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A Case for the English Landed Aristocracy

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The following was delivered as a speech to the Britain-based Libertarian Alliance on February 10th.

 

The following was delivered as a speech to the Britain-based Libertarian Alliance on February 10th. You can listen to the speech there.

To understand the rubbish heap that England has become, it is useful to look at the circumstances that prompted the emergence of the modern State in Europe.

Around the end of the thirteenth century, the world entered one of its cooling phases. In a world of limited technology, this lowered the Malthusian ceiling – by which I mean the limit to which population was always tending, and beyond which it could not for any long time rise. Populations that could just about feed themselves during the warm period were now too large.

In the middle of the fourteenth century, this pressure was suddenly relieved by the Black Death, which seems to have killed about a third of the English population, and probably about a third of the human race as a whole. The result was a collapse of population somewhat below the Malthusian ceiling. In turn, this led – in England and Western Europe, at least – to an age of plenty for ordinary people.

However, continued cooling and a recovery of population led, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, to renewed contact with the Malthusian ceiling. So far as we can tell from the English statistics – which are the most complete and generally accurate – ordinary living standards fell rapidly throughout that century. With mild variations, they continued to fall until the last third of the eighteenth century. While the ceiling tended to rise during this period, the corresponding tendency to higher average living standards was offset by rising population. Living standards began to recover strongly only after the middle of the nineteenth century, when renewed warming, joined by the Industrial Revolution, lifted the ceiling out of sight. Even so, living standards in England did not recover their fifteenth century levels till about the 1880s. It was later elsewhere in Western Europe.

I think these natural forces go far to explaining the sudden emergence of religious mania and political unrest in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Reformation and Wars of Religion can be explained partly in terms of an unfolding intellectual change. Ideas are an autonomous force. At the same time, the force of the explosion we date from 1517 has its origin in perturbations of the Sun, or whatever other natural cause drives changes in the climate.

One of the responses of the governing classes to the spreading wave of instability was to centralise and greatly to strengthen power. Most notably in France, but in Western Europe generally, kings were exalted far above their mediaeval status. Because they were unreliable members of the new order, nobilities were brought under control, and power was shared with humble officials, who might collectively grow powerful, but who individually could be made or broken as kings found convenient. The various divine right theories of this age were the legitimising ideology of the new order.

In France, the King withdrew to Versailles. The leading nobles were required to live with him, thereby breaking their connection with the land from which they were allowed to continue drawing their wealth. Much government was given to a class of office holders, who multiplied their functions and arrested much tendency to economic improvement in ways that I do not need to describe.

I turn now to England. In some degree, there was a growth of absolutism here during the sixteenth century. The Tudor Kings ended the civil wars, and made themselves supreme and unchallenged. Because England was an island with only one land border – and Scotland was easily managed – there was no need for a standing army; and standing armies, and the consequent arms race between states with land borders, were a secondary cause of the growth of absolutism. Even so, the Tudor Monarchy ruled England through a strong administration centred on London.

This growth was arrested and reversed in 1641, by the abolition of nearly every body of state unknown to the Common Law. The Privy Council remained, but its subordinate institutions – Star Chamber, for example, and the Council of the North – were swept away. The immediate result was civil war, followed by a republic run by religious maniacs. But this soon collapsed, and the Monarchy was restored in 1660.

However, the Restoration was of the Monarchy in name only. It is best seen as an aristocratic coup. The Restoration Parliament finished the work of 1641, by abolishing the feudal tenures, by which the Monarchy had kept control over the nobility. The landed aristocracy gained something like absolute title over their estates, untouchable by the King. The network of fights and obligations that tied them to those who worked the land was simplified to a relationship of landlord and tenant.

From the 1660s, we can see the emergence of an aristocratic ruling class checked only at the margins by the Crown. Before then, Members of Parliament were often humble men from their localities, who needed to look to their localities for expenses and even salaries. Very soon, the Commons was flooded with the younger sons of peers and aristocratic nominees. Andrew Marvell was one of the last of the last Members of Parliament who needed to draw a salary. The commons became an aristocratic club. This process was hastened by the decay of many boroughs and the growth of the more or less unrepresentative system that was ended only after 1832.

There was one attempt at reaction by the Crown. Charles II presided over the growth of a new official class. Samuel Pepys is the most famous representative of this class. But there is also Leolyn Jenkins, the son of a Welsh farm labourer, who was educated in the Roman Law – not the Common Law – and who led the parliamentary resistance to the Exclusion Bills by which the aristocracy in effect tried to seize control over who could be King of England.

But James II overplayed his hand, and was deposed and exiled in 1688. Thereafter, the aristocracy did control appointment to the Crown, and was able to monopolise every institution of state – allowing those that failed to serve its interest to atrophy.

During the eighteenth century, the internal administration in England became largely a matter of obedience to the Common Law. History was written backwards, so that it became a narrative of struggle to maintain or to restore a set of ancient liberties that were usually over-stressed, or even mythical. I suspect that any educated man brought forward from 1500 to 1750 would have failed to recognise his own England in the standard histories. The tension between competing institutions and legal systems that shaped his life had been reduced to a set of struggles over a Common Law that was only one element in what he considered the legitimate order of things.

I repeat that ideas are an autonomous force. The whiggish ideologies that dominated the century were strongly believed by the ruling class, and were beneficial to the people as a whole. Opposition to Walpole’s excise, and the Theatres Bill cannot be simply explained as the play of sectional interests, or the work of politicians hungry for office. There was an almost paranoid suspicion of government within the ruling class, and a corresponding exaltation of the liberties of the people. But English liberty was also a collateral benefit of the aristocratic coups of 1660 and 1688. Self-help and a high degree of personal freedom were allowed to flourish ultimately because the enlightened self-interest of those who ruled England maintained a strong bias against any growth of an administrative state – the sort of state that would be able to challenge aristocratic dominance. People were left alone – often in vicious pursuits – because any regulation would have endangered the settlements of 1660-88.

Our understanding of English history in the nineteenth century is shaped by the beliefs of the contending parties in that century. The liberals and early socialists demanded an enlarged franchise and administrative reform, because they claimed this would give ordinary people a controlling voice in government. The conservatives claimed that extending the franchise would lead to the election of demagogues and levellers by a stupid electorate.

This does not explain what happened. Liberal democracy was a legitimising ideology for the establishment of a new ruling class – a ruling class of officials and associated commercial interests that drew power and status from an enlarged state. The British State was not enlarged for the welfare of ordinary people. The alleged welfare of ordinary people was merely an excuse for the enlargement of the British State. The real beneficiaries were the sort of people who thought highly of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

If this analysis is correct, men like John Stuart Mill and even Richard Cobden were at best useful idiots for the bad side in a struggle over which group of special interests should rule England. The real heroes for libertarians were men like Lord Eldon and Colonel Sibthorp, who resisted all change, or men like Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, who, after the battle for “reform” was lost, found ways to moderate and, in the short term, to neutralise the movement of power from one group to another. Or the greatest hero of all was Lord Elcho, who kept the Liberty and Property League going until he nearly and hundred, and who fought a bitter rearguard action for an aristocratic ascendency that was intimately connected with the rights to life, liberty and property of ordinary people.

This is not to romanticise the aristocratic ascendency. Eighteenth century England was a brutal place filled with injustice – the game laws, the press gang, a chaotic civil and criminal law, pervasive corruption. All the same, utopia has never been on offer. I will end by addressing myself to left-libertarians like Kevin Carson and Keith Preston. Their critique of the corporate elites and the plutocracy that are hurrying us into tyranny is fundamentally correct. But they are wrong to denounce the aristocratic ascendency that preceded the system under which we now live. It would have been nice for England to emerge into the modern world as a land of masterless men – of yeomen farmers and independent craftsmen and tradesmen. But this was never on offer. By the time the eighteenth century radicals found their voice, the only alternatives on offer were aristocratic ascendency and middle class bureaucracy. Old Lord Fartleigh had his faults. He hated the Papists, and thought nothing of hanging poachers. But he would never have thought it his business to tell us what lightbulbs we could buy, or whether we could smoke in the local pub.

Let it never be forgotten that the demolition of aristocratic rule was largely completed by the Liberal Government elected in 1906. This was the Government that also got us into the Great War, and kept us in it to the bitter end. The kind of people who formed it had already given us most of the moral regulation that we think of as Victorian – regulation that was usually resisted in the Lords. Since then, these people have taken up one legitimising ideology after another – national efficiency, the welfare of the working classes, multiculturalism, environmentalism, supranational government. The common thread in all these ideologies has been their usefulness as a figleaf behind which ordinary people could be taxed and regulated and conscripted, and generally made to dance as their rulers desire. Perhaps the main reason why Classical Marxism never became important in England was that, just when it was very big in the world, Keynesian demand management emerged as a more suitable legitimising ideology for the ruling class we now had.

I therefore commend the English landed aristocracy. If I am now, in middle age, an increasingly radical libertarian, it is only because I have realised that the system raised up by that class can no more be restored than the class itself can be made supreme again.

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America Identity Politics

Choosing Limbo

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In his “statement of principles” issued this past Thursday, Senate Majority Leader John Boehner claims to have—at last!—put forth a “common-sense” and “bipartisan” approach that will fix our “broken immigration system.” Such clichés have become all-too familiar, and the memo is yet one more variation on a theme, played every couple of years for the past 15.  

In his “statement of principles” issued this past Thursday [PDF], Speaker of the House John Boehner claims to have—at last!—put forth a “common-sense” and “bipartisan” approach that will fix our “broken immigration system.”

Such clichés have become all-too familiar, and the memo is yet one more variation on a theme, played every couple of years for the past 15.

As other commentators have pointed out, Boehner’s “principles” are quite similar to those of the “Gang of Eight,” whose bill died in the House in 2013. The difference that jumps out is that Boehner would allow migrants who are in the U.S. illegally to acquire legal status, though not citizenship. (In other words, they would be allowed to stay but not allowed to vote for Democrats.)

Coming after the Gang of Eight’s failure, Boehner’s memo and resultant bill (if there ever is one) amount to a calculated attempt to negotiate between two centers of power in the Republican Party. The first is a constellation of interests that, for ideological and economic reasons, wants ever more immigration and access to global labor pools. The second is the GOP’s overwhelmingly White electoral base, which accounts for some 90 percent of Republican vote totals.

Mass immigration is patently unpopular among White Republicans; more important, immigration (along with “illegals,” “amnesty,” and related buzzwords) has taken on a profoundly symbolic meaning. Immigration is a kind a proxy war—and maybe a last stand—for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.

There are many within nationalism and traditionalism, as well as the “hard Right” of Beltway conservatives, who are convinced that the GOP is acting like “the Stupid Party” in supporting the mass immigration of millions of likely Democrats. Such activists, it seems, want to save the GOP from itself, and prevent an unnecessary political suicide at the behest of clueless “RINOs”. (My fear is that Republicans aren’t as stupid as they look.)

But the GOP’s “grassroots” are, on some level, at fault for continuing to articulate their opposition to immigration using the bugaboo of “amnesty,” which effectively makes immigration a matter of legality, national security, and abstract notions of citizenship. (I, for one, would happily grant “amnesty” to a million Russian, German, or Italian “boat people” who might happen to wash up on American shores.)

Immigration and “amnesty” are, as mentioned, non-racist proxies for race and culture. In focusing on these, the base has effectively painted itself into a corner, in which it will have a difficult time opposing a bill that, say, promises border enforcement and increases legal immigration or, qua Boehner’s memo, offers penalties and legal status to migrants without citizenship and voting rights.

Putting that aside, a bill based on Boehner’s memo (if it ever sees the light of day) would create a “new normal” socially and demographically—and one with many unintended political consequences.

First and foremost, the migrants would remain here, regardless of whether they’d be allowed to vote. Hispanics would thus continue to establish enclaves and quasi-homelands.

