Food For The European Mind

2007-10-13T07:41:00.000-07:00

Heidegger

and

The Environment

Books & Reviews

Not Easy Being Green: Process, Poetry and the Tyranny of Distance [PDF]

Damon A. Young

For Heidegger, then, our existence in a World is ‘spread’ over the people who are in the place with us, and the ‘things’ that share these places. In Heidegger’s later work, this notion of Being-in-the-World is extended to include the notion of ‘dwelling’. With dwelling, our self, ‘stretched’ in time and place, exists in a manner that cares for the people and ‘things’ that are incorporated into this ‘stretching’.

Heideggerian Phenomenology [PDF]

Matthew Antolick

[Heidegger] is not attempting to reveal the application of mathematical knowledge as faulty: there is far too much evidence in support of the effectiveness of mathematical method in problem solving, scientific experimentation, and so-called “mastery” of nature by humans. The problem lies in the assumption that such successes point to the mathematical comportment as the comportment: as the one way of grasping the real. To put it another way: while Heidegger clearly acknowledges the correctness of mathematical method, he doubts the mathematical as primordially true.

Body in Environmental Virtue

Simon P. James

To free ourselves of the alienating influence of technology and recover our rootedness in the world, Heidegger maintains that we must cultivate a mode of being he calls a “releasement toward things.” To be “released” toward a thing is to attend to it as the particular thing that it is, rather than as a placeholder for some other thing that would serve the same function.

Ontology and Ethics at the Intersection of

Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy

Iain Thomson

Because phenomenological methods undercut mind/world dualism, phenomenology is able to recognize the reality of environmental ‘values’, the alleged ‘fact’ that certain pro-environmental values are ‘always already in the world’ and so simply await the appropriate phenomenological approach in order to be discovered and made the basis of a new environmental ethics.

Heidegger’s Gift to Ecocriticism [PDF]

Kate Rigby

[I]n Heidegger, dwelling involves an attunement to the given, it is itself not given, either by place of birth or ancestral belonging, even if your dwelling place does in fact happen to be that of your forefathers.

Allows the Beautiful to Occur [!PDF!]

Sean McGrath

At the end of “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger leaves us with the cryptic suggestion that a “saving power” lies concealed in this “dangerous” moment in the destiny of the West. We are at a stage in the history of being where the human being no longer fully encounters itself because everywhere it finds only itself.

Heidegger and Dwelling

Michael Peters

Ruth Irwin

Crucially, physis does not rely on the materiality of the planet, but rather on its dynamic of obscurity and emergence into the light of truth, aletheia. Physis is, at once, aspects of the earth coming forth and at the same time, necessarily, retaining a hidden element.

The Place of Nature in the Fourfold [!PDF!]

Keith Brown and Dr. Richard Owsley

The concept of "earth" by Heidegger

History and the "oblivion of Being"

Alberto Carrillo Canán

Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics

Tad Beckman

National-Anarchism and Classical American Ideals:

2007-07-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

National-Anarchism and Classical American Ideals:

Is A Reconciliation Possible?

"Establishing a new world order of supranational government is Hitlerian in concept and will need to be Stalinist in execution." (1)

-Taki Theodoracopulos

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence-it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."(2)

-George Washington

"That government is best which governs least."(3)

-Thomas Jefferson

"anarchism ('an-ar-kiz-im) n (1642): a political theory holding all forms of government to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups"(4)

-Webster's Dictionary

As long as there has been power and authority, there has been rebellion. From the insurrectionary efforts of Spartacus in ancient times to the noble resistance of the people of Occupied Palestine in our own era, the enslaved and oppressed have sought to throw off the chains by which their masters keep them bound. The great libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard argued that the history of human civilizations is largely a struggle of liberty against power with the latter gaining the upper hand with much greater frequency than the former. The great nineteenth century historian Lord John Acton insisted that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At no point has the truth of Acton's famous adage been demonstrated more strongly than in the last century. R. J. Rummell's monumental studies in a unique field that he chooses to label "democide", a term coined to describe the systematic slaughter of subjects by the states which rule over them, show that nearly one hundred seventy million persons were annihlated by "their" governments during the twentieth century alone. These figures exclude those killed in intra-state warfare. Reviewing the sorry record of the treatment of subjects by states, Rummell paraphrases Acton and concludes that "power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely".(5) In a similar vein, the Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich August von Hayek recognized that power comes most easily to the ruthless, treacherous, cunning and amoral. Those who achieve power are faced with constant challenges to their position of supremacy and are therefore driven to eliminate all those who can challenge their rule. The more concentrated power becomes, the more ruthless and deadly those who hold it will be. Hence, those who have held the greatest amount of power throughout history have also been history's massest of mass murderers-Stalin, Hitler, Mao and others of their ilk.

The greatest crimes are those committed by large disciplined organizations rather than solitary individuals. Arthur Koestler noted:

"...a series of fundamental misconceptions...which prevented (man) from learning the lessons of the past, and...now put his survival in question. The first of these..is putting the blame for man's predicament on his selfishness, greed, etc.; in a word, on the aggressive, self-assertive tendencies of the individual...I would like to suggest that the integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies." (6)

One need not reject the claims of a Hobbes or a Burke that humans are creatures of passion rather than reason to recognize that the most severe crimes perpetrated by individuals pale in comparison to those committed by organizations led by some sort of institutionalized authority. The modern serial killer is insignificant when contrasted with the death squad member or secret policeman. The greatest crimes of all are, of course, committed by the institution of the state, what Nietzsche characterized as a "cold monster". It is of the utmost importance to recognize that even persons of "normal" psychological make-up or moral temperament can be driven to act in the most atrocious ways when prodded by group norms or the direction of malignant leaders. This is borne out by the relevant studies in social psychology, particularly those of Stanley Milgram.(7) Hannah Arendt described this phenomena as "the banality of evil", a process whereby the most senseless and irrational forms of inhumanity acquire an aura of normalcy and take place within an atmosphere of dull mechanization.(8)

Various critiques of power, authority and the state have arisen thoughout history. The European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave birth to the ideology of classical liberalism, which sought to limit the rule of power through various institutionalized mechanisms and processes. Classical anarchism arose as an ideology that explicitly rejected the authority of the state in toto, rather than seeking to simply curb its worse abuses. In his study on the origins of the state, Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that states have their roots in the invasion, conquest and plundering of some groups by others.(9) This observation strips the state of any veneer of legitimacy it may try to shroud itself with. Modern theorists of "democratic" or "constitutionalist" expressions of the state will typically argue that "modern" states are somehow to be differentiated from those of the Old Order, who claimed authority on the basis of divine right or superior might rather than "popular sovereignty", "the general will" or other such platitudes. Yet claims of this type have been effectively exposed and discredited by Lysander Spooner, Hans Hermann Hoppe and other notable anti-state thinkers. (10)

If the primary danger to human life and liberty is the excessive concentration of power, then humanity has never faced a greater threat than it does today as the universal dictatorship of the New World Order under the boot of American imperialism continues to be consolidated. At present, the American imperial regime demands the exclusive "right" of the first-use of military force, including nuclear weaponry, as part of its own "defensive" perogative, yet curiously seeks to deny this right to others. In a manner rivaling the greatest tyrants in history, the US regime has systematically fabricated all sorts of extravagant falsehoods to justify its imperial ambitions regarding the Islamic nations. The American regime has established a Faustian bargain with the degenerate ideology of Zionism for the purpose of further consolidation of its own power, both internationally and within the American nation itself. The emerging world order is one of unilateral and utterly arbitrary rule by a regime that demands absolute obedience, economic domination by a handful of transnational corporations of the First World by means of mercantilist arrangements managed by byzantine bureaucracies, and cultural dominance by the combined values of liberal commercialism-consumerism and authoritarian leftist-egalitarianism and "multiculturalism" under the ideology of "political correctness". David Michael describes the dangers, both bellowing and subtle, posed by such a global order:

"Even without the danger of the machinery of world government falling into the hands of a Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, and without the danger of large supranational institutions or nations being manipulated or exploited to serve certain groups or individuals at the expense of other groups or individuals, the sheer remoteness of supranational institutions from the ordinary people can have undesirable effects. The remoteness of decision making can lead to inappropriate decisions, as might occur where the quality of the food we eat is determined by supranational institutions rather than local farmers. The remoteness of the dominant culture can engender psychological and sociological problems-violence, alienation, crime and youth problems have been attributed, inter alia, to globalization and the breakdown of communities that it has engendered."(11)

As power has never been quite so centralized as it is at present, the anarchist critique is now more relevant than ever. The essence of the traditional anarchist position is that the state is no more than a criminal gang writ large. The state exists to control territory, protect an artificially privileged ruling class, exploit its subjects or expand its power. Any other claims by or on behalf of the state are simply a matter of evasion, obfuscation, or perhaps mere naivete. Although the philosophical anarchist critique of the state originating from the ideas of William Godwin or Pierre Joseph Proudhon is the most radical and comprehensive, this critique follows in the footsteps of many strands of traditional ethical, religious and philosophical systems going back to very ancient times. These include the criticisms of power offered by the early Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, the Stoic and Cynic branches of classical Greek philosophy, the very ancient Hebrew scriptures, and the teachings of early Church fathers such as Augustine of Hippo as well as tendencies within the Radical Reformation, such as the Anabaptists.(12)

Having emerged only a couple of centuries ago and having never been dominant in any particular nation or culture, philosophical anarchism is still a rather new and underdeveloped political outlook. "Classical" anarchism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century variety, represented by Bakunin, Kropotkin and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, positioned itself as the most radical wing of the international socialist labor movement, as the so-called "labor question" was the dominant social struggle of the day. The political programs of the classical anarchists, as well as their contemporary "neo-anarchist" descendants, typically call for some sort of decentralized socialism, although neo-anarchism often focuses more on the advancement of left-wing cultural values such as feminism, "anti-racism" and "gay liberation" than on politico-economic matters. Another branch of modern anarchist thought, the "libertarian" anarchism of Murray Rothbard, is more rooted in classical liberalism than classical socialism, and traces its ancestry to the uniquely American branch of classical anarchism that emerged in the nineteenth century, the so-called "individualist" anarchism of Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker. Although these variations of anarchist thought provide a rich intellectual heritage that can be drawn upon, they are clearly inadequate in a number of important ways. The principle error in the branches of anarchism thus far established is that of universalism. It is particulary important that this error be confronted if anarchism is to offer a viable alternative to the universalist ideology that provides the intellectual foundations of the New World Order.

Reading through the incessant manifestos and political statements issued by anarchist factions, one notices a number of dominant themes. Foremost among these is a type of Rousseauan utopianism that postulates the innate benevolence of human nature, a benevolence that would realize its potential if only the oppressive chains of established institutions were removed and the true essence of humanity allowed to flourish. As the nineteenth century was a time of enormous human advancement, classical anarchists like Proudhon or Bakunin can be forgiven for adopting such a childishly naive outlook. However, with the experience of the twentieth century now behind us, such a perspective becomes laughable with the advantage of hindsight. Another common theme in conventional anarchist thought is an implicit reliance on archaic Marxist and Fabian social democratic economic theory, a set of ideas that have been disasterous in every nation where they have been put into practice. Marxism is a dead faith, except among Western radicals, and the elitist social democratic views advanced by the Fabians have served to create a permanently entrenched "new class" of bureaucratic parasites that are slowly but surely driving the First World nations towards stagnation, deterioration and eventual collapse.(13) Anarchists are typically the most zealous champions of the cultural ideals of the modern Left-feminism, environmentalism, homosexualism, anti-racism. Yet these ideas are hardly radical in the modern welfare states of the West. Traditional forms of oppression such as bestial violence towards ethnic out-groups, the traditional religious subordination of women, and the organized state persecution of homosexuals have become socially unacceptable in modern societies to such a degree that Scotland Yard now maintains a "Diversity Directorate" to police attitudes not sanctioned by the high priests of "political correctness". Left-wing anarchists have, on such matters, become a type of self-parody that robotically parrots the rhetoric of the left-wing of the ruling class.

The professed aims of anarchists of the Left also conflict with one another. The ideal political order postulated by left-anarchists is typically something that resembles a traditional New England town meeting or the participatory democracy of ancient Athens. While this model is no doubt as legitimate as any other, it is hardly any sort of panacea. After all, it was the democracy of Athens that put Socrates to death, thereby souring his successors Plato and Aristotle on democracy, and it was the town meeting governments of Puritan New England that instigated the witch trials of Salem. Yet, left-anarchists somehow assume that all of their idealized directly democratic, consensus-based, decentralized communities are somehow going to embrace the egalitarian-multicultural perspective of the Left. If such a system were put into place in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, the first vote taken would be to appoint Osama bin Laden to the position of President for Life. Libertarian anarchists make a similar mistake in their efforts to universalize a commercialist culture bound together by no common threads other than the actions of consumers in the marketplace and the standard common law rules concerning crimes, torts and contracts.

To understand what is wrong with these schools of anarchism, it may be useful to draw upon the work of Hayek. Loosely and awkwardly, we might characterize a Hayekian approach to social theory as one that draws a sharp distinction between "constructivist" and "organicist" understandings of social evolution and the origins of human institutions. Both leftist and libertarian variations of anarchist theory are implicitly rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, which tended to glorify and overstate the capacities of human reason and the ability of human beings to achieve a certain state of existence through the application of critical intelligence for the purpose of reconstructing the external world. While the excesses of the Enlightenment in this realm may have been an understandable backlash against the superstition and irrationalism that often dominated previous eras, the enduring legacy of all this has been a prevailing tendency towards fantastic utopianisms on the part of modern intellectuals, whether they be of the left-anarchist, left-liberal, libertarian, Marxist or neoconservative varieties. As an antidote, Hayek emphasized the inherent limitations of human knowledge and human reason as a means of "constructing" elaborate plans for the reorganization of society that are ultimately doomed to failure and the intellectual conceit reflected by such efforts.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of anarchists is the smallness of their ranks. This is likely rooted in the tendency of most anarchists, of whatever school, to focus on ideological abstractions and a type of intellectual elitism that disregards the sentiments and sensibilities of ordinary people. Most people are not intellectuals. Most people are not interested in ideology. Most people are not the rugged self-reliant individualists idealized by libertarians or the faithful crusaders for social justice that serve as left-wing archetypes. Instead, the nature of most people is to focus on their immediate day-to-day business. Most people seek security, identity and self-actualization in groups and get their ideas about what constitutes "right and wrong" from cues taken from peers, members of their own in-groups and perceived leaders and authority figures. The strongest attachments of this type seem to be family, ethnicity, religion, culture, language, geography and, to some degree, economic function and social class. Particularistic attachments of these types are commonly disregarded by leftist and libertarian intellectuals (and by establishment liberals and neoconservatives!) as reactionary, backward, overly parochial or provincial, ignorant and superstitious and even bigoted and hateful. Yet it is precisely these types of particularism that provide the social glue that holds organic and authentic human societies and cultures together. It is these types of particularism that the ruling class of the New World Order wishes to eliminate in order to reduce every individual to the level of identity-less worker-consumer drone faithfully practicing the religion of the credit card and reciting the catechism of political correctness. Consequently, it is these particularisms and the attachments that ordinary people have to them that serve as humanity's best hope for fostering resistance to the universal slavery the oligarchs of the New World Order wish to bring about.

There remains the question as to how the anarchist critique is to be practically applied and what sort of institutions an anarchism-influenced civilization would likely produce. Unlike some of his successors, the godfather of classical anarchism Pierre Joseph Proudhon recognized that "anarchy" was an ideal, like "peace" or "justice", towards which humanity could only strive. Said Proudhon:

"...It is scarcely likely, however far the human race may progress in civilization, morality and wisdom, that all traces of government and authority will vanish."(14)

Likewise, the eminent philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell characterized anarchism as "the ultimate ideal to which society should approximate".(15) Instead of pursuing utopian fantasies, anarchists should focus on identifying and breaking up concentrations of power wherever they may be located. The best bet for achieving this aim would likely be the development of strong regionalist and localist movements, both inside and outside of the territorial boundaries of the United States, with each of these reflecting the unique cultural or ideological orientations of their own organic or intentional communities, and organized in ways whereby different regions and communities are independent but mutually supportive of one another in the face of imperial power, regardless of their particular sectarian differences. The perspective of Troy Southgate offers a clue as to how to proceed:

"We firmly believe in political, social and economic decentralization. In other words, we wish to see a positive downward trend whereby all bureaucratic concepts such as the UN, NATO, the EU and the World Bank and even nation-states like England and Germany are eradicated and consequently replaced by autonomous village communities." (16)

Such a vision is entirely compatible with the original anarchist vision of Proudhon who offered decentralized confederations of communities, municipalities and distinctive regions, each containing their own cultural identity, combined with an economy ordered on the basis of small property holders and dispersed control over resources, cooperatives and worker organizations. Such a vision affords most of humanity the opportunity to obtain sovereignty within the context of the social groups most strongly identified with. Such a vision offers a means of reconciling the numerous social conflicts fostered by the modern state resulting in an increase in social harmony, liberty, prosperity and peace. Those with conflicting values should simply separate from one another in favor of mutual self-segregation. Such is the way to authentic cultural diversity as opposed to the vision of those for whom "diversity" is simply a collection of exotic foods, museum displays and state-mandated social engineering.

As noted, anarchism as a political philosophy is still very much in the elementary stage of its development as an intellectual system. Fortunately, certain strands of anarchistic thought have emerged in recent years that may eventually prove to be a corrective for some of the extravagance and frivolity found in the established branches of anarchism. One of these is a tendency emerging from the British Far Right known as "National-Anarchism". This particular variation of anarchist theory lacks the irrational utopianism found in most other schools of anarchism. It might be said that national-anarchism is anarchy without pretensions. The core tenet of national-anarchist ideology is a fervent opposition to the emerging global system of the "New World Order" under the rule of American imperialism. More than any other political tendency, anarchist or otherwise, national-anarchism recognizes that there is really only one system of government in the contemporary world and that is the American empire. As a national-anarchist publication, "Voice of the Resistance", puts it:

"Nations, at least as you knew and loved them, are dead. We live today in a post-nationalist, globalized world. What you call your nation is now a mere administrative district of the New World Order. Never mind its 'proud and ancient history'! Never mind its 'wonderful accomplishments'! Never mind how many of your ancestors fought and died for it! Those things were in the past." (17)

Incidentally, this apt description of the nature of the New World Order applies to the American nation as well, despite the American origins of the global system. The conservative Catholic commentator Joseph Sobran observes:

"Only a few Americans have clearly understood that contrary to our sentimental illusions, the old federated constitutional republic has become not only a single consolidated state, but an empire as well. Today the president has ceased to be a mere executive, subordinate to the legistlative branch, and has become an elective emperor, a temporary Caesar. This is hard for Americans to see, because it goes against our cherished national myths and has no close historical precedent. But foreigners may see it more clearly than we do. To American ears, the phrase "American imperialism" still sounds like leftist jargon. But it is more accurate than our slogans of democracy."(18)

American conservatives, libertarians and other anti-statists and anti-globalists now find themselves in an interesting ideological predicament. To consistently oppose "Big Government", one must first and foremost oppose centralized government, imperial government and global government. The foremost proponent of centralism, imperialism and globalism in today's world is the US regime. This necessitates that authentic anti-statists adopt an attitude that the jingoist wing of US politics would characterize as "anti-Americanism". As a look at the leading "paleoconservative" publications will show, this is a position that traditionalist conservatives are loathe to adopt. Their deathly fear of being labeled "anti-American" and lumped together with the riff raff of the reactionary left prevents them from developing as comprehensive a critique of the global imperial order as they otherwise might (just as their deathly fear of being labeled "anti-Semitic" prevents them from developing a similar critique of the role of Zionist ideology in the formulation of American imperial ambitions).(19) Yet these phobias are unfounded. If the historic America that traditionalist conservatives cling to is just another nation that has died at the hands of the empire, then the current US regime is not an expression of America but a hostile, enemy, occupational regime. Joseph Sobran notes:

"At any rate, the old America-the America of hard work and sound money, of thrift and piety, of small property and free markets, of individual freedom and responsibility, of limited government and dispersed power-is gone. The kind of people who made the old America hardly exist anymore. Their descendants might as well belong to another species; anyway, they will soon be outnumbered by aliens and "minorities"... Americans neither remember the old America nor comprehend the new one, which defies comprehension. What is an "American" these days? Someone who has filled out the proper forms? One out of hundreds of millions of disinherited people, who have nothing in common but a government that supplies them with depreciating paper currency? A mere digit of the empire, I suppose." (20)

Serious opponents of global empire are not conservatives but radicals and revolutionaries of the first order. More than any other ideological tendency, national-anarchism recognizes that traditional ideological, cultural and even national boundaries are irrelevant in the current world order. As David Michael, a leading theoretician of national-anarchism, explains:

"The 'left/right' political distinction is a cynical ploy to divide the people and set them against each other so that they do not unite against the single main enemy of us all: the Establishment. As Eduard Limonov remarked: 'There's no longer any left or right. There's the system and the enemies of the system." (21)

If traditional nations have been absorbed by the empire, and if the traditional left/right political spectrum has been dissolved by the universalization of the values of American imperialism and global capital, then the traditionalist elements of the right are the natural allies of the anti-corporate left. The primary divisions among these scattered forces are cultural in origin. The traditional right places its emphasis on established institutions and values such as family, religion, ethnicity, nationality, traditional culture and organic communities. The left focuses first and foremost on those social groups believed to have been previously dispossessed or "excluded" in some way. These include workers and the poor, racial minorities, women, homosexuals and others. This type of progressivism has become institutionalized and rigidified in its own right as the existence of Scotland Yard's Diversity Directorate and the "speech codes" found on the campusues of American universities demonstrate. Both sides on these matters regard their opponents as tyrants and reactionaries. If effective opposition to the New World Order necessarily involves the creation of an anti-Establishment alliance that transcends conventional ideological, cultural and national boundaries, then obviously some means of accommodating such a diverse array of perspectives is sorely needed. National-anarchism invokes the ideal of radical decentralization as a means to this end. As "Voice of the Resistance" states:

"Consider the ancient Greek polis or city-state. Here was an institution that truly allowed for diversity of government. Although no overarching state structure existed, a variety of communities thrived across ancient Greece, often with very different systems of government ranging from the quasi-democracies of Athens to the more communistic regimes of Sparta. It is not too difficult to envisage an adapted form of such a system as an alternative to the American imperialism of the modern age. This, surely, must be anarchism at its most practicable and useful."

"Let a thousand different communities flourish! Let those who want communism have communism! Let those who want Islam have Islam! Let those who want Christianity have Christianity! Let those who want to live among their own racial kind do so! Let even those who want to keep the sham democracies of American imperialism have them! But let us all unite to defend such diversity, such freedom, against the tyranny of the bland capitalism espoused by our lords and masters and their media puppets." (22)

National-anarchism of the type described here is a marked improvement over prior expressions and applications of anarchist theory. National-anarchism lacks the utopian fantasies employed by traditional left-wing anarchism and instead employs a heavy dose of realism. The contradictory nature of the conventional left-anarchist demand for decentralization, communal socialism and proletarian supremacy combined with the universalization of left-wing cultural values is absent from national-anarchism. Political decentralization would result in more rather than less social discrimination as there would be no centralized state to enforce egalitarian or progressivist values within local communities. Likewise, the poor and working class tend to be the most socially conservative cultural element. Secularism, feminism, multiculturalism and homosexualism are the predominant social values of the cultural elite rather than the common people. Economic collectivism requires maximum social discipline and conformity. There is a reason why highly collectivist regimes, such as those of the Marxist-Leninist variety, severely repress political dissidents, religious believers and perceived sexual deviates.

Much of what passes for left-wing anarchism would, if implemented, be anything but anarchistic. Consider, for example, the political outlook of an outfit called the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC):

"As anarcho-communists, we struggle for a classless, stateless, and non-hierarchical society. We envision an international confederation of directly democratic, self-managed communities and workplaces; a society where all markets, exchange value, systems of wages and divisions of labor have been abolished and the means of production and distribution are socialized in order to allow for the satisfaction of human needs, adhereing to the communist principle: 'From each according to ability, to each according to need'." (23)

What we have here is simply a restatement of traditional Marxism with some nominally anarchistic ideas thrown in for good measure. How is this "international federation" going to be somehow different from a state? What if some communities in this federation decide to withdraw? Is an anarcho-Abe Lincoln going to come along to prevent them from doing so? What if some "directly democratic, self-managed communities and workplaces" do not want to abolish "all markets, exchange value, systems of wages and division of labor"? How are "the means of production" going to be "socialized in order to allow for the satisfaction of human needs" without either a consumer market or a state plan? What about those people who do not wish to contribute "according to ability" but prefer to take more than their "need"? Who is going to say otherwise? It becomes clear that for NEFAC "anarchism" is simply a world communist government with a centrally planned economy of the type that has typically failed miserably in Marxist states. This becomes clear in an overview found in the NEFAC publication of the economic arrangements established by the anarcho-syndicalists of 1930s Spain:

"Had the Spanish collectives been moving in a genuinely communist direction the tendency towards self-suffiency and autonomy for each collective... would have been reversed in favor of centralized planning by delegate bodies."(24)

It is the precisely the decentralist and most anarchistic aspects of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist collectives that are being condemned. Of course, the NEFAC group represents the intellectual bottom of the barrel even among the reactionary left. The ideas of all socialist-anarchists are not always so muddled and incoherent. The "libertarian" or "anarcho-capitalist" variations of anarchist theory are usually more well-developed than those of their left-wing counterparts. Economic problems and matters of practical application aside, a principal difficulty with "free market" anarchism is its reliance on abstact ideological concepts and indifference to cultural matters. Libertarians of this type make the same mistake as the Marxists who view everything from the perspective of a narrow economic determinism and intellectual constructs. The primary strength of national-anarchism is its rejection of universalism in favor of particularism. Adherents of national-anarchism are not required to accept any particular set of philosophical or cultural values beyond the bare minimum of opposition to the New World Order and the need to replace it with decentralized, community based political institutions. David Michael comments:

"One of the really neat things about national-anarchism is that it can appeal to a lot of very different people. Whether you're a communist, a nationalist, a Muslim, a Christian, or whatever, if you go along with the basic core ideas, such as opposition to the American-led 'New World Order', opposition to global governance by a one-world superstate (de jure or de facto), and a belief in a world of small, relatively independent communities, each 'doing its own thing', then national-anarchism could appeal to you....national-anarchism, by its very nature, allows its adherents to hold to a wide variety of peripheral values (Islamic, communist, Christian, Satanist and so forth)." (25)

Theoretically, then, national-anarchism could include not only the kinds of communities mentioned above but also communities organized according to the variations of classical anarchism (mutualism, syndicalism or anarch-communism), neo-anarchism (primitivism, libertarian municipalism or the ideas of Lorenzo Komboa Ervin), libertarianism (whether of the Rothbardian, Randian or Hayekian variety), racial nationalism (including such tendencies within all races), various populist tendencies (such as the US militia movement or the Swedish National Democrats), monarchism (such as that favored by certain elements among the indigenous peoples of Hawaii) or the traditional tribe and clan based cultures found in African, Asian or Middle Eastern societies. Even ideological groupings that theoretically endorse a powerful centralized state (such as Marxist-Leninists or National Socialists) could achieve sovereignty within their own enclaves. Those who wish to retain some variation of the present system could do so. Those who favor a radically different system could, to a large degree, realize their goals as well. National-anarchism focuses on cultural struggles, community sovereignty and authentic cultural diversity rather than economic determinism, abstract intellectual constructs or utopian egalitarianism and universalism.

