Keith Preston: Understanding Carl Schmitt

 

Keith Preston: Understanding Carl Schmitt

Sommerakademie zur Konservativen Revolution

 

Sommerakademie zur Konservativen Revolution

 

Cf: http://www.sezession.de/

Seit dem verheerenden Attentat in Norwegen haben bestimmte Kausalketten wieder Konjunktur. Beispielsweise wenn Volker Weiß bei Spiegelonline irgendein Zitat Oswald Spenglers für die Tat verantwortlich macht. Treffen will Weiß damit die ganze sogenannnte Konservative Revolution und möglichst auch jede Art von Demokratiekritik, die nicht von links kommt.

Carl Schmitt nannte solche Konstrukte „irreale Bedingungssätze“: Wenn Oswald Spengler nicht gelebt hätte, wäre Breivik nicht zum Mörder geworden. So einfach (in doppelter Hinsicht) kann Geistesgeschichte sein. Wir wollen Weiß auf seinen simplen Pfaden nicht folgen, sondern uns grundsätzlich mit dem Phänomen „Konservative Revolution“ auseinandersetzen, das immer wieder in einen Ruf gerät, der in einem so merkwürdigen Widerspruch zu seiner tatsächlichen Wirkungslosigkeit steht.

Die 12.Sommerakademie des IfS wird sich daher vom 16. bis 18. September 2011 dem Thema „Konservative Revolution“ widmen. Dabei geht es nicht um das Herunterbeten der fünf Mohlerschen Hauptgruppen, sondern um die gegenwärtig gültigen Gedanken dieser Geistesrichtung. Daher wird es nach einer ausführlichen Einleitung durch Karlheinz Weißmann u.a. um folgende Themen gehen: den Zusammenhang von Politik und Lebensreform, den Gedanken einer schöpferischen Restauration, um Heideggers konservative Revolution der Philosophie, um das Verhältnis von Deutschtum und Christentum…

Wie immer: 40 Teilnehmerplätze, sieben Vorträge, Film, Diskussionen, Sport: Wenn Sie 35 Jahre oder jünger sind, können und sollten Sie teilnehmen! Die 11. Winterakademie wird nicht in Schnellroda stattfinden, sondern in der Region zwischen Hannover und Kassel! Der Ausweichort ist gut mit der Bahn erreichbar. Genaue Informationen gibt es nach der Anmeldung. Die Hörerbeiträge sind nicht hoch, wer Geld verdient, bezahlt für zwei Übernachtungen, Vollpension und alle Vorträge 80,00 €, alle anderen bezahlen 35,00 €. Und: Keiner sollte wegen finanzieller Engpässe fernbleiben. Rufen Sie uns an, falls es knapp wird!

Tagungsfolge und Antwortbogen.

 

Oswald Spengler ed il senso metapolitico del declino occidentale

 Oswald Spengler ed il senso metapolitico del declino occidentale

Luca Valentini

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

La crisi morale, oltre che economica e finanziaria, che attualmente attanaglia l’Italia, le farsesche vicende dell’attuale cricca di potere al governo, spesso conducono anche i più acuti osservatori a smarrire quella visione d’insieme e di lontani orizzonti che dovrebbe sempre caratterizzare una visione del mondo e della vita autenticamente tradizionale, cioè fondata e determinata su principi dall’Alto.

E’ importante tale precisazione, perché, al di là delle giuste analisi sociologico-politiche, delle doverose battaglie per il benessere del Popolo Italiano, mai si dovrebbe dimenticare che l’ampiezza della crisi va ben oltre il nostro Paese e che le radici sono ben più profonde di ciò che ai nostri occhi si manifesta, essendo il piano finanziario solamente una risultante di un processo degenerativo, che interessa, nelle sue profondità abissali, i caratteri più interni dell’intera civilizzazione occidentale, nel suo spirito, nella sua moderna involuzione, nelle imboscate e nei tradimenti che essa ha subito.

Riferirsi a Oswald Spengler ed a ciò che ha espresso nelle sue opere, particolarmente nel Il Tramonto dell’Occidente, come noi faremo sinteticamente in questo articolo, ha proprio la determinata volontà di mettere in risalto codesto piano d’osservazione, un orizzonte che va ben oltre la semplice narrazione storicistica o i lineari ed apparentemente confusi e contradditori accadimenti del quotidiano, ma che vuole riaprire una riflessione, un ragionamento all’interno della nostra comunità sull’essenzialità di un approfondimento metapolitico che è e deve essere un approfondimento sulla nostra civiltà, sulla decadenza secolare che la caratterizza, nel rapporto della Tradizione Europea – che dal nostro punto di vista è essenzialmente Tradizione elleno-romano-germanica – con la sfera del Sacro, con l’esplicitazione nell’istituzione statuale, fino alle più ramificate e secondarie sezioni dello sviluppo produttivo e sociale: “Le civiltà sono degli organismi. La storia mondiale è la loro biografia complessiva” (da Il Tramonto dell’Occidente).

Un’analisi che valorizzi e ridesti il senso nascosto, occulto, quella terza dimensione della storia che molti smarriscono, insieme con quei punti di riferimento che unici possono stabilire un preciso quanto indispensabile percorso di autoriconoscimento identitario per la nostra comunità, per chi ricerca nell’impegno politico e culturale l’Uomo Nuovo e Differenziato dalla modernità, dalla pandemia inarrestabile che conduce oramai da diversi secoli l’intero Occidente – e con esso tutto il resto del mondo – verso un baratro di cui non si riescono a vedere vie d’uscita o possibilità di risalita. Per riferirci direttamente a Oswald Spengler, si rammenti come affermasse esserci un ciclo vitale per ogni singola civiltà, quasi fosse la stessa un vero e proprio ente animico, con una precisa contezza di se stesso. In riferimento all’Occidente sarebbe esistita prima la civiltà greco-romana, sorta grazie alle migrazioni indoeuropee in Grecia e nella penisola italica, che lo stesso ha definito “apollinea”, seguita da una civiltà germanica o detta “faustiana”. Entrambe queste Kultur hanno in sé un simbolo esprimente il proprio spirito vitale: Apollo, divinità della forma e della misura, dell’equilibrio interno, spirituale ed estetico; Faust, il personaggio creato da Goethe, come aspirazione perpetua che tenta di colmare lo iato tra l’esistenza parziale e limitata dell’Uomo e le altezze metafisiche della Divinità Trascendente. L’odierna società, pertanto, è il prodotto dell’esaurimento di tale forza originaria, di tale spirito ancestrale, lo spegnimento progressivo di ogni slancio oltre l’umano, di ogni classica forma interna: “Ognuna ha la sua fanciullezza, la sua gioventù, la sua età virile e la sua senilità (da Il Tramonto dell’Occidente)”.

A tal punto, partendo proprio da questa presa di coscienza, che dovrà risultare quanto più profonda e lucidamente attiva, si può accennare a ciò può e deve essere il senso di una militanza, di un impegno politico-culturale. Nella fase finale di questo ciclo, in questa umanità parodistica, l’unica via da percorrere è quella che conduce alla fedeltà nel proprio essere, alla costruzione di una comunità di uomini e di donne, conscia delle proprie radici e fiera della propria diversità dal resto del mondo. La lotta interna per la nascita di uomo che tragga da sé la legge da osservare, che sia impassibile ed inattaccabile di fronte alla marea che tutto corrompe, un uomo che con il suo essere sia esempio e trasmissione di Tradizione, questa la via d’onore che i nostri cuori hanno il diritto di percorrere. Il nostro ed unico scopo è quello, pertanto, anche grazie a questo giornale, di mettere a disposizione di quanti possano e vogliano le nostre umili  conoscenze di studio e di ricerca tradizionali, per “fare ciò che deve essere fatto”, come Evola ci ricorda, e per rimanere fedeli all’Idea, che può essere valorosamente servita solo se da Spengler si assume la consapevolezza del mondo in cui siamo stati destinati a vivere: “…civiltà crepuscolare che è – scrive su La Vita italiana Evola riferendosi agli scritti di Spengler – una civiltà delle masse, civiltà antiqualitativa, inorganica, urbanistica, livellatrice, intimamente anarchica, demagogica, antitradizionale”.

* * *

Pubblicato sul periodico d’informazione politica Il Megafono, anno 2011.

Luca Valentini

Carl Schmitt: Total Enemy, Total State & Total War

Total Enemy, Total State, & Total War

Carl SCHMITT

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

 Translated by Simona Draghici

Editor’s Note:

The following translation from Carl Schmitt appears online for the first time in commemoration of Schmitt’s birth on July 11, 1888. The translation originally appeared in Carl Schmitt, Four Essays, 1931–1938, ed. and trans. Simona Draghici (Washington, D.C.: Plutarch Press, 1999).

I

In a certain sense, there have been total wars at all times; a theory of the total war, however, presumably dates only from the time of Clausewitz who would talk of “abstract” and “absolute” wars.”[1] Later on, under the impact of the experiences of the last Great War, the formula of total war has acquired a specific meaning and a particular effectiveness. Since 1920, it has become the prevailing catchword. It was first brought out in sharp relief in the French literature, in book titles like La guerre totale. Afterwards, between 1926 and 1928, it found its way into the language of the proceedings of the disarmament committee at Geneva. In concepts such as “war potential” (potentiel de guerre), “moral disarmament” (désarmement moral) and “total disarmament” (désarmement total). The fascist doctrine of the “total state” came to it by way of the state; the association yielded the conceptual pair: total state, total war. In Germany, the publication of the Concept of the Political has since 1927 expanded the pair of totalities to a set of three: total enemy, total war, total state. Ernst Jünger’s book of 1930 Total Mobilization made the formula part of the general consciousness. Nonetheless, it was only Ludendorff’s 1936 booklet entitled Der Totale Krieg (The Total War) that lent it an irresistible force and caused its dissemination beyond all bounds.

The formula is omnipresent; it forces into view a truth whose horrors the general consciousness would rather shun. Such formulas, however, are always in danger of becoming widespread nationally and internationally and of being degraded to summary slogans, to mere gramophone records of the publicity mill. Hence some clarifications may be appropriate.

(a) A war may be total in the sense of summoning up one’s strength to the limit, and of the commitment of everything to the last reserves.[2] It may also be called total in the sense of the unsparing use of war means of annihilation. When the well-known English author J. F. C. Fuller writes in a recent article, entitled “The First of the League Wars, Its Lessons and Omens,” that the Italian campaign in Abyssinia was a modern total war, he only refers to the use of efficacious weapons (airplanes and gas), whereas looked at from another vantage point, Abyssinia in fact was not capable of waging a modern total war nor did Italy use its reserves to the limit, reach the highest intensity, and lead to an oil blockade or to the closing of the Suez Canal, because of the pressure exerted through the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations.

(b) A war may be total either on both sides or on one side only. It may also be deliberately limited, rationed and measured out, because of the geographical situation, the war technique in use, and also the predominant political principles of both sides. The typical 18th-century war, the so-called “cabinet war,” was essentially and deliberately a partial war. It rested on the clear segregation of the soldiers participating in the war from the non-participant inhabitants and non-combatants. Nevertheless, the Seven Years War of Frederick the Great was relatively total, on Prussia’s side, when compared with the other powers’ mobilization of forces. A situation, typical of Germany, showed itself readily in that case: the adversity of geographical conditions and the foreign coalitions compelled a German state to mobilize its forces to a higher degree than its more affluent and fortunate bigger neighbors.[3]

(c) The character of the war may change during the belligerent showdown. The will to fight may grow limp or it may intensify, as it happened in the 1914–1918 world war, when the war trend on the German side towards the mobilization of all the economic and industrial reserves soon forced the English side to introduce general conscription.

(d) Finally, some other methods of confrontation and trial of strength, which are not total, always develop within the totality of war. Thus for a time, everyone seeks to avoid a total war which naturally carries a total risk. In this way, after the world war, there were the so-called military reprisals (the 1923 Corfu Conflict, Japan-China in 1932), followed by the attempts at non-military, economic sanctions, according to Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (against Italy, autumn 1935), and finally, certain methods of power testing on foreign soil (Spain 1936–1937) emerged in a way that could be correctly interpreted only in close connection with the total character of modern warfare. They are intermediate and transitional forms between open war and true peace; they derive their meaning from the fact that total war looms large in the background as a possibility, and an understandable caution recommends itself in the delineation of the conflictual spaces. Likewise, it is only from this point of view that they can be grasped by the science of international law.

II

The core of the matter lies in warfare. From the nature of the total war one may grasp the character and the whole aspect of state totality; from the special character of the decisive weapons one may deduce the peculiar character and aspect of the totality of war. But it is the total enemy that gives the total war its meaning.[4]

The different services and types of warfare, land warfare, sea warfare, air warfare, they each experience the totality of war in a particular way. A corresponding world of notions and ideas piles on each of these types of warfare. The traditional notions of “levée en masse” (levy), “nation armée” (nation in arms), and “Volk in Waffen” (the people in arms) belong to land warfare.[5] Out of these notions emerged the continental doctrine of total war, essentially as a doctrine of land warfare, and that thanks mainly to Clausewitz. Sea warfare, on the other hand, has its own strategic and tactical methods and criteria; moreover, until recently, it has been first and foremost a war against the opponent’s trade and economy, whence a war against non-combatants, an economic war, which by its laws of blockade, contraband, and prizes, drew neutral trade into the hostilities, as well. Air warfare has not so far built up a similar fully-fledged and independent system of its own. There is no doctrine of air warfare yet that would correspond to the world of notions and concepts accumulated with regard to land and sea warfare. Nonetheless, as a consequence of air warfare, the overall configuration sways in the main towards a three-dimensional total war.

The “if” of a total war is beyond any doubt today. The “how” may vary. The totality is perceptible from opposite vantage points. Hence the standard type of guide and leader in a total war is necessarily different. It would be too simple an equation to accept that the soldier will step into the centre of this totality as the prevailing type in a total war to the same extent as in other kinds of wars previously.[6] If, as it has been said, total mobilization abolishes the separation of the soldier from the civilian, it may very well happen that the soldier changes into a civilian as the civilian changes into a soldier, or both may change into something new, a third alternative. In reality, it all depends on the general character of the war. A real war of religion turns the soldiers into the tools of priests or preachers. A total war that is waged on behalf of the economy becomes the tool of economic power groups. There are other forms in which the soldier himself is the typical model and the ascending expression of the character of the people. Geographical conditions, racial and social peculiarities of all kinds, are factors that determine the type of warfare waged by great nations. Even today it is unlikely that a nation could engage in all the three kinds of warfare to a degree equal to the three-dimensional total war. It is probable that the centre of gravity in the deployment of forces will always rest with one or the other of the three kinds of warfare and the doctrine of total war will draw on it.[7]

Until now the history of the European peoples has been dominated by the contrast of the English sea warfare with the Continental land warfare. It is not a matter of “traders and heroes” or that sort of thing, but rather the recognition that any of the various kinds of warfare may become total, and out of its own characteristics generate a special world of notions and ideals as its own doctrine and also relevant to international and constitutional law, particularly in the assessment of the soldier’s worth and of his position in the general body of the people. It would be a mistake to regard the English sea warfare of the last three centuries in the light of the total land warfare of Clausewitz’s theory, essentially as mere trade and economic but not total warfare, and to misinterpret it as unconnected with and markedly different from totality. It is the English sea warfare that generated the kernel of a total world view.[8]

The English sea warfare is total in its capacity for total enmity. It knows how to mobilize religious, ideological, spiritual, and moral forces as only few of the great wars in world history have done. The English sea warfare against Spain was a world-wide combat of the Germanic and Romance peoples, between Protestantism and Catholicism, Calvinism and Jesuitism, and there are few instances of such outbursts of enmity as intense and final as Cromwell’s against the Spaniards. The English war against Napoleon likewise changed from a sea war into a “crusade.” In the war against Germany between 1914 and 1918, the world-wide English propaganda knew how to whip up enormous moral and spiritual energies in the name of civilization and humanity, of democracy and freedom, against the Prussian-German “militarism.” The English mind had also proved its ability to interpret the industrial-technical upsurge of the 19th century in the terms of the English worldview. Herbert Spencer drew an extremely effective picture of history that was disseminated all over the world, in countless works of popularization, the propagandistic force of which proved its worth in the 1914–1918 World War. It was the philosophy of mankind’s progress, presented as an evolution from feudalism to trade and industry, from the political to the economic, from soldiers to industrialists, from war to peace. It portrayed the soldier essentially as Prussian-German, eo ipso “feudal reactionary,” a “medieval” figure standing in the way of progress and peace. Moreover, out of its specificity, the English sea warfare evolved a full, self-contained system of international law. It asserted itself and its own concepts held on their own against the corresponding concepts of Continental international law throughout the 19th century. There is an Anglo-Saxon concept of enemy, which in essence rejects the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants, and an Anglo-Saxon conception of war that incorporates the so-called economic war. In short, the fundamental concepts and norms of this English international law are total as such and certainly indicative of an ideology in itself total.

Finally, the English constitutional regulations turned the subordination of the soldiers to the civilians into an ideological principle and imposed it upon the Continent during the liberal 19th century. By those standards, civilization lies in the rule of the bourgeois, civilian ideal which is essentially unsoldierly. Accordingly, the constitution is always but a civil-bourgeois system in which, as Clemenceau put it, the soldier’s only raison d’être is to defend the civilian bourgeois society, while basically he is subject to civilian command. The Prussian soldier state carried on a century-long political struggle on the home front against this bourgeois constitutional ideal. It succumbed to it in the Autumn of 1918. The history of Prussian Germany’s home politics from 1848 to 1918 was a ceaseless conflict between the army and parliament, an uninterrupted battle which the government had to fight with the parliament over the structure of the army, and the army budget necessary to make ready for an unavoidable war, that were determined not by the necessities of foreign policy but rather by compromises regarding internal policy. The dictate of Versailles, which stipulated the army’s organization and its equipment to the smallest detail, in an agreement of foreign policy, was preceded by half a century of periodical agreements of internal policy between the Prussian-German soldier state and its internal policy opponents, in which all the details of the organization and the equipment of the army had been decided by the internal policy. The conflict between bourgeois society and the Prussian soldier state led to an unnatural isolation of the War Office from the power of command and to many other separations, consistently rooted in the opposition between a bourgeois constitutional ideal imported from England either directly or through France and Belgium, on the one hand, and the older constitutional ideal of the German soldiery, on the other.[9]

Today Germany has surmounted that division and achieved a close integration of its soldier force.[10] Indeed, attempts will not fail to be made to describe it as militarism, in the manner of earlier propaganda methods, and to hold Germany guilty of the advent of total war. Such questions of guilt too belong to the totality of the ideological wrangles. Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes (spiritual combat is as brutal as the battles of men). Nonetheless, before nations stagger into a total war once more, one must raise the question whether a total enmity truly exists among the European nations nowadays. War and enmity belong to the history of nations. But the worst misfortune only occurs wherever the enmity is generated by the war itself, as in the 1914–1918 war, and not as it would be right and sensible, namely that an older, unswayed enmity, true and total to the Day of Judgment, should led to a total war.

Translator’s Notes

Originally published in Völkerbund und Völkerrecht, vol. 4, 1937, this essay was reproduced in Posirionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Gent-Versailles, 1929–1939, (Hamburg, 1940), pp. 235–239.

1. General Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) is best known for his book Vom Kriege, never finished and published posthumously, which incidentally has been translated into English under the title On War. There are numerous versions available in print.

2. Carl Schmitt’s own political principles of “will” and “energy,” components of his qualitative concept of total state, derive from this characteristic feature of “total war”: collective determination to assume a cause considered worthwhile and unreserved commitment to its fulfillment. As a generalized rallying around and enthusiasm for a cause and a particular course of action, it is a frequent phenomenon of social psychology, yet its usually ephemeral character makes it unfit as a durable basis of any social structure. I remember the enthusiasm with which in 1982, to a man, the Argentines, for instance, rallied to the idea of going to war to free the Maldives and hurried to put it into practice, and the accompanying hatred which grew against the British. The enthusiasm cooled off quickly, but not the hatred, which lingered on. To perpetuate the enthusiasm, a plethora of other factors have to be brought in, of which, in the case of Germany at the beginning of the ’thirties, Carl Schmitt actually had not a clue.

3. The “lesson” is in keeping with the Hitlerite Frederician cult and legitimating tradition and does not claim to be historically accurate. Although a digression that seems out of place, it has a certain significance for the time it was made. In the autumn of 1936, Hitler circulated a memorandum revealing his expansionist intentions. Then in 1937, the organization of the nation to serve those intentions began, a process which coincided with the rise of the SS state. In November of the same year the German media were ordered to keep silent about the preparations for a “total war.” Bearing all that in mind, Schmitt’s short digression reads more as a warning of danger than a point of military strategy.

4 . What is interesting here is his insistence on the existential essence of the phenomenon, which is consonant with his earlier definition of the political and at the same time renders the distinction between the professional soldier and the civilian meaningless. Moreover, total enmity with its implicit elimination of the adversary excludes any prospect of a peace treaty, as the war is to go on until one of the belligerents is annihilated.

5. Das Volk in Waffen (The Nation in Arms) happens to be the title of a work on total war by Colmar von der Goltz (1843–1916), published in 1883, and which is an important stepping stone in the reflection on modern warfare that led to Ludendorff’s book.

6. At the beginning of February 1938, Adolf Hitler became commander in chief of the German armed forces, appointing General Keitel his assistant at the head of the High Command of the Armed Forces, as the War Ministry was dissolved.

7. Eventually only the Soviet Union came closest to Carl Schmitt’s expectations, while the United States waged a fully-fledged three-dimensional war, dictated by its geographical position and sustained by its vast economic and technical resources most of which remained outside the battle zone.

8. For a broader treatment of the subject-matter see Carl Schmitt’s Land und Meer, which as Land and Sea is available in an English translation (Washington, D.C.: Plutarch Press, 1997).

9. The conflict between the civil society and the military in Germany was the subject-matter of a longer essay by Carl Schmitt, published in Hamburg in 1934 under the title Staatsgefüge und Zusammenbruch des Zweites Reiches. Der Sieg des Burgers über den Soldaten (The State Structure and the Collapse of the Second Reich. The Burghers’ Victory Over the Soldiers).

 

10. Röhm, the ideological soldier, had been eliminated in 1934, at the same time as the political soldiers, the Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow. Furthermore, as already mentioned in note 6 above, the War Ministry ceased to exist at the beginning of 1938, while the Commander in Chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg was removed from his post for having compromised himself by marrying a “lady with a past,” and his prospective successor, General von Fritsch was forced to resign on a trumped-up Charge of homosexuality. At the same time, sixteen other generals were retired and forty-four were transferred. Göring who had been very active in carrying out this “integration” got for it only the title of field marshal, as Hitler kept for himself the supreme military command.

 

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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/07/total-enemy-total-state-and-total-war/

Herman Wirth en de Indo-Europese voorgeschiedenis

door Marc. EEMANS

Ex: http://marceemans.wordpress.com/

Toen het Derde Rijk ineengestort was hebben heel wat gezellen van het eerste uur gepoogd zich – met min of meer sukses – als slachtoffers van het nationaal-socialisme voor te doen. Anderzijds had de regelrechte nazi-jacht die de overwinnaars ontketenden tot gevolg dat een aantal persoonlijkheden die tot de konservatieve revolutie behoorden en vanaf het begin duidelijk afstand hadden genomen van Hitler, toch werden verdacht, vervolgd en soms zelfs gedood.

Dat was onder meer het geval met de jurist Carl Schmitt, de schrijvers Ernst en Georg Jünger en Ernst von Salomon, de wijsgeren Martin Heidegger en Hermann von Keyserling, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, een der meest eminente leden der Thule-Gesellschaft, of nog de geleerden Friedrich Hielscher en Herman Wirth.

 

Ernst Jünger bracht de oorlog door te Parijs, als Duits officier. Hij had kennis van het tegen Hitler gerichte komplot van 20 juli 1944, maar was een van de weinige, zoniet de enige samenzweerder die werd gespaard. Hoe Heidegger vervolgd werd door de fanatici van het regime hebben wij hier reeds beschreven (zie: Martin Heidegger en de traditie van het Westers denken, in TK&S afl. 12, november 1980, pag. 150/11-20). Met opmerkelijke waardigheid en een stoïcisme dat dat der Oudheid evenaart, verdroeg hij zowel deze vervolging als, na 1945, die door linksen van allerlei pluimage.

Men kent Ernst von Salomons boek Der Fragebogen (1951), waarin hij de soms lachwekkende, maar altijd hatelijke aard van de “denazifikatie-riten” aanklaagt. In feite trad von Salomon nooit tot het nationaal-socialisme toe, dat hij – net als o.m. Julius Evola – zijn demagogische en plebeïsche aard verweet. Zijn vriend uit de dagen van de Brigade Ehrhardt, Hartmut Plaas, werd in 1944 omgebracht in het KZ Ravensbrück.

Datzelfde misprijzen vinden we bij Hermann von Keyserling, stichter van de School der Wijsheid, die echter toch, na de anarchie van de Weimar-republiek, de opkomst van het nationaal-socialisme begroette als een zegen voor Duitsland, maar zich dan weer plots uit alle politieke aktiviteit terugtrekt.

Rudolf von Sebottendorf kreeg last met de nazi-autoriteiten na de publikatie van zijn boek Bevor Hitler kam: het werd meteen verboden en bijna alle beschikbare eksemplaren vernietigd. Maar ook na 1945 blééf het door de Geallieerden verboden, zodat dit boek, dat voor de genesis van het nationaal-socialisme van kapitaal belang is, omzeggens onvindbaar werd, vermits het nooit heruitgegeven of vertaald werd. (1) De schrijver zelf verliet Duitsland en verdronk in 1945 in de Bosporus, in geheimzinnige omstandigheden.

Een geheimzinnig personage is ook Friedrich Hielscher. Men kent zijn naam doorgaans nog enkel omdat hij Wolfram Sievers, sekretaris-generaal van het wetenschappelijk instituut Ahnenerbe bijstond, toen die op 2 juni 1948 als “oorlogsmisdadiger” in Landsberg werd opgehangen. Hielscher zélf werd door de denazificeerders niet verontrust. Men beweerde dat hij lid zou zijn geweest van de Thule-Gesellschaft, maar in de ledenlijst van dit genootschap (opgesteld door Rudolf von Sebottendorf en door René Alleau gepubliceerd in zijn Hitler et les sociétés secrètes, Grasset, Parijs, 1969) vinden we zijn naam niet terug.

Ernst Jünger, die hem goed moet hebben gekend, noteert in zijn Parijs’ dagboek op 14 oktober 1943 “Hielscher bevestigde het vermoeden – dat ik al lang koesterde – dat hij een Kerk zou gesticht hebben. De dogmatiek is hij al voorbij en in de liturgie is hij ver gevorderd. Hij heeft mij een reeks gezangen getoond en een cyclus feesten, het heidens jaar, die een ganse ordening godheden, kleuren, dieren, spijzen, edelstenen, planten … omvat.” De konfrontatie Hielscher-Sievers, tijdens diens laatste ogenblikken, lijkt de thesis “Hielscher, kerkstichter” te bevestigen, als men tenminste geloof mag hechten aan hen die Wolfram Sievers’ martelgang beschreven. Jean-Claude Frère schrijft in zijn boek Nazisme et sociétés secrètes (Grasset, Parijs, 1974): “Toen Sievers zijn vonnis vernam, vroeg hij in zijn laatste ogenblikken te worden bijgestaan door Hielscher. Dit werd hem toegestaan; en toen kon men, aan de voet van de galg, het verbazend, krankzinnig schouwspel beleven van twee mannen die een onbekende ritus voltrokken, onbegrijpelijke formules spraken, en alle aanwezigen – tot de beul toe – zenuwachtig maakten. Tenslotte drukte Hielscher Sievers tegen zich aan, de veroordeelde trad achteruit, boog voor zijn meester en leverde zich dan, onbewogen, aan de beul over.”

In het spoor van de studie der geschiedenis van onze voorouders zullen we straks Herman Wirth ontmoeten, maar blijven we nog even bij Friedrich Hielscher stilstaan. Hij werd geboren in 1902, studeerde rechten en bewoog zich in de jaren twintig in zgn. nationaalrevolutionaire kringen, op een behoorlijke afstand van het nationaal-socialisme. Hij schreef diverse boeken, waaronder Das Reich (1931) en raakte bevriend met Sievers, die hem het werk leerde kennen van Herman Wirth, wiens leerlingen ze beide werden. Hun wegen liepen echter weldra sterk uiteen: terwijl Sievers het nationaal-socialisme vervoegde ging Hielscher in de oppositie. Das Reich werd verboden en hij kreeg bij herhaling last met de nazi-autoriteiten. Hij werd de ‘ideoloog’ van een verzetsgroep die men best als Widerstandsgruppe Hielscher kan aanduiden. Toch bleef hij met Sievers bevriend, werkte aan de rand van het Ahnenerbe met hem mee en zou hem zelfs in zijn verzetsaktiviteiten hebben betrokken – wat hij tevergeefs, om Sievers van de strop te redden, voor het Nürnbergtribunaal trachtte te bewijzen.

Carl Schmitt werd er door zijn tegenstanders van beticht te hebben meegewerkt aan het opstellen van wetten, ten tijde van het Derde Rijk: ongetwijfeld deed hij dat ook. Vanaf 1935 werd hij echter de schietschijf van een aantal aan het nazi-regime onderworpen juristen en een aanval tegen hem in het officiële SS-blad Das schwarze Korps bracht hem ertoe zich volledig terug te trekken uit het openbare leven. Na 1945 hield een geallieerde onderzoekskommissie zich met hem bezig, klasseerde de aantijgingen “zonder gevolg” en rehabiliteerde hem.

Alvorens we nu de idee en het werk van de protohistoricus Herman Wirth behandelen, schetsen we eerst zijn levensloop. Herman Wirth Roeper Bosch, Nederlander, werd in 1885 te Utrecht geboren, als zoon van een turnleraar. Hij studeerde Germaanse filologie, volkskunde, geschiedenis en muziekwetenschap aan de universiteiten van Utrecht, Leipzig en Bazel. In 1910 doktoreert hij op de thesis De ondergang van het Nederlandse Volkslied, die een jaar later in Den Haag als boek verscheen. In 1909 was hij al tot lektor benoemd aan de universiteit van Berlijn, voor het vakgebied Nederlandse filologie.

Hij meldt zich in 1914 als oorlogsvrijwilliger in het Pruissische leger en wordt kort daarop verbindingsofficier te Brussel. Hij onderhield de kontakten met de groep Jong Vlaanderen, die de motor was van het aktivisme, en nam ook aktief deel aan de proklamatie van de Raad van Vlaanderen in 1917 en de kortstondige Vlaamse zelfstandigheid , die in 1918 met de nederlaag van het Duitse keizerrijk ter ziele ging (2). Intussen was hij, in 1916, aan de Berlijnse universiteit tot professor benoemd.

ln 1920 probeerde Wirth in Nederland onder de benaming Dietse Trekvogels een jeugdbeweging van de grond te krijgen, naar het model van de Wandervogel in Duitsland en de Blauwvoeterie in Vlaanderen. In 1923 vestigt hij zich dan in Marburg an der Lahn, als zelfstandig ethnograaf en begint met zijn diepgaand onderzoek naar de Europese pre historie. In 1925 werd hij lid van de  N.S.D.A.P., maar in juli 1926 stapt hij er weer uit. In 1928 laat hij bij Diederichs in Jena zijn bekend werk Der Aufgang der Menschheit verschijnen. In die periode behoorden Friedrich Hielscher en Wolfram Sievers tot zijn trouwste leerlingen. Net ais Wirth zelf werkten ze, op diverse vlakken, aan Ahnenerbe mee, ook al was alleen Sievers een partijman. Wirth was trouwens een van de oprichters van Ahnenerbe en moet er één der invloedrijke leden van zijn geweest, vermits hem meteen de sektie Studie van voorhistorisch schrift en symbolen werd toevertrouwd. In 1935 en 1936 was hij vele maanden op studiereis in Skandinavië. In 1938 brak hij met Ahnenerbe, wei onder de dubbele druk van de vakhistorici, die hem voor een dilettant hielden, en van de nazi•ideologen die hem hoogst kwalijk namen dat hij niet ophield te proklameren dat elke Führerkultus historisch gezien een vervalverschijnsel is…

De eerste bekende anti-Wirth brochure was van de hand van Prof. Dr. Paul Hambruch en droeg de alleszins niet dubbelzinnige titel: Die Irrtumer und Phantasien des Prof. Dr. Herman Wirth/Marburg, Verfasser von “Der Aufgang der Menschheit” und “Was heisst deutsch”. Dit denunciërende geschrift werd dan nog uitgerekend door het Deutscher Polizeiverlag uitgegeven (Lübeck, 1931). De latere Berlijnse n.s.-rektor Alfred Baeumler, bekend o.m. om zijn even perfide als doldrieste aanvallen tegen Heidegger, volgde weldra met het boekje Was bedeutet Herman Wirth für die Wissenschaft? (1932).

ln datzelfde jaar volgde van de geoloog Prof. Dr. Fritz Wiegers Herman Wirth und die deutsche Wissenschaft, waarin Wirth openlijk van dilettantisme werd aangeklaagd: “De geschriften van deze ethnoloog vormen slechts een weefsel van valse besluiten, van onbewezen beweringen en van ontkenningen van wetenschappelijke evidenties” … En verder: “De ‘ontdekkingen’ van Wirth zijn niets meer dan de fantazieën van een door de religieuze gedachte geobsedeerde geest”. In 1934 verscheen dan van Rudolf Glaser een brochure die Herman Wirth kategorisch verwierp, ditmaal niet in naam van de wetenschap, maar in naam van het nationaal-socialisme: Wer ist Herman Wirth? Volkstümliche Aufsatze über die Forschungen Herman Wirth’s von Rudolf Glaser. In de bibliografie vindt men al 62 pro- en contra-Wirth geschriften.