Secondly, their children would be citizens. In other words, the political effects would not be immediate but they would be inevitable, some 25 years later when the current crop of Republicans are in retirement and no longer need to build careers by manipulating White voters.

Thirdly, and most provocatively, America would have generated a new “Jim Crow” myth. If Boehner proves successful, imagine the stories we’d read, only a couple of years on, of hard-working “José,” who’s here legally and whose lifelong dream is to vote or run for office. The American Left (and, likely, much of the Right) would be revitalized by the prospect of advocating for American Hispanics “living under Apartheid,” working and paying taxes but not receiving representation.

In the near term, I’ll refrain from predicting what will come of Boehner’s memo. A year ago, my gut feeling was that the Gang of Eight’s bill, introduced shortly after Obama’s second inauguration, would prove successful. (I was incorrect.) And since Boehner’s memo was released, there has been passionate opposition, even among mainstream conservatives.

Of course, all of this has remained entirely on the level of reaction: conservatives express their distaste and unease, without really articulating a competing vision—even on the most rudimentary level of Who We Are. For better and for worse, a likely scenario is that we will remain in the same limbo we’ve been in for decades: mass Third World immigration will continue, legally and illegally, and White America will keep putting off a definitive answer on its identity. At a time when it is needed most.

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Identity Politics Science

To Survive—One Hour Longer Than the Machine

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The crisis that began in 2008 with the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble is no ordinary downturn. All observers understood this intuitively. Something has gone wrong with our world, something lying at the very foundation of our way of living, producing, and consuming—and even of our way of thinking.

This something that has just been broken is our faith in the millenarian mechanism of Progress.  

The following is the Foreword to the French edition of Survive—The Economic Collapse.

The crisis that began in 2008 with the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble is no ordinary downturn. All observers understood this intuitively. Something has gone wrong with our world, something lying at the very foundation of our way of living, producing, and consuming—and even of our way of thinking.
This something that has just been broken is our faith in the millenarian mechanism of Progress.

For three centuries, Western man has had the idea that he does not need God, since he is his own savior. Humanity is the messiah of humanity: thus proclaimed the new religion. A religion that entered into Catholicism on tiptoes with Descartes. A religion, also, that ended up substituting itself everywhere in the place of the ancient faith.

People sometimes laugh at Juche, that ridiculous North Korean ideology whose only article states that man can transform nature indefinitely. Wrongly. In more sophisticated forms, all contemporary systems rest upon the postulate of human omnipotence. China has razed the house of Confucius and frenetically converted to the religion of growth. Eternal India—yes, even India—has set itself to conceiving the future as a rising curve.

All mankind has gradually entered into the naïve communion of the new religion, much less rational than it seems: technology to perform miracles, banks to serve as temples of the monetary idol. Monetarist neoliberalism—the last ideology, standing victorious upon the corpses of Jacobinism, classical liberalism, social democracy, communism, and fascism—would lead man to the millennium, the long-lost terrestrial paradise soon to be regained.

It was a false promise and a trap. We ought to have been suspicious. For the past few decades, the facade of the progressivist temple has begun to crack. . .

Since the 1970s, various Cassandras have been warning us: a project of indefinite growth cannot be carried out in a finite world. Their arguments have been swept under the rug as “not taking account of scientific perspectives.”

In the 1980s, the collapse of the USSR following the Chernobyl catastrophe provided food for thought for anyone willing to think: “so, an extremely large, over-integrated system can collapse suddenly, once a certain threshold of fragility is reached?” Here again, we have refused to draw the lessons from the event, preferring to blame the collapse on communist ideology without posing the question of over-concentration and over-integration as such.

During the 1990s, the West was giddy with triumph. Those were the mad years of the Internet bubble. “Who cares that the material world is finite: capitalism will invade virtual worlds of its own construction!” But the dream ended abruptly when the model of the new economy revealed its real nature—it was a mirage, an illusion. If there was a dizzying fall at the turn of the millennium, it was not that of the Twin Towers, but the collapse of hopes placed in virtual reality, the escape hatch through which were pushed the ever more insurmountable internal contradictions of a capitalist system driven mad by the permanent confusion between the monetary map and the economic landscape.
Once again, people decided to see nothing, to learn nothing. In order to maintain at all costs the illusion that the millenarian utopia could construct the meaning of history, the financial oligarchy put the economic system on life support, giving the American economy fix after fix of debt. It was an absurd effort that, besides, pointed out the absurdity of neoliberal monetarist semantics.

This absurdity could only endure for so long. In the fall of 2008, its time was up.

A great shiver ran down the spine of the hundred-thousand-headed beast—the ruling class. Amidst the crash, still more dollars were injected into the system, like so many symbols that concealed nothing, but which once more, for a few years, perhaps, allowed the neoliberal propaganda machine to keep grinding away at all costs.

These were just the last, dilatory maneuvers that will not change anything in the end: it is all an illusion. It hardly matters that financial indices are artificially maintained by lowering interest rates to zero. Breaking the thermometer never cured a fever.

Economic rationality alone is not able to provide the meaning of history. Technology cannot accomplish everything. A project of infinite development cannot be conducted on a finite planet. Man cannot have everything he wants; he must want what he is able to get.

We are faced with a return to limits.
Mankind will not be its own messiah—the humanist religion is a failure.

The beast with a hundred thousand heads is, indeed, behaving like a beast—in particular, it is as dangerous as a wounded animal that feels its hour has struck. Back from the failure of the credit system that served as an ideological shelter for their power, the elites and their trustees are now struggling to save their power, to preserve the messianic fiction, while gradually restricting it to themselves. On the one hand, a superior humanity that wants to be a messiah for itself and itself alone; on the other, an inferior humanity sent back into the symbolic shadows of thought’s absence, the non- existence of meaning—in fact, into the negation of its status as an autonomous subject, where it is forbidden to define a mental space free of the constraints placed upon it. A humanity skinned of its spirit.
Such is the generative schema of the next decades. The future is menacing. We might as well understand this. The humanist religion is going to transform itself into an anti-human ideology.
This turnabout, the creating of a monster by those who sought to make an angel, has been underway since the 1970s. But the 2010s will mark a perceptible acceleration in this process. And life, in consequence, will soon be very difficult for many of us.
In this context, the stakes of the game, for true men, will soon be to survive. That’s all—to survive.

Going back to the ranks of the powerful madmen is not an option. You might obtain the intoxicating illusion of superiority, and certainly easier living conditions, but only at the price of your soul. Resigning yourself to vegetating among the mass of the ruled is hardly less depressing. (And amidst that oppressed and impoverished body, violence will be the norm.) Our contemporaries have too deeply assimilated the perverse logic of the consumer society to convert suddenly to the voluntary simplicity that might save them.

Survival will almost certainly play itself out away from today’s bustle, in refuges we must know how to create and defend. Physical survival, yes; but also psychological and spiritual survival.

Of course, this is no exalted ideal. But at this stage, resisting the inhuman machine will often mean passing by it unnoticed, and above all, being able to do without it.

A modest struggle, but hardly a contemptible one.

For one day, when that machine has exhausted all the possibilities of its original élan, it will totter and fall. Then, for us, it will be enough to be numerous, to maintain solidarity, so as collectively to regain control of our Earth after we have fiercely defended our few areas of retreat. It is in order to be there, at that decisive moment, that we must survive now. So do not be ashamed: let us build our refuges! Remember that a rebel wins if he can hold out one hour longer than his adversary. Let us organize ourselves to do so.

So, my friend . . . wipe away that sad, drawn smile. Raise up those eyes you have kept lowered for so long. Look straight ahead at the horizon. Hold your chin up. Your life has meaning—to survive one hour longer than the machine.

Pass the word on: comrade, our children are counting on you!

Michel Drac is a writer, political commentator, and economist. For fifteen years, he worked as a controller. He is the author of numerous books and the founder of the publishing house Le Retour aux Sources. He is also a member of the national association Equality & Reconciliation.


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Identity Nationalism Politics

Being Who We Are

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Russia is capable of ceasing to be the world’s gas station (there are more suitable candidates for this purpose) and gaining self-respect:

  • If it becomes a Pan-Slavic country ready to defend its brothers in blood, language, and faith even if only against the Euro-bureaucratic pink-Liberal dictatorship, even if only against extreme Islamism;
  • If it becomes a Eurasian country restoring the great continental project, defending its peoples against the West (in its neo-Liberal and “Euro-Communist” versions) and the East (in its Chinese and Saudi-Caliphate versions);
  • If it becomes a nationalist country capable of taking care of millions of Russians left behind the post-Soviet cordon, from Sevastopol in Ukraine to Ust-Kamenogorsk in Kazakhstan, capable of becoming the “Great Bear” ready to tear apart anyone who comes in between her and her cubs.

Is there anything that Russia can offer the world other than oil of the “Ural” brand?

Russian journalist Mikhail Moshkin analyzes the current instability in Ukraine with a special focus on the meaning of traditional Russian identity and statehood. This translation was originally published at The Soul of the East.

The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it.

G. W. F. Hegel

Ukraine: Two Alternatives of Returning to One and the Same

A well-known formula, “the patient is either alive or dead,” encapsulates the Ukrainian situation in its entirety for those looking from the outside (and, most likely, the participants themselves). Either the Maidan finally topples Viktor Yanukovich over, or, a more likely scenario in light of the current events is that Yanukovich will give up everything he possibly can, handing out status positions in the government to the Maidan triumvirate, which is rapidly losing popularity for collaborating with “zlochinna vlada”—“criminal authorities” (offending Oleg Tyagnibok to top it off!). And, considering that it is impossible to return to the pre-Maidan status quo, Yanokovich will become a “lame duck,” with the 2004 Constitution in his beak and the omnipotence of the Verkhovna Rada. In a country that just collapsed into yet another economic and political pit.

Given the prospect of Vitali Klitschko’s presidency (yet how can the boxer become president if Yulia Tymoshenko is released?), the prospect of a “white-and-blue” regional separatism, the secession of Crimea, etc., are all real possibilities. We are seeing the signs thereof already. At the same time, all our political scientists and analysts should not get overly excited about “redrawing the new underdeveloped countries on the map.” The specter of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Fronde haunted Ukraine as early as 2004 as well, but even then, with Viktor Yushchenko’s victory (does anyone still remember this political figure?), the southeastern autonomous region did not come to fruition, whereas Yevgeniy Kushnarev, the chief ideologue of separatism, got off lightly. Most likely, despite the ever-present antagonism between Galicia and the Southeast, there won’t be a “divorce.”

It looks like we might end up with bad infinity. Either, after the Maidan’svictory, we return to the “orange-ism” of ten years ago, or, after Maidan is pacified, we go back to the status quo from six months ago. The Eternal Return of one and the same, one and the same, one and the same.

In other words, this is obvious.

Russia: Lacking Meaningful Alternatives

More central to this question, in response to the challenge of the Maidan—a gauntlet had been thrown down without any doubt—is what Russia can say or, more importantly, do. Let us attempt to be honest with ourselves and answer the following question: why is it that we, as we stand now, have the right to restore the Eurasian space, the triune Slavic union, and so on?

Critics of “gathering the lands of Russia” are, sadly, correct that our “Babylonian” spirit is still strong. And we have yet (do we?) to transform from the New Babylon into the Third Rome. Is it the Russia of mindless celebrities that is the beacon for all those discontent with “Euro-Sodom” and globalist Americanism?

Yes, we can become the focus of hope, but only if we ourselves find meaning in our own existence throughout history.

The author of this text is neither a Communist nor a fan of the USSR, “USSR v. 2.0″ or futuristic modernist projects in general. Therefore, he can only comment distantly: Russia of the 1920-30s (even if it were thrice Soviet and socialist, it remained Russia) was a realized possibility of a different world order and a different future. Antonio Gramsci and Georgi Dimitrov were pro-Soviet Communists not because of grant money, whereas Romain Rolland and Lion Feuchtwanger composed panegyrics without any exchange for thirty pieces of silver.

