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lundi, 09 septembre 2019

The Legacy of Lothrop Stoddard

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The Legacy of Lothrop Stoddard

Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) was, in many respects, decidedly a man of his times. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he devoted the bulk of his writing to the nascent field of social science, hoping to harness the discipline not only to explain the past and present, but also to affect positive changes in the future. He can accurately be surmised as a disciple of Madison Grant, who was himself the intellectual progeny of Arthur de Gobineau by way of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The Rising Tide of Color [2], the 1920 geopolitical and anthropological work for which Stoddard was and is best known, shows Grant’s influence not only in its division of the Aryan race into three subcategories (Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean), but also in its overriding pessimism and anxiety about the future of white civilization, a trait characteristic of the post-First World War generation of Right-wing intellectuals.

LS-schum.jpgHowever, Stoddard departed from Grant in meaningful ways and, while some of Grant’s work is commendable, Stoddard’s deviations from it are almost uniformly for the better. In The Passing of the Great Race [3], Grant suggested that the Nordic race was characterized by a set of sublime, masterful traits which were absent from lesser races, including the other Caucasoid races. Stoddard, by contrast, is less interested with these subdivisions than with the fate of the larger racial community. Grant wrote the preface to The Rising Tide of Color, and the word “Nordic” appears far more often in those thirty-two pages than in the remaining three-hundred some pages of the book. As one would expect, Stoddard is guilty of some of the purity-spiraling which characterized his generation of racial theorists and remains a problem for white activism today, but these forays into excess are easy to overlook in favor of the more relevant argument and his obvious admiration for a greater racial community.

Stoddard has some positive things to say about non-white races, even as he views geopolitical circumstances naturally drawing them into conflict with whites. For instance, Stoddard praises the Chinese for their laboriousness. The Japanese are praised for their rapid industrialization, and the West is chastised for having underestimated their abilities. Stoddard even praises the Islamic Revival as regenerative within its particular cultural context, restoring to the Arab world a vitality which had been lost within the bureaucratic Ottoman Empire, and he portrays Arabs as some of the world’s fiercest warriors. Stoddard’s advocacy of racial hygiene thus has the goal of preserving the distinctive traits of all races, not just a particular subset of the Caucasoid race. In this sense, he has more in common with many on the New Right than does Madison Grant.

In The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard made a number of predictions which have proven startlingly accurate, if not wholly original. Stoddard’s thesis, in essence, is that the apparent hegemony of Europe in his day would be short lived – white civilization would soon be overrun by the “colored” races. Unsurprisingly, he does not predict that this circumstance will be brought about by non-whites overtaking whites in terms of ability. Rather, this usurpation of the West would be a simple metric of quantity over quality, the result of higher birth rates among non-whites. These higher birth rates, he notes ironically, would not be possible without the medicinal, technological, and political changes brought to Africa and Asia by European colonists. At stake here was not just the displacement of whites from their traditional homelands. Stoddard, who had previously written The French Revolution in San Domingo, was well aware of the probable fate of white minorities. The dysgenic tragedy of the First World War, which Stoddard aptly portrayed as meaningless but unfairly blames almost exclusively on the Germans, is portrayed as accelerating the onset of this catastrophe.

LS-racreal.jpgStoddard foresaw that capitalism would encourage the importation of non-white labor that would outcompete whites not in its quality, but in its quantity and its willingness to work for practically nothing. This willingness is owed to the fact that, given the Malthusian pressures triggered by the overpopulation of their nations, even the most meager subsistence would be preferable from their perspective. Needless to say, this prediction has been made manifest in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere. Stoddard predicted that the Islamic Revival would bring the Muslim world into war against the West and that black Africans would align with Muslims in this effort. Stoddard predicted that internecine rivalries between non-whites would be put aside in favor of a sort-of rainbow coalition that would persist up until the moment that the white world had been defeated. He also predicted that the moral grandstanding about national self-determination during and after the First World War would make continued maintenance of the massive European colonial empires an impossibility. This seems obvious in retrospect – the values codified at Versailles both incentivized the creation of nationalist movements across the European colonies and made the ruling position blatantly and indefensibly hypocritical – but it must not have been to the contemporary British and French ruling class, who made efforts (with varying degrees of intensity) to cling to their empires into the 1960s. He predicted that the Bolsheviks would persuade discontented colored nationalists to the cause of Communism. He predicted that Japan would challenge the West for hegemony over Asia – another accurate prediction, although its impressiveness is mitigated by the fact that this was already a widespread belief following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. He also presaged Samuel Huntington by prophesying that the struggle between various races and cultures, rather than Marxist materialist concerns, would be the primary cause of conflict and consciousness in the twentieth century and beyond.

The Rising Tide of Color was well-received, despite being panned by the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas, who (in keeping with his Jewishness) was endeavoring to remove all racial considerations from a field historically composed almost exclusively of racial studies. Stoddard took the implications of his research seriously, and worked to prevent the catastrophe he foresaw from becoming a reality. To this end, he helped lobby for the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, much admired by contemporary and modern Rightists, which created an immigration system based upon quotas designed to preserve the traditional ethnic makeup of the United States. This seems to have alleviated much of his pessimism, as his 1927 book Re-forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood [4] celebrates the (sadly, illusory) palingenesis of the US and its founding stock. Reflecting the non-racial dysgenic concerns described within The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman [4] (1922), Stoddard helped promote eugenicist policies, working alongside Margaret Sanger to create the birth control movement. He also spent time as a correspondent in the Third Reich, of which he held an ambivalent view. Nonetheless, German government officials naturally preferred giving interviews to Stoddard rather than to the more hostile William Shirer. During and after the Second World War, Stoddard, like many of his generation, was shut out from even supposedly conservative publications. The man and his work were suddenly heretical to the intellectual and political establishment, and he was silenced to such an extent that his death in 1950 went practically unreported in the press.

LS-revciv.jpgToday, the unfortunate veracity of Stoddard’s predictions has reignited interest in his scholarship, sympathetically in dissident circles and, of course, negatively in the establishment. The similarity of his predictions to the “Great Replacement” which we observe today will not be lost on any conscious reader. It is safe to say that this is the reason that Stoddard has recently begun reappearing in Leftist publications. The Left uses Stoddard [5] to demonstrate that anything but an open border is racist and evil, and those articles are exactly the kind of insipid, smooth-brained commentary you would expect – in essence, Stoddard proves that “orange man bad.” Another article positions Stoddard as evidence for the dangers of academic and speech freedoms [6]. A slightly (but only slightly) more interesting article suggests that Douglas Murray is the heir apparent to Stoddard’s legacy [7], a somewhat accurate assessment nonetheless muddled by the asinine, copy-and-paste commentary suggesting that the displacement of whites is at once a ridiculous conspiracy theory and an inevitable force of nature that we should celebrate and embrace. The establishment Right [8] has also recently begun smacking around Stoddard, using him to tar Planned Parenthood as part of its ridiculously misguided and self-destructive campaign against abortion rights.

It will doubtless be a shock to all Counter-Currents readers to learn that none of this mainstream pabulum is worth the time invested in reading it. However, there has been one recent article regarding Stoddard which caught my attention and which, through its enshrinement in Stoddard’s Wikipedia entry, has now become part of his popular legacy. The article, published in The New Yorker and penned by Ian Frazier, regrettably grabbed my attention with the clickbait headline “When W. E. B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist [9].” I immediately knew, based on the fact that he had once engaged in a public debate with Du Bois, that the eponymous “supremacist” was Stoddard. Moreover, I immediately knew that the article must be laughably disingenuous, given that Du Bois was not remotely close to Stoddard in terms of ability (and given that it was published in The New Yorker). Du Bois is a beloved icon of the modern American Left, a fact attributable to his blackness, his constant demands that whites change their societies to include and advance blacks, and his Marxism.

Du Bois is uniformly portrayed as an inimitable genius, rivaled only by Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas as a founder of social science. However, when one actually examines his ideas, it becomes obvious that not only was he wrong about practically everything but, worse, he also had nothing novel to say. Every single one of Du Bois’ supposed contributions to social science can more meaningfully be attributed to someone else. The term “color line” to describe racial segregation was coined by Frederick Douglass (and, at any rate, is hardly an insight), and the argument that the concept of race only exists to justify capitalist exploitation was clearly lifted from Karl Marx’s theories of superstructure and false consciousness. Du Bois’ most celebrated achievement, elucidated in The Souls of Black Folk, is the theory of “Double Consciousness,” wherein blacks are forced to consider themselves through white racial conceptions. Even this is lifted from elsewhere, little more than a modified version of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of the same name. Moreover, double consciousness’ claim that black Americans are forced to inexorably struggle to reconcile a black ethnocultural identity with their existence in a European cultural context has always struck me as a direct contradiction of Du Bois’ race negationism. Race, when it is conceived by whites, is a social construct created to justify exploitation. When conceived by blacks, race is an innate reality of existence, and Pan-African cultural traits persist within the black soul regardless of their physical location.

Nonetheless, and despite the much more numerous successes of his arch-rival Booker T. Washington, Du Bois was regarded as the leading black intellectual of his day. In The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard had explicitly cited Du Bois as an example of the growing non-white resentment that would undermine and eventually destroy white civilization. This, coupled with Stoddard’s constant willingness to express his ideas in front of even uniformly hostile audiences (he even gave a speech to all-black Tuskegee University in 1926), led to a 1929 debate between Stoddard and Du Bois in Chicago. The debate was Du Bois’ brainchild, and was thus held in front of a largely black audience and reported on primarily by the black press. One is thus forced to wonder what Stoddard thought this debate would accomplish. At the time, there remained some slight degree of optimism that blacks and whites would both remain in their proverbial lanes, with blacks following the example of Booker T. Washington and his Atlanta Compromise. Indeed, Stoddard referenced Washington’s metaphor of the American races as a hand (in which each race is kept distinct, like the fingers, but works together for the betterment of all) during the debate. But Washington’s path, which focused on black self-improvement, cultural assimilation, and interracial cooperation until black-white parity was achieved, was always a longshot; it required blacks to possess low time preference. Du Bois’ way – simply demanding that white society change to fit black expectations by appealing to the white sense of fair play and benevolence – was always going to be an easier sell.

To borrow a beloved Leftist expression, everything about the debate was “rigged.” The New Yorker article, like the magazine’s Jewish readership and the debate’s contemporary audience, has of course already made up its mind on who won the debate before a single word is relayed. Author Ian Frazier mocks Stoddard as a “nut,” citing his belief in “germ-plasm” as the conveyor of genetic information. Stoddard’s understanding of this process retrospectively comes across as nonsense, and The New Yorker clearly feels that it is no excuse that he was writing at a time when no one on Earth understood it much better. Likewise, the black correspondents who recorded the details of the event from which we are to draw our conclusions represented The Chicago Defender, which had called Stoddard “the high priest of racial baloney,” and The Baltimore Afro-American, which had at once rejected the premise of The Rising Tide of Color while simultaneously celebrating its statistics showing that non-white people outnumbered whites worldwide.

LS-Dark.jpgThe central question of the debate was “Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?,” a concept which had never been relevant to Stoddard’s research but was the entire raison d’etre for Du Bois’ career. Moreover, the framing of the question was such that, even at the time, it would have been impossible to make a cogent argument against it. The contrary position, that whites should actively discourage blacks from bettering themselves, would not have been how segregationists presented their position. And, of course, Du Bois was not asking for whites to “encourage” blacks to “seek” their own achievements – that was the position of Booker T. Washington, his hated nemesis. Du Bois’ goal was to dissolve white institutions, or at least inject blacks into them, and to accomplish a Marxist redistribution of wealth along racial lines.

The debate began with the moderator presenting Du Bois as “one of the ablest speakers for his race not only in America but in the whole wide world,” while Stoddard was “a man whose books and writings and speaking have made his views known to many hundreds of thousands of people both in this country and abroad.” In other words, Du Bois is among the most brilliant people in the world, and Stoddard is someone who is literate enough to convey his ideas through the written word. Du Bois’ speech at the debate was typical for him and the precedent of black activism he established: He argues that everyone should be given cultural equality freely rather than having to seek or earn it, that since Abolition blacks have a list of accomplishments with “few parallels in human history” (though what these are is not stated), and that the white race has actually done far more ill for the world than good. Nordic whites, he says, have inflicted war, suffering, and tyranny on more people than any other group, a position that could be found restated verbatim in any modern Leftist publication. The same could be said of his next argument, which is that science (in the abstract) has proven that the races are equal in their aptitudes.

Du Bois also says that Stoddard is hypocritical for opposing miscegenation, for it is whites that have brought about the majority of interracial interaction in the world via exploration and colonization. Moreover, it is only arrogance which leads whites to believe that blacks would want to copulate with them in the first place. In the very next breath, Du Bois asserts that racial categorization itself is ridiculous because, as a mixed-race person himself, he is both Nordic and negro. This obvious contradiction – wherein he chastises whites for miscegenation before immediately saying resisting miscegenation is foolish – gets no commentary from The New Yorker, which presents Du Bois’ argument as brilliant at every turn, carefully luring Stoddard into a rhetorical trap. Du Bois finishes by saying that the US is founded upon Christian values, which it betrays by denying equality to blacks; in essence, that “this is not who we are.” What is most striking about Du Bois’ speech is that it reveals that the Left simply never changes. Their rhetoric today is the very same as it was ninety years ago. While it has never ceased being emotionally manipulative and intellectually bankrupt, you can hardly blame Leftists for sticking to a script which has won them a practically uninterrupted string of major victories.

Stoddard, for his part, does not even address Du Bois’ points. His proposal is the maintenance of the “separate but equal” dictum established by Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the races are kept apart not based on claims of superiority, but simply on the basis of racial difference. The New Yorker predictably presents this as a distortion of his beliefs, but I have little doubt that Ian Frazier never read The Rising Tide of Color, which makes the same essential argument. This brings us to the climactic moment of the debate when, as The New Yorker tells it, Du Bois makes a laughingstock of Stoddard, exposing his “unintentionally funny” ideas for just how ridiculous they are. Let us see how Du Bois’ brilliant dialectical style unfurled in full flower, ensnaring this hapless, “Nazi-loving” fool in its wake.

LS-clash.jpgStoddard says that “the more enlightened men of southern white America” are trying to ensure that, while the races are kept separate, that the facilities to which they have access are nonetheless equal in quality. This elicited laughter from the black audience, who found the claim to be ridiculous. Stoddard then informed them that he did not see the joke, apparently eliciting more whooping. Angered, Stoddard rebutted that bi-racial cooperation of the Atlanta Compromise mold was making more progress than anything Du Bois was attempting – another apt prediction, for Du Bois died having accomplished none of his goals. Du Bois gave up on “progress” in the US and eventually moved to observe and admire Mao Zedong’s brutality in China before settling in Ghana. His NAACP was and remains little more than a debating and protesting society. From its inception in 1909, the NAACP incessantly complained for over fifty years until other acronymous black organizations, aided by the bayonets of the National Guard and the Cold War exigencies of “winning hearts and minds,” ended the white near-monopoly on American political power.

The duplicity of The New Yorker’s portrayal here is so obvious that I have to imagine even those few goyim foolish enough to regularly sift through its wretched pages were able to at least sense a slight tingling in their temporal lobe. Clearly, Du Bois did nothing to “make a laughingstock” of Stoddard. Stoddard simply stated his beliefs in front of an audience so hostile to them that they met his arguments with incredulous laughter. The same result would befall anyone today who attempted to suggest before a black audience that Affirmative Action is racially biased or that Michael Brown was not a gentle giant. One wonders what the response would have been if Du Bois had returned Stoddard’s courtesy by conducting a debate in front of an educated, pro-white audience. How might they have reacted if Du Bois had made his claim that science disproves human genetic variation?

Ironically, the 2019 retrospective on this debate in The New Yorker is evidence of the veracity of Stoddard’s ideas. The entire informational apparatus of the US has been seized by vengeful non-whites and their self-destructive white allies, and is now used as a vanguard for affecting anti-white sociopolitical change. The rest of society is already taking and will continue to take the same course as whites become an increasingly scarce minority. Barring a miracle reversal, the “rising tide” which he feared and helped delay will subsume whites, subjecting them to the conditions which have befallen white minorities everywhere around the world.

 

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

URL to article: https://www.counter-currents.com/2019/09/the-legacy-of-lothrop-stoddard/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: https://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/9-5-19-4.jpg

[2] The Rising Tide of Color: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22915/page/n5

[3] The Passing of the Great Race: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.39871/page/n5

[4] Re-forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.43395/page/n13

[5] The Left uses Stoddard: https://www.thenation.com/article/replacement-theory-racism-white-supremacy/

[6] as evidence for the dangers of academic and speech freedoms: https://qz.com/1093545/a-brown-professor-explains-how-americans-faith-in-civilized-debate-is-fueling-white-supremacy/

[7] Douglas Murray is the heir apparent to Stoddard’s legacy: https://medium.com/@buffsoldier_96/the-strange-case-of-douglas-murray-74a670150172

[8] The establishment Right: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/06/planned-parenthoods-brutal-century/

[9] When W. E. B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist

 

mardi, 20 septembre 2016

Rightist Critique of Racial Materialism

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Rightist Critique of Racial Materialism

 
Ex: http://www.katehon.com

While France and England gave materialistic, anti-traditional expressions to the concept of “the people” that was taking shape since the French Revolution, German Idealism was a return to a spiritual, metaphysical direction. The German Revolution moved in a volkish direction, where the volk was seen as the basis of the state, and the notion of a volk-soul that guided the formation and development of nations became a predominant theme that came into conflict with the French bourgeois liberal-democratic ideals derived from Jacobinism. Fichte had laid the foundations of a German nationalism in 1807-1808 with his Addresses to the German Nation. Although like possibly all revolutionaries or radicals of the time, beginning under the impress of the French Revolution, by the time he had delivered his addresses to the German nation, he had already rejected Jacobinism. Johann Heder had previously sought to establish the concept of the volk-soul, and of each nation being guided by a spirit. This was a metaphysical conception of race, or more accurately volk, that preceded the biological arguments of the Frenchman Count Arthur de Gobineau. Herder stated that the volk is the only class, and includes both King and peasant, and that “the people” are not the same as the rabble that are championed by Jacobinism and later Marxism. 

