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Depuis un certain temps déjà, on polémique contre tout et tous ceux qui soulignent en Allemagne l’importance de la souveraineté nationale. Cette polémique s’est renforcée massivement au cours des dernières semaines et fait preuve – de la part de la politique dominante établie et de quelques institutions publiques – de paroles et d’actes de tendances clairement discriminatoires et illicites. Il faut donc aussi prendre en considération que l’on entreprend des «opérations sous de fausses bannières» suite à des motivations de politique intérieure. 
A propos: les Etats nationaux souverains étaient et sont naturellement en mesure de trouver des accords internationaux et de conclure des contrats face à des tâches transfrontalières. Ils sont capables de trouver des solutions correspondantes à la volonté des peuples concernés. Des traités ayant des partenaires contractuels égaux en droits et souverains, suivant les principes de la bonne foi – qui peuvent cependant aussi être annulés et renégociés si les peuples le désirent. Thanks to Rowan Lock for the biographical details, and general assistance with writing.
You can get hold of the copy of The Glass Bees I read here.
You can get hold of the copy of The Glass Bees I read here.
Ernst Jünger was one of the true luminaries of the intellectual Right in the 20th century. A popular hero of the First World War, famous for his memoir of the conflict entitled The Storm of Steel, he became aligned with the German conservative revolutionary movement in the interbellum years, and as such advocated a radical, authoritarian, militarist nationalism. This being said, he never made the fatal gesture Heidegger made, and was never associated with National Socialism; his relationship with Nazism began as coolly ambivalent, progressing into antipathy and finally open hostility (he was even peripherally involved with 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler). This being said, his contribution to political theory outside his initial context was, essentially, minimal. However, he was regarded as a figure of great literary stature in post-war Europe. He was a prolific novelist, and his incredibly long lifespan (over a century) gave him an enviable vantage point to comment from: he was a grown man when the German Empire collapsed, he was present during the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and lived to see the reunification of Germany (comfortably outliving the German Democratic Republic). His fans included a variety of contradictory figures, including Hitler, Goebbels, Francois Mitterand, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. As well as writing, he was also a well-educated botanist and entomologist. He was even one of the very earliest experimenters with LSD. He was a man who embodied the very paradoxes and contradictions of recent European existence.The Glass Bees is a novel about Captain Richard, a retired cavalryman-turned-tank-inspector. He's been offered an interview for a job working for Zapparoni, a technology magnate who embodies the Zeitgeist of modernity perfectly, and is depicted almost as a synthesis of Walt Disney and Steve Jobs, only infinitely cooler. Zapparoni's company makes the finest automata in the land, but these aren't the clunky mechanoids you might expect, they're rather more like the kind of tech that we have here-and-now. They are modest, ubiquitous, labour saving devices, tiny robots performing a host of domestic and industrial tasks. That isn't the limit to Zapparoni's vision though, he is also a purveyor of cinematic products, his automata bringing characters from myth and legend to all-too convincing life (in other words, animatronics). The vividness of the distractions he produces is, however, somewhat disquieting:
Children, in particular, were held spellbound [by his films]. Zapparoni had dethroned the old stock figures of the fairy tales...Parents even complained that their children were too preoccupied with him.
Richard is not a man of his time, arguably like Jünger himself. He harks back to the glory days of warfare and conflict that still felt human, battles fought with flesh and steel, and not simply with mechanisms and calculations. He feels a particular disgust at the kind of dismemberment produced by the technics of modern warfare, remarking that one doesn't find any stories of amputated limbs in the Iliad. That statement in particular becomes eerily prescient of the image of today's soldier wounded by an IED in one of our misadventures in the Middle East, missing an arm or a leg, but still alive: Richard mourns the loss of wars that killed you cleanly. Richard's world is one that has been plunging into chaos and uncertainty since his youth, when his country, Asturia, was plunged repeatedly into war, including civil war. He is a man whose principles were formed in a world now lost, and the one he finds himself in does not feel like an improvement.
[My father] had led a quiet life, but at the end he hadn't been too happy either. Lying sick in bed, he said to me: "My boy, I am dying at just the right moment." Saying this, he gave me a sad, worried look. He had certainly foreseen many things.
This is a deeply reactionary novel, and doesn't make for easy reading. Jünger's writing meanders, straying into lengthy digressions into his narrator's memory; his pace is languid, virtually glacial in fact. Although his prose is beautiful, even poetic, it feels incredibly indulgent and is often, frankly, dull. Very little happens as such in the novel, the bulk of it simply being Richard's recollections. And yet, what is curious is how this achingly slow piece of writing is able to convey the sheer speed with which modernity did away with the old world. The narrator, like Jünger, grew up in a world were the horse was still yet to be rendered obsolete by the automobile. Jünger's clear concern is that technological progress will injure humanity very, very deeply.
Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other...Technical perfection strives toward the calculable, human perfection toward the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms...evoke both fear and a titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.