Being Who We Are

Russia is capable of ceasing to be the world’s gas station (there are more suitable candidates for this purpose) and gaining self-respect:

  • If it becomes a Pan-Slavic country ready to defend its brothers in blood, language, and faith even if only against the Euro-bureaucratic pink-Liberal dictatorship, even if only against extreme Islamism;
  • If it becomes a Eurasian country restoring the great continental project, defending its peoples against the West (in its neo-Liberal and “Euro-Communist” versions) and the East (in its Chinese and Saudi-Caliphate versions);
  • If it becomes a nationalist country capable of taking care of millions of Russians left behind the post-Soviet cordon, from Sevastopol in Ukraine to Ust-Kamenogorsk in Kazakhstan, capable of becoming the “Great Bear” ready to tear apart anyone who comes in between her and her cubs.

Is there anything that Russia can offer the world other than oil of the “Ural” brand?

Something does emerge as a sketch: this is a country that remains the bastion of Right-wing conservative Christian value, and, in general, a sort of a stronghold of the “global Right” force, ready to pick up J.B. Fichte, Alexander Hamilton, and Yamamoto Tsunetomo, ejected from the steamship of Modernity. What remains to be done is small: transferring this from the sphere of declarations (they are very much at odds with reality) into the sphere of political action.

We will also have to examine our recent past, since we were considered a stronghold of the “global Left” in the 20th century. It would be most logical to treat the Soviet era precisely as a period in history. Otherwise, there is the impression that Lenin and Stalin are still alive ruling our lives on a daily basis. It is time to leave necropolitics behind.

The latter will help us stop looking for cravings toward Tradition, faith, and hierarchy in the Communist Party’s congresses and speeches of leaders. We must stop looking for traces of Rurikid and Romanov Empires in the “Red Empire,” or, conversely, we must stop searching for crypto-Communists among the likes of Alexei Kudrin, Oleg Deripaska, and Viktor Yanukovich. Without bias or wrath, we must choose all that will be useful to us (that same socially-oriented economy with, as mentioned hundreds of times, Right-wing politics), leaving Vladimir Ilyich and Iosif Vissarionovich for the historians.

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Europe Identity Race

Emanations of Wotan

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Surely as Wotan/Odin personifies the warrior god amongst many of his emanations, Wotan also epitomizes the mystic priest, as well, as the All-father is unbound to simplistic distillations. The emanations of Wotan, as suggested by Jung in his essay, change, evolve, and adapt to the time at hand.

The Spirit of White Consciousness WWII to the Present

Much has been written about Carl Jung’s 1936 essay entitled “Wotan,” where Jung provides an esoteric traditionalist criticism of contemporary events during this precarious era of European history, focusing specifically on the rising atavistic Teutonic ethos embodied by the Nazis and the German people. However, the following paragraphs will not focus on the coming renaissance of Odinism, nor will it focus on erroneous rationalizations for RAHOWA, or any other spurious exegeses the essay has inspired.

Surely as Wotan/Odin personifies the warrior god amongst many of his emanations, Wotan also epitomizes the mystic priest, as well, as the All-father is unbound to simplistic distillations. The emanations of Wotan, as suggested by Jung in his essay, change, evolve, and adapt to the time at hand. In this manner, the ethos and Zeitgeist of modern White consciousness in all the major European theaters of the world (North America, Europe, Australia, etc…) no longer exhibits the ethos and characteristics of Wotan, the war god; instead, the contemporary White, Occidental world reflects Wotan, the master of words, language, and mysticism, as our world moves away from mass violence and mass warfare as the most effective and efficient means of communication both literal and symbolic.

The most important, and often quoted, metaphor extracted from Jung’s essay concerns Jung’s metaphor of the river bed. Through this image, Jung asserts that the gods of our ancestors, as archetypal mechanisms of the psyche, have existed as long as we have existed as a race. The subconscious archetypal gods of the Teutonic peoples are the innate creations of our earliest ancestors. The trough of their riverbed, or the subconscious erosion made by these archetypes over such a great period of time, extends the deepest and remains most readily to be filled when the flood of mystic waters flows over this subconscious topography once more. This explains how these ancient gods continue with us. Even if the river bed is dry for a time and the gods seemingly dead, the riverbed remains waiting to be filled by the spirit of these same gods. More often than not, the gods never die; rather, their aspects and nomenclature change and shift.

Jung’s riverbed metaphor explains the power that this Teutonic ethos wielded during the Nazi era. Even though the pagan period had all but lied dormant for a thousand years, this atavistic Zeitgeist remerged in the mid-20th century, irrevocably altering the landscape of the time and the people who survived the period. Viewing the Nazi period objectively, without moralism, their return to ancient ideologies, symbols, perspectives, and philosophies at least lends empirical credence to the idea of racial memory, how there is a narrative unfurling in every racial culture and spirituality, and how these aspects endure and adapt overtime.

Considering the occultic phase “As above, so below,” in other words “the macrocosm will reflect the microcosm and vice-versa,” archetypal gods such as Wotan and the Aesir macrocosmically reflect the microcosm of the Teutonic soul. In Germanic metaphysics of the soul, there existed the idea of the soul complex made up of different, yet complimentary parts, much unlike the unified soul idea of Christianity. One particular aspect of the soul complex is the fetch. On this concept, Esoteric Germanic Scholar Stephen Flowers asserts,

The fetch can be understood in the traditional sense as an entity separate from the individual, but which is attached to him for the duration of his life. It is the conduit through which the gods communicate to him, and the embodiment of all that he has ever been. It is a storehouse of images and powers from beyond this life and from beyond Midgard. (…) In this is housed all of the echoes of all of the deeds ever done by the bodies to which the fetch has ever been bound (58-59).

In other words, the fetch represents the racial collective unconscious that Jung himself introduce as a concept. On the macrocosmic level, Wotan reflects the mechanism of the fetch to the whole race instead of the mere individual. If one ponders about this archetypal role of the gods in connection with Oswald Spengler’s view of civilization as reflecting the microcosmic cycle of birth, life, and death of the human individual on the macrocosmic level, then the notion that the spiritual, that which is immaterial yet ever-present, must function on the macrocosmic level, as well. Therefore, the body of the civilization must die; however, the ancestral spirit and ethos is eternal in some sense.

The spirit of the civilization lives long after the corporeal civilization. Both the spiritual and residual physical legacy continues. The spirit of Wotan, operating as the fetch on the macrocosmic level, detaches from the dead civilization and reattaches to a nascent civilization of the same racial stock. The physical legacy is more obvious. The best example of physical legacy would be in the consideration of how important classicism (the legacy of Greek and Rome) is still to the present day. Wotan and the Aesir still linger in our subconscious though Germanic and Scandinavian practice ended a thousand years earlier. Plato’s Republic or Artistole’s Treatise on Rhetoric still reach from beyond the ancient grave to influence modern thought. In turn, the runes and the gods lied mostly dormant, much like the One Ring of Tolkien’s epic, until both the runes and the gods revealed themselves once more during the German Romantic period of the late 19th century.

It is my assertion that Wotan, the War god, reared his ugly head during this period of turmoil as the most effective means of communication and action. Unexhausted by the First World War, nations and principalities on both sides of the Ally and the Axis powers malevolently postured in the perilous geopolitical situation. The goals of these various parties and their globalist banker “philanthropists” could only be achieved through mass warfare. The most effective means of communication to fight the growth of Marxism in the Soviet Union, the Fascism of Mussolini’s Italy, or the National Socialism of Germany was to forego intellectual debates of merit and dive head strong in a measure of brute force. Though “mass” media of the period could reach and influence great numbers over great distances of geographic locations, its distribution was far too slow to keep apace with the escalating situation of World War II. The metaphysical semiotics of War, whether Ally or Axis, were far more powerful statements than the written word. Only the mass blood shed of Dresden, Nazi and Soviet Death Camps, post-war German civilian concentration camps, and last, but hardly least, the atomic bombs dropped upon Nagasaki and Hiroshima both provided the shock-and-awe military leaders, politicians, and globalist bankers wanted while also sobering the frenzied bloodlust of the world’s population for a time.

Today, Occidental denizens, White or otherwise, have reached our threshold for wanton and mass violence. There is no longer a fervor, no longer a romanticism of war. Vietnam and the War on Terror shattered the last vestiges of the idea of noble warfare. Hardly 10 years since the beginning of the War on Terror, ordinary Americans and our ordinary global counterparts no longer call for blood against nebulous, barely-identifiable groups. I feel even a true, authentic sense of shame in America for our initial reaction to 9/11 and the exponential mess originating therefrom. Not even the rednecks of my home state have the gall nor the want to wish ill-fates upon “towel heads” any longer. Too many pictures of dead women and children. Too many destroyed lives. Too many raw, uncensored videos. Even the toughest, most cynical vanguardist would be hard pressed not to be affected by an Arab father losing his daughter, wife, son, etc. Though the signs of degradation surround us, we still understand on some level that we are blessed.

The rise of global communications, the Internet, alternative journalism, and the like have begun to decimate the globalists’ logos and rationale for the continuation of purposeless wars that benefit none but the globalists themselves. Blind faith in politics, political leaders, and their agendas is seemingly less and less tolerated or fashionable on either the left or the right. We are now so much unlike the Great Generation willing to die for God and Country, a generation whose members sometimes committed suicide if unable to fight for freedom and liberty. Even the poorest of the cracker proletariats are hardly that naïve in 2014. Military service is a means-to-an-end, not a service of valor, honor, and courage. There is no authentic ethos that guides the passions of youthful combatants, only the promise of a paycheck, skills specialization, and a means of going to college. I surely do not mean this as a slight to service men and women, but they must be willing to accept the vast difference in what it means to be a part of the military now as opposed to then.

The priestly avatar of Wotan, that archetypal spinal column of the Teutons, emerges once more. No longer does the god of the Wild Hunt scorch the land. The Valkyrie no longer trails behind in such great force to lift up the 60 million slain Einherjar as the result of fratricidal World War II. Now Wotan, the god of poetry, mysticism, and language wanders the information superhighway. Wotan is present at every church, every community, every group within instinctually/inherently white cultures and subcultures. Is there any doubt there is a correlation between Odin the wanderer and the migratory nature of White “racism”? At White cultures most pacifist, our ethnic migratory trends and patterns reflect the desires of White Americans at large whether they are conscious of the fact or are completely unawares. If White culture has been rendered mute by the established hierarchy and artificial structures that reinforce cultural Marxist norms, then Whites silently congregate. Whether this is the White churches, from the “mega” to the bible study at home, or at concerts/festivals of inherently White music, or certain particular geographically insular wWhite communities, we still seek those like us. Hysterically, few Whites who engage in the latter activities would be galled to admit this is true. Yet when Christians “fight for Christmas,” they fight for Wotan. When yuppies and hipsters converge for music where they lift up their voices in one accord comfortable in the safety of familiar demographics, they sing for Wotan in their transcendent groupthink. And one day, when the place between that which is hard and the rock closes in, the spirit of Wotan will guide our voices once more.

Communication now vastly outweighs war as the most effective means of transfiguring cultural and societal landscapes. Now is the age of the “Info War,” a term Alex Jones poignantly coined. He is correct in this affair. In the First World still, battles of words and intellect have mostly replaced military or crusader tactics of submit-or-die type conversion techniques. We can take the skirmish to Twitter or Facebook instead of bloodletting on the battlefield. As such, a new spirit of Wotan now emerges. Some readers may be offended that I have reduce Wotan to the role of some beta male who is somehow emasculated; however, I would argue that Wotan is not an unlearned, uninitiated, lowly warrior. The modern world is now far too complex to apply brute strength as a means of change. The modern world is far more like a vast and complicated game of chess than a game of Battleship. The oversoul of the Teutonic, Scandinavian, Slav, and Celtic peoples must adapt to this new paradigm of warfare. A long-game strategy must be deployed. We may be forced to into defensive stance at present, but being on the defensive in the chess analogy does not mean we will lose. It means we must, we have to, play a serious, committed, and smart game for the win.

