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samedi, 29 août 2020

Notes on Populism

les-bonnets-rouges-sont-a-morlaix-pour-les-premiers-etats-generaux-de-bretagne-photo-afp-fred-tanneau-1420347220.jpg

Notes on Populism

By Greg Johnson

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

Populism seeks to rescue popular government from corrupt elites. Naturally, the elites strike back. The most common accusation from elite commentators is that populism is “anti-democratic.” As Yascha Mounk frames it, populism is “the people vs. democracy.” I argue that populism is not anti-democratic, but it is anti-liberal. (See Donald Thoresen’s review of Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy here ^[2].)

Many critics of populism accuse it of being a form of white identity politics, and many critics of white identity politics accuse it of being populist. Populism and white identity politics are distinct but sometimes overlapping phenomena. I will argue, however, that populism and white identity politics complement one another, so that the strongest form of white identity politics is populist, and the strongest form of populism is identitarian. But first, we need to clarify what populism really is.

Political Ideology or Political Style?

One of the more superficial claims about populism is that it is not a political ideology but simply a “political style.” An ideology is a set of principles. A political style is a way of embodying and communicating political principles. The idea that populism is merely a political style is based on the observation that there are populisms of the Left and the Right, so how could it be a unified ideology? Of course, there are also liberalisms of the Left and Right, but this does not imply that liberalism is merely a style of politics rather than a political ideology.

Principles of Populism

Just as Right and Left liberalism appeal to common political principles, Right and Left populists also have the same basic political ideas:

All populists appeal to the principle of popular sovereignty. Sovereignty means that a people is independent of other peoples. A sovereign nation is master of its own internal affairs. It can pursue its own ends, as opposed to being subordinated to the ends of others, such as a foreign people or a monarch. The sovereignty of the people is the idea that legitimate government is “of the people, by the people, for the people,” meaning that (1) the people must somehow participate in government, i.e., that they govern themselves, and (2) the state acts in the interest of the people as a whole, i.e., for the common good.
All populists politically mobilize on the premise that popular government has been betrayed by a tiny minority of political insiders, who have arrogated the people’s right to self-government and who govern for their own factional interests, or foreign interests, but not in the interest of the people as a whole. Populists thus declare that the political system is in crisis.
All populists hold that the sovereignty of the people must be restored (1) by ensuring greater popular participation in politics and (2) by replacing traitorous elites with loyal servants of the people. Populists thus frame themselves as redeeming popular sovereignty from a crisis.

Two Senses of “the People”

When populists say the people are sovereign, they mean the people as a whole. When populists oppose “the people” to “the elites,” they are contrasting the vast majority, who are political outsiders, to the elites, who are political insiders. The goal of populism, however, is to restore the unity of the sovereign people by eliminating the conflict of interests between the elites and the people.

Ethnic and Civic Peoplehood

There are two basic ways of defining a people: ethnic and civic. An ethnic group is unified by blood, culture, and history. An ethnic group is an extended family with a common language and history. Ethnic groups always emerge in a particular place but do not necessarily remain there. A civic conception of peoplehood is a construct that seeks to impose unity on a society composed of different ethnic groups, lacking a common descent, culture, and history. For instance, civic nationalists claim that a person can become British, American, or Swedish simply by government fiat, i.e., by giving them legal citizenship.

Ethnic nationalism draws strength from unity and homogeneity. Ethnically defined groups grow primarily through reproduction, although they have always recognized that some foreigners can be “naturalized”—i.e., “assimilated” into the body politic—although rarely and with much effort. Civic nationalism lacks the strength of unity but aims to mitigate that fact with civic ideology and to offset it with strength in numbers, since in principle the whole world can have identity papers issued by a central state.

A civic people is a pure social construct imposed on a set of particular human beings that need not have anything more in common than walking on two legs and having citizenship papers. Civic conceptions of peoplehood thus go hand in hand with the radical nominalist position that only individuals, not collectives, exist in the real world.

An ethnic people is much more than a social construct. First of all, kinship groups are real biological collectives. Beyond that, although ethnic groups are distinguished from other biologically similar groups by differences of language, culture, and history, there is a distinction between evolved social practices like language and culture and mere legislative fiats and other social constructs.

Ethnic peoples exist even without their own states. There are many stateless peoples in the world. But civic peoples do not exist without a state. Civic polities are constructs of the elites that control states.

Populism and Elitism

Populism is contrasted with elitism. But populists are not against elites as such. Populists oppose elites for two main reasons: when they are not part of the people and when they exploit the people. Populists approve of elites that are organically part of the people and function as servants of the people as a whole.

Populists recognize that people differ in terms of intelligence, virtue, and skills. Populists want to have the best-qualified people in important offices. But they want to ensure that elites work for the common good of the polity, not for their own factional interests (or foreign interests). To ensure this, populists wish to empower the people to check the power of elites, as well as to create new elites that are organically connected to the people and who put the common good above their private interests. (For more on this, see my “Notes on Populism, Elitism, and Democracy ^[9].”)

Populism and Classical Republicanism

When political scientists and commentators discuss the history of populism, most begin with nineteenth-century agrarian movements like the Narodniki in Russia and the People’s Party in the United States. But nineteenth-century populism looked backward to the republics of the ancient world, specifically the “mixed regime” of Rome.

Aristotle’s Politics is the most influential theory of the mixed regime. (See my “Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics” here ^[10].) Aristotle observed that a society can be ruled by one man, a few men, or many men. But a society can never be ruled by all men, since every society inevitably includes people who are incapable of participating in government due to lack of ability, for instance the very young, the crazy, and the senile.

Aristotle also observed that the one, few, or many could govern for their factional interests or for the common good. When one man governs for the common good, we have monarchy. When he governs for his private interests, we have tyranny. When few govern for the common good, we have aristocracy. When the few govern for their private interests, we have oligarchy. When the many govern for the common good, we have polity. When they govern for their factional interests, we have democracy.

It is interesting that for Aristotle, democracy is bad by definition, and that he had to invent a new word, “polity,” for the good kind of popular rule that was, presumably, so rare that nobody had yet coined a term for it.

Aristotle recognized that government by one man or few men is always government by the rich, regardless of whether wealth is used to purchase political power or whether political power is used to secure wealth. Thus popular government always empowers those who lack wealth. The extremely poor, however, tend to be alienated, servile, and greedy. The self-employed middle classes, however, have a stake in the future, long-time horizons, and sufficient leisure to participate in politics. Thus popular government tends to be stable when it empowers the middle classes and chaotic when it empowers the poorest elements.

Finally, Aristotle recognized that a regime that mixes together rule by the one, the few, and the many, is more likely to achieve the common good, not simply because each group is public spirited, but also because they are all jealous to protect their private interests from being despoiled by the rest. Aristotle was thus the first theorist of the “mixed regime.” But he was simply observing the functioning of actually existing mixed regimes like Sparta.

One can generate modern populism quite easily from Aristotle’s premises. Aristotle’s idea of the common good is the basis of the idea of popular sovereignty, which means, first and foremost, that legitimate government must look out for the common good of the people.

Beyond that, Aristotle argued that the best way to ensure legitimate government is to empower the many—specifically the middle class—to participate in government. The default position of every society is to be governed by the one or the few. When the elites govern selfishly and oppress the people, the people naturally wish to rectify this by demanding participation in government. They can, of course, use their power simply to satisfy their factional interests, which is why democracy has always been feared. But if popular rule is unjust, it is also unstable. Thus to be stable and salutary, popular rule must aim at the common good of society.

The great theorist of popular sovereignty is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his On the Social Contract, Rousseau claims that the General Will is the fount of sovereignty and legitimacy. What is the General Will? The General Will wills the common good. The common good is not a convention or construct of the General Will but rather an objective fact that must be discovered and then realized through political action.

Rousseau distinguishes the General Will from the Will of All. The General Will is what we ought to will. The Will of All is what we happen to will. The Will of All can be wrong, however. Thus we cannot determine the General Will simply by polling the people.

Rousseau even holds out the possibility that an elite, or a dictator, can know the General Will better than the populace at large. But no matter how the General Will is determined—and no matter who controls the levers of power—political legitimacy arises from the common good of the people.

Populism and Representation

Populism is often associated with “direct” as opposed to “representative” democracy. Populists tend to favor referendums and plebiscites, in which the electorate as a whole decides on important issues, as opposed to allowing them to be decided by representatives in parliament. In truth, though, there is no such thing as direct democracy in which the whole of the people acts. Even in plebiscites, some people always represent the interests of others. Thus democracy always requires some degree of representation.

One can only vote in the present. But a people is not just its present members. It also consists of its past members and its future members. Our ancestors matter to us. They created a society and passed it on to us. They established standards by which we measure ourselves. And just as our ancestors lived not just for themselves, but for their posterity, people today make decisions that affect future generations. Thus in every democratic decision, the living must represent the interests of the dead and the not yet born.

Moreover, within the present generation, some are too young to participate in politics. Others are unable due to disability. The basic principle for excluding living people from the electorate is that they would lower the quality of political decision-making. However, they are still part of the people, and they have genuine interests. Thus the electorate must represent their interests as well.

Beyond that, there are distinctions among competent adults that may lead to further constriction of the electorate, again to raise the quality of political decision-making. For instance, people have argued that the franchise should be restricted to men (because they are the natural guardians of society or because they are more rational than women), or to people with property (because they have more to lose), or to people with children (because they have a greater stake in the future), or to military veterans (because they have proven themselves willing to die, if necessary, for the common good). But again, all of those who are excluded from the franchise are still part of the people, with interests that must be respected. So they must be represented by the electorate.

Thus even in a plebiscite, the people as a whole is represented by only a part, the electorate. Beyond that, unless voting is mandatory, not every member of the electorate will choose to vote. So those who do not vote are represented by those who do.

Thus far, this thought experiment has not even gotten to the question of representative democracy, which takes the process one step further. An elected representative may stand for hundreds of thousands or millions of voters. And those voters in turn stand for eligible non-voters, as well as those who are not eligible to vote, and beyond that, those who are not present to vote because they are dead or not yet born. The not-yet-born is an indefinite number that we hope is infinite, meaning that our people never dies. It seems miraculous that such a multitude could ever be represented by a relative handful of representatives (in the US, 535 Representatives and Senators for more than 300 million living people and untold billions of the dead and yet-to-be-born). Bear in mind, also, that practically every modern politician will eagerly claim to be really thinking about the good of the entire human race.

But we have not yet scaled the highest peak, for people quite spontaneously think of the president, prime minister, or monarch—a single individual—as representing the interests of the entire body politic. Even if that is not their constitutional role, there are circumstances—such as emergencies—in which such leaders are expected to intuit the common good and act accordingly.

Thus it is not surprising that cynics wish to claim that the very ideas of a sovereign people, a common good, and the ability to represent them in politics are simply myths and mumbo-jumbo. Wouldn’t it be better to replace such myths with concrete realities, like selfish individuals and value-neutral institutions that let them peacefully pursue their own private goods?

But the sovereign individual and the “invisible hand” are actually more problematic than the sovereign people and its avatars. From direct democracy in small towns to the popular uprisings that brought down communism, we have actual examples of sovereign peoples manifesting themselves and exercising power. We have actual examples of leaders representing a sovereign people, divining the common good, and acting to secure it.

There is no question that sovereign peoples actually exercise power for their common goods. But how it happens seems like magic. This explains why popular sovereignty is always breaking down. Which in turn explains why populist movements keep arising to return power to the people.

Populism and Democracy

The claim that populism is anti-democratic is false. Populism simply is another word for democracy, understood as popular sovereignty plus political empowerment of the many. Current elites claim that populism threatens “democracy” because they are advocates of specifically liberal democracy. (See my review of Jan-Werner Mueller’s What Is Populism? here ^[15] and William Galston’s Anti-Pluralism here ^[16].)

Liberal democrats claim to protect the rights of the individual and of minorities from unrestrained majoritarianism. Liberal democrats also defend “pluralism.” Finally, liberal democrats insist that the majority is simply not competent to participate directly in government, thus they must be content to elect representatives from an established political class and political parties. These representatives, moreover, give great latitude to unelected technocrats in the permanent bureaucracy.

Liberal democracy is, in short, anti-majoritarian and elitist. Populists recognize that such regimes can work for the public good, as long as the ruling elites are part of the people and see themselves as its servants. But without the oversight and empowerment of the people, there is nothing to prevent liberal democracy from mutating into the rule of corrupt elites for their private interests and for foreign interests. This is why populism is on the rise: to root out corruption and restore popular sovereignty and the common good.

Populists need not reject liberal protections for individuals and minorities, ethnic or political. They need not reject “pluralism” when it is understood as freedom of opinion and multiparty democracy. Populists don’t even reject elites, political representation, and technocratic competence. Populists can value all of these things. But they value the common good of the people even more, and they recognize that liberal values don’t necessarily serve the common good. When they don’t, they need to be brought into line. Liberals, however, tend to put their ideology above the common good, leading to the corruption of popular government. Ideological liberalism is a disease of democracy. Populism is the cure.

Populism and White Identity Politics

What is the connection between populism and white identity politics? I am both a populist and an advocate of white identity politics. But there are advocates of white identity politics who are anti-populist (for instance, those who are influenced by Traditionalism and monarchism), and there are non-white populists around the world (for instance, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand).

However, even if there is no necessary connection between populism and white identity politics, I wish to argue that the two movements should work together in every white country. White identitarians will be strengthened by populism, and populism will be strengthened by appeals to white identity.

Why should white identitarians align ourselves with populism? Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin argue in National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy that the rise of national populism is motivated by what they call “the Four Ds.” The first is Distrust, namely the breakdown of public trust in government. The second is Destruction, specifically the destruction of identity, the destruction of the ethnic composition of their homelands due to immigration and multiculturalism. The third trend is Deprivation, referring to the collapse of First-World living standards, especially middle-class and working-class living standards, due to globalization. The final trend is Dealignment, meaning the abandonment of the center-Left, center-Right duopolies common in post-Second World War democracies. (For more on Eatwell and Goodwin, see my “National Populism Is Here to Stay ^[18].”)

The Destruction of identity due to immigration and multiculturalism is a central issue for white identitarians. The Deprivation caused by globalization is also one of our central issues. The only way to fix these problems is to adopt white identitarian policies, namely to put the interests and identity of indigenous whites first. Once that principle is enshrined, everything we want follows as a matter of course. It is just a matter of time and will.

As for Distrust and Dealignment, these can go for or against us, but we can certainly relate to them, and we can contribute to and shape them as well.

Eatwell and Goodwin argue that the “Four Ds” are longstanding and deep-seated trends. They will be affecting politics for decades to come. National populism is the wave of the future, and we should ride it to political power.

Why do populists need to appeal to white identity? It all comes down to what counts as the people. Is the people at its core an ethnic group, or is it defined in purely civic terms? Populists of the Right appeal explicitly or implicitly to identitarian issues. Populists of the Left prefer to define the people in civic or class terms and focus on economic issues. Since, as Eatwell and Goodwin argue, both identitarian and economic issues are driving the rise of populism, populists of the Right will have a broader appeal because they appeal to both identity and economic issues.

The great task of white identitarians today is to destroy the legitimacy of civic nationalism and push the populism of the Right toward explicit white identitarianism.

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dimanche, 03 mars 2019

Yockey et la machine américaine à uniformiser

Les Carnets de Nicolas Bonnal

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org

René Girard a parlé de l’Amérique comme puissance mimétique. Sur cette planète de crétins en effet tout le monde veut devenir américain, y compris quand il s’agit de payer des études à quarante mille euros/an, des opérations à 200 000 euros, de devenir obèse et même abruti par la consommation de médias et d’opiacés...

L’affaire est déjà ancienne et René Guénon a bien évoqué après Tocqueville ou Beaumont la médiocrité industrielle de la vie ordinaire/américanisée qu’on nous impose depuis les bourgeoises révolutions...

Un des américains à avoir le mieux parlé de cette uniformisation, après Poe ou Hawthorne, fut Francis Parker Yockey. Je laisse de côté ses vues politiques totalement aberrantes et je prends en compte ses observations sociologiques qui, comme celles de Louis-Ferdinand Céline, sont souvent justes ou/et intéressantes. Voici ce qu’il observe à l’époque de Bogart, quand tout le monde là-bas mène une vie gris Hopper, clope sans arrêt, boit son whisky au petit-déjeuner, imite les criminels en se couvrant d’un chapeau et d’une ridicule gabardine :

« La technique pour éliminer la résistance américaine à la distorsion de la culture a été l'uniformité. Chaque Américain a été fait pour s'habiller de la même manière, vivant et discutant de la même façon, se comportant de la même manière et pensant aussi identiquement. Le principe de l'uniformité considère la personnalité comme un danger et aussi comme un fardeau. Ce grand principe a été appliqué à tous les domaines de la vie. La publicité d'un genre et à une échelle inconnue de l'Europe fait partie de cette méthode d'éradication de l’individualisme. On voit partout le même visage vide, souriant. »

La femme américaine fut plus facilement mécanisée que l’homme :

« Ce principe a avant tout été appliqué à la femme américaine dans les vêtements, les cosmétiques et le comportement, elle a été privée de toute individualité. Une littérature, vaste et inclusive, s'est développée pour mécaniser et uniformiser tous les problèmes et toutes les situations de la vie. Des millions de livres sont vendus pour dire à l’Américain «Comment se faire des amis». D’autres livres lui expliquent comment écrire des lettres, se comporter en public, faire l’amour, jouer à des jeux, uniformiser sa vie intérieure, comment beaucoup d'enfants à avoir, comment s'habiller, même comment penser. »

Le cinéaste Tim Burton a bien moqué ce comportement homogénéisé/industriel dans plusieurs de ses films, par exemple Edouard aux mains d’argent. Kazan avait fait de même dans l’Arrangement. Aujourd’hui ce comportement monolithique/industriel s’applique à l’humanitaire, à la déviance, à la marginalité, au transsexualisme, au tatouage, au piercing, etc.

Toujours dans Empire, Francis Parker Yockey ajoute :

« Un concours a récemment eu lieu en Amérique pour trouver «Mr. L'homme moyen». Des statistiques générales ont été utilisées pour trouver le centre/moyen de la population, les relations matrimoniales, la répartition de la population, le nombre de familles, la répartition rurale et urbaine, et ainsi de suite. Enfin, un homme et sa femme avec deux enfants dans une maison de taille moyenne en ville ont été choisis comme «famille moyenne». Ils ont ensuite fait un voyage à New York, ont été interviewés par la presse, fêtés, sollicités pour approuver les produits commerciaux... »

On pense aux films de Capra qui déclinaient jusqu’à l’écœurement ce modèle de l’homme moyen dont se moquent les Coen dans leur œuvre (revoyez Barton Fink ou l’Homme qui n’était pas là sous cet angle) :

Yockey : « Leurs habitudes à la maison, leurs ajustements de vie ont généralement fait l’objet d’une enquête, et puis de généraliser. Ayant trouvé l'homme moyen du haut vers le bas, les idées et les sentiments ont ensuite été généralisés sous la forme de pensées moyennes impératives et des sentiments. Dans les «universités» américaines, les maris et les femmes assistent à une conférence sur l'adaptation au mariage. L’individualisme ne doit même pas être accepté dans quelque chose d'aussi personnel que le mariage. L’uniforme civil est aussi rigoureux – pour chaque type d’occasion – en tant que vêtement militaire ou liturgique le plus strict. »

Notre rebelle dénonce la liquidation des arts :

« Les arts ont été coordonnés dans le schéma directeur. Il n’y a en Amérique, avec ses 140 000 000 d’habitants, pas une seule compagnie d'opéra continue, ni un seul théâtre continu ; le théâtre n’y produit que des «revues» et des pièces de propagande journalistique. »

Comme Céline ou Duhamel, Yockey souligne le rôle du cinéma :

« Pour le reste, il n’y a que le cinéma et c’est, après tout, le moyen le plus puissant de l’uniformisation de l’Américain. »

La peinture et la musique sont remplacées :

« Dans un pays qui a produit West, Stuart et Copley, il n'y a pas un seul peintre de notoriété publique qui continue dans la tradition occidentale. Les «abstractions», la folie picturale et le souci de la laideur monopolisent l'art pictural.

La musique est rarement entendue en Amérique, ayant été remplacée par le battement de tambour sans culture du noir. Comme le dit un musicologue américain: «Le rythme du jazz, tiré de tribus sauvages, est à la fois raffiné et élémentaire et correspond aux dispositions de notre âme moderne. Cela nous excite sans répit, comme le battement de tambour primitif du danseur de la prière. Mais il ne s'arrête pas là. Il doit en même temps tenir compte de l'excitabilité de la psyché moderne. Nous avons soif de stimuli rapides, excitants et en constante évolution. La musique est un excellent moyen d’excitation, syncopé, qui a fait ses preuves. »

Et la littérature aussi :

« La littérature américaine, qui a produit Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau et Poe, est aujourd'hui entièrement représentée par des distorteurs de la culture qui transforment les motifs freudiens et marxistes en pièces de théâtre et en romans. »

Famille et religion n’existent déjà plus (années de la révolution sociétale Roosevelt) :

« La vie de famille américaine a été complètement désintégrée par le régime qui déforme la culture. Dans le foyer américain habituel, les parents ont en réalité moins d'autorité que les enfants. Les écoles n'appliquent aucune discipline, pas plus que les églises. La fonction de formation des esprits des jeunes a été abdiquée par tous en faveur du cinéma. Le mariage en Amérique a été remplacé par le divorce. Ceci est dit sans intention paradoxale. Les statistiques montrent que dans les grandes villes, un mariage sur deux se termine par un divorce. Le pays dans son ensemble, le chiffre est un sur trois. »

La presse sert à manipuler, à préparer la guerre (pensons à l’Iran, au Venezuela, à la Russie, à la Chine, gros morceaux pourtant, mais rien n’arrêtera nos couillons) :

« L'uniformité est la technique de l'excitation. La presse présente chaque jour de nouvelles sensations. Que ce soit un meurtre, un enlèvement, un scandale gouvernemental ou une alerte à la guerre, peu importe la raison. Mais, à des fins politiques particulières, ces dernières sensations sont les plus efficaces. Pour nous préparer à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le facteur de distorsion a administré tous les jours une nouvelle "crise". Le processus a augmenté jusqu'à ce que la population soit prête à se féliciter du déclenchement de la guerre comme un soulagement de la constante tension nerveuse. Lorsque la guerre est apparue, le distorteur a immédiatement appelé une "guerre mondiale" malgré le fait que seulement trois puissances politiques étaient engagées, et les plus forts pouvoirs n'étaient pas impliqués. »

On tape souvent sur les Américains ou les Anglo-Saxons en oubliant, comme me disait Jean Parvulesco peu avant sa mort, qu’ils avaient d’abord perdu le combat chez eux…

Source

Yockey, Imperium, world-outlook, pp. 502-506

16:03 Publié dans Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : francis parker yockey, ulrick varange, droite américaine, nouvelle droite américaine, théorie politique, états-unis, américanisme, politologie, histoire, sciences politiques, philosophie politique | | del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg | Facebook

dimanche, 24 février 2019

Introduction à "World State of Emergency" de Jason Reza Jorjani

Introduction à "World State of Emergency" de Jason Reza Jorjani

World State of Emergency

Jason Reza Jorjani

Arktos, London 2017

Inexorablement, avec hésitation, terrible comme le destin, la grande tâche et question approche : comment la terre dans son ensemble sera-t-elle gouvernée ? Et à quelle fin l’« homme » dans sa totalité – et plus comme un peuple ni une race – sera-t-il élevé et formé ?

--- Friedrich Nietzsche, La Volonté de puissance.

INTRODUCTION

(extraits)

Apocalypse. Dans son sens grec originel, le mot signifie « révélation ». Au cours des prochaines décennies, en l’espace d’une génération, certaines avancées technologiques convergentes révéleront quelque chose de profond sur l’existence humaine. La biotechnologie, la robotique, la réalité virtuelle, et le besoin de rechercher de l’énergie sur notre Lune après le pic pétrolier, convergeront dans des approches se renforçant mutuellement et qui feront éclater le cadre fondamental de nos sociétés. Ce n’est pas une question de changement progressif. L’apocalypse technologique dans laquelle nous entrons est une singularité qui amènera une transformation qualitative dans notre manière d’être. Les systèmes sociopolitiques occidentaux modernes comme les droits humains universels et la démocratie libérale sont tristement inadéquats pour faire face aux défis posés par ces développements.

L’apocalypse technologique représente un état d’urgence mondial, qui est mon concept pour un état d’urgence d’ampleur mondiale qui demande aussi l’établissement d’un Etat mondial. Une analyse de l’incohérence interne des droits humains universels et de la démocratie libérale, spécialement à la lumière des implications sociétales et géopolitiques des technologies, révèle qu’ils ne sont pas des concepts politiques appropriés pour fonder cet Etat mondial. L’urgence planétaire demande plutôt une unification sociopolitique à l’échelle mondiale sur la base d’une tradition profondément enracinée avec un potentiel évolutionnaire maximal. Cet héritage vivant qui doit former l’éthos ou l’ordre constitutionnel de l’Etat mondial post-national, à un niveau existentiel, est la tradition aryenne ou indo-européenne partagée par la majorité des grandes nations de la Terre – de l’Europe et des Amériques jusqu’à l’Eurasie, le Grand Iran ou monde persan, l’Inde hindoue, et l’Orient bouddhiste.

Le terme Aryen (ou Airyânâ, Irân, ou Erin) signifie littéralement « bien mis ensemble » ou « finement forgé », en d’autres mots « habilement fait », et « noble » seulement d’une manière dérivative pour cette raison. Ce fut peut-être un terme que d’autres appliquèrent d’abord aux Indo-Européens ou que ces derniers adoptèrent après leur rencontre avec des cultures qui manquaient complètement de leur maîtrise des arts manuels et de leur génie industrieux. Le terme Aryen est également associé au bon chemin vers la Sagesse ou Prajnâ dans le Buddha Dharma. Le nom natif du bouddhisme, choisi par Siddhârta Gautama lui-même, est Âryâ Ashtangâ Marga ou « Octuple Sentier aryen », qui est fondamentalement basé sur les Âryâ Chatvâri Satyâni ou « Quatre Vérités aryennes » (souvent traduit par « Quatre Nobles Vérités »). Le principal symbole du Dharma, dans ses variétés bouddhistes aussi bien qu’hindoues, est bien sûr le Swastikâ.

L’Ordre Mondial indo-européen est l’une des trois formes possibles que l’Etat mondial peut prendre. Les deux autres sont une hégémonie planétaire chinoise, probablement sous l’apparence de l’Organisation de Coopération de Shanghai ([SCO], et le premier Califat islamique vraiment mondial, qu’il évolue à partir de l’actuel Etat Islamique et d’Al-Qaïda ou à partir de quelque autre mouvement musulman transnational plus modéré mais bien plus dangereux qui remplacerait ces groupes. Bien que ces trois blocs géopolitiques aient à peine commencé à se reconnaître eux-mêmes, en particulier celui des Indo-Européens, ils sont déjà mutuellement engagés dans une Troisième Guerre mondiale. Cette bataille géopolitique finale et absolument décisive sera aussi connue comme la Plus Longue Guerre. C’est en partie parce que, à la différence des première et seconde guerres mondiales, la troisième est un choc de civilisations plutôt qu’un conflit entre Etats-nations. C’est la guerre qui nous mènera au-delà de l’Etat-nation comme unité de base de l’organisation politique. Le Système International des Nations Unies formé à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, avec la Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Homme comme Magna Carta, est voué à être déconstruit par le genre de guerre civilisationnelle qui a commencé le 11 septembre 2001.

C’est le sujet de mon premier chapitre. Il dit que la Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Homme (UDHR) est intérieurement incohérente et se sape elle-même. En établissant une liberté de religion sans réserve comme l’un des principaux droits humains avec une applicabilité universelle, les rédacteurs dédaignèrent la possibilité qu’une « majorité morale » dans un pays particulier pourrait utiliser les préceptes fondamentaux de sa religion comme une base pour nier les droits humains putatifs des minorités dissidentes. En se basant sur une philosophie politique des Lumières européennes, les fondateurs des Nations Unies ne virent pas qu’une certaine religion, comme l’islam, peut entrer en conflit avec certains des plus importants droits humains que ces gentlemen voudraient croire universels, tout en étant une religion qui s’affirme tout à fait consciemment comme fermée à la réforme ou à l’évolution progressive.

Samuel Huntington dit que dans le « choc des civilisations », la religion est plus déterminante que les idéologies politiques laïques. En tant que principal antagoniste dans ce choc civilisationnel, l’Oumma musulmane mondiale est en possession d’une religion dont le livre saint est aussi une constitution politique cohérente. Bien qu’ayant été « révélés » dans l’Arabie du VIIe siècle, beaucoup d’articles de cette constitution, incluant ceux qui sont les plus répugnants pour les défenseurs des droits humains universels, ne peuvent pas être amendés. Je le dis très clairement. Un Ordre Mondial islamique ou Califat Mondial est un ordre où les femmes, à l’échelle mondiale, seront légalement subordonnées aux hommes et auront très peu de droits, un ordre où l’esclavage sera légalisé ; la dissidence religieuse et intellectuelle sera criminalisée, les minorités seront obligées de payer un tribut, et les voleurs ordinaires subiront des punitions draconiennes comme l’amputation.