Houston Stewart Chamberlain - Occult History Third Reich - Peter Crawford.jpgFrench and English racism was introduced to Germany by the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain who had a seminal influence on Hitlerism. English Darwinism, a manifestation of the materialistic Zeitgeist that dominated England, was brought to Germany by Ernst Haeckel; although Blumenbach had already begun to classify race according to cranial measurements during the 18th century. Nonetheless, biological racism reflects the English Zeitgeist of materialism. It provided primary materialistic doctrines to dethrone Tradition. Its application to economics also provided a scientific justification for the “class struggle” of both the capitalistic and socialistic varieties. Hitlerism was an attempt to synthesis the English eugenics of Galton and the evolution of Darwin with the metaphysis of German Idealism. Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola attempted to counter the later influence of Hitlerian racism on Italian Fascism by developing a “metaphysical racism,” and the concept of the “race of the spirit,” which has its parallels in Spengler, whose approach to race is in the Traditionalist mode of the German Idealists.

Because the Right, the custodian of Tradition within the epoch of decay, has been infected by the spirit of materialism, there is often a focus on secondary symptoms of culture disease, such as in particular immigration, rather than primary symptoms such as usury and plutocracy. “Race” becomes a matter of skull measuring, rather than spirit, élan and character. Hence the character of a civilisation and of a people is discerned via the types of bone and skull found amidst the ruins. History then becomes a matter of counting and measuring and statistics. How feeble such attempts remain is demonstrated by the years of controversy surrounding the racial identity of Kennewick Man in North America, having first thought to have been a Caucasian, and now concluded to have been of Ainu/Polynesian descent. The Traditionalist does not discount “race”. Rather it plays a central role. How “race” is defined is another matter. 

Trotsky called “racism” “Zoological materialism”. As an “economic materialist”, that is, a Marxist, he did not explain why his own version of materialism is a superior mode of thinking and acting than the other. They arose, along with Free Trade capitalism, out of the same Zeitgeist that dominated England at the time, and all three refer to a naturalistic life as struggle. The Traditionalist rejects all forms of materialism. The Traditionalist does not see history as unfolding according to material, economic forces, or racial-biological determinants. The Traditionalist sees history as the unfolding of metaphysical forces manifesting within the terrestrial. Spengler, although not a Perennial Traditionalist, intuited history over a broad expanse as a metaphysical unfolding. Although a man of the “Right”, he rejected the biological interpretation of history as much as the economic. So did Evola.

The best known exponents of racial determinism were of course German National Socialists, the reductionist doctrine being expressed by Hitler: 

“…This is how civilisations and empires break up and make room for new creations. Blood mixture, and the lowering of the racial level which accompanies it, are the one and only cause why old civilisations disappear…” 

The USA provided a large share of racial theorists of the early 20th century, whose conception of the rise and fall of civilisation was based on racial zoology, and in particular on the superiority of the Nordic not only above non-white races, but above all sub-races of the white, such as the Dinaric, Mediterranean and Alpine. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi wrote a book championing the cause of segregation, and more so, the “back-to-Africa” movement, stating that miscegenation with the Negro will result in the fall of white civilisation. He briefly examined some major civilisations. Bilbo wrote that Egyptian civilisation was mongrelised over centuries, “until a mulatto inherited the throne of the Pharaohs in the Twenty-fifth dynasty. This mongrel prince, Taharka, ruled over a Negroid people whose religion had fallen from an ethical test for the life after death to a form of animal worship”. This should be “sufficient warning to white America!” Because Sen. Bilbo had started from an assumption, his history was flawed. As will be shown below, it was Taharka and the Nubian dynasty that renewed Egypt’s decaying culture, which had degenerated under the white Libyan dynasties.  Sen. Bilbo proceeds with similar brief examinations of Carthage, Greece, and Rome. 

julius%20evola%20sintesi%20e%20dottrina%20della%20razza%20heopli.jpegJulius Evola, while repudiating the zoological primacy of “racism” as another form of materialism and therefore anti-Traditional, suggested that a “spiritual racism” is necessary to oppose the forces seeking to turn man into an amorphous mass; as interchangeable economic units without roots; what is now called “globalisation”. 

Evola gives the Traditionalist viewpoint when stating that there “have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands”. He gives Sweden and The Netherlands as recent examples, pointing out that although the race has remained unchanged, there is little of the “heroic disposition” those cultures possessed just several centuries previously. He refers to other great cultures as having remained in a state as if like mummies, inwardly dead, awaiting a push “to knock them down”. These are what Spengler called Fellaheen, spiritually exhausted and historically passé. Evola gives Peru as an example of how readily a static culture succumbed to Spain. Hence, such examples, even as vigorous cultures such as that of the Dutch and Scandinavian, once wide-roaming and dynamic, have declined to nonentities despite the maintenance of racial homogeneity. 

The following considers examples that are often cited as civilisations that decayed and died as the result of miscegenation.

Greek

A case study for testing the miscegenation theory of cultural decay is that of the Hellenic. The ancient Hellenic civilisation is typically ascribed by racial theorists as being the creation of a Nordic culture-bearing stratum. The same has been said of the Latin, Egyptian, and others. Typically, this theory is illustrated by depicting sculptures of ancient Hellenes of “Nordic” appearance. Such depictions upon which to form a theory are unreliable: the ancient Hellenes were predominantly a mixture of Dinaric-Alpine-Mediterranean. The skeletal remains of Greeks show that from earliest times to the present there has been remarkable uniformity, according to studies by Sergi, Ripley, and Buxton, who regarded the Greeks as an Alpine-Mediterranean mix from a “comparatively early date.” American physical anthropologist Carlton S. Coon stated that the Greeks remain an Alpine/Mediterranean mix, with a weak Nordic element, being “remarkably similar” to their ancient ancestors.

American anthropologist J. Lawrence Angel, in the most complete study of Greek skeletal remains starting from the Neolithic era to the present, found that Greeks have always bene marked by a sustained racial continuity. Angel cited American anthropologist Buxton who had studied Greek skeletal material and measured modern Greeks, especially in Cyprus, concluding that the modern Greeks “possess physical characteristics not differing essentially from those of the former [ancient Greeks]”. The most extensive study of modern Greeks was conducted by anthropologist Aris N. Poulianos, concluding that Greeks are and have always been Mediterranean-Dinaric, with a strong Alpine presence. Angel states that “Poulianos is correct in pointing out ... that there is complete continuity genetically from ancient to modern times”. Nikolaos Xirotiris did not find any significant alteration of the Greek race from prehistory, through classical and medieval, to modern times. Anthropologist Roland Dixon studied the funeral masks of Spartans and identified them as of the Alpine sub-race. Although race theorists often stated that Hellenic civilisation was founded and maintained by invading Dorian “Nordics”, Angel states that the northern invasions were always of “Dinaroid-Alpine” type. A recent statistical comparison of ancient and modern Greek skulls found “a remarkable similarity in craniofacial morphology between modern and ancient Greeks.”

If miscegenation and the elimination of an assumed Nordic (Dorian) culture-bearing stratum cannot account for the decay of Hellenic civilisation, what can? Contemporary historians point out the origins. The Roman historian Livy observed: 

“The Macedonians who settled in Alexandria in Egypt, or in Seleucia, or in Babylonia, or in any of their other colonies scattered over the world, have degenerated into Syrians, Parthians, or Egyptians. Whatever is planted in a foreign land, by a gradual change in its nature, degenerates into that by which it is nurtured”.

tarn-2.jpgHere Livy is observing that occupiers among foreign peoples “go native”, as one might say. The occupiers are pulled downward, rather than elevating their subjects upward, not through genetic contact but through moral and cultural corruption. The Syrians, Parthians and Egyptians, had already become historically and culturally passé, or Fellaheen, as Spengler puts it. The Macedonian Greeks in those colonies succumbed to the force of etiolation. Alexander even encouraged this in an effort to meld all subjects into one Greek mass, which resulted not from a Hellenic civilisation passed along by multitudinous peoples, but in a chaotic mass from which Greece did not recover, despite the Greeks staying racially intact. Unlike the Jews in particular, the Greeks, Romans and other conquerors did not have the strength of Tradition to maintain themselves among alien cultures. Dr. W. W. Tarn stated of this process:

“Greece was ready to adopt the gods of the foreigner, but the foreigner rarely reciprocated; Greek Doura (the Greek temple in Mesopotamia) freely admitted the gods of Babylon, but no Greek god entered Babylonian Uruk. Foreign gods might take Greek names; they took little else. They (the Babylonian gods) were the stronger, and the conquest of Asia (by the Greeks) was bound to fail as soon as the East had gauged its own strength and Greek weakness.”

Spengler pointed out to Western Civilisation and the current epoch that one of the primary symptoms of culture decay is that of depopulation. It is a sign literally that a Civilisation has become too lazy to look beyond the immediate. There is no longer any sense of duty to the past or the future, but only to a hedonistic present. Polybius (b. ca. 200 B.C.) observed this phenomenon of Hellenic Civilisation like Spengler did of ours, writing: 

tarn-1.jpg“In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us. If, then, any one had advised our sending to ask the gods in regard to this, what we were to do or say in order to become more numerous and better fill our cities,—would he not have seemed a futile person, when the cause was manifest and the cure in our own hands? For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury. For when there are only one or two sons, it is evident that, if war or pestilence carries off one, the houses must be left heirless: and, like swarms of bees, little by little the cities become sparsely inhabited and weak. On this subject there is no need to ask the gods how we are to be relieved from such a curse: for any one in the world will tell you that it is by the men themselves if possible changing their objects of ambition; or, if that cannot be done, by passing laws for the preservation of infants”.

Do Polybius’ thoughts sound like some unheeded doom-sayer speaking to us now about our modern world? If the reader can see the analogous features between Western Civilisation, and that of Greece and Rome then the organic course of Civilisations is being understood, and by looking at Greece and Rome we might see where we are heading.

Roman

Another often cited example of the fall of civilisation through miscegenation is that of Rome. However, despite the presence of slaves and traders of sundry races, like the Greeks, today’s Italians are substantially the same as they were in Roman times. Arab influence did not occur until Medieval times, centuries after the “fall of Rome”, with Arab rule extending over Sicily only during 1212-1226 A.D. The genetic male influence on Sicilians is estimated at only 6%. The predominant genetic influence is ancient Greek. The African have a less than  1% frequency  throughout Italy other than in , , and where there are frequencies of 2% to  3% . Sub-Saharan, that is, Negroid, mtDNA have been found at very low frequencies in Italy, albeit marginally higher than elsewhere in Europe, but date from 10,000 years ago. This study states: “….mitochondrial DNA studies show that Italy does not differ too much from other European populations”. Although there are small regional variations, “The mtDNA haplogroup make-up of Italy as observed in our samples fits well with expectations in a typical European population”. 

Hence, an infusion of Negroid or Asian genes during the epoch of Rome’s decline and fall is lacking, and the reasons for that fall cannot be assigned to miscegenation. What slight frequency there is of non-Caucasian genetic markers entered Rome long before or long after the fall of Roman Civilisation. There was no “contamination of Roman blood”, but of Roman spirit and élan.  

declinerome.jpgAlien immigration introduces cultural elements that dislocate the social and ethical basis of a Civilisation and aggravate an existing pathological condition. The English scholar Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, writing on the fall of Rome, commented that the Roman conquerors were subjected “to cultural inundation and grassroots influence”. Because Rome extended throughout the world, like the present Late Western, the economic opportunities accorded by Rome drew in all the elements of the subject peoples, “groups of mixed origin and alien ways of life”. “Even more significant was what the Romans learnt while on duty overseas, for men so influenced were of the highest rank”. Parkinson quotes Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, referring to the Roman colony of Antioch: 

“…Fashion was the only law, pleasure the only pursuit, and the splendour of dress and furniture was the only distinction of the citizens of Antioch. The arts of luxury were honoured, the serious and manly virtues were the subject of ridicule, and the contempt for female modesty and reverent age announced the universal corruption of the capitals of the East…” 

Roman historian Livy wrote of the opulence of Asia being brought back to Rome by the soldiery:

“…it was through the army serving in Asia that the beginnings of foreign luxury were introduced into the City. These men brought into Rome for the first time, bronze couches, costly coverlets, tapestry, and other fabrics, and - what was at that time considered gorgeous furniture - pedestal tables and silver salvers. Banquets were made more attractive by the presence of girls who played on the harp and sang and danced, and by other forms of amusement, and the banquets themselves began to be prepared with greater care and expense. The cook whom the ancients regarded and treated as the lowest menial was rising in value, and what had been a servile office came to be looked upon as a fine art. Still what met the eye in those days was hardly the germ of the luxury that was coming”.

The moral decay of Rome resulted in the displacement of Roman stock, not by miscegenation, but by the falling birth-rate of the Romans. Such population decline is itself a major symptom of culture decay. The problem that it signifies is that a people has so little consciousness left as to its own purpose as a culture that its individuals do not have any responsibility beyond their own egos. Professor Tenney Frank, foremost scholar on the economic history of Rome, also considered the results of population decline, from the top of the social hierarchy downward: 

“The race went under. The legislation of Augustus and his successors, while aiming at preserving the native stock, was of the myopic kind so usual in social lawmaking, and failing to reckon with the real nature of the problem involved. It utterly missed the mark. By combining epigraphical and literary references, a fairly full history of the noble families can be procured, and this reveals a startling inability of such families to perpetuate themselves. We know, for instance, in Caesar’s day of forty-five patricians, only one of whom is represented by posterity when Hadrian came to power. The Aemilsi, Fabii, Claudii. Manlii, Valerii, and all the rest, with the exception of Comelii, have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius raised twenty-five families to the patricate, and all but six disappear before Nerva’s reign. Of the families of nearly four hundred senators recorded in 65 A. D. under Nero, all trace of a half is lost by Nerva’s day, a generation later. And the records are so full that these statistics may be assumed to represent with a fair degree of accuracy the disappearance of the male stock of the families in question. Of course members of the aristocracy were the chief sufferers from the tyranny of the first century, but this havoc was not all wrought by delatores and assassins. The voluntary choice of childlessness accounts largely for the unparalleled condition. This is as far as the records help in this problem, which, despite the silences is probably the most important phase of the whole question of the change of race. Be the causes what they may, the rapid decrease of the old aristocracy and the native stock was clearly concomitant with a twofold increase from below; by a more normal birth-rate of the poor, and the constant manumission of slaves 

While allusions to “race” by Professor Frank are enough for “zoological materialists” to spin a whole theory about Rome’s decline and fall around miscegenation of the “white race” with blacks and Orientals, we now know from the genetics that despite the invasions over centuries, the Italians, like the Greeks, have retained their original racial composition to the present. What Frank is describing, by an examination of the records that show a disappearance of the leading patrician families, is that Rome was in a spiritual crisis, as all civilisations are when they regard child-bearing as a burden. Traditionalists such as Evola pointed out that the “secret of degeneration” of a civilisation is that it rots from the top downward, and as Spengler pointed out, one of the primary signs of that rot is childlessness. That there were Roman statesmen with the wisdom to understand what was happening is indicated by Augustus’ efforts to raise the birth-rate, but to no avail. Of this symptom of moral decay, Professor Frank wrote: 

“In the first place there was a marked decline in the birthrate among the aristocratic families. … As society grew more pleasure-loving, as convention raised artificially the standard of living, the voluntary choice of celibacy and childlessness became a common feature among the upper classes. …”

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Urbanisation, the magnetic pull of the megalopolis, the depopulation of the land and the proletarianism of the former peasant stock as in the case of the West’s Industrial Revolution, impacted in major ways on the fall of Rome. A. M. Duff wrote of the impact of rural depopulation and urbanisation:

“But what of the lower-class Romans of the old stock? They were practically untouched by revolution and tyranny, and the growth of luxury cannot have affected them to the same extent as it did the nobility. Yet even here the native stock declined. The decay of agriculture. … drove numbers of farmers into the towns, where, unwilling to engage in trade, they sank into unemployment and poverty, and where, in their endeavours to maintain a high standard of living, they were not able to support the cost of rearing children. Many of these free-born Latins were so poor that they often complained that the foreign slaves were much better off than they, and so they were. At the same time many were tempted to emigrate to the colonies across the sea which Julius Caesar and Augustus founded. Many went away to Romanize the provinces, while society was becoming Orientalized at home. Because slave labour had taken over almost all jobs, the free born could not compete with them. They had to sell their small farms or businesses and move to the cities. Here they were placed on the doles because of unemployment. They were, at first, encouraged to emigrate to the more prosperous areas of the empire to Gaul, North Africa and Spain. Hundreds of thousands left Italy and settled in the newly-acquired lands. Such a vast number left Italy leaving it to the Orientals that finally restrictions had to be passed to prevent the complete depopulation of the Latin stock, but as we have seen, the laws were never effectively put into force. The migrations increased and Italy was being left to another race. The free-born Italian, anxious for land to till and live upon, displayed the keenest colonization activity.” 

