept in mind if you want to understand our position:
1) Like the British historian Christopher Hill brilliantly demonstrated in his books “The World Turned Upside Down – Radical Ideas During the English Revolution” and “Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England”, the core ideas that lead to the foundation of the British Thirteen Colonies in the Northern part of the New World was “dissidence” in front of all the European political systems inherited from the past. Later Clifford Longley in “Chosen People – The Big idea that Shapes England and America” produced an very accurate historical analysis of this Biblical idea of a Chosen People that leads Britons and Americans to perceive themselves not as a particular people of the European Caucasian family but as a “lost tribe of Israel”. Longley explains us that state of affairs by writing that Britons and Americans don’t have an identity, as other European people have, but thinks that they have a particular destiny, i. e. to build an aloof “New Jerusalem” and not a concrete defensive Empire of the European people, that would be born out of the genuine historical traditions of the subcontinent and simultaneously the legitimate, syncretic, Continental and Insular (Britain, Ireland, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, etc.) heir of the Roman Empire and of the medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The very idea of incarnating a “New Jerusalem” leads to despise the “non chosen”, even if they are akin people having importantly contributed to the ethno-genesis of the English or American nation (Dutch, Flemings, Northern Germans as Hanovrian or Low Saxons, Danes and Norwegians). Kevin Phillips, former Republican strategist in the United States and political commentator in leading American papers, in his fascinating book “American Theocracy – The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century”, criticizes the new political theology induced by the several Bush’s Administrations between 2000 and 2008, that have bereft the Republicans from the last remnants of traditional diplomacy, leading to what he calls an “Erring Republican Majority”. Indeed each chosen people’s theology introduced in the events of the international chessboard destroys all the traditional ways of practising diplomacy, as surely as French Sans-Culottes’ Republicanism or Bolshevism did or Islam Fundamentalism does. Europe, as a continent that has a long memory, cannot admit a scheme that rejects vehemently all the heritages of the past to replace them by mere artificial myths, that were moreover imported from the Near East in Roman times and have received a still faker interpretation in the decades just after Reformation.
2) The second main fact of history to keep in mind in order to understand the complex Euro-American relationship is the effect the Monroe Doctrine had on the international chessboard from the second quarter of the 19th Century onwards. In principle the Monroe Doctrine aimed at preventing European interventions in the New World or the Western Hemisphere as the Spanish “creole” countries had rebelled against Madrid and gained their independence and as the British had burnt Washington in 1812, after having invaded the States from Canada, and the Russians were still formally in California and Alaska. Monroe feared a general intervention of the “Pentarchy” powers everywhere in the new World that would have prevented the former Thirteen Colonies to develop and would synchronously have choked any attempt to rise as a Northern American continental and bi-oceanic power. Indeed the young Northern American Republic faced at that time a huge Eurasian block that seemed definitively indomitable, with British room projections in India and Southern Africa. The American historian Dexter Perkins in his book “Hands off: A History of the Monroe Doctrine” (1955) explains us that President Monroe got the audacity to challenge the European/Eurasian block at a time when the United States couldn’t actually assert any well-grounded power on the international chessboard. Monroe’s bold affirmation created US power in the world, simply because a pure will, expressed in plain words, can really anticipate actual power, be the very first step towards it. It is not a simple matter of chance that Carl Schmitt stressed the uttermost importance of the Monroe Doctrine in the genesis of the geopolitical shape of present-day world. Jordis von Lohausen says in his book “Mut zur Macht” that if Monroe wanted to preserve the New World from any European intervention, he wanted simultaneously to keep this New World for the USA themselves as sole hegemonic power. But if the New World is united under the leadership of Washington, it must control the other banks of the Oceans in a way or another to prevent any concentration of power able to disturb US hegemony or to regain authority in Latin America, be it directly political (like during the attempt of Maximilian of Hapsburg to create a European-dominated Empire in Mexico in 1866-67 with the support of France, Belgium, Spain and Austria) or indirectly by trade and economical means (as Germany did just before the two World Wars). So in the end effect, the Monroe Doctrine implies that the United States have to control the shores of Western Europe and of Morocco and the ones of Japan, China, Indochina and the Philippines in order to survive a the main superpower in the world.
The critical attitude we always have developed in front of the US American fact derives from these two core ideas. We cannot accept a Biblical ideology refusing to take into account our real roots and reducing all the institutions generated by our history to worthless rubbish. We can neither accept an affirmation of power that denies us the right to be ourselves a power on political, military and cultural levels. Would America get rid of the former British dissident ideology and adopt the principles of continental autarky, as Lawrence Dennis taught to do, there wouldn’t be any problem anymore. It would even be of great benefit for the US American population itself.
In your many articles you have exhibited an impressive knowledge of European thinkers from Hamsun and Evola to Spengler and Schmitt. Do you consider some of them more important, and a good starting-point for the pro-European individual?
The study of our “classical” heritage of authors is a must if we want to create a real alternative worldview (“Weltanschauung”). Moreover, Evola, Spengler and Schmitt are more linked to each other than we would imagine at first glance. Evola is not only the celebrated traditional thinker who is worldwide known as such. He was an intrepid alpinist who climbed the Northern wall of the Lyskamm in the Alps. His ashes were buried in the Lyskamm glacier by his follower Renato del Ponte after he had been cremated in Spoleto (a town that remained true to Emperor Frederick Hohenstaufen) after his death in 1974. Evola was a Dadaist at the very beginning of his career as an artist, a thinker and a traditionalist. His was totally involved in the art avant-gardes of his time, as he himself declared during a very interesting television interview in French language that you can watch now on your internet screen via “you tube” or “daily motion”. This position of him was deduced from a thorough rejection of Western values as they had degenerated during the 18th and 19th Centuries. We have to get rid of them in order to be “reborn”: the Futurists thought we ought to perform promptly this rejection project in order to create a complete new world owing absolutely nothing to the past; the Dadaists thought the rejection process should happen by mocking the rationalist and positivist bigotry of the “stupid 19th Century” (as Charles Maurras’ companion Léon Daudet said). Evola after about a decade thought such options, as throwing rotten tomatoes at scandalized bourgeois’ heads or as exhibiting an urinal as if it was a masterwork of sculpture, were a little childish and started to think about an exploration of “the World of Tradition” as it expressed itself in other religions such as Hinduism, the Chinese Tao Te King, the first manifestations of Indian Buddhism (“the Awakening Doctrine”), the Upanishads and Tantric Yoga. For the European tradition, Evola studied the manifestations and developed a cult of Solar Manly Tradition being inspired in this reasoning by Bachofen’s big essay on matriarchal myth (“Mutterrecht”). Thanks to the triumph of the Solar Tradition, a genuine Traditional Europe could awaken on the shores of the Mediterranean and especially in the Romanized part of the Italic peninsula, invaded by Indo-European tribes having crossed the Alps just before the Celts did after them. Besides, he was the translator of Spengler and reviewed a lot of German books written by authors belonging to what Armin Mohler called the “Konservative Revolution”. In Italy Evola is obviously very well known, even in groups or academic work teams that cannot be considered as “conservative-revolutionist”, but the role he played as a conveyer of German ideas into his own country is often neglected outside Italy. But still today people rediscover in Latin countries figures of the German “Konservative Revolution” through the well-balanced reviews Evola once published in a lot of intellectual journals from the 1920s to the 1960s. As his comments on these books and publications were very well displayed on didactical level, he can also be still very helpful to us today.