Il est important de se rappeler que l’islam n’a même pas besoin de conquérir le monde par la force des armes. Sa conquête de la Terre par la seule démographie est presque assurée. Dans la dernière partie de ce siècle, les musulmans auront une majorité décisive sur cette planète. Cela nous amène à la question de la globalisation de la démocratie, le sujet du chapitre 2. En se basant sur les tendances démographiques actuelles, en 2075 une démocratie globale signifiera un Etat mondial islamique. Point-barre. Je dis que cela montre à quel point la démocratie libérale est incohérente. Le libéralisme est une idéologie politique européenne distincte qui peut facilement être séparée de la démocratie.

En fait, la démocratie eut des racines extrêmement conservatrices et autoritaires, dans la Grèce classique et lorsqu’elle fut remise à l’honneur par Jean-Jacques Rousseau au début de l’ère moderne comme antidote romantique aux théories rationalistes des Droits Naturels (c’est-à-dire les Droits Humains). Les Grecs classiques aussi bien que Rousseau reconnurent que les besoins religieux doivent être la base de la volonté générale qui constitue d’une manière cohésive le pouvoir décisionnaire souverain d’un régime politique. Rousseau fit même l’éloge de l’islam comme étant le meilleur type de « religion civique » précisément parce que, à la différence du christianisme, dans son fondement même il refuse de reconnaître toute séparation entre l’autorité religieuse et l’autorité politique laïque. Cependant, le libéralisme, parfaitement illustré dans sa forme la plus pure par John Stuart Mill, défend une neutralité de l’Etat fausse et intenable concernant le choix personnel des citoyens à vivre leur vie de la manière qu’ils veulent. Je montre que Mill, d’une manière caractéristique des libéraux, glisse vers des préjugés culturels injustifiés concernant les sortes de conduites individuelles qui sont acceptables dans une société libérale ou libre. Son « principe de tort » est mal défini et motivé par une tentative malencontreuse de forger un ordre politique qui rejette l’ethos civilisationnel et l’identité collective. L’individualisme radical libéral est certainement radicalement anti-démocratique.

Carl Schmitt analysa le conflit entre le libéralisme et la démocratie comme faisant partie de sa formulation de ce qu’il appelait « le concept du politique ». D’après Schmitt, les libéraux et les démocrates confondent le politique avec l’économique et les autres structures sociales, alors que le politique en tant que tel n’est pas ouvert à des débats et à des négociations sans fin et n’est pas non plus une question de préférence personnelle. Le concept même du politique concerne celui qui a le pouvoir de prendre une décision souveraine sur la vie et la mort de ceux qui sont à l’intérieur de l’Etat. Pendant un état d’urgence ou d’exception, la constitution écrite d’un Etat est suspendue et le Parlement ne peut pas tenir de débat sur ce qu’il convient de faire. Cet état d’urgence révèle non seulement qui est le souverain, mais aussi sur quelles bases il prend des décisions affectant la vie et les biens de ses sujets. Dans la mesure où cette prise de décision est efficace, elle révèle la vraie constitution existentielle ou ethos de son peuple. Celui-ci sous-tend la constitution écrite et est la base de l’acceptation au moins tacite par son peuple de ses ordres même s’ils violent la constitution légale plus superficielle et dérivative. Une telle crise peut finir par la restauration de l’ordre légal établi, mais l’état d’urgence peut aussi être un état d’urgence où un nouvel ordre constitutionnel se révèle comme un reflet plus fidèle de l’esprit d’un peuple qui parvient à se renouveler.

Au cœur de la prise de décision souveraine durant l’état d’urgence se trouve la détermination de l’Ami et de l’Ennemi. Carl Schmitt dit que le souverain est la personne ou le conseil qui peut effectivement décider, dans une situation d’urgence, qui sont les « siens », qui sont les amis ou les alliés, et qui est l’ennemi, même si cet ennemi est à l’intérieur des frontières. Les lignes sur une carte ne définissent pas une nation. C’est l’ethos ou caractère existentiel d’une communauté historique mondiale qui le fait. Une nation peut s’étendre par-dessus de nombreuses frontières arbitraires tracées du fait d’une incapacité à saisir les distinctions politiques conceptuellement. Une telle nation peut avoir un ou plusieurs ennemis parmi elle – des ennemis qui menacent son ordre constitutionnel à un niveau existentiel. En accord avec cette analyse, Schmitt pensait qu’il ne pourrait jamais y avoir un Etat mondial unique et que toute tentative d’en appeler à une « humanité commune » comme concept politique était une tromperie, parce que l’Humanité-dans-son-ensemble n’a pas d’ennemi concret. Ce qui est pire est que le discours universaliste sur les droits politiques de l’Humanité ou sur une démocratie universelle diabolise en réalité tous ces humains qui, sur la base de leurs propres cultures, rejettent ce discours. Schmitt considérait que cet impérialisme planétaire des Humanistes était l’idéologie la plus tyranniquement inhumaine, et que celle-ci avait été illustrée, à son époque, par l’OTAN aussi bien que par l’Union soviétique.

Cependant, tout à la fin de sa vie, Schmitt commença à reconsidérer cette position. Il le fit en pensant que les développements technologiques spectaculaires qu’il constatait pourraient être considérés comme quelque chose ressemblant à une menace pour toute l’humanité. Pour lui, les principaux de ces développements était la prolifération des armes nucléaires miniaturisées à une époque de guerre de partisans déterritorialisée (c’est-à-dire le terrorisme transnational), et une militarisation de l’espace qui pour la première fois englobe et définit la Terre entière comme un théâtre de combat. Bien qu’il admettait que cela pourrait requérir de repenser le concept du politique, et sa distinction cruciale Ami-Ennemi, Schmitt n’eut jamais vraiment le temps ou l’énergie pour développer ces idées dans sa Théorie du Partisan. D’une certaine manière, ses derniers aperçus étaient aussi prématurés. C’est seulement maintenant, alors que nous faisons face à des développements technologiques qui pourraient nous permettre de modifier notre forme humaine d’incarnation, de nous perdre dans des simulacres spectaculaires, ou de faire face à une guerre interplanétaire contre quelque intelligence cybernétique post-humaine, que nous avons un contexte concret pour penser ce qui restait encore impensable pour Carl Schmitt, c’est-à-dire un état d’urgence mondial. Dans les chapitres 3 à 5 de ce livre, je montre qu’un certain nombre d’innovations technologiques requiert pour chacune une dimension mondiale de la décision souveraine, par souci de la simple survie de quelque chose de reconnaissable comme Humanité et pour éviter toutes sortes de futurs horriblement inhumains.

Le chapitre 3 traite des biotechnologies néo-eugénistes qui requièrent une réglementation mondiale. La biotechnologie nous offre toute une variété de potentiels pour promouvoir l’épanouissement humain. En utilisant la sélection des embryons, qui est un processus augmenté de fertilisation in-vitro lorsqu’on est capable de profiler les embryons qui sont ensuite réinsérés dans la matrice pour se développer, il est possible d’éliminer les maladies héréditaires. On sait aussi qu’il y a environ 15 points de différence de QI entre l’enfant le plus brillant que l’on pourrait avoir et celui qui aura le plus de difficulté à étudier diverses disciplines. Le QI peut être accru d’environ 15 points par génération, rien qu’en utilisant la sélection des embryons (sans modifier la structure génétique de l’embryon). Bien sûr, « intelligence » est un terme imprécisément défini. Mais il y a certains facteurs d’intelligence qui ont un lien avec la capacité d’apprendre la physique et de manipuler des mathématiques complexes, qui ont de très fortes corrélations génétiques. Il est très important que nous établissions un certain consensus concernant la manière dont cette technologie sera utilisée. Si nous devions avoir un accroissement de 15 points de QI par génération dans un seul pays ou une seule culture, cela introduirait un dangereux déséquilibre de puissance géopolitique.

En raison de l’histoire de l’eugénisme dans le monde occidental, les vues sur l’utilisation de cette technologie à des fins essentiellement néo-eugénistes sont largement négatives en Occident. Par comparaison, l’establishment scientifique, académique et politique chinois est presque à 100% favorable à l’utilisation des biotechnologies émergentes pour, par exemple, accroître le QI de sa population. Les facteurs spécifiques d’intelligence qui peuvent être manipulés par ce processus sont précisément ceux qui conduisent à des percées technologiques, qui historiquement, malheureusement, ont eu leurs premières manifestations dans la technologie militaire. Même dans un pays unique, si seuls les riches ont accès à ce genre de technologie, nous pourrions voir des disparités de classes se transformer en véritables distinctions de castes entre une aristocratie génétique et ceux qui ne sont pas aussi chanceux génétiquement.

Les implications sociétales sont encore plus importantes si nous pensons aux manipulations génétiques qui modifient réellement la structure de l’embryon. Nous pouvons augmenter la durée de vie. On a découvert que les souris qui avaient été génétiquement modifiées pour une durée de vie plus longue, ont aussi une morbidité plus courte – ce qui veut dire qu’à la fin de leur vie elles déclinent très rapidement au lieu de passer par un processus de vieillissement prolongé. Nous serions aussi capables de renforcer le physique. Les mêmes techniques qui furent initialement développées pour traiter la maladie de Lou Gehrig ont été appliquées dans le but de développer la masse musculaire et de diminuer les risques d’obésité. Ensuite, en termes de fonctionnement cognitif, il y a aussi des techniques de manipulation génétique qui furent développées initialement pour traiter l’Alzheimer et qui ont été utilisées pour augmenter la capacité de mémoire par un facteur de deux ou trois. Ces renforcements particuliers semblent très positifs, mais la manipulation génétique nous donne aussi la capacité de raccorder des gènes humains et animaux. Nous devrions vraiment nous demander si nous voulons créer une espèce hybride. Ce n’est pas une décision qui devrait être laissée à un seul pays ou à une seule culture, et encore moins à une grande entreprise opérant dans le libre marché global.

L’une des biotechnologies les plus controversées est le clonage humain. Même si nous devions avoir un consensus assez large pour dire que le clonage humain en vue de la reproduction de personnes identiques (en d’autres termes, la création d’un grand nombre de « jumeaux ») n’est pas une grande idée, le clonage humain fait implicitement partie de la sélection des embryons. Il arrive souvent que quand un embryon optimal est inséré dans la matrice pour se développer, l’implantation initiale échoue et une autre tentative doit être faite. Par conséquent, si l’on est déjà arrivé à un embryon optimal, le clonage de cet embryon un certain nombre de fois permet des tentatives répétées d’implantation. Puisque le clonage va faire partie de l’augmentation de la sélection des embryons (une forme plus acceptable de biotechnologie), il n’y a pas besoin de dire comment le clonage pourrait être utilisé si nous n’avons pas un système de réglementation efficace à l’échelle mondiale.

La pire chose qui pourrait arriver avec la biotechnologie, ce qui nous amène aussi dans le domaine de la robotique ou de la cybernétique, est qu’un certain pays ou une certaine civilisation pourrait décider unilatéralement de créer génétiquement une race d’esclaves. Les créateurs de ces robots biomécaniques pourraient trouver un moyen de nous convaincre que leurs créatures ne sont pas vraiment des êtres humains qui seraient porteurs de droits politiques. Le raccordement des gènes qui incorpore des éléments du génome d’autres animaux pourrait permettre à ces humanoïdes de travailler dans des conditions environnementales hostiles qui seraient difficiles à supporter pour des humains.

[…]

Malheureusement, l’émergence de cet Etat mondial profondément unifié par un ethos unique sera un processus violent. Ce n’est pas dire qu’il sera établi par la force arbitraire. C’est plutôt, tout à fait en conformité avec l’analyse de Carl Schmitt sur la vraie constitution d’un Etat, un peuple historique-mondial distinct qui subira une transformation alchimique dans le chaudron de l’apocalypse technologique et qui revendiquera son destin d’hégémonie planétaire. Face aux ennemis externes et internes incapables de guider la Terre d’une manière responsable à travers l’apocalypse technologique, la communauté indo-européenne se définira comme une nation souveraine de dimension planétaire ou même interplanétaire. Avec leur origine commune dans une ethnicité et une langue uniques, les Indo-Européens surgirent d’un heartland proto-iranien ou aryen en Ukraine (Scythie) et dans le Caucase pour former les civilisations européenne, iranienne, hindoue et bouddhiste. Ils continuèrent à s’influencer les uns les autres par l’intermédiaire de la nation quintessentiellement indo-européenne, l’Irân-Shahr ou Imperium Aryen (connu en Occident sous le nom d’« Empire perse »). Collectivement, leurs contributions aux religions mondiales, aux arts, à la philosophie, à la science et à la technologie établissent les Indo-Européens comme les candidats les plus viables pour former un Etat mondial à partir de l’urgence planétaire.

Les chapitres 6 et 7 se concentrent sur l’histoire et la culture des Indo-Européens, et disent que notre convergence en une seule civilisation de dimension planétaire peut devenir la base pour l’Etat mondial dont nous avons tellement besoin pour survivre à l’apocalypse technologique. L’alternative est l’intervention de l’Islam ou de la Chine pour sauver l’Humanité du génie prométhéen des Indo-Européens. Au lieu de cela, nous devrions maîtriser cet esprit faustien d’une manière qui évitera des monstruosités inhumaines et nous conduira dans un avenir d’épanouissement surhumain. Puisque, comme le comprend Samuel Huntington, l’Islam joue le rôle le plus catalytique dans le choc des civilisations, parmi toute la communauté indo-européenne l’Iran est la nation dont le rôle dans la Troisième Guerre mondiale sera le plus décisif pour notre avenir commun. En plus d’être le carrefour interculturel du monde indo-européen depuis plus de 3.000 ans, l’Irân-Shahr ou « Imperium Aryen » offre à l’Occident des principes et des valeurs qui ont déjà profondément influencé les siens et qui pourra catalyser une revitalisation culturelle après l’échec des concepts modernes comme la démocratie libérale et les droits humains universels.

Dans le septième et dernier chapitre, j’expose comment depuis 2012 un renouveau néo-zoroastrien connu sous le nom de Renaissance Iranienne s’est répandu dans le Grand Iran comme un feu de broussaille. Il est profondément significatif qu’en cela les Perses et les Kurdes sont les premiers des peuples aryens à avoir traversé toute la tradition religieuse abrahamique et à être ressortis de l’autre coté. L’Europe est seulement maintenant à la veille d’être conquise par l’Islam, alors que les Iraniens sont finalement en train de surmonter 1.400 ans de colonisation arabo-islamique oppressive qui s’est appropriée d’une manière parasite le génie persan dans les arts et les sciences. Partageant une longue frontière avec la Chine en Asie Centrale iranienne ou Khorasan, et étant située au cœur d’un Califat Islamique émergeant contrôlé par ISIL dans ses territoires de l’ouest et Al-Qaïda vers l’est, une renaissance du Grand Iran ou Irân-Shahr sera le fer de lance de la guerre pour un Ordre Mondial indo-européen.

Si nous sommes un jour capables de sortir et d’explorer le cosmos, si nous parvenons à traverser cette apocalypse technologique, nous découvrirons que l’état d’urgence mondial est survenu dans l’histoire de toutes les espèces intelligentes. Si les développements technologiques peuvent continuer au-delà de ce point, cela représente vraiment une sorte de singularité. La période avant lui et la période après lui seront incommensurables l’une avec l’autre. En ce sens, c’est une catastrophe classique. Un moment exceptionnel. Le temps approche où des technologies seront développées qui remettront en question la forme même de la vie d’une certaine espèce, et les membres de cette espèce doivent tenter collectivement de parvenir à une compréhension d’eux-mêmes qui leur permettra d’utiliser ces technologies pour obtenir un épanouissement de leur existence, plutôt qu’une dégradation. Que l’on soit prêt ou pas, le temps est venu de poser la question : « Qui parle pour la Terre ? ».

Copyright Arktos 2017.

jeudi, 11 octobre 2018

What is the Alternative Right?

By Greg Johnson

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

Author’s Note:

This is the opening essay of a forthcoming anthology called The Alternative Right.

The Alternative Right does not have an essence, but it does have a story, a story that begins and ends with Richard Spencer. The story has four chapters.

First the term “Alternative Right” was coined in 2008. Then the Alternative Right webzine was launched on March 1, 2010 and ran until December 25, 2013. When it was first coined, the Alternative Right simply referred to an alternative to the American conservative mainstream. When it became the name of a publication, it functioned as a broad umbrella term encompassing such schools of thought as paleoconservatism, libertarianism, race-realism, the European New Right, Southern Nationalism, and White Nationalism. By the time the Alternative Right webzine was shut down, however, the term Alt Right had taken on a life of its own. It was not just the name of a webzine, but a generic term for Right-wing alternatives to the conservative mainstream.

The second chapter is the emergence in 2015 of a vital, youth-oriented, largely online Right-wing movement. This movement encompassed a wide range of opinions from White Nationalism and outright neo-Nazism to populism and American civic nationalism. Thus this movement quite naturally gravitated to the broad generic term Alt Right. The new Alt Right threw itself behind Donald Trump’s run for the presidency soon after he entered the race in 2015 and became increasingly well-known as Trump’s most ferocious defenders in online battles, to the point that Hillary Clinton actually gave a speech attacking the Alt Right on August 25, 2016.

The third chapter is the Alt Right “brand war” of the fall of 2016. The Alt Right “brand” had become so popular that it was being widely adopted by Trumpian civic nationalists, who rejected the racism of White Nationalists. White Nationalists began to worry that their brand was being coopted and started to push back against the civic nationalists. The brand war ended on November 21, 2016 at a National Policy Institute conference with the incident known as Hailgate ^[2], in which Richard Spencer uttered the words “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” and raised his whiskey glass in a toast, to which some people in the audience responded with Hitler salutes. When video of this went public, civic nationalists quickly abandoned the Alt Right brand, and the “Alt Lite” was born.

The fourth chapter is the story of the centralization and decline of the Alt Right, largely under the control of Richard Spencer. This period was characterized by polarization and purges, as well as the attempt to transform the Alt Right from an online to a real-world movement, which culminated at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11–12, 2017. Both trends led the Alt Right to shrink considerably. Some abandoned the brand. Others abandoned the entire movement. The remnant has retreated back to its strongholds on the internet. As of this writing, there is no fifth chapter, and the Alt Right’s future, if any, remains to be seen. Like cancer, there may be no stage five.

1. The Invention of a Brand

The Alternative Right brand first emerged in the fuzzy space where the paleoconservative movement overlaps with White Nationalism. The term “paleoconservatism” was coined by Paul Gottfried, an American Jewish political theorist and commentator. Paleoconservatism defined itself as a genuinely conservative opposition to the heresy of neoconservatism.

The paleoconservative movement was a safe space for the discussion and advocacy of everything that neoconservatism sought to abolish from the conservative movement: Christianity, tradition, America’s white identity, an America-first foreign policy, immigration restriction, opposition to globalization and free trade, the defense of traditional/biological sexual roles and institutions, and even—although mostly behind closed doors—biological race differences and the Jewish question.

Aside from Gottfried, the leading paleocons included Samuel Francis, who openly associated with White Nationalists; Joseph Sobran, who was purged from National Review for anti-Semitism and who also openly associated with White Nationalists; and Patrick Buchanan, who stayed closer to the political mainstream but was eventually purged from MSNBC for “racism” because his book Suicide of a Superpower ^[3] defended the idea of the United States as a normatively white society.

William H. Regnery II (b. 1941) is a crucial figure in the rise of the Alt Right because of his work in creating institutional spaces in which paleoconservatives and White Nationalists could exchange ideas. Lazy journalists repeatedly refer to Regnery as a “publishing heir.” In fact, his money came from his grandfather William H. Regnery’s textile business. The conservative Regnery Publishing house was founded by Henry Regnery, the son of William H. Regnery and the uncle of William H. Regnery II. (In 1993, the Regnery family sold Regnery Publishing to Phillips Publishing International.)

In 1999–2001, William H. Regnery II played a key role in founding the Charles Martel Society, which publishes the quarterly journal The Occidental Quarterly, currently edited by Kevin MacDonald. In 2004–2005, Regnery spearheaded the foundation of the National Policy Institute, which was originally conceived as a vehicle for Sam Francis, who died in February of 2005. NPI was run by Louis R. Andrews until 2011, when Richard Spencer took over. Both the Charles Martel Society and the National Policy Institute are White Nationalist in orientation. The Occidental Quarterly is also openly anti-Semitic.

But at the same time Regnery was involved with CMS and NPI, he was also working with Jewish paleocon Paul Gottfried to create two academic Rightist groups that were friendly to Jews. First, there was the Academy of Philosophy and Letters,[1] ^[4] of which Richard Spencer was reportedly a member.[2] ^[5] But Regnery and Gottfried broke with the Academy of Philosophy and Letters over the issue of race, creating the H. L. Mencken Club, which Gottfried runs to this day.[3] ^[6] The Mencken Club, like the Charles Martel Society and NPI, is a meeting ground for paleoconservatives and White Nationalists, although it is also friendly to Jews.

Richard Spencer began as a paleoconservative, entered Regnery’s sphere of influence, and emerged a White Nationalist. In 2007, Spencer dropped out of Duke University, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in modern European intellectual history. From March to December of 2007, Spencer was an assistant editor at The American Conservative, a paleoconservative magazine founded in 2002 by Scott McConnell, Patrick Buchanan, and Taki Theodoracopulos in opposition to the neocon-instigated Iraq War. By the time Spencer arrived, however, Buchanan and Taki had departed. After being fired from The American Conservative, Spencer went to work for Taki, editing his online magazine Taki’s Top Drawer, later Taki’s Magazine, from January of 2008 to December of 2009. Taki thought his magazine was stagnant under Spencer’s editorship, so they parted ways. With money raised through Regnery’s network, Richard Spencer launched a new webzine, Alternative Right (alternativeright.com) on March 1, 2010.

The phrase “alternative right” first appeared at Taki’s Magazine under Spencer’s editorship. On December 1, 2008, Spencer published Paul Gottfried’s “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right ^[7],” originally given as an address at that year’s H. L. Mencken Club conference in November. Spencer claims credit for the title and thus the phrase “alternative right,” while Gottfried claims that they co-created it.[4] ^[8] The Alternative Right in decline is, of course, the paleoconservative movement. The Alternative Right on the rise is the more youthful post-paleo movement crystallizing at the Mencken Club and allied forums. The Alternative Right webzine was to be their flagship.

The Alternative Right webzine had an attractive design and got off to a strong start. I particularly respected Spencer’s decision to publish Steve McNallen and Jack Donovan, important writers who were anathema to Christians and paleocons. But after about six months, the site seemed to lose energy. Days would go by without new material, which is the key to building regular traffic, and matters were not helped by the site layout. Instead of simply putting new material at the top of a blog roll, the site had a host of departments, so one had to click six or eight links to discover that there was no new material. After doing this for a couple of weeks, readers would stop coming, waiting to hear about new material by email or on social media. By the beginning of 2012, Spencer had lost interest in editing the webzine. On May 3, 2012, he stepped down and handed the editorship to Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell.

However, in 2013, Spencer was embarrassed by negative press coverage of one of Liddell’s articles and realized that he would always be linked to Alternative Right, even though he no longer had control of its contents. On Christmas day of 2013, Spencer shut Alternative Right down without consulting or warning Nowicki and Liddell. The domain address was repointed to Spencer’s new webzine, Radix Journal, which would never become a household name. Then, after another strong start, Radix too slumped into a low-energy site.

Nearly four years of articles and comments at Alternative Right—the collective contributions of hundreds of people—simply vanished from the web. Nowicki and Liddell salvaged what they could and carried on with the Alternative Right brand at blogspot.com, although their site had few readers and little influence. In 2018, embarrassed by the decline of the Alt Right brand, they changed the name to Affirmative Right.

Spencer’s greatest mistake in shutting down Alternative Right was not his high-handed manner, which caused a good deal of bitterness, but the fact that he pulled the plug after its name had become a generic term. Just as the brand “Xerox” became a term for photocopying in general, the brand “Hoover” became a verb for vacuuming in general, Sony’s “Walkman” became a generic term for portable cassette players, and “iPod” became a generic term for portable mp3 players, the Alt Right had become a generic term for a whole range of radical alternatives to mainstream conservatism. Imagine Xerox rebranding with a weird sounding Latinate name like Effingo once it had become synonymous with its entire industry.

The beauty of the Alt Right brand is that it signaled dissidence from the mainstream Right, without committing oneself to such stigmatized ideas as White Nationalism and National Socialism. As I put it in an article hailing Alternative Right to my readers at TOQ Online:

I hope that Alternative Right will attract the brightest young conservatives and libertarians and expose them to far broader intellectual horizons, including race realism, White Nationalism, the European New Right, the Conservative Revolution, Traditionalism, neo-paganism, agrarianism, Third Positionism, anti-feminism, and right-wing anti-capitalists, ecologists, bioregionalists, and small-is-beautiful types. . . . The presence of articles by Robert Weissberg and Paul Gottfried indicates that Alternative Right is not a clone of TOQ or The Occidental Observer. (Not that anybody expected that, although some might applaud it.) But that is fine with me. It is more important to have a forum where our ideas interface with the mainstream that to have another Occidental something-or-other.com.[5] ^[9]

Obviously, a term as useful as Alternative Right was going to stick around, even after being abandoned by its creator. Writers at Counter-Currents, the Alternative Right blogspot site, and even Radix kept the concept of the Alt Right in circulation in 2014 and the early months of 2015, after which it caught on as the preferred name of a new movement.

2. The Emergence of a Movement

The second phase of the Alt Right was quite unlike the first. The new Alt Right had different ideological origins, different platforms, and a radically different ethos. But it rapidly converged on White Nationalism and carried off some of its best ideas, as well as the term Alt Right. Then it became an international media phenomenon.

In terms of ideology, the first Alt Right was heavily influenced by White Nationalism and paleoconservatism. But the new Alt Right emerged largely from the breakdown of the Ron Paul movement, specifically the takeover of the libertarian movement by cultural Leftists, which drove culturally more conservative libertarians to the Right. (In 2009, I predicted that people in the Ron Paul movement would start moving toward white identity politics, so I sponsored an essay contest on Libertarianism and Racial Nationalism at The Occidental Quarterly, which I edited at the time, to develop arguments to ease the conversion of libertarians.[6] ^[10]) Other factors driving the emerging racial consciousness of this group were the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown controversies, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the beginning of the migrant crisis in Europe.

The first Alt Right emerged from a milieu of dissident book publishers and print journals, quasi-academic conferences where speakers wore coats and ties, and middle to highbrow webzines. The new Alt Right emerged on social media, discussion forums, image boards, and podcasts, with the webzines coming later. The most influential incubators of the new Alt Right were 4chan and 8chan, Reddit, and The Right Stuff, especially its flagship podcast, The Daily Shoah, and affiliated discussion forums.

The new Alt Right also had a very different ethos and style. While the first Alt Right published reasonable and dignified articles on webzines, the new Alt Right’s ethos was emerging from flame wars in the comment threads below. Whereas the first Alt Right cultivated an earnest tone of middle-class respectability, avoiding racial slurs and discussing race and the Jewish question in terms of biology and evolutionary psychology, the new movement affected an ironic tone and embraced obscenity, stereotypes, slurs, and online trolling and harassment.

There were also generational differences between the two Alt Rights. The first Alt Right was the product of a Gen-Xer under the patronage of people born in the Baby Boom and before, who actually had memories of America before the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the massive demographic shifts after 1965, when America opened its borders to the non-white world. The new Alt Right consisted primarily of Millennials and Gen-Zs, some of them as young as their early teens, who were products of a multicultural America with rampant social and familial decay, sexual degeneracy, and drug and alcohol abuse. The first group tended to be conservative, because they had memories of a better country. The latter group had no such memories and tended toward radical rejection of the entire social order.

In 2013, I argued that White Nationalists needed to reach out to significant numbers of white Millennials who had graduated from college during the Obama years, often with crushing debts, and who found themselves unemployed or underemployed, and frequently ended up living at home with their parents.[7] ^[11] I believed that White Nationalists had better explanations for and solutions to their plight than the Occupy Movement, and this “boomerang generation” could be an ideal “proletariat,” because they were highly educated; they were from middle and upper middle class backgrounds; they had a great deal of leisure time, much of which they spent online; and they were angry and disillusioned with the system, and rightly so.

As is so often the case, our movement’s outreach gestures went nowhere, but the logic of events drove these people in our direction anyway. Boomerang kids became a core group of the new Alt Right known as the “NEETs”—an acronym for Not in Education, Employment, or Training. When these NEETs and their comrades focused their wit, intelligence, anger, tech savvy, and leisure time on politics, a terrible beauty was born.

The Gamergate controversy of 2014 was an important trial run and tributary to what became the new Alt Right in 2015. Gamergate was a leaderless, viral, online populist insurrection of video gaming enthusiasts against arrogant Leftist SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) who were working to impose political correctness on gaming. Gamergate activists turned the tables on bullying SJWs, brutally trolling and mocking them and relentlessly exposing their corruption and hypocrisy. Gamergate got some SJWs fired, provoked others to quit their jobs, and went after the advertisers of SJW-dominated webzines, closing some of them down.[8]^[12]

Gamergate is important because it showed how an online populist movement could actually roll back Leftist hegemony in a specific part of the culture. Although not everyone involved in Gamergate went on to identify with the Alt Right, many of them did. A leading Gamergate partisan, for instance, was Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart, who later gave favorable press to the Alt Right and is now a prominent Alt Lite figure. Moreover, Alt Rightists who had nothing to do with Gamergate eagerly copied and refined its techniques of online activism. Indeed, I would argue that Gamergate was the moral and organizational model for the Disney Star Wars boycott of 2018, which tanked the movie Solo ^[13] and cost Disney hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

One of the best ways to understand the evolution of the new Alt Right is to read The Right Stuff and listen to The Daily Shoah from its founding in 2014 through the summer of 2015, when Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the President of the United States. The members of The Daily Shoah Death Panel began as ex-libertarians and “edgy-Republicans” and educated themselves about race realism and the Jewish question week after week, bringing their ever-growing audience along with them. In February of 2015, Mike Enoch attended the American Renaissance conference and afterwards started calling himself a White Nationalist.