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America Europe Identity

Nation-States, the European Union and the Occident (1/3)

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Below is the first installment of a three-part series on how we get from stato-national feeling to Pan-Occidental awareness. The second part will be about the “European alibi,” dealing mainly with the wave of anti-European hysteria currently washing through Britain, and the third and last one will be about “reclaiming the Occident,” since there’s a misconception in New Right circles about Europe and the West being antagonistic.

Below is the first installment of a three-part series on how we get from stato-national feeling to Pan-Occidental awareness. The second part will be about the “European alibi,” dealing mainly with the wave of anti-European hysteria currently washing through Britain, and the third and last one will be about “reclaiming the Occident,” since there’s a misconception in New Right circles about Europe and the West being antagonistic.

NATION-STATES AS STEPPING STONES TOWARDS GLOBALISM

I have hesitated before writing about the obscolescence of the Nation-State since I’m not sure that American readers, not to mention their European counterparts, are ready to fully realize its implications. White nationalism is a promising movement, but it is still defined in narrow American terms (“a homeland for White Americans”). On the other side of the ocean, Euro-nationalism is on the rise, but its conceptual framework still relies on Nation-States, which aborts the movement before it can fully develop.

Whether the project is a White Republic in the Pacific Northwest or a Southern Republic in Dixie (the latter being as likely as the restoration of absolute monarchy in Europe), or a “Europe of Nations,” miraculously deprived of extra-European settlers (and with the same failed states as today), nationhood, or rather “nation-statehood,” is still involved, and it is what prevents us from imagining a path out of the present mess. I suggest that, as a vanguard webzine, we get rid of nation-statehood altogether. More practical, grass-roots organizations will have to speak in terms that people will understand, but we are here to coin new terms, forge new concepts, and discard all the irrelevant ones.

Short-term National interests vs. Long-term Western interests

The main problem with the Nation-State is that it negates both what is above itself (race and civilization) and what is beneath itself (ethnicities). When stato-nationalists pay lip service to the “Europe of Nations” mentioned above, what they think of is Nation-States, and they defend Europe only to the extent that European states remain “sovereign,” that is, remain able to betray the European whole at any moment if it is in their short-term, selfish interests. From Francis the 1st allying with Suleiman the Magnificent against the Habsburg Emperor to Germany helping Lenin return to Russia during WW1, stato-nationalism has a clear record of repetitively harming the West. This will continue to happen as long as nations are not submitted to the Western, greater good.

Stato-nationalists have to resort to historical manipulation to justify their position: for them, nations came first, and then they “created” Europe/the West. Actually the reverse is true: Western European nations originate from the Carolingian Empire, which was shared out in 843 A.D. between the three grandsons of Charlemagne. This separation was rendered necessary both because of the dynastic rivalry of Louis the Pious’s sons and because of the linguistic gap between the Latin and Germanic parts of the Empire. One year before the Treaty of Verdun officialized this separation, two of the three sons of Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, concluded an alliance against their brother Lothair, who was claiming the whole Empire for himself. Charles the Bald, whose troops were Latin-speaking, had to swear an oath in High Old German for Louis the German’s soldiers to understand. Reciprocally, Louis the German swore his oath in Old French. The latter is the earliest known text in this language. From the dislocation of the Western Empire, as it was then named, emerged thus three states. These were Francia Occidentalis (which would become France) and Francia Orientalis (later the Holy Roman Empire, which was Germanic). Lothair kept an awkwardly-shaped strip in the middle, including all the regions European powers would seek to conquer up to WW2: what would later become the Low Countries, Rhineland, Alsace, Switzerland, Northern Italy.

The Denial of Ethnicities

Petty nationalists often summon, quite hypocritically, the “principle of subsidiarity” to explain why Nation-States have to remain “sovereign.” It is hypocritical because this same principle is not applied within the Nation-State. Let’s take a relaively recent example: in April 2013, there was a referendum in France to determine whether Alsace, France’s Germanic region, could be reunited in one single sub-national entity, instead of being divided between two départements (the French equivalent of U.S. counties).

Marine Le Pen’s Front National campaigned against it because it would “dismember” France, and it even used anti-German and anti-European imagery to make its case. That unfortunate campaign meant that Germanic Alsatians have to remain separated from their German brothers in the name of “France,” an entity that doesn’t mean anything outside the Germanic, Celtic and Latin peoples the royal state had managed to unite while respecting their uniqueness.

Modern Nation-States are based on the denial of ethnicity. Aside from a few cases, most states don’t reflect the ethnic composition of Europe, let alone North America. Ethnicities are scattered in various states (Magyars in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine), or their homeland is divided between more than one state (Catalans, Flemings).

Is there any wonder, then, that Nation-States still exist in the current context of globalization? Far from being fences, Nation-States are actually the stepping stones upon which globalists relied, and still rely, to advance their agenda. I will deal with the European Union in the next installment. I’ll demonstrate how the EU is effectively run by its member-states, proving how stato-nationalists, particularly British nationalists, are deadly wrong on this matter, which they don’t seem to really understand or even know about.

Aside from the European Union, other supra-national organizations gather Nation-States together. The United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, and the WTO, are funded by Nation-States (which, to this day, are the only entities capable of raising taxes), composed of representatives of those states, and act, when they effectively do so, on behalf of their member states.

It is therefore ironic to see civic nationalists like UKIP’s Farage present the return to “sovereignty” as a matter of national pride for Britain, given that the entire globalistic project was built upon the basis of Nation-States. In Farage’s case, civic nationalism is perfectly compatible with global corporate “free” trade, as he has repeatedly admitted.

Divisive symbols

But before I move on to the next part, I’d like to conclude the present one with an observation that should be obvious for anyone thinking seriously of these questions: stato-nationalism has already failed, and there is no reason why it would magically succeed in the coming decades. Stato-nationalists, in their propaganda, have to use historic symbols of the division of the West. I can only feel admiration for Joan of Arc, who, when she was only 17, decided to rise up in arms and “chase the English out of France.” As admirable as this historic figure might be, and as necessary as her deeds were in the early 15th century, she obviously belongs in history books as of 2013. The enemy is not “the English,” and what has to be saved and reborn is not a single kingdom, but an entire race and civilization.

The English still pompously celebrate their Waterloo victory by shabbily welcoming continental trains at the eponymous station, but Napoleonic troops are unlikely to invade Britain through the Channel tunnel. Rather, Pakistani gang-rapists, West African soldier-beheaders and Caribbean looters come by plane, and are granted visas by the same state that British nationalists profess to defend.

Where are the Las Navas de Tolosa airports and Lepanto stations in today’s West? Having to raise the question, and even having to explain what these battles were about and why they mattered for the fate of the entire White race, illustrates how far we are from a real Pan-Occidental awareness, and how it will be needed in the times to come.

This article was originally published at AlternativeRight.Com.

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Culture Identity Politics

When the Gods Hear the Call

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Black Metal shares the fate of all complex and multifaceted phenomena that transcend their narrow genre identities and, similar to Hegel’s philosopher who is able to “grasp an era through thought,” are always ahead of their time, either by affirming, or by totally rejecting the spiritual foundations of the time period in which they live. Both require an ability to examine it from a distance. As the unquestionable product of Modernity, Black Metal paradoxically issues a death sentence to the Modern world. The latter is the case not only with respect to contemporary Christianity: it is the antithesis to everything that is believed to be of any value for an average representative of today’s Western society: from the conventional notions of the good and the beautiful to the metaphysical Being itself. In other words, Black Metal, at a glance, is the very embodiment of an active-nihilistic phase in a metaphysical process of transvaluation of all values heralded by Friedrich Nietzsche.
This is the second reason why Black Metal is mostly defined apophatically, that is to say, from negation. I have already mentioned the first reason for this: despite Black Metal’s prevalent description as a subculture, it is more accurate to define it as a counterculture the goal of which is to terminate the entire Modern era. Many sociologists would disagree with my assertion, because some of them share the idea that early Christianity was the only fully successful counterculture in European history, which overthrew the values of the previous era, whereas the adherents of Black Metal, both genre creators and ordinary fans, are totally integrated into the current social system, support its cultural codes, and never question that which is truly vital for its existence axioms. 

THE CONSERVATIVE-REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF BLACK METAL ART

I. Black Metal: a Subculture or a Counterculture? Methodological Foundations

Black Metal shares the fate of all complex and multifaceted phenomena that transcend their narrow genre identities and, similar to Hegel’s philosopher who is able to “grasp an era through thought,” are always ahead of their time, either by affirming, or by totally rejecting the spiritual foundations of the time period in which they live. Both require an ability to examine it from a distance. As the unquestionable product of Modernity, Black Metal paradoxically issues a death sentence to the Modern world. The latter is the case not only with respect to contemporary Christianity: it is the antithesis to everything that is believed to be of any value for an average representative of today’s Western society: from the conventional notions of the good and the beautiful to the metaphysical Being itself. In other words, Black Metal, at a glance, is the very embodiment of an active-nihilistic phase in a metaphysical process of transvaluation of all values heralded by Friedrich Nietzsche.
This is the second reason why Black Metal is mostly defined apophatically, that is to say, from negation. I have already mentioned the first reason for this: despite Black Metal’s prevalent description as a subculture, it is more accurate to define it as a counterculture the goal of which is to terminate the entire Modern era. Many sociologists would disagree with my assertion, because some of them share the idea that early Christianity was the only fully successful counterculture in European history, which overthrew the values of the previous era, whereas the adherents of Black Metal, both genre creators and ordinary fans, are totally integrated into the current social system, support its cultural codes, and never question that which is truly vital for its existence axioms.

As attentive readers of Ernst Jünger know, almost everything — no matter how “subversive” or “irreverent” — can be incorporated back into the system as “manifestation of freedom. Therefore, Black Metal may be considered only a subculture, which is exaggerated in many infamous parodies that reveal the infantile and ultimately primitive character of the self-proclaimed “true blackers” who cannot cope even with their parents. Undoubtedly, these observations are not groundless, and are basically endorsed within the movement itself, which developed its own ways of social regulation in order to expel the so-called “untrue” posers from their community, i.e., trendies and money-makers that appeared after the scandalous events in the early history of Black Metal.

However, I would like to emphasize the fact that the given survey is not sociological; otherwise, I would have to put a full stop right after stating that the Black Metal scene degraded a long time ago, which means that there is no place for wishful thinking. In other words, I will discuss not what Black Metal currently is, but what it is supposed to be according to the pioneers of the Black Metal movement and those who stayed devoted to the latter tradition. Therefore, I consider Max Weber’s Verstehende Soziologie (Interpretative Sociology) to be the only suitable sociological method that seeks to understand a certain cultural phenomenon from within, describes it on its own terms and operates within the notion of the ideal type. The latter gives the opportunity to avoid biases of positivist thinking and legitimately apply the heuristic mental constructs derived from the empirical data for the purpose of better analyzing reality. The most famous example of the ideal type is the “Protestant ethic” used by Weber as a key for exploring the emergence and the essence of capitalism in his renowned work Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), which provides a fruitful alternative to the popular historical-materialistic explanation of Karl Marx. Accordingly, our ideal type is called “Black Metal Art” or simply “Black Metal.”