Evola was also a diplomat trying to link again to Italy the countries having belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian empire. He was active in Prague, in Vienna (a City he loved) and in Budapest. He also had contacts with the Romanian Iron Guard, which he admired as a kind of citizens’ militia controlling severely the bends of petty politics limping towards corruption and “kleptocracy”. Even if he was mobilized when he was still a very young man as an artillery officer in the Italian army during WW1, Evola disapproved the war waged against traditional Austria and didn’t agree with the Futurists, d’Annunzio and Mussolini who were hectic interventionist warmongers. He was aware that the destruction of the Holy Roman Imperial Tradition in the centre of Europe would be a catastrophe for European culture and civilization. And it was indeed a catastrophe that we still can grasp today: a contemporary author like Claudio Magris, born in Trieste, explains it very well in his books, especially in “Danube”, a kind of nostalgic travelogue, written during peregrinations from one place to another in this lost Empire of former times, now torn into many scattered pieces belonging to thirteen different countries.
Carl Schmitt in several books or articles expresses the nostalgia of a kind of “Empire’s secret Chamber” regulating the general policy of a “greater room” (“Grossraum”): for him the members of such a Chamber, if it ever becomes reality, would find inspiration from Bachofen’s ideas and their interpretations, from Spengler pessimistic decay philosophy and from the analyses of all possible teams devoted to geopolitics (Haushofer and others). Carl Schmitt just as Evola was also deeply interested in art avant-gardes.
My interest for Hamsun comes from the implicit anthropology you find in his works: the real man is a peasant running an estate. He is free: what he owns is his own production; he is never defined or bound by others, i. e. by alien capitalists or by State’s servants or by foreign rulers or by the eager members of a ruling and crushing party (Orwell’s pigs in “Animal Farm”). The general urbanization process that started in the historical cities of Europe (especially Paris, London and Berlin) and in the new hectic cities of the United States lead to the emerging of an enslaved mankind, unable to coin its own destiny with the only help of his own inner and physical forces. Spengler and Eliade both say also that true mankind is incarnated in the “eternal peasant”, who is the only type of man that can generate genuine religion. David Herbert Lawrence’s most important book for us is without any doubt “Apocalypse”: this English author laments the disappearing of “cosmic forces” in man’s life, due to the bias inaugurated by Reformation, Deism (mocked by Jonathan Swift), 18th Century Enlightenment and political extremism derived from the blueprints (Burke) of the French Revolution. Man became gradually detached from the cosmic frame in which he was embedded since ever. He’s lost also all his links to the natural communities in which he was born, like the poor immigrant Hamsun was in Chicago or Detroit, limping from one miserable job to another, bereft of all youth friends and family members. The cosmic frame Lawrence was talking about receives a comprehensive and understandable translation for the humble in the aspect of a religious liturgy and calendar (or almanac), expressing symbolically the rhythms of nature in which each man or woman lives. Although Flanders has been urbanized since the Middle Ages and had important industrial cities like Bruges and Ghent, the anthropological ideal of the 19th Century romantic or realist Flemish literature is the one of the independent peasant (“Baas Gansendonck” in Hendrik Conscience’s novel, the unfortunate and stubborn Father figure in Stijn Streuvels’ “Vlaschaard”, the heroes of Ernst Claes’ and Felix Timmermans’ rural novels and short stories, etc.). In Russian literature too, the rural element of the population is perceived as doomed under any communist or Westernized regime but simultaneously perceived as the only force able to redeem Russia from its horrible past. Solzhenitsyn pleaded for a general liberation of the Russian peasantry in order to restore the Ukrainian “Corn Belt” in the “Black Earth” area, giving Russia back the agricultural advantages it potentially had before the total destruction of the “Kulaks” by the Bolsheviks.
But we can talk for hours and hours, write full pages of interpretations of our common literary heritage; I cannot answer your question thoroughly as it would need writing a good pile of books. Let us conclude by saying Tradition or literary “ruralism” (be it Flemish, Scandinavian or Russian) are good things provided you don’t remain glued into it. Futurism is a dynamic necessity also, especially in societies like ours, where the countryside isn’t the only life frame anymore. Marinetti and more recently Guillaume Faye stressed the fact that in order to be able to compete on the international chessboard we have the imperious task to get rid of archaisms. But if Faye is obviously more futurist that “archaist”, I plead for a good balance between immemorial past and audacious future (like Claes did in his marvellously filmed novel “Mira”, in which a backward rural community refuses the building of a bridge that would link the village to the next important town; the young sensual prostitute Mira, treated as a witch by the village bigots, having just come back from Paris, where she was on the game, falls in love with the handsome engineer, the bridge is built and the village dwellers linked to the rest of the people’s community without abandoning their roots – the ideal balance between past and future, between demure morality and forgiven sin, is realised). To put it in realistic arguments: we need both a sound rural population (crushed nowadays by the EU-ukases) and a high tech engineering elite (able to create super-weapons) to become a re-born superpower, which would not be unnecessarily aggressive or feverish “imperialist” (in the bad sense of the word), but calmly civilian (Zaki Laïdi) and simply powerful by its plain presence in the world. Mentally, we, as the forerunners of the needed “new teams” in present-day messy and derelict Europe, should be real and staunch “archeo-futurists”, mastering our roots and planning boldly our future. The rest is only mean and petty trifles.
(Answers given in Forest-Flotzenberg, March 2011).
00:25 Publié dans Nouvelle Droite, Réflexions personnelles, Synergies européennes | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : synergies européennes, nouvelle droite, théorie politique, sciences politiques, politologie, robert steuckers, révolution conservatrice, eurasisme, géopolitique | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mercredi, 04 mai 2011
Armin Mohler / Eine politische Biographie
Armin Mohler. Eine politische Biographie
Götz KUBITSCHEK
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.
00:15 Publié dans Livre, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, suisse, droite, conservatisme, conservatisme allemand | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 17 avril 2011
Thomas Mann: Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen - über die Wiedersprüche der demokratischen Gesinnungsethik
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Thomas Mann: Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen - Über die Wiedersprüche der demokratischen Gesinnungsethik Geschrieben von: Prof. Dr. Paul Gottfried (Gastautor) |
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Als Universitätsstudent wurde mir eingehämmert, dass beides dieselbe antidemokratische Streitlust bloßlegt, die den Krieg angestossen hatte. Obendrein ist ein gradliniger Verbindungsgang vermeintlich aufzuspüren, der von Manns Empfehlung des „deutschen Sonderwegs“ in den Betrachtungen bis auf die Nazi-Gewaltherrschaft hinüberleitet. Das wurde in den relativ beschaulichen und unparteiischen USA im Jahre 1963 gelehrt. Man kann sich vorstellen, wie dröhnend dieselbe Mahnung im heutigen antifaschistischen Deutschland ertönen muss. |
00:05 Publié dans Histoire, Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (1) | Tags : allemagne, weimar, histoire, philosophie, révolution conservatrice, thomas mann | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
samedi, 16 avril 2011
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897)
Archives 1994
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897)
Jos VINKS
Il y a 170 ans, W. H. Riehl naissait, le 6 mai 1823, à Bieberich dans le pays de Hesse, aux environs de Giessen. Je m’étonne que son nom ne soit plus cité dans les publications conservatrices ou dextristes. Récemment, la très bonne revue allemande “Criticon” a consacré un article à Riehl. En 1976 était paru, dans une collection de livres publiés par l’éditeur Ullstein, le texte “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”, un des plus importants écrits socio-politiques de notre auteur, paru pour la première fois en 1851.
