CARL SCHMITT AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY WITH RICHARD SUBWORTH

StJohnsNottingham

 

Carl Schmitt is Right:
Liberal Nations Have Open Borders Because They Have No Concept of the Political

By Ricardo Duchesne

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

Before World War II liberal rights were understood among Western states in a libertarian and ethno-nationalistic way. Freedom of association, for example, was understood to include the right to refuse to associate with certain members of certain ethnic groups, even the right to discriminate in employment practices. This racial liberalism was still institutionalized right up until the 1960s. The settler nations of Australia, Canada, United States, and New Zealand enjoyed admission and naturalization policies based on race and culture, intended to keep these nations “White.”

This liberal racial ethos was socially accepted with a good conscience throughout Western society. As Robert H. Jackson has observed:

Before the war prevailing public opinion within Western states — including democratic states — did not condemn racial discrimination in domestic social and political life. Nor did it question the ideas and institutions of colonialism. In the minds of most Europeans, equality and democracy could not yet be extended successfully to non-Europeans. In other words, these ideas were not yet considered to be universal human rights divorced from any particular civilization or culture. Indeed, for a century or more race had been widely employed as a concept to explain the scientific and technological achievements of Europeans as compared to non-Europeans and to justify not only racial discrimination within Western states but also Western domination of non-western peoples. Racial distinctions thus served as a brake on the extension of democratic rights to people of non European descent within Western countries as well as in Western colonies. [Robert H. Jackson, “The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations,” In Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change, ed. Goldstein and Keohane, Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 135]

Even in the case of denazified Germany, governments after 1945 endorsed, as a matter of common sense, and well into the 1970s, an ethnic conception of German nationality, accepting migrants only as temporary “guest workers” on the grounds that Germany was “not an immigrant country.” European nations took for granted the ethnic cohesion of their cultures and the necessity of barring the entry and incorporation of people from different cultures categorized as a threat to the “national character.”

Why, then, did the entire Western liberal establishment came to the view that European ethnocentrism was fundamentally at odds with liberal principles a few decades after WWII?

I argued in a paper posted at CEC over a month ago (which I have withdrawn because it was flawed) that a new set of norms (human rights, civic nationalism, race is a construct) with an in-built tendency for further radicalization suddenly came to take a firm hold over Western liberal nations in response to the Nazi experience, and that once these norms were accepted, and actions were taken to implement them institutionally, they came to “entrap” Westerners within a spiral that would push them into ever more radical policies that would eventually create a situation in which Western nations would come to be envisioned as places always intended to be progressing toward a future utopia in which multiple races would co-exist in a state of harmony.

Carl Schmitt

Was there something within the racialist liberalism of the pre-WW II era that made it susceptible to the promulgation of these norms and their rapid radicalization thereafter? Why did Western leaders succumbed to the radicalization of these norms so easily? The answer may be found in Carl Schmitt’s argument ^[2] that liberal states lack a strong concept of the political. I take this to mean that liberals leaders have an inherent weakness as political beings due to their inability to think of their nation states as a collectivity of people laying sovereignty claim over a territory that distinguishes between friends and enemies, who can belong and who cannot belong in the territory. Liberals believe that their nation states are associations formed by individuals for the purpose of ensuring their natural right to life, liberty, and happiness. They have an imaginary view of their liberal states as associations created by isolated individuals reaching a covenant, a contract or agreement, amongst themselves in abstraction from any prior community. They have a predilection to whitewash the fact that their liberal states, like all states, were forcibly created by a people with a common language, heritage, racial characteristics, religious traditions, and a sense of territorial acquisition involving the derogation of out-groups.

For this reason, in the words of Carl Schmitt, liberals have an undeveloped sense of the political, an inability to think of themselves as members of a political entity that was created with a clear sense of who can belong and who cannot belong in the community. Having a concept of the political presupposes a people with a strong sense of who can be part of their political community, who can be friends of the community and who cannot be because they pose a threat to the existence and the norms of the community.

Liberals tend to deny that man is by nature a social animal, a member of a collective. They think that humans are all alike as individuals in wanting states that afford them with the legal framework that individuals need in the pursuit of liberty and happiness. They hold a conception of human nature according to which humans can avoid deadly conflict through a liberal state which gives everyone the possibility to improve themselves and society through market competition, technological innovation, and humanitarian works, creating an atmosphere in which political differences can be resolved through peaceful consensus by way of open deliberation.

They don’t want to admit openly that all liberal states were created violently by a people with a sense of peoplehood laying sovereign rights over an exclusive territory against other people competing for the same territory. They don’t want to admit that the members of the competing outgroups are potential enemies rather than abstract individuals seeking a universal state that guarantees happiness and security for all regardless of racial and religious identity. Humans are social animals with a natural impulse to identify themselves collectively in terms of ethnic, cultural and racial markers. But today Europeans have wrongly attributed their unique inclination for states with liberal constitutions to non-Europeans. They have forgotten that liberal states were created by a particular people with a particular individualist heritage, beliefs, and religious orientations. They don’t realize that their individualist heritage was made possible within the context of states or territories acquired through force to the exclusion of competitors. They don’t realize that a liberal state if it is to remain liberal must act collectively against the inclusion of non-Europeans with their own in-group ambitions.

Hegel, Hobbes, and Schmitt

But I think that Schmitt should be complemented with Hegel’s appropriation of the ancient Greek concept of “spiritedness.” Our sense of honor comes from our status within our ethnocultural group in our struggle for survival and competition with other groups ^[4]. This is the source of what the ancient Greeks called “spiritedness,” that is a part of the soul comprising, in Plato’s philosophy, pride, indignation, shame, and the need for recognition. Plato believed that the human soul consisted of three parts:

1. a physically desiring part that drives humans to seek to satisfy their appetites for food, comfort, and sensual pleasure;
2. a reasoning part that allows humans to calculate the best way to get the things they desire; and
3. a “spirited” part that drives humans to seek honor and renown amongst their people.

Liberal theory developed in reaction to the destructive tendency inbuilt into the spirited part which was exemplified with brutal intensity during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and English Civil War 1642-1651). Thomas Hobbes devalued the spirited part of man as just another appetite for power, for riches, and adulation. At the same time, he understood that this appetite was different from the mere natural appetites for food and sensual pleasure, in that they were insatiable and conflict-oriented.

State of nature according to Hobbes

Hobbes emphasized the destructive rather than the heroic character of this aspect of human nature. In the state of nature men are in constant competition with other men for riches and honor, and so enmity is a permanent condition of the state of nature, killing, subduing, and supplanting competitors. However, Hobbes believed that other aspects of human nature, namely, the instinct for self-preservation, fear of death and desire for “commodious living,” were more powerful passions among humans, and that it was these passions, the fear of death in particular, which eventually led men to agree to create a strong central authority that would end the war of competing megalomaniacs, and maintain the peace by monopolizing the means of violence and agreeing to ensure the secure pursuit of commodious living by all. The “insatiable desire and ambition of man” for power and adulation would henceforth be relegated to the international sphere.

But by the second half of the seventeenth century Hobbes’s extreme pessimism about human nature gradually gave way to more moderate accounts in which economic self interest in the market place, love of money, as calculated and contained by reason, would come to be seen as the main passion of humans. The ideal of the spirited hero striving for honor and glory was thoroughly demeaned if not denounced as foolish. By the eighteenth century money making was viewed less as avaricious or selfish and more as a peaceful passion that improves peoples’ manners and “makes for all the gentleness of life.” As Montesquieu worded it, “wherever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle.” Commerce, it was indeed anticipated, would soften the barbaric ways of human nature, their atavistic passions for glorious warfare, transforming competition into a peaceful endeavour conducted by reasonable men who stood to gain more from trade than the violent usurpation of other’s peoples property.

Eventually, liberals came to believe that commerce would, in the words expressed by the Scottish thinker William Robertson in 1769, “wear off those prejudices which maintain distinction and animosity between nations.” By the nineteenth century liberals were not as persuaded by Hobbes’s view that the state of nature would continue permanently in the international relationships between nations. They replaced his pessimistic argument about human nature with a progressive optimism about how humans could be socialized to overcome their turbulent passions and aggressive instincts as they were softened through affluence and greater economic opportunities. With continuous improvements in the standard of living, technology and social organization, there would be no conflicts that could not be resolved through peaceful deliberation and political compromise.

The result of this new image of man and political relations, according to Schmitt, was a failure on the part of liberal nations to understand that what makes a community viable as a political association with sovereign control over a territory is its ability to distinguish between friends and enemies, which is based on the ability to grasp the permanent reality that Hobbes understood about the nature of man, which is that humans (the ones with the strongest passions) have an insatiable craving for power, a passion that can be held in check inside a nation state with a strong Leviathan ruler, but which remains a reality in the relationship between nations. But, whereas for Hobbes the state of nature is a war between individuals; for Schmitt one can speak of a state of war between nations as well as between groups within a nation. Friends and enemies are always groupings of people. In our time of mass multicultural immigration we can see clearly how enemy groups can be formed inside a national collectivity, groups seeking to undermine the values and the ethnic character of the national group. Therefore, to have a concept of the political is to be aware, in our multicultural age, of the possibility that enemy outgroups can emerge within our liberal nations states; it is to be aware that not all humans are equally individualistic, but far more ethnocentric than Europeans, and that a polity which welcomes millions of individuals from collectivist cultures, with a human nature driven by the passions for power and for recognition, constitute a very dangerous situation.

It was Hegel, rather than Hobbes, who spoke of the pursuit of honor instead of the pursuit of riches or power for its own sake, as the spirited part of human nature, which is about seeking recognition from others, a deeply felt desire among men to be conferred rightful honor by their peers. We can bring this Hegelian insight into Schmitt to argue that the spirited part of the soul is intimately tied to one’s sense of belonging to a political community with ethno-cultural markers. Without this spirited part members of a community eventually lose their sense of collective pride, honor, and will to survive as a political people. It is important to understand that honor is all about concern for one’s reputation within the context of a group. It is a matter of honor for immigrants, the males in the group, to affirm their heritage regardless of how successful they may be economically. Immigrants arriving in large numbers are naturally inclined to establish their own ethnic groupings within Western nations rather than disaggregate into individual units, contrary to what liberal theory says.

Non-White ethnic groupings stand as “the other,” “the stranger,” to use Schmitt’s words, in relation to nations where Europeans still constitute the majority. The friend-enemy distinction, certainly “the Us versus Them” distinction, can be applied to the relation between non-White ethnic groupings and European national groupings in the degree to which the collective actions of non-European groups negates the heritage and overall way of life of the majority European population. Ethnic groupings that negate the way of life of European liberal nations must be repulsed if European nations are to preserve their “own form of existence.” To be cognizant of this reality is what it means to have a concept of the political in our current age of mass immigration. It does not mean that alien groupings are posing an immediate physical threat. Enemy groupings may also emerge as a major force through sheer demographic growth in a seemingly peaceful atmosphere, leading to all sorts of differences over voting patterns, accumulation of wealth and resources, ethnic hierarchies, divergent customs and religious practices, that become so pervasive that they come to threaten the way of life of the founding peoples, polarizing the nation into US versus Them.

The Leftist Interpretation of Schmitt is Wrong

But don’t Western liberals have enemies? Don’t they believe, at least many Republicans, that Islamic radicals, and nations openly opposed to “Western values,” are enemies of liberalism, against whom military violence may be used when necessary, even if Republicans negate the political in the sense that they want to bring about a situation in which humans define themselves as economic agents, or as moral crusaders dedicated to “democratic” causes? Don’t multicultural liberals believe that opponents of multiculturalism and mass immigration in Western countries are “deplorable” people who must be totally marginalized as enemies of humanity?

Academics on the left have indeed appropriated Schmitt to argue that right wing liberals have not negated the political but simply produced a highly effective smokescream over the West’s ambition to impose an American-led corporate order in the world nicely wrapped with human rights for everyone. They see Schmitt as someone who can teach us how to remove the smokescream of “democracy,” “human rights,” and “economic liberty” from Western hegemony, exposing the true power-seeking intentions behind the corporate liberal elites.

It seems to me that this appropriation of Schmitt is seriously flawed. Of course, Schmitt did not say that liberal nations as such are utterly devoid of any political existence, and of a concept of the political, since the very existence of a state supposes a sovereign right over a territory. A complete denial of the political would amount to a denial of the existence of one’s state. It is also true that for Schmitt “what has occurred [in liberal nations] is that economics has become political” in the enormous power that capitalist firms have, and in the way liberal states seek to augment, through non-economic means, their market share across the world. More than this, Schmitt emphasized how liberal states have “intensified” the enemy-friend distinction by ostracizing as enemies any state or political group disagreeing with their conception of humanity and conceptualizing liberal aggression against illiberal nations as final wars to end all wars.

There is no question, however, that Schmitt’s central thesis is that liberalism has no concept of the political and that it lacks a capacity to understand the friend-enemy distinction. Liberals believe that the “angelic” side of humans can manifest itself through proper liberal socialization, and that once individuals practice a politics of consensus-seeking and tolerance of differences, both inside their nations and in their relationships with other liberal nations, they will learn to avoid war and instead promote peaceful trade and cultural exchanges through commercial contracts, treaties, and diplomacy. Even though liberal states have not been able to “elude the political,” they have yet to develop theories of the political which apprehend this sphere of human life in terms of its defining aspect, the friend-enemy distinction. Rather, liberal theorists are inclined to think of the state as one pressure group among a plurality of political groups all of which lack a concept of the political in thinking that differences between groups can be handled through institutions that obtain consensus by means of neutral procedures and rational deliberation.

The negation of the political is necessarily implicit in the liberal notion that humans can be defined as individuals with natural rights. It is implicit in the liberal aspiration to create a world in which groups and nations interact through peaceful economic exchanges and consensual politics, and in which, accordingly, the enemy-friend distinction and the possibility of violence between groups is renounced. The negation of the political is implicit in the liberal notion of “humanity.” The goal of liberalism is to get rid of the political, to create societies in which humans see themselves as members of a human community dedicated to the pursuit of security, comfort and happiness. Therefore, we can argue with Schmitt that liberals have ceased to understand the political insomuch as liberal nations and liberal groups have renounced the friend-enemy distinction and the possibility of violence, under the assumption that human groups are not inherently dangerous to each other, but can be socialized gradually to become members of a friendly “humanity” which no longer values the honor of belonging to a group that affirms ethno-cultural existential differences. This is why Schmitt observes that liberal theorists lack a concept of the political, since the political presupposes a view of humans organized in groupings affirming themselves as “existentially different.”

Thus, using Schmitt, we can argue that while Western liberal states had strong ethnic markers before WWII/1960s, with immigration policies excluding ethnic groupings deemed to be an existential threat to their “national character,” they were nevertheless highly susceptible to the enactment of norms promoting the idea of civic identity, renouncing the notion that races are real, romanticizing Third World peoples as liberators, and believing that all liberal rights should be extended to all humans regardless of nationality, because they lacked a concept of the political. The racial or ethnocentric liberalism that prevailed in the West, collectivist as it remained in this respect, was encased within a liberal worldview according to which, to use the words of Schmitt, “trade and industry, technological perfection, freedom, and rationalization . . . are essentially peaceful [and . . .] must necessarily replace the age of wars.”

They believed that their European societies were associations of individuals enjoying the right to life and liberty. The experience of WWII led liberals to the conclusion that the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had finished feudal militarism, and which then led the Allies to fight a world war against the new militarism of fascism, were still “unfinished revolutions.” The liberal bourgeois nations were still not liberal enough, in their division and ranking of individuals along ethnic lines, with many individuals not enjoying the same rights that were “naturally” theirs. The project of the Enlightenment, “the universalist spirit of the political Enlightenment,” in the words of Jürgen Habermas, was not yet completed.

What Western liberals in the 1960s, the ones who dismantled immigration laws that discriminated against non-Whites, and introduce the notion that multiple cultures could co-exist within the same state, did not realize was that their sense of racial identity was the one collectivist norm still holding their liberal nations safely under the concept of the political. Once this last bastion of collectivism was deconstructed, liberal nations would be caught up within a spiral of radicalization wherein liberal nations would find it ever more difficult to decide which racial groups may constitute a threat to their national character, and which groups may be already lurking within their nations ready to play the political with open reigns, ready to promote their own ethnic interests; in fact, ready to play up the universal language of liberalism, against ethnocentric Europeans, so as to promote their own collectivist interests.

Source: http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2016/10/carl-schmitt-liberal-n... ^[6]

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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/10/carl-schmitt-is-right/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/carlschmitt.jpg

[2] Carl Schmitt’s argument: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5458073.html

[3] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/SchmittQuote.jpg

[4] in our struggle for survival and competition with other groups: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0985452307/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=15121&creative=330641&creativeASIN=0985452307&linkCode=as2&tag=counofeurocan-20

[5] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/State-of-nature-Hobbes.jpg

[6] http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2016/10/carl-schmitt-liberal-nations-have-open-borders-because-they-have-no-concept-of-the-political.html: http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2016/10/carl-schmitt-liberal-nations-have-open-borders-because-they-have-no-concept-of-the-political.html

A LIRE : Le Questionnaire, d’Ernst von Salomon

Ex: http://www.theatrum-belli.com

Le célèbre auteur des Réprouvés, cadet prussien qui racontera sa perception presque romantique de l’histoire des corps-francs d’après-guerre et du terrorisme des groupuscules nationalistes, a également publié en 1951 un livre fameux, Le Questionnaire, que Gallimard a la bonne idée de rééditer.

L’architecture générale du livre s’appuie sur les quelques 130 questions auxquelles les Américains demandèrent aux Allemands de répondre en 1945 afin d’organiser la dénazification du pays, mais en les détournant souvent et prenant à de nombreuses reprises le contre-pied des attentes des vainqueurs. A bien des égards, le livre est ainsi non seulement à contre-courant de la doxa habituelle, mais camoufle également bien des aspects d’une réalité que l’Allemagne de la fin des années 1940 refusait de reconnaître : « Ma conscience devenue très sensible me fait craindre de participer à un acte capable, dans ces circonstances incontrôlables, de nuire sur l’ordre de puissances étrangères à un pays et à un peuple dont je suis irrévocablement ». Certaines questions font l’objet de longs développements, mais presque systématiquement un humour grinçant y est présent, comme lorsqu’il s’agit simplement d’indiquer son lieu de naissance : « Je découvre avec étonnement que, grâce à mon lieu de naissance (Kiel), je peux me considérer comme un homme nordique, et l’idée qu’en comparaison avec ma situation les New-Yorkais doivent passer pour des Méridionaux pleins de tempérament m’amuse beaucoup ». Et à la même question, à propos des manifestations des SA dans la ville avant la prise du pouvoir par les nazis : « Certes, la couleur de leurs uniformes était affreuse, mais on ne regarde pas l’habit d’un homme, on regarde son coeur. On ne savait pas au juste ce que ces gens-là voulaient. Du moins semblaient-ils le vouloir avec fermeté … Ils avaient de l’élan, on était bien obligé de le reconnaître, et ils étaient merveilleusement organisés. Voilà ce qu’il nous fallait : élan et organisation ». Au fil des pages, il revient à plusieurs reprises sur son attachement à la Prusse traditionnelle, retrace l’histoire de sa famille, développe ses relations compliquées avec les religions et les Eglises, évoque des liens avec de nombreuses personnes juives (dont sa femme), donne de longues précisions sur ses motivations à l’époque de l’assassinat de Rathenau, sur son procès ultérieur et sur son séjour en prison. Suivant le fil des questions posées, il détaille son éducation, son cursus scolaire, son engagement dans les mouvements subversifs « secrets », retrace ses activités professionnelles successives avec un détachement qui parfois peu surprendre mais correspond à l’humour un peu grinçant qui irrigue le texte, comme lorsqu’il parle de son éditeur et ami Rowohlt. Il revient bien sûr longuement sur les corps francs entre 1919 et 1923, sur l’impossibilité à laquelle il se heurte au début de la Seconde guerre mondiale pour faire accepter son engagement volontaire, tout en racontant qu’il avait obtenu en 1919 la plus haute de ses neuf décorations en ayant rapporté à son commandant… « un pot de crème fraîche. Il avait tellement envie de manger un poulet à la crème ! ». Toujours ce côté décalé, ce deuxième degré que les Américains n’ont probablement pas compris. La première rencontre avec Hitler, le putsch de 1923, la place des élites bavaroises et leurs rapports avec l’armée de von Seeckt, la propagande électorale à la fin des années 1920, et après l’arrivée au pouvoir du NSDAP les actions (et les doutes) des associations d’anciens combattants et de la SA, sont autant de thèmes abordés au fil des pages, toujours en se présentant et en montrant la situation de l’époque avec détachement, presque éloignement, tout en étant semble-t-il hostile sur le fond et désabusé dans la forme. Les propos qu’il tient au sujet de la nuit des longs couteaux sont parfois étonnants, mais finalement « dans ces circonstances, chaque acte est un crime, la seule chose qui nous reste est l’inaction. C’est en tout cas la seule attitude décente ». Ce n’est finalement qu’en 1944 qu’il lui est demandé de prêter serment au Führer dans le cadre de la montée en puissance du Volkssturm, mais « l’homme qui me demandait le serment exigeait de moi que je défende la patrie. Mais je savais que ce même homme jugeait le peuple allemand indigne de survivre à sa défaite ». Conclusion : défendre la patrie « ne pouvait signifier autre chose que de la préserver de la destruction ». Toujours les paradoxes. Dans la dernière partie, le comportement des Américains vainqueurs est souvent présenté de manière négative, évoque les difficultés quotidiennes dans son petit village de haute Bavière : une façon de presque renvoyer dos-à-dos imbécilité nazie et bêtise alliée… et donc de s’exonérer soi-même.

Au final, un livre qui doit être lu, car au-delà même de ce qu’il raconte de von Salomon et de l’entre-deux-guerres, il est également très éclairant sur la façon dont une partie non négligeable de la population allemande s’est en quelque sorte « auto-protégée » en 1945.

Gallimard, Paris, 2016, 920 pages. 18,50 euros.

Source : Guerres & Conflits

Ernst von Salomon révolutionnaire, conservateur, amoureux

Auteur : Valentin Fontan-Moret

Ex: http://www.philitt.fr

Dans Les Réprouvés (1930), Ernst von Salomon retrace sa folle aventure politique au lendemain de la Grande Guerre. Son personnage littéraire devient emblématique de la Révolution conservatrice allemande et l’ouvrage une prophétie pour les générations perdues. Son enseignement : le nihilisme peut être vaincu par une passion plus vive que les tourments de l’Histoire. Le réprouvé trouve alors son salut dans l’expérience guerrière à laquelle succède l’élévation de l’esprit. 

Les Réprouvés s’ouvre sur une citation de Franz Schauweker : « Dans la vie, le sang et la connaissance doivent coïncider. Alors surgit l’esprit. » Là est toute la leçon de l’œuvre, qui oppose connaissance et expérience et finit par découvrir que ces deux opposés s’attirent inévitablement. Une question se pose alors : faut-il laisser ces deux attractions s’annuler, se percuter, se détruire et avec elles celui qui les éprouve ; ou bien faut-il résoudre la tension dans la création et la réflexion.

Amoureux éperdu d’une Allemagne en lambeaux, éconduit par l’Histoire au soir de la Première Guerre mondiale à laquelle son trop jeune âge l’a empêché de participer, Ernst von Salomon incarne la passion révolutionnaire conservatrice en acte lorsqu’il choisit de s’engager au sein des corps francs pour poursuivre la lutte. Mais si Dominique Venner a pu décrire cette épopée mythique comme une aventure nihiliste, l’obstination déraisonnable de Salomon apparaît comme une authentique quête de sens qui se poursuit tout au long de son parcours de guerrier puis de militant. Malgré le désarroi ambiant et l’absence de but dont certaines têtes brûlées semblent souffrir, le marginal Salomon exprime toujours l’instinct de reconquête d’une nation chérie. À ses yeux, seule la révolution peut redonner à l’Allemagne sa splendeur d’antan, celle pour qui on lui avait appris à mourir.

Révolutionnaire éperdu

Ernst von Salomon a tout juste 16 ans lorsque l’armistice est signé le 11 novembre 1918,  âge des folies, des idées à couper au couteau et des passions qui empêchent la résignation. Si la confusion est le premier sentiment que confesse l’auteur à l’ouverture des Réprouvés, l’espérance lui succède aussitôt et c’est cette tension permanente entre deux penchants contraires qui fait de la lutte acharnée sa raison de vivre. Car la vie de l’auteur, au début de son œuvre, ne semble tenir qu’à la poursuite de son idéal, dont il entrevoit déjà sans doute qu’il est un mirage mais refuse pourtant de l’abandonner. Ainsi confesse-t-il : « Aussi nous étions prêts à agir sous la seule impulsion de nos sentiments ; et il importait peu que l’on pût démontrer par la suite la justesse de nos actes. Ce qui importait c’est qu’en ces jours des actes fussent accomplis. » Ce n’est pas la raison, ce n’est pas l’idée qui guide l’aspirant épris d’Allemagne et vexé par une paix humiliante, mais une rage sentimentale qu’il ne maîtrise pas. De là naît l’instinct révolutionnaire, instinct destructeur par essence qui se donne pour seul objectif de renverser l’ordre établi, y compris l’ordre intérieur, spirituel et moral, de celui qu’il anime. Il s’agit d’éprouver le monde en s’éprouvant soi-même, d’expérimenter avant de prétendre connaître.  

Le mouvement avant toute autre chose, l’action tous azimuts apparaissent comme les seules voies du salut, l’unique conviction de cette génération frustrée étant celle que rien de bon ne pourra surgir de l’ère du parlementarisme et de la bourgeoisie régnante. Peut-être ne le comprend-il pas encore, mais c’est contre l’immobilisme de la pensée systématique, qu’elle soit libérale ou marxiste, qu’il importe de lutter. Et si nous parlons de salut, il ne s’agit pas uniquement d’un salut collectif dans la restauration de la grandeur allemande. La guerre, puis la défaite et les conditions de la paix ont comme détruit moralement l’individu. Le mouvement est donc la condition de la survie de chacun, une tentative vitale de retrouver du sens : « Dans l’attaque nous espérions trouver une délivrance, une suprême exaltation de nos forces ; nous espérions être confirmés dans la conviction d’être à la hauteur de tout destin, nous espérions sentir en nous les véritables valeurs du monde. Nous marchions, nourris par d’autres certitudes que celles qui pouvaient valoir pour notre pays. » Des lignes qui rejoignent celles de La guerre comme expérience intérieure d’Ernst Jünger et montrent à quel point l’esprit de revanche anime les individus et fabrique des guerriers plutôt que des soldats, des hommes affranchis plutôt que des fonctions révocables.

C’est là l’expression d’une folie impatiente, d’une folie amoureuse. Refuser l’immobilisme, sans cesse se mettre en péril comme on se remet en question, c’est le signe de ce que la révolution nationaliste rejette l’amour platonique d’une idée. Parce que la nation tant aimée a été perdue, il convient de la conquérir à nouveau, d’en occuper les frontières comme on épouse les replis, et non pas de la séduire. Pourtant vient un moment où l’acte ne suffit plus à nourrir l’espérance. La violence exalte peut-être autant qu’elle détruit celui qui la subit comme celui qui l’exerce. « Nous avions allumé un bûcher où il n’y avait pas que des objets inanimés qui brûlaient : nos espoirs, nos aspirations y brûlaient aussi, les lois de la bourgeoisie, les valeurs du monde civilisé, tout y brûlait, les derniers restes du vocabulaire et de la croyance aux choses et aux idées de ce temps, tout ce bric-à-brac poussiéreux qui traînait encore dans nos cœurs », avoue l’auteur. L’idéal s’annihile, l’idéaliste tend vers le nihilisme. La fatalité de plus en plus évidente oblige le guerrier à considérer à nouveau ses aspirations, ou à mourir d’avoir consumé tout ce qui habitait son cœur. Pour survivre, il faut projeter de nouveau un idéal, tailler une alternative dans l’étendard terni que l’on brandit encore sans y croire. Le mouvement devient une coquille vide qui ne demande qu’à être remplie par une production de l’esprit, l’expérience est vaine sans la connaissance. Il ne s’agit plus seulement de se mouvoir pour survivre, mais de savoir dans quel sens se mouvoir, et dans quel but. Alors, la passion révolutionnaire, se souvenant qu’elle était née de la réaction, se propose un but conservateur audacieux.

