If there is one thing that frustrates me to end, it’s seeing white nationalists/advocates actively supporting conservatism, especially after it has proven just as destructive to our cause as liberalism on ethnic issues and vastly more destructive than liberalism on every other matter.

I find that white advocates generally support conservatism for two reasons. The first reason is that they essentially become single-issue voters because they believe that conservatives will be more hawkish in regard to illegal immigration. While white nationalist conservatives understand that mainstream conservatives still fully support third-world immigration and multiculturalism, they will settle for anyone who will do something about our demographic situation, however insignificant it may be.

This approach baffles me, as anyone who thinks conservatives are substantially better on immigration than liberals is extremely misguided. Did we forget that in 1986, Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants and that his act didn’t even obligate employers to verify the authenticity of workers’ documents?

I think liberals have better reasons for their support of immigration and multiculturalism than conservatives. It strikes me that liberals actually believe that immigrants enrich our country culturally and economically, while conservatives (being good corporate puppets) support immigration as a way to get cheap labor and to weaken unions. I can’t think of a single conservative politician who has done anything to meaningfully combat multiculturalism in any way. Conservatives are truly just cowards afraid to address any of America’s demographic threats and alienating potential voters and afraid of upsetting their corporate overlords, so in the public discourse they generally parrot liberal lines about diversity being our strength and so on.

In a way, I can respect liberals for their belief that a multicultural society is a good thing, even though I profoundly disagree with this view, because they are sincere, while conservatives hide their true reasons for supporting immigration. Just look at Mitt Romney as a perfect example of conservative cowardice on this issue. In recent debates he called Arizona’s SB1070 law a model for the nation. Anyone with eyes can see that he was only trying to cut down his primary opponents by moving to their right to win the support of gullible blue-collar whites. Just weeks ago, Romney confessed at a private fundraiser that winning the support of Latinos is critical and his campaign staff has said that he’s still making up his mind on his positions about immigration reform.

The other reason white nationalists vote conservative is because they sincerely support conservative principles. This deeply rooted conservative ideology amongst many (if not most) white nationalists is, in my opinion, possibly the greatest threat to our movement gaining any traction or being taken seriously. I find that the political ideology espoused by these white nationalist conservatives betrays a profound ignorance when it comes to understanding the political questions of our time.

Conservatism has harrowed our country: its economic policies have been disastrous, it has greatly empowered corporations, it has screwed over countless impoverished European-Americans, it has pursued treasonous foreign policies and wars that our citizens have no stake in, it has fought relentless battles over non-issues like abortion and gay marriage, it has ravaged the environment, it has obstructed meaningful progress in Congress with the abuse of filibusters, it has undermined healthcare reform, and it has threatened to cut successful welfare and entitlement programs. Liberalism has the more compelling case and the greatest intellectual weight — Greg Johnson has admitted before that the left attracts the brightest minds — on almost every issue except the matter we find ourselves discussing here on Counter-Currents.

Let’s look at the records of conservative Republicans across a few of the issues and see whether their goals are really in line with those of white nationalists.

• In 2011, the Republican-led House voted nearly 200 times to weaken, block, or delay needed measures to update laws that defend our air, water, wildlife, and lands.
• In 2010, the Republican Supreme Court Justices held in the Citizens United case that corporations can make unlimited political expenditures. The decision also allows tax-exempt incorporated public advocacy groups to spend money on political races without disclosing their donors’ names in their FEC filings. Republicans love to decry Obama for disregarding the constitution, but is there any decision more contradictory to the spirit of the constitution than the Citizens United ruling?
• Republican-led state legislatures across the United States introduced 2,044 provisions restricting women’s reproductive rights in 2011 and 2012. Their legislation has focused on mandating that women seeking an abortion must have medically unnecessary ultrasounds intended to scare them out of going through with their abortions and the legislation also narrows the time when abortions may be performed and limits insurance coverage of abortion.
• Republican state legislatures have implemented right-to-work laws that cripple unions. Controlling for all variables, wages in right-to-work states are 3.2 % lower, the rates of employer-sponsored health insurance are 2.6 % lower, and the rates of employer-sponsored pensions are 4.8 % lower compared with non-right-to-work states.

The greatest horrors conservatives have inflicted on this country, as well as the rest of the West, are their neoliberal economic policies. I’ll mention a few relevant points and then wrap up my argument, but I must encourage everyone to read Timothy Noah’s series of articles about income inequality on Slate, as well as Paul Krugman’s NYT columns, and also William Deresiewicz’s recent humorous article about capitalism and psychopathy at the NYT.

In light of the current economic crisis, Hayekian/neoliberal economics should have been discredited as these theories were the driving force behind our pursuit of financial deregulation, while Keynesian economics should have been validated. However, conservative governments across Europe, showing their weak grasp of economics, decided to remain faithful to the principles that resulted in this crisis and have implemented sweeping austerity measures. Conservatives argued that we needed to reduce our deficits, bring down our national debts, undertake structural reforms, and promote growth, however the results haven’t been promising as countries like the UK have slipped into a double-dip recession.

At home, Republicans have rallied around the Paul Ryan budget plan that would have America take the same course as Europe. Republicans show no signs of possessing the faculty of critical thinking that would dictate that their economic policies must be reevaluated when confronted with the reality of Europe’s prolonged recession, but detachment from reality is a conservative hallmark. There is no reason tackle the federal budget deficit or the debt at a time when we’re facing staggering unemployment and underemployment that prevents the lower and middle classes as well as private corporations from spending and consuming regularly. Once the economy has been stimulated and has fully recovered, then it will be an appropriate time to work on reducing our debt.

Realistically, Obama has governed very centre-right and all of his failings to improve the economy can be attributed to the way he has caved to Republicans any time they have pushed back against him. Obama’s stimulus was anemic not only because of its small size, but because it was full of tax cuts that Republicans had demanded.

With regards to Eric Holder, many white nationalists hate him because of how he sued Arizona over SB1070, and I agree that that was ridiculous. However, the fact that Eric Holder hasn’t prosecuted Goldman Sachs or any of the other financial institutions that were caught defrauding their clientele is even more serious. Many figures on the left, like Eliot Spitzer, have called for Holder’s resignation, however I am doubtful that Holder will suddenly grow the balls to prosecute Goldman Sachs and I certainly don’t think that a Republican attorney general would have done so either.

I haven’t said much about Mitt Romney yet, but I fail to see how any white nationalist could even contemplate voting for him. He epitomizes everything wrong with conservatism. Here’s a portrait of Mitt Romney to give you a better understanding of what kind of leader he is.

• I deferred military service to go bicycling in France and while I was there, I lived in a 5-bedroom house with a chef and a housekeeper.
• I’ve claimed that I lived like a poor person then.
• I spent the duration of the Vietnam War proselytizing and converting people to my faith rather than serving my country.
• I worked at Bain Capital where I became the CEO. I turned the company from a venture capital enterprise into a corporate raider.
• I drove 22 companies into bankruptcy after stripping them of their assets and selling them off.
  In the case of Ampad, I personally helped Bain reap $100,000,000 after completely destroying a profitable company.
• I laid off more than 10,000 living, breathing people, solely to line my own pockets.
• I enjoy firing people.
• Of the companies I didn’t completely bankrupt, I drove tens of thousands of people with livable wages into accepting minimum wage and told every single one of them that if they didn’t like it they could leave.
• At the same time I gave the company’s top management huge pay rises.
• I created countless jobs on foreign shores and the people who worked for me there earned a couple of dollars a day, in appalling conditions and with no safety standards.
• I retired and my termination agreement still sees me receiving more than 7 million dollars a year and because they are deferred payments, I pay 13 % in taxes on unhidden money, though until it became illegal in 2011, I hid it in tax havens.
• I had the third lowest job creation rate of any state in America as governor.
• While I was governor, I used the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan and created Romneycare, which lowered the insurance costs for my electorate by 1/3
• I was proud when President Obama decided to use the plan, as I thought it would help my chances of becoming President, but when my party vilified it, I abandoned my only life accomplishment.
• It cost Massachusetts $200,000 when I replaced all of the state’s government computers to hide my record.
• I think corporations are people but if you look at my history, you’ll find that I don’t think people are people.
• I have been perpetually running for president.
• I have made $1/4 billion by destroying thousands of lives.
• I don’t care about any of those lives, as they can’t contribute to my campaign to lower America’s living standards.
• I spent $200,000,000 to beat the weakest and most bizarre field ever in Republican politics.

Not only is his record appalling, but so are his policies. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has determined that relative to current policy — that is, if you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, as Romney wants to do — Romney’s tax cutting plans would increase the deficit by nearly $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s on top of keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Romney has promised to close various loopholes to pay for his tax cuts, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Until he does, the Tax Policy Center concludes his plan would cost $5 trillion — which would be added, yes, to the deficit. Romney’s plan would also cut the top corporate tax rate form 35 percent to 25 percent.

Last but not least, there is the issue of income inequality. Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, has documented a five-decade pattern in which income inequality has grown under Republican presidents and shrunk under Democratic ones.

The most significant challenges America faces today include income inequality, financial deregulation, the decline of the middle class, and the loss of opportunity. When you look at a list of countries ranked by the Gini coefficient, the US has levels of income disparity comparable to China, Russia, and Nigeria. Our economic inequality has long been masked by our high per capita income. Generally, our income is higher than the rest of the Western world. However, America’s higher income generally reflects our lower taxes. And our lower taxes reflect a neglect of social services to our citizens. In the US, the cost of healthcare is nearly double that of any other country, yet we have 50 million-plus with little or no insurance at all. By contrast, other Western countries have higher taxes that are used to support robust social service programs such as healthcare.

Finally, income disparity is not just a material measure. It is also a measure of social cohesion. I fear the US will not be able to escape the same social issues that now plague third world countries. Our own citizens will no longer continue to accept third world levels of income inequality while the elite amass vast and largely untaxed fortunes.

Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869), "Italia and Germania"

2,087 words

Translated by Greg Johnson

There are probably as many theories of nationalism as there are nationalist theories. It is obviously impossible to give an account of them here. We will not take part in the false quarrel over whether nationalism is a pathological exacerbation of patriotism, or if it represents, on the contrary, its conscious and rigorous doctrinal elaboration. Let us note only that, beyond the often extremely complex typologies suggested today,[1] nationalism can be defined in two basic ways.

First, nationalism is the more or less voluntary aspiration, founded on objective facts or not, of a people to be constituted (or restored) as a nation, generally in a context perceived as hostile to its collective identity. Thus it presents itself as a movement of historical construction. In the second definition, nationalism is the political doctrine that affirms that a government must be concerned above all with the national interest, even based upon it exclusively.

These two definitions show from the start the ambivalence of nationalism, an ambivalence directly related to its eminently reactive character. Nationalism generally appears in circumstances that are “exceptional,” in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the term. Nationalism aims at reacting against a threat, real or supposed, that would weigh upon the collective identity and prevent it from founding itself as or persisting as a nation. Nationalism, for example, appears just as much in reaction to a foreign occupation as in a situation of colonization, in the framework of an exacerbated regionalism, etc. Its essence, therefore, is related to conflict. It needs an enemy. But this enemy can take the most diverse forms. Hence the plasticity of nationalism which, in history, can just as well be modern or antimodern, intellectual or popular, of the Right or Left. (During the whole nineteenth century, let us recall, nationalism was primarily liberal and republican.)

The definition of nationalism as a political doctrine raises other problems. Once an identity is recovered or the nation emerges, what in nationalism can truly be used as a principle of government? The concept of “national interest” is fuzzy. Maurras writes that a nationalist “subordinates his feelings, his interests, and his systems to the good of the fatherland.” But what faction would not lay claim to this expression? The “good of the fatherland” is a concept for which almost anything can be claimed, the more so as one can have extremely different ideas about it. Given that conflict is of the essence of nationalism, the risk is then great that a nationalist government can exist only while engaging in new arenas of conflict. Any foreigner, for example, will be potentially seen as an enemy. As for the concept of an “inner enemy,” it will lead to civil war, which nationalism seems to prohibit on principle.

The contents of nationalism thus remain rather obscure. One sees nationalist movements appearing in the world, but in general they have few things in common. They are opposed to one another. They claim contradictory values. It all seems as if nationalism were more a form than a substance, a container than a content.

One can understand it better, however, if one relates it to the idea of the nation, from which it cannot be dissociated. Indeed, nationalism initially represents a political instrumentality of the collective identity that gives rise to the nation. However, the nation is only one form of polity among others. And it is a specifically modern form.

Neither the Gallic resistance against Caesar nor that of Arminius against the legions of Varus is relevant to our sense of “nationalism.” The application of the word “nation” to Antiquity or the Old Regime is for the most part an anachronism. In the Middle Ages, the “nation” (from natio, “birth”) had a cultural or ethnic sense, but by no means a political one. At the time of the Hundred Years War, patriotism refers to the “country” (pays), i.e., to both a familiar region and an ensemble of intermediate bodies concretely defining a shared identity. In the political sense, the nation appears only in the eighteenth century, and it is defined in opposition to the king. The “patriots” then were those who thought the nation, not the king, incarnates the unity of the country, i.e., the nation exists independently of the kingdom. The nation joins together those who share the same political and philosophical ideas. It is in this sense that Barrère[2] was able to say to the Convention that “the aristocrats have no fatherland.” The nation is thus initially perceived as the sovereign people, then as the population of a given territory recognizing the authority of the same state and themselves as members of the same political unity, and finally as this political unity itself. One reads, in Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: “The principle of any sovereignty lies primarily in the nation.”

The Old Regime in France had already largely started the process of centralization. The Revolution continued this process in a new form. It aimed at “producing the nation,” creating a new social bond, generating social behaviors giving rise to the nation as a body politic formed of equal individuals. The state, consequently, became the producer of the social. And this production was built on the ruins of the intermediate bodies. Beginning with the Revolution, the nation became for any individual an immediate presence. It is a collective abstraction to which one belongs directly, without the mediation of intermediate bodies or the state. There is thus, paradoxically, an individualistic root of the nation and nationalism. Louis Dumont has written on this subject:

Historically, the nation in the precise, modern sense of the term, and nationalism—distinguished from simple patriotism—have depended upon individualism as a value. The nation is precisely the type of overall society corresponding to the reign of individualism as a value. Not only does the nation accompany individualism historically, but the interdependence of the two is essential, so that one can say that the nation is a society composed of people who regard themselves as individuals.[3]

The “modernity” of the nation and nationalism remained unseen for a long time, initially because nationalism was at times also a reaction (or an answer) to the social and political dysfunctions born of modernity, then, starting in the late nineteenth century, because the political Right took up the national idea in opposition to the “internationalist” socialist movements.

This individualistic and modern sense of the national idea allows us to understand how nationalism falls within the horizon of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Heidegger, who sees subjectivity as the modern form (Gestalt) of being oneself (Selbstsein), writes in this connection:

 Any nationalism is, on the metaphysical plane, an anthropologism and as such a subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome by pure internationalism, but only enlarged and established as a system. Nationalism is as little brought and raised to humanitas by internationalism as individualism is by ahistorical collectivism. Collectivism is the subjectivity of man on the plane of totality.[4]

 At the same time this also clarifies the relationship between nationalism and liberal individualism: the “we” that forms the base of the former is only an enlargement of the “I” characteristic of the latter. In liberalism, it is legitimate for the individual always to seek his own best interest; in nationalism, the national interest precedes all. In both cases, justice and truth merge with what is good for me or for us. In both cases, the ultimate decision lies in subjective interest, that is, in utility.

In the quotation above, Heidegger shows just as well that political universalism (“pure internationalism”) does not fundamentally contradict nationalism. Exacerbated ethnocentrism, moreover, is defined quite classically as the private individual enlarged to universal dimensions, and universalism, conversely, as a masked ethnocentrism. The private individual attests only to his truth, but he tends to present it as the truth in itself. Such is the base of the pretense of certain peoples or certain nations to be regarded as “chosen,” i.e., called to fulfill a “universal mission.” France has not escaped this temptation, and even succumbed more often than others. Guizot declared: “France is the heart of civilization.” Lavisse added: “Our fatherland is most human of the fatherlands,” thus giving to understand that there exist degrees of “humanity.” In fact, it is often said that French nationalism cannot be fundamentally intolerant because in France the idea of the nation goes along with that of humanity. But this assertion makes one wonder. Indeed, if the idea of the nation goes with that of humanity, then the idea of humanity also goes with that of the nation. Whoever does not belong to the nation consequently finds himself excluded from humanity.

Any claim of collective identity need not necessarily be formulated in terms of the ideology of nationalism. Such a confusion, given the historical excesses of nationalism, could only call into question the value of the very concept of collective identity. Yet such a concept, regardless of methods and foundations, is essential to any true sociality. In communist societies, it is what made it possible for the people to survive by opposing their own identity to the one the regime tried to impose upon them. In Western society, it is what continues to nourish the symbolic imagination and give meaning to the desire to live together. Nationalism, in what is most tumultuous and questionable in it, is no more the inevitable consequence of the assertion of collective identities than is the nation the only way of politically organizing the citizenry. Indeed, it is the negation of collective identities, such as we encounter throughout the twentieth century in liberalism as well as in Communism, that causes these identities to assume irredentist, convulsive, and destructive forms.

To be more precise, let us say that there are two different ways to pose the affirmation of a collective identity. The first, which could be that of nationalism, restricts the individual to defending his people, while the second, concerned above all with diversity, sees the necessity of defending all peoples against the ideologies that threaten to eradicate them.

Consider the English saying “My country, right or wrong.” This saying is generally misunderstood. It does not state that membership is a mere fact from which one cannot draw an abstraction. It also says that my country can be right or wrong—and not that it is always right.

Yet, in all rigor, a nationalist could not recognize his country is wrong, simply because to judge it wrong, he must have a criterion of justice that goes beyond mere belonging, i.e., ultimately, a clear awareness of the objective truth. A nationalist is spontaneously carried from thinking his country is never wrong to thinking that it is always right. From such a point of view, in the event of conflict, only force can decide. Force then becomes the supreme value. It is identified with truth, which means that history is basically right: the winners are always right, for the sole reason that they won. One paradoxically lapses into social Darwinism, which is only another form of the ideology of progress.

If, on the contrary, I can judge my country wrong, without forgetting it is mine, that is because I know that my membership is not a criterion of objective truth. Then I leave behind the metaphysics of subjectivity, the point where nationalism and liberal individualism converge. The identity of others is no longer in principle a threat to mine. I am ready to defend my identity because this defense is a general principle, whose legitimacy I also recognize for others. In other words, if I defend my “tribe,” it is also because I am ready to defend those of others.

Notes

Norman Rockwell, "Forward America"

1,516 words

“Hey man, I still think we can turn this thing around.”

That’s what your vote says.

That’s what you’re telling people when you argue in favor of a candidate, or against one.  You’re saying that a change in management could, at least potentially, create a better future. It’s not the system that’s broken; it’s those head-niggas-in-charge who are ruinin’ everything. The bright idea is that if we get their guy out and put our guy in—our nigga—he could really turn things around.

Where, exactly, is your nigga gonna turn it to?

How far is he going to turn back the clock? How much cleaning up are they going to let him do?  How many agencies is he going to close? How many amendments is he going to repeal? How many policies is he going to change, and why is he going to do these things for you? What’s in it for him?

Let’s say there’s an honest man in the race. Let’s just say there is—for the sake of argument.

Let’s say it for the laughs.

Let’s just say there is an honest man in the race who believes in the things that you believe in, a guy who is on your side.  Let’s imagine a candidate—because there isn’t one, not one—who is willing to take a stand against global business conglomerates that wield more power than most nations. Let’s imagine a nationalist candidate—an anti-globalist who isn’t going to make things easier for companies to export jobs, import cheap goods, and price Americans out of their own market. Let’s imagine there’s a guy who is actually willing to draw a line where our borders are supposed to be and say “no more.”

Conjure in your mind, if you will, a fella who is going to side with men when women want something—who won’t beta down and give in every time women nag him a little. I’m trying to keep this fantasy realistic, so let’s not get crazy. Let’s not get into divorce laws or domestic violence polices or sexual discrimination lawsuits or women in the military. Just try to imagine a guy who can stand up and say that men ought to feel free to exclude women from a private golf club if they want to. Imagine that guy—because he’s about the best you can hope for.

This guy, your best hope, is going to get up every morning and tell companies wielding the wealth of nations and 51% of the voting population to go fuck themselves, because he’s on your side.

You see how unrealistic that is, right?

Funny stuff.

What’s your best-case-scenario for America? I think the best that most men can reasonably hope for is for this thing to keep limping along and not get too much worse—that we’ll still be able to find a way to make it, to play the system and win sometimes.

(Some men will inevitably prosper no matter how bad things get for most men. Maybe you want to be that guy. Good on ‘ya. The point here is about changes in your odds.)

The likelihood of feminist laws being rolled back, even as far as the 1980s, is slim. The best you can hope for from elected officials—who also depend on the votes of women—is to fend off deep, hen-pecked “Swedish” feminism.

Whites are going to become minorities in a lot of areas, and hopefully being a minority white man who isn’t wealthy won’t suck too much. We can hope that all of the “youths” and “vibrants” who have been taught that we are their natural oppressors—and that we are naturally to blame for everything bad that happens to them—will be kind and benevolent to us. We can hope that they won’t hold a grudge or take advantage of us or attack us in an angry mob whenever the media winds them up.

We can hope that we’ll still have the right to bear arms and defend ourselves, and that we’ll be treated fairly by a legal system run by and for others.  The average guy can hope that judges and legislators will at least be reminded of the Constitution when they give decisions and write laws.

We can hope that freedom of speech will outlast us. We know that writing or saying the wrong thing may get us fired, but we can hope that they won’t put us in prison for it, like they do in more “evolved” nations like France, Germany, or England.

Basically, we can take a conservative position.  We can try to hold on to what remains from the past and what is good in the present. We can vote to keep things from changing too much, too fast. Maybe, if we’re really lucky, we’ll be able to regain some ground every once in a while—to right some wrongs, to correct some errors. Voting for the guy who is going to fuck things up the least is a conservative position.

Progressives—feminists, multiculturalists, socialists, and others—are more enraptured by their leaders and more excited about the future because they have an end goal in mind. They aren’t voting to keep things from getting too much worse, they are voting to achieve a State of Kumbaya. In the State of Kumbaya, every person of every sex and race is equal in every which way. Everyone shares and shares alike, and no one has a bad word to say about anyone else. In Kumbaya, there is no one to kill or die for (and no religion, too). This is not a radical position, because it is more or less the official position, but people who vote toward Kumbaya are still voting forward.

Conservatives vote to block them, or to go backward. They vote to restore, reclaim, and prevent. Conservatives believe that they can still turn this thing around.

I’m not a conservative.

I don’t believe we can turn this thing around by voting to put a new head-nigga-in-charge.

I’m not going to argue with you about why this nigga is better than that nigga.

I’ll be sitting it out entirely.

From now on, I’m voting with my ass.

I’m not advocating apathy. I don’t want you to stop caring. I want you to stop believing.

Voting implies consent. It implies that you still believe in the system and that you are satisfied with your options.

I want you to withdraw your consent.

In 2008, voter turnout was around 57%. That’s actually high for elections in recent years, and for a variety of reasons I doubt we’ll see that kind of enthusiasm again soon. However, the fact that we are being governed with the active consent of less than 60% of the population is worth consideration. In 1924, less than 49% of the voting age population turned out to elect an established incumbent challenged by a lackluster candidate who was actually a compromise between two other deadlocked candidates.  2012 looks like a great year to aim for under 50% again.

Let the head-nigga-in-charge claim he has a mandate from the people, when half of the voting age population couldn’t be bothered to vote either for or against him. And this isn’t even about him. It’s not about any one candidate. It’s about a system that can only produce globalists to act in our national interests. It’s about a system that makes it easier for men to pander to women than it is for them to stand up for men.

America is losing faith in its public institutions. In a 2011 Gallup poll, only 12% expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress. 35% had faith in the presidency, 37% in the Supreme Court. As few had confidence in newspapers (28%) as they did in television news (27%).  Less than 30% trusted the criminal justice system, the banks, the unions or big business.

Withdrawing your support for America’s political system is a more powerful statement than your vote.

Not voting is a vote of “no confidence.”

Your vote isn’t going to turn this thing around. The best thing you can do for your country—for the men around you, for the future—is to let the system tear itself apart. The way to increase personal sovereignty for men is to decrease the sovereignty of the state by withdrawing the consent of the governed.  Sure, this could and probably will result in naked power grabs by “elected” officials. These actions will only decrease confidence further. That’s short-term. I’m thinking about the long game. If American men stop thinking of the government as “us” and start thinking of it as “them”—if we stop thinking of ourselves as Americans and start acting in our own interests, things could get really interesting.

So this year, don’t argue about politics.

Don’t vote.

Vote with your ass.

Or, if you really want to vote, don’t vote for any of the official candidates. Have fun with it. Vote for a write-in.

Vote for Zod. Vote for Cthulhu. Vote for Crom. Vote for fucking Cobra Commander for all I care.

Just don’t vote for any of the assholes on the ballot.

Posted first at In Mala Fide.com 

Jonathan Bowden in the Wild West

1,281 words

I first saw Jonathan Bowden speak in 2009. It was the most rousing speech I had ever heard. I was sitting at table with a number of like-minded friends, and by the end of the speech we were all ready to follow Jonathan over the barricades. Some scornful words of Ayn Rand keep coming back to me when I think about our reaction: “Theirs is the mentality ready for a Führer.”