The foreign cultures and religions that had come to Rome from across the empire changed the temperament of the Romans masses who were uprooted and migrating to the cities; where as in the nature of the cites, as Spengler showed,  they became a cosmopolitan mass. Frank writes of this: 

“This Orientalization of Rome’s populace has a more important bearing than is usually accorded it upon the larger question of why the spirit and acts of imperial Rome are totally different from those of the republic. There was a complete change in the temperament! There is today a healthy activity in the study of the economic factors that contributed to Rome’s decline. But what lay behind and constantly reacted upon all such causes of Rome’s disintegration was, after all, to a considerable extent, the fact that the people who had built Rome had given way to a different race. The lack of energy and enterprise, the failure of foresight and common sense, the weakening of moral and political stamina, all were concomitant with the gradual diminution of the stock which, during the earlier days, had displayed these qualities. It would be wholly unfair to pass judgment upon the native qualities of the Orientals without a further study, or to accept the self-complacent slurs of the Romans, who, ignoring certain imaginative and artistic qualities, chose only to see in them unprincipled and servile egoists. We may even admit that had these new races had time to amalgamate and attain a political consciousness a more brilliant and versatile civilization might have come to birth.” 

Fall-of-the-Roman-Empire.jpgWhat is notable is not that the Romans miscegenated with Orientals, but that the uprooted, amorphous masses of the cities no longer adhered to the Traditions on which Roman civilisation was founded. The same process can be seen today at work in New York, London and Paris. Duff wrote of this, and we might consider the parallels with our own time: 

“Instead of the hardy and patriotic Roman with his proud indifference to pecuniary gain, we find too often under the Empire an idle pleasure-loving cosmopolitan whose patriotism goes no further than applying for the dole and swelling the crowds in the amphitheatre”. 

The Roman Traditional ethos of severity, austerity and disdain for softness that Emperor Julian attempted to reassert was greeted by “fashionable society” with “disgust”. Parkinson remarks that “there is just such a tendency in the London of today, as there was still earlier in Boston and New York”. These “world cities” no longer reflect a cultural nexus but an economic nexus, and hence one’s position is not based on how one or one’s family unfolds the Traditional ethos, but on whether or how one accumulates wealth. 

Indian

social_pyramid_f02.jpgIndia is the most commonly cited example of a civilisation that decayed through miscegenation, the invading Aryans imparting a High Culture on India and then forever falling into decay because of miscegenation with the low caste “blacks”, or Dravidians. However, Genetic research indicates that the higher castes have retained to the present a predominately Caucasian genetic inheritance.

“As one moves from lower to upper castes, the distance from Asians becomes progressively larger. The distance between Europeans and lower castes is larger than the distance between Europeans and upper castes, but the distance between Europeans and middle castes is smaller than the upper caste-European distance. … Among the upper castes the genetic distance between Brahmins and Europeans (0.10) is smaller than that between either the Kshatriya and Europeans (0.12) or the Vysya and Europeans (0.16). Assuming that contemporary Europeans reflect West Eurasian affinities, these data indicate that the amount of West Eurasian admixture with Indian populations may have been proportionate to caste rank.

“…As expected if the lower castes are more similar to Asians than to Europeans, and the upper castes are more similar to Europeans than to Asians, the frequencies of M and M3 haplotypes are inversely proportional to caste rank.

“…In contrast to the mtDNA distances, the Y-chromosome STR data do not demonstrate a closer affinity to Asians for each caste group. Upper castes are more similar to Europeans than to Asians, middle castes are equidistant from the two groups, and lower castes are most similar to Asians. The genetic distance between caste populations and Africans is progressively larger moving from lower to middle to upper caste groups. 

“…Results suggest that Indian Y chromosomes, particularly upper caste Y chromosomes, are more similar to European than to Asian Y chromosomes.

“…Nevertheless, each separate upper caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians.”

Citing further studies, “…admixture with African or proto-Australoid populations” is “occasional”. 

The chaos that afflicted India seems to have been of religio-cultural type rather than racial. Despite the superficiality of dusky hues, the Indian ruling castes have retained their Caucasian identity to the present. The genetic contribution of Australoids and Africans was minor. 

Egyptian

Like India, Egypt is often cited as an example of a civilisation that was destroyed primarily by miscegenation, with Negroids. However, despite the myriad of invasions and population shifts, today’s Egyptians are still more closely related genetically to Eurasia than Africa. Migrations between Egypt, Nubia and Sudan have not been extensive enough to “homogenise the mtDNA gene pools of the Nile River Valley populations”, although Egyptians and Nubians are more closely related than Egyptians and southern Sudanese. However, significant differences remain. Even now, today’s Egyptians have primary genetic affinities with Asia, and North and Northeast Africa. The least affinity is to the populations of Sub-Sahara.  The Haplotype  M1, with a high frequency among Egyptians,  hitherto thought to be of Sub-Saharan origin,  is of Eurasian origin.  

Miscegenation with Nubian “slaves” and mercenaries seems unlikely to have caused Egypt’s decay. While a Nubian or “black” pharaoh is alluded to by racial-zoologists as a sign of Egyptian decay, the Nubian civilisation had an intimate connection with the Egyptian and was itself impressive and of early origins. 

Nubian civilisation, with palaces, temples and pyramids, flourished as far back as 7000 B.C. 223 pyramids, twice the number of Egypt, have been found along the Nile of the Nubian culture-region. The Nubian civilisation was of notably long duration surviving until the Muslim conquest of 1500 A.D. The Egyptians have viewed the Nubians either as a “conquered race or a superior enemy”. Hence, Egyptian depictions of shackled black slaves, give a widely inaccurate impression of the Nubian.  Nubians became the pharaohs of Egypt’s 25th dynasty, providing stability where previously there had been ruin caused by civil wars between warlords, ca. 700 B.C. The Nubians were the custodians of Egyptian faith and culture at a time when Egypt was decaying. They regarded the restoration of the faith of Amun as their duty. It was the Nubian dynasties (760-656 B.C.), especially the rulership of Taharqa, which revived and purified Egyptian culture and religion. It was under the “white” rule of the Libyan pharaohs of the 21st dynasty (1069-1043 B. c.) that Egypt began a sharp decline. Ptolemaic (Greek) rule (332-30 B.C.) under Ptolemy IV (222 to 205 B.C.) brought to the rich and sumptuous pharaohs’ court “lax morals and vicious lifestyle” ending in “decadence and anarchy”. Byzantine rule (395 to 640 A.D.) through Christianisation wrought destruction on the Egyptian heritage, which was succeeded by Islamic rule. Of the long vicissitudes of Egypt’s rise and fall, it was the Nubian dynasty that had restored Egyptian cultural integrity. References to Nubians on the throne of the pharaohs tell no more of the causes of Egypt’s decay than if historians several millennia hence sought to ascribe the causes of the USA’s  culture retardation to Obama’s presidency as a “black”. 

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We see in Egypt as in Rome, the Moorish civilisation, India and others, the causes of culture decay and fall as being something other than miscegenation. The contemporary Westerner should look for answers beyond this if only because he can see for himself that the West’s decay has no relationship to miscegenation. The number of Americans describing themselves as “mixed race” was just under 9 million in 2010. Of the 3,988,076 live births in the USA in 2014  368,213 were non-white.  The USA did not become the global centre of culture-pestilence because of its mixed race population. What is more significant than the percentages of miscegenation, are the percentages of population decline caused by such factors as the limitation of children, and the rates of abortion. Twenty-one percent of all pregnancies in the USA are aborted. Such depopulation statics are an indication of culture pathology. 

gallery-1431027249-122315523.jpgOf Egypt’s chaos contemporary sages observed, as they did of Rome and India, a disintegration of authority, traditional religion, and the founding ethos and mythos around which a healthy culture revolves. Egypt was often subjected to invasions and to natural disasters. These served as catalysts for culture degeneration. The papyrus called The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, state that after invasions and what seems to have been a class war, Egypt fell apart, there was family strife, the noble families were dispossessed by the lowest castes, authority was disrespected and overthrown, lawlessness and plunder were the norm, and the nobility was attacked: “A man looks upon his son as an enemy. A man smites his brother (the son of his mother)”. Craftsmanship has become degraded: “No craftsmen work, the enemies of the land have spoilt its crafts”. There is rebellion against the Uraeus or Re. “A few lawless men have ventured to despoil the land of the kingship”. It appears that the foundations of Traditional society, god, monarch, family and land, have been caste asunder. Further, “Asiatics” have seized the land from the ancestral occupiers, and have so insinuated themselves into the Egyptian culture that one can no longer tell who is Egyptian and who is alien: “There are no Egyptians anywhere”. “Women are lacking and no children are conceived”. Evidently there is a population crisis; that perennial symptom of decay. The political and administrative structure has collapsed, with “no officers in their place”. The laws are trampled on and cast aside. “Serfs become lords of serfs”.  The writings of the scribes are destroyed. 

What is being described is not a sudden upheaval, although the allusion to natural disasters and Asiatic invasion would imply this. The breakdown of regal authority, civil authority, depopulation, laws, family bonds, religious faith, agriculture and the social structure, imply an epoch of decline into chaos. The social structure has been inversed, as though a communistic revolution had occurred. “He who possessed no property is now a man of wealth. The prince praises him. The poor of the land have become rich, and the possessor of the land has become one who has nothing. Female slaves speak as they like to their mistresses. Orders become irksome. Those who could not build a boat now possesses ships. “The possessors of robes are now in rags”. “The children of princes are cast out in the street”. 

With this inversion of hierarchy has come irreligion and the degradation of religion. The ignorant now perform their own rites to the Gods. Wrong offerings are made to the Gods.  “Right is cast aside. Wrong is inside the council-chamber. The plans of the gods are violated, their ordinances are neglected… Reverence, an end is put to it”.

Ipuwer’s admonition was not only to rid Egypt of its enemies but to return to the Traditional ethos. This meant the reinstitution of proper religious rites, and the purification of the temples. “A fighter comes forth,” Ipuwer prophesises, to “destroy the wrongs”. “Is he sleeping? Behold, his might is not seen”. The Egyptians await an avatar, the personification of the Sun God Re (which Tradition states was the first of the Pharaohs) an Arthur who sleeps but will awaken, a redeemer that is a universal symbol from the Hindu Kalki, to Jesus in the vision of John of Patmos, the Katehon of Orthodox Russia, and many others across time and place. 

Nefertiti2-Re_158267t.jpgIpuwer avers to Egypt having gone through such epochs, alluding to his saying nothing other than what others have said before his time.

The Pharaoh is castigated for allowing Egypt to fall into chaos, with his authority being undermined, and without taking corrective actions. The Pharaoh as God-king, in terms of Tradition, had not maintained his authority as the nexus between the earthly kingdom and the Divine. The Pharaoh had caused “confusion throughout the land”. Certainty of the social hierarchy, crowned by the God-king, is the basis of Traditional societies. It seems that Egypt had entered into an epoch of what a Westerner could today identify in our time as that of scepticism and secularism. Chaos follows with the undermining of Cosmos.

Nefer-rohu warned Pharaoh of similar chaos. Likewise there would be “Asiatic” invasions, natural disasters, Re withdrawing his light, and again the inversion of hierarchy: 

“The weak of arm is now the possessor of an arm. Men salute respectfully him whom formerly saluted. I show thee the undermost on top, turned about in proportion to the turning about of my belly. It is the paupers who eat the offering bread, while the servants jubilate. The Heliopolitan Nome, the birthplace of every god, will no longer be on earth”.

It is notable, again, that Nefer-rohu identifies the chaos with the breaking of the nexus with the divine, and the social order that has become “the undermost on top”. Also of interest is that Nefer-rohu refers to a redeemer, who has a Nubian mother, uniting Egypt and driving out the Asiatics, and the Libyans (the whitest of races of the region) and defeating the rebellious.  Chaos resulted not from bio-genetic-race-factors but from a falling away of the regal and religious authority. If there is a race-factor it is in regard to Nubians being the custodians of Egyptian culture in periods of Egyptian decay, analogous to the revitalising “barbarians” who wept over the decaying Roman Empire.

Islamic 

Islam had its Golden Age and rich civilisation, centred in Morocco, and extending into Spain.  It is in ruins like civilisations centuries prior.  The cultures that flourished in Morocco, both Islamic and pre-Islamic, were Berber. The Islamic civilisation they established with the founding of the Idrisid dynasty in 788 A. D. was ended by the invasion of the Fatimids from Tunisia ca. 900 A.D. Chaos ensued. Although there was a revival of High Culture during the 11th and 14th centuries, dynasties fell in the face of tribalism.  The 16th century saw a revival initiated by al-Ghalin, several decades of wars of succession after his death in 1603, and continuing decline under Saadi dynastic rule during 1627 to 1659. 

stanlane.jpgCaucasoid mtDNA sequences are at frequencies of 96% in Moroccan Berbers, 82% in Algerian Berbers and 78% in non-Berber Moroccans. The study of Esteban et al found that Moroccan Northern and Southern Berbers have only 3% to 1% Sub-Saharan mtDNA. Although difficult to define, since “Berber” is a Roman, not an indigenous term, the estimate for present day Morocco is 35% to 45% Berber, with the rest being Berber-Arab mixture. The primary point is that the Moroccan civilisation had ruling classes, whether pre-Islamic or Islamic, that remained predominantly Berber-Caucasian for most of its history, whether during its epochs of glory or of decline. Miscegenation does not account for the fall of the Moorish Civilisation. 

The High Culture of Moorish Spain (Andalusia) was brought to ruin and decay not by miscegenation between “superior” Spaniards” and “inferior” Moors but by the overthrow of the Moorish ruling caste. Friedrich Nietzsche had observed this culture denegation with the fall of Moorish Spain (Andalusia). Stanley Lane-Poole wrote of the history of decay:

“The land, deprived of the skilful irrigation of the Moors, grew impoverished and neglected; the richest and most fertile valleys languished and were deserted; most of the populous cities which had filled every district of Andalusia fell into ruinous decay; and beggars, friars, and bandits took the place of scholars, merchants, and knights. So low fell Spain when she had driven away the Moors. Such is the melancholy contrast offered by her history”.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a well-travelled sage, grappled with the same problems confronting Islamic Civilisation as those Spengler confronted in regard to The West. A celebrated scholar, political adviser, and jurist, Ibn Khaldun’s domain of influence extended over the whole Islamic world. His major theoretical work is Muqaddimah (1377), intended as a preface to his universal history, Kitabal-Ibar, where he sought to establish basic principles of history by which historians could understand events.  His theory is cyclic and morphological, based on “conditions within nations and races [which] change with the change of periods and the passage of time”. Like Evolahe was pessimistic as to what can be achieved by political action in the cycle of decline, writing that the “past resembles the future more than one drop of water another”.

Ibn Khaldun stated that history can be understood as a recurrence of similar patterns motivated by the drives of acquisition, group co-operation, and regal authority in the creation of a civilisation, followed by a cycle of decay. These primary drives become distorted and lead to the corrupting factors of luxury and domination, irresponsibility of authority and decline.

Like Spengler, in regard to the peasantry, Ibn Khaldun traces the beginning of culture to group or familial loyalty starting with the simple life of the rural - and desert – environments. The isolation and familial bonds lead to self-reliance, loyalty and leadership on the basis of mutual respect. Life is struggle, not luxury. According to Ibn Khaldun, when rulership becomes centralised and divorced from such kinship, free reign is given to luxury and ease.  Political alliances are bought and intrigued rather than being based on the initial bonds and loyalties. Corruption pervades as the requirements of luxury increase. The decadence starts from the top, among the ruling class, and extends downward until the founding ethos of the culture is discarded, or exists in name only.

timbre-citation-ibn-khaldoun_les-arabes.pngIbn Khaldun begins from the organic character of the noble family in describing the analogous nature of cultural rise and fall, caused by a falling away of the original creative ethos with each successive generation:

“The builder of the family’s glory knows what it cost him to do the work, and he keeps the qualities that created his glory and made it last. The son who comes after him had personal contact with his father and thus learned those things from him. However, he is inferior to him in this respect, inasmuch as a person who learns things through study is inferior to a person who knows them from practical application. The third generation must be content with imitation and, in particular, with reliance upon tradition. This member is inferior to him of the second generation, inasmuch as a person who relies upon tradition is inferior to a person who exercises judgment.

“The fourth generation, then, is inferior to the preceding ones in every respect. Its member has lost the qualities that preserved the edifice of its glory. He despises those qualities. He imagines that the edifice was not built through application and effort. He thinks that it was something due to his people from the very beginning by virtue of the mere fact of their descent, and not something that resulted from group effort and individual qualities. For he sees the great respect in which he is held by the people, but he does not know how that respect originated and what the reason for it was. He imagines it is due to his descent and nothing else. He keeps away from those in whose group feeling he shares, thinking that he is better than they”.