Avant de traiter de l’oeuvre de cet auteur zélé et fécond, nous retracerons en bref sa biographie, ce qui s’avère nécessaire pour la situer dans le temps et dans la société.
Riehl a suivi l’école primaire à Bieberich, le lieu de sa naissance, après quoi il fréquenta le Pedagogium de Wiesbaden. En 1837, il s’inscrit au Gymnasium de Weilheim. En 1839, son père se suicide, parce qu’il estimait être une victime de l’arbitraire bureaucratique. Riehl voulait étudier la théologie et devenir prédicateur évangélique, contre la volonté de son père, qui, en tant qu’homme de confiance des Ducs de Nassau et d’intendant de leur château, avait quelque connaissance du monde, grâce aux voyages qu’il avait entrepris. Riehl se trouvait tout à la fois sous l’influence des théories de son père, un rationaliste et un adepte des idées de 1789, et sous celles, traditionalistes, de son grand-père, Grand Maître de Maison auprès des Nassau. C’est ainsi que l’on peut expliquer la position intermédiaire qu’il prendra, entre l’ordre ancien d’une communauté d’états (Stände) et la problématique d’un dépassement révolutionnaire de ces vieilles structures, ce qui donnera un “conservatisme réflexif”. En 1841, il débarque à l’Université de Marbourg. Son intérêt pour l’histoire culturelle s’y éveille. De Marbourg, il ira à Giessen car l’université de cette ville se trouvait plus près de Bieberich; ce seront surtout des considérations financières qui le forceront à prendre cette décision. A Giessen, il se lie d’amitié avec Michael Carrière, un ami de Bettina von Arnim, égérie du “Cercle des Romantiques”. Le romantisme, avec la sympathie qu’il cultivait pour le moyen âge, avec sa vision artistique mais aussi sociale et économique sur l’histoire, sur le caractère national et sur la “populité”, va s’emparer de la pensée de notre auteur, même s’il s’était auparavant familiarisé avec les pensées de Kant et de Hegel, par l’intermédiaire de ses professeurs de Marbourg et de Giessen. Plus tard, il aurait dit qu’il avait des dispositions trop nettes pour le réalisme et ne pouvait dès lors pas s’enfermer dans un système philosophique.
Après Giessen, il s’en va à Tübingen, une université où les Jeunes Hégéliens donnent le ton. Dans les textes qu’il rédige à l’époque, il salue avec passion le succès de la Révolution de Juillet en France, en 1848. Sa position politique, à ce moment, n’est pas unilatéralement révolutionnaire, selon Geramb (Bibliographisches Jahrbuch, 1900) mais témoigne bel et bien d’une liberté de pensée et d’esprit, surtout dans le domaine religieux. L’influence des Jeunes Hégéliens et de l’esprit libéral de cette époque se perçoivent clairement chez lui ainsi qu’un sens résolument national, opposé à toutes les idées cosmopolites. A l’automne 1843, Riehl avait passé l’examen de théologie à Herborn et avait obtenu des subsides pour poursuivre ses études. Ce qu’il fera à Bonn, où, notamment, le fougueux nationaliste démocrate Ernst Moritz Arndt dispensait ses leçons. Finalement, il abandonnera les études de théologie pour se consacrer entièrement à l’étude du peuple et des structures que celui-ci génère, dans la continuité anthropologique qu’il représente. Il finit par admettre que l’Etat constitue le “peuple organisé” et qu’il existe “pour la volonté du peuple”. Pour gagner son pain, il se fait journaliste dans les colonnes du journal libéral-conservateur “Oberpostamts-Zeitung” de Francfort entre 1845 et 1847. A partir de 1847, il devient rédacteur auprès de la “Karlsruher Zeitung”, puis directeur du “Badische Landtagsbote”.
La révolution de 1848 impulse un tournant à son développement intellectuel. D’après lui-même, ce fut l’année où il devint conservateur en pleine conscience. Il quitte Bade et revient à Wiesbaden. Il y fonde la “Nassauische Allgemeine Zeitung” et devient aussi le cofondateur du Parti démocrate-monarchiste. Pendant un bref laps de temps, il dirigera le Théâtre de la Cour à Wiesbaden. La conséquence de tout cela fut une prise de distance avec la politique et avec le journalisme: il quitte son poste de rédacteur en 1850. Il commence alors les études qui le conduiront à rédiger “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”. Même s’il a quitté la politique, il y revient indirectement par le biais de ses études culturelles. Il publie dans un ouvrage en quatre volumes, “Naturgeschichte des Volkes”, les études qu’il avait fait paraître dans les journaux ainsi que quelques travaux de circonstances.
En 1851 parait la première édition de “De bürgerliche Gesellschaft” et, trois ans plus tard, “Land und Leute” (“Le pays et les gens”). “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft” avait pour intention première de décrire le peuple dans tous les liens qu’il tisse, dans tous ses “états”, mais détaché de toute particularité locale. Dans “Land und Leute”, au contraire, il s’efforcera de pénétrer dans toutes les particularités et les différences locales et régionales du peuple. “Au départ des relations individuelles du pays et des hommes se développe l’abstraction culturelle/historique de la société bourgeoise/citoyenne”, écrit-il. Le Roi Maximilien II de Bavière est vivement impressionné par ce travail. Il appelle donc Riehl à ses côtés.
Riehl devient ainsi membre du “Cabinet littéraire” puis est admis dans le “Symposium”, sorte de table ronde autour de la personne du Roi, où siègent déjà, entre autres illustres personnages, Liebig, Bodenstedt, Geibel et Kaulbach. Au cours de cette même année 1853, il obtient un poste honoraire de professeur à l’Université de Munich. Il avait déjà été nommé responsable des relations avec la presse pour la Maison Royale et pour le Ministère bavarois des affaires étrangères. Son discours inaugural à l’Université était consacré à l’ethnographie: il y déclara que la richesse et la diversité de la nature, des paysages et des sols dans les Allemagnes d’alors dépendait de la formation individuelle au sein du peuple allemand et que, pour cette raison, l’Allemagne devait impérativement viser son unité politique, sans toutefois sombrer dans les affres d’un unitarisme centralisateur. Les activités de Riehl se mesurent au nombre de ses conférences et des lieux qu’il a visités —plus de cent— et au nombre de personnes qui sont venues l’écouter: environ 300.000.