It was quite simply the most inspiring, spell-binding performance I had ever witnessed. Not even Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom I had heard some years earlier, could surpass it. (This might be due, in part, to the fact that I don’t understand a word of French.) I realized I was in the presence of a rather remarkable human being.

Tentatively I approached him afterwards and chatted for a minute or two (getting his autograph in the process). But I didn’t linger. There was something disturbing about his gaze, which seemed to go right through me. I had the feeling I was being carefully assessed, and it was none too comfortable.

I didn’t see Jonathan again until February of this year, when I flew out to San Francisco for a Counter-Currents event. Jonathan hit town the day after I did, having been invited by Greg Johnson to be special guest speaker. He arrived wearing a black suit and tie, which he wore during the entirety of his visit. (I never saw him without his tie.) And he carried a large, blue art portfolio which contained a rather grim and ghastly painting he had brought for Greg. I have to confess I don’t care too much for Jonathan’s art, but it certainly is original, and it certainly is “him.”

We went out to eat that first night at a restaurant on Washington Square. Then we took Jonathan to the famous City Lights Books. He was of course familiar with its place in the history of the Beatnik movement. Eventually, jet lag got the better of him and he simply disappeared into his room and was not seen again until the next morning.

I spent a good deal of time with Jonathan over the next several days. He was guarded at first, and now and then that piercing gaze would return – so much so that sometimes I just had to look away from him. There were awkward silences in our conversations during which he seemed to be taking the measure of me. But gradually he began warming up.

We talked of many things.

I have a soft spot for the British Royal Family (and for the institution of monarchy; see my essay “In Defense of Royalty”), and when I meet an Englishman I always bring up the topic, just to see what the reaction will be. I’m usually disappointed. Jonathan, unsurprisingly, was keen on monarchy. But he saw the Queen as basically a kind of limousine liberal, probably genuinely committed to “diversity” (and quite possibly on Christian grounds).

We also had a lively conversation about some of my favorite British spy series from the 60s: Danger Man, The Avengers, and The Prisoner, all of which Jonathan remembered fondly.

I tried to get to know him, but much of the man’s life seemed shrouded in mystery. For some time he had been writing short essays for Counter-Currents, always using a computer in the public library somewhere in the U.K. On this particular visit (only his second to the U.S.), Greg Johnson and Mike Polignano gave him a rather spiffy laptop as a gift, so that he could more easily write for the website. (Jonathan couldn’t have gotten much use out of the machine, as he died just a month later.)

I asked him whether he was married. He said that he was, and that his wife had been a schoolteacher. I inquired further, but received only very short, monosyllabic responses and a lot of awkward silence. Oddly, I can’t find any mention of his having been married in any of the sources I’ve looked at.

During lunch one day I asked him where he had gone to school. Smiling awkwardly, he pointed to the design on his dark tie, which featured a number of small red crests. I assumed I was supposed to recognize the design, but confessed that I did not. “Cambridge,” he said. “Ah,” I replied, suitably impressed (and unsurprised, given that the man was obviously fantastically well educated). But again, I can’t find any reference to Jonathan attending Cambridge (one source notes that he completed just one year of a B.A. history course at London University’s Birkbeck College, then left). If it was a lie, I couldn’t care less. I’ve always found people who tell tall tales to be rather endearing. Jonathan was a thoroughly outrageous, and outrageously gifted man. Absurd self-aggrandizement in a man like that is easily forgiven.

The speech Jonathan gave at the event wasn’t as funny or as inspiring as the one I heard in 2009. But it was still quintessential Jonathan. He told me beforehand that he had no idea what he was going to talk about. He called his style of speaking “mediumistic.” It involved getting up in front of an audience and gauging its mood and feeding off of it. As a result, his speaking style had a kind of incantatory quality, as if he were conjuring up spirits. He had a truly remarkable ability to achieve rapport with an audience. And a remarkable ability to speak off the cuff (which I truly envy). Just as before, everyone (well, almost everyone) loved his speech – and Jonathan loved giving it. He promised to come back in the summer and speak at another event. Alas, it was not to be.

After a couple of days, Jonathan relaxed considerably, and a warmer, and even funnier side of him began to show itself. Over one memorable dinner he regaled us with his impressions of various Right Wing figures, and with his repertoire of accents. (He liked to imitate American accents, though he always went a bit over the top, exaggerating their worst features.)

After dinner, we wound up at a friend’s house, who decided to show Jonathan his gun collection. Having been starved of any contact with guns in the U.K., Jonathan was delighted. After their owner made sure they were all unloaded, Jonathan began examining them, tentatively at first. But then the child in him took over. I got out my camera and began snapping pictures as Jonathan struck various poses with the pistols, taking goofy delight in playing James Bond and Dirty Harry. Those images are what come to mind now when I think of Jonathan.

I flew out the next day, hours before Jonathan was to return to London, fully expecting to see him again in a few months. Mentally, I now added him to my list of “unusual and exceptional friends” (of which I’m quite proud). When I heard the news of his death a little more than a month later, I didn’t believe it. And in a way I still don’t want to.

Jonathan had a brilliant command of intellectual history, and it is a pity he did not produce more disciplined books. But perhaps he wasn’t capable of that. Jonathan was exceptionally strange, irascible, protean, and very loud. One never quite got to the bottom of him, and I am convinced he was also slightly mad. But his was a divine madness. I suppose one could describe him as a British eccentric — except that there was nothing harmless about Jonathan Bowden.

What a tremendous loss! I will miss him.

Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, ink on paper

6,281 words

Previous chapter here

Chapter 3

First Session, Part 1

The snow was falling over Nuremberg on 23rd December when President Schoepf declared the session open. He had been elected the day before, with Joyce-Spencer and Leone Brignano as his assessors, while Stanislas Loubski was to be public prosecutor. There were a few journalists in the press box, French friends invited by myself and the jury, without reference to political creed. A few Germans came in of their own accord, probably to enjoy the warmth of the auditorium, because we had made no publicity to attract their attention. Of course, one of them could have been a member of the Secret Police!

President Schoepf made a short opening speech.

“Members of the jury, we have known one another for some time now; we do not, therefore, need any introductions. We are a people’s tribunal, representing to the best of our ability a new Europe, which claims to be different from the old one, and we have been called upon to judge a man who has already been condemned as a criminal by the International Court of Nuremberg. We must confirm or reverse this judgment, and possibly also indicate other guilty parties. The public prosecutor may begin.”

Public Prosecutor Stanislas Loubski: “Gentlemen, the historians tell us that the crimes perpetrated by Hitler against humanity took their heaviest toll of the Jewish people. It is not important that the figure of 6,000,000 victims is today contested everywhere, because if Hitler had only destroyed 60 persons with his system of concentration camps, he would still have to give account of his actions. However, I should like our people’s tribunal, before examining the matter in detail, to explain why an Austrian of humble extraction, but favored by good fortune, after attaining the heights of supreme power which he could have transfigured by a show of clemency, should for twelve years have given free rein to his hatred for a people which had never done him any wrong? When, why, and how did Hitler become anti-Semitic?”

One of the deputy jurymen asked for permission to speak.

Juryman Georg Krefka: “The question asked by the public prosecutor seems to be of great importance. Anti-Semitism is not a hereditary affliction, such as syphilis or hemophilia. Yet it is constantly to be found cropping up in societies which are forced by geopolitical necessity to maintain contact with certain Jewish communities: in your country, the Ukraine; in the Baltic countries, in Poland, North Africa and the Middle East and also Alsace, isn’t it true, Mr. President? There is a certain kind of anti-Semitism which we could call hereditary, in spite of the law of separate development — or perhaps because of it! On the one hand we see the ghetto, on the other the village or the medina: the Jews withdraw voluntarily into the former, the peasants or fellahin into the latter, thereby seeking a precarious equilibrium with which to reduce as far as possible the settling of accounts which we usually call pogroms, an old custom of which the Jews are always the victims. In those countries where this ‘apartheid’ does not exist, anti-Semitism appears sporadically. It often starts as a result of the struggle for existence which is common to all peoples, including the Jews. The small trader turns anti-Semitic because the shoemaker on the corner, an African Jew or a Jew of the Ashkenazim, does better business than he. He often forgets, of course, that the Jew works harder than he does, contrary to those legends propagated by the anti-Semites. However, Hitler was not placed in a situation of this kind, and the public prosecutor can rightly inquire why and how he became anti-Semitic. Could Advocate Kleist offer us some explanation?”

Advocate Georg Kleist: “Gentlemen of the tribunal, gentlemen of the jury, this statement might surprise you, but let me say that it took my client more than fifteen years to become an anti-Semite!”

President Schoepf: “On what do you base this assertion?”

Adv. Kleist: “On my client’s own evidence in Mein Kampf.”

President Schoepf: “The tribunal rejects this kind of evidence, since it is a book written by the accused.”

Adv. Kleist: “Quite right, but it has one incontestable merit, one which has indeed never been questioned. Every time that Hitler exposed in Mein Kampf one or other of his political or social ideas, he applied them later rigorously, developing them to their final consequences as soon as he had been given the power to do so. It might be claimed that this policy was a subtle form of Machiavellianism, but does it matter if other politicians, professional liars that they are, should have been trapped by this honesty? I am not looking for proofs in Mein Kampf, as you seem to think, but merely for facts which could explain certain events.”

President Schoepf: “On this basis we will accept Mein Kampf as evidence.”

Adv. Kleist: “At the age of fifteen, when he was still in the Realschule at Linz, Hitler recalls that there were very few Jews in this town and that he furthermore considered them to be Germans, like everyone else. The unfavorable comments, made by certain elements about the Jews, filled him with feelings of antipathy which could almost be classified as revulsion. I want to spare the jury long references which could encumber the debates, and I refer members therefore to the defense dossier where these references may be freely consulted.[1] Let us continue. On his arrival in Vienna my client was not yet an anti-Semite, but he makes no mystery about the way in which he became one. Initially it was the physical contact with the Jews, living in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who came, generally speaking, from the East. It must be admitted that they were not particularly attractive, having been molded by the misery of the Galician, Ruthenian, and Polish ghettos from which they had escaped westwards.”[2]

Jury Member Karl Verschaeve: “We all know that Hitler was an artist, but to become an anti-Semite for purely aesthetic considerations seems to me to be rather frivolous, do not you agree, Advocate Kleist?”

Adv. Kleist: “Hitler became anti-Semitic for much more serious reasons. He may well have been robbed by the Viennese dealers, all of them Jews, but that was not sufficient to determine the ideological orientation of a man who never allowed his political conduct to be guided by his private life.[3] No, the anti-Semitism of the Führer was the result of his racialism. With men, just as with animals, two different races that have by chance occupied the same territory will fight until one of them has become master of the terrain. At this time, the Jews occupied in Vienna every single position which could influence the press, literature, art, politics, social life, customs, private and public morality. My client was of the opinion that the Jewish race was in this way undermining the Germanic peoples, together with their concepts of man and the world in which he lives, with a view to destroying them, so that the Jews could take their place.”

Jury Member Charles Zermatten: “Counsel for the Defense seems to me to be in error when he talks of a Jewish race, and it is, by the way, the same error as that of his client in Mein Kampf. There is no Jewish race, only a Jewish people. The notion of race has today been scientifically defined as a “biological group, whose relative homogeneity is the product of natural selection, offering a sufficient basis for an attempt at direct evolution, that is to say, voluntary selection.”[4]

Adv. Kleist: “The Jewish people fits into the framework of this definition, Mr. Zermatten. Beginning with the relative originality which it presented on leaving its Afro-Asian area of cross-breeding at the start of our era, it has never stopped evolving voluntarily in an even more Jewish sense. Think of Israel today, where the law defining Jewish nationality is centered on the womb of the mother, who alone is considered to be a proper instrument for perpetuating a Jewish concept which has been biologically founded.”

President Schoepf: “Gentlemen, we must not be side-tracked. This tribunal is not concerned with establishing whether the Jews are a race or an ethnic group, a people or a religious community.”

Adv. Kleist: “I do not agree, because I have to defend Hitler against Judah. If I am expected to produce a proper portrait of Hitler then I must do the same for the people of Judah. Objectivity is indivisible! May I return to the argument which I was busy developing when the jury raised the question of race. Having started out from a completely neutral position, indeed, a position which was almost favorable to the Jews until he reached the age of sixteen or eighteen, Hitler became anti-Semitic on making contact with the Viennese Jews who were very numerous and active. First of all, he dissociated the concept of a Jewish race or, if you prefer, a Jewish people, from the Hebrew religion which everyone had up to that time considered to be the most important aspect in the particular genius of this people. What he says on this matter in Mein Kampf [5] merely confirms the declarations of important Jewish personalities who are both sincere and also well informed.[6] At a later stage, considering the problem not from the vantage point of personal interest or taste, but as future leader of the Germanic race — a vocation which he already felt was growing within him — he condemned the Jews because of the nationalism which they generated for their own profit, and because of the degrading ethical and aesthetic ideas which they imposed on Austria through their domination of her press, her literature and her art.”[7]

Adv. David Hollander: “Mr. President, gentlemen of the jury, my colleague, who has been called upon to defend the indefensible Adolf Hitler, has just explained how the greatest criminal of all times became an anti-Semite. He has spoken in an objective manner about Hitler’s development. I can confirm this because I too have read Mein Kampf. Everyone is entitled to become an anti-Semite but . . .”

Interruption by a member of the jury: “No one is entitled to say so anymore, not since 1939, because the Jews have had laws passed in all parliaments, curtailing freedom of speech for their benefit alone, on the pretext that discussions about race and religion could unleash hatred!”

President Schoepf: “I must inform you, Mr. Guadamur, that I have no intention of tolerating any political controversy before this tribunal. Advocate Hollander, please proceed.”

Adv. David Hollander: “I was saying that anyone is entitled to become an anti-Semite. We have had enough examples of this over a period of 2,000 years and longer, to be sure! Hitler even claimed that anti-Semitism had almost always been of benefit to the Jewish people.[8] Be that as it may!”

“What I should ask the tribunal, can be summed up as follows: does anti-Semitism confer the right of life and death over the Jewish people?”

President Schoepf: “Your question will be answered in the Judge’s summing up.”

Adv. Kleist: “Mr. President, counsel for the defense intends to examine various aspects of the matter at once. Firstly, my client never claimed the right of life and death over the Jewish people, and I will prove it. Secondly, the anti-Semitism of the Führer was based on the principle of legitimate self-defense!”

Counsel for Judah affected a show of great surprise and murmurs could be heard throughout the assembly. One journalist called out: “Kleist is not an advocate but an agent of the Gestapo!”

President Schoepf: “Mr. Ziegler, please leave this hall. I cannot allow you to insult counsel for the defense.”

Ziegler closed his brief-case and walked red-faced towards the exit. The session proceeded, in an atmosphere of great excitement.

Adv. Kleist: “Hitler never had any intention of destroying the Jewish people!”

Adv. Hollander: “What about the ‘final solution’?’”

Adv. Kleist: “We can discuss the matter with the greatest of pleasure! My client often spoke of a final solution even before the war, and not merely during those tragic days which might compel a head of State to adopt desperate measures. As my client saw it, the final solution of the Jewish problem was to be the normalization of this people’s existence. The Jews were to leave the territory of the host nations, establish themselves on a piece of land, and live by their own labor, as everybody else does, instead of behaving like parasites. Hitler never thought of any other final solution, and I shall prove it. I am stunned by the fact that in 1946 the so-called tribunal of Nuremberg should have been content to pick on one short phrase, taken out of context! But of course, every fraudulent inquisition uses this procedure!”

Adv. Hollander: “I understand that you were formerly a Nazi, my dear colleague? Are you still a Nazi?”

Adv. Kleist: “Definitely!”

President Schoepf: “Gentlemen, gentlemen, the first session is adjourned!”

The President wanted to keep the peace during the debates, but I think that he was also hungry. The tribunal dispersed for lunch at the Baeren, and I accompanied Hollander and Brentford, who were the guests of an American diplomat. The members of the jury went off in different directions. It was snowing, and the wind kept lifting the grey curtains which veiled the distant view of Nuremberg. The advocate from Rotterdam said:

“It is snowing harder than in the Nazi film Jud Süss, Mann’s novel [actually by Lion Feuchtwanger -- Ed.], when they hanged the wretched Jew, locked-up in his cage. We shall never see that again!”

“Can you be so sure?” asked Brentford. “History has a habit of repeating itself!”

At 3 o’clock we were back in the auditorium, and a few minutes later the session was resumed in an atmosphere of greater calm.

President Schoepf: “Advocate Kleist was explaining to us this morning how his client had changed from indifference to a state of anti-Semitism, and he gave a few reasons as justification for this evolution. The tribunal will admit that anti-Semitism exists, although it cannot approve of such a thing, but it cannot understand how an Austrian could have established a complete system of Government on this principle, or how he could have engaged 80,000,000 Germans in a war to justify it. However, while Advocate Kleist was speaking, he mentioned a rather unusual argument, namely, that Hitler considered himself to be acting from motives of legitimate self-defense vis-à-vis the Jewish people. On what do you base this argument?”

Adv. Kleist: “On the existence of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a series of strategic and tactical plans for a secret war, waged by the Jews for a period of centuries against the goyim, that is to say, against all non-Jews. These documents came to light only at the beginning of this century, but previously the Christians had suspected their existence and had defended themselves vigorously. In this they acted very wisely. Since the end of World War II, which they won, the Jews have occupied a position of strength from which they could continue their operations of condemning the defense measures which Hitler had adopted with regard to the Protocols — documents with which he was acquainted, although the popes and kings had apparently forgotten about their existence. The Jews are experts when it comes to the ideological lie, and they have since the Middle Ages been reversing responsibilities so cleverly that they can today disclaim all guilt for the crimes, imputed to them by Hitler, and also by all other Christians.”

Public Prosecutor Loubski: “Had Hitler read these famous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion?”

Adv. Kleist: “Of course! Hitler had read everything! I remind you of what he said in Mein Kampf.”[9]

Jury Member Brignano: “I have on occasion tried to read these documents. They are extremely boring, and very badly written. I could never summon up enough courage to finish them!”

Jury Member Kozica: “I have read them all! The plans set out in this program are so monstrous that I can scarcely believe them to be authentic!”

Jury Member Kittila Saronen: “I have not read them. Could Counsel for the Defense please give us a resume of the documents which are supposed to substantiate his plea of legitimate self-defense?”

Adv. Kleist: “With pleasure. I have here 12 copies of the book which I offer to the members of the jury.[10] But for the moment I shall sum up the contents with a single quotation, which is in itself sufficient to establish the criminal character of the plan for Jewish world domination.”

“Madam, gentlemen, please give me your attention:

‘We have a limitless ambition, we thirst for a pitiless vengeance, we are burning with hatred. It is from us that the all engulfing terror proceeds.

We have in our service persons of all opinions, of all doctrines: those who wish to restore the monarchy, demagogues, socialists, communists, and utopian dreamers of every kind. We have harnessed them all to the task: each one of them, on his own account, is boring away at the last remnants of authority, is striving to overthrow all established forms of order.

By these acts, all States are in torture: they exhort to tranquility, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace: but we will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our International Super-Government, and with a submissive heart.[11].

“Gentlemen, this is the spirit in which the Jewish people wages its war against the Aryan world at a time when it has the audacity to pose as the pitiful victim of Hitler! Do you not think, Mr. President, gentlemen of the jury, that having learnt of such base intentions, my client had no other choice than to adopt a policy of legitimate self-defense, not only for the German people, but also for all other non-Jewish peoples who are governed by blind or venal rulers?”

President Schoepf: “Will Counsel for Judah please answer?”

David Hollander: “Gentlemen, I have listened with a great deal of patience to my learned colleague, and I see very clearly what he is getting at. Unfortunately, his apparently faultless arguments are utterly invalid.”

“Why?”

“Because the famous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are fakes. They were forged by the Russian Czarist police so as to direct the discontent of the people on to the Jews. The intention was to harness anti-Semitic sentiments, which were always latent in Russia, to produce a pogrom. The Russian tyrants would have been extremely partial to Hitler’s ‘final solution’!”

“No! Hitler adopted his final solution with deliberate intent, and not as a policy of legitimate self-defense!”

Adv. Kleist: “For the past fifty years the Jews have quite naturally tried to explain the origin of the Protocols by the hypothesis which my learned colleague has just put forward. However, if these texts were mere fakes, forgeries of the Czarist Okhrana, why should the Jews have taken them so seriously as to have their agents discreetly buy up all copies, hidden away in the secondhand bookshops of every country in the world? Why do the Jews, who already enjoy considerable power at the international level, not try to have the apocryphal character of these texts established by a well-known historian or by a tribunal composed of non-Jews, a panel of impartial men?”

Adv. David Hollander: “It has already been done!”

Adv. Kleist: “Oh no, no, no! I am sorry that you should be defending so weak a case. The Jews did once try to obtain the required result by appearing before a Swiss tribunal. But a judgment which, thanks to some very clever manipulation of the evidence, appeared to favor their case, was immediately quashed by a decree of the Federal Tribunal.”

“They made a second attempt in 1968 when, on behalf of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, they took Dr. James-Albert Mathez to court for publishing an enormous book of 700 pages, entitled The Past, the Present, and the Jewish Question. It is true that Mathez was condemned by the tribunal of the Canton of Vaud, not however because he had quoted the supposedly fake Protocols, but because he had insulted Jews of Swiss nationality. This was perfectly in order, because although it might be deemed reasonable to fear and hate the Jews on account of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the ambition to which they bear witness, should to a certain extent command our respect” [12].

“I do not believe that one should be allowed to insult a man because of his race, his ethnic group, or his religion, and although I have agreed to defend Hitler before this People’s Tribunal, I would have refused in the case of Julius Streicher. Be that as it may, I would submit, my dear colleague, that the last attempt to prove these Jewish texts to be forgeries has failed, and to the best of my knowledge, no other attempt has yet been made.”[13]

“I am still convinced that this tribunal will recognize the authentic character of these texts and that it will consequently endorse the policy of legitimate self-defense which my client was compelled to adopt.”

Adv. Hollander: “Good common sense argues in favor of the apocryphal character of these texts. Mr. President, Mr. Public Prosecutor, Gentlemen of the Jury, please reflect for just one moment! Is it possible to suppose that the Jewish people should have brooded for centuries over this abominable plan for the destruction of other peoples when it is well-known that the Jew loves peace, and always preaches non-violence, since he has been himself the victim of violence for many centuries?”

“The Jew is a humanist, a lover of inoffensive intellectual speculation! And if these qualities, which are generally recognized throughout the world, were merely supposed to mask some dark design, why should we suddenly expose our terrible plans, why should we give them to our enemies and disclose the secret of our successful offensive against the goyim? Common sense is surely more valid than the decisions of a Swiss court!”

“And in any case, I could use my learned colleague’s arguments against him. Let us agree that the Protocols were not condemned as forgeries in Zurich, Bern, and Lausanne — but they were also not judged to be authentic: so where do we go from here?”

Adv. Kleist: “I shall prove the authenticity of the texts to this court by a process of cause and effect. For several centuries past, the subversive tactics, defined in the Protocols, have been a very grim political and social reality. Today, in 1976, the assault on the goyim is much easier to discern than in the 19th century. The motives of the Jew, whether he be Israeli or a member of the Diaspora, and the final stages of the struggle he is waging against us, are visible — so to speak — to the naked eye.”

Advocate Hollander was incensed: “This is the worst kind of anti-Semitism!”

Adv. Kleist: “Quite the contrary, my dear colleague. It is truth of the highest order. I have no quarrel with the ordinary Jew, a man who is generally honest enough. I also have no quarrel with the Jewish bourgeoisie, because neither the one nor the other has read the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It is the secret leaders who have made these plans and who pull all the strings of the conspiracy. These Jewish leaders are hand in glove with American super-capitalism and with so-called Russian socialism! In the course of these proceedings I shall give irrefutable examples of what I have claimed.”

President Schoepf: “The tribunal will hear what you have to say about this matter with the greatest interest, just as it will also listen to your other arguments. During the first session you have provided an acceptable explanation for the birth and development of your client’s anti-Semitic feelings. I hope that tomorrow you will show us how this anti-Semitism was translated into acts of government.”

Adv. Kleist: “I shall need several sessions for this, Mr. President.”

President Schoepf: “You shall have them.”

The session was adjourned, and it was agreed that the whole assembly should meet again the following day.

Notes

1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: “Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say when the word ‘Jew’ first gave me grounds for special thoughts. At home I do not remember having heard the word during my father’s lifetime. I believe that the old gentleman would have regarded any special emphasis on this term as cultural backwardness. In the course of his life he had arrived at more or less cosmopolitan views which, despite his pronounced national sentiments, not only remained intact, but also affected me to some extent.

“Likewise at school I found no occasion which could have led me to change this inherited picture.

“At the Realschule, to be sure, I did meet one Jewish boy who was treated by all of us with caution, but only because various experiences had led us to doubt his discretion, and we did not particularly trust him; but neither I nor the others had any thoughts on the matter.

“Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word ‘Jew’ with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions. This filled me with mild distaste, and I could not rid myself of an unpleasant feeling that always came over me whenever religious quarrels occurred in my presence. At that time I did not think anything else of the question.