Intellectuel et violent : le jaillissement de l’esprit

L’enchevêtrement permanent des considérations collectives et individuelles dans l’œuvre en fait un parfait portrait psychologique du révolutionnaire, du militant au sens strict (c’est-à-dire aux méthodes militaires). Mais dans la lutte politique de l’immédiat après-guerre, c’est d’abord le jeune Ernst von Salomon qui se révèle à lui-même, intellectuel et violent, bien plutôt qu’une idée qui avance. À ses débuts, la volonté politique de l’auteur et de ses complices est au mieux une quête, une volonté de retrouver des repères dans le brouillard de la crise ambiante, plus qu’une véritable velléité. Mais si la simple réflexion n’est pas au départ de cette quête, c’est un symptôme de ce que l’idéal allemand de la Révolution conservatrice naissante n’est pas purement philosophique. Il est plus englobant, plus total : c’est une « vision-du-monde » (Weltanschauung) certes imprégnée de philosophie, digérée par l’intellect, mais aussi concrètement éprouvée, viscérale. Cette vision du monde se nourrit autant de la pensée que de la volonté et se livre sous les traits du sentiment en des termes lyriques, oniriques, suggestifs ou allégoriques qui défient les jargons et les découpages conceptuels rationalistes. Style emblématique de la Révolution conservatrice allemande que l’on retrouve aussi bien sous la plume d’Ernst Jünger ou de Carl Schmitt, et qui vise à suggérer, toucher, projeter plutôt qu’à simplement exposer. Car le réprouvé qu’incarne Salomon n’est pas un homme de salon. Il n’éprouve pas non plus la connaissance, chez lui, l’expérience prime. Le ressenti du jeune homme précède sa formation intellectuelle et sa conscience métapolitique. Ce n’est qu’en écrivant qu’il recherche la vérité de valeurs éternelles dans l’extrémité des expériences vécues, pour muer l’expérience en connaissance. Pour la surélever, l’ériger au rang de l’utile et de l’accessible à tous, alors l’œuvre prend son sens. 

On retrouve ici une expression magnifique du paradoxe de la pensée révolutionnaire conservatrice, moderne parmi les anti-modernes en ce qu’elle se propose de retourner la modernité contre elle-même, mais aussi et surtout en ce qu’elle peut sembler accorder la priorité à l’action, l’impulsion naissant du domaine du sensible et non de celui des idées. Ce qui ne s’éprouve pas n’est que tergiversation bourgeoise, comme semble le suggérer l’un des camarades d’Ernst von Salomon à qui l’ouvrage de Walter Ratheneau — assassiné avec la complicité de notre auteur par l’Organisation Consul — intitulé Des choses futures n’inspire que ce commentaire lapidaire : « Tant d’étincelles et si peu de dynamite. » Primat dont le naufrage est admis par Salomon lui-même, lorsqu’il avoue avec dépit que les considérations de la haute politique font des corps francs des idiots utiles au service des intérêts étrangers. Et la volonté d’agir envers et contre tout dans une fuite en avant permanente ne semble épargner que ceux qui, comme lui, se trouvent capables de sublimer l’action par la pensée et en extraire un peu de vérité, éclaircir une vision du monde, se proposer un but. La folie révolutionnaire, pulsion anarchique et déraisonnable, est comme canalisée, équilibrée par l’instinct conservateur qui appelle une plus grande sagesse et un effort de conceptualisation indispensable.

Mais cet équilibre, Salomon ne le trouvera cependant pas, bien qu’il en ait l’intuition, avant sa sortie de prison. Encore trop brûlant, trop extrême dans sa volonté d’agir à tout prix, jusqu’au crime, jusqu’à une damnation qu’il ne semble même pas craindre. Les réprouvés sont des éconduits que la gifle de l’histoire a jetés dans les bras du démon, des marginaux que l’exclusion détruira pour les plus faibles, confortera dans une citadelle assiégée pour les autres. Peu avant sa mort, plus de 40 années après la publication des Réprouvés, il confesse s’être réellement interrogé sur le sens de son action lors de sa seconde détention, après laquelle il épouse pleinement le mouvement de la révolution conservatrice en amorçant pour de bon la « révolution de l’esprit » déjà évoquée et présente en germe dans son oeuvre. C’est-à-dire un travail de redéfinition des concepts, à l’image de celui des encyclopédistes français du XVIII^ème siècle, précurseurs présumés de la Révolution française. Mais comme si la tension entre connaissance et expérience était fondamentalement indépassable, l’histoire confrontera ce travail, cette connaissance, à l’expérience du politique et le fera dépérir par le détournement idéologique et politicien du national-socialisme.

The Characterology of Ludwig Klages

Joakim Andersen:

The Characterology of Ludwig Klages

Ex: https://www.righton.net

Klages developed a reactionary school of psycho-physical thought. Capable of 'psychoanalyzing' not just individuals, but races and even material structures such as buildings or cities, his work in some ways anticipates and outstrips postmodernism.

Is it possible to imagine a reactionary school of psychology? Jung and Szondi moved in this direction, while Freud is a representative of the dark side of the enlightenment that manifested itself in the early 1900s. His thoughts are pessimistic, but hard to combine with optimistic liberalism and with perennial tradition.

Instead, we find a reactionary psychology when we turn to Ludwig Klages and his so-called characterology. The science of Klages was used, in a modified form, by the German Wehrmacht, but he also influenced feminism with the concept of logocentrism. One of the ironies of history is that the legacy of the antisemitic Klages during the second half of the twentieth Century was mostly transmitted by German-Jewish thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Wilhelm Reich. Benjamin was especially influenced by Klages, notably in his attempt to “read” architecture and in his studies of intoxication.

Characterology and psychology

… the question is how far the individual peculiarity of the living entity must be made the basis for interpreting every manifestation of life, and what means we possess for an intellectual penetration of individuality as such.
– Klages on the task of characterology

Klages does not think highly of most psychology. It is based on misunderstandings, it has limited possibilities to describe personalities, and it is not a science of the soul. This means that modern psychology and older wisdom about the soul are strangers to each other. Klages does connect to such wisdom. Among other things, he is interested in the psychological insights of folk-language. People are “seeing red”, they get “high” or “carried away”, and become “blue”. Klages is interesting to read when he studies this area.

The flaws of psychology are caused by it being a child of the modern age, adopting modern values. Klages notes that a renaissance psychologist would have studied a persons capacity to act, a medieval psychologist her faith, and a classical psychologist her ability to be happy. But not the modern psychologist. Klages writes:

Such traits have lost their value for the modern psychologist; they are not even regarded at all, and industry has remained as the only virtue with its satellites, ambition and success – a complex, that is, which the Ancients would never have hesitated to relegate to the lowest of men, to pariahs and to slaves.

Character and psychology

If his nature furnishes the material for the life-tune of the living man, then the material of character may be compared with the musical instrument which serves to translate the tune into sound.
– Klages on material and nature

The task of characterology is the study of personality. According to Klages a personality can be described using the concepts of material, nature and structure. Klages is not an egalitarian. Our material consists of the talents and gifts we have been handed. We are born with different gifts. Our nature is connected to our driving forces and interests, the general direction of our lives. Structure is also called temperament. Klages studies Personal Capacity for Stimulation of Feelings, Personal Capacity for the Stimulation of Will and Personal Capacity for Expression.

Klages insists that his science may be used not only to describe individuals, but also to understand peoples, races, epochs, castes, buildings et cetera. This brings to mind Klages friend Benjamin, and his attempt to interpret buildings and cities. Klages writes that ” in principle all relics of culture admit of interpretation” and “originally every object of apprehension was taken to delimit and delineate a soul”.

Klages is often a rewarding thinker. He explains hysteria with the concept of inhibition. In the modern world the connection of the soul to the body is often so repressed that many people appear to be hysterical. Phantasms, imitation, repetition, and representation abound. Some people never live, but represent most of their lives.

Ego, Soul, and Spirit

…the different species of character can all be traced back to different proportions in which Spirit and Soul are mixed.
– Klages

Klages is well known for his analysis of the conflict between Soul (Seele) and Spirit (Geist). Geist intrudes between the poles of Body and Soul, such that history is an account of the growing domain of Spirit. Klages describes the steps in this process. The connection between Soul and Body is severed, the body is condemned as “sinful”, the Will to Power takes the Place of Soul, and the Machine Man is born. Sometimes the process was primarily economic; those who could not keep up were pushed aside. At other times it has been very bloody (1789, the attack on the Templars, the Russian revolution). The process started with the mythical fall, when man became aware of his mortality and the Ego was born.

According to Klages, Ego is a combination of Soul and Spirit, “a chemical combination having for elements the universal spirit and an eternally particular soul”. Those with a strong Soul experience the world as a series of images. When Spirit grows too strong they are replaced by things (“things are Egos projected into the World”), things to control and manipulate.

Klages mentions four personality types, according to the combinations of Soul and Spirit. Ecstasy and intoxication (Benjamin’s Rausch) have important roles. During ecstasy some people can re-experience the union of Body and Soul. Klages also describes a personality type where Soul is strong and Spirit a servant. He describes intuitive and speculative types (the romantics used the terms night- and day-consciousness). Klages focuses on the night, on dreams and intuition.

Klages as conservative

According to Klages the modern world is sick, but he is not a typical conservative. He sees Will to Power, as well as the restlessness of capitalism and modern science, as an expression of Spirit. Klages is no friend of Christianity either. Instead he views Life and the ability to experience it as the essential. Related to Soul are such things as love of nature, the home, the motherland, animals, plants, memories, ancestors and the Cosmos.

Klages is opposed to most of what modern liberals appreciate. He is no friend of the “Enlightenment”, of 1789, “progress” or “equality”. He is no feminist, but according to Klages women have historically been closer to Life and men to Spirit. He writes that the intelligence of women is different rather than inferior.

Klages and postmodernism

… the symbol has gone beyond that which it symbolized and thought, operating by symbols, has taken the place of thought operating by units of meaning, or even by concepts. But this is the essence of formalism.
– Klages

In many ways Klages is an early postmodernist, reminding us of Baudrillard. He talks about the growth of formalization, especially in finance and mathematics. Symbols swallow facts in the same way that money replaces value. Combined with his theory of hysteria and phantasm, this is a valuable key to understanding the modern world. All in all there is much of value in Klages and his characterology, especially for the reactionary reader.

Julius Evola - Tom Sunic & E. Christian Kopff

Julius Evola - Tom Sunic & E. Christian Kopff

Yanni McQueen

 

Tom Sunic interviews renowned educator, classicist and writer Dr. E. Christian Kopff. Topics include:

- How Tradition get passed down through the generations
- The mind of Julius Evola and what he meant by “revolting against the modern world.”
- Evola’s thoughts on the “masses.”
- Evola’s thoughts on Western Tradition
- Evola’s thoughts on masculinity
- Evola’s relevance for Americans and the rest of the modern West
- Evola’s criticism of Communism and its comparison to Capitalism
- The spiritual life vs. racial science; the State vs. the People
- Ezra Pound
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Recorded April 20, 2010

Zarathustra par Nicolas Roerich (1931)

Zoroastrismo, modernidad y Nietzsche

Ex: http://hiperbolajanus.com

Irán es un país lejano, tanto en el ámbito geográfico como en aquel de las mentalidades, y más respecto a un Occidente moderno totalmente carente de empatía hacia cualquier realidad que sobrepase el marco de «valores» y mentalidades convencionalmente aceptados. En el contexto de la geopolítica mundial atlantista Irán representa uno de los males absolutos a abatir, al que combatir con toda clase de armas, desde la desinformación y la propaganda negra hasta la difamación y las visiones más grotescas. La revolución islámica de Jomeini cambió las perspectivas de Occidente respecto a este país, especialmente en el momento en el que dejó de ser un títere de los americanos para recuperar la integridad de su soberanía. Pero más allá de estos conflictos y visiones de nuestros días, ¿qué sabemos realmente de Irán? ¿Qué sabemos de su sistema de creencias más allá de la fe islámica ahora dominante sobre un extenso territorio y casi 80 millones de habitantes? Hoy nos gustaría destacar la importancia de ciertas creencias preislámicas que, desarrolladas en suelo iranio, han tenido una importancia, que no conviene infravalorar, en la configuración de las grandes religiones monoteístas.

En primer lugar, habría que reconocer a este extenso país el mérito de haber sido el origen del sincretismo y sistematización de algunos conceptos que son parte inestimable de las grandes religiones abrahámicas, y entre los elementos más destacables están la articulación de un sistema dualista a nivel cosmológico, religioso y ético o de los valores de las grandes religiones del desierto. No en vano, de estas concepciones dualistas surgió la idea del «bien» y del «mal» que forman parte del juicio moral que estas concepciones religiosas hacen del mundo, y son parte inextricable de su cosmovisión. Otros mitos recurrentes y asociados a formas de profetismo, así como la idea de resurrección de los muertos encontraron también sus primeras teorizaciones en tierras iranias. Sin embargo, cuando buscamos el origen de estas ideas y su formulación doctrinal el enigma y el misterio vuelve a aparecer ante nosotros, y en este caso la figura de Zoroastro o Zaratustra se nos presenta como una incógnita que entre el mito, la leyenda y la realidad, pero frente al cual ciertos especialistas en la religión y espiritualidad iranias tratan de arrojar algo de luz: por un lado se habla de un Zaratustra histórico y vinculado a una función revolucionaria, como reformador de las concepciones religiosas y espirituales de los pueblos iranios. Otra vertiente duda de la función de profeta e historicidad de la figura de Zaratustra para destacar aquello que éste representa desde la perspectiva de las creencias espirituales de los antiguos pueblos de Irán.

 

Más allá del debate historiográfico acerca de la veracidad histórica del personaje, su función arquetípica dentro de un universo simbólico y espiritual es inestimable. Algunos han fechado su existencia entre el 1000 y el 600 a,c, aunque se ha podido concretar que pudo vivir entre el 628 y el 551 a.c y se dice que pudo vivir en el este de Irán, probablemente en Jorasmia o Bactriana. Según la tradición fue zaotar, que se correspondería con la figura de un sacerdote sacrificador, vinculado a la ejecución de los ritos, y cantor, y sus escritos sagrados, sus gathas, se inscribirían en una vieja tradición indoeuropea vinculada a la poesía sagrada. Pertenecía al clan Spitama, de criadores de caballos y su padre se llamaba Purusaspa. Se sabe que Zaratustra estuvo casado y que tuvo dos hijos, de los que incluso se conocen los nombres. El contexto en el que Zaratustra difundió su mensaje era el de una Comunidad sedentaria de pastores, fuertemente pertrechada por valores étnico-religiosos y sacerdotales, en la que nuestro Profeta representó un factor revolucionario desde el punto de vista espiritual al poner en duda a las autoridades sacerdotales, y de hecho en su ataque a esta casta saderdotal invocó a Ahura Mazda, a la divinidad tribal. Como consecuencia de estos ataques a la ortodoxia religiosa vigente, Zaratustra se vio obligado a huir de la Comunidad y refugiarse en los dominios de otro grupo tribal, de la tribu Fryana, donde consiguió convencer y convertir a su nueva fe al jefe de la tribu, Vishtaspa, que, desde ese momento, se convertiría en su principal valedor y protector. Sin embargo, sus enemigos continuaron en su empeño de defenestrarle, tanto a él como a su familia. En los gathas también se conserva el testimonio de las actividades misioneras de Zaratustra, de la extensión de su palabra y de los numerosos adeptos y discípulos que se agruparon en torno a él. Este texto sagrado, que refleja un sentido de la existencia sobrio, tono pedreste o la sequedad en la narración, también refleja las enseñanzas zoroastrianas bajo la forma de las parábolas, o enseñanzas a través de las que se trazan una particular cosmovisión del mundo, donde el castigo a los malvados y la recompensa a los virtuosos es una constante. Al mismo tiempo hechos milagrosos y relatos mitológicos van generando una aureola mística y salvífica del personaje, quien representa la luz sobrenatural del bien en su grado excelso frente al mal absoluto de los demonios.

 

Se ha vinculado a Zaratustra a las experiencias y técnicas empleadas por los chamanes y el uso de alucinógenos y otros estimulantes, algo que se ha contrastado históricamente entre los indo-iranios por otros pueblos coetáneos como fueron los escitas o los indios, y que en teoría habrían inspirado sus profecías, que le habrían sido transmitidas directamente por Ahura Mazda. La particularidad de esta revelación divina es que deja a la libre elección del hombre la elección del bien y el mal, y su ejercicio depende enteramente de la voluntad humana, abandonada a su libre albedrío. De modo que existe la posibilidad de que el hombre acepte el camino correcto, el que dirige a la regeneración en lo primordial, como la vía contraria, la que hunde al hombre en el envilecimiento del mal. Tanto el bien como el mal tienen su origen en Ahura Mazda, pero éste trasciende toda contradicción al acoger todas las opciones en su seno, y parece indicar que la aparición del mal estaría directamente relacionada con la condición previa de la libertad humana. Al mismo tiempo Zaratustra se opuso a una serie de ritos orgiásticos y sacrificios cruentos y otros excesos que formaban parte de la liturgia tradicional de los pueblos indo-iranios. Paralelamente en la reformulación de las antiguas tradiciones étnicas, Zaratustra trató de otorgarles un nuevo valor, y con ello revigorizarlas. Otro de los elementos que aparece en este contexto de reforma es el viaje de los muertos y la idea de juicio al final de los tiempos, un elemento especialmente recurrente en la escatología cristiana, donde los justos serán salvados y admitidos en el paraíso, mientras que los malvados formarán parte de la casa del Mal.

 

El fin último de Zaratustra no era otro que transformar la existencia, probablemente ante la idea de un inminente fin de los tiempos, y la idea de renovación, la cual tendría lugar a través de la intermediación directa de Ahura Mazda, quien representa un modelo de bondad, santidad y omnipotencia que sus adeptos deben tomar como modelo al representar éste el bien frente al mal, que sería identificado con la antigua religión. La división entre buenos y malos es lo que desemboca en una visión dualista del mundo que define dos cosmovisiones antagónicas y enfrentadas, tanto a nivel cósmico como antropológico, y una forma particular de ser y estar en el mundo.

 

Finalmente, y según nos cuentan las fuentes, Zaratustra murió asesinado a la edad de 77 años a manos del turanio Bratvarxsh en un templo del fuego. En algunas fuentes tardías se dice que los asesinos se disfrazaron de lobos, que representaban simbólicamente a las sociedades de hombres vinculadas a las antiguas tradiciones iranias, a las que Zaratustra identificaba con el Mal.

 

Hay muchos más elementos de análisis que podríamos comentar, pero que dada la naturaleza de nuestro texto no vamos a profundizar en ellos. No obstante, es importante apuntar la existencia de elementos de reflexión muy profundos, de naturaleza filosófica, y el conocimiento de la doctrina y teología de la antigua tradición indo-irania.

 

Las referencias que tenemos en el presente del Zoroastrismo y su fundador están muy mediatizadas por el uso que el filósofo alemán Friedrich Nietzsche hizo de su figura, al que, paradójicamente, convirtió en una especie de apóstol o profeta de sus propias enseñanzas. Zaratustra proporcionó una multitud de elementos, mitos y doctrinas que, ulteriormente, servirían de vehículo de expresión, hasta llegar al terreno de los mitos, y en el ámbito teológico, para el desarrollo de las grandes religiones monoteístas, y en concreto del cristianismo, que fue precisamente la máxima expresión de la moral del rebaño, de la desfiguración y falsificación de la existencia a manos de los sacerdotes, a los que también se enfrentó el propio Zaratustra en su momento. Sin embargo, Nietzsche no buscaba moralizar el mundo, sino más bien destruir las categorías morales bajo las cuales se pretendía enmascarar la naturaleza y la Verdad, y enfrentar al hombre a sus propios miedos y al mismo abismo de la vida, en toda la magnitud de su crudeza. Zaratustra era el hombre solitario, acompañado de sus animales heráldicos, el águila y el león, que vive en una cueva, apartado del mundo, y que para transmitir su mensaje a la humanidad, su mensaje de superación, renovación y transfiguración, tiene que volver entre los hombres, y enfrentarse a sus miserias, a sus vilezas y mediocridades.

 

Zaratustra se convierte en el vehículo de los grandes conceptos de la doctrina nietzscheana, desde la voluntad de poder, el superhombre o la idea de transvaloración, y lo hace transformando la esencia de las ideas que, históricamente, había representado aunque no de ciertas actitudes, como aquellas relacionadas con la voluntad de transmutar la esencia del discurso religioso dominante, o una forma de trascendencia más directa e inmanente, y con ello más dependiente de la voluntad humana. Nietzsche tenía un conocimiento muy limitado del mundo oriental, aunque en ocasiones hacía referencias a éste, y son conocidas sus menciones del famoso Código de Manú, un antiguo texto védico en lengua sánscrita, que había servido de base a la sociedad de castas, y que destaca por su rigor y la rectitud de los principios que lo articulan, el cual es mencionado con veneración por parte del filósofo alemán.

 

La trascendencia y espiritualidad dependen enteramente de un principio de objetividad, de la existencia de unas verdades eternas e inamovibles capaces de hacer partícipes en la esencia de lo primordial a los hombres. El abandono de los preceptos espirituales o la democratización de las grandes verdades esotéricas al gran público no hace sino destruir y vulgarizar el Principio Divino, al cual no se puede someter a ningún tipo de discusión, y mucho menos ser puesto en duda por parte del hombre prometeico y racionalista moderno, quien trata de sustituir las grandes verdades de la Tradición por la falsa omnipotencia de la razón y la ciencia. Zaratustra fue un reformador y el contexto de su discurso era fundamentalmente religioso, con un afán claramente proselitista, algo es propio de las religiones del «fin de los tiempos», del Kali-Yuga, donde la formulación de aspectos personales y relacionados con la salvación tendrían una importancia decisiva frente a los mencionados aspectos de Trascendencia, de Verdades eternas o perennidad.

 

Hans Zehrer: een man van de wereld en de daad

Dirk Rochtus

Ex: http://www.doorbraak.be

Een man van de wereld en de daad

Hans Zehrer, drijvende journalistieke kracht achter ‘Die Tat’ en ‘Die Welt’, overleed 50 jaar geleden

Had Zehrer de Machtergreifung van Hitler kunnen verhinderen? Misschien niet met de pen, maar wel met de wapens van een regerende generaal?

Een tijdschrift dat de gemoederen in het Duitsland van vlak voor Hitler bewoog, was 'Die Tat' (De daad), het rechts-georiënteerde maandblad dat geleid werd door de strijdbare conservatief Hans Zehrer (1899-1966). Opgericht in 1909, en van 1912 tot 1928 nog geleid door de bekende uitgever Eugen Diederichs, kende het blad voor 'de toekomst van de Duitse cultuur' met zijn oplage van duizend exemplaren een sluimerend bestaan. Tot Diederichs op de lumineuze idee kwam de leiding van 'Die Tat' in 1929 over te dragen aan een journalist die zijn strepen als redacteur had verdiend bij de invloedrijke 'Vossische Zeitung'. De eerste twee jaren verschool Hans Zehrer zich om professionele redenen nog achter schuilnamen, maar daarna wijdde hij al zijn energie aan de uitbouw van wat het meest invloedrijke tijdschrift ter rechterzijde zou worden in de Republiek van Weimar (1919-'33). Zehrer wist met de verhoging van de oplage van 1000 tot 30.000 de talloze rechtse publicaties in de schaduw te stellen en zelfs de meest geduchte linkse concurrent 'Die Weltbühne' met meer dan de helft te overtreffen. Samen met een kring van uitgelezen publicisten als Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, Giselher Wirsing, Ferdinand Friedrich Zimmermann, Hellmuth Elbrechter en Ferdinand Fried vormde Zehrer de 'Tat-Kreis', de redactiegemeenschap van het maandblad.

Fascisme

De Weimarrepubliek ging na de beurskrach van Wall Street in oktober 1929 moeilijke jaren tegemoet. De werkloosheid snelde de hoogte in, veel jonge mensen zagen ondanks hun kwalificaties geen toekomst meer in Duitsland. De lokroep van extremistische partijen weerklonk steeds luider. Communisten (KPD) en nationaalsocialisten (NSDAP) beukten onvermoeibaar in op de economisch en politiek verzwakkende republiek. De klassieke partijen spanden zich nauwelijks in om haar te verdedigen. Weimar was als een 'democratie zonder democraten'. Zehrer wilde het zijne ertoe bijdragen om het oude, verstarde liberaal-democratische systeem ten val te brengen zodat er een nieuwe ordening zou kunnen ontstaan. In dat opzicht behoorde hij tot de zogenaamde 'Konservative Revolution' waarover Armin Mohler een standaardwerk heeft geschreven[i]. Want hij wilde wel een revolutie, maar niet in de marxistische zin van het woord. Een revolutie die een ware 'Volksgemeinschaft' tot leven zou wekken. Het parlementarisme en de daaraan gekoppelde tegenstelling links-rechts beschouwde Zehrer als achterhaald. Het volk zou niet langer vertegenwoordigd mogen worden door partijen maar door standen. De standenstaat zou moeten berusten op de volkswil, waarbij het volk geleid werd door een elite met een rijkspresident die 'auctoritas' bezat. Leger, politie en ambtenarij zouden de 'potestas' uitoefenen. Het nationalisme zoals dat van de 'Action française' en het syndicalisme van een Georges Sorel moesten met elkaar verzoend worden. Alleen de synthese van die beide stromingen kon het opnemen tegen het liberale, kapitalistische systeem. Zehrer schreef daarover in 'Die Tat'[ii] (Vertaling in eindnoot[iii]):

"Im Faschismus Mussolinis laufen die Elemente, die in Frankreich noch nebeneinander herlaufen, sich nur berühren, aber wenig verschmelzen und im übrigen erfolglos bleiben, zusammen. Während in Frankreich zwischen den antiliberalen Kräften rechts und links nur einige Funken sprühen, schließt sich im Faschismus der Stromkreis zum erstenmal in der Praxis, 'rechts' und 'links' tun sich in einer neuen militanten Bewegung zusammen und beseitigen gemeinsam das liberale System. Nationalismus und Syndikalismus marschieren gemeinsam gegen den gemeinsamen Gegner."

Geestelijke waarden

'Die Tat' kwam tegemoet aan het verlangen van een hele generatie jongeren naar nieuwe horizonten, naar alternatieven voor een weinig bezielende democratie die zich in de greep van het 'Kapitaal' en de 'Massa' bevond . De journalist Paul Sethe riep in een aan Zehrer gewijde 'Nachruf' (Die Zeit, 02.09.1966) een beeld op dat kenschetsend was voor die jonge zoekende lezers: 'Damals traf man in der Eisenbahn oft auf junge Leute, die "Die Tat" lasen; fast immer Leute mit klugen und nachdenklichen Gesichtern' (Toentertijd trof je in de trein vaak jonge lui aan die de "Tat" aan het lezen waren; haast altijd mensen met een verstandige en piekerende gezichtsuitdrukking). Veel van die jonge mensen kwamen uit de middenklasse, uit die groep die 'in de strijd tussen het kapitalistische en het massadenken bereid is, geestelijke waarden te laten primeren op andere waarden', zoals het heette in het door Zehrer opgestelde programma voor 'Die Tat'. Vele ideeën van de conservatief-revolutionairen vertoonden verwantschap met die van het nationaalsocialisme. Adolf Hitler wist miljoenen mensen naar zich toe wist te trekken door in te spelen op oude 'Sehnsüchte' (verlangens) naar een 'warme gemeenschap' als alternatief voor de 'koude maatschappij', naar een heropleving van de onder het Verdrag van Versailles kreunende natie, en naar een 'Messias', een 'bevrijder van het Duitse volk'.