Natuurlijk verschenen er ook artikels en werken die van sympathie en belangstelling getuigden, maar de (tegen)partij had een veel grotere invloed, vooral toen Prof. Dr. Wiegers het argument hanteerde dat Wirth nog in 1932 relaties onderhield met de vrijmetselarij en Bolko Freiherr von Richthofen, de voorzitter van de Beroepsvereniging der Duitse Prehistorici, de aandacht trok op Wirth’s vriendschappelijke betrekkingen met bepaalde Joden… In een brief aan Prof. Hans F.K. Günther schreef Richthofen dat hij “niet begreep waarom men Wirth zou moeten ontzien omwille van taktische en humanitaire redenen” en op 16 januari 1934 liet hij aan Ministerialrat Sunkel weten: “Herr Wirth weiss genau, dass ihm führend besonders kiimpferische Nationalsozialisten gegenüberstehen. Mit Heil Hitler und deutschem Gruss, Ihr ergebenster gez. B. Frhr. v. Richthofen”.

Ook voor de grote kampagne tegen zijn ideeën en zijn persoon moet Herman Wirth binnen Ahnenerbe wel aanstoot gegeven hebben, door zijn onderzoekingen naar een oerkultuur en een oerreligie, die op een heel andere man-vrouw-relatie steunde, als hoogste godheid een “Almoeder” zou gekend hebben en eerder “demokratisch” van inslag was, in de zin van de latere IJslandse demokratie dan.

Wirth verdedigde de stelling dat de overheersend mannelijke trekken in de late kultuur, met hun overwaardering van het militaire leiderschap, typische dekadentieverschijnselen waren uit een periode van kulturele laagkonjunktuur zoals de tijd van de grote volksverhuizingen en de Vikingerperiode. De pogingen van het nationaal-socialisme om precies met deze periodes terug aan te knopen waren hem dan ook een politieke gruwel én kulturele nonsens.

In zijn studie Die Frage der Frauenberge – eine europäische Gegenwartsfrage (1972) komt Herman Wirth nog eens terug op zijn oude thesis: “De Vrouwenberg bij Cappel, nabij Marburg, is een van de meer dan honderd vrouwenbergen, maagden-, jonkvrouwen- enz. – bergen, -burgen, -stenen van het Duitse taalgebied en volksgebied. Wat hun ontstaan en hun bloeitijd betreft behoren deze Vrouwenbergen tot een bepaalde grote periode van het Avondland, gaande van de periode der grote stenen graven en de rotstekeningen in de Jongsteentijd tot bij het begin van de Volksverhuizingen. Over de geschiedenis en de betekenis van deze “Vrouwenbergen” is niets bekend. Dat er niets over geweten is, dat men niet eens geprobeerd heeft op het vraagstuk van de “Vrouwenbergen” enige vat te krijgen, heeft een tweeledige reden. De eerste reden is van psychologische aard: in een nog altijd mannelijk-ideologisch gericht wetenschapssysteem kan het probleem van een blijkbaar verheven plaats van de vrouw op religieus, kultureel en sociaal vlak geen geschiedkundige betekenis en belangrijkheid worden toegekend. En de tweede reden was dat de “Vrouwenbergen” tot de zgn. voorgeschiedenis behoren, d.w.z. dat er over dit onderwerp geen historische bronnen, geen schriftelijke overlevering (inskripties, berichten) bestaat. Dat er daarover toch een schriftelijke overlevering bestond en bestaat, niet in letterschrift maar in symboolschrift, daarvan hadden en hebben de totnogtoe bevoegde wetenschappen tot op de dag van vandaag geen idee: de prehistorici niet, maar evenmin de volkskundigen, de germanisten, de godsdiensthistorici, de mythologen enz.”

Zijn vriend Dr. Joachim Weitzäcker schrijft: “Na Herman Wirth’s “verwijdering” uit Ahnenerbe, dat hij gesticht had (3), verloor hij in 1938 zijn leerstoel aan de Berlijnse universiteit, omwille van zijn op gewetensbezwaren gegrondveste oppositie en zijn eis tot vrij onderzoek. Hij moest terug naar Marburg en kreeg verbod om nog onderricht te geven, te publiceren en in het openbaar te spreken. Tenslotte leverde de wet van het stilzwijgen zijn naam aan de vergetelheid over…”

Maar Wirth was niét helemaal vergeten: in 1945 namen de Amerikanen zijn bibliotheek en zijn omvangrijke dokumentatie in beslag; hij bleef aan dezelfde verbodsbepalingen onderworpen als tijdens de laatste zeven jaren van het Hitlerregime.

Zonder dokumentatie en bijna zonder bestaansmiddelen, herbegon hij, bijgestaan door zijn echtgenote Margarete Schmitt, en enkele vrienden, met bewonderswaardige moed aan zijn levenswerk. In 1960 verscheen in Wenen Um den Ursinn des Menschseins. Hij stichtte de Europaische Sammlung für religionsgeschichte en, in 1979 begon hij – 94 jaar jong! – in de ruïnes van een oud slot te Lichtenberg nabij Kusel, met de installatie van een museum en van archieven, die al zijn geschriften en zijn verzamelingen zou herbergen.

De allerlaatste jaren, haast volledig verlamd, werkte hij onverdroten verder, geholpen door enkele trouwe vrienden, en in leven gehouden met wat schaarse subsidies. Begin van dit jaar is hij er overleden.

Laat ons nu (noodgedwongen oppervlakkig) onderzoeken, wat Herman Wirth’s werk betekent. In zijn paleo-epigrafische opzoekingen, die de historische rekonstruktie van een oerreligie beogen, waagt Wirth zich in feite erg ver in de voorhistorie. In zijn opvatting zouden de Indo-europeërs slechts de vertegenwoordigers zijn van een erg late, hoogstens protohistorische periode.

Inderdaad, al wat de voorstanders van de “primordiale traditie”, waarvan René Guénon en Julius Evola de meest eminente vertegenwoordigers zijn, als positief d.i. kontroleerbaar kunnen bevestigen, gaat niet verder achteruit dan de eerste geschriften, waarmede volgens hen in feite de geschiedenis begint. Al de rest is slechts gissing, die op – weliswaar konvergerende – tradities steunt … doch het blijven tradities, om niet het woord ‘legenden’ te gebruiken. De meeste van Wirth’s werken moeten ook tot deze konjekturale wetenschap gerekend worden, en al zijn opsommingen van tekens en symbolen, waarvan hij de uitleg geeft, steunen (althans volgens zijn criticus Fritz Wiegers) slechts op vaak vernunftige interpretaties, die niet of moeilijk kontroleerbaar zijn. Dat er naast het “letterschrift” ook een koherent “symboolschrift” bestaat, word t intussen minder betwist dan ten tijde van Wirth’s eerste werken: het probleem ligt op het vlak van de duiding.

Vermelden we terloops dat de klassieke prehistorici wantrouwig staan tegenover elke subjektieve interpretatie. Ze doen opgravingen, ontdekken fossielen of voorwerpen van aile aard, klasseren ze en situeren ze meestal naar gelang de vindplaats. Uit hun ontdekkingen kunnen we afleiden, dat in deze of gene periode de Homo sapiens die of deze stap zette in de langzame opgang der mensheid naar wat we prozaisch “beschaving” noemen. Zo spreekt men over lager-, midden-, en lioger-paleoliticum, mesoliticum, neoliticum, bronstijdperk en ijzertijdperk, mét hun onderverdelingen, die ais “beschavingen” bestempeld worden, en waarvan de recentste die van Hallstatt en die van La Tène zijn. Om die periodes te dateren gebruikt men heden de radio-carbonmethode. Intussen ontdekken de prehistorici aanwijzingen omtrent de religie, de technologie, de begrafenisriten, zonder de eerste kunstuitingen te vergeten.

Onder de resten van een tamelijk geëvolueerde beschaving vermelden we de rotstekeningen van Altamira en Lascaux, die volgens de klassieke prehistorici uit het laag-neoliticum stammen (zowat tussen 35.000 en 10.000 v.o.j.). Vermits ze in een geografische ruimte liggen die zich ver van Noord-Europa bevindt, konden ze noch Wirth, noch de geleerden van Ahnenerbe interesseren, vervuld ais ze waren van die Indo-europese beschaving, waarvan de oudste sporen niet vroeger te situeren zijn dan in het 5de of 4de milennium vóór onze tijdrekening. Eerder zou men van het 3de of zelfs het 2de milennium moeten spreken, wat onze Europese primordiale traditie wei érg dicht bij ons legt. Werkt een kenner van de Indo-europese traditie ais Georges Dumézil trouwens niet bij voorkeur op geschreven bronnen? En nu weten we, dat het schrift van tamelijk recente datum is.

De klassieke prehistorici struikelen nog over raadsels, zoals die van de megalithen. Ze stellen hun bestaan vast, wagen een interpretatie, maar trekken geen besluiten: dat laten ze liever over aan geleerden als Wirth, die ze voor het overige wantrouwen. En wat raadsels ais Atlantis of het verloren kontinent Mu betreft, verkiezen ze er niet aan te raken en laten gissingen omtrent die vraagstukken over aan mensen die ze ais specialisten van “science-fiction” beschouwen.

Wij moeten toegeven dat de klassieke prehistorici al wat wij onze “primordiale Traditie” noemen, ignoreren; het vertrekpunt van deze benaming en van de vraagstukken die er verband mee houden, vindt men in een werk van de Duitse taalkundige Franz Bopp Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Lithauischen, Gotischen und Deutschen, dat uit de jaren 1833-52 stamt. Het vraagstuk van de Indo-europeërs breidde zich vlug uit van de taalkunde naar het probleem van het woongebied der volkeren die Indo-europese talen spraken en schreven, zonder dat de geleerden het eens konden worden over het vertrekpunt en de datering van deze verspreiding. Het zou interessant zijn dit probleem te bestuderen: men zou dan vaststellen dat op dit vlak de grootste verwarring heerst. Wat zeker is: overal waar de Indo-europeërs zich vestigden, overvleugelden ze de bevolking die al in dat gebied woonde, en onderwierpen ze hen (de Dravida’s in Indië b.v.).

Overal, zowel in Europa ais in Azië, vormden ze de twee overheersende kasten, die de geestelijken en die der strijders of ridders.

Om naar Herman Wirth te rug te keren, stellen we vast dat hij, al zat hij dan min of meer in de lijn van Bachofen, de theoreticus van het matriarchaat, toch niet afkerig was van de Odinistische mythologie, die hij uit de graffiti op de rotswanden van Noord-Europa meende te mogen afleiden en die hij poogde in te voegen in zijn konstrukties omtrent een matriarchale godsdienst. Ook de runen horen daar ergens bij, zodat men in zijn theorieën een soort mythisch-godsdienstig synkretisme mag zien, waarvan het “Mutter Erde”-begrip het sluitstuk is. Het is onbetwistbaar (de klassieke prehistorie bévestigt het ons) dat er in het Atlantisch Europa van het derde millenium een “megalitische” godsdienst bestond, met aanbidden van een vruchtbaarheidsgodin, die tegelijk de begrafenis-riten voorzat. Maar even zeker is dat er sinds het neoliticum (wellicht zelfs sinds het paleolitieum) een verering van de vrouwelijke godheid bestond: dit wordt bevestigd door talrijke beelden, als de “Venus” van Savignano (Italië), Gargarino (USSR) en Willendorff (Oostenrijk); of door de vrouwenkoppen van Dolmi Vestaniee (Tsjeehoslovakije) en Brassempuy (Frankrijk), wat ons zéker tot zowat 30.000 jaren vóór onze tijdrekening terugvoert.

Wirth’s onderzoeken waren vooral op Noord-Europa gericht, zoals zijn reizen uit 1935-36 aantonen. Wij moeten er, om met de klassieke prehistorici te spreken, uit besluiten dat zijn onderzoek vooral het zogenaamd mesoliticum betrof, dat aanvangt rond 10.000 v66r onze jaartelling en zich uitstrekt over het neoliticum en de twee metaaltijdperken, tot de eerste eeuwen van onze jaartelling, voor de kerstening van Noord-Europa.

Volgens de primordiale Traditie moet er echter, vóór die tijd, een ander, veel zachter klimaat geheerst hebben, toen Groenland en Spitzbergen groene en vruchtbare gebieden waren , (de naam Groenland wijst er op!). Hoe dit tijdperk situeren ? Laat ons het antwoord afwachten van de geologen, de prehistorici of de historici van de primordiale Traditie. Immers, in welke periode van het Pleistoceen de groene velden van het aloude Ultima Thule situeren ? Wie weet gaat het om een vrij recente periode, uit het zesde tot derde milennium vóór onze jaartelling, en die men in de geologie de Atlantische periode noemt. Toen was het legendarische Mu-gebied allang, rond 12.500 of 12.000 jaar voor onze jaartelling, in de golven verdwenen (4). Waarschijnlijk verdween, tijdens dezelfde natuurramp, Atlantis, dat andere hypothetische land .

Wat er ook van zij, doorheen heel zijn lange loopbaan heeft Wirth niet opgehouden, zijn studies over Europa’s voorgeschiedenis voort te zetten, daarbij vooral de aandacht vestigend op de paleo-epigrafie.

In zijn speurtocht naar al wat de voorhistorische Moeder Aarde-kultus kan bevestigen, heeft hij het onmetelijk belang onderstreept van de pre-Indo-europese beschaving voor het kultureelleven én de religie in Europa. Het magisch-religieuze leven in die periode hield hem voortdurend bezig, en hij bewees dat vóór de stroom Indogermaanse veroveraars, die over heel de antieke wereld van de Atlantische oceaan tot het Nabije- en Verre-Oosten neerstortte, er hier reeds mensen leefden die zich even zeer als de nieuwkomers om geestelijke zaken bekommerden.

Mogelijk zijn Wirth’s werken getekend door een zeker dilettantisme, maar loopt niet iedereen die zich in de kronkelingen van ons oudste verleden waagt, dit risiko ? Hoeveel bewonderaars van dat geheimzinnig verleden goochelen niet met min of meer fantaisistische gevolgtrekkingen en benaderingen, zich tegelijk als “gezaghebbend” voordoend ? Zij weten, wat u, de lezer, niet weet; zij zijn ingewijd en u bent het niet. Zij halen hun ‘wetenschap’, rechtstreeks of onrechtstreeks, bij een of ndere Tibetaanse monnik, of bij een of andere, min of meer geheimzinnige Goeroe, die de sleutel tot een eeuwenoud mysterie bezit…

Laat ons maar toegeven: hoeveel pretentieuze domheden vinden we niet onder de dekmantel van wat onze vrienden van de Traditie, de ‘Primordiale Traditie’ noemen ? René Guénon en Julius Evola hebben zich veel moeite getroost, de kwakzalvers van de – zogezegd – traditionele wetenschappen te ontmaskeren. Desondanks lopen ze nog rond en staan ze voortdurend klaar, u om het even welke valse ‘revelatie’ of welk produkt van hun op hol geslagen verbeelding ook aan te smeren …

Moeten we Herman Wirth bij de kwakzalvers van de Traditie onderbrengen ? Wij zijn overtuigd van niet, maar wél dienen we met omzichtigheid de resultaten van zijn onderzoekingen te beschouwen.

Zo heeft hij zich vér in de zogenaamde Ura Linda-kroniek gewaagd. Is ze een vervalsing, een louter literaire fantasie in de aard van de “Ossian-liederen” ? Is het een laattijdige kompilatie van een mondelinge traditie, ais de “Kalewala” ? De vraag blijft gesteld.

Vergeten we anderzijds ni et dat hij zolang hij persona grata was bij Ahnenerbe, ais groot geleerde op het vlak van de prehistorie werd beschouwd; en dat hij na zijn ongenade, zelfs het recht verbeurde les te geven en in het openbaar te spreken.

Jean Beelen schreef: “De onmetelijke verdienste van Prof. Wirth ligt erin, de oerperiode van het geschrift en de symboliek te hebben dóórgelicht en te hebben bewezen dat de mensen uit die tijd een kosmisch aanvoelen hadden dat aan de basis lag van een volkse godsdienst”. Dat is al héél wat en zo moeten we wei rekening houd en met al wat hij deed, en al wat hij schreef, zelfs al blijven we vrij te redetwisten over zijn – onbetwistbaar belangrijke – aanbreng inzake de voorgeschiedenis van de Westerse wereld.

Marc. EEMANS

(Vert. Roeland Raes)
(1) Het boek van Sebottendorf is niet te verwarren met dat van Dietrich Bronder dat eveneens de titel “Bevor Hitler kam” draagt (Hans Pfeiffer-Verlag, Hannover, 1964). Het essay van R.H. Phelps “Before Hitler came”. Thule Society and German Order” (in het Journal of Modern History, 1963) is géén vertaling maar een zelfstandige studie.
(2) Over Herman Wirth en het aktivisme, over Herman Wirth en het Vlaams-nationalisme, is het laatste woord nog niet gezegd. Willemsen en Elias vermelden hem even in de rand. Heel wat meer gegevens vindt men in een studie van Dr. Lammert Buning over Wirth, verschenen in Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen, 3/74.
(3) In feite medegesticht, samen met Hermann Reischle, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Babel, Georg Ebrecht, Erwin Metzner en Richard Hintmann.
(4) Zie James Churchward: “Mu, le continent perdu.”

Interview with "New Antaios"

 

Interview with "New Antaios"

(http://www.new-antaios.net)

Who are you? What’s the main purpose of your “New-Antaios” project? And why do you refer to the mythological figure of Antaios? Is it a revival of Jünger’s and Eliade’s Antaios or an English counterpart of the former Antaios journal of the Belgian novelist Christopher Gérard?

I was born in Agram (a German name for the city of Zagreb) in Croatia just over 42 years ago. I have lived in Zagreb during the times while my country was occupied by Yugoslav communist regime led by dictator Josip Broz Tito. There I have studied Political Sciences at the University of Zagreb and later on Philosophy and Psychology at Hrvatski Studiji, University of Zagreb. I have studied as well at Universities in Scandinavia, United Kingdom and Germany. I am coming from a family which is of an ethnic German heritage.

Antaios is uniting Earth and Sea, soil and water without whom both there is no life. Antaios father was Poseidon, the God of Sea and mother Gaia of the Earth. Antaios or Antaeus in Greek means as well ‘’against’’ so in this way ‘’The New Antaios’’ is in cultural and philosophical terms set to make an intellectual bulwark against that what is destroying Our European culture, tradition, heritage, folklore and with that ultimately our roots.

Journal ‘’The New Antaios’’ is the continuation of the original ‘’Antaios’’ Journal of Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger so we can say it is a revival albeit the Journal will/is as well reflecting on all that is happening in these postmodern times. Hence Journal represents what I call ‘’Postmodern European thought’’ and as such serves primarily as an outlet for the postmodern philosophers and thinkers.

I do respect and highly admire Christopher Gerard and his work on Antaios in years from years 1992 to 2001. Like Gerard I dislike New Age teachings and don’t have any interest in TraditionalistSchool.  The New Antaios is made of four sections which are making the whole Journal. First part is ‘’Plethon’’ the name I gave after the Byzantine Hellenistic philosopher George Gemistos Plethon and articles in that section are related to Hellenism, Heathenism in a scholarly way. Contributions will be made as well by certain authors from Asatru background. Heathenism and Heithni comes from the Old Norse word heiðni which was used to describe the pre-Christian spiritual beliefs and practices of the Northern European peoples. The word Heithinn (or Heathen) comes from the Old Norse word heiðinn, an adjective to describe the ideals of Heithni (ex. Heithinn ethics - those ethics which conform to Heithni), or as a noun to describe those who live by the ethic and world-view of Heithni (ex. He is Heithinn, those people are Heithnir [plural]). Heiðni also means 'high, pure, clear' in Icelandic language. Word also describes person who is a dweller in place in the nature. Postmodern Heathens are those people who are reviving and revitalizing the tradition through serious study, research and dedication combined with the worship of the Gods and Goddesses or just simply in a way of their thinking without the ritual worship part. Personally I am keen of combining the two in a proper and balanced way. Second section is ‘’Aesthetic Vedanta’’ named after the book by Swami Bhaktivedanta Tripurari Maharaja, Western teacher of ancient tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Aesthetic Vedanta section deals with Hindutva, Hinduism,Vaishnavism and Gaudiya Vaishnavism exclusively. Third section is ‘’Suncovrat’’ a Croatian archaic word for the Solstice and deals with pre-Christian cultures which existed prior to Christianization of what makes nowadays Republic of Croatia. Fourth section is the main section of the Antaios Journal.

I would further like to point out that Christopher Gerard has no input whatsoever and isn’t in any way associated or affiliated with this new Journal. That is why the journal has prefix ‘’The New’’ to clearly mark difference with previous two journals. As far as I know Gerard’s Journal ceased to exist just on the turn of the century hence prefix ‘’The New’’ is completely appropriate here. While it will preserve and retain the original idea and concept with due respect to previous editors and directors of the Journal, it will be updated with short blog style texts, proper academic articles and essays which reflect on and take a critical eye of current state of affairs in different areas of  philosophy, politics, culture, art, tradition, science and these postmodern times .

What was the maturation process of your worldview? Has it to do with Croatian politics or not?

 I would say that I have spiritual and political Weltanschauung complementing each other. I was brought up in a family whose background is Christian albeit my late grandfather and my late father were both reading authors like Nietzsche and Jünger and considere themselves to be Pagans. I was brought up on stories from ancient Greece and Old Norse and Germanic tales whom my friends in school didn’t even hear about. My own father was a Heathen. He wrote small and up until now unpublished treatise on what he calls ‘’Raan’’. In this book Raan is knowledge of the Gods and Goddesses who once in previous Yugas did visit our planet. In this work he is influenced by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophy.

After spending years at the University in Croatia studying Political sciences in Zagreb I went to become a monk in Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. The reason for that was again in the Family. During the mid to late 80es my family got interested in Gaudiya Vaishnavism so I started reading and studying different books of Vedic knowledge like Upanishads, Puranas and Bhagavad Gita. I have discovered in mid 90es about Traditionalist School, Rene Guenon and Julius Evola. In years to come I have been reading and studying about diverse cultures, traditions of Europe and parallel with that I got initiated in the Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism while travelling to one of my spiritual pilgrimages to India.

Hence as a result, my own spiritual belief system would be Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism, while I permanently study and read about Indo-European beliefs of our ancestors, Ostrogothic pre-Christian beliefs, Old Norse, Hellenic and Germanic pre-Christian belief systems and Mithraism. Vedic knowledge in my opinion is very important key to unlock many secrets of the European tradition itself. In line with that I very much admire Hindutva writers such as Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup, Indian historian Bal Gangadhar Tilak , contemporary scholar from Belgium Dr. Koenraad Elst as well as Alain Danielou who are all big influence. Next influence would be primarily my own teacher Sri Ananta das Babaji Maharaja by whom I was directly initiated in Parivar or Traditional line which goes back many centuries ago, then authors such as: Sri Kunjabihari das Babaji Maharaja (who is the direct teacher of my own teacher Ananta das Babaji Maharaja), Kundali das, Binode Bihari das Babaji and Sripad Bhaktivedanta Tripurari Swami Maharaja whose certain books and teachings are in my opinion the Gaudiya Vaishnava answer to Traditionalist school. There should be veneration of our ancestors together with the firm belief in divine origins of Our Ancestral lines, veneration of Nature and veneration of the Gods and Goddesses which are part of our European Identity. Perhaps it would be the best to quote here another great influence of mine, Dominique Venner: ''To live according to tradition is to conform to the ideal that incarnates, to cultivate excellence according to its standard, to rediscover its roots, to transmit its heritage, to be in solidarity with the people who uphold it. ''

Croatian politics were influential to my worldview and perhaps it would be better to give a bit of background explanation from the not so well known Croatian history. Certain people would like such knowledge to remain hidden as such. In my opinion Croatian people have a unique position in Europe. There are people who label Croatia Western Balkans which is a complete nonsense. According to what I was reading from diverse sources Croats aren’t only just Slavs and are mixture of Slavenized Germanic tribes, Celtic tribes, Illyrians, ancient Romans, ancient Greeks and Indo-Persians. Over the span of more than half a century Croat academics and researchers who were proclaiming such theories were executed or ‘’disappeared’’. Persecutions started in times of the monarchist Yugoslavia up to late 80es of 20^th century in the communist regime. Names like Haraqwati and Haraxvati which paleographic expert Dr. Kalyanaraman has found were names of the tribes, etnonymes which clearly show how early we can find about Croatian origins. Places where such names were found were part of Bharata Varsha or what is today India. Archaeologists have found along names emblems and coats of arms which look very much similar to Croatian coat of arms with the twenty - five field "chessboard". In a similar way the remnants and artefacts were also found when those tribes have moved from what is today India to Persia and those names can be found in 6th century before Christ in places like Bagistan and Persepolis and also with ancient peoples like Hurrwuhé. Ancestors of today’s Croats were worshippers of Saraswati Goddess of Vedic India (Goddess of learning, arts and music) and from her name comes originally name Hrvati. Croats are therefore known as Hrvati, Haravaitii, Arachosians or Sarasvatians, descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the Harauti province & the Haravaiti or the Sarasvati River. The recent hravati /hrvati [sic] hence comes from haraxvaiti and earlier spelt as haraquati (arachotos, arachosia, araxes). Sarasvati is the river and Arachosia being the region." Their mention is as well on the legendary inscriptions of Darius the Great. Early Croatian pre-Christian religion was derived from primordial Persian Sun-worship. Even the Croatian word for tie is kravat(a) which is again another connecting word.

Furthermore, the name of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, is related to the Zagros mountain range of Iran. The Dinara mountains in Dalmatia may be connected to Mount Dinar (Dene) of Iran. When the tribes came to what is nowadays Croatia they have mingled with the numerous local Slavic (or Slavenized Germanic tribes) tribes and adopted the Slavic language from them. Meanwhile after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire Croats organized the local Slavs into a state and gave them their national name. Before the invasion of the Avars ca. 560 the White or Western Croats created along with the Antes a great state extending north of the Carpathians from the upper Elbe to the upper Dniester. (35: Niederle, 263-266; Dvornik, The Slavs, 277-297) R. Heinzel is of the opinion that the Carpathians of the old Germanic Hervarsaga took their name from the Croats who called them the Harvate mountains i.e. Croatian mountains. (36: Heinzel, 499; Dvornik, op. cit., 284, sq.)" (Mandic 1970, Ch.1)

There are similarities in folklore as well. "There are old Croatian customs and national poems that have been cited as evidencing lingering traces of the fire and sun worship of the Persians. Fire, the essence of human origin, the sun, and the great boiling cauldron around which the warriors spring in the age old kolo or circle dance, all these are ingredients in the national lore of the Croatian nation. The Croat vilas or fairy witches resemble the peris of Iranian mythology. Then there is the legendary Sviatozov, the personification of strength, a being almost too huge for the earth to bear. He is strongly reminiscent of the "elephant-bodied" Rustum of Persian legend." (Guldescu 1964, pt.1.II) "It should be noted that only the thesis of the Iranian origin of the Croats can explain the name "Horvath", the title of a Croat dignitary Banus, the names "White" and "Red Croatian", and the Bogumile phenomenon (like Cathars in Occitania). According to this theory, the Croats were a branch of the Caucasian Iranians, who lived somewhere in the western Caucasus during the era of the Roman Emperors. The Caucasian Anten were another branch of this group." (Dobrovich 1963)

Research shows clearly everything what I have written and quoted above to be the truth although some oppose that theory as they want to preserve artificial Panslavism , idea of  Yugosphere ( the idea for the 3^rd  united Yugoslavia without Slovenia and with Albania) under the guise of ‘’Western Balkans’’. In Croatian language there is an excellent word I really like: ‘’Samosvojnost’’. Samosvojnost means Identity in Croatian language. In my opinion Croatian identity should and must be preserved only through the independent republic of Croatia or as it is now. Hence Croatia does not need any new unions. Friendship yes, but union definitely not.

Serbia on the other hand would like to establish themselves as a regional leader. They play with naive Croatian government and Croatian president Josipović while behind their back they lobby in EU to make what was once war in ex-Yugoslavia look as a ‘’civil war’’ and accuse Croatia who were defending themselves . They do have some allies and friends in Europe who would like to see them as the leaders in the region. Those allies on the other hand actually don’t consider Serbia as a friend but as a tool for their own means and nothing else. It is a travesty of justice to see Croatian generals such as Gotovina and Markač to be sitting in Hague so just that Croatia can get a green light for EU so that bureaurocrats in EU they can say that ‘’all sides’’ were equally responsible. I would like to ask the question then. What about the people and country of Croatia which was invaded, whose homes are burned and destroyed? According to that ‘’theory’’ Croatians should not have been defending themselves as they were supposed just to sit and wait to be erased from the face of this planet. 

Croatia has been suffering since demise of Austria-Hungary. It wasn’t good for Croatians either to be in any previous unions but union with Serbs has proven to be so far the worst one. Union with Austria-Hungary was far from perfect but at least we were in a monarchy which had culture and tradition. Croatian people don’t need anything anymore other than their own independence and peace with the neighbouring nations.

How the time is passing by I am less and less interested in Croatian politics. As a result I won’t be writing in Croatian language anymore since there is no purpose for it. I will rather use and invest my energy, effort and time for something I think will yield certain results than to write constantly for something what will anyway reach just a handful of people or just completely wither away. I have learned that from an example of the members of the ‘’Croatian Historical Revolution’’. Over the years I have read articles by leading Croatian intellectuals and scholars such as Dr. Tomislav Sunić then Dr. Jure Georges Vujić, prof. Amir Riđanović, prof. Petar Bujas (all members of Croatian group similar to G.R.E.C.E. – Arhelinea – www.arhelinea.com ) Dr. Zoran Kravar, then Croat republican conservatives such as: Tomislav Jonjić, Mario Marcos Ostojić, Hrvoje Hitrec, Croatian scientists such as : Dr. Vitomir Belaj, prof. Tomo Vinšćak, Dr. Radoslav Katičić, and prof. Mario Kopić and Dr. Hrvoje Lorković (of whom we can’t hear these days what is a real tragedy since Dr. Lorković is one of Croatian important intellectuals). Croatians should be happy to have such giants of free thinking yet many in Croatia don’t even know about some of them. That is for me completely bizarre. If one is carefully reading articles and books by above mentioned intellectuals and scholars one can only see that many of them are actually disillusioned with the current state of Croatia altogether. That is evident even from their articles. Hence as a result of that Zoran Kravar is not interested in any kind of politics neither he wants to be or get involved (yet he is one of authorities on Ernst Jünger in Croatia) same is with prof. Tomo Vinšćak as well, while others like Mario Kopić and Dr. Tom Sunić are publishing their new books outside of Croatia because there is hardly any interest in their ideas in Croatia. It seems that Dr. Jure Georges Vujić will publish his new books as well outside of Croatia. That is unavoidable since Croatians are lethargic in finding new solutions in political dialogue or any kind of new political ideas. They would rather stick to something what is completely falling apart while thinking that ‘’it would get better’’. I have a best friend in Croatia whose political ideas are in minority and while he wants betterment in any spheres of Croatian life (including politics and his fight against corruption) he doesn’t have as much support as he actually would and should get. It is the apathy and lethargy which are deeply rooted in certain parts of Croatian nation (thankfully not all of it) with its roots in the fear of change and political and historical lower self-esteem (which is really uncalled for, since Croats have such rich history, tradition and culture of whom they should be absolutely proud of) . The question they often ask themselves is: ‘’ What would happen if things change? ‘’ and because of constantly repeating that question they are indeed unable to make any significant change. I believe firmly that in the forthcoming parliamentary elections Croats will elect again some party or coalition of parties which will not bring nothing new to already stagnating Croatian political scene. In the right as well as left and centre there is nobody who could potentially have a quality for the deep changes Croatia needs desperately. In the right side of spectrum and as well on centre and left one can just see political opportunists in Croatia who long for their seat in parliament (called Sabor in Croatia) or certain position. That is their goal before anything else I am afraid, of course my humble bow to those politicians who aren’t like that and are in significant, significant minority.

My own political interests nowadays evolve around Eurocontinentalism and European Identitarian Communitarianism. Even though I do speak Croatian language I consider myself first and foremost an ethnic German with Prussian mentality, after that I am an European.