“There were few Jews in Linz. In the course of the centuries their outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look; in fact, I even took them for Germans. The absurdity of this idea did not dawn on me because I saw no distinguishing feature but the strange religion. The fact that they had, as I believed, been persecuted on this account sometimes almost turned my distaste at unfavorable remarks about them into horror.

“Thus far I did not so much as suspect the existence of an organized opposition to the Jews.

“Then I came to Vienna.” (pp. 47-48, Hutchinson & Co., Ltd. May 1944.)

2. Mein Kampf: “Once, as I was strolling through the inner city, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and with black hair locks. ‘Is this a Jew?’ was my first thought. “For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: ‘Is this a German?’

“As always in such cases, I now began to try and relieve my doubts by books. For a few Hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. Unfortunately, they all proceeded from the supposition that in principle the reader knew or even understood the Jewish question to a certain degree. Besides, the tone for the most part was such that doubts again arose in me, due in part to the dull and amazingly unscientific arguments favoring the thesis. I relapsed for weeks at a time, once even for months.

“The whole thing seemed to me so monstrous, the accusations so boundless, that, tormented by the fear of doing injustice, I again became anxious and uncertain.

“Yet I could no longer very well doubt that the objects of my study were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves; for since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the inner city and the districts north of the Danube canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans” (p. 52).

3. “When he was in good form, Hitler could do one painting a day: he specialized in aquarelles, wash-tints, sketches and charcoal sketches. In 1938 buyers squabbled over these productions, the prices of which varied from 2,000 to 8,000 marks each! His friend, or rather his colleague, the engraver Reinhold Hanisch, was entrusted with the task of selling Hitler’s work, either to chance buyers, or to the picture-framer Wenzel Reiner, whose shop was situated in the Lichtensteinstrasse. It was in August 1910 that Hanisch — who changed his name to Fritz Walter for personal reasons, the secret of which died with him in an SS prison in 1938 — went to jail for eight days after Hitler had charged him with stealing 19 Kronen from him” (Pas à pas avec Hitler. Ray Petitfrere, Presses de la Cité, 1974, Paris. Vol. I, p. 93.)

4. Dictionary of the Uppsala Academy, a philosophical secret society. This should not be confused with the universities of this Swedish city.

5. Mein Kampf: “The Jew has always been a people with definite racial characteristics and never a religion; only in order to get ahead he early sought for a means which could distract unpleasant attention from his person. And what would have been more expedient and at the same time more innocent than the ‘embezzled’ concept of a religious community? For here, too, everything is borrowed or rather stolen. Due to his own original special nature, the Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason than because he lacks idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the conviction of survival after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world.

“The Jewish religious doctrine consists primarily in prescriptions for keeping the blood of Jewry pure and for regulating the relations of Jews among themselves, but even more with the rest of the world; in other words, with non-Jews. But even here it is by no means ethical problems that are involved, but extremely modest economic ones. Concerning the moral value of Jewish religious instruction, there are today, and have been at all times, rather exhaustive studies (not by Jews: the drivel of the Jews themselves on the subject is, of course, adapted to the purpose) which make this kind of religion seem positively monstrous according to Aryan conceptions. The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude towards the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties — and this against their own nation” (pp. 278–79).

6. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: “The Jewish question is neither social nor religious, despite the fact that it sometimes takes on this appearance” (pp. 75–76).

“The Jew remains a Jew, even if he changes his religion; if a Christian were to adopt the Jewish religion, he would not become a Jew, because the quality of Jewishness does not reside in religion, but in the race” (The Jewish World, December 14, 1922).

7. Mein Kampf: “The so-called liberal press was actively engaged in digging the grave of the German people and the German Reich. We can pass by the lying Marxist sheets in silence; to them lying is just as vitally necessary as catching mice is for a cat; their function is only to break the people’s national and patriotic backbone and make them ripe for the slave’s yoke of international capital and its masters, the Jews.”

8. Mein Kampf: “. . . in the struggle against the Jews on a religious basis they thought they had discovered a slogan transcending all of old Austria’s national differences. It is obvious that combating Jewry on such a basis could provide the Jews with small cause for concern. If the worst came to the worst, a splash of baptismal water could always save the business and the Jew at the same time. With such superficial motivation, a serious scientific treatment of the whole problem was never achieved, and as a result far too many people to whom this type of anti-Semitism was bound to be incomprehensible, were repelled. The recruiting power of the idea was limited almost exclusively to intellectually restricted circles unless true knowledge were substituted for purely emotional feeling. The intelligentsia remained aloof as a matter of principle. Thus the whole movement came to look more and more like an attempt at a new conversion of the Jews, or even an expression of a certain competitive envy. And hence the struggle lost the character of an inner and higher consecration; to many, and not necessarily the worst people, it came to seem immoral and reprehensible. Lacking was the conviction that this was a vital question for all humanity, with the fate of all non-Jewish peoples depending on its solution. Through this half­heartedness the anti-Semitic line of the Christian Social Party lost its value. It was a sham anti-Semitism which was almost worse than none at all; for it lulled people into a feeling of security; they thought they had the foe by the ears, while in reality they themselves were being led by the nose. In a short time the Jew had become so accustomed to this type of anti-Semitism that he would have missed its disappearance more than its presence inconvenienced him.”

9. Mein Kampf: “To what an extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shewn incomparably by the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here conscientiously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain these disclosures originate: the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contents as well as their ultimate final aims. The best criticism applied to them, however, is reality. Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of the people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken.”

10. The text used by advocate Kleist is the 1901 version, translated from Nilus. The references are those of the 1920 edition produced by La vieille France of Paris. There are many editions of the Protocols. The texts show variations in the translations, but the message never varies. Some of them have subtitles which do not appear in the original edition, 500 copies of which are said to have been printed by Nilus himself in 1905, with the approval of the Russian Synod. The manuscript, which he is said to have received in 1901 in circumstances which have never been clearly defined, was handled by the firm of Sergy Troitsky. Of the two copies of this original edition which are known to be in the West, one is in the British Museum, reference no. 3926-d-17, dated August 10, 1906. These extremely controversial texts should be treated with the utmost circumspection. (Note of the author.)

11. Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (Paris: La vieille France, 1920).

12. “The judge who, to quote Grossen, is called upon to weigh against each other the conflicting interests of author and injured party, does not need to decide in the abstract whether anti-Semitism as a system of ideas or doctrine may, or may not, be preached without committing an illicit act. He merely has to say whether the book of the accused is injurious to the interests of the plaintiff, and whether the interests of the accused can be considered to be more sacrosanct than those of the latter. We are forced to admit that the book in question is full of grave insults, expressions of utter contempt, serious accusations without proper foundation couched in general terms; the Jews, and especially the plaintiffs, are exposed to the contempt, reprobation, and hatred of their fellow citizens. It is inadmissible that the personal opinion of Mathez about the Jewish problem, sincere or otherwise, could justify such an action” (Minutes of the judgment pronounced by the civil court of the Vaud canton tribunal on April 17, 1968, presided over by Mr. Fitting, p. 30).

13. “This court is not of the opinion that it needs to decide whether certain documents, quoted by the defendant, to wit, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, are authentic and to verify the correctness of their sources. Even if certain complaints, of a political nature or otherwise, made in every age and in every country with regard to the Jews, should appear to be well-founded, which this court cannot decide, the summary generalization of the said complaints to include all Jews, taken as a whole or as individuals, invalidates the proof of these accusations” (Ibid., p. 17.)

Most modern cinema is essentially the re-enactment of the same story. A protagonist is born into a world containing racism, sexism, anti-Semitism or some combination thereof. After a lengthy struggle, which may involve overcoming deep seated prejudice and bias within oneself, the properly reconstructed hero overcomes whatever remnants of Tradition exist, and triumphantly sets the world onto the correct path towards ever greater Equality. The costumes and character names may change, but The Narrative is always the same.

There is a variance of this plot, where the white hero is set on the road to enlightenment by a non-white who possesses the cultural authenticity, empathy, and soul that whites lack by their own inherently evil nature. The non-white helps the atomized Aryan come to a better understanding of himself, his place in the world, and, inevitably, his failed romantic life. Thus, the protagonist transcends his white identity to become an active soldier against his own people in the fight for ever greater equality. In so doing, of course, he proves his own moral and social superiority over his fellow whites. The contradiction between the previous two sentences, needless to say, is never noticed. When white advocates or anti-racists criticize such films as anti-white or condescendingly racist respectively, both groups are correct.

The Last Samurai is a typical example of the genre, seething with over-the-top hatred of Western Civilization and stuffed with progressive racial fantasies. It’s Stuff White People Like comes to Japan, complete with SWPL entry number #11 (Asian girls.) However, the movie inadvertently transcends itself in its defense of the moral code of the Samurai and the apology for a vanished society. Equality, economism, democracy, and modernity itself are savaged in the name of aristocracy and honor. The Last Samurai may be one of the most compelling defenses of Tradition and organic society Hollywood has ever produced. However, it’s only possible because the startlingly reactionary message of The Last Samurai is marinated in the contemptuous anti-Western hatred the Zeitgeist demands. It is simultaneously anti-white and anti-liberal and for that reason its intended message is confused and contradictory.

The movie begins with a recounting of Shinto mythology about the creation of the Japanese home islands. The nation itself is a product of divine providence, with blood, soil, and the gods integrated into one whole. The narrator, Mr. Graham, tells us that he believes that Japan was really created by a group of brave men who willed it into existence – the samurai. We are introduced to the leader of the samurai rebellion, Katsumoto, who is mediating on a vision of a white tiger flailing at a circle of foes surrounding him. This foreshadows the white protagonist. As with all stories of this type, the white man’s redemption through self-hate is at the center of the tale.

Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is an American military hero who has returned from the Indian Wars with the Congressional Medal of Honor. A drunk, he’s been reduced to making rambling speeches about Winchester firearms in front of crowds of potential customers. An earlier version of the script shows Algren haunted by the memory of his brother’s death in a Civil War battle. However, since having a hero loathe himself for participating in the butchery of evil Southern racists may lead to uncomfortable conclusions, the produced film limits the Civil War to a passing reference and changes the traumatic experience to Algren tormented by memories of killing saintly, peaceful, and enlightened Native Americans.

Algren makes his last sales pitch in front of a horrified audience, with Cruise overdoing the clichéd “horrors of war” by moaning about the bodies of scalped troopers baking in the sun and holes being blown open in the fathers of children. After he demonstrates the accuracy of the rifle by firing over the heads of the terrified crowd, he bitterly thanks them “on behalf of those who died in the name of better mechanical amusements and commercial opportunities.”

After he walks into the street, his old comrade Gant (Billy Connolly) greets him and tells him of a job opportunity. He drunkenly meets with his old commander, Colonel Bagley, whom he despises. Colonel Bagley tells him that Japan “has it in mind to become a civilized country” and wants “white experts” to train their army. The main Japanese figure behind the planned modernization is Omura, who enthusiastically wants modern weapons to crush a rebellion of Samurai, but secretly despises the Americans. “A nation of cheap traders,” he caustically remarks to an aide. Algren accepts the contract but makes sure to tell Bagley before he leaves that Algren may be willing to kill whoever he is ordered to for money, “but I’ll gladly kill you for free.”

Algren arrives in Japan and finds a society in transition. While most of the people in the streets are dressed in traditional clothing, there are a few in Western garb. A deleted scene shows the samurai Uijo walking through the streets before being confronted by two Japanese men in top hats and tails. They refuse to show deference and mock him for his top knot, sword, and clothing. One even pokes him with a cane. Uijo instantly slices the man’s head off and coolly walks on, while the other rolls onto his belly to show homage. We can expect that this scene was cut because this is what a society dominated by the samurai actually was – a rigid social order where a refusal to show deference to one’s betters could be punished by death. Modern cinema demands that the “good guys,” in this case the samurai, must be shown only as victims.

Therefore, in the produced film, the samurai receive a more appropriate and modern introduction. Algren questions the translator Simon Graham on everything he knows about the samurai. When the Irish sergeant Gant mocks them for still wearing armor, Graham uses the usual cinematic trope of reminding the white man that while his ancestors were barbarians, the nonwhites were superior. In this case, we are told the samurai were the most cultivated warriors in the world while Europeans were presumably grubbing amidst the caves.

Even though the training of the Japanese peasant conscripts has barely begun, Algren receives orders to move the army to confront a samurai force that is destroying Omura’s railway. The terrified peasants line up in the woods, the view shrouded by fog. The samurai, with terrifying masks and huge horned helmets, appear as demons out of the mist, their charge instantly breaking the conscripts’ line. Gant ignores Algren’s order to move to the rear and is killed for it. Despite refusing to use “cowardly” weapons like firearms, the samurai easily manage to defeat the rifle armed infantry. Algren meanwhile manages to slay several of the enemy, before being wounded and surrounded. He flails wildly with a spear he’s captured from an enemy that has a banner with a white tiger. Katsumoto approaches, recognizing the premonition. Wounded, Algren is about to be slain by a warrior in red armor, but at the last moment, Algren stabs him in the throat. Katsumoto saves Algren before he can be killed by the others and takes him prisoner.

Thus begins Algren’s introduction to an idyllic and vanished world. First, of course, he must confront his own evil. The pathetic drunk suffers through alcohol withdrawal as he cries out for sake and is consumed by visions of slaughtering peaceful Indians. He also learns that he is being kept in the house of Taka, Katsumoto’s sister and the wife of the warrior in the red armor that he killed. When he finally recovers and is brought to Katsumoto, he cannot understand why is being kept alive only to have “conversations” so Katsumoto can learn about his enemy. Algren, the modern post-Western man that the movie has retrofitted into the past, speaks with shame and loathing about his service with General Custer. Katsumoto meanwhile, is impressed that Algren has served with such a legend and envies Custer’s glorious death.

The main contradiction of the movie is thus established. Katsumoto is a man who curtly ordered his sister to take in the man who murdered her husband. When she understandably objects and offers to take her own life, he orders her to “do what you are told.” The society is Katsumoto is one of a firmly established patriarchy, with peasants obeying their masters, and a forthright embrace of warrior values. However, since it is non-whites doing it, the film never shows anyone rebelling against this, and instead emphasizes the beauty, dignity, and harmony of an organic society. No one is opposed to this within Japan itself except for self-centered and greedy capitalists such as Omura, who, it is implied, is only this way because he has been corrupted by the outside world.

The movie thus succeeds in creating a way to critique modernity while not associating with anything icky or reactionary like an authentic Western tradition. As we’ve all learned in our distinguished universities, “whiteness” is a social construct, and here it is defined as the leveling forces of capitalism, industrialization, and globalization. As Algren increasingly identifies with his new community, and with Taka and her children, he ceases to be white and becomes Japanese. When spring comes and he is returned to the Japanese government, he finds that in his absence the frightened peasants that he left behind have been transformed into a disciplined modern army, complete with artillery and Gatling guns. The transformed Algren, now enlightened about the evils of the West, reacts with disgust. He quietly refuses command of the new force and Omura perceives him as an enemy for the first time.

Before the final struggle, there is a brief attempt to forge a peace between the old Japan and the new. Katsumoto is permitted to ride to the capital and meet with the young Emperor Meiji, who addresses him respectfully as his old instructor. Katsumoto frames his rebellion as a rising not against the Emperor, but against the Emperor’s true enemies. In a critical scene, the Emperor reveals that he doesn’t know what to do and begs Katsumoto to tell him the correct path. Katsumoto is thus faced with the classic problem of all reactionaries – the institution he has sworn to serve has become subverted, but the logic of his ideology prohibits him from taking command and thus destroying the principle of authority. Katsumoto prostrates himself and tells the Emperor that he must find the strength within himself.

Alas, the Emperor, despite his divine nature, is not capable of such an act of courage. Katsumoto is maneuvered out of power when he refuses to relinquish his sword during a council meeting, which is technically against the law. The Emperor remains silent, refusing to defy Omura, who has become the real ruler of Japan. Arrested, defeated, disgraced, Katsumoto’s rebellion appears to be over.

Instead, it is the white man who takes up his rescue and, of course, is responsible for further bloodshed. The translator Simon Graham helps Algren bluff his way past the guards by intimidating them, claiming Algren is in fact “the President of the United States” who has come to personally defeat the rebel army. While easily the funniest scene of the movie, the implication is that Japan is now so degraded that the President of a foreign power is somehow perceived as in command even by the Japanese military. Together with some of the samurai, Katsumoto is freed, but at the cost of his own son, who dies bravely in battle slaughtering rifle armed troops with bow and arrow.

Returning to their hideaway, Katsumoto wonders aloud if the Samurai have become obsolete. With the zeal of a convert, Algren tells him that the role of a traditionalist warrior is somehow more necessary than ever and that he should fight back against the attack that is coming. Of course, this means that men will die in a futile struggle in the name of “honor.” While Algren was disgusted by Custer’s willingness to die for an abstraction, it is justified and even glorious for nonwhites to sacrifice their lives for a greater cause, and he is quite willing to lend his own sword hand.

Algren and Katsumoto meet their foes in the field, but arrange their archers and swordsmen in such a way to draw their enemies into a trap. Algren tells Katsumoto about the Battle of Thermopylae, laughingly telling him that the defenders were “dead to the last man” in glorious combat by the end. It’s amazing what fighting for another people’s culture can do for the white man, as he grins in anticipation of his own sacrifice.

By soaking the ground with flammable pitch and feigning a retreat, the samurai draw their enemies close and take away their advantage of superior weaponry. Having won a tactical victory, but knowing enemy reinforcements are on the way, Algren, Katsumoto, and the surviving warriors take to their horses for a final charge.

The final battle scene is a masterpiece. One is reminded of Faulkner writing about Pickett’s charge, “This time, maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain…” They rip through a line of infantry that fail to stop the charge, Colonel Bagley impaled by Algren’s sword. Omura begins to panic, shrieking hysterically for the soldiers to load the “new guns”. The inexperienced Japanese soldiers fumble with the loading mechanism and the samurai draw ever closer, screaming their wild cry of battle frenzy. Any moment one expects to see the officers cut through apart by the vengeful guardians of old Japan as the music swells to a crescendo. Suddenly, the music cuts off and the sickening mechanical clank of the Gatling guns shatters the sudden quiet. They are all cut down – Algren, Katsumoto, and the rest. We see that they weren’t even that close. The age of chivalry has gone, and that of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded, thanks to the new guns.

Wounded, dying, Katsumoto crawls to Algren to request help in ending his own life. Omura shrieks for his troops to finish them off, but his own officers disobey, revolted by the dishonorable slaughter. Algren assists Katsumoto to commit seppuku, giving the samurai both an honorable death and a moment of total perfection as he dies. Awed by the sacrifice, the Japanese troops bow to their vanquished foes. Of course, as Algren (albeit wounded) is seemingly the only survivor, what we are actually seeing are the non-white masses prostrating themselves before the principled anti-racist. It is the ultimate liberal fantasy.

Now that the rebellion has been crushed, the Japanese are poised to sign a trade agreement with the United States that will give great benefits to the Americans, as well as personally profit Omura. As the agreement is about to be signed, Algren limps into the imperial chamber to present the Emperor Meiji with Katsumoto’s sword. Deeply moved, the Emperor speaks, explaining that he dreamed of a powerful Japan with modern weapons and industries, but now that they have those things, “we must not forget who we are.”

Cultural authenticity is then re-established with a capricious act of Oriental despotism. The Emperor suddenly tells the American ambassador that he will not approve the treaty. The ambassador is understandably outraged at this duplicitous behavior, while Algren grins, having successfully harmed the interests of his own country. Omura protests, only to be told that the Emperor is randomly seizing all of his property. If he feels shamed, the Emperor suggests, Omura can kill himself using Katsumoto’s sword. While modernity is here to stay, the greater nobility of the way of the sword, of patriotism, and of service to the Emperor is established by the sacrifice of the samurai, whose deaths have now been redeemed (thanks to anti-racist whites.)

On a superficial level, one is tempted to simply dismiss The Last Samurai as a rip-off of James Cavell’s Shogun. However, the film is distinct from Campbell’s story in its basic theme in two ways, aside from the obvious differences of setting, characters, and plot. First, while Shogun shows the glory of Japan’s traditional way of life, it also reveals the deviousness and backstabbing underlying the talk of honor and sacrifice in the same way as Game of Thrones. The Last Samurai allows nothing to interfere with its portrayal of Traditionalist life. While we can perhaps chalk this up to naiveté or even liberal condescension, it is refreshing to see a forthrightly positive portrayal of an organic society.

More importantly, The Last Samurai has genuinely bracing insights on the inherent evils of modernity and liberal capitalism. Even though democracy has justified its triumph in the name of “dignity” for every person, the film shows that everyone from a samurai to a peasant had a value and worth in a real society, “dedicating themselves to perfection” in all that they do. Under modernity, there are vulgar city dwellers parading in foreign garb, mocking their own traditions in the empty pursuit of status granted by an alien elite.

The Last Samurai portrays the rot of nationalist identity once the primary value becomes money grubbing, but more than that, it show the even greater evil when nationalism (as a word) is married to money grubbing. Despite all the professions of loyalty, sacrifice, and power, the Japanese Army throughout most of the film is essentially a private security force for Omura’s corporate interests.

There is an obvious parallel to the American military, and to Smedley Butler’s passionate cry that his distinguished Marine Corps career was nothing but serving as a “high class muscle man for Big Business.” If it is sickening to see the way of the sword and the pursuit of perfection replaced by the rule of gold, it is infinitely worse to see martial values in the service of international finance.

Of course, the second way the film differs from Shogun is why the film is permitted to give this subversive message. Instead of a white man traveling amongst the Japanese as in Shogun, the film portrays the Japanese as essentially backdrops to the moral journey of the white man. That journey, of course, is away from his own “whiteness,” which is explicitly defined as modernity, capitalism, moral rot, and of course, alcoholism.

During one scene, Colonel Bagley asks Algren, “Just tell me one thing, what is it about your own people that you hate so much?” Algren has no answer. However, we get a hint in his response to a samurai child who asks him why he, Algren, is willing to fight against the “white men” who are coming to destroy Katsumoto’s army. Algren responds, “Because they come to destroy what I have come to love.”

Cut off from his own roots, with his own martial service in defense of “better mechanical amusements,” Algren turns to self-hate. It’s impossible to imagine his erstwhile Confederate opponents plagued by such doubts. With Traditionalism removed from Western Man, he seeks salvation in the Tradition of others, immersing, assimilating, and ultimately annihilating himself in the society of the Other. Thus the film ends with Mr. Graham suggesting that Algren ultimately found peace by living as a Japanese man, married to Taka and raising the children of his former foe.

As we see the postmodern graduates of American universities throw themselves into the indigenous rituals of agrarian tribes or champion the causes of all oppressed peoples except their own, we find that Colonel Bagley’s question is still with us and deserves an answer. What is it about our own people that we hate so much?

It’s that our people have been defined not by a culture, but by an anti-culture. In a cruel irony, “whiteness” has become a social construct, identified as export of junk food, junk culture, and junk values. Moreover, such “whiteness” should be hated. Cut off from ourselves and our past, we reasonably seek to identify with a real culture and a real people somewhere else.

Of course, there is a solution. If Algren had said to himself that while it is nice to have modern technology and material prosperity, whites “must not forget who we are,” the film would have a real message of subversion. However, our enemies won’t make that movie, never mind concede that whites even can refer to themselves as we. Like Katsumoto, we must rise; rise against the institutions that have failed us, in the name of the triumphs of the past and future we demand. That said, unlike the noble but failed samurai warlord, we cannot be bound by the enemy’s rules.

Zubin Mehta conducting Bayerische Staatsoper Bayerisches Staatsorchester (National Theatre Munich)

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Gustave Le Bon, 1841–1931

1,488 words

Translations: English, German

Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules

“A multidão é sempre intelectualmente inferior ao indivíduo isolado, mas do ponto de vista dos sentimentos e das ações que esses sentimentos provocam, a multidão pode, segundo as circunstâncias, ser melhor ou pior que o indivíduo. Tudo depende da natureza da sugestão à qual a multidão é exposta”.

Esse diagnóstico foi feito por um homem de estatura imponente e uma aparência irônica e severa, uma face suavemente desdenhosa, uma testa imensa, olhos penetrantes, e uma barba antiquada evocando os deuses da Renascença. Ele se chamava Gustave Le Bon. Ele nasceu em 1841 em Nogent-le-Rotrou.

Nascido de uma família de soldados e magistrados, de ascendência borgonhesa e bretão, Gustave Le Bon era um amigo de Théodole Ribot (Les maladies de la personnalité) e de Henri Poincaré (La science et l’hipothèse). Sua bibliografia, que é uma das mais importantes dos últimos dois séculos, é dominada por dois títulos: Psychologie des foules e L’é volution de la matière.

Um viajante infatigável, foram seus relatos de suas primeiras expedições (ao Norte da África, Índia, e Nepal) que primeiro atraíram atenção. “O ponto que permaneceu mais claramente fixo em minha mente”, ele escreveu em Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples, “é que cada povo possui uma constituição mental tão fixa quanto suas características anatômicas, uma constituição que é a fonte de seus sentimentos, pensamentos, instituições, crenças, e artes”.

Um precursor da psicologia social, ele era interessado tanto em etnografia quanto em antropologia, sociologia, filosofia da história, física, biologia, história das civilizações e doutrinas políticas, cartografia, e mesmo psicologia dos cavalos e equitação!