For Ibn Khaldun’s “generation” we might say with Spengler “cultural epoch”. Ibn Khaldun addresses the causes of this cultural etiolation, leading to the corrupting impact of materialism. Again, his analysis is remarkably similar to that of Spengler and the decay of the Classical civilisations:  

“When a tribe has achieved a certain measure of superiority with the help of its group feeling, it gains control over a corresponding amount of wealth and comes to share prosperity and abundance with those who have been in possession of these things. It shares in them to the degree of its power and usefulness to the ruling dynasty. If the ruling dynasty is so strong that no-one thinks of depriving it of its power or of sharing with it, the tribe in question submits to its rule and is satisfied with whatever share in the dynasty’s wealth and tax revenue it is permitted to enjoy. ... Members of the tribe are merely concerned with prosperity, gain and a life of abundance. (They are satisfied) to lead an easy, restful life in the shadow of the ruling dynasty, and to adopt royal habits in building and dress, a matter they stress and in which they take more and more pride, the more luxuries and plenty they acquire, as well as all the other things that go with luxury and plenty.

“As a result the toughness of desert life is lost. Group feeling and courage weaken. Members of the tribe revel in the well-being that God has given them. Their children and offspring grow up too proud to look after themselves or to attend to their own needs. They have disdain also for all the other things that are necessary in connection with group feeling.... Their group feeling and courage decrease in the next generations. Eventually group feeling is altogether destroyed. ... It will be swallowed up by other nations.

Ibn Khaldun refers to the “tribe” and “group feeling” where Spengler refers to nations, peoples, and races. The dominant culture becomes corrupted through its own success and its culture become static; its inward strength diminishes in proportion to its outward glamour. Hence, the Golden Age of Islam is over, as are those of Rome and Athens. New York, Paris, and London are in the analogous cultural epochs to those of Fez, Rome and Athens. The “world city” becomes the focus of a world civilisation that ends as cosmopolitan and far removed from its founding roots. Our present “world-cities’” – in particular, New York and The City of London - are the control centres of world politics, economics, and mass-culture by the fact of their also being the centres of banking. These world-cities are the prototypes for a world civilisation that continues to be called “Western”, under the leadership of the USA, a rotting centre like Fez and Rome.

The Muslim determination of what is “progress” and what is “decline” has a spiritual foundation:

“The progressiveness or backwardness of society at any given point of time is determinable in relative terms. It can be compared to other contemporary societies [like the Spenglerian method] or to its own state in the past. … for Muslim society although economic progress is not frowned upon, it is placed lower on the order of priorities as compared to other factors; e.g. the acquisition of knowledge or the provision of justice. There is also a tradition (Hadis) of the Holy Prophet that lists the symptoms of society that is in a pathological state of decline. These outward symptoms point to an underlying malaise in the society but can also provide a useful starting point for corrective actions for stopping or reversing the onset of decline”.  The high and low points of Muslim civilisation can be identified as those of a “Golden Age” or of an “Abyss”.

Comparable to the warnings of other sages, in an epoch of decline again there is an inversion of hierarchy, or more specifically here, of character, the Hadith stating that those in such a society would be corrupted, while others might resist within themselves:

“There will be soon a period of turmoil in which the one who sits will be better than one who stands and the one who stands will be better than one who walks and the one who walks will be better than one who runs. He who would watch them will be drawn by them. So he who finds a refuge or shelter against it should make it as his resort”.

Hebrew “Race”

A Traditionalist “race”, conscious of its nexus with the Divine as the basis of culture, endures regardless of contact with foreigners because of its inward strength. This allows it to accept foreigners not only without weakening the cultural organism but even strengthening it; because it accepts foreign input on its own terms. A Traditionalist “race” surviving over the course of millennia without succumbing to the cyclical laws of decay is the Jewish. They are the Traditionalist “race” par excellence. No better example can be had than this People that has maintained its nexus with its Divinity as the basis of cultural survival, whose religion is a race-founding and race-sustaining mythos. 

Phineas.jpgContrary to the beliefs of certain racial ideologues, including extreme Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, this survival is not the result of bans on miscegenation. The Jewish law as embodied in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, is based not on zoological race but on a race mythos. The Mosaic Law demands “race purity” in the Traditionalist sense; that of a community of belief in a heritage and a destiny. 

Bizarrely, some white racists have adopted the Torah commandments as being based on genetic purity, in their belief that whites are the true Israelites. For example the priest Phineas, at the time of Moses is held in esteem by such white supremacists because he speared an Israelite and a Midianite in the act of copulation. At this time apparently the Midianites were seducing Israel away from its God, towards Baal. A purge of Israel took place. However the chapter in its entirety makes plain this was a matter of religion, not miscegenation. The nexus between Israel and the Divine was being broken by the influence of “the daughters of Moab.” Israel’s Divinity is recorded as having threatened wrath because of “my insistence on exclusive devotion.” The Divine nexus was established for eternity with the line of Phineas because he had “not tolerated any rivalry towards his god”.  Moses himself had married the daughter of a Midianite priest, so the issue with the Midianites was clearly religious, and specifically that such foreign influences would break Israel’s nexus with the Divine that renders them a “special people”. Where marriages with Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, et al are prohibited it is because this nexus would be subverted. However, in the same book Deuteronomy, where the Israelite war code is being established, when a city has been defeated the adult males are to be eliminated, and the women and children are to be taken to be grafted on to Israel. The commandments for this type of “scorched earth policy” were based on preventing foreigners from teaching Israel their religions. There are precise laws as to marrying a non-Israelitish captive woman, who after a month of mourning for the deaths of her family, will have the marriage consummated and thereby become part of Israel. 

Jeremiah (ca. 600 B.C.), son of the high priest Hilkiah, was one of the most significant voices against culture-decay, analogous to Ipuwer the Egyptian sage,  Titus Livius, and Cato the Censor, in Rome, and our own Spengler and Evola. He warned that Israel would prosper while the nexus with Tradition and ipso facto with the Divine was maintained; Israel would fall physically if it fell away morally from that Tradition. Jeremiah saw the destruction of the Temple of Solomon and the carrying into Babylonian captivity of Judah. As with the other Civilisations that have fallen, the first symptom had been a subversion of its founding religion. Interestingly, religious decay would be quickly proceeded by an invasion of foreigners, reminiscent of Ipuwer’s warning of Egypt’s invasion by “Asiatics”. Hence, Jeremiah warns that invasion is imminent as a punishment for Israel’s departure from the Traditional faith: “I will pronounce my judgments on my people because of their wickedness in forsaking me, in burning incense to other gods and in worshiping what their hands have made”. From their self-styled role as a Holy People, they had fallen from the oath of their forefathers, Jeremiah/YHWH admonishing: “The priests did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD?’ Those who deal with the law did not know me; the leaders rebelled against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal, following worthless idols. ‘Therefore I bring charges against you again,’ declares the LORD. ‘And I will bring charges against your children’s children’”. Jeremiah states that the priesthood has become corrupted, from whence the rot proceeds downward. “The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way. But what will you do in the end?” Specifically, all of Israel had become motivated by greed. The admonition was to stand at the “crossroads” as to what paths to follow, and choose “the ancient paths”. 

“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says the LORD. This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it’”.

Greed, or what we now call materialism, has been the common factor of the fall of Civilisations, referred to by sages and philosophers up to our own Spengler, Brooks Adams, and Evola. The other common factor, as we have seen, has been the corruption of religion and the priestly caste, the priests and the prophets being condemned by Jeremiah.

The perennial survival of the Israelites is based on their adherence to Tradition. Prophets such as Jeremiah are the Jews’ constant warning to stay true to their “ancient paths” or destruction will result. The Jews worldwide have had, when not a King over Israel, the focus of a coming King-Messiah, Jerusalem, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Temple of Solomon (including the plans to rebuild the Temple as another focus for the future) as their world axial points, and the Mosaic Law as a universal code of living across time and place.These axial points have formed and maintained the Jews as a metaphysical race. Whatever others might think of some of their laws and beliefs their maintenance of a Traditional nexus has allowed them to supersede the cyclic laws of decay perhaps like no other people, to overcome decline and be restored, while paradoxically being the carriers of cultural pathogens among other civilisations (Marxism, Freudianism). 

What the genetics of races shows, past and present, is that miscegenation has not been a cause for the collapse of civilisations. Perhaps dysgenics might cause such a collapse, but hitherto there seems scant evidence for it. By focusing to the point of ideological obsession and dogma on the assume causes of culture-death being that of miscegenation, the actual causes are overlooked. Perhaps civilisation, theoretically, might die through dysgenics, whether racial or otherwise, but it seems that before such a dysgenic process has ever taken place the morphological laws of organic life and death have intervened as witnessed by those such as Livy, Cato, Ibn Khaldun, and in our time Spengler, Evola and Brooks Adams.

jeudi, 04 juin 2015

The Question of Race in Spengler & its Meaning for Contemporary Racialism

Kunze_Spengler_2.jpg

The Question of Race in Spengler & its Meaning for Contemporary Racialism

Picture, above: Michael Kunze, Oswald Spengler

Introduction

It is a tradition at Counter-Currents to remember the great German philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, on the anniversary of his birth, the 29th of May. This year, I would like to take the time to critically reflect on Spengler’s views of race within his magnum opus, The Decline of the West (1918–22), and, in particular to discuss the importance these ideas hold for modern day racialists and ethno-nationalists. 

Some of these issues were touched on by Greg Johnson in his 2010 essay, “Is Racial Purism Decadent? [2],” and my arguments here are largely in response to some of the questions he poses therein. In brief, my intent with this piece is to (1) provide a brief overview of Spengler’s racial doctrine, (2) illustrate the disjunctions existing between the Spenglerian conception of “race” and materialistic ones, and (3) to explore what the Spengler being correct on the question of race means for those currently involved in the various shades of racial preservationism common among Counter-Currents’ readership.

When discussing “race,” it is common parlance among racial preservationists to adopt usages of the term derived from the great physical anthropologists and anthropometrists of the early 20th century. It is in works such as Carleton S. Coon’s The Races of Europe (1939) or Bertil Lundman’s Nordens Rastyper (1940), that the highly developed and nuanced models of the different human races are exemplified. And, it is from works such as these that contemporary discourses on race within preservationist circles find their genealogical root. Primary examples of this can be seen in the wide selection of early-twentieth century literature hosted on the website of the Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology (SNPA)[1]—an organization “founded in January 1999 […] by three university students” with the goals of reviving the theories of “the nature and phylogeny of human biodiversity” which dominated academia “prior to 1950.”[2] The SNPA’s website is presently hosted by a racial preservationist web forum, The Apricity, one of whose most active sub-forums is devoted to classifying both forum members and celebrities according to the racial typologies such as Lundman’s or Coon’s.[3] The deep relationship between pre-1950 physical anthropology and contemporary racialist discourse is hardly unique to The Apricity, and can be found throughout racialist websites and forums.

This biological view of race—focusing both on the phenotypical and genotypical variations both within and without Europe—is, however, quite far from what Spengler means when uttering the word “race.” While he does not deny that there is a biological dimension to race, Spengler does not reduce race to biology.[4] Rather, for Spengler, the notion of race was one which included the material, but supervened over it to include psychological and cultural dimensions as well. Later in life, this non-reductionist position would put him at odds with the high-profile members of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP), particularly with Alfred Rosenberg, whose racialism bore more in common with Lundman and Coon’s physical anthropology than with Spengler’s anti-materialism.[5] What, however, is meant by an anti-material conception of race? If Spengler did not reduce race to physical characteristics, how did he understand it?

Spenglerian “Race”

In his own words, Spengler defines a race as “the cosmic-plantlike side of life, of Being, [which] is invested with a character of duration.”[6] Race is, he tells us, “determined by the fact that the bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a landscape”—with “race” standing in for the “fact of a blood which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or wide landscape.”[7] Prima facie, this definition of the term does not sound too far a cry from those of the physical anthropologists. However, as Spengler develops his thesis within The Decline of the West, his position emerges as one which is far closer to the völkisch landscape mystics of the Bodenbeschaffenheit movement, such as Hermann Keyserling.[8] We see this connection emphasized in the relationship Spengler postulates between race, landscape, language, and culture. In terms of the connection between race and landscape, we see Spengler advocating for a fundamentally formative and governing impact of the latter upon the former:

A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its “home,” but it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans.[9]

In this, we see that Spengler’s view on race is such that it can be essentially treated as a function of a specific landscape and place—with individual races being inextricably tied to their geographic birthplaces as peoples.[10] The differences between this conception of racial formation and Darwinian models of evolution are more pronounced when we consider as well that Spengler’s philosophy treated a race not as a collection of related organisms, but rather as a single organism, and that the physical and psychological formation wrought by the landscape was collective rather than individual in nature. This collectivism is seen in the relationship Spengler posits between race and language as well, with the two complementing one another in a way analogous to body and mind in an individual:

In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language the efficient form of one great waking-consciousness that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one another.[11]

This relationship between a people’s race and its language, then, is one wherein each necessarily complements one another, with both being fundamentally necessarily to the integral unity of the singular organism. Carrying the metaphorical comparison between the individual and the people further, we see culture emerge from this race-language dyad as the natural expression of the two as they exist in the world. Spengler sees language as essentially two-fold, being divided into talk and speech, with each linguistic mode being proper to one “of the two primary Estates” such that “talk belongs with the castle [the state], and speech to the cathedral [the church].”[12] By means of its expression through these two estates, Spengler sees language as participating in the “waking relation that has Culture, [and] that is Culture.”[13] In this way, culture emerges as the activity of the interaction of the bodily race and mental language of a people with their given landscape.

This conception of mankind which Spengler elucidates is not anti-material in that it denies the material dimensions of race, but is so in that it does not treat a people as being reducible to mere physiological characteristics and differences. For Spengler, the very term “people” is not a simple designation for a group with physical or political or linguistic ties, but is “a unit of the soul,” designating a unified collective spiritual internality shared by all members of the group.[14] For Spengler, this racial soul was expresses most fully through the peoples’ modes of cultural production—namely through the arts. He saw racial virility as being intimately tied to artistic expression, with the development of High Art being “a mark of race,” rather than of learning.[15] He tells us that “the great art by which the Culture finds its tongue is the achievement of race and not that of craft.”[16] In this, Spengler is saying that the art whose expression comes to define a people (e.g. the relationship between Gothic architecture and Western man) is essentially racial in nature, and not a learned skill—insofar as the art itself is the cultural “vocalization” of the race’s experience of the world.[17]

It is with this sense of both the terms “race” and “art” that we can make sense of Spengler’s assertion that “the creators of the Doric temples of South Italy and Sicily, and those of the brick Gothic of North Germany were emphatically race-men, and so too the German musicians from Heinrich Schütz to Johann Sebastian Bach.”[18] For, in this, he is saying that these great artists throughout history exemplified through their works the inner experience of their race, and as such were great men of race. The art of these great men, which forms the core cultural expression of Western man, is for Spengler, thus seen not as the products of artistic education achieved by individuals. Rather, it is a fundamentally racial production, which can no more be separated from the race of the people who birthed it than can that race from its language, nor the race from its landscape. It is through cultural production generally, and through art particularly, that the genius of the race is made manifest—its strength and vitality being translated into forms which supervene over the brute materiality of phenotype and genotype.

Questions of Preservation

If Spengler is correct, what does this mean for contemporary racialists and racial preservationists? To begin, let us examine one of Spengler’s best known statements on the question of racial purity and preservation, from The Hour of Decision (1943):

But in speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America to use it today: Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque world in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike—that is, healthy—generations with a future before them have from time immemorial always welcomed a stranger into the family if he had “race,” to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it. This manifests itself above all in self-evident elemental fecundity, in an abundance of children, which historical life can consume without ever exhausting the supply.[19]

In this passage, we see Spengler vehemently rejecting the purity-based racial theories prevalent within the NSDAP. But, what is the nature of this strong rejection? At its root, what we see in Spengler is a sharp contrast between his characterization of (a) the raceless man’s engaging in discourse on race and (b) the man of race’s non-discursive lived experience of race. The former discursive behavior, we see Spengler treat as degenerate and weak—the latter non-discursive behavior, as vital and strong. As Johnson notes, one of the key differences between these two behaviors is the activity’s vector; where “racial consciousness is backwards looking […] the feeling of race is forward-looking.”[20] The former is an after-the-face reflection on the past activities of race men; while the latter is the present experience of the man of race, impelling him to reach new creative heights in the cultural expression of his race.

Spengler would argue, then, that the discursive activities of contemporary racialists and racial preservationists on maintaining racial purity not only miss the point of race entirely by reducing it to mere physical characteristics, but also that such discursive action is a decadent and unhealthy way of approaching race. The man of race would view, Spengler tells us, such concerns with racial purity as entirely backwards-looking, seeking to preserve what his race once was. However, the non-discursive experience of one’s race is correspondingly forward-looking, seeking to actualize and create a strong and vital future culture. Johnson tells us that Spengler would argue that “the racial purist looks to the past, not the future, because he does not have the vitality in him necessary to create a future.”[21] The racial consciousness of the preservationist is defined entirely by his race’s past—a past which is, by definition, immutable and fixed; his engagement with race, then, is wholly discursive, merely talking of past glories and present ills. It is not defined by the action born of the inner experience of race-feeling itself.