As such, this method is quite akin to the philosophical-hermeneutical approach developed by Martin Heidegger and his disciple Hans-Georg Gadamer who rejects the very term “method” as a natural-scientific remnant in the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences). According to Heidegger’s philosophical interpretation focused on the classic concept of the hermeneutic circle (“to understand the whole, we need to understand the parts and visa versa”), the task is not to find the way out of the circle, but rather to enter it correctly, since this circle is that of our existence. Put simply, we (“Dasein” as “Being-in-the-world”) always understand certain phenomena in this or that way, so our sole duty is to explicate our assumptions or, in Gadamer’s words, our “anticipation of perfection.” The latter is what I am going to do in this paper, although I have to admit that in some cases we deal with such a high level of self-reflection demonstrated by the Black Metal artists that the researcher gratefully turns into a mere commentator: consider the first-ever DVD “Opus Diaboli” released in May of 2012 by the Swedish band Watain to experience the difference between the interpretation of Watain’s vocalist E. and those given in most Black Metal documentaries, interviews, and thematic investigations. The vast majority of such sources still are very disappointing or insufficient.

II. Aesthetics and Metaphysics vs. Ideology and Politics of Black Metal. The Principal Directions within the Black Metal Movement

What is the starting point for this research? Since the times of Aristotle, it has been obvious that the shortest way to the essence of a thing lies in its definition. But, again, mostly negative definitions of Black Metal exist. They do reflect the greatness and intensity of this phenomenon but say little about its main idea. For example, the epochal and countercultural significance of the latter can be easily inferred from the well-known attempts to clarify the essence of Black Metal such as, “it is not another musical genre,” “it is not mere music,” and “it is not entertainment/business.” Another set of negative definitions due to the nihilistic orientation of Black Metal is also widely recognized: it is believed to be anti-religious, especially anti-Christian, antisocial, misanthropic, blasphemous, and so forth.

Likewise, all intellectual efforts to articulate what Black Metal is rather than what it is not usually end up with an appeal to a certain spectrum of moods and emotions (“dark,” “melancholic”), sometimes–to certain highly metaphoric concepts (“evil,” “ugliness,” “war”) or to Black Metal aesthetics known as part of the well-established phrase “Black Metal Art.” This expression, however, raises further questions since Black Metal is represented as l’art pour l’art only if the latter means something like Supreme Art that bears explicit occultist connotations, which is the very opposite of this approach. If not, one is welcome to enter endless debates regarding the basic principle(s) of Black Metal ideology, which are mostly centered on Satanism.

Depending on what one considers the object of negation or the enemy against whom the War is being waged (“Black Metal ist Krieg”), there exist different ideological trends within the general Black Metal movement, which regularly cause sharp disagreements between its members: radical nihilism and atheism that stand behind Satanist imagery and sometimes overlap with LaVeyan Social Darwinism; the Occultist trajectory, which is often connected with the Left-Hand Path; Theistic Satanism (the religion of Deus/Diabolus Absconditus) that borders on Gnosticism and similar teachings, on the one hand, and archaic Pagan cults, which may be linked to “Aryan Luciferianism”—on the other; variations of Heathenism, from Pantheism to Vedic hymns, which are mainly developed within such subgenres such as Folk Black Metal or Viking Black Metal, and even Christian “Unblack” Metal, not to mention other innovative Black Metal bands often focused on their own “philosophy.” Naturally, we may legitimately wonder which direction is more representative of the movement or, in contrast, should in no way not be associated with it as one that transcends the limits of this ideal type.

Another way to fill the gap between the apophatical definitions involves pointing out the mystical or even a religious feeling that is typical of the Black Metal Weltanschauung, its special “spirit.” A reference to this theophanic experience that underlies rational explanation, among others, can be found in the interview with the French Black Metal band Deathspell Omega:

Some of us had a religious upbringing indeed, and these obviously went through the initial phase of global denial, whereas others were raised under the sign of rationality. That we eventually all experienced a shattering theophany is something very hard to explain in rational terms. There’s of course cultural arguments, anyone who went through long universitarian studies has been given keys—and this despite the fact that most universities in the occidental world are actually strongholds of humanitarian egalitarianism—and we chose not to ignore these keys, whereas most people do as they prefer to remain in harmony with the current Zeitgeist.[1]

Such purely phenomenological descriptions could have dissolved genre boundaries, yet we feel that Black Metal has its positive core which strictly differentiates it from the related genres and may be formulated very simply. Therefore, even though only the National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) scene and its rarer leftist analogues are notable for direct political involvement, Black Metal as a countercultural movement with great ambitions but carefully guarded borders is political par excellence, political in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the distinction between the friend and the enemy, which translates into the ultimate degree of association and dissociation between “us” and “them.” A highly selective approach to potential membership in the Black Metal community, of course, is more eloquent than inherent in any genuine aesthetic formation, prioritizing artistic expression and detesting the rigid and external ideological clichés, whether political or otherwise.

At the same time, such Ukrainian Black Metal bands as Nokturnal Mortum, Kroda, Drudkh, or Hate Forest, which at present comprise one of the most acclaimed NSBM scenes in the world, if not the most, even though they may introduce themselves as simply patriotic and concerned with traditional heritage preservation (another esteemed Ukrainian one-man band Lutomysl was described in a recent interview by Pavel “Lutomysl” Shishkovskiy, who envies people “whose only problems boil down to the presence of Jews or blacks,” as NEONSDSBM [2]), can hardly be regarded as such that impose restrictions on ways of expression in order to meet ideological needs. Above all, they gained recognition all over the world owing to their musical masterpieces.

In a narrow sense, Black Metal as a total war against the Modern world cannot be free of the political implications either, although most crimes in the early history of Black Metal were committed due to personal, not political reasons [3]. Similarly, one may single out both the left-wing and the right-wing tendencies since the very birth of the Black Metal movement represented accordingly by Satanist Øystein Aarseth “Euronymous” of Mayhem, who sympathized with left-wing extremism, and Varg Vikernes of Burzum as a scholar of Old Norse religion, an adherent of Paganism, and an authoritative figure in the contemporary right-wing circles (among his influences are Knut Hamsun, Oswald Spengler, and Julius Evola), who distanced himself from Satanism and the whole Black Metal scene after its newcomers had started exploiting the original ideas and aesthetics invented by the pioneers merely for their shock value or for commercial purposes. Retrospectively speaking, it is no wonder that Euronymous was killed by Vikernes in 1993, which is regarded as “the beginning of the end” followed by the split and the growing commercialization of the scene (consider Nargaroth’s song “The Day Burzum Killed Mayhem”). On the other hand, I would not say that there is an irresolvable conflict of these two tendencies, or that there is no such metaphysical position that integrates them on a higher level.

Indeed, it is possible to oppose the Modern world and its symbolic incarnation, Christianity, both “from the Left” and “from the Right.” Furthermore, although liberation, nihilism, anti-clericalism (remember the famous Norwegian church burnings), etc. are mostly associated with the Left, even those Black Metal groups that stick to the Left-Hand Path (for instance, Polish Black Metal band Behemoth) do not necessarily correspond with the political Left, both classical and Cultural Marxism. Often quite the reverse is true, or they go beyond politics. This ambivalence is also visible on an aesthetic level: the “right-wing” symbols of the Empire, King, God, etc. are no less popular than the “left-wing” concepts of Homelessness, Void, Rebellion, and so on.

Benjamin Noys, who also addressed the issue of politics in the Black Metal movement, used as a case study the interview answers by Sale Famine of the French Black Metal band Peste Noire[4] which was not an accident. Famine, who believes that left-wing Black Meal is contradictio in adjecto, underlines the chthonic and, as a result, the nationalist character of Black Metal and glorifies “the dark European past,” declared the synthesis of both approaches in a very transparent manner:

Black Metal is the musical memory of our bloodthirsty ancestors of blood, it is the marriage of Tradition, of old racial patrimony with fanaticism, with the rage and the rashness of a youth now lost.” [5]

Likewise, Famine describes his nationalism as fundamentally twofold, “temporal” and “spiritual,” which correlates with being a citizen of France (“medieval,” “rural”) and of Hell (“Sieg Hell!”)[6]. Noys fairly draws a parallel between this focus on the chthonic aspect of Black Metal and the telluric grounding of Carl Schmitt’s Partisan. Finally, searching for the roots of this ambiguity in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is also absolutely correct: the greatest European nihilist was simultaneously the greatest elitist, aristocrat, and traditionalist who looked ahead to the beginning of the new Golden Age. That is why Nietzsche referred to himself as “the first perfect Nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself”[7], that is the first anti-nihilist as well.

In addition, Nietzsche was the greatest aesthete and stylist who erased the very distinction between form and content by making even the superficial details ideologically relevant and meaningful. The latter sheds light on the reasons why the expression “Black Metal Art” means something incomparably deeper than, for instance, “Black Metal Ideology” or “Black Metal Politics” and has the potential to reach a metaphysical level. At this point, an appeal to the Conservative Revolution—another complex cultural phenomenon that has much in common with Black Metal—becomes inevitable.

III. The Grand Invocation: the Conservative Revolution as an Act of Ushering the Gods Back into the World

Conservative Revolution and Black Metal are similar for at least two reasons. First, both have countercultural value. The only difference lies in the fact that what requires additional reconstruction in the context of Black Metal belongs to the explicit objectives of the conservative-revolutionary theory, which may be unequivocally derived from its name. Conservative Revolution was a broad ideocratic movement that evolved in Germany during the 20th century’s interwar period. It was also known under the name of the “Third Position” or the “Third Way” because it was impossible to classify it as ideologically Right or Left. Some of its principal players have already been mentioned: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Edgar Julius Jung, Carl Schmitt, Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger, Julius Evola, Ernst Niekisch, Martin Heidegger, Armin Mohler, and others. The global aim of the conservative-revolutionary movement was formulated by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1927 as part of his legendary speech delivered to students in Munich. He argued that the Conservative Revolution is a phenomenon previously unknown in European history that strives to terminate not only the era of the Enlightenment, but also that of Renaissance and Reformation. In other words, its goal is to construct the New Middle Ages.

This necessity of revolting against the course of history was proclaimed in Julius Evola’s work Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order of the Kali Yuga (1934), which, to a great extent, was nothing but a radicalized and politicized version of the major text The Crisis of the Modern World written by René Guénon, the founder of integral traditionalism, in 1927. In the chapter called “The Doctrine of the Four Ages” of his work, Evola writes:

Although modern man until recently has viewed and celebrated the meaning of the history known to him as epitomizing progress and evolution, the truth as professed by traditional man is quite the opposite. In all ancient testimonies of traditional humanity it is possible to find, in various forms, the idea of a regression or a fall: from originally higher states beings have stooped to states increasingly conditioned by human, mortal, and contingent elements. This involutive process allegedly began in a very distant past; the term that best characterizes it is the Eddic term ragna-rokkr, “the twilight of the gods”… According to Tradition, the actual sense of history and the genesis of what I have labeled, generally speaking, as the “modern world,” results from a process of gradual decadence through four cycles or ‘generations.’[8]

In his later book Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1953), Evola defined Conservative Revolution as “the return to the starting point,” “to the source.” Naturally, in order to secure this grand historical coup, one has to rely on the means available in that very Modern world. This insight gave birth to the shortest formula of fascism “René Guénon Plus Tank Divisions,” which may be found in The Morning of the Magicians written by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in 1960. Indeed, back in 1921 Thomas Mann considered Conservative Revolution in his Russian Anthology as a political projection of Nietzscheism understood as a synthesis of “conservatism” and “revolution,” “freedom” and “bonds,” “faith” and “Enlightenment,” “God” and “the world” and compared it with the Russian messianic idea as two totally different phenomena united, although, by their common “religious nature, religious in a new vital sense that has a great future.”