Um homem da ciência, vivendo sozinho em seu laboratório, em 1878 ele inventou o primeiro relógio capaz de rebobinar a si mesmo através das variações diárias em temperatura. Pouco depois, ele provou a existência da radioatividade. Muito antes de Einstein, ele demonstrou a falsidade do dogma da indestrutibilidade da matéria estabelecendo que matéria e energia são a mesma coisa sob aspectos diferentes (Mémoires de physique, L’évolution de la matière, La naissance et l’èvanouissement de la matière).

Em 1902, ele fundou a famosa Bibliothèque de Philosophe Scientifique, uma marca ainda publicada hoje por Flammarion.

Dedicado a Théodole Ribot, Psicologia da Multidão tanto estabeleceu seu autor como deu origem a um novo campo de estudo. Em 1929, o livro estava em sua 37ª edição. A idéia central de Psicologia da Multidão é que o indivíduo se torna outra pessoa ao se unir a uma multidão, uma “célula” cujo comportamente deixa de ser autônomo e que se subordina mais ou menos completamente ao grupo, quer permanentemente ou temporariamente, do qual ele é um dos constituintes.

A “Unidade Mental das Multidões”

Em um prefácio em geral desinteressante, Otto Klineberg, um professor na Sorbonne, relembra um dos princípios essenciais da psicologia da forma (Gestalttheorie): o todo é mais do que a simples soma de suas partes.

Como com a teoria dos todos, a multidão é portanto mais do que a mera soma dos indivíduos que a constituem. “É por essas razões”, escreve Le Bon, “que se vê júris dando vereditos que cada jurado individual desaprovaria, que assembléias parlamentares adotam leis e medidas que cada um de seus membros desaprovaria pessoalmente. Tomados separadamente, os homens da Convenção eram burgueses de hábitos pacíficos. Unidos em uma multidão, eles não hesitaram, sob a influência de alguns líderes, em enviar as mais manifestamente inocentes pessoas à guilhotina”.

A sugestão se torna exagerada ao ser recíproca. A multidão criminosa que assassinou de Launay, o governador da Bastilha em 14 de julho de 1789, consistiam majoritariamente de transeuntes desocupados, lojistas, e artesãos. Similarmente os massacres do Dia de São Bartolomeu e das Guerras Religiosas, as “tricoteuses” de 1793, as Communardas, etc.

Os mesmos excessos também podiam ser observados do outro lado: “A renúncia de todos os seus privilégios pela qual a nobreza votou na celebrada noite de 4 de agosto de 1789 jamais teria sido aceita por qualquer de seus membros tomados como indivíduos”.

Pode-se portanto enunciar uma “lei da unidade mental das multidões”, caracterizada pelo “desaparecimento da personalidade consciente e pela orientação de sentimentos e pensamentos na mesma direção”. “Nós entramos na era das multidões”, escreve Le Bon, que enfatiza as consequências da irrupção legal das massas na vida política. Com consequências perturbadoras – se é verdade que as “multidões não possuem poder para mais do que a destruição, seu domínio sempre representa um período de desordem”.

Barão Motono, um ex-Ministro das Relações Exteriores do Japão que traduziu Psicologia das Multidões ao japonês, escreveu: “Com o progesso da civilização, as raças, como os indivíduos de cada raça, tendem a se tornar cada vez mais diferenciados. Portanto não é em direção à igualdade que a humanidade avança, mas em direção a uma progressiva desigualdade”.

O próprio Le Bon também acreditava que “o fator racial deve ser colocado acima de todos os outros, pois por conta própria ele é muito mais importante do que todos os outros em determinar as idéias e crenças das multidões”.

Isso explica porque os traços da caráter manifestos pelas multidões, sendo governados pelo inconsciente, são “possuídos pela maioria dos indivíduos normais de uma raça praticamente em mesma medida”. A “multidão psicológica” assim age para revelar a alma coletiva, no sentido de Jung: “O heterogêneo é sobrepujado pelo homogêno, e as qualidades inconscientes predominam”.

O que explica a qualidade de curto prazo da ação das multidões: “As decisões de uma natureza geral feitas por uma assembléia de homens distintos, mas de especialidades diferentes, não são sensivelmente superiores às decisões que seriam tomadas por uma reunião de imbecis. Eles só podem reunir, em verdade, aquelas qualidades medíocres que todos possuem. Multidões acumulam, não inteligência, mas mediocridade”.

Tradições guiam o povo. Apenas as formas exteriores das tradições são modificadas, o que dá a ilusão de sociedades rompendo com seu passado. “Uma multidão latina”, nota Le Bon, “não importa quão revolucionária ou quão conservadora se supõe que seja, invariavelmente apelará ao Estado para realizar suas demandas. Ela sempre se distingue por uma tendência notável para a centralização e por uma inclinação, mais ou menos pronunciada, em favor de uma ditadura. Uma multidão inglesa ou americana, ao contrário, não reserva nada para o Estado, e apela apenas à iniciativa privada. Uma multidão francesa põe peso particular na igualdade e uma multidão inglesa na liberdade. Essas diferenças raciais explicam como é que há quase tantos tipos distintos de multidões como há de nações”.

Le Bon acrescenta: “O conjunto de características comuns impostas pelo meio e pela hereditariedade sobre todos os indivíduos de um povo constitui a alma de seu povo”.

Multidões são também intolerantes e “femininas” (“mas as mais femininas de todas”, diz Le Bon, “são as multidões latinas”). Entre elas, o instinto sempre vence sobre a razão. Inclinadas à simploriedade, a juízos excessivos, elas não toleram contradições. “Sempre prontas para se sublevar contra uma autoridade frágil, elas se curvam com servilidade diante de uma autoridade forte”.

Homens de Ação

Conhecer a arte de impressionar a imaginação das multidões é conhecer a arte de governá-las. “É sempre o lado maravilhoso e lendário dos eventos que mais especialmente assombra as multidões. Ademais, todos os grandes estadistas de cada era e cada país, incluindo os déspotas mais absolutos, consideraram a imaginação popular como a base de seu poder”.

Napoleão disse ao Conselho de Estado: “Foi tornando-me católico que eu dei fim à Guerra da Vendéia; tornando-me muçulmano que eu me estabeleci no Egito; tornando-me ultramontano que eu conquistei os padres na Itália”.

“O homem pode geralmente fazer mais do que ele crê, mas ele não sabe sempre o que pode fazer”. Os líderes das multidões revelam isso a ele. Os líderes das multidões não são homens de pensamento, mas homens de ação. Eles tem mais energia do que inteligência pura. Sua ascendência assume a forma de um grande desígnio que cataliza vontades e orienta instintos.

Idéias simples tornam a conquista das multidões mais fáceis, acima de tudo idéias que sejam ricas em promessas, entre as quais Le Bon cita “as idéias cristãs da Idade Média, as idéias democráticas do último século, as idéias socialistas de hoje”.

Georges Sorel, o autor de Réflexions sur la violence, escreveu: “Se a psicologia algum diz for bem sucedida, entre nós, em ser anexada ao domínio do conhecimento que um homem deve possuir para ter o direito de se considerar verdadeiramente cultivado, nós deveremos o resultado aos esforços perseverantes de Gustave Le Bon”.

Psicologia das Multidões já foi traduzido em uma dúzia de línguas, incluindo russo, turco, japonês, e árabe. Anunciando as grandes convulsões revolucionárias do século recente, de fato os desenvolvimentos mais recentes da guerra psicológica, ela foi na década de 1920 a leitura de cabeceira dos oficiais da École Supérieur de Guerre, e entre eles, em 1922, do jovem capitão De Gaulle. O obscurantismo durkheimiano, que desde então tem oprimido a sociologia francesa, foi incapaz de ocultar sua importância.

O livro tem 82 anos de idade. Ele não envelheceu um único dia.

Gustave Le Bon, 1841–1931

1,713 words

Die englische Übersetzung von Matthew Peters erschien zum Gedenken an Gustave le Bons Geburtstag (7.5.1841) am 7. Mai 2012 auf Counter-Currents. Das französische Original stammt von Alain de Benoist und erschien  in Vu de droite: anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 2001 [1977]), pp. 282–284. Ins Deutsche übersetzt von Osimandia.

Aus Die Psychologie der Massen (Psychologie des foules) von Gustave Le Bon:

“Die Masse ist dem isolierten Einzelmenschen gegenüber immer intellektuell unterlegen, aber was Gefühle und die Aktionen angeht, die von diesen Gefühlen hervorgerufen werden, kann die Masse den Umständen entsprechend besser oder schlechter als der Einzelmensch sein. Alles hängt von der Natur der Beeinflussung ab, der die Masse ausgesetzt ist.”

Diese Diagnose stammt von einem Mann von imposanter Statur, einer gleichermaßen ironischen und ernsthaften Erscheinung mit leicht hochmütigem Gesicht, enormer Stirn, stechenden Augen und einem altmodischen Bart, der in der Vorstellung die Götter der Renaissance hervorruft. Sein Name war Gustave le Bon und er wurde 1841 in Nogent-le-Rotrou geboren.

Als Abkömmling einer Soldaten- und Beamtenfamilie von burgundischer und bretonischer Herkunft war Gustave le Bon mit Théodule Ribot (Les maladies de la personnalité [Erkrankungen der Persönlichkeit]) und Henri Poincaré (La science et l’hypothèse [Wissenschaft und Hypothese]) befreundet. Sein Werk, das eines der bedeutsamsten der vergangenen zwei Jahrhunderte ist, wird von zwei Titeln dominiert: Psychologie des foules (Die Psychologie der Massen) and L’évolution de la matière (Die Entwicklung der Materie).

Als unermüdlicher Reisender waren es die Berichte über seine ersten Expeditionen (nach Nordafrika, Indien und Nepal), mit denen er zunächst die Aufmerksamkeit auf sich zog. “Der Punkt, der sich  am klarsten in meinem Verstand festgesetzt hat” schrieb er in  Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (Félix Alcan, 1894) “ist der, dass jedes Volk eine Geistesverfassung hat, die genauso festgelegt ist wie körperliche Charakteristika, eine Verfassung, die Quelle seiner Gefühle, Gedanken, Institutionen, Glaubensüberzeugungen und Künste ist.”

Als Pionier der Sozialpsychologie interessierte er sich genauso sehr für Völkerkunde wie für Anthropologie, Soziologie, geschichtliche Philosophie, Physik, Biologie, die Geschichte von Zivilisationen und politischen Lehrmeinungen, Kartographie und sogar für die Psychologie von Pferden und der Reiterei!

Als Mann der Wissenschaft, der alleine in seinem Labor lebte, erfand er 1878 die erste Uhr, die sich selbsttätig durch die täglichen Temperaturschwankungen aufziehen konnte. Kurz danach bewies er die Existenz von Radioaktivität. Lange vor Einstein widerlegte er das Dogma der Unzerstörbarkeit von Materie, indem er konstatierte, dass Materie und Energie ein und dasselbe unter verschiedenen Aspekten sind (Mémoires de physique, L’évolution de la matière, La naissance et l’évanouissement de la matière). 1902 gründete er die berühmte Bibliothèque de philosophe scientifique (Bibliothek der Wissenschaftsphilosophie), eine Reihe, die heute noch von Flammarion publiziert wird.

Théodule Ribot gewidmet machte Die Psychologie der Massen sowohl seinem Autor einen Namen als auch den Weg für den Aufstieg eines neuen Forschungsfeldes frei. 1929 erschien das Buch in seiner 37. Auflage. Die Kernvorstellung von Die Psychologie der Massen ist, dass das Individuum zu einer anderen Person wird, wenn es sich einer Masse anschließt, eine “Zelle”, deren Verhalten aufhört, autonom zu sein und die sich mehr oder weniger vollständig der Gruppe unterordnet, von der sie ein Teil ist – sei es dauerhaft oder vorübergehend.

Die mentale Einheit von Massen

In einem weitgehend uninteressanten Vorwort erinnert Otto Klineberg, ein Professor an der Sorbonne, an eines der grundlegendsten Prinzipien der Gestalttheorie: Das Ganze ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile.

Nach dieser Theorie von Ganzheiten ist die Masse also mehr als die bloße Aufsummierung der Individuen, aus denen sie besteht. “Aus diesen Gründen” so schreibt Le Bon “kann man erleben, dass eine Jury Urteile fällt, die jeder einzelne Geschworene missbilligen würde, dass Parlamente Gesetze und Maßnahmen absegnen, die jedes einzelne Parlamentsmitglied persönlich missbilligen würde. Einzeln gesehen waren die Männer des Nationalkonvents Bürger mit einer friedfertiger Lebensweise. Zu einer Masse zusammengefasst zögerten sie nicht, unter dem Einfluss einiger Anführer die unschuldigsten Menschen unter die Guillotine zu schicken.”

Suggestion übersteigert sich, wenn sie erwidert wird. Die kriminelle Masse, die Launay, den Direkter der Bastille am 14. Juli 1789 ermordete, bestand weitgehend aus untätigen Schaulustigen, Ladenbesitzern und Handwerkern. Genauso verhielt es sich mit den Schlächtern der Bartholomäusnacht, den Tricoteuses von 1793, den Kommunarden, usw.

Dieselben Exzesse konnten auch auf der anderen Seite beobachtet werden: “Der Verzicht auf all seine Privilegien, für den der Adelsstand in der berühmten Nacht des 4. August 1789 stimmte, wäre von keinem einzigen seiner Mitglieder in Isolation befürwortet worden.”

Man kann daher ein “Gesetz der mentalen Einheit von Massen” feststellen, das durch “das Verschwinden der bewussten Persönlichkeit und der Orientierung von Gefühlen und Gedanken in dieselbe Richtung” charakterisiert ist. “Wir sind in das Zeitalter der Massen eingetreten” schreibt Le Bon, und hebt dabei das (legale) Einbrechen der Massen in das politische Leben hervor. Mit bestürzenden Folgen – wenn es zutrifft, dass “Massen keine andere Macht als die zur Zerstörung haben und ihre Vorherrschaft immer eine Zeit des Chaos repräsentiert.”

Baron Motono, ein ehemaliger japanischer Außenminister, der Die Psychologie der Massen ins Japanische übersetzt hat, schrieb: “Mit fortschreitender Zivilisation tendieren die Rassen genauso wie die Individuen innerhalb jeder Rasse dazu, zunehmend unterschiedlich zu werden. Die Menschheit schreitet daher nicht in Richtung zunehmender Gleichheit fort, sondern vielmehr in Richtung zunehmender Verschiedenheit. (L’œuvre de Gustave Le Bon, Flammarion, 1914).

Auch Le Bon selbst glaubte, dass “der rassische Faktor über alle anderen gestellt werden muss, denn schon er alleine genommen ist sehr viel bedeutsamer dabei, die Vorstellung und Glaubensinhalte einer Masse festzulegen als alle anderen.”

Das erklärt, warum die Charakterzüge, die sich in Massen manifestieren und vom Unbewussten kontrolliert werden “in der Mehrheit der normalen Individuen einer Rasse weitgehend zum gleichen Grad vorhanden sind”. Die “psychologische Masse” agiert sozusagen dahingehend, die kollektive Seele zu offenbaren, und zwar im Sinne Jungs: “Das Heterogene wird vom Homogenen überflutet und die unbewussten Eigenschaften herrschen vor.”

Das erklärt auch die kurzfristige Beschaffenheit von Massenaktionen: “Die Entscheidungen allgemeiner Natur, die von einer Versammlung herausragender Männer, die allerdings aus verschiedenen Spezialrichtungen kommen, getroffen werden, sind nicht vernünftiger als die, die von einer Ansammlung von Schwachsinnigen getroffen werden würden. Sie können in der Tat nur die mittelmäßigen Eigenschaften vereinigen, die jedermann besitzt. Massen häufen nicht Intelligenz an sondern Mittelmäßigkeit.“

Traditionen führen das Volk. Nur die äußerlichen Formen der Traditionen werden modifiziert, was die Illusion hervorruft, Gesellschaften würden mit ihrer Vergangenheit brechen. “Eine romanische Masse” notiert Le Bon “wird, gleichgültig wie revolutionär oder konservativ sie betrachtet werden mag, unbeirrt an den Staat appellieren, um ihre Forderungen erfüllt zu bekommen. Sie zeichnet sich stets durch eine markante Tendenz in Richtung Zentralisierung und durch eine mehr oder weniger ausgeprägte Neigung in Richtung Diktatur aus. Eine englische oder amerikanische Masse hingegen legt keinen großen Wert auf den Staat und appelliert nur an private Initiative. Eine französische Masse legt besonderes Gewicht auf Gleichheit, eine englische Masse auf Freiheit. Diese Rassenunterschiede erklären, dass es fast genauso viele verschiedene Arten von Massen gibt, wie es Nationen gibt.”

Le Bon fügt hinzu: “Die Gesamtheit gemeinsamer Charakteristika, die allen Individuen eines Volkes durch äußere Einflüsse und Vererbung auferlegt sind, stellen die Seele dieses Volkes dar.”

Masssen sind außerdem intolerant und “weiblich” (“aber die weiblichsten von allen” so Le Bon “sind romanische Massen”). Instinkt obsiegt in ihnen fast immer über Vernunft. In Richtung Einfältigkeit und zu exzessiven Beurteilungen tendierend dulden sie keinen Widerspruch. “Jederzeit bereit, sich gegen eine schwache Autorität zu erheben, unterwerfen sie sich einer starken Autorität kriecherisch.”

Männer der Tat

Die Kunst, das Vorstellungsvermögen der Massen zu beeindrucken, ist die Kunst, sie zu beherrschen. “Es ist immer die wundersame und märchenhafte Seite von Ereignissen, die Massen besonders beeindruckt. Darüberhinaus haben alle großen Staatsmänner aller Zeitalter und Länder, einschließlich der absolutesten Despoten, das Vorstellungsvermögen des Volkes als Grundlage ihrer Macht betrachtet.”

Napoleon äußerte gegenüber dem Staatsrat: “Indem ich Katholik wurde, beendete ich den Aufstand in der Vendée; indem ich Moslem wurde, etablierte ich mich in Ägypten; indem ich Ultranmontanist wurde, gewann ich die Priester in Italien für meine Seite.”

“Der Mensch kann im allgemeinen mehr, als er glaubt, aber er weiß nicht immer, was er kann (Hier et demain – Gestern und morgen). Der Führer einer Masse offenbart es ihr. Die Führer einer Masse sind keine Männer des Denkens sondern Männer der Tat. Sie haben mehr Energie als reine Intelligenz. Ihr Aufstieg nimmt die Form eines großen Entwurfs an, der katalytisch auf das Wollen wirkt und Instinkten eine Richtung gibt. Einfache Ideen erleichtern das Erobern von Massen, vor allem Ideen, die reich an Versprechungen sind, wofür Le Bon “die christlichen Ideen des Mittelalters, die demokratischen Ideen des vergangenen [19.] Jahrhunderts und die sozialistischen Ideen von heute” als Beispiel anführt.

Georges Sorel, der Autor von Réflexions sur la violence [Gedanken über Gewalt], schrieb: “Wenn die Psychologie es eines Tages schafft, bei uns zu dem Bereich des Wissens zu zählen, den ein Mensch besitzen muss, um sich wahrlich kultiviert nennen zu dürfen, werden wir dieses Ergebnis den beharrlichen Anstrengungen von Gustave Le Bon verdanken.”

Die Psychologie der Massen ist in ein Dutzend Sprachen übersetzt worden, einschließlich russisch, türkisch, japanisch und arabisch. Als Vorbote der großen revolutionären Umwälzungen des jetzigen [20.] Jahrhunderts und tatsächlich auch der jüngsten Entwicklungen in psychologischer Kriegsführung, war dieses Buch in den 1920er Jahren die Bettlektüre der Offiziere der École supérieur de guerre, zu denen 1922 der junge Hauptmann de Gaulle zählte. Durkheimischer Obskurantismus, der seither die französische Soziologie geprägt hat, ist nicht in der Lage gewesen, seine Bedeutsamkeit zu verbergen. Das Buch ist 82 Jahre alt. Es ist nicht um einen Tag gealtert.

Anmerkung

Das einzige Buch über Gustave Le Bon, das nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg veröffentlicht wurde, ist  The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage Publications, 1975) von Robert Nye. Obwohl es sich fast ausschließlich auf den politischen Aspket von Le Bons Werk konzentriert, enthält es eine beträchtliche Anzahl von bisher unbekannten Details. Sein Autor, ein Professor für Geschichte an der Universität von Oklahoma, liefert uns mehr als nur eine Studie über Le Bon, denn er hat auch Personen befragt, die Le Bon [verstorben 1931] während seiner Lebenszeit kannten.

1976 wurde eine Gesellschaft der Freunde von Gustave Le Bon (Société des amis de Gustave Le Bon) initiiert von Pierre Duverger (34 rue Gabrielle, 75018 Paris) gegründet. Unter dem Vorsitz von Jacques Benoist-Méchin plant sie, vier Bücher von Le Bon neu zu drucken: Psychologie de socialisme, Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peoples, Les opinions et les croyances und Psychologie de l’éducation.

Source: http://schwertasblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/gustave-le-bon/

What is “new” about the North American New Right, and how does it relate to the “Old Right”?

Before I can answer that, I need to clarify what the Old Right and the New Right have in common and what differentiates them from today’s phony right: namely the present-day center-right parties and all forms of classical liberalism.

The true Right, in both its Old and New versions, is founded on the rejection of human equality as a fact and as a norm. The true right embraces the idea that mankind is and ought to be unequal, i.e., differentiated. Men are different from women. Adults are different from children. The wise are different from the foolish, the smart from the stupid, the strong from the weak, the beautiful from the ugly. We are differentiated by race, history, language, religion, nation, tribe, and culture. These differences matter, and because they matter, all of life is governed by real hierarchies of fact and value, not by the chimera of equality.

The true right rejects egalitarianism root and branch.

The true right has three species: traditional society, the Old Right, and the New Right.

Every traditional society known to man is inegalitarian. All forms of traditional society have been destroyed—or are in the process of being destroyed—by modern, egalitarian, mass society.

For our purposes, the Old Right means Fascism, National Socialism, and other national-populist movements, which are the pre-eminent attempts to restore traditional hierarchical social forms within the context of modernity. Fascism and National Socialism were not merely reactionary, rear-guard resistances to modern egalitarianism by partisans of corrupt hierarchies. They represented a genuinely revolutionary impetus to restore vital, archaic, hierarchical values within the context of modern science, technology, and mass society.

The New Right and the Old Right share the same goal: a society that is not just hierarchical but also organic, a body politic, a racially and culturally homogeneous people, a people that is one in blood and spirit, a people that is politically organized and sovereign and thus in control of its own destiny.

Our ideal is a hierarchical society free of exploitation and injustice because the sole justification of political inequality is the common good of the body politic, not the factional good of the ruling stratum.

So how does the New Right differ from Fascism and National Socialism? This is a vital question, because of the intense stigmas attached to these movements since the Second World War. The North American New Right, like the European New Right, is founded on the rejection of Fascist and National Socialist party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide.

The North American New Right is a new movement. We do not have any thinkers of the caliber of Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, and many others. We are deeply indebted to the decades of work they have done. But since North American differs from Europe, our approach differs as well, in three important ways.

First, because of the blending of European stocks and breakdown of more compact European national identities in North America, we are forced to stress the deeper roots of common European identity, including racial identity.

Second, because of the leading role of the organized Jewish community in engineering the destruction of European peoples, and because the United States is the citadel of Jewish power in the world today, the North American New Right must deal straightforwardly with the Jewish Question.

Third, the North American New Right cultivates a much more frank and direct critical engagement with Fascism and National Socialism. The European New Right tends to focus on the fringes of the National Socialist and Fascist milieu, which has produced enormous intellectual dividends, particularly with the study of the Conservative Revolutionary movement. The North American New Right, however, takes full advantage of our First Amendment protections. But our willingness to go where there be dragons means that we need to clarify our precise relationship to the Old Right. Indeed, we should have done so a long time ago.

Again: The North American New Right is founded on the rejection of Fascist and National Socialist party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide.

We believe that racial and cultural diversity within the same society inevitably leads to hatred and violence, and that nationalism is the most practical way to ensure peace between peoples.

We believe that all peoples should have sovereign homelands where they can live according to their own lights, free from the interference of other peoples.

We believe that such a world can be achieved through gradual and humane programs of territorial partition and population transfer.

We believe that these aims can come about by changing people’s consciousness, i.e., by persuading enough people in positions of influence that everyone has a stake in ethnonationalism.

The promotion of political change through the transformation of consciousness and culture is what we call metapolitics.

Metapolitics refers to what must come before the foundation of a new political order. Metapolitics breaks down into two basic activities. First, there is education: articulating and communicating forms of white nationalism tailored to the interests and outlooks of the full array of white constituencies. This includes not just ivory tower theorizing but also artistic expression, topical cultural and political commentary, and the whole range of media by which they are communicated. Second, there is community organizing, meaning the cultivation of real-world communities that live according to our vision in the present and may serve as the seeds of a New Order to come.

The primary metapolitical project of the North American New Right is to challenge and replace the hegemony of anti-white ideas throughout our culture and political system. The entire cultural and political mainstream—including every shade of the “respectable” political spectrum—treats white racial consciousness and white self-assertion as evil.