These unhealthy manifestations of discursive preoccupations with racial purity run counter to the healthy non-discursive race-feeling and its resulting cultural production not because the discourse of the purist is wrong. Indeed, as Johnson argues, “decadent people can be right, and healthy people can be wrong.”[22] However, in terms of effective action, there are more important things than simply holding “correct” opinions, or engaging in “correct” discourses. What is needed so much more than mere discourse is the action which springs naturally from the healthy man of race’s vitality. In, correctly in my estimation, judging “White nationalism in America” as “as overwhelmingly degenerate movement,” Johnson concludes his musings on Spengler by asking the question: “what would a vital white nationalism look like?” We know now what a movement whose primary activity is discourse on race looks like; it is what we have today—a decadent movement which produces a near endless stream of discussion and literature on the topic of race. How would a vital and healthy movement differ from this? Johnson speculates:

A vital white nationalist movement would be a utopian, progressivist, eugenicist mythical-cultural phenomenon. It would not be founded on empirical studies of how race influences culture. It would not propagate itself through academic conferences and policy studies. It would be founded on a grand culture-creating, race-shaping myth, propagated through art and religion, that enthralls and mobilizes a whole people. It would be less concerned about the race we were or the race we are than about the race we can become.[23]

In terms of Spenglerian views on the question of race, we can imagine a healthy movement as one whose primary activity is not discourse, but cultural production. A healthy movement would not necessarily be wholly unconcerned with “correct” discourse on race, but its dominant and overriding concern would be the cultural production stemming from the non-discursive experience of the vital feeling of one’s race. The healthy movement would by defined not by polemic literature on the “dangers” of race-mixing, but by grand works of art expressing the inner experience of the race. It would be a movement whose “celebrities” were not the authors of books on race, but men whose entire being was devoted to the furtherance of their race’s artistic expression.

In this way, Richard Wagner, stands forth as the near-ideal example of Spengler’s man of race. Wagner was not unconcerned with the question of race, or with discourse on race, but when we look at the scope of his life and work, his activities were overwhelmingly defined by cultural production rather than discourse. We remember Wagner not primarily for his writings on race. Rather, we remember him because the art he produced was a force of nature, which expressed to purely the soul of his race that it drew together thousands upon thousands of the German people—giving rise to sweeping cultural movements. Taking Wagner as our paradigm, then, we should perhaps revise our questions. Rather than asking what would a vital movement look like, perhaps we should ask how can I become a Spenglerian man of race? It is my contention that if we are to succeed—to win, as Johnson puts it—it will not be through the endless discourse we have engaged in thus far; nor will it be through grand plans to re-shape the movement from the top-down.

Our success will come through individual change and progress. It is not necessary that we cease engaging in racialist discourse, or that such discourses are wrong, but this is not the means of our victory. Rather than through imitation of racialist authors like Francis Parker Yockey, our success will come through the imitation of cultural producers like Wagner. Naturally, such a movement would be characterized by physical vitalism and fecundity as well, but it would not be limited to such. It would be equally—if not moreso—characterized by cultural fecundity and strength. In this way, a reevaluation of our very idea of “race” in Spenglerian terms proves to be of the utmost importance in providing a pathway to success.

Bibliography

Bolton, Kerry. “Oswald Spengler: May 29, 1880–May 8, 1936.” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time. 29 May 2012. http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/oswald-spengler/ [3] [accessed 25 May 2015].

Borthwick, Stephen M. “Historian of the Future: An Introduction to Oswald Spengler’s Life and Words for the Curious Passer-by and the Interested Student.” Institute for Oswald Spengler Studies. https://sites.google.com/site/spenglerinstitute/Biography [4] [accessed 25 May 2015].

Brown, David Henry. “Metaphysical Presuppositions in Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes.” PhD diss., McMaster University 1979.

Coon, Carleton S. The Races of Europe. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939. http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/racesofeurope.htm [5]

Dreher, Carl. “Spengler and the Third Reich.” The Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion. 15, no. 2 (1939). http://www.vqronline.org/essay/spengler-and-third-reich [6] [accessed 25 May 2015].

Duchesne, Ricardo. “Oswald Spengler & the Faustian Soul of the West, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time. 2 January 2015. http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/oswald-spengler-and-the-faustian-soul-of-the-west-part-1/ [7] [accessed 25 May 2015].

———. “Oswald Spengler & the Faustian Soul of the West, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time. 5 January 2015. http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/oswald-spengler-and-the-faustian-soul-of-the-west-part-2/ [8] [accessed 25 May 2015].

“Essays & Excerpts.” Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology. http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/index2.htm [9] [accessed 25 May 2015].

Farrenkopf, John. “Spengler’s Historical Pessimism and the Tragedy of Our Age.” Theory and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 391–412.

———. “Spengler’s Theory of Civilization.” Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology 62, no. 1 (2000): 23–38.

“Introduction.” Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology. http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/introduction.htm [10] [accessed 25 May 2015].

Johnson, Greg. “Is Racial Purism Decadent?” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time. 10 July 2010. http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/is-racial-purism-decadent/ [2] [accessed 25 May 2015].

Lundman, Bertil. Nordens Rastyper: Geografi och Historia. Verdandis Småskrifter 427. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier, 1940.

Noll, Richard. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Revised edition. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961.

———. The Hour of Decision: Germany and World-Historical Evolution. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.

Notes

[1] [11] “Essays & Excerpts,” Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology.

[2] [12] “Introduction,” Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology.

[3] [13] “The Apricity: A European Community.”

[4] [14] Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s Historical Pessimism and the Tragedy of Our Age,” 395; Borthwick, “Historian of the Future”; Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”.

[5] [15] Dreher, “Spengler and the Third Reich”; Bolton, “Oswald Spengler.”

[6] [16] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:113.

[7] [17] Ibid.

[8] [18] Noll, The Jung Cult, 95–103.

[9] [19] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:119.

[10] [20] Brown, “Metaphysical Presuppositions in Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes,” 223.

[11] [21] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:114.

[12] [22] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:153.

[13] [23] Ibid.

[14] [24] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:165.

[15] [25] Spengler, The Decline of the West,

[16] [26] Ibid.

[17] [27] Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s Historical Pessimism and the Tragedy of Our Age,” 396; Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s Theory of Civilization,” 24–25.

[18] [28] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:118–19.

[19] [29] Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 219.

[20] [30] Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”

[21] [31] Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”

[22] [32] Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”

[23] [33] Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”

 

 

 

 

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

 

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/05/the-question-of-race-in-spengler/

 

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Kunze_Spengler_2.jpg

[2] Is Racial Purism Decadent?: http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/is-racial-purism-decadent/

[3] http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/oswald-spengler/: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/oswald-spengler/

[4] https://sites.google.com/site/spenglerinstitute/Biography: https://sites.google.com/site/spenglerinstitute/Biography

[5] http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/racesofeurope.htm: http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/racesofeurope.htm

[6] http://www.vqronline.org/essay/spengler-and-third-reich: http://www.vqronline.org/essay/spengler-and-third-reich

[7] http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/oswald-spengler-and-the-faustian-soul-of-the-west-part-1/: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/oswald-spengler-and-the-faustian-soul-of-the-west-part-1/

[8] http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/oswald-spengler-and-the-faustian-soul-of-the-west-part-2/: http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/oswald-spengler-and-the-faustian-soul-of-the-west-part-2/

[9] http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/index2.htm: http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/index2.htm

[10] http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/introduction.htm: http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/introduction.htm

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mardi, 11 octobre 2011

Julius Evola’s Concept of Race: A Racism of Three Degrees

Julius Evola’s Concept of Race: A Racism of Three Degrees

By Michael Bell

Ex: http://www.toqonline.com/

COP_ORI_005.jpgSince the rise of physical anthropology, the definition of the term “race” has undergone several changes. In 1899, William Z. Ripley stated that, “Race, properly speaking, is responsible only for those peculiarities, mental or bodily, which are transmitted with constancy along the lines of direct physical descent.” 1 In 1916, Madison Grant described it as the “immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of physical predispositions and impulses.”2 He was echoed a decade later by German anthropologist Hans F.K. Gunther, who in his Racial Elements of European History said, “A race shows itself in a human group which is marked off from every other human group through its own proper combination of bodily and mental characteristics, and in turn produces only its like.”3 According to the English-born Canadian evolutionary psychologist J. Philippe Rushton:

Each race (or variety) is characterized by a more or less distinct combination of inherited morphological, behavioral, physiological traits . . . Formation of a new race takes place when, over several generations, individuals in one group reproduce more frequently among themselves than they do with individuals in other groups. This process is most apparent when the individuals live in diverse geographic areas and therefore evolve unique, recognizable adaptations (such as skin color) that are advantageous in their specific environments.4

These examples indicate that, within the academic context (where those who still believe in “race” are fighting a losing battle with the hierophants of cultural anthropology), a race is simply a human group with distinct common physical and mental traits that are inherited.

Among white racialists, where race has more than a merely scientific importance, a deeper dimension was added to the concept: that of the spirit. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler set forth the idea of the Apollinian, Faustian, and Magian “soul forms,” which can be understood as spiritual racial types.5 In this highly influential Spenglerian tome Imperium, Francis Parker Yockey elaborated this notion, asserting that while there are genetically related individuals within any particular human group, race itself is spiritual: it is a deeply felt sense of identity connected with a drive to perpetuate not just genes, but a whole way of life. “Race impels toward self-preservation, continuance of the cycle of generations, increase of power.”6 Spiritual race is a drive toward a collective destiny.

The spiritual side of race, however, was never systematically explained to the same extent as the physical. Its existence was, rather, merely suggested and taken for granted. It was only in the writings of the much overlooked Italian Radical Traditionalist and esotericist Julius Evola that the spiritual dimension was finally articulated in detail. One who has studied race from the biological, psychological, and social perspectives should turn to Evola’s writings for a culminating lesson on the subject. Evola’s writings provide a wealth of information that one cannot get elsewhere. Through a careful analysis of ancient literature and myths, along with anthropology, biology, history, and related subjects, Evola has pieced together a comprehensive explanation of the racial spirit.

My purpose here is simply to outline Evola’s doctrine of race. Since Evola’s life and career have been thoroughly examined elsewhere,7 the only biographical fact relevant here is that Evola’s thoughts on race were officially adopted as policy by Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1942.8

Body and Mind

Evola’s precise definition of “race” is similar to Yockey’s: it is an inner essence that a person must “have”; this will be explained further below. In the meantime, a good starting point is Evola’s understanding of distinct human groups.

Evola agrees with the physical anthropologists that there are distinct groups with common physical traits produced by a common genotype: “the external form . . . which, from birth to birth, derives from the ‘gene’ . . . is called phenotype.”9 He refers to these groups as “races of the body,” and concurs with Gunther that suitable examples include the Nordic, Mediterranean, East Baltic, Orientalid, Negroid, and many others.10

Evola describes the “race of the soul” as the collective mental and behavioral traits of a human stock, and the outward “style” through which these are exhibited. Every race has essentially the same mental predispositions; all human peoples, for example, desire sexual satisfaction from a mate. However, each human stock manifests these inner instincts externally in a different way, and it is this “style,” as Evola terms it, which is the key component of the “race of the soul.”

To illustrate this point, compare the Spartan strategos (Nordic soul) to the Carthaginian shofet (Levantine soul)11: the Spartan considers it heroic to fight hand-to-hand with shield and spear and cowardly to attack from a distance with projectiles, whereas the Carthaginian finds it natural to employ elephants and grand siege equipment to utterly shock and scatter his enemies for an expedient victory.

The names of these races of the soul correspond to those of the body, hence a Nordic soul, a Mediterranean soul, Levantine soul, etc. Evola devotes an entire chapter in Men Among the Ruins to comparing the “Nordic” or “Aryo-Roman” soul to the “Mediterranean.” The Nordic soul is that of “‘the race of active man,’ of the man who feels that the world is presented to him as material for possession and attack.”12 It is the character of the quintessential “strong and silent type”:

Among them we should include self-control, an enlightened boldness, a concise speech and determined and coherent conduct, and a cold dominating attitude, exempt from personalism and vanity . . . The same style is characterized by deliberate actions, without grand gestures; a realism that is not materialism, but rather love for the essential . . . the readiness to unite, as free human beings and without losing one’s identity, in view of a higher goal or for an idea.13

Evola also quotes Helmuth Graf von Moltke (the Elder) on the Nordic ethos: “Talk little, do much, and be more than you appear to be.”14

The Mediterranean soul is the antithesis of the Nordic. This sort of person is a vain, noisy show-off who does things just to be noticed. Such a person might even do great deeds sometimes, but they are not done primarily for their positive value, but merely to draw attention. In addition, the Mediterranean makes sexuality the focal point of his existence.15 The resemblance of this picture to the average narcissistic, sex- and celebrity-obsessed American of today – whether genetically Nordic or Mediterranean – is striking. One need only watch American Idol or browse through the profiles of Myspace.com to see this.

Race of the Spirit

The deepest and therefore most complicated aspect of race for Evola is that of the “spirit.” He defines it as a human stock’s “varying attitude towards the spiritual, supra-human, and divine world, as expressed in the form of speculative systems, myths, and symbols, and the diversity of religious experience itself.”16 In other words, it is the manner in which different peoples interact with the gods as conveyed through their cultures; a “culture” would include rituals, temple architecture, the role of a priesthood (or complete lack thereof), social hierarchy, the status of women, religious symbolism, sexuality, art, etc. This culture, or worldview, is not simply the product of sociological causes, however. It is the product of something innate within a stock, a “meta-biological force, which conditions both the physical and the psychical structures” of its individual members.17

The “meta-biological force” in question has two different forms. The first corresponds to an id or a collective unconscious, a son of group mind-spirit that splinters off into individual spirits and enters a group member’s body upon birth. Evola describes it as “subpersonal” and belonging “to nature and the infernal world.”18 Most ancient peoples, as he explains, depicted this force symbolically in their myths and sagas; examples would include the animal totems of American aborigines, the ka of the Pharaonic Egyptians, or the lares of the Latin peoples. The “infernal” nature of the latter example was emphasized by the fact that the lares were believed to be ruled over by the underground deity named Mania.19 When a person died, this metaphysical element would be absorbed back into the collective from whence it came, only to be recycled into another body, but devoid of a recollection of its former life.

The second form, superior to the first, is one that does not exist in every stock naturally, or in every member of a given stock; it is an otherworldly force that must be drawn into the blood of a people through the practice of certain rites. This action corresponds to the Hindu notion of “realizing the Self,” or experiencing a oneness with the divine source of all existence and order (Brahman). Such a task can only be accomplished by a gifted few, who by making this divine connection undergo an inner transformation. They became aware of immutable principles, in the name of which they go on to forge their ethnic kin into holistic States – microcosmic versions of the transcendental principle of Order itself. Thus, the Brahmins and Kshatriyas of India, the patricians of Rome, and the samurai of Japan had a “race of the spirit,” which is essential to “having race” itself. Others may have the races of body and soul, but race of the spirit is race par excellence.

Transcendence is experienced differently by different ethnic groups. As a result, different understandings of the immutable arise across the world; from these differences emerge several “races of the spirit.” Evola focuses on two in particular. The first is the “telluric spirit” characterized by a deep “connection to the soul.” This race worships the Earth in its various cultural manifestations (Cybele, Gaia, Magna Mater, Ishtar, Inanna, etc.) and a consort of “demons.” Their view of the afterlife is fatalistic: the individual spirit is spawned from the Earth and the returns to the Earth, or to the infernal realm of Mania, upon death, with no possibility.20 Their society is matriarchal, with men often taking the last names of their mothers and familial descent being traced through the mother. In addition, women often serve as high priestesses. The priesthood, in fact, is given preeminence, whereas the aristocratic warrior element is subordinated, if it exists at all.

This race has had representatives in all the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa that were first populated by pre-Aryans: the Iberians, Etruscans, Pelasgic-Minoans, Phoenicians, the Indus Valley peoples, and all others of Mediterranean, Oriental, and Negroid origin. The invasions of Aryan stock would introduce to these peoples a diametrically opposed racial spirit: the “Solar” or “Olympian” race.

The latter race worships the heavenly god of Order, manifested as Brahman, Ahura-Mazda, Tuisto (the antecedent of Odin), Chronos, Saturn, and the various sun deities from America to Japan. Its method of worship is not the self-prostration and humility practiced by Semites, or the ecstatic orgies of Mediterraneans, but heroic action (for the warriors) and meditative contemplation (for the priests), both of which establish a direct link with the divine. Olympian societies are hierarchical, with a priestly caste at the top, followed by a warrior caste, then a caste of tradesmen, and finally a laboring caste. The ruler himself assumes the dual role of priest and warrior, which demonstrates that the priesthood did not occupy the helm of society as they did among telluric peoples. Finally, the afterlife was not seen as an inescapable dissolution into nothingness, but as one of two potential conclusions of a test. Those who live according to the principles of their caste, without straying totally from the path, and who come to “realize the Self,” experience a oneness with God and enter a heavenly realm that is beyond death. Those who live a worthless, restless existence that places all emphasis on material and physical things, without ever realizing the presence of the divine Self within all life,, undergoes the “second death,”21 or the return to the collective racial mind-spirit mentioned earlier.

The Olympian race has appeared throughout history in the following forms: in America as the Incas; in Europe and Asia as the Indo-European speaking peoples; in Africa as the Egyptians, and in the Far East as the Japanese. Generally, this race of the spirit has been carried by waves of phenotypically Nordic peoples, which will be explained further below.