Hitler verhinderen

Als intellectueel minachtte Zehrer de NSDAP omwille van haar proletarisch karakter, en hoewel hij gehuwd was met een joodse vrouw, gaf hij toch de nazipartij zijn stem omdat hij in haar een middel zag om de Weimarrepubliek onderuit te halen. Maar zijn argwaan tegenover Hitler groeide naarmate hij begon in te zien dat de 'Führer' van de NSDAP meer de nationalistische kaart trok dan de socialistische. Zehrer zocht contact met generaal Kurt von Schleicher die van 3 december 1932 tot 28 januari 1933 het ambt van rijkskanselier bekleedde. Schleicher wilde de republiek redden en daartoe moest hij eerst Hitler zien klein te krijgen. Zehrer steunde en adviseerde hem daarbij. De 'rode generaal' streefde ernaar de linkervleugel van de NSDAP onder Gregor Strasser af te doen scheuren van de partij, en dan samen met de 'linkse nationaalsocialisten', de vakbonden en de sociaaldemocraten het land te besturen. Toen Strasser uit de NSDAP stapte maar amper gevolgd werd, was het plan van de 'Spaltung' (opsplitsing) mislukt. Zehrer zag nog maar één kans om Hitler te verhinderen, van de macht af te houden. Op 24 januari 1933 adviseerde hij Schleicher het parlement te ontbinden zonder nieuwe verkiezingen in het vooruitzicht te stellen. Rijkspresident Paul von Hindenburg wees dit voorstel af. Enkel een staatsgreep – regeren met behulp van de 'Reichswehr' – bleef nog als optie over. Maar de generaal kreeg het niet over zijn hart om al die drastische maatregelen te nemen en een militaire dictatuur te installeren. Volgens Zehrer belichaamde Schleicher het type 'des musischen Militärs', en daaraan zou hij ten gronde gegaan zijn. Zes dagen later werd Hitler door rijkspresident Hindenburg benoemd tot rijkskanselier. Anderhalf jaar later zou de 'Führer und Reichskanzler' Strasser en Schleicher, naast vele andere rivalen, laten vermoorden in de 'Nacht van de Lange Messen'.

Vizier

'Die Tat' mocht dan wel met haar strijd tegen Weimar, tegen Versailles, tegen het parlementarisme en voor een elitair bestuurde natiestaat en een 'Duits socialisme' geestelijk mee het pad hebben geëffend voor de machtsovername door de nationaalsocialisten, dezen vergaten nooit wie tijdens de tocht naar de top aan hun kant had gestaan en wie niet. Enkele weken na de Machtergreifung werd Zehrer gedwongen de leiding over 'Die Tat' af te staan. Hij trok zich in de komende jaren terug op het eiland Sylt, ver weg van Berlijn, uit het vizier van de nationaalsocialisten. Zijn joodse echtgenote emigreerde in 1938 naar Groot-Brittannië. Zehrer werkte in de beginjaren van de oorlog nog als zaakvoerder van de uitgeverij Stalling en diende van 1943 tot 1945 bij de staf van de Luftwaffe. Na de oorlog werd Zehrer hoofdredacteur van 'Die Welt', de krant die door de Britse bezettingsmacht in Hamburg was opgericht. Duitse sociaaldemocraten protesteerden hiertegen omdat ze de strijd van Zehrer tegen de Weimarrepubliek niet waren vergeten. Zehrer moest opstappen en schreef tot 1953 voor andere dagbladen. Toen de bekende uitgever Axel Springer, een goede vriend, in 1953 'Die Welt' kocht, kon Zehrer weer aan de slag, en wel als hoofdredacteur bij deze krant, die nog altijd een van de vlaggenschepen van de Bondsrepubliek is.[iv]

Moskou

Zehrer was nog altijd een 'Duits nationalist' gebleven. Hij droomde van de 'Wiedervereinigung', de staatkundige hereniging van Duitsland dat in twee staten, de Bondsrepubliek en de DDR, opgedeeld was. Aan de maatstaf van wat de hereniging kon bevorderen, mat hij de politiek van de Bondsregering af. Onder Zehrer ontpopte 'Die Welt' zich dan ook – en dat in volle Koude Oorlog – tot 'das führende Oppositionsblatt' tegen de politiek van bondskanselier Konrad Adenauer die erop gericht was de Bondsrepubliek vast in het Westen te verankeren. Zo bekritiseerde hij ook het verbod van de Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) als zogenaamde 'vijfde colonne' van Moskou[v]. Ten tijde van het geïnstitutionaliseerde anticommunisme van de Bondsrepubliek getuigde dat van moed, en zeker vanwege iemand met een verleden als conservatief revolutionair. Zehrer pleitte voor meer 'Ostorientierung' (gerichtheid op het Oosten, dus Rusland), meende zelfs de 'Wirksamkeit der nationalen Geschichte und des russischen Wesens' te ontdekken onder de bolsjewistische korst. De sleutel voor de Duitse hereniging lag volgens Axel Springer in Moskou. De krantenuitgever ondernam dan ook samen met zijn hoofdredacteur Zehrer in januari 1958 een legendarische reis naar Moskou. Beide hoopten van Nikita Chroesjtsjov, de leider van de Sovjet-Russische Communistische Partij, een signaal te vernemen dat Moskou de Duitse hereniging genegen was. Het interview dat ze met Chroesjtsjov voerden, beroofde hen van alle illusies. Springer en Zehrer kwamen van een kale kermis terug. Zehrer liet zich echter niet ontmoedigen en hield als publicist en topjournalist onvermoeibaar het geloof in de Duitse eenmaking levendig.

Geloof

In januari 1966 werd Zehrer met een leverziekte opgenomen in een West-Berlijns ziekenhuis. Op 24 mei vernamen de lezers van 'Die Welt' dat Zehrer om gezondheidsredenen ontslag had genomen als hoofdredacteur. Van op zijn ziekenbed dicteerde hij nog artikels, maar uiteindelijk sloeg de dood toe op 23 augustus 1966. De links-liberale journalist Joachim Besser drukte in een in memoriam zijn bewondering uit voor 'den glanzvollen, ideenreichen Journalisten', maar schreef ook kritisch over Zehrer als product van de 'Konservative Revolution': 'Er glaubte an das Volk und nicht an die Gesellschaft [...] er glaubte an die Gemeinschaft, und nicht an die vielschichtige, von Interessenten beherrschte Gesellschaft der Demokratie ...' [vi] (Hij geloofde aan het volk en niet aan de maatschappij [...] hij geloofde aan de gemeenschap en niet aan de veelzijdige, door belanghebbenden beheerste maatschappij van de democratie ...)

[i] Armin Mohler: Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch., Darmstadt 1989.

[ii] Hans Zehrer (1931): Rechts oder Links?, in: Die Tat, 23. Jahrgang, Heft 7, Februar 1931, p. 530.

[iii] 'In het fascisme van Mussolini lopen de elementen samen, die in Frankrijk nog naast elkaar lopen, zich slechts beroeren, maar weinig versmelten en voor het overige zonder succes blijven. Terwijl in Frankrijk tussen de antiliberale krachten rechts en links slechts enkele vonken ontspringen, sluit zich in het fascisme de stroomkring voor de eerste keer in de praktijk, „rechts' en „links" komen samen in een nieuwe militante beweging en schakelen samen het liberale systeem uit. Nationalisme en syndicalisme marscheren samen tegen de gemeenschappelijke tegenstander.'

[iv] Ebbo Demant, Von Schleicher zu Springer. Hans Zehrer als politischer Publizist, Mainz 1971.

[v] Hans Zehrer: Entlassen in den Untergrund, in: Die Welt, 18.08.1956

[vi] Joachim Besser; Glänzender und zugleich schillernder Zeitungsmann, in: Kölner Stadtanzeiger, 25.08.1966

Islam: The Magian Revolution

Gregory Ritter

Ex: http://www.radixjournal.com

Western academics and media-types write a lot of drivel about Islam. Part of the problem is there is a dearth of good information, and a bounty of superficial, politically self-serving garbage. But the real problem is misplaced emphasis. Western experts and commenters are used to thinking of history in simplistic terms--as the story of human progress. This model might be a good fit for Euro-American history, it is at least workable. But the progressive model falls apart when applied to the history of Islam. Islam’s heights seem to correspond to the West’s depths, and vice-versa. The “Progress” model causes Westerners to ask the wrong questions about Islamic history. “What went wrong?” “Why has the Middle East been so beset by violence?” “When will Islam adopt modern political and ethical principles?”

This misguided criticism has two faces--liberal and reactionary. Both sides share a simplistic view of history--that millennia-long, worldwide advance of the human spirit. But each side approaches its subject with different motives. Liberals, who dominate public discourse on the subject (surprise), assume the intrinsic goodness of all people. “Islam is peace” (eye roll). They feel good when they can cite examples of seemingly precocious modernism, such as early Muslim rulers’ tolerance (in the strictest sense) for religious minorities. It makes them feel good to contrast these anecdotes with the supposedly unrelenting fanaticism of Euro-Americans throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, the 19th and 20th centuries, up to and including last week. This rosy, Islamophilic picture is not really about Islam. It is just another stick with which to beat guilt into the Euro-American historical conscience.

The liberal position, while dominant, does not go unchallenged. On the other side are the reactionaries. They are “reactionaries” because they have no real position on Islam, they only know that the liberals are wrong, and reflexively counterattack. Theirs is a form of hypercriticism, given to denying long-established facts and trends of Islamic history with little or no justification other than to refute the Islamophiles. Given the current situation in the West, their excesses are understandable. But the reactionaries’ zeal leads them to stake out indefensible positions. Many of them are have ulterior motives--some are pro-Jewish fanatics or apologists for imperialism, others are democratic ideologues. But they share a defect. They lack a healthy, Faustian drive to pursue universal Truth--whether we like its conclusions or not.

Both approaches fail for two reasons. First, neither affords its subject the proper attitude of “sympathetic criticism.” The student must devote himself to understanding a culture on its own terms--learning its languages, reading its history and literature--all the while imagining things from its perspective. Once he has done this, he can render judgment on its ethics, its cultural attainments, and its overall importance to history. This was the approach of the great orientalists of the late 19th and early 20th century. They devoted tremendous intellectual effort to comprehending Islamic civilization, yet they were unafraid to pass judgment on its shortcomings. The liberals have no aptitude for criticism, the reactionaries have none for sympathy.

Second, the liberals and reactionaries neglect the questions of philosophical history. It is from this oversight that they fall into their assumption of perpetual historical progress. But there is a better way. One hundred years ago, Oswald Spengler reframed the discussion of history by tearing down an idea of progress (at least as it is commonly understood). His “Copernican revolution” in historical thought worked wonders for the study of Classical civilization and Europe, but it would prove even more effective for understanding the meaning of Middle Eastern history. Spengler shifted the emphasis away from time and toward Cultures. Following Spengler, we can understand how meaningless most of the questions posed by conventional commenters are, and begin to see Islam for what it really is.

The Magian Reformation

Spengler rejected the conventional historical focus on religions and polities. He saw these as merely superficial expressions of something deeper--the Culture. Cultures, in Spengler’s scheme, are a complex of peoples who share a world-outlook. This outlook--the spirit of a Culture--drives it to produce or adapt a religion. “Religion” is the outward expression of the world-outlook and includes such things as prayer rituals, religious architecture, calligraphy, and sculpture. For example, while Euro-Americans and Korean evangelicals may both be “Christians,” they do not belong to the same Culture, because their world-outlooks differ so drastically, despite their notionally common religion. A present-day American protestant has more in common, spiritually, with a 9th-century Norse pagan than with a modern-day Korean convert, despite professing the same doctrines. Cultures are the basic unit by which to analyze history.

Islam is part of the “Magian” Culture. In his Decline of the West, Spengler defines the Magian Culture as comprising the Muslim Arabs, but also many pre-Islamic Middle Eastern groups such as the Babylonian Jews, the Zoroastrians, the Coptic and Syriac Christians, as well as syncretic/heretical groups like the Manichaeans. It arose around the time of Christ and lasted until the 12th century when the anti-rationalist thinker Al-Ghazali dealt the deathblow to Magian philosophical speculation. All of subsequent Magian history was, in Spengler’s view, “civilization”--grandiose, bombastic, imperial, but sterile. No new philosophical or religious ideas could arise from the Magian world outlook. The culture had run its course.

So the birth of Islam does not represent the foundation of a new religion. It was, rather, a revolution in Magian religious thought. As such, it is analogous to the Reformation in Western history. Like Luther, Muhammad preached a puritanical systematization of earlier currents in the spiritual thought of his Culture. Muhammad and Luther were both anti-clerical, iconoclastic reformers who exhorted their adherents to build a more personal relationship with God. They both made the scripture accessible to the masses--Luther by translating the Bible into the vernacular, Muhammad by “receiving revelations” in easily memorized rhymed prose. After their deaths, their Cultures were unified the culture by marginalizing the earlier creeds and, at the same time, quickly spawning an array of heresies. The puritanical movements unleashed a storm, driving the post-reformation Europeans and post-Islam Magians to conquer half the world in a fanatical outburst of religious fervor--compare that to the religious and colonial wars of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Both movements, to a large degree, cleansed their cultures of foreign influence. Hellenistic influence on the Middle East, while not wiped out, was severely reduced in the first centuries of Islam. The Greek language, long the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, died out in Egypt and Syria, and later in Anatolia. To use Spengler’s term, Islam ended the Hellenistic pseudomorphosis (false-development) of early Magian Culture, allowing it to come into its own. Likewise after Luther, Northern Europe was free to work out its own cultural development. Free of Rome, the North underwent its own Renaissance. Florence and Rome were replaced by Nuremberg, Rotterdam, and Weimar. The Italian composers of the baroque were, by degrees, superseded by the likes of Bach and Handel. Thus Muhammad is not an Islamic Jesus, but a Luther. His movement, Islam, is a puritanical systematization of earlier currents in the Magian spirit.

Islam needs a Reformation

All this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom. Lacking any deeper insight into the place of Islam in history, the Mass-Media has been promoting a meme, “Islam needs a Reformation” eg: (WSJ and HuffPo). It makes sense superficially. Based on the conventional historical assumptions, one would compare Muhammad to Jesus as founders of world-religions. It follows then that Islam, having gotten a late start, is due for a reformation. After all, it’s been 14 centuries since Muhammad fled to Medina, and about the same duration separates Jesus from Martin Luther. The pre-Reformation Church superficially resembles current-day Islam.

But with a deeper understanding of history, comparing Jesus to Muhammad is preposterous. In contrasting the current state of the West and the Middle East, it would be ridiculous to set the two up as analogs. Jesus no longer matters to Faustian man. When the decadent West looks for myths and heroes, it looks for world-denying saints of Tolerance and Progress. New heroes must spring up or be manufactured--MLK and Gandhi, Anne Frank and Mother Theresa. Jesus would seem to fit the mold, but he is too bound-up in the popular imagination with the distant past. And in the popular imagination, History is Progress, therefore the farther back you go, the more evil everything is. But the West has absolutely no need for heroic men-of-the-world like Luther, so his place in our history is undervalued.

But the reborn Islamic fury, much pondered in the West, is not the necessary outcome of Islam’s doctrines. That the Middle East is still populated by “Muslims” is of less consequence than its stage of historical development. Islam is in winter. For centuries following the Crusades the Arabs and Persians were inactive. Islam’s last great conquests were not carried out by these “core-Magians,” but by the Berbers, Turks, and Mughals. And these imperial peoples could only prolong the agony of Magian decline. After c. 1500, the Magians had no meaningful history. They have endured wars and changes of dynasty, but no revolutions of thought or spirit. Classic histories of Middle East recognized this historical void--in over 750 pages of The History of the Arabs, the Lebanese Christian scholar Philip Hitti devoted less than 100 to anything after the 13th century.

What’s to be done

The liberal and reactionary views of Islam are shallow and polemic. They are worthless as history. Neither framework allows us to understand the relationship between Magian culture and ours because the Magians are actually ahead of us. Their decline did not begin in the 19th century, but in the 11th. Their reformation did not happen in the 16th century, but in the 7th.

Where are we now? Today’s situation resembles the era of the Crusades, with the roles reversed. Like Islam of the 1100s, the West has passed its peak. Our spirit is dying, our philosophy and art have ossified. We find ourselves beset by external enemies, barely able to summon the strength for our own preservation. Like Europe of the 1100s, the Middle East is the matrix of peoples--young, vigorous and aggressive.

What can we look forward to? If the West follows the same trajectory as Islam did after 1100, we are doomed. While Islam expelled the Crusaders and launched counteroffensives on its Eastern and Western frontiers, it only did so because it received infusions of fresh blood semi-civilized converts. These barbarian peoples adopted the outward forms of Magian Culture--Islam--but were unable to revive its spiritual vigor.

So contrary to the common view, the West does not face an ancient religious enemy. Islam died centuries ago--any invocation of its doctrines is now entirely superficial. The Arabs have for centuries wallowed in spiritual decrepitude. The “refugees” are not driven on by religious fervor, but simple greed, lust, and envy. They are not so much religious fanatics as they are zombies. Soulless and decrepit, they swarm to history’s last civilization. Do we still have the spirit to do what needs to be done?

---

Holland, Tom. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. New York: Doubleday, 2012.

Spengler, Oswald, and Charles Francis Atkinson. The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World-history. Vol. 2. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.

Carl Schmitt : le nomos de la terre ou l’enracinement du droit

Auteur : Valentin Fontan-Moret

Ex: http://www.philitt.fr

Dans Le Nomos de la Terre (1950), Carl Schmitt montre qu’il ne peut exister d’ordre sans enracinement. Contre la pensée positiviste et l’idéal cosmopolitique, il en appelle à la terre, substrat élémentaire de toute société, pour comprendre le rapport de l’humanité au monde.

[Article initialement paru dans la revue PHILITT #2 consacrée à la terre et à l’enracinement.]

Grande figure de la Révolution conservatrice allemande, Carl Schmitt s’oppose aux héritiers du positivisme d’Auguste Comte, et plus spécifiquement au positivisme juridique dont Hans Kelsen (d’ailleurs contradicteur de Schmitt) est le théoricien le plus célèbre. Celui-ci, dans sa Théorie pure du droit, n’étudie et ne reconnaît comme tel que le droit en vigueur édicté par l’homme, que l’on appelle droit positif, occultant l’origine profonde de ces normes et rejetant l’idée même d’un droit naturel qui serait fondé sur des valeurs éminentes. À l’inverse, s’attachant à en retrouver la source, Schmitt ressuscite la conception d’un droit inhérent à la terre. Si la localisation, l’espace géopolitique délimité, prime dans son étude des rapports de force, sa philosophie du droit nous invite à une lecture très organique, à la connotation écologiste. Alors, sans même invoquer de quelconques valeurs morales, que les positivistes qualifient d’extrinsèques à la matière juridique pour mieux les mépriser, Le Nomos de la Terre met la logique de ces légalistes à l’épreuve du bon sens du paysan : « En premier lieu, la terre féconde porte en elle-même, au sein de sa fécondité, une mesure intérieure. Car la fatigue et le labeur, les semailles et le labour que l’homme consacre à la terre féconde sont rétribués équitablement par la terre sous la forme d’une pousse et d’une récolte. Tout paysan connaît la mesure intérieure de cette justice. » Aussi la terre est-elle délimitée par l’homme qui la travaille, de même que par les reliefs ou les cours d’eau. Enfin, elle est le socle de toutes les clôtures, autant de manifestations visibles de l’ordre social, du pouvoir et de la propriété. On comprend donc que la terre est « triplement liée au droit ». Il existe un ordre particulier, propre et défini par et pour une terre donnée, qui s’impose dès lors que celle-ci est prise. Si les mers sont libres, l’ordre règne sur la terre ferme.

Cette vision d’un enracinement de fait et a priori de l’ordre semble évacuer la posture relativiste consistant à croire que ce sont les États et les nations qui plongent de force, à grands coups d’artifices, de symboles et de discours enflammés, un ordre qu’ils créent de toutes pièces dans le sol qu’ils dominent. Comme si l’enracinement se décrétait, comme s’il s’agissait de donner les attributs d’une force naturelle et le visage rassurant d’un mythe fondateur visant à unir un peuple à sa terre de façon quasi-mystique. Carl Schmitt met en échec ceux qui aujourd’hui encore voudraient voir en la notion d’un enracinement garant de l’ordre une pure abstraction romantique sans prise avec le réel, un outil superflu et ringard à dispositions des politiques, voire un mythe « nationaliste » du « repli sur soi et de la haine de l’autre », selon la formule abjecte désormais consacrée. En réalité nous découvrons que c’est tout l’inverse, car qui n’admet pas qu’une terre particulière est irrémédiablement liée à un ordre particulier – celui qui se prétend citoyen du monde, par exemple – considérerait que l’ordre auquel il consent à se conformer est valable partout : il violerait potentiellement toutes les terres, tous les ordres, tous les droits, à l’exception du sien.

Le pacifique authentique ne peut qu’admettre qu’au moment même où une terre est prise, l’ordre qu’elle porte s’impose et ce aussi bien vers l’intérieur, à ceux qui la prennent, que vers l’extérieur, c’est à dire vers l’étranger qui ne saurait légitimement imposer un ordre différent. Autrement dit, considérer qu’il n’existe pas de lien concret d’enracinement entre un ordre particulier, un droit donné et la terre sur laquelle il règne, en vertu de la prise de cette terre, est une négation des souverainetés qui s’expriment dans la diversité des ordres. L’enracinement n’apparaît donc plus comme un choix, un mythe ou une construction a posteriori, mais d’abord comme une nécessité indépassable du politique : celle de se soumettre à l’ordre que la terre porte et impose à celui qui la prend, la partage et la travaille. Refuser ce postulat ne peut mener qu’à la destruction du substrat élémentaire même de toute société. En employant à dessein le terme de nomos pour « la première mensuration qui fonde toutes les mesures ultérieures, pour la première prise de terres en tant que première partition et division de l’espace, pour la partition et la répartition originelle », l’auteur formule en creux une critique de la pensée positiviste dans son ensemble, que le « mode de naissance » des choses n’intéresse pas et pour qui seule la « loi du phénomène » compte. Cet effort sémantique montre qu’en matière de droit aussi, celui qui méprise l’histoire méprise la terre autant que celui qui méprise la terre méprise l’histoire : il est un déraciné.

Le projet politique idéaliste et universaliste hérité de la Révolution française semble alors absurde, faisant de ce que l’auteur désigne comme des « généralisations philosophiques de l’époque hellénistique faisant de la polis une kosmopolis » une ambition concrète. Et Schmitt d’ajouter qu’ « elles étaient dépourvues de topos, c’est à dire de localisation, et ne constituaient donc pas un ordre concret ». On en vient naturellement à penser que tout projet politique, s’exprimant par le droit, qui ne s’ancre à aucun moment dans la terre ferme et les réalités qu’elle impose, est suspect.

De la pensée hors-sol au mépris destructeur de la terre

Car si le déracinement des positivistes, quand il n’est qu’une hypothèse de travail, une posture intellectuelle d’universitaire n’est a priori pas un danger, les évolutions juridiques et politiques auxquelles s’intéressent Carl Schmitt à la fin du Nomos de la Terre illustrent le désastre auquel ce paradigme conduit. Le « jus publicum europaeum » que la Révolution française commença à remettre en cause avant que la Première Guerre mondiale ne l’achevât, reposait sur l’acceptation de la diversité des ordres juridiques et spatiaux et la reconnaissance de l’ennemi comme justus hostis, autrement dit comme un ennemi légitime à faire la guerre. Mais la pensée hors-sol de la Société des Nations (puis de l’Organisation des Nations unies), l’impérialisme américain parfois masqué sous les traits d’un universalisme bienveillant, conjugués avec les moyens considérables de destruction massive, pourraient avoir rompu l’attachement instinctif et naturel de l’humanité à la terre en introduisant de nouveau la notion autrefois théologique (et soumise à l’arbitrage du Pape) de justa causa dans le rapport à la guerre tout en subventionnant le rêve cosmopolitique. Comme si l’homme aujourd’hui capable de détruire la terre de l’autre (surtout si ce dernier ne peut pas en faire autant) la méprisait profondément. Comme si l’homme capable, aussi, de détruire la planète, ne pouvait avoir soif que de la dominer toute entière pour se préserver. Et l’ambition d’un « nouvel ordre mondial », expression que nous empruntons à George W. Bush lui-même, est le symbole le plus frappant de cette rupture politique et intellectuelle : il ne semble plus y avoir de place pour des ordres politiques et juridiques multiples et divers, liés à leurs propres terres, dont les relations seraient régies par des normes visant simplement à limiter la guerre. Il y aura désormais un ordre unique, universel et cosmopolitique, que l’on imagine naître dans les décombres de la Vieille Europe, prenant symboliquement racine dans les ruines de la cathédrale de Dresde. Un ordre qui n’a pas d’histoire puisqu’il n’a rien pris, un ordre qui n’a pas de terre mais qui a détruit.

Aussi, la guerre ne sera plus limitée, mais criminalisée, et prohibée en principe par l’Organisation des Nations unies. Car un ordre, même mondial, ne peut-être que pacifié. L’humanité s’étant employée à accumuler des moyens suffisants pour réduire le monde en poussière, s’est de ce fait confrontée à la question morale de l’usage de ces armes de destruction massive. On ne peut raisonnablement admettre de les employer que dans des guerres prétendument justes contre un ennemi qu’il faut détruire, et non plus seulement contraindre. Or la guerre aérienne et les très médiatiques opérations de « police bombing » sont l’image du mépris absolu pour la terre. « Le bombardement aérien (…) n’a pour sens et fin que l’anéantissement », constate l’auteur. On voit les avions de chasse comme autant de vecteurs arrogants et fiers de ce nouvel ordre mondial qui s’impose par le haut, méprisant les terres depuis leurs cockpits, eux qui ne connaissent que celle de la maison mère américaine. En prétendant mener une guerre sans jamais fouler le sol du territoire ennemi, on rompt ce lien essentiel aux yeux de Schmitt entre l’occupation, l’obéissance, et la protection. Sans soldat au sol, et donc sans lien concret avec la terre, on ouvre la voie à sa destruction pure et simple depuis les airs. Mais l’opinion est préservée : ses soldats ne meurent plus au champ d’honneur. Une fois encore, le lien à la terre apparaît comme une incontournable et nécessaire source de l’ordre, quand l’usage du seul espace aérien sème le chaos. Il semble que seule la projection d’hommes sur terre, mère et support de tout ordre, soit susceptible de donner des résultats politiques satisfaisants. Mais peu importe, puisqu’il n’y a plus de guerre, puisque tous les ennemis que l’on frappe ne sont pas des États égaux à ceux qui les combattent, mais l’incarnation du Mal ! Or, si comme David Cumin, biographe et spécialiste de Carl Schmitt, aime à le rappeler, l’ennemi est pour ce dernier « la figure de notre propre question », la guerre d’anéantissement interroge le paradigme et la morale des grandes puissances militaires occidentales. Ce nouveau rapport à la terre nous invite à considérer sérieusement la leçon de Carl Schmitt à la fin de sa préface : « C’est aux pacifiques que la terre est promise. L’idée d’un nouveau nomos de la terre ne se révèlera qu’à eux. » Car la guerre moderne et destructrice prive le droit de sa source et de son siège qu’est la terre.

Carl Schmitt, citation

4 juillet 2003 - Armin Mohler nous quittait !

4 juillet 2003 - Armin Mohler nous quittait !