Eurocontinentalism in this case represents strong continental Europe which stands between USA and Great Britain on one and Russia on the other side. The question of Europe here is not just a matter a blood; it is spiritual, historical and cultural phenomenon.
This further quote actually explains some of my thinking on the matter: ‘’Implicit in this view is the assumption that the body is inseparable from the spirit animating it, that biological difference, as a distinct vitality, is another form of spiritual difference, and that the significance of such differences (given that man is a spiritual being, not merely an animal) is best seen in terms of culture and history rather than nineteenth-century biological science. American "white racialists" with their materialist-technical conceptions of race actually diminish the significance of the Racial Question by reducing it to a simple matter of genes, biology, equations....’’ ( Mladikov – The Phora Forum)

Dominique Venner is in my opinion the greatest influence for the Eurocontinentalism and my own political Weltanschauung with his writings, articles and books. In Croatia some of his books are available as well.

His thoughts describe the best what I think further:

‘’ The idea that is made of love is no more frivolous than the tragic sense of history that characterizes the European spirit. It defines the civilization, its immanent spirit, and each person’s sense of life, in the same way the idea shapes one’s work. Is the sole point of work to make money, as they believe across the Atlantic, or, besides ensuring a just return, is it to realize oneself in a job well done, even in such apparently trivial things as keeping one’s house. This idea urged our ancestors to create beauty in their most humble and most lofty efforts. To be conscious of the idea is to give a metaphysical sense to “memory.”

To cultivate our “memory,” to transmit it in a living way to our children, to contemplate the ordeals that history has imposed on us–this is requisite to any renaissance. Faced with the unprecedented challenges that the catastrophes of the twentieth century have imposed on us and the terrible demoralization it has fostered, we will discover in the reconquest of our racial “memory” the way to respond to these challenges, which were unknown to our ancestors, who lived in a stable, strong, well-defended world.

The consciousness of belonging to Europe, of Europeanness, is far older than the modern concept of Europe. It is apparent under the successive names of Hellenism, Celticness, Romanism, the Frankish Empire, or Christianity. Seen as an immemorial tradition, Europe is the product of a multi-millennial community of culture deriving its distinctness and unity from its constitutive peoples and a spiritual heritage whose supreme expression is the Homeric poems. ‘’

To read further perhaps I would recommend this article (and as well all other articles by Dominique Venner) : http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/06/europe-and-europeanness/#more-881

What were your main sources of inspiration?

I have mentioned some of them above. I would say that Ernst Jünger, Dominique Venner and Nicolás Gómez Dávila are the most significant and important influence for me personally simply because they complement each other perfectly and in my own opinion they represent the true European Tradition which Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Alain Danielou and Koenraad Elst represent in Hindu Tradition. Apart from them other authors, thinkers and philosophers I would say first of all I feel especially close regarding ideas and Weltanschauung are : Croatian thinkers and members of the ‘’Croatian Historical Revolution’’, Classical philosophers such as : Emperor Julian the Apostate, Porphyry, Celsus, Platonis Sallustius, Libanius, Julius Firmicus Maternus, Iamblichus, Gemistus Pletho(n) and other such philosophers, Erik von von Kuehnelt - Leddihn, Croatian philosopher prof. Mario Kopić, prof. Robert Steuckers, certain ideas of Alain de Benoist, certain ideas of Dr. Guillaume Faye, Dr. Georges Dumezil, Dr. Jan Assmann, Mircea Eliade, Emile Cioran, Alain Danielou, German greatest living poet Rolf Schilling,  Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, German Romanticism period authors and artists, Felix Dahn, Antoine Saint du Exupery, certain ideas of Julius Evola, Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt, composers Arvo Part and Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, postmodern musical projects such as Triarii, Arditi, In Slaughter Natives and new project Winglord, artists such as Ludwig Fahrenkrog, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Fidus, Caspar David Friedrich, Hermann Hendrich, Franz von Stuck, Carl Larsson, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Jean Béraud and others.

Who are the main Croatian thinkers according to you and that are completely ignored in the rest of the world? How could we discover them?

Main and most influential Croatian thinkers were:  Dr. Milan von Šufflay, Dr. Ivo Pilar, Dr. Vinko Krišković, Dr. Filip Lukas, Dr. Julije (Julius) von Makanec, Dr. Stjepan Buć and authors involved with journal ‘’Spremnost’’ : prof. Tias Mortigjija, Dr. Milivoj Magdić, Dr. Ante Ciliga & Dr. Vilko Rieger (Dr. George W. Cesarich) . Influential are also early works of prof. Ivan Oršanić, Dr. Ivo Korsky, then author Ivan Softa (Croatian Knut Hamsun), national poet Jerko Skračić and a few others. It is very hard for somebody in Europe to discover them as their works were burned, destroyed and left to be forgotten by Yugoslavian and Serbian communist regime. Back in 1970es of 20^th century for just reading the works of these authors, philosophers and thinkers one could get a lengthy prison term and that would be of course if you did find their books somewhere. I am collecting their works wherever I can find them and that is in most cases extremely hard and on top of that some of their books command very high prices. Situation is not like with authors of Conservative Revolution whose works remain saved and translated to many languages now. Most of the above mentioned people were brutally murdered by either Serbian Monarchist regime who ruled the first Yugoslavia or by communist regime who ruled Yugoslavia and occupied Croatia after the year 1945.

At this point in time there is no translated literature in any of other languages except the book ‘’Southslav question’’ written by Dr. Ivo Pilar (under pseudonym Dr. Leon v. Südland) which was printed at the beginning of the 20^th century in Vienna originally in German language. Book was never reprinted again either in German or English (or any other foreign language) and was translated in Croatian language and has since been in print only twice. Copies of both editions are virtually impossible to find. Books of other authors are not being reprinted at all. I really don’t know if that is because of the economic crisis in Croatia since many members of Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) turned out to be crooks and thieves who were stealing money from their own country and country’s resources. It has been going on like that for a long time and no government (even the coalition of liberals and social democrats which lasted for 4 years)  didn’t make situation any better or because there is no interest in those books and those authors at all. It is partially because of many Croatians were killed and murdered from 1944 to early 1950es by communist regime (and in years after that up to 1990 just prior to war in Croatia) and because of the mentality which became a norm since 1918, after Croats lost the war as part of Austria-Hungary. Dr. Ivo Pilar did warn Croatians about those kinds of problems especially in two of his books. One of those books was above mentioned ‘’Southslav question’’.

I am afraid that the only way to discover them will be through book I am currently writing and subsequently I will translate some of the most important works by Šufflay, Pilar, Lukas, Krišković, Makanec, Mortigjija and Magdić. I will start with works of Dr. Ivo Pilar and Dr. Milivoj Magdić whose works I am collecting at the present time. I am putting together Dr. Milivoj Magdić’s and dr. Ivo Pilar’s articles and smaller important works and will include one very informative article about Milivoj Magdić’s life done by one Croatian historian. Dr. Pilar’s book ‘’Southslav question’’ will be most likely the first one to surface followed by Dr. Magdić’s collected works. It is very interesting to mention that Dr. Ivo Pilar and Dr. Milivoj Magdić had both the biggest private libraries in the city of Zagreb and most likely in Croatia at that time. I have heard that currently Alain de Benoist has one of the biggest private libraries.

So we can talk about a genuine Croatian “Conservative Revolution”?

Croatian Historical Revolution was a German Conservative Revolution’s and France’s Ordre Nouveau’s counterpart. It strikes me how there wasn’t anybody in Croatia trying to compare German Conservative Revolution with all these authors we have had. My guess is that certain levels of academia in Croatia have some sort of inferiority complex and lower self-esteem. Except post modern Croatian intellectuals and academics I have mentioned above (and most in this group were living, studying and teaching for some time outside of Croatia) other Croatian intellectuals constantly behave in a way which has ruined indescribably reputation of Croatia. Members of Croatian Historical revolution were totally opposite. Partially that is because they grew up in Austria- Hungary and partially because up until year 1918 influence of Balkan ‘’culture’’ wasn’t predominant in Croatia and our gene pool wasn’t almost destroyed as it is the case today (holocaust of Croats and ethnic Germans from years 1944 -1950es). Most of the people who today want any kind of communism to be back in Croatia are leftovers of previous regime and they are not even Croats by their genes or in spirit.

Members of CHR (Croatian Historical Revolution) have had experience with different ideologies and transformations as the ones in Germany. They rallied for the Croatia as an integral part of Europe and how some of them called it at the time ‘’Bieli Zapad’’ (White West). Like authors in German counterpart they have produced diverse works such as philosophical treatises, political journalism, manifestoes which have outlined their ideas for the transformation of Croatia and role of Croatia in Central Europe and Europe altogether. They were strongly opposing liberalism and even liberal democracy and they have rejected despiritualization and commercial culture. They advocated new conservative thought which was inspired by Croatian national patriotism. I find their ideal very much connected with ideals of German Conservative Revolution members and nowadays with prof. Dominique Venner.

How could we connect Croatian authors with their other European counterparts? Who are the Croatian authors that should be read together, beyond every language barrier?

My opinion is that all the works of the above mentioned members of the Croatian Historical revolution are very much worth exploring, studying and reading. They all do come highly recommended albeit due to totalitarian and primitive backwards communist regime headed by Josip Broz Tito and his blind followers lots of original writings are lost , destroyed or are very rare to that extent that only Croatian National Library may have only one copy or original of each of the original works of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution. None of those works were translated in any languages (as I have mentioned above) except Dr. Pilar’s ‘’Southslav question’’ which was originally written in German and then translated to Croatian. Dr. Ivo Pilar was speaking and writing as Dr. Milan v. Šufflay and many other members of CHR, in several languages. In those times after the I WW it was quite normal for people of Croatia to speak German as a second and in many cases as their mother language together with Croatian language. Hopefully in time through my own ‘’ Hyperborea Press’’ which is the part of Somnium Media all the main works of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution will surface and be translated in English language. As always one has to be realistic, as with any of such efforts good will isn’t enough, I will have to invest money and time into this project in a balanced manner.

Do you see original viewpoints or bias by these Croatian authors that you cannot find back in the works of their other European counterparts?

 I know that I risk now sounding a bit vague but most of their viewpoints are similar or identical with their German and French counterparts, although one of their main focal points or focus was naturally fight against the repressive Serbian monarchist regime and its imperialistic hegemony. I have written recently some articles about this topic. I believe that I will answer much broader to this question in my book about Croatian Historical Revolution.

What are your projects for the near future?

The New Antaios Journal’s further development is my priority and alongside with TNAJ there is ‘’Eurocontinentalism Journal’’ and my own ‘’Somnium Media’’ website which offers music, merchandise and books which are serving as an alternative to world of mass consumerism we live in. Great help in that effort is my dear friend mr. Zvonimir Tosic who is an editor in chief and managing webmaster of The New Antaios Journal and Somnium websites. The New Antaios and Eurocontinentalism Journal will both have some interesting interviews and articles in months to come. Somnium Media imprint ‘’Hyperborea Press’’ will publish most significant works of members of the Croatian Historical revolution and hopefully some works by Nicolas Gomez Davila.

Further related to ‘’Hyperborea Press’’ I have plans for the three books and three translations. First one is above already mentioned book about Croatian Historical Revolution and its members and it will be an overview of the significance of Croatian Historical Revolution and works of its members and authors not only for Croatia but for Europe and European thought as well. Another book is ‘’ Gaudiya Vaishnavism - The Living and Timeless Tradition ‘’ which will explain how important Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism is (a belief in Hinduism) not only for Hinduism but for the resurgence of Indo – European thought in general. I know that Dr. Alexander Jacob has written extensively on the topic of resurgence of Indo-European thought but his emphasis is not like in authors such as Georges Dumezil , Jan de Vries, or Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel and Alain Danielou in Hinduism or ancestral pre-christian beliefs. Rather he uses as an example for restoration of Indo –European thought resurgence of European Medieval Christian noble spirit of ‘’archaic and brave’’ and Prussian noble spirit. In my own opinion the best starting point for such study would be a Saxon epic ‘’Heliand’’.

Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnava thought in this book will serve as an alternative for the Traditionalist thought which was espoused by Guenon, Schuon and other Traditionalists. Third book deals with Croatian pre-Christian and pre-Slavic legends and it delves in times of the heroic Croatian past. I have contacted one still living Croatian author who gave me information on stories and its characters which obviously have roots in pre-Christian and pre-Slavic times of Croatia. It is quite a work and a huge challenge to reconstruct those tales and to find out and connect certain characters. Some shortened versions of those stories I will be presenting at certain Storytelling Fairs in Ireland during the summer. Three translations will be my most likely first translation work on the new book by Dr. Jure Georges Vujic (which will be his first book in English language) followed by translations of two books of the members of the Croatian Historical Revolution, Dr. Ivo Pilar’s ‘’Southslav question’’ and Dr. Milivoj Magdić’s best and collected works complete with my own explanations and commentaries. I will also continue writing for Brett Stevens's Journal on line www.amerika.org which is with Europa Synergon one of the most interesting journals to be found on line.

Thank you very much Robert for the opportunity you gave me with this interview and as well thank you for your influence on my own thought which is indispensable and very important. I would also like to thank to anybody who has read this interview and found it interesting or just thought provoking.

 

(interview taken by Robert Steuckers, late spring 2011).

Urkultur 15: Moeller van den Bruck, conservadurismo revolucionario

URKULTUR Nº 15. MOELLER VAN DEN BRUCK: CONSERVADURISMO REVOLUCIONARIO

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

 

URKULTUR Nº 15.

MOELLER VAN DEN BRUCK:
CONSERVADURISMO REVOLUCIONARIO.

REVISTA ELECTRÓNICA:
Enlace con issuu.com

SUMARIO.

Editorial.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck y la Nouvelle Droite
Sebastian J. Lorenz

Moeller van den Bruck: un rebelde conservador
Luca Leonello Rimbotti

Moeller van den Bruck: ¿un “precursor póstumo”?
Denis Goedel

Moeller y Dostoievski
Robert Steuckers

Moeller y la Kulturpessimismus de Weimar
Ferran Gallego

Moeller y los Jungkonservativen
Erik Norling

Moeller y Spengler
Ernesto Milá

Moeller y la Konservative Revolution
Keith Bullivant

Moeller van den Bruck
Alain de Benoist

 

Publicado por [e-mail]

Wertvollzug

 

Wertvollzug

 

Ex: http://rezistant.blogspot.com/

 

Die Wertlehre feiert in der Erörterung der Frage des gerechten Krieges ihre eigentlichen Triumphe. Das liegt in der Natur der Sache. Jede Rücksicht auf den Gegner entfällt, ja sie wird zum Unwert, wenn der Kampf gegen diesen Gegner ein Kampf für die höchsten Werte ist. Der Unwert hat kein Recht gegenüber dem Wert, und für die Durchsetzung des höchsten Wertes ist kein Preis zu hoch. Hier gibt es dann infolgedessen nur noch Vernichter und Vernichtete. Alle Kategorien des klassischen Kriegsrechts des Jus Publicum Europaeum - gerechter Feind, gerechter Kriegsgrund, Verhältnismässigkeit der Mittel und das geordnete Vorgehen, der debitus modus - fallen dieser Wertlosigkeit hoffnungslos zum Opfer. Der Drang zur Wertdurchsetzung wird hier ein Zwang zum unmittelbaren Wertvollzug.

Carl Schmitt, Die Tyrannei der Werte, 1960.

Gottfried Benn

Gottfried Benn in Interview (1956)

Gottfried Benn liest aus "Kunst und Drittes Reich"

 

Evola e il mondo di lingua tedesca

Evola e il mondo di lingua tedesca

Alberto Lombardo

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

La Germania e in genere il mondo di cultura tedesca ebbero per Evola un’importanza centrale. Sin da giovanissimo questi apprese il tedesco per avvicinarsi alle opere della filosofia idealistica; la sua dottrina filosofica deve molto all’idealismo, ma ancor più a Nietzsche, Weininger e Spengler. Nel 1933 compì il suo primo viaggio in Austria ; per tutti gli Anni ’30 e ’40 continuò a tenersi aggiornato leggendo saggî scientifici in lingua tedesca sui diversi argomenti dei quali si occupava: dalla romanità antica (Altheim) alla preistoria (Wirth, Günther), dall’alchimia (Böhme) alle razze (Clauß, ancora Günther), dalla teoria politica (Spann, Heinrich) all’economia (Sombart) e via dicendo. In generale, considerando gli apparati di note, i riferimenti culturali e in un bilancio che tenga conto di tutti gli apporti non mi sembra affatto di esagerare sostenendo che il peso degli studi pubblicati in tedesco sia nell’opera complessiva di Evola almeno pari a quello di quelli italiani.

Tutto questo è già assai indicativo dell’influenza della cultura tedesca sull’opera di Evola. Vanno aggiunti però altri dati: richiamando qui quanto accennato in sede biografica nel capitolo primo, ricordo i lunghi soggiorni di Evola in Austria e Germania, le numerose conferenze ivi tenute, i rapporti con esponenti della tradizione aristocratica e conservatrice mitteleuropea e della Konservative Revolution etc . Inoltre nei paesi di lingua tedesca Evola godette, almeno sino alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale, di una notorietà diversa da quella che ebbe in Italia, poiché vi fu accolto quasi come l’esponente di una particolare corrente di pensiero italiana, e ciò sin dal 1933, anno della pubblicazione di Heidnischer Imperialismus . Questo il giudizio in merito di Adriano Romualdi: «L’azione di Evola in Germania non fu politica, anche se contribuì a dissipare molti equivoci e a preparare un’intesa tra Fascismo e Nazionalsocialismo. Essa investì il significato di quelle tradizioni cui in Italia e in Germania si richiamavano i regimi, il simbolo romano e il mito nordico, il significato di classicismo e romanticismo, o di contrapposizioni artificiose, come quella tra romanità e germanesimo» .

Dal 1934 Evola tiene conferenze in Germania: in un’università di Berlino, al secondo nordisches Thing a Brema, e all’Herrenklub di Heinrich von Gleichen, rappresentante dell’aristocrazia tedesca (era barone) col quale stabilì una «cordiale e feconda amicizia» . Così Evola ricordò nel 1970 quest’importante esperienza: «ogni settimana si invitava una personalità tedesca o internazionale in quel circolo di Junkers. Devo dire peraltro che, se ci fossimo aspettati di vedere dei giganti biondi con gli occhi azzurri la delusione sarebbe stata grande, poiché per la maggior parte erano piccoli e panciuti. Dopo la cena e il rituale dei toasts, l’invitato doveva tenere una conferenza. Mentre questi signori fumavano il loro sigaro e sorseggiavano il loro bicchiere di birra, io parlavo. Fu allora che Himmler sentì parlare di me» .
È effettivamente assai verosimile che l’attenzione da parte degli ambienti ufficiali per Evola sia nata in seguito alle prime conferenze in Germania. I suoi rapporti col nazionalsocialismo furono di collaborazione esterna, e specialmente con diversi settori delle SS tra cui l’Ahnenerbe ; Evola espresse nei confronti dell’“ordine” guidato da Himmler parole assai positive , anche nel dopoguerra , che da una parte gli valsero i prevedibili (e fors’anche scontati) strali dei suoi detrattori, dall’altra determinarono una rilettura – in seno alla storiografia e allo stesso “sentimento del mondo” della Destra Radicale del dopoguerra – del nazionalsocialismo come di un movimento popolare guidato da un’élite ascetico-guerriera . Dagli ormai numerosi dati d’archivio pubblicati, risulta un quadro di Evola tenuto in considerazione ma sempre osservato con cura dagli ambienti ufficiali tedeschi .

Dopo il conflitto mondiale la notorietà di Evola nei paesi di lingua tedesca andò scemando; la sua immobilità fisica pare che gli impedì, tra l’altro, ulteriori viaggi all’estero. Solo negli ultimi decenni Evola è stato fatto oggetto di una sorta di riscoperta, per merito soprattutto di Hans Thomas Hansen, che ne ha tradotto (e ritradotto) la buona parte delle opere, con il consenso dello stesso Evola quando questi era ancora in vita, e che viene giustamente considerato uno dei massimi conoscitori del pensiero e della vita di Evola. Oltre alla rivista da questi fondata e animata, «Gnostika» (che come suggerisce il titolo ha interessi prevalentemente esoterici), negli ultimissimi anni stanno nascendo diverse attività che si ispirano in vario modo all’opera di Evola, tra le quali meritano una menzione le riviste tedesche «Elemente» e «Renovatio Imperii» e soprattutto l’austriaca «Kshatriya», diretta da Martin Schwarz (autore della più ampia bibliografia evoliana sino a oggi stilata ), di più marcata impronta “evoliana ortodossa”. A margine di ciò, si stanno iniziando a tenere convegni sul pensatore e a tradurre sue ulteriori opere. Inoltre il centenario della nascita di Evola, nel 1998, è stato occasione per varie testate tedesche per ricordarlo con ampi articoli, tra cui quelli apparsi sulla storica «Nation & Europa» (che esce ormai da mezzo secolo, e cui nei primi Anni ’50 lo stesso Evola collaborò), «Criticn» e la prestigiosa «Zeitschrift für Ganzheitforschung», altra rivista cui Evola collaborò (nei primi Anni ’60) e che fu fondata e lungamente diretta da Walter Heinrich (sino alla morte di questi, avvenuta nel 1984), che era in grande amicizia con Evola. Come curiosità, segnaliamo che per l’occasione numerosi complessi e gruppi musicali tedeschi e austriaci hanno dedicato nel centenario allo scrittore tradizionalista un disco, intitolato Cavalcare la tigre.

* * *

Sebbene alcuni elementi politici della storia d’Italia e di quella tedesca appaiano affini, (il processo di unificazione nazionale avvenuto nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento, la comune partecipazione alla Triplice Alleanza, l’Asse Roma-Berlino), Evola individua nella “tradizione germanica” dei tratti che differenziano nettamente – in senso positivo – i paesi di lingua tedesca dall’Italia. Così anzitutto «può dirsi che in Germania il nazionalismo democratico di massa di tipo moderno non fece che una fuggevole apparizione. […]. Il nazionalismo in tal senso, con un fondo democratico, non andò oltre il fugace fenomeno del parlamento di Francoforte del 1848, in connessione con i moti rivoluzionari che in quel periodo imperversavano in tutta l’Europa (è significativo che il re di Prussia Federico Guglielmo IV rifiutò l’offerta, fattagli da quel parlamento, di mettersi a capo di tutta la Germania perché accettandola egli avrebbe anche accettato il principio democratico – il potere conferito da una rappresentanza popolare – rinunciando al suo diritto legittimistico, sia pure ristretto alla sola Prussia). E Bismarck, creando il secondo Reich, non gli diede affatto una base “nazionale”, vedendo nella corrispondente ideologia il principio di pericolosi disordini anche dell’ordine europeo, mentre i conservatori della Kreuzzeitung accusarono nel nazionalismo un fenomeno “naturalistico” e regressivo, estraneo ad una più alta tradizione e concezione dello Stato» . Estranei a questa forma “naturalistica” di nazionalismo, i paesi di lingua tedesca cullarono un diverso spirito, quello del Volk, che animò lo spirito pangermanico. La corrente völkish, che un notevole peso ebbe anche nella genesi del nazionalsocialismo, affondava le sue radici nei Discorsi alla nazione tedesca di Fichte, in Arndt, Jahn e Lange e soprattutto nel Deutschbund e nella deutsche Bewegung . In questa diversità di retroterra si ha la prima divaricazione tra Italia e Germania.

Ma le differenze di ambiente sono assai più nette. Nel suo saggio sul Terzo Reich, delineando le correnti culturali complesse e spesso irriducibili che cooperarono nella sua genesi, Evola scrive: «Dopo la prima guerra mondiale in Germania la situazione era sensibilmente diversa da quella dell’Italia. […] Mussolini dovette creare quasi dal nulla, nel senso che nel punto di combattere la sovversione rossa e di rimettere in piedi lo Stato non poteva rifarsi ad una tradizione nel senso più alto del termine. Tutto sommato, ad essere minacciato era solo il prolungamento dell’Italietta democratica ottocentesca, con un retaggio risorgimentale risentente delle ideologie della Rivoluzione Francese, con una monarchia che regnava ma non governava e senza salde articolazioni sociali. In Germania le cose stavano altrimenti. Anche dopo il crollo militare e la rivoluzione del 1918 e malgrado il marasma sociale sussistevano resti aventi radici profonde in quel mondo gerarchico, talvolta ancora feudale, incentrato nei valori dello Stato e della sua autorità, facenti parte della precedente tradizione, in particolare del prussianesimo. […]. In effetti, nell’Europa centrale le idee della Rivoluzione Francese non presero mai tanto piede quanto nei restanti paesi europei» .

In un’occasione Evola cita la teoria giuridica di Carl Schmitt dell’international law . Il filosofo della politica tedesco aveva espresso l’idea della caduta del diritto internazionale europeo consuetudinario avvenuta, all’incirca, dopo il 1890, e la conseguente affermazione di un diritto internazionale più o meno ufficializzato. «Noi però qui non siamo interamente del parere dello Schmitt», scrive Evola, spiegando che «di contro all’opinione di molti, nei riguardi dell’azione svolta da Bismarck, sia all’interno della Germania che in Europa, non tutte le cose sono “in ordine”. […]. Più che Bismarck, a noi sembra che, se mai, Metternich sia stato l’ultimo “Europeo”, vale a dire l’ultimo uomo politico che seppe sentire la necessità di una solidarietà delle nazioni europee non astratta, o dettata solo da ragioni di politica “realistica” e da interessi materiali, ma rifacentesi anche a delle idee e alla volontà di mantenere il migliore retaggio tradizionale dell’Europa» . Contrariamente a quanto sostenuto da Baillet , Evola fu dunque piuttosto critico nei confronti di Bismarck, che non ebbe, secondo la visione tradizionale evoliana, il coraggio di opporsi in modo sistematico e rigoroso al mondo moderno e della sovversione (nella sua forma economico-capitalistica), ma dovette in alcuni casi venire a patti con esso.

La stessa Germania federiciana e poi guglielmina, seppur conservante le strutture e l’ordine di uno stato tradizionale, nel quale la stessa burocrazia e l’apparato statale apparivano quasi come corpi di un ordine, conteneva i germi della dissoluzione, dovuti alle idee illuministe che avevano iniziato a filtrare – in modo più larvato che altrove – presso le varie corti. Se il giudizio evoliano nei confronti del codice federiciano conservante l’ordinamento diviso negli Stände è positivo, ciò è poiché, per l’epoca in cui sorse, quel codice conservava meglio d’ogni altro le strutture feudali e gerarchiche precedenti. Esse, tramite la tradizione prussiana, affondavano nell’Ordine dei cavalieri teutonici e nella loro riconquista delle terre baltiche: un ordine ascetico-cavalleresco formato da una disciplina e da una severa organizzazione gerarchica. Così, sin da giovanissimo Evola intuì l’assurdità della “guerra civile europea” che, come ufficiale, egli andava a combattere sulla frontiera carsica: l’Italia si schierava cioè contro ciò che restava della migliore tradizione europea. «Nel 1914 gli Imperi Centrali rappresentavano ancora un resto dell’Europa feudale e aristocratica nel mondo occidentale, malgrado innegabili aspetti di egemonismo militaristico ed alcune alleanze sospette col capitalismo presenti soprattutto nella Germania guglielmina. La coalizione contro di essi fu dichiaratamente una coalizione del Terzo Stato contro le forze residue del Secondo Stato […]. Come in poche altre della storia, la guerra del 1914-1918 presenta tutti i tratti di un conflitto non fra Stati e nazioni, ma fra le ideologie di diverse caste. Di essa, i risultati diretti e voluti furono la distruzione della Germania monarchica e dell’Austria cattolica, quelli indiretti il crollo dell’impero degli Czar, la rivoluzione comunista e la creazione, in Europa, di una situazione politico-sociale talmente caotica e contraddittoria, da contenere tutte le premesse per una nuova conflagrazione. E questa fu la seconda guerra mondiale» .

Come accennato, anche nei confronti della tradizione dell’Austria Evola espresse un giudizio marcatamente positivo. La stessa linea dinastica degli Asburgo ebbe un ruolo di rilievo in questa valutazione (Evola si era espresso in termini molto positivi nei confronti di Massimiliano I) ; nel periodo in cui visse a Vienna Evola respirò ciò che restava dell’atmosfera antica dell’Austria felix, e venne in contatto con quella temperie culturale e spirituale e soprattutto con uomini in cui, per usare le parole di Ernst Jünger, «la catastrofe aveva certo lasciato le sue ombre […], ma si era limitata a distruggerne la serenità innata senza distruggerla. A tratti scorgevamo […] una patina di quella sofferenza che potremmo definire austriaca e che è comune a tanti vecchi sudditi dell’ultima vera monarchia. Con essa venne distrutta una forma del piacere di vivere che negli altri paesi europei già da generazioni era diventata inimmaginabile, e le tracce di questa distruzione si avvertono ancora nei singoli individui. […]. Da noi nel Reich, se si prescinde dal generale esaurimento delle forze, si incominciava a notare tutt’al più la disparità degli strati sociali; qui invece si erano aperte, come voragini, le differenze tra le varie etnie» . In questo humus storico degli anni compresi tra le due guerre, in cui ancora forti erano i legami sentimentali ed etici di molti con la precedente tradizione imperiale – la monarchia asburgica d’Austria aveva almeno formalmente conservato, sino al Congresso di Vienna, la titolarità del Sacro Romano Impero – Evola ebbe anche modo di percepire direttamente l’attaccamento diffuso a livello popolare alla monarchia , e lo spiegò in questi termini: «Senza riesumare forme anacronistiche, invece di una propaganda che “umanizzi” il sovrano per accattivare la massa, quasi sulla stessa linea della propaganda elettorale presidenziale americana, si dovrebbe vedere fino a che punto possano avere un’azione profonda i tratti di una figura caratterizzata da una certa innata superiorità e dignità, in un quadro adeguato. Una specie di ascesi e di liturgia della potenza qui potrebbero avere una loro parte. Proprio questi tratti, mentre rafforzeranno il prestigio di chi incarna un simbolo, dovrebbero poter esercitare sull’uomo non volgare una forza d’attrazione, perfino un orgoglio nel suddito. Del resto, anche in tempi abbastanza recenti si è avuto l’esempio dell’imperatore Francesco Giuseppe che, pur frapponendo fra sé e i sudditi l’antico severo cerimoniale, pur non imitando per nulla i re “democratici” dei piccoli Stati nordici, godette di una particolare, non volgare popolarità» . In questo stesso senso nel 1935, scrivendo a proposito della possibilità di una restaurazione regale in Austria, Evola riferisce ciò che gli esponenti del pensiero conservatore e monarchico in quel paese sostenevano: «La premessa, intanto, è quella a cui ogni mente non ingombra di pregiudizî può anche aderire, cioè che il regime monarchico, in generale, è quello che più può garantire un ordine, un equilibrio e una pacificazione interna, senza dover ricorrere al rimedio estremo della dittatura e dello Stato centralizzato, sempreché nei singoli sussista la sensibilità spirituale richiesta da ogni lealismo. Questa condizione, secondo dette personalità, sarebbe presente nella gran parte della popolazione austriaca, se non altro, per la forza di una tradizione e di uno stile di vita pluricentenario» .

Il problema dell’Anschluss, dell’annessione dell’Austria alla Germania naizonalsocialista, fu negli anni che lo precedettero al centro di un ampio dibattito internazionale. Giuristi e politici lo affrontarono da diversi punti di vista; Evola non fu in concordanza di vedute, su questo tema, con l’amico Othmar Spann, che, scriveva Evola, per la coraggiosa coerenza delle sue idee non era ben visto né in Austria né in Germania. Scrivendo sul sociologo viennese, Evola affermava: «gli Austriaci non perdonano le sue simpatie per la Germania, mentre i Tedeschi non gli perdonano le critiche da lui mosse al materialismo razzista» . Ampliando alla scuola organicistica viennese e al mondo culturale austriaco il suo sguardo, Evola ne esponeva in questi termini le vedute: «Non ci si può rassegnare a far scendere una nazione, che ha la tradizione che l’Austria ha avuto, al livello di un piccolo Stato balcanico. Qui non si fa quistione della mera autonomia politica, si fa essenzialmente quistione di cultura e di tradizione. Storicamente, la civiltà austriaca è indisgiungibile da quella germanica. Non è possibile che oggi l’Austria a tale riguardo si emancipi e cominci a far da sé. Proprio perché essa è stata menomata, ridotta ad un’ombra di quel che essa fu precedentemente, le si impone di connettersi nel modo più stretto alla Germania, appoggiarsi ad essa, trarre da essa gli elementi che possono garantire l’integrità della sua eredità tedesca». Proseguiva Evola sostenendo che dal lato positivo l’Austria avrebbe avuto molto a sua volta da trasmettere alla Germania sotto il profilo della tradizione culturale. Ma di là dal piano squisitamente intellettuale, «Nel dominio delle tradizioni politiche l’antitesi è ancor più visibile. Vi sarebbe infatti da chiedere a questi intellettuali germanofili che cosa essi pensino quando parlano di tradizione austro-tedesca. La tradizione austriaca era una tradizione imperiale. Erede del Sacro Romano Impero, il Reich austriaco, formalmente almeno, non poteva dirsi tedesco. Di diritto, era supernazionale, e di fatto esso sovrastava un gruppo di popoli assai diversi come razza, costumi e tradizioni, gruppo nel quale l’elemento tedesco non figurava che come parte. Nemmeno giova dire che purtuttavia la direzione dell’impero austriaco era intonata in senso tedesco e faceva capo ad una dinastia tedesca. Dal punto di vista dei principî ciò conta così poco quanto il fatto che i rappresentanti del principio supernazionale della Chiesa Romana siano stati in larga misura italiani. Se si deve parlare di tradizione austriaca», concludeva Evola, «è ad una tradizione imperiale che bisogna riferirsi. Ora, che cosa può avere a che fare una tale tradizione con la Germania, se Germania oggi vuol dire nazionalsocialismo?» . Francesco Germinario ha scritto a tale proposito che per Evola «un’Austria legata alle radici cattoliche, e in cui, soprattutto, rimaneva ancora vivo il ricordo degli Asburgo, era molto più vicina ai valori della Tradizione rispetto a una Germania travolta dalla nuova ondata di modernizzazione promossa dal nazismo» .