By the spring of 2015, this new movement was increasingly comfortable with the term Alt Right.

When Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the US Presidency on June 16, 2015, most White Nationalist currents found common cause in promoting his candidacy. Trump advocacy encouraged cooperation and collegiality within the movement and provided a steady stream of new targets for creative memes and trolling, and as Trump’s candidacy ascended, the new Alt Right ascended with him.

In July of 2015, in the runup to the Republican Primary debates, the new Alt Right scored a major victory by injecting a meme that changed the mainstream political conversation: “cuckservative.” The inception of this meme was at Counter-Currents when on May 2, 2014, Gregory Hood referred to “cuckhold conservatives like Matt Lewis.”[9] ^[14] At this point, many in the media and political establishment realized that a genuine alternative to the mainstream Right had arrived.

The new Alt Right became skilled in using social media to solicit attention and promote backlashes from mainstream media and politicians. This attention caused the movement to grow in size and influence, reaching its peak when Hillary Clinton gave her speech denouncing the Alt Right on August 25, 2016.

An older generation of white advocates saw the notoriety of the Alt Right as an opportunity to reach new audiences. Jared Taylor, who was never thrilled with the Alt Right label, wrote about “Race Realism and the Alt Right.”[10] ^[15] Kevin MacDonald wrote about “The Alt Right and the Jews.”[11] ^[16] Peter Brimelow spoke at National Policy Institute conferences. David Duke began circulating memes.

Although I prefer to describe myself with much more specific terms like White Nationalism and the New Right, I always appreciated the utility of a vague term like Alt Right, so I allowed its use at Counter-Currents and occasionally used it myself. But whenever I use “we” and “our” here, I am referring to White Nationalism and the New Right, not the fuzzy-minded civic nationalists and Trumpian populists who also came to use the term Alt Right.

Some have dismissed the Alt Right as a Potemkin movement because it was small, existed largely online, and grew by provoking reactions from the mainstream. But this ignores the fact that America is ruled by a tiny elite employing soft power propagated by the media. So if the Alt Right is somehow illegitimate, so is the entire political establishment. The new Alt Right was a perfect mirror image of the establishment media: it was a metapolitical movement that promoted political change by transforming values and perceptions, but it was promoting change in the opposite direction by negating the establishment’s values and worldview.

The Alt Right’s particular tactics were dictated by the asymmetries between itself and the mainstream media. They had billions of dollars and armies of professional propagandists. We had no capital and a handful of dedicated amateurs. But new software gave us the ability to create quality propaganda at home, and the Internet gave us a way to distribute it, both at very little cost. The establishment’s vast advantages in capital and personnel were also significantly negated by the facts that the multicultural consensus it promotes is based on falsehoods and can only cause misery, and the people who control it are weakened by arrogance, smugness, and degeneracy. They are easily mocked and triggered into self-defeating behavior. Our great advantage was telling the truth about liberalism and multiculturalism and proposing workable alternatives. As long as we could stay online, and as long as we attacked from our strengths to their weaknesses, we went from success to success.

But many in the movement were not psychologically ready for success.

Notes

[1] ^[17] https://philosophyandletters.org/ ^[18]

[2] ^[19] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/hes-spent... ^[20]

[3] ^[21] http://hlmenckenclub.org/ ^[22]

[4] ^[23] Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), p. 63.

[5] ^[24] Greg Johnson, “Richard Spencer Launches Alternative Right,” TOQ Online, March 2, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20161204105956/http://www.toq... ^[25]

[6] ^[26] The essays appeared in The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 2011).

[7] ^[27] Greg Johnson, “The Boomerang Generation: Connecting with Our Proletariant,” Counter-Currents, August 23, 2013, https://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/the-counter-curr... ^[28]

[8] ^[29] For a fuller account of Gamergate, see Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (Castalia House, 2015).

[9] ^[30] Gregory Hood, “For Others and their Prosperity,” Counter-Currents, May 2, 2014, https://www.counter-currents.com/2014/05/for-others-and-t... ^[31]

[10] ^[32] Jared Taylor, “Race Realism and the Alt Right,” Counter-Currents, October 25, 2016, https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/10/race-realism-and... ^[33]

[11] ^[34] Kevin MacDonald, “The Alt Right and the Jews,” Counter-Currents, September 13, 2016, https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/09/the-alt-right-an... ^[35]

[12] ^[36] George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 68.

mardi, 18 septembre 2018

Technological Utopianism & Ethnic Nationalism

By Greg Johnson

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

^[1]Author’s Note:

This is the text of my talk at the fourth meeting of the Scandza Forum in Copenhagen, Denmark, on September 15, 2018. In my previous Scandza Forum talk ^[2], I argued that we need to craft ethnonationalist messages for all white groups, even Trekkies. This is my Epistle to the Trekkies. I want to thank everybody who was there, and everybody who made the Forum possible.

The idea of creating a utopian society through scientific and technological progress goes back to such founders of modern philosophy as Bacon and Descartes, although the idea was already hinted at by Machiavelli. But today, most people’s visions of technological utopia are derived from science fiction. With the notable exception of Frank Herbert’s Dune series ^[3], science fiction tends to identify progress with political liberalism and globalism. Just think of Star Trek, in which the liberal, multi-racial Federation is constantly battling against perennial evils like nationalism and eugenics. Thus it is worth asking: Is ethnic nationalism—which is illiberal and anti-globalist—compatible with technological utopianism or not?

My view is that technological utopianism is not only compatible with ethnic nationalism but also that liberalism and globalization undermine technological progress, and that the ethnostate is actually the ideal incubator for mankind’s technological apotheosis.

Before arguing these points, however, I need to say a bit about what technological utopianism entails and why people think it is a natural fit with globalization. The word utopia literally means nowhere and designates a society that cannot be realized. But the progress of science and technology are all about the conquest of nature, i.e., the expansion of man’s power and reach, so that utopia becomes attainable. Specific ambitions of scientific utopianism include the abolition of material scarcity, the exploration and settlement of the galaxy, the prolongation of human life, and the upward evolution of the human species.

It is natural to think that scientific and technological progress go hand in hand with globalization. Reality is one, therefore the science that understands reality and the technology that manipulates it must be one as well. Science and technology speak a universal language. They are cumulative collaborative enterprises that can mobilize the contributions of the best people from across the globe. So it seems reasonable that the road to technological utopia can only be impeded by national borders. I shall offer three arguments why this is not so.

1. Globalization vs. Innovation

I define globalization as breaking down barriers to sameness: the same market, the same culture, the same form of government, the same way of life—what Alexandre Kojève called the “universal homogeneous state.”

As Peter Thiel argues persuasively in Zero to One ^[4], globalization and technological innovation are actually two very different modes of progress. Technological innovation creates something new. Globalization merely copies new things and spreads them around. Thiel argues, furthermore, that globalization without technological innovation is not sustainable. For instance, it is simply not possible for China and India to consume as much fossil fuel as the First World countries, but that is entailed by globalization within the present technological context. In the short run, this sort of globalization will have catastrophic environmental effects. In the long run, it will hasten the day when our present form of civilization collapses when fossil fuels are exhausted. To stave off this apocalypse, we need new innovations, particularly in the area of energy.

The most important technological innovations of the twentieth century are arguably splitting the atom and the conquest of space. Neither was accomplished by private enterprise spurred by consumer demand in a global liberal-democratic society. Instead, they were created by rival governments locked in hot and cold warfare: first the United States and its Allies against the Axis powers in World War II, then the United States and the capitalist West versus the Soviet Bloc until the collapse of Communism in 1989–1991.

Indeed, one can argue that the rivalry between capitalism and communism began to lose its technological dynamism because of the statesmanship of Richard Nixon, who began détente with the USSR with the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks in 1969, then went to China in 1971, lessening the threat that the Communist powers would recoalesce into a single bloc. Détente ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could have spurred major technological advances, but merely threatening it was enough to persuade Gorbachev to seek a political solution. So the ideal situation for spurring technological growth is political rivalry without political resolution, thereby necessitating immense expenditures on research and development to gain technological advantages.

Since the collapse of Communism and the rise of a unipolar liberal-democratic world order, however, the driving force of technological change has been consumer demand. Atomic energy and sending men into space have been pretty much abandoned, and technological progress has been primarily channeled into information technology, which has made some of us more productive but for the most part just allows us to amuse ourselves with smartphones as society declines around us.

But we are not going to be able to Tweet ourselves out of looming environmental crises and Malthusian traps. Only fundamental innovations in energy technology will do the trick. And only the state, which can command enormous resources and unite a society around a common purpose, has a record of accomplishment in this area.

Of course none of the parties to the great conflicts that spurred technological growth were ethnonationalists in the strict sense, not even the Axis powers. Indeed, liberal democracy and communism were merely rival visions of global society. But when rival visions of globalization are slugging it out for power, that means that the globe is divided among a plurality of different political actors.

Pluralism and rivalry have spurred states to the greatest technological advances in history. Globalization, pacification, and liberalism have not only halted progress but have bred complacency in the face of potential global disasters. A global marketplace will never take mankind to the stars. It will simply distract us until civilization collapses and the Earth becomes a scorched boneyard.

2. Innovation vs. Cost-Cutting

In economics, productivity is defined as a mathematical formula: outputs divided by inputs, i.e., the cost per widget. Mathematically speaking, you can increase productivity either by making labor more productive, chiefly through technological innovation, or simply by cutting costs.

Most of the productivity gains that come from economic globalization are a matter of cost-cutting, primarily cutting the costs of labor. The Third World has a vast supply of cheap labor. Economic globalization allows the free movement of labor and capital. Businesses can cut labor costs by moving factories overseas or by importing new workers to drive down wages at home.

Historically speaking, the greatest economic spur to technological innovation has been high labor costs. The way to raise labor costs is to end economic globalization ^[5], by cutting off immigration and by putting high tariffs on foreign manufactured goods. In short, we need economic nationalism. Indeed, only economic nationalism can lead to a post-scarcity economy.

What exactly is a “post-scarcity economy,” and how can we get there from here? First of all, not all forms of scarcity can be abolished. Unique and handcrafted items will always be scarce. There will only be one Mona Lisa. Scarcity can only be abolished with identical, mass-produced items. Second, the cost of these items will only approach zero in terms of labor. Basically, we will arrive at a post-scarcity economy when machines put everyone involved in mass production out of work. But the machines, raw materials, and energy used in production will still have some costs. Thus the post-scarcity economy will arrive through innovation in robotics and energy production. The best image of a post-scarcity world is the “replicator” in Star Trek, which can change the atomic structure of basic inputs to materialize things out of thin air.

Of course workers who are replaced by machines can’t be allowed to starve. The products of machines have to be consumed by someone. Production can be automated but consumption cannot. It would be an absurdist dystopia if mechanization led to the starvation of workers, so consumption had to be automated as well. One set of robots would produce things, then another set of robots would consume them and add zeroes to the bank balances of a few lonely plutocrats.

To make the post-scarcity economy work, we need to ensure that people can afford to buy its products. There are two basic ways this can be done.

First, the productivity gains of capital have to be shared with the workers, through rising wages or shrinking work weeks. When workers are eliminated entirely, they need to receive generous pensions.

Second, every economic system requires a medium of exchange. Under the present system, the state gives private banks the ability to create money and charge interest on its use. The state also provides a whole range of direct payments to individuals: welfare, old-age pensions, etc. A universal basic income ^[6] is a direct government payment to all citizens that is sufficient to ensure basic survival in a First-World country. Such an income would allow the state to ensure economic liquidity, so that every product has a buyer, while eliminating two very costly middlemen: banks and social welfare bureaucracies.

All of this sounds pretty far out. But it is only unattainable in the present globalized system, in which cost-cutting is turning high-tech, First World industrial economies into low-tech Third World cheap-labor plantation economies. Only economic nationalism can spur the technological innovations necessary to create a post-scarcity economy by raising labor costs, both through immigration controls and tariff walls against cheap foreign manufactured goods.

3. Ethnonationalism & Science

So far we have established that scientific and technological progress are undermined by globalization and encouraged by nationalist economic policies and the rivalries between nations and civilizational blocs. But we need a more specific argument to establish that ethnonationalism is especially in harmony with scientific and technological progress.

My first premise is: No form of government is fully compatible with scientific and technological progress if it is founded on dogmas that are contrary to fact. For instance, the republic of Oceania might have a population of intelligent and industrious people, an excellent educational system, first rate infrastructure, and a booming economy. But if the state religion of Oceania mandates that the Earth is flat and lies at the center of the universe, Oceania is not going to take us to the stars.

My second premise is: The advocacy of racially and ethnically diverse societies—regardless of whether they have liberal or conservative regimes—is premised on the denial of political experience and the science of human biological diversity.

The history of human societies offers abundant evidence that putting multiple ethnic groups under the same political system is a recipe for otherwise avoidable ethnic tensions and conflicts. Furthermore, science indicates that the most important factors for scientific and technological advancement—intelligence and creativity—are primarily genetic, and they are not equally distributed among the races. Finally, Genetic Similarity Theory predicts that the most harmonious and happy societies will be the most genetically homogeneous, with social conflict increasing with genetic diversity.

Denying these facts is anti-scientific in two ways. First and most obviously, it is simply the refusal to look at objective facts that contradict the dogma that diversity improves society. Second, basing a society on this dogma undermines the genetic and social conditions necessary for progress and innovation, for instance by lowering the average IQ and creating greater social conflict. Other things being equal, these factors will make a society less likely to foster scientific and technological innovation.

My third premise is: Ethnonationalism is based on both political experience and the science of human biological diversity—and does not deny any other facts. Therefore, ethnonationalism is more compatible with scientific and technological progress than are racially and ethnically diverse societies—other things being equal.

Of course some research and development projects require so much money and expertise that they can only be undertaken by large countries like the United States, China, India, or Russia. Although we can predict with confidence that all of these societies would improve their research and development records if they were more racially and culturally homogeneous, even in their present states they can accomplish things that small, homogeneous ethnostates simply cannot dream of.

For instance, if a country of two million people like Slovenia were to adopt ethnonationalism, it would probably outperform a more diverse society with the same size and resources in research and development. But it would not be able to colonize Mars. However, just as small countries can defend themselves from big countries by creating alliances, small states can work together on scientific and technological projects too big to undertake on their own. No alliance is stronger than its weakest member. Since diversity is a weakness and homogeneity is a strength, we can predict that cooperative research and development efforts among ethnostates will probably be more fruitful than those among diverse societies.

Now someone might object that one can improve upon the ethnostate by taking in only high-IQ immigrants from races. Somehow Americans went to the Moon without importing Asians and Indians. Such people are being imported today for two reasons. First, importing foreign brains allows us to evade problems with producing our own, namely, dysgenic fertility and the collapse of American STEM education, largely due to political correctness, i.e., racial integration and the denial of biological intelligence differences. Second, the productivity gains attributed to diversity in technology are simply due to cost-cutting. But the real answer is: The Internet allows whites to collaborate with the best scientists around the world. But we don’t need to live with them.

To sum up: The idea that technological utopia will go hand-in-hand with the emergence of a global homogeneous society is false. The greatest advances in technology were spurred by the rivalries of hostile political powers, and with the emergence of a unipolar world, technological development has been flagging.

The idea that technological utopia goes hand-in-hand with liberal democracy is false. Liberalism from its very inception has been opposed to the idea that there is a common good of society. Liberalism is all about empowering individuals to pursue private aims and advantages. It denies that the common good exists; or, if the common good exists, liberalism denies that it is knowable; or if the common good exists and is knowable, liberalism denies that it can be pursued by the state, but instead will be brought about by an invisible hand if we just allow private individuals to go about their business.

The only thing that can bring liberal democrats together to pursue great common aims is the threat of war. This is what sent Americans to the Moon. America’s greatest technological achievements were fostered by the government, not private enterprise, and in times of hot and cold war, not peace. Since the end of the Cold War, however, victory has defeated us. America is no longer a serious country.

The solution, though, is not to go back to war, but to junk liberalism and return to the classical idea that there is a common good that can and must be pursued by the state. A liberal democracy can only be a serious country if someone like the Russians threatens to nuke them every minute of the day. Normal men and normal societies pursue the common good, because once one is convinced something really is good, one needs no additional reason to pursue it. But if you need some extra incentives, consider the environmental devastation and civilizational collapse that await us as the fossil fuel economy continues to expand like an algae bloom to its global limits. That should concentrate the mind wonderfully.

The idea that technological utopia will go hand-in-hand with global capitalism is false. Globalization has undermined technological innovation by allowing businesses to raise profits merely by cutting costs. The greatest advances in manufacturing technology have been spurred by high labor costs, which are products of a strong labor movement, closed borders, and protectionism.

Finally, the idea that technological utopianism will go hand-in-hand with racially and ethnically diverse societies is false. This is where ethnonationalism proves its superiority. Diversity promotes social conflict and removes barriers to dysgenic breeding. The global average IQ is too low to create a technological utopia. Global race-mixing will make Europeans more like the global average. Therefore, it will extinguish all dreams of progress. Ethnonationalists, however, are actually willing to replace dysgenic reproductive trends with eugenic ones, to ensure that every future generation has more geniuses, including scientific ones. And if you need an extra incentive, consider the fact that China is pursuing eugenics while in the West it is fashionable to adopt Haitian babies. Ethnonationalism, moreover, promotes social harmony and cohesion, which make possible coordinated efforts toward common goals.

What sort of society will conquer scarcity, conquer death, and settle the cosmos? A society that practices economic nationalism to encourage automation. A homogeneous, high-IQ society with eugenic rather than dysgenic reproductive trends. A harmonious, cohesive, high-trust society that can work together on common projects. An illiberal society that is willing to mobilize its people and resources to achieve great common aims. In short, if liberal democracy and global capitalism are returning us to the mud, it is ethnonationalism that will take us to the stars.

11:43 Publié dans Théorie politique, Utopie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : théorie politique, philosophie politique, sciences politiques, politologie, nouvelle droite, nouvelle droite américaine, new right, american new right, greg johnson, utopie, utopie technologique, nationalisme, nationalisme ethnique, ethnisme | | del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg | Facebook

jeudi, 09 novembre 2017

The Youth, Evola and the rise of a true Right

evolaAR-,550x550,brown.u3.jpg

The Youth, Evola and the rise of a true Right

by Thierry Durolle

As traditionalists (1), we believe in the doctrine of cosmic cycles (2) and therefore we know that our present time matches with the last cycle, the one which is known by the name of Kali-Yuga (3). This particular cycle is the darkest one of all four cycles and affects every aspects of life in general. Thus human beings, civilizations and politics cannot escape its corrupting power. This is an important fact to keep in mind.

However, the cycle ends only to start up again with the first one, the Golden age or Krita-Yuga, the dark days leaves room for a new era. Yet in the meantime some of us, the youth, feels the urge for political action but need a strong formation to face the abominations of our post-modern societies. Right-wing is a wide concept after all, as it is the same for the Left. In France – we give this example because we know the situation of this country very well – the Right means ‘Economic Right’, even if it appears sometimes more progressive, sometimes more conservative. Within its scale of principals, the economic principle is always the highest and all the others are subordinated to it. Here is a clear example of a final stage of involution.

The definition of what should be considered the real Right is an imperative task. Among the numerous topics he dealt with through his writings, Julius Evola wrote numerous articles about that question. The Italian philosopher, often reduced to an ‘esoteric fascist’, embodies himself the man of the Right. His writings but especially his deeds made him a living example of the uprightness one would try to attain. The neo-fascist youth of post WW2 Italy was not wrong to seek all the gems herein Evola’s books in order to build its doctrine.

Originally published in Hungarian at the end of 2012 as an anthology of Evola’s articles about the youth and the Right, A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth is now available thanks to Arktos in English. We hope that a french version will see the day sooner or later. Indeed, Evola’s influence on the now famous french Nouvelle Droite and all its heirs (from identitarians to national-revolutionary and traditionalist-revolutionary militants), not to mention the founder of this website Georges Feltin-Tracol (4), contributors Daniel Cologne (5) and ourselves, is simply huge.

A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth contains seventeen texts, mostly press articles but also some excerpts from books like The Bow and the Club and the entire essay Orientations. It includes a foreword by Gabor Vona who is the Chairman of Jobbik and bibliographical notes by Robert Horvath. We also must stress the numerous footnotes and the quality of their explanations. The reader ends up with a handbook intended for militants but also for anyone yearning to discover Julius Evola.

As the title suggests, the two main subjects are the Right and the Youth. The first one was a common topic developed by the author along his writings. In fact the Right follows the Italian writer like his shadow. Julius Evola remains the most political awakener of the Tradition. He always considered himself a man of the Right, he wrote about the Right and his critics and stances outlined a doctrine, even better, a view of the world from the Right:

‘Yet it is also possible to leave all institutional assumptions aside and speak of the Right as a spiritual orientation and worldview. Aside from opposing democracy and all ‘socialists’ myths, belonging to the Right means upholding the values of Tradition as spiritual, aristocratic, and warrior values (possibly with references to a strict military tradition, as in the case of Prussianism, for instance). Moreover, it means harboring a certain contempt for intellectualism and for the bourgeois fetishism of the ‘cultured man’ [...]’ (p.50.).

Throughout the different texts herein the book, Julius Evola stresses how the real Right is: anti-egalitarian, anti-materialistic, anti-democratic but spiritual and heroic. In one word traditionalist: ‘In this sense, the concept of Tradition applies to a system in which ‘all activities are in principle ordered from above and have an upward direction’ (p.37.). In addition, Julius Evola aims at the main sources of infection which must be fought according to him (Marxism, Psychoanalysis, existentialism and Darwinism) and give some clues on the cultural domains that the Right should focus on, one of them being the historiography.

About the second subject Robert Harvath points out ‘that the subject of youth was not among Evola’s central concerns; it’s a thin, but visible, line that runs throughout his entire oeuvre’ (p.150.). When writing about the Youth, Julius Evola either encourages an autre jeunesse or, on the contrary, criticizes it. The latter belongs to the average youth so to speak and Evola focused especially his critics on students and beatniks like in Against the Youth or Some Observations on the Student Movement, both featuring in this handbook.

Julius Evola wrote his first post WW2 writings for the young Italian neo-fascist militants. He does not write about what has to be done but how to be:

‘Not letting oneself go is what is crucial today. In this society gone astray, one must be capable of the luxury of having a character. One ought to be such that, even before being recognized as the champion of a political idea, one will display a certain conduct of life, an inner coherence, and a style consisting of uprightness and intellectual courage in every human relationship’(p.1).

‘As spirit there exists something that can serve as an outline for the forces of resistance: it is the legionary spirit. It is the attitude of one who knows how to choose the hardest life, to fight even when he knows that the battle is substantially lost, and to confirm the words of the ancient saga: ‘loyalty is stronger than fire’. Through him the traditional idea is affirmed’(p.7).

‘Inner action must precede all other actions’(p.3).

We believe that these advice are of first-hand importance even if Evola wrote about more strictly political themes like the imperial idea, corporatism, occult war or the ‘demonic possession of the economy’. Some people like Claudio Mutti hastily made Evola an admirer of islam since he positively showed to his readers the warlike mentality of this particular religion and its concept of greater jihad. What he wanted to show (and mostly liked) is this ascetic process, this almost alchemical transformation of oneself to reach something higher. His interests for magic, which he explored in company of Arturo Reghini (6) in the Ur-group, his interest for vamachara tantra or mountaineering are facts that tend to prove our point.

Concerning this collection of texts, we could have appreciated if the last parts of Evola’s Ride the Tiger (6) which consist in a bunch of precepts to be and become in this dark age of Kali-Yuga could have been added. Also, and this would have been a necessary addition according to us, some texts or excerpts from his writings about race, which would have been an excellent correcting concerning racialism.

To conclude, A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth is definitely a must have for any political and metapolitical militants, for every men of the Right in its true essence. We strongly believe that Western societies need a renewal of the Right, not to say a revolution. Gabor Vona pointed out a real problem in nowadays ‘real right’:

‘The tragedy of this situation is that the tools of the Left are infectious. This creates a political catastrophe, which is extremely common nowadays: the landscape of the so-called Right is in reality becoming more and more filled with Leftist ideas, and allows the Left’s borders to approach closer and closer, displaying and mainstreaming the pseudo- or fake Rightism. Of course, this results in total confusion, schizophrenia, and a chaos of ideas’ (p.11. Of the foreword).

This is the greater danger the real Right faces now. National-Bolshevism and nazi-maoism left aside (even if their Third-Worldism was ideologically harmful), we clearly identify a strong ‘leftisation’ of the French Nouvelle Droite (especially of one of its prominent figure Alain de Benoist) and what the mass media names Far-Right. The prevalence of the social and economic question, the critics of liberalism from a marxist perspective and worse, the abandonment of the defense of our people’s race – the number one emergency for most of western European countries – and the will to even avoid such words and topics are true signs of degeneracy. We do not have the time and should not bother analyzing the causes; the fruit is too far rotten. The time to rebuild a true Right is now. Julius Evola’s books and A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth are more than necessary readings in order to set les idées à l’endroit!

Thierry Durolle

Footnotes:

(1) By ‘traditionalist’ we mean someone who refers to the meaning of the word explained by René Guénon.

(2) The doctrine of cosmic cycles is often understood as Hindu concept, yet it corresponds to Hesiod’s ages of Man as well.

(3) It is the same than Hesiod’s age of iron or Nordic age of the wolf.

(4) Born in 1970, Georges Feltin-Tracol is the editor-in-chief of the Europe Maxima website as well as the author of numerous books and articles. Being a long time militant for the Greater Europe, he always claimed Julius Evola’s influence on his work.

(5) Born in 1946, Daniel Cologne is a journalist and essayist. He wrote several books about Tradition and worked with the traditionalist magazine Totalité.

(6) Born in 1878, Arturo Reghini was an Italian free-mason and was considered as the most famous Italian Pythagorean.

(7) Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul, Inner Traditions, 2003, 256 pages.

01:40 Publié dans Nouvelle Droite, Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (1) | Tags : états-unis, altright, nouvelle droite, nouvelle droite américaine, american new right, philosophie, tradition, traditionalisme, julius evola | | del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg | Facebook

jeudi, 21 septembre 2017

Close Encounters of the Third Rome Kind: An Interview with Fenek Solère, the Author of Rising

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

Moscow and Peter’s grad, the city of Constantine,
these are the capitals of the Russian kingdom.
But where is their limit? And where are their frontiers
to the north, the east, the south and the setting sun?
The Fate will reveal this to future generations.
Seven inland seas and seven great rivers
from Nile to Neva, from Elbe to China,
from Volga to the Euphrates, from Ganges to Danube.
That’s the Russian kingdom, and let it be forever,
Just as the spirit foretold and Daniel prophesied. — Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873)

Greg Johnson: What led you to write your second novel Rising?

Fenek Solère: I was working in St. Petersburg and my girlfriend, a student and part-time actress, was auditioning for the role of Traudl Junge in the 2004 movie Downfall (Der Untergang). A part that was eventually taken by Alexandra Maria Lara who went on to play Annik Honore, the Ian Curtis extra-marital love interest in Control (2007) and Petra Schelm in the Baader Meinhoff Complex (2008). I was mixing with the generation that had survived the economic crisis of the nineties, the more politically literate of whom were crowding into small venues like Club DADA to see Death in June and discussing the ideological merits and electoral and legal problems faced by various nationalist fringe groupings like The Movement Against Illegal Immigration, Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, Dugin’s Eurasian Party, The Other Russia, and the Russian Imperial Movement.

It was the same demographic that had spawned Pussy Riot, thrill seeking roof-toppers like Kirill Vselensky, and Instagram celebrities like Nastasya Samburskaya. An egotistical and yet fragile generation of young people that had learned through bitter experience not to plan too far ahead. Voting for Putin because he represented stability in the face of lawlessness and economic well-being after the calamitous extravagance of the Yeltsin years. They were in effect the party-goers who had woken up with a decades-long hangover, only to discover their country had been asset-stripped of nickel, gold, and oil deposits by so-called gladiator capitalists, who were in-fact no more than ruthless, looting, self-dealing kleptomaniacs turned oligarchs like Roman Abramovich, Pyotr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Movers and shakers that wielded unimaginable power in the vacuous corridors of the pre-Putin Kremlin.

And although I had travelled widely and studied under an Emeritus Professor of Russian literature in London who had published extensively on Gogol and Dostoevsky and occasionally accompanied him to the Cathedral of the Dormition in Ennismore Gardens to celebrate Orthodox Christmas, nothing could have prepared me for the shabby sophistication of the museums, art galleries, and Italianate architecture of the Venice of the North, the granite-faced business mentality of Muscovites, or the burnt orange sunsets that gaped across the endless flat Steppe toward Omsk.

Rising attempts to capture some of the grandeur of that former Empire. It is a homage to St. Petersburg, a mist shrouded city of cobwebs that haunts you in much the same way as Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, once you have delved into its phantasmagoric underworld.

GJ: I can see it must have been a life-changing experience. Can you describe some of your activities and impressions of Russia?

FS: Russia is a land of incredible contrasts. Unimaginable wealth living side by side with extreme poverty; catastrophic rural depopulation juxtaposed with multi-billion urban construction projects like the glass towers and copper-colored shards of Moscow’s financial district; and overt commercial and governmental corruption set against acts of amazingly generous Christian piety. It is a truly exhilarating environment.