What is curious here is that before the Second World War, Jünger advocated Germany's complete embracing of the technological age as the only way it could find victory in the next war. He felt that it was Germany and Austria-Hungary's traditional, aristocratic hierarchy that prevented it from being able to properly mobilise itself in the total way the more levelled, egalitarian societies of the democracies were capable of doing (he discusses this in his work Total Mobilisation), and only by accepting the levelling effects of technological modernity could Germany once again find itself triumphant. Perhaps by the time of writing The Glass Bees Jünger had simply become disenchanted with the fury of warfare.
Elsewhere Richard, and maybe Jünger, speaks of the loss of the simple 'joy' of labour, of working the earth, of harvesting crops, of the well-deserved rest at the end of the long day, and how this has been traded in for labour that is certainly easier, and leisure time that is longer, but doesn't carry the same weight of satisfaction. The fear that we have lost much and gained little except damnation in return is the central theme of this book.
Zapparoni himself, in fact, has utilised his vast wealth and power to create a private world at first seemingly devoid of the artefacts that have made his name. He has a residence located within the grounds of his plant (which Bruce Sterling, in his introduction, remarks is not dissimilar to the campus feeling of Silicon Valley) in the form of a converted abbey. Richard explores its private library, finding books on Rosicrucianism and other occult sciences, and is later sent down the path to a cottage that comes close to the very Platonic Form of idyllic country residences. What is curious here is that this retreat from modernity has only been made possible by Zapparoni's very success at the practices and theories that Richard feels have destroyed the simple authenticity of the old world. How might this be read? Perhaps Jünger is suggesting that the only way back into the world that has been lost is to pass through the modern one, presuming we are capable of surviving it, and to use its mechanisms and ingenuity to recreate a new version of the old.
There's a feeling of resignation in this novel. Jünger isn't really calling on us to take up arms against the machines. His constant allusions to astrology suggest that he feels that what we now find ourselves in was, somehow, inevitable. It is our bad luck to find ourselves in the midst of it, but a way out might be found if we can weather the storm of the new. This being said, Richard repeatedly describes his attitude as 'defeatist'. Perhaps the more subtle suggestion Jünger is making here is that things only became inevitable when we decided we can't stop them.
I'm left feeling torn by this book. I share Jünger's concerns about the insidious nature of these devices we're now surrounded by, and yet the past he (or Richard) is seemingly appealing to is one that is forever out of reach, and if we were to find ourselves in it, it wouldn't be what we wanted. Consider the above statement about how now modern war doesn't kill one cleanly, that we now have the mutilated, dismembered wounded: we can equally well read this as 'Human technical ingenuity is now such that it can protect us, admittedly only limitedly, from the extremities of human malice.'
The question posed by modernity is one that has not yet had a satisfactory answer. Indeed, the question itself has yet to be fully formulated. Jünger's contribution to understanding the condition that we find ourselves in is an important one. If nothing else, he can remind us how incredibly recent all of this still is. Up until only very recently, there were people alive who'd fought in the war of Kings, Kaisers and Tsars, witnessed the rise of all the great and terrible varieties of attempted Utopia the last century produced, saw a human being walk upon the surface of the Moon (an image which disturbed Heidegger no end), and died in the age of Facebook.
It really is anyone's guess where this will all lead.
2016 Reading List Progress
List 1:
2. Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam by Peter Lamborn Wilson
3. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4. United States of Paranoia by Jesse Walker
5. Axiomatic by Greg Egan
Les valeurs : un argument terroriste
Les valeurs contre la vertu
Il faut en outre dénoncer les propos inacceptables de Malika Sorel-Sutter, une icône d’une soi-disant « droite » toujours aussi stupide, qui affirme que « ce sont bel et bien des Français de souche qui ont trahi la République. Trahir la République française, ce n’était pas trahir n’importe quelle République, car la République française porte en elle la traduction de l’héritage politique et culturel du peuple français (5) ». Elle inverse les responsabilités ! C’est en fait la République qui trahit les Français de souche et ce, depuis bien longtemps. Cette dame oublie peut-être que la République, Troisième du nom, a surtout éradiqué les nombreuses cultures vernaculaires en généralisant deux redoutables instruments d’aliénation psychosociale : la conscription militaire soumise à la férule de sous-officiers obtus et l’école laïque obligatoire régie par la baguette des sinistrement fameux « hussards noirs ». Ces deux terribles encadrements diffusèrent un délétère esprit de revanche germanophobe et contribuèrent à l’éradication poussée des campagnes françaises au cours de l’absurde Première Guerre mondiale. Trahir la République s’impose par conséquent comme une urgente nécessité.
Mentionnant cette affaire
Le PiS et Kaczynski restent antirusses, sans le moindre doute, mais dans un temps où la question de l’antagonisme avec la Russie est en train de perdre en Europe même de son importance politique immédiate, notamment en Europe de l’Est, et alors que la Russie s’est placée dans une position très favorable du point de vue de la communication avec son intervention antiterroriste en Syrie ; par contre, la querelle européenne intervient quotidiennement dans la vie de tous les États-membres, et par conséquent dans celle de la Pologne et pas du tout à l’avantage de l’UE. La question de la mise en lumière complète des circonstances de l’accident de l’avion transportant Lech Kaczynski et sa suite continue à être une hypothèque considérable dans le chef du PiS et du Premier ministre polonais par rapport aux relations avec la Russie. Qu'importe puisque ce qui est en jeu aujourd’hui, ce ne sont plus les relations avec la Russie mais d’abord et essentiellement les relations de la Pologne avec l’UE et l’état de quasi-dissidence de la Pologne par rapport à l’UE qui s’ébauche avec les premières mesures du gouvernement Kaczynski.