Jünger, il tempo e gli orologi

Jünger, il tempo e gli orologi

di Stefano Di Ludovico

Fonte: Centro Studi La Runa

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it

Se ci fermiamo un attimo a riflettere su quale sia il gesto che, durante una nostra comune giornata, ripetiamo il maggior numero di volte, riconosceremo presto che si tratta del gesto di guardare l’orologio. Un gesto così scontato, ormai istintivo, che quasi come una funzione fisiologica accompagna la nostra esistenza, che ci appare impossibile immaginare una vita senza orologio. Il tempo, pensiamo giustamente, è il giudice supremo ed impietoso della nostra vita: come potremmo vivere senza misurarlo, senza tenerlo costantemente sotto controllo? E quale strumento migliore che i nostri orologi sempre più precisi e sofisticati?

Eppure, a pensarci bene, anche le nostre menti ormai assuefatte al ticchettio e aidisplay di questi insostituibili nostri compagni di vita non potranno non riconoscere che in effetti ci sono state intere epoche storiche, grandi civiltà che si sono alternate nel tempo e nello spazio, in cui nessuno portava l’orologio. Cosicché si resta alquanto increduli a pensare che grandi avvenimenti, guerre e battaglie, scoperte ed avventure che hanno segnato la storia dell’umanità siano avvenute senza che nessuno… sapesse che ora fosse! Che l’uomo, allora, non controllasse il proprio tempo? Che gli avvenimenti si susseguissero disordinatamente senza che nessuno li “misurasse”? Capiamo bene che ciò sarebbe impossibile: se il tempo è la dimensione più intima – ed insieme più misteriosa, ineffabile – dell’esistenza, bisogna riconoscere come ogni epoca, ovvero ogni civiltà, ha avuto il proprio specifico e peculiare rapporto con il tempo e, di conseguenza, il suo peculiare e specifico modo di coglierne l’inesorabile trascorrere.

Una storia delle “visioni del mondo”, delle visioni della vita e del cosmo che la ospita, può essere così vista da questa particolare prospettiva, ovvero come una storia delle visioni del tempo e dei modi della sua misurazione: una storia degli orologi. Nel 1954 Ernst Jünger pubblicò un curioso libro, Il libro dell’orologio a polvere. A prima vista un libro di erudizione, spesso citato di sfuggita nelle bibliografie del grande scrittore tedesco, quasi si trattasse di una delle immancabili “opere minori”. Ad uno sguardo meno superficiale, invece, una suggestiva riflessione sulla “storia del tempo”, in cui dietro la storia di quel particolare tipo di orologio che per interi secoli ha segnato lo scorrere del tempo prima dell’avvento degli attuali orologi meccanici, emerge la straordinaria vicenda dei rapporti tra uomo e tempo.

“Sono certo – racconta Jünger all’inizio dell’opera – che il lettore conoscerà quel particolare stato d’animo in cui un oggetto, non importa se usato tutti i giorni oppure osservato solo di sfuggita, acquista ai nostri occhi uno speciale fascino”: fu proprio questo incontro quasi “casuale” con una clessidra regalatagli da un amico, a trasformare quello che anche ai nostri occhi appare come null’altro che un semplice quanto singolare soprammobile, buono per scaffali d’epoca o librerie, in un “simbolo” rivelatore di una ben precisa concezione del tempo. Una concezione che allo sguardo ormai “illuminato” di Jünger appare subito come radicalmente diversa, se non addirittura agli antipodi, rispetto a quella in cui è immerso l’uomo del mondo moderno, il mondo in cui il tempo dell’orologio a povere è stato soppiantato dal tempo dell’orologio meccanico.

“Un rassicurante senso di pace, l’idea di una tranquilla esistenza”: ecco le sensazioni che Jünger prova di fronte al lento e silenzioso scorrere della polvere bianca da un recipiente all’altro della clessidra. Non è un caso, sottolinea ancora Jünger, che “l’affinità dell’orologio a polvere con la quiete degli studi eruditi e con l’intimità della casa è stata più volte osservata”. Segno consolante di un tempo che lentamente “dilegua ma non svanisce”, crescendo anzi in profondità, la clessidra evoca quelle atmosfere suscitate anche da certi quadri famosi, richiamati da Jünger nel corso dell’opera, come la Melancholia o il San Gerolamo nello studio di Dürer, o da certi ambienti appunto di studio e meditazione o di familiare convivialità, dove, non importa se trascorso in silenzio o conversando, il tempo sembra scorrere con assoluta lentezza, quasi immobile o sospeso.

L’orologio a polvere ci riconduce così a quelle epoche in cui il tempo non veniva ancora “misurato”, almeno nel senso che diamo noi oggi a tale termine; a quelle età in cui i nostri orologi meccanici, con la loro “precisione”, sarebbero stati inconcepibili. Perché più che “misurare” il tempo, la clessidra lo lascia appunto scorrere, dileguare, e l’uomo si rapporta ad esso limitandosi a stimarlo con quella che solo agli occhi dell’uomo moderno può apparire una vaga quanto inammissibile approssimazione; approssimazione che invece per l’uomo del passato costituiva il modo più consono e naturale di rispettare il trascorrere stesso del tempo.

Il sorgere e il tramontare delle costellazioni, il giorno e la notte, la sera e il mezzodì, il canto del gallo e il volo degli uccelli – unici ed effettivi riferimenti temporali dell’uomo delle società arcaiche e premoderne – rappresentano infatti unità di misurazione fluide, dove i confini netti si perdono e confondono l’un nell’altro. Era un tempo, quello, dove la parola “puntualità” era assente dal vocabolario: ci si poteva aspettare anche per interi pomeriggi, per l’intero calar del sole al tramonto, senza che ciò costituisse alcun problema. Non si era mai “di fretta” e non si aveva paura di “fare tardi”. L’uomo si adeguava al ritmo ed al corso della natura, ai suoi “tempi”; quindi il suo stesso tempo era un tempo “concreto”, legato alle molteplici attività lavorative che sullo scorrere naturale del tempo erano fondate. Ancora per gli antichi romani, la durata delle ore non era sempre la stessa, in quanto dipendeva dal tempo effettivo di luce; cosa che a noi moderni sembra un’assurdità. Perché i moderni orologi meccanici mandano in frantumi quel legame: essi misurano il tempo secondo rigide unità uniformi, perciò stesse astratte ed artificiali, che spezzano l’armonia con il tempo naturale creando una nuova “natura”, quella della “Tecnica”, che rimodella il tempo secondo propri criteri. E se per l’uomo antico era il suo concreto lavoro a fondare e scandire il tempo, per l’uomo moderno è l’astratta pianificazione temporale dei suoi orologi a fondare i tempi del lavoro e quindi dell’esistenza. “In attività come la pesca, la caccia, la semina e il raccolto – afferma Jünger – viviamo senza orologio. Ci alziamo all’alba e aspettiamo finché non abbiamo catturato la selvaggina o […] rimaniamo nei campi finché non è stato caricato l’ultimo covone. Non è l’orologio che qualifica la nostra attività; al contrario il tipo di attività qualifica il tempo”. Del resto, lo stesso cambiamento si è verificato in merito allo spazio: in passato ogni “spazio” aveva i suoi propri strumenti e le proprie unità di misura, legati anche qui all’agire concreto dell’uomo – i piedi, i passi, il palmo -, prima che tutto venisse misurato con lo stesso “metro”. E che il tempo dell’orologio meccanico sia un tempo astratto, un tempo “innaturale”, che ci tiene prigionieri e annulla la nostra libertà, è una sensazione ancora oggi ben avvertita: l’esigenza di “staccare”, di rimmergersi nel tempo naturale, è una delle più sentite dall’uomo contemporaneo, che nei sempre più rari momenti di evasione dal mondo dell’automazione pianificata – il momento della fuga verso le “foreste”, il momento degli “amanti”, del “gioco” e della “musica”, scrive Jünger – per prima cosa desidera lasciare a casa l’orologio. Perché l’orologio non si addice a questi momenti.

E’ l’orologio a polvere, invece, proprio nella sua misurazione non eccessivamente precisa, che appare più adeguato a venire incontro a simili esigenze. Il suo non è un tempo astratto buono per tutte le occasioni, che omologa tutte le occasioni, bensì un tempo la cui durata è conforme ad un’attività ben definita. Si ricorre ad esso se si ha intenzione di studiare o pregare per circa un’ora, tenere una predica o una lezione di una mezzora, riposare o “cuocere un uovo”, dice Jünger: “in tutti questi casi l’orologio a polvere sarà […] come un fidato servitore. Proprio la possibilità di correlarlo empiricamente a determinate attività ne rivela il carattere insieme concreto e umano”. Insomma, dall’orologio a polvere non si vuole sapere “che ora è”, ma solo essere accompagnati in quella data attività, circoscrivendola in un determinato lasso di tempo. Perché l’orologio a polvere non “gira a vuoto”, come i moderni orologi meccanici, slegati da ogni relazione con la vita concreta.
Prima dell’orologio a polvere, nelle civiltà più antiche, è stato poi l’orologio solare a mettere in relazione, con ancor maggior aderenza ai cicli naturali ed al concreto operare umano, l’uomo e il tempo. Come per l’uomo arcaico la misura del tempo poteva essere fornita dall’ombra di un monte o di un albero, o dalla sua stessa ombra – il variare della cui lunghezza egli poteva costantemente osservare nel corso del giorno -, l’orologio solare, l’antico gnomone, seguiva lo stesso principio, proiettando un’ombra indicante la posizione del sole. E a tal riguardo, non dobbiamo pensare solo agli strumenti a questo scopo appositamente congegnati, come quelli che ritroviamo a Babilonia e in Egitto, e da lì poi introdotti in Grecia e a Roma: i primi orologi solari furono gli obelischi, le piramidi, le costruzioni megalitiche della preistoria. Invece di “che ora è”, si chiedeva: “Com’è l’ombra?” Gli orologi solari, a dispetto della sempre maggiore diffusione di quelli a polvere e poi di quelli meccanici, furono molto diffusi ancora nel Medioevo e fino al Settecento, continuando ad ornare, ad esempio, le cattedrali: era quindi la luce del sole a segnare il tempo, che era il tempo, in questo caso, della liturgia e delle festività religiose, il tempo “sacro”. E il tempo, prima dell’avvento di quello “tecnico” introdotto dall’orologio meccanico, è stato sempre un tempo “sacro”: se l’orologio solare si legava al ciclo del sole, quindi al movimento degli astri, simboli visibili degli dei invisibili, il rintocco delle campane delle chiese annunciava le ore canoniche della preghiera: erano queste, in numero di otto, a scandire il ritmo della giornata, e non le astratte ventiquattro dei nostri orologi meccanici.

Il tempo dell’orologio solare è un tempo ciclico, il tempo delle stagioni e dell’eterno ritornare. E’ un tempo non umano, perché il suo principio è il sole, “occhio” del Cielo; quindi tempo celeste. E’ il tempo del destino, del fato, a cui l’uomo non può sottrarsi: il corso delle ombre non dipende da lui, così come è impossibile divincolarsi dalla propria di ombra, che, proprio come il tempo e il fato, ci segue ovunque. Il tempo ciclico è così un tempo “inquietante”, tempo di antiche paure: paura che gli dei, o gli antenati, tornando, possano vendicarsi dell’ingratitudine degli uomini; o paura che il sole non torni più, negando la vita ai suoi figli prediletti, gli uomini. Il tempo ciclico è quindi anche il tempo del rito e del sacrificio. Tempo inquietante, il tempo ciclico è altresì il tempo del ricordo, il tempo della nostalgia: ricordo e nostalgia delle origini, dell’Età dell’oro, quando, in illo tempore, tutto ebbe inizio. Quindi tempo delle feste, che ritornano anch’esse ciclicamente e sulla cui cadenza si sono regolati tradizionalmente i calendari.

Se l’orologio solare si ricollega al Cielo, l’orologio a polvere è legato alla Terra: è quindi uno strumento di misura di natura tellurica. Il primo si fonda sugli elementi celesti – la luce irradiata dal sole e il ciclico alternarsi tra luce e ombra – il secondo su quelli terreni, come la sabbia che riempie i recipienti e la forza di gravità della Terra che la fa scorrere. Strumenti tellurici sono anche i parenti più prossimi dell’orologio a polvere, gli orologi ad acqua – presenti già nell’antichità e nei quali la sabbia è sostituita dall’acqua – e gli orologi ignei – che misurano il tempo attraverso la combustione di determinate sostanze e diffusi soprattutto nel Medioevo. E se il tempo degli orologi solari è un tempo “ciclico”, il tempo degli orologi tellurici è il tempo “lineare”: qui non abbiamo a che fare con moti circolari, bensì con movimenti di materia che scorre, fluisce, in senso appunto lineare. Siamo così di fronte alle due essenziali concezioni del tempo che, attraverso alterne vicende, hanno accompagnato il cammino dell’uomo: da una parte il tempo “mitico”, dall’altra il tempo “storico”; là il tempo del ricordo e della nostalgia, qua il tempo della speranza e dell’attesa. Il tempo ciclico è un tempo che dona e restituisce; il tempo lineare un tempo che promette. Nel primo l’Eden, dove il tempo è sospeso e non battono più le ore, è posto all’inizio, prima di tutti i tempi; nel secondo alla fine, la fine dei tempi. La differenza tra le due concezioni si esprime anche nei modi di dire e nelle espressioni della quotidianità: “il tempo passa”, “il tempo fugge” riflettono la concezione lineare; “tutto torna”, “corsi e ricorsi” la concezione ciclica.

Se l’orologio solare riflette il tempo del mito e quello a polvere il tempo della storia, l’orologio meccanico sancisce la fine della storia e l’avvento del regno della Tecnica. C’è storia, infatti, fin quando riconosciamo avvenimenti unici ed irripetibili, la cui trama disvela un senso che li lega l’un l’altro. L’orologio meccanico, dividendo il tempo in unità astratte ed uniformi, e pertanto intercambiabili – come intercambiabili sono gli individui che su di esse regolano la propria esistenza – annulla la peculiarità degli eventi e proietta l’uomo in un orizzonte privo di senso. Il tempo della Tecnica né dona né promette: si limita a “riprodurre” se stesso. Si limita a funzionare. Nel tempo della Tecnica, passato, presente e futuro sono parole “senza senso”, essendo tutti i momenti uguali, ripetibili, privi di una propria e specifica identità, dove “l’uno vale l’altro”. Nell’orologio a polvere, invece, questi tre momenti, che costituisco il filo della storia, sono ben scanditi: “nel vaso superiore – osserva Jünger – la riserva del futuro si dilegua, mentre in quella inferiore si accumulano i tesori del passato; tra le due guizzano gli attimi attraverso il punto focale del presente”. L’orologio meccanico realizza così l’aspirazione ultima dell’uomo della società tecnologica: la fine della storia e l’affermazione di un mondo che si limita a riprodurre se stesso, espandendosi indefinitivamente secondo linee di sviluppo puramente quantitative. Jünger anticipa così quelle riflessioni che costituiranno il tema centrale del successivo Al muro del tempo(1959), destinata a diventare una delle sue opere più note del periodo successivo alla seconda guerra mondiale, e dedicata appunto al problema delle nuove concezioni temporali che si annunciano al configurarsi dell’umanità post-storica.

Jünger arriva a definire l’orologio meccanico il prototipo della “macchina”, quasi l'”archetipo” di tutte le macchine. Il concetto di “macchina”, infatti, evoca subito quello di un oggetto fondato sullo stesso principio dei moderni orologi: l’automazione di una serie di ingranaggi regolati da movimenti meccanici uniformi e ripetitivi. L’orologio meccanico è quindi la necessaria premessa della macchina, perché senza di quello queste sarebbero impensabili. “Tutte le macchine e gli automi che lo seguiranno – afferma Jünger – lavorano al ritmo dell’orologio meccanico: le loro prestazioni sono traducibili nel suo tempo e si possono misurare in base ad esso”. E’ per questo che Jünger pone l’orologio meccanico a fondamento del mondo moderno: “con questo tempo ‘diverso’ ha inizio la modernità come oggi la intendiamo. Per capire cosa sia accaduto basta che guardiamo l’orologio”. La modernità non inizia né con la polvere da sparo, né con la stampa, e nemmeno con la scoperta dell’America, bensì con l’invenzione dell’orologio meccanico: “si può dire che il grande spettacolo della tecnica umana e della sempre più rigida automazione – continua Jünger – sia cominciato con il movimento del primo orologio meccanico”. Esso costituisce il primo anello di quella vasta catena, la prima maglia di quell’enorme rete planetaria tutto avvolgente che il mondo mobilitato dalla Tecnica rappresenta; il suo battito ha dato il là alla monotonia ed alla ripetitività che contraddistinguono i ritmi della nostra vita.

Prima della comparsa dell’orologio meccanico, l’Occidente non sembra conoscere nemmeno una sua specifica “tecnica”, ed i suoi strumenti, le sue “macchine”, erano più o meno quelli del mondo antico. Solo con l’orologio meccanico, secondo Jünger, “ciò che da allora in poi avrà il nome di macchina avrà poco a che vedere con ciò che gli antichi definivano con lo stesso nome”. Perché è sempre la diversa concezione del tempo, dunque del mondo, che sta dietro a tali strumenti a definirne l’essenza e la natura, e solo la scissione dagli “elementi naturali” per l’affermazione di un tempo “artificiale” ha reso possibile la macchina nella sua accezione di modello di organizzazione totale del mondo e non di semplice strumento ad hoc, limitato ed adeguato ad una sola e specifica circostanza. Più che prima macchina, allora meglio si potrebbe definire l’orologio meccanico come primo “automa”. Certamente anche l’antichità ha conosciuto i suoi automi, ma questi, in genere, venivano considerati nulla più che stravaganze, bizzarri giocattoli frutto dell’ingegno di menti senza dubbio geniali ma al tempo stesso eccentriche. Anzi, i costruttori di macchine e di automi dei tempi passati avevano spesso la fama di maghi, stregoni, da cui era bene stare alla larga. A tal proposito, Jünger ricorda il noto e divertente episodio di Tommaso d’Aquino che distrusse a colpi di bastoni l’androide costruito dal suo maestro Alberto Magno, e che questi si divertiva a far apparire all’improvviso ai suoi ospiti. Quell’Alberto Magno ricordato dai posteri anche come mago.

E come mago, dedito addirittura alla magia “nera”, è passato alla storia anche quello che la tradizione riconosce come l’inventore dell’orologio meccanico, Gerberto di Aurillac, arcivescovo di Reims e maestro dell’imperatore Ottone III, salito al soglio pontificio nel 999 con il nome di Silvestro II, tra le menti più universali che la civiltà medievale abbia vantato. Teologo, scienziato, matematico ed inventore di numerose “macchine”, nel corso del Medioevo si intrecciano attorno alla sua figura numerose leggende, che lo vogliono esperto in magia nera ed in combutta con il demonio. Sarà un caso che la tradizione abbia indicato proprio in lui l’inventore dell’orologio meccanico? E’ comunque certo che questo abbia fatto la sua apparizione attorno all’anno mille, ed il modo con cui la mentalità medievale si raffigurava il suo presunto inventore e si rapportava alle sue creazioni la dice lunga su cosa si pensasse a quel tempo delle “macchine”: in un modo o nell’altro, erano tutte opera del “demonio”. Ancora Pio IX, in pieno Ottocento, considerava tale l’invenzione delle ferrovie. E secondo Jünger a ragione, a partire da una certa prospettiva, perché dove fa la sua comparsa la “macchina”, là muore il “sacro”. “Con la stessa diffidenza – nota Jünger – il selvaggio accosta l’orecchio all’orologio da tasca. Se pensa che vi sia nascosto un demone, forse non ha torto”. Ed è per questo, che pochi, ai tempi di Gerberto o di Alberto Magno, di fronte alle macchine come agli automi, si lambiccavano il cervello per ricercarne o intravederne le possibili implicazioni pratiche. E’ notorio, del resto, che la storia delle invenzioni antiche è spesso storia del loro mancato utilizzo, cosa che per la mentalità moderna risulta inspiegabile. A tal proposito, un’altra tradizione vedrebbe nei cinesi gli inventori anche dell’orologio meccanico; ma come per la polvere da sparo, la stampa e la bussola, anche quello sarebbe stato destinato a restare poco più che una curiosità. Solo con l’occidentalizzazione, e quindi l’affermarsi della relativa concezione del tempo, l’orologio meccanico iniziò a diffondersi anche in Cina.

Echi di quella diffidenza, di quel sospetto, risuonano anche oggi, nel malessere e nell’insofferenza che ancora ai nostri giorni suscita in noi il contatto troppo ravvicinato con il mondo delle macchine, il mondo dell’orologio meccanico, che spesso additiamo come il vero responsabile delle nostre ansie e del nostro stress quotidiano. Ancora oggi, dice Jünger, avvertiamo che “esso indica realmente un tempo diverso da quello che scorre. Anche quando parliamo del movimento, del corso del tempo, del trascorrere del tempo, alludiamo a questo tempo antico, continuo, indiviso. Ma la lancetta dell’orologio non si muove secondo le sue leggi”. La lancetta non scorre, ma si muove a scatti; si ferma per poi riscattare in avanti e così all’infinito. Che tempo è mai questo? Un tempo che non scorre più, fluido e silenzioso, come scorrevano la sabbia o l’acqua della clessidra, la fiamma che bruciava il lucignolo dell’orologio igneo o l’ombra dello gnomone seguendo i movimenti degli astri. Eppure, proprio al fine di misurarlo e dominarlo meglio, di strapparlo alle forze elementari della natura e costringerlo entro le mura della nostra città, “fu concepita l’idea di misurare e suddividere il tempo con quelle macchine che noi chiamiamo orologi. […] Così cominciarono la loro corsa tutti gli orologi che oggi ‘vanno'”. Ma, osserva Jünger, è lecito chiedersi se in questo modo ci siamo costruiti un palazzo o una prigione. Resta il fatto che “all’epoca degli orologi a polvere tutti avevano più tempo di oggi che siamo accerchiati dagli orologi”. Abbiamo voluto misurare e dominare meglio il tempo; ma forse “il mondo degli orologi e delle coincidenze è il mondo degli uomini poveri di tempo, che non hanno tempo”.

Carl SCHMITT, La guerra d'aggressione come crimine internazionale

Teodoro Klitsche de la Grange: Recensione a

Carl SCHMITT, La guerra d'aggressione come crimine internazionale

Ex: http://civiumlibertas.blogspot.com

Carl Schmitt La guerra d’aggressione come crimine internazionale. Il Mulino Bologna 2015 pp. 142, € 16,00.

Nel 1945 il grande industriale tedesco Friedrick Flick, che aveva fondate ragioni di credere di venire accusato dagli alleati per la collaborazione a guerra d’aggressione, richiese a Carl Schmitt un parere per la difesa da tale (eventuale) accusa. Accusa che non venne mai mossa a Flick, il quale fu tuttavia condannato per un “capo d’imputazione” diverso: lo sfruttamento di manodopera straniera deportata dalle S.S..

Schmitt in tale promemoria distingue tra i crimini di guerra tra classi le “violazioni delle regole e degli usi della guerra, commesse principalmente da appartenenti alle forze armate di uno Stato belligerante. Si tratta d’infrazioni del cosiddetto diritto in guerra, lo jus in bello … Tale regole presuppongono che la guerra sia permessa e legale”; “Di natura essenzialmente diversa è il secondo tipo di crimini di guerra che qui deve essere distinto. Si tratta delle atrocities in un senso specifico: uccisioni pianificate e crudeltà disumane, le cui vittime erano uomini inermi”. Neppure la “esimente” dell’esecuzione di un ordine superiore può escludere in tali casi l’imputabilità e la punibilità. Infine la terza “Crimini di guerra nel terzo significato del termine è la guerra di aggressione, concepita come un crimine in sé, vale a dire come un crimine secondo il diritto internazionale. Qui, dunque, la guerra stessa è un crimine e non si tratta propriamente di un crimine di guerra ma, più precisamente, del «crimine di guerra»”.

Schmitt valuta queste tre classi alla luce sia del “politico” che dei principi dello jus publicum europaeum. In primo luogo se la guerra è, nel sistema westphaliano, non solo un fatto pubblico ma che presuppone la distinzione tra pubblico e privato, allora non può farsi carico a un privato (come Flick) di aver concorso ad una guerra di aggressione.

Come scrive Galli nella presentazione, Schmitt considera “la guerra come un atto di sovranità di cui sono responsabili gli Stati – una responsabilità politica soprattutto – e non certo i singoli cittadini, tenuti solo ad obbedire al potere legale. Schmitt recupera quindi l’ordine moderno che egli invece ha descritto, già da una decina d’anni, come periclitante: ovvero lo jus publicum europaeum all’esterno, per cui la guerra è affare di Stato, che non può essere processata; e, all’interno, un rigido positivismo giuridico statocentrico”.

D’altra parte il giurista di Plettenberg distingue tra il pensiero giuridico inglese (e in larga misura anche americano) da quello continentale in relazione alla guerra d’aggressione come crimine: “si pone anche per la concezione americana la questione di che cosa propriamente sia la novità di un crimine. La conseguenza è che qui si giunge spesso a una sintesi e a una mescolanza di punti di vista morali e giuridici. Per il modo di pensare del giurista di formazione positivistica, continentale, la separazione del punto di vista giuridico da quello morale è familiare da quasi due secoli, proprio rispetto alla questione della penalizzazione di nuove fattispecie di reato. Negli Stati Uniti d’America l’unione dei due punti di vista potrebbe far sì che gli ostacoli che derivano dal principio nullum crimen sine lege siano addirittura meno presenti per il giurista americano di quanto lo siano per un giurista della tradizione inglese pura”.

Per la guerra d’aggressione prosegue: “In questo caso, sia la fattispecie stessa (atto di aggressione e guerra di aggressione) sia la connessione tra il carattere internazionale e quello criminale, rappresentano davvero un novum, la cui particolarità deve essere portata a consapevolezza per mostrare come il principio nullum crimen abbia qui il significato di un limite alla punizione”.

È chiaro che poi l’argomentazione di Schmitt va sul concetto di giusta causa, la quale cancella il requisito dello justus hostis che nel pensiero dei teologi (da Suarez a Bellarmino) andava con quello di conserva: ambedue, insieme allo jus in bello e alla recta intentio, condizioni dello justum bellum.

Nel complesso un libro interessante che completa i numerosi scritti dedicati da Schmitt alla modificazione del concetto di guerra nel XX secolo.

Teodoro Klitsche de la Grange

Carl Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso

Teodoro Klitsche de la Grange: recensione a:

 

Carl Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso

Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza 2012, pp. 312, € 16,50.

 

Ex: http://civiumlibertas.blogspot.com

Questa non è una delle molte raccolte di scritti di Schmitt tradotti e pubblicati in Italia negli ultimi quarant’anni, ma si prefigge, attraverso i testi e le interviste raccolte (alcuni dei quali già pubblicati in italiano), di “fornire una chiave di lettura per una delle figure più discusse e contraddittorie del ventesimo secolo” e l’“esercizio di lettura che il libro propone assomiglia pertanto alla decifrazione di quelle figure nascoste dentro un paesaggio o in altro disegno che appaiono improvvisamente se si tiene lo sguardo fisso sull’immagine abbastanza a lungo” (così Giorgio Agamben nell’introduzione).

Schmitt è stato uno dei maggiori interpreti della crisi del XX secolo; la sua peculiare concezione del diritto ha fatto si che lui, giurista come si considerò sempre fino alla morte – ma come tutti i grandi giuristi portatore di una visione che trascende il mero orizzonte giuridico – sia stato in Italia apprezzato prevalentemente come politologo e filosofo della politica.