Some defining moments that I can readily recall are walking down Nevsky Prospekt and being completely overwhelmed by how homogenous the Slavic community still is in comparison to Western Europe and North America; being intellectually aware of Orthodox eschatology but still feeling surprised by the very real power and energy of resurgent religious practice; and if you will excuse my sexism, observing from a heterosexual red-blooded male perspective, the disproportionate number of attractive and slim women of child-bearing age, as they walked out of the underground stations in the cities or made their way from stall to stall in the market squares of the provincial towns and villages I occasionally visited.

Besides moshing to Arkona’s pagan riffs in concerts as far apart as Kiev and Lakewood, Ohio there were also moments of thoughtful reflection. I would stand by my friends as they filed in an orderly line to go into onion topped cathedrals, their smiling faces reflecting in the polished double-headed eagles hanging on the walls, congregating under the glistening chandeliers, crossing themselves when the chant of gospodi pomilui mixed with the crackle of wax candles and the tinkle of silver bells rose to the crescendo of ‘Vechnaia Pamiat,Vechnaia Pamiat!’ Placing flowers on the graves of the philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Il’in and General Anton Denikin, head of the anti-Bolshevik White forces in Southern Russia during the Civil War, two figures representing the pen and sword of anti-Communism, now returned to their native soil after decades of exile. Honorable men who stood against Lenin’s doctrine of Mass Terror and the indiscriminate shooting by Cheka operatives of thousands of bourgeois hostages in the Petrograd and Kronstadt prisons; the containment of hundreds of thousands of dissidents in camps like that in Maykop, where women, children, and the elderly died of typhus, cholera, and starvation; the summary executions in Moscow, Tver, Nizhny-Novgorod, Vyatka, Perm, Tula, Odessa, Kharkov, and Kiev; the Decossakization of the Don and Kuban territories; the rounding-up of the Kulaks; and the plans to use asphyxiating gas against counter-revolutionaries in the forests around Tambov. People Lenin described as harmful insects, lice, vermin, and germs. Indicating the need to cleanse Russia of fleas, bugs, and parasites.

Inhuman crimes that continued well after the Civil War had petered out in 1921 and Lenin’s wax-like corpse lay embalmed in the Kremlin, climaxing in the extermination of the remnant of White sympathizers in the Crimea, the deliberate starving to death of at least four million Ukrainians in the Holdomor of 1932/33 under the direct supervision of Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, and the construction of the Gulag system immortalized in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In fact a body count that when you include the murderous activities of NKVD leaders like Nikolai Yezhov and Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda under the Stalin regime adds up to over 58,000,000 between 1922 and 1991. At least 100,000 of which were priests and nuns. Although still falling short of Mao Zedong’s estimated 73,000,000 victims, it makes an absolute mockery of fatuous claims by ‘court’ sponsored historians like Laurence Rees in his The Holocaust: A New History (2017) that the events in Central and Eastern Europe between 1939-45 were unprecedented and amount to the “most appalling atrocity in history.”

GJ: What are you trying to communicate about the Rightist Revolutionary demimonde?

FS: That it is we who hold the moral high ground, and we should continue to maintain that position against the lies, hypocrisy, and double-standards of the Left, liberals, and neoconservatives acting in the interests of the Robber-Baron globalist elites. It is we, not they, who are under constant attack by malign forces who are using every demographic, ethnic, financial, and politically correct artifice in their tool-box to first dispossess us of all that our civilization has accumulated over centuries and then eradicate us from our very homelands. Desperate attempts to deny individuals and groups advocating for whites and their constitutional and legal rights, efforts to disrupt funding streams to alternative media sites and the de-platforming of our spokespeople are symptomatic of the establishment’s anxiety and fear that our message is beginning to gain traction. Their response is reminiscent of the Soviet regime’s strategy to quell internal opposition in the dying days of communism. And if people think that is an exaggeration or an unfair comparison I would advise them to read Zhores Medvedev’s Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich (1973) and reflect on how different that is to the current situation in Russia. With Putin saying:

To forgive the terrorists is up to God. To send them to him is up to me!

And:

We see that many Euro-Atlantic states have taken the way where they deny or reject their own roots, including their Christian roots, which form the basis of Western Civilization. In these countries, the moral basis and any traditional identity is being denied. There, the politicians treat families with many children as equal to a homosexual partnership; faith in God as being equal to faith in Satan. The excesses and exaggerations of political correctness in these countries leads to serious consideration for the legitimization of parties that promote the propaganda of paedophilia.

And with the Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeev adding:

The fact is, the Catholic Church in the West exists today under an information blockade, under a very hard diktat from secular society. In this case we are without question allies. We can search together for the answer to those challenges which threaten the very existence of Christianity. I call it a strategic alliance between Orthodoxy and Catholics, that is the understanding that if there are threats, then these are common threats and if there are challenges, they are also common.

Dare we speak such truths in the West, shackled as we are by political correctness? And what would the media make of such statements? President Trump was literally shouted down at a press conference for merely pointing out that the Left had behaved violently at the recent Charlottesville debacle. What a reversal of fortune between the freedom of expression in the East and West. But having said that please do not think I am naïve enough to envisage Taras Bulba’s Cossacks riding over the horizon to save White Civilization. There is far too much suspicion and misunderstanding between Slav and Saxon for that. Rather, I see Russia as part of a larger geopolitical jigsaw, playing its part to protect, preserve, and extend a global commonwealth of independent white ethno-states that also ensures the autonomy of Baltic countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as part of a broader Scandinavian confederation.

GJ: You comment extensively about Alexander Dugin’s philosophy in your interview with Daniel Macek on the New European Conservative website. Have you ever met Dugin and what are your current thoughts on his brand of Eurasianism?

FS: No, I have never met Dugin. I’m afraid I do not move in such exalted circles. Most of my Russian compatriots are devotees of his and have read his works like Putin vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed From The Right (2014) in the original language. My Russian is too poor for that, so I am limited to the translated versions like those offered by Arktos. I see Dugin as very much part of a much longer tradition of thinkers and I would advise anyone coming to his works for the first time to familiarize themselves with L. N. Gumilev’s The Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom (The Legend of the Kingdom of Prester John) translated by R. E. F. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press (1987). A work in which the celebrated, if controversial historian, opens both the eyes and minds of the reader to the migrations and conflicts that have shaped Khazaria and the peoples and cultures living on the Eurasian steppe.

GJ: Do you in any way identify with the main character. Is the novel biographical?

FS: I think it is natural for a writer to draw to some extent on personal experience. I walked the streets, parks, and thoroughfares I write about in Rising, breathed the dry dusty air of the polluted backstreets, and drank shots of vodka in dimly lit bars listening to the dreams of young idealists. Remember what Joseph-Marie Comte de Maistre said “There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.” I would agree. I loved every minute of it and would not change a thing. My head still spins with the excitement and hedonism, like fondly remembered moments of a misspent youth. Embracing Mokosh, the goddess of destiny and pumping my fists in the air when Masha the Scream sings “Rus Narodnyi!”

lundi, 07 août 2017

Postmodernism vs. Identity - Greg Johnson’s talk at The Scandza Forum

Scandza Forum Oslo, 2017

Postmodernism vs. Identity

Greg Johnson’s talk at The Scandza Forum in Oslo, July 1, 2017.

Red Ice TV

Greg Johnson speaks at the Scandza Forum in Oslo, Norway on July 1, 2017.

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mercredi, 22 février 2017

A Review of The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement

Where Conservatism Went Wrong:
A Review of The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement

By Spencer Quinn

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

Review:

Paul E. Gottfried & Richard B. Spencer (eds.)
The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement ^[2]
Arlington, Va.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2015

All political movements need a history, and such histories, if well-constructed, almost always coalesce into myth. Once mythologized, a movement’s past can inform its present members about its reason for being, its need for continuing, and its plans for the future. And this can be accomplished quickly – and without the need for study or research – in the form of what Edmund Burke called “prejudice.” “Prejudice,” Burke says ^[3], “is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved.”

Prejudice is a time-saver, in other words, and it puts everyone on the same page. These are two invaluable things for any movement which aims to effect political change. For those who wish to participate in any of the various factions of the Alt Right and learn its history and myth, they do not need to go much farther than The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement.

Edited by Paul Gottfried of the H. L. Menken Club and Richard Spencer of Radix Journal, The Great Purge discusses the march of the once-mighty American conservative movement towards the abject irrelevance it faces today. This took about fifty years, but the villains of this inquisition managed to purge conservatism of its conservatives and replace them with a globalist elite which kowtows to political correctness. The villains, of course, are National Review founder and publisher William F. Buckley (an unflattering photo of whom graces the book’s cover) and a cabal of refugees from the Left known as “neoconservatives.” The Great Purge, as Spencer tells us, is less a “full chronicling of these purges,” and more a “phenomenological history of conservatism. It seeks to understand how its ideology . . . functioned within its historic context and how it responded to power, shifting conceptions of authority, and societal changes.”

The book presents seven essays, with a foreword by Spencer and an afterward by VDARE.com founder and former National Review writer Peter Brimelow. In between, we have essays from established Dissident Right luminaries such as Gottfried, William Regnery, and John Derbyshire. Sam Francis, perhaps one of the godfathers of the Alt Right, who passed away in 2005, contributes a comprehensive and quite useful philosophical treatise on how mainstream conservatism devolved into the toothless friend of the Left it has become today. Rounding out the remainder is American Revolutionary Vanguard founder Keith Preston, professor and writer Lee Congdon, and independent author and scholar James Kalb.

So, according to myth, William F. Buckley founded his conservative magazine National Review in the mid-1950s and revitalized a flagging conservative ideology. At the time, liberalism in its various forms enjoyed near-complete hegemony in academia, enough to prompt scholar Lionel Trilling by mid-century to announce that conservatism, at least as it had been embodied by what we now call the Old Right, was dead. Buckley, along with other conservative thinkers such as Russell Kirk and popular authors like Ayn Rand, proved that reports of conservatism’s death were a tad overstated. Thanks to Buckley, conservatism now had the intellectual heft to resist the Left, both foreign and domestic. As Spencer describes it, this entailed promoting free-market capitalism over Soviet Communism, erecting the Christian West as a bulwark against Soviet atheism, and pushing for an aggressive foreign policy both to thwart Soviet militarism and promote the interests of Israel. The New Right was born.

Enter the neocons. Disenchanted by the manifest failures of Communism, these former Leftists, led by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, began testing the waters in conservative circles by the 1970s. The neocons shared much of the New Right’s anti-Soviet belligerence and loyalty towards Israel. Having given up on the New Deal and other big-government initiatives, the neocons were equally uncomfortable with free-market capitalism. Sam Francis quotes Irving Kristol at length, describing how the welfare state should not be eradicated, but altered to create a “social insurance state.”

Most importantly, the neocons promoted a Wilsonian “global and cosmopolitan world order” which sought to greatly increase America’s role in foreign affairs, often through military interventionism. In particular, democracy was the great talisman which could civilize the world – whether the world wanted to be civilized or not. Bolstered by their faith in the Democratic Peace Theory, which posits that democracies do not wage war upon each other, the neocons transferred the messianic fervor of Communism to democratization and never looked back. Lee Congdon’s entire essay. “Wars to End War,” rails against such “morality-driven foreign policy” and how it co-opted conservatism almost completely. “Pluralism, (human) rights, and democracy,” as stated by Charles Krauthammer, became something of a rallying cry for the neocons. Against such high-minded egalitarianism, which opened the door for feminism, gay rights, race-mixing, and other by-products of democratic freedom, the traditional conservative arguments began to crumble.

Congdon quotes Pat Buchanan as defending true conservatism when he wrote in 2006 that America is bound together by “the bonds of history and memory, tradition and custom, language and literature, birth and faith, blood and soil.” This is an outright rejection of the neocon claim of America being a “proposition nation” in which citizens are “bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds,” to quote George W. Bush from his first inaugural address. Essentially, if you believed in putting America first, or had no interest in foreign wars, or took the libertarian ideal of limited government seriously, or (most importantly) professed a tribal or familial fealty to the white race, then you had no place among the neocons or in the New Right.

And there to police you and expunge you into the wilderness, if need be, was none other than Mr. Buckley himself.

Both Paul Gottfried and William Regnery provide first-hand accounts of the purges, as well as some historical perspective on them. For example, according to Gottfried, Buckley banished the John Birch Society from respectable conservatism in the 1960s not because of anti-Semitism, but because the Birchers expressed insufficient hawkishness against the North Vietnamese and in the Cold War in general. This point is echoed later in the volume by Keith Preston. It seems that any anti-Semitic aspect in the early victims of the purge was purely incidental.

That didn’t remain the case, of course. What I find most striking and ironic about The Great Purge is that the “racist” infractions of many of the purge victims were so slight, so indirect, and so buried in one’s past that to summarily expurgate a person on those grounds required almost Soviet levels of behind-the-scenes machinations and ruthlessness. Gottfried explains that his offense was to merely assume a leadership role in the H.L. Menken Club, which gives a platform to people “who stress hereditary cognitive differences.” For this, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) severed all ties with him. Another example is Joe Sobran, who was labeled an anti-Semite by Buckley and banished from the National Review in the late 1980s because, as Gottfried explains, Sobran “noticed the shifting meaning of ‘anti-Semite,’ from someone who hates Jews to someone who certain Jews in high places don’t like.”

William Regnery relates how he had been banished from the ISI as well, an organization to which his grandfather, father, and uncles had very close ties for many years. Regnery’s offense? He spoke at an American Renaissance study group in 2005 and promoted “building a sense of racial unity.” For this, he faced an anonymous charge from ISI and was tried among his peers, only one of whom voted to keep him on. Seventeen voted to expel him, and expelled he was.

Another person who pops up a lot in The Great Purge is Jason Richwine, a junior researcher who lost his job at the Heritage Foundation in 2013. It was discovered that his approved doctoral thesis from years earlier contained a fully supported statistic which pointed to the lower than average IQ of many immigrant groups. For this, and for fear of causing too much consternation among Leftist elites, the Heritage Foundation determined that Richwine had to go, his permanently sullied reputation notwithstanding. Certainly, mainstream conservatives know how and when to eat their own – unlike the Left, of course. As Regnery aptly points out, “Media Matters would never have cashiered a researcher on the strength of conservative ire.”

This only cracks the surface of the damage the Bill Buckley mentality has done to the Right over the years. John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow relate how their more deliberate infractions got them evicted from the movement. Keith Preston describes how, despite the New Right’s professed desire to limit government, it did absolutely nothing to stop its near-exponential growth. In The Great Purge, Buckley and his epigones are called nearly every name in the book, from cowardly to cannibalistic, yet Regnery attributes much of this betrayal to something a little more mundane: complacency. Buckley and his people were simply unwilling to give up their cushy lifestyles in order to combat the Left in any meaningful way. As a result, they put tight leashes on anyone who did.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this volume is the thirty-five page essay from Sam Francis, which was written back in 1986. Francis, who suffered his own purge from The Washington Times in the 1990s thanks to Dinesh D’Souza, provides a philosophical vocabulary to explain the fall of conservatism in America. It was the slow usurpation of the Old Right, in other words “traditionalist and bourgeois ideologies, centering on the individual as moral agent, citizen, and economic actor” by a “managerial elite” which did in conservatism. This “managerial humanism,” according to Francis, espoused

a collectivist view of the state and economy and advocated a highly centralized regime largely unrestrained by traditional legal, constitutional, and political barriers. It rejected or regarded as backward, repressive, or obsolete the institutions and values of traditional and bourgeois society – its loyalties to the local community, traditional religion and moral beliefs, the family and social and political differentiation based on class, status, and property – and it articulated an ideal of man “liberated” from such constraints and re-educated or redesigned into a cosmopolitan participant in the mass state economy of the managerial system.

This certainly is an apt description of the Left, and as more and more neocons joined the conservative movement, the more apparent it became that they were bringing this managerial humanism along with them. This cultural shift, of course, had deleterious effects across the board for the Right, not least of which was separating it from its stated purpose and weakening its resolve to combat change. In characteristic form, Francis ends his essay with a prediction, this one quite dire:

If neoconservative co-optation and the dynamics of the continuing managerial revolution deflect the American Right from [its] goal, the result will not be the renaissance of America and the West but the continuation and eventual fulfillment of the goals of their most ancient enemies.

If The Great Purge has any flaws, it’s of omission, which isn’t really a flaw since Spencer copped to it in his Foreword. This book is not a history, but rather a collection of reminiscences and musings on the state of the Right. So, it’s not surprising that many things are left out. Still, I wish more detail had been provided in places. It is possible, for example, that there was more to the Sobran affair than what Gottfried and others provide. Sobran’s split with Buckley may have spoken as much to Buckley’s sincere philo-Semitism and his desire not to appear anti-Semitic as it did to Sobran’s desire (or need) to speak out against Israel. The whole thorny issue of whether or not this constitutes anti-Semitism was covered thoroughly (and perhaps ad nauseum) in In Search of Anti-Semitism ^[4], Buckley’s 1992 recounting of the affair. But it would have been nice to hear a different perspective from one who was around back then.

Further, The Great Purge seems to let Buckley off the hook for not banishing the John Birch Society because of anti-Semitism, yet fails to mention (at least in my reading) any mention of Buckley’s early purge of writers from The American Mercury, which was, in Buckley’s words, “anti-Semitic.” Therefore, Buckley showed his philo-Semitic stripes early on, and that may have informed some of his attitude vis-a-vis the John Birch Society.

The Jewish Question in general is also never explored. While not absolutely necessary to the subject, I’m sure it would have been interesting at the very least, given how eighty to ninety percent of the neoconservatives named in the book are obviously Jewish. Really, it’s impossible not to notice the nigh-homogeneous ethnic makeup of the neocons who appear over and over in The Great Purge like a gang of irrepressible supervillains. Such a list renders parenthesis-echoing utterly superfluous: Irving Kristol, Norman Podheretz, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Lipset, Ben Wattenberg, Elliott Abrams, Michael Ledeen, Max Boot, David Gerlenter, Allen Weinstein, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Paul Wolfowitz.

You could practically host a baseball game with such a lineup. And is it all a huge coincidence? Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait for the sequel to find out.

In the meantime, however, The Great Purge does a magnificent job of myth-making for the Alt Right. It spells out our origins and purpose, and describes the challenges and betrayals the older generation of conservatives had to face while remaining true to the nationalist, traditionalist, and racialist ideals which made Western civilization great to begin with. Most importantly, The Great Purge shows what happens when you give up on winning and instead compromise with the enemy. You eventually become him. And at no point will your pettiness and spite become more apparent than when you turn on your own.

18:11 Publié dans Actualité, Livre, Livre, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : paul gottfried, richard spencer, états-unis, actualité, conservatisme, livre, théorie politique, sciences politiques, politologie, philosophie politique, alt right, nouvelle droite américaine, alternative right | | del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg | Facebook

mardi, 21 février 2017

Erkenbrand Pool Party - Guillaume Durocher (English)

Erkenbrand Kanaal

Guillaume Durocher gave a speech about tradition and ancestry at Erkenbrand's first Pool Party of 2017.

samedi, 17 septembre 2016

Robert Stark interviews Keith Preston about Thinkers Against Modernity

Robert Stark and co-host Alex von Goldstein interview Keith Preston about his book Thinkers Against Modernity

Topics include:

How the book is an examination of thinkers critical of modernity from a value neutral perspective

How Keith is influenced by the intellectual tradition of the enlightenment, yet finds value in traditionalist critiques of modernity

Julius Evola as the purest critique of modernity

How the Right tends to have a pessimistic view of the present and idealizes a particular era of the past(ex. Julius Evola the 8th Century BC, Nietzsche the Sophist era in Ancient Greece, Traditional Catholics the Middle Ages, and mainstream conservatives the 1950’s or Reagan Era)

Defining characteristic of the Right include rejection of social change, egalitarianism, and universalism, and a fixed view of human nature

Nietzsche’s point that ideologies become new religions, and how the modern politically correct left is a new moralistic religion rather than genuine liberalism or Marxism

Aleister Crowley’s aristocratic individualism, and his view that capitalism and mass democracy degraded a genuine cultural elitism

The Distributist G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, their views on the distribution of capital, and their critic of capitalism as degrading traditional values

Carl Schmitt’s view that democracy was incompatible with liberal individualism

How Carl Schmitt subscribed to the realist school of though and viewed the

United States as having an ideologically driven foreign policy

The United States as a nation founded on Classical Liberalism and the Enlightenment

The European New Right, how it was founded in the late 1960’s as a counter to the New Left, fusing aspects of the New Left with the conservative revolution of the interwar period

How the New Right tried to appeal to the left on issues such as anti-globalization, anti-consumerism, anti-imperialism, and environmentalism

The New Right’s critique of political correctness, feminism, and mass immigration as being products of capitalism

Noam Chomsky on capitalism and anti-racism

The American Alternative Right, how it is influenced by the European New Right, and how it is different

Guillaume Faye’s Archeo-Futurism and futurist thought on the right

Audio Player

To listen to:

http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=2644

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Check out Robert Stark’s Artwork

Join Erkenbrand This September!

Join Erkenbrand This September!

Author: Guillaume Durocher

The West is crumbling, our lands are being invaded and the best politics can offer us in the Netherlands is a civic nationalist funded by foreign money. It is long past time we got together and started getting organized. Online activism is great, but we have to take the next step and make connections in the real world. The Alternative Right, while born in the English-speaking world, must ultimately be dedicated to saving all the European peoples.

We have set up Erkenbrand for exactly this purpose, to bring people together. We are organized as a study society where we can have intellectual discussions each month about subjects related to our current situation, and more importantly socialize and make new friends. We started off small, but we are growing rapidly. We aim to bring together like-minded people who work together to further our cause: not only politically, but also to build a tight-knit group of men who can count on each other.

At our last meeting, attended by around 40 people, we discussed the future of the European peoples and how to deal with SJWs, on the basis of Vox Day’s book SJWs Always Lie. We more generally want to create a new culture which promotes a healthy lifestyle and strong communities for our people. We ended our formal talks with an inspirational speech in which we also called for action. Action to contribute to the new culture by producing articles, videos, memes, etc.

We regularly publish articles on our site on various subjects related to the Alt Right and Dutch history and culture.

On September 27 in Rotterdam, we are organizing a conference with well-known American speakers such as Greg Johnson and F. Roger Devlin. It is time to get away from the keyboard and bring the struggle to real life. Help us build a foundation for the future by joining Erkenbrand!

For more information about the event, email us at: erkenbrand@protonmail.com

lundi, 21 mars 2016

A Brief Case for Universal Nationalism

By Guillaume Durocher

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

I would like to briefly make the case for universal nationalism, a political ideology defined here as the belief that every nation should have a society and a state of its own. Put more simply still: Every people should have its own country; every people should rule itself, rather than be dictated by outsiders. I believe universal nationalism encapsulates many of the principles which would allow all human beings to live in a more peaceful, prosperous, and progressive world.

I base this upon two premises:

The desirability of the nation-state, that is to say of homogeneity and a common ethnic identity within societies.
The desirability of human (bio)diversity, that is to say of ethnic, cultural, political, economic, and other differences between societies.

Perhaps the most fundamental fact supporting the idea of universal nationalism is the reality of ethnocentrism. Human beings are inherently tribal and, with good reason, have evolved over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years to be so. In the modern era, with its mass communications and mass politics, this tribalism becomes fixated on the ethnic group. Whereas individuals in a society should all identify with each other as much as possible, as this is a prerequisite for the solidarity on which the public good always rests, we tend to find that identification fractures along ethnic lines.

This leads to a negative reason for universal nationalism: The multiculturalists’ persistent failure to create a truly cohesive and harmonious multiethnic society. It matters not whether the ethnic differences are based on language (Belgium, Canada), religion (Iraq, Syria), or race (the United States, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa . . .).[1] In each case, the lack of a common identity leads to a perpetual tribalization of politics. These problems are sometimes peaceful managed, but they quite often lead to horrific and otherwise unnecessary ethnic civil wars. In any case, the problems are intractable. People on average are simply not as willing to submit to authority, pay taxes, or give their life in war for another group, as they would for their own group. In a word: There is no solidarity.

This lack of solidarity tends to be worsened by the fact that ethnic groups tend to have different levels of educational and socio-economic performance. Ethnic pride is one of the most powerful emotions in the world, and the sight of another ethnic group doing better than one’s own inevitably leads to enormous amounts of ill-feeling. The less well-performing group will be underrepresented in the countries’ influential institutions and circles (e.g. politics, media, academia, law, corporations, the oligarchy . . .) and will tend to accuse of the better-performing group of ethnic nepotism or of biasing its use of power in its own interests, i.e. “racism.” Conversely, a better-performing ethnic group tends to resent the less well-performing ones for being a relative drag on society, committing more crimes and requiring more policing, dragging down school performance, providing less in taxes, and generally requiring more resources from the public purse in the form of welfare. These dynamics largely account for the endless conflicts and tensions between Jews, East Asians (e.g. Overseas Chinese), white gentiles, browns, and blacks whenever these groups inhabit the same countries.

Different ethnic groups also tend to have different preferences. Living in the same society and under the same government, each is not free to pursue them, but must accommodate ill-fitting common decisions, either decided unilaterally by one group or through awkward inter-ethnic compromises.

The result of all this is that multiethnic societies are, invariably, unions of resentment and mutual recriminations. Multiethnic societies are sometimes inevitable and must be peacefully be managed, but one should not pretend that these are either optimal or desirable.

Mirroring the intractable problems of the multiethnic society, there are positive reasons for universal nationalism. In short, in the nation-state man’s tribal instinct no longer tears the society apart, but brings it together. Instead of ethnic fragmentation and conflict, ethnocentrism in the nation-state turns the entire society into one extended family. This tends to both be emotionally compelling – hence the power of political nationalism throughout the modern era[2] – and to enable societies in which individuals are more willing to sacrifice for the public good, whether in the form of respecting public authority and the law, paying taxes, or defending against foreign aggression. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the powerful “cuddle hormone” oxytocin tends to promote both altruism (self-sacrifice) and ethnocentrism (in-group identity and preference), which makes perfect evolutionary sense.[3]

The nation-state, like a family, is both a preexisting biological and cultural reality, and a project to be carefully cultivated over the generations. In the ideal nation-state, common national identification is developed through the elimination of sub-national particularisms, either by assimilation to a common ethnic group or by minorities’ gaining independence in their own nation-states.

In the modern era, the European nation-state was found to be such a powerful form of socio-political organization that it was emulated throughout the world. Belief in the desirability of the nation-state was sharply weakened by the excesses of the world wars. But the nation-state is only a tool, a powerful but double-edged sword, and cannot be blamed for being misused. In any event, a nation-state bien compris would recognize kinship with closely-related nations and logically organize to defend common interests. Even after the Second World War, the liberal-conservative Jewish intellectual Raymond Aron, for one, continued to consider the nation-state to be “the political masterpiece.” Few would argue that Europeans’ relative abandonment of the nation-state – such as the creation of African and Islamic ghettos in the cities or the building of a flawed currency union – have improved their well-being or influence in the world.

Finally, the domestic homogeneity of the nation-state is desirable because it is the only way of guaranteeing humanity’s international diversity. Human beings, contra an evil Judeo-Christian doctrine, are not separate from the animal kingdom and the rest of Nature, but an integral part of it. Humanity, like any species, is subject to the same Darwinian rules of natural selection and struggle. It may survive and prosper and achieve higher forms of consciousness, or it may go extinct. Perhaps the best guarantee to ensure humanity’s maximal survivability is diversity, true diversity. True human diversity would be biological, cultural, political, economic, and otherwise.

The globalists argue that all political regimes, across the world, that are different from their own “liberal-democratic” ideals should be destroyed and that all countries should be integrated into a single hyper-consumerist global capitalist economic system. Thus, the Earth is being consumed to fill our bellies, but she cannot sustain all Third World countries achieving Western standards of living, the rainforests being destroyed and hundreds of millions of years of accumulated fossil-fuels being consumed for our vulgar pleasures.

The globalists also argue that – at least concerning Western countries – that ethnic homogeneity should be destroyed, that America should be “globalized” into a raza cósmica and that Europe should be Afro-Islamized. They call this “diversity.” But the equation of ethnic heterogeneity with “diversity” is very misleading insofar as, actually – notwithstanding their genetic or linguistic differences, or an intractable tendency towards self-segregation and the formation of subcultures – different ethnic gorups in a given society must anyway must submit to a common political and ideological model to live together. Is the elimination of European ethnicities and identity, and the subjugation of the entire world to a single “liberal-democratic” ideology and capitalist economic system, really “diverse”?

I posit the contrary: Subjugating all of humanity to a single economic and ideological model means putting all our eggs in one basket. If it is seriously flawed, as it surely is or will occasionally be, that means we would all suffer from its failures and risk extinction.

Instead, humanity really should be biologically, culturally, politically, and economically diverse. Thus, with every new era, each society will evolve and react somewhat differently. While one may stagnate or even collapse, others may survive and prosper. The innovations of one part of humanity – the Japanese, say – can be adopted and adapted to other parts. Would the elimination of Japan’s uniqueness through Africanization or Islamization really benefit the rest of humanity, or even Africa and the Islamic World? Most would think not. And the same is true of Europe and Europeans. We can ask simply: Would, as is currently proposed, the decline and steady disappearance ethnic Europeans really benefit the Third World? Given the lack of innovation of Latin America, Africa, and the Islamic World, this seems hard to believe. And certainly, few would argue that Haiti or Zimbabwe have benefited much from white extinction in those countries.