Racial Genesis

Of considerable importance to Evola’s racial worldview is his explanation of human history. Contrary to the views of most physical anthropologists and archaeologists, and even many intellectual white racialists, humanity did not evolve from a primitive, simian ancestor, and then branch off into different genetic populations. Evolution itself is a fallacy to Evola, who believed it to be rooted in the equally false ideology of progressivism: “We do not believe that man is derived from the ape by evolution. We belive that the ape is derived from man by involution. We agree with De Maistre that savage peoples are not primitive peoples, but rather the degenerating remnants of more ancient races that have disappeared.22

Evola argues in many of his works, like Bal Ganghadar Tilak and Rene Guenon before him, that the Aryan peoples of the world descend from a race that once inhabited the Arctic. In “distant prehistory” this land was the seat of a super-civilization – “super” not for its material attainments, but for its connection to the gods – that has been remembered by various peoples as Hyperborea, Airyana-Vaego, Mount Meru, Tullan, Eden, and other labels; Evola uses the Hellenic rendition “Hyperborea” more than the rest, probably to remain consistent and avoid confusion among his readers. The Hyperboreans themselves, as he explains, were the original bearers of the Olympian racial spirit.

Due to a horrific cataclysm, the primordial seat was destroyed, and the Hyperboreans were forced to migrate. A heavy concentration of refugees ended up at a now lost continent somewhere in the Atlantic, where they established a new civilization that corresponded to the “Atlantis” of Plato and the “Western land” of the Celts and other peoples. History repeated itself, and ultimately this seat was also destroyed, sending forth and Eastward-Westward wave of migrants. As Evola notes, this particular wave “[corresponded[ to Cro-Magnon man, who made his appearance toward the end of the glacial age in the Western part of Europe,"23 thus leading some historical evidence to his account. This "pure Aryan" stock would ultimately become the proto-Nordic race of Europe, which would then locally evolve into the multitude of Nordic stocks who traveled across the world and founded the grandest civilizations, from Incan Peru to Shintoist Japan.

Evola spends less time tracing the genesis of nonwhite peoples, which he consistently refers to as "autochthonous," "bestial," and "Southern" races." In his seminal work Revolt Against the Modern World, he says that the "proto-Mongoloid and Negroid races ... probably represented the last residues of the inhabitants of a second prehistoric continent, now lost, which was located in the South, and which some designated as Lemuria."24 In contrast to the superior Nordic-Olympians, these stocks were telluric worshippers of the Earth and its elemental demons. Semites and other mixed races, Evola asserts, are the products of miscegenation between Atlantean settlers and these Lemurian races. Civilizations such as those of the pre-Hellenes, Mohenjo-Daro, pre-dynastic Egyptians, and Phoenicians, among countless others, were founded by mixed peoples.

Racialism in Practice

Racialist movements from National Socialist Germany to contemporary America have tended to emphasize preserving physical racial types. While phenotypes were important to Evola, his foremost goal for racialism was to safeguard the Olympian racial spirit of European man. It was from this spirit that the greatest Indo-European civilizations received the source of their leadership, the principles around which they centered their lives, and thus the wellspring of their vitality. While de Gobineau, Grant, and Hitler argued that blood purity was the determining factor in the life of a civilization, Evola contended that "Only when a civilization's 'spiritual race' is worn out or broken does its decline set in."25 Any people who manages to maintain a physical racial ideal with no inner spiritual substance is a race of "very beautiful animals destined to work,"26 but not destined to produce a higher civilization.

The importance of phenotypes is described thusly: "The physical from is the instrument, expression, and symbol of the psychic form."27 Evola felt that it would only be possible to discover the desired spiritual type (Olympian) through a systematic examination of physical types. Even to Evola, a Sicilian born, the best place to look in this regard was the "Aryan or Nordic-Aryan body"; as he mentions on several occasions, it was, after all, this race that carried the Olympian Tradition across the world. He called this process of physical selection "racism of the first degree," which was the first of three stages.

Once the proper Nordic phenotype was identified, various "appropriate" tests comprising racism of the second and third degrees would be implemented to determine a person's racial soul and spirit.28 Evola never laid out a specific program for this, but makes allusions in his works to assessments in which a person's political and racial opinions would be taken into account. In his Elements of Racial Education, he asserts that "The one who says yes to racism is one in which race still lives," and that one who has race is intrinsically against democratic ideals. He also likens true racism to the "classical spirit," which is rooted in "exaltation of everything which has form, face, and individuation, as opposed to what is formless, vague, and undifferentiated."29 Keep in mind that for Evola, "having race" is synonymous with having the "Olympian race" of the spirit. Upon discovering a mentality that fits the criteria for soul and spirit, a subsequent education of "appropriate disciplines" would be carried out to ensure that the racial spirit within this person is "maintained and developed." Through such trials, conducted on a wide scale, a nation can determine those people within it who embody the racial ideal and the capacity for leadership.

Protecting and developing the Nordic-Olympians was primary for Evola, but his racialism had other goals. He sought to produce the "unified type," or a person in whom the races of body, soul, and spirit matched one another and worked together harmoniously. For example: "A soul which experiences the world as something before which it takes a stand actively, which regards the world as an object of attack and conquest, should have a face which reflects by determined and daring features this inner experience, a slim, tall, nervous, straight body - an Aryan or Nordic-Aryan body."30

This was because "it is not impossible that physical appearances peculiar to a given race may be accompanied by the psychic traits of a different race."31 To Evola, if people chose mates on the basis of physical features alone, there is a good chance that various mental and spiritual elements would become intermingled and generate a dangerous confusion; there would be Nordics with Semitic mental characteristics and Asiatic spiritual predispositions, Alpines with Nordic proclivities and fatalistic religious attitudes, and so on. Such a mixture was what Evola considered to be a mongrel type, in whom "cosmopolitan myths of equality" become manifested mentally, thus paving the way for the beasts of democracy and communism to permeate the nation and take hold.

Evola cared more about the aristocratic racial type, but he did not want the populace to become a bastardized mass: "We must commit ourselves to the task of applying to the nation as a whole the criteria of coherence and unity, of correspondence between outer and inner elements."32 If the aristocracy had as its subjects a blob of spiritless, internally broken people, the nation would have no hope. For the Fascist state, he promoted an educational campaign to ensure that the peoples of Italy selected their mates appropriately, looking for both appearances and behavior; non-Europeans would of course be excluded entirely. The school system would play its role, as would popular literature and films.33

Another way to develop the "inner race" is through combat. Not combat in the modern sense of pressing a button and instantly obliterating a hundred people, but combat as it unfolds in the trenches and on the battlefield, when it is man against man, as well as man against his inner demons. Evola writes, "the experience of war, and the instincts and currents of deep forces which emerge through such an experience, give the racial sense a right, fecund direction."34 Meanwhile, the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and its pacifist worldview lead to the crippling of the inner race, which will ultimately become extinguished if external damage is thenceforth inflicted (via intermixing with inferior elements).

Conclusion

American racialists have much to gain from an introduction to Evola's thoughts on race. In the American context, racialism is virtually devoid of any higher, spiritual element; many racialists even take pride in this. There are, without a doubt, many racialists who consider themselves devout Catholics or Protestants, and they may even be so. However, the reality of race as a spiritual phenomenon is given little attention, if any at all. For whatever reason, American racialists are convinced that the greatness of Western civilization, evinced by its literature, architecture, discoveries, inventions, conquests, empires, political treatises, economic achievements, and the like, like solely in the mental characteristics of its people. For instance, the Romans erected the coliseum, the English invented capitalism, and the Greeks developed the Pythagorean theorem simply because they all had high IQs. When one compares the achievements of different Western peoples, and those of the West to the East, however, this explanation appears inadequate.

Intelligence alone cannot explain the different styles that are conveyed through the culture forms of different peoples; the Greeks' Corinthian order on the one hand, and the Arabs' mosques and minarets on the other, are not results of mere intellect. Sociological explanations do not work either; the Egyptians and Mayans lived in vastly different environments, yet both evoked their style through pyramids and hieroglyphs. The only explanation of these phenomena is that there is something deeper within a folk, something deeper and more powerful than bodily structures and mental predispositions. As Evola elucidates through his multitude of works - themselves the result of intense study of ancient and modern texts from every discipline imaginable - race has a "super-biological" aspect: a spiritual force. Ancient peoples understood this reality and conveyed it through their myths: the Romans used the lares; the Mayans used totemic animal symbols; the Persians used the fravashi, which were synonymous with the Nordic valkyries;35 the Egyptians used the ka; and the Hindus in the Bhagavad-Gita used Lord Krishna.

To better understand the spiritual side of race, the best place to look is Julius Evola. Through his works, which have greatly influenced the European New Right, Evola dissects and examines the concept of the Volksgeist, or racial spirit. It is the supernatural force that animates the bodies of a given race and stimulates the wiring in their brains. It is the substance from which cultures arise, and from which an aristocracy materializes to raise those cultures to higher civilizations. Without it, a race is simply a tribe of automatons that feed and copulate.

When the super biological element that is the center and the measure of true virility is lost, people can call themselves men, but in reality they are just eunuchs and their paternity simply reflects the quality of animals who, blinded by instinct, procreate randomly other animals, who in turn are mere vestiges of existence.36

Nowhere would Evola's racial ideas be more valuable than in the United States, a land in which the idea of transcendent realities is mocked, if not violently attacked. Even American racialists, who nostalgically look back to "better" times when people were more "traditional," are completely unaware of how the Aryan Tradition, in its purest form, understand the concept of race. Many of these people claim to be "Aryan" while simultaneously calling themselves "atheist" or "agnostic," although in ancient societies, one needed to practice the necessary religious rites and undergo certain trials before having the right to style oneself an Aryan. Hence the need for these "atheist Aryans" to become more familiar with Julius Evola.

Michael Bell writes about race and popular culture from a Radical Traditionalist point of view.

________________________________

[1] William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1899), 1.
[2] Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (North Stratford, NHL Ayer Company Publishers, Inc., 2000), xix.
[3] H.F.K. Gunther, The Racial Elements of European History, trans. G.C. Wheeler (Uckfield, Sussex, UK: Historical Review Press, 2007), 9.
[4] Philippe Rushton, “Statement on Race as a Biological Concept,” November 4, 1996, http://www.nationalistlibrary.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1354.
[5] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1926 & 1928), vol. 1, chs. 6 and 9; cf. vol. 2, ch. 5, “Cities and Peoples. (B) Peoples, races, Tongues.”
[6] Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium (Newport Beach, Cal.: Noontide Press, 2000), 293.
[7] See the Introduction to Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins, trans. Guido Stucco, (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 2002).
[8] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 48.
[9] Julius Evola, The Elements of Racial Education, trans. Thompkins and Cariou (Thompkins & Cariou, 2005), 11.
[10] Evola, Elements of a Racial Education, 34-35.
[11] For more on the Levantine “race of the soul” see Elements of Racial Education, 35.
[12] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 35.
[13] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 259.
[14] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 262.
[15] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 260. Evola’s descriptions of Nordic and Mediterranean proclivities show the strong influence of Gunthers’s The Racial Elements of European History.
[16] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 29.
[17] Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory, & Death in the World of Tradition, ed. John Morgan and Patrick Boch (Aarhus, Denmark: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2007), 63.
[18] Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1995), 48.
[19] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 48.
[20] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 40.
[21] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 48.
[22] Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love, trans. anonymous (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1991, 9.
[23] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 195.
[24] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 197.
[25] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 58.
[26] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 170.
[27] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 30.
[28] Julius Evola, “Race as a Builder of Leaders,” trans. Thompkins and Cariou, http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id7.html.
[29] Evola, The Elements of Racial Education, 14, 15.
[30] Evola, The Elements of Racial Education, 31.
[31] Evola, “Race as a Builder of Leaders.”
[32] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 33.
[33] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 25.
[34] Evola, Metaphysics of War, 69
[35] Evola, Metaphysics of War, 34.
[36] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 170.

mercredi, 20 mai 2009

Préface à "Religiosité indo-européenne" de H. F. K. Günther

gunther.jpg

 

 

 

Archives de SYNERGIES EUROPÉENNES - Septembre 1987

Préface du traducteur à "Religiosité indo-européenne" de H. F. K. Günther

Un préjugé défavorable accompagnera ce livre de Günther. En effet, en France, Günther jouit d'une réputation détestable, celle d'être "l'anthropologue officiel" du Troisième Reich de Hitler. Cet étiquetage n'a que la valeur d'un slogan et il n'est pas étonnant que ce soit le présentateur de télévision Polac qui l'ait instrumentalisé, lors d'un débat à l'écran, tenu le 17 avril 1982 sur la "Nouvelle Droite" d'Alain de Benoist. Avec la complicité directe d'un avocat parisien, Maître Souchon, et la complicité indirecte d'un essayiste britannique, ayant comme qualification scientifique d'être un "militant anti-fasciste", Michael Billig (1), Polac pouvait fabriquer, devant plusieurs centaines de milliers de téléspectateurs, le bricolage médiatique d'un "Günther hyper-nazi", maniaque de la race et dangereux antisémite. Comme aucun représentant de la "Nouvelle Droite", aucun anthropologue sérieux, aucun connaisseur des idées allemandes des années 20 et 30, n'étaient présents sur le plateau, Polac, Souchon et leurs petits copains n'ont pas dû affronter la contradiction de spécialistes et le pauvre Günther, décédé de-puis quatorze ans, a fait les frais d'un show  médiatique sans la moindre valeur scientifique, comme le démontre avec brio David Barney dans Eléments  (n°42, juin-juillet 1982).

Qui fut Günther? Hans Friedrich Karl Günther est né le 16 février 1891 à Fribourg en Brisgau, ville où il vécut sa jeunesse. Il y fréquenta l'université et, après un séjour d'études à Paris, acquit les diplômes qui sanctionnaient ses connaissances en linguistique comparée et en philologie germanique. La formation de Günther est donc celle d'un philologue, non celle d'un anthropologue. Quand éclate la guerre de 1914, Günther se porte volontaire mais, atteint d'un rhumatisme des articulations pendant son instruction, il est renvoyé chez lui et jugé inapte au service actif. Il servira ultérieurement le Reich dans la Croix-Rouge. La guerre finie, il enseigne à Dresde et à Fribourg. Son premier ouvrage paraît en 1920 et s'intitule Ritter, Tod und Teufel. Der heldische Gedanke  (= Le chevalier, la mort et le diable. L'idée héroïque), conjointement à une pièce de théâtre, d'inspiration nationaliste, faustienne, païenne et romantique, Hans Baldenwegs Aufbruch. Ein deutsches Spiel in vier Auftritten  (=Le départ de Hans Baldenweg. Pièce allemande en quatre actes). Le destin de Günther venait d'être scellé. Non par le contenu intellectuel de ces deux travaux, mais par la personnalité de son éditeur munichois, Julius Friedrich Lehmann, enthousiasmé par Ritter, Tod und Teufel.  Cet éditeur connu avait repéré des qualités innées d'anthropologue chez son jeune protégé. Günther, avait remarqué Lehmann, repérait tout de suite, avec justesse, les caractéristiques raciales des individus qu'il rencontrait au hasard, dans les rues ou sur les chemins de campagne. Il était dès lors l'homme que cherchait Lehmann, pour écrire un précis de "raciologie" vulgarisé, accessible au grand public, commercialisable à grande échelle. Malgré l'avis défavorable d'un professeur d'anthropologie de l'université, Lehmann déci-de de payer Günther pendant deux ans, afin d'achever, à l'abri du besoin, sa "raciologie". En juillet 1922, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes  sort de presse. Plusieurs éditions se succéderont jusqu'en 1942 et 124.000 exemplaires du livre trouveront acquéreurs. En 1929, paraît une édition abrégée, Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes,  rapidement surnommée Volksgünther,  qui sera, elle, tirée à 295.000 exemplaires.

Auteur d'un ouvrage scientifique de référence sur "l'idée nordique" en Allemagne (2), Hans-Jürgen Lutzhöft explique les raisons qui ont fait le succès de ces deux manuels:

1) En reprenant les classifications des races, dressées par les anthropologues anglo-saxons Beddoe et Ripley, Günther analysait la population allemande et repérait les mixages dont elle était le résultat. C'était la première fois qu'un livre aussi didactique sur la question paraissait en Allemagne. Günther faisait dès lors figure de pionnier.

2) Didactique, Günther initiait ses lecteurs, avec une remarquable clarté, aux arcanes et aux concepts fondamentaux de l'anthropologie biologique. Le lecteur moyen acquérait, avec ce livre, un texte "initiatique" pratique, concret et instructif.

3) Les deux ouvrages étaient richement illustrés, ce qui ôtait toute abstraction ennuyeuse aux descriptions des phénotypes raciaux (physionomies, corpulences, formes des crânes, couleur des cheveux et des yeux etc.).

4) Le style du livre était précis, clair, compréhensible, convaincant.

5) La simplicité des démonstrations encourageait la lecture.

6) Günther ne sombrait dans aucune polémique gratuite. Certes, sa race "favorite" était la race nordique mais jamais il ne médisait des au-tres races européennes. Cette absence de propos médisants, inhabituelle dans les vulgarisations anthropologiques de l'époque, accordait à Günther un public nettement plus large que celui des petites sectes nordicomanes.

7) Vulgarisation qui n'avait pas la prétention d'être autre chose, la Rassenkunde  possèdait un niveau scientifique réel et incontestable, malgré les lacunes que pouvaient repérer les spécialistes autorisés des universités. Pour l'anthropologue Eugen Fischer, le plus renommé dans sa profession pendant l'entre-deux-guerres allemand, la lecture de la Rassenkunde  était impérative pour le débutant et même pour le professionnel qui voulait acquérir une souplesse didactique dans sa branche.