Si esprimevano in questi termini già nel 1935 le posizioni critiche di Evola nei confronti del nazismo, di cui il filosofo tradizionalista accusava gli eccessi populistici, sociali e di sinistra. Il tono in questo caso è particolarmente critico perché il raffronto è con l’Austria, nella quale Evola vedeva appunto l’erede spirituale della più alta tradizione europea. D’altronde, si tratta di una linea interpretativa e storiografica apprezzabile, e che Evola mantenne anche nel dopoguerra, tendendo a separare i diversi elementi e le varie correnti che operarono nel nazionalsocialismo per giudicarli separatamente . Concludeva dunque la sua lettura politica della situazione internazionale affermando: «Se non ci si vuole rassegnare alla perdita dell’antica tradizione supernazionale centro-europea, l’Austria più che verso la Germania dovrebbe volgere i suoi sguardi verso gli Stati successori, nel senso di vedere fino a che punto è possibile ricostruire una comune coscienza centro-europea come base non solo della soluzione di importantissimi problemi economici e commerciali ma eventualmente […] anche della formulazione di un nuovo principio politico unitario di tipo tradizionale» .

Nei confronti della seconda guerra mondiale, il cui esito indubbiamente Evola vedeva come l’ultima fase del crollo epocale della civiltà europea, lo scrittore tradizionalista denunciava le colpe morali delle potenze occidentali: «a Himmler si deve un tentativo di salvataggio in extremis (considerato da Hitler come un tradimento). Pel tramite del Conte Bernadotte egli tramise una proposta di pace separata agli Alleati occidentali per poter continuare la guerra soltanto contro l’Unione Sovietica e il comunismo. Si sa che tale proposta, la quale, se accettata, forse avrebbe potuto assicurare all’Europa un diverso destino, evitando la successiva “guerra fredda” e la comunisticizzazione dell’Europa di là dalla “cortina di ferro”, fu nettamente respinta in base ad un cieco radicalismo ideologico, come era stata respinta, per un non diverso radicalismo, l’offerta di pace fatta da Hitler di sua iniziativa all’Inghilterra in termini ragionevoli in un famoso discorso dell’estate del 1940 quando i Tedeschi erano la parte vincente» .

Anche dopo la seconda guerra mondiale Evola mantenne un occhio di riguardo nei confronti dei paesi di lingua tedesca. La sua visione fu di ammirazione nei confronti della nuova resurrezione economica operata dai Tedeschi dopo la distruzione del secondo dopoguerra («questa nazione ha saputo completamente rialzarsi di là da distruzioni senza nome. Perfino in regime di occupazione essa ha sopravvanzato le stesse nazioni vincitrici sul piano industriale ed economico riprendendo il suo posto di grande potenza produttrice») , e per il coraggio col quale la Repubblica federale aveva bandito il pericolo comunista dalla sua politica («I Tedeschi fanno sempre le cose con coerenza. Così anche nel giuoco di osservanza democratica. Essi hanno messo su una democrazia-modello come un sistema “neutro” – diremmo quasi amministrativo, più che politico – equilibrato ed energico a un tempo. A differenza dell’Italia, la Germania proprio dal punto di vista di una democrazia coerente ha messo al bando il comunismo. La Corte Costituzionale tedesca ha statuito ciò che corrisponde all’evidenza stessa delle cose, ossia che un partito che, come quello comunista, segue le regole democratiche soltanto in funzione puramente tattica e di copertura, per scopo finale dichiarato avendo invece la soppressione di ogni contrastante corrente politica e la dittatura assoluta del proletariato, non può essere tollerato da uno Stato democratico che non voglia scavare la fossa a sé stesso») . Ma, ciò nonostante, la guerra aveva ormai prodotto un vacuum, un vuoto spirituale non più colmato: «Di contro a tutto ciò, stupisce, nella Repubblica Federale, la mancanza di qualsiasi idea, di qualsiasi “mito”, di qualsiasi superiore visione del mondo, di qualsiasi continuità con la precedente Germania» . Anche nel campo della cultura, Evola ravvisa un generale franamento, una sorta di generale “venire meno” alle posizioni coraggiose e d’avanguardia tenute dall’intellettualità tedesca negli anni – ad avviso di Evola, assai floridi e proficui sotto il profilo culturale – del Reich nazionalsocialista. Nel suo giudizio negativo Evola prende come esempio di questo crollo Gottfried Benn ed Ernst Jünger (cadendo con ciò in errori di veduta piuttosto grossolani ).

 

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Da Vie della Tradizione 125 (2002), pp. 37-50.
Il presente articolo è stato ripubblicato privo delle note a pié pagina.

Revista de Historia del Fascismo - Julius Evola en Alemania

 

Revista de Historia del Fascismo

Sumario

REVISIONES

Hitler [no] me ha dicho: Rauschning, un falsario desenmascarado

Durante décadas el libro de Hermann Rauschning Hitler me ha dicho se ha considerado como un pieza fundamental del Caso Hitler. Desde obras “ligeras” como El retorno de los brujos de Louis Pauwels y Jacques Bergier hasta las  sesudas  obras  de  historiadores  académicos  como Trevor-Roper, era frecuente entre los años 50 hasta finales del milenio, recurrir a esta obra para dirimir cómo era la verdadera personalidad del führer. Aun hoy algunos siguen considerando a esta obra como “fuente primaria”… lamentablemente  para  ellos,  desde  hace  20  años,  está demostrado ad nauseam que la obra de Rauschning no tiene credibilidad sino que es uno de tantos ejemplos de propaganda de guerra.

BIOGRAFIAS

Abate Barruel: el padre de todas las conspiranoias

A  finales  del  siglo  XVIII  al  abate  Augustin  Barruel  consiguió una fama extraordinaria con la publicación de su obra Memorias para servir a la historia del jacobinismo en  donde  daba  una  explicación  teleológica  a  todos  los episodios que se habían sucedido en Francia a partir de 1780 y que se desencadenaron aquella orgía de sangre que  fue  la  Revolución  Francesa.  El  éxito  de  Barruel  fue tan rutilante como efímero, sin embargo, todavía hoy se le considera como el introductor de la visión conspirativa de la historia y su obra como el “padre” de todas las conspiraciones. Esta es la vida y la obra del abate Barruel…

NEOFASCISMO

L’Uomo Qualunque: un producto de postguerra

En la confusión de la Italia de la postguerra, durante un corto  ciclo  de  apenas  tres  años,  un  partido  político  de nuevo cuño llamó particularmente la atención: el Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque, literalmente el Frente del Hombre Cualquiera (aunque otra traducción alternativa sería “del Pobre Diablo”) entendiendo como tal al ciudadano sin expectativas  que  sufre  las  consecuencias  de  las  situaciones  adversas  generadas  por  otros.  El Uomo  Qualunque fue  un  grito  de  desesperados  que  se  extinguió  pronto ingresando una parte sustancial de sus miembros en el Movimiento  Social  Italiano  que  heredó  también  buena parte de sus votos. 

MÍSTICA FASCISTA

Codreanu y su mística guerrera

Nuestro colaborador Eduardo Basurto nos envía este artículo sobre la mística guerrera de Codreanu que supone el primer estudio publicado en la Revista de Historia del Fascismo  sobre  esta  corriente  en  Rumania.  Además  de hacer honor al título, el estudio de Eduardo Basurto realiza un repaso a la historia de la varidad rumana del fascismo singularmente preciso.

CINEMATOGRAFÍA

Forces Occultes… El cine francés bajo la ocupación

Hasta hace poco inencontrable y desde que se han puesto en marcha las plataformas de intercambio de archivos Peer to Peer y youTube fácilmente accesibles en la red, Forces Occultes es un película extraña que responde en primer lugar a las exigencias antimasónicas del gobierno francés de Vichy y de la propaganda alemana. Pero nos equivocaríamos si considerásemos que Forces Occultes solamente  es  “propaganda”.  Es  mucho  más:  refleja  por primera vez en la historia del cine cómo es una iniciación masónica de la que hasta ese momento el “gran público” no tenía conciencia exacta en qué consistía. Y no hay en ella absolutamente ninguna falsificación. La pesquisa en torno  a Forces  Occultes  nos  llevará,  por  extensión  lógica, en la segunda parte de este artículo, a examinar el panorama del cine “colaboracionista” realizado durante la ocupación y terminará con una referencia a la figura de Claude Autant-Lara, fallecido en 2000 después de ser durante un período diputado europeo del Front National.

DOSSIER:

Julius Evola y el III Reich
Las relaciones y los proyectos de Julius Evola en Alemania 1930-1945.

I. Introduccion

II. Julius Evola y la cultura alemanas

III. Contactos en el Reich 

          - La Comunidad de  Trabajo de los nacionalistas

          - Con la “revolución conservadora”

          - La red del príncipe KarlAnton von Rohan

          - Gottfried Benn y el Rivolta  

          - Del Herrenklub a las SS

          - La “defensa de la raza” en Alemania e Italia

          - Los objetivos del período 1938-1943

          - Evola en el Cuartel General del Führer

 

Características: 

Formato libro 150 x 210 mm

Páginas 216

Tapas en cuatricomía con solapas 

Pedidos: [e-mail] 

Precio venta al público: 18,00 euros + 3,00 euros de gastos de envío (precios para España, resto mundo, consultar) 

Forma e pago: ingreso en cuenta corriente BBVA (al hacer el pedido indicamos el número) o pago a través de pay-pal (ver columna de la derecha)

 

Suscripción: 

6 números: 100 euros

12 números: 200 euros

Othmar Spann / Jungkonservativ

 

Jungkonservativ

 

pdf der Druckfassung aus Sezession 41 / April 2011

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner is overleden

Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner is overleden

 

Ex: Deltanieuwsbrief nr. 47 - Mei 2011

“Conservatisme is een ‘elitaire’, men kan ook zeggen ‘esoterische’ aangelegenheid (…).  Het misverstand als zou de conservatief een theorielozen, een onfilosofische, ja, zelfs antifilosofische pragmaticus zijn, lijkt onuitroeibaar. Ik heb nochtans met veel kracht en overtuiging aangetoond dat het een misverstand is, toen ik het over die domeinen had, die man als ‘conservatieve mystiek’ zou kunnen omschrijven (…). Een zekere zin voor de onoplosbare complexiteit van de werkelijkheid, de erkenning van het feit dat men over het leven slechts brokstukgewijs rationeel kunnen spreken, de aandacht voor de tegenstelling, voor het tragische en voor het gedeeltelijk demonische dat door de geschiedenis waart, een constitutionele scepsis tegenover de ‘grote oplossingen’”. Woorden van Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner, een grote Oostenrijkse mijnheer, die bij menig jonge Europeaan de grondvesten van een degelijke conservatieve ideeënwereld heeft gelegd.

Kaltenbrunner werd in 1939 in Wenen geboren, maar na zijn studies in de Rechten in 1962 trok hij naar Duitsland en werkte er bij uitgeverijen als lektor. In 1972 publiceerde hij een verzamelwerk Rekonstruktion des Konservatismus, en ontwierp hiermee, enkele jaren na 1968, de basis voor een conservatieve tegenactie. Hij ging in het werk uit van de idee dat het conservatisme eerst de hegemonie op het geestelijke vlak moet veroveren, vooraleer politieke consequenties te trekken.

Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner wou niet zomaar ‘conserveren’: hij was er veeleer op uit het ‘moderne’ conservatieve denken mee gestalte te geven – met daarin natuurlijk dat wat eeuwig een Europese waarde had. De door hem opgezette en gepubliceerde Herderbücherei Initiative  - een reeks die liep van 1974 tot 1988 – bracht op een hoog niveau conservatieve auteurs, wetenschappers, onderzoekers en andere bijeen, die rond bepaalde thema’s (soms) baanbrekende bijdragen brachten.  Interessante titels waren (en zijn): Die Zukunft der Vergangenheid (1975), Plädoyer für die Vernunft: Signale einer Tendenzwende (1974).  Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner legde ook een bijzondere ijver aan de dag om de bronnen voor het conservatieve denken open en toegankelijk te houden. Hij publiceerde een driedelig werk Europa. Seine geistigen Quellen in Porträts aus zwei Jahrtausenden (1981-1985). Ook het werk Vom Geist Europas heeft niets van zijn waarde verloren en verdient het zeker op opnieuw gelezen te worden.

Hierna werd het stil rond Kaltenbrunner. Hij trok zich – na de ontgoocheling over het uitblijven van een échte conservatieve wende – terug als een lekenmonnik in Kandern, afgesneden van alle moderne communicatiemiddelen. Hij trok ook voorgoed een streep onder het metapolitieke werk. Nochtans loont het de moeite, zeker in deze tijden van ideeënarmoede ter linker en rechter zijde de moeite om de stijl en de onderwerpen die Gerd Klaus Kaltenbrunner nauw aan het hart lagen, te bestuderen.  Met TeKoS hebben wij in elk geval niet op het overlijden van deze bescheiden, overtuigdconservatieve intellectueel gewacht om bijdragen van hem te publiceren. In ons nummer 127 brachten wij een vertaling van Elite. Erziehung für den Ernstfall, in het Nederlands: Zonder Elite gaat het niet. Wij groeten u met bijzondere veel respect, meester Kaltenbrunner!

(Peter Logghe)

Robert Steuckers: Answers given to the Scandinavian Group "Oskorei"

Robert Steuckers:

Answers Given to the Scandinavian Group and Internet Forum “Oskorei / motpol.nu”)

 

Picture: Walking along Heidegger's path in Todtnauberg, Germany, July 2010 (Photo, copyright: AnaR).

 

Why did you found « Synergies Européennes » ?

 

Initially I had no intention to found any group or subgroup in the broad family of New Right clubs and caucuses. But as, for many reasons, cooperation with the French branch around Alain de Benoist seemed to be impossible to resume, I first decided to retire completely and to devote myself to other tasks, such as translations or private teaching. This transition period of disabused withdrawal lasted exactly one month and one week (from December 6^th, 1992 to begin January 1993). When friends from Provence phoned me during the first days of 1993 to express their best wishes for the New Year to come and when I told them what kind of decision I had taken, they protested heavily, saying that they preferred to rally under my supervision than under the one of the always mocked “Parisians”. I answered that I had no possibility to rent places or find accommodations in their part of France. One day after, they found a marvellous location to organise a summer course. Other people, such as Gilbert Sincyr, generously supported this initiative, which six months later was a success due to the tireless efforts of Christiane Pigacé, a university teacher in political sciences in Aix-en-Provence, and of a future lawyer in Marseille, Thierry Mudry, who both could obtain the patronage of Prof. Julien Freund. The summer course was a success. But no one had still the idea of founding a new independent think tank. It came only one year later when we had to organise several preparatory meetings in France and Belgium for a next summer course at the same location. Things were decided in April 1994 in Flanders, at least for the Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and French. A German-Austrian team joined in 1995 immediately after a summer course of the German weekly paper “Junge Freiheit”, that organized a short trip to Prague for the participants (including Sunic, the Russian writer Vladimir Wiedemann and myself); people of the initial French team, under the leading of Jean de Bussac, travelled to the Baltic countries, to try to make contacts there. In 1996, Sincyr, de Bussac and Sorel went to Moscow to meet a Russian team lead by Anatoly Ivanov, former Soviet dissident and excellent translator from French and German into Russian, Vladimir Avdeev and Pavel Tulaev. We had also the support of Croatians (Sunic, Martinovic, Vujic) and Serbs (late Dragos Kalajic) despite the war raging in the Balkans between these two peoples. In Latin America we’ve always had the support of Ancient Greek philosophy teacher Alberto Buela, who is also an Argentinian rancher leading a small ranch of 600 cows, and his old fellow Horacio Cagni, an excellent connoisseur of Oswald Spengler, who has been able to translate the heavy German sentences of Spengler himself into a limpid Spanish prose. The meetings and summer courses lasted till 2003 and the magazines were published till 2004. Of course, personal contacts are still held and new friends are starting new initiatives, better adapted to the tastes of younger people. In 2007 we started to blog on the net with “euro-synergies.hautetfort.com” in seven languages with new texts every day and with “vouloir.hautetfort.com” only in French with all the articles in our archives. This latest initiative is due to a rebuilt French section in Paris. These blogging activities bring us more readers and contacts than the old ways of working. Postage costs were in the end too high to let the printed stuff survive. The efforts of our American friend Greg Johnson, excellent translator from French into English, has opened us new horizons in the world, where English is more largely known than other European languages, except Spanish. The translations of Greg can be read on “counter-currents.com”. Tomislav Sunic with all his connections in the New World, in England and Scandinavia has played a key role in this step forward. He will force me to write in English in the next future, just as you do now, and to abandon my habit to write mainly in French and sometimes in German, languages that I master better that English. The next long interview in English will be the one that Pavel Tulaev submitted to me some days ago (January 2011). In fact, when I entered as a full member the New Right groups in September 1980, after having been drilled during a special summer course in Provence in July 1980 in the frame of the so-called “Temistoklès Savas Promotion” (T. Savas was a Greek friend who had just died in a motorbike accident in the Northern Greek mountains), I promised to Prof. Pierre Vial, who was at that time one of the main leaders of the celebrated GRECE-group, to lead a metapolitical battle till my last breath. So things are still going on as they ought to.

 

The marvellous water bridge of Rocquevafour were formerly the GRECE Summer Courses were given

Now the very purposes of “Synergies Européennes” or “Euro-Synergies” were to enable all people in Europe (and outside Europe) to exchange ideas, books, views, to start personal contacts, to stimulate the necessity of translating a maximum of texts or interviews, in order to accelerate the maturing process leading to the birth of a new European or European-based political think tank. Another purpose was to discover new authors, usually rejected by the dominant thoughts or neglected by old right groups or to interpret them in new perspectives.

 

“Synergy” means in the Ancient Greek language, “work together” (“syn” = “together” and “ergon” = “to work”); it has a stronger intellectual and political connotation than its Latin equivalent “cooperare” (“co” derived from “cum” = “with”, “together” - and “operare” = “to work”). Translations, meetings and all other ways of cooperating (for conferences, individual speeches or lectures, radio broadcasting or video clips on You Tube, etc.) are the very keys to a successful development of all possible metapolitical initiatives, be they individual, collegial or other. People must be on the move as often as possible, meet each other, eat and drink together, camp under poor soldierly conditions, walk together in beautiful landscapes, taste open-mindedly the local kitchen or liquors, remembering one simple but o so important thing, i. e. that joyfulness must be the core virtue of a good working metapolitical scene. When sometimes things have failed, it was mainly due to humourless, snooty or yellow-bellied guys, who thought they alone could grasp one day the “Truth” and that all others were gannets or cretins. Jean Mabire and Julien Freund, Guillaume Faye and Tomislav Sunic, Alberto Buela and Pavel Tulaev were or are joyful people, who can teach you a lot of very serious things or explain you the most complicated notions without forgetting that joy and gaiety must remain the core virtues of all intellectual work. If there is no joy, you will inevitably be labelled as dull and lose the metapolitical battle. Don’t forget that medieval born initiatives like the German “Burschenschaften” (Students’ Corporations) or the Flemish “Rederijkers Kamers” (“Chambers of Rhetoric”) or the Youth Movements in pre-Nazi Germany were all initiatives where the highest intellectual matters were discussed and, once the seminary closed, followed by joyful songs, drinking parties or dance (Arthur Koestler remembers his time spent at Vienna Jewish Burschenschaft “Unitas” as the best of his youth, despite the fact that the Jewish students of Vienna considered in petto that the habits of the Burschenschaften should be adopted by them as pure mimicking). Humour and irony are also keys to success. A good cartoonist can reach the bull’s eye better than a dry philosopher.

 

Provence village of Lourmarin where three Summer courses of "Synergies Européennes" were held

 

How do you view the proper relationship between the national state and the European Community?

 

Well, it depends which national state you are talking about. Some states have a strong political personality, born out of their own history. Others are remnants of former greater empires, like many states in Central Europe, which once upon a time were parts of the Austrian-Hungarian Habsburgs Empire. France, Britain and Sweden, for instance, have such a well-defined strong personality. Belgium, the country in which I was born, is a more or less artificial state, being a remnant entity of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and of the medieval German Holy Roman Empire but having been strongly under the influence of France due to the use of French language in the Southern part of the kingdom and among the elites, even in Flemish speaking provinces. Croatia has been part of the Hungarian Crown’s Lands within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and still desires to have closer links with Austria, Germany and Italy. Bosnia cultivates both the nostalgia of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and of the Ottoman Empire. The Netherlands has certainly a stronger identity than Belgium or Croatia but this identity has the tendency to develop in two very different directions: a see-oriented direction towards Britain and the United States, or a land-oriented direction towards Germany and Flanders in Belgium. Countries with a weaker identity have the tendency to be more pro-European than the ones that have this strong history born personality I’ve just mentioned. But on the other hand Britain is experimenting nowadays a process of devolution, especially in Scotland and in a lesser extent in Wales. France is still theoretically the embodiment of a strongly centralised state but regional and local identities are flourishing as an alternative to the official universalistic ideology of the “République”, leading to a compelled acceptation of mass immigration imposed to the native populations, that, as a result, instinctively take up local or regional roots, which look more genuine and gentle, being seen as in complete accordance with one’s “deepest heart”.

 

To theorise the “proper relationship” between the national state and the European Union, you have to look out for a functioning model, in which several types of identities, be they linguistic or confessional, are overlapping and displaying a kind of mosaic patchwork on a smaller scale than Europe, which is obviously such a patchwork, especially in its central continental areas. The only functioning model we have is the Swiss model. This democratic model was born in an intersection area in the middle of the European continent, where three main European languages and one local language meet as well as two different Christian faiths, Protestantism and Catholicism, Swiss Protestantism being once more divided between Lutherans in German speaking Basle and Calvinist in French speaking Geneva, with remnants of Zwingli’s Protestantism around Zurich. Most German speaking Swiss are otherwise Roman Catholics, while most French speaking Swiss are Protestants except in the Canton of Jura. To coordinate optimally all these differences, what could lead to endless conflicts, the Swiss political system invented a form of federalism that allowed people to live in peace while keeping their differences alive. This could be a model for all European states and for regions within these states. The federal level in Switzerland is a “slim” and efficient level. Most matters are left in the hands of local politicians and officials. Moreover the Swiss system foresees the referendum as a decision making instrument at both federal and cantonal levels. The people can introduce a claim at local or national level, leading to the organisation of a referendum for all kind of matters: the building of a bridge, ecological problems, introduction or suppression of a railway or a bus connection, etc. In 2009 and in 2010, two referendums took place at federal level: the first one was introduced by a rightist populist party to forbid the building of minarets in Swiss cities and towns, in accordance to the very old ecological and town-planning laws of the Swiss Confederation, mostly accepted or introduced by leftist “progressive” political forces in former times. In November 2010, also very recently, people voted to expel all criminal foreigners out of the country, avoiding in this way the most painful effects of mass immigration. Such people’s initiatives would be impossible in other European countries, despite the fact that expelling criminals cannot be considered as “racist” (as non criminal foreigners cannot be expelled) or as hostile to particular religious faiths, as no religion tolerates crimes as acceptable patterns of behaviour.

 

Therefore, the possible adoption of this Swiss model, beyond its latest anti-immigration aspects, would allow other European peoples to vote in order to coin a policy-making decision about actual problems and so to avoid being arrogantly ordained by ukases imagined by the fertile fantasy of Eurocratic eggheads in Brussels. The adoption of the Swiss model implies of course to reduce most of the biggest states in Europe into smaller entities or to adopt a federal system like in Spain, Austria, Belgium or Germany, plus the possibility to organise referendums like in Switzerland, as this is not the case in the otherwise complete federal states I’ve just mentioned. This is a lack of democracy. The main problem would be France, where this kind of federalism and of democracy has never been introduced. Nevertheless, the demand for the referendum system is growing in France, as you can read it on www.polemia.com, where former New Right exponent Yvan Blot is currently resuming all his ideas, suggestions and critics about this topic.

 

Picture: The Splügenpass at the Italian-Swiss boarder where Synergon's Summer Course 1996 was held (Photo: RS)

 

The introducing of a general federal system in Europe with broad devolution within the existing states is not accepted everywhere. In Italy, where the federalist Lega Nord is continuously successful in the Northern provinces of the country, partisans of a strong state argue that a balkanization in the disguise of a general federalisation would weaken many state’s instruments that have been firmly settled in former times and enable the present-day state foundations or practices to avoid absorption by globalist American-lead agencies or concerns. This is of course an actual risk. So all the state institutions having been developed in Europe to enhance autarky (self-sufficiency) at whatever level possible must be kept out of any dissolution process implied by any form of devolution.

 

A policy consisting of introducing a referendum to avoid people being crushed by too centralised states or by eurocrats, of a devolution allowing this genuine form of democracy to be established everywhere and of keeping alive all institutions aiming at self-sufficiency was perhaps the hope of Solzhenitsyn for his dear old Russia. Such a policy ought to be made secure according to historical Russian and Swiss models, but cannot of course be implemented by the current political personnel. Needless to say that such a personnel is corrupt but not only that. It is brainwashed and duped by all kind of silly ready-made ideologies or blueprints, invented mostly in American think tanks, their European counter-parts and the main media agencies. To summarize it, these ideologies aim at weakening the societies by mocking their traditional patterns of behaviour, at generalizing the ideological assets of neo-liberalism in order to let globalization be thoroughly implemented in every corner of the world and at reducing Europe to remain once for ever a disguised colony of the United States.

 

Therefore, there is the need to replace such a deceiving personnel by new teams in every European country. These new teams cannot be the usual populist alternative parties as they are mostly unaware of the dangers of neo-liberalism, i.e. the new universalistic ideology suggested and imposed by the most dangerous think tanks of the left and of the establishment: from the camouflaged Trotskites within the social-democratic parties to the “new philosophers” in France, who paved the way to a subtle mixture of “political correctness”, apparent libertarianism, an apparently vehement and staunch defence of the human rights, avowed antifascism and anticommunism (communism being the result of a worship of mostly German “thought masters” (“maîtres-à-penser”) like Hegel  or Marx). The usual populist parties never managed to develop a discourse about and against this real danger jeopardizing Europe’s future. They were each time trapped by one aspect or another of this subtle mixture, especially all the anticommunist aspects.

 

A “new team” should give following answer to the now well-established official ideology of the main medias:

-          A defence of the social systems in Europe or of an adaptation/modernization of them, erasing the corruptions that deposited during several decades; the model would be of course the partnership existing since the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany between workers and bosses; the investment model called the “Rhine Model” by the French thinker Michel Albert, where the capital is permanently invested in new technologies, in Research & Development, in academic think tanks, etc. The defence of the so-called socialist social systems in Europe aims essentially at preserving the families’ patrimony (especially modest working-class families because it gives them a safe security net in case of recession), at securing the future of the school and academic networks (now disintegrating under the iron heel of the banksters’ neoliberalism) and at securing a free and good functioning medical system in all European countries. It has often been said that the “non merchant sectors” were suffering due to all kind of imposed shortages (in the name of an alleged economic efficiency) and to the poor salaries earned by teaching or medical personnel. The “anti-shopkeeper” mentality of the so-called “right” or “new right” is an old heritage linking us to the ideals of the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle and the American poet Ezra Pound. If we want to translate these core ideas into a political programme, we’ll have to elaborate in each European country a specific defence of the “non merchant sectors”, as a civilization is measured not by material and transient productions but by the excellence of its medical and academic systems. We always were defenders of the primacy of culture against the iron heel of banks and economics.

The Varese Lake, Lombardia, where Synergon's Seminar 1995 and Synergon's Summer Course 2000 was held

 

-          The notion of human rights, as they are propagated by the mainstream medias and by the official American think tanks, is a would-be universalistic ideology, aiming at replacing all the old messianic faiths, be they a religious bias or a Hegelian or Marxist tinted ideology (“the main narratives” of Jean-François Lyotard). But the mainstream notion of human rights are not merely an ideology, it is an instrument fabricated by strategists at the time of President Jimmy Carter, in order to have a constant opportunity to meddle in the affairs of alien countries, in order to weaken them (a strategy already suggested by Sun Tzu). The Chinese could observe very early that drift from a pious reference to human rights towards manipulation and subversion and reacted in arguing that every civilization should be permitted to adapt the notion of human rights to its own core cultural patterns. If the Chinese have the right to adapt, why wouldn’t we Europeans not be entitled to give our own interpretation of human rights within the frame of our own civilization? And above all to be allowed to make a clear distinction, when human rights are evoked, between what is genuine in the true defence of citizens’ rights and obligations and what is the result of an offensive attack perpetrated by an alien “soft power” in order to destabilize our countries’ policy in whatever matters. We should have the courage to denounce every abuse in the manipulating of the human rights’ topic when they are solemnly summoned up only in order to promote any American imperialist project in Europe, as, for instance, the war against Yugoslavia in 1999 was. The justification put forward to start this war was the so-called breach of human rights committed by the Serbian government against the Albanians composing the majority of Kosovo’s population. But in the end it brought to power an infamous gang in this American-backed secessionist province of Kosovo, currently accused of trafficking human organs, weapons and prostitutes. Where are the rights of the people having been bereft of their organs by force or of the poor girls attracted by seducing work contracts in Western Europe, then beaten, locked up in some dreary cellar and finally forced to be on the game? All the media orchestrated humbug about human rights promoted by Carter, Clinton and Albright ended exactly in the worst breaches in common law, that were deleterious for thousands and thousands of victims. The American discourse about human rights is deceitfulness and cant and nothing else. The real purpose was to establish a gigantic military base in Kosovo, namely “Camp Bondsteel”, in order to replace the abandoned bases in Germany after the Cold War and the German reunification and to occupy the Balkans, an area which, since Alexander the Great, allows every audacious conqueror to control Anatolia and all areas beyond it, namely Iraq and Persia. A “new team” in Europe should ceaselessly stigmatize and vilify these abuses and clearly tell the public opinion of their respective countries what are the real purposes behind each American human rights policy. The “new team” should work a bit like Noam Chomsky in the United States, who indefatigably reveals what is Washington’s hidden agenda in every part of the world.

 

To adopt a Swiss model with referendum at local and national level, to reject vehemently the anti-autarky policies induced by the neo-liberal ideology and economical theory, to reject also the mainstream bias of “political correctness” and to perceive the real geopolitical and strategic intentions hidden behind each American step are not capabilities that the political personnel in Europe can currently display. Therefore you won’t have a proper relationship between the national states (and the people as an ethnic reality) and the highest institutions of the European Union, as long as a fooled political pseudo-elite is ruling these latest. You need “new teams” to induce a “proper relationship”.            

 

What is your analysis of the current European Union and it’s future and potential?

 

The answer to the question you ask here could be the stuff of a whole book. Indeed to answer it properly and in a complete way, you need to evoke the all story of the European integration process, starting with the founding act of the CECA/EGKS, i.e. the “European Community of Coal and Steel”, in 1951. After that you had the “Treaty of Rome” in 1957, launching the so-called “Common Market” and, later, the “Treaty of Maastricht” and the “Treaty of Lisbon”.  It seems useless to resume now the entire history of the European “Eurocratic” institutions, especially at a present time when they are totally degenerated by liberal and neo-liberal ideas that of course weaken them and make them in a certain way superfluous. The core idea at the very beginning was to create an “autonomous market”, leading to a certain autarky, which was absolutely possible when the six founding countries possessed large parts of Africa and could so exploit the most important industrial and mineral resources. The decolonization and the support that the United States provided to the independence movements in Africa bereft Europe of a direct access to the main resources. The core idea of an autarky within a certain “Eurafrican” commonwealth has no real significance anymore. This new situation could already have been foreseen in October 1956 when the United States tolerated (and indirectly supported) the Soviet invasion of Hungary despite the opinion of their main allies in Europe and condemned the French-British intervention in Egypt. The year 1956 announced the fate of Europe: the European powers had no right to intervene within Europe itself, as Hungary had freed itself from Soviet yoke and as the treaties signed after 1945 foresaw the withdrawal of all Soviet troops out of the country after some months. The European powers, including Britain, had no right anymore to intervene in Africa in order to keep order.