I believe Europeans, like any group, should take their own side. But many of our people, partly due to their in-born generosity and partly due to a misleading education, are insensitive to arguments of self-interest. For them the good must be couched exclusively in universal terms. These people are disturbed by the growing inequality and social fragmentation evident throughout the Western world yet are powerless to understand why this happening or articulate a valid response. For them, I answer: Nationhood is a supreme moral good necessary to a solidary and harmonious society, and therefore all nations, particularly our dear European nations, should be preserved and cultivated.

Notes

1. The nearest thing I have found to an exception to this rule is Swizterland, a very successful country in which the diversity between Protestants and Catholics, and between German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-speakers appears to pose few problems. Scholars have proposed that one reason Switzerland is so peaceful is because these groups, while united in a fairly weak federal state (with central government spending of just 10% of GDP), are sharply separated in their own largely self-ruling cantons. One should also not neglect that Switzerland’s ethnic diversity has in fact led to tensions and conflict throughout its history and required very peculiar, in some respects stifling and fragile, political structures. Véronique Greenwood, “Scientists Who Model Ethnic Violence Find that in Switzerland, Separate is Key to Peace,” Discover blog, October 12, 2011. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/10/12/scie... ^[2]

2. Indeed, nationalism is probably the single-most-powerful and most-exploited political sentiment in modern history, including by political movements who might be theoretically opposed to it. For instance, the twentieth-century revolutionary Chinese and Vietnamese communist movements and the various “anti-racist” anti-colonial movements, were quite obviously motivated and empowered by ethnocentric sentiment against overbearing foreign powers.

3. Carsten De Dreu et al, “The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans,” Science, June 2010. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5984/1408 ^[3] “Oxytocin increases social altruism,” Science Daily, November 26, 2015.

mardi, 29 septembre 2015

Invitation to Become Who We Are

BECOME WHO WE ARE
10/31/15
Washington, DC

Registration: http://NPIEvents.com
Eventbrite: http://becomewhoweare.eventbrite.com

00:05 Publié dans Actualité, Evénement, Nouvelle Droite | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : actualité, nouvelle droite, nouvelle droite américaine, american new right, événement, washington, états-unis, guillaume faye, jack donovan, keith preston, richard spencer | | del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg | Facebook

lundi, 10 février 2014

Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right

Foreword to Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right

By Kevin MacDonald

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

Perhaps it’s best to start off with what New Right vs. Old Right ^[2]is not. Greg Johnson does not assail his readers with statistics to prove the Jewish role in the decline and impending fall of whites in America and elsewhere. He does not discuss the corruption of the media and the academic world and how they got that way. He does not discuss data on race differences in IQ and criminality to explain the behavior of non-white America. He doesn’t aim to refute the current mantra that race is nothing more than a social construct designed to provide white people with unearned privilege.

Those intellectual battles are over, and we have won, although the mainstream media and academic world continue to promulgate cultural Marxist blather as if it were a set of truths set in stone. The starting point for NRvOR is that the media, the academic world, and the political process are hopelessly corrupt. So where do we go from here?

Greg Johnson’s basic point is that we must work to create a metapolitics of explicit white identity—that is, a movement that will develop “the intellectual and cultural foundations for effective White Nationalist politics in North America, so that we can ultimately create a white homeland or homelands on this continent.”

Greg is one of the reasons why I think this is a feasible project. A very great reason for optimism is that there are so many intelligent, well-spoken people who “get it”—who understand that whites around the world are in decline and that there will be dire consequences if whites are unable to establish white homelands. People like Greg Johnson are part of a hugely important trend. I have recently met a great many young, intelligent, well-educated, and well-spoken people at conferences dedicated to activism on behalf of the interests of white America—the exact opposite of the image of uneducated, violent males sporting swastikas and missing a couple of teeth that has been so carefully crafted by our hostile elites.

Despite growing up with a constant barrage of multicultural, anti-white propaganda beginning in elementary school, these individuals understand that at this point America is an unfolding disaster as whites are increasingly displaced throughout the economic and political spectrum. They are acutely aware that whites are a minority of births in America and that whites will be a minority within their lifetimes—a minority with diminished prospects and increasingly victimized by the non-white majority, many of whom retain historical grudges against white America. It is very likely that the America of the future will be beset with chronic conflict among different racial/ethnic groups. The idea that America or the West can avoid such conflicts as their societies become ever more factionalized is magical and utopian.

The goal, therefore, is not, a “supremacism” that is in any way invidious. Rather, “the best way to ensure peace and good will among peoples and preserve human racial, cultural, and religious diversity is to give each distinct group a homeland where it can live and develop according to its own distinct nature and destiny.”

This is an attitude that seems to me to be pervasive in the white advocacy movement. It at once defuses a very effective bit of rhetoric of the Left—repeated with predictable regularity by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. We are white advocates, people who, as Greg phrases it in several places following Michael Polignano, “take our own side” in issues of racial/ethnic conflict. And in taking our own side, we are doing exactly what racial/ethnic groups have done from time immemorial. No one accuses the Koreans of “Korean supremacism” for adopting policies aimed at retaining Korean demographic and cultural predominance. And imagine the horror by Western elites at a proposal to flood African countries with whites so that native Africans cease to be a political majority.

Make no mistake about it. The policies that are making whites minorities in lands they have dominated for hundreds or (in the case of Europe) thousands of years are not driven by utopian dreams of a raceless future, except among gullible, intimidated whites. The non-whites who are so enthusiastically embracing the decline of white political and cultural power are driven by hatred toward whites as a people and as a culture. This is a major theme of my writing on Jewish influence, and apparent as well in a host of non-white intellectuals and activists.

Greg Johnson received his Ph.D. in philosophy, and it shows. His forte is the well-developed argument presented in a lucid, easily understood style. There will be no complaints about this book being filled with turgid prose. And I can’t find any major disagreements.

I was particularly struck by several points. For example, unlike the European New Right, Greg is an advocate of white racial nationalism:

insofar as the breakdown of European national identities and the blending of European stocks in our North American context forces us (1) to give greater place to biological race and other deep roots of common European identity, and (2) to put greater emphasis on the Jewish question, given the role of American Jewry in promoting anti-white policies both in the United States and in white countries worldwide.

Right. As a biologist, there is always the tendency to see matters like race as a decontextualized matter. DNA, after all, is DNA. But American whites are indeed a very intermixed lot—a successful example of a European melting pot. In effect, we have created a new biological reality not present in any European country.

Nevertheless, we must remember that Europeans are in general closely related biologically, particularly in the north and east of Europe, as recent data continue to show. Indeed,

typical pairs of individuals drawn from across Europe have a good chance of sharing long stretches of [identical genes] by descent, even when they are separated by thousands of kilometers. We can furthermore conclude that pairs of individuals across Europe are reasonably likely to share common genetic ancestors within the last 1,000 years, and are certain to share many within the last 2,500 years.[1]

The white race is indeed a biological as well as a cultural reality. This biological reality forms a powerful basis for a scientifically based understanding of a commonality of interests wherever whites are living, whether in Europe or in the European diaspora.

And, yes, although the organized Jewish community has pursued the same set of policies favoring displacement-level immigration and multiculturalism throughout the West, Jewish influence varies in different Western societies. This brings up the need for developing a good model of cultural diffusion within the West. For example, academic culture is self-consciously international. If indeed the main impetus for the leftward shift is Jewish involvement in the Left beginning in the United States with the movements described in The Culture of Critique, it is not at all surprising that this culture spread to other areas with less Jewish influence given the pre-eminence of the U.S. in the post-World War II Western world. An aspiring academic in, say, Norway or Finland, who subscribes to a White Nationalist worldview would find himself ostracized from international academic societies, while countrymen who subscribed to the reigning cultural Marxism would find international recognition.

The same phenomenon occurs in the political realm, as, for example, when Austrian politician Jörg Haider joined a coalition government in 2000. This resulted in huge international pressure, with EU member states refusing to cooperate with the Austrian government and Israel withdrawing its ambassador. The assault on the Golden Dawn party in Greece is a more recent example. Any Western government that opposed continued immigration and multiculturalism would be subjected to similar pressures.

The culture of Western suicide exists throughout the white world, and dominating the most powerful country in the West goes a very long way to dominating the entire Western world, particularly given the fact that Jews often control media even in countries with very tiny Jewish populations, as with the Bonnier family in Norway and Sweden.

Greg does not shy away from discussing difficult issues having to do with National Socialism, supporting the ideal of an organic, hierarchical, meritocratic society dedicated to advancing the interests of whites and rejecting “party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide.”

I agree entirely. It’s a very good strategy to confront such issues head-on rather than to leave them to be discussed solely by our enemies. It’s the same with the holocaust. The holocaust is simply not important for white advocacy, and whatever happened is not the responsibility of any living whites; it’s something that must be simply “stepped over,” to use Jonathan Bowden’s felicitous phrase. Even if the holocaust were proved to have never occurred to the satisfaction of one and all, there is more than enough resentment by Jews about their past in Europe and the United States to fuel the hostility toward the West that has been such a prominent feature of the organized Jewish community and so many influential Jewish individuals. The reality of Jews as a hostile elite aiming to displace white elites throughout the West would not change at all.

I should think that it would be uncontroversial that the white advocacy movement must be metapolitical, since there is a crying need to build up a self-confident, prideful culture than can eventually become mainstream. Greg’s argument that it is premature to pursue nationalist party politics—that at this point the money can be better used in education and organizing—will be more controversial. The question is whether these are really incompatible goals and, as Greg rightly notes, “We share the same broad aims, but we differ as to the best means of achieving them. We need to acknowledge these differences frankly, then divide our camp and pursue our common aims by the various paths that seem best to us.” Different ways should be attempted in the hope that eventually something will work. In the meantime, we must be as inclusive as possible.

In fact, nationalist parties have made substantial headway in Europe, and many observers are expecting a significant representation of nationalist parties to result from the 2014 European Parliament elections. With increasing success, the messages of these parties have inevitably become more widely known. Significantly, these parties have not developed with an explicitly pro-white or pro-ethnic nationalism agenda, but have rather attempted to stay under the radar of political correctness on race and on Jewish influence, basing themselves on an implicit ethnic nationalism that opposes immigration and multiculturalism for a whole host of reasons apart from the danger of ethnic swamping that is in fact lurking in the background. Not surprisingly, these messages are often most effective with the white working class, the group that has suffered the most from the immigration tsunami.

Indeed, I believe that model of change that I think most probable is that the revolution will begin in Europe with the success of one of these parties, particularly if it occurs in a pivotal country like France where there is a clear possibility that the Front National will obtain power, and in a context where other nationalist parties have substantial representation in other areas of Europe so that an effective countermovement of isolation and ostracism cannot develop. I think we are rapidly approaching such a situation now. Compared to America, Europe has the advantage of very ancient cultures and identities that are mortally endangered by this new dispensation. Once such a party gains power, then more explicit messages of ethnic and racial interests may become more acceptable, paving the way for more the dissemination of a theoretical framework based explicitly on ethnic interests.

I worry that in the absence of near-term political goals, a purely metapolitical movement is in danger of being a detached inward-looking, even self-serving elite. For one thing, the Left is completely in control of the academic scene and very actively— indeed passionately—polices any deviation from political correctness. This is quite unlike the situation in American universities where Franz Boas was able to control academic anthropology by the early 20th century, and several of the New York Intellectuals obtained positions at elite universities well before 1960. This is a very formidable barrier to the spread of an elite culture of white identity given the close relationship between universities and intellectual life in the West. There was no complaint from the academic world when the 1965 immigration law opened up immigration to the United States to all peoples of the world. Indeed, in several Western countries, Australia comes to mind, the movement to open up immigration to non-whites originated in the universities.

Even in America, with so many barriers against us, political action inside or outside the context of the electoral process could be a positive force for change. Americans need to see noisy, intelligent, attractive, committed white people marching in the street with signs opposed to immigration, multiculturalism, and the strident ethnic politics of other groups; there is a need for a steady drumbeat of political advertising where pro-white themes, whether explicitly white or not, are repeated over and over to the point that they become part of the furniture of life even if winning elections remains a distant goal.

Such movements may be particularly important for whites with less education who may be turned off by an elite culture of white identity. The white working class in fact has been the prime loser in the cultural changes promoted by our hostile elites. A great many of them are angry and, with less to lose than so many well-educated whites, they are an important natural constituency.

In any case, I wholeheartedly agree that we have to be open to a diversity of approaches.

Greg’s essay, “The Moral Factor,” raises the important issue of moral motivation which I think is an aspect of Western uniqueness. One does not see Chinese people agonizing over the fact that the Han Chinese greatly expanded their territory at the expense of other peoples. Nor does one see the Bantu peoples of Africa worrying about the ethics of displacing other African peoples as they spread far and wide from their homeland in Central Africa, including into South Africa where their treatment at the hands of white South Africans became Exhibit A for white evil during the apartheid era; nor do the Bantu-speaking peoples agonize about the widespread practice of slavery in Africa. Arabs do not apologize about their conquests in the name of Islam or their centuries-old role in slavery and the slave trade. As Greg notes, the Spaniards have apologized for the Reconquista that expelled the Muslims from Spain, but there are no apologies from the Muslims for the Conquista.

Whites are the only people to abolish slavery, and a great many of the activists and the fundamental popular sentiments so crucial in the ultimate victory over slavery were motivated by moral idealism, including especially empathy for slaves.[2] They did so despite very real costs to many individuals and to society as a whole, and all this occurred before the rise of the Jewish hostile elite. Indeed, this unique characteristic of whites is exploited by Jewish intellectuals for their own hateful ends. My basic theory is that this is a holdover of Northern European hunter-gatherer culture, where one’s status in a group is based on reputation for moral behavior (honesty, fair dealing) rather than on kinship relations—an aspect of Western individualism.

So I agree that “even if White Nationalism is politically meaningful, people will resist it if they think it is immoral. But they will move heaven and earth to establish white homelands if they think it is the right thing to do.” We must win the moral battle. The problem is that “our people overwhelmingly believe that our cause is unjust.” And yet, the moral argument for white survival is obvious and compelling. Fundamentally, our basic survival as a people and as a culture are threatened. As Greg notes, “the present system is not merely anti-white, it is genocidally anti-white.”

That’s enough for me to mark the present system as utterly depraved morally. It is profoundly immoral to inflict multiculturalism upon the white populations of the West, given that ethnic conflict is absolutely predictable, based upon everything we know of the bloody history of ethnically divided societies. This is especially the case given that support for multiculturalism and support for their own demographic and political eclipse have never been majority views among whites. Whether in Australia or New Zealand, North America or Europe—in every case throughout the West, immigration and multi-culturalism have been projects of media, academic, and political elites. These changes have been top-down, not at all bottom-up.

We must pay more attention to the morality of infringing upon the legitimate rights and interests of the white majority. Everyone has rights and everyone has interests. The interests and rights of whites as a majority are no less morally legitimate than those of any other group. Whites must jettison the ideal of moral universalism and ask what is good for the future of whites.

On the basis of this collection of essays, Greg Johnson has a compelling vision of the impending disaster facing the people and culture of the West and what we can do about it right now. It is presented in a highly readable, well-argued manner that at once shows the power and confidence of the developing metapolitical culture of a Western renaissance. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

January 15, 2014

Note:

Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right is available for purchase here ^[2].

Notes

1. Ralph Peter and Graham Coop, “The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe,” PLOS Biology, vol. 11, no. 5 (May 7, 2013): e1001555. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.100155

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001555&representation=PDF ^[3]

2. Kevin MacDonald, “Empathy and Moral Universalism as Components of White Pathology: The Movement to Abolish Slavery in England,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 39–63.

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

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[2] New Right vs. Old Right : https://secure.counter-currents.com/new-right-vs-old-right/

[3] http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001555&representation=PDF: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001555&representation=PDF

New Right vs. Old Right

Greg Johnson
Foreword by Kevin MacDonald
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013
248 pages

Kindle E-book: $5.99

Nook E-book: $5.99

Hardcover and paperback release date: February 21, 2014

hardcover: $35

Note: The first 100 hardcovers ordered through this site will be numbered, signed, and personalized by the author. Unless otherwise indicated, the books will be personalized to the name that appears on the purchaser’s mailing address.

paperback: $20

Dr. Greg Johnson draws upon the ideas of the European New Right to promote a new approach to White Nationalist politics in North America. New Right vs. Old Right collects 32 essays in which Dr. Johnson sets out his vision of White Nationalist “metapolitics” and distinguishes it from Fascism and National Socialism (the “Old Right”), as well as conservatism and classical liberalism (the “Phony Right”).

Dr. Johnson rejects the Old Right’s party politics, totalitarianism, imperialism, and genocide in favor of the metapolitical project of constructing a hegemonic White Nationalist consciousness within a pluralistic society. He argues that White Nationalists are too dependent on the model of hierarchical organizations and need also to work on creating resilient lateral networks. He offers New Rightist answers to a number of disputed questions within the White Nationalist community, including white culpability for our decline, Hitler and National Socialism, the Jewish question, the holocaust, the role of women, Christianity vs. paganism, and the relationships of populism, elitism, and democracy. He sets out some basic principles for creating a growing, resilient, networked movement. Finally, he criticizes distractions and dead-ends like “mainstreaming,” conservatism, “premature” populism, and political violence.

Engagingly written and constructively critical, Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right is an important contribution to the emerging North American New Right.

Praise for New Right vs. Old Right

“Greg Johnson’s basic point is that we must work to create a metapolitics of explicit white identity—that is, a movement that will develop ‘the intellectual and cultural foundations for effective White Nationalist politics in North America, so that we can ultimately create a white homeland or homelands on this continent.’ Greg is one of the reasons why I think this is a feasible project. . . . Greg received his Ph.D. in philosophy, and it shows. His forte is the well-developed argument presented in a lucid, easily understood style. Nobody can complain about this book being filled with turgid prose. And I can’t find any major disagreements.”

—Kevin MacDonald, from the Foreword

“In New Right vs. Old Right, Greg Johnson lays out his vision for a pro-white movement more focused on ideas, education, and communication than on politics or thuggery. True to this vision, his writing is extremely accessible. Throughout this collection, Johnson breaks down complex philosophical concepts and challenging ideas into tight, efficient sentences and effective explanations. Johnson doesn’t drone on trying to sound clever. Like an enthusiastic professor, he truly wants his readers to understand why he believes it is morally right for whites—and all peoples—to determine their own collective destinies.”

—Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men

“Dr. Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right delineates the differences between two ‘Rights,’ without repudiating the common philosophical origins of both in opposing egalitarianism and other passé ideologies that continue to dominate much of the world. The primary value of this collection of essays, however, is that Dr. Johnson asks the perennial question, from our side: “what is truth?” In doing so he lays the foundations for a morality of the New Right. This book is therefore unique in the English-speaking Rightist milieu that was, for much of the post-1945 era, poorly served in comparison to its counterparts in Europe. As such, Dr. Johnson’s book will be of relevance to many beyond the North American New Right, of which he is a founding father.”

—Kerry Bolton, author of Artists of the Right

“Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right is an important compilation that describes the North American New Right and explains how ‘this thing of ours’ differs from both the Old Right and the European New Right.

“Old Right terms like ‘National Socialism’ and ‘fascism’ do not accurately describe what we believe. We reject the narrow nationalism of the Old Right in favor of pan-Europeanism, and we also reject the totalitarianism and apocalyptic visions of bloodshed and genocide that are associated, rightly or wrongly, with Old Right thought and that are promoted by modern-day Nazis.

“On the other hand, the North American New Right differs from our European New Right counterparts: we reject their emphasis on narrow nationalist particularisms, their Continental existentialism that eschews Anglo empiricism, their naïve knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and their weakness on biological race and ‘the JQ.’

“The North American New Right is a new movement, neither constrained by a reactionary idealization of the nationalist past, nor beholden to the intellectual errors of the today’s Old World nationalists.

“You may not agree with everything in this volume. But there is no rigid ‘party line.’ There’s much room for discussion, disagreement, and debate as we articulate our worldview. We are still feeling our way around in the dark that precedes the new dawn, attempting to find our way on the proper path.

“This work represents an important signpost along that path. So, agree or disagree, I am confident that the readers will find this volume useful and illuminating. I invite the reader to join us in our crusade to reshape the future.”

—Ted Sallis

CONTENTS

Foreword by Kevin MacDonald

1. Introduction

Politics and Metapolitics

2. New Right vs. Old Right
3. Hegemony
4. Metapolitics and Occult Warfare
5. Theory and Practice
6. Reflections on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political
7. The Relevance of Philosophy to Political Change
8. The Moral Factor
9. The Psychology of Conversion

Disputed Questions

10. Our Fault?
11. The Burden of Hitler
12. Dealing with the Holocaust
13. White Nationalism & Jewish Nationalism
14. The Christian Question in White Nationalism
15. Racial Civil Religion
16. That Old-Time Liberalism
17. The Woman Question in White Nationalism
18. Notes on Populism, Elitism, & Democracy
19. The Perils of Positive Thinking
20. The Politics of Resentment
21. “Worse is Better”

Building a Movement

22. Learning from the Left
23. Explicit White Nationalism
24. Secret Agents
25. The Psychology of Apostasy
26. First, Do No Harm

Distractions and Dead Ends

27. White Nationalists and the Political “Mainstream”
28. Why Conservatives STILL Can’t Win
29. Status Competition, Jews, and Racialist Mainstreaming
30. The Laugh Test
31. Premature Populism
32. On Violence

Index

About the Author

Greg Johnson, Ph.D., is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd. and its journal North American New Right. He is author of Confessions of a Reluctant Hater (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2010) and Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).

samedi, 21 septembre 2013

Kerry Bolton: Revolution from Above

Kerry Bolton: Revolution from Above

By Manfred Kleine-Hartlage

Ex: http://www.sezession.de

Jeder, der einmal versucht oder auch nur theoretisch erwogen hat, einen größeren geistig-politischen Umschwung herbeizuführen – von einer Revolution ganz zu schweigen –, weiß, daß dazu vor allem eines erforderlich ist: Geld.

Geld bringt Journalisten dazu, bestimmte Themen hoch- oder niederzuschreiben, Geld veranlaßt Professoren, ihre Erkenntnisinteressen denen ihrer Drittmittelgeber anzupassen, Geld ermöglicht es, Zeitungen und Fernsehsender zu kaufen, mit Geld kann man Kurse für Agitatoren und solche, die es werden wollen, bezahlen, mit Geld eine Infrastruktur von „Nichtregierungsorganisationen“ unterhalten, und wenn all dies nicht reicht, kann man mit Geld Waffen kaufen.

Obwohl dies so offenkundig ist, daß man es schon banal nennen muß, ist es zugleich ein Tabuthema. Jeder weiß zwar, daß etwa die Bolschewiki eine Organisation von „Berufsrevolutionären“ waren; und jeder, der darüber nachdenkt, könnte sich sagen, daß Berufsrevolutionäre – wie alle anderen Berufstätigen auch – auf Arbeitgeber oder Kunden angewiesen sind, die sie bezahlen. Und doch gilt die Oktoberrevolution bis heute als das Werk eines gewissen Lenin, nicht etwa als das seiner Geldgeber. Allenfalls gesteht man zu, daß die Millionensummen, die die deutsche Regierung während des Ersten Weltkriegs zur Verfügung stellte, eine gewisse Rolle gespielt haben mögen. Daß entsprechende Summen aber schon lange vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg an die Bolschewisten und andere revolutionäre Organisationen flossen, und daß sie keineswegs aus Deutschland stammten, sondern aus amerikanischen Finanzkreisen: Das ist zwar kein Geheimnis, sondern wohldokumentiert; im offiziösen Geschichtsbild kommt es aber nicht vor.

Dabei ist die Russische Revolution noch dasjenige Thema, bei dem der kausale Zusammenhang zwischen den Interessen schwerreicher Finanziers und der Entfesselung der Revolution am ehesten thematisiert werden kann. Wer dagegen fragt, warum 1789 wie auf Kommando in ganz Frankreich Agitatoren auftauchten, die ein gar nicht so unzufriedenes Volk aufzuhetzen verstanden, sieht sich schnell als „Verschwörungstheoretiker“ abgestempelt, und erst recht gilt dies für den, der den ominösen „Zeitgeist“ hinterfragt, der – man weiß nicht wie – seit rund hundert Jahren, spätestens aber seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, grundsätzlich nur von links zu wehen scheint.

Wiederum ist es nicht wirklich ein Geheimnis, daß dieser Zeitgeist keineswegs von selbst entstanden ist, und es ist auch kein Geheimnis, wer seine Entstehung organisiert und finanziert hat: Die verantwortlichen Akteure rühmen sich dessen sogar und geben in ihren Veröffentlichungen detailliert Auskunft darüber. Und doch haben diese allgemein zugänglichen Informationen kaum Eingang ins herrschende politische Bewußtsein gefunden.

In seinem Buch „Revolution from Above“ ^[2], das zur Zeit leider nur auf Englisch verfügbar ist, hat der neuseeländische Autor Kerry Bolton diese Informationen zusammengetragen und zu einem theoretisch überzeugenden und empirisch unanfechtbar untermauerten Ganzen zusammengefügt. Er weist überzeugend – und dies ausschließlich auf der Basis von Selbstzeugnissen der einschlägigen Akteure! – nach, daß praktisch alle intellektuellen und politischen Strömungen der Linken im 20. Jahrhundert, soweit sie nicht von der UdSSR finanziert wurden, nur aufgrund der milliardenschweren Unterstützung durch eine winzige Schicht von amerikanischen Superreichen und deren Stiftungen zum Zuge kommen konnten. Zumindest hätten sie ohne diese Unterstützung bei weitem nicht die Durchschlagskraft haben können, die sie haben.

Ein solcher Befund mag denjenigen überraschen, der den Gegensatz von Kapitalisten und Sozialisten immer noch für unüberbrückbar hält. Tatsächlich war er das nie. Die Linke leistet dem Kapital vielmehr gute Dienste bei der Zerstörung hergebrachter Strukturen, Bindungen und Werte. Sie planiert damit das Gelände, auf dem der globale Kapitalismus errichtet wird. Sie zerstört reale, gewachsene Solidarität im Namen einer fiktiven und bloß ideologisch postulierten, und sie erzeugt damit die Gesellschaft von atomisierten Einzelnen, die auf ihre Rolle als Produzenten und Konsumenten zurückgeworfen werden und als Masse so lenkbar und nutzbar sind wie eine Viehherde. Das gilt für die russischen und chinesischen Kommunisten, die eine traditionelle agrarische Gesellschaft ins Industriezeitalter katapultierten und schließlich in den Weltmarkt einbanden; es gilt genauso für die westliche Linke mit ihrem Kampf gegen Nation, Tradition, Religion und Familie.

Boltons Buch ist die passende Ergänzung zu meinen eigenen Ausführungen zu diesem Thema (in „Die liberale Gesellschaft und ihr Ende“ ^[3]). Wo ich die Zusammenhänge abstrakt analysiere, nennt er konkrete Namen, Summen, Profiteure und Strategien. Steinchen für Steinchen entsteht dabei das Mosaik einer langfristigen Strategie der amerikanischen Plutokratie, die auf nicht mehr und nicht weniger hinausläuft als auf eine Weltrevolution – eben auf die Revolution von oben, der das Buch seinen Titel verdankt.

Solche Bücher können auch entmutigen: Wie will man denn, so mag mancher Leser fragen, einem Feind entgegentreten, der an allen Fronten unter Einsatz schier unbegrenzter Mittel auf dem Vormarsch ist? Ist da nicht jeder Widerstand von vornherein zumm Scheitern verurteilt?

Ich selbst ziehe den umgekehrten Schluß: Wenn der Feind Milliardensummen einsetzt, dann deshalb, weil er es nötig hat. Wer ganze Völker mit einem geschlossenen System von Lügen indoktrinieren muss, muß wesentlich mehr investieren als der, der es sich leisten kann, mit Wahrheiten zu operieren. Freilich rechtfertigt auch diese Feststellung nicht eine in manchen Kreisen immer noch verbreitete naive rechte Sozialromantik, die ohne professionelle Strukturen auszukommen glaubt, weil die Wahrheit sich allein durch den Idealismus ihrer Verfechter durchsetzen werde.

Kerry Boltons Buch ist insofern kein Anlaß zu Resignation, wohl aber zu produktiver Ernüchterung: Wir kommen mit weniger Geld aus als der Gegner, aber auch wir werden viele Millionen Euro benötigen, um einen spürbaren politischen Effekt zu erzielen. Es wird Zeit, daß diese Einsicht sich unter den besser betuchten Sympathisanten der politischen Rechten herumspricht.

Article printed from Sezession im Netz: http://www.sezession.de

URL to article: http://www.sezession.de/40908/kerry-bolton-revolution-from-above.html

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.sezession.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/kerry-bolton-revolution-from-above.jpg

[2] „Revolution from Above“: http://www.arktos.com/revolution-from-above.html

[3] „Die liberale Gesellschaft und ihr Ende“: http://antaios.de/detail/index/sArticle/314/sCategory/13

samedi, 17 août 2013

On Yockey’s America

The Jitterbugs & the Vabanquespieler :
On Yockey’s America

By Michael O'Meara

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

“For us there is but one crime: to be untrue to ourselves.”

– Francis Parker Yockey, 1953

The “Judeo-African cacophony” mesmerizing the jitterbugs on the dance floors of the Thirties was part of a larger program to debauch the conservative Christian rhythms of American life.