Tuttavia come scrive Agamben nell’attenta introduzione “non si comprende nulla del pensiero di Schmitt, se non lo si situa innanzitutto in una concezione del diritto che poggia su un elemento antagonistico rispetto alla legge”. E tale considerazione è del tutto condivisibile; ancor più a considerare che la polemica anti-normativista di Schmitt è essa stessa rivolta ad indagare la crisi dell’Europa (e del pensiero europeo) del XX secolo, di cui il normativismo di Kelsen – e ancor più quello dei suoi epigoni è stato, ad un tempo, la conseguenza e anche la rappresentazione (forse) più coerente. Risolvere la legittimità nella legalità, l’esistente nel normativo, l’ordinamento nella norma, la decisione sovrana nella coscienza dell’interprete, espungendo (i primi termini) dal diritto è la sintesi giuridica e politica di una concezione che ha perso i riferimenti (e la dipendenza) dalla concretezza e dalla storia. E così da quello che Maurice Hauriou chiamava le fond théologique, al quale la couche juridique è ancorata (e senza la quale diventa ondivaga).

D’altra parte i contributi del giurista di Plettemberg hanno il pregio d’interpretare non solo il tempo a lui contemporaneo, ma anche il futuro. Come si legge nell’introduzione “A quasi trent’anni di distanza, le analisi di Schmitt sono divenute ancora più pertinenti. Si prenda il problema della costituzione europea, che oggi è al centro del dibattito politico. Ciò che il «no» dei cittadini francesi e olandesi è venuto a ricordare è che una nuova costituzione non può essere insediata attraverso accordi «legali» fra governi, ma deve passare attraversi una fase costituente. Un nuovo potere costituito senza un potere costituente può essere legale, ma non legittimo. E nulla è più sconcertante dell’incoscienza con cui le democrazie occidentali, dopo essere scivolate tra le due guerre legalmente nel fascismo, pretendono oggi di trapassare altrettanto legalmente in prassi e forme di governo per le quali ci mancano i nomi e che non sono certo migliori di quello”. Schmitt ha buon gioco nel dimostrare che un potere costituente europeo implica “qualcosa come un patriottismo europeo”. Il quale a sua volta presuppone un sentire comune e un patrimonio che, in omaggio ad un legalismo burocratico il trattato naufragato, col rifiuto delle “radici giudaico-cristiane”, dimenticava e respingeva.

Non sorprende perciò quanto ancora si legge nell’introduzione del saggio Staat, bewegung, volk, tradotto da Cantimori con il titolo Principi politici del Nazionalsocialismo, indovinato perché Cantimori aveva ben capito che Schmitt intendeva ivi delineare i principi del nuovo ordine nazionalsocialista. Come scrive Agamben “Ma, per i lettori attenti di oggi, l’interesse è raddoppiato dalla scomoda, ma ineludibile consapevolezza che questo testo delinea, in realtà, i principi costituzionali delle società postdemocratiche del secolo ventesimo nel cui solco ancora oggi ci muoviamo. Se l’interpretazione che di questo testo proponiamo è corretta, allora esso conterrebbe il centro esoterico e per così dire l’arcanum della teoria schmittiana del diritto pubblico”. Tuttavia oltre che alla biopolitica e al criterio del politico/impolitico il collegamento con le costituzioni novecentesche, del c.d. Stato sociale (o pluriclasse), è, ad avviso di chi scrive, dato dalla continuità (dialettica) dello Stato totale come “autorganizzazione della società”. Stato totale quantitativo nella Repubblica di Weimar, che diviene (anche e soprattutto) qualitativo col Terzo Reich (v. Der Hüter des Verfassung, saggio di Schmitt, peraltro precedente l’ascesa di Hitler al potere).

La stessa capacità di comprensione dell’attualità emerge (tra gli altri) dal saggio sulla “Rivoluzione legale mondiale”, nel quale l’ormai anziano (1978) Schmitt applica all’eurocomunismo - che appartiene di pieno diritto alla fase senescente, ideologica e politica, del comunismo – le proprie considerazioni sull’uso politico della legalità e sul cambiamento legale della costituzione della rivoluzione, già enunciate negli anni ’20 sulla dottrina (e la prassi) leninista e sul costituzionalismo di Kelsen.

Valutando la tesi di Santiago Carillo che i metodi violenti della rivoluzione bolscevica sono “oggi antiquati e si troverebbero nel posto giusto e nel momento giusto solo laddove si trattasse di fare il salto da una società agrario-contadina a una moderna ed industriale. In quanto metodi di una rivoluzione comunista erano legittimi ma non legali. Oggi invece sono superati, perché adesso a essere in questione nelle società industrialmente sviluppate è la potenza statale. Quei metodi, pertanto, non possono più essere un modello appropriato di rivoluzione comunista e devono essere sostituiti da metodi pacifici, vale a dire statali-legali”. Lo Stato peraltro è “il portatore della legalità, la quale realizza quel miracolo che è una rivoluzione pacifica. La rivoluzione, dal canto suo, legittima lo Stato in cambio dell’atto di beneficenza con cui esso permette che abbia luogo una rivoluzione statale-legale. La rivoluzione legale diviene permanente e la rivoluzione statale permanente diviene legale”. Il che significa per gli eurocomunisti condividere la tesi kelseniana sull’abrogazione legale della Costituzione. Schmitt ricorda che proprio le ascese del fascismo in Italia e del nazismo in Francia avvennero osservando le procedure costituzionali, pure quelle dettate in omaggio alla “superlegalità” (concetto di Maurice Hauriou). Quindi, in sostanza nulla di nuovo. Solo che il tutto non elimina il problema della legittimità dell’ordinamento e del potere costituente, ambedue non riconducibili alla legalità.

In particolare il potere costituente ha generato una prassi per il cambiamento di costituzione: “ogni rivoluzionario di professione ha imparato a maneggiarle: si destituisce il governo legale esistente, si convoca un «governo provvisorio» e si indice un’assemblea nazionale costituente… attraverso rivoluzioni grandi e piccole, europee e non europee, è sorta nell’arco di due secoli una prassi legittimante nella legalizzazione del colpo di stato e delle rivoluzioni”. Tuttavia è “difficile immaginare il trasferimento di un potere costituente dalla nazione all’umanità…L’organizzazione attuale della pace mondiale non è utile solo all’unità, ma anche allo status quo dei suoi numerosi membri sovrani. Dovremmo forse prospettarci un’assemblea plenaria dell’ONU p almeno una seduta del Consiglio di sicurezza che si svolga similmente a quella della notte del 4 agosto 1789, in cui i privilegiati rinunciarono festosamente a tutti i loro privilegi feudali?”.

A cercare il “filo di Arianna” in questi saggi e contributi (uno di questi fili perché, data la ricchezza delle riflessioni di Schmitt, ve ne sono parecchi) pare a chi scrive di ricondurlo alla formula che “l’esistente prevale sul normativo”, la quale, pur nelle differenze, accomuna Schmitt non solo ai concetti ed alla dottrina dello jus publicum europeaeum, ma anche al pensiero di Hauriou e di Santi Romano. Al contrario della dottrina del diritto prevalente nel secondo dopoguerra, dove è il normativo che più che prevalere, non considera l’esistente.

Così i rapporti forza/diritto, legittimità/legalità, costituente/costituiti, comando/obbedienza sono più che risolti, occultati da un normativismo che ha la funzione della notte di Hegel: di rendere grigie tutte le vacche. E così di nascondere il potere sotto la couche di una legalità autoreferenziale. La quale è come il barone di Munchaüsen il quale evitava di cadere nella palude sostenendosi per il codino della parrucca. Prima o poi il tonfo è assicurato.

Teodoro Klitsche de la Grange

Is de ondergang van Europa onvermijdelijk?

Is de ondergang van Europa onvermijdelijk?

Ex: http://www.erkenbrand.nl

De geschiedenisfilosoof Oswald Spengler voorspelde in zijn beroemde boek 'Der Untergang des Abendlandes' de onvermijdelijke ondergang van de Europese beschaving. Wie was hij en hoe kwam hij tot deze conclusie?

Afgelopen week bezochten drie leden van Erkenbrand een lezing van de NSV! Gent. De NSV! is een Vlaamse nationalistische studentenvereniging met afdelingen in de universiteitssteden Gent, Antwerpen, Brussel en Leuven. Voor de lezing maakten we een mooie stadswandeling door het middeleeuwse Gent. Daarbij ontbraken natuurlijk het heerlijke Vlaamse bier en de Vlaamse frieten niet.

Aldus gesterkt richtten we onze schreden naar de lezing, die gegeven zou worden door Peter Logghe, redacteur van de uitgeverij TeKoS. Deze uitgeverij brengt boeken uit van bijvoorbeeld Alain de Benoist en Koenraad Elst. Dit jaar verschijnt bij hen ook een nieuwe Nederlandse vertaling van "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" van Oswald Spengler. Over deze beroemde filosoof en geschiedkundige zou de lezing gaan. Wat nu volgt is geen weergave van de lezing, maar een kort essay waar ik onder andere deze lezing voor heb gebruikt.

Oswald Spengler wordt gerekend tot zogenaamde 'Conservatieve Revolutie'. Dit was een intellectuele stroming die antwoorden zocht op de maatschappelijke chaos na de ineenstorting van het Duitse keizerrijk in de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Overal waren opstanden en revoluties door de communisten. De hele samenleving dreigde af te glijden naar links en dus naar de heerschappij van de meute.

De Conservatieve Revolutie wilde de laffe toegeeflijkheid van het doorsnee conservatisme vervangen door een radicaal doordacht maatschappelijk en cultureel model. Daarin stonden hiërarchie, kwaliteit en onderscheid centraal. Een rechtvaardige samenleving leek volgens hen eerder op een leger dan op een markt. Kwaliteit moest doorslaggevend zijn, niet kwantiteit, de massa. Het is typerend voor de Conservatieve Revolutie dat de meeste leden ook Hitler afwezen omdat ze hem een proleet vonden.

Wat is nu de centrale stelling van Spengler? Spengler onderzocht culturen van over de hele wereld. Hij probeerde patronen te ontdekken in hun geschiedenis. Hij wilde tot een morfologie te komen die zowel de geschiedenis van culturen zou kunnen verklaren als hun toekomst zou kunnen voorspellen. Spengler kwam tot de conclusie dat alle culturen een onontkoombare levenscyclus doormaken, net als een bloem, of de wisseling der seizoenen. Na een periode van groei en bloei komt verval en dood, en daar is niets tegen te doen. Ook niet bij onze cultuur, die nu in haar laatste fase zou zitten.

Onze cultuur, de cultuur van het Avondland, ziet Spengler als 'Faustisch', naar het toneelstuk 'Faust' van Goethe. Het idee is dat de mens van onze cultuur streeft naar onbeperkte kennis, zelfs als hij daarvoor – net als Faust – een pact met de duivel moet sluiten. Als poëtisch beeld voor deze cultuur geeft Spengler “de oneindige ruimte”. Het ruimtevaartprogramma zou hij als een typerende  cultuuruiting van het Avondland zien.

Het begin van onze cultuur legt Spengler rond 900, bij de opkomst van een sterk Germaans beïnvloed Katholicisme. Hierna volgde de eerste fase, die Spengler 'Kultur' noemt, en die zijn hoogtepunt bereikt rond 1500, op het snijpunt van de Gotiek en de Barok. De tweede fase, die van het verval, noemt Spengler 'Zivilisation'. Deze begint met de Verlichting, en de Amerikaanse- en Franse Revolutie. 'Zivilisation' betekent een toenemende vormloosheid, een overwinning van de stad op het platteland, van de massa op de elite, van de kwantiteit op de kwaliteit, van het geld op de politiek. De kosmopolitische, ontwortelde, vormeloze massa grijpt de macht. De cultuur kent geen innerlijke morele beleving meer, heeft geen binding meer met het land, en wordt intolerant en oorlogszuchtig.

Op grond van zijn historische voorbeelden, met name van het Romeinse rijk, voorziet Spengler drie fasen in de 'Zivilisation' van het Avondland. Van 1800 tot 2000 de fase van de democratie, wat in feite de heerschappij van het geld betekent. Dan tot 2200 de heerschappij van steeds primitievere volksmenners en despoten in de lijn van Caesar. In de laatste fase volgt dan volledige verstarring en onmacht door nepotisme en corruptie van de machthebbers, een krimpen van de bevolking en totale weerloosheid tegen het binnendringen van andere culturen en volken.

De houding die Spengler aanbeveelt tegenover deze onvermijdelijke loop van de geschiedenis is een 'heroïsch realisme': acceptatie van het einde en het dapper dragen van het noodlot. Alain de Benoist vult hierbij aan dat het einde ook een voltooiing is. Optimisme is volgens Spengler  ongegrond en laf. Geïnspireerd door Nietzsche spreekt hij zelfs over een "amor fati", een liefhebben en omarmen van het lot. Wat telt is karakter en moed, naar het voorbeeld van de Romeinse soldaat van Herculaneum. Deze werd opgegraven uit de lava, nog steeds op zijn post staande. Hij had zijn plaats niet verlaten tijdens de uitbarsting van de vulkaan Vesuvius, omdat hij niet was afgelost.

De invloed van Spenglers ideeën was enorm en reikt tot in onze tijd. We zien zijn ideeën bijvoorbeeld terug bij Patrick Buchanan en bij Samuel Huntington. Deze laatste ziet de verschillende culturen als een soort acteurs op het wereldtoneel in zijn boek "The Clash of Civilizations". We kunnen de invloed van Spengler ook terugzien bij Tolkien. De opeenvolgende tijdperken in diens Midden-aarde kennen allemaal opbloeiende- en afstervende culturen. Zelfs in de overwinning op de Zwarte Heerser Sauron ligt een zekere melancholie, omdat daarmee "het tijdperk van de Elfen" ten einde gaat.

In hoeverre kunnen wij nu Spengler volgen in zijn analyse?

Wetenschap houdt zich bezig met het ontdekken van patronen in de werkelijkheid, maar de kans is aanwezig dat de onderzoeker patronen ziet die er niet zijn. De enorme feitenkennis van Spengler is geen garantie. Het is natuurlijk vrij opvallend dat de door hem geponeerde neergangsfase van onze cultuur precies die kenmerken vertoont die Spengler als persoon afkeurde. Bovendien is een absoluut determinisme van de historische ontwikkeling bij Spengler net zo min gerechtvaardigd als bij Marx of Hegel. De toekomst is per definitie onvoorspelbaar.

We zouden Spengler misschien wel kunnen gebruiken voor het ontdekken en inschatten van globale trends. Wat kan de geschiedenis van andere culturen ons leren over de toestand in onze huidige cultuur? Spengler heeft wellicht de menselijke neigingen in groepsprocessen goed in kaart gebracht.

Zo zouden we in het Duitsland en Italië van de jaren twintig tot vijfenveertig een periode van 'Caesarisme' kunnen zien, de tweede fase van de 'Zivilisation'. Onze huidige tijd zou een combinatie kunnen zijn van de eerste en derde fase: de heerschappij van democratie en het geld, gecombineerd met verstarde despoten op de achtergrond die heersen door geld en "soft power" ( dat wil zeggen: indoctrinatie via de media en het schoolsysteem ).

Zeker is dat de door Spengler beschreven kenmerken van verval in onze cultuur ruimschoots aanwezig zijn, zoals wijdverbreide gevoelens van leegte, verlies, decadentie en ontworteling, een laag geboortecijfer en een binnendringen van vreemde culturen en volken. Het is een grote verdienste van Spengler dat hij de aandacht vestigt op deze kwetsbaarheid van onze cultuur. Dit staat haaks op het gevaarlijk naïeve idee van de Verlichting en de Amerikaanse- en Franse Revolutie dat er alleen maar lineaire vooruitgang mogelijk is in de geschiedenis. Tegenover dit aan het Christendom ontleende lineaire denken stelt hij het heidense, cyclische denken, dat juist ook rekening houdt met neergang in plaats van alleen maar vooruitgang.

Misschien heeft Spengler gelijk, en maken wij nu de onafwendbare ondergang van het Avondland mee. Volgens zijn theorie zal echter ook uit de vergane glorie een nieuwe cultuur verrijzen. Daar kunnen wij wellicht toch al een bijdrage aan leveren, ook al zullen wij haar opbloei niet meer meemaken.  Hoe het ook zij, voor onze instelling zou het niet mogen uitmaken. Er zijn nooit  garanties. Zoals Tolkien schrijft:

'Ik wou dat het niet in mijn tijd hoefde te gebeuren,' zei Frodo.

'Ik ook,' zei Gandalf, 'en dat geldt voor allen die in een dergelijke tijd leven. Maar die beslissing is niet aan hen. Het enige dat wij moeten beslissen, is wat we zullen doen met de tijd die ons gegeven is.'

Oswald Spengler & the Controversy of Caesarism

By Margot Metroland

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

There has long been a commonplace notion in journalism (now often repeated in blogs and social media), that Oswald Spengler declared us to be at the end of Civilization. After all, he did write The Decline of the West, didn’t he? Furthermore, Spengler’s end-phase of Civilization is Caesarism, and we passed that many decades ago—so the story goes—during the age of Musso & Dolf.

This is all nonsense, of course. It comes as no surprise that this misrepresentation took hold during the 1930s and early 1940s, when Spengler came to be recast as a kind of prophet for National Socialist Germany. But before getting to that, let me just point out that the “Caesarism” bit is easily disproven. You need only consult the fold-out endpaper charts of “Historical Morphology” in The Decline of the West to set the facts straight.

I reproduce a portion of the relevant ‘Contemporary “Political” Epochs’ table at the bottom of this essay for reference, but the essential takeaway is this: Spengler’s “Winter” epoch, when Civilization finally supplants Culture, begins with the age of Napoleon around 1800 and moves on through two centuries of Imperialism and Wars of Annihilation. After 2000 comes the period of Caesarism, which reaches final maturity, and decay, after 2200.[1]

According to this matrix, our Caesarism period of 2000-2200 corresponds to 100 BC – 100 AD in Classical civilization. The post-2200 era corresponds to the Roman Empire from Trajan onwards. Here civilization has attained its peak, while cultural forms are completed, calcified, past evolution. This, you might say, is the true End of History—for our Western, Faustian civilization at least. But we have a way to go.

Now, one can dismiss Spengler’s schema as hogwash, the way one might reject astrology or Kondratieff waves; but one should at least know Spengler’s timeline before declaring an opinion on it. Just as one should bear in mind that in presenting his theory of the morphology of history, Spengler uses convenient analogies, e.g., the cultural epochs of Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. When he says the great cultures are organic—they mature, bloom, and decay—he does not literally mean they are flowers. Yet these metaphors have always been a sore point with his critics. [2]

Getting back to Caesarism, let’s accept Spengler’s thesis arguendo and look at its significance. Caesarism marks the end of “Democracy,” brings “Victory of force politics over money” (chart at bottom). Economic powers give way to an authoritarian model that promotes collective values of health and social justice—or to use Spengler’s own description, “Ethical socialism after 2000” (Table I, Contemporary “Spiritual” Epochs—not reproduced here).

Breaking the money-power and promoting the national welfare was of course what the European nationalist governments of the 1920s and 1930s imagined they were doing, or intended to do. Spengler himself rejected the association of ‘Caesarism’ with National Socialism (The Hour of Decision). But it is easy to see how journalists—or Nazis—might confuse the two.

To Spengler, Caesarism isn’t a good thing or a bad thing, it just is. But his description of the epoch in Roman times is bleak. This truly was the end of that culture’s growth-and-struggle:

There are no more of those great decisions which concentrate the inner meaning of the whole culture . . . All great political questions are solved, as they are solved sooner or later in every civilization, inasmuch as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked . . .

. . . The struggle for the Caesar-title became steadily more and more negroid, and might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, eternal” forms.

These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life. (Vol .2, pp. 50-51)

The “alien Life” Spengler has in mind here is of course our own culture and civilization, what he called Western or Faustian-Gothic. The solons of the Renaissance and Enlightenment might have liked to imagine otherwise, but there is no real continuity between the civilization of Greece and Rome and our own; we merely treasure their artifacts as museum-pieces.

Confusion about Caesarism, and Spengler’s schema in general, has been around a long while. But it was apparently not there in the 1920s when thoughtful people read Decline for the first time. That cynosure of high-middlebrow discernment, Time magazine, treated it appreciatively, almost worshipfully, when it reviewed Vols 1 and 2 in 1926 and 1928.

Hard to improve upon is Time’s deft précis of the complete work, noting that Spengler

. . . analyzes history by huge analogies. Civilizations he sees as emerging & disappearing in cycles, each one, like a flower, experiencing birth, growth, decay, death. Our own Western civilization he declares to be in the phase of decay, characterized by material expansion, effete spirituality. Collapse is imminent in perhaps 300 years. But by that time another human group will be unwittingly generating a new civilization to flourish and sink in its own long turn. Herein lies the refutation of the charge of pessimism applied to Spengler by lesser minds. Regarding civilizations as organisms, he is no more the pessimist than any man who recognizes the transient nature of all organic life.[3]

This would be the high point of Spengler’s international reputation. A polymath and popular philosopher with a special appeal to autodidacts, Spengler was inevitably ground down by other, more specialized critics. Scholars in every field nit-picked his assertions and called him an amateur, a dilettante, a shoddy researcher. (A mere Gymnasium teacher, moreover.) Writing in The Spectator in 1929, an English reviewer lambasted Spengler’s whole conception of history as a “top-heavy tower,” a house of cards built upon factual inaccuracies and murky reasoning. Spengler’s description of the coming Caesarism came in for particular criticism as obscurantist wish-fulfillment.[4]

Anyway, when Time reviewed Man and Technics a few years later, the bloom was off the rose. In an about-face from 1926, Time now declared Spengler a pessimist, one who thinks Civilization is done for. This time around, the reviewer dismissed his work with lip-smacking sarcasm:

To ward off suicidal despair Spengler recommends the psychological attitude of the Roman soldier who died at his post in Pompeii. When the volcano under civilization explodes, and the burning dust begins to descend, the more honorable Spenglerian carnivores will take it standing, polish up their buttons as the lava rises. [5]

The height of anti-Spenglerism came about ten years later. At the height of World War II, Foreign Affairs ran a 25-year retrospective of Decline of the West and found it all nail-bitingly depraved. 1942 was of course the height of the Second World War, thus this essay by Georgetown diplomatic historian Hans W. Wiegert can be regarded as a sort of stuffy, highbrow equivalent of Der Fuehrer’s Face.

Since Spenglerism is a flame which burns and can cripple souls, we are justified in reexamining it twenty-five years later. Indeed, we have a duty to do so. [6]

Wiegert demonizes Spengler’s masterwork as pure proto-Nazi propaganda on a par with Karl Haushofer. Decline is so tendentious that although Spengler pretends to be writing about the West (Abendland), he’s really describing an aggressive, expansive Germany:

The realm which he calls the West is not the West as we understand it. It is limited distinctly to Germany, and not even the whole of Germany, but only those parts of it which can be labeled (spiritually rather than geographically) the Germanic North. England and America, even France and Italy, are not within the boundaries of the West which he covers in his factual materials and comparisons.

* * *

The present writer believes that the human area which Spengler calls the Faustian-Nordic-German sphere, and whence he drew the factual foundations of his doctrine, is the only one where a Spenglerian conception of a human type fits—the type, that is, which gave up its freedom to become an earth-bound slave of Hitlerism.[7]

Wiegert spends several pages musing over the interplay of Spengler’s Caesarism forecasts and the rise of Hitler. At no point does he ever admit that Hitler just doesn’t fit into Spengler’s Caesar-time-scheme. He doesn’t care. Spengler sounded the drumbeat for Caesarism, incited the crowds. Thus he bears the weight of guilt for Nazism.

Spengler’s conception of Caesarism foreshadowed the growth of the totalitarian religions of our time. He translated Plato’s ideas on the relationship of tyranny and democracy into the language of the twentieth century. The dictatorship of money had used democracy as its political weapon. At the end of the First World War Spengler saw the doom of this money-power age. New forces, the forces of Caesarism, of which the multitude becomes willingly the passive object, were arising from the soil of democracy. The scene was set for the final battle between the forces of financial plutocracy and the purely political will-to-order of the Caesars.

* * *

Those Caesars who would rule the world when all the creative forces of culture had disappeared would be war-keen men. The appearance of one, Spengler wrote in 1917, would suddenly raise a powerless nation to the very peak, and his death would plunge a mighty nation into chaos. “They are for war, and they want war,” he added. “Within two generations it will be they whose will prevails.”[8]

For Wiegert, Hitler is plain-and-simple part of the Caesarian drama. He tops off his analysis with the suggestion that Hitler himself will succumb a military coup. (“The great drama of German Caesarism: the fall of the tyrant and the rise of army rule.”[9])

Wiegert seems to be suggesting an officers’ revolt along the lines of what became the failed coup of July 1944. But that’s really beside the point here, because he is trying to shoehorn the Hitler situation into Spenglerian Caesarism, and it just doesn’t fit.

Notes

1. This is taken from the combined one-volume 1928 edition of The Decline of the West, published by Alfred Knopf, translated by C. F. Atkinson. In the original two-volume format published in 1926 and 27, the tables appear at the end of Volume One, subtitled “Form and Actuality.”

2. See for example the C.E.M. Joad review in The Spectator, quoted below. (And not to belabor the point, but I have found that Spengler’s metaphors are very hard for some people to wrap their heads around. Decades ago I gave Yockey’s Imperium to a co-worker, thinking he’d enjoy it. And he did, but found the Spenglerian conceits ridiculous because “Culture isn’t really a living organism.” It is as though I showed him a chair for the first time and referred to its legs, and he said: “But those aren’t really legs! Those are just pieces of wood!” Maybe we’re all autistes when encountering the unfamiliar.)

3. Time, June 28, 1926.

4. “A Top-heavy Tower”, C.E.M. Joad, The Spectator, 12 January 1929.

5. Time, Feb. 29, 1932

6. Hans W. Wiegert, “Spengler Twenty-Five Years After,” Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1942.

7, 8, 9. Ibid.

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NATION? – Un retour du «romantisme politique»?

NATION? – Un retour du «romantisme politique»?

 

par Maryse Emel

Ex: http://www.nonfiction.fr

Le livre récent de Christian E. Roques , (Re)construire la communauté, a pour projet de présenter la réception du romantisme politique sous la République de Weimar par des philosophes et des penseurs politiques critiques de la modernité. Son but n'était pas de faire un travail sur la vérité des interprétations multiples qui en ont été faites, mais plutôt de voir ce que ces diverses lectures ont pu ouvrir comme perspectives politiques. L’enjeu est qu’au départ, le romantisme politique consiste en un discours en opposition à la philosophie des Lumières, qui met en question le pouvoir de la raison, et donc le pouvoir politique fondé sur l’exercice de la raison.

Genèse du romantisme politique

Le premier romantisme allemand s’organisme autour du Cercle d’Iéna, qui rassemble le théoricien de la littérature, Friedrich Schlegel, le philosophe Johann Gottlieb Fichte et des écrivains comme Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder et Novalis. Reprenant la thématique de Max Weber à propos du désenchantement du monde, le philosophe allemand Rüdiger Safranski identifie le projet romantique, dans sa globalité, comme une tentative pour ré-enchanter le monde et redécouvrir le magique, en repoussant la raison dans ses confins. Autour de 1800, le motif romantique s’inscrit dans plusieurs champs : la théologie protestante de Friedrich Schleiermacher définit ainsi la religion comme « le sens et le goût pour l’infini », et les études philologiques d’un Görres ou d’un Schlegel cherchent les racines de la langue et la vérité de l’origine dans l’Orient et l’Inde antiques. Ce désir des origines perdues s’exprime non seulement à travers des voyages spirituels dans le lointain, mais aussi dans la reconstitution d’un passé imaginaire. La Grèce de Friedrich Hölderlin illustre cette relation au passé, poétiquement condensée, et qui confronte une Antiquité mythologiquement sublimée à la réalité profane de sa propre époque :

«La vie cherches-tu, cherche-la, et jaillit et brille
Pour toi un feu divin du tréfonds de la terre,
Et frissonnant de désir te
Jettes-tu en bas dans les flammes de l’Etna.
Ainsi dissolvait dans le vin les perles l’effronterie
De la Reine ; et qu’importe ! si seulement
Tu ne l’avais pas, ta richesse, ô poète,
Sacrifiée dans la coupe écumante !
Pourtant es-tu sacré pour moi, comme la puissance de la terre,
Celle qui t’enleva, mis à mort audacieux !
Et voudrais-je suivre dans le tréfonds,
Si l’amour ne me retenait, ce héros.» 