Probably the most controversial aspect of national-anarchism is the fact that many of its leading theoreticians and adherents have their political roots in the British Far Right and have been previously involved with anti-immigration and white nationalist tendencies like the National Front or the International Third Position. Some national-anarchists continue to hold what might be characterized as, for lack of a better term, "conservative" views on race and culture. As Troy Southgate, the founder of national-anarchism, explains:

"Racial miscegenation, for example, is viewed by National-Anarchists, as something which runs contrary to nature. Similarly, we regard issues like human cloning, euthanasia, homosexuality, genetically-modified foodstuffs, vivisection and abortion in the same way...(O)ur vision is based upon the realities of self-determination for all peoples and not on mindless racial hatred toward others. Furthermore, we do not subscribe to a supremacist agenda or wish to enforce our world view on others...These are issues which must be decided by those concerned, although we do remain adamant that such practices remain outside of our own naturally-based Anarchic communities...if people disagree...(w)e have no problem with that. As long as they do not prevent us from occupying our own space and land in which to live according to our own principles and beliefs. Those who attempt to interfere with our way of life or prevent us from realizing our distinct vision based upon Natural Order are nothing short of fascistic and authoritarian. We do not wish to persecute others or bend them to our will. Let them found their own communities..."(26)

This outlook is a refreshing alternative to the anti-intellectualism and pseudo-Marxist totalitarianism offered by left-wing anarchists and the aristocratic, robber baron conservatism offered by anarcho-capitalists. With national-anarchist arrangements, controversial social questions could be resolved by means of community preference. There could be communities for separatists within all the different ethnic and religious groups along with multi-ethnic and secular communities. There could be pro-abortion and anti-abortion communities, gay militant and "homophobe" communities, gun nut and anti-gunner communities, vegan and carvivore communities, druggie and anti-druggie communities. Theoretically, there could be communities for UFO worshippers or human sacrifice enthusiasts. Some communities could be as closed as those of the Taliban or the Nazis while others could be as free-wheeling as the Mardi Gras. Those who did not like the communities they found themselves in could simply migrate to a more appealing community. Such a vision, what David Michael describes as an anarchy of "nations" or "homelands" or "communities", seems to be a realistic alternative to those forms of anarchism that promise the fulfillment of utopian fantasies of absolute social equality and social harmony or absolute individual sovereignty where every person somehow functions as a sovereign nation unto themselves. Such a vision seems entirely compatible with any consistent application of the traditional anarchist ideals of decentralization, anti-statism, mutual aid, voluntarism, individual sovereignty, free association and federation and community self-determination. However, because of the views of some leading theoreticians and adherents of national-anarchism on racial and cultural matters, the typical reaction of left-wing anarchists to national-anarchism has been rather similar to what one might expect from a five-year-old girl who suddenly discovers a gargantuan spider in her bed. But such hysteria is more illustrative of typical left-wing bigotry and narrow-mindedness rather than any actual weakness in the national-anarchist perspective.

For the record, I am not nor have I ever been either a racial separatist or a social conservative. On a purely personal level, an individual's race, religion or sexual orientation is no more important to me than their hair or eye color. Politically, my approach is fairly eclectic. Race is no doubt a factor in the determination of individual character and social relations, but so too is class, gender, religion, individual psychological traits, geography, culture, history, educational methods, parenting methods, life experience, probably physics and many other things. I would not prioritize race in the same manner as the above statements by Troy Southgate indicate. However, Southgate's views on Natural Order are relatively similar to those found among many nationalist or separatist tendencies among non-whites, most traditional religions, traditional indigenous cultures that leftists tend to romanticize, and much of the Old Left (which often regarded feminism as bourgeoise and homosexuality as a manifestation of capitalist decadence). Many social groups that leftists claim to champion-urban American black males, rank and file union members, the oppressed masses of the Islamic world-would include within their ranks many people with such an outlook. All ethnic groups have their separatist, preservationist tendencies along with their assimilationist, integrationist tendencies just as all religions have their fundamentalist or traditionalist as well as their ecumenical tendencies. If it is acceptable for left-wing environmentalists to seek to preserve the tiniest micro-species, then why is it not acceptable for some people to wish to preserve traditional races, nationalities, religions, languages or cultures? If the destruction of the Baghdad Museum and Library is rightfully viewed as a crime against culture, then why is the extinction of unique ethnic identities to be casually dismissed? While an interest in the preservation of specific ethnic groups does not have to mean that new ones cannot evolve, would the world really be a better place if everyone were beige?

On social matters, I tend to follow the lead of the late Ernest Van den Haag, who for many years was a leading American conservative intellectual and part of the circle of staunch Cold War militarists associated with William F. Buckley Jr. and the National Review magazine. Van den Haag was a harsh critic of leftists and libertarians alike and held right-wing social democratic views not unlike those of today's neoconservatives. He was also a fervent proponent of "law and order" and vigorously defended the death penalty and the strict punishment of criminals. Yet, Van den Haag also supported the "right-to-die", abortion rights, decriminalization of drugs and prostitution and eventually reversed his earlier position of support for the censorship of pornography. He also remarked that society has no compelling interest in regulating or legistlating concerning the matter of homosexuality. While I am an anti-imperialist and an anarcho-socialist rather than a conservative like Van den Haag, I largely share his social outlook. He was no doubt drawing on the experience of his own native Holland, a nation that maintains what are likely the most "liberal" policies in these matters and a nation that I have visited myself and found to be rather harmonious, prosperous and attractive.

It seems to me that efforts to eliminate abortion are simply futile. Many American social and religious conservatives lament the famed 1973 "Roe v. Wade" Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the early stages of pregnancy and rail incessantly about the number of abortions that have occurred since then, yet abortion remains illegal in Mexico but that nation has a higher rate of abortions per capita annually than the US. Reinstituting the legal ban on abortions would likely be about as effective as the legal ban on psychoactive drugs. The ancient Greeks seem to have had literally no conception of sexual morality and homosexuality was apparently the virtual norm in ancient Greece, at least among the elites, yet classical Greek culture is regarded by many as the apex of Western civilization, particularly and ironically by many conservatives. On euthanasia, I draw a sharp distinction between voluntary euthanasia and involuntary euthanasia. On one hand, if a terminally ill or severely physically disabled person wishes to end their own life and others wish to assist them, I can see no objection to that. Yet, I do not consider it to ever be appropriate for someone to take it upon themselves to kill another person without their consent and call it "mercy killing" or whatever, though I certainly think that such acts should not be penalized nearly as severely as homocides committed during the course of common crimes. On ecological questions, I take a somewhat more moderate position than that of many radicals. I largely agree with the conclusions of former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg,(27)who regards the fears of modern environmentalists as greatly exaggerated. I am considerably less sanguine about human cloning and genetic engineering, conjuring as they do the images of the eugenicist ideals of Hitler, Pol Pot and Imperial Japan.

Of course, all of the aforementioned questions are of an endlessly controversial nature with fervent and emotional opinions being held on all sides. Anarchistic political institutions provide a means for such disputes to be settled as peacefully as possible. Those with conflicting values or ideals should simply go their own way. Webster's Dictionary defines anarchism as "a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups". The catch is that people with different values or goals will form different kinds of associations. Egalitarians will form egalitarian associations. Elitists will form elitist associations. Socialists will form socialist associations. Racialists will form racialist associations. It may be that such absolute voluntarism can be maintained only as an ideal to be striven for. Obviously, the next best thing is radically decentralized politics. Such decentalization would likely result in the vast ideological and cultural diversity favored by national-anarchists. It is not all that difficult to envision how a system of political, cultural and geographical decentralization might work. However, for this kind of decentralization to exist as a concrete reality rather than as a theoretical construct only, economic decentralization would have to take place as well. Otherwise, political/cultural/geographical decentralization would exist only on paper. Consider, for example, the US constitutional system. Formally, the government of the United States is organized on the basis of a separation of powers, both vertically and horizontally. The national government consists of three separate and distinct branches-the legistlative, executive and judicial-with executive power spread out through a myriad of bureaucracies. The national government ostensibly shares power with the semi-autonomous state governments who maintain a similar separation of powers and delegate certain authority to localities. The enforcement arm of government is divided into the courts, the prosecutor's office, the police, the lawyer's guilds, and the penal system, with each of these being theoretically independent of one another. The military functions as a semi-autonomous state with its own legal system and governmental structure (much like the medieval church), but is still subject to external civilian authority. As sophisticated as this entire state apparatus may be, all of it is still controlled at the top by those with economic power in the broader society (Big Business, Big Banking, Big Oil, armaments manufacturers and other corporate interests) and a variety of well-organized and financially well-endowed interest groups (bureaucrats' unions, professional associations, Zionists and other ethnic/religious interests and single-issue pressure groups like "pro-life" and "pro-choice). As Jaroslaw Tomasiewicz states:

"A pluralistic, decentralized society can be the only alternative to a unified and centralized New World Order, a formless plasma fed on pop culture. Not only does territorial decentralization (broadening the authority of communities and regions) have to occur but also different cultural communities should gain autonomy. Not only the state but also every community should have the opportunity to proclaim its own laws for its own people. In that situation, coexistence of traditional patriarchal families and feminists' or homosexual pairs, religious fundamentalists' communities and countercultural groups, military-racist communities of the right wing and anarchistic or communistic groups of the left wing would be possible. So that the territorial and cultural decentralization doesn't become a fiction, it has to be accompanied by economic decentralization and that would mean eliminating the concentration of property and production forms. The information technology revolution gives the opportunity to make this process real. I believe that this idea of a pluralistic society is the only program, which would be able to combine so many scattered and quarrelling sections of anti-System opposition. The only requirement for accepting it is surrendering the ambition of making the whole of humanity happy by your own idea (It will be enough if you concentrate on making yourself happy only)." (28)

This vision outlined by Tomasiewicz intersects nicely with the original anarchist ideal offered by Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a man whose ideas illustrate that one can be both an extreme radical and an extreme conservative simultaneously. For this kind of Left-Right convergence to emerge in the modern world, a mutual cease fire and non-aggression pact would have to be established among competing cultural groups with political decentralization and mutual self-segregation utilized as a means of dealing with unresolvable disputes. Economic decentralization is somewhat more problematical given the technical questions involved. While in decentralist, pluralist social systems different types of communities would have widely divergent economic arrangements contingent upon their own needs, traditions and ideological orientations, it would seem that certain common economic principles could and should be agreed upon by the various anti-System forces. The principle conflicts involve the role of the state in economic matters and the historic dispute between the lassez faire and socialist traditions. The ranks of economic radicals include anarcho-syndicalists, mutualists, guild socialists, councilists, agrarians, primitivists, distributists, anarcho-communists, adherents of social credit, geoists, populists and others. The common thread among all of these tendencies is a belief that economic power and control over resources, property and productive processes should be dispersed and devoid of centralism. Economic decentralization is a natural complement to political decentralization and vice versa.(29)

When considering these ideas, it is interesting to consider their relevance to authentically American cultural history and traditions. It is a great irony, and perhaps an illustration of a fatal contradiction in the American psyche, that a nation originally founded by explorers, pioneers, mercenaries, pirates and refugees, established by means of an anti-colonial revolution, the principle exponent of the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, structured on a decentralist, federalist basis, should degenerate after only two centuries into an imperialist empire ordered on crass commercialism and consumerism, intellectual mediocrity, conformity and murderous neo-colonial aggression. The decentralist, anti-imperialist sympathies and immense respect for an authentic plurality of cultures found in national-anarchist thought are perfectly in keeping with early American traditions and classical American ideals. The isolation of North America allowed those who wished to escape persecution in Europe to find a homeland in the New World. Puritans went to Massachusetts, Baptists to Rhode Island, Quakers to Pennsylvania. Virginia and the Carolinas were largely colonies established by merchants and sea traders. Georgia was a penal colony a la Botany Bay. The American Revolution of 1776 came from a desire on the part of the colonists to preserve the freedom and independence they had found in America from the creeping tyranny of the Crown. (30)The westward expansion involved the creation of settlements organized as anarchistically as any ever found.(31) Along the way there has been the Southern independence movement of the Confederacy, slave revolts, labor uprisings, and massive resistance to imperialist wars and conscription. It is this aspect of American history and culture that modern revolutionaries should appeal to and capitalize on. Judging by the standards of classical American ideals, the modern US regime is nothing more than one massive act of treason.

It is also interesting to note the compatibility of national-anarchist ideals with those of authentic resistance movements that have emerged from the grassroots of American society in recent years. Many in the militia/patriot/constitutionalist milieu have worked to form their own intentional communities governed by the ideological principles of their choice. Others have created an alternative governmental or legal infrastructure based on the US Constitution, the Confederate Constitution, state constitutions, the Bible, the Magna Carta, old English common law, the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance and other sources of perceived cultural authority.(32) Some, like the Christian Jural Societies or the Continental Congress, have created a separatist or provisional political structure in the same way that the Palestinians established their own national organizational structure, Parliament and all, in the face of exile and the expropriation of their homeland by Zionist invaders. The national-anarchist concept of small, seceded communities emerging in the face of the global superstate is also consistent with the ideas postulated by some of the more radical libertarian thinkers, particularly Murray Rothbard and the leading contemporary exponent of Rothbardian anarchism, Hans Hermann Hoppe. Like the national-anarchists, Hoppe is a harsh critic of modern systems of liberal democracy. Like the national-anarchists, Hoppe regards the universalization of American imperialism and liberal democracy to be the primary threat to freedom and liberty. His book, "Democracy: The God That Failed" is a landmark work in political philosophy and political economy. (33)Hoppe regards modern democracy as a degeneration from earlier monarchical systems which he regards as less wasteful and warlike. When the stable, prosperous monarchy of Liechtenstein is compared with the indebted, near bankrupt, rapidly deteriorating social democratic states that dominate Europe, we can see that Hoppe may be on to something.(34) Some national-anarchist sympathizers express monarchist tendencies as well. Rothbard believed the right of political secession to be among the most powerful bulwarks against state tyranny. As a staunch anti-militarist and anti-imperialist, Rothbard believed that only two wars in American history were "just" wars-the American Revolution and the Southern War of Independence of 1861-1865. This position is consistent with that of the early American anarchist Lysander Spooner, an anti-slavery lawyer who championed southern secession while at the same time calling for slave insurrections against the southern aristocracy. If only the South had won the US Civil War, there would have been no consolidated national regime, and therefore no American entry into World War I, no Treaty of Versailles, no Hitler, no World War II, no Holocaust, no Stalinist occupation of Eastern Europe, no Cold War, no arms race, no Korean War and no War in Vietnam. Indeed, it would appear that the failure of the Confederate States of America was one of the greatest tragedies in world history. Applying these principles of secession and sovereignty to the modern world, it becomes obvious that anti-imperialists must stand by all nations and movements who defy the New World Order. This means defending Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, the Sudan, Iran, North Korea, Lebanon and any other nations who display resistance, regardless of what one may think of their internal politics. It means standing by nations like Russia, Germany, France, Turkey and Belgium when they refuse the dictates of American imperialism, even if this is largely an intramural dispute within the ranks of the masters of the New World Order. It means supporting armed insurrectionary movements on the periphery, such as the FARC of Colombia, the Peoples' War Group of Nepal, the Shining Path of Peru, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Hamas, Hezbollah, the ETA, IRA and the Corsican autonomists.

Hoppe's views on secession also involve a preference for small communities. Critiquing the failure of the Confederacy, Hoppe argues that the Union refused to allow the secession because the loss of revenue, subjects and territory involved was simply more costly to itself that fighting a war "to preserve the Union". As an alternative, a modern secessionist effort should:

"...take its cues from the European Middle Ages when, from about the twelfth century until well into the seventeenth century (with the emergence of the modern central state), Europe was characterized by the existence of hundreds of free and independent cities, interspersed into a predominately feudal social structure. By choosing this model and striving to create a U.S. punctuated by a large and increasing number of territorially disconnected free cities-a multitude of Hong Kongs, Singapores, Monacos and Liechtensteins strewn out over the entire continent-two otherwise unattainable but central objectives can be accomplished. First, besides recognizing the fact that the liberal-libertarian potential is distributed highly unevenly across the country, such a strategy of piecemeal withdrawal renders secession less threatening politically, socially and economically. Second, by pursuing this strategy simultaneously at a great number of locations all over the country, it becomes exceedingly difficult for the central state to create a unified opposition in public opinion to the secessionists which would secure the level of popular support and voluntary cooperation necessary for a successful crackdown." (35)

Of course, it is important to realize that Hoppe is preceding from a totally different set of ideological presumptions than those of the national-anarchists. Hoppe is clearly in the liberal-Enlightenment tradition while national-anarchists are critical of modernity in a way that is similar to that of traditional conservatives in the Burkean tradition, notably Russell Kirk. Also, Hoppe is primarily interested in a more uniform liberal-libertarian-capitalist ideological secession while national-anarchists favor a proliferation of communities that span the ideological and cultural spectrum. The national-anarchist position appears to be the preferable one, as it is more conducive to the kind of diversity that would be necessary to make such efforts viable. Hoppe's views on secession are very similar to those of David Michael. Unlike many leftist or libertarian anarchists, Michael does not reject electoral action, demonstrations, infiltration or "lone wolf" actions out of hand. Michael is refreshingly pragmatic and methodical when it comes to questions of strategy. (36)While favoring a "fight on all fronts" approach, Michael's primary emphasis is on acquiring territory, resources and influence and building communities and alliances. On the question of alliances, Michael comments:

"Many groups are opposed to globalisation-often for different reasons: anarchists, national-anarchists, nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Maoists, national bolsheviks, national socialists, national revolutionaries, third positionists, evironmentalists...As globalisation and American imperialism tighten their grip upon the world we might wonder whether the old, and largely redundant, distinction between 'left' and 'right' in politics might be replaced by a new and far more bitter struggle: the struggle between the global Establishment-the monopolar New World Order, dominated by America and American neoliberal economics and values-and those many and varied people who oppose it. " (37)

In the process of building communities and homelands, David Michael suggests a number of core conditions that need to be met. Such projects must be adequate in size, involve enough people and involve people of high quality and committment. Geographical isolation is also a necessity, along with ideological isolation, the avoidance of provocation of external authorities, an absence of destructive ideological or personality traits among the participants and a resolute committment to the avoidance of efforts to dominate other communities. Michael notes:

"Certain of our fellow travelers in the struggle against the Establishment have imperialist potential. The communists, National Socialists, and Islamic fundamentalists-all of these are fighting against the New World Order. Yet each, if it were to triumph all over the earth, has the potential to produce a globalised world order every bit as sinister as that of the current American empire. Care needs to be taken, when working with such people, that in working with them for the destruction of the Establishment, we do not inadvertently work towards the replacement of one globalising or imperialist force with another."(38)

We might also remember that is has been precisely these types of internecine battles among rival revolutionary factions that have destroyed prior revolutionary efforts, such as those of France of 1789, Russia of 1917, Spain of 1936 and Paris of 1968. David Michael's warnings concerning these matters echo those of Bakunin, whose foresight regarding the inherent statist and centralist tendencies of the Marxists offered a prophetic vision of the horrors and tragedies that were to emerge in the twentieth century. As a means of avoiding the replacement of one imperialism with another, we might once again return to the lessons of classical anarchism and learn from the example of the First International. The Marxists favored the concentration of power into the hands of the International's General Council, which they had control over, while the Bakuninists (who comprised a majority of the International's membership) believed the International should be a model for the future post-revolutionary society with as much autonomy as possible afforded to the local sections. Similarly, the alliance against the New World Order should be radically decentralized. Just as the International maintained sections in various countries, each with their own specific ideological inclinations, so should an alliance against Anglo-Zionist imperialism be structured in such a way as to reflect the varying ideological and cultural currents found within distinctive communities, regions and nations. I am not particularly knowledgeable of the cultural map of Europe or Asia beyond the purely elementary level. However, I might be able to provide a sketch of how such an alliance might be formed in North America, "in the belly of the beast", as Gueverra said. America, Canada and Mexico each include a number of distinctive regions. In the US, the primary regions are the Northeast corridor, long time home of the mercantile trade and banking interests, the Southern "Bible Belt", a hot bed of religious fundamentalism and social conservatism, the Midwest, with its inclinations towards heartland populism, the West, still a bastion of Marlboro country individualism, and the Left Coast, a multicultural region with many diverse ethnic and religious populations and a reputation as a haven for "alternative" lifestyles. Breaking things down a bit further, the rural and small town communities within America tend to lean towards social and cultural conservatism while the urban, metropolitan areas are more inclined towards "liberalism" and "progressivism". It is instructive to note the ideological content of various secessionist and decentralist movements that have appeared in the US in recent years. A San Francisco newspaper published an editorial calling for secession by that city and the creation of a liberal-progressivist city-state, citing Iceland as a model. A still small but growing neo-secessionist movement in the old Confederate states claims Christianity and conservative Southern heritage as its banners. A libertarian-capitalist group, the Free State Project, wishes to colonize an American state and set about the business of eliminating its government. During the 1970s some in the hippie movement undertook an effort to colonize Vermont with some apparent success, as anyone familiar with the internal politics of Vermont is no doubt aware. The white separatist tendencies in the US have at times subscribed to a doctrine called "Northwest Imperative", the aim of which would be to establish a white nationalist homeland in the Northwestern United States. Similarly, the black nationalist Nation of Islam organization has long called for a sovereign black homeland within the borders of the US. While Europe is more traditionally homogenous and less pluralistic than America, no doubt similar arrangements can be found in European society as well. Troy Southgate notes that a number of the tendencies in the national-anarchist family tree, such as the National Front and the English Nationalist Movement, called for regional independence for the distinctive regions among the British Isles and, despite a strong anti-immigrationist stance, cooperation with black and Asian communities within Britain.(39) Independence movements exist in northern Italy, Flanders, Corsica, the Basque country and, of course, Northern Ireland.

All of this brings us back to the original vision of Thomas Jefferson. At the risk of grotesque oversimplification, we might characterize American political history as an ongoing battle between the decentralist, agrarian ideals of Jefferson and the mercantilist, centralist preferences of his rival, Alexander Hamilton. Indeed, we might regard the establishment of the US national state in its earliest, late eighteenth century form as the first triumph of the Hamiltonians over the Jeffersonians, an event where the far more libertarian and decentralized Articles of Confederation was replaced via mercantilist coup with the more centralist, presidential form of government with which Americans are familiar. Subsequent American history has dramatically illustrated the wisdom of the early anti-federalist critics of the US Constitution, such as Jefferson and Patrick Henry. The Jeffersonians went on to suffer severe military defeat during the US Civil War of 1861-65 and Hamiltonian mercantilism and state capitalism continued to tighten its grip on America. Mark Winchell observes:

"By 1930, the Hamiltonian vision had triumphed everywhere in the United States except for the South and a few isolated pockets of rural culture elsewhere in the country...The Agrarians, however, believed that the Faustian bargain being offered to the south would result in the region giving up too much for too little. (It is doubtful that even they could have imagined the contemporary Sunbelt, with indistinguishable shopping malls stretching from Phoenix to Atlanta and a landscape of high-rise hotels with revolving restaurants on top.)"(40)

The early Jeffersonian vision of a republic of republics, with governmental systems ordered on the basis of counties divided into wards, and political leadership drawn from the ranks of natural aristocrats who achieved their position through superior ability, intelligence and character, with distinct communities achieving self-determination, includes a core set of ideas whose evolution continues through the work of Proudhon and Kropotkin, godfathers of British Distributism like G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, traditionalist American conservatives such as Richard Weaver and M. E. Bradford, libertarians like Karl Hess and, today, the national-anarchist movement. To be a Jeffersonian in the America of today is to be both an extreme radical and, in a sense, an extreme reactionary. A modern Jeffersonian, in any authentic sense, is a "conservative revolutionary" of the first order. Norman Mailer, a self-described "Left-Conservative", characterizes such an outlook as "thinking in the style of Karl Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke". Mark Winchell continues:

"Certainly, one of the challenges now facing any political philosophy is to find a way to achieve harmony in an increasingly pluralistic society. Properly understood, the qualities of diversity and tolerance are more natural to a conservative than a schematic leftist mindset. Among his 'six canons of conservative thought,' (Russell) Kirk identifies an 'affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.' Decentralization-political, cultural, and economic-is one way of maintaining and enhancing that proliferating variety."(41)

Samuel Francis has speculated that paleoconservatives may be mistaken in adopting the label of "conservative". What is it about the world order of modern times that anyone should wish to conserve? The ideals of the paleocons and the national-anarchists converge on a number of key points-regionalism, localism, agrarianism, traditionalism. The vociferous anti-Americanism of the national-anarchists may trigger an instinctively negative reflex among those paleocons who regard themselves as patriots, but is the America which the national-anarchists reject so fervently the America of either classical Jeffersonian or contemporary paleoconservative ideals? Obviously not. Perhaps Francis is right.(42) Perhaps those modern thinkers who find inspiration in classical American values are not conservatives at all, but anarchists. Benjamin R. Tucker once remarked that if Jefferson had been alive in his own era (this was the late nineteenth century!), he would have been an anarchist. Indeed, the iconic conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet expressed admiration for the communitarian ideals championed by classical anarchists like Kropotkin. And for those who wish to preserve both authentic diversity and distinctive communities, both inside and outside the territorial United States, national-anarchism does indeed offer a way. Indeed, it might not be too much of a stretch to say that national-anarchism is paleoconservatism taken to its logical conclusions. Of course, it remains to be seen whether paleoconservatives and national-anarchists alike would agree with that estimation.

Notes:

1) Taki Theodoracopulous, "The United States of Everywhere", American Conservative, March 10, 2003

2) Bool and Carlyle, "For Liberty"

3) Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia"

4) Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1983.

5) R. J. Rummell, "Power Kills" and "Death by Government".

6) Arthur Koestler, "The Ghost in the Machine"

7) Stanley Milgram, "Obedience to Authority"

8) Hannah Arendt, "The Banality of Evil"

9) Franz Oppenheimer, "The State"

10) Lysander Spooner, "No Treason" and Hans Hermann Hoppe, "Democracy: The God That Failed"

11) David E. Michael, "A New Land, A New Life, A New Hope", Voice of the Resistance, Issue Two, February 2003.

12) Colin Ward, "Anarchy in Action" and Harold Barlcay, "People Without Government: The Anthropology of Anarchy"

13) Kevin A. Carson, "The New Class' Will to Power: Liberalism and Social Control" at www.attackthesystem.com

14) quoted in Barclay, "People Without Government" p. 27.

15) quoted in Noam Chomsky, "Deterring Democracy" p. 398.

16) Troy Southgate, interviewed by Richard Hunt, from the Terra Firma web site at http://www.rosenoire.terrafirma.org

17) Voice of the Resistance, Issue Two, February 2003.

18) Joseph Sobran, "The Empire and Its Denizens", The Wander, May 15, 2003.

19) For example, the colorful paleoconservative commentator Taki Theodoracopulous states: "...the recent antiwar demonstrations all over Europe were heartbreaking, at least for me. Basically the demonstrations were anti-American, no ifs or buts about it. I am very much against the war for the obvious reasons...The idea, however, that I'm on the same side with American-haters like the egregious Biance Jagger makes my blood boil." Taki Theodoracopulous, "The United States of Everywhere", American Conservative, March 10, 2003. The very same issue of American Conservative featured a particulary mediocre article by neoconservative ideologue John Derbyshire reviewing Kevin MacDonald's "Culture of Critique", a work that exposes racist tendencies within Jewish culture. The piece was obviously included as "Look, we're not anti-Semitic!" window dressing. John Derbyshire, "The Marx of the Anti-Semites", American Conservative, March 10, 2003.

20) Sobran, "The Empire..."

21) David E. Michael, "Unity in Diversity", Voice of the Resistance, Issue One, October 2002.

22) Voice of the Resistance, Issue One, October 2002.

23) The Northeastern Anarchist, Issue Four, Spring/Summer 2002.

24) "Anarchist Economics", Subversion, The Northeastern Anarchist, Issue Four, Spring/Summer 2002.

25) David E. Michael, "National-Anarcist FAQ", from the nationalanarchist.com web site.

26) Southgate, interviewed by Hunt.

27) Bjorn Lomborg, "The Skeptical Environmentalist"

28) Jaroslaw Tomasciewicz, "An Alternative to the American Empire of the New World Order" at www.attackthesystem.com/alternative.html

29) Kevin A. Carson, "The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand" at www.mutualist.net. Keith Preston, "What Would An Anarcho-Socialist Economy Look Like?" at www.attackthesystem.com/economy.html

30) Murray N. Rothbard, "Conceived in Liberty"

31) Terry Anderson and P. J. Hill, "An Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild West", 3 Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, 1979.