Our goal is to critique and destroy this consensus and make white racial consciousness and self-assertion hegemonic instead, so that no matter what political party wins office, white interests will be secured. Our goal is a pluralistic white society in which there is disagreement and debate about a whole range of issues. But white survival will not be among them.

There are systematic analogies between the Old Right and the Old Left, and between the New Right and the New Left.

The Old Right and Old Left had widely divergent aims, but shared common means: hierarchical, ideological political parties organized for both electioneering and armed struggle; one-party police states led by dictators; the elimination of opposition through censorship, imprisonment, terror, and outright murder, sometimes on a mind-boggling industrial scale.

Yes, in the case of classical National Socialism, revisionists argue that many of these atrocities are exaggerated or made up out of whole cloth. But revisionism about the Second World War is really beside the point, because the terroristic, imperialistic, genocidal impulse exists in National Socialism today. For instance, latter-day National Socialist William Pierce routinely pooh-poohed the Holocaust. But he was willing to countenance real terrorism, imperialism, and genocide on a scale that would dwarf anything in the 20th century. That spirit is what we reject.

Yes, there were degrees of totalitarianism. The Communist abolition of private property entailed a far greater disruption of and intrusion into private life than Fascism or National Socialism, which merely sought to harmonize private property and private enterprise with the common good whenever they conflicted. Fortunately, hard totalitarianism—even the softest version of hard totalitarianism—is neither desirable nor necessary to secure the existence of our people, so we reject it.

It is instructive to look at how the New Left has handled the mind-boggling, heart-rending, stomach-churning atrocities of the Old Left. The best New Leftists do not deny them. They do not minimize them. They do not pin their hopes on “Gulag revisionism” or rehabilitating the reputation of Pol Pot. They simply disown the atrocities. They step over them and keep moving toward their goals.

This is exactly what we propose to do. We are too busy resisting our own genocide to tie ourselves to defending the mistakes and excesses of the Old Right. They are simply not our problem. To borrow a phrase from Jonathan Bowden, “We’ve stepped over that.” Our enemies keep throwing it down in our path, and we just keep stepping over it.

The New Left retained the values and ultimate goals of the Old Left. They also retained elements of their philosophical framework. They then set about spreading their ideas throughout the culture by means of propaganda and institutional subversion. And they won. Aside from Cuba and North Korea, orthodox Communism is dead. Capitalism seems everywhere triumphant. And yet in the realm of culture, leftist values are completely hegemonic. The left lost the Cold War, but they won the peace.

(Since in the West, both the Old and the New Left functioned primarily as a vehicle for Jewish ethnic interests, it would be more precise to say that Jewish values are hegemonic throughout the culture, even on the mainstream right.)

The New Left and New Right have widely divergent aims, but very similar means, namely the pursuit of political change through transforming ideas and culture, aiming at the establishment of intellectual and cultural hegemony.

The New Right rejects the totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide of the Old Right.

But we do not reject their political model: the ethnically and culturally homogeneous, hierarchically organized, organic society. We want a world in which every distinct people has such a homeland, including the Jews.

Nor do we reject the theoretical frameworks of Fascism and National Socialism, which today are more relevant and better-grounded in science and history than ever before.

Nor do we reject such figures as Hitler and Mussolini. Objectivity requires that we recognize their virtues as well as their flaws. We have much to learn from them. We will never repudiate awakened white people just to curry favor with the Bourgeoisie.

I have received some gentle ribbing about including Hitler and Mussolini among the birthdays we commemorate, as it smacks of the totalitarian cult of personality. But as an editor, I find that birthdays are ideal, regularly-occurring occasions to discuss important figures. They also produce spikes in search engine traffic, which we want to capture. Besides, we commemorate many birthdays, and it would be craven to discuss people like Ezra Pound or Knut Hamsun but ignore the people they were imprisoned for following. So we will keep commemorating their birthdays until, eventually, everybody does.

One of the main motives of the New Left’s move from politics to culture was disappointment with the proletariat, which was so effectively mobilized by Fascism and National Socialism, not to mention the centrist regimes of the Cold War era.

The New Left believed they represented the interests of the workers, but their approach was entirely elitist. They focused their attention on influencing the college-educated middle and professional classes, because these people have disproportionate influence on the rest of society, particularly through education, the media, and popular culture.

Likewise, the New Right represents the interests of all whites, but when it comes to social change, we need to adopt a resolutely elitist strategy. We need to recognize that, culturally and politically speaking, some whites matter more than others. History is not made by the masses. It is made out of the masses. It is made by elites molding the masses. Thus we need to direct our message to the educated, urban middle and professional classes and above.

There is no shortage of Old Right-style groups with populist messages targeting working class and rural constituencies. But we need to go beyond them if we are going to win.

Who I am speaking for here? When I say “we,” I am speaking for more than just myself, but not for all or even most of our writers or readers. There is no presumption that every author we publish approves of our agenda, in whole or in essence. (Indeed, many of them are dead.) Nor is there any presumption that any author agrees with any other author published here. Publication here does, however, imply that I, as the Editor-in-Chief, think that a given work advances our agenda directly or indirectly: directly, by articulating a viewpoint that I would endorse as true; indirectly, by helping us build an intellectually exciting movement.

And the North American New Right is an intellectual movement, not a fixed doctrine. The goals are fixed. The basic intellectual strategy is fixed. But everything else is in movement: usually toward our goals, but sometimes just whirling around the dance floor for the sheer joy of it (which, in a subtler way, also moves toward our goals).

There is a wide array of different and often incompatible intellectual traditions within the New Right. We have followers of the Traditionalism of Julius Evola and René Guénon as well as other thinkers who emphasize a metaphysics of eternal form. We have followers of non-Traditionalist, flux and history-oriented philosophers like Nietzsche, Spengler, and Heidegger. We have believers in decline and believers in Promethean progressivism. We have Darwinian biologists and scientific materialists squared off against metaphysical dualists. We have atheists, and we have representatives of all schools of religion, Christian and pagan, Eastern and Western.

We need this kind of diversity, because our goal is to foster versions of white nationalism that appeal to all existing white constituencies. We can speak to multitudes because we contain multitudes.

How does the North American New Right relate to Old Right-style groups in North America and around the globe? And how do we relate to various democratic nationalist parties in America and Europe?

Alex Kurtagic has recently argued that democratic party politics can perform the metapolitical functions of education and community organizing, thus there is no fundamental contradiction between metapolitics and party politics. Of course political campaigning involves education and community organizing, but these are merely the byproducts of pursuing office. And that goal means that all educational and organizing efforts must be dominated by the election cycle and the political issues of the day.

That is fine, if one’s real goal is to win office. But outside of proportional representation systems, seeking office is pretty much futile. So if one’s real goal is education and organizing, then political campaigning is merely a distraction. So why not focus all one’s energy into educational and organizing efforts, and determine the agenda ourselves, rather than let electoral politics determine it for us?

Why not take all the money spent on purely political activities—voter registration drives, campaign travel, campaign literature—and channel it into education and organizing?

David Duke, for example, has been doing enormously important work with his writings, speeches, and videos. Most of that work would come to a stop if he were to make another futile and expensive run for office.

Intellectually, we need to draw a sharp, clear line between New Right metapolitics and all forms of nationalist party politics. We share the same broad aims, but we differ as to the best means of achieving them. We need to acknowledge these differences frankly, then divide our camp and pursue our common aims by the various paths that seem best to us.

I do not wish to spend time criticizing and attacking other sincere white advocates, competing for turf and followers or squabbling over dimes. In the end, the only valid argument for or against an approach is to look at its results. I want to win support by doing good work, not denigrating the work of others.

Even though one can draw a sharp intellectual line between New Right metapolitics and nationalist party politics, no wall separates us in the real world. The North American New Right is not a political party or a party-like intellectual sect. We are an informal network that can overlap and penetrate all social institutions, including parties. I maintain contacts with people all over the globe who are involved in various political parties. They know where I stand. Where we disagree, we agree to disagree.

Speaking personally, however, I wish that a wall could be erected in some cases, for if there are only six degrees of social separation between me and Barack Obama, there are far fewer degrees of separation between me and the next Anders Behring Breivik. And, for me, that is just too close for comfort. I do not want anything to do with gun-toting armies of one. The only gun I want to own is made of porcelain.

You see, I really believe that what I am doing is right and important. Too right and too important to expose to the risk of grown men dressing up as Knights Templar or Stormtroopers and playing with real guns. I have nothing against guns or gun-owners as such. But the Old Right model attracts unstable, violence-prone people, which just makes our job harder.

But since I can’t build a movement—even a metapolitical movement—by being a hermit, the best I can do is draw clear intellectual lines of demarcation: again, the North American New Right is founded on the rejection of Fascist and National Socialist party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide.

(Breivik is a complex case, because he emerged from the Counter-Jihad movement, a Jewish-dominated false opposition to the Islamic colonization of Europe. But we still share his basic concerns and his goal of Europe for Europeans, even though we reject his actions and much of his analytical framework.)

Cynics have accused the New Left of being nothing but a dishonest marketing ploy. Of course, there is no point in trying to convince cynics, who know a priori that the truth is always more sordid than it seems. But the New Left actually delivered on its promises: Marxism without totalitarianism, without terror, without camps.

Of course we all know that the present regime is a form of soft totalitarianism which is enacting the genocide of the white race in slow motion. But the point is that this regime was not imposed upon our people through a violent revolution. They accepted it because of the transformation of their consciousness. They can be saved the same way.

Anders Breivik Preparing to Read His Statement in Oslo District Court, April 17, 2012

6,837 words

Translated and annotated by Andrew Hamilton

Translator’s Note:

The terrorism trial of Norwegian revolutionary nationalist Anders Behring Breivik, 33, began in Oslo District Court in Norway on April 16, 2012, and is expected to last until July.

He is accused of “destabilizing or destroying basic functions of society” and “creating serious fear in the population” by bombing a key government building and conducting a shooting spree on the island of Utøya at a gathering of the Workers’ Youth League (AUF, Arbeidernes ungdomsfylking), the youth auxiliary of Norway’s Left-wing, anti-white Labor Party. His July 22, 2011 crime, in which a total of 77 people died, has been described as the worst act of terrorism in Norway since WWII.

Breivik freely admits to committing the offenses, but denies culpability on the grounds that he was acting out of “necessity” (nødrett). The purpose of the trial is to determine whether he will be sent to prison, or committed to a psychiatric institution. Either way, he will spend the rest of his life in detention.

On the second day of the trial, the defendant read a statement to the court setting forth his rationale for the attacks. A complete translation of his 70-minute statement, the recording and broadcast of which was prohibited, follows. I have added some hyperlinks and brief explanatory information in square brackets.

The statement was published in Norwegian by the large Oslo tabloid newspaper Verdens Gang, as transcribed by reporters in the courtroom working “at a rapid pace.” I was unable to find a version of the text published in any English language news source, major or minor. A handful of small, private blogs posted rough translations. Mine is new. It is unclear whether the defendant’s full statement appeared in any major media outside of Norway, in any language.

Breivik’s Opening Statement, Day 2 (April 17, 2012)

Dear Judge [Wenche Elizabeth] Arntzen: [Defense attorney Geir] Lippestad indicated yesterday that it will take approximately 30 minutes or possibly longer. The prosecution yesterday laid the framework for their work, and I also ask that I may lay the framework for my defense, and I can’t get that done if I can’t use the point list.

I hope I will be allowed to explain the causes and motives related to July 22 and I hope you do not interrupt me.

I have a bulleted list, but I will start over after I’ve finished setting the parameters for my defense. So the question is whether I will get your permission to set the parameters first? I must remind you that I have undergone 1,100 pages of questioning, and I have no opportunity to explain myself without laying the framework for my defense first.

I should also mention that I have toned down the rhetoric for the sake of the victims and their relatives, and I think it should be within both acceptable limits and my rights.

I stand here today as representative of the Norwegian and European resistance movement. When I speak, I speak on behalf of the many Norwegians who do not want our indigenous rights to be taken from us.

Norwegian media and prosecutors have argued and will continue to argue that the reasons I executed the attack were random, and because I was a pathetic and spiteful loser, that I do not have integrity, that I am a notorious liar, lack morality, am insane and that I am therefore forgotten by other cultural conservatives in Europe.

They will say that I fell out of the workplace, and socially.

All this they have claimed. They also claimed that I am narcisstic, antisocial, have a phobia for germs, have gone with a face mask for many years, and that I’ve had an incestuous relationship [incestforhold] with my own mother.

They also claimed that I am a child and baby killer, despite the fact that I have not killed anyone under 14. It has been argued that I am a coward, homosexual, pedophile, psychopath, and Nazi. All this has been claimed. They also claimed that I am mentally and physically retarded, with an IQ of around 80.

I am of course not surprised by these characterizations. I expected this and wrote down in advance what would be written, and it turned out to be true.

But it is important that everyone understands why the journalists, lawyers and even the prosecutor in this case will continue to lie about me.

The answer is simple. I have conducted the most spectacular attack committed in Europe since the Second World War. And they want to do everything in their power to prevent this.

I and my nationalist brothers and sisters represent what they fear. They want to try to intimidate others from doing the same. It is the reason the massive demonization of me is going to continue.

I’ll actually start to tell a little about how it all started, and I start with the Second World War. Norway and Western Europe have not had real democracy since the interwar period. Norway and Europe are choked by almost total conformity.

Norway and other countries in Western Europe are not democratic countries and have not been democratic since the interwar period.

Liberals and cultural Marxists have since the Second World War worked together to keep (…) [all parenthetical ellipses with missing words such as this were contained in the original Norwegian language text, apparently representing brief gaps that the on-site reporters were unable to understand, or catch] from power, as their ultimate fear is that new Hitlers will pop up. What today is called democracy is in reality a cultural Marxist dictatorship.

The cultural Marxism that won out in Europe was raised shortly after the war to the only truth. Hitler came to power and this is one of the reasons why cultural Marxists have not permitted proper freedom of speech.

Cultural conservatism was reduced to a prohibited contribution, marked by barbarism and inhumanity.

These truths, created and adopted in ’45, were later reinforced under the ’68-founders I will tell about now. Nationalists and cultural conservatives lay with a broken back after the fall of the Axis powers.

Europe never had any [anti-Communist Joseph] McCarthy, so the Marxists had great latitude. They spent much time in the beginning infiltrating the school system.

In particular, these same Marxists had been told by the other parties in Europe that they were too extreme to obtain political positions. This happened not only in Norway but throughout Europe.

There were many Marxists who were university teachers and it was the most effective way to exercise power.

1968 occurred as a direct result of the fact that we had no anti-Communist leader like McCarthy. The problem was that McCarthy was too moderate. He tried to deport all cultural Marxists to the Soviet Union, but unfortunately did not. [This, of course, is incorrect.]

Cultural institutions in Western Europe were an easy target for Marxists to establish and administer. Marxists soon controlled the culture and bourgeois liberals controlled the economy.

The Marxist reforms introduced the transformation of the church, education, morals and behavior to name a few. 1968 and following were the years of Marxist cultural revolution. Reformation of social norms. A socialist egalitarian society was created.

The higher up in the new hierarchy of power you could get. Today the culture is controlled by Marxists and liberals govern the economy, while nationalists and cultural conservatives have been kept out of power since the Second World War. Today Norway and many countries are suffering cultural self-hatred [selvforakt] due to multicultural ideology.

A couple of questions that might be most important in our time and that all journalists, academics and politicians should ask themselves are the following:

Do you think it is undemocratic that the Norwegian people [norske folk] have never been asked through a popular referendum that they be made into a multicultural state?

Is it democratic to do so without asking people about the law?

The second question is the following:

Do you think it is undemocratic that Norway accepts so many African and Asian immigrants that they risk being made into a minority in their own capital?

And then someone will say: No, there is no problem because there are free elections.

But then the next question: Do you believe that free elections are enough, and that the press has an obligation to communicate [honestly] to people? When Norwegians and Europeans have been displaced at the steering wheel—among others, journalists.

That they will lose their culture, their land and traditions and Christianity. Our opinions are seen as inferior and we are seen as second-class citizens.

As it is now, there is no real democracy in Norway and Europe when the Marxist elite decide.They boycott democracy when they feel like it.

I’ll take an example from Austria a few years ago. We can not allow a nationalist and culturally radical party to assume power because their party is intolerant and inhumane. National and international news organizations put a lot of pressure on Austria, and called them racists and Nazis.

And the same happened when the Swiss voted against the conditions (…) Again, they described them as intolerant and inhumane.

The same is happening now in Hungary, where the nationalist alliance is a victim of the same. (…) By calling them fascists and intolerant.

Swedish news agencies continue to do the same against Sweden Democrats and the Norwegian media has done the same for 20 years against the Progress Party. Here, too, they boycott democracy and try to pressure the Norwegians and Swedes by calling them racists, cruel and intolerant.

Norwegian and European politicians and journalists should ask themselves this question:

Has the Norwegian press ever directed campaign journalism against the Progress Party before the election? The answer is yes, they have been running a smear campaign against the Progress Party for 20 years and will continue to do so, and the same is going on throughout Europe.

Norway be called a democracy when 100 percent of the news organizations support multiculturalism and systematic censoring of individuals that support ethnic and cultural protectionism?

The answer is no. Norway cannot be called a democracy as long as this systematic censorship is taking place.

Answers to a questionnaire [spørreundersøkelsen] by Frank Aarebrot in Nore show that more than 60-70 percent vote for parties on the left. The answer is that journalism colleges in Volda and at the University College in Oslo are totally dominated by socialist leaders.

Bruce Bawer [a New York City-born, anti-Norwegian, homosexual Left-wing expatriate anti-Islamic writer in Oslo—I'm guessing Jewish], among others, has written about this. And these Marxist teachers help to indoctrinate students. It is necessary to introduce a quota.

This [a compulsory ideological quota on the major media, compelling them to convey pro-nationalist views] is one of the few chances to obtain a free and objective press.

A British survey shows that 69 percent of Britons see immigration as a big problem or a very big problem. Source references are in the compendium. [Breivik's 1,518-page 2083: A European Declaration of Independence (2011)]

The latest survey from Statistics Norway shows that 70 percent of Britons [believe that Britain] has become a dysfunctional country as a result of immigration. The source is The Times February 2010.

Another British study showed that 70 percent are dissatisfied with multiculturalism.

[The judge interrupts.]

No it is only citations that emphasize the point: Norwegian and European journalists are anti-nationalist and political activists. They allow Muslims and Marxists to fill the newspapers, but they call everyone else bigoted Islamophobes and racists.

If 70 percent of Britons believe that multiculturalism puts their country at risk, how many do you think believe the same thing in Norway?

Journalists provide information and should be objective, but they are not objective. It is a mandatory requirement for one who would call himself a journalist.

About 30 percent of Norwegians and Europeans are against multicultural activism. But there is not a single news organization that represents our views. In reality 30 percent of news organizations should take ​​our side and represent our views [under Breivik's compulsory ideological quota system for big media].

More and more cultural conservatives realize that the democratic struggle is pointless. It is not possible to win when no real freedom of speech exists. As more realize this in the coming decades it is a short path to the weapon.

When a peaceful revolution is impossible, a violent revolution is the only possibility.

It is no secret that the opponents of multiculturalism and immigration have not been able to speak freely since the Second World War. That is the real terror.

It is these injustices that created me, and Laserman in Sweden [a killer of immigrants named after an earlier Swedish killer of Swiss-German descent, John Ausonius; it is unclear which of the two Breivik is referring to]. People who call me evil have misunderstood the difference between brutal and evil.

Brutality is not necessarily evil. To call someone evil you must know the person’s motives.

It is equally ignorant to call me evil, as to call the U.S. military leaders during World War II evil. Those who decided that 3.2 million Japanese civilians should be killed. [Breivik's figure is within the proper range for all Japanese, military and civilian, killed during WWII—not just the victims of the atomic bombings.] They did so not because they were evil, but because they calculated that a violent action would save millions of lives.

These were good intentions and motives, even if the methods they used were brutal. I and other nationalists are using exactly the same logic. If we can force Labor to change immigration policy and stop colonization.

If we can force them to change direction by executing 70 people, then obviously this will contribute to our not losing our ethnic group, our Christianity, and our culture.

This will therefore help prevent a future civil war in Norway, which could result in the death of hundreds of thousands of Norwegians. I and other militant nationalists are a hundred percent convinced that if we manage to stop the multicultural project in Europe, we will save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Then a great civil war will be averted. We do not have the luxury that we can wait any longer with confrontation.

Because if we wait 20, 30, 40 years, the ethnic Norwegians and Europeans will be in the minority. We therefore are not able to wait long. The motives are based on our goodness and not evil.

If there is someone who is evil, it’s Social Democrats, who not only engaged in systematic ethnic deconstruction, but have also [ignored] tens of thousands of threats that the consequences will be very bloody.

The only thing that should surprise Norway and Europe is why such a bloody conflict did not happen earlier.

We have arranged for Norway and Western Europe to Balkanize. Like the Balkans it will all end in bloodshed. And yes, I would have done it again, because crimes against the people and my culture are 1000 times more barbaric.

Implementation of a small barbarity is better than a great barbarity.

As stated in the compendium, it is important to trigger and provoke a witch hunt of moderates. That in turn will increase polarization and contribute to growing radicalization. Short term it will be counterproductive.

But when the moderates are persecuted, many of them will be radicalized and provoked by the witch hunt; it was therefore critically important to our cause in the long term. Cultural Marxists and (…) have had thousands of opportunities to change course since the Second World War.

But they have refused to change course again and again. The question is then:

Do AUF [the Workers’ Youth League, whose members Breivik attacked on Utøya] and Labor do this because they are evil, or just because they are naive?

And if they are simply ignorant—should we forgive them or punish them?

The answer is that most AUFers are indoctrinated and brainwashed.

Many people have been indoctrinated by adult Labor-people or by the media. All others have been indoctrinated by the Norwegian school curriculum or their parents. These were not innocent civilian children, but political activists.

As many as 44 of 65 AUFers had leading positions in the AUF and many had offices in the county council, etc. AUF is very similar to the Hitler Youth.

Utøya is an indoctrination camp for political activists, and on the 20th of July they had been indoctrinated for several hours by Marthe Michelet [b. 1975, leader of the Communist Youth 1996-98, broadcast journalist for NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, writer for Dagbladet, Norway's third largest newspaper; she has a daughter by her Muslim partner.] The daughter of arch-communist Jon Michelet [a high-ranking figure in Norway's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Workers' Communist Party (AKP) and its successor party Red].

She had been invited by AUF’s management as a speaker. This caliber feels such a huge hatred against our cultural heritage that she decided to convert to Islam.

And it’s communist speakers and leaders like this who are doing the indoctrinating.

All those who advocate multiculturalism and cultural Marxism should expect to be held liable in the future.

It is not difficult to foresee when Europe is ruled by multiculturalists. It is the price we pay.

You try to save your people, when the majority chooses propaganda and says that you are a murderer and terrorist. All this we know in advance, so we do not complain. I wrote in the compendium before the operation that I would be demonized.

To die a martyr for his people’s survival is the greatest honor in a man’s life.

This is not only our right but our duty. Knowing that I will be imprisoned does not frighten me. I was born in a prison and have lived my whole life in a prison, where there has been no freedom of speech.

A prison where freedom of speech does not exist and where I have been forced to look on as my own ethnicity is being deconstructed by cultural Marxists.

In this prison resistance is not allowed, and it is even expected that I will applaud my people’s destruction.

In this prison management has decided that if you criticize, that is not good.

Demonized, ridiculed. This prison is called Norway. It does not matter whether I’m locked up in Skøyen [an Oslo suburb] or Ila [Ila Detention and Security Prison outside Oslo. Norwegians judged to have been collaborators with the Germans, or of harboring politically incorrect racial views, were imprisoned there after WWII. Today Ila houses the men deemed by authorities to be the most dangerous in Norway. Breivik has been imprisoned there since his arrest on July 22, 2011.]

This is equally urgent no matter where you live in Norway, because you’re sitting there with a certainty that the entire country will ultimately be deconstructed to the multicultural hell we call Oslo.

And you sit there with the knowledge that democratic struggle is futile because it is controlled with the use of undemocratic methods. The latest report from Statistics Norway which shows that immigrants will be in the majority in 2040 is very misleading.

It says very little about the relationship between ethnic Norwegians and non-Norwegians. The reason the report is worthless is that they have deliberately omitted a number of other immigrant groups.

They have also excluded 3rd generation immigrants, illegal immigrants, and children where one parent is from another non-Nordic area.

The report was commissioned by multiculturalists, where they try to conceal the fact that ethnic Norwegians will be made into a minority in Oslo in just a few years.

This is going to happen. It also shows statistics from (…) that 47 percent of those born at Norwegian hospitals are non-ethnic Norwegian.

This is today’s Oslo, not Oslo in 28 years. SSB [Statistics Norway] should therefore be renamed the Labor Party central bureau.

Many have claimed that ultra-nationalists like me want to build a terrorist regime. This is wrong. I support the Japanese and South Korean model. [Although Breivik is right about Japan, the situation in South Korea is deteriorating rapidly, as described by anthropologist Peter Frost here. Breivik's characterization of the country was correct until recently, however.]

Nothing more, nothing less. Are Japan and South Korea really such horrible regimes?

No, they are not. They are high-tech nations. And said no to multiculturalism and mass immigration in the 1970s. They are living proof that rejection of mass immigration is successful.