Such at least was the argument Francis Parker Yockey made in his first published work, “The Tragedy of Youth” (1939).[1]

In this early piece, full of promise and prefiguring aspects of his later critique of American life, the 22-year-old Yockey depicted an America whose youth had begun to keep step with the intonations and inflections of its Jewish bandmasters.

Besides the folly of their un-European cavorting, Americans, he thought, were acting out the worldview of an alien-minded minority in control of the country’s media and entertainment.

Drinking, smoking, and other bad habits glamorized by Hollywood became, in this spirit, marks of sophistication; sports were fetishized; public opinion was shaped and reshaped to legitimate machinations of every sort.

More seriously, God was “replaced by lust, the priest by the psychoanalyst, and the hero and heroine by the promiscuous lounge-lizard and the glittering harlot.”[2]

For the more educated, there were books and magazines promoting class war, racial equality, and anti-European (especially anti-German) hatred – aimed at destroying “whatever exclusiveness, national feeling, or racial instinct” still part of the American people.[3]

Institutionalizing these subversions, Roosevelt’s New Deal, the granddaddy of the present anti-white system, took on debts and obligations favoring the Left forces – themselves puppets of the international financiers and bankers responsible for the deception and dissimulation entrancing the jitterbugs.

Against this backdrop of cultural distortion, usurious state policy, and agitations favoring causes alien to American affairs, the country’s youth, Yockey claimed, was being conditioned to fight as conscripts in liberal, Jewish, and Communist causes inimical to their national interest.

***

The Catholic-educated prodigy of German-Irish descent — already speaking to public meetings of the German-American Bund (40 percent of whose members were Irish), Pelley’s Silver Shirts, and Father Coughlin’s “clerico-fascists” – had an understanding of the New Deal State and its innovative forms of corporate-financial-cultural control –that was virtually unique among American anti-liberals, an understanding inspired by the Conservative Revolution of Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, and Karl Haushofer.

Since the late Forties, Yockey’s opus has animated much of Europe’s vanguard and been vindicated, in the main, by subsequent events. He nevertheless remains a prophet without honor in his native land.

The True America

A certain ambiguity runs through Yockey’s understanding of America. On the one hand, he saw it as a colonial offshoot of European civilization and thus an organic facet of its High Culture.

On the other, he knew that from the beginning there were problems with the “new nation” — problems that disposed it not just to alien influences, but to demonic entreprises endemic to the capitalism that came with its Protestant revolt against Gothic Europe.

The line between inner disposition and outer subversion is accordingly blurred in Yockey – as it was within the larger metahistorical forces affecting the “country” itself.

***

Basic to Yockey’s understanding of America was his belief that it was, at root, an integral and organic part of Europe.

Whenever he spoke of “the true America,” as opposed to the America that had been taken over by the “culture distorters” and become “the enemy of Europe,” it was the America that had originated as a European colony — the America whose “culture” was a branch of Europe’s High Culture — the America whose people still bore traces of the noble, heroic, and Gothic character of their ancestors.

“All colonials,” Yockey felt, “have a certain plane of their being which is susceptible to the centripetal attraction of the mother-soil.”[4] For they share a common history with “the parent-organism” – no matter how much the distorters might insist otherwise.

The true American – i.e., the American whose highest loyalty was to his “mother soil and father culture” – thus instinctively isolated himself from all efforts to betray Europe: like French Canadians and South African Boers who refused to be conscripted by Washington in the Jews’ war against the Third Reich.[5]

A child of European, especially German, culture, Yockey alone among American anti-liberals saw that America’s origin had tied its destiny to that of Europe, and that no matter how many cities the colony built, no matter how many millions of automobiles it turned out every season — no matter, even, how successful it was in reducing Europe to rubble and occupying it — no matter, it (the colony) would never, not in a thousand years, surpass the achievement and destiny of its mother soil and father culture.

To even think it was philosophically absurd.

***

The country that grew from a small, 17th-century European settlement on the Eastern seaboard faced “a vast hinterland populated with hostile savages and untouched with any form of civilization.”[6]

This would be the start of America’s abnormal development, for its frontier represented a confrontation with nature, very unlike the European frontier, which formed a distinct boundary between rival power-units with contending cultural or religious styles and was thus a boundary that of necessity enhanced the state-idea among Europeans — most brilliantly so in Hohenzollern Prussia.[7]

America’s European settlers – especially its hardy Scots-Irish pioneers, who conquered its frontier through “personal will” – would do so with the hardiness and fearlessness once characteristic of the European race, in its urge for great distance and conquest – but, alas, without the formative influence of a regnant state.

(No Celt, anyway, could possibly bear the state, for its alien heel has been kept on his neck for all its history — except, of course, for those English Celts, whose Germanic language and ways made them so different).[8]

But if the absence of a regnant state enhanced the Americans’ admirable sense of “self-reliance, resourcefulness, bravery, and independence,” it also undermined the European idea of the state as the superpersonal expression of the nation’s will.[9]

America and Europe’s High Culture

Revilo Oliver, whose materialism and rationalism exemplified Yockey’s notion of 19th-century thought, claimed his premises were Spengler’s conclusions.[10] Oliver didn’t quite understand, though, that Yockey wasn’t an orthodox Spenglerian — but rather a radical revisionist intent on turning Spenglerian pessimism into a fresh assertion of ascendent European life.[11]

Like his mentor (Spengler), Yockey saw civilizations as spiritual organisms, with distinct ages or cycles attuned to the growth (the possibility) of the inner idea (the “soul”) inherent in their culture. The “organism,” as such, takes the human material at its disposal and “impresses it into its service.”

Unlike Spengler, Yockey thought there was still a good deal of life left in Western culture and thus that it was vital the culture remain true to itself.

But here America’s problem began. While the “true America” was an offshoot of Europe’s High Culture, the country (first as colony, then as sovereign state) lacked an indigenous culture class and a significant nativist articulation, which, as a colony, left it with shallow roots in its mother soil. America especially lacked an inner organic sense of mission or necessity. Without this sense, it had only a creedal identity based on a crusading Prostestanism opened to all the world and ordered solely for the sake of its predetaory capitalism.

The 19th-century ideas of rationalism and materialism, shorn of all faith and instinct, would thus dominate Americans in ways they never dominated Europeans (at least not until 1945). In dismissing all non-utilitarian and non-economic considerations, such rationalist-materialist ideas left Americans increasingly indifferent to Europe’s destiny, and ultimately defenseless before the ethnocidal dangers intrinsic to their purely monetary (i.e., cultureless and thus amoral) enterprise.

***

This was especially the case once liberal modernity roared onto the scene (1861–65 was the transitional period), turning rationalism and materialism into the unmitigated rule of money and commerce. Money, Yockey held, was the enemy of authority, being private, individualistic, and, ultimately, irresponsible.[12]

Here again, America, product of England’s predatory Whig Oligarchy, differed from Continental Europe. For the High Culture relegates the productive and reproductive aspects of life (the economic aspects, however vital they may be to survival) — to the lowest order of existence.[13]

The American, as such, was preeminently a “capitalist” — motivated by the will to accumulate, prosper, and thus demonstrate his individual salvation. As Spengler put it, he was a Calvinist rather than a Pietist, a Viking rather than a knight, and a pirate whose instinct favored personal gain and not the knight’s devotion to Duty and Destiny.[14]

There was, as a consequence, no aristocratic and priestly estates in America to serve as the culture’s guardian, only economic forces oriented to the lower animal aspects of existence.

In the New World, the Faustian will to power of Europe’s High Culture became a soulless mechanization, whose technical fixation on immediate sensate phenomena left it oblivious to higher realities.

Their enchantment with technics and capitalist ethic of quantification would eventually lead these colonials to see Europeans as inferior to themselves — especially once their flying fortresses incinerated much of the Continent’s millennial heritage.

The hard-headed apostles of science and rationality, economically fixated on comfort and pleasure (“the pursuit of happiness”) have, it follows, been more inclined to feminine principles than to virile exploits or metaphysical perspectives.

The abstract ideological principles of the colonies’ Masonic, Deist, and Unitarian elites, who based their new nation on a scrap of paper (the Constitution), ostensively founded the nation on “the rule of reason, humanity, justice and all the rest,” but in actuality their novel enterprise was little more than a caricature of the European “nation-idea,” dedicated to legitimating the great money-making possibilities inherent in the country’s speculative development.

Without a dynastic, cultural, or historical identity, the “new nation” was bereft of true politics, knowing only the business of partisan haggling.[15]

“The empty, smiling face, the uniform mind, the senseless chasing after noise, movement, and sensation, the obsession with money, the rejection of all spiritual standards of attainment” – this was the condition of Yockey’s jitterbugs, who hadn’t a clue as to what kind of world was being designed for them.[16]

Politically and culturally, such tendencies made America an enterprise without grand possibility, evident in the fact that the American people never achieved a true sense of nationhood or statehood — that the country lacked both a ruling class and a culture stratum — and that, from the beginning, spiritual and transcendent principles were subordinated to materialist ones – thereby preparing the way for the money-changers, whose alien forms of parasitism would facilitate their rapid ascension into the inner circles of America’s plutocratic money elites.

America’s outremer “primitiveness” was especially evident in the condition of the Negro, who constituted a sort of paradigm for the country as a whole.

Incapable of tragedy, pleasure-seeking, and child-like, the Negro, like the culturally-distorted American, exemplified “natural man” — incapable of abstraction, without a virile sense of history or honor, with no art and no will to destiny, fixated almost solely on happiness, status, and sensate vocations. This feminine-matriarchal people devoted to routine and technicization could not, then, but orient to the lowest common denominator.

The Culture of Distortion

Given their shallow culture and the dismissal of the tradition to which they were heirs, Americans were particularly vulnerable to the corrosions of 19th-century rationalism and materialism. Relatedly, they were an easy mark for “culture aliens” — for a world governed by money was a world indifferent to a man’s qualities.[17]

Foremost among the culture-aliens were the Jews: product of Spengler’s “Magian” culture, instinctually hostile to the European spirit, and bent on revenge.

In their counting houses, Americans would invariably overlook the Jews’ otherness, though they were of a different “Culture-Nation-Race.” Even before the War of Independence, they treated Jews as Europeans – Jews who had been shunned, ghettoized, and seen by most Europeans as an evil to be avoided.[18]

In traditionless, rationalized, money-worshipping America, the Jew, as culture and nature dictated, would effortlessly spread their “culture-pathology.”

Notions of “culture-parasitism” and “culture-retardation,” integral to Yockey’s analytical perspective, are familiar forms of cultural pathology and largely self-explanatory. The notion of “culture-distortion,” though roughly analogous to Spengler’s “pseudomorphorsis,” is entirely Yockey’s and plays a leading role in his understanding of America’s 20th-century experience in anti-Europeanism.

“Culture-distortion,” he explains, “is the condition in which outer life-forms [divert] the culture from its true life-path.”[19] The culture-distorter thus assumed control of the host organism by introducing alien elements into it that squandered its energies on things unrelated or opposed to its development. Culture-distortion would consequently end up mutilating the culture-organism, turning it away from its growth, its possibility, its destiny.

Beginning in the 1880s, the Jews (these inassimilable aliens rejected by Europe’s High Culture) began their invasion of America. By 1905, they were already a power, evident in fact that the United States, for the first time in its history, severed diplomatic relations with Russia on account of the “anti-Jewish pogroms” that had followed the Russo-Japanese War.

***

Through its financial acumen and early control of media (the press, movies, radio), and in alliance with the native forces of decadence and degeneration, Jewish power in the New World grew at an unprecedented rate.

In a country where “mass-thinking, mass-ideals, and mass-living prevails,” Jewish propaganda (in the form of advertising, fashion, and a hundred other things) effortlessly reshaped the American consciousness, propelling the jitterbugs onto the dance floor of their world-conquering schemes. Stories of German sadism or Orson Welles’ Mars invasion were peddled with similar success, just as “the ethical syphilis of Hollywood and the spiritual leprosy of New York” infiltrated the larger cultural body.

In 1933, the year of the European Revolution, the Jews acquired outright political control of the United States — something that a thousand years of effort had failed to achieve in Europe.

From this point forward, “the formation of the Jewish-American Symbiosis begins.”[20]

Swarming into Washington, Jews and their “sub-American” contractors started dissimulating the Jewish world view and “bringing under control every factor of public expression.”[21]

All who resisted were to be purged or ostracized.

Then, as the country’s racial instincts were worn down by the distorters, America (in accord with the policies of its liberal state and in the programming of its Culture Industry) assumed “a Jewish countenance” in its relations both with the rest of the world and with itself.[22]

For Yockey, Franklin Roosevelt, “the monster . . . who made of his life a study in infamy,” was a creature of the Jews, just as his New Deal was bent on Judaifying American government and society, promoting, as it did, principles of tolerance and universal brotherhood, which were further developed by Rockerfeler-funded social-engineers intent on morally disarming the American people.

In this, the prescient Yockey might be criticized for confusing Jewish supremacy with the increasing Judaification of American society (which Matthew Arnold had warned of in the 1860s), for Jewish power in America was arguably not consolidated until the late 1960s (even if its secular low-church market, in making money the ultimate standard, had already Judaicized American life and sentiments).[23]

That Roosevelt, in October 1937, began to maneuver the United States into the coming world war and that this war would be a war of annihilation — i.e., the sort of war fought between racially and culturally alien, rather then related peoples sharing the same civilization — was further evidence, in Yockey’s eyes, of Jewish hegemony and the Jews’ genocidal hatred of Europe.

Despite a certain exaggeration of Jewish power in this period, Yockey was nearly alone in seeing that the United States had become an anti-European power bound to the Jews’ vengeful compulsion to suppress Europe’s destiny.

Unlike other American anti-liberals, anti-Semitism for him evolved, rapidly and logically, into an anti-Americanism.

The Enemy of Europe

As long as America had been ruled by men of European Christian stock, it remained “a European colony.”[24] But the America “distorted by the Revolution of 1933″ (a revolution carried out by the allegedly Jewish-dominated New Deal), was now lost to Europe.

America’s Judified anti-Europeanism was especially evident in the Second World War and in its subsequent occupation of the Continent.

For if the United States had possessed a proper ruling class, a tradition, and a regalian state, it would have stayed out of the Second World War, which became a defeat not just for Germany, but for all Europe — and thus, ultimately, a defeat for the true America.

Under its new Jewish-American regime, Washington after 1933 was instrumental in preparing the way for another European civil war – a war it would wage as if the enemy (their European kinsmen) weren’t human.[25]

Instead of being the great moral crusade against the absolute evil of fascism, the war in actuality represented a giant step toward the Judeo-plutocratic inauguration of a New World Order, based on American open markets and American economic practices.

To this end, American bombers (supported by their British vassals) reduced every German city to a heap of rubble, intentionally targeting heavily populated working-class residences — that is, “homes and families”; cities in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Eastern Europe were also bombed, adding further hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties to US “kills”; American fighter-pilots similarly sought out civilians to machine-gun and terrorize; vast stores of equipment and armaments, often denied to American troops, were supplied to Soviet Russia to defend the Communist state and encourage its penetration into the heart of Europe; and throughout this most barbaric and punitive war in the white man’s history, the Washington regime talked incessantly of the enemy’s “war crimes” and its “inhumanity.”[26]

Yockey blamed America’s dishonorable conduct in the war on the culture-distorters, whose “motivation derived from the deep and total organic irreconcilability between a High Culture and a parasitic organism” (though I suspect that the country’s latter-day Puritans, given their tendency to dehumanize the enemy, ought also to share a large part of the responsibility).[27]

Even after the guns were silenced, America’s “ghastly dishonor” continued.

With the Red Army occupying Eastern Europe and the US Army Western Europe, the looting, raping, pillaging — and ethnic cleansing — began.

The Soviets plundered everything not bolted down; the greatest mass rape in Western history occurred in what became “East Germany”; and 16 million East-European Germans were forced to abandon lands and homes they had inhabited for centuries, 2 million of whom (mainly the very old and the very young) perished in the process.

With greater discrimination, the Americans raided German patent offices, stealing their superior technology; they rounded up their rocket scientists, confiscated the libraries they hadn’t burned, and made off with priceless art works. German women, most on the verge of starvation, were not subject to mass rape (except by black American and French African troops), but their favors could be had for a half-dozen eggs, some cigarettes, or a few chocolate bars.

If this weren’t enough, the culture-distorters (whose “fury had been heightened by the European Revolution of 1933″)[28], along with their American accomplices (especially the budding military-industrial complex), introduced large-scale starvation, abused POWs (several million of whom died as a consequence), hunted down anyone who failed to bow to the new conquerors, and imposed laws with ex post facto application.[29]

Adding insult to injury, the “American world-clown and the sadistic Jew” then endeavored to “re-educate” Europeans in the arts of anti-fascism, mammon-worship, and democracy (i.e., “the corruptibility of the government by private wealth”).

The war for Yockey represented a categorical defeat for the “true America” — and a total victory for the Jews over Western Civilization.

***

Since 1945, the two sides of the Atlantic have ceased to share the same inner experience of feeling, for it was essentially a war against Europe. European Americans who supported it, Yockey contended, were traitors — inner enemies of their own culture.[30]

Then, after being reduced to “a beggar colony of America,” Europe’s pre-1945 elites were replaced by “Michel elements” (liberal philistines embodying “the sum of European weaknesses”), who could be trusted to do the Jews’ bidding.

In the name of democracy, press rights and free speech were henceforth abrogated; political parties were required to obtain licenses; any expression of nationalism was criminalized, just as all anti-liberal formations critical of the occupiers’ regime were driven to the political fringe.

America-Jewry in this way sought to sever Europe’s roots, suppress her will to power, and deprive her of a sense of destiny.

In no meaningful political sense did Europe, in fact, continue to exist after 1945, thanks almost entirely to this monstrous entity with the Jewish head and the American body.[31]

America-Jewry’s anti-European vengeance was especially evident in comparison to its generous treatment of defeated Japan.

Indeed, the entire nonwhite world was soon made to know that the United States had conquered Europe and that the colored outer-revolt, encouraged by the distorters, was ready, at last, to triumph over its former white masters.

More than Soviet Communism, Yockey argued that Jewish-controlled America was the “enemy of Europe.”[32]

And this made America an enemy of “true America,” for the Jewish idea of America — as a land of immigrants, creedal propositions, and universal brotherhood — stripped it of any “national-spiritual significance” it may have once had, doing so, ultimately, for “the enslavement of the world by big business.”[33]

Every European-American loyal to his ancestral homeland — loyal to his own inmost being – was, Yockey concluded, duty bound to be disloyal to what America had become (even as he struggled to return it to Europe).

The American Vabanquespieler

Yockey believed the 19th-century Age of Materialism and Rationalism, which had shaped America’s cultureless civilization and opened the way to the culture-distorters, came to an end with the First World War (1918), as a new age struggled to succeed it – a new age that would be animated by the same primordial sources that had brought about the European Revolution of 1933.

If not for America-Jewry’s Old Testament war on Europe, German-Prussian Ethical Socialism (in rejection of liberalism’s individualistic Reign of Quantity) would have inaugurated a New Age of Authority, Discipline, and Faith, bringing the whole world under Europe’s influence. Instead, the very opposite occurred.[34]

But even though the America of the culture-distorters had emerged victorious from the war, it changed not in the least the fact that America (this apotheosis of the 19th-century rationalism and materialism born of liberalism) still represented the past — and the past, Yockey held, could never defeat the future latent in Europe’s High Culture.

The barbarian victory of America’s 19th-century capitalism over the Germans’ Ethical Socialism had, indeed, already spread chaos and disorder throughout Western Civilization, heightening the imperative for a revolutionary transformation.[35]

***

All Yockey’s written works (several of which are works of genius) — all his tireless efforts to rally the defeated and demoralized anti-liberal vanguard for the coming struggle against America-Jewry — his alliance with and clandestine service to Slavic Communism in its Cold War against America’s Jewified liberalism — everything about this extraordinary man whose entire existence was devoted to the realization of Europe’s destiny makes him, in my mind, an exemplar of what Ernst Jünger called the Vabanquespieler.

“A player of dangerous games,” “an adventurer willing to stake all on the throw of the dice,” a hero forged in storms of steel, a nature with the grandeur of a medieval knight[36] — Yockey the Vabanquespieler stood against the entire postwar era, heralding a coming global war between Europe and anti-Europe — between the white men of the North and America’s Jewish culture-distorters.

***

After a half year in Ireland’s enchanted west (1948), where he wrote his magnum opus, Yockey the Vabanquespieler set out to “build a new pan-European fascist superpower,” by rallying the scattered remnants of Europe’s defeated elites to a new assertion of Europe’s destiny — somewhat in the way 7th and 8th-century Irish monks had tried to keep the lights of the old civilization from going out on the mainland.[37]

Rejecting the “petty stateism” of the interwar movements and accounting for their mistakes, Yockey in 1949 founded the European Liberation Front, whose revolutionary-nationalist principles — particularly in its anti-Americanism and pro-Sovietism — were rejected by England’s pro-American Union Movement; then by Continental Hitler-worshippers, who preferred a strictly racialist to a European-culturalist orientation; and, finally, by American anti-liberals (like Revilo Oliver) rooted in 19th-century rationalism and materialism.

Yockey’s European Liberation Front nevertheless dissimulated ideas, especially relevant to our age of American decline, that have since found their way into the most advanced sections of Europe’s anti-liberal resistance: evident in Jean Thiriart’s Euronationalism, in the pan-Europeanism and anti-Americanism of Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite, in Robert Steuckers’ Euro-Synergies, and in numerous national-revolutionary tendencies beginning with Yockey, René Binet, Saint-Loup, and others in the late 1940s.[38]

Only in America, lacking an indigenous anti-liberal tradition and an organic bond to Europe’s living tradition, are his never-more-pertinent ideas still ignored.[39]

***

For the Vabanquespieler, the creation of a new European order (in the form of a Continental imperium stretching “from Galway to the Urals”) would entail a great, heroic undertaking, as the white men of the North, sworn to a transcendent idea, rallied to throw off an exhausted, putrefied, but nearly all-powerful Jewish-American system — citadel of world liberalism and hence the principal source of evil in the 20th and 21st centuries (more so even than England’s “evil empire” of the 18th and 19th centuries).

The Last Men of America’s consumer paradise may therefore think the distorters have tamed the forces of history and quieted the demands of destiny, but the American apostate knew better. He also knew that Americans could do better.

The beating of the [American] people into a thing of mass-ideals, mass-thinking, mass-conduct, mass-living, was a distortion . . . of the American’s [European] soul. Europe and America constituted a single spiritual unit whose life-aim was to actualize their common destiny.[40]

The coming Age of Absolute Politics, he prophesied, would again “summon forth the latent heroism of the American people.”

Inspired thus, the Vabanquespieler stood with valor against the Jew-run, liberal-capitalist, anti-European Mammon System that had become America.

***

In anticipating the next cycle of Western Destiny, Yockey’s life work bequeaths to New World Europeans a legacy affirming that “the old Gothic religious idea” is still latent in them and that the 21st century will be an age of European peace and order, if they are prepared to fight for it.

The “American ideology” may therefore have no future, but “the soul of the American people,” born of Europe, will be reborn with Europe’s assumption.[41]

Notes

1. Francis Parker Yockey, “The Tragedy of Youth” (1939), at http://home.alphalinks.com.au/~radnat/fpyockey/index ^[2].

2. Kerry Bolton, ed., Francis Parker Yockey and the ELF Frontfighter (Paraparaumu Beach, NZ: Renaissance Press, 1998), 14-15.

3. Francis Parker Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, trans. T. Francis (York, SC: Liberty Bell, 1981 [1953]), 3.

4. Kerry Bolton, ed., Varange: The Life and Thought of Francis Parker Yockey (Paraparaumu Beach: Renaissance Press, 1998), 31–39

5. Francis Parker Yockey, “The Proclamation of Europe of the European Liberation Front” (1949), at http://home.alphalinks.com.au/~radnat/fpyockey/index ^[2].

6. Ulick Varange (Francis Parker Yockey), Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (Costa Mesa: Noontide Press, 1962 [1948]), 445.

7. Yockey, Imperium, 323.

8. Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (New York: Norton, 2006).

9. Yockey, Imperium, 125–28, 134.

10. Revilo P. Oliver, The Enemy of Our Enemy (York, S.C.: Liberty Bell, 1981), 17.

11. This was the basis of Julius Evola’s critique of Yockey; see his “Spiritual and Structural Presuppositions of the European Union” (1951), at http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id54.htm ^[3].

12. Yockey, Imperium, 345.

13. Yockey, Imperium, 43.

14. Oswald Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism [1919], trans. D. O. White, at http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/P%20Soc/Prussianism.Socialism.htm ^[4].

15. Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, 73.

16. Yockey, Imperium, 508.

17. Yockey, “The Proclamation of London.”

18. Francis Parker Yockey, “The Destiny of Europe” (1955), at http://home.alphalinks.com.au/~radnat/fpyockey/index ^[2].

19. Yockey, Imperium, 404.

20. Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, 23.

21. Francis Parker Yockey, “The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation” (1961), at http://home.alphalinks.com.au/~radnat/fpyockey/index ^[2].

22. Yockey, “The World in Flames.”

23. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 [1869]).

24. Yockey The Enemy of Europe, 3.

25. Dirk Bavendamm, Roosevelts Krieg: Amerikanische Politik und Strategie 1937–1945 (Munich: Herbig, 1993).

26. Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–1945, trans. A. Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Maximilian Czesant, Europa im Bomben-Krieg 1939–1945 (Gras: Stocken, 1998).

27. Yockey, Imperium, 219, 545.

28. Yockey, Imperium, 574.

29. Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007); James Bacque, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Death of German POWs after World War Two, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999); James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2007); Ralph F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Costly Attempt to Exterminate the People of Germany (York, SC: Liberty Bell, 2004); Alfred M. De Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

30. Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, 47.

31. Yockey, Imperium, 192–93; The Enemy of Europe, 59.

32. Kerry Bolton, “Yockey and Russia: Lessons for the Present and Future from the Author of Imperium,” forthcoming.

33. Oswald Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism, §23.

34. Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, 19.

35. Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, 30. Cf. Jean Parvulesco, Dans la forêt de Fontainebleau (Paris: Alexipharmaque, 2007).

36. Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn: Automedia, 1999), 148–49. (Coogan misspells the word as “Vanbanquespieler.”)

37. Kevin Coogan, “Lost Imperium: The European Liberation Front (1949–54),” Patterns in Prejudice XXXVI:3 (2002).

38. Francis Parker Yockey, Le prophète de l’Imperium (Paris: Avatar Éds., 2004), 15; Nicolas Lebourg, Le Monde vu de la plus Extrême Droite: Du fascisme au nationalisme-révolutionnaire (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2010).

39. Cf. Ted Sallis, “The Overman High Culture: Future of the West,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/10/the-overman-high-culture-future-of-the-west/ ^[5].

40. Yockey, Imperium, 550–51.

41. Yockey, Imperium, 551; Raymond Abellio, Assomption de l’Europe (Paris: Flammarion, 1978 [1953]).

Source: The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4 (Winter 2010–2011); re-edited June 2013.

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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/the-jitterbugs-and-the-vabanquespieler-on-yockeys-america/

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[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/BentonDanceHall.jpg

[2] http://home.alphalinks.com.au/~radnat/fpyockey/index: http://home.alphalinks.com.au/~radnat/fpyockey/index

[3] http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id54.htm: http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id54.htm

[4] http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/P%20Soc/Prussianism.Socialism.htm: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/P%20Soc/Prussianism.Socialism.htm

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lundi, 20 mai 2013

The Enlightenment from a New Right Perspective

immanuel_kant_f.20101213-11.jpg

The Enlightenment from a New Right Perspective

By Domitius Corbulo

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

“When Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, of Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought.” — Oswald Spengler

“Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race.” — Immanuel Kant

Every one either praises or blames the Enlightenment for the enshrinement of equality and cosmopolitanism as the moral pillars of our times. This is wrong. Enlightenment thinkers were racists who believe that only white Europeans could be fully rational, good citizens, and true cosmopolitans.

Leftists have brought attention to some racist beliefs among Enlightenment thinkers, but they have not successfully shown that racism was an integral part of Enlightenment philosophy, and their intention has been to denigrate the Enlightenment for representing the parochial values of European males. I argue here that they were the first to introduce a scientific conception of human nature structured by racial classifications. This conception culminated in Immanuel Kant’s anthropological justification of the superior/inferior classification of “races of men” and his “critical” argument that only European peoples were capable of becoming rational and free legislators of their own actions. The Enlightenment is a celebration of white reason and morality; therefore, it belongs to the New Right.

In an essay ^[2] in the New York Times (February 10, 2013), Justin Smith, another leftist with a grand title, Professeur des Universités, Département d’Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences, Université Paris Diderot – Paris VII, contrasted the intellectual “legacy” of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former slave who defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony in 1734, with the “fundamentally racist” legacy of Enlightenment thinkers. Smith observed that a dedicatory letter was attached to Amo’s dissertation from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Kraus, praising the “natural genius” of Africa and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs.” Smith juxtaposed Kraus’s broad-mindedness to the prevailing Enlightenment view “lazily echoed by Hume, Kant, and so many contemporaries” according to which Africans were naturally inferior to whites and beyond the pale of modernity.