32) Joel Dyer, "Harvest of Rage"

33) Keith Preston, "Democracy As Tyranny" at www.attackthesystem.com/hoppe.html

34) Karen De Coster, "Will Liechtenstein Autonomy Prevail?", Mises Institute, April 28, 2003. http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1214

35) Hans Hermann Hoppe, "Democracy: The God That Failed".

36) Michael, "A New Land..."

37) Michael, continued.

38) Michael, continued.

39) Southgate, "Transcending the Beyond: From Third Positionism to National-Anarchism"

40) Mark Royden Winchell, "This Land Is Your Land", American Conservative, July 14, 2003.

41) Winchell, continued.

42) It should be pointed out that Francis is a social nationalist and not an anarchist.

The Races of Britain

2007-05-15T01:49:00.001-07:00

The Races of Britain

(excerpts)

1885

by John Beddoe

Preface

... The ever-increasing rapidity of local migration and intermixture, due to the extension of railways and the altered conditions of society, will in the next generation almost inextricably confuse the limits and proportions of the British races; and it is a source of satisfaction to me that I have laboured to seize on fleeting opportunities, and to observe and record phenomena, which, however trivial they may appear from some points of view, may for generations to come retain some biological and historical value.

Chapter I. On Methods

It was the ancient controversy respecting the colour of the hair of the Kelts, then burning briskly enough, and even now still smouldering, that led me to begin systematic numerical observations in physical anthropology. Very little reading sufficed to show me that, if it was a difficult task to ascertain the complexional peculiarities of the Kelts of 2000 years ago, it was a no less puzzling one to determine those of their supposed representatives at the present day. It is of little use to appeal to current opinion, or the results of casual observation. The eye may rest upon a great many sets of features in the course of a long day's travel, but the mind will retain but few of them photographed on the tablet of memory; and those few will probably be such as have presented striking peculiarities, or have belonged to the persons brought most frequently and nearly into the company and contact of the observer. This fact, together with the inveterate tendency of so many scientific observers, to see everything as they wish and expect it to be, rather than as it is, may account for the striking discrepancies among ethnological writers on this simple matter of fact ...

My first observations were vitiated by faulty classification; but I soon settled down into the system to which I have since adhered, and which recommended itself chiefly by its convenience, as it generally enabled me to locate an individual in his proper class and division on a very cursory inspection.

I acknowledge three classes of eyes, distinguished as much by shade as by colour & light, intermediate or neutral, and dark ... Each of my three classes of eyes is subdivided into five, in accordance with the accompanying colour of hair: ... When unable to decide in which of two columns...an individual ought to be inscribed, I divide him between the two, by a Solomonian judgment, and set down 1/2, or .5, in each of them.

When engaged in this work I set down in his proper place on my card of observation every person (with the exceptions to be mentioned presently) whom I meet, or who passes me within a short distance, say from one to three yards. As a rule, I take no notice of persons who apparently belong to the upper classes, as these are more migratory and more often mixed in blood. I negelect those whom I suppose to be under age -- fixing the point roughly at 18 or 20 for men, 17 or 18 for women -- as well as those whose hair has begun to grizzle. Thus I get a fairly uniform material to work upon ... In order to preserve perfect fairness, I always examine first, out of any group of persons, the one who is neares, rather than the one to whom my attention is most drawn ... Considerable difficulties are created by the freaks of fashion....When I began to work in England, dark hair was in fashion among the women; and light and reddish hues were dulled with greasy unguents. In later years fair hair has been more in vogue; and golden shades, sometimes unknown to nature, are produced by art ... Fortunately, most vagaries of this kind are little prevalent in the classes among whom I seek my material.

It may be objected that there is no security that many of the persons observed may not be aliens to the place or neighbourhood wherein they are encountered. Certainly, there is no such security. But if a sufficient number of observations be secured, and the upper and other notoriously migratory classes (who are mostly easy of recognition) be excluded, the probability is immense that the great majority of the remainder have been born within a moderate radius of the centre of observation; and the majority will determine the position of the community in my chromatic scale.

A ready means of comparing the colours of two peoples or localities is found in the Index of Nigrescence. The gross index is gotten by subtracting the number of red and fair-haired persons from that of the dark-haired, together with twoce the black-haired. I double the black in order to give its proper value to the greater tendency to melanosity shown thereby ... From the gross index, the net, or percentage index, is of course readily obtained.

... On account of [the] dearth of material [on the measurements of British heads], I have measured a considerable number of living British heads, and shall make use of the results of these measurements in the present volume. As no accredited method existed when the work was done, it was necessary to frame one....It was necessary to avoid fatiguing or irritating the subects; yet it was desireable to obtain as many data as possible suitable for comparison with those taken from ancient crania[; I therefore] restricted myself to the use of the index callipers and graduated tape.

... I have spoken of the necessity and frequent difficulty of obtaining the consent of the owner of the head to be examined. His reluctance may sometimes be overcome by means of money, without going to the extent of the new hat always jocularly demanded in such cases. Sometimes other means have proved successful. I cannot resist detailing those by which I obtained a valuable series of head-measurements in Kerry [in western Ireland]. Our travelling party consisted of Dr. Barnard Davis, Dr. T. Wise, Mr. Windele, and myself. Whenever a likely little squad of natives was encountered, the two archaeologists got up a little dispute about the relative size and shape of their own heads, which I was called in to settle with the callipers. The unsuspecting Irishmen usually entered keenly into the debate, and before the little drama had been finished were eagerly betting on the sizes of their own heads, and begging to have their wagers determined in the same manner.

Chapter II. Prehistoric Races

... If our palæolithic race were really the ancestors of the Eskimos, or at least their near relations, ... it is at least possible that they may have left descendants behind them to mingle their blood with the neolithic races and their descendants of to-day. Now I think some reason can be shown for suspecting the existence of some Mongoloid race in the modern population of Wales and the West of England.

Their most notable indication is the oblique or Chinese eye, with its external angle in a horizontal plane a little higher than the internal one ... I have notes of 34 persons with oblique eyes. Their heads include a wide range of relative breadth, from 73 to 86.6; and the average index of latitude in 78.9, which is not much greater than the average of England and Wales. But in other points the type stands out distinctly. The cheek-bones are almost always broad; the brows oblique, in the same direction as the eyes; the chin, as a rule, narrow or angular; the nose is often concave or flat, seldom arched; and the mouth is rather inclined to be prominent. The forehead usually recedes a little; the inion [a point at the external occipital protuberance of the skull, just above the nape of the neck] is placed high, and the naso-inial arc is rather short (13.8 inches), so as to lead one to suppose that the cerebellum is scarcely covred by the posterior lobes. The iris is usually hazel or brown, and the hair straight, dark brown, black, or reddish. This type seems to be common in Wales, in West Somerset, and especially in Cornwall ...

No instance of this type has turned up among the (comparatively few) heads from the East of England which I have had the opportunity for measuring, and very few from Ireland. I believe, however, that specimens of it might easily be found in the mountainous parts of Connaught, especially on the borders of Sligo and Roscommon. I have seldom noticed it in Scotland, but it occurs in Shetland. Dr. Mitchell mentions the obliquely-set eye in his description of one of his Scottish types, "the Irish Celt or Fin;" but though I am acquainted with the type he evidently had in mind, I cannot recognize in it any resemblance to the Finns of Finland, nor to the patterns of features just described.

There is an Irish type, known to Mr. Hector Maclean, and admirably described by him, which I am disposed to derive from the race of the Cro-Magnon, and that none the less because, like some other Irish types, it is evidently common in Spain, and furnishes, as Maclean remarks, the ideal portrait of Sancho Panza. It is said to be pretty common in the Hebrides, but rare in the Highlands. In the West of Ireland I have frequently seen it; but it is curious, psychologically, that the most exquisite examples of it never would submit to measurement. Though the head is large, the intelligence is low, and there is a great deal of cunning and suspicion.

There are, however, in my lists more than 40 persons who are noted as progthanous, or, more exactly, "having prominent mouths;" ... roughly speaking, about 6 per cent. of the English, 8 per cent of the Welsh, and 20 per cent. of the Irish list. The "Mongoloids" and the "progthanous" overlap each other in six instances; but except in these cases there are very decided points of difference. The latter have longer and narrower heads; their index of breadth is but 76.5, and in the bare skull would never exceed 80. The cheek- bones are much narrower (135 against 141 millimetres), but almost invariably prominent in the face. The usual form of the forehead is flat, narrow, and square; that of the chin, narrow and often receding; that of the nose, oftener concave than straight, oftener straight than sinuous or aquiline, usually prominent at the point, with the long slitty nostrils, which, whencesoever derived, are characteristicof the modern Gaels. The flatness of the temporal region, which comes out in the narrowness of the diameter at the root of the zygoma [bony arch below the orbit of the skull from which the cheekbones rise] gives to the norma verticaolis that coffin- or pear-shape which Daniel Wilson ascribes to the Celts. The hair is generally very dark, and often curly, but the eyes are more often blue or light- or dark-grey than of any shade of brown ...

This is evidently the Gaelic type of Mr. D. Macintosh, whom I rank with Hector Maclean as one of the best observers and recorders of local physiognomy. Macintosh finds these people very numerous in Dorset and Devon, especially toward Exmoor; and several of my specimens came from that quarter. It may be worth notice that there was a large immigration from Ireland into North Devon in the sixteenth century, during one of the perpetually recurring seasons of civil strife in that island ...

This one character of prognathism, taken separately, may be objected to as being of small value; but there is, as I have shown, a very great similarity in other respects among the individuals who present it. It will scarcely do to ascribe it, as is often done, to the effect of misery and oppression on the physique of the race. The average stature of my 34 was 5 ft. 7.6 in. (1.717 metre): my material is taken mostly from the labouring classes, yet in the progthanous lists appears one of the ablest and most distinguished clergymen in Wales. I have also noticed it in the portraits of some well-known Welsh bards; in fact, eloquence, or at least readiness of speech, seems to be a general characteristic of the type.

While Ireland is apparently its present centre, most of its lineaments are such as lead us to think of Africa as its possible birthplace; and it may be well, provisionally, to call it Africanoid, applying the name Atlantean, which has been suggested, to the widely- diffused Ibero-Berber race type, of which it is probably a subdivision, in spite of the wide difference in the form of the jaws between it and the basque type of Zaraus, the best accredited Iberian standard.

Though I believe this Africanoid type to have been of very high antiquity, it must be acknowledged that we have no evidence carrying back its presence, in any of the British Isles, beyond the polished stone period. But the best authenticated ancient skulls from Ireland may have belonged to it; for example, the three from the Phoenix Park tumuli )of which two are figured in the Crania Britannica), and those from the bed of the Nore at Borris. These show the inclination to progthanism to be of remote date in Ireland, as well as the peculiar form of low, straight brow that still prevails there, and which is connected with low, square, horizontal orbits.

Here follows a Comparative Table of Mongoloid and Africanoid Types.

... It has been noted that the great development of the brows, and the transverse furrow on the forehead above them, are shared by this type ["the men of the British bronze race," which persists, according to Beddoe, in "the West of England and in Wales"] with the Australians and some other savage races, as well as by the ancient Canstadt race, who have even been thought to retain in these points a Simian characteristic. Ranke and Kollmann say well, however, that points of likeness to anthropoid apes are distributed variously among the different races of mankind, but that none of them can be taken in themselves to imply intellectual or moral inferiority. King Robert Bruce's skull was of the Canstadt type, and Savanarola's approached it. Certain it is that the British bronze type is found frequently -- I should say with disproportionate frequency - - among our best as well as our ablest and strongest men.

Chapter III. Britain Before Caesar and Claudius

... To sum up this chapter, the natives of South Britain, at the time of the Roman conquest, probably consisted mainly of several strata, unequally distributed, of Celtic- speaking people, who in race and physical type, however, partook of the tall, blond stock of Northern Europe than of the thick-set, broad-headed, dark stock which Broca has called Celtic, and which those who object to this attribution of that much-contested name may, if they like, denominate Arvernian. Some of these layers were Gaelic in speech, some Cymric; they were both superposed on a foundation principally composed of the long-headed dark races of the Mediterranean stock, possibly mingled with the fragments of still more ancient races, Mongoliform or Allophylian. This foundations layer was still very strong and coherent in Ireland and the north of Scotland, where the subsequent deposits were thinner, and in someparts, wholly or partially absent ...

Chapter XIII. Preface to the Tables and Maps

... It may be objected that an Irish surname is insufficient evidence of Irish blood and probable Irish physical type; that an O'Hanlon may be the son of an English mother. But this is very rarely the case: Englishwomen very rarely marry Irish, or at least Catholic Irish, men ...

Chapter XIV. General Commentary on the Tables

When we talk of a race mixed from two or three stocks, we are apt to forget that even these parent stocks were not absolutely homogeneous ... The variations, therefore, in the description I am going to quote, with slight abridgement, from Hector Maclean, are not greater than necessary to correctness: --

"The dolichocephalous [long-headed] Celt," he says, "is of various sizes, but often tall; he is of various complexion, the colour of the skin ranging from a ruddy white to a swarthy hue; the shape of the body is often graceful; the head is high and long, often narrow, seldom broad in proportion; the face is frequently long, and the profile more or less convex; the lips are usually full, often thick and more or less projecting; the chin and lower jaw are obliquely placed, and the contour of the lower jaw, taken from its junction with the neck, is but slightly curved, and often looks to the eye as if it were a straight line; the chin is seldom round, and generally somewhat trapezoidal; the forehead, viewed in profile, gradually increases in prominence from the coronal region towards the eyebrows; face, from the external orbital angels to the point of the chin, long -- a characteristic of which the old Gael, Feinn, or Scots seem to have felt rather proud (see 'Lay of Diarmaid,' West Highland Tales, translated by J.F. Campbell). The nose is frequently large and prominent; eyebrows prominent, long, slightly arched, sometimes closely approaching a straight line; cheekbones large and prominent, eyes most frequently gray or bluish gray, sometimes dark gray or dark brown; hair reddish yellow, yellowish red, but more frequently various shades of brown, of which yellow is the ground colour; sometimes, when it appears altogether black, a yellow tinge is discovered when it is closely examined; when mixed with other types, the hair is coal-black, but hardly ever so when pure. Leg and foot usually well- developed, thigh long in proportion, instep high, ankle well-shapen and of moderate size; step very elastic and rather springing, the heel being well raised and the knee well bent. Quick in temper and very emotional, seldom speaking without being influenced by one feeling or another; more quick than accurate in observation; clear thinkers but wanting in deliberation; they have a fertile and vivid imagination; love the absolute in thought and principle ; dislike expediency and doubt; sympathetic with the weak, patriotic, chivalrous."

Maclean describes with equal minuteness and accuracy another type, which he calls the brachycephalous Celt, and which is, he says, frequent in the eastern and northern parts of the Highlands. In this the head is broad (comparatively), the profile straight, cheekbones borad and large, nose generally sinuous, face tapering rapidly to the chin, which is often prominent and angular; the skin is dark; the eyes deep-set, often small, dark-gray or dark-brown; the hair reddish-brown, red, or raven-black; the lips seldom prominent; the hand square, large-jointed; the chest square and broad; the calf large, and well-formed. The gait is easy and shuffling. These people have strong attachments and feelings, but much forethought and self-control; are gloomy, fervent, humorous ...

Maclean's third "Celtic" type is that of Sancho Panza, already described, and said to be especially prevalent in the outer Hebrides, as well as in the west of Ireland ...

In few parts of Britain does there exist a more clearly marked moral type than in Yorkshire. To that of the Irish it has no affinity; but the Scotchman and the Southern Englishman alike recognise the differences which distinguish the Yorkshire character from their own, but ate not so apt to apptrehend the numerous respective points of resemblance. The character is essentially Teutonic, including the shrewdness, the truthfulness without candour, the perseverance, energy and industry of the Lowland Scotch, but little of their frugality, or of the theological instinct common to the Welsh and Scotch, or of the imaginative genius, or the more brilliant qualities which sometimeslight up the Scottish character. The sound judgment, the spirit of fairplay, the love of comfort, order, and cleanliness, and the fondness for heavy feeding, are shared with the Saxon Englishman; but some of them are still more strongly marked in the Yorkshireman, as is also the bluff independence -- a very fine quality when it does not degenerate into selfish rudeness ...

[Map: Index of Nigrescence]

The Cornish are generally dark in hair and often in eye: they are decidedly the darkest people in England proper; they resemble the Scottish Highlanders in their warmth of colouring ... The point which comes out most distinctly from my head-measurements is the prominence of the glabella and (probably also) of the brow-ridges. To these may be added, more doubtfully, a receding forehead, a head much arched longitudinally, and broad about the parietal eminences ...

The statistics for Wales give several very distinct indications; they represent the Welsh as a generally-dark-haired and often dark-eyed people, among whom the Gaelic combination is common ...

The inferences that can be drawn from my head-measurements respecting the Welsh are but scanty....[W]e may with some certainty put the index of breadth at about 78, somewhat greater than that of the Irish or of the Wiltshire or West Somerset men, but below that of the eastern Englishman....[W]e may infer with less certainty a broad forehead, a small glabella, a somewhat low head, a somewhat short face, and a considerable lateral development of the zygoma. dark complexions, square foreheads, and sinuous noses prevail; noses more or less aquiline are more common that the concave.

But, in truth, the Welsh are anything but a homogeneous race. The diagram of head- breadth indices confirms other lines of probability, and points towards the presence in force of at least two races in South Wales, not thoroughly amalgamated. The characteistics of several types are doubtless smoothed over, and to a great extent neutralised in these averages. Those which come out are not those of the dominant race, the true Kymry, whose purest representatives should be sought in the tall, long- faced, light-eyed, darkish-haired population of Nithsdale, Upper Galloway, and the neighbouring region.

...The account which Giraldus de Barry gives of his countrymen is extremely interesting, and may still, after 700 years, be read with instruction....It presses very hardly on worst points of the Welsh character; but some of the vices which he alleges are those with which their enemies still charge them.

"They are inconstant," he says, "mobile: they have no respect for their oaths, for their promises, for the truth....[T]hey are always ready for perjury."

"They attack fiercely, with much noise; if repulsed, they flee as in terror, but as readily return to the charge. They are given to digging up boundary fences, and removing landmarks; they are continually having lawsuits about land. They are abstinent in need, and temperate by habit; but will gorge themselves at another's expense: no one wastes his own substance out of gluttony as the English do; but they are ostentatious in vieing with others."...

Vengefulness is also noted as a characteristic by Giraldus, and withal love of race and family, regard for high birth, and carefulness about genealogies. This last quality does undoubtedly belong to the Welsh, and makes it strange that they have not contrived for themselves a better system of surnames....

Throughout the greater part of Ireland one distinct type of man decidedly predominates; and to describe it is easy, though to explain its origin and constitution may be difficult....

In the personal observation table for Ireland, the localities are arranged in an ascending scale of depth of colour of hair; and it will be seen from the figures, and from the illustrative maps, that blonds are most numerous on and near the eastern coast, and brunets towards the west, whither they have been driven by successive invasions. There are a few exceptions to the rule, mostly explicable.

Under 30 per cent. of nigrescence come ... the upper classes in Dublin and Cork, with the people of Enniskillen, Youghal, Cloyne, and the neighbourhood, of Cashel and Cahir in Tipperary, of Charleville in Limerick, of Waterford town and Wexford county, and some other parts of Leinster. The index in these cases is comparable with that found in most parts of England; but in no case is it nearly so low as in many parts of the nort and east of that country or of Scotland.

Between 30 and 50 per cent. ranks the general population of Cork and Dublin, of Drogheda and Kildare, of Killarney in Kerry, of Collooney in Sligo, of Joyce's Country in Galway, of some districts about Cork, and of the county of Fermanagh with Western Cavan; also the people of the fisherman's quarter in Galway, called the Claddagh. Most parts of the Scottish Highlands would come in here.

Between 50 and 70 ranks the largest number of districts; viz., the counties of Longford and Leitrim, most part of those of Sligo, Roscommon, and Galway, with the town of Galway and the Arran Isles, Athlone, pettigo in South Donegal, Dingle in Kerry, and Capoguin in Waterford. The indices here equal those met with in Wales and Cornwall. Lastly, over 70 come several districts in the west of Kerry, with Clifden in Connemara, Jar-Connaught, Moytura in the hills between Sligo and Roscommon, and Mallow in county Cork. Such a preponderance of dark hair does not, I believe, occur anywhere in Great Britain; it ranges with that found in Auvergne, Savoy, and Northern Italy ...

The physiognomy of the Irish as distinguished from the English, Welsh, and Scotch, is best studied in the west and south-west, where there has been least immigration. Apart from that, one type probably predominates in almost all parts of the country. Davis well says that it is easily seen to be derived from the cranial conformation. The leading feature is the level eyebrow, surmounting low deep orbits.

... Though there are other primitive types of feature in the west of Ireland, the one already referred to as correlated with the skull-type is by far the most conspicuous ... The nose is generally long and sinuous, except in those (a decided minority) who are notably prognathanous, in whom it is generally of moderate length and somewhat concave: in either case it is pointed and has the true Gaelic nostril, which is long and narrow, and often conspicuously visible. Quite a due proportion, perhaps more, of the fairer people belong to the prognathanous class. This is a little strange, as in the west of England prognathousness goes with dark hair ...

The people of the Aran Isles, in Galway Bay, have their own strongly marked type, in some respects an exaggeration of the ordinary Gaelic one....We might be disposed, trusting to Irish traditions respecting the islands, to accept these people as representatives of the Firbolg [a semi-mythical people of pre-Christian Ireland], had not Cromwell, that upsetter of all things Hibernian, left in Aranmore a small English garrison, who subsequently apostatised to Catholicism, intermarried with the natives, and so vitiated the Firbolgian pedigree.

There are several islands off the west coast [of Ireland], besides Aranmore, which it might repay an anthropologist to visit. I have had the privilege of seeing but one of them, Inismurray, county Sligo. There "the barbarous people received us with no little kindness." Barbarous they were, however, as they grew up, as the "Queen" of the island told me, "all the same as cattles." ...

Final Chapter. Conclusions and Inconclusions

... That in the absence of trustworthy evidence as to a change of colour-type in Britain, in the direction from light to dark, it is best to rest upon the undoubted fact that the gaelic and Iberian races of the west, mostly dark-haired, are tending to swamp the blond Teutons of England by a reflux migration. At the same time, the possible effects of conjugal selection, of selecytion through disease, and of the relative increase of the darker types through the more rapid multiplication of the artizan class, who are in England generally darker than the upper classes, should be kept in view ...

That sundry important problems respecting the Picts; the origin of the modern Gaelic type, and particularly of the prognathous element therein; the complexion of some of the "Celts" of history ... &c., &c., remain yet unsolved ... The physical type of the modern Gael in Ireland and Scotland, and of their apparent kinsmen in parts of Wales and the wets of England, is, on the whole, best accounted for, perhaps, by a cross of the Iberian witha long-faced, harsh-featured, red-haired race, who contributed the language and much of the character ... The great geographical extension of this type in the British Isles makes it more likely that it was generated by a crossing effected on the Continent than that it was produced in situ ...

But a truce with speculation! It has been this writer's aim rather to lay a sure foundation ... to prepare some small part of a solid platform, whereon insight and genius may ultimately build, than himself to erect an edifice of wood and stubble, which may make a fair show for a day, and then be consumed by the testing fire. If these remaining questions are worthy and capable of solution, they will be solved only by much patient labour, and by the cooperation of anthropologists with antiquarians and philologists; so that much of the blurred and defaced prehistoric inscription as is left in shadow by one light may be brought into prominence and illumination by another.

An Interview with Christian Bouchet

2007-05-09T04:09:00.001-07:00

Christian Bouchet was on the National Directorate of Resistance, a French national-revolutionary group. The following interview first appeared in Issue #9 of The English Alternative magazine.

Q: Would you provide our readers with a brief history of Revolutionary Nationalism in France, particularly with regard to your own previous involvement with Troisieme Voie?

CB: Revolutionary Nationalism came from the radical Leftist current of the French Revolution, with men like Hebert, Marat and Baboeuf. After that it was embodied in the Blanquist Movement until after the French Commune of 1870-1. These militants were at the same time both Socialists and Nationalists. At the end of the Second Empire this current was anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and believed in a form of Darwinian eugenics.

During the boulangisme and the Dreyfus Affair, the current became split between a section of the Left and Nationalist organisations. After that, and after the First World War, there were some Revolutionary Nationalist or Fascist movements like the Faisceau of Valois (a former Anarchist leader), the Parti Fasciste Revolutionnaire of Lamour, the Parti Populaire Francais of Doriot (a former Communist leader), and the Rassemblement National Populaire of Deat (a former Socialist leader). This ended in blood with the so-called �liberation� of France by the Allies. Thousands of people were killed by mobs or condemned to death by popular - in fact Communist - juries, because they were Fascists, Monarchists, Rightists and so on. At this time my grandfather was also condemned to death (thanks to the gods that he was not shot) and my whole family put into jail.

After the Second World War some tiny groups were founded like the Phalange of Lucas, which was in contact with Otto Strasser and the French section of its European Popular Movement. In the 1960�s Thiriart�s Jeune Europe came, too, followed in 1970 by Duprat (who was slain by Zionists in a car bombing). He formed the Groupe Nationaliste Revolutionnaire de Base as a faction operating both in and out of the Front National, which was created in 1972. After Duprat�s death the same year, the Mouvement Nationaliste Revolutionnaire was formed by merging former members of the Group d�Action Jeunesses (an anti-Communist youth action group), the organisation Lutte du Peuple (a tiny group of Thiriart partisans, in which I served as Administrative Secretary), and the Groupe Nationaliste Revolutionnaire de Base. In 1985, the Mouvement Nationaliste Revolutionnaire changed its name to Troisieme Voie, with a youth wing called Jeune Garde.

Sometime later on, I was duly elected as the group�s National Secretary. Within Troisieme Voie there was a struggle between disciples of Jean Thiriart - led by myself in a faction called Les Terceristes Radicaux [Radical Third Positionists] - and Malliarakis, the President of the party who was a reactionary. We expelled him in 1991 and then changed our name to Nouvelle Resistance. We had in Nouvelle Resistance a very National-Bolshevik orientation, and we were very active. We met and worked with former Communist leaders in Russia, officials in Libya, Islamic leaders, independence activists and so on.

At the same time we published a bi-monthly publication which was sold in all the newspaper shops in France and for two years we published a small weekly, too. We also used entryism to infiltrate the Greens (taking control of their youth section), regionalist movements and anti-fascist groups. In fact one of our members was able to infiltrate the International Socialists (French section of the Socialist Workers Party) to such an extent that he even slept with one of their female leaders! This led to great amusement when it was actually revealed in our newspaper that penetration had actually taken place on two fronts!!

Q: When and why did you actually decide to form Resistance?

CB: Our main problem was the growth of the Front National (FN), which became very popular amongst industrial workers, poor people and the youth of the lower social classes. So for us it was very difficult to gain new members and keep those we already had. In the summer of 1997 we decided to dissolve Nouvelle Resistance and to work as a fraction both in and out of the FN using the names Resistance and Jeune Resistance. Since this time, we have also worked alongside a student action group, called the Groupe d�Union et de Defense (GUD).

Q. What is the Movement�s attitude towards Jean Marie Le Pen and the Front National?

CB: For a very long time we were bitterly opposed to JMLP and the FN, but gradually the FN began to change under the influence of New Right thinkers. Its social base also changed, and the FN is now the leading workers� party in France. So it is difficult not to agree with it and impossible for a Nationalist to oppose the FN because its enemies are the same as ours: Zionists, Red activists, liberals, 'sexualdeviants' and so on. We now try to have an influence on its youth group and on its more radical wing. In many ways, we try to work as Militant has done in the Labour Party.

Q: You were heavily involved in the establishment of the European Liberation Front (ELF), so perhaps you would care to outline the aims and objectives of this committee?