En 1857, Riehl, avec Felix Dahn, prend en charge un important travail d’ethnographie et de topographie: les “Bavarica”. En 1860 parait le volume consacré à la Haute Bavière (Oberbayern) et en 1863 un volume sur le Haut Palatinat (Oberpfalz) et la Souabe. En 1873, il est promu recteur de l’Université de Munich et en 1883 il reçoit un titre de noblesse. En 1885, il est nommé directeur du Musée National Bavarois et conservateur général des bâtiments et monuments classés de Bavière. En 1894, l’année où meurt sa femme, il écrit son dernier livre, “Religiöse Studien”. Deux ans plus tard, notre philosophe, à moitié aveugle et fort affaibli, épouse Antonie Eckhardt, qui le soignera jusqu’à sa mort, le 16 novembre 1897.
Riehl est le père de l’ethnographie scientifique. Il nous a aussi laissé un testament politique. Ses critiques disent que ce testament, qui insiste sur le concept social d’état (Stand), ne tient pas compte des nouvelles formes d’organisation de la société industrielle. Selon Riehl, les peuples, dans leur diversité, sont un produit de différences et de caractéristiques de nature ethnique, historique ou naturelle/territoriale. Pour lui, les noyaux naturels (la famille, la tribu, le peuple/Volk) reçoivent une sorte de primauté. Ils revêtent une signification plus profonde que l’Etat. Les liens familiaux et tribaux sont plus anciens que la conscience individuelle ou la conscience d’appartenir à un Etat, c’est-à-dire plus anciens que les formes créées par les individus ou par les Etats. L’importance qu’il assigne à la famille se voit encore soulignée par le fait qu’il y consacre un volume entier de son oeuvre principale, “Naturgeschichte”.
Ses conceptions socio-politiques sont dominées par l’idée de deux forces qui influencent toute la vie sociale: la force de maintenir (Macht des Beharrens) et la force du mouvement; c’est-à-dire une force conservatrice et une force révolutionnaire. Les forces conservatrices sont représentées par la paysannerie et l’aristocratie. Les forces du mouvement par la bourgeoisie et par le quart-état. Parmi les forces du mouvement, Riehl compte aussi le prolétariat, à côté de la bourgeoisie. Mais son concept de prolétariat est totalement différent de celui de Marx. Il est “le stade de la chute” et “l’état d’absence d’appartenance à un état”. Les ressortissants du prolétariat sont ceux qui se sont détachés ou ont été exclus des groupes existants de la société. Ils se sont alors déclarés “véritable peuple” et c’est dans cette proclamation tacite qu’il faut voir l’origine de toutes les tentatives d’égalitarisme.
On peut certes rejeter la division de la société en “états”, que propose Riehl, comme étant en contradiction flagrante avec les réalités sociologiques de la société moderne. Mais on ne peut pas non plus considérer que Riehl est un théoricien borné, dont la pensée s’est figée sur les rapports sociaux préindustriels. Il s’est efforcé de partir du donné réel pour affronter une société en train de se moderniser et de comprendre celle-ci à l’aide de concepts conservateurs-sociaux (cf. Peter Steinbach, Introduction à “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”).
La tentative de classer les strates sociologiques de la société selon des forces fondamentales, telle les “états”, pour les opposer au concept de classe selon Marx, s’est manifestée également après Riehl. Ferdinand Tönnies a défini la société comme une “Communauté” (Gemeinschaft) et comme une “Société” (Gesellschaft) tout à la fois. La première consiste en un ordonnancement selon des caractéristiques et des liens naturels (famille, tribu, peuple); la seconde selon des appartenances changeantes et interchangeables (classe, parti, travail, profession, etc.). A côté du cosmos naturel de la vie du peuple, Riehl a placé la nature proprement dite sur un pied d’égalité avec la culture et a suggéré qu’il fallait la conserver, la défendre, car c’était une nécessité incontournable. Le mouvement de préservation de la nature, le mouvement pour la Heimat (en Allemagne et en Suisse, ndt), le mouvement de jeunesse Wandervogel, entre 1890 et 1914, ont trouvé chez Riehl des idées d’avant-garde (ainsi que nos mouvements verts, avec trois quarts de siècle de retard!). Ernst Rudolf se réclame de Riehl à plusieurs reprises, notamment dans “Heimatschutz” (Berlin, 1897). En dénonçant la destruction du patrimoine forestier allemand, il soulève une question éminemment conservatrice, en réclamant un droit propre à la nature. Sa critique de l’urbanisation outrancière doit également être lue à la lumière des travaux de Riehl.
Riehl avait ses défenseurs et ses critiques. Grimm se basait sur ses écrits, par exemple pour expliquer la différence essentielle entre Schiller et Goethe. Marx en revanche considérait que les conceptions sociales et politiques de Riehl constituaient “une injure au siècle du progrès”. Treitschke aussi s’attaqua à la conception organique du peuple chez Riehl et surtout contre sa vision de la société divisée en “états”: “il n’y a pas plus d’états naturels qu’il y a un état de nature”, écrivait-il dans sa thèse universitaire. Riehl eut un admirateur en la personne de Tolstoï. Leo Avenarius le nommait le “Altmeister der Wanderkunst” (“le vieux maître en l’art de pérégriner”) et avait chaleureusement recommander la lecture de ses “Wanderbücher” à la jeunesse du Wandervogel.
Riehl fut honoré dans l’Allemagne nationale-socialiste: cela s’explique pour maintes raisons mais ne signifie rien quant à ses options véritables. Jost Hermand, dans son ouvrage “Grüne Utopien in Deutschland” (“Utopies vertes en Allemagne”), écrit, entre autres choses: “Riehl avait la ferme conviction qu’une industrialisation et une urbanisation croissantes, avec pour corollaire la destruction du fond paysan, devaient immanquablement conduire à une ‘dégénérescence de la nature’”.
Le conservatisme de Riehl, avec son idée centrale de conservation de la nature et de la culture et son rejet principiel de l’individualisme libéral et de la pensée libérale qui ne raisonne qu’en termes de déploiement de puissance matérielle, font de l’auteur de “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”, un philosophe qui, au début de l’ère industrielle, théorisait non pas l’ère pré-industrielle, mais l’ère post-industrielle. Il pensait donc ses idées parce qu’il avait préalablement investiguer les racines mêmes du peuple, les avait décortiquées et en avait conclu, après observation minutieuse et reconnaissance des données naturelles, qu’il fallait protéger et la nature et la culture populaire.
Jos VINKS.
(article paru dans “Dietsland Europa”, Anvers, n°5/1994).
00:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Sociologie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, sociologie, allemagne, bavière, 19ème siècle, conservatisme, révolution conservatrice | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
mardi, 05 avril 2011
Carl Schmitt, the Inquisition, and Totalitarianism
Carl Schmitt, the Inquisition, and Totalitarianism
Arthur VERSLUIS
Ex: http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/
The work of Carl Schmitt, on its face, presents us with enigmas; it is esoteric, arcane, words that recur both in scholarship about Schmitt and in his own writings. Jan-Wenner Müller observes that Schmitt “employed what has been called a kind of philosophical ‘double talk,’ shifting the meaning of concepts central to his theory and scattering allusions and false leads throughout his work.”[1] And Müller goes on to remark about Heinrich Meier’s work on Schmitt that ultimately Meier too “lapsed into the kind of double talk, allusiveness, and high-minded esoteric tone so typical of Strauss and, to a lesser extent, Schmitt.”[2] Indeed, Schmitt himself writes, in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes that “like all great thinkers of his times, Hobbes had a taste for esoteric cover-ups. He said about himself that now and then he made ‘overtures,’ but that he revealed his thoughts only in part and that he acted as people do who open a window only for a moment and closely it quickly for fear of a storm.”[3] This passage could certainly be applied to Schmitt himself, whose work both makes direct reference to Western esoteric traditions, and itself has esoteric dimensions. These esoteric allusions and dimensions of Schmitt’s thought are, in fact, vitally important to understanding his work, but the question remains: what place do they have in it?
Carl Schmitt and Early Modern Western Esotericism
Much has been made of the exoteric-esoteric distinction in the thought of Leo Strauss. Some authors suggested that a Straussian esotericism guided the neonconservative cabal within the Bush II administration, after all a secretive group that disdained public opinion and that was convinced of its own invincible rectitude even in the face of facts.[4] It is true that Strauss himself distinguished between an esoteric and an exoteric political philosophy. In perhaps his most open statement, Strauss writes, coyly, of how “Farabi’s Plato eventually replaces the philosopher-king who rules openly in the virtuous city, by the secret kingship of the philosopher who, being a ‘perfect man,’ precisely because he is an ‘investigator,’ lives privately as a member of an imperfect society which he tries to humanize within the limits of the possible.”[5] Strauss’s “secret kingship of the philosopher” is, by its nature, esoteric; as in Schmitt’s, there is in Strauss’s work a sense of the implicit superiority of the esoteric political philosopher.
But in fact those who are searching for esotericism have much more to find in the work of Schmitt, not least because Schmitt’s references to classical Western esotericism are quite explicit. Schmitt refers directly to Kabbalism and to Rosicrucianism, to Freemasonry, and, most importantly for our purposes, to Gnosticism. It is quite important, if one is to better understand Schmitt, to investigate the meanings of these explicitly esoteric references in his work. While there are allusions to such classical Western esoteric currents as Jewish Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry scattered throughout Schmitt’s writings, those references are concentrated in Schmitt’s 1938 The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. There are a number of reasons why Western esoteric currents should form a locus in this particular work, among them the fact that many of these traditions (notably, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and Christian theosophy) emerged precisely in the early modern period of Hobbes himself and so correctly, as Schmitt recognized, represent historical context as well as contribute to Schmitt’s larger argument.
Both Schmitt and Guénon came from a Catholic background and perspective—and Guénon’s broader thesis was that the advent of early modernity represented one stage in a much larger tableau of decline in which modernity (representing the kali yuga or final age) would conclude in the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the world. In this Guénonian tableau of decline, the emergence of individualistic Protestantism represented an important step downward from the earlier corporate unity of Catholicism, and a similar perspective inheres in Schmitt’s work, no doubt why he alludes to Guénon in the first place. Hence, in the important Chapter V of Leviathan, Schmitt refers to the “separation of inner from outer and public from private” that emerged during the early modern period, and in particular to “secret societies and secret orders, Rosicrucians, freemasons, illuminates, mystics and pietists, all kinds of sectarians, the many ‘silent ones in the land,’ and above all, the restless spirit of the Jew who knew how to exploit the situation best until the relation of public and private, deportment and disposition was turned upside down.”[8]
At this point, we can see Schmitt’s perspective is implicitly critical of the subjectification and inward or contemplative turn characteristic of those who travel “the secret road” “that leads inward.” He opposes the split between private spiritual life and public life, which Schmitt associates with Judaism as well as with Protestantism and the profusion of esoteric groups during this period—and by implication, affirms a unified, corporate inner and outer life that is characteristic of Catholicism. Schmitt remarks that “as differently constituted as were the Masonic lodges, conventicles, synagogues, and literary circles, as far as their political attitudes were concerned, they all displayed by the eighteenth century their enmity toward the leviathan elevated to a symbol of state.”[9] He sees Protestantism and the variety of esoteric groups or currents during the early modern period as symptomatic—like Guénon, he sees the emergence of modernity as a narrative of cultural disintegration.
It becomes clearer, then, how Schmitt could have seen in National Socialism a secular alternative to modernity. Fascism represented for him, at least potentially, the re-unification of inner and outer life, a kind of modern re-unification of the mythic and spiritual with the outer public life. It at first seemed to conform to the Hobbesian notion that in exchange for obedience, one receives protection from the state; it represented a new form of corporatism as an alternative to the socio-political disintegration represented by parliamentary democracy in the Weimar era; and it even offered an apparent unity of esoteric and exoteric through its use of symbolism and mythology in the service of the state. But to the extent that he allied with the Nazis, Schmitt was consciously siding with the Inquisitors, and with totalistic state power. In retrospect and by comparison, perhaps the “secret road” inward as represented by eighteenth-century esotericism was not quite so bad as all that. Yet to understand more completely Schmitt in relation to the esoteric, we must turn to a subject he treats somewhat more explicitly: Gnosticism.
Schmitt writes that oppositions between friend and enemy are “of a spiritual sort, as is all man’s existence.”[11] In Politische Theologie II, he writes that Tertullian is the prototype of the theological possibilities of specific judicial thinking, and refers to him as the “jurist Tertullian.”[12] Heinrich Meier discusses Schmitt’s indebtedness to Tertullian and in fact remarks that “Tertullian’s guiding principle We are obliged to something not because it is good but because God commands it accompanies Schmitt through all the turns and vicissitudes of his long life.”[13] What is it about Tertullian that Schmitt found so fascinating that he returned to his work again and again? Divine authority as presented by Tertullian divides men: obedience to divine authority divides the orthodox from the heretics, the “friends of God” from the “enemies of God,” and the political theologian from the secular philosopher. Here we are reminded of perhaps Tertullian’s most famous outcry: “What then does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What does the Academy have to do with the Church? What do the heretics have to do with Christians?”[14] Tertullian was, of course, a fierce enemy of Gnosticism, and his works, especially De praescriptione haereticorum, belong to the genre of heresiophobic literature.
Now with Tertullian’s antignosticism in mind, we should turn to the afterword of Schmitt’s Politische Theologie II, in which “gnostische Dualismus” figures prominently. There, Schmitt remarks that Gnostic dualism places a God of Love, strange to this world, in opposition to the lord and creator of this evil world, the two conflicting in a kind of “cold war.”[15] This he compares to the Latin motto noted by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit, “nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse”—only a god can oppose a god.[16] With these references, Schmitt is alluding to the Gnostic dualism attributed to the Gnostic Marcion, who reputedly posited two Gods, one a true hidden God, the other an ignorant creator God.