Dans un second temps, émerge le romantisme politique. Il prend racine à partir du concept de nation chez Fichte, de l’idée d’un « Etat organique » développée par Adam Müller, ainsi que dans le populisme artificiel de Ernst Moritz Arndt et de Friedrich Jahn. Il se nourrit également de la haine à l'encontre de Napoléon et des Français, transfigurée par la littérature de Heinrich von Kleist. Aussi le romantisme s’est-il éloigné de ses prémisses philosophiques. Cette prise de distance caractérisera également la littérature du romantisme tardif d’un Josef von Eichendorff et d’un E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Réceptions du romantisme : un concept polémique

Qui sont les philosophes ou les théoriciens qui, sous la République de Weimar, opposent le romantisme à ce qu’ils perçoivent comme des errements de la modernité? . Christian E. Roques distingue trois principales lectures du « romantisme politique ».

La première, de 1918 à 1925, fait immédiatement suite à l’instauration de la République weimarienne : elle met en place un discours à la recherche d’une communauté nouvelle ainsi qu’une critique de l’individualisme libéral. Le romantisme, traditionnellement identifié à un discours conservateur, a inspiré des projets communautaires d’inspiration à la fois socialistes et romantiques, cherchant à donner sens au politique après la conflagration guerrière de 1914-1918. A droite, au contraire, certaines voix comme celle du philosophe Carl Schmitt s’élèvent contre le romantisme.

La seconde lecture du « romantisme politique », de 1925 à1929, est plus apaisée : elle tente d’établir le romantisme comme fondement de la « pensée allemande ». C’est ce qui structure la pensée du philosophe et sociologue autrichien Othmar Spann tout au long des années 1920-1930. Le romantisme politique devient chez lui un discours droitier. Il met en place tout un travail philologique sur les auteurs romantiques. Quant au sociologue allemand Karl Manheim, il démontre dans sa thèse de 1925,  comment le conservatisme est inhérent au romantisme. Il révèle ainsi à partir de ses travaux un nouveau rapport entre politique et savoir, ouvert sur la dimension irrationnelle de l’existence humaine.

Puis de la crise de 29 jusqu’à la veille de l’avènement du parti nazi, l’ampleur des troubles socio-économiques rend caduque le questionnement théorique sur la question de la modernité et de son dépassement, face à l’imminence de la crise politique et l’urgence de la question du « que faire ? » - qualifiée de léniniste par Christian Roques. Ainsi, si l'ancien officier de la Wehrmacht Wilhem von Schramm affirme encore l’actualité du projet romantique, c’est en proposant d’adopter la démarche de « l’ennemi bolchévique », à savoir sa méthode révolutionnaire d’enthousiasme pseudo-religieux, afin de retrouver l’esprit communautaire vécu dans les tranchées. Le théologien protestant allemand Paul Tillich ouvre dans un même temps un dialogue avec les forces « socialistes » de tout bord.

Réactiver la polémique du romantisme au XXIe siècle ?

Mais l’essentiel se situe peut-être après le moment de Weimar : en effet, ce sont les discours et les actions politiques produites pendant la République à partir de ces lectures des romantiques, qui donneront sens aux réflexions et décisions politiques après Weimar. A ce titre, l’ouvrage de Christian E. Roques s’apparente au laboratoire d’une modernité en crise. Il y expérimente, par des lectures croisées du « romantisme politique », des rencontres imprévues entre des penseurs au positionnement politique opposé. De fait, dès Weimar, le « romantisme politique » est d’abord un concept polémique pour comprendre le réel présent : c’est une sorte d’instrument de mesure des idéologies politiques actuelles, à la lumière des idéologies passées d’Etats en crise.

Dans le monde moderne, le romantisme se présente comme le correctif salutaire aux discours politiques « rationnels », dans la mesure où ses aspirations transgressives font apparaître les limites de la rationalité. C’est en cela qu’on a pu y lire une opposition aux Lumières ou du moins une réflexion sur les limites du pouvoir de la raison. Le philosophe brésilien Michael Lôwy, déclarait, en faisant référence à Marx que le romantisme était d’abord une « vision du monde » en opposition à la bourgeoisie au nom d’un passé antérieur à la civilisation bourgeoise, et qu’il perdurerait tant que cette bourgeoisie sera là, comme son contre-modèle indissociable  : « On pourrait considérer le célèbre vers de Ludwig Tieck, Die mondbeglanzte Zaubernacht, « La nuit aux enchantements éclairée par la lune », comme une sorte de résumé du programme romantique » .

Finalement, le travail de Christian Roques se justifie par sa conviction que le concept romantique n’aurait rien perdu de sa force polémique dans notre propre présent : « Au regard notamment du retour en force du discours écologique (voir éco-socialiste) qui repose fondamentalement sur un appel à une approche universaliste, dépassant les égoïsmes individuels pour adopter une conception globale, il semble légitime de se demander si nous ne sommes pas à l’aube d’une nouvelle "situation romantique". » . Présenté comme alternative au discours libéral en temps de crise, le romantisme politique réapparaît aujourd’hui avec des références politiques et philosophiques qui dépassent le cadre binaire des partis politiques.

Christian E. Roques, (Re)construire la communauté : La réception du romantisme politique sous la République de Weimar, MSH, 2015, 364 p., 19 euros

 À retrouver sur nonfiction.fr : 

Tous les articles de la chronique Nation ?

Présentation de l'éditeur:

(sur: http://www.fabula.org ) 

"Le "romantisme politique" connaît un regain d'intérêt important en Allemagne sous la République de Weimar (1918-1933), au point de devenir un élément essentiel du discours politique de l'époque. Avec la "communauté", la "nation" ou le "peuple", le "romantisme" va constituer un des mots magiques autour desquels se cristallisent les débats de la vie intellectuelle weimarienne. Le présent ouvrage entreprend donc d'analyser les stratégies de discours politiques qui se structurent autour du paradigme romantique entre 1918 et 1933. À partir d'un corpus d'auteurs variés, pour certains célèbres et pour d'autres tombés dans l'oubli (Arthur Rubinstein, Carl Schmitt, Othmar Spann, Karl Mannheim, Wilhelm von Schramm, Paul Tillich), il est possible de montrer l'existence non d'une idéologie politique clairement définie, mais d'une sensibilité "romantique" qui transcende les oppositions politiques traditionnellement conçues comme imperméables (gauche/droite, conservateur/progressiste, nationaliste/universaliste, etc.) et qui se construit dans l'opposition fondamentale à l'individualisme matérialiste du "libéralisme" capitaliste."

Sommaire:

• Introduction : La république de Weimar, laboratoire d'une modernité en crise -- Romantisme, romantisme politique : l'impossible définition ? -- La généalogie du romantisme : un paradigme fantôme -- Le romantisme politique : de gauche, de droite, au-delà ? -- Pour une archéologie de la réception -- La rupture méthodologique -- Le problème de la téléologie : savoir historique et condamnation morale des engagements en faveur du nazisme -- Le champ discursif du "romantisme politique" : les marqueurs d'une renaissance -- Des "néoromantiques" sous la République de Weimar ? -- La redécouverte d'Adam Müller -- Le socialisme romantique : un projet démocratique post-marxiste -- Socialisme, marxisme, romantisme : affinités électives ? -- Landauer, penseur socialiste vakisch -- Les jeunesses socialistes entre romantisme et marxisme -- Une révolution sous le signe des conseils -- Faire sens du moment révolutionnaire -- Crise de la théorie marxiste -- Une nouvelle idée émerge : des soviets allemands ? -- Le conseil au coeur de la nouvelle démocratie -- Du paradis médiéval aux abysses absolutistes -- Le Moyen Âge communautaire et démocratique -- La barbarie de l'absolutisme : contrat social et souveraineté -- Crise de l'absolutisme -- Romantisme et absolutisme -- Le romantisme comme projet d'avenir -- Le romantisme, une hérédité occultée -- Une critique radicale du libéralisme -- La radiographie de l'ennemi : Carl Schmitt contre le romantisme politique -- Un livre sous influences : les racines françaises de la critique schmittienne -- Le jeune Schmitt : une position atypique entre isolement et influence étrangère -- Les inspirateurs allemands -- Les parrains français -- Le romantisme politique : l'idéologie de l'ennemi -- Romantisme : l'impossible définition ? -- Aux sources intellectuelles du romantisme -- L'essence du romantisme : l'occasionnalisme subjectivisé -- Le romantisme comme impuissance politique -- Qui est l'ennemi ? Schmitt et la crise de l'idéologie allemande -- Schmitt l'inquisiteur de Carl ? -- Continuités d'une pensée en guerre -- La mort de l'intellectuel apolitique -- L'universalisme romantique d'Othmar Spann : la réponse allemande à l'individualisme moderne -- Spann et la galaxie universaliste -- Othmar Spann, père de l'Église néoromantique -- L'école néoromantique -- "L'État véritable" et l'actualité du romantisme politique -- De l'histoire économique au projet politique -- Les éléments de la contre-offensive romantique -- Rejet nazi de l'universalisme spannien : l'enjeu romantique -- Penser l'envers de la modernité : romantisme et conservatisme chez Karl Mannheim -- Penser à la marge -- L'émigré hongrois -- Un travail scientifique entre décentrement et écriture essayistique -- Trouver sa place à l'université : la thèse de 1925 -- La naissance romantique du conservatisme -- Conservatisme et traditionalisme : de l'anthropologie à l'idéologie -- Morphologie du conservatisme allemand : à contre-courant de la modernité -- Le locus antimoderne : le romantisme aux sources du conservatisme -- Une nouvelle synthèse ? -- S'ouvrir à l'irrationnel : penser comme conservateur -- La synthèse et ses "vecteurs" : une conceptualité romantique ?

• La politique radicale de Wilhelm von Schramm : victoire du christianisme romantique -- Wilhelm von Schramm : officier, écrivain et théoricien politique -- Au coeur des réseaux du nouveau conservatisme weimarien -- La fascination du modèle russe : le bolchevisme entre émulation et terreur -- Ernst Jünger : nationalisme militaire et théorie de la guerre -- Les jeunes-conservateurs et la tradition du romantisme politique -- Le modèle soviétique -- Le projet intellectuel : aller à l'essentiel -- Théorie générale du bolchevisme -- Bolchevisme et romantisme allemand : généalogie du nouvel universalisme -- Revenir aux racines allemandes : le romantisme comme solution -- Le XIXe siècle allemand : entre mission romantique et schizophrénie nationale -- Le projet romantique et chrétien de Wilhelm von Schramm -- Mythe romantique et décision socialiste : Paul Tillich à la recherche de l'unité du politique -- La "jeune droite" et la rénovation de la social-démocratie -- Des "jeunes-socialistes" à la "jeune droite" -- La plateforme du renouveau : les Neue Blatter flir den religilisen Sozialismus -- Le projet socialiste contre le mythe romantique -- Crise et division : penser le monde moderne à l'aune du jeune Hegel -- Ontologie politique : l'homme entre origine et devenir -- Le mythe de l'origine : retour critique sur le romantisme politique -- Antinazisme ou réconciliation ? -- Le projet politique de Tillich en 1933.

L’ère de la pyropolitique a commencé…

Robert Steuckers :

L’ère de la pyropolitique a commencé…

Qu’entendent les quelques politologues contemporains par « pyropolitique », concept qui vient d’être formé, notamment par le Professeur Michael Marder (cf. infra) ? Pour comprendre le contexte dans lequel ce vocable nouveau a émergé, il convient d’explorer deux domaines particuliers, exploration qui nous permettra de cerner le contenu même de la pyropolitique : le premier de ces domaines est celui de la théologie politique, avec, notamment, les réflexions de Juan Donoso Cortès sur le libéralisme, le socialisme et le catholicisme (posé, dans son œuvre, comme la « Tradition » à l’état pur) ; il faudra aussi, en explorant ce domaine de la théologie politique, relire les textes où Carl Schmitt affirme que tout concept politique moderne recèle en lui-même, quelque part, une racine théologique ; deuxième domaine à explorer dans l’œuvre politologique de Carl Schmitt : le corpus dans lequel le juriste de Plettenberg pose les confrontations du monde contemporain comme un choc permanent entre forces élémentaires brutes, de pré-socratique mémoire, en l’occurrence l’affrontement entre l’élément Terre et l’élément Eau. Toute expression réelle du politique (« das Politische ») étant, dans cette optique, une expression du facteur élémentaire « Terre », le politique en soi ne pouvant avoir qu’un ancrage tellurique, continental. Le véritable homme politique est alors une sorte de géomètre romain, explique Carl Schmitt dans son Glossarium publié après sa mort. Un géomètre qui mesure et organise le territoire qui tombe sous sa juridiction.

Suite aux deux défaites allemandes de 1918 et de 1945, la Terre n’a plus été l’élément dominant de la politique mondiale : elle a été remplacée par l’Eau, élément du Léviathan thalassocratique. D’où Carl Schmitt démontre quelle dialectique subversive et mortifère se profile derrière la lutte de la Terre (« Land ») contre la Mer (« Meer »). L’Eau/la mer arrache finalement la victoire au détriment des forces telluriques et des puissances continentales. Dans son Glossarium, Carl Schmitt insiste lourdement sur les effets désastreux, pour toute civilisation, de l’écrasante victoire de l’hydropolitique américaine.

« Pyros » signifie « feu » en grec ancien et représente un autre élément fondamental selon Michael Marder, qui combine en son sein plusieurs aspects : celui d’un feu omni-dévorant, aux flammes destructrices, mais aussi des corollaires comme la lumière et la chaleur, aspects autres, et tout aussi fondamentaux, de l’élément « feu ». Si Schmitt avait campé le choc animant la scène internationale comme le choc entre les deux éléments « Eau » et « Terre », cela ne signifie pas que les éléments « air » et « feu » n’existaient pas, ne jouaient aucun rôle dans le politique, même si cela ne transparaissait pas aussi clairement aux époques vécues par Schmitt.

L’élément « Feu » recouvre dès lors plusieurs significations : il est la force brûlante/dévorante de la destruction (que l’on retrouve dans les révolutions anti-traditionnelles) ; il est aussi la « lumière-sans-chaleur » de l’idéologie des Lumières ou encore la chaleur couvant sous la cendre, celle de la révolte silencieuse contre les institutions abstraites et anti-traditionnelles issues des divers corpus modernistes du 18^ème siècle des Lumières.

Dès le moment historique où il n’y a plus aucun territoire vierge à conquérir et à organiser sur la planète (voir les thèses de Toynbee à ce sujet), à la mode tellurique/continentale des géomètres romains, la « Terre », en tant qu’élément structurant du véritable politique, cède graduellement sa place prépondérante, non seulement à l’Eau mais aussi au Feu. L’Eau est l’élément qui symbolise par excellence le libéralisme marchand des thalassocraties, des sociétés manchestériennes, des ploutocraties : voilà pourquoi un monde dominé par l’élément Eau refuse de reconnaître limites et frontières, les harmonies paisiblement soustraites à toute fébrilité permanente (Carl Schmitt rappelle dans son Glossarium que qui cherche le repos, immobile, en mer coule et se noie). Il n’y a plus d’ « otium » (de repos fructueux, d’introspection, de méditation, de transmission sereine) possible, il n’y a plus que du « neg-otium » (de la nervosité fébrile, des activités matérielles, acquisitives et cumulantes, sans repos). Seul ce « neg-otium » permanent et ubiquitaire survit et se développe de manière anarchique et exponentielle, submergeant tout sous son flux. Nous vivons alors dans des sociétés ou une accélération sans arrêt (Beschleunigung) domine et annule toutes les tentatives raisonnables de procéder à une « décélération » (Entschleunigung). Dans cette perspective, toute véritable pensée écologique, et donc non politicienne, vise à ramener l’élément Terre à l’avant-plan de la scène où se joue le politique (même si la plupart de ces menées écologiques sont maladroites et empêtrées dans des fatras de vœux pieux impolitiques).

La domination de l’hydropolitique, par l’intermédiaire des superpuissances maritimes, conduit donc à la dissolution des frontières, comme nous pouvons très clairement le percevoir aujourd’hui, à la suprématie mondiale de l’économique et aux règles hypermoralistes du nouveau droit international, inauguré par le wilsonisme dès la première guerre mondiale. L’économique et l’hypermoralisme juridique étant diamétralement contraires aux fondements du politique vrai, c’est-à-dire du politique tellurique et romain.

Cependant, même si la Terre est aujourd’hui un élément dominé, houspillé, cela ne veut pas dire qu’elle cesse d’exister, de constituer un facteur toujours potentiellement virulent : elle est simplement profondément blessée, elle gémit dans une hibernation forcée. Les forces hydropolitiques cherchent à détruire par tous moyens possibles cette terre qui ne cesse de résister. Pour parvenir à cette fin, l’hydropolitique cherchera à provoquer des explosions sur les lambeaux de continent toujours résistants ou même simplement survivants. L’hydropolitique thalassocratique va alors chercher à mobiliser à son profit l’élément Feu comme allié, un Feu qu’elle ne va pas manier directement mais confier à des forces mercenaires, recrutées secrètement dans des pays ou des zones urbaines en déréliction, disposant d’une jeunesse masculine surabondante et sans emplois utiles. Ces forces mercenaires seront en charge des sales boulots de destruction pure, de destruction de tout se qui ne s’était pas encore laissé submerger.

L’apogée des forces thalassocratiques, flanquées de leurs forces aériennes, a pu s’observer lors de la destruction de l’Irak de Saddam Hussein en 2003, sans que ne jouent ni l’adversaire continental russe ni les forces alliées demeurées continentales (l’Axe Paris-Berlin-Moscou). Il y avait donc de la résistance tellurique en Europe et en Russie.

Mais la guerre contre l’Irak baathiste n’a pas conduit à une victoire totale pour l’agresseur néoconservateur américain. Les puissances thalassocratiques n’étant pas des puissances telluriques/continentales, elles éprouvent toujours des difficultés à organiser des territoires non littoraux comme le faisaient les géomètres romains. Les terres de l’intérieur de l’Irak arabe et post-baathiste résistaient par inertie plus que par volonté de libération, ne passaient pas immédiatement au diapason moderniste voulu par les puissances maritimes qui avaient détruit le pays. Cette résistance, même ténue, recelait sans doute un maigre espoir de renaissance. Or cet intérieur irakien, mésopotamien, doit être maintenu dans un état de déréliction totale : la thalassocratie dominante a eu recours à l’élément Feu pour parfaire cette politique négative. Le Feu est ici l’incendie destructeur allumé par le terrorisme qui fait sauter immeubles et populations au nom d’un fanatisme religieux ardent (« ardent » dérivant du latin « ardere » qui signifie « brûler »). Les attentats terroristes récurrents contre les marchés chiites à Bagdad (et plus tard au Yémen) constituent ici les actions les plus horribles et les plus spectaculaires dans le retour de cette violente pyropolitique. Le même modèle de mobilisation pyropolitique sera appliqué en Libye à partir de 2011.

Lorsque l’on refuse les compétences du géomètre, ou qu’aucune compétence de géomètre n’est disponible, et lorsque l’on ne désire pas créer un nouvel Etat sur les ruines de celui que l’on a délibérément détruit, nous observons alors une transition vers une pyropolitique terroriste et destructrice. L’ex-élite militaire baathiste, dont les objectifs politiques étaient telluriques, ont été mises hors jeu, ont cherché emploi et vengeance : elles ont alors opté pour la pyropolitique en créant partiellement l’EIIL, l’Etat islamique, qui s’est rapidement propagé dans le voisinage immédiat de l’Irak meurtri, aidé par d’autres facteurs et d’autres soutiens, aux intentions divergentes. Aux sources de l’Etat islamique, nous trouvons donc des facteurs divergents : une révolte (assez légitime) contre le chaos généré par l’agression néoconservatrice menée par les présidents Bush (père et fils) et une manipulation secrète et illégitime perpétrée par les puissances hydro- et thalassopolitiques et leurs alliés saoudiens. L’objectif est de mettre littéralement le feu aux pays indésirables, c’est-à-dire aux pays qui, malgré tout, conservent une dimension politique tellurique. L’objectif suivant, après la destruction de l’Irak et de la Syrie, sera d’amener le Feu terroriste chez les concurrents les plus directs du monde surdéveloppé : en Europe d’abord, aujourd’hui havre de réfugiés proche- et moyen-orientaux parmi lesquels se cachent des terroristes infiltrés, puis en Russie où les terroristes tchétchènes ou daghestanais sont d’ores et déjà liés aux réseaux wahhabites.

Conclusion : la stratégie thalassocratique de mettre le Feu à des régions entières du globe en incitant à des révoltes, en ranimant des haines religieuses ou des conflits tribaux n’est certes pas nouvelle mais vient de prendre récemment des proportions plus gigantesques qu’auparavant dans l’histoire. C’est là le défi majeur lancé à l’Europe en cette deuxième décennie du 21^ème siècle.

La pyropolitique de l’Etat islamique a un effet collatéral : celui de ridiculiser –définitivement, espérons-le-  les idéologies de « lumière-sans-chaleur », dérivées des Lumières et professées par les élites eurocratiques. La lumière seule, la trop forte luminosité sans chaleur, aveugle les peuples et ne génère aucune solution aux problèmes nouveaux qui ont été fabriqués délibérément par l’ennemi hydro- et pyropolitique, qui a l’habitude de se déguiser en « allié » indispensable. Toute idéologie politique déterminée uniquement par l’élément « lumière » est aveuglante, dans la perspective qu’inaugure Michael Marder en sciences politiques ; elle est aussi dépourvue de tous sentiments chaleureux, déterminés par l’aspect « chaleur » de l’élément Feu. Cette absence de « chaleur » empêche tout élan correcteur, venu du peuple (du pays réel), et ôte tout sentiment de sécurité. Toute idéologie de « lumière sans chaleur » est, par voie de conséquence, condamnée à échouer dans ses programmes d’organisation des sociétés et des Etats. Les Etats européens sont devenus des Etats faillis (« failed States ») justement parce que leurs élites dévoyées n’adhèrent qu’à des idéologies de « lumière-sans-chaleur ». Dans les circonstances actuelles, ces élites ne sont faiblement défiées que par des mouvements plus ou moins populistes, exigeant le facteur « chaleur » (la Pologne fait exception).

L’Europe d’aujourd’hui subit une double agression, procédant de deux menaces distinctes, de nature différente : la première de ces menaces provient des systèmes idéologico-politiques relevant de la « lumière seule » parce qu’ils nous conduisent tout droit à cet effondrement planétaire dans la trivialité qu’Ernst Jünger avait appelé la « post-histoire ». L’autre menace est plus visible et plus spectaculaire : c’est celle que représente la pyropolitique importée depuis le monde islamisé, littéralement incendié depuis deux ou trois décennies par divers facteurs, dont le plus déterminant a été la destruction de l’Irak baathiste de Saddam Hussein. La pyropolitique de l’Etat islamique vise désormais à bouter le feu aux pays de l’Europe occidentale, tenus erronément pour responsables de l’effondrement total du Proche- et du Moyen-Orient. La pyropolitique de l’Etat islamique est un phénomène complexe : la dimension religieuse, qu’elle recèle, se révolte avec sauvagerie contre l’idéologie dominante de l’Occident et de la globalisation, qui est, répétons-le, une idéologie de lumière froide, de lumière sans chaleur. Exactement comme pourrait aussi se révolter un pendant européen de ce déchaînement féroce de feu et de chaleur, qui agite le monde islamisé. Ce pendant européen viserait alors le remplacement définitif des nuisances idéologiques aujourd’hui vermoulues, qualifiables de « lumière seule ». Le piètre fatras libéralo-eurocratique, condamnant les peuples au dessèchement et au piétinement mortifères et post-historiques, cèderait le terrain à de nouveaux systèmes politiques de cœur et de chaleur. L’avatar néolibéral des idéologies de « lumière seule » cèderait ainsi devant un solidarisme générateur de chaleur sociale, c’est-à-dire devant un socialisme dépouillé de toute cette froideur qu’avait attribué aux communismes soviétique et français Kostas Papaioannou, une voix critique du camp marxiste dans les années 60 et 70 en France.

La pyropolitique salafiste/wahhabite n’est pas seulement une critique, compréhensible, de la froideur des idéologies de la globalisation ; elle recèle aussi un aspect « dévorateur » et extrêmement destructeur, celui qu’ont cruellement démontré les explosions et les mitraillades de Paris et de Bruxelles ou que mettent en exergue certaines exécutions publiques par le feu dans les zones syriennes conquises par l’Etat islamique. Ces attentats et ces exécutions visent à insuffler de la terreur en Europe par le truchement des effets médiatiques qu’ils provoquent.

L’utilisation de ces dimensions-là de la pyropolitique, et le fait qu’elles soient dirigées contre nous, en Europe, constituent une déclaration de guerre à toutes les parties du monde où la religiosité absolue (sans syncrétisme aucun) des wahhabites et des salafistes n’a jamais eu sa place. Le monde, dans leur perspective, est un monde constitué d’ennemis absolus (Dar-el-Harb). Nous faisons partie, avec les orthodoxes russes, les Chinois ou les bouddhistes thaïlandais, de cet univers d’ennemis absolus. Position qu’il nous est impossible d’accepter car, qu’on le veuille ou non, on est toujours inévitablement l’ennemi de celui qui nous désigne comme tel. Carl Schmitt et Julien Freund insistaient tous deux dans leurs œuvres sur l’inévitabilité de l’inimitié politique.

Personne ne peut accepter d’être rejeté, d’être la cible d’un tel projet de destruction, sans automatiquement se renier, sans aussitôt renoncer à son droit de vivre. C’est là que le bât blesse dans l’Europe anémiée, marinant dans les trivialités de la post-histoire : le système politique qui la régit (mal) relève, comme nous venons de le dire, d’une idéologie de lumière sans chaleur, mise au point au cours des cinq dernières décennies par Jürgen Habermas. Cette idéologie et sa praxis proposée par Habermas n’acceptent pas l’idée agonale (polémique) de l’ennemi. Dans son optique, aucun ennemi n’existe : évoquer son éventuelle existence relève d’une mentalité paranoïaque ou obsidionale (assimilée à un « fascisme » irréel et fantasmagorique). Aux yeux d’Habermas et de ses nombreux disciples (souvent peu originaux), l’ennemi n’existe pas : il n’y a que des partenaires de discussion. Avec qui on organisera des débats, suite auxquels on trouvera immanquablement une solution. Mais si ce partenaire, toujours idéal, venait un jour à refuser tout débat, cessant du même coup d’être idéal ? Le choc est alors inévitable. L’élite dominante, constitué de disciples conscients ou inconscients de l’idéologie naïve et puérile des habermassiens, se retrouve sans réponse au défi, comme l’eurocratisme néolibéral ou social-libéral aujourd’hui face à l’Etat islamique et ses avatars (en amont et en aval de la chaîne de la radicalisation). De telles élites n’ont plus leur place au devant de la scène. Elles doivent être remplacées. Ce sera le travail ardu de ceux qui se sont toujours souvenu des enseignements de Carl Schmitt et de Julien Freund.

Robert Steuckers,

Forest-Flotzenberg, mai 2016.   

Source: Michael Marder, Pyropolitics: When the World is Ablaze (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).

Lectures complémentaires (articles du Prof. Michael Marder):

"The Enlightenment, Pyropolitics, and the Problem of Evil," Political Theology, 16(2), 2015, pp. 146-158.

"La Política del Fuego: El Desplazamiento Contemporáneo del Paradigma Geopolítico," Isegoría, 49, July-December 2013, pp. 599-613.