CB: I think that we must unify the National Revolutionary forces in Europe and prepare them for a more effective war against the System. It is not easy. Usually, radical Nationalist groups are happy when they are exchanging letters and newspapers, and as far as they are concerned this is called �international relations�. The ELF believes that we must create a European Party, with one national directorate at a European level and regional directorates in each nation. In many ways, we must work like the Komintern.

Q: Who does Resistance consider to be its chief ideologues?

CB: The founders of Revolutionary Nationalism in France like Blanqui and Valois, but also Russians like Oustrialov, Germans like Paetel, Lass, Niekisch, Strasser and Junger, Italians like Bombacci, Evola and the Futurists, and Spaniards like Ledesma Ramos. We are also very influenced by Juan Peron, Jean Thiriart and Alain de Benoist.

Q: Given your support for political decentralisation, is a centralised Nationalist administration really a viable option or should we be looking to emulate certain strains of Anarchism?

CB: We need organic, grass-roots democracy and subsidiaries. Each level must decide to the best of its abilities.

Q: What do you consider to be the greatest single hurdle facing National Revolutionaries today?

CB: Non-European immigration and globalisation.

Q: What is your current position on armed struggle, and can you ever see this changing in the future?

CB: Before speaking of armed struggle you must determine who is the enemy. You must also have a wide social base like the PIRA, the Spanish ETA or Corsican FLNC. But even then armed struggle is very difficult. Jean Thiriart wrote that it needs an exterior lung (a non-European country which can assist) or a Piedmont (a European country which has begun the war abroad). We have neither of these. In France, the last armed struggle was that of the OAS during the early 1960�s and it suffered a bloody defeat. I think that it is not yet the time to speak of armed struggle. It is romantic but not very serious, although the time will come.

Q: How do you view the current situation with regard to Revolutionary Nationalism in England?

CB: I have been interested in Mosley for a long time, and particularly with the post-war ideas of the BUF. I find it very strange that they are not more popular in English Nationalist circles, as their ideas of European union were good, better than petty bourgeois Nationalism. Since the demise of the National Front I had close links with Patrick Harrington and Third Way, but I do not understand the group�s evolution. It is too soft and liberal. I do not understand what he wants to do and where he wants to go. Ulster Nation is a courageous newspaper, but so tiny. Once I met Derek Holland and various other ITP leaders, but they were strange bigots with strange ideas who, when you oppose them, do not answer politically but label you either a faggot or a Satanist!! For me the ITP is not Revolutionary Nationalist but petty bourgeois and bigoted. In fact England is crying out for the creation of a real Revolutionary Nationalist organisation, one which will be proud of the past but look to the future. I think that the cultural fight must be as important as the political fight. A grass-roots cultural fight and not one of the university variety.

Q: And finally, Christian, is there anything you wish to add?

CB: Read Gramsci, learn of the good and bad experiences of groups in other countries. Be the best and you will attract the best.

We would like to thank Mr. Bouchet for taking the time to send us his thoughts.

Will to Power

2007-05-07T23:18:00.001-07:00

Friedrich Nietsche

1. Will to Power vs. Self-Preservation. Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results. (Beyond Good and Evil, Section 13)

2. Truth and Will to Power. The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. (Beyond Good and Evil, Section 4)

3. Will to Power and Organic Functions. Suppose we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will — namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment — then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as will to power. The world viewed from the inside, the world defined and determined according to its "intelligible character" — it would be "will to power" and nothing else. (Beyond Good and Evil, Section 36)

4. Will to Power and Equality. To refrain from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploitation, to equate one’s own will with that of another: this may In a certain rough sense become good manners between individuals if the conditions for it are present (namely, if their strength and value standards are in fact similar and they both belong to one social group). As soon as there is a desire to take this principle further, however, and if possible even an the fundamental principle of society, it at once reveals itself for what it is: as the will to the denial of life, as the principle of dissolution and decay. Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation. ‘Exploitation’ does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will of life. (Beyond Good and Evil, Section 259)

5. Life and Obedience. But that you may understand my teaching about good and evil, I shall relate to you my teaching about life and about the nature of all living creatures. Wherever I found living creatures, there, too, I heard the language of obedience. All living creatures are obeying creatures. And this is the second thing: he who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures. . . .What persuades the living creature to obey and to command and to practice obedience even in commanding? Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power: and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master. The will of the weaker persuades it to serve the stronger; its will wants to be master over those weaker still: this delight alone it is unwilling to forgo. And as the lesser surrenders to the greater, that it may have delight and power over the least of all, so the greatest, too, surrenders and for the sake of power stakes — life. He who shot the doctrine of — will to existence — at truth certainly did not hit the truth: this will does not exist. For what does not exist cannot will; but that which is in existence, how could it still want to come into existence? Only where life is, there is also will: not will to life, but — so I teach you — will to power. The living creature values many things higher than life itself: yet out of this evaluation itself speaks —the will to power. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, Of Self-Overcoming)

BETWEEN THE GODS AND THE TITANS

2007-05-07T23:16:00.002-07:00

Alain de Benoist considers the achievement of the writer Ernst Juenger and his ideal of the Worker in the context of the Conservative Revolution.

This article first appeared as part of the central theme in Nouvelle Ecole No.40 (41, rue Barrault, 13 arr. 75 Paris) under the title Ernst Juenger: La Figure du Travailleur entre les Dieux et les Titans. We have translated it and are reprinting it in two parts in considerably abridged form with acknowledgements. Ernst Juenger is arguably the most provocative of all the writers of the Conservative Revolution. (Among other remarks attributed to him is the one that the abolition of torture is an indication of decadence in a society.) Even his most provocative utterences have the intellectual virtue, however, of forcing his opponents to articulate their opposition to him in an intelligent manner. Scorpion readers able to read French may be interested to know that Alain de Benoist is the general editor responsible for the publication of a new series of French translations of the writers of the Conservative Revolution, published by Pardes, (B.P. 47, 45390 Puiseaux 45390 France).

FOR ARMIN MOHLER, author of the classic manual on the German Conservative Revolution (Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland), Ernst Juenger's Der Arbeiter was one of those which he "still could not pick up without his hands shaking". For Mohler Der Arbeiter is more than a philosophy, it is a work of poetry. The word is apt, above all if we consider that all poetry possesses an incipient quality: it simultaneously penetrates the world and unveils the divine. Der Arbeiter possesses a metaphysical quality which takes it far beyond the historical and political context in which it was written.

Ernst Juenger was born on 28th March 1895 in Heidelberg, the son of Ernst Georg (1868-1943), a chemist and assistant to research chemist Viktor Meyer. He had one sister and five brothers, two of whom died very young. Juenger went to school in Hannover and Scwarzenberg, later in Brunswick and finally in Hannover again, as well as having attended Scharnhorst Realschule (secondary school). In 1911 he joined the Wunstdorf section of the Wandervogel and in the same year published his first poem, Unser Leben, in their local journal. In 1913 he left home to sign up at Verdun for the French Foreign Legion. After a few months, when the young man had already begun training in Algeria, his father was able to persuade him to return to Germany, where he attended the Hannover Guild Institute. It was at this time that he became familiar with the works of Nietzsche.

The First World War began for Germany on August 1st 1914 and Juenger signed up on the first day. He rose in the ranks to become lieutenant, was wounded three times before being awarded the Iron Cross First Class on December 16th 1916. In February 1917 he became Stosstruppfuehrer (leader of an assault battalion). This led to the experience of hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches. Juenger was decorated with the Ritterkreuz of the Order of the Hohenzollerns. He finished the war in hospital, having been wounded fourteen times. Juenger was also awarded the Cross Pour le merite, the highest award in the German army. Only twelve subalterns in the German army received this award during the First World War, among the other eleven the future Marshal Rommel.

Between 1918 and 1923, in the barracks at Hannover, Juenger began to write in earnest, inspired by his experiences at the front. In Stahlgewittern (In Hurricans of Steel), first published in 1919 and reedited in 1922, was an immediate success. There followed Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922) Das Waeldchen 125 (1924) and Feur und Blut (1925) (The Fight within, Copse 125, Fire and Blood). Juenger also wrote on specialist military themes in Militaer-Wochenblatt and became known as something of an expert on military matters; but he did not feel at ease in a peacetime army. In 1923 he left the Reichswehr and entered Leipsic University to study biology, zoology and philosophy. In 1925 he married the 19 year old Gretha von Jeinsen. His political views developed rapidly in the political tumult of the time. In the space of a few months Juenger had become one of the principle representatives of the so-called national-revolutionaries of the Conservative Revolution. In September 1925, a former commando leader, Helmut Franke, launched the review Die Standarte which set out to "contribute towards a spiritual deepening of the Front mentality". Juenger was on the editorial board along with another "nationalist soldier", Franz Schauwecker. The journal began life as a supplement to the magazine Der Stahlhelm, which was the organ of the Stahlhelm movement. (This was an active association of former combatants opposed to the Treaty of Versailles. In 1925 it had 250 thousand members. After the national socialists came to power in 1933, the association was forcibly amalgamated with the regime's official old combattants' organization (NSDFB) and by 1935 no trace of Der Stahlhelm remained.) In Die Standarte Juenger immediately adopted a radical tone, quite different to that of most of the Stahlhelm adherents. In an article published in October 1925, he criticised the theory of the "stab in the back" (Dolchstoss), which was accepted by almost all nationalists, namely that the German army was not defeated at the front but by a "stab in the back" at home. Juenger also pointed out that certain revolutionaries of the far left had fought in the war with distinction. This caused an uproar in Die Stahhelm and the movement distanced itself from the young writer. In March 1926 it closed down Die Standarte. Juenger started the magazine again a month later however with the same name, but dropping the "Die". Nevertheless, not all lines had been severed and Standarte was supported financially by several members of Der Stahlhelm. In the pages of Standarte on June 3rd 1926, Juenger made an appeal to all former soldiers to unite for the creation of a "Nationalist Workers' Republic". In August, Otto H<148>rsing, co-founder of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot Gold, the Social Democrats' security force, proposed to the government that the journal should be banned, which it was, but for only five months. Franz Seldte, the leader of Der Stahlhelm and still proprietor of the journal, took the opportunity to sack its leading editor, Helmut Franke. Juenger went with him. With Wilhelm Weiss the two launched another review, called Armenius. (Standarte, under different editorship, continued until 1929.) In 1927 Juenger moved from Leipsic to Berlin, where he made contact with the Buendisch youth. The Bunds were an attempt to unite the romantic spirit of the Wandervogel with an organization more permanent and hierarchical. Juenger became the leader (Schirmherr) of one of these youth groups. In 1927 Juenger was associated with the launching of yet another publication, Der Vormarsch (Advance) which was the brain-child of Captain Ehrhardt.

"Losing the War to Win the Nation"

At this time Juenger was subject to several literary and philosophical influences. There was a French fin de siecle influence in his early works, notably Der Kampf als innere Erlebnis also a kind of Baudelairian dandyism in Sturm, a very early work. Mohler draws a comparison between Juenger and the Barres of Roman de l'Energie nationale: in the works of both writers nationalism is a substitute for religion, a manner of enlargening and strengthening the soul, the result of a conscious choice, a factor which emerged as a result of the destruction of old norms in the wake of the Great War. The influence of Spengler and Nietzsche is also evident. In 1929, in an interview given to an English journalist, Juenger defined himself as a "disciple of Nietzsche", stressing with approval the fact that Nietzsche was the first to challenge the fiction of an abstract universal man, by dividing mankind into the strong and the feeble. In 1922 Juenger read the first volume of Der Untergang des Abendlandes with great passion, but he was no passive disciple of Spengler, as we shall see. The experience of war, however, remained the strongest influence in Juenger's writings. He distinguished between the Gegner (opponent) and Feind (enemy); it is because there was not an absolute enemy but only the opponent of the moment, that the Great War and war as such has something "holy" about it.

Another lesson which Juenger claimed to have learned was that "life is nourished by death" and that life, in its essence, is "indestructable". The war had been lost but this defeat had a potentially positive aspect, according to Juenger. Formal defeat or victory is not the "bottom line" in war. The aim is not the be all and end all of struggle. The war had not been so much a war between nations as between a certain kind of man. As an epigraph to his book Aufbruch der Nation (National Reveille) published in 1930, Franz Schauwecker wrote "we needed to lose the war in order to win the nation". Juenger had written in a similar vein. For Juenger after the Great War there could be "no going back". The old roads led nowhere. He called the Great War an Umbruch, an irreparable break with the past. The war had provided a model for the peace. War has a profound significance and the sacrifice of millions must have a meaning but the meaning can not be so much rationalised as felt (geahnt). From 1926 onwards, Juenger appealed incessantly for a united front of nationalist groups and movements. At the same time he tried, without notable success, to change them. Nationalism should become revolutionary. From this perspective the crux of the national struggle was the struggle against liberalism. In Armenius and in Der Vormarsch he attacked the humanists who favoured an "anaemic" society, the cynics who wished to see the Great War as nothing but futility and madness. At the same time he opposed the sentimentality of conservative nationalism ("the cult of museums") and distinguished between healthy neo-nationalism and the sentimentality of what he called "grand-daddy nationalism". The nation is more than a country, it is an idea and Germany exists there where the idea of Germany fires the spirit.

In the April issue of Arminius Juenger took a nominalist position: for him there is no universal truth, no universal moral, no universal man with a just claim to equal rights. Value is found in the particular. While Voelkisch groups sought a return to the soil, Juenger on the contrary exalted the power of technics and repudiated the individual. Born of bourgeois rationality, technology was now going to turn on the spirit which had engendered it. As technology advances, so the individual will disappear. In the meantime the town had become the "front" in the national struggle and in Berlin representatives of many different currents of the Conservative Revolution met around Juenger, including the writer Ernst von Saloman, the Nietzschean Friedrich Hielscher, who was editor of Das Reich, the neo-conservatives August Winnig (whom Juenger met through Alfred Baeumler) and A.E. Guenther, co-editor with Wilhelm Stapel of Deutsches Volkstum, the national-Bolsheviks Ernst Niekisch and Karl Paetel and of course his own brother Friedrich Georg Juenger, who had become quite well known in his own right.

In April 1928 Juenger handed over editorship of Der Vormarsch to Hielscher, who was a close friend of his. (Among other things Hielscher was the coordinator of a European regionalist movement and the founder of a neo-Pagan church. In the Third Reich he was to hold an important position in the Ahnenerbe while maintaining contact with the "internal immigration". He was arrested in September 1944 and thrown into prison and only escaped execution thanks to the special pleading of Wolfram Sievers, (most of whose writings, apart from an autobiography, have never been published.) In 1930 Juenger became, with Werner Lass, the editor of Die Kommenden, a point of contact with national-Bolsheviks, as these wrote regularly for the paper. He also wrote for Widerstand (Opposition) edited by Ernst Niekisch, whom he knew personally. For Niekisch the future man was collective man, who alone would be able to face up to the "murderous consequences" of technological discovery. The national movement and the communist movement had the same enemy: the bourgeois West. Although fascinated by Bolshevism, Juenger was at no time a national-Bolshevik. He and Lass left Die Kommenden in July 1931, Lass to found an out and out national-Bolshevik publication: Der Umsturz (Overthrow), but Juenger had not the least inclination to take part in this project, nor in the national-socialist movement. In an article written for Suedeutsche Monatshefte in September 1931 he included national-socialism among the nationalisms which were inspired by the past and therefore, according to him, tainted with liberal and bourgeois ideas. As Marcel Decombis noted in his work on Juenger published in 1943, "Juenger, the perfect Prussian officer, who subjects himself to the most intense self-discipline, could never submit again to a collectivity." His brother evolved politically in much the same direction. At that time they went on a number of voyages to Southern Europe together. From 1929 onwards, Juenger spent less time writing for publications and more on writing books. In 1929 the first version of Das abenteurliche Herz (Adventurous Heart) was published, followed by Die totale Mobilmachung (Total Mobilisation) in 1931 and Der Arbeiter (The Worker) in 1932.

The Worker

The first part of the book revolves around the notion of what the writer called Gestalt (form, figure). This Gestalt is seen as a global type, of which the totality includes characteristics which can not be found in any of the separate constituent parts. It is at the root of sense, a supreme reality which gives sense to phenomena. Sense is not here intended to have exactly the meaning we associate with cause and effect, rather it is sense in being an imprint which marks a period in time and gives that period in time.. sense. Man here is the measure of all things. Gestalt is the "pre-formed power" (vorgeformte Macht) which only accedes to being to the extent that it is willed into being by man who feels its appeal. The Gestalt is not dependent on man to be what it is, but it does depend on man to assume the status of existence, which it endows with the dimesion of profundity. It can only be understood dialectically, for it encompasses many different aspects. It is at once unchanging and localised. Its relationship to history is complex: it is not so much the product of history as what permits history to take place. It determines historical movement. History does not bring forth historical types but is transformed through its interaction with them. (Juenger noted elsewhere that our epoch was rich in types but poor in great men.) History is the metaphysics of being. The Gestalt is beyond Good and Evil. Not only is it not subject to a morality, it alone makes morality possible. The same goes for Truth and Beauty. The role of the theorist is not therefore to judge a figure but instinctively to recognise it. To identify with it is to commit a revolutionary act.

What is the dominant form of our time? Work, according to Juenger. It is therefore in the figure of the Worker that Juenger claimed to see the Gestalt of the generation to come. Juenger does not mean work as the key to economic activity or work as the "law of humanity", nor work as the consequence of original sin, nor does work here represent an "alienation". Juenger uses the term "work" to describe all creation which aims at giving form in the world; it is the affirmation of power, the deployment of energy. Work is the means by which the modern world is totally mobilised, the expression of a special form of being. Science, love, art, faith, culture, war: all is Work; Work too the vibration of molecules and the force which drives the stars and planets. Work is not so much an activity as the will which is "at work" within an activity, the "will to will", which is the creative force of history. The notion of the Worker as an economic creation is too restrictive and betrays the bourgeois reference frame of whoever sees Work in such a restrictive light. The Worker is not be confused with the proletariat, unless we conceive him as a "proletarian" within all classes. Juenger thus distinguishes sharply between the Worker's State as he saw it and the Marxian notion of "the workers' state". Against the Marxist Arbeiterschaft (work force), Juenger opposed the Arbeitertum, identification with work, the community of those dedicated to work. (This distinction was also made by August Winnig, notably in his Der Glaube an das Proletariat and Vom Proletariat zum Arbeitertum, but his stress was much more political in the practical sense of the word than Juenger's.) But Juenger himself stressed that his work was not anti-Marxist. Marx had his place in an understanding of the concept of the Worker, but that place should not be exclusive. Marxism, "useful because corrosive", had to be surpassed. Marx limited the notion of work to the economic field, but for Juenger work had a breadth which extended "from the atom to the galaxies". Marx believed that the worker would one day be transformed into an artist. Juenger believed that the artist was being transformed into a worker.

The worker reveals himself by virtue of his power. He will dominate by virtue of his Will to Power, which is expressed through work, a work which succeedes in mobilising. The Gestalt represents the spirit of the world at a given period. The key to all is power, for behind the representations of spirit in the world are not pure ideas but matter. Contrary to what Hegel claimed, theory does not determine reality but on the contrary reality engenders ideas. Economy plays a secondary role for Juenger, as he underlined in an interview given to Le Monde (2oth June 1978). The figure of the Worker is metaphysical and in its fundamental character is not transformed. Juenger called the Worker a "titanic personage". The antithesis of the Worker is the Bourgeois; for Juenger, to be anti-liberal is to be first and foremost anti-bourgeois. The Bourgeois too is a Gestalt which encapsulates a mode of life and thought, a scale of values, a state of mind, which can be found in all classes, not just the middle-classes. The Bourgeois has no metaphsical worth, he only reasons in a utilitarian manner. The Bourgeois wants to take as much as possible from life and give as little as possible. Above all else the Bourgeois is worried about safety. The Bourgeois is represented by the type of person who is afraid of life and is who is incapable of acting historically. The Bourgeois avoids all commitment to the decisive, the creative act. War and love, nature and death, all the elementary forces are "irrational" to him and do not belong to his society, for society, as he sees it, is the result of a voluntarily made and rationally conceived contract based on the principle of equality for all. Worker and Bourgeois are as different as dawn and dusk.

The advent of the figure of the Worker is linked to a new state of society which Juenger calls "total mobilisation" (totale Mobilmachung). This expression was clarified by Juenger in a long essay which served as a kind of preface to Der Arbeiter. It is the effects of the evolution of the techniques of war which heralds, in the most characteristic manner, entry into the era of total mobilisation. Since Clausewitz described the condition of "total war", the situation had rapidly evolved. Especially from 1916, the spirit of progress and the development of the techniques of war went hand in hand. Technology dominates the scene more and more. The Great War thus marked the end of the era of chivalry and traditional heroic values. From his own experience in the trenches, Juenger had seen the evolution of war into the pitting of abstract material force against abstract material force. The troops become canon fodder. War is impregnated with the same spirit as that which created the machines. Technical instruction becomes more and more crucial for every soldier. "...the men who march at the head, the tank drivers, the pilots, the U-boat captains, are all accomplished technicians." (Waeldchen 125) The technician then represents the modern state at war. The question must then be raised: in such a situation what meaning does the soldier's sacrifice have? The answer lies in the notion of total mobilisation. At the same time as war becomes a technical undertaking, the traditional distinction between combattant and non-combattant breaks down. Even the notion of war and peace gives way to the reality of permanent global conflict. Even the pacifist has to be ready to fight for his beliefs! The decisive aspect of the new state of affairs is the fact that all are potentially involved in war and all are available for mobilisation. The capacity to mobilise becomes increasingly the key factor in the destiny of peoples. Modern war has become an aspect of Work. The world as we know it is transformed into a universal factory, a "Vulcan's forge". The world is now mobile and mobilised. The Great War therefore exceeds the French Revolution in historical importance, for it has brought forth a new man, the man with a hammer in his hand. Worker and Soldier become one and the same. The military front and the industrial front are the same. The Great War also witnessed the emergence of the collectivist era (Wirzeit) as opposed to the individualistic one (Ichzeit). The rural world is in decline, motorways are built, leisure becomes an industry, political parties blossom, the screen takes precedence over the stage, the photograph over the portrait, national planning becomes very important, the value of money is controlled, production is standardised, statistics and typologies abound, the "metallic" (male) or "cosmetic" (female) fixidness of the face, the restrictions on individual liberty brought about by automation, the convergence of effort towards economic objectives which exceed their own frame of reference, the collaboration of state and industry: these among other factors accompany the replacement everywhere of the individual by the uniform and typical. In Juenger's eyes these factors are positive. His tone in evoking the power and importance of machines sometimes recalls Italian Futurism. The critic Henri Plard called Der Arbeiter "the richest and most provocative of his works", in which is allied "an effectively and passionately reactionary ideology with a modernism which clears all the dead wood of whatever is not 100% up-to-date." (Etudes Germaniques July-September 1979). The standardisation or uniformation of the world is taken as the bearing of a uniform. This is not a sign of decadence but a promise of the future and the precondition of the destruction of the Bourgeois type. The Worker must accelerate this process. The Worker arises as a result of the death of the individual. Only decomposition allows for recomposition at a higher level. The individual whose demise Juenger so joyously proclaims is not altogether identical with the individual person; rather it is the bourgeois individual, the Individuum, born of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, a creature struck from its roots, from its heritage, is in contrast with the Einzelne, the individual person, whose identity is situated in an "organic environment". The Individuum is "most charming invention of burgeois sentimentality..a part of the mass, which is the contrary of a people." So the individual is just "mass" in smaller letters. Work is indissociable from Liberty. Man puts most energy into something at a command. Liberty is a voluntary adhesion to a Gestalt in service to which the full capacity of the Worker is able to express itself. To be free means to take part, the will to be free is the will to work. Liberty presupposes a life filled with sense, an attachment rather than freedom from restraint. As a result of attaining liberty the Worker is able to realise his integration (Eingliederung) in the general structure of society through which the Worker is fully realised. Man is not to be considered as an individual but as an incarnation of Gestalt and attains liberty through participation in the attainment of the figure of which he is, as individual person, a representation. In the future society envisaged by Juenger, each person's place will not be determined by birth, fortune, or rank, but by the degree of adhesion to the type of the Worker.

Clearly Juenger's thought has gone way beyond drawing from the experience of war. When he speaks of the war of material forces he is not only making an observation concerning the technological evolution of war, he is pointing to the idea that the technical transformation of war has produced a rupture which affects the entire planet. This rupture marks the end of the rule of man or gods made in the image of man, and the emergence of the titanic force of the elemental in daily life. Ancient religions tell us that at the origin of civilizations there was a struggle between Gods and Titans. For millennia the Titans held the Gods in awe and kept their distance but now it is the Twilight of the Gods and the Giants are returning. They are returning by means of the immense force which technology has unleashed. Confronted with the unchaining of the elemental, all the old defences, old attitudes, old doctrines are withered. Anachronistic too are the traditional forms of political action. Defeat must be turned into victory. Life must be intensified and the Worker will prevail.

According to Julius Evola, "Juenger should be credited in this first stage of his thought, with having recognised the fatal error of thinking that all could be restored to what it was before, that the new world which was looming could be mastered or halted on the basis of a vision of a bygone era" (Oriente e Occidente Arche, Milan 1982 p.69) and, "man must become the instrument of the mechnical and yet at the same time master it, not only in the physical sense, but also spiritually. This is only possible in the context of a new human type...a being more the subject than the object, one who accepts those aspects of destruction which lead to a surmounting of individualism in favour of a new active impersonalism, towards a "heroic realism"." (Il cammino del cinabro, Arche, Milan 1983 pp. 99 191-192). What is important for man, according to Juenger, is neither happiness nor wealth. It is to enter into a state of resonance with respect to the Figure which is the way to achieve determination, destiny, a discovery which endowes sacrifice with a meaning. The Worker considers the military esprit de corps as nothing exceptional: for him it is the discipline on which he bases his whole life and therein lies his innate superiority. The great force of heroic realism is to be able to face anything, even the certainty of failure with equananimity: nothing can shake the resolve of the Worker. This equananimity is not to be confused with fatalism, it does not preclude the will to action. On the contrary, it provides a lucidity which stimulates action. The key notion of movement, of not being passive, recalls Nietsche's amor fati or Evola's "riding the tiger". Not life in itself is important but the nobility of life, that we can lead a life in the "grand style". The Worker gives form to a chaotic world. The Worker is a demi-urge.

Whether one welcomes it or not, the Worker's day will come. For Juenger force will solve many future problems and will resolve, in the most radical way, many of the tensions of society. The Worker must mobilise, that is to say, be prepared to act forcibly and to be mobile, swift to take advantage of the technical opportunities opening up, the source of the creation of the modern Worker in the first place. Only the Worker is capable of an authentic rapport with the "totalistic character of work", of a genuine relationship with the machine. Being as revealed in the Worker as Gestalt and the essence of the machine is The Will to Power. Technics constitute not only the "symbol of the figure of the Worker" but also the "manner in which that figure mobilises the world". And technology is not here to accelerate progress but to intensify power. Not only progress, but also the notion of the "infinite possibilities of technological development" are illusions. Technology will reach a point of perfection which will mark the furthest stage it can reach, and as with all form, its perfection is reached at the point that it is used to the maximum extent of its inherent potential. At this point there is a difference to be noted between Ernst Juenger and his brother, Friedrich Georg Juenger. The idea of technical perfection in the sense of achievement and fulfillment (Vollendung), is one which the latter examines critically in his writings but which Ernst Juenger sees in a positive light, arguing that one day technology, reaching its amplitude, its perfection, will be able to dominate the entire world, but that this can only be realised by the coming to power of the non-individualist Worker.