So virulent is Tertullian in his hatred of those he perceives as heretics that he goes so far as to imagine that “There will need to be carried on in heaven persecution [of Christians] even, which is the occasion of confession or denial.”[18] Here we begin to see the dynamic that impels Tertullian’s hatred of those he designates as heretical. On the one hand, Tertullian belongs in the context of Roman persecution of Christians as a whole—but on the other hand, he in turn carries on an intellectual persecution of heretics whom he sees as scorpions, that is, as vermin.[19] Thus we see Tertullian’s perception of himself as defender of the historicist orthodox, the strength of whose identity comes on the one hand, from affirmation of faith in the historical Christ against the Romans, on the other hand, from rejection of the Gnostics who seek to transcend history and who affirm, for example, a docetic Christ. Tertullian’s very identity exists by definition through negation—he requires the persecution of “heretics.” Tertullian is the veritable incarnation of a friend/enemy dynamic, and he exists and defines himself entirely through such a dynamic. We can even go further, and suggest that the background of persecution by the Romans in turn inevitably impels the persecuted historicist Christians to themselves become persecutors of those whom they deem heretics—a dynamic that continues throughout the subsequent history of Christianity (from the medieval condemnation of Eckhart right through the various forms of early modern and modern anti-mysticism within Protestant and Catholic Christianity alike).[20] Tertullian, for all his fulminations against what he imagines as Gnostic dualism, is in fact himself the ultimate dualist [or duelist]. He cannot exist without historical enemies, without persecutors and without those whom he can persecute in his turn.
Now I am not arguing that Schmitt’s work—and in particular his emphasis on the role of antagonism and hostility as defining politics, nor his emphasis on historicity—derives only from Tertullian. Rather, I hold that Schmitt refers to Tertullian because he finds in him a kindred spirit, and what is more, that there really is a continuity between Schmitt’s thought and the anti-heretical writings of Tertullian. Both figures require enemies. Schmitt goes so far as to write, in The Concept of the Political, that without the friend-enemy distinction “political life would vanish altogether.”[23] And in the afterword to Political Theology II, Schmitt—in the very passages in which he refers to Gnosticism and in particular to dualism—ridicules modern “detheologization” [Die Enttheologisierung] and “depoliticization” [Die Entpolitisierung] characteristic of a liberal modernity based upon production, consumption, and technology. What Schmitt despises about depoliticizing or detheologizing is the elimination of conflict and the loss thereby of the agonistic dimension of life without which, just as Tertullian wrote, the juridical trial and judging of humanity cannot take place. Tertullian so insists upon the primacy of persecution/prosecution that he projects it even into heaven itself. Schmitt restrains himself to the worldly stage, but he too insists upon conflict as the basis of the political and of history; and both are at heart dualists.
The work of Schmitt belongs to the horizontal realm of dualistic antagonism that requires the antinomies of friends and enemies and perpetual combat. Schmitt is a political and later geopolitical theorist whose political theology represents, not an opening into the transcendence of antagonism, but rather an insistence upon antagonism and combat as the foundation of politics that reflects Tertullian’s emphasis on antagonism toward heretics as the foundation of theology. When Schmitt writes, in The Concept of the Political, that “a theologian ceases to be a theologian when he . . . no longer distinguishes between the chosen and the nonchosen,” we begin to see how deeply engrained is his fundamental dualism.[24] This dualism is bound up with Schmitt’s insistence upon “the fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man” and his adamant rejection of those who deny original sin, i.e., “numerous sects, heretics, romantics, and anarchists.”[25] Thus “the high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”[26] The enemy, here, just as in Tertullian’s work, is those deemed to be heretical.
As perhaps Tertullian once did, Schmitt too came up against the command of Christ to “love your enemies” (Matt. 5.44; Luke 6.27). His interpretation of it is befitting a wily attorney—he takes it only on a personal level. “No mention is made of the political enemy,” Schmitt writes. “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than to defend Europe,” he continues, and the commandment of Christ in his view “certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people.”[28] Thus, Christ can be interpreted as accepting political antagonism and even war—while forgiving one’s personal enemies along the way. Schmitt conveniently overlooks the fact that nowhere in the New Testament can Christ be construed as endorsing, say, political war against Rome—His Kingdom is not of this world. Is it really so easy to dismiss the power of the injunction to love one’s enemies?
There is more. For Schmitt’s distinction between the personal and the political here makes possible what his concept of the katechon also does: Christian empire. Here we see the exact point at which the Christian message can be seen to shift from the world-transmuting one of forgiving one’s enemies to the worldly one that leads inexorably toward the very imperial authority and power against which Christ himself stood as an alternative exemplar. “My Kingdom is not of this world,” Christ said. But somehow a shift took place, and suddenly Christ was being made to say that his kingdom is of this world, that rather than forgiving one’s enemies, one should implacably war against them. Thus we have the emergence of Christian empire. But the collapse of feudalism and of the medieval polis, and the emergence of modernity ultimately meant the de-politicization of the world—the absence of enemies, of heretics, of those against whom others can define themselves—none other than the cultural vacuum represented by technological-consumerist modern society.
Conclusions
And so we again reach the argument that I began to suggest in “Voegelin’s Antignosticism and the Origins of Totalitarianism,” but from a very different angle. There, I argued that rather than attempting (like Voegelin and his acolytes) to blame the victims—the Gnostics and ‘heretics’—for the advent of modernity and for totalitarianism, it might be more reasonable to take a closer look at the phenomenon of the Inquisition and of historicist Christianity (particularly millennialist Christianity) for the origins of modern secular chiliasm. After all, it wasn’t the heretics or the Gnostics who burned people at the stake, or created institutional torture chambers, or who slaughtered the Albigensians. Rather, it was the institutional church that did this. Our analysis of Schmitt’s work has brought us, unexpectedly, back to the same general terrain.
Schmitt’s work belongs to the juridical tradition of Tertullian and he inherits Tertullian’s need for enemies, for heretics by which one can define oneself. Thus it was not too difficult for Schmitt to organize the 1936 conference to weigh the “problem” of “the Jews”—he was predisposed toward the division of “us” and “them” by the triumphant Western historicist Christian tradition that peremptorily and with the persistence of two thousand years, rejected “heretics” who espoused gnosis and, all too frequently, rejected even the possibility of transcending dualism. Indeed, Schmitt’s work allows us to see more clearly the historical current that was operative in National Socialism as well as in Mussolini’s Fascist party—and that brought Schmitt to open his 1936 conference remarks with the words of Hitler: “In that I defend myself against the Jews, I struggle to do the work of the Lord.”[30] The murder of heretics has a theological origin; the murder of secular opponents has a political origin—but often the two are not so far apart, and so one could even speak of political theology in which to be the enemy is to be de facto heretical.