Discipline, honor [æreskodekser], and pride of their own heritage is essential in Japan and South Korea. Women have a secondary role in the workplace. It is therefore absolutely incorrect that people like me want to introduce a vicious terrorist regime.

Today’s most successful nations are Japan and South Korea, which have used ethnic protectionism.

This model is today the most perfect of all political models. In Europe, the alliance between Marxists and liberals after World War II basically destroyed Europe.

In addition, Europe’s Marxists have made it so ​​that we focus all our resources on social security, including sickness benefits for the inhabitants. In the opposite direction, Japan and South Korea focused on research, export and high tech products.

[Breivik then says, evidently in response to the judge, who interrupted him five times:]

It is not possible to shorten the scope of my defense.

[And, again, presumably in response to a follow-up comment by the judge:]

Yes, that’s fine. Always end the argument.

Japan, South Korea, and to some extent China are living proof that countries that say no to multiculturalism and mass immigration are successful.

Jo Benkow, former leader of the Conservative Party issued the following statement. “An ethnically homogeneous society is a harmonious society.” [Benkow, born Josef Elias Benkowitz in 1924, was a member of the Storting (the Norwegian parliament) for 28 years, its President for 8 years, and leader of Norway's Conservative Party. He is the uncle of the late Norwegian Jewish "journalistic fraudster" Bjørn Benkow.]

The more culturally and ethnically fragmented society becomes, the more it becomes weakened.

Where the lack of trust between citizens is reduced every day until it ends, as in Greece, where only government employees pay tax. This will not only affect [social] interaction, but in the long run lead to confrontation. It will also occur when Islam is so dominant in Norway and Europe.

It has been claimed that European left-wing academics and journalists deplore violence.

Another study from Britain shows that 40 percent of Muslims believe that September 11 can be justified.

The official lie is that while 99.9 percent of Muslims do not support violence, the truth is that 25-40 percent of Muslims support Jihadist violence. The Labor Party, academics, and journalists are intelligent people who know this truth and conceal it.

The reason that they lie about this is that there is a consensus, that is an indirect cooperation between European elites, who lead the cultural Marxist agenda behind the scenes [bak lyset, lit., "behind the light"]. With a view to protecting the multicultural experiment.

The few examples I mention here are the tip of the iceberg.

But now everything is turned upside down. The Norwegian press has the power to define things. They have decided that evil is good and good is evil.

Now the perpetrators are good, and I and others who are fighting against [them] are evil. Nationalists and cultural conservatives are treated just as badly as Islamists were treated in the Middle East before the Arab spring.

[The Norwegian transcriber here writes, "Breivik refers to a spokesman in a Norwegian organization," without indicating whether he named the spokesman or the organization.]

The question he posed was: How much longer will European nationalists be punished for World War II? Norway has made no progress, the war never ended but is still going on today.

It is time that Europe’s liberals and Marxists stop punishing nationalists for what happened during the Second World War.

We do not accept it anymore. A weak and fragmented ethnic group will result in a weak culture, resulting in a weak nation.

An ethnic group is the actual heart of a culture. Gradually we see that the ethnic group becomes fragmented. This we see clear signs of in Oslo and other European cities. In these cities the aggressive cultures like Islam dominate more and more.

The Muslim enclaves in Europe will grow as aggressively as cancer, until one day they constitute a dominant force.

Is this really so difficult to understand? Of all our people have secured, the people’s freedom has been directly related to the integrity and strength of our ethnic group.

This is the most priceless and the most fragile. Our ethnic group is the heart of our own culture. Our culture cannot exist without a strong heart. To safeguard this ethnic group, our culture, is what our ancestors dedicated their lives to and hundreds of thousands have fought for.

Our ethnic group, our culture, our Christianity, our identity . . . It is the framework for the defense, and I have consideration for families and the victims.

[The judge interrupts again, but her specific remark was not reported.]

Originally this [opening statement] was 20 pages. I have condensed it down to 13 pages. But there is much talk about the five days I have received. I never asked for five days.

[The first five days of the trial were devoted to direct and cross-examination of Breivik. The remaining three months have been overwhelmingly allotted to testimony by police, officials, psychiatrists, victims, and others. At the moment, extensive testimony is being taken from victims.]

I have not asked for five days, only about an hour. It is the hour I have now. It is critically important to me that I get this hour to explain myself.

[The Norwegian journalist here writes, "Breivik is now starting to talk about Islamic culture and immigration after the judge has interrupted him."]

This is more than double the Norwegian birth rate of 1.5. If this continues, we will end up a minority in our own country. Lebanon was a Christian country, but when the Muslims came in 1960, they felt themselves strong enough to take over the country.

[Defense attorney Geir Lippestad requests that Breivik be allowed to continue: "Your comment, Honorable Judge, is that we have allocated five days for the defendant's explanation, and he has five pages left. I understand the Court's view but I also pray that we can continue. It is essential that we get his explanation, both the written part, and the oral later."]

As we know, the Christians lost in the 1980s. Today they are a persecuted minority that makes up less than 25 percent.

Then we come to another central European problem. Islamization that manifests itself as a large number of Muslim requirements: Shari’a laws, etc.

This gradual Islamization is funded by Arab countries, while Norway uses oil money on social security for immigrants. According to official information they have spent 600 billion kroner and financed Islamic centers in European countries.

They have financed the construction of 1,500 mosques, nearly 2,000 Islamic schools predominantly in Europe, Canada and America. It is worth noting that most of these institutions propagandize Wahhabi-Islamism, which is a very conservative form of Islam.

Journalists and political commentators have claimed that I called Mullah Krekar [a Kurdish Islamist refugee in Norway] as a witness to show my world view and that there is a rivalry. According to many of them including [Torgeir] Husby and [Synne] Sørheim [the court psychiatrists who declared Breivik criminally insane, a conclusion disputed by a subsequent psychiatric evaluation by different psychiatrists] these are psychotic delusions shared only by me and Mullah Krekar.

What these reporters have forgotten to inform the Norwegian people is that it’s not just me and Mullah Krekar who believe this, but in fact up to 60 percent of Muslims in Europe.  And in addition, a large proportion of Norwegians and Europeans, perhaps as many as 30 percent.

To say that this is psychotic delusion is stupid. Subi Sali [unkown Islamic authority cited by Breivik; the misspelling of the name is apparently a transcription error by the reporter; several misspellings occurred throughout the news report] says the following: Anyone who distinguishes religion and politics has abolished 600 Koranic verses.

It also means that anyone who does not accept a religious state and Sharia ( . . .) The same leader said that the Muslim Brotherhood does not recognize diversity merely because there are secular Muslims, but only [fundamentalist] Islam.

According to orthodox Muslims such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to kidnap secular Mulisms like Abid Raja [a high-ranking Norwegian-born Pakistani lawyer, government official, and politician] to use for their own purposes, there are no secular and moderate Muslims, there is only the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim community wonders who has given Abid Raja the right to abolish 600 Koranic verses. One cannot trust so-called secular Muslims in Europe. There are no secular Muslims or dropouts.

The second is that all Muslims are practicing deception as the Prophet Muhammad recommended. One cannot rely on such secular Muslims, because it could be that they are implementing a so-called deception. Ethnic Norwegians and Europeans have been subjected to cruel acts since our doors opened for immigration in the 1960s and ’70s.

Since Norwegian and European multiculturalists opened the doors to immigration, about 30 million Muslims have poured into Europe. More than 90,000 of my Norwegian sisters have been raped from 1960 to the present [ = 1,764/year; seems very high].

Against the people’s will. It is primarily the Labor Party that will be held responsible for my brothers and sisters.

Many have been gang raped. More than 300,000 have been physically and mentally harassed, beaten and robbed by Muslims since the 1950s and ’60s.

Several have committed suicide as a result of these atrocities. Hundreds of Norwegians have been killed by Muslims in recent years, including [23-year-old] Martine [Vik Magnussen], who was killed and raped by a Muslim in England. [The only suspect in her 2008 murder is the son of a billionaire, one of Yemen's richest men.]

All these atrocities are crimes against the Norwegian people and it is the Norwegian Labor Party including the AUF that are responsible for this because they’ve invited them here and continue to invite them here.

As a result, we see that ethnic Norwegians . . .

[Breivik is again interrupted by the judge, asking him to come to a conclusion.]

I have reduced this from 20 pages, I try to explain the framework and reasons for my actions.

[Norwegian reporter: "Breivik goes on and talks about the ethnic Norwegians fleeing Muslim neighborhoods. Like Groruddalen." (The Grorud Valley in eastern Oslo containing four of the city's boroughs.)]

Although I grew up on the west side, I see this. Oslo buys public sector flats for Muslims. They have become Muslim ghettos.

A great many Muslims do not want to be integrated. They disdain the sexual revolution and the moral decay that characterizes not only Norway, but Europe. They want Sharia.

The Norwegian delusions of politicians are that Muslims want integration and inclusion. This applies in Groruddalen, at Furuset, Holmlia [all in Oslo], in Malmö [Sweden; 2 min. English-language video], in Luton, London [English cities], Berlin and Utrecht [the Netherlands], to name a few.

The ex-President of Algeria issued a political warning to Europe in 1974: “One day, a million men will leave the southern latitudes to settle in the northern latitudes. They will not come as friends. They will go there and overcome it and defeat it with their sons (…) [excess fertility].”

They want autonomy and self-government with Sharia. The evolution of the world demonstrates the same. Muslims demand independence. This has already happened in India, Israel and Western China. We will see this in the next few decades in Europe also, as the Muslim population increases; it always starts with small demands.

Historical examples prove that it always ends with demands for autonomy and self-rule. There is not one single example in the world in which Muslim groups live in harmony with the country they settle in. Not a single example.

There is not a single example. Unfortunately there are 40 examples to the contrary that Islam has become more and more dominant.

Sitting Bull is and was a hero who was celebrated by America’s indigenous peoples. He fought on behalf of his people against General Custer.

Crazy Horse and Chief Galen [another transcription error by the reporter] were other military leaders of the American indigenous people. Were they terrorists, or were they heroes?

Were they evil or were they heroes?

American history books describe them as heroes, not terrorists. Meanwhile, nationalists in Europe are described as terrorists.

Isn’t that hypocritical and very racist? Individuals or groups that fight against foreign colonization are not terrorists, as history illustrates.

We are no more terrorists than the native Britons who fought against those who facilitated the Roman invasion. Norway has a native people. Aren’t ethnic Norwegians Norway’s indigenous people?

Haven’t these indigenous people lived here for the past 12,000 years?

The answer is yes, Norway has an indigenous people, and ethnic Norwegians are Norway’s indigenous people.

There is no difference between the battle fought in the Soviet Union and for autonomy in Bolivia, and our struggle for nationalism in Europe.

In 2009 the Bolivian parliament decided that the indigenous people in Bolivia should have autonomy if they wanted it. There is no difference between the Norwegian people and the Bolivian indigenous people.

Why are Nordic and European indigenous people treated worse than other indigenous people? Why are Norwegian indigenous activists branded as racists and Nazis, while indigenous activists in other parts of the world win support and acceptance?

It is extremely unfair and it is unacceptable. Our ancestors have lived in this country for 12,000 years and we, as Norway’s indigenous people, do not accept that our country will be colonized against our will.

We, like all other indigenous peoples, have special rights in this country, and this is something we will continue to fight for. I know that the information that I present is difficult to understand when one is taught to believe something else.

It is difficult to fight against the multicultural flow when the media pumps out such multicultural propaganda all the time.

Most Norwegians and Europeans will soon realize that multiculturalism has failed. Mark Twain said:

“In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.” [Notebook, 1904]

This case is about finding the truth. The documentation and examples I have provided are true. If they are true, how can what I did be illegal?

I have documented that academics, journalists are working in the same ways to combat Norwegian identity and Norwegian Christianity.

How can it be illegal to engage in armed resistance against these people? Thomas Hylland Eriksen has said “The great white spot consists in deconstructing them …..” [Eriksen is a prominent Norwegian academic and powerful advocate of white genocide like Jews Noel Ignatiev and Tim Wise, or Scandinavian-American academic Robert Jensen, in the US. Breivik has called Eriksen as a hostile witness in his trial.]

What he meant when he said this was the following: “We will deconstruct the Norwegian ethnic group, so they can never call themselves a majority again.”

This is what their plan is. They will face massive opposition. Something that July 22 [Breivik's 2011 attack] showed. Something that Laserman showed. These preventive attacks bear witness that a European civil war is coming.

Enoch Powell was a member of parliament in England, and he warned as early as the 1970s what the consequences of mass immigration would be.

He said: “Rivers of blood will run through our streets.” Unfortunately, no one listened to him or the others who gave warning.

The reason is that everyone has been censored and ignored. And what do we see today?

Rivers of blood have run through many cities in Europe. And rivers of blood caused by European patriots have run through the streets of Oslo, Malmö, and Germany.

The most frustrating of all is that European multiculturalists wanted [ = "have not wanted"?] peace negotiations since World War II. They do not want dialogue, but have instead chosen (…) They will not succeed. More censorship, more ridicule, and more repression of nationalists and cultural conservatives.

[The judge asks: "Are you soon finished, Breivik?" Breivik answers: "There is a page left."]

[French President Nicolas] Sarkozy, [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [UK Prime Minister David] Cameron have admitted that multiculturalism has failed in Europe. It does not work. Mass immigration has been a loss, down the drain, and has encountered many severe problems. The three powerful [leaders] in Europe finally admitting that multiculturalism does not work.

And in Norway, the reverse happens. Instead we go for more mass immigration from Asia and Africa. They refuse to change the ideological direction.

From this point I engage in self-censorship, just for the record.

They refuse to introduce ethnic and cultural protectionism. They have apparently decided to deconstruct the Norwegian ethnic group, no matter what the cost.

Thomas Jefferson said: “The tree of Liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants.” When national governments are destructive, the people have the right to abolish them.

It is their duty to overthrow such a government, and then establish new safeguards for their future security.

It is 100 percent certain that there will be a war between nationalists and internationalists in Europe. We, the first militant nationalists, are the first rain drops indicating that a big storm is coming.

There will be a gradual escalation and polarization in society and we will see further attacks. The multiculturalist government is forced to fight a two front war against us on the one hand and militant Islamists on the other.

My European nationalist brothers and sisters will triumph, which will proclaim the end of a left extreme government that has lasted since the Axis powers fell.

How can I be so certain that this will happen?

The reason is that multiculturalism is a self-destructive ideology. National cohesion is so weakened that the economy cannot sustain the welfare state. The economic crisis will make the financial crisis today look like a picnic.

The economy will crash and result in mass layoffs of public employees. People who then lived with blinders end up in a situation where they will lose everything.

When they have lost everything, they are forced into a state of suffering, and then, only then, will they dare to say what they really mean.

And at this time, having lost their religion and culture and their identity, Norwegian European men will no longer fear nationalism.

Only when we recognize within ourselves that you have to stand up for your opinions, and it will happen in a few decades in Europe, and in fifteen years in France.

In the meantime it is important that more patriots in Scandinavia and Europe take responsibility as I have done, as Peter Mangs of Malmö [a Swedish Hunter-type killer of immigrants] has done.

It is important that these Nordic and European nationalist heroes receive the attention they deserve. These heroic young men have sacrificed their lives to ensure that everything we love will not disappear.

They are all ideal knights, perfect foot soldiers for the conservative revolution. For national rebirth. Europe needs more heroes like them.

I am approaching the end.

Multiculturalism is an anti-Norwegian and anti-European hate ideology. Multiculturalism is an evil ideology that forces itself upon us.

We, the indigenous people of Norway, are now in a situation where we are losing our capital [Oslo] and our cities. We are about 5-10 years away from being a minority in our own capital.

The political elites [i båre land] are actually so brazen that they expect us to applaud deconstruction. And those who do not applaud are branded as evil racists and Nazis.

This is the real madness—they should be the object of a psychiatric evaluation and labeled as sick, not me.

The Labor Party’s parliamentary group and all other social democrats in Europe. And why is this the real madness?

This is the real madness because it is not rational to work to deconstruct their own group, their own culture, their own religion.

It is not rational to flood his country with Africans and Asians, so that our culture is lost. This is the real madness. This is the real evil. Universal human rights allow ethnic Norwegians the right of self-defense.

Responsible Norwegians and Europeans feel morally obligated to see that Norwegians are not made into a minority in their own country.

They will not accept that we are made into a minority in our own country, we will fight against multiculturalism in the Labor Party and among others working toward the same goal.

The attacks were preventative attacks in defense of Norwegian culture and my people. I acted from the principle of necessity on behalf of my people, my religion, my ethnicity, my city, and my country.

I therefore demand that I be acquitted of the charges.

This was the thirteen pages I had prepared.

[End of Statement.]

Original Norwegian text: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/rettssaken/artikkel.php?artid=10065238

“Im Abendrot” is the fourth of Richard Strauss’ “Four Last Songs.” It is sung here by Renée Fleming. The conductor is Christoph von Eschenbach. The orchestra is not named.

“Im Abendrot” (“At sunset”) (Text: Joseph von Eichendorff)

Wir sind durch Not und Freude
gegangen Hand in Hand;
vom Wandern ruhen wir
nun überm stillen Land.

Rings sich die Täler neigen,
es dunkelt schon die Luft.
Zwei Lerchen nur noch steigen
nachträumend in den Duft.

Tritt her und laß sie schwirren,
bald ist es Schlafenszeit.
Daß wir uns nicht verirren
in dieser Einsamkeit.

O weiter, stiller Friede!
So tief im Abendrot.
Wie sind wir wandermüde–
Ist dies etwa der Tod?

In English:

We have gone through sorrow and joy
hand in hand;
Now we can rest from our wandering
above the quiet land.

Around us, the valleys bow;
the air is growing darker.
Just two skylarks soar upwards
dreamily into the fragrant air.

Come close to me, and let them flutter.
Soon it will be time for sleep.
Let us not lose our way
in this solitude.

O vast, tranquil peace,
so deep at sunset!
How weary we are of wandering—
Is this perhaps death?

Composed: May 6, 1948

Editor’s Note:

The following is a transcript by D. E. C. of Jonathan Bowden’s speech at the 12th meeting of the New Right in London on November 3, 2007. The audio is available on YouTube here. If you have any corrections, please contact me at editor@counter-currents.com or simply post them as comments below.

Now this talk which I’m going to give on Revisionism, left and right, hard and soft, could be construed in the future as a dangerous talk, because the Chancellor of contemporary Federal Germany would like to extend, as a particular remit of the Constitution/Treaty which is being negotiated at the present time, the idea that revisionist laws — or more accurately, anti-revisionist laws — that exist in certain continental societies which have allegedly “known Fascism” at a particular period, be extended to this society and to all other EU access states, including a great wave of Eastern European countries who of course have acceded to the Union in recent years.

Now, one of the ways round this of course is to speak methodologically and in such a way as you talk about an area, and you interpret what people have said, and you put forward what very mainstream and counter-propositional and non-revisionist historians and others have said. And if you keep it within that box and within that framework, to be frank, you will be “alright.” Don’t forget, my father’s generation was told they’d fought in the Second World War for freedom of speech. And now we have to attenuate what we say before we even get down to saying it, so that we will not fall liable to particular laws that haven’t even been introduced yet.

Now the concept of Revisionism: there are several different meanings.

One comes from Marxist-Leninist theory. Whenever you have within Communism, say Plekhanov teaching Lenin quite a bit of the Marxism that he actually knew and some of its materialist theory. When you then had later on a re-interpretation of theory, either for reasons of brutal state power or statecraft or genuine ideological split, it was called a revision. You were revising the prior theory, and it is true that certain right wing writers, academics, fringe academics, people who will have been expelled from the academies, and so on have used the term “revisionism” as a counter-propositional term, as an “enemy” term. They’ve shot an arrow back at former political and ideological opponents by using this term.

There’s also, as the President of Iran said quite recently in a German magazine, a genuine element within historiography — which is the writing of history, history as texts over time ramifying with each other — whereby different interpretations are revised over time and statements which were considered normative and absolute and beyond comparison later get changed and attenuated and repositioned and looked at in a different light.

Before I get on to the most controversial areas of Revisionism let’s just have a few, more minor and less emotionally charged examples.

Churchill: In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, biographies which were not hagiographies in other words biographies which weren’t enormous tributes to the man’s internal and external excellence would not have been permitted. He was in some ways a secular sort of sacral figure. When these revisionist biographers — Pimlott a little bit on the left, Charmley on the center-right to right as a dissentient Cambridge don, and David Irving’s two volumes known as Churchill’s War — when these books occurred, they occurred in an era when Churchill was already dipping down. Charmley’s biography has Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Churchill on the front, which of course the Churchill family destroyed because they didn’t like that particular image of him.

So to revise something is to change the cultural shift, is to change the way in which something has been perceived that otherwise was uncritically received.

There are many examples. One key one in recent Anglo-Irish historiography is Cromwell and the massacres in Wexford and Drogheda. He was believed to have massacred, with the English New Model Army, two whole Irish towns, and Irish people have been taught this for centuries. Indeed in popular Irish culture the word “Cromwell” is worse than the “c” word in traditional usage because he killed everybody in those towns and all the women and all the children and all the animals!

Now there was a book published by a Trinity College Dublin university professor (similar to an Oxbridge level professor over here) called Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy and building on the partially revisionist essay by Thomas Carlyle about Cromwell in the 19th century which forced, particularly within Protestant discourse, a re-evaluation of our only military dictator in English/British history. The idea began to creep forward. There’s a little echo of it even in Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, where there’s a little bit of congratulations to Cromwell for being at least a man of will, of honor, of courage, and of decision, even though he was in turn a hateful regicide. So Cromwell has been revisited and has been turned around and has been revived.

It now appears that in Wexford and Drogheda, the Catholic parishonal and diocesan records state that nearly everybody in that area who lived before his army passed through lived after his army passed through. That the number of people killed may have been a thousand combatants who were slaughtered at the high point of a battle when they themselves had surrendered and probably put up the white flag to draw people in before they used arms, which in most forms of war does result in such an event.

That event occurred in the context of Protestants being massacred in 1641. It’s taken four centuries; and this is just historical events between different peoples in these islands, for a slightly more judicious, a slightly more rounded, a less emotive, and more temperate view of massacres and events which are believed to have occurred, to be re-written and entered into mainstream historical record.

Now when you’re dealing with events like the First World War and the Second World War, which are climaxes, which were the sort of the industrialization of the principle of death in relation to the First World War; many who went through that experience saw a sort of factory type killing established in battlefields in Europe, whereby the surface of the Earth became lunar and looked like the surface of the moon. Millions of men slaughtered each other in mud and filth and barbed wire. These were extraordinarily savage events almost sort of revolutions in consciousness for the generation that went through them. Therefore even to have revised views about the circumstances that led to that war has been very controversial.

One of the earliest American revisionists was [Harry] Elmer Barnes, and he really concentrated on the First World War and the currents that led to it, both at a micro level, looking at the Lusitania sinking, and at a macro level, looking at the power-politics that came out of that war and that many believe led to the Second [World War], because many do see the second war as a postscript to the first. Many see it actually almost beginning in a stage one before war is actually announced in ’39-’40, because it was partly unfinished business and we were partly into a cycle. Much of the hedonism of the ’20s in Europe, and much of the despair of the Depression in the ’30s in Europe, was that generation sensing an enormous revisitation of the bloodbath was coming.

Most of the writers and intellectuals during that period realized they were living between two explosions and between two wars. We in 2007 are living in the after effects of the Second European Civil War, which is really what the Second World War in Europe amounted to. And the First World War was the First European Civil War.

There is a dissentient notion within political history that the American Civil War, which of course is different and distinct, has echoes of some of the conflicts that will follow. The use of mass artillery and early machine guns of a sort against massed forms of cavalry and infantry, leading to massacre on one side and a very defensive warfare on the other. And the fact that you have two regimes: a white racialist, aristocratic, slave-owning regime against an industrial, liberal, bourgeois regime which preaches radical democracy, which tries to lead us on the other side to a degree, which puts a client government into the defeated South after it’s all over. There are echoes. But this is inevitable because in cycles of war and history you will have echoes before, and you will have echoes afterwards.

Even the Boer War and its origins in 1899 through 1902 between ourselves (the British) and the Afrikaners has been revised and looked at again, even by liberals. But that is a war about which the controversial heat and the gas flare of intensity is much lower down.

When you’re dealing with much more incisive and explosive matters these things are much nearer the edge. And it’s not “talk”! You’ll lose your career; you’ll lose your reputation; you’ll lose your respect; you’ll be put in prison for having certain counter-propositional views about historical events.

In several major European societies at least 10,000 people, in one category or another, have been arraigned for these “crimes” of thought, including many major historians. Many historians, if you read them today, know that this is a minefield they will not go near.

If you take a very contemporaneous book like Richard Overy’s history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes [The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia] (as he calls them) the Soviet death total and the Soviet camps he’s infinitely cautious with. He’s prepared to draw an enormous amount of criminological and empirical evidence to prove that the Stalinist Genocide maybe claimed a quarter of the lives that somebody like Robert Conquest writing in the ’50s and ’60s with The Great Terror and [The Harvest of Sorrow] said. And he’s extremely careful and very judicious; very, very mainstream; very, very obliging to fact or presumed fact. Don’t forget many of the KGB archives have been opened up since 1990.

But when he comes to the Germans in the Second World War, there is a gap, and there is a statement whereby he said, “Some of what I’m going to say in this section may be refuted by future research.” And then he goes on to give a new version of the official version of the issue that most generations of schoolchildren have been indoctrinated with now for forty to fifty to sixty years.