Therefore, second distinctive feature of Black Metal and the Conservative Revolution comprises the fact that both movements are not only anti- and contra- but also meta-phenomena, which reject the narrow genre and political identities in favor of the higher goals. Conservative Revolution is always positioned as a metapolitical movement and, speaking in Ernst Jünger’s terms, as “the absolute revolution” that ruins tradition as form but thus realizes the sense of tradition. This is the so-called “metahistorical” and “dynamic” approach to Tradition written with a capital “T,” which was introduced by Julius Evola as an ability to sacrifice forms in the name of principles. Furthermore, another similarity between Black Metal and the Conservative Revolution is that both ideal types are portrayed as a special recognizable “style,” that is, ultimately as an aesthetic phenomenon.

The merger between the aesthetic and the political elements in the conservative-revolutionary movement, which was noted with displeasure by leftists who were always afraid of “irrationality,” Walter Benjamin, in particular, was undoubtedly carried out beyond decorative purposes in mind. It was aesthetics that was meant to be that magical key used to “re-enchant” the world and reintegrate the autonomous and disconnected fields of politics, science, religion, ethics and, again, aesthetics, which replaced the hierarchic medieval universe subordinate to one transcendental principle. However, conservative revolutionaries mostly spoke not of God but of gods in the plural; the generally acknowledged metaphor that signifies re-mythologization of the world is “the return of the gods” or “the return of the sacred,” which was especially anticipated by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jünger.

“Merely” waiting for re-sacralization of the world, however, is not a rule and corresponds only to the current phase of metaphysical transvaluation of all values. This phase was preceded by the active-nihilistic period of titanic domination, the reign of Prometheus, who symbolizes the elemental powers of technology. According to Ernst Jünger’s observation made in his essay “On Pain” (1934), we live in the time when the new orders have moved far ahead, but the new values have not become visible yet:

We conclude, then, that we find ourselves in a last and indeed quite remarkable phase of nihilism, characterized by the broad expansion of new social orders with corresponding values yet to be seen.[9]

This means that Übermensch “als Sieger über Gott und das Nichts,” the Superman as a victor over God (the ruined old order) and Nothingness that replaced the latter, enters the final phase of the battle with Nothingness itself. At this stage, both Jünger and Evola developed the concepts of apoliteia, right-wing anarchism and the differentiated man that rejects the Modern world not out of nihilism, but because it does not meet the ideal of the new sacred order. Of course, this stage is temporary: Evola’s right-wing anarchist and Jünger’s Anarch are always ready to seize the opportunity to build a new Empire.
Structural similarities between Black Metal and the Conservative Revolution are also obvious. Armin Mohler, who published a monograph Conservative Revolution in Germany: 1918–1932 (1950), which started the tradition of academic investigation of the conservative-revolutionary movement, singled out five main directions within the latter, three of which became exemplary: Young Conservatives (Moeller van den Bruck, Edgar Jung, Oswald Spengler), National Revolutionaries (Ernst Jünger, Ernst Niekisch, Hans Freyer), and the völkische movement that made the greatest impact on National Socialism (the famous doctrine of “Blood and Soil”). Accordingly, Young Conservatives mostly developed the organic imperialist models; National Revolutionaries were on extremely good terms with the destructive forces of the industrial civilization, and the völkische resemble the contemporary Pagan Front.

In his profound examination of the conservative-revolutionary recollections in the Black Metal movement, Alex Kurtagic primarily emphasized völkisch ideas [10], which is justifiable. At the same time, I would say that the most representative of the Conservative Revolution was not the völkisch but rather the national-revolutionary movement. Its members, Ernst Jünger, in particular, elaborated on the main metaphysical sentiment of the Conservative Revolution, that is the unity of freedom and the necessity presupposed by the concept of German voluntarism, in the most detailed and accurate manner. This metaphysical standpoint corresponds with the Gnostic Anti-Cosmic trend in the Black Metal movement, which is also notable for strict dualism between one’s divine will and anything else (“Death against death”) and does not seek the sacred within the limits of this world. A well-known description of National Socialist metaphysics by Hendrik Möbus of the German NSBM group Absurd (“the most perfect synthesis of the Luciferian will to power, and neo-heathen principles and symbolism”) would also be relevant in this context, although he is more closely associated with the Pagan Front. Incidentally, his conversation with “Velesova Sloboda”[11] is the most interesting and professional discussion of the classic conservative-revolutionary topics by any Black Metal musician that I have ever read.

In conclusion, I would like to quote the words of Erik Danielsson of Watain about the revolutionary essence of true art and the necessity “to get deeper and deeper” while exploring the horizons of the genre:

If you want to do something groundbreaking in something as sinister as black metal—if you want to correspond with dark energies that exist beyond this world, you cannot have a mere interest in black metal. A passion for a music genre is not enough to change the course of musical history or the history of the world. To me, it’s not strange there aren’t more bands like us because individuals of that sort are very rare. If you have an extreme source of energy flowing inside yourself you either end up in prison, sharing a high place with a politician or you do what we do.[12]

It is difficult to disagree and overlook the parallels with the aspirations of the most devoted and bright members of the conservative-revolutionary movement. After all, Mohler’s academic research was nothing more than a way to gather the new extreme front in post-war Europe under an alternative name after discrediting the National Socialist project and any other movements dangerous for the system, including Black Metal in its purest manifestations. Is it surprising that one day the representatives of these metahistorical and countercultural directions will join their forces as the “contenders in the larger game”?[13]

  1. Ajna Offensive, Deathspell Omega Interview.  ↩
  2. Interview with Lutomysl at Orthodox Black Metal.  ↩
  3. Kevin Coogan, How Black is Black Metal?, Nachrichten Heute  ↩
  4. Benjamin Noys, “Remain True to the Earth!”: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal, Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I; Edited by Nicola Masciandaro (Charleston: CreateSpace, 2010), p. 105–128.  ↩
  5. Nathan T. Birk, Interview with La Sale Famine of Peste Noire, Zero Tolerance  ↩
  6. Ibid.  ↩
  7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power; Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale; Edited by W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 3.  ↩
  8. Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order of the Kali Yuga; Translated from the Italian by Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1995), p. 177.  ↩
  9. Ernst Jünger, On Pain (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2008), p. 46.  ↩
  10. Alex Kurtagic, “Black Metal: Conservative Revolution in Modern Popular Culture,” The Occidental Quarterly Online, republished at Counter-Currents.  ↩
  11. Hendrik M. (Absurd) im Gespräch mit der Redaktion von “Velesova Sloboda”  ↩
  12. Darren Cowan, Interview with Erik Danielsson of Watain at Blistering.com  ↩
  13. Ibid.  ↩
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America Identity Politics

The Old-Time Religion

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Maybe that darkness will be lifted when Whites finally extricate themselves from decades of witless but safe obsessions like cheerleading for obscene wars, dancing to the demands of civil rights hustlers, acting as self-appointed watch-keepers over who is deemed a true “patriot,” presuming to be able to read the mind and intentions of God, and intruding into the birthing predilections of strangers

 

Elizabeth Wright (1937–2011) lived a life of self-imposed isolation and obscurity. For those who appreciate her writings, however, she is fondly remembered as one of the most remarkable conservative commentators of her generation. An African-American, and a libertarian and individualist, she nevertheless had a deep understanding of—and “tough love” for—Founding-stock Anglo-Americans. Her greatest insights were, indeed, those of an outsider—one who was out-of-step with the prevailing Zeitgeist and could thus view the White race (as well as her own) with critical objectivity.

For more than two decades, Elizabeth was Editor of Issues and Views, both in its newsletter and online manifestations. This article was originally published in September 2010 at Alternative Right, in response to Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally that had just been held on the Washington, DC, Mall. The piece is a critique of “Tea Party conservatism,” which was reaching its culmination at the time (and has since faded). But the essay bursts through this context by virtue of Elizabeth’s devastating insights into the psychology of White Americans. The “Tea Party” phenomenon, in her reading, was not simply a reaction to the 2008 stock-market crash or the election of Barack Obama; it was yet one more episode in an ongoing process, in which Europeans gleefully dispossess themselves through their participation in the reigning civic religion.

~Richard B. Spencer

Now that the dust has settled on that overhyped, fevered Glenn Beck rally, what have we learned? Is it clearer than ever that no sober knight will come riding in to bring the enlightenment that some of us thought the Tea Partiers might have offered? It appears that the expectations surrounding those initial enigmatic stirrings, which made one almost believe that the furor was about more than just anger over political issues, have been extinguished. Was it all just a momentary aberration?

As it turns out, White conservatives don’t want to take the lead in preserving what remains of this country’s now tenuous White, Anglo-Euro culture. To take on such a responsibility would make them even more vulnerable to the racial bullets and daggers they have been ducking for years.

If Beck’s rally taught us anything, it’s that nothing has changed in the White middle-class mindset and that fear of the “racist” label continues to rule as strongly as ever. We’ve now learned for certain that such Whites are determined never to put the name to their fear and anxiety. If anything, they are fighting all the harder to bury even deeper the visceral knowledge of what is going on in this country and the inevitable future that is on its way. Christopher Hitchens’s assessment of the August 28 mass meeting is correct, when he claims that Beck’s tepid event was “a call to sink to the knees rather than rise from them.”[1] (If Hitchens, of all people, gets it, who could miss it?)

Even as other groups gradually dispossess them in the country whose political system was constructed by their forebears, conservative Whites persist in their obstinate assertion that their apparent discontent is “not about race.” What hogwash. Of course it’s about race and culture. Why shouldn’t it be? No matter how assiduously they deny it, resentment is growing over the ever-looming fact that this country, due to swiftly altering demographics, will no longer be the product of those Founders. And reality informs us that the ruling law, that is, the Constitution (or what’s left of it), soon will be openly renounced by competing populations that never have had even the remotest historical connection to the notions set forth by those Englishmen.

No one has to look far abroad to see what is on the horizon. In their guts these conservatives know what’s coming, as their unnamed enemies pick up the pace in the drive to usurp political power. What were mere hints just two decades ago have grown into loud trumpet blasts. And along comes Glenn Beck who offers these perceptive, yet reluctant conservatives a way to feel better about things. According to his prescription, all they have to do is Believe and Pray.

After watching that half-baked celebration of Martin Luther King Jr., and the determined laundering of his well-documented leftist convictions, how could one not conclude, like Ross Douthat, that “Beck’s “Restoring Honor” was like an Obama rally through the looking glass,” that these conservatives wished to be “cosmopolitan and young-at-heart, multicultural and hip”?[2] Nobody wants to be known as “square,” whatever squareness entails at any given time. Remember how conservatives used to laugh at and rail at political correctness? Now, they’re the ones who don’t want to be depicted as “incorrect.”

My observations of these Whites lead me to agree with Paul Gottfried, who astutely argues, “Whites would desert the GOP in droves unless their party continues to make an effort to be PC.” And further, he claims, many Republicans would not vote for a party that was “not marching in lockstep with the media in expressing horror over America’s evil racist, sexist, and homophobic past.”[3]

Whites of all political stripes, no matter which political label they give themselves, have been sold on the unique wickedness of America’s past racism that surely had to be the most grievous sin ever committed by mankind. Hence, the Glenn Beck carnival of repentance.

Beck picked up on this peculiar self-flagellation, and his soap opera rally was customized to meet the needs of this constituency. It seems that the unconstitutional Brown v. Board of Education court decision, the deceptive Civil Rights Act, forced busing (which tore apart whole school districts around the country), a national holiday for a Black preacher, and endless, ever-evolving new perks and goodies to benefit Black elites, have not quite made the grade of cleansing those past sins.

And so, to prove that they possess no resentment over the decades of social strife that has plagued our society, in August, the good conservatives took to D.C., where they engaged in a ceremony to worship a 19th-century President, who could come up with no better solution to his nation’s problems than a war that brought about the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen, and a Black man who specialized in emotional oratory.