 

The decolonization process left Europe without a necessary “Ergänzungsraum”, i. e. a “complementary space”, that could be administrated from European capitals and give African people the efficiency of well drilled executives, what they lack since then, precipitating the whole Black continent into a terrible misery. But autarky doesn’t mean the direct access to mineral resources: it means first of all “food autarky”. Few European countries are (or were at the end of the 80s, just before the collapse of the Soviet block) really independent at food level or are now able to produce food excesses. Only Sweden, Hungary, France and Denmark were. For the excellent French demographist Gaston Bouthoul Denmark is the best example of a well-balanced agriculture. This small Scandinavian country is able to produce food excesses that make of it an “agricultural superpower” in Europe: one should simply remember that Danish peasants furnished 75% of the food for the German Wehrmacht during WW2. Without the Danish food excesses, Hitler’s armies wouldn’t have resisted so long in Russia, in Northern Africa and in the West (Italy).

Perugia, Umbria (Italy) where the common "New Right" Conference (with Dr. Marco Tarchi, Dr. Alessandro Campi, Alain de Benoist, Michael Walker and Robert Steuckers) was held in February 1991 and where Synergon's Summer Course 1999 took place

 

The core idea of autarky survived quite long within the European institutions. We should remember the last plan trying to materialise autarky, the so-called “Plan Delors”, proposing a policy of large scaled public works and of favouring telecommunications and public transports within the EU area. The EU has no future if it remains what American economists called “a penetrated system” at the time of the Weimar Republic in Germany when American big business tried a disguised colonisation of the defeated Reich through the Young and Dawes Plans. The EU is now a penetrated system where not only American multinationals are carving important segments of the inner European market but also the new Chinese State’s companies and where the textile industry is now entirely dependant from delocalized factories settled in Turkey or Pakistan. Unemployment reaches astronomical figures in Europe because of delocalisation.

 

Recently the German weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” has published figures showing that Europe is experimenting now a real decay. More and more European countries are leaving the hit parade of the 20 most important economies on the world. The results of the PISA inquiry about the levels reached by school systems reveals also a general decay of the European standards. University teacher and former student and translator of Carl Schmitt, Julien Freund, thought us in his important book “La fin de la Renaissance” (1981) that decay comes when you begin to hate yourself, to despise what you are and to abhor your own past. The whole “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” not only in Germany but in all European countries, where children and teenagers are subtly induced to loathe themselves and their fatherlands, has repercussions on the general economics of the entire continent. The EU can only survive when it finds its ideological roots again, i. e. the very notion of autarky. Otherwise the process of decay will amplify tremendously and lead to the complete disappearance of the European peoples and civilisation. In this process the EU area may become, as a kind of new “Eurabia” or Euro-Turkey or Afro-Europe, an appendix of a “Transatlantic Union” under US leadership. 

 

Well, let us now turn to the real question, the question that matters. Are we socialists or not? If we are, what’s the difference between us and the conventional socialists or social democrats?  What’s the difference between the synergist anti-liberal with his New Right background and the Marxist or Post-Marxist we find in all the parliaments in Europe and of course in the European Parliament where they constitute the second main group after the Christian Democrats of the EPP? Well, the conventional socialists would say that they get their inspiration from their holy icon Marx and from his followers of the 2^nd International, even if a born-again Marx would fiercely mock their liberal and permissive bias with the acidity he always used to lash verbally his foes. The problem is that the socialism of the direct heirs of the 2^nd International is a type of socialism without a frame, consisting mainly of irresponsible promises emitted by cynical politicians in order to grasp as many mandates or seats as possible. Long before Marx wrote his well-known communist manifesto, there was an economical genius in Germany called Friedrich List, who opposed the free trade ideology of Britain at that time. Free trade meant in the first half of the 19^th Century a generalized colonial system in the entire world, where Britain would have been the world only workshop or factory, while the rest would have remained underdeveloped only producing raw materials for the Sheffield or Manchester mills. Included all European countries of course. List asserted that every country had the genuine right to develop its own territorial assets. As the British fleet was the instrument enabling the British Crown to be ubiquitous and reach the harbours on all shores where it could get the raw materials and sell the products of England’s factories, List suggested an inner development of all countries in the world by inner colonization (fertilization and cultivation of all abandoned lands), building of railways and canals in order to boost communications. List inspired the German government under the leading of Bismarck, the small Belgian kingdom which was an economical power having experimented an actual industrial revolution immediately after Britain, the French positivists for the necessity of starting an inner agricultural colonization of the former Gallic mainland and above all the US government that had to face the huge problem of developing the gigantic land space between the Atlantic and the Pacific. List is the intellectual father of the Transcontinental Railway and of the canals linking the Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. He is the real intellectual father of the industrial power of the United States. On the other hand he inspired anti-colonialists in the former Third World, especially India and China: Gandhi, who wanted the Indians to cultivate cotton and weave their own clothes with it, and Dr. Sun Ya Tsen, founder of the Chinese Republic in 1911, were more or less inspired by List’s theories and practical suggestions. The Chinese National-Republican economist Kai Sheng Chen, who theorized the very important notion of  “armed economy”, was a pupil of List and of Ludendorff, who adapted the peaceful ideas of List in the context of WW1. Taiwan and South Korea have proved that Kai Sheng Chen’s ideas can be successfully realized.

 

In the present-day United States the caucus around Lyndon LaRouche has produced an excellent analysis of the opposition between the Free Trade system and List’s practical views of a world of free autarkic areas. You can find a long documentary on the Internet about this dual interpretation given by the LaRouche’s group. Many Europeans would of course object that LaRouche’s vision of the economical history of the Western World during these two last centuries is quite over-simplified. Of course it is. But the core of this interpretation is correct and sound, whereas the over-simplification made of the all corpus a good didactical instrument. There is indeed an opposition between Free Trade (neo-liberalism, reaganomics, thatcherite economics, Chicago Boys, Hayek’s theories, etc.) and List’s idea of a harmonious juxtaposition of autarkies on the world map. The LaRouche caucus never quotes List (as far as I know) and says Lincoln and McKinley were opponents to the Free Trade, a position that, according to Lyndon LaRouche, explains their assassinations. Both were killed after a plot aiming at cancelling all political steps towards a North American autarkist system. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were supporters of the Free Trade system and of a British-American alliance along the lines theorized by an almost forgotten proponent of geopolitics, Homer Lea, author of a key book, “The Day of the Saxons”. Lea, having got a degree in West Point, had been dismissed for medical reasons and turned to pure theory, advocating an eternal alliance of Britain and the United States. We can read in his book today the general principles of a control of the South Asian “rimlands” by both Anglo-Saxon sea powers, especially Afghanistan, and of a control of the Low Countries and Denmark to avoid any push forward of Germany in the direction of the North Sea or any push forward of France in the direction of the harbours of Antwerp and Rotterdam.

 

The LaRouche caucus aims obviously at emphasizing the role in history of some icon figures of America like Abraham Lincoln of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nevertheless Free Trade and Continental Autarky are truly a couple of opposites that you cannot deny, even if the binary antagonism isn’t certainly so sharp as explained by LaRouche’s team. For instance, it is true that F. D. Roosevelt started his career as a US President by launching the huge project of the “Tennessee Valley”, foreseeing the building of a series of colossal dams to tame the violent waters of the Tennessee, Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The New Deal and the “Tennessee Valley Project” were distinctly continental purposes but they were torpedoed by the proponents of Free Trade, who in the end imposed a new Free Trade policy, an alliance with Britain, despite the fact that Chamberlain tried to create an inner Commonwealth autarky. This shift in Roosevelt’s policy lead to war with Japan and Germany because the failure of the New Deal policy implied to choose for exportations and to abandon the project of developing the inner Northern American market. If you have to prevent other areas in the world to develop their own closed markets, you must destroy them, according to the good old colonial logics, and get them as exportation markets. So the United States were doomed to destroy the European system of the Germans and the “Co-Prosperity Sphere of East Asia” under the leadership of Japan.

 

To summarize our position, let us remember that Russia developed and came out of underdevelopment under the “Continental Project” of Serguei Witte and Arkady Stolypin, who were either dismissed after a gossip campaign or assassinated by a crazy revolutionist. China after its communist isolation under Mao turned to a form of autarkist model under Deng Xiao Ping, leading the country to an unchallenged economical success. Putin in Russia is trying, with less success, to adopt the same guidelines. But the “Continental Autarkists” are assembling nowadays under the direction of the informal Shanghai Group or of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Europe and the United States will have to adapt in order to avoid complete decay. The key idea to successfully perform this adaptation is the good old project of Friedrich List. And the American can refer to one of his most brilliant students: Lawrence Dennis, who coined a project for “continental autarky”, being influenced by the “continentalist” school of South America, where he lived for a quite long time as a diplomat.

 

The Flemish village of Munkzwalm where many technical meetings and several Spring Courses were held between 1989 and 1995

 

Q.: Is it important for the pro-European activist to be familiar with geopolitics?

 

Of course. If you are a pro-European activist, you should perceive Europe as a geopolitical entity, surrounded by possible foes and having to control militarily its periphery, for instance by preventing the North African states to become sea powers again or to prevent any alien power to provide them sea power tools or missiles able to strike the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. The whole history of Europe is the history of a long defence battle against Barbary Coast pirates and their Ottoman rulers. Once this danger eliminated, Europe could develop and prosper. Nowadays mass immigration within the boarders of European countries replace the external danger of Barbary Coast piracy or of Ottoman threat by introducing parallel economical circuits and mafia systems of drug bosses, the so-called “diaspora mafias”, who weaken the whole social system by literally milking money from the well established European social security system and by earning colossal fortunes from drug dealing (Moroccan cannabis which amounts to 70% of the entire European consumption or Central Asian heroin dispatched by Turkish mafias). The type of danger has changed but comes always from the very next periphery of Europe. Racialist as well as so-called anti-racist arguments are preposterous in such matters, as you don’t need to develop a “racialist argumentation” to criticize mass immigration: you simply have to stress the fact that international authorities like the UNESCO or the UNO have urged the EU to finance alternative crops in Morocco, in order to replace the huge fields of cannabis in the Northern parts of the country by useful plantations. But the money given by the EU has been used to triple the area where cannabis crops are cultivated! So Morocco, the Moroccan citizens or the European citizens of Moroccan origin who trust drugs from the Rif area are lawbreakers in front of the EU, UNESCO and UNO policy. Anti-racist arguments, caucuses and legislations, trying to crush all people criticizing mass immigration, are in fact tools in the hand of the secret lobbies and the drug bosses that try to weaken Europe and to maintain our homelands in a permanent state of debility and decrepitude.

 

For you Swedes, as fellow countrymen of Rudolf Kjellén and Sven Hedin, geopolitics is of course a genuine part of your political and cultural heritage. Moreover the Russian Yuri Semionov, author of a tremendously interesting book on Siberia, was a refugee in Sweden in the Thirties. In Swedish libraries you must find a lot about the first theories on geopolitics (as it was Kjellén who coined the word), about the travelogues of Hedin, explorer of Central Asia and Tibet, and maybe about Semionov’s works. At the very beginning of the so-called New Right project, geopolitics was still taboo. There was certainly an implicit geopolitics among diplomats or generals, which was not genuinely different from the former geopolitical endeavours of the previous decades, but the very word was taboo. You couldn’t talk about geopolitics without being accused of trying to resume Nazi geopolitics, which had been set once for all as “esoteric”. Karl Haushofer, the German pupil of Kjellén, had been depicted as a crazy mystical mage having disguised his belonging to a so-called secret society of the “Green Dragon” behind a weak discourse about history, geography and international affairs. When you read Haushofer and his excellent “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik” (which survived him under the name of “Geopolitik” in the Fifties), you find comments on current affairs, reasonable reflections about frontiers within and outside Europe, interviews of foreign diplomats and excellent analyses about the Pacific area but no pseudo-Chinese or neo-Teutonic esoteric humbug. At the end of the Seventies, things changed. In the United States, Colin S. Gray decided to break definitively the taboo on geopolitics. As an Anglo-Saxon proponent of geopolitics, Gray was of course a pupil of Sir Halford John MacKinder, of Homer Lea and of their pupil Spykman. But he explained that Haushofer’s geopolitics was a continental reaction against MacKinder’s sea power geopolitics. Haushofer was so rehabilitated and could be studied again as a normal proponent of geopolitics and not as a mystical crackpot.

 

In the group of students, who followed the works of the New Right groups in Brussels at the end of the Seventies and was lead by late Alain Derriks, we had of course purchased a copy of Gray’s book but, at the same time, we discovered the book of an Italian general, Guido Giannettini, “Dietro la Grande Muraglia” (“Beyond the Great (Chinese) Wall”). This book was extremely well written, offered simultaneously a historical approach and present-day analyses, and opened wide perspectives. Giannettini had observed how the whole international chessboard had been turned upside down in 1972, when Kissinger and Nixon had coined a new implicit alliance with communist China. Formerly, the American lead Western world had faced a giant Eurasian communist block, embracing China and the USSR, even when the relationship between Moscow and Beijing wasn’t optimal anymore or could even become sometimes frankly antagonist (with a clash between both armies along the River Amur in Far Eastern Siberia). After the defeat of Germany in 1945, Europe had been divided, according to the rules settled at Teheran and Yalta, into a Western part dominated by NATO and an Eastern part under the direction of the Warsaw Pact. At that time Euro-nationalists around my fellow countryman Jean Thiriart, rejected both systems and pleaded for an alliance with China and the Arab world (Egypt, Syria and Iraq) in order to loose the choking entanglement of both NATO and Warsaw Pact. In Thiriart’s clearly outlined strategy for his Europe-wide but tiny movement, Chinese and Arabs would have had for task to keep Americans and Soviets busy outside Europe, so that the pressure would be lighter to bear in Europe and lead, if possible, to a successful liberation movement, aiming at restoring Europe’s independence and sovereignty. When Americans and Chinese joined their forces to contain and encircle Soviet Russia, the wished Euro-Chinese alliance to disentangle Yalta’s yoke in Europe became a sheer impossibility. On the other side, the Arabs were too weak and not interested in a European revival, as they feared a come back of the colonial powers in their area, as during the Suez affair in October 1956. Giannettini’s option for a Euro-Russian block became the only possible choice. Thiriart agreed. So did we. But our views about a possible future Euro-Russian alliance were confused at the very beginning: we couldn’t accept the occupation of Eastern Europe and even less the partition of Germany that is, geographically speaking, the core of Europe. On the other hand, the American disguised occupation was also for us an unacceptable situation, especially after De Gaulle’s breach with NATO and the new independent course in international affairs that it induced, according to Dr. Armin Mohler. After the Israeli victory of June 1967 with the help of Mirage III fighters and bombers, France’s new world policy lead to the exportation of Dassault jet fighters in Latin America, South Africa, India and Australia. It could have generated a new European based aeronautical industry, as in 1975 the Scandinavian and Low Countries air forces had the choice between the Mirage IV, the Saab Viggen jet, a new model produced by a future common French-Swedish project, or the American F-16. European independence was only possible if Europe could build an independent aeronautical industry, based on merges between already existing aeronautical companies. The fact that after corruption affairs the Scandinavian and Low Countries armies opted for the American F-16 jet ruined the possibility of a jointed independent European aeronautical industry. It was the purchase of the F-16 jets and the subsequent ruin of a possible French-Swedish fighter project that induces our small group to reject definitively all forms of pendency in front of the Western hegemonic power. But what else if the Iron Curtain seemed to be not removable and if the inner European situation was apparently a stalemate, bound to remain as such eternally?

 

Other readings helped us to improve our views. I’ll quote here two key books that shifted unequivocally our viewpoints: Prof. Louis Dupeux’ doctor paper on German “national bolshevism” at the time of the Weimar Republic in the Twenties and Prof. Alexander Yanov’s UCLA paper on the Russian “New Right” in the last years of Soviet rule, at the end of Brezhnev’s era and just before Gorbachev’s perestroika. Dupeux helped us to understand the relevancy of the Soviet-German tandem in the Twenties, starting with the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 (between Rathenau and Chicherin). This relevancy could explain us the cause of the ephemeral Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of August 1939. A European-Russian tandem could therefore offer the possibility of independence and Continental-Eurasian strength. But such a tandem was impossible under communist rule. But was communism as monolithic as it was described in the Western press and medias? In his paper Yanov divided Soviet-Russian political thought into two categories and each of these two categories again in two others: the Zapadniki (the Westerners) and the Narodniki (the proponents of Russian identity). You could find dissident Zapadniki in the emigration and pro-regime Zapadniki within the Soviet institutions (i. e. Marxist of the old school as Marxism was a Western importation). You could also find dissident Narodniki in the emigration, such as Solzhenitsyn, and pro-regime Narodniki in the Soviet-Russian academic world, such as the writer Valentin Rasputin, who wrote “rural” novels criticizing the reckless industrialisation and “electrification” of old traditional Russian villages or areas. For Yanov the Russian New Right was incarnated in all the Narodniki, be they dissidents or not, and all Narodniki were of course dangerous compeers and rascals as they challenged dominant Western as well as Soviet principles. So our position, and the one staunchly defended in Germany by former Gulag prisoner Wolfgang Strauss (arrested during the East German riots of June 1953), was to hope for a Narodniki political or metapolitical revolution in Russia and in Eastern Europe, giving the possibility to create an International of Narodniki, from the Atlantic coasts to the Pacific Ocean, challenging the Western hemisphere and its liberal leftist ideology. Meanwhile after Reagan’s election in November 1981 the missile crisis swept all over Europe. The piling up of missiles on both sides of the Iron Curtain risked in case of war to destroy definitively all European countries. The reaction was passionate especially in Germany: more and more puzzled voices required a new neutrality status, to avoid implication in a military system of warmongers, and pleaded for a withdrawal from NATO, as the Treaty’s Organisation was lead by an external hegemonic power, which didn’t care for the safety of Europe and was ready to unleash a horrible nuclear apocalypse upon our countries. A neutrality status, as suggested by General Jochen Löser in Germany (in “Neutralität für Mitteleuropa”), implied also to promote a kind of “Third Way” system, which would have been a synthesis between state socialism and market capitalism. “Wir Selbst” of Siegfried Bublies (Koblenz) was the leading magazine, which backed a policy of NATO withdrawal and Central European neutrality, a “Third Way” (for instance the one theorized by the Slovak economist Ota Sik), a reconciliation with Russia (according to Ernst Niekisch or Karl-Otto Paetel as dissidents both of the Weimar Republic and of the Third Reich), the devolution movements in Western and Eastern Europe, and the new dissidents in the Soviet dominated block. The magazine had been created in 1979 and remained till the very beginning of the 21^st Century the main forum for alternative thought with a humanist touch in all Europe. I mean “humanist” in the sense given to this word by the main non Westernized dissidents of Eastern Europe, being no Narodniki in the narrow sense of this expression. The years 1982 and 1983 were determined by the pacifist revolt throughout Europe, especially in Germany around an interesting thinker like air force Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Mechtersheimer, and in the Low Countries but also in Britain, where huge demonstrations were held to prevent the dispatch of American missiles. Our small group supported the pacifist movement against the conventional positions of many other Rightist or even New Right clubs (including de Benoist at that time, who accused us of being the “Trotskites” of the movement, positioning himself as a kind of Stalin-like Big Brother!). The new pacifism and neutralism ceased to thrive when Gorbachev declared he intended to launch a glasnost and perestroika policy to soften the Soviet rule. Once Gorbachev promised a new policy, we could only wait and see, without abandoning all necessary scepticism. 

 

During the second half of the Eighties, we hoped for a new world, in which the Iron Curtain would one day disappear and the dominant systems would gently evolve towards a “Third Way”. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall was suppressed, we all thought very naively that the liberation of Europe and of Russia was imminent. The Gulf War and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Iraq and of Afghanistan proved that Europe was in fact totally unable to take an original decision in front of the world events, with the slight exception of the short French, German and Russian opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, an opposition naively hailed as the new “Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axe” but an Axe that couldn’t of course prevent the unlawful invasion of Saddam Hussein’s country. So we still are in a desolate state of subjugation despite the fact that Europe now counts 27 states in full membership.

 

Let us come back to geopolitical theory. In 1979, when we discovered Giannettini’s book, I read General Heinrich Jordis von Lohausen’s book “Mut zur Macht”, which was a very good summary and actualisation of Kjellen’s ideas, as well as of all notions formerly defined by Haushofer and his broad team (Walter Pahl, Gustav Fochler-Hauke, Otto Maull, Walter Wüst, R. W.  von Keyserlingk, Erich Obst, etc.). I wrote a small paper for my end examination of “International Affairs”, which was read with interest by the teacher, who found Lohausen’s positions interesting but still “dangerous”. Geopolitics in June 1980, date when I passed the examination with brio (18/20! Thank you, dear General von Lohausen!), was still taboo in “poor little Belgium”. It wouldn’t last a long time before this “dangerousness” would definitively belong to the past. The French intellectual world produced successively many excellent geopolitical studies: I’ll only quote here Yves Lacoste’s journal “Hérodote”, the accurate maps of Michel Foucher, the encyclopaedic studies of Hervé Coutau-Bégarie and the courses of Ayméric Chauprade (who, as a teacher in the French High Military Academy, was recently sacked by Sarközy because he couldn’t accept the coming back of France in the commanding structures of NATO as a full member state). In the Anglo-Saxon world, the best books on the matter are those produced by the British publishing house “I. B. Tauris” (London).

 

You cannot concentrate only on geopolitics as a mean strategic way of thinking. To use the tools properly you need an accurate knowledge in history that the shelves in Anglo-Saxon bookshops offer you in abundance. Then to be a good proponent of geopolitics you need to study lots of maps, especially historical maps. I therefore collect historical atlases since I got the first one in my life, the official one you had to buy when you reached the third year in the secondary school. When I was 15, I bought my very first German book, volume two of the “DTV-Atlas zur Weltgeschichte”, at Brussels’ flea market. The book lies now since about forty years on my desk! Indispensable tools are also the atlases of the British University teacher Colin McEvedy, which were translated into Dutch for Holland’s schools. McEvedy sees history as a regular succession of collisions between “core peoples” (Indo-Europeans, Turkish-Mongolic tribes, Semitic nomads of the Arabic peninsula, etc.), which he perceives as balls moving on a kind of huge billiard table, which is Eurasia with all its highways across the steppes. By reading McEvedy’s comments on the maps he draws we can understand history as permanent systolic and diastolic movements of “core peoples” (together with assimilated alien tribes or vanquished former foes) against each other, in order to control land, highways or sea accesses to them. And what is European history if not a long process of resisting more or less successfully Mongolic or Turkish assaults in the East and Hamito-Semitic incursions in the South? Next to McEvedy, the most interesting historical atlas in my collection is the one that a Swiss professor produced, namely Jacques Bertin’s “Atlas historique universel – Panorama de l’histoire du monde”, where you’ll find even more precise maps than the ones of McEvedy. Also, the German DTV-Atlas (which exists in an English version published at Penguin’s publishing house in Britain), McEvedy’s works and Bertin’s panorama are the tools that I use since many years. They have been my paper companions since I was a teenager.

 

What is your analysis of the actual and ideal relationship of Europe and Russia, Turkey and the United States?

 

To answer your question here in a complete and satisfying way, I should rather write a couple of thick books instead of babbling some insufficient explanations!  Indeed your question asks me in fact to summarize in some short sentences the whole history of mankind. I suppose that, for historical reasons, Swedes don’t perceive Russia and Turkey as citizens of Central or Western Europe would perceive these countries. Swedes must remember the attempt of King Charles XII to restore what was seen as the “Gothic Link” between the Baltic and the Black Sees by becoming the heir of the Polish-Lithuanian State in decay at his time: therefore he had to wage war against Russia and try to obtain the Turkish alliance. During the Soviet-Finnish war of winter 1939-40, Swedes were terribly worried because the move of Stalin’s Red Army to recuperate Finland as a former Tsarist province implied a future Soviet control of the Baltic See reducing simultaneously Swedish sovereignty and room for manoeuvre in these waters. It was also jeopardizing the fragile independence of the Baltic States.

 

Vlotho, Low Saxony (Germany) where a lot of meetings, conferences and Summer courses took place

 

Russia still wants to have access to the Atlantic via the Baltic see routes but in a less aggressive way than in Soviet times, when a messianic ideology was running the agenda. After the disappearing of the Iron Curtain, we are back to the situation we had in 1814. Once Napoleon Bonaparte had been eliminated and together with him the tone-downed Bolshevism of his time, i. e. the blood drenched French revolution ideology, Europe was a more or less united block nicknamed in Ancient Greek language the “Pentarchy” (The “Five Powers”), stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts. We often forget nowadays that Europe was a strategic united block between 1814 and 1830, i. e. only during fifteen years. This unity allowed the pacification of Spain in 1822-23, the Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1828 and later the crushing of Barbary Coast piracy by the landing of French troops in present-day Algeria in 1832. But the “Pentarchy” ceased to be a harmonious symphony of allied traditional powers when Belgium become independent from the King of Holland: indeed, Britain (in order to destroy the sea power of Holland, the industrial capacities in present-day Belgium’s Walloon provinces and the potentialities of the Indonesian colonial realm of the United Low Countries Kingdom) and France (aiming at recuperating Belgium and the harbour of Antwerp as well as a portion of the Mosel Valley in Luxemburg, leading to the very middle of German Rhineland in Koblenz) supported the rather incoherent Belgian independence movement while the other powers (Prussia, Austria and Russia) supported the Dutch King and his United Kingdom of the Low Countries. France, which started in the Thirties of the 19^th Century to carve its African Empire not only in Algeria but also in present-day Gabon and Senegal, and Britain, which was already a world empire whose cornerstone was India, became very soon Extra-European realms deriving their power from wealthy colonies and were therefore not more interested in the strategic unity of Europe, as the genuine civilisation area of all the people of our Caucasian kinship. The competition between European powers to get colonies implied that colonial rivalries could perhaps end in inner European conflicts, what happened indeed in 1914. The spirit of 1814 was kept alive by the “Drei Kaisersbund”, the “Alliance of the three Emperors” (United Germany after 1871, Austria-Hungary and Russia), which unfortunately started to disintegrate after Bismarck’s withdrawal in 1891 and due to the French-Russian economical-financial alliance under Tsar Alexander III (cf. the limpid book of Gordon Craig and Alexander L. George, “Zwischen Krieg und Frieden. Konfliktlösung in Geschichte und Gegenwart”, C. H. Beck, Munich, 1984; this book is a history of European diplomacy from the Treaty of Vienna in 1814 to WW1, where the authors describe the gradual disintegration of the “Pentarchy”, leading to the explosion of 1914; both authors remember also that Nixon and Kissinger tried to re-establish a kind of “Pentapolarity”, with China, Japan, the United States, Europe and Soviet Russia, but the attempt failed or was reduced to nought by the new human rights’ diplomacy of Carter. The only possible present-day “Pentapolarity” is represented by the “BRIC”-system, with Brazil, Russia, Iran, India, China and maybe, in a next future, post-Mandela South Africa).

 

Sababurg Castle, along the "Märchenstrasse" ("Fairy Tales Road"), Hessen (Germany), where the German friends usually held their regular meetings

 

In the first decade of the 20^th Century, the “Entente” was not an obvious option at the very beginning: Russia and Britain were still rivals in Central Asia and on the rimland of South Asia; Britain and France were rivals in Sudan as Britain couldn’t tolerate a French military settlement on the Nile River (the Fashoda incident in 1898), a situation which would have cut the British possessions in the Southern part of Africa from the Egyptian protectorate in the North; we should remember here that Cecil Rhodes’ project was to link Cape Town to Cairo by a British managed Trans-African railway, after the elimination of the German colony of Tanganyka or a possible occupation of Belgian Katanga. Even if already grossly decided in 1904, the French-British-Russian alliance, known as the Entente, was far to be a sure fact before the fatidic year of 1914. The Anglo-Russian dispute in Persia had still to be settled in 1907. Moreover the three Entente powers hadn’t yet shared their part of the pie on the rimlands, as France had to accept first the de facto English protectorate in Egypt. In return for this acceptation, Britain accepted to support France’s interests in Morocco against the will of the German Emperor, who wanted to extend the Reich’s influence to the Sherifan Kingdom in North Africa, threatening to close the Mediterranean and to reduce to nought the key strategic importance of Gibraltar. For all these reasons, it is obviously not sure that Russian efficient ministers as Witte or Stolypin would have waged a war, as Russia was still economically and industrially to weak to sustain a long term war against the so-called Central Powers, i.e. Austria, Germany and the Ottomans, especially as China and Japan could possibly take advantage in the Far East of a debilitated Russia on the European stage.

 

The problem is that we Europeans cannot escape the necessity of using the Siberian raw materials and the gas and oil of the Caucasian, Central Asian and Russian fields. The weakness of Europe lays in its lack of raw materials (nowadays 90% of the rare earths, indispensable for high tech electronic devices, have to be bought in China). Europe could save itself from the Ottoman entanglement by conquering America and by circumnavigating Africa and arriving in the Indian harbours without having to pass through Islam dominated areas. Europeans aren’t visceral colonialists: they carved colonial empires despite their will, simply to escape an Ottoman-Muslim invasion.

 

The European-Turkish relationship has always been conflictual and remains today as such. It is not a question of race or even of religion, although both factors ought of course to be taken reasonably into account. Religion played certainly a key role as the Seldjuks had turned Muslim before attacking and beating the Byzantine Empire in 1071 but one forgets too often that at the same time other Turkish tribes, known as the Cumans, attacked Southern Russia and moved in the direction of the Low Danube without having turned Muslim: their faith war still Pagan-Shamanic. They nevertheless coordinated their wide scale action with their Muslim cousins. Muslim and Pagan-Shamanic Turks took the Pontic area (Black Sea as Pontus Euxinus) in a tangle: the Pagan Cumans in the North, the Muslim Seldjuks in the South. It is neither a question of race as present-day Turkey is a mix of all possible neighbouring peoples, tribes and ethnic kinships. It isn’t a joke to say that you have now Turks of all colours, like on an advertisement panel of Benetton! The European Danubian, Balkanic (Bosnians, Greeks, Albanians) and Ukrainian contribution to the ethno-genesis of the present-day Turkish population is really important, as are the parts of converted local Byzantine Greeks or Armenians or as are also the Sunni Indo-European Kurds. The Arab-Syrian influence is also clear in the South. The Turkish danger is that the Turks, whatever their real origin may be, still see themselves as the heirs of all the Hun, Mongolic and Turkish tribes that moved westwards to the Atlantic. Sultan Mehmed, who took Constantinople in 1453, kept in his mind the idea of the general move of Turkish tribes westwards but added to his geopolitical vision the one that moved the Byzantine general Justinian, who wanted at the beginning of the 7^th Century to conquer again all the Mediterranean area till the shores of the Atlantic. Mehmed’s vision was also a merge of Turkish and Byzantine geopolitics. In his own eyes, he was the Sultan and the Byzantine Basileus at the same time and wanted to become also Pope and Emperor, once his armies would have taken both Rome (“the Red Apple”) and Vienna (“the Golden Apple”). Mehmed even thought that one day such a shift as a “translatio imperii ad Turcos” could happen, like there had been a “translatio imperii ad Francos” and “ad Germanos”, just after the definitive crumbling down of the Roman Empire.  

 

The idea of moving westwards is still alive among Turks. The strong Turkish desire to become a full member of the EU means the will to pour the Anatolian demographic overpopulation into the demographically declining European states and to transform them in Muslim Turkish dominated countries. This statement of mine is not a mean reflection of an incurable “Turkophobic” obsession but is purely and simply derived from an analysis of Erdogan’s speech in Cologne in February 2008. Erdogan urged the Turkish immigration in Germany and in other European countries not to assimilate, as “assimilation is a crime against mankind” because it would wipe out the “Turkishness” of Turkish people, and urged also to create autonomous Turkish communities within the European states, that would welcome the new immigrants by marriage of by so-called “family gathering”. Later Erdogan and Davutoglu threaten to back the Turkish mafias in Europe, would the authorities of the EU postpone once more the admission of Turkey as a full member state. Every serious political personality in Europe has to reject such a project and to struggle against its possible translation into the everyday European reality. A migration flood of totally uneducated workforces into Europe would lead to high joblessness and let the social security systems collapse definitively. It would mean the end of the European civilisation.