"After the Fire: The Politics of Ashes," Telos, 161, Winter 2012, pp. 163-180. (special issue on Politics after Metaphysics)

"The Elemental Regimes of Carl Schmitt, or the ABC of Pyropolitics,"  Revista de Ciencias Sociales / Journal of Social Sciences, 60, Summer 2012, pp. 253-277. (special issue on Carl Schmitt)

 

Note à l'attention des lecteurs:

La version originale de ce texte est anglaise et a paru pour la première fois le 6 mai 2016 sur le site américain (Californie): http://www.counter-currents.com dont le webmaster est Greg Johnson qui a eu l'amabilité de relire ce texte et de le corriger. Merci!

La version espagnole est parue sur le site http://www.katehon.com/es , lié aux activités d'Alexandre Douguine et de Leonid Savin. Merci au traducteur!

La version tchèque est parue sur le site http://deliandiver.org . Merci au traducteur!

Llega la era de la piropolítica

Robert Steuckers

Ex: http://www.katehon.com/es

¿Qué significa cuando los politólogos hablan de "piropolítica"? Hay dos fuentes que explorar con el fin de entender de qué hablan. En primer lugar, uno tiene que investigar todo el ámbito de la teología política, incluyendo el pensamiento de Juan Donoso Cortés sobre el liberalismo, el socialismo, y el catolicismo (el último en ser percibido como Tradición como tal) y, por supuesto, uno debe luego estudiar a fondo la tesis central de Carl Schmitt, que demuestra que todas las ideas políticas tienen un transfondo teológico; en segundo lugar, usted tiene que tomar en consideración la percepción de Schmitt de la política mundial como un choque entre elementos primarios tales como la tierra y el agua. La política real, llamada en genuino alemán como  “das Politische”, está necesariamente ligada a la tierra, es continental, y el hombre político verdaderamente eficaz es una especie de geómetra romano que organiza el territorio objeto de su jurisdicción mediante la simple medición del mismo.

Tras las dos derrotas alemanas en 1918 y 1945, la Tierra ya no fue el elemento central de la política mundial y fue reemplazado por el Agua. De ahí la nueva dialéctica subversiva y destructiva del “Land und Meer”, o la Tierra y el Mar, en virtud de la cual el Agua alcanza la victoria al final. El diario de Schmitt editado póstumamente, Glossarium, insiste en gran medida en los efectos destructivos de los victoriosos "hidropolíticos" estadounidenses que todo lo abarcan. "Piros" significa "fuego" en griego, y representa, según Michael Marder (véase más abajo), otro elemento primario que combina no sólo la idea de una llama devoradora/ardiente, sino también los corolarios de "luz" y "calor". Incluso si Schmitt reduce las posibilidades de la política a dos elementos principales (tierra y agua), esto no significa que el fuego o el aire no existan y no jueguen un papel, incluso aun cuando los mismos son menos perceptibles.

Por lo tanto, el "Fuego" significa varios fenómenos: la fuerza ardiente de destrucción (que se encuentra en las revoluciones anti-tradicionales), la "luz-sin-calor" de la Ilustración, o el calor de la revuelta silenciosa contra las instituciones no tradicionales (en abstracto) derivado de varios corpus ideológicos de la ilustración del siglo XVIII.

Una vez que ya no hay territorios vírgenes que conquistar (ver el pensamiento de Toynbee) y subsiguientemente organizada de acuerdo a los mismos principios ligados a la tierra de los geómetras romanos, la Tierra, como elemento estructurante de la verdadera política, es reemplazada gradualmente, no sólo por el Agua, sino también por el Fuego. El Agua, como elemento emblemático del liberalismo, especialmente del tipo manchesteriano, el poder marítimo o plutocracia, no conoce fronteras claras o en reposo positivo (aquellos que descansan hundiéndose en el mar y se ahogan, dijo Schmitt en su Glossarium). Ningún "otium" (el descanso fructífero, la introspección, la meditación) es posible ya, sólo el "neg-otium" (la nerviosidad febril de las actividades materialistas sin descanso) sobrevive y prospera. Vivimos entonces en sociedades donde domina sólo la aceleración incesante ("Beschleunigung") y cancela todos los intentos razonables para desacelerar las cosas (el hermano de Ernst Jünger, Friedrich-Georg, fue el principal teórico de la "desaceleración" o "Entschleunigung", verdadero pensamiento ecológico que es un complicado intento para traer de vuelta el elemento primario Tierra a la escena política mundial).

La dominación de la hidropolítica (el poder marítimo) conduce a la disolución de las fronteras, como se puede observar claramente en la actualidad, y a la supremacía mundial de la economía y de las reglas anti-tradicionales/anti-telúricas/antipolíticas de la ley moral (por ejemplo, el wilsonismo).

No obstante, incluso como un elemento ahora sometido a la dominación, la Tierra no puede ser simplemente eliminada, pero permanece en silencio como si estuviera profundamente herida y en estado de hibernación. Por lo tanto, las fuerzas hidropolíticas se esfuerzan por todos los medios posibles para destruir definitivamente el elemento Tierra tácitamente resistente y, con posterioridad,  provocar explosiones en el continente, es decir, movilizar al fuego como un coadyuvante, un fuego que no manipulan ellos mismos, sino que dejan a las fuerzas mercenarias contratadas en secreto para hacer los trabajos sucios en países con una gran cantidad de jóvenes sin trabajo. El vértice del Mar y el poder aéreo pudo observarse después de la destrucción del Irak de Saddam Hussein en 2003, sin la complicidad de aliados y extranjeros (el eje París-Berlín-Moscú). La guerra contra el Irak baasista no resultó una victoria completa para los agresores neocon. Los poderes del Mar, como no son poderes ligados a la Tierra, son renuentes a organizar áreas ocupadas como hicieron los geómetras romanos. Por lo tanto, para mantener a los países vencidos y destruidos en un estado de abandono total, los poderes hidropolíticos movilizaron el elemento fuego, es decir, el terrorismo (con su estrategia de volar a la gente y los edificios, y su ardiente fanatismo religioso - "ardiente" se deriva del latín "Ardere", que significa "quemar"). Los recurrentes ataques terroristas contra mercados del Bagdad chií son las acciones más atroces en este retorno de la violenta piropolítica. El mismo patrón de violencia destructiva total se utilizará más adelante en Libia.

Cuando ninguna de las habilidades del geómetra están disponibles y cuando no hay deseo de crear una nueva categoría de estado para reemplazar el que se ha roto, se observa una transición a la piropolítica. La élite militar baazista ligada a la Tierra del antiguo Iraq también se dirigió a la piropolítica, en parte mediante la creación del ISIS, que se extendió en la zona, siendo al mismo tiempo una revuelta contra el caos generado por la guerra del neoconservador Bush y una manipulación de las fuerzas secretas hidro/ talaso/políticas para dejar en llamas a los países indeseables y, finalmente, difundir el devorador Fuego fanático/terrorista a los territorios de los principales competidores (a Europa como un puerto para los refugiados, entre los cuales se esconden los terroristas, y a Rusia, donde los terroristas chechenos y dagestaníes están directamente vinculados a las redes wahabíes).

La estrategia hidro/talaso/política para establecer zonas enteras en llamas incitando revueltas, el odio religioso, y las enemistades tribales seguramente no es nueva, pero recientemente ha tomado nuevas dimensiones más gigantescas.

La piropolítica del ISIS tiene como efecto colateral la ridícula "luz-sin-calor" característica de las ideologías de la ilustración de las élites eurocráticas. Una luz ciega que no produce verdaderas soluciones para los nuevos problemas que fueron inducidos por la hidro y la piro política del enemigo disfrazado. Una luz cegadora de determinada ideología política que también está desprovista de cualquier "dar calidez", de sentimientos de seguridad, y está obviamente destinada al fracaso. Los estados europeos se vuelven gradualmente Estados fallidos porque se adhieren a la "ideología-sólo-luz", siendo solo débilmente desafiados por los llamados movimientos populistas "exigiendo-calor". Europa está siendo sometida a una doble agresión por parte de dos amenazas: una, de los sistemas ideológicos de "luz-sin-calor" - que conducen a lo que Ernst Jünger define como "post-historia" -, y la otra, de los piropolíticos importados del mundo musulmán anteriormente incendiado por varios factores, entre los cuales la destrucción total del Irak de Saddam es el más determinante. La piropolítica del ISIS tiene por objeto dejar en llamas los países de Europa occidental que se mantienen erróneamente responsables del colapso completo de los países del Cercano y Medio Oriente. La piropolítica del ISIS es, sin embargo, un problema bastante complejo: el elemento religioso en eso se rebela salvajemente contra toda "sólo-luz", determinando la ideología dominante occidental y global y promoviendo una piropolítica alternativa "basada en el calor", exactamente como una contraparte europea que también tendría como objetivo sustituir las anticuadas y sombrías molestias ideológicas "sólo-luz", por sistemas políticos más cálidos y abiertos de corazón. El avatar neoliberal de la ideología "sólo-luz" debe ser por lo tanto sustituido por un solidarismo "que-da-calor", es decir, el socialismo que debe perder todo el "frío" que fue atribuido al comunismo soviético o francés por Kostas Papaioannou, una voz crítica interna del comunismo en los años 60 y 70 en Francia.

Pero también hay un salvaje y destructivo aspecto "como-en-llamas" en la piropolítica: el ardiente fuego de las explosiones y el traqueteo de las ametralladoras (como en París y Bruselas) y de algunas ejecuciones públicas por el fuego en la Siria ocupada por el ISIS, con el objetivo de encender el miedo en Europa a través del efecto mediático que inevitablemente tenían.

El uso de tales dimensiones de la piropolítica es una declaración de guerra contra el resto del mundo, que se configura como un reino mundial de enemigos totales (Dar-el-Harb), que no puede ser aceptado (como usted es, inevitablemente, el enemigo de todos aquellos que le declaran enemigo - Carl Schmitt y Julien Freund subrayan esto muy claramente en sus obras).

Nadie puede aceptar un rechazo tan radical y feroz sin negarse automáticamente a ellos mismos y su propio derecho a vivir. El problema se hace aún más agudo, ya que todo el sistema establecido por la ideología de "luz-sin-calor" (Habermas) no acepta la idea polémica del "enemigo". A los ojos de los seguidores de Habermas, nunca hay un enemigo; sólo hay interlocutores. Pero si los interlocutores se niegan a discutir, ¿qué ocurre? Los enfrentamientos son entonces inevitables. La elite dominante, como los seguidores del pobre e infantil Habermas, se quedan sin ninguna respuesta al desafío. Tendrán que ser reemplazados. Será la pesada tarea de aquellos que siempre han recordado las enseñanzas de Schmitt y Freund.

Robert Steuckers
Forest-Flotzenberg, May 2016

Fuente: Michael Marder, Pyropolitics: When the World is Ablaze (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).

Further readings (articles of Prof. Michael Marder):

"The Enlightenment, Pyropolitics, and the Problem of Evil," Political Theology, 16(2), 2015, pp. 146-158.

"La Política del Fuego: El Desplazamiento Contemporáneo del Paradigma Geopolítico," Isegoría, 49, July-December 2013, pp. 599-613.

"After the Fire: The Politics of Ashes," Telos, 161, Winter 2012, pp. 163-180. (special issue on Politics after Metaphysics)

"The Elemental Regimes of Carl Schmitt, or the ABC of Pyropolitics,"  Revista de Ciencias Sociales / Journal of Social Sciences, 60, Summer 2012, pp. 253-277. (special issue on Carl Schmitt)

Note à l'attention des lecteurs:

La version originale de ce texte est anglaise et a paru pour la première fois le 6 mai 2016 sur le site américain (Californie): http://www.counter-currents.com dont le webmaster est Greg Johnson qui a eu l'amabilité de relire ce texte et de le corriger. Merci!

La version espagnole est parue sur le site http://www.katehon.com/es , lié aux activités d'Alexandre Douguine et de Leonid Savin. Merci au traducteur!

 

Related links

La idea de Eurasia. El eurasianismo como camino hacia una multipolaridad real

Apuntes de geopolítica (I)

"Caos controlado" como herramienta de estrategia geopolítica

Geopolítica posmodernista vs Eurasia

La fractura geopolítica de Sudamérica empieza en Brasil

La geopolítica y el conflicto en el Sáhara Occidental

The Era of Pyropolitics is Coming

By Robert Steuckers

What do political scientists mean when they talk about “pyropolitics”? There are two sources to explore in order to understand what they mean; first, you’ll have the whole realm of political theology to investigate, including Donoso Cortés’ thoughts about liberalism, socialism and Catholicism (this last being perceived as Tradition as such) and of course you’ll have to study thoroughly the core idea of Carl Schmitt, having proved that all political ideas have a theological background; second, you’ll have to take into consideration Schmitt’s perception of world politics as a clash between raw elements such as Earth and Water. Real politics, called in his genuine German as “das Politische,” is necessarily Earth-bound, continental and the truly efficient political man is a kind of Roman geometer who organizes the territory coming under his jurisdiction, by simply measuring it.

After both German defeats in 1918 and 1945, Earth is no longer the core element of world politics. It has been replaced by Water: it’s the new subversive and destructive dialectics of “Land und Meer,” of Land and Sea, whereby Water obtains victory in the end. Schmitt’s posthumously edited diary Glossarium insists heavily on the destructive effects of the victorious all-encompassing US-“hydropolitics.” “Pyros” means “fire” in Greek and represents, according to Michael Marder (cf. infra), another raw element combining not only the idea of a devouring/burning flame but also the corollary ones of “light” and “warmth.” Even if Schmitt reduced the possibilities of politics to two main elements (Earth and Water), this does not mean that Fire or Air didn’t exist and didn’t play a role, even less perceptible. “Fire” means therefore several phenomena: the burning force of destruction (that you find in anti-traditional revolutions), the “light-without-warmth” of Enlightenment, or the warmth of silent revolt against untraditional (abstract) institutions derived from several ideological strands of the 18th-century Enlightenment.

As no virgin territories can be conquered anymore (see Toynbee’s thoughts) and subsequently organized according to the very earth-bound principles of Roman geometers, the Earth as structuring element of true politics is gradually replaced not only by Water but also by Fire. Water, as the emblematic element of liberalism, Manchesterism, seapower, or plutocracy, doesn’t know neither clear borders nor positive rest (those who rest on sea sink and are drowned, said Schmitt in his Glossarium). No “otium” (fruitful rest, introspection, meditation) is possible anymore, only “neg-otium” (febrile nervosity of restless materialistic activities) survives and thrives. We live then in societies where only ceaseless acceleration (“Beschleunigung”) rules and cancels all sensible attempts to decelerate things (Ernst Jünger’s brother Friedrich-Georg was the main theorist of “deceleration” or “Entschleunigung,” true ecological thinking being an awkward attempt to bring back the raw element Earth on the world political stage). Domination of hydropolitics (seapower) leads to border dissolution, as we clearly can observe nowadays, and to a worldwide preponderance of economics and anti-political/anti-telluric/anti-traditional rules of moralistic law (e.g. Wilsonism).

Nevertheless, even as a dominated element, Earth cannot be simply wiped out and remains currently silent, as if it were deeply wounded and hibernating. Hydropolitical forces should therefore try other means to destroy definitively the tacitly resisting element Earth and, subsequently, to provoke explosions on the continent, i.e., mobilize Fire as an adjuvant, a Fire they don’t manipulate themselves but leave to mercenary forces hired secretly in countries with a surplus of young jobless men to do the dirty work. The apex of sea and air power could be observed after the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, without the complicity of allies and aliens (the Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis). The war against Baathist Iraq didn’t result in a complete victory of the neocon aggressors. Sea powers, as they aren’t earth-bound powers, are reluctant to organize occupied areas like Roman geometers did. Therefore, to keep the defeated and destroyed countries in a state of total dereliction, hydropolitical powers mobilized the element Fire, i.e., terrorism (with its strategy of blowing up people and buildings and its ardent religious fanaticism, “ardent” being derived from the Latin “ardere,” meaning “to burn”). The recurrent terrorist attacks against Baghdad’s Shiite marketplaces are the most appalling actions in this return of violent pyropolitics. The same pattern of total destructive violence would be used later in Libya.

When no geometer’s skills are available and when there is no desire to create a new statehood to replace the broken one, we observe a transition to pyropolitics. The Earth-bound Baathist military elite of former Iraq itself turned also to pyropolitics by partly creating ISIS, that spread in the neighborhood, while being at the same time a revolt against the chaos generated by the neocon Bush war and a manipulation of hydro/thalassopolitical secret forces to set undesirable countries ablaze and eventually spread the devouring terrorist/fanatical Fire to the main competitors’ territories (to Europe as a harbor for refugees among whom terrorists hide and to Russia where Chechen and Daghestani terrorists are directly linked to the Wahhabite networks). The hydro/thalassopolitical strategy to set whole areas ablaze by stirring up revolts, religious hatred, and tribal enmities is surely not new but has recently taken new more gigantic dimensions.

picture: Prof. Michael Marder - http://www.michaelmarder.org/

ISIS’ pyropolitics has as a collateral effect to ridicule the “light-without-warmth” Enlightenment ideologies of the Eurocratic elites. Light alone blinds and doesn’t produce genuine solutions for new problems that were induced by the disguised foe’s hydro- and pyropolitics. A blinding political ideology determined by light alone — that is also bereft of any “warmth-giving” feelings of security — is obviously bound to fail. European states become gradually failed states because they keep to “light-only-ideologies,” being only weakly challenged by so-called “warmth-demanding” populist movements. Europe is now undergoing a double aggression under two threats: the one of “light-without-warmth” ideological systems ­– leading to what Ernst Jünger defined as “post-history” — and the one of imported pyropolitics from the Muslim world formerly set ablaze by several factors, among which the total destruction of Saddam’s Iraq is the most important. ISIS’s pyropolitics aims at setting ablaze the Western European countries held erroneously responsible for the complete collapse of Near- and Middle Eastern countries. ISIS’ pyropolitics is nevertheless a quite complex problem: the religious element in it rebels savagely against the “light-only” all determining Western and global dominant ideology and promotes a pyropolitical “warmth-based” alternative exactly like a European counterpart of it would also aim at replacing the old-fashioned and bleak “light-only” ideological nuisances by more open-hearted and warmer political systems. The neoliberal avatar of the “light-only” ideology should therefore be replaced by a “warmth-giving” solidarism, i.e., a socialism that should have lost all the “coldness” that was attributed to Soviet or French communism by Kostas Papaioannou, a voice of Communist internal criticism in the ’60s and ’70s in France.

But there is also a savage, destroying “flame-like” aspect in pyropolitics: the burning fire of explosions and machine-gun fire (like in Paris and Brussels) and of some public executions by fire in ISIS-occupied Syria, aiming at sparking fear in Europe through the media effect it has inevitably had. The use of such dimensions of pyropolitics is a declaration of war to the rest of the world, which is set as a worldwide realm of total foes (Dar-el-Harb), what cannot be accepted (as you are inevitably the foe of all those who declare you a foe, as Carl Schmitt and Julien Freund used to stress it very clearly in their works). No one can accept such a radical and fierce rejection without automatically negating themselves, their very right to live. The problem becomes still more acute as the whole system set up by the “light-without-warmth” ideology (Habermas) doesn’t accept the polemical idea of the “enemy.” In the eyes of Habermas’ followers, there is never an enemy, there are only discussion partners. But if the partners refuse to discuss, what happens? Clash is then inevitable. The dominating elite, as followers of poor silly Habermas, don’t have any response to the challenge. They will have to be replaced. It will be the difficult task of those who remember Schmitt’s and Freund’s lectures.

Robert Steuckers
Forest-Flotzenberg, May 2016

Source: Michael Marder, Pyropolitics: When the World is Ablaze (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).

Further readings (articles of Prof. Michael Marder):

"The Enlightenment, Pyropolitics, and the Problem of Evil," Political Theology, 16(2), 2015, pp. 146-158.

"La Política del Fuego: El Desplazamiento Contemporáneo del Paradigma Geopolítico," Isegoría, 49, July-December 2013, pp. 599-613.

"After the Fire: The Politics of Ashes," Telos, 161, Winter 2012, pp. 163-180. (special issue on Politics after Metaphysics)

"The Elemental Regimes of Carl Schmitt, or the ABC of Pyropolitics,"  Revista de Ciencias Sociales / Journal of Social Sciences, 60, Summer 2012, pp. 253-277. (special issue on Carl Schmitt)

Note à l'attention des lecteurs:

La version originale de ce texte est anglaise et a paru pour la première fois le 6 mai 2016 sur le site américain (Californie): http://www.counter-currents.com dont le webmaster est Greg Johnson qui a eu l'amabilité de relire ce texte et de le corriger. Merci!

Understanding Spengler

By Jonathan Bowden

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

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of Richard Spencer’s Vanguard Podcast interview of Jonathan Bowden about Oswald Spengler. You can listen to the podcast here ^[2]. 

Richard Spencer: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard! And welcome back as well, Jonathan Bowden! How are you, Jonathan? 

Jonathan Bowden: Yes, hello! I’m very well. Thanks for having me on again.

RS: Quite good. Today we’re going to talk about the philosophy of Oswald Spengler. In these podcasts we’ve talked quite a bit about philosophers who are of interest to the New Right or the Alternative Right or White Nationalists or whatever you want to call us. And we’ve talked about Nietzsche in particular. Nietzsche is an interesting case in the sense that, despite the fact that he has quite a few unfashionable ideas from the standpoint of our enlightened modern age, nevertheless he is still quite popular. Libraries and bookstores are well-stocked with titles on Nietzsche.

Spengler, on the other hand, who equaled or surpassed Nietzsche’s popularity in Central Europe in his own time, has gone down the memory hole in a way. It’s hard to find a book by Spengler at your local bookstore, even a large one. Though I think people have heard about him or they have some general notion that he was a pessimistic German or something like this, they don’t really know a lot about the man and his philosophy. We hope we can increase the level of understanding, certainly, with this discussion today.

Jonathan, the way I wanted to start out this talk about Spengler and the philosophy of history is at a very basic level of understanding. I was thinking before we started this conversation that this idea of linear history is one that is really powerful for people and it also has something to do with Christianity in a way, but it’s also something that’s survived well into the post-Christian West. What I mean by linear history is what maybe could be described in just a simple phrase like “It keeps getting better all the time,” this notion that we’re the next step in history, and this history leads to greater freedom, greater liberation, greater understanding, greater technology, so on and so forth and that, yes, there might be some bad things that happen along the way but those are kind of speed bumps along this highway towards utopia or something like that.

I think if we look at the world from the standpoint of technology perhaps that is true. We’ve had the creation of medicines, from the automobile to the iPhone. Obviously, there’s a way that things have been getting better. They’ve been slowly perfected.

But, of course, culture and civilization, these are two very different things than technology.

Jonathan, maybe we can talk just a little about that just to get this conversation started and to get our listeners’ minds’ wheels turning, so to speak, about the philosophy of history. Think about that powerful assumption. Just that it seems like something that everyone in the modern West, maybe even the modern world, Left and Right, all have and that is of linear history and how Spengler is really challenging that. What do you think about that idea, Jonathan?

JB: Yes, I think that’s a good way in. Spengler is a cosmologist of history. He’s a botanist of history, in a way. He sees human cultures and their attendant civilizations very much like geological strata or the morphology of plant life in that they have a natural cycle, even a diurnal, seasonal one. They have a brief flowering and they have a spring, they have a summer, they have an autumnal phase, and then they have a winter of the soul, and then they die. They literally atrophy and die. His belief in the death of great cultures, that cultures could be seen to come to an end, or they can lie silent for enormously long periods prior to some renaissance or kickstart, is deeply troubling to the modern mind which is addicted to the idea of progress and progressivism whatever its standpoint.

Spengler’s emotional register was profoundly melancholic and pessimistic. He once famously in Man and Technics said that “optimism is cowardice.” There is a degree to which his view of history, which is these radial circles which overlap with each other rather like a Venn diagram in mathematics, a science with which he was familiar, accords very much with his own view that things are cyclic and circular and turn back upon themselves, and cultures go through various stages which are inevitable, and each stage follows from the other one and has the seeds of death in its own mouth in the sense that the thing will turn full circle on itself. He turned cultural decline away from merely being of archival and archeological interest.

These are forbidding and almost totalitarian insights of pessimism which don’t accord easily with the 20th century. If you look at a book like Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World, for example, which is a narrative of the extreme violence in Western and global society in the century of the masses, the 20th century, that’s a mordant book. It’s an apocalyptic book. It’s a book that in some ways is opposed to the idea that things are getting better and better. Yet at the same time, it doesn’t feel emotionally pessimistic despite the fact that it’s brimming, on the whole, with pessimistic criteria. So, Ferguson remains an optimist in a sort of belletrist liberal methodology, the belief that things can get better even if they turn out for the worst at a particular time, which he wishes to express.

Spengler would have no truck with that. Spengler believes that cultures are sort of caged in a way and will wither and die a natural death just as [. . .] beauty in accordance with the rhythm which is close to that of biological life in human affairs.

RS: Before we get into his organic concept of history let’s talk a little bit about his milieu, where he was coming from. I would like to talk about the milieu of his life in Germany at the first quarter, first half of the 20th century.

But before that I think it’s worthwhile going back a little bit to the 19th century and some of the philosophies of history which preceded Spengler’s, and I’m thinking, of course, of Hegel and Kant — probably the two biggest figures in that philosophical school. Maybe you could just mention what are some of the ways that Hegel, probably the most well-known, influenced Spengler. Obviously Hegel had a dialectical view of history which is certainly more complicated than “it’s getting better all the time” linear view, but nevertheless it was a progress view of history. He actually felt that history was coming to an end with the Prussian state and so on and so forth.

So, what do you think about, say, the influence of some of these great German idealist thinkers that came before Spengler and how that impacted his notion of the decline of the West?

JB: Yes, I think that they obviously affected him deeply, because they looked for systematic answers unlike the neo-Kantian school that said there is no time for history and that all attempts to find a time in history are artistic and subjective and therefore historically worthless.

It’s important to realize that for a proportion of critics Spengler’s view is not just anathema, but it’s been fundamentally mysterious, because quite a few philosophical schools believe, whether it’s on the Left with Toynbee or it’s on the Right with Spengler, that it’s utterly pointless to have attempts at historical analysis which are non-linear and which seek for an answer to the conundrum of history, that seeks to elucidate the Sphinx and get it to answer questions about the nature of historical reality. They consider that there is no plan. There is nothing other than linear motion in the spasm of time and any attempt to find a historical plan other than the received wisdom of a work is fruitless. They would consider a work like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon to be perfect in its way because it takes the Roman Empire as its topic where you have an enormous unfolding vista of historical time, and you have the idea that you have many triumphs and many disasters, but the end is partly a projection of the beginning. So, you have almost a biography of a society.

That’s acceptable. What isn’t acceptable from this school of thinking, which is the current one in academic orthodoxy at the present time, is to try to find a key or philosophical agency to history, to interpret history, that history has a meaning in the way that Thomas Carlyle believed it had meaning in the 19th century. Spengler’s addicted to finding the meaning in history, which pulls him to the outside of several of the major historical schools to begin with. There’s also the fact that he was self-taught and was a sort of autodidact and a sort of terribly gifted dilettante, as someone not completely kindly once said. History is an area par excellence which only academics really believe they are entitled to write.

So, in two areas, academicism and the search for an ontology in history — the search for teleology, the belief that there is a prospective future which can be determined, as Marx believed in a different way, and mapped out — those lie outside of Spengler’s purview and yet make marginal his historical essay, his attempt at finding out the meaning of things in his two volume enormous work The Decline of the West published in 1918 and 1923.

So, he draws on the primary idealists like Hegel, but I don’t think there’s much comparison to be frank when you get to the work, because Hegel believes that history will reach its fulcrum and its termination in the idealistic presentation of the Prussian state in history — a sort of being in history — whereas for Spengler the Prussian state, although he wanted Germany and the Germany of his time to dominate Europe, was just a part of the West and a part of the cycle of the West that would be doomed to decline as all of the great civilizations — the Arab, the Eastern Chinese, the Medieval — were doomed to decline in their way.