In the town that I live in, a selection of sixth formers from all schools were recently taken on an Auschwitz tour paid for by the local authority and its taxpayers to prove the evil of racism, to prove that voting for certain tendencies is regarded as a priori illegitimate and immoral, and also to look at a crime against humanity leading to the need for universal constructions of law and of morality.

And leading to trials whereby political leaders in conflicts that have little to do with what happened in Europe and beyond between ’39 and ’45 of the last century, can themselves be arraigned! The trial and death of Saddam Hussein involving procedures very close to the Nuremberg ones, very close to a similar ideology that was applied to post-war Yugoslavia, very close to an ideology that was applied to some of the fallen militarist leaders from imperial Japan, very close to trials that people have wanted to enact but have held back.

Now, what’s happened in modernity is that the ability to kill large numbers of people has become an ideological weapon on all sides. During the Cold War, one part of the human learnt a view of history. Few people know that there was a massacre of Communists in Indonesia in the middle 1960s. I’ve met an Australian who saw a pyramid of bodies on one side of an airport in that society. Whereas other crimes would be on the media almost every other night. And the reason for this is that one of the legitimizations of human rights and civil rights rhetoric is the belief that certain tendencies are evil and unregenerate and that other tendencies “make mistakes” and “have excesses” and “commit blunders” or are “not opportune.”

Even in relation to the Iraq War 2 there is a mass debate within our contemporary establishment. The Lancet, which is the journal of our doctors, has said (methodologically) that 670,000 Iraqis, and more, have perished since the invasion, and Blair and Bush say, “It’s a lie! We refute their figures, we refute the methodology upon which those figures are based. The actual figure is 150-170,000.”

Why would they bother about that?

They bother about it because in the war of position and the crucible of political struggle the numbers matter and are of crucial importance, because they enable you to demonize one side and extol another. They enable you to excuse one thing as deviation or error (subject to revisionism of one sort or another). Or you actually say that one tendency, by virtue of these actions, is beyond even what it is to be political, is a species of Satanism, is that which you have nothing to do with.

One of the reasons we have a left wing society, a liberal society, is partly because conservatism, that which is supposed to “conserve,” is brain dead in the West, and is terrified, and is afraid. But one of the reasons it’s afraid is because of this area of secular demonology. Because when you have to think in an illiberal way you will “go over there.” You will have to go “over there.” You will have to touch certain thinkers who actually are in that proximity, and that is demonic, and you have to remain in the center. And if you remain in the center, you can’t oppose the liberal left. You can’t oppose the world as it now is inside Western societies. We’re now in the position that we’re invading other societies to impose what exists here (or variants of same) on them!

Of course there are a lot of people inside the West who do not agree with the dispensation that exists here.

Now, Germany was divided at the end of the Second World War into two occupation regimes. In contemporary history and journalistic writing the Eastern Regime of Ulbricht and Honecker was in some ways described as it was, a country that built a wall to keep its citizenry in and shot them if they got over the barbed wire in an attempt to get over that wall

The Western Zone though, was never said to be “occupied.” It had been “freed.” It had been “liberated” by Western power and liberal jurisprudence, French, [British], and American. We had set up a zone there that later became the Federal Republic of Western Germany. Since then, the German political elite and beyond it — Central European political elites — have been terrified of any reversal in the demonic fortunes of the parties that fought the wars that brought them to power. Any change, any shift, any relativism even, any minor factual amendment (which always will happen in history) becomes decisive.

In the First World War, Lloyd George and others invented a large strand of German atrocity story which was revealed in 1928 in the House of Lords. This is the idea that the Germans committed bestial atrocities in Belgium, the Germans ran around with babies on spikes; that they committed atrocities against prisoners that were outside of the European consciousness and form of civility. It was later realized that it was complete propaganda, although in a society with a mass media that was far less refined and pervasive than it is now. You go out there and look at that screen out there, it’s enormous! It covers the whole room ideologically and sort of in terms of its system of signs.

Now media understanding was much less cynical in 1914–1918. There’s a degree to which a large number of white people were stimulated by propagandistic elites to loathe and detest each other and to kill not just hundreds of thousands but millions of each other right across Europe. In accordance with actually predated forms of alliance politics which in an era of mechanized and mass politics meant less and less.

Now the First World War’s dipped down, there’s hardly anyone left. But the Second World War is still alive and still real in human consciousness today.

Mussolini and Franco have largely been historicized. Their dictatorial regimes, their traditionalist, European, socially authoritarian governments have largely entered into a process that acclimatises them to the memory of Caesar, never mind Cromwell and Napoleon. They are seen as regrettable but normal European dictatorships.

The National Socialist one is not and remains in a sort of shadow, outside. And while we have the present dispensation that we have in Europe, that will have to be so. So you have to understand that what appears to be historical research is historical and is research. It isn’t about historical research as power perceives it.

If somebody says that Zionist terrorists blew up a hotel in Jerusalem in 1948, and Begin said, “There was a warning, but no-one else heard it.” That’s one view of history. Zionist militants say to this day that MI6 had its headquarters in that hotel and therefore it was a “legitimate act of struggle.” Struggle! And those are two perspectives. But that is for historians and for minor debate and for articles in the Times and the Jewish Chronicle.

What happened in the middle of Europe in the 20th Century is cardinal to certainly a definition of white or Caucasian identity today.

One of the many reasons why our people find it so difficult to assert themselves — even to think about the prospect that they might! — is because of these events and how they’ve been interpreted. Because, as soon as they say “this is the English flag behind, this is the British flag, the Swedish flag, this is the German flag”: “No! No! He’s got the English flag! He’s gone over there!”

You are entering into proximity to moral danger, to what some philosophers call “moral hazard.” You’re tip-toeing towards what, the first thing a liberal journalist will ask you. I was once representative of an organization called “Western Goals” (it was a Cold War organization). The second question the journalist asked me on mainstream media was, “What’s your view of the holocaust?”

That’s the second issue, because they actually had — and he had it on his paper there — two lines. One is, “Treat them like a negative barrister. They’re hostile to your case and you rag them and you try and take them down.” That’s the first mental proposition for the interviewer.

The second is: “National Socialism — Shoah.” Get them squirming on that, and what they’ve got to say about what Enoch Powell said, or what they’ve got to say about the European Union, or what they’ve got to say about contemporary crime is of no significance at all, because you have them there! In the pit, squirming! And that pits’s pre-programmed. It’s pre-programmed! And quite deliberately so. It’s irony piled upon irony, because of course, many of the people who use these weapons partly don’t care about the truth itself, indeed deeply, often cynically have no interest in it at all! It is a weapon that’s used, a grenade, it’s a spear that is used.

Now a series of historians, often privately funded, often researching themselves, often people beyond even fringe academic life, have published a series of books since Maurice Bardèche in the late 1940s, questioning the veracity of some of these events, including people who’ve used other names which are not their own. Whether or not Alain de Benoist ever published a particular revisionist article using another name, he has never admitted to it. He has never said he didn’t do it. No-one knows, because you have to understand that this was extreme and deep thought criminality.

An intellectual rather similar to Bardèche was executed by the French Resistance and its occupation/liberation authorities in France just after the war: [Robert] Brasillach. So there is a degree to which certain people have paid with their lives for having certain ideas or living through them. The French film director Truffaut knew [Lucien] Rebatet very well, because certain fascist theorists in France were obsessed with cinema; because that is mass ideology and mass visualization; if you have an authoritarian view of society you will want to communicate not with just the small elite but with the masses; you communicate with the elite before you communicate with the mass. And Truffaut once said, vis-à-vis his friendship with this old French National Socialist — which is what Rebatet was, he was beyond the Vichyite! — nevertheless he said, “You can respect men who are put to death for daring to adumbrate an idea.”

This is in the land of Voltaire, don’t forget, where ideas are supposed to be free and set us free in pursuit of the truth.

Now, a range of writers, normally they’re in the United States. Why in the United States? Because they at least have (strangely) the covering of First Amendment rights and can publish freely, which is why an enormous amount of this material of course has come back; it’s come back into Europe; it’s come back even beyond Europe into the Arab and Muslim world in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s come back from often German Americans or expatriate Germans in America doing this sort of thing.

Tony Hancock said to me years ago, “What should happen to this material?” by which he meant revisionist material, and I said, “Well, the internet will solve all that for you, but one way to do it, just one of many, is to give it to the Muslim world. Because it will then come back into the West in a way which does not seem congruent with the radical right within the West. That’s one of the ways in order to do this.”

Now many of these revisionist historians of course are historians, who do not agree with each other and have different lines. [Paul] Rassinier is a Social Democrat of a sort who was actually imprisoned in a camp himself. Others may well be dissentient Jews like Berg and [Alexander] Baron and others. Others are radical neo-Fascists and ultra-Conservatives. Others are Germans who believe that the use of the Shoah is a form of racism against them, that it is used to demonize German people and people of German ancestry all over the world.

The interesting thing about these “crimes” and the memory and the historical narrative through which they are institutionalized, is that they began affecting a particular nation state and its warrior elite at a particular time. Then it extended to some of the allied nationalities. Then it extended out to (reflexively) the nationalities of people who destroyed that country! Now if somebody who’s English asserts themselves in an ethnic manner, with a little bit too much militancy, they will be accused of spiritually being aligned to those forces, when they are descended from men who flew planes that obliterated the cities of that government.

What has happened is that it has become a generic form of thought criminality which extends out to almost all Caucasians, and then beyond, including in the victor and successor states! So it’s become a generalized negative propaganda against all of us stretching from Iceland to Australia. No-one is immune from the taint of this retrospective “criminality.”

So it’s been used as an extraordinarily effective thought weapon and ideological buttress. And in societies where you can’t read Butz or Faurisson or Hoffman or Rassinier or Stäglich or Magelaine or Sanning or Graf or Rudolph or Mattogno or any of these people. The irony is that people actually know what they say. The Daily Telegraph had a poll about four years ago in which they said — to the average Briton, this is the average Radio 4 Briton:

“Do you believe the Shoah occurred?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that the numbers that are used in contemporary historical record are right?”

“No!”

That is interesting. That is Joe Public, who’ve had nothing but one view, are prepared to accept that the figures are exaggerated, which of course if you put it in a certain way will get you imprisoned in certain contemporary Western societies. The irony is that because we have a conflict between state law and power and the desire to crush dissent and historical research, all sorts of little people, nerdy academics — people who don’t look both ways before they cross — get smashed down in the middle because it’s a doctrine and an ideology of power against power in terms of memory.

If you’re a German citizen and you say what the Israeli state says occurred, you can be imprisoned!

This is a fact, because Yad Vashem says that the number of victims for the Shoah is a half of the number that you’re supposed to use. Therefore we have a situation that European countries will imprison their nationals for saying what the Israeli President can say openly!

But that’s because it’s about power, it’s not about truth! The view is that the significant proportion of the European population believe that the post-war settlement was unjust, that it was victor’s justice, that the government in 1948 — although Adenauer may have genuine sides to him and was broadly speaking conservative in difficult circumstances — nevertheless his regime was a partly illegitimate one. That there is unfinished business there, that America’s domination of half of the continent was a different version of Soviet domination of the other half of the continent. That the endless laws of memory, and trace of memory, are an endless vilification of German people and people of Germanic ancestry.

During the 1970s and ’80s there was an enormous split in Germany between the generations, and there was an enormous amount of intergenerational hatred, and far left terrorism grew out of that: a rebellion against everything German, a rebellion against everything that had gone before, a destruction and a hostility towards everything that was prior. You had very great oddities, though because some of these revolutionary left groups ended up fighting against Israel with the Palestinians: fanatically anti-Zionist but would kill anyone for a scintilla of what they deemed anti-Semitism. So you get these strange combinations as you always do within a crucible of history.

But nevertheless, the extraordinary damage psychologically and sort of intestinally, that was done to modern Germany by the self-hatred and loathing that has been institutionalized there as a result of the discourse of the Shoah, is incalculable.

The Jewish-American novelist Norman Mailer said that the real victims of the Second World War were the Germans. A revolutionary statement, and in many ways a truthful one. What he means by that is that the people have been partly spiritually destroyed, morally destroyed.

Because before you take a structure down, you take it down spiritually and morally and in terms of its ethical sense of itself. You take down that which is above the top consciousness of the rational mind. You take down that which leads to a morally efficacious sense of self. If you grew up believing that you’re descended from murderers and your nationality is worthless, and the most extreme form that your nationality took has no value –and even the Communist states have an element of that — you will end up with a self-loathing population as De Benoist has described it, which characterizes a large number of Western individuals at the present time.

It’s a sort of moral and psychological form of cancer, and almost everybody who doesn’t like the changes in Western societies has had this moment. Almost everybody who’s thought “I might (in the 1970’s) vote National Front”

“No you don’t!”

“What do you mean?”

“No you don’t!”

Because you’re going to be linked to a trajectory that links you to this, and a lot of Caucasian people feel, “Oh my God, you know, to sort of assert myself in a minor and nationalist way, I will be re-routing my sensibility through what is presented as ‘the dungeon’; the sort of Fred and Rosemary West writ large.”

Your average Western person says, “NO! No I’m not going there. I’m not going there. A bit of Conservatism’s alright. But I’m not going there!” And this means that we are, or have been left partly mentally defenseless in relation to many of the changes which have occurred. It’s a sort of secular version of a fall, in a way, and there is within contemporary Liberalism [the belief] that there’s a denied God that needs a Devil, an extraordinary parallelism in the use of this idea.

People who hold these sorts of ideas, these sorts of historians including Thion, who’s a leftist, including Chomsky who wrote an introduction to Faurisson’s book saying he should be given at least freedom of speech, for which he was vilified by neo-conservative lobbies in the United States. Everybody who’s gone into this area faces demonization. Not just white people either. Anyone who touches this area faces it, and it’s created a sort of paralysis and a double reflex in our entire population.

It means that the most right wing view that’s allowed in our society is virtually President Bush and those around him. That’s where you can go and remain within the spectrum of the non-demonic within secular modernity. You go outside that, you are morally other.

And it is not nonsense that I’m speaking. Almost every self-conscious generation that’s come up since the war has this moment, irrespective of education, of class, and of everything else. There’s this moment when people will say, “You’re one of them, and it leads to that, and I don’t want to know!”

And the problem is that we as a European civility will gradually disappear, because the generations that fought in that particular war and came after will disappear, but the memory and the ideological re-interpretation of these events will not.

Blair was asked in 1999 why the Second World War was fought, and he said it was to protect the Jewish race from extermination. Which is an extraordinary remark and an extraordinarily illiterate remark! This is what you get. Because many Western politicians never inform their population about normative historical truth, an enormous number of people are totally mis-educated now. The fact that the Second World War resulted from a confluence of parallel institutions of power, and the idea that great powers in Europe balanced stable alliances with each other, so that Germany could have one area but not another, and Britain would give guarantee to another state in order to invade, which in the minds of some of the people who made these decisions was the cause of war. It’s all out of the window with Blair. Blair views the whole of that war — and the present intellectual clericy and academic and intellectual life; turn on the media that isn’t sport over there and they all agree with this view — this war was fought from the retrospective outcome of ovens at it’s end. It had nothing to do with rivalry between states, nothing to do with ideological conflict! It had to do with some of the victims of that particular conflict and its aftermath.

So why has this event become so crucial?

It’s become so crucial because it justifies the post-war age.

It justifies Western multi-culturalism. It justifies Western multi-racialism. It justifies mass immigration by virtue of reverse. It justifies forms of liberal and attenuated European integration, because separate nationalism is a bad thing. Therefore you integrate to overcome the memory and legacy of events which have occurred. This isn’t theory. No-one’s interested in the European Union, let alone most Europeans, but there is a degree to which whenever they get a chance to vote on these things, a certain mania of consciousness intrudes.

We had a referendum recently in two continental countries that were before then thought to be very pro EU. One politician from one of those countries went to stand in the demarcated fields of Auschwitz and said on mass European and world television if people vote NO in this very minor, methodological referendum/poll they are “voting for the Shoah; they are voting for this!”  He later revised — a bit of revisionism on the spot — he later “revised” that sort of remark. Jack Straw said that the rejection of those treaties “would be a moral disaster for Europe.” He later said that he’d said no such thing or meant something completely different. Because a vote before it happens is crucial, and then afterwards you think “well who cares about that?”

So there’s a degree to which the post-war world is based upon this. And one of the most crucial reasons for this is the domination of the whole of the Western self-conception by the United States, and the domination of Mid-East politics by Israel and Israel’s conception of itself in relation to the United States, and America’s conception of its own self-interest as almost being aligned with Israel to the degree that maybe there is a little bit of separation, maybe there is a distinct chink of light between the contemporary American nationalist/neo-imperialists and Zionism. But it is so fine a difference and you have radical Protestantism as the cultural discourse in the background that forces — even if there was any difference — a virtual merger between the two.

And this means that European countries, whether they like it or not, in the First and the Second Gulf wars, were dragged along to fight essentially an Israeli war pursued by American power, whether they wanted to or not. And all the muteness and the partial semi-surrender, and the very weak and rather corrupt French president daring to stand up to the United States and its colossal power with Germany hiding, literally hiding — contemporary Germany — behind the French, was an attempt at a minor neutralism and which is an attempt not to go along with that.

Britain? We’re in with America, and we go where they go. And any war or adventure they want, we go in as well. We’ve spent six-and-a-half billion of our cash in Iraq. We’ve lost two hundred men. We’ve achieved absolutely nothing! Absolutely nothing. And we have done so because in 1956 we attempted a very minor independent move with the Israelis and with the French and earned American disapproval. And that was a very cold burst. And the British establishment doesn’t like cold bursts. And American power faced internally within the West is awesome, even though they have very little idea what to do with it.

And yet, in a strange way, they do know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is imposing the logic of an attenuated French Revolution, of the American Revolution, on the whole planet. Equality, indeterminacy, aspiritualism, materialism, the right to shop, the right to vote (parts of it are the same), human rights, civil rights, Israel always safe. This is the agenda that’s being pushed all over the world in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Central and Latin America, which they virtually regard as a dominion and an extension of their own state power, from the Monroe Doctrine onwards.

Now, this means that when you tack against certain historical verities, even in relation to numbers, you are pushing against the nature of the modern world as it’s become, as it’s been constructed. So in a way you are chipping away at the foundations of an enormous edifice.

An element of the emotion around these issues is semi-religious! There are many people who regard blasphemy in relation to this orthodoxy in the way that atheism would have been treated in this country before 1800. It is: you are outside if you posit this. And this is a crucial thing that right wing and Europeanist discourse has to confront and has to, in a sense, overcome. The past won’t do it. To just say, “Time will pass, a century will pass, in forty years from now it’s a century from me to them! People will forget.”

No! Because these things will be put before them always and present and forever and a day. They’ll even be used against assertion by the new Russia, a country which can only be fitted into the schema in a sort of strange way, but a power that fought might and main against fascism and has achieved an element of national sense of itself under Communism in that war. It has to go along with the feelings of guilt and moral reparation as well, certainly if it’s ever to join the rest of the West in a wholehearted way. And if you are perceived as a country that links at all with the ideas of the regimes that fell in flames and have been demonized by trial, even if you fought against them in the past, you are part of that trajectory of guilt and that solidarity of lost innocence.

Now, the figures that were adumbrated immediately after the war of seven-and-a-half million have come down to six, have come down to four-and-a-half according to Norman Stone. Raul Hilberg for instance would push that much further down. So we have a sort of collapse in some of the paraphernalia of this particular historical narrative. But what’s really happened is that the political use of this has partly separated off from revisionism and counter-revisionism because it’s become an ideological arrow, bludgeon, weapon, independent of the facts.

So there is a degree to which, even if there is a sort of conceptual shift — like your computer goes down, “clunk” and then you reboot it, and it comes up again — and Western ideology in the next 50 years, from the top down, recomposes itself to say, “Well there was an error about these figures, and there was Communist post-war exaggeration particularly from Poland, and we’re now revising it all for you, maybe for a lesser figure.”

But the impact of the moral statement will in a sense be the same or different. Indeed to say that because the figure may well be less that less of a moral crime is imputed, will be made to be worse than the prior discourse, because it’s not really about those who suffered and those who died and those who didn’t in a particular way. It’s about who rules the West, and who rules Britain, and who rules the United States, and what the future of the world will be.

At the moment we have an enormous “clash of civilizations” as it’s called, and much of the Western world is now convulsed by the idea that we are pitched headlong into an antithetical struggle with the Islamic world. You only have to turn on the news broadcast to see that. And many ordinary Westerners internalize this and cannot at all understand, in many ways, what is going on. Has Communism been replaced by a new bloc in secular Western terms that we need to oppose?

But in actual fact, of course, although cultures and civilizations will clash and will often clash violently with each other, the reason for these wars and the reason for this contestation began in 1945, began in 1939, began in 1914 and is a continuation of these processes that may even predate that. We are always in a situation whereby if we were to chart an independent course we would have to overthrow American foreign policy in the last fifty years.

I was once asked on a platform for a party that I used to be a member of — that changed its opinions about some of these matters several years ago — what my view of Israel was and I said — and everyone else on the platform had refuted what I’d said before I’d said it, which is an interesting conceit — and I said, “Israel is a terrorist state, and is not a morally legitimate one.”

Horror! But he’s posh, and he’s got a bow tie on, so we’ll let him say it. But there was moral horror. And this is a group that is regarded as fascistic, don’t forget. This is a group that is regarded as a far right group by the media. The Guardian would say they’ve just changed their lines to accommodate themselves to new realities. It’s just cynicism.

In actual fact it’s not quite that actually. It’s cynicism and other things as well, all combined. But, there’s a degree to which we will be dragged into war after war in relation to the Third World, in relation to American power politics over the Gulf and their need for oil, but also we will be systemically dragged in to the radical and increasingly radical consequences of the post-war dispensation. The fact that in a way the governments and opportunities of white people in Europe that were occupied twice over after 1945 by Communism and American capitalism and by a particular world view which is not a European one, and that the occupation of the West was subtler and deeper and more invasive and more destructive than the occupation of the East.

Communism killed and chopped off the arms and behaved like you’re on a Procrustean bed. “You want more sympathy? We’ll cut another finger off!”

But American domination was subtler, more deconstructive. It’s broken down people in the West far more than people, though physically savage, were broken in the East, because it’s destroyed elements of their self-respect. Peter Hain was asked recently, “What has Western civilization achieved?” He said, “Nothing! . . . Nothing at all!”

He said “Nothing at all”!

“These are the people,” he said with his finger in the air, “these are the people,” he was then negotiating the peace deal in Northern Ireland, “these are the people who gave us Stalin,” interesting as he’s a leftist, “Stalin and Hitler, these are the people who gave us that!”

It’s interesting isn’t it? This is his own civilization as he allegedly perceives it, and all we’ve done is that!

We’ve created no millennial civilization. There have been no libraries. There’s been no classical or neo-classical sculpture. There’s been no Beethoven. There’s just death and pillage and authoritarianism. This is allegedly what we are responsible for. And this is a man in our government! As though we’re beasts without mind and without wit and without intelligence.

There’s an irony here. When somebody’s uncultured, when somebody’s boorish or doesn’t know anything about art and kind of things, they’re called a Philistine. There are certain archaeologists who have actually dug down and looked at the Philistine culture. And the Philistine culture, such as it was, was not quite as barren, not quite as stupid, not quite as archaic as one might suppose, or their enemies supposed. And there’s an important lesson there, and that is that civilization and barbarism — often in a Western, Faustian context — are interwoven with each other.

We believe in the ferocious remaking of reality, moment by moment and layer by layer. Our previous speaker partly touched on some of the dynamics in our very complicated, fluid, but also hard civilization. When you ask a contemporary liberal what do they believe, they don’t really know, and they fear that if they authenticate themselves they will be revisiting the after-effects of the Shoah. That’s the truth. That is the mental construction that people face. It’s almost tendentious, if somebody says a bit too militantly, “I like the music of Richard Wagner!” That implication is only just under the surface. And it’s only just under the surface of being under the surface if you say Beethoven and Mozart instead of Wagner. It’s there! Any white self-assertion is regarded as an act of semi-criminality now, and it is because we cannot face certain facts, certain misreading of facts.

Let’s have a few facts.  Hundreds of thousands of Germans who were pushed out of Slavic countries they’d been in for centuries, decimation of German cities by British terror bombing (let’s face it), total destruction of those cities. A friend of mine called Bill Hopkins once told me that if you went to Hamburg — and I believe he was in the RAF there in ’48 — the stench in summer of all the bodies under the buildings was unbearable, unbearable in the height of summer.

Let’s have a few other facts: massacres of large numbers of white Russian prisoners who fought on the Axis side because they had become “enemies of the people.” When we de-camped them back to Yugoslavia, and they went before people’s courts to receive the summary justice of the masses.

The large number of death squads who roamed French towns and villages after the liberation with white sort of things on their sleeves and they said, “We’re with the Free Forces of the French Interior.” And you had a book by Charles Maurras on your shelf, and they drag you out, and shoot you in the back of the head, and put your body in a ditch. “Purification” it was called, the purging of those who had collaborated in a corps, against the interests of the French masses and humanity, and so on and so on.