 

The Turks are plenty aware of the key position their country has on the world map. Would I be a Turk, I would of course staunchly support Erdogan and Davutoglu. But I am not and cannot identify myself to such an alien vision of geopolitics. I wouldn’t care if all the efforts of the new Turkish geopolitics would be directed towards the Near East, as the Near East needs a hegemonic regional power to get rid of the awful chaos in which it is now desperately squiggling. It wouldn’t perhaps not be so easy for the Turks to become again the hegemonic power in an Arab Near East as conflicts were frequent between Ottomans and Arab nationalists, especially since the end of the 19^th Century when Sultan Abdulhamid started a centralisation policy, which was achieved by the strongly nationalist Young Turks in power since 1908. Arab liberal nationalists contended this new Young Turkish nationalist rule, which was not more genuinely Islamic, universal and Imperial-Ottoman but strictly Turkish national, stressing the superiority of the Turks within the Ottoman Empire, reducing simultaneously the Arabs to second-class citizens. The challenging Arab nationalists were severely crushed at the eve of WW1 (public hangings of Arab liberal intellectuals were common in Syrian or Lebanese towns at that time). But a renewed Turkish policy in the Near East cannot in principle collide frontally with the vital and paramount European interests, except of course if it would dominate the Suez Canal zone and control this essential portion of the sea route leading from West Europe to the Far East: one should not forget that the Zionist idea, i. e. the idea of settling Jews in the area between Turkish Anatolia and Mehmet Ali’s successful Egypt of the first half of the 19^th Century, that was supported by France, was an idea shaped in the late 1830s in the English press and not in the mind of Rabbis in Eastern European ghettos. The idea had already been evoked by Prince Charles de Ligne during the war between the Ottoman Empire and the coalition of Russia and Austria in the 1780s as a means to weaken the Turks and to create a focal point of troubles on another front, far from the Balkans, Crimea and the Caucasus; Napoleon wanted also to settle Jews in Palestine in order to prevent a future Turkish domination in the Suez area, as the French at that time, by supporting the Mameluks of Egypt against their Turkish masters, already had the intention to dig a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Zionism is also not a genuine ideology born in Jewish ghettos but an idea forged artificially by the British to use the Jews as mere puppets. This role of Israel as a simple puppet state explains also why the relationship between Turkey and Israel are worsening now as the renewed Ottoman diplomacy of Davutoglu induces the Turkish state to resume his previous influences in the Arab Near East or Fertile Crescent. This could lead to a complete reverse of alliances in the region: voices in the United States are pleading for a new Iranian-American tandem between Mesopotamia and the Indus River which would fade or dim the usual alliance between Ankara, Washington and Tel Aviv. Such a shift would be as important as the Nixon-Kissinger renewed diplomacy of 1971-72, when suddenly China, the former “rogue state”, turned instantaneously to be the best ally of the States. It would also rule out many oversimplifying ideologists who have opted for cartoonlike pro-Zionist, pro-Palestinian (or pro-Hamas or pro-Hizbollah) or pro-Iranian positions in order to support either a Western Alliance or an Anti-Western/Anti-American coalition on the international chessboard. Things might or even may be completely turned upside down within a single decade. The Anti-American pro-Iranian ideologist of today may become a pro-Zionist Anti-American tomorrow if he wants to remain Anti-American and if he is not turned still crazier by the crumbling down of his too schematic worldview as many Western Maoists did in the 1970s, when their former anti-American anti-imperialist perorations coined on the Chinese model of Mao’s cultural revolution became totally outdated and preposterous once Kissinger had forged an alliance with communist China, that wasn’t ready anymore to support Maoist zealots and puppets in the Western world. Indeed, the United States would better than now contain Russia, China and India in case of a renewed alliance with Teheran. And using the quite wide influence sphere of the “Iranian civilization” (as the former Shah used to say), they could extend more easily their preponderance in Central Asia, in the Fertile Crescent, in Lebanon (with the Shiite minority armed by the Hizbollah) and in the Gulf where Shiite minorities are important. But Iran would then become a too powerful ally, exactly like China, the new ally of 1972, does. And before Iran would become a new China and develop naval capacities in the Gulf and in the Oman Sea, i. e. in one of the main areas of the Indian Ocean, like China wants to control entirely the Southern Chinese Sea in the Pacific, Europe would have to unite with Russia and India to contain a pro-American Iran! Stephen Kinzer, former “New York Times” bureau chief in Turkey, celebrated analyst of Iran’s turmoil in 1953 (the Mossadegh case) and International relations teacher at Boston University, pleads in his very recent book “Reset Middle East” for a general alliance on the Near East, Middle East and South Asian rimlands between Turks, Iranians and Americans (which would include also Pakistan and so re-establish the containing bolt that the Bagdad Treaty formerly was). When you are interested in geopolitics you should have fine observing skills and foresee all possible shifts in alliances that could occur in a very near future. It is also obvious that if Washington continues to treat Teheran as a “rogue state”, the Iranians will be compelled to play the game with Russia that remains nevertheless historically a foe of the Persians. Each Russian-Persian tandem would split in its very middle the rimland’s room that was organised by the Bagdad Treaty of the Fifties and give the Russians indirectly a broad “window” on the Indian Ocean, which is a state of things totally contrary to the principles settled by Homer Lea in 1912 and since then cardinal to all the Anglo-Saxon sea powers.  

 

The relationship with the United States is a quite complex one. Two main ideas must be kept in mind if you want to understand our position:

1)       Like the British historian Christopher Hill brilliantly demonstrated in his books “The World Turned Upside Down – Radical Ideas During the English Revolution” and “Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England”, the core ideas that lead to the foundation of the British Thirteen Colonies in the Northern part of the New World was “dissidence” in front of all the European political systems inherited from the past. Later Clifford Longley in “Chosen People – The Big idea that Shapes England and America” produced an very accurate historical analysis of this Biblical idea of a Chosen People that leads Britons and Americans to perceive themselves not as a particular people of the European Caucasian family but as a “lost tribe of Israel”. Longley explains us that state of affairs by writing that Britons and Americans don’t have an identity, as other European people have, but thinks that they have a particular destiny, i. e. to build an aloof “New Jerusalem” and not a concrete defensive Empire of the European people, that would be born out of the genuine historical traditions of the subcontinent and simultaneously the legitimate, syncretic, Continental and Insular (Britain, Ireland, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, etc.) heir of the Roman Empire and of the medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The very idea of incarnating a “New Jerusalem” leads to despise the “non chosen”, even if they are akin people having importantly contributed to the ethno-genesis of the English or American nation (Dutch, Flemings, Northern Germans as Hanovrian or Low Saxons, Danes and Norwegians). Kevin Phillips, former Republican strategist in the United States and political commentator in leading American papers, in his fascinating book “American Theocracy – The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21^st Century”, criticizes the new political theology induced by the several Bush’s Administrations between 2000 and 2008, that have bereft the Republicans from the last remnants of traditional diplomacy, leading to what he calls an “Erring Republican Majority”. Indeed each chosen people’s theology introduced in the events of the international chessboard destroys all the traditional ways of practising diplomacy, as surely as French Sans-Culottes’ Republicanism or Bolshevism did or Islam Fundamentalism does. Europe, as a continent that has a long memory, cannot admit a scheme that rejects vehemently all the heritages of the past to replace them by mere artificial myths, that were moreover imported from the Near East in Roman times and have received a still faker interpretation in the decades just after Reformation.

 

2)       The second main fact of history to keep in mind in order to understand the complex Euro-American relationship is the effect the Monroe Doctrine had on the international chessboard from the second quarter of the 19^th Century onwards. In principle the Monroe Doctrine aimed at preventing European interventions in the New World or the Western Hemisphere as the Spanish “creole” countries had rebelled against Madrid and gained their independence and as the British had burnt Washington in 1812, after having invaded the States from Canada, and the Russians were still formally in California and Alaska. Monroe feared a general intervention of the “Pentarchy” powers everywhere in the new World that would have prevented the former Thirteen Colonies to develop and would synchronously have choked any attempt to rise as a Northern American continental and bi-oceanic power. Indeed the young Northern American Republic faced at that time a huge Eurasian block that seemed definitively indomitable, with British room projections in India and Southern Africa. The American historian Dexter Perkins in his book “Hands off: A History of the Monroe Doctrine” (1955) explains us that President Monroe got the audacity to challenge the European/Eurasian block at a time when the United States couldn’t actually assert any well-grounded power on the international chessboard. Monroe’s bold affirmation created US power in the world, simply because a pure will, expressed in plain words, can really anticipate actual power, be the very first step towards it. It is not a simple matter of chance that Carl Schmitt stressed the uttermost importance of the Monroe Doctrine in the genesis of the geopolitical shape of present-day world. Jordis von Lohausen says in his book “Mut zur Macht” that if Monroe wanted to preserve the New World from any European intervention, he wanted simultaneously to keep this New World for the USA themselves as sole hegemonic power. But if the New World is united under the leadership of Washington, it must control the other banks of the Oceans in a way or another to prevent any concentration of power able to disturb US hegemony or to regain authority in Latin America, be it directly political (like during the attempt of Maximilian of Hapsburg to create a European-dominated Empire in Mexico in 1866-67 with the support of France, Belgium, Spain and Austria) or indirectly by trade and economical means (as Germany did just before the two World Wars). So in the end effect, the Monroe Doctrine implies that the United States have to control the shores of Western Europe and of Morocco and the ones of Japan, China, Indochina and the Philippines in order to survive a the main superpower in the world.

 

The critical attitude we always have developed in front of the US American fact derives from these two core ideas. We cannot accept a Biblical ideology refusing to take into account our real roots and reducing all the institutions generated by our history to worthless rubbish. We can neither accept an affirmation of power that denies us the right to be ourselves a power on political, military and cultural levels. Would America get rid of the former British dissident ideology and adopt the principles of continental autarky, as Lawrence Dennis taught to do, there wouldn’t be any problem anymore. It would even be of great benefit for the US American population itself.

 

In your many articles you have exhibited an impressive knowledge of European thinkers from Hamsun and Evola to Spengler and Schmitt. Do you consider some of them more important, and a good starting-point for the pro-European individual?

 

The study of our “classical” heritage of authors is a must if we want to create a real alternative worldview (“Weltanschauung”). Moreover, Evola, Spengler and Schmitt are more linked to each other than we would imagine at first glance. Evola is not only the celebrated traditional thinker who is worldwide known as such. He was an intrepid alpinist who climbed the Northern wall of the Lyskamm in the Alps. His ashes were buried in the Lyskamm glacier by his follower Renato del Ponte after he had been cremated in Spoleto (a town that remained true to Emperor Frederick Hohenstaufen) after his death in 1974. Evola was a Dadaist at the very beginning of his career as an artist, a thinker and a traditionalist. His was totally involved in the art avant-gardes of his time, as he himself declared during a very interesting television interview in French language that you can watch now on your internet screen via “you tube” or “daily motion”. This position of him was deduced from a thorough rejection of Western values as they had degenerated during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. We have to get rid of them in order to be “reborn”: the Futurists thought we ought to perform promptly this rejection project in order to create a complete new world owing absolutely nothing to the past; the Dadaists thought the rejection process should happen by mocking the rationalist and positivist bigotry of the “stupid 19^th Century” (as Charles Maurras’ companion Léon Daudet said). Evola after about a decade thought such options, as throwing rotten tomatoes at scandalized bourgeois’ heads or as exhibiting an urinal as if it was a masterwork of sculpture, were a little childish and started to think about an exploration of “the World of Tradition” as it expressed itself in other religions such as Hinduism, the Chinese Tao Te King, the first manifestations of Indian Buddhism (“the Awakening Doctrine”), the Upanishads and Tantric Yoga. For the European tradition, Evola studied the manifestations and developed a cult of Solar Manly Tradition being inspired in this reasoning by Bachofen’s big essay on matriarchal myth (“Mutterrecht”). Thanks to the triumph of the Solar Tradition, a genuine Traditional Europe could awaken on the shores of the Mediterranean and especially in the Romanized part of the Italic peninsula, invaded by Indo-European tribes having crossed the Alps just before the Celts did after them. Besides, he was the translator of Spengler and reviewed a lot of German books written by authors belonging to what Armin Mohler called the “Konservative Revolution”. In Italy Evola is obviously very well known, even in groups or academic work teams that cannot be considered as “conservative-revolutionist”, but the role he played as a conveyer of German ideas into his own country is often neglected outside Italy. But still today people rediscover in Latin countries figures of the German “Konservative Revolution” through the well-balanced reviews Evola once published in a lot of intellectual journals from the 1920s to the 1960s. As his comments on these books and publications were very well displayed on didactical level, he can also be still very helpful to us today.

 

Evola was also a diplomat trying to link again to Italy the countries having belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian empire. He was active in Prague, in Vienna (a City he loved) and in Budapest. He also had contacts with the Romanian Iron Guard, which he admired as a kind of citizens’ militia controlling severely the bends of petty politics limping towards corruption and “kleptocracy”. Even if he was mobilized when he was still a very young man as an artillery officer in the Italian army during WW1, Evola disapproved the war waged against traditional Austria and didn’t agree with the Futurists, d’Annunzio and Mussolini who were hectic interventionist warmongers. He was aware that the destruction of the Holy Roman Imperial Tradition in the centre of Europe would be a catastrophe for European culture and civilization. And it was indeed a catastrophe that we still can grasp today: a contemporary author like Claudio Magris, born in Trieste, explains it very well in his books, especially in “Danube”, a kind of nostalgic travelogue, written during peregrinations from one place to another in this lost Empire of former times, now torn into many scattered pieces belonging to thirteen different countries.

 

Carl Schmitt in several books or articles expresses the nostalgia of a kind of “Empire’s secret Chamber” regulating the general policy of a “greater room” (“Grossraum”): for him the members of such a Chamber, if it ever becomes reality, would find inspiration from Bachofen’s ideas and their interpretations, from Spengler pessimistic decay philosophy and from the analyses of all possible teams devoted to geopolitics (Haushofer and others). Carl Schmitt just as Evola was also deeply interested in art avant-gardes.

 

My interest for Hamsun comes from the implicit anthropology you find in his works: the real man is a peasant running an estate. He is free: what he owns is his own production; he is never defined or bound by others, i. e. by alien capitalists or by State’s servants or by foreign rulers or by the eager members of a ruling and crushing party (Orwell’s pigs in “Animal Farm”). The general urbanization process that started in the historical cities of Europe (especially Paris, London and Berlin) and in the new hectic cities of the United States lead to the emerging of an enslaved mankind, unable to coin its own destiny with the only help of his own inner and physical forces. Spengler and Eliade both say also that true mankind is incarnated in the “eternal peasant”, who is the only type of man that can generate genuine religion. David Herbert Lawrence’s most important book for us is without any doubt “Apocalypse”: this English author laments the disappearing of “cosmic forces” in man’s life, due to the bias inaugurated by Reformation, Deism (mocked by Jonathan Swift), 18^th Century Enlightenment and political extremism derived from the blueprints (Burke) of the French Revolution. Man became gradually detached from the cosmic frame in which he was embedded since ever. He’s lost also all his links to the natural communities in which he was born, like the poor immigrant Hamsun was in Chicago or Detroit, limping from one miserable job to another, bereft of all youth friends and family members. The cosmic frame Lawrence was talking about receives a comprehensive and understandable translation for the humble in the aspect of a religious liturgy and calendar (or almanac), expressing symbolically the rhythms of nature in which each man or woman lives. Although Flanders has been urbanized since the Middle Ages and had important industrial cities like Bruges and Ghent, the anthropological ideal of the 19^th Century romantic or realist Flemish literature is the one of the independent peasant (“Baas Gansendonck” in Hendrik Conscience’s novel, the unfortunate and stubborn Father figure in Stijn Streuvels’ “Vlaschaard”, the heroes of Ernst Claes’ and Felix Timmermans’ rural novels and short stories, etc.). In Russian literature too, the rural element of the population is perceived as doomed under any communist or Westernized regime but simultaneously perceived as the only force able to redeem Russia from its horrible past. Solzhenitsyn pleaded for a general liberation of the Russian peasantry in order to restore the Ukrainian “Corn Belt” in the “Black Earth” area, giving Russia back the agricultural advantages it potentially had before the total destruction of the “Kulaks” by the Bolsheviks.

 

But we can talk for hours and hours, write full pages of interpretations of our common literary heritage; I cannot answer your question thoroughly as it would need writing a good pile of books. Let us conclude by saying Tradition or literary “ruralism” (be it Flemish, Scandinavian or Russian) are good things provided you don’t remain glued into it. Futurism is a dynamic necessity also, especially in societies like ours, where the countryside isn’t the only life frame anymore. Marinetti and more recently Guillaume Faye stressed the fact that in order to be able to compete on the international chessboard we have the imperious task to get rid of archaisms. But if Faye is obviously more futurist that “archaist”, I plead for a good balance between immemorial past and audacious future (like Claes did in his marvellously filmed novel “Mira”, in which a backward rural community refuses the building of a bridge that would link the village to the next important town; the young sensual prostitute Mira, treated as a witch by the village bigots, having just come back from Paris, where she was on the game, falls in love with the handsome engineer, the bridge is built and the village dwellers linked to the rest of the people’s community without abandoning their roots – the ideal balance between past and future, between demure morality and forgiven sin, is realised). To put it in realistic arguments: we need both a sound rural population (crushed nowadays by the EU-ukases) and a high tech engineering elite (able to create super-weapons) to become a re-born superpower, which would not be unnecessarily aggressive or feverish  “imperialist” (in the bad sense of the word), but calmly civilian (Zaki Laïdi) and simply powerful by its plain presence in the world. Mentally, we, as the forerunners of the needed “new teams” in present-day messy and derelict Europe, should be real and staunch “archeo-futurists”, mastering our roots and planning boldly our future. The rest is only mean and petty trifles.    

(Answers given in Forest-Flotzenberg, March 2011). 

Armin Mohler / Eine politische Biographie

Armin Mohler. Eine politische Biographie

Götz KUBITSCHEK

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Mann: Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen - über die Wiedersprüche der demokratischen Gesinnungsethik

Thomas Mann: Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen - Über die Wiedersprüche der demokratischen Gesinnungsethik

Geschrieben von: Prof. Dr. Paul Gottfried (Gastautor)

Ex: http://www.blauenarzisse.de/   

Eine Vielfalt von bunten, einander verwandten Themen bilden Die Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, die Thomas Mann zwischen 1915 und 1918 zusammentrug und vor Kriegsende herausbrachte. Der Erstteil des Werkes erwähnt, dass der Schriftsteller ein schon angesetztes „Künstlerwerk“ beiseite schob, nämlich den Zauberberg, um sich einem zeitdringlicheren Auftrag zuzuwenden. Eine Kontinuität erschliesst sich zwischen den letzten Szenen des Romans, als Hans Castorp sich kriegsmäßig gekleidet auf dem Schlachtfeld herumtummelt, und dem tragenden Thema der Betrachtungen, die eine Verteidigung des Deutschtums in einem folgenschweren Krieg darbieten.

Als Universitätsstudent wurde mir eingehämmert, dass beides dieselbe antidemokratische Streitlust bloßlegt, die den Krieg angestossen hatte. Obendrein ist ein gradliniger Verbindungsgang vermeintlich aufzuspüren, der von Manns Empfehlung des „deutschen Sonderwegs“ in den Betrachtungen bis auf die Nazi-Gewaltherrschaft hinüberleitet. Das wurde in den relativ beschaulichen und unparteiischen USA im Jahre 1963 gelehrt. Man kann sich vorstellen, wie dröhnend dieselbe Mahnung im heutigen antifaschistischen Deutschland ertönen muss.

Der deutsche Sonderweg gegen die jakobinisch-westliche Versuchung

Dazu gehören ein paar abgrenzende Bemerkungen. Wie andere Ehrenverteidiger auf beiden Seiten versuchte Mann im Verlauf der Kriegsaktion seine Heimat vor der Propaganda ihrer Opponenten zu bewahren. Da die auf der anderen Seite ausgerichteten Polemiker wie Lord Bryce und Henri Bergson, sich als Verfechter der westlichen Demokratie mit glänzendem Erfolg ausgegeben hatten, entschied sich Mann dafür, Widerstand zu leisten und Deutschland als eine konservative, volksgemeinschaftliche Kultur vorzustellen. Im Gegensatz zu ihren Widersachern kämpften die Deutschen und ihre Verbündeten nicht für eine zivilisatorische Sendung sondern gegen die Auslöschung ihrer Lebensweise und die Verdrängung „des deutschen Wesens“ durch ein eindringende Fremdlehre, sei es das Jakobinertum oder ein getarntes Römertum im revolutionären Gewand.

Vorrangig ist die deutsche Kriegssache als ein defensiver Einsatz auszulegen, auch wenn die Deutschen gezwungen wurden, gegen die Alliierten den ersten Schlag zu richten. Auf der internationalen Ebene war es schwer, einen anderen Kurs einzuschlagen. Schon vor den Ansätzen seines Kunstwerks scharten sich Manns verhasste „Zivilisationsliteraten“ in neutralen Ländern zusammen, den anderen voran, die spanischen Literaten, José Ortega y Gasset und Azorin, um für die „liberalen Streitmächte“ die Werbetrommel zu schlagen.

War das deutsche Kaiserreich fortschrittlich?

Wenngleich Hermann Cohen in seiner Kampfschrift Deutschtum und Judentum (1917) die Deutschen als Vehikel einer fortschrittlichen Weltzivilization schilderte, muss zugegeben werden, dass die Alliierten die Fortschrittsargumentation wirksamer für sich vereinnahmt hatten. Zum Ausgleich dieses propagandistischen Vorsprungs wäre den deutschen Eliten geboten gewesen, eine aufklärungsfreundlichere Miene vorzuzeigen. Bestimmt vermochten die Deutschen und Österreicher ihre modernisierenden und freiheitlichen Errungenschaften hervorzuheben. Es hätte gelohnt, diesen Vorzug auszuspielen, um den Deutschfeindlichen einen Strich durch die Rechnung zu machen. Mann und seine Mitkämpfer gerieten somit auf den Holzweg, als sie zum Glauben gelangten, dass die deutsche Rolle als Kulturhüter auf Entfernung von mehr als dreißig Meilen von Deutschland Anklang finden würde. Die Auseinandersetzung der Deutung von „Kultur“ und „Zivilisation“ fochten sie so in kultureller Abgeschlossenheit aus.

Auch bemerkbar sind Manns vielmalige Hinweise in den ersten sechzig Seiten auf Scheinpazifisten und auf die verachteten Kosmopoliten, die Deutschlands Geisteskräfte schwächen. Anvisiert ist vor allem Manns Bruder Heinrich, mit dem er damals zerstritten war. Anfang der Kriegsereignisse erklärte sich der linksgesinnte Heinrich für neutral, und wie der französische Romanautor Romain Rolland setzte er sich für eine Einstellung der Kriegshandlung von der Schweiz aus ein. Thomas Mann befand den „widersetzlichen“ Bruder als Fürsprecher für die Alliierten (nicht ganz grundlos). Die geringschätzenden Verweise sind nicht leicht zu kontextualisieren, ohne auf den biographischen Hintergrund Bezug zu nehmen.

Thomas Mann mit seinen Betrachtungen auf dem Holzweg: Er selbst schuf damit etwas Fremdartiges

Eine durchdringende Zwiespältigkeit zeigt auch der Text, die ebensostark auf die Befindlichkeit des Autors zurückverweist. Es bleibt im Schwanken, dass sein „Künstlerwerk“ dem deutschen Gemeinnutz dienen könnte. Mann grübelt vor sich hin, ob seine Wortkunst nicht eine unterwühlende Gabe darstellt, da sie kein wahrhaftiges Erzeugnis des „deutschen Geistes“ hergibt. Im Unterschied zu der deutschen Veranlagung zum Dichtwerk und zu musikalischen Leistungen befasst er sich mit einer „undeutschen“ Kunstform, der Schriftstellerei und erst recht mit französisch anmutenden Novellen und Romanen. Obwohl Mann deswegen nicht Abbitte tut, erscheint es (ihm vielleicht selbst zu jener Zeit), dass, was er schafft, fremdartig aussieht.

Als „Eideshelfer“, um seine patriotische Sache besser zu begründen, griff er zum Russen und Slavophil Dostojewski, der die Festigkeit und Rechtschaffenheit des deutschen Wesens pries. Angesichts dieser Hinweise wird es schwer, den Eindruck zu verfehlen, dass Mann den russischen Schriftsteller trotz seiner angegebenen Vorbehalte den Deutschen gegenüber zutiefst bewundert. Zu dem Dreigestirn von Nietzsche, Schopenhauer und Wagner, deren schöpferischer Ertrag Mann mitgeprägt hat und die er auch als Zeugen zur deutschen Größe zuzieht, kehrt er Dostojewski zum selben Zweck hervor.

Versteckte Slavo- und Frankophilie: Mann zwischen Faszination und Erschrecken über das Fremde

Es fällt ebenso in den Sinn, dass Mann von der französischen Schriftstellerei und besonders von Gustave Flaubert begeistert war. Den allerzwingendesten Beweis ergibt der lange Passus im Zauberberg, in welchem Mann die Zärtlichkeiten des Hans Castorp seiner Geliebten gegenüber en français zum Ausdruck bringt. Mann machte daraus keinen Hehl, dass er den französischen Autoren bis zum Gebrauch ihrer eigenartigen französischen Ausdrucksform Ehre zollte. Hinzu kommt, dass der Gro?teil der Betrachtungen das deutschpatriotische Leitmotiv nebensächlich berühren. Sie behandeln wahlweise das europäische Literatentum oder Manns’ Eigenschriften.

Die aufsehenerregendsten Seiten sind die ungefähr ersten dreißig, in denen Mann aus allen Rohren feuernd das Deutschtum gegen die Westernisierung hochhält. Der Verfasser hält sich für „unpolitisch“, indem er die Politisierung mit dem Aufmarsch des Kosmopolitanismus gleichsetzt. Im Gegensatz zu seinen deutschfeindlichen Gegnern verrät er keineswegs einen unweigerlich „politisierten Geist“. Er beschützt sein Vaterland nicht lediglich als Mittel, um eine demokratische „Weltbekehrung“ zu vervollständigen, sondern weil sie von außen bedroht ist.

Der Pazifismus der gesinnungsethischen Literaten

Zeitrelevanter ist die von Mann getroffene Unterscheidung von „Gesinnungsmilitarismus“ und „Zweckmilitarismus“. In Abgrenzung zu dem preußischen Dienstadel mit ihrer miltärstolzen Gesittung schlagen die bewaffneten Advokaten der Zivilisationsdemokratie empört auf ihre ideologischen Gegner los. Sie stürmen mit einfallenden Armeen nicht bloß, um den Feind zurückzustoßen, sondern gegen das Böse eine Weltmission durchzuführen: „Wir beobachten da eine Art von Irrationalismus, der in Wahrheit ein vergeistigter Rationalismus ist und darin besteht, dass man den Krieg für ein Gottesgericht erklärt.“ Die Zivilisationsliteraten, die für diese bevorzugte Kriegsart eintreten, sind keineswegs gegen das Vergießen des Blutes: Diese „Menschenliebe ist nicht blutscheu; so gut wie das literarische Wort gehört die Guillotine zu ihren Werkzeugen.“

Ebensowenig sind die erklärten Pazifisten in Deutschland grundsätzlich gegen die Gewalt: „Sein Verhältnis zu diesem Krieg schwankt zwischen humanitärem Abscheu und größter Bewunderung für die soldatischen Leistungen der Feinde.“ Umso kriegslustiger ist der Scheinpazifist, der der mit Deutschland im Widerstreit stehenden Seite beitrat. „Er ist entzückt von den Leistungen der Zivilisationsmächte, er bewundert ihr Kriegsgerät, ihre Stahlplatten, Betongräbern, Fliegerpfeile, Erkrasit- und Stickgasbomben, ohne sich zu fragen,wie sich das alles mit Edelschwäche verträgt, und während er dieselben Dinge auf der deutschen Seite ekelerregend findet. Eine französische Kanone scheint ihm verehrungswürdig, eine deutsche verbrecherisch, abstoßend und idiotisch.“ Wie die Entente-Minister und -Journalisten fühlt sich der antideutsche Gemütsdemokrat nicht bemüßigt zu fragen, warum die andere Seite „gerüstet, glänzend gerüstet“ sei, wenn er uns vormachen will, dass es nur die Deutschen sind, die mit ihrer soldatischen Überlieferung über Heerscharen und Kriegsmittel verfügen.

Der Krieg für die gute Sache, der auch heute noch geführt wird

Mann ging mit den Fahnenträgern des demokratischen Internationalismus ins Gericht, ehe die amerikanische Regierung das „Junkertum“ zu bekriegen anfing. Mann rückte das Scheinwerferlicht auf das Jakobinertum und die Freimauererei, denen der französischen Feind und seine ausländischen Schwärmer verschrieben seien. In seiner Schilderung weist er jedoch über das Nahziel hinaus und trifft die heutzutage allgegenwärtige menschenrechtliche Ideologie. Beim Kriegsausbruch musste es einem Unbefangenen dämmern, dass beide Seiten ihr Scherflein beitrugen, um die Lawine loszutreten. Jedoch deutete Mann auf ein Novum hin, als er eine Art Militarismus umschrieb, der mit traditonsverbundenen Gesellschaften nichts zu tun hat. Vielmehr haftet diese Haltung spätmodernen, ausgesprochen demokratischen Ländern an, die der ganzen Welt ihre menschenfreudige Gesinnung zurschaustellen wollen.

Im Vergleich mit den alten Monarchien steht das Neumodell im Aufwind. Von den geschlagenen Mittelmächten sich abhebend, gaben sich die siegreichen Demokraten als Humanisten aus, die im Zeichen einer weltweiten Friedensmission gekämpft haben. Aus ihrem Schlag stammen die Wilsonianer und noch zeitgeistiger die Neokonservativen, die militärische Einsätze verkünden, um wesensfremde Gesellschaften zu „vermenschlichen“. Mann erhob die Fragen, warum die Humanisten der Friedsamkeit wohlgerüstet auftreten und warum der vermutlich allerletzte Kampf für die demokratische Ruhe zu immer verbisseneren Kriegsaktionen hinüberführt. Und natürlich werden die Literaten aufgebracht, wenn versucht wird, die Stellung der Antidemokraten klarzukriegen. Man wittert bei solchen Klarmachungen den Hauch einer schandhaften Aufrechnung. Die wehrhaften Demokraten gereuen sich keineswegs, dass ein Bombenkrieg im Zweiten Weltkrieg gegen Zivilisten geführt wurde. Blutige Ungeheurlichkeiten sind hinzunehmen, wenn eine demokratische Weltverwandlung den Kämpfern vorschwebt. Thomas Mann traf in seinen (später von ihm bedauerten und zurückgezogenen) Betrachtungen den Nagel auf den Kopf, als er die harte Anwendung von Zwangsmitteln kurz- und mittelfristig als die zweckmilitäristischen Kosten darstellt, die eine friedlich-demokratische Weltordnung zustande bringen sollten.

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897)

Archives 1994

 

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897)

 

Jos VINKS

 

Il y a 170 ans, W. H. Riehl naissait, le 6 mai 1823, à Bieberich dans le pays de Hesse, aux environs de Giessen. Je m’étonne que son nom ne soit plus cité dans les publications conservatrices ou dextristes. Récemment, la très bonne revue allemande “Criticon” a consacré un article à Riehl. En 1976 était paru, dans une collection de livres publiés par l’éditeur Ullstein, le texte “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”, un des plus importants écrits socio-politiques de notre auteur, paru pour la première fois en 1851.

 

Avant de traiter de l’oeuvre de cet auteur zélé et fécond, nous retracerons en bref sa biographie, ce qui s’avère nécessaire pour la situer dans le temps et dans la société.

 

Riehl a suivi l’école primaire à Bieberich, le lieu de sa naissance, après quoi il fréquenta le Pedagogium de Wiesbaden. En 1837, il s’inscrit au Gymnasium de Weilheim. En 1839, son père se suicide, parce qu’il estimait être une victime de l’arbitraire bureaucratique. Riehl voulait étudier la théologie et devenir prédicateur évangélique, contre la volonté de son père, qui, en tant qu’homme de confiance des Ducs de Nassau et d’intendant de leur château, avait quelque connaissance du monde, grâce aux voyages qu’il avait entrepris. Riehl se trouvait tout à la fois sous l’influence des théories de son père, un rationaliste et un adepte des idées de 1789, et sous celles, traditionalistes, de son grand-père, Grand Maître de Maison auprès des Nassau. C’est ainsi que l’on peut expliquer la position intermédiaire qu’il prendra, entre l’ordre ancien d’une communauté d’états (Stände) et la problématique d’un dépassement révolutionnaire de ces vieilles structures, ce qui donnera un “conservatisme réflexif”. En 1841, il débarque à l’Université de Marbourg. Son intérêt pour l’histoire culturelle s’y éveille. De Marbourg, il ira à Giessen car l’université de cette ville se trouvait plus près de Bieberich; ce seront surtout des considérations financières qui le forceront à prendre cette décision. A Giessen, il se lie d’amitié avec Michael Carrière, un ami de Bettina von Arnim, égérie du “Cercle des Romantiques”. Le romantisme, avec la sympathie qu’il cultivait pour le moyen âge, avec sa vision artistique mais aussi sociale et économique sur l’histoire, sur le caractère national et sur la “populité”, va s’emparer de la pensée de notre auteur, même s’il s’était auparavant familiarisé avec les pensées de Kant et de Hegel, par l’intermédiaire de ses professeurs de Marbourg et de Giessen. Plus tard, il aurait dit qu’il avait des dispositions trop nettes pour le réalisme et ne pouvait dès lors pas s’enfermer dans un système philosophique.