Thus, after the “Night of the Long Knives” and after Goebbels and Himmler carried out the murder of various dissidents, Schmitt published an article defending the right of the Third Reich and its leader to administer peremptory justice—and, in an interview published in the party newspaper Der Angriff, defending none other than the Inquisition as a model of jurisprudence.[31] Schmitt argued there that when Pope Innocent III created the juridical basis for the Inquisition, the Church inaugurated perhaps the “most humane institution conceivable” because it required a confession. Of course, he goes on, the subsequent advent of confessions extracted by torture was unfortunate, but in terms of legal history, he thought the Inquisition a fine model of humane justice. He managed to overlook the fact that the “crimes,” both in the case of the Inquisition and in the case of National Socialism in mid-1930s Germany, were primarily “crimes” of dissidence.
[1] See Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), p. 7
[2] Ibid., p. 205
[3] See Carl Schmitt, G. Schwab, trs., The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), p. 26.
[4] See Hugh Urban, “Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration: The Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum,” in Esoterica VII(2005): 1-38.
[5] See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1952), p. 17; Leo Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato,” Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), pp. 357-393, p. 384.
[6] Schmitt, Leviathan, op. cit., p. 3.
[7] Ibid., p. 29.
[8] Ibid., p. 60.
[9] Ibid., p. 62.
[10] Ibid., pp. 96-97.
[11] See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), p. 59, citing The Concept of the Political (1933 ed.) III.9.
[12] See Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1970), p. 103, to wit: “Für eine Besinnung auf die theologischen Möglichkeiten spezifisch justischen Denkens ist Tertullian der Prototyp.”
[13] Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), p. 92.
[14] See Meier, op. cit., p. 94, citing Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, VII. 9-13: “Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? Quid academiae et ecclesiae? Quid haereticis et Christianis?”
[15] Schmitt, PTII, op. cit., p. 120: “Der gnostische Dualismus setzt einen Gott der Liebe, einen welt-fremden Gott, als den Erlöser-Gott gegen den gerechten Gott, den Herrn und Schöpfer dieser bösen Welt. . . [einer Art gefährlichen Kalten Krieges]”.
[16] Ibid., p. 122.
[17] See A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), III.521.
[18] Ibid., III. 643.
[19] See Tertullian’s treatise “Scorpiace,” op. cit., III.633-648.
[20] Here we might remark that Western forms of Christianity are strikingly different in this respect from those in the Eastern Church, where mysticism remained (however uneasily at times) incorporated into orthodoxy itself and not imagined as inherently inimical to orthodoxy.
[21] See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, G.L. Ulmen, trs., (New York: Telos, 2003), pp. 59-60.
[22] Ibid., p. 60.
[23] Carl Schmitt, G. Schwab, trs., The Concept of the Political, (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1976), p. 51.
[24] Ibid., p. 64.
[25] Ibid., p. 65.
[26] Ibid., p. 67.
[27] I write “supposedly” dualist and “reputedly” held the world to be evil because these accusations, repeated by Tertullian and several other ante-Nicene Fathers, are hardly borne out as characteristics of all the works we see in the Nag Hammadi library, the collection of actual Gnostic writings discovered in 1945.
[28] Ibid., p. 29.
[29] See Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse: Ideological Roots of Terrorism, (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. xi. I wholeheartedly agree with Pellicani’s basic thesis that “The expansion on a planetary scale of a new form of chiliasm that substituted transcendence with absolute immanence and paradise with a classless and stateless society is the most extraordinary and shattering historical-cultural phenomenon of the secular age.” But this “new form of chiliasm” has nothing whatever to do with Gnosticism as an actual historical phenomenon. One cannot find a single instance in late antiquity among the Gnostics themselves for such a phenomenon—but if one were to refer instead to “the destructive calling of modern pseudo-gnostic revolution” that seeks to “purify the existing through a policy of mass terror and annihilation,” Pellicani’s thesis would no longer be quite as subject to the criticism of an anachronistic misuse of terms. Later in the book, Pellicani discusses the cases of the Pol Pot regime and of Communist China—both of which illustrate his larger thesis well. But neither of these have anything whatever to do with the phenomenon of Gnosticism in any historically meaningful sense. Even Voegelin himself expressed doubts about attempting to apply “Gnosticism” to the case of Communist Russia—let alone to Cambodia! Such cases could be construed to illustrate a uniquely modern pseudo-gnosticism—though one could with more accuracy dispense entirely with the dubious references to “Gnosticism” and simply refer to secular millennialism.
[30] See Carl Schmitt, “Das Judentum in der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft,” in “Die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den jüdischen Geist,” in Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, 41(15 Oct. 1936)20:1193-1199, cited in Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, (London: Verso, 2000), p. 206.
[31] See “Können wir uns vor Justizirrtum schützen?” Der Angriff, 1 Sept. 1936, cited in Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 1995), p. 703; see also Balakrishnan, op. cit., pp. 202-203.
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mercredi, 02 mars 2011
Reflections on Carl Schmitt's "The Concept of the Political"
Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political
Greg Johnson
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/
“Why can’t we all get along?”–Rodney King
Carl Schmitt’s short book The Concept of the Political
The aim of The Concept of the Political is the defense of politics from utopian aspirations to abolish politics. Anti-political utopianism includes all forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short, all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished.
In ordinary speech, of course, liberalism, international socialism, etc. are political movements, not anti-political ones. So it is clear that Schmitt is using “political” in a particular way. For Schmitt, the political is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy. Utopianism is anti-political insofar as it attempts to abolish that distinction, to root out all enmity and conflict in the world.
Schmitt’s defense of the political is not a defense of enmity and conflict as good things. Schmitt fully recognizes their destructiveness and the necessity of managing and mitigating them. But Schmitt believes that enmity is best controlled by adopting a realistic understanding of its nature. So Schmitt does not defend conflict, but realism about conflict. Indeed, Schmitt believes that the best way to contain conflict is first to abandon all unrealistic notions that one can do away with it entirely.
Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity. There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish perpetual peace.
Us and Them
What does the distinction between friend and enemy mean?
First, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy is collective. He is talking about “us versus them” not “one individual versus another.”
Schmitt introduces the Latin distinction between hostis (a collective or public enemy, the root of “hostile”) and inimicus (an individual and private adversary, the root of “inimical”). The political is founded on the distinction between friend (those on one’s side) and hostis (those on the other side). Private adversaries are not public enemies.
Second, the distinction between friend and enemy is polemical. The friend/enemy distinction is always connected with the abiding potential for violence. One does not need to actually fight one’s enemy, but the potential must always be there. The sole purpose of politics is not group conflict; the sole content of politics is not group conflict; but the abiding possibility of group conflict is what creates the political dimension of human social existence.
Third, the distinction between friend and enemy is existentially serious. Violent conflict is more serious than other forms of conflict, because when things get violent people die.
Fourth, the distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to any other distinction. For instance, it is not reducible to the distinction between good and evil. The “good guys” are just as much enemies to the “bad guys” as the “bad guys” are enemies to the “good guys.” Enmity is relative, but morality—we hope—is not.
Fifth, although the friend/enemy distinction is not reducible to other distinctions and differences—religious, economic, philosophical, etc.—all differences can become political if they generate the friend/enemy opposition.
In sum, the ultimate root of the political is the capacity of human groups to take their differences so seriously that they will kill or die for them.