The more one identifies with the primitive, the more one rejects the elaboration and refinement of advanced civilization. Germans are among the most civilized, and I don’t measure that by bombastic monuments, but by the subtlest civilized gestures. Outside the entrance of a shopping mall toilet, I noticed management had left bowls of water and dog food, and inside each bathroom stall at my university, there is a toilet bowl scrubber to use if necessary. Germans also rarely jaywalk or litter. Of course, they have also produced guys with names like Bach, Beckmann and Sebald. I work on Beethoven Street. Hey, rambling schmuck, and what about dudes with names like Mengele, Heydrich and, uh, Hitler?! I’m talking about civilization’s forms, not its moral contents. Except when they go berserk, Germans are among the most domesticated. In this, they resemble the Japanese. Both have been superbly toilet trained.
One of the earliest German hip hop albums was called “Krauts with Attitude,” a clear nod to N.W.A., “Niggas with Attitude.” N.W.A. has become very mainstream, of course, as attested by the 2015 release of Straight out of Compton. Around Leipzig, I now see stickers and posters of seven masked German militants, under the heading “STRAIGHT OUT OF CONNEWITZ.”
Ceux qui s’illusionnent sur l’efficacité de la politique politicienne et les bienfaits très relatifs et largement surestimés de la démocratie directe helvétique manquent trop souvent d’une colonne vertébrale idéologique et d’une culture leur donnant des clés d’analyse à long terme ( « pérenne » comme on dit en novlangue d’Orwell,1984).Le nombre des électeurs ( les parts de marché électoral) peut certes être augmentée et mobilisée pour freiner l’irrésistible montée du mondialisme et des valeurs totalitaires de la lutte contre les inégalités naturelles et irréductibles. Mais aujourd’hui, l’influence, les arrangements consensuels discrets, la propagande médiatique uniformisée l’emportent presque systématiquement. Il est important de savoir se former, s’informer, en lisant revues et textes pluralistes et alternatifs, dissidents, hors du courant dominant, en accédant aux medias de réinformation accessible sur le Net (comme Lesobservateurs.ch mais il y en a beaucoup d’autres, comme Polemia et j’en passe). Avant que la censure et le contrôle d’Internet ne soient imposés pour des raisons bien sûr de lutte contre le terrorisme.
Comment serait-il aimé, voire, tout simplement, lu et commenté, ce penseur durablement ostracisé par une élite médiatico-politique qu'il n'est plus vraiment besoin de présenter, puisque non seulement Jules Monnerot a magnifiquement analysé la faillite de son surgeon le plus réussi, l'intellectuel, mais a en outre averti qu'il n'écrivait que s'il avait quelque chose à dire (1), au rebours donc des pratiques lamentables de cette même élite dont l'essence labile réside dans le fait de parler, écrire ou, simplement, se montrer, pour ne rien dire, écrire ou même, montrer ?
On constate qu'un polémiste, mais pouvions-nous l'ignorer en lisant un 
Il nous faut cependant revenir aux années trente : «La chronologie (l'existence joue de ces tours à l'essence) nous indique que l'effervescence antifasciste atteint son acmé au temps même de la Iejovtchina, la grande purge de Staline, et des plus célèbres procès de Moscou : après Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek et Boukharine, pour ne parler que d'eux. Des cent trente-quatre membres du Comité central du P.C. de l'U.R.S.S., et des suppléants qui siégeaient au XVIIe congrès (1934), cent dix furent fusillés ou disparurent... Que ces victimes trouvent des pleureuses, ou qu'elles s'en passent ! L'intellectuel a toutes ses larmes retenues !» (p. 84).
(2) Il n'est sans doute pas inutile de rappeler que Jules Monnerot est l'auteur d'une Sociologie du communisme parue en 1949 et traduite en plusieurs langues, qui constitue un réquisitoire aussi implacable que documenté sur l'idéologie la plus meurtrière qu'ait connue, jusqu'à ce jour, l'humanité. Sans doute tenons-nous là l'explication majeure de l'occultation volontaire dans laquelle les mandarins français ont tenu (et continuent de tenir) les analyses de Jules Monnerot, et cela en dépit même du fait qu'un Julien Gracq a répété son admiration pour un livre tel que La poésie moderne et le sacré. Évoquons ce jugement sans appel de l'auteur sur ses contemporains si prudemment taiseux : «Une généralisation de la lâcheté sociologique telle que les paralogismes marxistes et communistes ne rencontrent pas du tout de résistance spécifique, reste encore improbable, en dépit des immenses efforts et moyens consacrés à ce résultat grandiose», Inquisitions, op. cit., p. 84.