 

Après Giessen, il s’en va à Tübingen, une université où les Jeunes Hégéliens donnent le ton. Dans les textes qu’il rédige à l’époque, il salue avec passion le succès de la Révolution de Juillet en France, en 1848. Sa position politique, à ce moment, n’est pas unilatéralement révolutionnaire, selon Geramb (Bibliographisches Jahrbuch, 1900) mais témoigne bel et bien d’une liberté de pensée et d’esprit, surtout dans le domaine religieux. L’influence des Jeunes Hégéliens et de l’esprit libéral de cette époque se perçoivent clairement chez lui ainsi qu’un sens résolument national, opposé à toutes les idées cosmopolites. A l’automne 1843, Riehl avait passé l’examen de théologie à Herborn et avait obtenu des subsides pour poursuivre ses études. Ce qu’il fera à Bonn, où, notamment, le fougueux nationaliste démocrate Ernst Moritz Arndt dispensait ses leçons. Finalement, il abandonnera les études de théologie pour se consacrer entièrement à l’étude du peuple et des structures que celui-ci génère, dans la continuité anthropologique qu’il représente. Il finit par admettre que l’Etat constitue le “peuple organisé” et qu’il existe “pour la volonté du peuple”. Pour gagner son pain, il se fait journaliste dans les colonnes du journal libéral-conservateur “Oberpostamts-Zeitung” de Francfort entre 1845 et 1847. A partir de 1847, il devient rédacteur auprès de la “Karlsruher Zeitung”, puis directeur du “Badische Landtagsbote”.

 

La révolution de 1848 impulse un tournant à son développement intellectuel. D’après lui-même, ce fut l’année où il devint conservateur en pleine conscience. Il quitte Bade et revient à Wiesbaden. Il y fonde la “Nassauische Allgemeine Zeitung” et devient aussi le cofondateur du Parti démocrate-monarchiste. Pendant un bref laps de temps, il dirigera le Théâtre de la Cour à Wiesbaden. La conséquence de tout cela fut une prise de distance avec la politique et avec le journalisme: il quitte son poste de rédacteur en 1850. Il commence alors les études qui le conduiront à rédiger “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”. Même s’il a quitté la politique, il y revient indirectement par le biais de ses études culturelles. Il publie dans un ouvrage en quatre volumes, “Naturgeschichte des Volkes”, les études qu’il avait fait paraître dans les journaux ainsi que quelques travaux de circonstances.

 

En 1851 parait la première édition de “De bürgerliche Gesellschaft” et, trois ans plus tard, “Land und Leute” (“Le pays et les gens”). “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft” avait pour intention première de décrire le peuple dans tous les liens qu’il tisse, dans tous ses “états”, mais détaché de toute particularité locale. Dans “Land und Leute”, au contraire, il s’efforcera de pénétrer dans toutes les particularités et les différences locales et régionales du peuple. “Au départ des relations individuelles du pays et des hommes se développe l’abstraction culturelle/historique de la société bourgeoise/citoyenne”, écrit-il. Le Roi Maximilien II de Bavière est vivement impressionné par ce travail. Il appelle donc Riehl à ses côtés.

 

Riehl devient ainsi membre du “Cabinet littéraire” puis est admis dans le “Symposium”, sorte de table ronde autour de la personne du Roi, où siègent déjà, entre autres illustres personnages, Liebig, Bodenstedt, Geibel et Kaulbach. Au cours de cette même année 1853, il obtient un poste honoraire de professeur à l’Université de Munich. Il avait déjà été nommé responsable des relations avec la presse pour la Maison Royale et pour le Ministère bavarois des affaires étrangères. Son discours inaugural à l’Université était consacré à l’ethnographie: il y déclara que la richesse et la diversité de la nature, des paysages et des sols dans les Allemagnes d’alors dépendait de la formation individuelle au sein du peuple allemand et que, pour cette raison, l’Allemagne devait impérativement viser son unité politique, sans toutefois sombrer dans les affres d’un unitarisme centralisateur. Les activités de Riehl se mesurent au nombre de ses conférences et des lieux qu’il a visités —plus de cent— et au nombre de personnes qui sont venues l’écouter: environ 300.000.

 

En 1857, Riehl, avec Felix Dahn, prend en charge un important travail d’ethnographie et de topographie: les “Bavarica”. En 1860 parait le volume consacré à la Haute Bavière (Oberbayern) et en 1863 un volume sur le Haut Palatinat (Oberpfalz) et la Souabe. En 1873, il est promu recteur de l’Université de Munich et en 1883 il reçoit un titre de noblesse. En 1885, il est nommé directeur du Musée National Bavarois et conservateur général des bâtiments et monuments classés de Bavière. En 1894, l’année où meurt sa femme, il écrit son dernier livre, “Religiöse Studien”. Deux ans plus tard, notre philosophe, à moitié aveugle et fort affaibli, épouse Antonie Eckhardt, qui le soignera jusqu’à sa mort, le 16 novembre 1897.

 

Riehl est le père de l’ethnographie scientifique. Il nous a aussi laissé un testament politique. Ses critiques disent que ce testament, qui insiste sur le concept social d’état (Stand), ne tient pas compte des nouvelles formes d’organisation de la société industrielle. Selon Riehl, les peuples, dans leur diversité, sont un produit de différences et de caractéristiques de nature ethnique, historique ou naturelle/territoriale. Pour lui, les noyaux naturels (la famille, la tribu, le peuple/Volk) reçoivent une sorte de primauté. Ils revêtent une signification plus profonde que l’Etat. Les liens familiaux et tribaux sont plus anciens que la conscience individuelle ou la conscience d’appartenir à un Etat, c’est-à-dire plus anciens que les formes créées par les individus ou par les Etats. L’importance qu’il assigne à la famille se voit encore soulignée par le fait qu’il y consacre un volume entier de son oeuvre principale, “Naturgeschichte”.

 

Ses conceptions socio-politiques sont dominées par l’idée de deux forces qui influencent toute la vie sociale: la force de maintenir (Macht des Beharrens) et la force du mouvement; c’est-à-dire une force conservatrice et une force révolutionnaire. Les forces conservatrices sont représentées par la paysannerie et l’aristocratie. Les forces du mouvement par la bourgeoisie et par le quart-état. Parmi les forces du mouvement, Riehl compte aussi le prolétariat, à côté de la bourgeoisie. Mais son concept de prolétariat est totalement différent de celui de Marx. Il est “le stade de la chute” et “l’état d’absence d’appartenance à un état”. Les ressortissants du prolétariat sont ceux qui se sont détachés ou ont été exclus des groupes existants de la société. Ils se sont alors déclarés “véritable peuple” et c’est dans cette proclamation tacite qu’il faut voir l’origine de toutes les tentatives d’égalitarisme.

 

On peut certes rejeter la division de la société en “états”, que propose Riehl, comme étant en contradiction flagrante avec les réalités sociologiques de la société moderne. Mais on ne peut pas non plus considérer que Riehl est un théoricien borné, dont la pensée s’est figée sur les rapports sociaux préindustriels. Il s’est efforcé de partir du donné réel pour affronter une société en train de se moderniser et de comprendre celle-ci à l’aide de concepts conservateurs-sociaux (cf. Peter Steinbach, Introduction à “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”).

 

La tentative de classer les strates sociologiques de la société selon des forces fondamentales, telle les “états”, pour les opposer au concept de classe selon Marx, s’est manifestée également après Riehl. Ferdinand Tönnies a défini la société comme une “Communauté” (Gemeinschaft) et comme une “Société” (Gesellschaft) tout à la fois. La première consiste en un ordonnancement selon des caractéristiques et des liens naturels (famille, tribu, peuple); la seconde selon des appartenances changeantes et interchangeables (classe, parti, travail, profession, etc.). A côté du cosmos naturel de la vie du peuple, Riehl a placé la nature proprement dite sur un pied d’égalité avec la culture et a suggéré qu’il fallait la conserver, la défendre, car c’était une nécessité incontournable. Le mouvement de préservation de la nature, le mouvement pour la Heimat (en Allemagne et en Suisse, ndt), le mouvement de jeunesse Wandervogel, entre 1890 et 1914, ont trouvé chez Riehl des idées d’avant-garde (ainsi que nos mouvements verts, avec trois quarts de siècle de retard!). Ernst Rudolf se réclame de Riehl à plusieurs reprises, notamment dans “Heimatschutz” (Berlin, 1897). En dénonçant la destruction du patrimoine forestier allemand, il soulève une question éminemment conservatrice, en réclamant un droit propre à la nature. Sa critique de l’urbanisation outrancière doit également être lue à la lumière des travaux de Riehl.

 

Riehl avait ses défenseurs et ses critiques. Grimm se basait sur ses écrits, par exemple pour expliquer la différence essentielle entre Schiller et Goethe. Marx en revanche considérait que les conceptions sociales et politiques de Riehl constituaient “une injure au siècle du progrès”. Treitschke aussi s’attaqua à la conception organique du peuple chez Riehl et surtout contre sa vision de la société divisée en “états”: “il n’y a pas plus d’états naturels qu’il y a un état de nature”, écrivait-il dans sa thèse universitaire. Riehl eut un admirateur en la personne de Tolstoï. Leo Avenarius le nommait le “Altmeister der Wanderkunst” (“le vieux maître en l’art de pérégriner”) et avait chaleureusement recommander la lecture de ses “Wanderbücher” à la jeunesse du Wandervogel.

 

Riehl fut honoré dans l’Allemagne nationale-socialiste: cela s’explique pour maintes raisons mais ne signifie rien quant à ses options véritables. Jost Hermand, dans son ouvrage “Grüne Utopien in Deutschland” (“Utopies vertes en Allemagne”), écrit, entre autres choses: “Riehl avait la ferme conviction qu’une industrialisation et une urbanisation croissantes, avec pour corollaire la destruction du fond paysan, devaient immanquablement conduire à une ‘dégénérescence de la nature’”.

 

Le conservatisme de Riehl, avec son idée centrale de conservation de la nature et de la culture et son rejet principiel de l’individualisme libéral et de la pensée libérale qui ne raisonne qu’en termes de déploiement de puissance matérielle, font de l’auteur de “Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”, un philosophe qui, au début de l’ère industrielle, théorisait non pas l’ère pré-industrielle, mais l’ère post-industrielle. Il pensait donc ses idées parce qu’il avait préalablement investiguer les racines mêmes du peuple, les avait décortiquées et en avait conclu, après observation minutieuse et reconnaissance des données naturelles, qu’il fallait protéger et la nature et la culture populaire.

 

Jos VINKS.

(article paru dans “Dietsland Europa”, Anvers, n°5/1994).

Carl Schmitt, the Inquisition, and Totalitarianism

Carl Schmitt, the Inquisition, and Totalitarianism

Arthur VERSLUIS

Ex: http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/

The work of Carl Schmitt, on its face, presents us with enigmas; it is esoteric, arcane, words that recur both in scholarship about Schmitt and in his own writings.  Jan-Wenner Müller observes that Schmitt “employed what has been called a kind of philosophical ‘double talk,’ shifting the meaning of concepts central to his theory and scattering allusions and false leads throughout his work.”[1]  And Müller goes on to remark about Heinrich Meier’s work on Schmitt that ultimately Meier too “lapsed into the kind of double talk, allusiveness, and high-minded esoteric tone so typical of Strauss and, to a lesser extent, Schmitt.”[2]  Indeed, Schmitt himself writes, in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes that “like all great thinkers of his times, Hobbes had a taste for esoteric cover-ups.  He said about himself that now and then he made ‘overtures,’ but that he revealed his thoughts only in part and that he acted as people do who open a window only for a moment and closely it quickly for fear of a storm.”[3]  This passage could certainly be applied to Schmitt himself, whose work both makes direct reference to Western esoteric traditions, and itself has esoteric dimensions.  These esoteric allusions and dimensions of Schmitt’s thought are, in fact, vitally important to understanding his work, but the question remains: what place do they have in it?

 

 

Carl Schmitt and Early Modern Western Esotericism

   Much has been made of the exoteric-esoteric distinction in the thought of Leo Strauss.  Some authors suggested that a Straussian esotericism guided the neonconservative cabal within the Bush II administration, after all a secretive group that disdained public opinion and that was convinced of its own invincible rectitude even in the face of facts.[4] It is true that Strauss himself distinguished between an esoteric and an exoteric political philosophy.   In perhaps his most open statement, Strauss writes, coyly, of how “Farabi’s Plato eventually replaces the philosopher-king who rules openly in the virtuous city, by the secret kingship of the philosopher who, being a ‘perfect man,’ precisely because he is an ‘investigator,’ lives privately as a member of an imperfect society which he tries to humanize within the limits of the possible.”[5]  Strauss’s “secret kingship of the philosopher” is, by its nature, esoteric; as in Schmitt’s, there is in Strauss’s work a sense of the implicit superiority of the esoteric political philosopher.

    But in fact those who are searching for esotericism have much more to find in the work of Schmitt, not least because Schmitt’s references to classical Western esotericism are quite explicit.  Schmitt refers directly to Kabbalism and to Rosicrucianism, to Freemasonry, and, most importantly for our purposes, to Gnosticism.  It is quite important, if one is to better understand Schmitt, to investigate the meanings of these explicitly esoteric references in his work.  While there are allusions to such classical Western esoteric currents as Jewish Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry scattered throughout Schmitt’s writings, those references are concentrated in Schmitt’s 1938 The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.  There are a number of reasons why Western esoteric currents should form a locus in this particular work, among them the fact that many of these traditions (notably, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and Christian theosophy) emerged precisely in the early modern period of Hobbes himself and so correctly, as Schmitt recognized, represent historical context as well as contribute to Schmitt’s larger argument.

   But what is Schmitt’s larger argument regarding these esoteric currents?  There is little to indicate, at first glance, that Schmitt is derogating these esoteric currents—even the references to the Kabbalistic interpretation of leviathan, which come on the wake of Schmitt’s notorious 1936 conference on Judaism and jurisprudence, are not immediately recognizable as anti-semitic.  Schmitt’s own overview of his argument is instructive.  He summarizes the first chapter as covering the “Christian-theological and Jewish-cabbalistic interpretations” of the symbol of leviathan, and “the possibilities of a restoration of the symbol by Hobbes.”[6]  A restoration indicates a prior fall: this is our first clue.  Schmitt’s treatise on Hobbesian state theory is also an occasion for Schmitt’s diagnosis of modernity as socio-political decline, and in this decline, (in Schmitt’s view), esoteric currents played a part.  Hence he references the seminal twentieth-century French esoterist René Guénon’s La Crise du monde moderne (1927), and specifically Guénon’s observation that the collapse of medieval civilization into early modernity by the seventeenth century could not have happened without hidden forces operating in the background.[7]

   Both Schmitt and Guénon came from a Catholic background and perspective—and Guénon’s broader thesis was that the advent of early modernity represented one stage in a much larger tableau of decline in which modernity (representing the kali yuga or final age) would conclude in the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the world.  In this Guénonian tableau of decline, the emergence of individualistic Protestantism represented an important step downward from the earlier corporate unity of Catholicism, and a similar perspective inheres in Schmitt’s work, no doubt why he alludes to Guénon in the first place.  Hence, in the important Chapter V of Leviathan, Schmitt refers to the “separation of inner from outer and public from private” that emerged during the early modern period, and in particular to “secret societies and secret orders, Rosicrucians, freemasons, illuminates, mystics and pietists, all kinds of sectarians, the many ‘silent ones in the land,’ and above all, the restless spirit of the Jew who knew how to exploit the situation best until the relation of public and private, deportment and disposition was turned upside down.”[8]

   At this point, we can see Schmitt’s perspective is implicitly critical of the subjectification and inward or contemplative turn characteristic of those who travel “the secret road” “that leads inward.”  He opposes the split between private spiritual life and public life, which Schmitt associates with Judaism as well as with Protestantism and the profusion of esoteric groups during this period—and by implication, affirms a unified, corporate inner and outer life that is characteristic of Catholicism.  Schmitt remarks that “as differently constituted as were the Masonic lodges, conventicles, synagogues, and literary circles, as far as their political attitudes were concerned, they all displayed by the eighteenth century their enmity toward the leviathan elevated to a symbol of state.”[9]  He sees Protestantism and the variety of esoteric groups or currents during the early modern period as symptomatic—like Guénon, he sees the emergence of modernity as a narrative of cultural disintegration. 

   Like Hobbes himself, Schmitt is pessimistic about the human condition.  Still, in Schmitt’s view, Hobbes was not proposing that human beings flee from the state of nature into a monstrous state leviathan, but rather was arguing for total state power only insofar as it guaranteed protection and security.  Hence, Schmitt writes, one’s obedience to the state is payment for protection, and when protection ceases, so too does the obligation to obey.[10]  The leviathan serves to diagnose the artificial, gigantic mechanism of the modern state, and to symbolize that state as an intermediate stage that can restrain or postpone the larger decline that modernity represents.  In Leviathan, Schmitt isn’t extolling the leviathan state or totalism, but rather coyly stops short—even though it is clear that he seeks a political alternative to the split between inner and outer life represented by the inward turn of esoteric groups and individuals, and by the subjectification represented by Romanticism during the early modern period. Schmitt belongs to the world of jurisprudence, to the realm of weighing and deciding, and one can see this in his treatment of esoteric groups, in which he acknowledges their differences—but he clearly has ‘placed’ them in his larger narrative as indicative of the fragmentation represented by modernity.

   It becomes clearer, then, how Schmitt could have seen in National Socialism a secular alternative to modernity.  Fascism represented for him, at least potentially, the re-unification of inner and outer life, a kind of modern re-unification of the mythic and spiritual with the outer public life.  It at first seemed to conform to the Hobbesian notion that in exchange for obedience, one receives protection from the state; it represented a new form of corporatism as an alternative to the socio-political disintegration represented by parliamentary democracy in the Weimar era; and it even offered an apparent unity of esoteric and exoteric through its use of symbolism and mythology in the service of the state.  But to the extent that he allied with the Nazis, Schmitt was consciously siding with the Inquisitors, and with totalistic state power.  In retrospect and by comparison, perhaps the “secret road” inward as represented by eighteenth-century esotericism was not quite so bad as all that.  Yet to understand more completely Schmitt in relation to the esoteric, we must turn to a subject he treats somewhat more explicitly: Gnosticism.

 Carl Schmitt and Gnosticism

   Schmitt writes that oppositions between friend and enemy are “of a spiritual sort, as is all man’s existence.”[11]  In Politische Theologie II, he writes that Tertullian is the prototype of the theological possibilities of specific judicial thinking, and refers to him as the “jurist Tertullian.”[12]  Heinrich Meier discusses Schmitt’s indebtedness to Tertullian and in fact remarks that “Tertullian’s guiding principle We are obliged to something not because it is good but because God commands it accompanies Schmitt through all the turns and vicissitudes of his long life.”[13]  What is it about Tertullian that Schmitt found so fascinating that he returned to his work again and again?  Divine authority as presented by Tertullian divides men: obedience to divine authority divides the orthodox from the heretics, the “friends of God” from the “enemies of God,” and the political theologian from the secular philosopher.  Here we are reminded of perhaps Tertullian’s most famous outcry: “What then does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?  What does the Academy have to do with the Church?  What do the heretics have to do with Christians?”[14]  Tertullian was, of course, a fierce enemy of Gnosticism, and his works, especially De praescriptione haereticorum, belong to the genre of heresiophobic literature. 

   Now with Tertullian’s antignosticism in mind, we should turn to the afterword of Schmitt’s Politische Theologie II, in which “gnostische Dualismus” figures prominently.  There, Schmitt remarks that Gnostic dualism places a God of Love, strange to this world, in opposition to the lord and creator of this evil world, the two conflicting in a kind of “cold war.”[15]  This he compares to the Latin motto noted by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit, “nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse”—only a god can oppose a god.[16]  With these references, Schmitt is alluding to the Gnostic dualism attributed to the Gnostic Marcion, who reputedly posited two Gods, one a true hidden God, the other an ignorant creator God. 

  What is important here, for our purposes, is the underlying theme of heresy and orthodoxy.  As is well-known, for Schmitt, especially from Der Begriff des Politischen onward, the political world is defined in terms of the well-known Schmittean distinction between friend and foe.  But not so often remarked is that this friend-foe distinction can be traced directly back to the anti-heresiology of Tertullian.  Tertullian devoted a considerable number of pages to the refutation of Marcion in five books, and in particular attacked what he perceived as Marcionitic docetism.  In “Against the Valentinians,” Tertullian attacked “certain heretics who denied the reality of Christ’s flesh,” first among these heretics being, again, Marcion.[17]  For Tertullian, historicity is paramount: the docetic view that Christ did not come in the flesh but belongs to another world—this is unbearable to him.  Tertullian devotes hundreds of pages to detailing and attacking the works of those he designates heretical, and (perhaps ironically, given Tertullian’s venomous diatribes) compares them to scorpions full of venom.

   So virulent is Tertullian in his hatred of those he perceives as heretics that he goes so far as to imagine that “There will need to be carried on in heaven persecution [of Christians] even, which is the occasion of confession or denial.”[18]  Here we begin to see the dynamic that impels Tertullian’s hatred of those he designates as heretical.  On the one hand, Tertullian belongs in the context of Roman persecution of Christians as a whole—but on the other hand, he in turn carries on an intellectual persecution of heretics whom he sees as scorpions, that is, as vermin.[19]  Thus we see Tertullian’s perception of himself as defender of the historicist orthodox, the strength of whose identity comes on the one hand, from affirmation of faith in the historical Christ against the Romans, on the other hand, from rejection of the Gnostics who seek to transcend history and who affirm, for example, a docetic Christ.  Tertullian’s very identity exists by definition through negation—he requires the persecution of “heretics.”  Tertullian is the veritable incarnation of a friend/enemy dynamic, and he exists and defines himself entirely through such a dynamic.  We can even go further, and suggest that the background of persecution by the Romans in turn inevitably impels the persecuted historicist Christians to themselves become persecutors of those whom they deem heretics—a dynamic that continues throughout the subsequent history of Christianity (from the medieval condemnation of Eckhart right through the various forms of early modern and modern anti-mysticism within Protestant and Catholic Christianity alike).[20]  Tertullian, for all his fulminations against what he imagines as Gnostic dualism, is in fact himself the ultimate dualist [or duelist].  He cannot exist without historical enemies, without persecutors and without those whom he can persecute in his turn.

   Thus we begin to see the reasons for Schmitt’s endorsement of Tertullian as the paradigmatic jurist theologian and political theologian.  For Tertullian, Christ’s historicity is paramount—exactly as is the case with Schmitt himself.  In Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt proposes the historical importance within Christianity of the concept of the katechon, or “restrainer” that makes possible Christian empires whose center was Rome, and that “meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon.”[21] The concept of the katechon is derived from an obscure Pauline verse: II Thessalonians 2.6-7, “And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time.  For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way.”  This passage is in the larger context of a Pauline warning against the “activity of Satan” among those who are “sent” a “strong delusion” by God himself [!] “so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth (II.2.11).”  The katechon represents, for Schmitt, an “historical concept” of “potent historical power” that preserves the “tremendous historical monolith” of a Christian empire because it “holds back” nothing less than the eschatological end of history.[22] The Pauline context in Thessalonians can be read to support institutional Christianity as a prosecutorial power. In any case, the katechon makes intellectually possible (in Schmitt’s view) the emergence of the Christian empire oriented toward Rome and itself now a juridical, prosecutorial or persecutorial imperial power within history. 

   Now I am not arguing that Schmitt’s work—and in particular his emphasis on the role of antagonism and hostility as defining politics, nor his emphasis on historicity—derives only from Tertullian.  Rather, I hold that Schmitt refers to Tertullian because he finds in him a kindred spirit, and what is more, that there really is a continuity between Schmitt’s thought and the anti-heretical writings of Tertullian.  Both figures require enemies.  Schmitt goes so far as to write, in The Concept of the Political, that without the friend-enemy distinction “political life would vanish altogether.”[23]  And in the afterword to Political Theology II, Schmitt—in the very passages in which he refers to Gnosticism and in particular to dualism—ridicules modern “detheologization” [Die Enttheologisierung] and “depoliticization” [Die Entpolitisierung] characteristic of a liberal modernity based upon production, consumption, and technology.  What Schmitt despises about depoliticizing or detheologizing is the elimination of conflict and the loss thereby of the agonistic dimension of life without which, just as Tertullian wrote, the juridical trial  and judging of humanity cannot take place.  Tertullian so insists upon the primacy of persecution/prosecution that he projects it even into heaven itself.  Schmitt restrains himself to the worldly stage, but he too insists upon conflict as the basis of the political and of history; and both are at heart dualists.

   Why, after all, was Schmitt so insistent upon what he called “political theology”?  In the very term, there is a uneasy conjunction of the worldly sphere of politics with what usually would be construed as the otherworldly sphere of theology.  But Tertullian represents the forced convergence of these two spheres—in some central respects, Tertullian symbolizes the point at which Christianity shifted from the persecuted by Rome to the persecutor from Rome, the shift from Christ’s saying that His Kingdom is not of this world, to the assertion of Christendom as a political-theological entity and of the possibility of Christian empire—that is, of the compression together and perhaps even the merger of politics and theology.  This forced convergence of politics and theology could not take place without the absolute insistence upon an historical Christ and on the paramount importance of the horizontal, that is, of history itself (as opposed to and indeed, founded on the explicit rejection of the transcendence of history or of the vertical dimensions represented by gnosis).

   The work of Schmitt belongs to the horizontal realm of dualistic antagonism that requires the antinomies of friends and enemies and perpetual combat.  Schmitt is a political and later geopolitical theorist whose political theology represents, not an opening into the transcendence of antagonism, but rather an insistence upon antagonism and combat as the foundation of politics that reflects Tertullian’s emphasis on antagonism toward heretics as the foundation of theology.  When Schmitt writes, in The Concept of the Political, that “a theologian ceases to be a theologian when he . . . no longer distinguishes between the chosen and the nonchosen,” we begin to see how deeply engrained is his fundamental dualism.[24]  This dualism is bound up with Schmitt’s insistence upon “the fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man” and his adamant rejection of those who deny original sin, i.e., “numerous sects, heretics, romantics, and anarchists.”[25]  Thus “the high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.”[26]  The enemy, here, just as in Tertullian’s work, is those deemed to be heretical.

   Here we should recognize a certain irony.  Tertullian, we will recall, railed against the Gnostics because they supposedly were dualists and because some of them reputedly held that humanity was deluded and that the world was evil.[27]  Yet much of mainstream Christianity, like Tertullian himself, itself came to espouse a fierce dualism and an insistence on the evil nature of humanity and of the world.  Even when it is clear, as in the case of Valentinus, that his thought includes the transcendence of dualism, Tertullian cannot bring himself to recognize this transcendence because his mind works on the level of the juridical only—he is compelled to attack; indeed, his entire worldview is constructed around those whom he rejects, ridicules, refuses to recognize as in any way legitimate—around those whom he sees as his enemies.  And this fierce dualism, this need for that which is construed as heretical, as the enemy, is exactly what Schmitt’s work also reflects. 

   As perhaps Tertullian once did, Schmitt too came up against the command of Christ to “love your enemies” (Matt. 5.44; Luke 6.27).  His interpretation of it is befitting a wily attorney—he takes it only on a personal level.  “No mention is made of the political enemy,” Schmitt writes.  “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than to defend Europe,” he continues, and the commandment of Christ in his view “certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people.”[28]  Thus, Christ can be interpreted as accepting political antagonism and even war—while forgiving one’s personal enemies along the way.  Schmitt conveniently overlooks the fact that nowhere in the New Testament can Christ be construed as endorsing, say, political war against Rome—His Kingdom is not of this world.  Is it really so easy to dismiss the power of the injunction to love one’s enemies?

   There is more.  For Schmitt’s distinction between the personal and the political here makes possible what his concept of the katechon also does: Christian empire.  Here we see the exact point at which the Christian message can be seen to shift from the world-transmuting one of forgiving one’s enemies to the worldly one that leads inexorably toward the very imperial authority and power against which Christ himself stood as an alternative exemplar.  “My Kingdom is not of this world,” Christ said.  But somehow a shift took place, and suddenly Christ was being made to say that his kingdom is of this world, that rather than forgiving one’s enemies, one should implacably war against them.  Thus we have the emergence of Christian empire.  But the collapse of feudalism and of the medieval polis, and the emergence of modernity ultimately meant the de-politicization of the world—the absence of enemies, of heretics, of those against whom others can define themselves—none other than the cultural vacuum represented by technological-consumerist modern society.

 

 Conclusions

   And so we again reach the argument that I began to suggest in “Voegelin’s Antignosticism and the Origins of Totalitarianism,” but from a very different angle.  There, I argued that rather than attempting (like Voegelin and his acolytes) to blame the victims—the Gnostics and ‘heretics’—for the advent of modernity and for totalitarianism, it might be more reasonable to take a closer look at the phenomenon of the Inquisition and of historicist Christianity (particularly millennialist Christianity) for the origins of modern secular chiliasm.  After all, it wasn’t the heretics or the Gnostics who burned people at the stake, or created institutional torture chambers, or who slaughtered the Albigensians.  Rather, it was the institutional church that did this. Our analysis of Schmitt’s work has brought us, unexpectedly, back to the same general terrain.

   It is worth remarking, however unpleasant it might be to admit it, that as Mao or Pol Pot did when their policies meant the deaths of millions, so too the Church itself did when it burned at the stake the great mystic Marguerite Porete, or the brilliant author Giordano Bruno and many others for heresy—all of these institutional murderers believed at least in part that they killed people for their own good, or at least, for the better good, and in order to realize some better state upon earth in the near future.  How is it that the medieval Church was so unwilling to allow the Albigensians their freedom and their own traditions?  Why was it so impossible to regard them as Christian brethren and not as enemies to be slaughtered?  By slaughtering those deemed heretics, one hastens the historical millennium of Christ’s kingdom upon earth, or so the logic goes.  Secular chiliasm in the technological modern world like that analyzed by Pellicani is only a more extensive and brutal form of the same phenomenon, whose origins are to be found in historicist Christianity, not among those victims of it that were deemed heretical.[29]

   Schmitt’s work belongs to the juridical tradition of Tertullian and he inherits Tertullian’s need for enemies, for heretics by which one can define oneself.  Thus it was not too difficult for Schmitt to organize the 1936 conference to weigh the “problem” of “the Jews”—he was predisposed toward the division of “us” and “them” by the triumphant Western historicist Christian tradition that peremptorily and with the persistence of two thousand years, rejected “heretics” who espoused gnosis and, all too frequently, rejected even the possibility of transcending dualism.  Indeed, Schmitt’s work allows us to see more clearly the historical current that was operative in National Socialism as well as in Mussolini’s Fascist party—and that brought Schmitt to open his 1936 conference remarks with the words of Hitler: “In that I defend myself against the Jews, I struggle to do the work of the Lord.”[30]  The murder of heretics has a theological origin; the murder of secular opponents has a political origin—but often the two are not so far apart, and so one could even speak of political theology in which to be the enemy is to be de facto heretical. 

   Thus, after the “Night of the Long Knives” and after Goebbels and Himmler carried out the murder of various dissidents, Schmitt published an article defending the right of the Third Reich and its leader to administer peremptory justice—and, in an interview published in the party newspaper Der Angriff,  defending none other than the Inquisition as a model of jurisprudence.[31]  Schmitt argued there that when Pope Innocent III created the juridical basis for the Inquisition, the Church inaugurated perhaps the “most humane institution conceivable” because it required a confession.  Of course, he goes on, the subsequent advent of confessions extracted by torture was unfortunate, but in terms of legal history, he thought the Inquisition a fine model of humane justice.  He managed to overlook the fact that the “crimes,” both in the case of the Inquisition and in the case of National Socialism in mid-1930s Germany, were primarily “crimes” of dissidence.

   Here we begin to consider the larger question of ideocracy as characteristic of modernity.  Ideocracy has nothing to do with Gnosticism or gnosis—but it might well have something to do with those who require enemies in order to define themselves, and with those who are willing to torture and slaughter in the name of some forthcoming imagined religious or secular millennium.  It is rigid ideocracy we see at work in the unreadable pronouncements of Communist China defending their occupation of Tibet and the insanity of the Cultural Revolution; it is rigid ideocracy at work in the pronouncements of Stalinist Russia, behind which millions upon millions lie dead.  Secular millennialism requires a rigid historicism—faith in history is necessary, a belief that one can remake this world and human society into a new historical model, even if the price is murder and torture.  Schmitt was a subtle thinker and very learned, no question of that.  His work offers us insights into the nature of modernity, into geopolitics, and into politics as combat.  But his work also, unexpectedly, throws light on the intellectual origins of modern ideocracies in early and medieval historicist, anti-heresiological Christianity.

 

---

[1] See Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), p. 7

[2] Ibid., p. 205

[3] See Carl Schmitt, G. Schwab, trs.,  The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), p. 26.

[4] See Hugh Urban, “Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration: The Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum,” in Esoterica VII(2005): 1-38.

[5] See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1952), p. 17; Leo Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato,” Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), pp. 357-393, p. 384.

[6] Schmitt, Leviathan, op. cit., p. 3.

[7] Ibid., p. 29.

[8] Ibid., p. 60.

[9] Ibid., p. 62.

[10] Ibid., pp. 96-97.

[11] See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), p. 59, citing The Concept of the Political  (1933 ed.) III.9.