It is important to note that Schmitt’s concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics. The rivalries of politicians and parties, provided they stay within legal parameters, do not constitute enmity in Schmitt’s sense. Schmitt’s notion of politics applies primarily to foreign relations — the relations between sovereign states and peoples — rather than domestic relations within a society. The only time when domestic relations become political in Schmitt’s sense is during a revolution or a civil war.
Sovereignty
If the political arises from the abiding possibility of collective life or death conflict, the political rules over all other areas of social life because of its existential seriousness, the fact that it has recourse to the ultimate sanction.
For Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the person who makes that decision.
If a sovereign declares an enemy, and individuals or groups within his society reject that declaration, the society is in a state of undeclared civil war or revolution. To refuse the sovereign’s choice of enemy is one step away from the sovereign act of choosing one’s own enemies. Thus Schmitt’s analysis supports the saying that, “War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”
Philosophical Parallels
The root of the political as Schmitt understands it is what Plato and Aristotle call “thumos,” the middle part of the soul that is neither theoretical reason nor physical desire, but is rather the capacity for passionate attachment. Thumos is the root of the political because it is the source of attachments to (a) groups, and politics is collective, and (b) life-transcending and life-negating values, i.e., things that are worth killing and dying for, like the defense of personal or collective honor, one’s culture or way of life, religious and philosophical convictions, etc. Such values make possible mortal conflict between groups.
The abolition of the political, therefore, requires the abolition of the human capacity for passionate, existentially serious, life and death attachments. The apolitical man is, therefore, the apathetic man, the man who lacks commitment and intensity. He is what Nietzsche called “the last man,” the man for whom there is nothing higher than himself, nothing that might require that he risk the continuation of his physical existence. The apolitical utopia is a spiritual “boneless chicken ranch” of doped up, dumbed down, self-absorbed producer-consumers.
Schmitt’s notion of the political is consistent with Hegel’s notion of history. For Hegel, history is a record of individual and collective struggles to the death over images or interpretations of who we are. These interpretations consist of the whole realm of culture: worldviews and the ways of life that are their concrete manifestations.
There are, of course, many interpretations of who we are. But there is only one truth, and according to Hegel the truth is that man is free. Just as philosophical dialectic works through a plurality of conflicting viewpoints to get to the one truth, so the dialectic of history is a war of conflicting worldviews and ways of life that will come to an end when the correct worldview and way of life are established. The concept of human freedom must become concretely realized in a way of life that recognizes freedom. Then history as Hegel understands it—and politics as Schmitt understands it—will come to an end.
Hegel’s notion of the ideal post-historical state is pretty much everything a 20th (or 21st) century fascist could desire. But later interpreters of Hegel like Alexandre Kojève
Why the Political Cannot be Abolished
If the political is rooted in human nature, then it cannot be abolished. Even if the entire planet could be turned into a boneless chicken ranch, all it would take is two serious men to start politics—and history—all over again.
But the utopians will never even get that far. Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peace- and love-mongers have enemies too, namely “haters” like us.
Thus the abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about politics. But dishonesty is the least of the utopians’ vices. For in the name of peace and love, they persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness that make good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison.
Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might, for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in scope and duration. And since it is a mere conflict of interest—in which both sides, really, are right—rather than a moral or religious crusade between good and evil, light and darkness, ultimately both sides can strike a deal with each other to cease hostilities.
But when war is wedded to a universalist utopianism—global communism or democracy, the end of “terror” or, more risibly, “evil”—it becomes universal in scope and endless in duration. It is universal, because it proposes to represent all of humanity. It is endless, of course, because it is a war with human nature itself.
Furthermore, when war is declared in the name of “humanity,” its prosecution becomes maximally inhuman, since anything is fair against the enemies of humanity, who deserve nothing short of unconditional surrender or annihilation, since one cannot strike a bargain with evil incarnate. The road to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was paved with love: universalistic, utopian, humanistic, liberal love.
Liberalism
Liberalism seeks to reduce the friend/enemy distinction to differences of opinion or economic interests. The liberal utopia is one in which all disputes can be resolved bloodlessly by reasoning or bargaining. But the opposition between liberalism and anti-liberalism cannot be resolved by liberal means. It is perforce political. Liberal anti-politics cannot triumph, therefore, without the political elimination of anti-liberalism.
The abolition of the political requires the abolition of all differences, so there is nothing to fight over, or the abolition of all seriousness, so that differences make no difference. The abolition of difference is accomplished by violence and cultural assimilation. The abolition of seriousness is accomplished by the promotion of spiritual apathy through consumerism and indoctrination in relativism, individualism, tolerance, and diversity worship—the multicult.
Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists, they are just less capable of honesty.
Liberalism, however, generally prefers to kill us softly. The old-fashioned version of liberalism prefers the soft dissolution of differences through cultural assimilation, but that preference was reversed when an unassimilable minority rose to power in the United States, at which time multiculturalism and diversity became the watchwords, and the potential conflicts between different groups were to be managed through spiritual corruption. Today’s liberals make a fetish of the preservation of pluralism and diversity, as long as none of it is taken seriously.
Multicultural utopianism is doomed, because multiculturalism is very successful at increasing diversity, but, in the long run, it cannot manage the conflicts that come with it.
The drug of consumerism cannot be relied upon because economic crises cannot be eliminated. Furthermore, there are absolute ecological limits to the globalization of consumerism.
As for the drugs of relativism, individualism, tolerance, and the multi-cult: only whites are susceptible to their effects, and since these ideas systematically disadvantage whites in ethnic competition, ultimately those whites who accept them will be destroyed (which is the point, really) and those whites who survive will reject them. Then whites will start taking our own side, ethnic competition will get political, and, one way or another, racially and ethnically homogeneous states will emerge.
Lessons for White Nationalists
To become a White Nationalist is to choose one’s friends and one’s enemies for oneself. To choose new friends means to choose a new nation. Our nation is our race. Our enemies are the enemies of our race, of whatever race they may be. By choosing our friends and enemies for ourselves, White Nationalists have constituted ourselves as a sovereign people—a sovereign people that does not have a sovereign homeland, yet—and rejected the sovereignty of those who rule us. This puts us in an implicitly revolutionary position vis-à-vis all existing regimes.
The conservatives among us do not see it yet. They still wish to cling to America’s corpse and suckle from her poisoned tit. But the enemy understands us better than some of us understand ourselves. We may not wish to choose an enemy, but sometimes the enemy chooses us. Thus “mainstreamers” will be denied entry and forced to choose either to abandon White Nationalism or to explicitly embrace its revolutionary destiny.
It may be too late for mainstream politics, but it is still too early for White Nationalist politics. We simply do not have the power to win a political struggle. We lack manpower, money, and leadership. But the present system, like all things old and dissolute, will pass. And our community, like all things young and healthy, will grow in size and strength. Thus today our task is metapolitical: to raise consciousness and cultivate the community from which our kingdom—or republic—will come.
When that day comes, Carl Schmitt will be numbered among our spiritual Founding Fathers.
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