RS: Before we talk a little bit more about Germany in his time, actually, I think it would be good to lay out some of the basic terms of Spengler’s history. He talked about a series of great or high cultures and these included the Magian culture, which I guess is the Semitic culture, and the Apollonian of Classical culture, and then Western-American culture, which he described as quintessentially Faustian in nature.

So, Jonathan, maybe you could elucidate some of these big ideas for our listeners so they could have an idea of his organic historical sense, just in particular with those three massive cultures. And again, we’re not talking about epochs, because he’s getting away from a sense of time and he’s putting it in terms of a culture and a people, a civilization. So, maybe you could explain those basic concepts and then also just delineate for our listeners what he means by the Magian, Apollonian, and then finally the Faustian culture, which he felt was coming to a close.

JB: Yes. He felt cultures were self-enclosed and were organic and were not time-concentric. He thought they have a period or expanse of time associated with them.

He sees the Middle Eastern culture as essentially magical and somewhat sterile and introverted and flat and a culture of the desert.

He sees Greek culture as proportioned and massive in its architectural and classical relief. He sees it as less dynamic than the Western culture, more staid, more fixed, and had a tendency towards a preternatural order and the specificity of same.

The Western culture, which he is most keen on, he sees as a partly diabolical culture. He sees it as Faustian. He sees it as a mismatch and matching of things that don’t coherently go together in other cultures. He sees it as a culture of advanced restlessness and absence of an inner sense of ease and with an extraordinary desire for self-transcendence, which is a desire to change everything again and again and again to make it new and make it work and make the Western culture the most dynamically aggressive culture on Earth.

RS: So, is he talking about a mindset with this — I hesitate to use this term but — a collective consciousness, so to speak, amongst the people that is expressed most fully in some of the great people of the civilization? Is that a good way to describe what he’s talking about?

JB: Yes, it’s a sort of civilizational construct of culture permeated through an elite as articulated through and by the masses within a particular civics over time. It’s racially-based to an extent, but only partly so, because his positions are sublimated racialisms whereby, although the Semitic mostly goes with the Magian and the Eastern Mediterranean largely goes with the Apollonian, and the Western is made up of most of Europe and ex-Europe in the New World and the far reaches of the world associated with Western imperial conquests and settlements, North America in particular, the notion that they are purely racial is not one that he accedes to.

He has a Nietzschean concept of race which is that race is important, because breeding is the basis of everything, but it’s too rudimentary for reasons of analysis. For analysis, you have to look at the culture and the civics which are created by specific races and intermingled variants of races over time, and pure biology is not enough to describe man’s ascent, if indeed it has been an ascent rather than a withering to death of prior acknowledged cultures of whatever beauty.

So, Spengler’s always an unhappy bedfellow for various people, because he never fits in with people’s preconditions and prior suppositions. There will always be a tension even with the racialist Right with Spengler as there is with the Left over his pessimistic and non-materialist views of history, his intuitionism, his opening to the subjective elements in culture, his belief in the wintering of the soul of a culture and its partial decline over time, his obsession with the coming up to decadence. All of these would not render him attractive to a Left-wing mind at all. But, at the same time, the liberal progressive sees little in him, the man of the center, because he’s too morbid, too mordant, and pessimistic, too professorial, and too linked to a prior theory which cuts against their ingrained optimism, including the idea, as you said at the beginning of this clip, that “things are getting better and better.”

RS: Jonathan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about this organic story of Western or Faustian culture and its origins after the collapse of the Roman Empire and then how he felt that it was declining and ending in his own lifetime? Maybe you could just give us some outlines of Faustian culture’s birth and flowering and then decline. What was he talking about? Obviously, in order to talk about these things you have to paint in really broad strokes, but I think that’s good, particularly with a podcast like this. So, give our listeners a sense of this organic story of Faustian culture.

JB: With the collapse of the Roman Empire I think he thinks that the classical world comes to an end and the medieval world as such begins. The medieval world is a static and closed civilization which is a magical one based upon totem and taboo and based upon a stiff and regulated cosmology that is only unsettled by the return of classical wisdom in what becomes the proto-Renaissance and then the Renaissance.

The Renaissance inflamed the entire civilization mentally and culturally and sends an enormous coursing torrent of energy through it which leads to an unmapping and an unfolding of new visions and new vistas. Whereby, we see the Middle Ages replaced by a post-Medieval Europe that looks back on the classical period but based upon the stolidity and solidity and the transcendental Magianship of the Middle Ages. It’s the Renaissance and the scientific methodology that gives rise to it, which is a return to a particular intellectual inheritance of the Greeks that gives man this diabolical pact element in the Western cosmos. This is the idea that Faust literally would sell his soul to Mephistopheles for knowledge. He would sell his soul for power over given things, for the power of magic almost in the interpretation of physical reality and the ability to hold sway over the physical world with which the sciences are concerned.

Western man begins a transmutation of everything in life, of every science, of every art, of all forms of economic dealing, all forms of culture and civilizational intent. Recalibrated and cast anew through this prism of Faustian fire, and this enables the West to set out as the Athenians had once done in a restricted Grecian compass to conquer much of the known world and to subdue it to their own restless tasking and desire for self-overbecoming at every possible instance. So, the West is seen as in some ways as a culture of the superman, in Nietzschean terms, reaching out across the world, reshaping other cultures and interacting with them in often destructively creative ways to release more energy, to enhance more transcendence, to enhance more creativity, to lead to more Faustian pacts and bargains, and then to become even more enraptured of its own colossal strength and vigor by importing even more energy through even greater and deeper and more resonating Faustian pacts until the thing teeters on the brink of absurdity to a degree, because the West becomes so enamored of its own mettle that it can’t see that it’s beginning, like all cultures, to engage upon ineffable decline.

RS: What creates the decline? What leads to decadence? What turns continual self-overcoming into decadence?

JB: Probably repetition and probably the fact that he believes that everything is pre-programmed like a computer chip to decay over time. You can only go to the well so often. Probably the spread of democratic, liberal humanist, and materialist ideas and the disjunction between the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.

The Renaissance is seen by most Enlightenment thinkers as a precursor of the Enlightenment, but he doubtless sees the Enlightenment as a giving way of the Faustian bargain to decadence to untrammeled ideas about the will of the majority which the people who put them forward, he believes, must know are absurd because the majority of men could never decide any question of any importance amongst themselves. That women would be given the vote and would be allowed into the function hall of the male. The liberal humanism that would increasingly refuse to distinguish between patterns of being and hierarchies in nature as they express themselves in society.

So, really, it’s the Enlightenment and its definition of the West, which is necessary, because in my reading of his codex of history the decline is necessary and therefore is inborn and the forces which are there, rather like illness and death in the individual, are there to permit change in the rule in the future and the ending of a cycle which is natural as it is in the biological world. So, he doesn’t see decadence as a disaster. He sees it as a necessity.

RS: So, are we still living in an enlightened age in a way that that was the turning point, and we’re kind of the last dregs of the Enlightenment?

JB: You could interpret it in that way, although at the end of The Decline of the West, of course, in the second volume, he preaches a new caesarism, that there may be a democratic caesarism, which of course came to be true throughout the latter third of the first quadrant of the 20th century.

His view that democratic niceties would be replaced by a much more Machiavellian and realistic politics, a politics of ruthless Realpolitik associated, even though he never advocated it, with Fascism. Although some of his political sayings are close to that of a fascistic or faschistoid conservative. That’s why, again, he falls between two camps. He’s not fascistic enough for those people who are enamored of those governments, movements, and regimes at a particular time, but nor is he conservative enough not to be associated with them at least through the glamor of nostalgia. So, he’s too quasi-fascistic for many conservatives, particularly now, but he’s also too conservative for thoroughgoing fascistic types. And that was his attitude, of course, to one of the most notorious governments in the Western world which he lived through the early stages of in the 1930s in his own country.

RS: Right. Actually, we talked about that and the Nazi regime banned his book, The Hour of Decision, which, again, I’m sure in the most of the modern mind they would probably just lump someone like Spengler on in there with Hitler as evil Right-wingers, but obviously that’s certainly not the way they saw it at the time.

Let’s put a little more pressure on this, because this is an interesting issue of Spengler’s life in an age which could even be described as “democratic caesarism.” That is, one based on populism, on popular sovereignty, but then one that is harsh and brutal in many ways, enamored with Realpolitik and so on and so forth. I think it’s a very interesting topic of Spengler’s own life.

JB: Yes, there’s always been a liberal qualm here as to why he didn’t support the Nazi regime. He did vote for Hitler against Hindenburg in the presidential election, which of course Hitler lost. Hindenburg retained the presidency until he died in office, and then it was after the Gleichschaltung it was just rolled up and it became one of Hitler’s many offices as he became supreme leader of all elements of the state and the offices of the president and chancellor were amalgamated into that of the Leader figure.

He also put a swastika outside his lodging windows to annoy the neighbors with his sister, saying that if he unfurled it one should always be prepared to pay the price for annoying people.

But, at the same time, he thought of them as irretrievably vulgar and without high culture, very much Ernst Jünger’s snobbish intellectual attitude towards them. He wasn’t so much bothered about the social origins of many of them, which is what convulsed the German old Right with which Spengler would have been more comfortable, but he was concerned about their cultural ignorance, as far as he was concerned, and the greatness and glory of what it was to be German seen in cultural terms.

In some ways, he’s too spare and too stark and too elitist a figure. For him, just to make mouthwatering speeches about Germany and German identity entirely begins it, what you mean by Germany, what you mean by German cultural identity, unless you’re highly educated, civilized, and knowledgeable about what it means to be German, or to be European in extenso, these political remarks are slightly meaningless.

His one intervention into politics, when he was attempting to get the power for a German on Ludendorff’s general staff during the First World War, General von Schacht I think, didn’t really go anywhere, because his view of practical politics as a man of the study was rather probably overly conspiratorial and sort of overly rarefied. Like a lot of academic intellectuals, he wouldn’t make a good politician.

But, at the same time, although he despised the Weimar Republic and regarded it as an unnecessary appendage, he looked at the glory of the German Empire which had preceded it. He was actually not particularly enamored of the Germans, partly because he believed they were too hostile to other European peoples, and he believed that the coming battles were civilizational and there should be alliances with other European nation-states against the hordes of Asia and Africa and the Far East who would be the real enemies in the future.

RS: So, he had an almost Nietzschean “Good European” sense or one that was almost similar to maybe even Lothrop Stoddard and some of the other people in that general time period.

JB: That’s right. To a Leftist’s mind, he’s almost as Right-wing as Hitler, but he doesn’t agree with his views, just as there are an enormous number of Left-wing intellectuals who, of course, didn’t agree with Stalin. So, there’s a degree to which he also didn’t entirely agree with the aggressive technological features in the Third Reich, which was Romantic and realist and agrarian at one level and yet embraced motorways and rockets and high technology at another, because he believed that technology had become a part of the enslavement of modern man. Very much prefiguring Heidegger’s thinking in this regard.

Also, of course, he didn’t share the anti-Semitism either, particularly. While in no sense being philo-Semitic, like Nietzsche, he didn’t share the crude Jew-baiting, beer hall attitudes that swirled around the German Right. It’s not civilizationally part of the way he perceived reality, because he didn’t view the world conspiratorially or metaphysically conspiratorially. He viewed the world in terms of these great overarching abstractions of cultural civilizations of which Germany was only a part.

He also was a pessimist and didn’t share the extreme and rather myopic optimism of that regime that was very shrill, particularly on its own behalf.

RS: So, Jonathan, what kind of ideas did Spengler have for the future and did he see the rise of a new civilization?

This past weekend I attended the American Renaissance conference, and Dr. Richard Lynn was there and he gave a very enjoyable and informative talk about eugenics, actually, but he ended by talking about the world of the 21st and probably 22nd, maybe 23rd century being that of the East and China in particular.

Did Spengler talk about any of this? Or did he believe that a new civilization would arise, that an Oriental civilization might have a new rebirth? Did he talk about this? Maybe you could even speculate on it yourself.

JB: Yes, he didn’t really speak of it. He sounded the death knell of an ever present West that was exhausted at the end of the Great War. His thesis was misunderstood and tens of thousands of copies that made him from a sort of penniless, living in genteel poverty intellectual into a sort of major cultural figure throughout Germany and the West, was based on a misnomer.

The mass of the cultured people, of course we’re talking in terms of hundreds of thousands and not the millions, who bought his enormous book and some of the others, which made him moderately wealthy as a consequence and able to live independently, they interpreted the book as an explanation for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and because it put it into world-historical and cosmological terms it exonerated Germany from its personal defeat. It also seemed scholarly and well-wrought and was not propagandistic. It was not the “stab in the back” mythology. It was not the fact that they’d been let down by forces at home, nor was it the normative liberal view that they’d just run out of men, run out of material, run out of resources and been defeated in that way.

So, people stuck to his book really on the misnomer, because what he was saying was that Germany’s defeat was part of a pattern of defeats that were going on within the civilization at a particular time.

He posited the idea that these defeats could be arrested for a time by democratic caesarism and various forms of populism for which he had a distaste actually, but which he believed to be necessary at this time in the cycle. In Man and Technics, for example, there’s a quite ruthless extolling of the virtues of some of these sorts of regimes up to a point. But he never thought that they were the be all and end all for culture. So, his belief was that the West would continue to decline throughout the 20th century. One of Spengler’s offshoots, of course, is the doctrine of the “clash of civilizations,” which was made famous by that book, The Clash of Civilizations.

RS: Right. By Samuel Huntington.

JB: Yes, written about what? Fifteen years ago now?

RS: Or so, yeah.

JB: Now, that’s a Spenglerian thesis, which he may not like to admit to be influenced by Spengler, some people don’t choose to. You have all sorts of people like the Beats on the Left, or metacultural Left — let’s put it that way — like Burroughs and Ginsberg and Kerouac, who openly admitted being strongly influenced by Spengler, but other people are very reluctant to even admit the fact that he’s come anywhere hear them and their thinking at all.

Nevertheless, the idea that other civilizations will rise, particularly in the Far East, and will challenge the West’s hegemony later in the last century — don’t forget he died in 1936 — is indisputable from the nature of his work, but he doesn’t go on to specify it very much. The second volume of The Decline of the West basically closes on the turnaround of democratic caesarism and the fact that the West is, nevertheless, going into an autumnal and wintry stage and leaves it at that.

But lots of people, of course, take up the mantle. Yockey’s views are strongly Spenglerian even though he fills in Spengler’s work by essentially giving it a National Socialist register. In some ways, Yockey is a Nazified Spengler, because Spengler was never a whole-hogger as far as they were concerned and actually had a different viewpoint. That’s why Yockey’s book tends to be two books in one. Eighty percent of it is a Spenglerian exercise and then at the end there’s the 20% where he basically adopts a Fourth Reich/Third Reich viewpoint, which is his own grafting onto the Spenglerian architecture of a sort of neo-National Socialist Proclamation of London opinion or editorial.

RS: One question that was coming to my mind was we are witnessing, experiencing the winter of Faustian Western culture. Do you think that if there were a rebirth amongst European peoples that it would be something different than Faustian culture? Would it be a kind of revival of the West as we’ve known it, or would there actually be a different paradigm that would be adopted by European peoples?

JB: Well, that’s very broad. I, personally, think that if there is to be a revival it would probably have to be more Classical than anything else and has to be a sort of classicism and has to be a return to the verities of the Greco-Roman world as at least a cultural basis and a starting point for thinking, because that provides you with a pre-Christian as well as a post-Christian dynamic. It’s rational. All of Western high culture had the Hellenic stamp upon it filtered through Rome and the Holy Roman Empire, Christianized and Germanicized, that came after it. And in some ways it’s a common appeal to the inner tensions in Western man that can be resolved classically. So, that’s the inner reason for GRECE, de Benoist’s outfit, calling itself the Group for Research and Study of European Civilization and culture. They want to go back to Greece with modern technology and with the hallmark of a new West and they want a new Right rather than an old Right to carry that project forward even though there are at least five currents of the New Right now separated even from de Benoist.

RS: Right. That’s certainly true. Well, Jonathan, this has been a fascinating discussion and I’m just going to put a bookmark in it because I think we could return to Spengler later on. As with so many of our podcasts, we only scratch the surface on these ideas and — I’m sure I speak for a lot of the listeners — I’m waiting for more. So, we should do it again. Thanks for being on the show again and speaking to us about Spengler, and we’ll talk to you soon.

JB: Thanks very much! All the best.Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/05/understanding-spengler/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/spengler6.jpg

[2] here: https://soundcloud.com/radixjournal/understanding-spengler

 

 

Presentazione del volume "Martin Heidegger - La verità sui Quaderni neri"

Aufstand des Geistes

Aufstand des Geistes

von BN-​Redaktion

Ex: http://www.blauenarzisse.de

Soeben ist der achte Band unserer Schriftenreihe BN-​Anstoß erschienen: „Aufstand des Geistes. Konservative Revolutionäre im Profil“ vereint zehn Portraits über Denker, die wir wiederentdecken müssen.

Denn nur wenn Parteien und Protestbewegungen von einem Aufstand des Geistes begleitet werden, können sie langfristig etwas bewirken und eine sinnvolle Neuordnung von Staat, Volk und Gesellschaft umsetzen.

Reaktionäre Rebellen …

Weil es eben um diese Prinzipien, Ideale und Ideen für eine „schöpferische Restauration“ (Rudolf Borchardt) gehen muß, wurde der Begriff der „Konservativen Revolution“ in unserem neuen Buch Aufstand des Geistes, das der Politologe Daniel Bigalke verfaßt hat und an dem außerdem die BN-​Autoren Carlos Wefers Verástegui und Felix Menzel mitgewirkt haben, sehr weit gefaßt, was im Vorwort erklärt wird.

Danach geht es direkt hinein in die Autorenportraits. Carlos Wefers Verástegui stellt mit Giambattista Vico (1668−1744) den „Vorläufer Spenglers“ vor, der in seiner Neuen Wissenschaft ein zyklisches Geschichtsbild entwarf, das mit einem völkerverderbenden Luxus über den Abschwung der Gegenwart Auskunft gibt. Vico deutete auch, wie es nach der Dekadenz weitergeht. Entweder komme ein Retter, ein fremder Eroberer oder es breche es „neues Mittelalter“ aus, in dem die zivilisierte Welt eine zweite Chance zur Revitalisierung erhalte.

… Sinnstifter, Erzieher, Dichter …

Verástegui hat auch das zweite Autorenportrait des Buches beigesteuert. Den Historiker Heinrich Leo (1799−1878) charakterisiert er als ein einen „reaktionären Rebell“ des 19. Jahrhunderts, der deshalb für die Gegenwart von größter Bedeutung ist, weil er die Gewaltfrage unübertroffen scharf umrissen hat und in seiner Naturlehre des Staates skizzierte, welche konservative Alternative es zur gewaltenteilenden Demokratie gibt.

Mit Julius Langbehn (1851−1907) ist danach ein Denker vertreten, der deutlich machte, daß wir eine Veränderung und Rückbesinnung auf allen Lebensbereichen brauchen. Daniel Bigalke beschäftigte sich insbesondere mit dem Werk Rembrandt als Erzieher, in dem Langbehn darum ringt, was „deutsche Kunst, Wissenschaft, Politik, Bildung und Menschheit“ ausmacht.

… Ökonomen, Wissenschaftler und Staatsdenker …

Bigalke verfaßte darüber hinaus die Portraits über Hans Blüher (1888−1955), den Bündischen, dem wir viel über das Verständnis zum Männerbund und unsere Stellung zur Natur zu verdanken haben, über Friedrich Gundolf (1880−1931), den Dichter, von dem das Lied „Schließ Aug und Ohr“ stammt, sowie über Edgar Julius Jung (1894−1934), den Staatsdenker, der die berühmte „Marburger Rede“ schrieb und daraufhin zu einem der ersten konservativen Opfer im Nationalsozialismus wurde.

… suchen nach der „wahren Ordnung“!

Verástegui stellt danach den Ökonomen und Soziologen Werner Sombart (1863−1941) als denjenigen konservativen Autoren vor, der sich am intensivsten mit dem Sozialismus und Kapitalismus beschäftigte und an Klarheit und Weite die Philosophen der Postmoderne deutlich übertraf. Friedrich Hielscher (1902−1990), der Sinnstifter, und Ernst Niekisch (1889−1967), der „Weltrevolutionär“ (Sebastian Haffner), werden danach wieder von Bigalke portraitiert. Abgeschlossen wird das Buch mit einem Beitrag über Václav Havel (1936−2011) von Felix Menzel. Insbesondere wird dabei auf die Essays aus der Dissidentenzeit des tschechischen „Dichterpräsidenten“ eingegangen, in denen er eine „Generalrevision“ der modernen Zivilisation forderte.

Das Buch umfaßt wie immer 100 Seiten, kostet 8,50 Euro und bietet all jenen „Urlaub von der Asylkrise“, die nicht nur an den Symptomen aktueller Probleme herumdoktern wollen.

Daniel Bigalke u.a.: Aufstand des Geistes. Konservative Revolutionäre im Profil. BN-​Anstoß VIII. Chemnitz 2016.

HIER BESTELLEN!

Why Carl Schmitt Would Oppose the War on Terror (Probably)

by Colm Gillis

Ex: https://carlschmittblog.com

Every now and then on Twitter I type in the name “Carl Schmitt” and see what’s up with the social media discussion on the German jurist. Invariably, there are new book releases and papers out; there are upcoming conferences; of course quotes from the great man; and even some humour. With every ying there’s a yang, however, and Schmitt does not get a ‘free ride’ on the Twitter-sphere. Of course, Schmitt did take a walk on the dark side and a Twitter search will invariably reveal some unpleasantries directed in Schmitt’s direction or even in the direction of his supporters. There not only are the to-be-expected spurts of invective: some people, trying to make sense of the increasing securitization of the globe and the seemingly 24/7 merry-go-round (if ‘merry’ is the appropriate word) news coverage of the War on Terror, accuse Schmitt of providing the intellectual armoury for the current trajectory the world hurtles on.

Because of his image, Schmitt is one of the fall-guys for some of those deeply unhappy with the War on Terror. As students of politics are aware of, Schmitt has a reputation for exalting conflict and sacrificing diversity for the sake of fashioning a coherent national narrative. He also has a reputation for favouring authority and order and thus for preferring authoritarianism to a messy pluralism. And above all, Schmitt is known as someone for whom law was a secondary concern and for whom there was always a higher purpose that could be found above legalism.

When one then looks around and observes the changes that have occurred in Western countries over the last 15 years – bearing in mind that these changes succeeded a period of intense optimism (thus leaving a sour taste in the mouth) – it then is a small step to draw a genealogy of increasing erosion of civil liberties and indicting Schmitt as the founding father of this genealogy.

What is remarkable about the popularly held views about Schmitt is that they are broadly correct factually, but tell us next to nothing about Schmitt’s core values and beliefs and thus are of little use in trying to decipher how Schmitt would have viewed the War on Terror. It’s true that Schmitt wasn’t shy of conflict, supported the German President to the extent of trying to clothe him in the robes of Caesarist dictatorship, that he persistently advocated a solid national identity (although he stopped far short of the racial propaganda of the National Socialists) and that he often chided parliamentarians and liberals for being so officious in their adherence to written law.

Yet Schmitt was really ‘not about’ existential conflict or brutal repression per se. His primary concern was with the substance, or lack thereof, of human existence. We can understand Schmitt’s general thinking on matters like law and authority far better if we concentrate on the purpose of his meditations on such matters, rather than the meditations themselves.

In  books like Roman Catholicism and Political Form Schmitt demonstrated that Europe, in spite of all its advances in economics and the sciences, had lost the transcendental element which corporations like the Church still possessed. It was therefore mired in nihilism and radical negation. This view became more evident by the late 1920s in his lecture The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticisations where he contrasted the vitality of the Soviets with the lethargy that had beset Western Man. Schmitt’s concern for the integrity of human existence was picked up quite astutely by Leo Strauss in his famous commentary on The Concept of the Political. It also emerges at a later date when he wrote about international law and relations. Here he questioned the validity of allowing non-European nations enter a modified public order that had been designed for those of a European outlook: how could the Japanese and Turks internalize a culture that was alien to them and how could they then have that necessary ‘love’ for it?

As an antithesis to the substantive nature of bodies like the Church or the invigorating effect of national loyalty, Schmitt cited the modern tendency to neutralize all inherently human problems by either plunging into endless compromises and discussion or (and this is most relevant to the War on Terror) evoking the concept of humanity. This facile humanity then called out for apolitical solutions to material problems, as opposed to political expressions of the human condition. Schmitt derided the common tendency of the Soviets and  Americans to seek an electrification of the earth and more generally was horrified at the thought of globalisation, which for him was manifested in finding technical solutions to problems, solutions and problems that all humans would find uncontroversial. Schmitt’s concerns resided in his conviction that human life must have substance, there must be things worth dying for if we are to have things worth living for, hating ‘others’ is part of loving one’s own kith and kin, having a solid purpose requires exacting moral decisions because that is the essence of a set ‘purpose.’

It was inevitable for Schmitt, if any of these things were to be instantiated in human existence, that peoples would divide into parties and factions and thus conflict would be an ever-present possibility. There could be no world of humanity for Schmitt.

So, now to the War on Terror. Now, I am know there are those who treat the War on Terror as a crusade against Islam, who view it as a way to revive an sleeping Western consciousness and who thus may be existing in a kind of Schmittian world-view. Generally, however, the War on Terror is commonly understood and promoted as merely a technical exercise. It is a conflict that has the ‘good guys’ of whatever religion or race on the side of shared human goals such as democracy, freedom and progress fighting the rest, the in-humane. If we take the Iraq war, for example, the US did not seek to colonize Iraq (at least not officially) but they did seek to replace, what was seen at the time as, a regime that promoted terror with one that was an Arab replica of an American state. Even Donald Trump, who has acquired a reputation as a Muslim-baiter, has spoken of his friends in Muslim countries. Generally US policy is towards supporting countries like Malaysia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, and even offering some support for a future Palestinian state, but against compromise with countries like Iran or Syria, except where circumstances dictate otherwise.

If we offer a fair account of the War on Terror, we can see that it’s true genealogy is not that of the Crusades or the epoch of hegemonic Western colonialism, but that of the post-WWI drive to end all wars, the League of Nations attempt to bring countries of disparate origins and dispositions together, and the policy of fashioning a world of technical excellence and commercial activity.

Yet another feature of the War which would have made Schmitt baulk is the unrealistic aim of ending all ‘terror’ in the world. Terror is a human emotion; and we get terrified as a matter of course. The idea that terror can be vanquished, as opposed to a political foe, would have seemed to Schmitt as fundamentally dishonest. Not only that, but terror is something wholly subjective as a legal condition. By contrast, a war between two nation-states is legally describable. Schmitt, I am sure, would have asked; who, in concrete terms, is the enemy, and what, in concrete terms, is the aim of any belligerent disposition.

A War on Terror really represents all that Schmitt saw as being wrong with the world. Normal human antipathy is ignored, humanity is evoked as a political constituency, policies which are carried out don’t cement and solidify a national identity but facilitate a global consciousness (one which Schmitt was adamant couldn’t exist), the aims are too vague,  the goal of perpetual safety chimeric. It’s understandable why the Twitter-sphere would promote Schmitt as being a War on Terror ‘hawk’ – i.e. based on his marquee statements and famous concepts – but while he was no ‘dove’ he was not someone who saw the human condition as akin to a machine that merely needed technical nous applied to it. A War on Terror, like a War of Poverty, presupposes an apolitical humanity who realise themselves through commerce and technique and that, for Schmitt, would have been unacceptable.

I have written three books on politics. The latest, The Terrible Beauty of Dictatorship, can be viewed here.