By rejecting the "myth of Progress", Juenger denies that technology is neutral, at the service of everyone, or that it is either intrinsically liberating or intrinsically oppressive. Technology enslaves those who are not adequate to cope with it and the form of life which it ushers in. The bourgeois mentality, on the other hand, is terrified of the Golom which it has created but is unable to master. Technology has its own langauge which the Worker is equipped to speak, but not the Bourgeois. Technology is a formation of the elementary forces of the world. This is the end of individualism. The "individual" will become a slave to the machine. The question, already posed by Juenger in Feuer und Blut, is whether man will dominate or be dominated by, his own inventions. Although Juenger rejects the notion that biologically race is important, but metaphysically technology calls forth a new elite and the will to form a new race (Wille zur Rassenbildung) and this new race must be "prudent, strong, shorn of equivocation, drunk with energy". Art will then become the "putting into form" (Gestaltung) of the world of Work. The advent of the Worker will herald the end of individualism and of proletarianism. It will reject the utopias of the materialists and the idealists and will interpret the world in its own image. Marxism and the old religions will all disappear.

Just as technology can not be neutral, nor can the state. The supposed neutrality of the liberal bourgeois state is a sham. In opposition to parliamentary democracies and democratic socialists, Juenger opposes the "democracy of the state", a society with a pyramidal structure founded on the Prussian principles of command and obedience, but in which the leader is not a despot but the "first servant, the first soldier, the first worker". For the Worker liberty and obedience are one. This notion of the "total state" was distinguished by Evola from that of the "totalitarian state", the first being supple, living, organic and marking the beginning of a cycle, the second being moribund, inflexible, mechanised, petrified and representing the end of a cycle. Juenger's state was to be tripartite: the first level with an economic funtion and passively reflecting the Gestalt of the Worker; the second level with an administrative and instructive function and actively reflecting the Gestalt of the Worker; the third level being the sovereign level, whose action would directly reflect the totality of Work and whose imperial authority would represent the Gestalt in its "pure" form. This tripartite system appears to be an adaption of an ancient model of a social scheme which to a certain extent was also reflected in the old German tripartite system of Staende.

In his work Die Totale Mobilmachung (Total Mobilisation) Juenger's perspective was essentially national: only the German people was capable of "affronting" itself, of undertaking a mobilisation of itself. It is in this sense that Juenger saw something positive emerging from the war for Germany: it gave Germany the opportunity to "realise itself". Mobilisation was to be mobilisation of everything which was German "and nothing else". In Der Arbeiter, on the other hand, Juenger abandoned the typical nationalist position in favour of a universal perspective. In the future the nations would become "planning areas" later to be followed by the rule of the Worker over the entire planet. The instauration of the Worker would signal the end of Western nihilism, for which the bourgeois system was responsible. The sovereignity of the "grand style" could only be realised on a global level. Man has reached the point where he must choose between mastering the world or renouncing his humanity.

THOUGHTS ON THE WAYS OF PROVIDENCE IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

2007-05-07T23:16:00.001-07:00

Chapter II of Considerantions on France by Joseph de Maistre

Every nation, like every individual, has a mission which it must fulfill. It would be futile to deny that France exercises a dominant influence over Europe, an influence she has abused most culpably. Above all, she was at the head of the religious system, and it was not without reason that her king was called most Christian: Bossuet has not over-stressed this point. However, as she has used her influence to pervert her vocation and to demoralize Europe, it is not surprising that terrible means must be used to set her on her true course again.

It is long since such an appalling punishment has been seen, visited on so many sinners. No doubt there are innocent people among the unfortunates, but they are far fewer than is commonly imagined.

All those who have worked to separate the people from their religious beliefs; all those who have opposed metaphysical sophistries to the laws of property; all those who have said, "Attack anything, so long as we gain by it"; all those who have meddled with the fundamental laws of the state; all those who have recommended, approved, favored the violent methods used against the king; even our restricted vision can perceive that all these have willed the Revolution, and all who willed it have most appropriately been its victims.

It is frightening to see distinguished intellectuals fall under Robespierre's ax. From a humane standpoint they can never be too much mourned, but divine justice is no respecter of mathematicians or scientists. Too many French intellectuals were instrumental in bringing about the Revolution; too many approved and encouraged it so long as, like Tarquin's wand, it cut off only the ruling heads. Like so many others, they said, A great revolution cannot come about without some distress. But when a thinker justifies such means by the end in view; when he says in his heart, A hundred thousand murders are as nothing, provided we are free; then, if Providence replies, I accept your recommendation, but you shall be one of the victims, where is the injustice? Would we judge otherwise in our own courts?

The details would be odious; but, among those who are called innocent victims of the Revolution, it is not much of a Frenchman whose conscience would not remind him:

Now you see the sad fruits that your faults have produced,
You can feel the blows that you yourselves have induced.

Our ideas on good and evil, on innocence and guilt, are too often affected by our prejudices. We frown on men who fight with daggers, but a duel with swords is considered honorable. We brand a man who steals a halfpenny from a friend, but think it nothing if he steals his wife. We pardon even if we do not make a virtue of all those flashy offenses involving great or likable qualities, above all those rewarded by success: whereas, the brilliant qualities which surround the guilty man blacken him in the eyes of true justice, for whom his greatest crime is the abuse of his gifts.

Every man has certain duties to perform, and the extent of these duties depends on his position in society and the extent of his means. The same action is by no means equally culpable when committed by two different men. Not to stray from our subject, the same act which results only from a mistake or a foolish characteristic in an obscure person, thrust suddenly into unlimited power, could be a foul crime in a bishop or a duke or a peer.

Indeed, some actions, which are excusable and even praiseworthy from an ordinary point of view, are fundamentally infinitely criminal. For example, if someone says, I have espoused the cause of the French Revolution in good faith, through a pure love of liberty and my country; I have believed in my soul and conscience that it would lead to the reform of abuses and to the general good, we have nothing to say in reply. But the eye of him who sees into every heart discerns the stain of sin; he discovers in a ridiculous misunderstanding, in a small puncturing of pride, in a base or criminal passion, the prime moving force behind those ambitions we wish to present to the world as noble: and for him the crime is compounded by grafting the falsehood of hypocrisy onto treason. But let us look at the nation in general.

One of the greatest possible crimes is undoubtedly an attack upon sovereignty, no other having such terrible consequences. If sovereignty resides in one man and this man falls victim to an outrage, the crime of lese-majesty augments the atrocity. But if this sovereign has not deserved his fate through any fault of his own, if his very virtues have strengthened the guilty against him, the crime is beyond description. This is the case in the death of Louis XVI; but what is important to note is that never has such a great crime had more accomplices. The death of Charles I had far fewer, even though it was possible to bring charges against him that Louis XVI did not merit. Yet many proofs were given of the most tender and courageous concern for him; even the executioner, who was obliged to obey, did not dare to make himself known. But in France, Louis XVI marched to his death in the middle of 60,000 armed men who did not have a single shot for their king, not a voice was raised for the unfortunate monarch, and the provinces were as silent as the capital. We would expose ourselves, it was said. Frenchmen - if you find this a good reason, talk no more of your courage or admit that you misuse it!

The indifference of the army was no less remarkable. It served the executioners of the king much better than it had served the king himself since it had betrayed him. It never showed the slightest sign of discontent. In sum, never have so many taken part in such a great crime (although no doubt in varying degrees).

It is necessary to add one important remark: it is that every offense committed against sovereignty, in the name of the nation, is always to a greater or lesser degree a national crime, since it is always to some degree the fault of the nation if any faction whatever is put in a position to commit the crime in its name. Thus, although no doubt not all Frenchmen have willed the death of Louis XVI, the immense majority of the people have for more than two years willed all the follies, injustices and offenses leading up to the catastrophe of January 21st.

Now, every national crime against sovereignty is punished swiftly and terribly; that is a law without exception. Not many days after the death of Louis XVI, someone wrote in the Mercure universel, "Perhaps it was not necessary go to so far; but since our legislators have taken this act on their shoulders, let us rally round them: let us smother all hatreds and question it no longer." Good - it was not perhaps necessary to assassinate the king, but since the deed is done, let us talk of it no more and let us all be good friends. What madness! Shakespeare showed more understanding when he said:

"The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armour of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it."

[Hamlet, Act III, Scene iii.] Each drop of Louis XVI's blood will cost France torrents; perhaps four million Frenchmen will pay with their lives for the great national crime of an antireligious and antisocial insurrection, crowned by a regicide.

Where are the first national guards, the first soldiers, the first generals who swore an oath to the nation? Where are the leaders, the idols of that first guilty Assembly, for whom the epithet constituent will stand as a perpetual epigraph? Where is Mirabeau, where is Bailly with his "beautiful day"? Where is Thouret who invented the term "to expropriate"? Where is Osselin who reported to the Assembly on the first law proscribing the emigres? The names of revolutionary activists who have died a violent death would be numbered in the thousands.

Yet it is here that we can appreciate order in disorder; because it is evident, however little one reflects on it, that the great criminals of the Revolution can fall only under the blows of their accomplices. If force alone were to bring about what is called the counter-revolution and replace the king on the throne, there would be no means of doing justice. For a sensitive man, the greatest misfortune would be to judge the murderer of his father, relatives, and friends or even the usurper of his property. However, this is precisely what would happen in the case of a counter-revolution, as the word is understood, because the higher judges, by the very nature of things, would belong to the injured class, and justice, even when it was aimed only at punishment, would have the air of vengeance. Moreover, legitimate authority always retains some moderation in the punishment of crimes in which large numbers have been involved. When it executes five or six criminals for the same crime, this becomes a massacre; if it goes beyond certain limits, it becomes detestable. In short, great crimes unfortunately demand great punishments; and in this way it is easy to pass the limits when it is a question of crimes of lese-majesty and flattery becomes the executioner. Would the sacred sword of justice have fallen as relentlessly as Robespierre's guillotine? Would all the executioners of the kingdom and every artillery horse have been summoned to Paris in order to quarter men? Would lead and tar have been melted in vast boilers to sprinkle on limbs torn by red-hot tongs? Moreover, how could different crimes be characterized? How could punishments be graduated? And above all how could punishments be imposed without laws? It might be said that some of the most guilty would have to be chosen and all the rest would have to be pardoned. This is precisely what Providence would not wish. Since it is omnipotent, it is ignorant of pardons produced by inability to punish. The great purification must be accomplished and eyes must be opened; the French metal, cleared of its sour and impure dross, must become cleaner and more malleable to a future king. Doubtless in times past Providence had no need to punish in order to justify its courses; but in this age, it puts itself within our range of understanding and punishes like a human tribunal.

There have been nations literally condemned to death like guilty individuals, and we can understand the reasons for this. If it was part of God's designs to reveal to us his intentions with regard to the French Revolution, we should read the chastisement of the French as if it were a legal decree. But what should we understand beyond this? Is not this chastisement apparent? Have we not seen France dishonored by a hundred thousand murders? The whole territory of this fair kingdom covered with scaffolds? And this unhappy land drenched with the blood of its children through judicial massacres, while inhuman tyrants squandered it abroad in a cruel war, sustained in their own private interests? Never has the bloodiest despot gambled with men's lives with so much insolence, and never has an apathetic people presented itself for butchering more willingly. Sword and fire, frost and famine, privations and sufferings of every kind, none of these disgust it with its punishment: everything that is laid down must accomplish its destiny: there will be no disobedience until the judgment is fulfilled.

Yet, in this cruel and disastrous war, there are points of interest, and admiration follows grief turn by turn. Let us take the most terrible epoch of the Revolution; let us suppose that, under the government of the diabolical Committee of Public Safety, the army by a startling change became suddenly royalist; let us suppose that it rallied the primary assemblies to its side and freely named the worthiest and most enlightened men to guide it in this difficult position; let us suppose, finally, that one of these representatives of the army rose and said:

"Brave and loyal soldiers, there are occasions when all human wisdom is reduced to choosing between different evils. It is no doubt hard to fight for the Committee of Public Safety, but it would be yet more disastrous to turn our arms against it. The moment the army meddles in politics, the state will be dissolved and the enemies of France, profiting from this period of disorder, will invade and divide it. We must act, not for the moment, but for the future: above all, the integrity of France must be maintained, and this we can do only by fighting for the government, whatever it may be; because by these means France, in spite of her internal dissensions, will preserve her military power and international influence. To press the point home, it is not for the government that we fight, but for France and for the future king, who will be indebted to us for an empire much greater perhaps than that found by the Revolution. It is therefore our duty to overcome the repugnance which makes us hesitate. Perhaps our contemporaries will calumniate our conduct, but posterity will do us justice."

This man would have spoken very wisely. In fact, the army has appreciated this hypothetical argument without knowing it; and the terror on the one hand and immorality and extravagance on the other, have done precisely what a consummate and almost prophetic wisdom would have dictated to the army. Fundamentally, it can be seen that, the revolutionary movement once having taken root, France and the monarchy could be saved only by Jacobinism.

The king has never had an ally; although he was never imprudent enough to state the fact, it is quite evident that the coalition had no love for French territorial integrity. However, how was the coalition to be resisted? By what supernatural means could the European conspiracy be broken? Only the evil genius of Robespierre could achieve this miracle. The revolutionary government hardened the French spirit, by drenching it in blood: it heightened soldiers' morale and doubled their power by a ferocious despair and contempt for life which derived from fury. The horror of the gallows, pushing the citizen to the frontiers, built up military strength in proportion as it destroyed the least internal resistance. Every life, all wealth, every power was in the hands of the revolutionary government; and this Leviathan, drunk with blood and success, the most appalling phenomenon ever seen and doubtless that ever will be seen, was both a frightful punishment of the French and the only means of saving France.

What were the royalists asking for when they demanded a counter-revolution such as they envisaged, that is to say, brought about suddenly and by force? They were asking for the conquest of France, and therefore for its division, the destruction of its influence and the abasement of its king, that is to say, perhaps three centuries of massacre, the inevitable result of such a breakdown of equilibrium. But our descendants, who will not bother themselves much with our sufferings and will dance on our graves, will laugh at our present ignorance; they will easily console themselves for the excesses that we have seen, and which have conserved the integrity "of the most beautiful kingdom after that of Heaven."[Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, Dedication to Louis XIII.]

It seems that all the monsters spawned by the Revolution have worked only for the monarchy. Through them, the luster of victories has won the world's admiration and has surrounded the name of France with a glory not entirely dimmed by the crimes of the Revolution; through them, the king will return to the throne with all his brilliance and power, perhaps even with an increase in power. And who knows if, instead of miserably sacrificing some of his provinces to obtain the right of ruling over the others, he will not be restored with the pride of power which gives what it can withhold? Certainly, less probable things have been seen to happen.

This same idea that everything works for the advantage of the French monarchy leads me to believe that any royalist revolution is impossible before the war ends; for the restoration of the Crown would weaken suddenly the whole machinery of the state. The black magic operating at this moment would vanish like a mist before the sun. Kindness, clemency, justice, all the gentle and peaceful virtues would suddenly reappear and bring back with them a certain general gentleness of character, a certain cheerfulness entirely opposed to the somber rigor of the revolutionary regime. No more requisitions, no more legal thefts, no more violence. Would the generals, preceded by the white flag, call revolutionary the inhabitants of the invaded areas who legitimately defended themselves? And would they enjoin them not to move on pain of being shot as rebels? These horrors, very useful to the future king, could not, however, be employed by him; he would then have only human means at his disposal. He would be on a level with his enemies; and what would happen at that moment of suspension which necessarily accompanies the transition from one government to another? I do not know. I am well aware that the great conquests of the French seem to put the integrity of the kingdom beyond dispute. (I even intend to touch here on the reason for these conquests.) However it still appears more advantageous to France and the monarchy that peace, and a glorious peace for the French, should be achieved by the Republic, and that, when the king returns to the throne, a stable peace should remove him from every kind of danger.

On the other hand, it is clear that a violent revolution, far from curing the people, would confirm them in their errors and they would never pardon the power that snatched their dreams from them. Since it was the people, properly speaking, or the masses, that the rebels needed to overturn France, it is evident that in general they have had to spare the people and that the heaviest burdens have had to fall first of all on the wealthy class. Thus the usurping power needs to weigh for some time on the people in order to disgust them with it. They have only seen the Revolution; they must feel it and enjoy, so to speak, its bitter consequences. Perhaps, at the moment when I write, this is not yet sufficiently the case....

Let us now glance at the outrageous persecution stirred up against the national religion and its ministers: it is one of the most interesting facets of the Revolution.

It cannot be denied that the French clergy was in need of reform; and, though I am very far from taking up the vulgar attacks on the clergy, nonetheless it appears to me incontestable that wealth, luxury, and a general tendency toward laxity had lowered this great body of men; that it was often possible to find under the surplice a man of the world rather than an apostle; and finally that, in the years immediately before the Revolution, the clergy had fallen, almost as much as the army, from the place it had occupied in public esteem.

The first blow aimed at the Church was the appropriation of its estates; the second was the constitutional oath; and these two tyrannical measures started the reformation. The oath screened the priests, if it can be so expressed. All who took it, save a few exceptions whom we can ignore, saw themselves led by stages into the abyss of crime and disgrace; opinion has only one view of these apostates.

The faithful priests, recommended to this same opinion by an initial act of firmness, won even more renown by the bravery with which they have been able to bear sufferings and even death in defense of their faith. The massacre of Carmes is comparable in its beauty to anything of this sort that ecclesiastical history can offer.

No more revolting tyranny can be imagined than that which expelled them from their country by thousands, against all justice and decency; but on this point, as in all the others, the crimes of the French tyrants became the weapons of Providence. It was probably necessary for French priests to be shown to foreign nations; they have lived among Protestant peoples, and this closeness has greatly diminished hatreds and prejudices. The considerable migration of the clergy, and particularly of the French bishops, to England especially seems to me a remarkable event. Surely words of peace will have been spoken and schemes of rapprochement formed during this remarkable reunion. Even if only common hopes were created, this would still be a great deal. If ever Christians draw together, as everyone asks them to, it seems that the impulse must come from the Church of England. Presbyterianism was a French, and consequently an exaggerated, creation. We stand too far away from the adherents of this insubstantial religion; there are no means of communication between us. But the Anglican Church, which touches us with one hand, touches with the other those whom we cannot approach; and although, from a certain point of view, it is exposed to attacks from the two sides, and although it presents the slightly ridiculous sight of a rebel who preaches obedience, it is nevertheless very valuable from another standpoint and can be seen as a catalyst, capable of combining elements incompatible of themselves.

The property of the clergy having been dissipated, no despicable motive can for a long time to come attract new members to it: so that everything combines to revive the clergy. There is reason to believe, moreover, that the contemplation of the work with which it is charged will give to it a degree of exaltation which raises men above themselves and makes them capable of great things.

Add to these circumstances the ferment of ideas in certain European countries, the inspiring opinions of several great men, and that kind of disquiet which is affecting religious people, especially in Protestant countries, and is pushing them along unwonted paths.

Notice at the same time the storm rumbling over Italy, Rome menaced as well as Geneva by the power that wants the destruction of all sects, and the national supremacy of religion abolished in Holland by a decree of the National Convention. If Providence deletes, it is no doubt in order to rewrite. I notice that when great systems of belief have established themselves in the world, they have been favored by great conquests in the formation of great sovereignties, and the reason can clearly be seen.

How indeed have these remarkable schemes which have baffled all human foresight come about in one day? In truth, there is a temptation to believe that political revolution is only a secondary object of the great plan which is developing before our eyes with such terrible majesty.

I talked, at the beginning, of the leadership that France exercises over the rest of Europe. Providence, which always fits means to ends and gives to nations, as to individuals, the instruments necessary to accomplish their destiny, has in this way given to the French nation two weapons and, so to speak, two hands with which to mold the world, its language and the spirit of proselytism that forms the core of its character; so that it has always the ability and the wish to influence other men.

The power, I almost said the royalty, of the French language is apparent; this cannot be seriously disputed. As for the spirit of proselytism, it is as obvious as the sun; from the dress designer to the philosopher, it is the foremost trait of the national character.

This proselytism is commonly ridiculed, and really it often merits it, particularly in the forms it takes, but fundamentally it has a function.

It is a constant law of the moral world that every function produces a duty. The Gallican Church was the cornerstone of the Catholic system or, more properly, since there is in truth only one system, the Christian system. Although perhaps they doubt it, the Churches opposing the universal Church exist only by virtue of it, being like those parasitic plants, those sterile mistletoes which draw their nurture from and weaken the tree that supports them.

From the fact that the action and reaction of opposing powers is always equal, the greatest efforts of the goddess of Reason against Christianity were made in France; the enemy attacked the citadel.

The French clergy should not therefore fall asleep; it has a thousand reasons for believing that it is called to a high destiny; and the same arguments that show it why it is suffering allow it also to believe itself fated for a crucial task.

In a word, if a moral revolution does not occur in Europe, if religious feeling is not strengthened in this part of the world, the social bond will be destroyed. Nothing can be predicted, and anything may be expected. But if any change for the better does come, either analogies, induction, and conjectural skills are useless or else it is France that is called to produce the change.

This is above all what leads me to believe that the French Revolution is a watershed in history and that its consequences of every kind will be felt far beyond the time of its outburst and the limits of its birthplace.

Political considerations confirm this view. How many European powers have deceived themselves over France! How many have dreamed up vain endeavorsl You who think yourselves free because you have no judges on this earth, never say: This suits me; DISCITE JUSTITIAM MONITE! What hand, at once severe and paternal, scourged France with every imaginable plague, and held sway with supernatural means by turning every effort of its enemies against themselves? Let no one come to speak to us of assignats and the power of numbers, for the possibility of assignats and of the power of numbers is itself the work of the supernatural. Moreover it is neither through paper money nor through numerical advantage that the winds guided the French ships and thrust back those of their enemies; that winter gave the French bridges of ice just when they needed them; that kings who impede them die conveniently; that they invade Italy without artillery, and that the most reputedly brave armies of the world, although equal in number, throw down their arms and allow themselves to be taken captives....

In fact, the punishment of the French breaks all the ordinary rules, as does also the protection accorded to France: but these two miracles combined serve to reinforce one another, and present one of the most astonishing sights of human history.

As events unfold, other and more wonderful reasons and relationships will show themselves. Moreover, I see only a fraction of those which a more perceptive insight could have discovered at this time.

The horrible effusion of human blood caused by this great upheaval is a terrible means, yet it is a means as much as a punishment, and can give rise to some interesting reflections.

Our Doom

2007-05-07T23:15:00.001-07:00

Excerpted from Chapter II of Spengler's Man and Technics, Oswald Spengler

To development belongs fulfilment — every evolution has a beginning, and every fulfilment is an end. To youth belongs age; to arising, passing; to life, death. For the animal, tied in the nature of its thinking to the present, death is known or scented as something in the future, something that does not threaten it. It only knows the fear of death the moment of being killed. But man, whose thought is emancipated from the fetters of here and now, yesterday and tomorrow, boldly investigates the "once" of past and future, and it depends on the depth or shallowness of his nature whether he triumphs over the fear of the end or not. An old Greek legend — without which the lliad could not have been — tells how his mother put before Achilles the choice between a long life or a short life full of deeds and fame, and how he chose the second.

Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual — from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual — whether this be animal or plant or man — is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the "have-been" works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hybris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements"?

World-history bears a very different face from that of which even our age permits itself to dream. The history of man, in comparison with that of the plant and animal worlds on this planet — not to mention the lifetimes prevailing in the star world — is brief indeed. It is a steep ascent and fall, covering a few millennia, a period negligible in the history of the earth but, for us who are born with it, full of tragic grandeur and force. And we, human beings of the twentieth century, go downhill seeing. Our eye for history, our faculty of writing history, is a revealing sign that our path lies downward. At the peaks of the high Cultures, just as they are passing over into Civilizations, this gift of penetrating recognition comes to them for a moment, and only for a moment.

Intrinsically it is a matter of no importance what is the destiny, among the swarms of the "eternal" stars, of this small planet that pursues its course somewhere in infinite space for a little time; still less important, what moves for a couple of instants upon its surface. But each and every one of us, intrinsically a null, is for an unnamably brief moment a lifetime cast into that whirling universe. And for us therefore this world-in-little, this "world-history," is something of supreme importance. And, what is more, the destiny of each of these individuals consists in his being, by birth, not merely brought into this world-history, but brought into it in a particular century, a particular country, a particular people, a particular religion, a particular class. It is not within our power to choose whether we would like to be sons of an Egyptian peasant of 3000 B.C., of a Persian king, or of a present-day tramp. This destiny is something to which we have to adapt ourselves. It dooms us to certain situations, views, and actions. There are no "men-in-themselves" such as the philosophers talk about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personal cast, who contend in battle with a given world and win through or fail, while the universe around them moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life — life, indeed, in the Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-Power.

ON REVOLUTIONS

2007-05-07T23:14:00.000-07:00

Chapter I of Considerations on France by Joseph de Maistre

We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance. Freely slaves, they act at once of their own will and under necessity: they actually do what they wish without being able to disrupt general plans. Each of them stands at the center of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the decision of the eternal geometry, which can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature.

In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum. In divine works, boundless riches reveal themselves even in the smallest component; its power operates effortlessly: in its hands everything is pliant, nothing can resist it; everything is a means, nothing an obstacle: and the irregularities produced by the work of free agents come to fall into place in the general order.

If one imagines a watch all of whose springs continually vary in power, weight, dimension, form, and position, and which nevertheless invariably shows the right time, one can get some idea of the action of free beings in relation to the plans of the Creator.

In the political and moral world, as in the physical, there is a usual order and there are exceptions to this order. Normally, we see a series of effects following the same causes; but in certain ages we see usual effects suspended, causes paralyzed and new consequences emerging.

A miracle is an effect produced by a divine or superhuman cause which suspends or is inconsistent with an ordinary cause. If in the middle of winter a man, before a thousand witnesses, orders a tree to cover itself suddenly with leaves and fruit, and if the tree obeys, everyone will proclaim a miracle and prostrate themselves before the thaumaturge. But the French Revolution, as well as everything that is happening in Europe at this time, is just as miraculous in its way as the instant fructification of a tree in January; yet men ignore it or talk nonsense about it, instead of admiring. In the physical order, into which man does not intrude as a cause, he is quite ready to admire what he does not understand; but in the sphere of his own activity, where he feels he acts freely as a cause, his pride easily leads him to see disorder wherever his own power is suspended or upset. Certain actions within the power of man regularly produce certain effects in the ordinary course of events; if he misses his mark, he knows, or thinks he knows, why; he recognizes the difficulties, he appreciates them, and nothing astonishes him. But in revolutionary times, the chain that binds man is shortened abruptly, his field of action is cut down, and his means deceive him. Carried along by an unknown force, he rails against it, and instead of kissing the hand that clasps him, he ignores or insults it.

I don't understand anything is the popular catchphrase. The phrase is very sensible if it leads us to the root cause of the great sight now presented to men; it is stupid if it expresses only spleen or sterile despondency. The cry is raised on all sides, "How then can the guiltiest men in the world triumph over the world? A hideous regicide has all the success for which its perpetrators could have hoped. Monarchy is dormant all over Europe. Its enemies find allies even on thrones themselves. The wicked are successful in everything. They carry through the most immense projects without difficulty, while the righteous are unfortunate and ridiculous in everything they undertake. Opinion runs against faith throughout Europe. The foremost statesmen continually fall into error. The greatest generals are humiliated. And so on."

Doubtless, because its primary condition lays it down, there are no means of preventing a revolution, and no success can attend those who wish to impede it. But never is purpose more apparent, never is Providence more palpable, than when divine replaces human action and works alone. That is what we see at this moment.

The most striking aspect of the French Revolution is this overwhelming force which turns aside all obstacles. Its current carries away like a straw everything human power has opposed to it. No one has run counter to it unpunished. Purity of motive has been able to make resistance honorable, but that is all; and this jealous force, moving inexorably to its objective, rejects equally Charette, Dumouriez, and Drouet.

It has been said with good reason that the French Revolution leads men more than men lead it. This observation is completely justified; and, although it can be applied more or less to all great revolutions, yet it has never been more strikingly illustrated than at the present time. The very villains who appear to guide the Revolution take part in it only as simple instruments; and as soon as they aspire to dominate it, they fall ingloriously. Those who established the Republic did so without wishing it and without realizing what they were creating; they have been led by events: no plan has achieved its intended end.