[12] See Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1970), p. 103, to wit: “Für eine Besinnung auf die theologischen Möglichkeiten spezifisch justischen Denkens ist Tertullian der Prototyp.”

[13] Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), p. 92.

[14] See Meier, op. cit., p. 94, citing Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, VII. 9-13: “Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?  Quid academiae et ecclesiae?  Quid haereticis et Christianis?”

[15] Schmitt, PTII, op. cit., p. 120: “Der gnostische Dualismus setzt einen Gott der Liebe, einen welt-fremden Gott, als den Erlöser-Gott gegen den gerechten Gott, den Herrn und Schöpfer dieser bösen Welt. . . [einer Art gefährlichen Kalten Krieges]”.

[16] Ibid., p. 122. 

[17] See A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), III.521.

[18] Ibid., III. 643.

[19] See Tertullian’s treatise “Scorpiace,” op. cit., III.633-648.

[20] Here we might remark that Western forms of Christianity are strikingly different in this respect from those in the Eastern Church, where mysticism remained (however uneasily at times) incorporated into orthodoxy itself and not imagined as inherently inimical to orthodoxy.

[21] See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, G.L. Ulmen, trs., (New York: Telos, 2003), pp. 59-60.

[22] Ibid., p. 60.

[23] Carl Schmitt, G. Schwab, trs., The Concept of the Political, (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1976), p. 51.

[24] Ibid., p. 64.

[25] Ibid., p. 65.

[26] Ibid., p. 67.

[27] I write “supposedly” dualist and “reputedly” held the world to be evil because these accusations, repeated by Tertullian and several other ante-Nicene Fathers, are hardly borne out as characteristics of all the works we see in the Nag Hammadi library, the collection of actual Gnostic writings discovered in 1945. 

[28] Ibid., p. 29.

[29] See Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse: Ideological Roots of Terrorism, (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. xi. I wholeheartedly agree with Pellicani’s basic thesis that “The expansion on a planetary scale of a new form of chiliasm that substituted transcendence with absolute immanence and paradise with a classless and stateless society is the most extraordinary and shattering historical-cultural phenomenon of the secular age.” But this “new form of chiliasm” has nothing whatever to do with Gnosticism as an actual historical phenomenon.  One cannot find a single instance in late antiquity among the Gnostics themselves for such a phenomenon—but if one were to refer instead to “the destructive calling of modern pseudo­-gnostic revolution” that seeks to “purify the existing through a policy of mass terror and annihilation,” Pellicani’s thesis would no longer be quite as subject to the criticism of an anachronistic misuse of terms.  Later in the book, Pellicani discusses the cases of the Pol Pot regime and of Communist China—both of which illustrate his larger thesis well.  But neither of these have anything whatever to do with the phenomenon of Gnosticism in any historically meaningful sense. Even Voegelin himself expressed doubts about attempting to apply “Gnosticism” to the case of Communist Russia—let alone to Cambodia!  Such cases could be construed to illustrate a uniquely modern pseudo-gnosticism—though one could with more accuracy dispense entirely with the dubious references to “Gnosticism” and simply refer to secular millennialism.

[30] See Carl Schmitt, “Das Judentum in der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft,” in “Die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den jüdischen Geist,” in Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, 41(15 Oct. 1936)20:1193-1199, cited in Gopal  Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, (London: Verso, 2000), p. 206.

[31] See “Können wir uns vor Justizirrtum schützen?” Der Angriff, 1 Sept. 1936, cited in Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 1995), p. 703; see also Balakrishnan, op. cit., pp. 202-203.

Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political

Greg Johnson

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

“Why can’t we all get along?”–Rodney King

Carl Schmitt’s short book The Concept of the Political (1932) is one of the most important works of 20th century political philosophy.

The aim of The Concept of the Political is the defense of politics from utopian aspirations to abolish politics. Anti-political utopianism includes all forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short, all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished.

In ordinary speech, of course, liberalism, international socialism, etc. are political movements, not anti-political ones. So it is clear that Schmitt is using “political” in a particular way. For Schmitt, the political is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy. Utopianism is anti-political insofar as it attempts to abolish that distinction, to root out all enmity and conflict in the world.

Schmitt’s defense of the political is not a defense of enmity and conflict as good things. Schmitt fully recognizes their destructiveness and the necessity of managing and mitigating them. But Schmitt believes that enmity is best controlled by adopting a realistic understanding of its nature. So Schmitt does not defend conflict, but realism about conflict. Indeed, Schmitt believes that the best way to contain conflict is first to abandon all unrealistic notions that one can do away with it entirely.

Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity. There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish perpetual peace.

Us and Them

What does the distinction between friend and enemy mean?

First, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy is collective. He is talking about “us versus them” not “one individual versus another.”

Schmitt introduces the Latin distinction between hostis (a collective or public enemy, the root of “hostile”) and inimicus (an individual and private adversary, the root of “inimical”). The political is founded on the distinction between friend (those on one’s side) and hostis (those on the other side). Private adversaries are not public enemies.

Second, the distinction between friend and enemy is polemical. The friend/enemy distinction is always connected with the abiding potential for violence. One does not need to actually fight one’s enemy, but the potential must always be there. The sole purpose of politics is not group conflict; the sole content of politics is not group conflict; but the abiding possibility of group conflict is what creates the political dimension of human social existence.

Third, the distinction between friend and enemy is existentially serious. Violent conflict is more serious than other forms of conflict, because when things get violent people die.

Fourth, the distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to any other distinction. For instance, it is not reducible to the distinction between good and evil. The “good guys” are just as much enemies to the “bad guys” as the “bad guys” are enemies to the “good guys.” Enmity is relative, but morality—we hope—is not.

Fifth, although the friend/enemy distinction is not reducible to other distinctions and differences—religious, economic, philosophical, etc.—all differences can become political if they generate the friend/enemy opposition.

In sum, the ultimate root of the political is the capacity of human groups to take their differences so seriously that they will kill or die for them.

It is important to note that Schmitt’s concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics. The rivalries of politicians and parties, provided they stay within legal parameters, do not constitute enmity in Schmitt’s sense. Schmitt’s notion of politics applies primarily to foreign relations — the relations between sovereign states and peoples — rather than domestic relations within a society. The only time when domestic relations become political in Schmitt’s sense is during a revolution or a civil war.

 

Sovereignty

 

If the political arises from the abiding possibility of collective life or death conflict, the political rules over all other areas of social life because of its existential seriousness, the fact that it has recourse to the ultimate sanction.

For Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the person who makes that decision.

If a sovereign declares an enemy, and individuals or groups within his society reject that declaration, the society is in a state of undeclared civil war or revolution. To refuse the sovereign’s choice of enemy is one step away from the sovereign act of choosing one’s own enemies. Thus Schmitt’s analysis supports the saying that, “War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”

 

Philosophical Parallels

The root of the political as Schmitt understands it is what Plato and Aristotle call “thumos,” the middle part of the soul that is neither theoretical reason nor physical desire, but is rather the capacity for passionate attachment. Thumos is the root of the political because it is the source of attachments to (a) groups, and politics is collective, and (b) life-transcending and life-negating values, i.e., things that are worth killing and dying for, like the defense of personal or collective honor, one’s culture or way of life, religious and philosophical convictions, etc. Such values make possible mortal conflict between groups.

The abolition of the political, therefore, requires the abolition of the human capacity for passionate, existentially serious, life and death attachments. The apolitical man is, therefore, the apathetic man, the man who lacks commitment and intensity. He is what Nietzsche called “the last man,” the man for whom there is nothing higher than himself, nothing that might require that he risk the continuation of his physical existence. The apolitical utopia is a spiritual “boneless chicken ranch” of doped up, dumbed down, self-absorbed producer-consumers.

Schmitt’s notion of the political is consistent with Hegel’s notion of history. For Hegel, history is a record of individual and collective struggles to the death over images or interpretations of who we are. These interpretations consist of the whole realm of culture: worldviews and the ways of life that are their concrete manifestations.

There are, of course, many interpretations of who we are. But there is only one truth, and according to Hegel the truth is that man is free. Just as philosophical dialectic works through a plurality of conflicting viewpoints to get to the one truth, so the dialectic of history is a war of conflicting worldviews and ways of life that will come to an end when the correct worldview and way of life are established. The concept of human freedom must become concretely realized in a way of life that recognizes freedom. Then history as Hegel understands it—and politics as Schmitt understands it—will come to an end.

Hegel’s notion of the ideal post-historical state is pretty much everything a 20th (or 21st) century fascist could desire. But later interpreters of Hegel like Alexandre Kojève and his follower Francis Fukuyama, interpret the end of history as a “universal homogeneous state” that sounds a lot like the globalist utopianism that Schmitt wished to combat.

Why the Political Cannot be Abolished

If the political is rooted in human nature, then it cannot be abolished. Even if the entire planet could be turned into a boneless chicken ranch, all it would take is two serious men to start politics—and history—all over again.

But the utopians will never even get that far. Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peace- and love-mongers have enemies too, namely “haters” like us.

Thus the abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about politics. But dishonesty is the least of the utopians’ vices. For in the name of peace and love, they persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness that make good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison.

Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might, for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in scope and duration. And since it is a mere conflict of interest—in which both sides, really, are right—rather than a moral or religious crusade between good and evil, light and darkness, ultimately both sides can strike a deal with each other to cease hostilities.

But when war is wedded to a universalist utopianism—global communism or democracy, the end of “terror” or, more risibly, “evil”—it becomes universal in scope and endless in duration. It is universal, because it proposes to represent all of humanity. It is endless, of course, because it is a war with human nature itself.

Furthermore, when war is declared in the name of “humanity,” its prosecution becomes maximally inhuman, since anything is fair against the enemies of humanity, who deserve nothing short of unconditional surrender or annihilation, since one cannot strike a bargain with evil incarnate. The road to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was paved with love: universalistic, utopian, humanistic, liberal love.

Liberalism

 

Liberalism seeks to reduce the friend/enemy distinction to differences of opinion or economic interests. The liberal utopia is one in which all disputes can be resolved bloodlessly by reasoning or bargaining. But the opposition between liberalism and anti-liberalism cannot be resolved by liberal means. It is perforce political. Liberal anti-politics cannot triumph, therefore, without the political elimination of anti-liberalism.

The abolition of the political requires the abolition of all differences, so there is nothing to fight over, or the abolition of all seriousness, so that differences make no difference. The abolition of difference is accomplished by violence and cultural assimilation. The abolition of seriousness is accomplished by the promotion of spiritual apathy through consumerism and indoctrination in relativism, individualism, tolerance, and diversity worship—the multicult.

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists, they are just less capable of honesty.

Liberalism, however, generally prefers to kill us softly. The old-fashioned version of liberalism prefers the soft dissolution of differences through cultural assimilation, but that preference was reversed when an unassimilable minority rose to power in the United States, at which time multiculturalism and diversity became the watchwords, and the potential conflicts between different groups were to be managed through spiritual corruption. Today’s liberals make a fetish of the preservation of pluralism and diversity, as long as none of it is taken seriously.

 

Multicultural utopianism is doomed, because multiculturalism is very successful at increasing diversity, but, in the long run, it cannot manage the conflicts that come with it.

The drug of consumerism cannot be relied upon because economic crises cannot be eliminated. Furthermore, there are absolute ecological limits to the globalization of consumerism.

As for the drugs of relativism, individualism, tolerance, and the multi-cult: only whites are susceptible to their effects, and since these ideas systematically disadvantage whites in ethnic competition, ultimately those whites who accept them will be destroyed (which is the point, really) and those whites who survive will reject them. Then whites will start taking our own side, ethnic competition will get political, and, one way or another, racially and ethnically homogeneous states will emerge.

Lessons for White Nationalists

To become a White Nationalist is to choose one’s friends and one’s enemies for oneself. To choose new friends means to choose a new nation. Our nation is our race. Our enemies are the enemies of our race, of whatever race they may be. By choosing our friends and enemies for ourselves, White Nationalists have constituted ourselves as a sovereign people—a sovereign people that does not have a sovereign homeland, yet—and rejected the sovereignty of those who rule us. This puts us in an implicitly revolutionary position vis-à-vis all existing regimes.

The conservatives among us do not see it yet. They still wish to cling to America’s corpse and suckle from her poisoned tit. But the enemy understands us better than some of us understand ourselves. We may not wish to choose an enemy, but sometimes the enemy chooses us. Thus “mainstreamers” will be denied entry and forced to choose either to abandon White Nationalism or to explicitly embrace its revolutionary destiny.

It may be too late for mainstream politics, but it is still too early for White Nationalist politics. We simply do not have the power to win a political struggle. We lack manpower, money, and leadership. But the present system, like all things old and dissolute, will pass. And our community, like all things young and healthy, will grow in size and strength. Thus today our task is metapolitical: to raise consciousness and cultivate the community from which our kingdom—or republic—will come.

When that day comes, Carl Schmitt will be numbered among our spiritual Founding Fathers.

Ernst von Salomon, mémorialiste de la révolution conservatrice allemande

Ernst von Salomon, mémorialiste de la révolution conservatrice allemande

Par Francis Bergeron

  

Ex: http://synthesenationale.hautetfort.com/

Article publié dans le dossier consacré à la Révolution conservatrice allemande du numéro 21 (janvier février 2011) de la revue Synthèse nationale.

 

Assez récemment, les éditions Bartillat ont eu l’excellente idée de rééditer Ernst von Salomon, auteur culte, certes, mais seulement pour un petit nombre d’adeptes. Et ses livres majeurs n’étaient plus disponibles depuis plusieurs années. Jean Mabire notait, dans son Que lire ? de 1996, pour le regretter,  que « la mort d’Ernst von Salomon, en 1972 n’avait « pas fait grand bruit, et, aujourd’hui, on parle fort peu de cet écrivain singulier ».

 

Et bien parlons-en, précisément dans ce numéro de Synthèse nationale, car l’auteur des Réprouvés est certainement, avec Ernst Jünger, l’écrivain qui a le mieux raconté la révolution conservatrice allemande. Car il en a été aussi un acteur majeur.

 

La famille von Salomon descendait semble-t-il de protestants français ayant émigré au moment des guerres de religion. Et ce n’est pas le moindre des paradoxes que  de constater que cet ancien cadet se voulait l’héritier des chevaliers teutoniques. Quant à son nationalisme, il est avant tout prussien.

 

Né en 1902 à Kiel, le grand port de guerre allemand, von Salomon s’engage dans une école militaire, - ces fameux cadets -, alors même que la guerre vient de s’achever sur l’humiliation de la défaite de 1918, et que le pays sombre dans la révolution et la guerre civile. Il participe aux aventures politico-militaires des corps francs, reçoit le baptême du feu à Berlin et combat les spartakistes (bolcheviques). Il est de tous les complots : depuis le putsch de Kapp (1920) jusqu’à l’assassinat du ministre Rathenau (1922). « Nous voulions liquider tout ce qu’il y avait en Allemagne comme politiciens favorables à la politique « réaliste », avouera-t-il, peu avant sa mort, en 1972, dans un long entretien télévisé. Nous voulions les tuer les uns après les autres, jusqu’à ce que le peuple se réveille ».

 

A la suite de ce dernier attentat, Von Salomon est arrêté, et condamné à cinq années de forteresse, et c’est en prison qu’il va écrire Les Réprouvés, publié en Allemagne en 1930, et en France l’année suivante. C’est un livre militant, ardent, qui traduit une pensée aristocratique, médiévale. Von Salomon n’est pas un doctrinaire, et pour lui, l’action et la volonté se justifient en soi. « La patrie brûlait sourdement dans quelques cerveaux hardis ». Cette phrase, on la trouve dans Les Réprouvés. Elle fut reprise bien des fois, aussi bien par les jeunes fascistes français d’avant-guerre et de l’Occupation, que par de jeunes résistants, ou encore par les activistes de l’OAS. Et von Salomon devint le maître à vivre (plus que le maître à penser) de beaucoup d’intellectuels qui se rêvaient hommes d’action. A commencer par Drieu la Rochelle.

 

Une grande partie du récit des Réprouvés est consacrée à la préparation du meurtre de Rathenau. Et comme le note Jean Mabire, le livre semble prôner « l’action pour l’action, dans une optique de violence et de pureté qui se soucie peu des préoccupations doctrinales ».

 

A peine libéré, von Salomon se rue à nouveau dans l’action. Il est une nouvelle fois condamné à trois ans de prison, après une violente bagarre. Libéré, il se lie avec Ernst Jünger et les cercles politico-littéraires de la révolution conservatrice. Mais ils entend rester d’abord un activiste, et le voici compromis dans la révolte armée des paysans du Schleswig-Holstein contre le pouvoir central. Von Salomon dirige leur journal, et on le soupçonne d’avoir participé à une série d’attentats à la bombe. A cette époque (1929), rappelle le journaliste Jean-Pierre Bonicco, qui a postfacé la réédition des Cadets, les quatre fils von Salomon sont tous en prison en raison de leurs engagements extrémistes, parfois opposés, d’ailleurs.

 

Le roman La Ville parait en 1932 (en 1933 en France). C’est le portrait d’un agitateur vagabondant dans le radicalisme absolu, c’est encore une sorte d’autobiographie, autour de ses engagements « paysans ».

 

Puis sont publiés Les Cadets (1933), dont la traduction française ne paraitra, pour la première fois, que vingt années plus tard, récit à la première personne de son intégration à l’école des Cadets royaux, texte essentiel : « C’est ici que tout a commencé. Ici s’est forgée sa formidable capacité de résister aux pouvoirs établis… Ici, il a découvert ses affinités électives avec le prussianisme considéré non pas comme un système, un ordre substitué à d’autres, mais bien comme « le système, l’ordre sans appel possible » (François Nourissier, La Nouvelle NRF, mai 1953).

 

Curieusement l’arrivée au pouvoir d’Adolf Hitler, le 30 janvier 1933, ne remplit pas von Salomon de joie. C’est pourtant bien l’écrasement du Rote Front et l’avènement d’un régime à la fois socialiste et nationaliste, que l’on pourrait penser assez proche des idéaux de la révolution conservatrice. Mais von Salomon a commencé à perdre sa fibre militante. Peut-être après la nuit des longs couteaux, où furent assassinés tant de ses anciens camarades des Freikorps. Ou parce que sa compagne était d’origine juive. Ou plus simplement parce que, pour lui, comme pour tous les vrais révolutionnaires de droite, « c’est dans l’échec seul que la liberté vit », selon la formule du polémiste Philippe Murray.  J’aurais tendance à privilégier cette dernière hypothèse.

 

Pendant l’Occupation, il voyage, en France, notamment, mais ne participe pas au culte national-socialiste, pas plus qu’au complot contre Hitler. Néanmoins il est interné par les Américains, en 1945, qui l’ont classé big nazi. Cet internement de dix-huit mois (son quatrième emprisonnement, en fait) va être l’occasion, une fois de plus, pour lui, d’écrire un nouveau chef d’œuvre : Le Questionnaire. Dans cet énorme livre (800 pages dans la version allemande, 650 pages dans la traduction française de Gallimard), von Salomon subvertit le « questionnaire de dénazification » en 131 questions qui lui a été soumis, et le transforme en un formidable pamphlet consacré aux cinquante dernières années de l’histoire de l’Allemagne. Le livre est un grand succès, de part et d’autre de la frontière (publié en 1951 en Allemagne, et en 1953 en France).

 

Mort en 1972, von Salomon n’a pas connu la chute du mur de Berlin, la fin du communisme, la réunification de l’Allemagne. Ses dernières années, il les avait passées, tranquillement, dans une maison au toit de chaume près de Hambourg. François Brigneau et Dominique Venner le rencontrèrent l’un et l’autre peu avant sa mort. Ils avaient cherché en vain dans « ce visage replet » les traits du jeune aventurier terroriste qu’il avait été. Mais c’est dans ses livres qu’ils sont gravés, et à jamais.

 

Les Réprouvés, La Ville, Les Cadets et Le Questionnaire constituent donc l’essentiel de l’œuvre de von Salomon. Commencez par Les Cadets (1), puis reprenez l’ordre chronologique de parution. Vous reconstituerez alors l’autobiographie de notre aventurier, une autobiographie transcendée par ce sens de la rébellion absolue qui fascina tant un Drieu la Rochelle ou un Roger Stéphane.

 

Note

1 - Les Cadets, par Ernst von Salomon, postface de Jean-Pierre Bonicco, Bartillat, 2008.

Ernst Jünger - Apostrophes 1981

Ernst Jünger - Apostrophes 1981

Ernst Jünger in den Kreidegräben der Champagne

Ernst Jünger in den Kreidegräben der Champagne

Alexander Dugin talks about the Conservative Revolution at Moscow State University

Alexander Dugin talks about the Conservative Revolution at Moscow State University

L'antiamericanismo di Evola

L’antiamericanismo di Evola non è pregiudizio, ma parte d’una visione coerente del mondo

di Francesco Lamendola

Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]

 

Recentemente la Fondazione Julius Evola ha curato la seconda edizione (dopo quella del 1983) dell’antologia di testi evoliani dedicati alla civiltà statunitense, a cura di Alberto Lombardo, intitolata «Civiltà americana».

Si tratta di una raccolta di quattordici scritti, apparsi fra il 1930 e il 1968, ossia da prima dello scoppio della seconda guerra mondiale a pochi anni prima della scomparsa del filosofo, avvenuta nel 1974. Il primo testo è il celebre «Noi antimoderni»; l’ultimo s’intitola «Suggestione negra». Fra i più significativi, come appare già dai rispettivi titoli, «”Libertà dal bisogno” e umanità bovina» (del 1952) e «Difendersi dall’America» (del 1957).

  

Molto è stato detto e scritto sull’antiamericanismo di Evola, nonché sulla circostanza, invero eloquente, che la sua produzione su questo tema è perfino più abbonante di quella dedicata all’anticomunismo; per cui riteniamo che questa ripubblicazione di una serie di scritti evoliani, dispersi su svariate riviste oggi in gran parte introvabili, sia di per sé una operazione culturale meritoria e di alto profilo.

  

Coglie perfettamente nel segno Alberto Lombardo allorché osserva che tutta la discussione in merito è sostanzialmente viziata dal fatto che americanismo e antiamericanismo, nel panorama politico e culturale italiano (ed europeo), hanno finito per assurgere al ruolo di bandiere di due co0ntrapposte - ma non opposte - visioni del mondo, che neppure la fine della Guerra Fredda, in apparenza, è riuscita a comporre o a rendere obsolete.

  

E questo per la buona ragione che tanto gli americanisti quanto gli antiamericanisti continuano a muoversi entrambi sul medesimo terreno culturale, proprio della modernità intesa in senso puramente quantitativo: democrazia, capitalismo, egualitarismo, cultura dei diritti, scuola di massa, dominio di una vociante “opinione pubblica” che non si rende conto di essere strumentalizzata, dietro la maschera della demagogia più sfrenata, da una rete occulta di “poter forti” di matrice finanziaria ed economica.

  

In questo senso, ha ancora ragione Lombardo quando osserva che l’antiamericanismo superficiale e viscerale di casa nostra non è affatto una alternativa ai valori, se così vogliamo chiamarli, rappresentato dalla civiltà americana, perché, in ultima analisi, si riduce ad un americanismo purgato dai fast-food di McDonald’s e dalla Coca-Cola.

La vera alternativa all’americanismo non è, pertanto, una modernità che vorrebbe accettare tutto il regno del quantitativo, rappresentato allo spirito americano, ma senza i suoi simboli più vistosi e appariscenti, per non dire più chiassosi e volgari; ma un lucido, ragionato rifiuto di tutto l’universo spirituale (o piuttosto anti-spirituale) sotteso a quella civiltà. 

  

Diversamente, l’antiamericanismo nostrano si riduce a quella misera cosa che in realtà è: una servile accettazione della sua essenza profonda, pretendendo però di nascondere alla vista - ipocritamente - certe forme esteriori.

  

Osserva, infatti, Antonio Lombardo a questo proposito (op. cit., 16-18):

«L’antiamericanismo, che un autore apprezzato dagli americani nostrani ha definito “una malattia psicologica”, non è sufficiente ad accostare Evola al movimento no/new global o ad altre correnti di pensiero. In Evola l’avversione al modello di civiltà propugnato dagli Stati Uniti non è un pregiudizio, come vorrebbe Massimo Teodori, ma parte da un’autentica visione del mondo e della storia. Già in due capostipiti della rivoluzione conservatrice tedesca, Oswald Spengler e Arthur Moeller van der Bruck, vi è una critica all’occidentalismo di marca anglosassone che è il risultato di un’analisi storica e geopolitica; analoghe posizioni si trovano in Johann von Leers e in Carl Schmitt. Vi è, soprattutto, il richiamo alla tradizione politica europea e la teorizzazione di una sua rinascita n forme nuove. Al contrario, tanto nei laudatori dell’americanismo che nei suoi detrattori, si osserva un’attitudine prona e remissiva che altro non è che una forma di disfattismo o di incoscienza. Anche i più accalorati antiamericani infatti non dubitano della validità dei dogmi  egualitari, della sacralità della democrazia, dell’importanza del meticciato come mezzo per abbattere le costrizioni di un modo che ha ancora troppe differenze.  Entrambi, americanofili e americanofobi, sognano un mondo on più ricchezza diffusa meno frontiere e più libertà di scambi e movimenti, con la peculiare variante della presenza, o meno, delle catene dei McDonald’so della Coca-Cola.

La recente elezione negli Stati Uniti del primo Presidente di colore della storia avrebbe certo dato lo spunto a Evola per qualche articolo, non tanto per la persona considerata in se stessa (Barack Obama), quanto per il valore simbolico e sintomatico del fato. Non vi è alcun dubbio che vedesse nella componente di colore della popolazione nordamericana la componente più tipica dello “spirito americano”: “L’America è ‘negrizzata’ in termini non semplicemente demografici, ma altresì di civiltà e di sensibilità,, quindi anche quando non esistono che scarse relazioni col sangue negro” (in “Il popolo italiano”, 12 luglio 1957). Evola avrebbe indubbiamente interpretato questo fatto come una conferma della degenerazione spirituale american, tanto più considerando che è stata una maggioranza bianca ad eleggere un presidente negro.

  

Comunque non è paradossale che proprio in America, a partire dagli anni Novantadel secolo corso, Evola abbia goduto di una marginale ma non del tutto trascurabile fortuna, dovuta soprattutto alla traduzione delle sue opere principali da parte della casa editrice Inner Traditions, oltre che ala presentazione del pensiero evoliano (in termini assai diversi) da parte di Thomas Sheehan, Richard Drake e Joscelyn Godwin. Ed è piuttosto significativo che in internet, dove il nome di Evola compare in centinaia di migliaia di pagine in tutte le lingue, uno dei primi testi integralmente tradotti e disponibili i inglese (così come in altre lingue) sia stato proprio il volumetto “Civiltà americana”.

  

A ben vedere, infatti, l’autentica opposizione al modello americano è proprio quella teorizzata da Evola, che punta al primato della qualità sulla quantità, dello spirito sulla materia dell’organicità sull’individualismo e della politica sull’economia. Però, così come la Tecnica è per sua natura universale, lo sono anche il modello economico capitalistico e l’ideologia egualitaria. Storicamente, laddove un’idea particolare si oppone ad una universale, la prima è destinata a venire travolta. Il messaggio fondamentale di Evola è proprio quello di interpretare e vivere i valori tradizionali in una prospettiva più che storica, assolutizzarli: solo con ciò potranno essere opposti a quelli dominanti, indipendentemente a ogni effettiva speranza pratica.»

Quello che non può trovarci d’accordo, nel pensiero di Evola sulla civiltà americana, è, d’altra parte, il suo atteggiamento nei confronti della questione degli afroamericani, che risente di un biologismo estraneo, a ben guardare, alle stesse motivazioni ideali del pensiero del filosofo e che si presta ad una lettura in chiave francamente e inaccettabilmente razzista.

  

Se la questione si riducesse ad un fatto puramente biologico, allora l’unico (ed ultimo) uomo politico europeo apertamente evoliano sarebbe Berlusconi, con la sua mediocrissima battuta sull’«abbronzatura» di Barack Obama. 

  

Invece, per le stesse ragioni per cui non è accettabile una critica all’americanismo che ne lasci intatte le base ideologiche e si fermi ad alcuni simboli e funzioni materiali, del pari ci sembra non sia accettabile una lettura in chiave razzista della questione afroamericana. 

  

Al contrario, ci sembra che proprio la sorte dei due gruppi umani che più hanno sofferto della intrinseca malignità dello “spirito americano”, sempre camuffata dietro una roboante enfasi retorica, i neri vittime della schiavitù e gli indiani vittime della “pulizia etnica”, dovrebbe essere vista come un perenne monito contro le sirene di quella ideologia che proclama diritti e libertà per tutti, ma non esita a spazzar via con le bombe al napalm chiunque osi attraversarle il cammino, come si vede, anche ai nostri giorni, per esempio, in Iraq e in Afghanistan.

  

Occorre demistificare l’intrinseca ipocrisia del “sogno americano” e la brutalità, eretta a sistema, dello “spirito della frontiera”, entrambe versioni rivedute e corrette di quel “destino manifesto” che ha fatto del nazionalismo statunitense la molla di una feroce volontà di sopraffazione a livello planetario, realizzata attraverso le immani distruzioni di due guerre mondiali, l’uso spregiudicato dei bombardamenti a tappeto e delle bombe atomiche, la cinica dottrina della “guerra preventiva” e la regia occulta delle lobbies politiche e finanziarie che hanno i loro centri nevralgici non solo a New York, ma anche a Londra e Gerusalemme.

  

E che il pensiero di Evola non sia immune da una certa vena razzista, lo dimostrano le pagine dedicate alla questione dell’apartheid nell’Africa australe; ove ad alcune osservazioni giuste e condivisibili, si intrecciano altre, che dovrebbero ripugnare non diciamo ad una coscienza cristiana - ed Evola è stato, infatti, un pensatore dichiaratamente pagano -, ma anche a quel tanto di coscienza morale che l’umanità ha comunque elaborato sotto l’influsso del Cristianesimo, anche senza rendersene conto o magari, come nel caso dell’Illuminismo, in antitesi ad esso e in aperta polemica contro di esso.

Queste riflessioni ci riconducono anche al discorso sulla posizione di Evola di fronte all’alternativa fra capitalismo di matrice americana e comunismo di modello sovietico. Per lui, si tratta di una falsa alternativa, e questa è la ragione per la quale rifiuta di farsi arruolare, sotto ricatto, nelle file degli “americanisti”. Capitalismo e comunismo non sono alternativi, proprio come, per Nietzsche, non lo sono liberalismo e marxismo: al contrario, si tratta di ideologie simmetriche e complementari, frutto, entrambe, della degenerazione quantitativa della modernità e dell’avvento di una concezione materialista, economicista, radicalmente laicista e avversa all’idea stessa del sacro, della gerarchia, del primato spirituale.

Alberto Lombardo osserva che, quando un’idea particolare si scontra con una universale, finisce per essere travolta. Come è stato fatto notare da diversi studiosi, la forza dell’americanismo sembra consistere proprio nel suo apparente universalismo; che, ad esempio, rende simili a penose battaglie di retroguardia gli sforzi della Francia di preservare la propria identità linguistica e culturale, dato che una strategia rigida soccombe sempre davanti ad una elastica.

Ebbene, si tratta di mostrare che il re è in mutande e cioè che l’americanismo, lungi dall’essere quella ideologia universalistica che cerca di apparire, è, in effetti, la più compiutamente particolaristica e la più ottusamente nazionalistica fra tutte quelle finora apparse durante il processo della modernità: l’ultimo e più abnorme frutto di una parabola degenerativa e non già il primo di un’epoca nuova e di un mondo nuovo.

Del resto, la cosa è evidente anche a livello puramente numerico. Estendere il “sogno americano” all’umanità intera, ad esempio a quei due miliardi e mezzo di Cinesi e di Indiani che bussano energicamente per sedere anch’essi alla tavola del capitalismo trionfante, prima che venga sparecchiata, è cosa semplicemente impossibile, e gli Stati Uniti saranno disposti a qualunque cosa pur di opporvisi. 

A quel punto, però, dovranno gettare la maschera e tutto il mondo potrà vedere che l’americanismo altro non è ce un meschino nazionalismo elevato all’ennesimo potenza e che, per oltrepassare le sue mendaci promesse, occorre ripensare radicalmente il posto dell’uomo nel mondo, il ruolo dell’economia e della tecnica, e soprattutto la dimensione trascendente dell’anima, che la cultura materialista e liberale ha voluto rinnegare e che ha cerato in ogni modo di estinguere.

Molto di più che una questione puramente politica, dunque: ma una vera e propria rifondazione dei valori ideali e perenni dello spirito umano.

In questo senso, ci sembra che la rilettura degli scritti di Evola sulla civiltà americana, nonché del saggio introduttivo di Alberto Lombardo, possa costituire un utile laboratorio di riflessioni e una autentica miniera di spunti critici per chi voglia porsi in maniera consapevole, e al tempo stesso propositiva, nei confronti della sempre più allarmante deriva nichilista di questa nostra tarda modernità.

 

 

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Alexander Slavros - Portrait of Ernst Jünger

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