One has to wonder who these people are who will march on Washington to “restore” the country’s “honor,” as the rally’s theme boasted, yet are in the forefront of supporting some of the most dishonorable acts engaged in by their country’s interchangeable governments. Just what is special about the moral convictions of these advocates, who fervently sermonize on such issues as patriotism, war, family life, religion, the nature of government ad nauseam?

On the subject of race, as we’ve seen, conservatives are savvy on this score and have learned that one way to deflect the scurrilous charge of racism is to celebrate the icons and infinite memorabilia of the civil rights movement, while keeping a contingent of Black people on hand to be prominently displayed at public events. Who said these savvy Whites couldn’t be condescending?

On the other hand, Whites are given little choice in this matter since, at the mere hint of the formation of any kind of all-White entity, Black and liberal elites will come charging in. Even if such an organization is inadvertently all-White, it must first be accused of loathsome, racist motives, so that it can be monitored. No matter how benign the group’s objectives, if White men are its creators, then it must be put under surveillance and ultimately neutralized.

When the new group’s leaders relent, we find a quid pro quo in place—the intruding Blacks get the benefits of prominent positions and other perks, while the Whites now have cover from any other such intrusions and accusations. We saw this game successfully played against the Promise Keepers[4] and, now again, very blatantly applied to the Tea Parties.

The Whites who resent the blackmail flee, while the rest remain comfortably ensconced, adapting to the politically correct reality of the times. Whites, it would seem, must not be left to their own devices. Before taking back the country, is it possible that they will first take back the right to organize among themselves?

But don’t feel too sorry, too soon for these conservatives, who greatly influence the country’s political direction through the national leaders and ethos they inflict on our society.

Take a look at how they feel about big government that they rail against so vehemently. It’s fine as long as it’s out there doing what government should be doing—that means making war. War making, you see, in the mind of the conservative patriot, shows how tough we are. And although we’re not supposed to care what the rest of the world thinks of us, it’s imperative to earn the world’s fearful regard when it comes to our toughness. It matters not who rules in DC, or how many of our young soldiers needlessly die in worthless battles, as long as the message is sent abroad that we’re the biggest, baddest country on earth. We’re the USA! USA! USA!

Conservatives are dedicated to one of their favorite little war slogans, which is designed to justify why our troops are “over there.” When Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul comes along and reverses this little ditty, explaining that the terrorists are “over here” only because we’re “over there,” he gets drummed out of the corps, for “pacifism.” Woe to even the most faithful conservative, if he appears to diss the USA’s abominable wars of choice.
When Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is quoted making negative remarks about the leadership of the United States, primarily due to this country’s toadying relationship with Israel, that’s reason enough to urge the U.S. military to bomb and kill millions of innocent Iranians. Don’t say nasty things about the USA or its Middle East client state, OR WE’LL KILL YOU!

Is this the mentality that worried Founder John Jay, who did not see leaders as being trustworthy initiators of war? In The Federalist Papers, he claimed that some leaders will make war even “when their nations are to get nothing by it,” and spoke of leaders harboring motives such as “personal ambition, thirst for military glory and revenge for personal affronts.” Jay warned about a nation putting itself in situations that “invite hostility or insult,” that could lead to “pretended” causes of war. And he was not impressed by the superiority of so-called republics as opposed to monarchies, believing that republics were just as “addicted” to war as monarchies. “Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter?” he asked.

But what did he know? Obviously, not as much as our sanctimonious conservatives, who cheer as 19-year-olds are sent off to prove their mettle, while offering opportunities for these stay-at-home warriors to engage in “support the troops” grandstanding. For all their noisemaking about restoring the Constitution, it is easy to suspect that these impostors look upon the Founders and their document as quaint and outdated as do most liberals.

And who isn’t impressed with how well these conservatives have taught us about family and commitment? What outstanding models they have given us. At the moment they are apoplectic over maintaining marriage for opposite sexes only, yet these are the people whose foremost political philosopher, Newt Gingrich, just married his fourth wife, making a mockery of that institution. (Will the fifth be the charm?) By the way, this mountebank of “family values” was the fourth husband of his previous wife No. 3. (How many broken vows does that make?) Could homosexuals, who claim to be “married,” dilute the significance of marriage any more than this?

Chosen as Leader of the conservative camp by acclamation, this Talking Hero is looked upon as the fount of wisdom to those who seek to teach the rest of us how to think and behave.

These deluded crusaders, in striving to exonerate their other leader by acclamation, Sarah Palin, from the charge of irresponsible parenting, could only shrug and come up with a pithy, new catchphrase: “Life happens.” As if we didn’t know that. With the advent of Palin, American youth are once again blessed with yet another fine conservative role model.

And what about immigration? Can we really expect to see these conservatives carry through on their stances against illegal immigration? Don’t count on it. Is there any chance that today’s conservative reformers will take the next step in calling for a moratorium on all immigration, the “legal” kind as well? Is there among some of them, at least, a sense of urgency to stem the tide of endless, unchecked floods from abroad? But then again, is it likely that people who worship at the pedestal of Martin Luther King would understand the meaning of such terms as “cultural suicide” or “death of the West,” or care about the transformation that is taking place around them?

Libya’s late leader Muammar Gaddafi used to laugh at the foolish Europeans, who have encouraged the immigration of millions of Third World aliens, and offers Europe’s leaders a financial deal to keep more of the mob out of that continent, are American conservatives taking notes?

As literally tens of thousands of African refugees in boats try to reach Italy, the Libyan navy has been instrumental in keeping them out, thanks to an agreement with the Italian government. “We don’t know,” the bemused Gaddafi is quoted as saying, “if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.” And then he comes right out and says it: your continent is turning into Africa.

Why should Europe turn into Africa? Why should Europeans want to live in a negrified Europe? Or an Arabized Europe? Why?

The good White conservatives in the U.S., although possessing an instinctive understanding of such questions, would be terrified to entertain such thoughts publicly, or even privately. Better to take one’s lead from the huckster Glenn Beck and play it safe, than to express the anxiety to which they dare not put words.

As one Dutchman observes, “This isn’t Holland anymore,” nor is it France or England or Germany. And soon it won’t be America anymore. In one country after another, clueless Europeans have already begun the process of dispossessing themselves via politics, as immigrants eagerly run for political office, thereby amassing power and influence over the native residents.

Is there something in Europe’s water that compels the Whites to submit to this updated form of conquest? Who are voting Black immigrants into political office in Sweden? The native Whites. Who just voted an African into office in Russia? The native Whites. At what point do Whites take responsibility for their ongoing demise or, as Paul Gottfried puts it, for going “soft in the head?”

It is true that, in order to achieve the quasi-religious goals at the heart of the multiculturalists’ vision for America, heavy doses of brainwashing have been perpetrated on the public via school systems and throughout the media. The major targets have been youth and, most especially, White youth, as they have had their opinions and beliefs pummeled in “multicultural workshops,” and “sensitivity training” sessions. No one can deny that this 30- to 40-year campaign of re- education has been successful.

A recent caller to a New York overnight radio show is almost a stereotype of the proud, de-racinated White man. The de-racinated Zero. He described growing up in Missouri, in the midst of what sounded like a predominantly Anglo population. Years later, when he visited New York City, he claims that this was his first encounter with assertively ethnic people. There he discovered Greek sections of town, Italian sections, Chinese, etc.
It seems that this did not rest well with him, since he was used to calling himself simply “American,” and could not comprehend any reason to expand his ethnic identification with a hyphen. The Zero Man always resents the use of hyphens. Not for him that Greek-American, Italian-American, Polish-American stuff. He’s just a plain, old “American,” disaffiliated from any specific cultural lineage and expecting everyone else to disaffiliate themselves as well.

This caller sounded as if he would be uncomfortable if described as an “Anglo-American” or “British-American.” Mr. Zero probably would be uncomfortable, but why should a Chinese-American attempt to erase his Chinese ancestry to accommodate the deracinated notion of what constitutes an “American?”

The Founders did not seem to think of themselves as Zeros, yet misleading hype continues the fiction that this country was formed in a vacuum by people who shared no heritage. If this were so, why did John Jay thank Providence for giving this country to “one united people,” who were “descended from the same ancestors?” Who establishes anything, that is expected to take root, with someone else’s progeny in mind?

Western countries are now being inundated with populations of foreigners who actively discourse on who they are, and they’re not going to let you forget it. As masses of Muslims bring their distinctive customs, laws and disciplines to Christian countries, and push the envelope to acquire even more privileges, Westerners are waking up to the folly of having thrown open their borders to an alien civilization. At one time, Europeans understood from past experience what was at stake, as they protected themselves, for centuries, from further encroachment by Muslims, and their American cousins instinctively understood that there were limits to “assimilation.”

But that was yesterday. Today, Muslims learned that, this time around, there was no need to attempt a siege of Paris with guns or swords. Instead, they are able to hold hostage entire streets in that city, while they perform their Friday prayers in public. It’s a sort of in-your-face dare to the foolish Frenchman. The authorities must defer to this illegal activity, or risk the kind of chaos for which Muslims in France are already well known. Not only will there be no banning of the burka, there will be no imposition of unwanted rules, as Muslims let the French government know just who’s boss.

“We have been in darkness for a long time,” intoned Glenn Beck the night before his big rally. “We have been standing in spiritual darkness for decades.” Yes, one could say that, but not for the reasons you cite, Mr. Beck.

Maybe that darkness will be lifted when Whites finally extricate themselves from decades of witless but safe obsessions like cheerleading for obscene wars, dancing to the demands of civil rights hustlers, acting as self-appointed watch-keepers over who is deemed a true “patriot,” presuming to be able to read the mind and intentions of God, and intruding into the birthing predilections of strangers.

At some point these misguided conservatives must turn their attention away from delusions and focus on the explicit needs of their own race, instead of fearing to deal with the unspeakable—that is, diminishing as a group into minority numbers—60 percent, 40 percent, 20 percent. It will certainly mean stepping into a more dangerous zone (and Whites do like to play it safe), but there’s not much time left to muster the courage, if they truly want to preserve (or, more accurately, rescue) the core of that which the Founders set out to establish.

If these Whites ever get their priorities straight, who knows what they might accomplish? Perhaps they might begin by ceasing to expend so much energy on admonishing others for opting not to have children and, instead, begin a crusade among their own people to raise the birth rates of Whites. Wouldn’t it be remarkable if there were a reversal of what now appears to be the inevitable?

Such an appeal to procreation could not be based on those ugly harangues about “sin” and “murder,” in which conservatives love to indulge, but on a sense of pride and a concern for the future custodianship of this country. Of course, White reproductive rates might never be able to outstrip those of the Muslims and other Third Worlders, but a sound, restrictive immigration policy would go a long way towards evening up the demographics. If they fail to turn their focus to such realities, just who do these conservatives think are most likely to work at preserving the foundational institutions of the country they supposedly yearn to “take back?”

At his rally, Beck told over a quarter of a million hopeful Whites that the emergence of the Tea Parties and similar entities of discontented citizens is evidence of “the beginning of the Great Awakening in America.” Would that were so.

  1. Christopher Hitchens, “White Fright: Glenn Beck’s rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected—the Waterworld of white self-pity.” Slate, 30 August, 2010. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/08/white_fright.html (accessed May 1, 2012).  ↩
  2. Ross Douthat, “Mr. Beck Goes to Washington,” New York Times, 29 August 2010; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opinion/30douthat. html?_r=1 (accessed May 1, 2012).  ↩
  3. Paul Gottfried, “Outreach to Nowhere,” AlternativeRight.com, 28 August, 2010; http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/district-of- corruption/the-outreach-to-nowhere/ (accessed May 1, 2012).  ↩
  4. The Promise Keepers, a not-for-profit charity, was founded in 1990 by a former Head Football Coach of the University of Colorado, Bill McCartney. His goal was to host mass, all-male religious revivals in football stadiums across America. Much like the Tea Party movement, the Promise Keepers were criticized by feminists as an organization of (overwhelmingly) White men meeting as men. Much like the Tea Party, the Promise Keepers had a vague agenda and fell over themselves denouncing racism and pursuing, in McCartney’s words, “racial reconciliation.”  ↩
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America Culture Identity

ONWARD INTO 2014!