Never did Robespierre, Collot, or Barere think of establishing the revolutionary government or the Reign of Terror; they were led imperceptibly by circumstances, and such a sight will never be seen again. Extremely mediocre men are exercising over a culpable nation the most heavy despotism history has seen, and, of everyone in the kingdom, they are certainly the most astonished at their power.

But at the very moment when these tyrants have committed every crime necessary to this phase of the Revolution, a breath of wind topples them. This gigantic power, before which France and Europe trembled, could not stand before the first gust; and because there could be no possible trace of greatness or dignity in such an entirely criminal revolution, Providence decreed that the first blow should be struck by the Septembrists, so that justice itself might be degraded.

It is often astonishing that the most mediocre men have judged the French Revolution better than the most talented, that they have believed in it strongly while skilled men of affairs were still unbelievers. This conviction was one of the foremost elements of the Revolution, which could succeed only because of the extent and vigor of the revolutionary spirit or, if one can so express it, because of the revolutionary faith. So untalented and ignorant men have ably driven what they call the revolutionary chariot; they have all ventured without fear of counter-revolution; they have always driven on without looking behind them; and everything has fallen into their lap because they were only the instruments of a force more farsighted than themselves. They have taken no false steps in their revolutionary career, for the same reason that the flutist of Vaucanson never played a false note.

The revolutionary current has taken successively different courses; and the most prominent revolutionary leaders have acquired the kind of power and renown appropriate to them only by following the demands of the moment. Once they attempted to oppose it or even to turn it from its predestined course, by isolating themselves and following their own bent, they disappeared from the scene....

In short, the more one examines the apparently more active personalities of the Revolution, the more one finds something passive and mechanical about them. It cannot be too often repeated that men do not at all guide the Revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men. It is well said that it has its own impetus. This phrase shows that never has the Divinity revealed itself so clearly in any human event. If it employs the most vile instruments, it is to regenerate by punishment.

The Organic View of History

2007-05-07T23:13:00.000-07:00

excerpted from the opening chapter of Spengler's Decline of the West (1918-1923)

Oswald Spengler It is a quite indefensible method of presenting world-history to begin by giving rein to one's own religious, political or social convictions and endowing the sacrosanct three-phase system [i.e. ancient-medieval-modern] with tendencies that will bring it exactly to one's own standpoint. This is, in effect, making of some formula—say, the "Age of Reason," Humanity, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the conquest of nature or world-peace—a criterion whereby to judge whole millennia of history. And so we judge that they were ignorant of the "true path," or that they failed to follow it, when the fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the same as ours. Goethe's saying "What is important in life is life and not a result of life" is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the riddle of historical form by means of a programme.

It is the same picture that we find when we turn to the historians of each special art or science (and those of national economics and philosophy as well). We find:

"Painting" from the Egyptians (or the cave-men) to the Impressionists, or

"Music" from Homer to Bayreuth and beyond, or

"Social Organization" from Lake Dwellings to Socialism, as

the case may be,

presented as a linear graph which steadily rises in conformity with the values of the (selected) arguments. No one has seriously considered the possibility that arts may have an allotted span of life and may be attached as forms of self-expression to particular regions and particular types of mankind, and that therefore the total history of an art may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some details of craft-technique.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we take our ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e. organic, experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on predilection.

"Mankind," however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. "Mankind" is a zoological expression, or an empty word. But conjure away the phantom, break the magic circle, and at once there emerges an astonishing wealth of actual forms—the Living with all its immense fullness, depth and movement—hitherto veiled by a catchword, a dry-as-dust scheme and a set of personal "ideals."

I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting one's eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves—but there is no aging "Mankind." Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These Cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding onto itself one epoch after another.

But the series "ancient-mediaeval-modern history" has at last exhausted its usefulness. Angular, narrow, shallow though it was as a scientific foundation, still we possessed no other form that was not wholly unphilosophical in which our data could be arranged, and world-history (as hitherto understood) has to thank it for filtering our classifiable solid residues. But the number of centuries that the scheme can by any stretch be made to cover has long since been exceeded, and with the rapid increase in the volume of our historical material—especially of material that cannot possibly be brought under the scheme—the picture is beginning to dissolve into a chaotic blur.

HISTORICAL RELATIVITY

When Plato speaks of humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias' art, or Rembrandt's art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed to show that Aristotle's intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it.

It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it—insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his "unshakable" truths and "eternal" views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of "Thought," the principles of "Tragedy," the mission of "the State." Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.

But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the problem of life (the will to life, to power, to action). Here it is not the ideal abstract "man" of Kant that is subjected to examination, but actual man as he has inhabited the earth during historical time, grouped, whether primitive or advanced, by peoples; and it is more than ever futile to define the structure of his highest ideas in terms of the "ancient-mediaeval-modern" scheme with its local limitations. But it is done, nevertheless.

Consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche. His conceptions of decadence, militarism, the transvaluation of all values, the will to power, lie deep in the essence of Western civilization and are for the analysis of that civilization of decisive importance. But what, do we find, was the foundation on which he built up his creation? Romans and Greeks, Renaissance and European present, with a fleeting and uncomprehending side-glance at Indian philosophy—in short "ancient, mediaeval and modern" history. Strictly speaking, he never once moved outside the scheme, nor did any other thinker of his time. And is the thought-range of Schopenhauer, Comte, Feuerbach, Hebbel or Strindberg any wider? Is not their whole psychology, for all its intention of world-wide validity, one of purely West European significance?

What the West has said and thought, hitherto, on the problems of space, time, motion, number, will, marriage, property, tragedy, science, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always looking for the solution of the question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers, that any philosophical question is really a veiled desire to get an explicit affirmation of what is implicit in the question itself, that the great questions of any period are fluid beyond all conception, and that therefore it is only by obtaining a group of historically limited solutions and measuring it by utterly impersonal criteria that the final secrets can be reached. In other Cultures the phenomenon talks a different language, for other men there are different truths. Thethinker must admit the validity of all, or of none. How greatly, then, Western world-criticism can be widened and deepened! How immensely far beyond the innocent relativism of Nietzsche and his generation one must look—how fine one's sense for form and one's psychological insight must become—how completely one must free oneself from limitations of self, of practical interests, of horizon—before one dare assert the pretension to understand world-history, the world-as-history.

THE HISTORICAL EYE

In opposition to all these arbitrary and narrow schemes, derived from tradition or personal choice, into which history is forced, I put forward the natural, the "Copernican," form of the historical process which lies deep in the essence of that process and reveals itself only to an eye perfectly free from prepossessions.

Such an eye was Goethe's. That which Goethe called Living Nature is exactly that which we are calling here world-history, world-as-history. Goethe, who as artist portrayed the life and development, always the life and development, of his figures, the thing-becoming and not the thing-become (Wilhelm Meister and Dichtung und Wahrheit), hated Mathematics. For him, the world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the world-as-organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form. As naturalist, every line he wrote was meant to display the image of a thing-becoming, the "impressed form" living and developing. Sympathy, observation, comparison, immediate and inward certainty, intellectual flair—these were the means whereby he was enabled to approach the secrets of the phenomenal world in motion. Now these are the means of historical research—precisely these and no others. It was this godlike insight that prompted him to say at the bivouac fire on the evening of the Battle of Valmy: "Here and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentlemen, can say that you 'were there.'" No general, no diplomat, let alone the philosophers, ever so directly felt history "becoming." It is the deepest judgment that any man ever uttered about a great historical act in the moment of its accomplishment.

And just as he followed out the development of the plant-form from the leaf, the birth of the vertebrate type, the process of the geological strata - the Destiny in nature and not the Causality—so here we shall develop the form-language of human history, its periodic structure, its organic logic, out of the profusion of all the challenging details.

In other aspects, mankind is habitually, and rightly, reckoned as one of the organisms of the earth's surface. Its physical structure, its natural functions, the whole phenomenal conception of it, all belong to a more comprehensive unity. Only in this aspect is it treated otherwise, despite that deeply felt relationship of plant destiny and human destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry, and despite that similarity of human history to that of any other of the higher life-groups which is the refrain of endless beast-legends, sagas and fables. But only bring analogy to bear on this aspect as on the rest, letting the world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the imagination instead of forcing it into a ready-made scheme. Let the words "youth," "growth," "maturity," "decay"—hitherto, and today more than ever, used to express subjective valuations and entirely personal preferences in sociology, ethics and aesthetics—be taken at last as objective descriptions of organic states. Set forth the Classical Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and expressing the Classical soul, put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian, the Babylonian, the Chinese and the Western, and determine for each of these higher individuals what is typical in their surgings and what is necessary in the riot of incident. And then at last will unfold itself the picture of world-history that is natural to us, men of the West, and to us alone.

The Danger of Americanism

2007-05-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

"Die Gefahr des Amerikanismus," Das Schwarze Korps, 14 March 1944, pp. 1-2.

When we speak of young Europe and its young nations, we contrast them to the senile world of dying liberalism which, under the leadership of Jewry, is once more gathering all its material resources in an attempt to forever subject the world to the power of money under the domination of those who have it. They want to perpetuate the social injustice they find so comfortable. More is involved than differences between ages and generations, however.

Our camp includes not only those who are young enough to topple the old and build a new world. It includes all those spiritual forces that see the new in the collapse of the old, who want to build a new future with new ways and means.

The triumph of the Copernican worldview over the unfruitful dogma of the past, the triumph of science over empty faith, was a victory of youth. They followed the shining examples of their predecessors. The youth have always been the battering ram that helped bring the national idea to fruition. The discovery of the laws of inheritance has been the occasion and guidepost of a new youth movement that builds on the eternal culture-building values of race and blood. They lead from the deadly and destructive lethargy of materialism to the new world of tomorrow.

Today it is as it always was in times of revolution. Those fighting for the new have more to offer the youth than those who live in yesterday, who hold to what they have grown accustomed to, even if it has long since become rigid, empty and stifling. We offer the youth the freedom to develop their nation, even in the case of smaller nations. We offer them room for creative fantasy, the opportunity to transform great thoughts to reality outside the lecture hall. We offer the realization of dreams on a world scale, a common Germanic will, a common European will. We fill the spiritual vacuum left by liberalism with the magic of a worldview that draws self-confidence and meaning to life from race and the blood of one's ancestors.

What does old England have to offer its youth to justify the war's requirements? It cannot even begin to solve its own social problems, much less offer anything to other peoples. Where is there a healthy youth that is on fire for Bolshevism? It was a danger only during the spiritual interregnum that followed the First World War. In the face of an inadequate yesterday, it was the only force, the only revolutionary movement, available, and anything was better than nothing.

Today Bolshevism may have reached its material and organizational pinnacle on the bent backs of its devotees, but as a spiritual movement it is finished. The crass incompetence of its methods and goals have proven it to be the very epitome of capitalist slavery.

The only remaining alternative is Americanism. As strange as it may sound, it is the only serious competition to National Socialism's racial worldview in the struggle for the youth, in the struggle for the future of humanity. In the end, however, it is only a forerunner of Bolshevism.

Americanism is certainly not a spiritual movement, nor is it a worldview that it is possible to oppose at the intellectual level. Its political beneficiaries have tried in recent years to give it, if not a face, at least a program or a goal: "the American Century." It is a collection of empty promises of the type democratic orators have always made—but this time on a world scale. There is nothing in them to excite a reasonable man. But that is exactly the point of Americanism! The key is not what it promises, but what it cannot promise. The key is not what it demands of men, but what gives them.

That would not matter if the world's youth were of the sound character that develops from racially conscious lines, tradition-rich families, good upbringing and close camaraderie. But that is not the way things are. The good fairy will not give youth the values they will need in life. The racially sound youth can be inspired by virtue of his blood. But the blood does not tell him what should inspire him. He can be misled into serving a bad cause. He can squander his enthusiasm if he matures in a spiritual vacuum. One should not underestimate the danger of Americanism, or its seductive power. It offers devotion to a culture of nothingness, independence, lack of restraint, a freedom from all obligation, from all honor, from all consideration.

We do not wish to deny this culture of nothingness its right to exist. It can even, rightly used, be good, just as it is sometimes a pleasure to do nothing. Should a German soldier happen to find a portable record player and jazz records in the deserted quarters of British or American soldiers, he does not smash them against the wall. Instead, he takes them along and thinks he has a great treasure. We don't want to suggest excessive cultural disaster here. There are times when he wants a vacation from himself, from us, from the whole world. He needs to relax, and certainly does not wish to ponder intellectual matters. Nothing is better suited to take him out of the normal world that the complete nonsense of this hot music, this cacophony of animal howls, wild instruments and foot-stomping Negro lust. It takes him away from human concerns back to the depths of pre-human apedom, returning him to the time when people did not need to think because there was no past and no future. Its effect is like that of alcohol, which turns normally rational men into shouting, destructive children. That can sometimes be good for serious and intelligent men. And the soldier certainly does not forget his German mission, nor does he lose his character or honor when he occasionally spends an hour relaxing to entertaining music. He is immune to the danger of confusing this rhythmic pig grunting with good music, much less art or culture. It cannot meet his higher standards.

Others, however, are not as immune. That is what those who deny any appeal of Americanism forget.

Certainly there is no danger that our young boys and girls will fall into sexual frenzy while listening to some Jewish lout blowing on a saxophone. One can introduce them to the high priests of the American jitterbug with no worries at all. At most they will laugh. Our young Luftwaffe aides and working girls would hardly join in a dance marathon. And the winning couple running through the arena in tattered, sweaty clothes would receive not applause, but a beating. But that is our youth. They are made of different stuff, and grew up in a world in which dignity comes from doing one's duty, and both are seen not as a burden but as the joy of life.

That may be self-evident to us, but it is not so to others. Whole nations behave in ways not guided by clear tasks. They are only individuals, parents, teachers, tribes and groups, able to lead them out of error and confusion into a clear world of meaning. We may not forget that during the tragic years following the First World War, a significant part of our youth too fell to the appeal of Americanism, waving their limbs in the Shimmy and the Charleston because there was nothing else to do.

We sometimes fail to see that there are young people in Europe today—often from the so-called better classes—who not only do not stand within the camp of young Europe, but even mock or scorn it. Many of us simply cannot understand how there can be a mass meeting at a Norwegian university protesting those who are risking their lives in the east for the freedom and security of their native land, or how Swedish students, even if they do not jump to the side of their Finnish brothers, do not at least follow their struggle with respect.

These young men surely are not consciously supporting the plans of Stalin and Roosevelt. Thank God, this small part of Europe's youth is not a politically aware counterpart to the European youth defending young Europe in the east. Those who think politically and act from conviction demonstrate it through their actions. The others have followed the comfortable path that leads from political thinking to Americanism.

That is the political danger of Americanism. It leads those who fall prey to it away from political thinking, away from responsibility, even to their nation, away from decency, even from national decency.

The American lad may use fine phrases to say that the nationalist is his political enemy. In reality, however, he fights a man who makes uncomfortable and difficult demands on him, the man who recognizes the fate of the nation as his fate, who respects the woman who will become the mother of his children, who wants to be a model, who always acts as if the eyes of the nation are upon him. The American lad feels his "freedom" restricted by such behavior. He wants to keep the hot music spinning on the record player, not be reminded that he must work as well as relax, that he must not only enjoy, but also honor the dignity of his nation.

That is neither comfortable nor pleasant. It is pleasant to talk slang and enjoy a loose moral life with those of like mind. Americanism has its delights, and he who is captivated by them not only sticks his head in the sand, he also gets some pleasure. It is nice to be able to dismiss all criticism of a too hearty enjoyment of life with the claim that one is defending human rights against Nazi brutality.

Americanism is not a logical development. It certainly does not spring from the descendants of the Virginia colonists with their Prussian sense of honor and duty, nor from the healthy farmers and citizens of the Midwest. It did not triumph easily against the often overdone moralism of Puritan circles. Its power grew along with that of Jewry. As is the case of everything that follows the orders of Jewry, Americanism's lack of culture and morality, its freedom-promising "Century of the Child," is nothing but a concealed way of ruining the youth.

Americanism is a splendid method of depoliticization. The Jews have used jazz and movies, magazines and smut, gangsterism and free love, and every perverse desire to keep the American people so distracted that they pay no attention to their own fate. Even in politics, they are no longer influenced by the head, only by what is under the belt.

The Jews would not be Jews if they did not want to apply such tested methods to the entire world. Nearly every nation in the world faced or is facing the need to combat Americanism, a generally pleasant retreat to a barbaric lack of culture.

The logical consequences of Americanism will help the world combat it. The fact that 60% of American crimes are committed by children 13-years-old and under and that rapes increased three-fold between 1942 and 1943 proves that Americanism has reached its limits. It will cause a counter-movement that, just as in Europe, can only be political.

Americanism is not merely a moral-cultural form of degeneration, nor can it be combated by nonpolitical means. It has already been defeated when one digs it up by its roots and sees there plainly the words: "Made in

Israel

Europe at the crossroads

2007-05-07T23:09:00.000-07:00

A Dark Outlook

The subject of "Europe Today" is not one to be approached with equanimity. It does not attract one's soul nor does it fill one with inner joy. We contemplate the image of Europe, as it is today, weighed down by many apprehensions and sadness. As soon as we are about to tackle its problems, we feel invaded by a sense of anxiety attacking us from a thousand ambushes. What aspects of today's Europe could possibly generate in us a spark of approval, let alone enthusiasm? Even with a maximum of good will, it would be very difficult for us to discover in its actual structure anything sound and enduring.

To speak of today's Europe in favourable or, at least, acceptable terms would be equal to seeking refuge in an illusion; closing our eyes to reality by deceiving ourselves. If our own destiny were not at stake, we might be less scrupulous in our appraisal of the situation. Since however, the question is not to recall a bygone era but to engage in the issue our own existence, which is threatened today by the gravest dangers, we are compelled to adopt an attitude of extreme vigilance when embarking on an examination of the actual state of affairs in Europe.

The picture presented by today's Europe is not boding well in any respect. No gift of prophecy nor any great erudition is needed to arrive at such a conclusion. It suffices to possess a sound judgment and to look reality in the face. Behind the deceptive facade of a continuously increasing material prosperity, explosive substances - originating from a multitude of mistakes, lack of foresight, weakness and cowardice - are accumulating and will, one fine day, raze to the ground all the super- structures, erected, with so much pains taking effort in concrete and steel, in place of the ruins left behind by World War II. The free Europe- any, as though transported with some industrial ecstasy, are building factories and workshops, ports and airports, sky-scrapers, roads and railroads, in the firm conviction that with each yard of new construction they are approaching a better life. In actual truth, however, they are act- ing like the man in Jesus' parable who built his house on sand. This whole technical saga of the West is undermined in its foundations and condemned to imminent disintegration for it is lacking in the certainty of a tomorrow.

The uneasiness which has invaded our era and the uncertainty in which we live is being sustained by the Communist menace. Until the Iron Curtain is removed, every free European engaging in the reconstruction of his own dwelling and country will be haunted by the question: will those houses and factories still be in their place tomorrow, and if they be there, having escaped destruction, will they still be- long to those who built them? This factor of uncertainty insidiously penetrates the atmosphere of our time, spoils the joy of living and frustrates the reward of all our labours. From the Russian steppes there are advancing the shadows of death to pursue the gigantic constructive effort put up by Western man.

Europe Mutilated

The symptom of the European crisis deserving most concern is undoubtedly the fact that free Europeans should have become used to living with only one half of the body of their Continent, after having, with an astonishing lightheartedness, abandoned its other half to Soviet imperialism. They do not feel incommodated any longer by the amputation thus suffered; they do no longer perceive their infirmity. Today's Europe, cut in two as it were by the mine-fields and barbed wire fences of the Iron Curtain, is no longer the Europe left to our heritage by the centuries. The East and the West of Europe together form an organic whole, a creative entity. What is termed `free' Europe is nothing but Europe mutilated. European culture was born in the Orient, and it is from there that it spread to the West. Even the name of Europe denoted, in the clays of ancient Greece, that continental region which lies to the north of the Aegean Sea; only later did it acquire the connotation which now covers also the Western parts of our Continent. If we come to consider European achievements in the spheres of the arts, politics, philosophy, science or Christianity, we realize they all are due to reciprocal efforts at cross-fertilisation between East and West.

The passing of Eastern Europe under the Soviet yoke is not destructive of the historic and cultural integrity of Europe alone; that subjection is not merely a blow to its past and traditions; the losses of territory and population endured by Europe have rendered questionable its future as well. Since times immemorial, beginning even with prehistoric invasions, Eastern Europe has constituted the protective dyke to Western Europe. There it was that the tidal waves of barbarian invasions clashed first with the forces of resistance, and by the time they launched a fresh attack against the West their destructive fury had lost much of its initial impetus. Because of this uninterrupted succession of invasions, the peoples that gradually came to coagulate in Eastern Europe have never been able to enjoy any prolonged period of peace and liberty. Their history could be likened to a panting respiration. The best part of the energies of these peoples has been spent on defending their very existence. A Rumanian chronicler described the bitter fate of our people by saying that "it has been placed on the road of all evils".

The peoples of Eastern Europe have been able to establish their national States only in the 19 th century, and their political emancipation was not concluded until the end of the second world war. From the 15 th century, which saw the gradual exhaustion of the barbarian invasions, to the beginning of the 20 th, these peoples lived in the griphold of three imperialisms - that of the Ottoman Turks, the Russians and the Habsburgs.

Being compelled to pay such a bloody tribute to history, the peoples of Eastern Europe have - quite naturally - fallen behind on the cultural plane. Their creative impulses could not find a way of asserting themselves in that state of turmoil in which they permanently lived. Every time the national genius of these peoples had begun to bear fruit it was stifled by invaders. All these peoples - whether they be Rumanians, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Bulgarians, Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks or Albanians- are young as regards their cultural age. Their tormented history has never granted them respite in which to demonstrate to the world the excellence of their talents. And now history is repeating itself - abandoned to Soviet tyranny they once more see the chance destroyed to express their creative originality in the cultural field.

The annihilation of the creative liberty of these Eastern peoples is not to be regarded as their exclusive liability. The shackling of their national genius by the Communists is a fact which impoverishes and disorganizes the cultural destiny of Europe as a whole. For the cultural trajectory of the Western peoples has already been established to a large extent. Without identifying ourselves with the theory of "The Decline of the Occident" (Untergang des Abendlandes) we dare affirm that these peoples have deployed in a very great measure their inner universe in the domain of the arts, philosophy and science.

The peoples of Eastern Europe do not find themselves in the same situation. These peoples have begun to partake of a higher form of life only about a hundred years ago. They still represent an enigma, an unknown factor in the cultural sphere. Eastern Europe has stored up within herself the cultural reserves of an entire continent. This region is destined to nourish the European spirit with new stimuli, with new means of creation. By abandoning these peoples to the Soviet sphere of influence, Europe has harmed its very creative substance and deprived itself of its best- its germ-cell of reproduction. Instead of fertilizing the culture of Europe, the creative energies of these peoples have been harnessed by the Soviet Union, diverted from their natural line of unfolding, and forced to serve the making of a civilisation alien to Europe.

That which the peoples dominated by Communism are creating today in the cultural sphere does not express their intrinsic equation and no longer bears the imprint of Europe. Nothing could be more alien to the very notion of culture than what is actually termed culture in today's Poland, Rumania, Hungary or Bulgaria. In these countries culture has become an industrial product. Culture is being manufactured in a fashion as ploughs, boots or tractors are turned out. Creative freedom is suppressed. The same pattern keeps repeating itself in all the countries concerned. There is no difference between the contents of novels or poems whether they be published in Rumania, China or the Kirghiz Republic. One can be substituted for the other without the slightest diffi- culty and without either losing any of its value whatever it may be. The author's personality, being curbed to the norm, disappears. Writers are being commissioned to write such and such novel in the same way a factory may receive an order to manufacture such and such a commodity.

What Does the Western Europe of Today Represent?

In this dispute between Orient and Occident, joined on themes which have no immediate significance, for they are related either to the past or the future, it is not easy to realize bow unenviable our position is. The sacrifices made by the Eastern peoples, their tormented past, the future of European culture - these are all arguments a little too suave to be apt to shake the indifference of the West and to induce it to do something for the countries subjugated by the Soviet Union. That is why we must make a deeper incision below the surface into the very substance of the West, in order to reveal to it how vulnerable Europe has become ever since its Eastern half was severed from it.

a) The Illusion of an Enduring Status Quo

The fact that Eastern Europe has passed under Soviet domination does not represent a loss merely local in character, a diminution of territory and population for which compensation could be found by establishing a new balance of power, as that redressing phenomenon has so often emerged in the history of our Continent when powers alien to Europe (e.g. Arabs or Turks) carved chunks out of its body. The situation which the West will now have to bring under control is a fundamentally different one. The Soviet Union differs in structure from all other states hitherto known in history. Its very nature makes it impos- sible in the long run that it should coexist with the free world. There is an element inherent in the make-up of that State which eugenders a perpetual dynamism compelling- it to sustain a merciless struggle against all the peoples of our globe. What does this special characteristic peculiar to the Soviet State consits of? What is it that kindles its persistent aggressiveness? The empires which have so far shone in the world's history - the Persian, the Alexandrine, the Roman, the Spanish, the Ottoman, the Napoleonic, the British empires or even the Third Reich - had for their mainspring, their inner driving force, the nation:; which founded them: the Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Turks, the Spaniards, the French, the British, the Germans. They had set for themselves the very limits to their own expansion. For all these empires had been national empires, and as soon as the reserves of the nations which had built them became exhausted, the empires themselves passed the zenith of their power. National empires can never become world empires - even though they may aspire to that title - because there is no nation so powerful as to be able to subjugate all others.

This rule does not, however, apply to the Soviet Union because it has at its disposal an offensive potential much greater than the resources of any single nation. In the case of the Soviet Union it is not the Russian nation which, by pouring out its overflow of energies into the outer world, threatens the freedom of other peoples: it is a supra-national revolution that has acquired a griphold over that nation and turned it into its spring-board for world conquest.* Communism is a movement of global character. It recruits its adherents from among the masses of all peoples. The African Negro, the Chinese and the European are equally accessible to that ideology. Nowhere does the front-line of Communism's struggle coincide with the borderline of any one country. Using a number of guises, it splits all peoples from top to bottom. All Communist Parties of the world rally round the Soviet Union, thereby removing entire sections of peoples from under their own national supremacy and integrating them with the effectives of the Soviet State.

To speak of an enduring status quo in relation to the Soviet Union would be to ignore the predatory character of Communism. The intrinsic nature of Communism, as well as of the State which incorporates its velleities to world dominion, is incompatible with the idea of peaceful coexistence that certain politicians of the West are anxious to achieve. If Communism were to cease conspiring against the free world, it would lose the very justification of its existence. By the incorporation of Eastern Europe in its sphere of influence, the Soviet Union has by no means reached the farthest limits of its expansion yet. That conquest has merely provided it with a new point of departure, closer to the final objectives pursued by world communism.

*_____

This statement of fact is not meant to acquit the Russian people of all guilt. Communism has exploited the messianic leanings of the Russian people who are beginning to feel complacent in this unnatural symbiosis, forgetful about the fact that they are only a raw-material in the service of Communism. Also, the Russians, while victimized by Communism, are a privileged victim. The day on which the Russians return to the community of the free peoples, they will have to repudiate not only Communism but also their imperialistic tendencies which gave support to that doctrine.

b) The Loss of World Leadership

Another consequence of the Soviet Union having penetrated to the centre of our Continent has been the loss for Western Europe of its position of world leadership. Up to the time of World War II, Europe had been the dominating influence in the world; in its chancelleries the politics of other continents were being fashioned. A completely absurd situation had to arise for the West to acquiesce in its own decapitation; to lose its dominions as well as its political credit in Asia, Africa and America. The loss of India, Burma, the Netherlands, East Indies and Indo- china was but a logical sequel of the concessions made at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. At the very moment the Western Powers offered up to Stalin the countries of Eastern Europe they signed the death-warrant of their colonial empires.