Smith questioned “the supposedly universal aspiration to liberty, equality and fraternity” of Enlightenment thought. These values were “only ever conceived” for a European people deemed to be superior and therefore more equal than non-whites. He cited Hume: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites.” He also cited Kant’s dismissal of a report of something intelligent that had once been uttered by an African: “this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” Smith asserted that it was counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Johann Herder, who would formulate anti-racist views in favor of human diversity. In the rest of his essay, Smith pondered why Westerners today “have chosen to stick with categories inherited from the century of the so-called Enlightenment” even though “since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that ‘negroid,’ ‘caucasoid,’ and so on represent real natural kinds.” We should stop using labels that merely capture “something as trivial as skin color” and instead appreciate the legacy of Amo as much as that of any other European in a colorblind manner.

Smith’s article, which brought some 370 comments, a number from Steve Sailer, was challenged a few days later by Kenan Malik, ardent defender of the Enlightenment, in his blog Pandaemonium ^[3]. Malik’s argument that Enlightenment thinkers “were largely hostile to the idea of racial categorization” represents the general consensus on this question. Malik is an Indian-born English citizen, regular broadcaster at BBC, and noted writer for The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, Sunday Times, New Statesman, Prospect, TLS, The Times Higher Education Supplement, and other venues. Once a Marxist, Malik is today a firm defender of the “universalist ideas of the Enlightenment,” freedom of speech, secularism, and scientific rationalism. He is best known for his strong opposition to multiculturalism.

Yet this staunch opponent of multiculturalism is a stauncher advocate of open door policies on immigration ^[4]. In one of his TV documentaries, tellingly titled Let ‘Em All In (2005), he demanded that Britain’s borders be opened to the world without restrictions. In response to a report published during the post-Olympic euphoria in Britain, “The Melting Pot Generation: How Britain became more relaxed about race ^[5],” he wrote: “news that those of mixed ethnicity are among the fastest-growing groups in the population is clearly to be welcomed ^[6].” He added that much work remains to be done “to change social perceptions of race.”

This work includes fighting against any immigration objection even from someone like David Goodhart, director of the left think tank Demos, whose just released book, The British Dream ^[7], modestly made the observation that immigration is eroding traditional identities and creating an England “increasingly full of mysterious and unfamiliar worlds.” In his review (The Independent ^[8], April 19, 2013) Malik insisted that not enough was being done to wear down the traditional identities of everyone including the native British. The solution is more immigration coupled with acculturation to the universal values of the Enlightenment. “I am hostile to multiculturalism not because I worry about immigration but because I welcome it.” The citizens of Britain must be asked to give up their ethnic and cultural individuality and make themselves into universal beings with rights equal to every newcomer.

It is essential, then, for Malik to disassociate the Enlightenment with any racist undertones. This may not seem difficult since the Enlightenment has consistently come to be seen — by all political ideologies from Left to Right — as the source of freedom, equality, and rationality against the “unreasonable and unnatural” prejudices of particular cultural groups. Malik acknowledges that in recent years some (he mentions George Mosse, Emmanuel Chuckwude Eze, and David Theo Goldberg) have blamed Enlightenment thinkers for articulating the modern idea of race and projecting a view of Europe as both culturally and racially superior. By and large, however, Malik manages (superficially speaking) to win the day arguing that the racist statements one encounters in some Enlightenment thinkers were marginally related to their overall philosophies.

A number of thinkers within the mainstream of the Enlightenment . . . dabbled with ideas of innate differences between human groups . . . Yet, with one or two exceptions, they did so only diffidently or in passing.

The botanist Carolus Linnaeus exhibited the cultural prejudices of his time when he described Europeans as “serious, very smart, inventive” and Africans as “impassive, lazy, ruled by caprice.” But let’s us not forget, Malik reasons, that Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae “is one of the landmarks of scientific thought,” the first “distinctly modern” classification of plants and animals, and of humans in rational and empirical terms as part of the natural order. The implication is that Linnaeus could not have offered a scientific classification of nature while seriously believing in racial differences. Science and race are incompatible.

Soon the more progressive ideas of Johann Blumenbach came; he complained about the prejudices of Linnaeus’ categories and called for a more objective differentiation between human groups based on skull shape and size. It is true that out of Blumenbach’s five-fold taxonomy (Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans and Malays) the categories of race later emerged. But Malik insists that “it was in the 19th, not 18th, century that a racial view of the world took hold in Europe.”

Malik mentions Jonathan Israel’s argument that there were two Enlightenments, a mainstream one coming from Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume, and a radical one coming from “lesser known figures such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and Spinoza.” This latter group pushed the ideas of reason, universality, and democracy “to their logical conclusion,” nurturing a radical egalitarianism extending across class, gender, and race. But, in a rather confusing way and possibly because he could not find any discussions of race in the radical group to back up his argument, Malik relies on the mainstream group. He cites David Hume: “It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the acts of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains the same in its principles and operations.” And George-Louis Buffon, the French naturalist: “Every circumstance concurs in proving that mankind is not composed of species essentially different from each other.” While Enlightenment thinkers asked why there was so much cultural variety across the globe, Malik explains, “the answer was rarely that human groups were racially distinct . . . environmental differences and accidents of history had shaped societies in different ways.” Remedying these differences and contingencies was what the Enlightenment was about; as Diderot wrote, “everywhere a people should be educated, free, and virtuous.”

Malik’s essay is pedestrian, somewhat disorganized, but in tune with the established literature, and therefore seen by the public as a compilation of truisms against marginal complaints about racism in the Enlightenment. Almost all the books on the Enlightenment have either ignored this issue or addressed it as a peripheral theme. The emphasis has been, rather, on the Enlightenment’s promotion of universal values for the peoples of the world. Let me offer some examples. Leonard Krieger’s King and Philosopher, 1689–1789 (1970) highlights the way the Enlightenment produced “works in which the universal principles of reason were invoked to order vast reaches of the human experience,” Rousseau’s “anthropological history of the human species,” Hume’s “quest for uniform principles of human nature,” “the various tendencies of the philosophes’ thinking — skepticism, rationalism, humanism, and materialism” (152-207). Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966) is altogether about how “the men of the Enlightenment united on . . . a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom . . . In 1784, when the Enlightenment had done most of its work, Kant defined it as man’s emergence from his self-imposed tutelage, and offered as its motto: Dare to know” (3). Norman Hampson’s The Enlightenment (1968) spends more time on the proponents of modern classifications of nature, particularly Buffon’s Natural History, but makes no mention of racial classifications or arguments opposing any notion of a common humanity.

Recent books are hardly different. Louis Dupre’s The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004), traces our current critically progressive attitudes back to the Enlightenment “ideal of human emancipation.” Dupré argues (from a perspective influenced by Jurgen Habermas) that the original project of the Enlightenment is linked to “emancipatory action” today (335). Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), offers a neoconservative perspective of the British and the American “Enlightenments” contrasted to the more radical ideas of human perfectibility and the equality of mankind found in the French philosophes. She brings up Jefferson’s hope that in the future whites would “blend together, intermix” and become one people with the Indians (221). She quotes Madison on the “unnatural traffic” of slavery and its possible termination, and also Jefferson’s proposal that the slaves should be freed and sent abroad to colonize other lands as “free and independent people.” She implies that Jefferson thought that sending blacks abroad was the most humane solution given the “deep-rooted prejudices of whites and the memories of blacks of the injuries they had sustained” (224).

Dorinda Outram’s, The Enlightenment (1995) brings up directly the way Enlightenment thinkers responded to their encounters with very different cultures in an age characterized by extraordinary expeditions throughout the globe. She notes there “was no consensus in the Enlightenment on the definition of the races of man,” but, in a rather conjectural manner, maintains that “the idea of a universal human subject . . . could not be reconciled with seeing Negroes as inferior.” Buffon, we are safely informed, “argued that the human race was a unity.” Linnaeus divided humanity into different classificatory groups, but did so as members of the same human race, although he “was unsure whether pigmies qualified for membership of the human race.” Turgot and Condorcet believed that “human beings, by virtue of their common humanity, would all possess reason, and would gradually discard irrational superstitions” (55-8). Outram’s conclusion on this topic is typical: “The Enlightenment was trying to conceive a universal human subject, one possessed of rationality,” accordingly, it cannot be seen as a movement that stood against racial divisions (74). Roy Porter, in his exhaustively documented and opulent narrative, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000), dedicates less than one page of his 600+ page book to discourses on “racial differentiation.” He mentions Lord Kames as “one of many who wrestled with the evidence of human variety . . . hinting that blacks might be related to orang-utans and similar great apes.” Apart from this quaint passage, there is only this: “debate was heated and unresolved, and there was no single Enlightenment party line” (357).

In my essay, “Enlightenment and Global History ^[9],” I mentioned a number of other books which view the Enlightenment as a European phenomenon and, for this reason, have been the subject of criticism by current multicultural historians who feel that this movement needs to be seen as global in origins. I defended the Eurocentrism of these books while suggesting that their view of the Enlightenment as an acclamation of universal values (comprehensible and extendable outside the European ethnic homeland) was itself accountable for the idea that its origins must not be restricted to Europe. Multicultural historians have merely carried to their logical conclusion the allegedly universal ideals of the Enlightenment. The standard interpretations of Tzvetan Todorov’s In Defence of the Enlightenment (2009), Stephen Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment (2004), and Robert Louden’s, The World We Want: How and Why the Ideals of the Enlightenment Still Eludes Us (2007), equally neglect the intense interest Enlightenment thinkers showed in the division of humanity into races. They similarly pretend that, insomuch as these thinkers spoke of “reason,” “humanity,” and “equality,” they were thinking outside or above the European experience and intellectual ancestry.

What about Justin Smith, or, since he has not published in this field, the left liberal authors on this topic? There is not that much; the two best known sources are two anthologies of writings on race, namely, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (1997), edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze; and The Idea of Race (2000), edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott. Eze’s book gathers into a short book the most provocative writings on race by some Enlightenment thinkers (Hume, Linnaeus, Kant, Buffon, Blumenbach, Jefferson and Cuvier). This anthology, valuable as it is, is intended for effect, to show how offensively racist these thinkers were. Eze does not disprove the commonly accepted idea that Enlightenment thinkers were proponents of a universal ethos (although, as we will see below, Eze does offer elsewhere a rather acute analysis of Kant’s racism). Bernasconi’s The Idea of Race is mostly a collection of nineteenth and 20th century writings, with short excerpts from Francois Bernier, Voltaire, Kant, and Blumenbach. The books that Malik mentions (see above) which connect the Enlightenment to racism are also insufficient: George Mosse’s Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1985) is just another book about European anti-Semitism, which directs culpability to the Enlightenment for carrying classifications and measurements of racial groups. David Goldberg’s Racist Culture (1993) is a study of the normalization of racialized discourses in the modern West in the 20th century.

There are, as we will see later, other publications which address in varying ways this topic, but, on the whole, the Enlightenment is normally seen as the most critical epoch in “mankind’s march” towards universal brotherhood. The leftist discussion of racist statements relies on the universal principles of the Enlightenment. Its goal is to uncover and challenge any idea among 18th century thinkers standing in the way of a future universal civilization. Leftist critics enjoy “exposing” white European males as racists and thereby re-appropriate the Enlightenment as their own from a cultural Marxist perspective. But what if we were to approach the racism and universalism of the Enlightenment from a New Right perspective that acknowledges straightaway the particular origins of the Enlightenment in a continent founded by Indo-European ^[10] speakers?

This would involve denying the automatic assumption that the ideas of the philosophes were articulated by mankind and commonly true for every culture. How can the ideas of the Enlightenment be seen as universal, representing the essence of humanity, if they were expressed only by European men? The Enlightenment is a product of Europe alone, and this fact alone contradicts its universality. Enlightenment thinkers are themselves to blame for this dilemma expressing their ideas as if “for men of all times and places.” Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), writing at the same time as Kant, did question the notion of a cosmopolitan world based on generic human values. He saw in the world the greatest possible variety of historical humans in different regions of the earth, in time and space. He formulated arguments against racial rankings not by questioning their scientific merits as much as their reduction of the diversity of humans to one matrix of measurement and judgment. It was illusory to postulate a universal philosophy for humanity in which the national character of peoples would disappear and each human on earth would “love each other and every one . . . being all equally polite, well-mannered and even-tempered . . . all philanthropic citizens of the world.”[1] Contrary to some interpretations, Herder was not rejecting the Enlightenment but subjecting it to critical evaluation from his own cosmopolitan education in the history and customs of the peoples of the earth. “Herder was among the men of the Enlightenment who were critical in their search for self-understanding; in short, he was part of the self-enlightening Enlightenment.”[2] He proposed a different universalism based on the actual variety and unique historical experiences and trajectories of each people (Volk). Every people had their own particular language, religion, songs, gestures, legends and customs. There was no common humanity but a division of peoples into language and ethnic groups. Each people were capable of achieving education and progress in its own way from its own cultural sources.

From this standpoint, the Enlightenment should be seen as an expression of a specific people, Europeans, made up of various nationalities but nevertheless in habitants of a common civilization who were actually conceiving the possibility of becoming good citizens of Europe at large. In the words of Edward Gibbon, Enlightenment philosophers were enlarging their views beyond their respective native countries “to consider Europe as a great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation” (in Gay, 13).

Beyond Herder, we also need to acknowledge that the Enlightenment inaugurated the study of race from a rational, empirical, and secular perspective consistent with its own principles. No one has been willing to admit this because this entire debate has been marred by the irrational, anti-Enlightenment dogma that race is a construct and that the postulation of a common humanity amounts to a view of human nature without racial distinctions. Contrary to Roy Porter, there was a party line, or, to be more precise, a consistently racial approach among Enlightenment thinkers. The same philosophes who announced that human nature was uniform everywhere, and united mankind as a subject capable of enlightenment, argued “in text after text . . . in the works of Hume, Diderot, Montesquieu, Kant, and many lesser lights” that men “are not uniform but are divided up into sexes, races, national characters . . . and many other categories” (Garret 2006). But because we have been approaching Enlightenment racism under the tutelage of our current belief that race is “a social myth” and that any division of mankind into races is based on malevolent “presumptions unsupported by available evidence ^[11],” we have failed to appreciate that this subject was part and parcel of what the philosophes meant by “enlightenment.” Why it is so difficult to accept the possibility that 18th century talk about “human nature” and the “unity of mankind” was less a political program for a universal civilization than a scientific program for the study of man in a way that was systematic in intent and universal in scope? It is quite legitimate, from a scientific point, to treat humans everywhere as uniformly constituted members of the same species while recognizing their racial and cultural variety across the world. Women were considered to be intrinsically different from men at the same time that they were considered to be human.

Not being an expert on the Enlightenment I found recently a book chapter titled “Human Nature” by Aaron Garrett in a two volume work, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy ^[12] (2006). There is a section in this chapter dealing with “race and natural character”; it is short, 20 pages in a 1400 page work, but it is nevertheless well researched with close to 80 footnotes of mostly primary sources. One learns from these few pages that “in text after text” Enlightenment thinkers proposed a hierarchical view of the races. Mind you, Garrett is stereotypically liberal and thus writes of “the 18th century’s dubious contributions to the discussion of race,” startled by “the virulent denigrations of blacks . . . found in the works of Franklin, Raynal, Voltaire, Forster, and many others.” He also playacts the racial ideas of these works as if they were inconsistent with the scientific method, and makes the very unscientific error of assuming that there was an “apparent contradiction” with the Enlightenment’s notion of a hierarchy of races and its “vigorous attacks on the slave trade in the name of humanity.”

Just because most Enlightenment thinkers rejected polygenecism and asserted the fundamental (species) equality of humankind, it does not mean that they could not believe consistently in the hierarchical nature of the human races. There were polygenecists like Charles White who argued that blacks formed a race different from whites, and Voltaire who took some pleasure lampooning the vanity of the unity of mankind. But the prevailing view was that all races were members of the same human species, as all humans were capable of creating fertile offspring. Buffon, Cornelius de Pauw, Linnaeus, Blumenbach, Kant and others endorsed this view, and yet they distinctly ranked whites above other races.

Liberals have deliberately employed this view on the species unity of humanity in order to separate, misleadingly, the Enlightenment from any racial connotations. But Linnaeus did rank the races in their behavioral proclivities; and Buffon did argue that all the races descended from an original pair of whites, and that American Indians and Africans were degraded by their respective environmental habitats. De Pauw did say that Africans had been enfeebled in their intelligence and “disfigured” by their environment. Samuel Soemmering did conclude that blacks were intellectually inferior; Peter Camper and John Hunter did rank races in terms of their facial physiognomy. Blumenbach did emphasize the symmetrical balance of Caucasian skull features as the “most perfect.” Nevertheless, in accordance with the evidence collected at the time, all these scholars asserted the fundamental unity of mankind, monogenism, or the idea that all races have a common origin.

Garrett, seemingly unable to accept his own “in text after text” observation, repeats the standard line that Buffon’s and Blumenbach’s view, for example, on “the unity and structural similarity of races” precluded a racial conception. He generally evades racist phrases and arguments from Enlightenment thinkers, such as this one from Blumenbach: “I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian because this stock displays the most beautiful race of men” (Eze, 1997: 79). He makes no mention or almost ignores a number of other racialists ^[13]: Locke, Georges Cuvier, Johann Winckelmann, Diderot, Maupertuis, and Montesquieu. In the case of Kant, he says it would be “absurd” to take some “isolated remarks” he made about race as if they stood for his whole work. Kant “distinguish between character, temperament, and race in order to avoid biological determinism” for the sake of the “moral potential of the human race as a whole.”

Actually, Kant, the greatest thinker of the Enlightenment, “produced the most profound raciological thought of the 18th century.” These words come from Earl W. Count’s book This is Race, cited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze in what is a rather good analysis of Kant’s racism showing that it was not marginal but deeply embedded in his philosophy. Eze’s analysis comes in a chapter, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology ^[14]” (1997). We learn that Kant elaborated his racial thinking in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ^[15] (1798); he introduced anthropology as a branch of study to the German universities together with the study of geography, and that through his career Kant offered 72 courses in Anthropology and/or Geography, more than in logic, metaphysics and moral philosophy. Although various scholars have shown interest in Kant’s anthropology, they have neglected its relation to Kant’s “pure philosophy.”

For Kant, anthropology and geography were inseparable; geography was the study of the natural conditions of the earth and of man’s physical attributes and location as part of this earth; whereas anthropology was the study of man’s soul, his psychological and moral character, as exhibited in different places on earth. In his geography Kant addressed racial classifications on the basis of physical traits such as skin color; in his anthropology he studied the internal structures of human psychology and the manner in which these internal attributes conditioned humans as moral and rational beings.

Kant believed that human beings were different from other natural beings in their capacity for consciousness and agency. Humans were naturally capable of experiencing themselves as self-reflecting egos capable of acting morally on the basis of their own self-generated norms (beyond the determinism which conditioned all other beings in the universe). It is part of our internal human nature to think and will as persons with moral agency. This uniquely human attribute is what allows humans to transcend the dictates of nature insofar as they are able to articulate norms as commandments for their own actions freed from unconscious physical contingencies and particular customs. As rational beings, humans are capable of creating a realm of ends, and these ends are a priori principles derived not from the study of geography and anthropology but from the internal structures of the mind, transcendental reason. What Kant means by “critical reason” is the ability of humans through the use of their minds to subject everything (bodily desires, empirical reality, and customs) to the judgments of values generated by the mind, such that the mind (reason) is the author of its own moral actions.

However, it was Kant’s estimation that his geographical and anthropological studies gave his moral philosophy an empirical grounding. This grounding consisted in the acquisition of knowledge about human beings “throughout the world,” to use Kant’s words, “from the point of view of the variety of their natural properties and the differences in that feature of the human which is moral in character.”[3] ^[16] Kant was the first thinker to sketch out a geographical and psychological (or anthropological) classification of humans. He classified humans naturally and racially into white (European), yellow (Asians), black (Africans) and red (American Indians). He also classified them psychologically and morally in terms of the mores, customs and aesthetic feelings held collectively by each of the races. Non-Europeans held unreflective mores and customs devoid of critical examination “because these people,” in the words of Eze, “lack the capacity for development of ‘character,’ and they lack character presumably because they lack adequate self-consciousness and rational will.” Within Kant’s psychological classification, non-Europeans “appear to be incapable of moral maturity because they lack ‘talent,’ which is a ‘gift’ of nature.” Eze quotes Kant: “the difference in natural gifts between various nations cannot be completely explained by means of causal [external, physical, climatic] causes but rather must lie in the [moral] nature of man.” The differences among races are permanent and transcend environmental factors. “The race of the American cannot be educated. It has no motivating force; for it lacks affect and passion . . . They hardly speak, do not caress each other, care about nothing and are lazy.” “The race of the Negroes . . . is completely the opposite of the Americans; they are full of affect and passion, very lively, talkative and vain. They can be educated but only as servants . . . ” The Hindus “have a strong degree of passivity and all look like philosophers. They thus can be educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences. They can never arise to the level of abstract concepts . . . The Hindus always stay the way they are, they can never advance, although they began their education much earlier.”

Eze then explains that for Kant only “white” Europeans are educable and capable of progress in the arts and sciences. They are the “ideal model of universal humanity.” In other words, only the European exhibits the distinctly human capacity to behave as a rational creature in terms of “what he himself is willing to make himself” through his own ends. He is the only moral character consciously free to choose his own ends over and above the determinism of external nature and of unreflectively held customs. Eze, a Nigerian born academic, obviously criticizes Kant’s racism, citing and analyzing additional passages, including ones in which Kant states that non-Europeans lack “true” aesthetic feelings. He claims that Kant transcendentally hypostasized his concept of race simply on the basis of his belief that skin color by itself stands for the presence or absence of the natural ‘gift’ of talent and moral ‘character’. He says that Kant’s sources of information on non-European customs were travel books and stories he heard in Konigsberg, which was a bustling international seaport. Yet, this does not mean that he was simply “recycling ethnic stereotypes and prejudices.” Kant was, in Eze’s estimation, seriously proposing an anthropological and a geographical knowledge of the world as the empirical presupposition of his critical philosophy.

With the publication of this paper (and others in recent times) it has become ever harder to designate Kant’s thinking on race as marginal. Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxill dedicated a chapter, “Kant and Race ^[17],” to Eze’s paper in which they not only accepted that Kant expressed racist beliefs, but also that Eze was successful “in showing that Kant saw his racial theory as a serious philosophical project.” But Hill and Boxill counter that Kant’s philosophy should not be seen to be inherently “infected with racism . . . provided it is suitably supplemented with realistic awareness of the facts about racism and purged from association with certain false empirical beliefs.” These two liberals, however, think they have no obligation to provide their readers with one single fact proving that the races are equal. They don’t even mention a source in their favor such as Stephen J. Gould ^[18]. They take it as a given that no one has seriously challenged the liberal view of race but indeed assume that such a challenge would be racist ipso facto and therefore empirically unacceptable. They then excuse Kant on grounds that the evidence available in his time supported his claims; but that it would be racist today to make his claims for one would be “culpable” of neglecting the evidence that now disproves racial classifications. What evidence ^[19]?

They then argue that “racist attitudes are incompatible with Kant’s basic principle of respect for humanity in each person,” and in this vein refer to Kant’s denunciation, in his words, of the “wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the whole litany of evils” which afflicted the peoples of the world who experience the “great injustice of the European powers in their conquests.” But why do liberals always assume that claims about racial differences constitute a call for the conquest and enslavement of non-whites? They forget the 100 million killed in Russia and China, or, conversely, the fact that most Enlightenment racists were opponents of the slave trade. The bottom logic of the Hill-Boxill counterargument is that Kant’s critical philosophy was/is intrinsically incompatible with any racial hierarchies which violate the principles of human freedom and dignity, even if his racism was deeply embedded in his philosophy. But it is not; and may well be the other way around; Kant’s belief in human perfectibility, the complete development of moral agency and rational freedom, may be seen as intrinsically in favor of a hierarchical way of thinking in terms of which race is the standard bearer of the ideal of a free and rational humanity.

It is quite revealing that an expert like Garrett, and the standard interpreters of the Enlightenment generally, including your highness Doctor Habermas, would ignore Kant’s anthropology. A recent essay by Stuart Elden, “Reassessing Kant’s geography ^[20]” (2009), examines the state of this debate, noting that Kant’s geography and anthropology are still glaringly neglected in most newer works on Kant. One reason for this, Elden believes, “is that philosophers have, by and large, not known what to make of the works.” I would specify that they don’t know what to make of Kant’s racism in light of the widely accepted view that he was a liberal progenitor of human equality and cosmopolitanism. Even Elden does not know what to make of this racism, though he brings attention to some recent efforts to incorporate fully Kant’s anthropology/geography into his overall philosophy, works by Robert Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics (2000); John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (2002), and Holly Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology (2006). Elden pairs off these standard (pro-Enlightenment, pro-Kant) works against the writings of leftist critics who have shown less misgivings designating Kant a racist. All of these works (leftists as well) are tainted by their unenlightened acceptance of human equality and universalism. They cannot come to terms with a Kant who proposed a critical philosophy only for the European race.

There is no space here for details; some of the main points these authors make are: Kant’s anthropology and geography lectures were part of Kant’s critical philosophy, “devoted to trying to enlighten his students more about the people and world around them in order that they might live (pragmatically as well as morally) better lives” (Louden, p. 65). The aim of these lectures, says Wilson, on the cultures and geography of the world was “to civilize young students to become ‘citizens of the world’” (p. 8). Kant was a humane teacher who cared for his students and expected them to become cognizant of the world and in this way acquire prudence and wisdom. “Kant explicitly argues that the anthropology is a type of cosmopolitan philosophy,” writes Wilson, intended to educate students to develop their rational powers so they could think for themselves and thus be free to actualize their full human potentiality (5, 115). This sounds very pleasant yet based on the infantile notion that knowledge of the world and cosmopolitanism, wisdom and prudence, are incompatible with a racial understanding. To the contrary, if Kant’s racial observations were consistent with the available evidence at the time, and if masses of new evidence have accumulated since validating his views, then a critical and worldly philosophy would require us to show understanding towards Kant’s racism, which does not mean one has to accept the subjective impressionistic descriptions Kant uses. Hiding from students the research of Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray, Arthur Jensen, among others, would negate their ability to become free enlightened thinkers.

Elden brings the writings of Bernasconi and David Harvey, agreeing with them that Kant played “a crucial role in establishing the term ‘race’ as the currency within which discussions of human variety would be conducted in the 19th century.” He agrees too that Kant’s racism is “deeply problematic” to his cosmopolitanism, and that earlier responses by Kantians to swept aside his racism as “irrelevant” or “not to be taken seriously” are inadequate. Elden thinks however that scholars like Louden and Wilson have risen to the leftist challenge. But what we get from Louden is the same supposition that Kant’s philosophy can be made to meet the requirements of humanitarianism and egalitarianism simply by discarding the racist components. This constitutes a confounding of the actual Enlightenment (and the authentic Kant) with our current cultural Marxist wish to create a progressive global civilization. Louden even makes the rather doleful argument that Kant’s monogenetic view of the races, the idea that all humans originated from a common ancestor, “help us reach our collective destiny.” Kant’s monogenetic view is not an adequate way to show that he believed in a common humanity. The monogenetic view is not only consistent with the eventual differentiation of this common species into unequal races due to migration to different environments, but it is also the case that Kant specifically rejected Buffon’s claim that racial differences could be reversed with the eventual adaptation of “inferior” races to climates and environments that would induce “superior” traits; Kant insisted that the differences among races were fixed and irreversible regardless of future adaptations to different environmental settings. Louden’s additional defense of Kant by noting that he believed that all members of the human species can cultivate, civilize, and moralize themselves does not invalidate Kant’s view that whites are the model of a universal humanity.

So many otherwise intelligent scholars have willfully misled themselves into believing that Enlightenment thinkers were promoters of egalitarianism and a race-less cosmopolitan public sphere. We do live in a time of major deceptions at the highest levels of Western intellectual culture. We are continually reminded that the central idea in Kant’s conception of enlightenment is that of “submitting all claims to authority to the free examination of reason.”[4] ^[21] Yet the very ideals of the Enlightenment have been misused to preclude anyone from examining freely and rationally the question of race differences even to the point that admirers of the Enlightenment have been engaged in a ubiquitous campaign to hide, twist beyond clarity, and confound what Enlightenment thinkers themselves said about such differences. White nationalists should no longer accept the standard interpretation of the Enlightenment. They should embrace the Enlightenment and Kant as their own.

Notes

[1] Gurutz Jáuregui Bereciartu, Decline of the Nation State (1986), p. 26.

[2] Hans Adler and Ernest Menze, Eds. “Introduction,” in On World History, Johan Gottfried Herder: An Anthology (1997): p. 5

[3] These words are cited in Stuart Elden’s “Reassessing Kant’s geography,” Journal of Historical Geography (2009), a paper I discuss later.

[4] Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, eds. Johan Bohman and Mathias Lutz Bachman. The MIT Press, 1997.