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NPI—which includes The National Policy Institute, Washington Summit Publishers, and Radix—also needs your help to cover basic expenses for projects that will launch in the coming months. (I’ll discuss these below.)  

 

But since it’s the turn of the year—a time for reflection—I don’t simply want to ask for money.  I want to show the path we’re treading as an organization so that we can understand how all of our project are part of a larger vision.    

The Christmas and New Year’s season is our favorite time of year. (That might sound trite, but it’s true.) We experience the return of family, rituals, and festivities. We also get the opportunity—which is quite rare today—to step back from the daily distractions and toil and honestly reflect on where we came from and where we’re going.

As I’m sure you know, Christmas and New Year’s also mark the season of fundraising campaigns. . . and by the time you read this, you have, no doubt, already been subjected to many.

NPI—which includes The National Policy Institute, Washington Summit Publishers, and Radix—also needs your help to cover basic expenses for projects that will launch in the coming months. (I’ll discuss these below.)

But since it’s the turn of the year—a time for reflection—I don’t simply want to ask for money. I want to show the path we’re treading as an organization so that we can understand how all of our project are part of a larger vision.

WHO ARE WE?

Before talking about what we did this past year, it’s useful to remind ourselves who we are, and of our fundamental mission. The National Policy Institute is dedicated to setting forth alternative political ideas, neither Left nor Right, which promote the flourishing of European-Americans, and Europeans around the world. Washington Summit Publishers produces literature on scientific understanding and, in particular, Human Biodiversity; and Radix seeks to establish a higher culture and revive distinctly Occidental ways of looking at the world. (Put most simply, politics, science, and culture; that is what NPI, WSP, and Radix are about.)

At NPI, we don’t believe in quick, easy fixes; that is, we don’t focus on a single issues or the next election or imagine that defeating this one bad bill or instituting this one good amendment would fundamentally alter our people’s and civilization’s destiny. Our task is as much about consciousness, understanding, culture, and awakening as it is about “politics” in the technical sense of the term.

At NPI, we don’t get caught up in the little stuff. We want to set big, meaningful goals for our movement—goals that might now seem “impossible,” even outlandish, but which will define our projects moving forward.

At the end of this essay (or by visiting this page), you can learn about becoming part of NPI, and about our basic membership program—The Sam Francis Circle (named after our co-founder).

What follows is a New Year’s reflection: an examination of what we’ve accomplished and where we’re headed.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

What did we do in 2013? Perhaps we should first look at what was done to us (!). It was impossible not to notice that in the past year mainstream media have been keen on “promoting” NPI, our projects, and yours truly. We were the subject of quite a few hit pieces; most prominently, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC warned her viewer against NPI and tried to use “the NPI menace” as a means of passing immigration reform, unsuccessfully. (I must admit, there was something surreal about seeing myself appear on the nightly news.) We also received press coverage by no less than the Washington Post, along with web outlets like Vice.com and The Daily Caller.

And then there was the curiously fawning profile of me in Salon. . .

We need to put these articles into perspective. Mainstream liberal media outlets have their own motivations for attacking us, and we shouldn’t fall into the trap of being defined by them and thinking that if they hate us, we must be doing something right! That’s not always true. For instance, I could definitely get another write-up by making a complete ass of myself, and we would recognize that this would harm NPI, our movement, and me.

But look closely at these various hit pieces. Amongst the vitriol, our attackers were unanimous in claiming that we are serious, even attractive; that we comprise the “next generation” of nationalism; and that we have influence among conservatives.

So let’s prove Rachel Maddow right!

This past year, we also took advantage of opportunities to present ourselves to the world on our own terms. This happened first in April, when I addressed Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance gathering, which was both an honor and thrill. There, I presented probably the most important piece I’ve written in some time, “Facing the Future as a Minority,” which argues that we must go beyond mainstream conservatism—beyond immigration and the hot-button issues we’re used to—and begin the struggle for a post-American Ethno-State on the American continent. This project is still in the stage of impossible, “utopian” ideals, but that’s where it has to start. Later in the fall, I also had the opportunity to travel to London and address the Traditional Britain Group, where I spoke on a similar topic.

And then in October, there was NPI’s 2013 National Conference, “After the Fall.” Put simply, this event put our organization on the map. First, there was the line-up of speakers, which included Alain de Benoist, a “founding father” of the postwar traditionalist Right. He spoke along with mainstays such as Tomislav Sunic, Alex Kurtagic, and Sam Dickson. We also featured new voices such as Jack Donovan, Roman Bernard, and a host of activists, publishers, and writers. And we did it all in Washington, DC—we turned the enemy territory against the enemy and made it our platform.

We need events like the National Leadership Conference for a number of reasons. They are rallying points and networking opportunity—perhaps their most important function is to facilitate introductions, friendship, and networking. They act as a means of communicating our messages to the world, and they demonstrate our resolve.

Looking ahead, I would like to announce three important things.

First, beginning in January, we will release all videos from the 2013 Conference—for free and on-demand.

Secondly, in the fall of 2014, NPI will be again host a gathering of a similar scale and importance as our 2013 event.

Thirdly, this spring, we’re going to try something new, edgy, and potentially rewarding for an event. I’ll be announcing details soon.

PUBLISHING

Now, let’s now turn to books. In September, we published The Newton Awards: A History of Genius in Science and Technology, by Michael Hart and Claire Parkinson (who’s a researcher at NASA). The Newton Awards is a quite readable history and, in its short life, it has already been sold to university libraries, bringing prestige to everything we do.

Also this winter, we published, under the Radix imprint, Survive—The Economic Collapse by Piero San Giorgio. Survive was a hit in Europe, where it first appeared, and was quite popular among “identitarian” groups. It is an analysis of the unsustainability of the credit-bubble, cheap-oil, endless-growth economy; it also offers a “practical guide” for building what Giorgio calls a “Sustainable Autonomous Base”—a self-reliant and resilient community. (In other words, you can learn how to live well in “interesting times.”) One quite positive thing about this book is that even though it’s about the end of the world as we know it, it’s never cranky; it’s written in an approachable and often humorous tone. This volume will appeal to a large community beyond our movement (including confused conservatives and leftists).

Our next volume is a real treasure—Reuben a novel by Tito Perdue. Reuben is both light-hearted and deeply serious, written in both a realistic and outrageous style. Tito tells the story of a man whose goal is nothing less than taking over the world, or at least “turning it around.” Without reading it yourself, it’s probably impossible for me to communicate just how funny and compelling it is.

Also, in the coming first quarter of 2014, we will release a second, revised edition of Richard Lynn’s classic Race Differences in Intelligence—which was, by the way, the first WSP volume I ever read—along with the second issue of Radix Journal.

Over the coming year, Radix will publish a study of Martin Heidegger by Alexandr Dugin as well as Raymond Wolters’s quite excellent book on education. And in late 2014, we have a surprise in store, a new book which is something of an archeological find . . . (I’ll say no more at this point.)

RadixJournal.com + NPIAmerica.org

NPI has also re-dedicated itself to having a strong web presence and being a place where we go, everyday, for analysis, culture, and commentary. NPI’s home website, NPIAmerica.org, was completely redesigned and now features regular blogging. Also, we launched RadixJournal.com, a complementary website to the print journal, which will involve some of the best writers in our movement. Roman Bernard has come on board to help me with all of these projects, especially the website. (I discussed our overall goals for Radix here.)

Put simply we’re doing a hell of a lot! And we need your help to keep getting better.

The best way of getting started with NPI is to join the Sam Francis Circle for only $50 per year. You get your choice of two book as well as access to our private social network, The Conspiracy, which is a discreet and secure forum for discussion (something that became a lot more relevant in 2013!).

And if you have the means, I would encourage you to make an even greater impact. We have created the Hyperborean Circle specifically for these donors who can make sustaining contributions to NPI.

Best wishes and Happy New Year!

RICHARD B. SPENCER
President and Director

Fill out my online form.

If you don’t want to join the Sam Francis Circle, but would still like to make a donation, you can do so below.
~Thanks!

Fill out my online form.

The National Policy Institute is classified as a Section 501 (c) (3) organization under the Internal Revenue Code. Individuals, foundations, corporations, and associations may support the educational and research work of NPI through tax-deductible gifts.

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America Culture Identity

Introducing RadixJournal.com

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On Christmas day, we started something new and revived something that needs a breath of life.  RadixJournal.com is now live, featuring original writing, podcasts, and blogging on culture, society, race, politics, and beyond. Roman Bernard is Managing Editor. Both he and I will contribute frequently, and we will also involve the best writers in our movement.

On Christmas day, we started something new and revived something that needs a breath of life. RadixJournal.com is now live, featuring original writing, podcasts, and blogging on culture, society, race, politics, and beyond. Roman Bernard is Managing Editor. Both he and I will contribute frequently, and we will also involve the best writers in our movement. Radix is a project of The National Policy Institute, as well as its publishing division, Washington Summit Publishers.[1]

Editing Takimag from 2008–2010 and founding AlternativeRight.com in 2010 and editing it for its first two years, I have a track record of producing superior material online and maintaining standards. Radix is a culmination of much what I’ve been working on and thinking about for the past five years.[2]

RadixJournal.com will also play a complementary role to the print journal. Many articles that appear first online will be developed and expanded for the journal; in turn, print articles will, after a while, get a second life online.

Radix Journal is, we think, the proper use of print in the 21st century. Paper has given way to the Internet and mobile Web as the primary means of communication; but print still possesses an aura of authority and permanence, and it presents aesthetic opportunities that are not available online. We need to work in this medium, and Radix Journal will be a cultural flagship.

We’ve been delighted with Radix’s first issue, The Great Erasure, as well as the second, Pop Fascism, which is in an advanced stage of preparation. That said, we’ve simply fallen behind on producing volumes—and we know this has really frustrated subscribers. Roman has promised to be a cruel taskmaster in keeping me and the print edition of Radix on schedule. And an extremely valuable person has stepped in to lighten my load in editing and publishing books. And the website will play a vital role as the incubator for new material.

What is the real motivation behind Radix? In many ways, it’s quite simple. Good writing is an end in itself, as is the creation of a culture outside the boundaries of Americanism, liberalism, and the hideous academic establishment. (Building a culture is, of course, a collective project, and Radix will be one voice among many others.)

Secondly, we who support projects like Radix recognize that renewing our our people and culture is not simply about passing or defeating one bill, turning one knob, pulling one lever, or pressing for one single issue. It’s not that “politics” (in this technical sense of the word) does not have a place … it does … but we must be honest with ourselves: defeating the latest bad bill produced in Washington would, in the rosiest possible scenario, delay the destruction of our people and civilization by an hour or two.

Our task is to develop a fundamentally new way of looking at the world, a new way of acting and understanding ourselves, a different and higher value system. This is an enormous task! But the fight is worth fighting, and the struggle will be rewarding.

We hope you’ll join us!

Sincerely,

Richard Spencer

  1. Radix is also an imprint of Washington Summit Publishers; its titles, which include fiction and non-fiction, explore many of the same themes as the journal.  ↩
  2. When I began AlternativeRight.com in March 2010, I wanted to a make a firm break with the mainstream “conservative movement”—a break that was announced in the site’s very name. Almost four years later, I feel that AltRight’s central goal was achieved. Also, unfortunately, after I ceased editing the webzine in the spring of 2012, the site’s standard of quality was not consistently maintained. Both of these factors led me to conclude that it was time to move one. AltRight remains a fantastic resource, and all of its material will gradually be republished here.  ↩
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