There is a close connection between European dominions overseas and the political state of Europe itself. Only so long could the Western Powers effectively defend their extra-European possessions as they were not menaced themselves on the Continent. In order to have tranquillity in their colonies they had to take care first not to become unsettled in Europe. There has been no European Power strong enough to defend itself on two fronts at the same time - the metropolitan and the Asiatic or African front. One of them had to be kept out of trouble while activities were engaged in on the other.

It was this imperative necessity which engendered the formula of the European balance of power. That principle became an axiom of the for- eign policies pursued by States which had interests to protect on other continents. The prime interest of the Western Powers, and particularly that of Great Britain possessing the most wide-spread Colonial Empire of all, had always been to prevent any single European Power becoming so strong as to be able to upset the established equilibrium. Whenever a situation arose in which one of the European Powers attempted to superimpose its will upon the Continent, Great Britain -for it was usually her- put herself at the head of a coalition and forced the recalcitrant to capitulate.

The Crimean war was launched because England and France could not agree to Russian expansion towards the Dardanelles. These same Powers supported the unification of the Danubian Principalities because they regarded the Rumanian State, founded on the lower reaches of the Danube, as an additional guarantee against Russian tendencies to dominate the Balkan Peninsula. After Bolshevism had installed itself in Russia, the Western Powers created a „cordon sanitaire" in Europe, consisting of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and also Rumania aggrandized by the return of Bessarabia.

The same considerations induced Great Britain to support Hitler dur- ing the first period of his rule while he was still conducting a reasonable foreign policy. A strong Germany was indispensable to the Europe- an balance of power so gravely threatened by the emergence of Soviet Russia. However, once Hitler exceeded the limits allowed by the principle of the European balance of power, Great Britain gave up her reserve. Hitler was striving to become the undisputed master of Europe to the detriment of France and Britain which he wanted to reduce to the status of secondary Powers.

Only once in their history did the Western Powers deviate from that principle -while in alliance with the SovietUnion- and mournful consequences ensued. By accepting the division of Europe into spheres of influence, the Western Powers have simultaneously bared both their flanks, the metropolitan as well as the colonial. The presence of the Red Army on the Elbe compels them to keep most of their effectives in Europe, thus drawing them away from the Asiatic and African fronts which are today imperilled on almost all sectors.

The position the Western Powers find themselves in is all the more critical as they are enggaged in a struggle against the forces of a world revolution. The enemy immobilizing them on the European Continent is identical with the one who attacks them in their colonies. Moscow, the strategic center of world Communism, controls all sectors of the conspiracy. Whether it be the question of new pressure being brought to bear on Berlin or of a new victory being won by Leftwingers in Latin America; whether there be trouble brewing in Indochina or fresh acts of terrorism commuted by the Mau-Mau - it is always the Kremlin which supports all these types of Communist encroachment on the area of the free world.

Communist strategy has forged for itself two principal weapons with which to destroy the old order-class warfare and the nationalism of the coloured races. Either is used according to the circumstances peculiar to the ground on which the struggle happens to be taking place. In Europe class warfare is being applied while in Asia, Africa and America the nationalism of the coloured races is the means with which the hatred of the indigenous populations is being whipped up against the Europeans and white man in general.

We do not propose to defend colonialism. All peoples have a right to live freely. Nor can the winding-up of colonial rule be brought to a halt any more. What must, however, be the preoccupation of all Europeans are the conditions under which the political emancipation of the peoples of Asia and Africa is being put into practice. The international climate in which this problem is to be solved and the time at which emancipation is being accomplished is liable to compromise good relations between the Western Powers and the peoples liberated from under alien rule. Even when the former are making concessions in Africa or Asia of their own accord, their withdrawal has the appearance of being accomplished under Communist pressure. All peoples attaining to their emancipation from under European tutelage turn towards Moscow with gratitude. It is logical that they should think that without the Soviet Union God only know how long they would still have had to endure European domination. While in Europe the Soviet Union is pursuing a policy of denationalisation, in Asia she poses as the champion of national liberty.

If we take the trouble to examine the political transformations wrought in Asia, we cannot fail to be struck by an even stranger fact; the politic- al emancipation of the coloured races renders no service to those indigenous populations either, who are supposed to benefit from it.

The peoples having freed themselves of the yoke of colonialism are losing their national liberty once more for the benefit of world Communism. At an astonishing rate of speed, the nationalism of the coloured ra- ces is being converted into Communism. While these peoples had still been under European domination, the Communists incited them to rise against white man, invoking the natural right of any people to take its destinies into its own hands. No sooner, howewer, have they obtained their political independence than the agents of Communism begin to change the tune of their propaganda. In lieu of nationalism, which does no longer serve their purposes, their agitation introduces a new ferment into the lives of these peoples - class warfare. The social order in the countries concerned facilitates the Communists' task. The feudal struc- ture of society, on the one hand, and capitalist exploitation introduced by the West, on the other, provide a fertile breeding ground for Marxism in its purest form.

The Asiatic nations do not as yet know what to use their newly gain- ed Liberty for. Their primitive nationalism - not nearly sublimated or purged of the residue of hatred as yet and animated exclusively by en- mity towards white man - cannot provide an effective barrier to CCommunism. The struggle for political emancipation waged by the African and Asiatic nations is being complicated by social convulsions which tend to annihilate all the institutions of the past. After a transitory period of freedom, these nations are sliding irrevocably into the orbit of Communism.

The Western nations, for their part, have not taken any precautions to forestall this danger. They have as yet not worked out any plan aiming at the internal consolidation of the emancipated countries. After having bared their European flank- thus giving proof of their complete lack of foresight - they have committed grave mistakes in Asia, too. They have purely and simply, launched these masses towards an unknown goal without assuming the slightest responsibility for their future. Having es- caped from colonial rule, the Asiatic masses, famished and at a loss as to where to turn, find no other way to save themselves except in giving themselves over to Communism. In a few years' time the immense hu- man reservoirs of India, Burma and Indonesia will have inflated the ranks of world Communism. We are about to offer to the rulers of the Kremlin the most propitious opportunity to carry out Lenin's scheme envisag- ing the mobilisation of Asia against Europe. When that happens Europe's fate will be sealed.

c) In the Tow of Extranean Forces

Finally what part does that fringe of Europe, having so far escaped Communist conquest -the so-called free Europe- play in the world contest of Powers? What weight does its voice still carry in the world's council chambers? Having stepped down from the top-rung of the ladder, does Europe at least hold a position which enables her to parley on an honourable footing with the new world Powers of America and Soviet Russia? True, the Western European democracies are not left out of meetings of the Big Three or Four, but do not let us be mislead by external appearances. Chiang Kai-shek's China, too, used to be included among "the Big" up to 1948 although she had then already been on the verge of disintegration.

Western Europe has ceased to be a subject of world politics from the moment on she separated herself from her Eastern half. She no longer takes part in the forging of the world's destinies, not even in the company of other Powers. Her own fate is now being decided elsewhere. A new balance of power has been created in the world in which free Europe only plays the role of an object -of the raw material as it were- of political action. The free world's center of gravity has been shifted to America while Western Europe must content herself with being a kind of marginal territory of the new world. She maintains her independence owing to the fact alone that she finds herself in a field of full tension between the two principal forces, Soviet Russia and America. If, by an absurd turn of events, America and Soviet Russia came to an understanding, and the price of their alignment were the partitioning of free Europe between these two powers, the West European States could put up against such a decision but symbolical resistance.

If, on the other hand, America returned to isolationism an withdrew her troops from Europe, a political and military vacuum would result in the West which the Soviet Union would immediately fill with her own substance. So-called free Europe is not a viable unit because the forces at her disposal do not suffice to ensure her independence. Without the presence on the Continent of the U. S. armed forces, the Western States would share the fate of the East European countries - Rumania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria etc.

There are certain Europeans who, when confronted with the disastrous balance-sheet of the second world war, react with a haughty attitude. They absolutely refuse to admit that the Europe of today is nothing but a glorious memory of the past. These incorrigible "Europeans" are struggling to achieve for the free fringe of their Continent the position of a "third force" which would enable it to hold the balance between the two rival giants.

In order to really establish such a position for herself, Western Europe ought to be strong enough to retrieve by her own means and without having recourse to America aid the Eastern territories. Only a Europe united within her frontiers of 1939 could aspire to a "third force" position. A manifestation of strength of this kind would furnish the crucial proof of the existence of a truly free Europe owing allegiance to no other power. So long, however, as Western Europe has not the strength enabling it to generate sufficient energy to roll back the Iron Curtain to the Dniester river without foreign aid, she will not be capable of resisting the Soviet threat on her own and will thus remain dependent on American generosity.

The Spiritual Disintegration of Western Europe

Having been smitten by defeat after defeat on a large scale over the last ten years or so, one would expect the Western peoples to react healthily and generate within themselves an almost superhuman tension with which to overcome the Communist peril. Any nation may well be taken by surprise and, therefore, make mistakes, but it would be the sign of total decrepitude if it failed even to make a gesture of mobilizing its means of defence. Only an organism deprived of the normal functioning of its nervous system or shaken by fever can be insensitive to pain and refuse to fight disease.

Yet in what sort of state do we find the West European Powers? The symptoms of convalescence do not appear, nor is the expected reaction being produced. Against the danger of Communist invasion no resist- ance is being organised. Steeped in complacency, Western Europe ignores the terrible warnings of fate. She is not conscious of her own tragedy. The populations of her countries are living in a carefree state of mind - in a sort of delirious unconsciousness - as though future were smiling at them. The climate of catastrophe has become a familiar one. Though danger might be impending, Europe glances distractedly at other preoccupations. Already Western civilisation is preparing to die, anticipating her passing away without convulsions, narcotized by the Soviet monster.

This blindness in the face of danger is equivalent to a paralysis of the western nations' vital resources and bodes ill for the future of Europe. There cannot even be hope in a world whose instinct of self-preservation is dead. Europe has become a no man's land which the Europeans themselves no longer claim or defend.

The disintegration of the European mind reveals itself clearly frorr the examination of the following groups of fact:

I. The Western countries are tolerating the legal existence of the Communist Party even though they know the danger it represents to their internal tranquillity. Nothing prevents the Communists, either in law or in fact, from taking over legally, should the majority of the people vote them into power. The coexistence of democracy an communism has in the West Eu. ropean countries become an acknowledged fact which no longer troubles the conscience or arouses doubt as to the principles of Parliamentary government. Moreover, since the heads of the political parties are at pains even to affirm that the Communist's presence in public life constitutes an evil which, however, cannot be eliminated so long as the electorate insist on sending them to Parliament, the only thing that remains to be done is to challenge them at the polls. No justification is found for infringing democratic liberties in order only to chase the Communists out of the political arena.

This kind of reasoning is faulty from a number of viewpoints.

1. The State has the right of proceeding against those, in the event of their taking power, would destroy its existing foundations.

2. Every form of government aims at establishing the public weal. If, however, a certain way of using democratic liberties should result in the opposite, jeopardizing the vital interests of a nation, would political leaders still be justified in invoking those liberties? Could such democratic principles politically prevent a stop being put to activities which clearly undermine the foundations of a nation ?

3. The communist parties are not national parties. Their centre of gravity is to be found in Moscow. They constitute the vanguard of a foreign Power placed in the very heart of the nation, the latter being certainly under no obligation to afford protection to its own enemies.

4. Wherever she exercises her influence, Soviet Russia suppresses the democratic regimes by the most brutal means. While in the West the communist parties are enjoying every kind of political liberty, in the countries occupied by the Soviet Union the democratic parties have all been destroyed, their leaders having been killed or imprisoned. Soviet Russia could raise no valid protest against communist parties being prohibited in the Western countries. For by so doing the West would only follow the Communists' example.

5. In the event of war, the communist organisations will become battle formations. Communist partisan units will begin to operate behind the front-lines of national armies, thus rendering precarious their position in the rear. By according the Communists full liberty of propaganda and action, the Western Governments are but facilitating enormously communist preparations for the advent of the decisive moment.

6. The great American democracy has adopted certain measures of defence against communist infiltration into the State and in so doing has not bothered excessively about certain formal elements of the democratic creed. Why, then, should not the Western Powers, directly menaced by the Soviet Union, impose at least certain restrictions?

7. Finally one more objection. Why had not the Western countries displayed similar zeal in the safeguarding of democratic principles when they were proceeding against nationalist forces? Why the rigid strictness of yesterday against the nationalists and the exces- sive tolerance today of the communists?

II. In contrast with the urbane manner in which the communists are treated - as though they were the most perfect gentlemen in the world- Westerners are displaying a scorn only thinly veiled toward the political refugees from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Normally, a spontane- ous relationship of solidarity should have established itself between the victims of Communism and the forces of the West who pretend to be anti-Communist. For a common destiny ties them together. After all, the picture which these Eastern refugees present is by no means far remote from the fate that might befall the Western peoples tomorrow; the tidal wave of terror which beats against the Eastern countries at the present time may well descend upon the West one fine day, compelling its inhabitants to take the road of exile. Being threatened by the Communists from the rear, the Western peoples have no earthly reason to consider themselves more fortunate than those refugees.

On the other hand, those refugees could prove valuable auxiliaries to the West in its struggle against Communism, for the former have gathered experiences in which the latter are utterly lacking. A multitude of reasons - humanitarian as well as political and military - would thus seem to warrant the West's receiving the emissaries of the peoples subjugated by the Bolsheviks with the greatest solicitude and the liveliest interest.

The Eastern refugees note with bitterness that yet another invisible Iron Curtain separates them from the Western peoples. The poliþical and psychological climate which reveals itself to the refugees is alien to their grief. While they had still been in their homelands their imagination, whipped up by suffering, promised them to find a Western world turned into one huge armed camp drawn up in line of battle. But instead of a heavily charged atmosphere, capable of generating great decisions, they find a flippant and carefree world which is not preoccupied even with its own existence.

Anti-Communism as practised in the West is a farce. Discouraged and humiliated, the refugees must ask themselves why they had removed themselves from the fight actually going on in their respective homelands. They are the carriers of a message. They have left behind a world where heroism and martyrdom ennobles life at every step - a world which, ignoring the disillusionments suffered through long years of waiting, has not yet lost its trust in the West and refused to bargain with the enemy. What clay, what spiritual substance are these Western peoples made of that they should be able to contemplate unmoved the sufferings of millions of other human beings, and not even draw from the tragedy of the Eastern countries the inferences forcibly relating to their own fate?

In the lack of understanding for the problems of the Eastern refugees there is reflected a deficiency of the Western soul. Animated, as they actually are, by this miserly, petty bourgeois spirit, they could hardly win the battle against Communism. Those who today refuse to face the Communist danger in a virile fashion shall tomorrow cringe in front of the Soviet hosts, begging for a mere piece of bread or an hour of liberty.

III. The Western world has been contaminated by Marxism. The doctrine which has engendered Communism and which continues in- vigorating its revolutionary impulses incessantly, is being publicly professed by individuals and political groups alike who pretend to be its adversaries. This is a fact of exceptional gravity for it spreads confusion, and it is confusion on the ideological front that prevents the political and military front of the free world from consolidating.

Communism is pursuing the fight to submit to its rule all peoples in the name of an ideology. Whith its final victory a new conception of life will have triumphed in to world. Communism is but Marxism inaction - Marxism in quest of its historical realization. Therefore, the first defen- sive measure to be adopted by the free world should be its complete ideological separation from Communism. The doctrine of the West must necessarily be given a keen edge. There should be no more dealings with Marxism. All ideas of a Marxist origin are ferments ultimately destructive to the free world. What anti-Communism represents as a positive reality, what its actual contents are, is comparatively difficult to define. It is easier, however, to give a clear indication of what it must not be under any circumstances lest it bring upon itself utter destruction: anti-Communism is a repudiation of Marxism in all its aspects. Where the one begins the other ceases. They are two irreconcilable conceptions of life.

How could you combat an ideological adversary by borrowing his outlook on life? How can you hope to detect the ambushes laid by Communism when your mental equipment is functioning defectively? Communism cannot but benefit by ideological breaches opened in the Western frontline. The Communist revolution is advancing in a massive, vigorous manner, making many moves of encirclement and displaying much adroit adaptability but also extreme vigilance as regards the contacts it is compelled to maintain with the spirit of the free peoples.

IV. Another sign of the confusion rampant in the camp of free Europeans is the great ease with which they fall a prey to Communist propaganda. In this field the Communists have lately scored sensational results; they have succeeded in creating among free, non-Communist Europeans a feeling of animosity against those very Americans who guarantee their liberty. Overwhelmed with praise and protestations of gratitude by the Europeans only a few years ago, the Americans are beginning to figure on the list of Europe's potential adversaries.

Twice the United States their armies across the Ocean in order to save the Western democracies; after the termination of World War II they made enormous material sacrifices to help reconstruct European economy. Even now it is due exclusively to the counterpoise represented by American military and industrial potential that Europe has not been engufled entirely by the Soviet Union. All these should indeed called forth, and justifiedly so, out of a sense of gratitude, an enduring current of sympathy going out to the Americans. Yet, after thirteen years of the closest collaboration, relations between the 'United States and Europe are beginning to suffer because of the agitation spread by the Communist parties. It is disloyal, this mute hostility to America, raising its head among free Europeans. Nor is it reasonable or politic. For what else are the Americans if not a people that has come into being by virtue of contributions from all the nations of Europe? The very body and soul of Europe has been transplantated into the soil of another Continent. The peculiarities of life which European immigrants have unfolded on that new Continent have not betrayed their fundamental character. Americans and Europeans alike belong to the same civilisation. This Euro-American civilisation now hinds itself confronted with Asiatic Communist barbarity.

V. The Western Powers continue to be seated on the benches of UNO side by side with Soviet Russia without feeling embarrassed in this sinister company. The presence of the Soviet Union in that Organisation represents a permanent offence against the principles solemnly declared by its founders. On the frontispiece of U NO there are engraved "the rights of man" and "the rights of nations". Soviet Russia, however, is the very doctrinal embodiment of those principles. Communism recognizes neither the rights of human beings nor those of ethnic communities. The ideal held by Communism is a monolithic bloc of humanity in which there shall be no frontier-lines between individuals or nations for that matter. How could a State, making use of genocide as one of its customary methods of government, be expected to respect the obligations devolving upon it from its membership of that institution?

If the Western Powers really respected their signatures affixed to the United Nations' Charter, they could not tolerate one minute longer the presence of Soviet Russia on that forum. x_'y refusing to take note of the transgressions perpetrated by the Soviet Union, the Western Powers are in fact annulling the legal and moral. validity of the United Nations Organisation. The debates in UNC are living enacted within a frame-work of tacitly tolerated fraud and conventional lies. It is a most terrible sin against humanity that innumerable crimes to the detriment of mankind should be allowed to be perpetrated under the aegis and the shelter of the very institution which has been brought into being to combat those crimes.

VI. The free Europeans, being spiritually deficient, are seeking satis- fication compensating themselves in the material sphere; they seem to imagine that economic efficiency will rid them of the inconvenience of Communism. The economic progress of Europe, however, is no indication of health and vigour - as its inhabitants are inclined to believe - for the same nations which have displayed such unheard-of perseverance in rebuilding their towns and cities devastated by the war are shunning to face reality and avoiding to take the decisive step in order to clarify their destinies. The economic progress made by the free nations reveals a lop-sided evolution; it is an excrescence because it is entirely divorced from political reality. While the political barometer is predict- ing storm the free Europeans are pursuing their "business as usual" as though the sky were clear. They have created for themselves an artificial international climate of "detente" as though peace were guaranteed for some generations to come.

In Soviet Russia, as well as in the countries subjected to Communist rule, economy is subordinated to the strategic interests of world Communism. Soviet economy in its entirety has been organised to serve the campaign conducted far the subversion of the free world and, eventually, war. At the same time, economy in Europe has become divorced from politics and is living the anarchical life of a wild growth. The political element has entered upon a crisis and is no longer able to discipline the economic domain.

This nefarious Western cult of economic materialism we find illustrated in a perfect manner by the European Coal and Steel Community and East-West trade.

It has been attempted to unify Europe by taking as point of departure a materialistic concept borrowed from the Marxist doctrine - namely, economic organisation. Let us only pull down the customs barriers, it has been said, and the unification of Europe will follow immediately. The political superstructure should be built on economic foundations. This method has proved to be a faulty one. Its results have fallen far short of what had been expected. The Coal and Steel Community has become a reality but Europe has not yet emerged from the stage of talks and projects. Homo oeconomicus has not been able to eliminate the rivalries dividing the peoples from one another.

The various movements calling themselves European have become entangled in their own ideas because neither of them did take into account a factor which plays a more important part in the lives of peoples than food, clothing or shelter - the state of the soul. Rivalries between peoples have their roots deep down in their souls. They will not simply disappear in return for material benefits. No nation will renounce its soul for economic advantages. In order to induce the peoples of Europe to sacrifice part of their national sovereignty in favour of a United Europe, one ought to convince them first that the new formula would not hamper the development of their specific national qualities. This project, however, has been compromised by the economically tainted mentality of the West. The psychological realities should have been chosen for a point of departure, and a climate of confidence created between the peoples, from which to approach the political and economic problems.

Commercial exchanges between East and West have been intensified recently thanks to the same mercantile mentality which has corrupted the soul of Europe. Free Europeans have by now progressed so far on the course of their uninhibited race after gain that they would sacrifice to the latter even their own security. The products imported by Soviet Russia - even if they do not bear the hall-mark of strategic goods - are destined exclusively for the purposes of military preparedness. It is not the population which benefits by those commodities but only the war economy of the Soviet Union.

Moreover, Soviet Russia is also drawing political benefits from the increased volume of its commercial exchanges with the West. Western public opinion tends to believe that the Communists are not as evil after all as the anti-Communists describe them. It is thought that the Communists could be lured into mutually fruitful exchanges; that trade pacts would in due course be followed by political agreements and that, in the end, it would be possible to readjust world politics altogether by discontinuing the cold war and the armaments race. Needless to mention the depressing effect which all this intensification of East-West trade would have on the populations of the countries subjugated by Soviet power.

VII. Any national community may be beset by a wide range of dangers arranged in a hierarchy of varying grades of gravity. This order of gravity cooresponds to a given situation, and any arbitrary modification of that order can entail serious consequences to the nations concerned. The leaders of a nation are worthy of the position they hold only if they perceive correctly the order of gravity of the dangers likely to interfere with the life of the community entrusted to their care and if they stagger the external policies of their country in conformity with that more remote perspective.

In present-day circumstances the principal danger to all free countries is represented by one and the same Power, Soviet Russia. All other dangers which may affect the interests of one or other Western country are secondary only in relation to that threat. It is only logical, therefore, so long as no satifactory solution has been found to the Communist problem, that the external policies of these countries should be revolving round that unknown factor. All other policies are running counter to reality.

It must be stated that the natural order of dangers menacing the free nations is not being correctly assessed by the West European community. France, for instance, continues viewing the question of a rapprochement to Germany through the prism of the past, even though their mutual situation has undergone a radical change over the last fifteen years. Anxieties that might be provoked by the possibility of Germany being able yet to spring a surprise on her neighbours are obliterated by that danger of the first magnitude which the Soviet Union represents. Thus the principal threat has, since 1945, shifted from Germany to Soviet Russia. France and Germany have now a common enemy whose presence no longer admits their becoming involved in secondary conflicts caused by ancient rivalries.

VIII. The neutralist tendencies, which seem to be gaining ground in the politics of the Western countries, must also be charged against the spiritual disintegration of Europe.

Formally, the West European Powers are integrated within the Atlantic community; nevertheless, they are separated from America by grave divergencies of interpretation. Thus, the Western Powers con- ceive of the Atlantic Pact as an instrument whose task it is to delineate a front-line destined to perpetual stagnation. According to this conception the Pact is meant exclusively to serve the indefinite extension of the reciprocal altercations between East and West. Free Europeans are inclined to make every concession - including the one which would involve sacrificing themselves - in order to avoid a new war.

The threat of war does not, in the view of the Europeans desirous to avoid that war, emanate from Soviet Russia alone: they are fearful in an equal measure lest America provoke that war. The Western Powers are permanently on their toes along both front-lines, always ready to intervene wherever an outbreak of fire might threaten. In times of international crisis, the European members of the Atlantic community behave in a paradoxical fashion: every time the Communists deal a blow to the free world, they will, instead of declaring their solidarity with the Americans, separate themselves from the latter, taking up an intermediate position so as to be able better to soften the blow. In most cases the Communists will, of course, keep their spoils while the Americans remain suspended, with their fists raised, as though poised for the attack, and yet paralyzed by some malignant influence.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, inasmuch as it has so far manifested itself, rather seems to have assumed the function of making the Americans the prisoners of other Powers' decisions. The clauses of the Pact put the United States under the obligation of consulting with their allies whenever a new act of Soviet aggression threatens the regions safeguarded by NATO. Those allies will invariably respond with counsels of moderation. Soviet Russia is thus utilizing the fear of war to keep the U. S. in check with the help of her allies, intimidated by the prospect of anew world conflagration.

The Atlantic Pact is functioning today to the advantage of the Soviet Union. American foreign policy is unable to find its bearings in the maze of the Atlantic community. The objective pursued by the Soviet Union is to push America into isolationism by speculating on the Europeans' defeatist spirit. Western neutralism is but a Soviet political manoeuvre aimed at isolating the United States and thus making Europe fall an easier prey to her lust of conquest.

The Cold War

Free Europe has fixed her hopes on the cold war. Tossed betwee; Scylla and Charybdis she imagines to be able to escape both the horror of a new war and the Communist nightmare if only she proceeds alon the middle of the road. According to the opinion held by free European there should be ways to make the Communist regime capitulate othe than yet another world war which would be equally destructive to th whole world. It might just happen that some internal cause-an accident an unkown factor-would arise in Soviet Russia in the course of the cola war to weaken the Government of that country and put it in a positio of inferiority in relation to the West. Speculations of this kind may b, placed into a number of categories:

-the Communist movement, bowing to the law of all revolutions will lose its initial harshness in order to enter upon a more benevolen phase. Its internal climate will be modified so as to draw closer to tha of the Western democracies. The answer: prognostications have been made so often about a pos sible "evolution" of Russian Communism; so often have radical trans formationE been taken for certain only because of the misleading effec of minor relaxations or tactical changes on the part of the Communis regime that we can no longer afford to preserve these illusions; historic al experience forbids us to do so.

-the subjugated peoples will rise against the Communist regime and overthrow it.

The answer: absolute terror such as rules supreme in Soviet Russi; annihilates all environments that might serve as a shelter for potentia centers of revolt. Discontent existing in the occupied countries canno coalesce into mass risings unless intervention from outside throws the machine of terrorism into confusion.

We should wait until a crisis occurs within the Russian Communist Party. The regime is threatened by rivalries inside the Party which set one group against the other. The answer: the Russian Communist Party demonstrated its solidity at the time of Stalin's death, The opening of the "succession" has not confirmed the hopes of those who believed that the disappearance of "the man of steel" would prove fatal to the regime. The new High Command is just as firmly embedded in the mechanism of the Soviet State than was its predecessor.

- Economic difficulties will increase in number in Soviet Russia and bring the regime down in the end.

The answer: economic upheavals can iatally affect the stability of government only in countries with a free or semi-free economy. In Russia the free play of economic forces has been suppressed. Soviet economy is only a service branch of the State, and the Soviet State will in any circumstances sacrifice the well-being of its citizens to the interests of the revolutionary and military sectors. The fruit of the labour of Soviet citizens is being confiscated in its entirety to sustain the fight. All crises within the Soviet economic system are resolved in a very simple manner - to the detriment of the people. That is so because the Soviet State is not answerable for its deeds to any kind of public opinion.

Many more of the speculations of this sort could be proffered, yet the result would always remain the same: what experience we have gathered so far in relation to Communist affairs forbids us to hope that the regime will be brought to a fall from within. This is not to say that there is no grain of truth contained in all these prophecies and calculations. The element of surprise cannot be excluded from history. Conscientious political leadership, however, cannot abandon itself to hazard with its hands tied. It is aware of its duty to intervene at all junctures with a maximum of effectiveness thus reducing the scope of fortune's play to a minimum.