Le succès incroyable et inattendu de la Rassenkunde  permet à Günther d'envisager la vie d'un écrivain libre. Il suit les cours de l'anthropologue Theodor Mollison (1874-1952) à Breslau et rencontre à Dres-de celle qui deviendra bien vite son épouse, la jeune musicologue norvégienne Maggen Blom. En 1923, il suit la jeune fille à Skien, sa ville natale, dans le Telemark norvégien, et l'épouse en juillet. Deux filles naîtront de cette union, Ingrid et Sigrun. Les Günther resteront deux ans à Skien, puis se fixeront à Uppsala en Suède, où se trouve "l'Institut d'Etat suédois de biologie raciale". Il travaillera là avec les anthropologues Lundborg et Nordenstreng. En 1927, la famille va habiter dans l'île de Lidingö près de Stockholm. Les années scandinaves de Günther sont indubitablement les plus heureuses de sa vie. Son âme de solitaire trouve un profond apaisement en parcourant les forêts et les montagnes peu peuplées de Norvège et de Suède. Il décline plusieurs invitations à revenir en Allemagne. En 1929, pourtant, quand le Reich est frappé durement par la crise économique, les ventes de la Rassenkunde  baissent sensiblement, ce qui oblige Günther à abandonner sa vie de chercheur libre. Son ami Hartnacke use de son influence pour lui donner, à Dresde, un emploi de professeur de Gymnasium  à temps partiel.

C'est à ce moment que des militants nationaux-socialistes ou nationalistes commencent à s'intéresser à lui. Darré estime que la Rassenkunde  a donné une impulsion déterminante au "mouvement nordique". Ludendorff en chante les louanges. Rosenberg, lui, avait déjà, dans le Völkischer Beobachter  du 7 mai 1925, réclamé la présence d'un homme du format de Günther à la Deutsche Akademie.  Ce sera finalement Wilhelm Frick, ministre national-socialiste de l'intérieur et de l'éducation populaire du Land  de Thuringe, qui, avec l'appui de Max Robert Gerstenhauer, Président thuringien de la Wirtschaftspartei  (= Parti de l'Economie), bientôt alliée au NSDAP, déploiera une redoutable énergie pour donner à Günther, apolitique et simplement ami du responsable national-socialiste Paul Schultze-Naumburg, une chaire de professeur à l'université d'Iéna. Le corps académique résiste, arguant que Günther, diplômé en philologie, n'a pas la formation nécessaire pour accéder à un poste de professeur d'anthropologie, de raciologie ou d'hygiène raciale (Rassenhygiene).  Frick et Gerstenhauer circonviennent ces réticences en créant une chaire "d'anthropologie sociale", attribuée immédiatement à Günther. Ce "putsch" national-socialiste, que Günther, bien que principal intéressé, n'a suivi que de loin, finit par réussir parce qu'une chaire d'anthropologie sociale constituait une nouveauté indispensable et parce que Günther, en fin de compte, avait amplement prouvé qu'il maîtrisait cette discipline moderne. La seule réticence restante était d'ordre juridique: les adversaires des nazis jugeaient que Frick posait là un précédent, risquant de sanctionner, ultérieurement, toutes inter-ventions intempestives du politique dans le fonctionnement de l'université. Le 15 novembre 1930, Günther prononce son discours inaugural seul, sans la présence du recteur et du doyen de sa faculté. Mais bien en présence de Hitler, qui vint personnellement féliciter le nouveau professeur, qui ne s'attendait pas du tout à cela... Hitler prenait sans doute la nomination de Günther comme prétexte pour être présent à l'université lors d'une séance publique et pour encourager ses compagnons de route à intervenir dans les nominations, comme l'avaient fait Frick et Gerstenhauer.

En 1933, quand Hitler et ses partisans accèdent au pouvoir, deux adversaires de Günther sont destitués voire emprisonnés, sans doute pour avoir mi-lité dans des formations hostiles à la NSDAP victorieuse. Rosenberg fait accorder à Günther le "Prix de science de la NSDAP" en 1935. En 1936, Günther reçoit une distinction honorifique moins compromettante: la "Plaquette Rudolf Virchow de la Société berlinoise d'Ethnologie, d'Anthropologie et de Proto-histoire", dirigée par Eugen Fischer. En 1937, il entre dans le comité directeur de la Société Allemande de Philosophie. Pour son cinquantième anniversaire, le 16 février 1941, il reçoit la "Médaille Goethe d'Art et de Science" et, ce qui est cette fois nettement compromettant, l'insigne d'or du parti.

En 1932, Günther publie un ouvrage très intéressant sur la présence d'éléments raciaux nordiques chez les Indo-Européens d'Asie (Indo-Iraniens, Beloutches, Afghans, Perses, Tadjiks, Galtchas, Sakkas, Tokhariens et Arméniens). Günther décèle de cette façon la voie des migrations indo-européennes, amorcées vers -1600 avant notre ère et repère les noyaux de peuplement encore fortement marqués par ce mouvement de population (3). 

En 1935, paraît un autre livre important de Günther, Herkunft und Rassengeschichte der Germanen.  Par la suite, jusqu'en 1956, Günther se préoccupera essentiellement d'hérédité, de sociologie rurale, etc., tous thèmes difficilement politisables. Malgré cet engouement du régime pour sa personne, Günther demeure en retrait et ne fait pas valoir sa position pour acquérir davantage d'honneurs ou d'influence. Hans-Jürgen Lutzhöft estime que cette discrétion, finalement admirable, est le résultat des dispositions psychiques, du tempérament de Günther lui-même. Il n'aimait guère les contacts, était timide et soli-taire. Par dessus tout, il appréciait la solitude dans la campagne et avait en horreur la fébrilité militante des organisations de masse. Comme le montre bien Frömmigkeit nordischer Artung  (1934, 6ème éd.: 1963), Günther détestait le "byzantinisme" et le fanatisme. En 1941, en pleine guerre, Günther fait l'apologie d'un sentiment: celui de la "propension à la conciliation", fruit, dans le chef de l'individu, d'une fidélité inébranlable à ses principes et d'une tolérance largement ouverte à l'égard des convictions d'autrui; pour Günther, véritable-ment "nordique", donc exemplaire selon les critères de sa mythologie, était l'adage: "You happen to think that way; allright! I happen to think this way"  (Vous pensez de cette façon? Fort bien! Moi, je pense de cette autre façon). Nostalgique de la Scandinavie, Günther, dit Lutzhöft, a souvent songé à émigrer; mais, une telle aventure l'aurait privé, lui et sa famille, de bien des avantages matériels...

Le cours des événements a fait réfléchir Günther et a renforcé son attitude réservée à l'endroit du régime. Entre l'idéologie officiellement proclamée et la pratique politique réelle de l'Etat national-socialiste, l'observateur détaché que voulait être Günther constate des différences flagrantes. Ce scepticisme croissant apparaît clairement dans le manuscrit qu'il prévoyait de faire paraître en 1944. Ce livre, intitulé Die Unehelichen in erbkundlicher Betrachtung  (= Les enfants illégitimes vus sous l'angle des notions d'hérédité) fut en dernière instance interdit par les autorités nationales-socialistes, surtout à l'instigation de Goebbels et de Bormann. Pourquoi? Günther, personnellement, ne reçut jamais aucune explication quant à cette interdiction, surprenante lorsqu'on sait que l'anthropologue détenait l'insigne d'or du parti. Lutzhöft donne quelques explications intéressantes, qui, approfondies, vérifiées sur base de documents et de témoignages, permettraient d'élucider davantage encore la nature du régime national-socialiste, encore très peu connu dans son essence, malgré les masses de livres qui lui ont été consacrées. La raison majeure de l'interdiction réside dans le contenu du manuscrit, qui défend la monogamie et la famille traditionnelle, institutions qu'apparemment la dernière garde de Hitler, dont Bormann, souhaitait supprimer. Pour Günther, la famille traditionnelle monogame doit être maintenue telle quelle sinon le peuple allemand "risque de dégénérer". L'urbanisation croissante du peuple allemand a entraîné, pense Günther, un déclin du patrimoine génétique germanique, de telle sorte qu'un bon tiers de la nation pouvait être qualifié de "génétiquement inférieur". Sur le plan de la propagande, un tel bilan s'avère négatif car il autorise tous les pessimismes et contredit l'image d'une "race des seigneurs".

Pour Günther, une politique raciale ne doit pas être quantitative; elle ne doit pas viser à l'accroissement quantitatif de la population mais à son amélioration qualitative. Günther s'insurge dès lors contre la politique sociale du IIIème Reich, qui distribue des allocations familiales de façon égalitaire, sans opérer la moindre sélection entre familles génétiquement valables et familles génétiquement inintéressantes. Ensuite, il critique sévèrement l'attribution d'allocations aux filles-mères parce qu'une telle politique risquerait de faire augmenter indûment les naissances illégitimes et de détruire, à plus ou moins courte échéance, l'institution du mariage. Günther avait eu vent des projets d'établissement de la polygamie (conçus par Himmler et les époux Bormann) afin de combler le déficit des naissances et l'affaiblissement biologique dus à la guerre. Le trop-plein de femmes que l'Allemagne allait inévitablement connaître après les hostilités constituait un problème grave devant être résolu au profit exclusif des combattants rescapés de l'épopée hitlérienne. Bormann envisageait une institution polygamique prévoyant une femme principale et des femmes secondaires ou "amantes légales", toutes destinées à concevoir des enfants, de façon à ce que les Germains demeurent majoritaires en Europe. Pour Günther, ce système ne pourrait fonctionner harmonieusement.

Les "amantes légales", souvent sexuellement attrayantes, fantaisistes, gaies, auraient monopolisé l'attention de leurs mâles au détriment des femmes principales, plus soucieuses, en théorie, de leurs devoirs de mères. En conséquence, pense Günther, les femmes sexuellement fougueuses, qui ne sont pas nécessairement valables génétiquement (Günther, en tout cas, ne le croit pas), verraient leurs chances augmenter au détriment de la race, tandis que les femmes plus posées, génétiquement précieuses, risquent d'être délaissées, ce qui jouerait également au détriment de la race. Pire, ce système ne provoquerait même pas, dit Günther, l'accroissement quantitatif de la population, pour lequel il a été conçu. La polygamie, l'histoire l'enseigne, produit moins d'enfants que la monogamie. L'opposition de Günther au régime est évidente dans cette querelle relative à la politique sociale du IIIème Reich; il adopte une position résolument conservatrice devant la dérive polygamiste, provoquée par la guerre et la crainte d'être une nation dirigeante numériquement plus faible que les peuples dirigés, notamment les Slaves.

Revenu à Fribourg pendant la guerre, il quitte une nouvelle fois sa ville natale quand son institut est détruit et se fixe à Weimar. Lorsque les Américains pénètrent dans la ville, le savant et son épouse sont réquisitionnés un jour par semaine pour travailler au déblaie-ment du camp de Buchenwald. Quand les troupes US abandonnent la région pour la céder aux Russes, Günther et sa famille retournent à Fribourg, où l'attendent et l'arrêtent des militaires français. L'anthropologue, oublié, restera trois ans dans un camp d'internement. Les officiers de la Sûreté le traitent avec amabilité, écrira-t-il, et la "chambre de dénazification" ne retient aucune charge contre lui, estimant qu'il s'est contenté de fréquenter les milieux scientifiques internationaux et n'a jamais fait profession d'antisémitisme. Polac, Billig et Souchon, eux, sont plus zélés que la chambre de dénazification... S'ils avaient été citoyens ouest-allemands, ils auraient dû répon-dre devant les tribunaux de leurs diffamations, sans objet puisque seule compte la décision de la chambre de dénazification  —contrôlée par la France de surcroît puisque Fribourg est en zone d'occupation française— qui a statué en bon-ne et due forme sur la chose à juger et décidé qu'il y avait non-lieu.

Günther se remit aussitôt au travail et dès 1951, recommence à faire paraître articles et essais. En 1952, paraît chez Payot une traduction française de son ouvrage sur le mariage (Le Mariage, ses formes, son origine,  Payot, 1952). En 1953, il devient membre correspondant de l' American Society of Human Genetics. En 1956 et 1957, paraissent deux ouvrages particulièrement intéressants: Lebensgeschichte des Hellenischen Volkes et Lebensgeschichte des Römischen Volkes, ("Histoire biologique du peuple grec" et "Histoire biologique du peuple romain"), tous deux repris de travaux antérieurs, commencés en 1929. En 1963, paraît la sixième édition, revue et corrigée, de Frömmigkeit nordischer Artung.  Cette sixième édition, avec l'édition anglaise plus complète de 1967 (Religious attitudes of the Indo-Europeans,  Clair Press, London, 1967), a servi de base à cette version française de Frömmigkeit nordischer Artung,  dont le titre est dérivé de celui d'une édition italienne: Religiosita indoeuropea.  Le texte de Frömmigkeit...  est une exploration du mental indo-européen à la lumière des textes classiques de l'antiquité gréco-romaine ainsi que de certains passages de l'Edda et de poésies de l'ère romantique allemande. Avec les travaux d'un Benveniste ou d'un Dumézil, ce livre apparaîtra dépassé voire sommaire. Sa lecture demeure néanmoins indispensable, surtout pour les sources qu'il mentionne et parce qu'il est en quelque sorte un des modestes mais incontournables chaînons dans la longue quête intellectuelle, philologique, de l'indo-européanité, entreprise depuis les premières intuitions des humanistes de la Renaissance et les pionniers de la linguistique comparée.

Après la mort de sa femme en 1966, Günther vit encore plus retiré qu'auparavant. Pendant l'hiver 1967-1968, il met péniblement en ordre  —ses forces physiques l'abandonnent—  ses notes personnelles de l'époque nationale-socialiste. Il en sort un livre: Mein Eindruck von Adolf Hitler  (L'impression que me fit Adolf Hitler). On perçoit dans ce recueil les raisons de la réticence de Günther à l'égard du régime nazi et on découvre aussi son tempérament peu sociable, hostile à tout militantisme et à tout collectivisme comportemental. S'il fut, malgré lui, un anthropologue apprécié du régime, choyé par quelques personnalités comme Darré ou Rosenberg, Günther fut toujours incapable de s'enthousiasmer pour la politique et, secrètement, au fond de son cœur, rejetait toute forme de collectivisme. Pour ce romantique de la race nordique, les collectivismes communiste ou national-socialiste sont des "asiatismes". L'option personnelle de Günther le rapproche davantage d'un Wittfogel, théoricien du "despotisme oriental" et inspirateur de Rudi Dutschke. L'idéal social de Günther, c'est celui d'un paysannat libre, sans Etat, a-politique, centré sur le clan cimenté par les liens de consanguinité. En Scandinavie, dans certains villages de Westphalie et du Schleswig-Holstein, dans le Nord-Ouest des Etats-Unis où se sont fixés de nombreux paysans norvégiens et suédois, un tel paysannat existait et subsiste encore très timidement. Cet idéal n'a jamais pu être concrétisé sous le IIIème Reich. Mein Eindruck von Adolf Hitler  (4) est, en dernière instance, un réquisitoire terrible contre le régime, dressé par quelqu'un qui l'a vécu de très près. Ce document témoigne d'abord, rétrospectivement, de la malhonnêteté profonde des pseudo-historiens français qui font de Günther l'anthropologue officiel de la NSDAP et, ensuite, de la méchanceté gratuite et irresponsable des quelques larrons qui se produisent régulièrement sur les plateaux de télévision pour "criminaliser" les idéologies, les pensées, les travaux scientifiques qui ont l'heur de déplaire aux prêtres de l'ordre moral occidental...

Epuisé par l'âge et la maladie, Günther meurt le 25 septembre 1968 à Fribourg. La veille de sa mort, il écrivait à Tennyson qu'il souhaitait se retirer dans une maison de repos car il ne ressentait plus aucune joie et n'aspirait plus qu'au calme.

Robert Steuckers.

(Bruxelles, septembre 1987).

Notes

(1) Michael Billig, L'internationale raciste. De la psychologie à la science des races,  François Maspero, Paris, 1981.

(2) Hans-Jürgen Lutzhöft, Der Nordische Gedanke in Deutschland, 1920-1940,  Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart, 1971. La présente introduction tire la plupart de ses éléments de cet ouvrage universitaire sérieux.

(3) Cf. Hans F. K. Günther, Die Nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanen Asiens,  Verlag Hohe Warte, Pähl, 1982 (réédition).

(4) Hans F. K. Günther, Mein Eindruck von Adolf Hitler,  Franz v. Bebenburg, Pähl, 1969.

mardi, 23 décembre 2008

L. F. Clauss: "L'âme des races"

L'âme des races - L.F. Clauss

Né le 8 février 1892 à Offenburg dans la région du Taunus, l'anthropologue Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss est rapidement devenu l'un des raciologues et islamologues les plus réputés de l'entre-deux-guerre, cumulant dans son oeuvre une approche spirituelle et caractérielle des diverses composantes raciales de la population européenne, d'une part, et une étude approfondie de la psyché bédouine, après de longs séjours au sein des tribus de la Transjordanie. L'originalité de sa méthode d'investigation raciologique a été de renoncer à tous les zoologismes des théories raciales conventionnelles, nés dans la foulée du darwinisme. Clauss renonce aux comparaisons trop faciles entre l'homme et l'animal et focalise ses recherches sur les expressions du visage et du corps qui sont spécifiquement humaines ainsi que sur l'âme et le caractère.