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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/05/the-enlightenment-from-a-new-right-perspective/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Kant_Portrait.jpeg

[2] essay: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/why-has-race-survived/

[3] Pandaemonium: http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/on-the-enlightenments-race-problem/

[4] open door policies on immigration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_Malik

[5] The Melting Pot Generation: How Britain became more relaxed about race: http://www.britishfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-melting-pot-generation.pdf

[6] welcomed: http://www.britishfuture.org/blog/mixed-britain-will-the-census-results-change-the-way-we-think-and-talk-about-race/

[7] The British Dream: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1843548054/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1843548054&linkCode=as2&tag=kenanmalikcom-21

[8] The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-british-dream-by-david-goodhart-8578883.html

[9] Enlightenment and Global History: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/04/enlightenment-and-global-history/

[10] Indo-European: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/12/where-is-the-historical-west-part-1-of-5/

[11] presumptions unsupported by available evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

[12] The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy: http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-History-Eighteenth-Century-Philosophy-Haakonssen/dp/0521418542

[13] other racialists: http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/foutz-racism.shtml

[14] The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology: http://books.google.ca/books?id=moH_07971gwC&pg=PA200&lpg=PA200&dq=%E2%80%9CThe+Color+of+Reason:+The+Idea+of+%E2%80%98Race%E2%80%99+in+Kant%E2%80%99s+Anthropology%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=Q9-oKv3Wks&sig=QDcpHumNboU6TrfmWYfZCdjPyss&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rHSOUbebCNWz4AP87YCwDA&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CThe%20Color%20of%20Reason%3A%20The%20Idea%20of%20%E2%80%98Race%E2%80%99%20in%20Kant%E2%80%99s%20Anthropology%E2%80%9D&f=false

[15] Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: http://books.google.ca/books/about/Kant_Anthropology_from_a_Pragmatic_Point.html?id=MuS6WI_7xeYC&redir_esc=y

[16] [3]: http://www.counter-currents.comfile:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/F9Q4VNXE/The%20Enlightenment%20from%20a%20New%20Right%20Perspective%20(1).rtf#_ftn3

[17] Kant and Race: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/465_11/readings/Race_and_Racism.pdf

[18] Stephen J. Gould: http://menghusblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/stephen-jay-gould-myth-and-fraud/

[19] What evidence: http://www.jehsmith.com/philosophy/2008/09/phil-498629-rac.html

[20] Reassessing Kant’s geography: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748808000613

[21] [4]: http://www.counter-currents.comfile:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/F9Q4VNXE/The%20Enlightenment%20from%20a%20New%20Right%20Perspective%20(1).rtf#_ftn4

vendredi, 12 avril 2013

Hegelian Reflections on Body Piercing & Tattoos

A Little Death:
Hegelian Reflections on Body Piercing & Tattoos

By Greg Johnson

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

It is safe to say that urban youth culture in the contemporary West is pretty much saturated with hedonism. Yet in the midst of all this hedoism, tattooing and body piercing are huge industries, and they hurt.

It is, moreover, shared pain, broadcast to and imposed upon all who see it. It is natural for human beings to feel sympathy for people in pain, or who show visible signs of having suffered pain. Perhaps this is a sign of morbid oversensitivity, but I believe I am not the only person who feels sympathy pains when I see tattoos and piercings, especially extensive ones. Sometimes I actually shudder and look away. Furthermore, am I the only one who finds tattoos and piercings extreme sexual turn-offs?

Sexual sadism and mascochism fit into a larger hedonistic context, since the are merely intensifications or exaggerations of features of normal hetrosexual relations. But what is the place of the non-sexual masochism of body piercing and tattooing in a larger hedonistic society?

This question first occured to me when I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, in which Jody, the wife of the drug dealer Lance, launches into a discourse about piercing. Jody, it is safe to say, is about as complete a hedonist as has ever existed. Yet Jody has had her body pierced sixteen times, including her left nipple, her clitoris, and her tongue. And in each instance, she used a needle rather than a relatively quick and painless piercing gun. As she says, “That gun goes against the whole idea behind piercing.”

Well then, I had to ask, “What is the whole idea behind piercing?” Yes, piercing is fashionable. Yes, it is involved with sexual fetishism. (But fetishism is not mere desire either.) Yes, it is now big business. But the phenomenon cannot merely be reduced to hedonistic self-indulgence. It is irreversible. And it hurts. And apparently, if it doesn’t hurt, that contradicts the “whole idea.”

For Hegel, history begins when a distinctly human form of self-consciousness emerges. Prehistoric man is merely a clever animal who is ruled by his desires, by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, including the desire for self-preservation. When we enjoy creature comforts, however, we are aware of ourselves as mere creatures.

But human beings are more than clever animals. Slumbering within prehistoric man is a need for self-consciousness. To see our bodies, we need a mirror. To see our self also requires an appropriate “mirror.” For Hegel, the first mirror is the consciousness of others. We see ourselves as we are seen by others. When the reactions of others coincide with our sense of self, we feel pride. When we are treated in ways that contradict our sense of self, we feel anger. Sometimes this anger leads to conflict, and sometimes this conflict threatens our very lives.

For Hegel, the duel to the death for honor reveals the existence of two different and conflicting parts of the soul: desire, including the desire for self-preservation, and honor, which is willing to risk death to find satisfaction. For Hegel, the man who is willing to risk death to preserve his honor is a natural master. The man who is willing to suffer dishonor to preserve his life is a natural slave. For the master, honor rules over desire. For the slave, desire rules over honor. Hegel sees the struggle to the death over honor as the beginning of history, history being understood as a process by which human beings come to self-understanding.

Of course not every road to self-understanding involves an encounter with death. But the primary means by which we understand ourselves is participation in a culture, and civilized life entails countless repressions of our physical desires, countless little pains and little deaths.

According to Hegel, if history is a process of self-discovery, then history can end when we learn the truth about ourselves and live accordingly. And the truth is that all men are free. Hegel’s follower Francis Fukuyama became famous for arguing that the fall of communism and the globalization of liberal democracy was the end of history. But he also followed Alexandre Kojève, Hegel’s greatest 20th-century interpreter, who argued that the end of history would not bring a society of universal freedom, but a society of universal slavery: slavery in the spiritual sense of the rule of desire over honor. And that is a perfect description of modern, hedonistic, bourgeois society.

But there is more to the soul than desire. Thus man cannot be fully satisfied by mere hedonism. The restless drive for self-consciousness that gave rise to history in the first place will stir again. In a world of casual and meaningless self-indulgence, piercing and its first cousin tattooing are thus deeply significant; they are tests; they are limit experiences; they are encounters with something—something in ourselves and in the world—that transcends the economy of desire. To “mortify” the flesh literally means to kill it. Each little hole is a little death, which derives its meaning from a big death, a whole death, death itself. Thus one can see the contemporary craze with body modification as the re-enactment of the primal humanizing encounter with death within the context of a decadent and dehumanizing society. History is beginning again.

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

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/03/a-little-death-hegelian-reflections-on-body-piercing-and-tattoos/

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00:05 Publié dans Nouvelle Droite, Philosophie, Réflexions personnelles | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : nouvelle droite, nouvelle droite américaine, american new right, moeurs contemporaines, sociologie, piercings, tatouages, hegel, philosophie, réflexions personnelles, greg johnson | | del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg | Facebook

dimanche, 05 décembre 2010

Interview with Greg Johnson

Alex KURTAGIC

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

1. Being a man of ideas, has literature played an important role in your life? What would you say were the texts that proved key in your personal and intellectual development? And why?

History and philosophy played more of a role in shaping my outlook than literature. In fact, I can’t name a single work of fiction, qua fiction, that has shaped my worldview. But works of fiction have provided me with concrete and vivid exemplifications of otherwise abstract ideas. I love philosophical novels. Plato’s dialogues, of course, qualify both as literature and philosophy.

Plato has had the greatest influence on my outlook, particularly the Republic, but also the Gorgias, Phaedrus, Symposium, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. Rousseau’s philosophical novel Emile also influenced my thinking profoundly. I love Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but classical liberalism, capitalism, and even individualism ultimately undermine aristocratic and heroic values.

The philosophers who have shaped me the most are Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Machiavelli, Vico, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, William James, Heidegger, Guénon, Evola. Alan Watts has had a huge impact as well, as have the Tao te Ching and the Upanishads.

Wagner’s music dramas are in a class by themselves, as texts somewhere between philosophy and literature/myth, married to some of the greatest music ever written. They are profound, and have influenced me profoundly.

Savitri Devi is also hard to categorize. She combines philosophy, history, religion, politics, and myth. She too has had a great influence on me.

As for literature proper: The writers I loved most as a child are ones I still love today: Poe, Tolkien, Kipling, and old illustrated compendiums of Greek and Norse mythology. Frank Herbert’s Dune books have also remained favorites. I like them more every time I return to them.

Later on I came to love Homer, Shakespeare, Blake, Goethe, Schiller, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Philip Larkin as poets and dramatists.

In terms of novels and stories, my favorite writers came to include Dostoevsky, Hugo, Flaubert, D. H. Lawrence, H. P. Lovecraft, Flannery O’Connor, and Yukio Mishima.

There are also “non-greats” whose voices I consistently enjoy: Edith Sitwell, Truman Capote, Evelyn Waugh.

I read a lot of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and Aldous Huxley in my teens. Someday I want to revisit them. I think Bradbury will stand the test of time.

Literary criticism is very important to me. My favorite critics are D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Camille Paglia, and H. L. Mencken.

I have very little time to read fiction now, unfortunately. The last novel I read was Mister! I read too much non-fiction and spend too much time staring at the computer screen. I just can’t add more reading on top of that. So my primary form of intellectual recreation is watching movies and operas and listening to music.

2. I first became aware of you following your appointment as editor of The Occidental Quarterly. However, I understand you had already been active as a dissident writer for a number of years, during which you wrote under various pen names. What, in your particular case, made you opt in favor of pen names? And why did you decide eventually to do away with them?

When I wrote under pen names, I was working for people who would fire me if they knew my real views.

When I took the TOQ job, I was told I would have to use my own name. At the time, I was explained that since TOQ is the would-be flagship of the intellectual wing of the Anglophone movement, it would not be suitable to edit it under a pen name. I accepted that argument at face value and took the plunge. At that point, I crossed the Rubicon. After about a year, all my old professional “friends” and contacts simply melted away.

At the Counter-Currents/North American New Right site, I am consolidating all of my writings under two names: Greg Johnson for all the political articles and Trevor Lynch for most of the movie and television reviews.

3. The internet and ‘the real world’ are often presented as diametrical opposites, with the former cast as phony and the latter as the only thing that counts. But, isn’t the internet as real as the so-called real world? I say this because behind the keyboards and in front of the screens sit real people, whose behaviour in the ‘real world’ is both a cause and a result of what happens on the internet. I am aware of the argument against: many real people adopt fake online identities, but, ultimately, in the long run it is next to impossible for people not to betray their own thoughts and feelings online. Fake identities aside, is not the internet perhaps the most honest record of what is actually on people’s minds? Is not ‘the real world’ in fact phonier, since many don’t say what is on their minds in face-to-face situations for fear of social disapproval, professional consequences, or ostracism?

There have been recent studies that suggest that people lie more on the internet than in real life. But to some extent I agree with you: the internet is like the voting booth, and in its privacy and anonymity people can be more honest about controversial matters. In more mundane matters, usually connected to online dating and banal narcissism, the internet is a vast sewer of lies and imposture.

All this relates to the “ethics” of pen names. To me, it is purely a matter of individual discretion. I recommend pen names to those who want to communicate ideas but can’t under their own names. After all, it is the ideas that matter in the end, not the authors.

Yes, cowardly and dishonorable people often hide behind pen names. But narcissistic jackasses also write under their own names. To me, the most important consideration is to get as much truth as possible circulating out there. The labels and brands are less important than the content.

4. Your tenure as TOQ editor saw a number of innovations: an active online presence was developed and articles and reviews appeared that covered a much wider spectrum of cultural spaces than ever before. What were your aims for the TOQ during this period?

My aim was to make TOQ a metapolitical journal for a North American New Right, the goal of which was to lay the foundations of the White Republic. There were, however, limitations built into TOQ from the beginning that made that difficult.

A problem was that the journal did not have clearly articulated goals. There were basic topics and parameters in the founding documents, which were drawn up by Sam Francis, Louis Andrew, William Regnery, and Kevin Lamb: TOQ was to deal with biological race differences as well as the Jewish Question. TOQ was not to bash homosexuals. TOQ was to be neutral on religion.

The de facto editorial line, however, can be divined from the interview published with Alain de Benoist. Only about half the actual interview was published. Everything critical of scientific materialism and Christianity was dropped. Benoist, I imagine, was quite disgusted. I certainly was when I learned about it. (I plan to publish the discarded portions in the first volume of North American New Right.)

Now, to his credit, the original Editor Kevin Lamb frequently crossed these boundaries. When I took over as Editor, I quickly learned that I had to edit as if I had a scientific materialist over one shoulder and a religious fundamentalist over the other. I too went beyond those strictures. I made some improvements in the design and editing of the journal, but ultimately I did not do anything radically different than Lamb.

5. The term ‘metapolitics’ is often used within the intellectual class, and no doubt there are some who think it is all pretentious nonsense. Please explain this term for the layman, and why metapolitics is important. Why not just straight politics?

Metapolitics deals with foundational questions connected to politics, questions from history, philosophy, religious studies, the arts, and the human sciences.

One way of understanding the distinction between metapolitics and politics is in terms of values.

A political leader has to appeal to the existing values and attitudes of his constituency. The reason why White Nationalist politics is premature is that it offends the values of the electorate. (David Duke’s one win was a fluke. It won’t be allowed to happen again.) We can’t get what we want, because our people don’t want what we want. They think our goals are immoral. They also think they are incoherent and impractical.

They think these things, because our enemies have carefully laid the metapolitical foundations for the power they enjoy. They control academia, the school system, publishing, the arts, the news and entertainment media, and they have remade the American mind to their liking. My aim is to change people’s sense of what is politically desirable and right, and their sense of what is politically conceivable and possible.

That means that we have to explore ideas that would offend the majority of people.

6. So metapolitics is not the province of impractical bookworms, then. How does it relate to politics?

Metapolitics is about laying the foundations for political change. There are three levels to our struggle. (1) The metapolitical struggle to change values, culture, worldviews. (2) The metapolitical struggle to create a white community, and not just a virtual community, but an actual, real world, face-to-face community. A counter-culture needs to be embodied in a counter-community. (3) The political struggle for actual political power. In the end, we want political power, because we want to make the survival and flourishing of our people the law of the land, a matter of explicit policy, indeed the fundamental law and policy.

But metapolitics is not compatible with political activity within the present system and at the present time. Why? Because the prevailing metapolitical consensus rejects White Nationalism as immoral and impossible. This means that pushing our agenda in the present system is ultimately futile. Any gains will be at tremendous cost and will be easily reversed. You can swim against the current, but it is exhausting, and as soon as you run out of energy, the current will sweep you back to where you started. You can’t build the political superstructure before you lay the metapolitical foundations.

This is not to say that it is impossible for a deep-cover White Nationalist to pursue political power. I hope a lot of them are.

Nor is it impossible for system politicians to support initiatives that White Nationalists can support. For me, the only political issue in the United States that I care about is immigration, and there is reason for hope on that front. Politicians who are close to the right bank of the mainstream are pushing initiatives that might slow or halt the onslaught of illegal immigration. It is far short of what White Nationalists want—namely, a race-based immigration policy—but it would give us time by putting back the date when Whites become a minority in the United States. Given how disorganized and kook-infested the White Nationalist movement is in the United States, we need all the time we can get. Thus if it is possible for a White Nationalist to push immigration policy in the right direction, I say do it, so long as you do not divert our community’s resources into the political mainstream.

What I reject utterly is the idea that White Nationalists—a tiny, despised, poorly funded, poorly led minority—should divert any of our scare political capital into the mainstream at the cost of building up our own institutions and community. The mainstream is capable of taking care of itself. We need to take care of ourselves. If we don’t articulate our message and build our community, nobody else will.

We can’t buy mainstream politicians. They would flee from and denounce us if they knew who we are. Thus spending our political capital on people like that and expecting White Nationalist results is analogous to taking one’s capital to Las Vegas and playing craps as opposed to building one’s own business that will provide long-term steady income.

Gambling, of course, is more fun than hard work, and the political system, like Las Vegas, is full of people who will be your friend and stroke your ego as long as you have money to blow. But the house always wins in the end, so White Nationalists who put their capital behind system politicians end up cleaned out, burned out, and useless to our cause.

7. Does not the inherent need for dissimulation in politics make it incompatible with free enquiry and open intellectual debate?

Yes, I will grant that. And if I thought that the time for political struggle were at hand, and if I thought that someone had come up with the perfect “Noble Lie,” I would fall right in line.

But White Nationalist politics is premature. Yet the main impediment I encounter is giddy people thinking that the time for political struggle is at hand, and the only thing standing in the way of that are people like me who insist on talking about things like the problems of Christianity, European idears like fascism and (horrors!) National Socialism, etc. After all, these ideas won’t play in Peoria! They tell us that we need to shut down such discussions so our enemies don’t use them to scare away the voters.

Well, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see where this is going. The first thing we need to do is stop publishing articles that might offend mainstream Republican types. So we can’t publish articles about Black Metal, because that is “Satanic,” or Traditionalism because it is “occult,” or paganism because it is pagan. And we can’t be critical of capitalism either.

But you can’t stop there. Nothing offends Christian fundamentalists more than Darwinism, so scientific race studies and evolutionary psychological studies of the Jews are out too. Why talk about race and Jews at all, for that matter? Isn’t that divisive? Why not just get people riled up about “unfairness” and “double standards” against “European Americans” based on our “skin color”? Maybe we should just talk about restoring the Constitution.

In short, why not just close up shop? That is the ultimate end of this lemming-like stampede into the safe, respectable oblivion of mainstream conservatism.

The trouble with the mainstream, though, is that our enemies have done the metapolitical engineering work necessary to divert the conservative mainstream away from the turbines of political power and into the irrigation ditches of irrelevance.

So until the time is ripe for political struggle, I think that it is best to have the most open and free-wheeling intellectual debate possible. That is the only way we will create an intellectually exciting and morally credible metapolitical movement.

Besides, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle or the toothpaste back in the tube. For instance, even if I shut up tomorrow about the damaging effects Christianity has had on our racial survival, our enemies could still use that to scare Christians about Godless or Satanic racists. So we might as well keep the conversation going.

Besides, racially-conscious Christians will never reform their churches unless we constantly scourge them to do it. Otherwise, they tend to be far more interested in shutting down criticism in our camp than in confronting anti-White hatred in their churches.

Maybe metapolitical debate is folly from the point of view of political expediency. But as William Blake put it, the fool, if he persists in his folly, becomes wise. So we will persist.

We aren’t going to shut up and blend in, so people in the mainstream had better figure out ways of making us work to their advantage, if only by using us as boogey men to make them seem moderate by comparison.

8. Revolutionising the collective consciousness is probably one of the most difficult tasks that can be attempted, because for the most part people are not conscious of how they thinking is pre-determined by implicit rules and taken-for-granted notions that, because they seem self-evident truths, act to make ideology invisible. Truly unfettered intellectual debate feels threatening because it seeks to break out of that cognitive cage. Worse, this cage is so insidious that it even affects those who already are outside of the mainstream. What are the most common everyday manifestations you have encountered of the barriers to unfettered intellectual debate?

I can think of three.

First, there are people who read Counter-Currents/North American New Right and TOQ before them who imagine themselves being confronted with quotes from these publications on the campaign trail, or in a press conference, or on trial, or during pillow talk. (Not that they are politicians or otherwise likely to be interviewed by the press, but they have vivid imaginations.) They imagine themselves being tried before the court of today’s public opinion for holding heretical beliefs. And they are scared.

Well, they should be scared. That is the whole necessity for metapolitical struggle in the first place: to change prevailing public opinion. And to change public opinion, one must first have the courage to disagree with it, to buck it, to say things that might offend the public and that demagogues and lawyers can easily twist into a noose before a baying lynch mob.

A second perennial confusion is what Guillaume Faye calls the misapplication of the “apparatus logic” of a political party to an intellectual movement or publication. I try to survey the full variety of intellectual and cultural currents on the racialist right. Well of course somebody out there disagrees strongly with everything that I publish. Only a schizophrenic could hold Darwinian evolutionism and Guénonian devolutionism in the same mind, for instance.

But I routinely hear from people saying that I shouldn’t have published something, or that I need to remove something potentially offensive from the site. My standard reply is: If you don’t agree with something, write a rebuttal and we will publish that too.

Frequently, the reaction is incomprehension and anger. I realized that I am dealing with people who think in terms of a single intellectual orthodoxy in which offending opinions are not debated but simply made to disappear. It is the mentality that gave us the Inquisition and the Gulag.

Third, there is the related confusion that I call “representation logic”: the idea that everything published in a magazine represents the views of everybody else in the magazine, or everybody who subscribes to it, or everybody who donates to it. The consistent application of that sort of thinking would shut down all intellectual discussion.

For example, when I published Derek Hawthorne’s review of Jack Donovan’s Androphilia, I had one reader write in and say that he could not be part of the North American New Right because he wasn’t homosexual—as if everybody else who reads the site or writes for it were! Another fellow wondered if we were all “Satanists” because I published something by Julius Evola on Aleister Crowley. It doesn’t work that way.

9. When my essay about Black Metal appeared at TOQ Online, it elicited the highest number of comments ever seen for a TOQ article. Why do you think TOQ readers felt so strongly about such an obscure form of music? And why do you think people who obviously never heard the music felt entitled to have such strong opinions about it?

First of all, let me say that I thought very highly of that article. I was proud to have it appear in our pages. I knew nothing about Black Metal, so I was very happy to find such a sophisticated and well-informed perspective on it.

I wish I could find similarly high quality articles on the Neofolk scene and other white subcultures. We need to know what is out there and what works. We need to establish connections with these communities. Your article is a model of the sort of work that I want to publish in North American New Right (hint, hint).

I would have thought that White Nationalists would have been delighted to discover such a vast musical subculture in which radical white racial consciousness is the norm. Unfortunately, that was often not the case. I received more criticism for that article than anything else I published.

Christians (and gallant atheists who throw their honesty in the mud so Christians need not dirty their feet) were shocked at the associations with Satanism, paganism, and National Socialism. Others with premature fantasies of political activism were worried about how it would play in Peoria. Most of it was just bad faith posturing.

10. After editing TOQ, you founded a publishing house, Counter-Currents. What are your aims with this new enterprise? What can we expect from, and what would you like to make happen with, Counter-Currents in the next five to ten years?

Counter-Currents publishes North American New Right, which is a metapolitical journal that aims at laying the foundations for a white ethnostate in North America. North American New Right has two formats.

First, there is our webzine, at the Counter-Currents website, www.counter-currents.com, which publishes something new every day. The reason we publish online is because it increases the availability and thus the impact of an article, and it makes it immediately available to the public. Our goal is to save the world, after all. If something contributes to that end, it is worth publishing right away.

Second, we will publish an annual print volume, which contains the best of the website and additional articles, reviews, interviews, etc. This will be a handsome book along the lines of the journals Tyr or Alexandria: The Journal of Western Cosmological Traditions. The first volume, for 2010, will go to press in March 2011.

We also plan to publish around six books a year. Our format is to publish short books that can be read in a day, say in the range of 120 to 160 pages, with 200 being the upper limit. All our books will be published in limited numbered, hardcover editions of 100 copies plus standard hardcover and paperback editions.

Our first two volumes are Michael O’Meara’s Toward the White Republic and Michael Polignano’s Taking Our Own Side. Forthcoming volumes include works by Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Kerry Bolton, and Edmund Connelly.

Counter-Currents/North American New Right focuses on philosophy, political theory, religion, history, the arts, and popular culture with a White Nationalist metapolitical slant, and a special emphasis on whites in North America, since this is where we are located. We do not focus on science, policy studies, or the daily news cycle. We are not a political activist group, but a politically aware publishing house.

11. During the summer you wrote “Learning from the Left,” to which I responded with an article of my own, “Learning from the Right,” both on The Occidental Observer. In my article, I enumerated what I considered to be the failed strategies of the right. What are, in your opinion, the failed strategies of the right? And, having learnt from them, what do you propose should be the Right’s focus/approach in the coming decade?

I will speak specifically of the American scene.

I think the greatest failure of the post-WW II racial right is not dealing with the Jewish Question, whether through ignorance or cowardice. Instead, the tendency has been to use euphemisms, circumlocutions, and proxies to speak about the enemy: liberals, socialists, cultural Marxists, etc. But you cannot fight an enemy whom you refuse to name and understand. Is it any surprise that people have not been eager to follow leaders who reek of cowardice and moral confusion?

Next is the failure to identify what we are fighting for, again whether through ignorance or cowardice. We are fighting for the survival of white people in North America. Again, the tendency has been to use euphemisms, circumlocutions, or proxies: the Constitution, free enterprise, Christianity. The most preposterous one that I have heard is the claim that we are “the descendants of non-duophysite Christians as of 1492.” Of course this is not a definition of anything, just a euphemism for white Europeans, not Arabs or Jews. But why not just come out and say that? Is it any surprise that a movement where this passes for cleverness has gotten nowhere?

The third great failure is ceding the whole realm of culture and ideas to the Jews and trying to fight a merely political battle, which leads inevitably to the buffoonery of cornpone populism as an attempt to make an end run around the establishment’s lock on thinking people. But it just hasn’t worked. It might have worked 60 years ago, but it didn’t. But today Jews control the whole realm of explicit culture, for the thinking and unthinking alike.

Whites in North America will not be able to regain control of our destiny until we (1) openly avow and defend our racial identity and interests, (2) openly identify the leading role of the organized Jewish community in setting our race on the path to degradation and death, and (3) lay the metapolitical foundations for political power, which includes (a) spreading our message through the whole realm of culture and ideas and (b) fostering a concrete, real-world, racially-conscious white community.

12. As an intellectual, your theatre of war is the realm of ideas. Yet, people are seldom, if ever, persuaded through reason. Those who adopt dissident views adopt them because they were already innately pre-disposed toward them, and events facilitated a process of becoming truer to themselves. What does that mean for dissident intellectuals, from a political-strategical point of view?

Rational persuasion does not presuppose a blank slate model or an idea of reason as “pure” and unconditioned by factors other than truth. Maybe all reasoning is in the end is getting people to become aware of what they are already predisposed to believe. Which is implies that those people who lack that predisposition will never believe, no matter how good your argument may be.

Well, if that is so, then universalism is out. Democracy is out. Egalitarianism is out. But that sounds fine to me.

If we can persuade 5% of our people of the truth of our cause and get another 20% to identify with the program in essentially irrational or sub-rational ways, we can dominate the rest. Perhaps we can win the loyalty of 50% by delivering prosperity, security, and peace. Even if 25% can never get with the program, no matter what we do, because they have innate predispositions to reject it, they would just have to grumble and put up with the New Order. If their attitudes are genetic, then our eugenics program can target those traits and try to make them less prevalent in every future generation.

These numbers are arbitrary, but I think they communicate an important truth: a small minority of true believers, if it wins the allegiance of a somewhat larger minority of people who merely hold the right opinions without good reasons, can dominate the whole of society, essentially buy the loyalty of the majority, and completely disempower its die-hard opponents.

The real question for me is how to gain that second group, the larger minority of people who hold the right opinions but not necessarily for rational reasons. That is why metapolitics has to go beyond reason—beyond philosophy, beyond science—and engage myth, religion, and art.

One of my aims for Counter-Currents/North American New Right is to foster and promote a white artistic movement. I have done some writing on this topic, but my ideas are not yet ready for publication. The essence of the program, though, has two main parts.

First, we need to expose young, racially-conscious white artists to the great exemplars of the past. You don’t have to go back too far before one discovers that practically all great thinkers and artists are “right wing extremists” by present-day standards. Beyond that, many of the greatest artists of the 20th century were on our side as well. That is a tradition that we need to recover.

Second, we need to gather together white artists and foster them by creating a community of artists and critics. Critics can play an important role, even critics who are not artists themselves. Eventually, this will become the topic of a series of articles and reviews, which I then will bundle into a book.

13. The typical Right winger excels at critiquing what is wrong with modern Western society, but falls well short when it comes to imagining a future society in which the Right’s intellectual traditions comprise the mainstream of culture. William Pierce’s single broadcast, “White World,” set against his hundreds of other broadcasts, epitomizes this condition. Surely the future must not simply be a futile (and impossible) return to the 1930s. The Left, on the other hand, has always had a utopian vision. Describe a future society where Savitri Devi’s texts are canonical university textbooks, read without controversy.

This is why I think we need to cultivate artists. Artists project worlds. Harold Covington’s Northwest Quartet novels, for example, are enormously effective at communicating ideas. His novel The Hill of the Ravens is set in a future Northwest Republic, as are parts of A Distant Thunder.

Of course film is even more effective at communicating ideas than books. Film really is the realization of Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Savitri Devi was politically to the right of Hitler. I guess the best image of a world where she is read without controversy is the final chapter of her Impeachment of Man: “Race, Economic, and Kindness: An Ideal World.”

14. Finally, how would you like to be remembered in 100 years? And how do you think you will be remembered by the enemy?

In truth, my initial reaction to your question is that I would like to be forgotten.

Human egoism is such an ugly thing. Narcissism is such a devastating personality trait in our movement—particularly the histrionic, “drama queen” variety. But there is a normal, healthy desire to be remembered that gets trampled and crushed by pathological narcissists stampeding toward what they imagine to be the stage of history and the spotlight of eternal glory. Of course in reality they end up telling the same stories to ever-dwindling meet, eat, and retreat groups; posturing on Facebook; or telling lies on internet forums.

I am less concerned with how I am remembered than by whom: I hope our people are alive and flourishing in a hundred years, and many centuries after that. As for our enemies: Frankly, I hope they lose their will to survive, suffer a demographic collapse, and eventually disappear. That is the sort of world in which I would like to be remembered.

I want to accomplish the goals I have set out above, and I would like them to contribute to that world. I want to leave the world a better place than I found it. I want to be part of the chain that carries what is best in our race and civilization onward and upward. Whether I am remembered or forgotten, I will still have played that role; it will be part of the permanent record of the cosmos, as unalterable as the laws of mathematics. That is more important than living on in other people’s memory.

Source: http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news241120100028...

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