Conjectures made as regards the Soviet Government's chances to maintain itself in power can at the best be employed only within the framework of awider plan, the planning of the cold war. When considered on the scale of such a plan, the probability of a failure of Communism for internal reasons may become interesting and even likely. But it is only in this context that it comes alive and is filled with reality. The political leadership engages in the cold war while keeping account of a multitude of hypotheses - such as the ones enumerated above - wihtout either of those depriving it of its initiative or condemning it to marking time. Thus the problem is shifted from one or other of these several conjectures justified by political logic on to the plane of their strategic utilization.

But, does such a master-plan exist?

It is a curious feature of Western politics that those responsible fo its conduct should not to this day have elaborated a plan of action relat ing to the cold war although that war has been on for over nine yers Provisional arrangements may work a year or two, but it is inexcusable that at the end of its ninth year no profile should yet have been giver to the cold war. A similar deficiency in general staff work does not exis within the Communist camp. The Communists are combining their moves in the field in conformity with the objectives they pursue. The Communists are conducting their cold war according to a masterplan. All actions taken by them are fitted into a vast perspective.

By contemplating what is happening in one camp and the other one arrives at a sensational statement of facts: the cold war is in reality waged by only one party, the Communist camp, while the other party the West, is merely enduring it. The latter is possessed of no strategic vision as regards the cold war. To every event it reacts separately Whenever the Communists encroach once more on the free world, the Western Powers improvise some means of defence, with the natural result that nearly always the engagement finishes to the advantage o1 the Soviet Union.

The Western Powers are acting on the consideration that too great risks are involved in retorting to Communist provocations with the force of arms. Therefore they have accepted the type of contest forced upon them by the adversary, i. e. the cold war. Quite apart from this not being the best solution, it would at least have been logical that, having allowed themselves to be engaged in it, they should have taken up the conduct of the cold war with all the consequences it implies. Firmness should have been displayed io this dangerous venture by moblizing all the means compatible with the nature and the limitations of that kind of warfare. It so happens that the cold war, like any other type of war, is being fought in order to be won and not merely to defer final decision "sine die".

The disappointment felt by Eastern refugees is due to the fact that the West does not cut an honourable figure even in this cold war; it is not prepared to discharge the obligations it has contracted. While reluctant to let it come to a shooting war, the West is showing itself reti- cent in the cold war as well. Nobody understands anything any longer. Or could it be that Western strategy is so subtle and impalpable as to resist all attempts at discerning its intentions?

The cold war is of a much more involved nature than war properly speaking. It is fantastically rich in widely differing aspects. Nothing could be more dangerors than trying to reduce it to a few simple lines. The theory of "containment" conceived by that illustrious American diplomatist, Mr. G. F. Kennan, is sinning by oversimplification. This theory takes into consideration but one single eventuality - the occurrence of a qualified act of aggression against the free world. Around the globe there are scattered a number of points, says Mr. Kennan, which, if taken in conjunction, constitute the vital frontier of the free world. Everyþime the Communists are trying to push beyond that limit, the forces of the free world must be set in motion in order to restore the previous situation. To every Communist pressure a counter-pressure of equal strength must be applied. The example to illustrate Kerman's thesis more clearly than anything else was the Corean war.

This American diplomat's vision of the cold war is defective. First of all, he makes the mistake of suggesting to the West a defensive strategy. By "staying put" the West offers an enormous advantage to world Communism. The area on which its launching sites are situated - viz. the Soviet Union - is exempt from hostile incusions and thus the combative energies of that State remain completely at the disposal of offensive designs. But not even the defensive aspect of the cold war is viewed correctly by Mr. Kennan. Of all means that may serve the safe- guarding of the free world he takes into consideration only one, the rebuttal of direct aggression. How could Mr. Kerman's doctrine be applied to Italy which may go Communist at the next general election?

Discriminations and limitations of this kind invalidate the strategy of the cold war. Its two principal aspects - the offensive and the defensive one - cannot be separated one from the other and must be treated with equal solicitude. To single out one sector is therefore arbitrary and harmful to him who does so. The West ought to identify all the vulnerable points of the Soviet system, and by turning them to good account should try to shake it internally. On the defensive plane it is necessary to discontinue once and for all the policy of the "open door". Communism should be treated in the Western countries with all the rigour imposed by the laws of war. The cold war is a venture much more serious than war in the proper sense of the word; it has already assumed proportions unparalleled in history. Its purview encompasses the whole globe. Everything, from what happens in the intimate circle of our acquaintances to the secrets of Soviet atomic industry; from the rising of an insignificant African tribe to the cotton crop in the United States - all this is subject to speculation on the stock-exchange of the cold war. The diversity of this war does know no degrees of latitude or longitude nor is any field of activity secluded from it. He who is intent to win the cold war must be prepared to spend on it prodigious quantities of talent, energy, courage and material resources.

War or Capitulation

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that in a few months hence the Western Powers will recover a great buoyancy of spirit and decide to engage in a coordinated effort relating on the cold war all their moral and material resources.

That fact could not alter much with regard to the passive balance of forces as it exists today. It is too late forthat formula to be applied. It will no longer be possible to make up for the advantage gained by the Soviet Union in those nine years of cold war. There is, so to say, a difference of civilisations between the human apparatus forged by the Soviet State during its thirty years of conspiring against the free world, on the one hand, and lamentable Western improvisations, on the other. In order to better realize how much the West is lagging behind as regards its preparedness for the cold war, we ought to imagine ourselves as still living in the bronze or iron age while the Soviet Union was already operating atomic energy.

The phase of the cold war is no longer a paying propostion to the Western Powers while it is leading the Communists to certain victory. The cold-war race has already been lost by the West. This kind of warfare could have no other conclusion but the capitulation of Europe. This is not to say that it should be given up. The cold war could serve as a preliminary operation to war pure and simple.

Apart from the time element, the West is handicapped in the cold war by another factor, too, the lack of an ideology. Even if the West did make a superhuman effort to catch up with the Soviet forces, the results would be just as precarious for the lack of that ferment which lends unity and coherence to isolated actions. The only ideology capable of organizing the anti-Communist front -nationalism- is detested by the West. By the term "nationalism" we do not necessarily understand extreme Right-wing parties but rather all political manifestations which are born out of the very depth of a nation, no matter what label they may be bearing. Therefore, from the viewpoint of both the time element and ideology there is only one conclusion to be derived forcibly: war alone can save the free world.

The U. S. Secretary of State, Mr. John Foster Dulles, has invested American foreign policy with a "new look". In the event of a new Communist aggression the conflict would no longer remain limited to the actual danger zone; the United States will apply its repressive measures in the first place against the country which is behind all acts of aggression, the Soviet Union. In other words, the war will expand into a general conflict. The State Department has come to the conclusion that the Soviet Union is trying to drag America into a series of local conflicts in order to make it disperse its forces, while Russia, herself, takes no part in either of those clashes, preserving its armed forces intact for the final intervention.

The "new look", however, does not modify the defensive position of the West. It is but a warning given to the Soviet Union not to venture beyond certain limits; the initiative continues to remain with the Communists. For American intervention to materialize, in the sense advocated by Mr. Foster Dulles, it would be no necessary that it should be preceded by an act of aggression of the Korean type. Nothing is more simple for the Communists than to adapt their strategy of the cold war to the terms of that declaration. Henceforward the Communists will avoid offering the Americans one single chance of putting into effect their policy of the "new look". TheJwill continue with their fight against the free world, using the entire range of devices compatible with the cold war, short of direct aggression. Why should the Communists risk calling the card of war if by proceeding with the methods of the cold war -at which they are past masters- they cannot fail to bag victory? Whey should they swap the certainty of the cold war against the unknown which war in the proper sense of the term represents?To them it is all s question of wait and see. Within the next 20-30 years the Communist flood will drown the whole world. What will the Americans be able to do when the Communist Party emerges victorious from civil war in one country or wins the elections in another? Obviously, in such cases the "new look" could not be operative.

The cold war is the most lucrative business for the Soviet camp. The Communists wish for nothing better than to be left undisturbed in ibis profitable pursuit of theirs which brings them closer every day to the goal of world domination. A Soviet invasion of Europe is very unlikely to occur. Even though the Soviet Union maintains a formidable Army it doe not enter its immediate plans to provoke war. Moscow is utilizing thi threat as a psychological pressure on the masses. The Soviet Army is one of the important arms of the cold war. There is only one thing that disturbs the peace of mind of the Kremlin's rulers -the danger of the West precipitating itself into a new war They know full well that the day on which the guns begin to rumble would inevitably spell the beginning of the end of their domination. At that very hour an explosion, far more terrible than that of all atomic and thermo nuclear bombs, will shake Soviet Russia and the countries controlled by her: the revolt of the subjugated nations. From China to Poland, those nine-hundred-odd million humans, now suffering under Communist ty. ranny, will get moving to sweep away with one united effort the Communist states. The system of Communist terror is so perfect that it would be impossible for the masses to rise against it without receiving an impulse from the external world. On the day, however, the Soviet Union finds herself engaged in a war with the West, no one will take notice of the terror any longer: the oppressed peoples will know that the last chance to regain their liberty has arrived and they will fight with the de- speration of prisoners in chains. The Soviet Union herself will be caught between the jaws of a mighty pincer, represented, on the one hand, by the armies of the West and, on the other hand, by the army of the interior -the famished and the humiliated, the tortured and the exploited. The disintegration of the Soviet Union from within will facilitate the task of the Western armies to a point enabling them to dispense with atomic warfare.*

*_____

Soviet Russia's far of a War with the West explains also its bitter opposition to German rearmament. Whal worries the rulers of the Kremlin far in excess of the military value of the German divisions, is tire psychological shock which a new German army will produce among the peoples beyond the Iron Curtain. The psychosis of war will throw the subjugated masses into a state of ferncent and thus upset the immense terrorist machinery of the Soviet Union. When viewed in this perspective, Soviet Russia's blackmail, threatening atomic reprisals, loses its effectiveness. The West is under no absolute compulsion to have recourse to atomic weapons in order to will the wãr. Concentional armaments ill conjunction with file revolutionary potential of the enslaved peoples will lead to the same result. The United States and, indeed, the entire free world must reserve the function of the atomic arms at their disposal by converting their role of offensive weapons into an instrument of reprisals, to be employed if the Soviet Union should attempt to force a final decision in that way.

War is the fatal danger to Soviet Russia as is the cold war to the Western Powers. The cold war leads to the capitulation of the West, the war to the catastrophe of world Communism. The free Europeans who find themselves quite close to the Iron Curtain and who are, therefore, in danger of being swallowed up by the Communist tide under the very eyes of the Americans, must now make their choice between war or capitulation. War or peace, war or peaceful coexistence are false alternatives. Peace and coexistence are but facets of the cold war which, in turn, is equivalent to the "suicide by stages" of the West.

When the Soviet Union is inundating the world with appeals and pacifist slogans, she knows what she is doing. It is in her interest to sustain that kind of pacifist agitation. Peace, in the sense conceived of by the Communists, that is, "war pursued by means other than classical" - to paraphrase a commonplace of military thought - represents the ideal international climate for the realization of their plans aiming at world conquest. However, that the West should allow itself to be enmeshed in the involved game of the cold war - which it does not understand and is unable to play - and that, on top of it all, the West should imagine that war has come to an end in 1945, and that it is now living in an era of peace - that is a little too thick. It just does not tally with the most elementary requirements of political thinking.

As Burnham rightly observed, the war between the West and the Soviet Union began in April, 1944, with the mutiny, instigated by the Communists, on board of the naval vessels moored in Alexandria harbour. Ever since, the war has been going on without interruption. The actual partisans of peace are thus speaking in terms remote from reality and are militating for a non-existent cause. True, the war waged by the Soviet Union against the free world is of a nature different from that of normal warfare, but this does not alter its intrinsic character. It still bears the name of war for it has the effect of a war; imense territories, numerous populations, priceless riches, are being grabbed from the free world to be added tho the potential of world Communism. Apparently, the Soviet Union is striving for peace but its vanguards are fully active everywhere; here it is an empire of some 600 million inhabitants that falls into its hands, there a Communist regime establishes itself after a victorious revolution, yet in another country strikes are breaking out engineered by the same Power. The fact that China or Indochina were conquered from within does not alter in the least degree the reality of the West having lost one more battle. It is difficult to redress the posi- tion of the West because it originates from an act of capitulation. The Allies had demanded Germany's unconditional surrender, but in actual fact Germany never surrendered either on or without any terms. To renounce the continuation of the fight and sign a document to that effect, at a moment when almost one's entire national territory has been absorbed by the adversary, and when the front-line has advanced to a few yards' distance from the Chancellery of the Reich, cannot be called capitulation. Capitulation means cessation of the struggle and surrender to the enemy before having used up all the forces at one's disposal. Those who really capitulated are the Western Powers and the true victors of the second world war are the Bolsheviks. At Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, the Western Powers endorsed all Soviet demands at a time when they still found themselves on the very summit of their power and glory. All they had out of the war was a series of mortgages of which to his day they have not been able to rid themselves. Never has history recorded a more striking defeat, so grave in consequences and so little justified. The road to Moscow stood open to the Allies.

It was within their grasp to eliminate the danger, once and for all, by launching a new campaign and afterwards to dictate world peace, thus turning into reality the spirit and the letter of the Atlantic Charter. Why have not the Allies done so? It must be admitted that public opinion in their countries had not been prepared for such a turn-about of the battle fronts; but from there to the crowning of Stalin with undeserved laurels, by satisfying his exorbitant demands, was a far cry that cannot be justified by any valid explanation nor by any analogy in recorded history. The Allies' generosity has cost hundreds of millions of humans their freedom.

This act of capitulation underlying Western policies has become a school of thought latterly; it has been turned into a spirit of capitulation. Every time the West found itself in a state of tension in relation to the Soviet Union it displayed the spirit of Yalta, that is, it bowed to Soviet demands. From 1945 to our days, the political, diplomatic and military trajectory of the Western Powers has been marked by defeats. Even the Korean war, if we analyze it judiciously, must be relegated to the chapter of defeats. While circumventing the major difficulty, the Allies replied only with palliative measures to Soviet attacks, offences and perfidy.

Western statesmen usually justify tbeir forthcoming attitude towards the Soviet Union with their great love of peace. A third world war, they maintain, would be so destructive as not to benefit even the victors. It would beset all mankind with death and sufferings. It would be foolish, indeed, not to be awe-stricken by such prospects, if mankind were actually eojoying peace. But what sort of peace is it that leaves behind it rivers of blood and, like a famished monster, demands new sacrifices year after year. How far is this love of peace to go? To the point where all the nations of the world are handed over, one by one, to the hangmen of the Kremlin? And what is peace after all? An abstract notion ? Is it not supposed to mean the same thing to the Rumanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles and Koreans as to the others? Should not all peoples benefit from the blessings of peace? Terrorism, concentration camps, forced labour, the systematic pillaging of nations, the rape of their independence, their denationalisation - are these to be taken for instruments off peace?

The West's adventure in pacifism cannot end but in a holocaust of all peoples. In the beginning, the West had fed the flesh of the East European nations to the Soviet monster; later it diverted the Kremlin's appetite to the Asiatic masses. If this period of "peace" were to last another ten to fifteen years, there would be just enough time for the Western peoples to be entirely engulfed. He who still falls into extases at the sight of the peace dove, either belongs to the category of suspects or has lost the last shreds of dignity. For it is impossible to believe that any Western politicians could live so far remote from reality as not to be aware that co-existence spells the funeral of nations and states alike. Does it suit the book of the French, the British, the Germans or the Spanish that the price of a few decades of peace should be the Mongols' definitively establishing themselves in London and Paris? Can the Communist danger be warded off by avoiding to face it manfully and by pursuing an ostrich policy?

Crisu Axente, a friend of mine who has been dead for some time, had been preoccupied with the idea of writing a book on "Peace Crimes", in which he intended to analyze the problem of the concessions arbitrarily made by the West to the Soviet Union. He regarded these concessions as liable to rank with the "crimes committed against humanity". Are we not led to think by the tragic situation in which all peoples find themselves to-day that there exists also a category of "peace criminals"? That is to say a kind of people who are busy prolonging the present state of affairs to a point where the Soviet Union will be enabled to engulf the entire world. War criminals are those who try to suppress the liberty of the peoples by means of war. Those, on the other hand, who, by abusing the sublime image of peace and the profoundly felt desire of the peoples to avoid the horrors of a new conflict, fail to warn mankind of what is hiding behind the peace offered by the Soviet Union, should be labelled peace criminals. These peoples are using the image of peace for a bait in order to haul nation after nation into slavery.

The defeatist activities of these "peace criminals" are all the more fraught with grave consequences as the free world has now only a very slender safety margin at its disposal. This very fact has recently been stated also by a Prince of the Church. Cardinal Spellman has said: "We are compelled to admit that the time at our disposal is fast running out. The realm of liberty has but receded for the last few decisive years; it runs the risk of receding even further if we do not put an end to our indifference and indecision as regards the Communist menace." (Speech on Dien Bien Phu, made in Paris, on May 20th, 1954). That safety margin, however, relates only to the war potential of the two adversaries. As to the cold war, the free world has already consumed its security margin a long time ago. If war broke out today, the West would still have every chance of winnig it. But if it continues hesitating, its safety margin will diminish until it disappears completely. Armaments will become evenly balanced. The Soviet stock of atom bombs will grow substantial enough to prevent the West from thinking of a war of salvation. At that stage, the Western world will have no option but resign itself to the slow agony of the cold war.

There is yet another question bothering the West. Supposing they were convinced of the necessity of waging war, how should they begin it if the Soviet Union is not willing to be the first to attack? Preventive wars are not in the line of tradition nurtured by the Western demo- cracies. Let us revert to what has been said before: we have been in a state of war for a long time already, even though that war is not conforming to the classical pattern. Soviet acts of aggression are following one another in a wild rythm. By deciding to have recourse to the force of arms the West would not but adapt itself to a state of war already existing. The presence of Soviet armies, nine years after the termination of the second world war, in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria, constitutes in itself an act of aggression entirely justifying Western intervention. There is no longer any question of a tem- porary occupation imposed by the necessities of war; what we are confronted with is an act of taking possession, as of right, and with no intention ever to relax the grip. The Allies have shouldered a number of obligations towards Eastern Europe; they are, therefore, entitled to put the Soviet Union before the choice of either withdrawing or facing a new war.*

*_____

If there is a means to save the world from a new war without capitulation, it is precisely the decision to wage it. Confronted with the West's determination to shoulder the ultimate consequences, the Soviet Unions will be compelled to yield. Should Russia be prepared to do so, the West will have to push its demands so far that in the new situation thereby created Communism can no longer constitute a danger. If, however, the Soviet Union remains unyielding, that will be an additional indication of war having become imperative and inevitable. Soviet Russia's preparations for war are already so far advanced that any further delay could prove fatal to the Western World.

During the night of August 23rd, 1944, when the Soviet troops invaded Rumania's territory without a shot being fired, the rulers of that country, who had been a willing party to that act of treason, popped the corks of innumerable bottles of champaigne in order to drink the health of the "liberators". How many of these dupes are still alive today? Most of them have died of famine or some disease in a Communist concentration camp or prison or have become mentally deranged or have put an end to their own lives. But at the same time they have dragged along with them into misery an entire nation.

It would be plainly too much to ask the Western Powers to come to the aid of millions of slaves behind the Iron Curtain out of sheer generosity or humanitarian sentiment. However, by meditating on the sinister imbecillity displayed by the Rumanian ruling class and the tragic fate which has subsequently befallen the Rumanian people, could not the free Europeans at least persuade themselves to rise from their apathy? Frightened of what is in store for them, could they not at least make vibrate the strings of their most sacred egoism?

A NOTE ON RENÉ GUÉNON

2007-05-07T23:07:00.000-07:00

by Frithjof Schuon

The question has been asked why Guénon "chose the Islamic path" and not another; the "material" reply is that he really had no choice, given that he did not admit the initiatic nature of the Christian sacraments and that Hindu initiation was closed to him because of the caste system; given also that at that period Buddhism appeared to him to be a heterodoxy. The key to the problem is that Guénon was seeking an initiation and nothing else; Islam offered this to him, with all the essential and secondary elements that must normally accompany it. Again, it is not certain that Guénon would have entered Islam had he not settled in a Muslim country; he had already been given an Islamic initiation in France through the intermediation of Abdul-Hadi, and at that time he did not dream of practicing the Muslim religion. Thus, in accepting a Shadilite initiation, it was initiation that Guénon chose, and not a "path".

Besides there is, in the expression "chose a path", when applied to a case like that of Guénon, something inadequate, tiresome and awkward-sounding; for Guénon was intrinsically a "pneumatic" of the "gnostic" or "jñâni" category; and, in this case, there is no question of a "path" or at least, if there is, the meaning is so altered that the expression itself becomes misleading. A pneumatic is in a way the "incarnation" of a spiritual archetype, which means that he is born with a state of knowledge which, for other people, would actually be the goal, and not the point of departure; the pneumatic does not "go forward" towards something "other than himself’; he stays where he is in order to become fully what he himself is — namely his archetype — by ridding himself, one after the other, of veils or outer surfaces, shackles imposed by the ambience or perhaps by heredity. He becomes rid of them by means of ritual supports — "sacraments", one might say — not forgetting meditation and prayer; but his situation is nonetheless quite other than that of ordinary men, even prodigiously gifted ones. From another point of view it must be recognized that a born gnostic is by nature more or less independent, not only as regards the "letter" but also as regards the "law"; and this does not make his relation with the ambience any simpler, either psychologically or socially.

At this point the following objection has to be parried: does not the "path" consist for every man in getting rid of obstacles and in "becoming oneself’? Yes and no; that is to say: metaphysically it is so, but not humanly because, I repeat, the pneumatic "realizes" or "actualizes" what he "is", whereas the non-pneumatic realizes what he "must become" — a difference at once "absolute" and "relative" about which one could argue indefinitely.

Another objection — or question - is the following: how are we to explain the imperfections and gaps — altogether surprising — in Guénon’s writing, given the quality of the author’s substance? The fact is that these gaps were by no means of an order opposed to this quality; they were, one might say, "accidental" and "superimposed" and certainly had nothing passional or worldly about them. It was a matter partly of traumatisms, intensified by the lack of compensatory factors in the soul and in the ambience.

One may well wonder, even so, why Providence allowed there to be flaws in Guénon’s writings which seem at odds with the profound personal character of the author; the answer is that Providence would never have permitted — and this can be said without temerity — a Guénonian corpus that would have no positive results; we are thinking here of his influence attested to in the most diverse circles, and that is the very least that can be said. Guénon was the victim of a certain dogging by fate, but his essential message was not in vain and could never be so, and that is all that matters.

Guénon was like a personification, not of straightforward spirituality, but of intellectual certitude in its own right; or of metaphysical self-evidence in a mathematical mode, and this explains the tenor of his teaching, which is abstract and reminiscent of mathematics, as well as explaining — indirectly and because of the lack of compensatory features — certain of his traits of character. No doubt, he had the right to be "one-sided" but this constitution went ill with the broad sweep of his mission, or with what he believed to be his mission; he was neither a psychologist nor an esthete — in the best sense of these terms — which is to say that he underestimated both aesthetic values and moral values, particularly in relation to their spiritual functions. He had an inborn distaste for everything that is human and "individual", and there are certain points on which this affected his metaphysics as when, for example, he felt himself bound to deny that the "human state" has a "privileged position", or that the "mind" — the essence of which is reason — constitutes a privilege for man; in reality, it is the presence of the faculty of reason that proves the "central" and "total" character of the human state and it would not exist without this character, which is its entire raison d’être.

However that may be, it is important, in recording flaws of this kind, not to lose sight of two things: the irreplaceable worth of what makes up the essence of Guénon’s writings, and the author’s gnostic or pneumatic substance.

Guénon was quite right to declare that the Vedanta is the most direct expression of pure metaphysics and, in a certain respect, the most assimilable; no attachment to any non-Hindu tradition obliges us to ignore it or to pretend to ignore it. In the realm of the monotheistic Semitic religions there is one esoterism "of fact" and another "by right"; it is the latter which — whether or not it is "seen for what it is" — corresponds to the wisdom of the Vedanta; de facto esoterism is the esoterism that has come about from what has in fact been said or written, with such veilings and side-tracking as are almost bound to be demanded by a particular framework of theology and, above all, by a particular religious upâya. It was doubtless esoterism de jure that the Qabbalists had in mind when they said that, if the esoteric tradition were lost, the sages could restore it.

I have had occasion more than once to point out that esoterism displays two aspects, one being an extension of exoterism and the other alien to it to the point of occasionally opposing it; for if it be true that the form "is" in a certain way the essence, the essence on the contrary is by no means the form; the drop is water, but water is not the drop. "Error alone is handed on", said Lao-tzu; likewise, Guénon did not hesitate to say in the review "La Gnose" that the historical religions are "so many heresies" compared with the "primordial and unanimous Tradition", and he declares in "le Roi du Monde" that "true esoterism is quite another thing than outward religion and, if it has certain relationships with it, this can only be insofar as it finds a mode of symbolical expression in religious forms; it matters little, moreover, that these forms should belong to this religion or that. . ." Guénon speaks of "true esoterism", and thus admits the existence of a modified esoterism and that is what I am referring to when I speak, in certain of my books, of "average sufism"; a somewhat loose expression, but in practice adequate.

Let us come back now to the question of the "pneumatic", quite apart from any personal application of the term: the quality of the born-gnostic involves not only modes but also degrees; there is the difference between the jnãni and the bhakta on the one hand and, on the other, differences of plenitude or breadth in the manifestation of the archetype. In any case, the pneumatic is situated, by his nature, on the vertical and timeless axis — where there is no "before" or "after" — so that the archetype which he personifies or "incarnates", and which is his true "himself’ or "his very self’ can, at any moment, pierce through the contingent, individual envelope; it is therefore really "himself’ who is speaking. The real gnostic does not attribute any "state" to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a tendency rather — through an "instinct for holding back" — to disguise his nature inasmuch as he has, in any case, awareness of "cosmic play" (lila) and it is hard for him to take secular and worldly persons seriously, that is to say, "horizontal" beings who are full of self-confidence and who remain, "humanists" that they are, below the vocation of man.

What the natural gnostic seeks, from the point of view of "realization", is much less a "path" than a "framework" — a traditional, sacramental and liturgical setting which will allow him to be ever more genuinely "himself’, namely a particular archetype of celestial "iconostasis". This puts us in mind of the sacred art of India and the Far East which demonstrates in supernaturally evocative fashion the heavenly models of earthly spirituality; therein lies, in fact, the raison d’être of that art which is at once "mathematical" and "musical" and which is founded upon the principle of the "darsana", the visual and intuitive assimilation of the symbol-sacrament. Moreover, this symbol does not belong to art alone but rises up also — and a priori — from animate and inanimate nature for there is, in all beauty, a liberating and, in the final account, saving element; which enables us to voice the esoteric paraphrase: "He that hath eyes to see, let him see!"

"Know thyself" was the inscription written above the portico of the Temple of Delphi; that is, know thine immortal essence but also, by that very token, know thine archetype. This injunction no doubt applies in principle to every man, but it applies to the pneumatic in a far more direct manner, in the sense that he has, by definition, awareness of his celestial model in spite of the flaws which his earthly shell may have undergone in contact with an all too uncongenial ambience. Paradox is part of the economy of this world below, given that the limitlessness of Universal Possibility necessarily implies unexpected, if not incomprehensible, combinations of things; phenomena can be what they are, but vincit omnia veritas.

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Ruth Irwin

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Alberto Carrillo Canán

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THOUGHTS ON THE WAYS OF PROVIDENCE IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Chapter II of Considerantions on France by Joseph de Maistre

Our Doom

ON REVOLUTIONS

Chapter I of Considerations on France by Joseph de Maistre

The Organic View of History

The Danger of Americanism

Europe at the crossroads

A NOTE ON RENÉ GUÉNON