Sous le IIIème Reich, Clauss a tenté de faire passer sa méthodologie et sa théorie des carcatères dans les instances officielles. En vain. Les autorités israéliennes ont fait planter un arbre en son honneur à Yad Vashem en 1979. Car sa fidélité qui le liait à son pays et son travail au Département VI C 13 du RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), en tant que spécialiste du Moyen-Orient n'a toutefois pas empêché l'amitié qui liait Clauss à sa secrétaire Margarete Landé (d'origine juive) qu'il sauva des camps de concentration.

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INTRODUCTION DE L'AUTEUR : LE PROBLÈME DES VALEURS


Chaque fois qu’une nouveauté surgit dans l'histoire, les clameurs ne se font pas attendre. Ce que la recherche allemande en racio-psychologie a dû affronter, un certain temps en Allemagne même, fut en réalité le lot de toute la raciologie allemande de la part du reste du monde. Les reproches les plus inouïs lui furent adressés. La plupart étaient d'ailleurs si niais que le temps en fit rapidement litière. Peu à peu cependant, les armes dirigées contre nous s'affinèrent. Mais, toujours, la question des valeurs fut au centre de l'argumentaire qui devait nous abattre. On nous accusa de tenir la race nordique pour la seule valable, toutes les autres étant supposées l'être moins... Là où cet « argument » fut cru, il nous fit d'autant plus de mal que l'épithète « nordique », à l'origine de tant de méprises chez le profane, se prête à toutes sortes de manipulations gratuites, allant de la malhonnêteté à la bêtise.

Le Vatican, hélas, joignit sa voix aux vociférations contre les acquis de la raciologie. Il nous attaqua en particulier, avec les arguments habituels, dans un article de l'Osservatore Romano du 30 avril 1938. Comme mes livres furent également la cible de ces attaques, il est de mon devoir, me semble-t-il, de mettre ici les choses au point en quelques lignes, tout au moins en ce qui me concerne. Même si ces propos anticipent sur le contenu de l'ouvrage qu'ils sont censés préfacer.

Il y a trois erreurs par lesquelles ces attaques essaient de nous brouiller avec nos voisins. La première consiste à donner l'impression que la raciologie allemande attribuerait à chaque race, comme le maître à ses élèves, un rang déterminé. Selon cette erreur, elle assignerait ainsi une place à chaque race, la première revenant à la race nordique. Ce qui impliquerait que la race méditerranéenne, par exemple, dût se contenter de la seconde, ou d'une place inférieure encore.

Rien n'est plus faux. Certes, des livres et des brochures, parus en Allemagne et à l'étranger, ont affirmé cela. Mais la racio-psychologie, dont la seule mission, en fin de compte, est de déterminer les valeurs liées à l'âme de telle ou telle race, nous enseigne d'emblée, très explicitement, que chaque race représente en elle-même et pour elle-même la valeur suprême. Chaque race porte son ordre et ses critères de valeurs. Elle ne peut être appréciée au moyen des critères d'une autre race. Il est donc absurde et de surcroît anti-scientifique de voir, par exemple, la race méditerranéenne avec les yeux de la race nordique et de porter sur elle un jugement de valeur selon des critères nordiques - et l'inverse est tout aussi vrai. Bien sûr, de telles bévues se produisent sans cesse dans la vie quotidienne, et c'est inévitable. Mais pour la science, c'est là un manquement à la logique la plus élémentaire.

Pour juger « objectivement » de la valeur d'une race humaine, il faudrait être au-dessus de toutes les races ! Chose impossible car être homme, c'est être déterminé par des caractères raciaux.

Dieu, peut-être, a-t-il son échelle de valeurs. Pas nous.

La science a donc pour mission de trouver la loi qui gouverne la constitution physique et mentale de chaque race. Cette loi particulière renferme également le système de valeurs spécifique, inhérent à cette race. On peut comparer ces systèmes de valeurs : l'échelle de valeurs spécifique à la race nordique, par exemple, peut être comparée à celle de la race méditerranéenne.

Ces comparaisons sont même instructives car toute chose, dans le monde où nous vivons, ne dévoile sa nature que si elle se distingue d'une autre, différente. Mais ces ordres de valeurs ne peuvent être jugés « en soi », à partir d'une axiologie « surplombante » puisqu'une telle axiologie, à notre connaissance, n'existe pas.

Que le Nordique soit nordique et le Méditerranéen méditerranéen ! Car ce n'est que si l'un et l'autre reste lui-même qu'il sera « bon », chacun à sa façon ! C'est la conviction de la racio-psychologie allemande que j'ai l'honneur de représenter, et cette conviction, la politique raciale allemande l'a reprise à son compte : le Bureau de la politique raciale du NSDAP a ainsi fait imprimer et distribuer dans les écoles des planches illustrées où l'on peut lire en gros caractères :

« TOUTES LES RACES SONT UNE VALEUR SUPRÊME »

La deuxième illusion que l'Osservatore Romano voudrait propager est la suivante : pour la science allemande, une race se distinguerait d'une autre par la possession de telles qualités, telle autre race ayant telles autres qualités. La race nordique, par exemple, se signalerait par son discernement, son dynamisme, son sens des responsabilités, son caractère consciencieux, son héroïsme - les autres races étant dépourvues de toutes ces qualités. Il n'est pas niable que de nombreux traités d'anthropologie anciens, dont certains furent rédigés par des Allemands, contiennent ce genre d'affirmations bien peu psychologiques.

Cela dit, ne vaut-il pas mieux consulter un cordonnier pour ses chaussures, un marin sur la navigation et un psychologue plutôt qu'un anatomiste sur les lois de la psychologie ?

Depuis 1921, la racio-psychologie allemande nous enseigne clairement ceci : l'âme d'une race ne réside pas dans telle ou telle « qualité ». Les qualités sont affaire individuelle : untel aura telles qualités, untel telles autres. La qualité « héroïsme » se rencontre sans aucun doute chez de nombreux Nordiques, mais également chez d'autres races. Il en est de même du dynamisme, du discernement, etc... L'âme d'une race ne consiste pas à posséder telle ou telle « qualité », elle réside dans le mouvement à travers lequel cette qualité se manifeste quand elle est présente chez un individu. L'héroïsme d'un Nordique et d'un Méditerranéen peut être « égal », il n'en reste pas moins que ces deux héroïsmes ne se présentent pas de la même façon : ils opèrent de manière différente, par des mouvements différents.

Le procédé parfaitement puéril consistant à rassembler une somme de qualités relevées chez quelques représentants individuels d'une race donnée, disons de la race nordique, et à (faire) croire que c'est dans la possession de ces qualités que réside le fait racial, est à peu près aussi intelligent que de vouloir décrire l'aspect physique de la race nordique, par exemple, en disant : elle a un nez, une bouche, des bras, des mains. Sans nul doute, cette race possède tout cela, et bien d'autres choses encore. Mais toutes les races possèdent un nez, une bouche, des bras et des mains. Ce n'est donc pas là, dans la possession de telle ou telle partie du corps, qu'il faut chercher le fait racial. Ce qui, en revanche, est déterminé racialement, c'est la forme du nez, de la bouche, et la manière dont on s'en sert. Même chose pour la forme des bras, des mains, et la façon dont ils se meuvent. Que l'homme de race méditerranéenne évolue dans l'espace différemment du Nordique, qu'il marche et danse différemment, qu'il accompagne son discours de gestes différents, cela est indéniable, il suffit d'ouvrir les yeux. Quant à savoir quels mouvements du corps, quelle gestuelle, ont le plus de « valeur », ceux du Méditerranéen ou ceux du Nordique, c'est là une question vide de sens. La réponse est : tous les deux, chacun à sa manière, chacun selon son style propre.

Les mouvements du corps sont l'expression des mouvements de l'âme, comme en témoignent le jeu des muscles de la face et les gestes des bras et des mains qui ponctuent l'élocution.
Pourquoi le locuteur agite-t-il ses mains de telle façon et non pas autrement ? Parce que le rythme auquel vit son âme lui dicte cette façon-là de remuer les mains. Le style des mouvements de l'âme détermine le style des mouvements du corps, car tous deux ne font qu'un.

Un exemple simple, tiré de l'observation quotidienne, illustrera ce propos : lequel, du Nordique ou du Méditerranéen, est le plus « doué » pour conduire une automobile ? Question, ici encore, vide de sens : ce n'est pas "le" Nordique, ni "le" Méditerranéen, qui a le don de ceci ou de cela, de nombreux êtres humains, appartenant à ces deux races, sont capables de conduire une automobile. Mais les Nordiques le seront d'une certaine manière, et c'est cette manière qui les fera apparaître comme tels. De même, les Méditerranéens le seront à la manière méditerranéenne, et c'est à cela qu'on les reconnaît comme méditerranéens. Voici la différence entre ces deux styles de conduite : le conducteur méditerranéen est maître de l'instant : où qu'il se trouve, il y est dans la perfection achevée du moment présent. D'un mouvement brusque du volant, il abordera un virage à toute vitesse, évitera un obstacle et freinera avec effet immédiat. Plus l'action est folle, dangereuse, plus le jeu sera magnifique. L'automobiliste nordique ne le suit pas sur ce terrain-là : non parce qu'il est piètre conducteur, mais parce que la loi qui préside aux mouvements de son âme et de son corps lui dicte un style de conduite différent. Le Nordique ne vit pas dans ce qui est, il vit toujours dans ce qui viendra : il n'est pas le maître de l'instant, il est le maître du lointain. Il n'abordera pas un virage de façon brusquée, il décrira au contraire un vaste arc de cercle : pour lui, le virage est « beau » s'il l'a prévu et s'il l'accentue le moins possible. Le Méditerranéen affectionne la surprise, l'imprévu : par là, il s'affirme comme le maître de l'instant présent. Le Nordique, lui, essaie toujours de pressentir, de prévoir ce qui va venir, même si cela n'est pas certain. C'est pourquoi il se crée un code de la route pensé jusque dans ses ultimes éventualités - ce qui exaspère le Méditerranéen. Car pour ce dernier, supprimer l'excitation de la surprise, ce n'est pas lui simplifier la tâche !

La troisième erreur que commet l'Osservatore Romano consiste à affirmer ceci : le peuple allemand se confond avec la race nordique, le peuple italien avec la race méditerranéenne. Si ce n'est pas dit explicitement, c'est admis implicitement. Or, le peuple allemand est composé de plusieurs races, parmi lesquelles la nordique prédomine bien sûr, mais elle n'est pas exclusive : il y a du sang méditerranéen dans le peuple allemand.

D'ailleurs, le peuple italien lui-même est constitué de plusieurs races, parmi lesquelles la race méditerranéenne domine certes (du moins dans la moitié Sud de la péninsule) ; mais il y a d'autres apports dans le peuple italien, par exemple beaucoup de sang nordique. Il n'existe pas de frontière raciale rigide entre les deux peuples, ils ont au contraire de nombreux traits communs, y compris au niveau du sang. Cette parenté biologique remonte très loin dans la Rome primitive et a, depuis, été renouvelée par plusieurs apports. Au sein des deux cultures, la germanique et la latine, les lois de la nordicité coexistent avec celles de la latinité mais le résultat en est différent d'une culture à l'autre : ces deux civilisations se sont formées ensemble, au contact l'une de l'autre. La latine est plus ancienne, la germanique plus récente. Laquelle a le plus de valeur, la plus ancienne ou la plus jeune ? Là encore, le problème nous paraît mal posé.

Le piège qui consiste à faire porter le soupçon sur la politique raciale allemande pour semer la méfiance entre peuples amis ne peut aujourd'hui leurrer que les naïfs. Tous les actes de la politique internationale, ou coloniale, viennent corroborer les acquis de la racio-psychologie et confirment son utilité pratique dans les relations avec des peuples différents. Son but n'est pas de séparer les peuples, mais de les rapprocher en fondant entre les divers types humains une compréhension mutuelle éclairée par la science.

Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, « L’âme des races ».

vendredi, 28 novembre 2008

Démocrates, Républicains et Afro-Américains

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Démocrates, Républicains et Afro-Américains

 

Georges Blair, dit Georges Orwell, fut véritablement un prophète d’une exceptionnelle lucidité: il avait compris comment allait fonctionner une société entièrement axée sur les médias de communication de masse, instruments d’ahurissement et de manipulation. “La vérité, c’est le mensonge”, écrivait-il dans son célèbre 1984 et, de fait, la “vérité” à laquelle nous sommes sommés de croire est généralement un mensonge fabriqué. L’amnésie imposée à tous est la pierre angulaire sur laquelle repose le système actuel en Occident, en Oceania, disait Orwell, fine allusion au fait que l’aire où sévissait Big Brother n’était ni continentale ni communiste mais thalassocratique et “autre chose”, une chose en train d’advenir, non encore parachevée, et qui échappait donc, à l’époque d’Orwell, à une définition claire et bien ficelée.

 

Tous les catéchismes de notre époque sont des fabrications et sont interchangeables. Le parti B ou le peuple C peuvent être aujourd’hui montrés en exemple comme des alliés ou des interlocuteurs formidables et incontournables puis, demain, devenir d’épouvantables croquemitaines et vice-versa: le parti A et le peuple D, anciens monstres décriés et voués aux gémonies,  pourront subitement se muer en un cénacle ou une population d’anges adorables, en quelques tours de passe-passe. Staline, la Russie et les peuples de l’ex-Yougoslavie sont passés par cette surprenante métamorphose.  

 

L’élection d’Obama, premier président noir des Etats-Unis, et figure de proue des Démocrates américains fait dire à tous les américanolâtres des gauches molles d’Europe et d’ailleurs que la gauche américaine, et son instrument, le parti démocrate, récoltent les fruits d’une idéologie faite depuis toujours d’émancipation, d’anti-esclavagisme, d’anti-racisme, d’eudémonisme, etc. Rien n’est moins vrai et la dernière livraison de la revue satirique bruxelloise “Père Ubu” (27 novembre 2008) a l’immense mérite de nous rappeler quelques vérités historiques, afin de sortir de l’amnésie imposée par Big Brother, dont le relais, en notre capitale, est bien entendu l’immonde torchon qu’est “Le Soir”, reponsable de “l’écervellement” généralisé de notre population.

 

“Père Ubu” rappelle donc:

-          que Martin Luther King était républicain et non pas  démocrate, comme presque tous les Afro-Américains à l’époque;

-          que cette fidélité des Noirs américains au parti de l’éléphant remonte à son fondateur, Lincoln, champion des droits civils dès le départ;

-          que les Noirs américains appelaient le parti démocrate, le parti du quadruple “S” (SSSS): Servitude, Sécession, Ségrégation et Socialisme;

-          que le Ku Klux Klan est une émanation du parti démocrate, qui entendait maintenir la ségrégation dans le Sud, le Dixieland, afin de conserver son électorat de “petits blancs”;

-          que le “Civil Rights Act” de 1957 émane du Républicain Eisenhower et que John Fitzgerald Kennedy et Al Gore (senior) s’y étaient opposés;

-          que Kennedy n’a fait volte-face qu’au dernier moment, en disant “If you can’t beat them, join them”;

-          que le Sénateur démocrate Robert Byrd, ancien militant du KKK, a déclaré quelques semaines avant l’assassinat de Martin Luther King, que ce dernier était un “fauteur de troubles” suite aux émeutes de Memphis dans le Tennessee;

-          que le Président démocrate Woodrow Wilson en 1912 a purgé toute l’administration fédérale de ce qu’elle comptait d’Afro-Américains;

-          que Lyndon Johnson, le successeur de Kennedy, a traité avec mépris Martin Luther King de “prêcheur nègre”, à cause de son opposition à la guerre du Vietnam;

-          que la mutation politique du Vieux Sud ségrégationniste n’a commencé que vers le milieu des années 70, sous l’impulsion de Nixon qui recommandait aux chrétiens blancs de ne pas boycotter leurs frères afro-américains en religion; le processus de “républicanisation” de l’électorat blanc des Etats du Sud a été très lent: la Géorgie n’a basculé dans le camp républicain qu’en 2002 et la Louisiane est toujours démocrate et conserve des relents camouflés de ségrégationnisme indirect en dépit des mutations de la société américaine;

-          que les démocrates, tout récemment, ont rejeté la proposition républicaine d’un salaire minimal, alors que cette mesure allait à l’encontre des désirs et des besoins de leur électorat afro-américain.

 

Voilà une belle batterie d’arguments historiques à envoyer dans les gencives des “belles âmes” des beaux quartiers, qui font l’équation entre “démocrates américains” et “anti-racisme”; et des socialistes qui reprochent à certains de nos concitoyens de faire du “racisme” alors qu’ils se proclament, de manière bien tonitruante, les alliés purs et durs de ceux qui, avec le KKK, ont maintenu le plus longemps possible les lois raciales et ségrégationnistes aux Etats-Unis, ce qui est somme toute normal, pour un parti qui a théorisé l’antisémitisme en Belgique, avant toutes les extrêmes droites ; et à cet abcès purulent qui empoisonne la vie politique belge, le “Centre d’égalité des chances, etc.”, avec ses parrains socialistes, issus d’une mouvance politique délibérément antisémite et alliée aux “Klanistes” démocrates américains, nous pourrons prouver qu’il nage et barbote dans les pires contradictions et contre-vérités qui soient.

 

(résumé de René Lauwers).

08:19 Publié dans Actualité | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : etats-unis, amérique, racisme, racialisme, anti-racisme | |  del.icio.us | | Digg! Digg |  Facebook