You see there are facts and facts. And there are those that are used one way and those that are used another. When America bombed Serbian positions in the 1990s, they said they were doing it to “stop ethnic cleansing.” But Israel is based on ethnic cleansing. So one standard for one and one standard for another.

But that’s life, and that’s power, and that’s the reality and the vortex of power. What we have to do is to understand that things have been used against us for ideological reasons, irrespective of the facts, and only when we have the courage to do that will we revive.

So it’s really only when a leader of revivalist opinion [is asked], “Well what’s your view of the Shoah then?”

And they say, “We’ve stepped over that.”

“What do you mean you’ve ‘stepped over’ that? Are you minimizing its importance to humanity?”

You say, “We are minimizing its importance to our form of humanity!”

At the present the United States Congress is trying to push through a sort of moral “statement” if you like, and they’re always very keen on this, saying the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians at the end of the Great War. This is causing great contravention, because they need Turkish support given the situation in northern Iraq. As we speak the Turks have massed a large part of their army on the north Kurdish border to invade, to attack a Marxist group that’s attacking Turkish territory.

The Turkish state has put out what would be regarded as revisionist ideology for most of the 20th century actually. You can get it from quite a lot of Turkish embassies and so on. And yet they also would contextualize much of the violence: as many Turks died as Armenians, different groups were involved in the slaughter, marches by one were met by hostility and massacres by another.

When Saddam Hussein was arraigned and tried, he was tried for gassing a Kurdish village. But don’t forget they were fighting a war which was called by some a First World War-type war often with gas, which was used by both sides in the Great War in the West of course. The Kurds fought on both sides simultaneously. The Iranians and the Iraquis both used gas. In the vortex of a war and the context of such struggle, to abstract one line of events and one series of interpretations and to arraign those who are responsible as criminals before humanity — a bit like Mafia leaders who are to be strung up on butcher’s hooks — this is part of the discourse of power not of history. But history is about power, and that’s the situation that we find ourselves in!

So I do advise people, before these books are banned and before various people fish around under their beds looking for this book: “Sanning? What on Earth’s that? And why has it got such a cheap cover?” “What’s inside it?” and this sort of thing. Well this book called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century or another book called Auschwitz: A Judge Decides. Or some of the ones that [Germar] Rudolf’s presently incarcerated for are up-to-date versions of some of these things.

One of the interesting counter-methodologies is that as the death totals in the most notorious camp of all have gone down and down and down, the burden of guilt/proof has been shifted to other camps (many of which don’t even exist now) because you have to keep the primary figure, because propagandistically the great fear and the great threat is that it will be destroyed.

I’ll end with one quote.

There is a minor political historian who was at the University of Bath in the West Country of England. And he wrote a book about Fascism in the last ten years. And he was asked about Revisionism, and he was asked particularly about Holocaust Day and the Shoah and its use in schools, and its use in primary schools, as a weapon of . . . as a “means of moral instruction.”

And he said: “I’m worried about it.”

And the researcher said, “You’re worried? Why are you worried?”

And he said, “There’re two problems with it, one: there’s too many Muslims in British schools, and some of them will stand up and say ‘I don’t believe in it,’ and then the propagandistic effect dips with white children.” And the second thing, he said, “is there are too many lies that have been told about it after the War, too many lies, and it’s becoming dangerous propagandistically!”

And this chap said, “Well if that’s the case what do we do?”

He said, “Ah, ah, ah! I’ve got an answer. What we do is we conflate that in with all other crimes, so we have a ‘Genocide Day’ to deny the self-affirmation of all groups!”

Because ultimately you see, the logic that applies to us will apply to everyone. Because identity, if it leads to the consequence through history of massacre, will affect all groups. So all groups partially de-scale or de-escalate all of their rival and competing identities. So we have One World for us all. That is in some ways what is proposed.

That is why, although radical right people are thought by others to be full of hate against other groups and so on, it’s actually a philosophical position of extreme conservatism: about structures from the past and how they relate to where we are now, and also how we can live on this planet together without losing identity which gives life meaning. Because without it, there is no context for art or beauty or philosophy or science or knowledge or progress of any sort. Because if somebody says to you “Who are you and what are you?” and you have no answer, all civilization will have come to an end.

Right wing views are about difference, they’re about inequality, they’re about distinction, and they’re about meaning. So I advise you to have a look at a few of these texts on the internet before Mrs. Merkel drags you away!

Thank you very much.

If I had to put my finger on the defining feature of contemporary American life, it would be anger. Everyone is angry about something, and in many cases, it is often an individual’s most defining characteristic. Mainstream conservatives are convinced that they have somehow been cheated out of their birthright, because liberals just won’t get with the program, and mainstream liberals are convinced that America would transform into utopia overnight, were it not for those other people with their nasty (and admittedly superficial, for the most part) hang-ups about tradition and morality and so forth. An entire cottage industry has sprung up around tapping into – and of course, making money off of – this anger, on both the “left” and the “right” (I put those terms in quotes since there is no genuine left/right dichotomy in the United States today, but only two branches of liberalism with slightly different priorities). The latest product to roll off the assembly line of anger is the film, God Bless America.

The film’s story, such as it is, is extremely basic: Frank, a middle-aged, divorced White office worker in Syracuse, New York, is hit with a double-dose of disaster, first being fired, and then being told by his doctor that he has a fatal brain tumor. Fed up with the state of America, Frank decides to use his remaining time on this Earth to rid the country of people whom he thinks are having a bad effect on it. He begins by tracking down the starlet of a popular reality TV show, a girl who got upset on-screen with her parents over the choice of car they gave to her for her birthday. Frank finds her at her high school and guns her down, in the process meeting up with a 16-year-old girl named Roxy, who is inspired by Frank’s actions and insists on coming with him. Together, the two begin crisscrossing the country, killing various media figures who they don’t like, and, predictably, becoming martyrs to their “cause” on the set of another reality TV show (obviously an imitation of American Idol).

The film starts out with some potential, resembling what might happen if Office Space were to meet Falling Down, following the formula of an entirely average office drone living a life of quiet desperation until, one day, he snaps. It’s not original in any way, but potentially interesting. The film quickly goes off the rails, however, when Roxy is introduced, and never makes it back on. The story and characters meander without any real point or apparent forethought by the film’s writers, basically being about a middle-aged man fed up with the fact that Americans aren’t “nice” enough to suit him anymore (he has no stated political motivation), trying to get along with a teen who seems to have little reason to be homicidally angry other than because America doesn’t live up to her NPR-liberal’s idea about what it should be (she continually harps on about “people who won’t let gay people get married,” surely the root of all America’s evils).

The finger is pointed at the usual bogeymen: reality TV, Fox News, and even George W. Bush (apparently, three years on, he’s still responsible for America’s entire cultural situation). But there are no real insights into any of it, and nothing ever gets resolved – we’re just supposed to cheer as the duo gun people down, since surely, we are just as frustrated and lacking in real solutions as they are.  Certainly, there are lots of problems in America today, and this film briefly touches on a few of them, but by the end of the film, the two characters, and presumably the film’s writers as well, are just as clueless about their real causes or what to do about them as they are at the beginning. Apparently, they think it’s enough to just blow off a little steam with some mindless violence, and then go on about our empty lives, supporting the American Moloch.

This raises an interesting question: why are Americans incapable of imagining a solution to our social and cultural ills that rises beyond going on a shooting spree (something we already have more than enough of in real life, thank you)? Have our collective imaginations been so dulled, and our attention spans been so shortened, that we can’t imagine solving a problem in any other way? Films like this certainly seem to indicate that. In earlier times, it was understood that bringing about social change meant a lot of contemplation, study, time, dedication and hard work, not to mention an ability for self-criticism (something these characters, like most Americans today, are too self-righteous to be capable of). But that’s too much trouble – it’s much more satisfying to just indulge in random acts of violence against our perceived enemies.

The other thing that irked me about the film is that television is the story’s primary demon, and yet the protagonists, in spite of their professed hatred for what’s on it, can’t stop watching it, and often express themselves in terms of references to popular TV shows and movies. This seems indicative of a strange paradox present throughout American life today. People complain about reality TV, or Fox News, or whatever, and yet they clearly possess detailed and up-to-the-minute knowledge about what they profess to hate, which they use to make themselves even angrier about “the state of America.”

Here’s a novel idea: TURN THE DAMN THING OFF! The last I checked, TV viewing isn’t yet compulsory in America. But the “off” button seems beyond the capacity of the average American’s imagination, these days. Everyone wants to be jacked in to something 24 hours a day. Apparently, it beats living.

It’s easy enough to make short shrift of this film, but I still find myself wondering about all this anger, which seems endemic throughout America today. I first began to notice this coming to prominence of anger in American life during the Clinton years. Conservatives hated Clinton with a passion I had not yet seen up to that point in my life. They hated him with a fervor typically reserved for a high school nerd’s jealousy of the prom king.

Although the real spark was the contentious 2000 election. This resulted in liberals feeling cheated and victimized for the next eight years, and conservatives becoming convinced that their opponents were out to sabotage the country by any means necessary. And throwing 9/11 into the equation was like adding lighter fluid. American political “discourse,” such as it is, has been white-hot ever since.

With Obama’s election, the paradigm simply reversed itself, but to me, it seems that the nation has been in an apocalyptic rage continuously since 2000. And I imagine this is now the norm, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

This anger is simply a distraction from the genuine issues, which most Americans are too stupid, timid and/or lazy to face – mainly because the average American hasn’t yet begun to feel the deep pain that is coming our way from the real, and much more disturbing, problems on the horizon. And few people are willing to wake up to the fact that both mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives are equally clueless about, not to mention culpable in, driving America toward the yawning gorge into which it Is soon to plunge, irrevocably so.

And the media industry is more than happy to help out, offering distraction after distraction while lining their pockets with the fruits of the people’s frustration. Besides, Americans are constantly on the edge of boredom and demand continual amusement – and politics is still the best show in town. Fox News and MSNBC are just modern forms of the Romans’ infamous bread and circuses (and, ironically, this is a point that is also made in God Bless America, in one of its few cogent moments).

I’m sure there is a great film waiting to be made about the American cultural predicament, but this isn’t it. I was reminded of the 1976 classic Network, which thematically overlaps with God Bless America in many ways, and how insightful and prophetic it was about the role that television was beginning to take in American cultural, economic and social life. I imagine there aren’t many filmmakers today who are capable of making a film of such depth.

God Bless America is just pornography for White middle-class liberals, essentially Bill Maher taken to a (more) ridiculous level.  I just hope that a real critique can get made before it’s too late – if it isn’t already. Time is running out.

Editor’s Note:

The following is a transcript by D. E. C. of Jonathan Bowden’s highly informative and entertaining speech at the 13th meeting of the New Right in London on January 12, 2008. The audio is available on YouTube here. 

I have marked several unintelligible words. I also marked a bit of audio missing at the beginning of one of the segments. Please contact me at editor@counter-currents.com if  you have the missing audio or if you can make out the unintelligible words.

I’d like to talk in this brief period that I have before me about the left, and about Marxism in particular, and within that about the Frankfurt School as a particular type of Marxism. We’ve never had a speech, and we’ve never had a talk, about the left before, in these gatherings as the New Right, per se.

Now, from one level if you were an extreme leftist now in the Western world, in Western Europe, maybe parts of Southern Europe (yes and no), and North America, you’d look around and you’d think there was a cultural desert, that you’d lost completely, that communism had collapsed, that far left movements have no votes at all, except residually in Italy, to a much smaller extent in France, and a few places elsewhere. You’d think that the socialist dream, that life could be better and more equal and free and so on, had come crashing down completely.

And yet paradoxically, these people have lost a world and yet gained another, because their values, in a subtle way, in a mediated way, in a transliterated way, are the values that exist largely of the society out there. And when you go down and remove Sky Sport or put something else on and even there residually, you will find, what a Marxist would call, “the reification of triumphant values,” in other words a soft left viewpoint put again and again and again, in every media, at every level.

Now how has this occurred? That a force that in a hard way seems to have lost everywhere: its states have gone down; its military structures have gone down. Its Chinese and Asiatic version is producing a mass, super-capitalist version, with an increasingly “post left,” indeed even racial elite that manage the society technologically and whose ideology is frozen into a type of theology. Many Marxists are in despair in this era, and the Frankfurt School, that we’re going to have a bit of a look at in this talk, actually in some ways is a movement of despair both within Marxism and within Western thinking. Yet, this victory in defeat and defeat in victory that we have all around us is something that I want to look at.

In England, in the early part of the 20th century, intellectuals of left and right often used to debate with each other. This is really no longer possible now eighty, ninety years on. G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, [G. B.] Shaw, and [H. G.] Wells knew each other well, often had debates with each other.

The irony is that if you’d turned to them or their audiences, maybe in venues like this, eighty-odd years ago and more, that we would have in the early part of the new millennium, a left wing, capitalist society, people would have said “You’re mad!” The idea that the market can adopt the values of the folded out, libertarian, slightly soft — but not entirely so — left would have been regarded as perverse by almost any social and ideological commentator of that era. But it’s what we’ve got! And it’s all around us, and it’s sort of in the ether; it’s all-pervasive. Even to cut against it in a very minor way is to create a shock somewhere. Certainly if you’re anyone of any reputation or any foreknowledge in the culture and you make a remark which is “incorrect,” and you’re known, and you’ve ventilated it as such, there’s a tremor in the web.

Now my interpretation of this is that hard Marxism, strict Marxist Leninism and various anarchistic and other variants often to one side of it, have failed, but the trajectory of the ideology itself has succeeded, has morphed, and has transfigured itself in a new way. You have the left has come into the center, taken it, turned it around, and what we’d call liberalism now, either with a small or large “L,” is not the liberalism of fifty to sixty years ago. It’s not even the liberalism of a hundred and fifty years ago. The truth is that the people who led Palmerstone’s Liberal Party had views which in the middle of the nineteenth century, could be construed as people who, if not to the right of this gathering, then wouldn’t have been too far away.

The Protestant ideological moralism that underpinned liberal ideas of a traditional sort has been ripped out. So it’s become a materialist and secularist ideology prone to infiltration and change by forces from its own radical left.

One of the things that’s most germane to the Frankfurt School is the Frankfurt School repudiates those elements of communist practice that liberals don’t like: the harshness, the camps, the belief in struggle, the secret police, the art of the people, and the crushing out of anything that the people don’t like. Vyshinsky screaming that ex-comrades should be killed, beheaded, and their families tortured before they die! All in the name of love, and humanity and peace. The French Communist party organ was L’Humanité, humanity!

Thorez who was the leader in the post war period was personally trained by Stalin in exile during Vichy to take France which the Eastern Bloc believed (more so than Italy at that time) was the first Western domino to go within Europe. Get them out of NATO, align them with the Warsaw Pact, create chaos inside the Western Alliance, and so on.

Now, Marxism grows up of course from the 19th century, but before Marx gave state socialism and ideological socialism a pseudo-scientific gloss and formulation, there’d been various other theorists, Saint-Simone, Fourier, Utopian types of socialism, some of them a secularization of Christian, libertarian ideals. Marx was determined to reshape not just the nature of the left but the nature of philosophy and the Europe of his time and the world for all time!

His type of trajectory relates to a particular view of society that certain intellectuals have — although he never specified it as such, Marx and those of his ilk who came after him, in a wide range of theorists who’ve almost died out today. There’s not one major Marxist theoretician really who’s alive today who’s of any importance. You get a minor, minor figure like Alex Callinicos who was associated with the Socialist Worker’s Party at one time, occasionally bobs up, but these are people of almost no importance whatsoever.

Baudrillard and major theorists like this are cynical, materialistic liberals and libertarians who laugh and sneer at everything, and it’s all a great game to them because they’re concerned with language, what it means, what it doesn’t mean, how it can be repositioned and so on. They’re not really Marxists at all. The last really powerful thinker in that trajectory–well there could be two of them, really—[are] Sartre in a way and Adorno, and after them there are just minor figures who floated up.

So this entire mass of theory that begins with Marx is part of the idea that intellectuals can totally dominate society. In the Anglophone world view intellectuals are on the whole praised and privileged to a degree but also accorded a very minor status. In France and in Eastern Europe, which often modeled itself on French patterns of intellectual culture, intellectuals form a class within the society which is very coherent and quite hard-edged. And it’s understood that you do the academic jobs, you do the higher journalistic jobs, you do the par, upper tier, pre-modern, professional media jobs. You write the books, you run the galleries, and so on. It’s not just an inchoate group of individuals; it’s a tier with its own morals, its own way of behaving, its own salons which are the parties and groups where this particular subset of intelligent people meet.

I went to an intellectual salon, run by a continental European of course, when I was eighteen, and all the intellectuals were talking about “ordinary people” because that is the class division if you’re an intellectual. There are those that live for the mind and ordinary people who don’t. So they have their own mental class division within that, and Marx in, his own way was a radical twist on some of those ideas. He believed that theory could dominate life and social process to such a degree that it could change the world, and even human nature, forever.

One of the important things about Marxism is its total and utter break with the past, its total and utter break with all religious ideas; there is nothing supernatural; they’re just human theories and mixed within language. There is nothing prior to man; there are no eternal values whatsoever; everything is in the now, and everything is based on materialistic precepts which predetermine every aspect of life. This means that in the high regime and ferocity stage, Communism represses religion with extreme and often irrational violence.

You always know that a communist movement is falling back again into social democratic centrism and state socialism when it allows people to adopt a religious preference. After the Soviet collapse when the Communist Party reared up again and in one of Yeltsin’s internal elections (one of the ones that his forces won) they had a bit of a chance. They said that Christianity and Orthodox Russian Christianity were now compatible with Marxist Leninism, which is the key to a weakening of the resolve for struggle, because the desire to crush out religious belief, even to the degree of atrocity such as those committed by Pol Pot in Kampuchea for example, where there was an actual attempt to kill every self- defining Buddhist in the society, is an attempt to eradicate completely that which exists before.

Mao, who was even more psychologically radical than Marx himself, believed–completely contrary to all biological ideas–that man is a piece of paper. Man is a white sheet. You can take a man and torture him to a gibbering wreck; you can take a man and say he’s a God and then shoot him afterwards. Man is changeable, and plastic, and can be molded by struggle, or what they called dialectic. Ideology in life and in language and in history. “Give me a man for half an hour and I’ll make him a communist.” It’s this sort of idea. And occasionally, many of their theories when applied, such as to American prisoners of war in the Korean War for example, had a certain salience.

Maoist behavioral theories worked on these lines. They believed that there is a five percent leadership caucus in all groups, so you take the officers away from the men when you’ve got them captured. Then you take away the non-commissioned officers. Then you take away the moral officers, those amongst the men who the elite amongst the mass of the troops who have personalities that will be known as leadership personalities. In crisis people would look to them. If the officer has fallen, they become the officer. You get rid of them. You remove them. You either shoot them or put them in a separate camp or send them back to the Americans. You want the mass that you can mold and destroy and remake.

And they did it with quite a lot of them. Many of them came back to the US three or four years later mouthing sort of Marxist platitudes, you know: “We invaded the Third World, man,” you know, “we deserved what we got” and this sort of thing. In the Vietnam War some of these tendencies to deterioration and degeneracy in the American Army became so large that many of them would shoot their own officers rather than go out on patrol, which is one of the many reasons why they ended in a surreal mess prior to surrender. America of course conducted a mass bombing campaign, said they’d won, and then cleared out; a scenario they may repeat in Iraq and Afghanistan in the next couple of years. But to return to our Marxist theory.

Marx emerged really, first in a group of radical German intellectuals called “The Free Ones” (“Die Freien”) who used to meet in a beer cellar in the 1840s. In the 1840s of course, liberalism and nationalism went together as ideologies; now, 150 years on, they’re daggers drawn. But in that group in the 1840s there were gathered some of the most radical, “let’s change the world” intellectuals in Germany, in central Europe.

Many of them have been forgotten today: Botho Strauss and Otto Strauss have been forgotten; Feuerbach is only remembered because Marx wrote an essay about him. Max Stirner is remembered for one book he wrote about extreme individualism. But in the corner of the paintings of The Free Ones as they gathered in this cellar there is a tall gentile Engels, the factory owner, the financier of the theorist, and Marx, then with an enormous black beard because he was very young then.

Marx’s idea is that you have to smash all the theory, particularly all the progressive theory that pre-dated him. That’s why he began with Groundwork (Grundrisse) and The German Ideology and you must clear away all these false and fake ‘progressive’ ideas based on liberal thinking, bourgeois semantics and utopianism. Everything must be based upon science and upon matter and must be provable and must be empirical. He believed that intellectuals could so interpret the changes in society that they could master the consciousness of a society, change it, and shift it, and force it in directions that even hadn’t entirely been predicated on the theory.

The one thing you notice about Marxism is it’s a seething vortex of ideas; it’s always restless; it’s always counter-propositional. Marx will make a statement, then he’ll qualify it, then he’ll withdraw it, then he’ll make another statement which is more radical. And this is part of again what they call “dialectic.”

Now the idea of dialectic is based on Hegelian theory, and it’s based on an ancient Greek thinker called Heraclitus, who believed that everything is in flux, and everything changes, and everything works on itself. The fury with which Marxists fall on each other in intellectual dispute, often about arcane matters which are of no relevance, which in a regime context is a choice between life and death! You advocate the dialecticism of a particular crop cycle and you get it wrong, and the party sides with another, you are shot! And your family’s shot! And those that are related to them are shot as well, because ideas are important.

The man who thumbs through the Guardian on the tube who thinks “ideas? . . . who cares?” To a Marxist ideas are life, and you write them in blood because they’re important. They suppress artistic forms because they believe they are important enough to merit that. And that’s the difference between why they almost conquered a world and did it in various ways.

Now Marxists on the whole form two camps in my mind, politically and ideologically. In all Marxist groups you get the rather weak, pacifistic, loving, humanistic people. The vicar’s daughter who believes human nature isn’t . . . right. If only we could be nicer to each other, if only we could spread more love. You get these people always in ultra left and communist groups, and next to them on the podium, next to them in the auditorium, [are] your utterly nihilistic, ruthless, virtually criminal types who want to use the structure of power when they get it to crush those underneath them, don’t give a damn about ideology, and are actually amongst the most misanthropic people you could ever meet. And you have these extremes of the innocent lovey and the sort of sadistic amoralist in the same group.

That’s why when a Communist regime comes in they have enormous purges because they have to start by purging their own, to get rid of all the idiots! To get rid of all of those who believed it was “love, love, love” and they’re led off by the men in leather jackets, because you’ve got to get rid of those fools early!

If a right wing regime is formed, and there’s a purge, it’s because it’s people struggling for power. That’s what it’s about.

Now, Marx, in the British library, began writing sort of pure theory as a critique. The interesting thing about Marxism is in a strange way its unoriginality. Epistemologically, it’s Hegel (and that’s the theory about how it thinks about its own theory) and Heraclitus. Politically it’s the ultra-left of its own time fitted in a made to do service.

All of the classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith onwards who underpinned capitalism as an idea, Marx doesn’t think up an original theory in relation to them, he critiques them. All Marxism is a shadow; it’s a critique; it’s a sort of feeding on the carcass of something which exists before you. You critique it, you turn it around, you re-engineer it and you come to [unintelligible] on the basis of a negation. So the negation of that which exists before is the key to this type of thinking.

And then you negate the negation, and then you negate the negation of the negation and you go on and on.

The most radical version of state communism is Trotskyism, the idea that you have a regime that renews itself through endless and perpetual struggle. “There is no rest!” “there is no motion!” Trotsky wrote endless sentences like this “no love, no serenity, no stillness, no motion, only the struggle!” And of course Stalin took him at his word, which is why he purged them all from the party after 1928. But until then, of course, they were giving almost as good as they got, and both sides in that dispute worshiped the parent, Lenin.

Now Lenin was taught his Marxism by Plekhanov who was a Menshevik who didn’t like the Bolshevik Revolution. Quite few Marxists who were purely sort of, almost gentle professors of cultural destruction, they didn’t actually like the Bolshevik Revolution because in actual fact it’s contrary to some Marxist theory.

The idea of the Plekhanov school is that if, in a totally undeveloped society, you have a militarist coup by a left-wing armed group (which is what the Bolshevik Revolution really was) you will end up in an extremely nasty, what we would call today Third World dictatorship which is exactly what happens because in their theory you have to allow capitalism and the bourgeois class–which is loathed and yet admired strangely, simultaneously–to reach fruition to create the proletariat industrially, then there must be leaders from the Bourgeoisie who split off,  form the communist vanguard, link with the proletariat, revolutionize the world, and create defective communism, create socialism — the first step. So it’s a progressive cycle.

The Leninist way of dealing with dissidents is to just shoot them! That was Lenin at the end, half his brain was virtually liquid towards the end, massacres on every front, the civil war was going badly. They won that civil war because every man on their own side who retreated more than eight paces, the secret police stood behind them and shot them. And Trotsky introduced that and advocated it in a booklet called “The Necessity of Red Terror.” The Necessity of Red Terror!

I met Corin Redgrave once who was one of the leaders of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and Redgrave, who’s this rather depressive sort of actor, basically, piped up in the middle of this party as he was chain smoking, and he said, “When we’re in power,” he said, “we’re going to have iron hard, IRON HARD . . . destruction of the bourgeois class!!”  Like this. And I said, “But Corin, you could be regarded as one of the most bourgeois men in Britain.” And he said, “No, NO! It’s all in the mind.”

And of course it is all in the mind.

He said something very interesting to me about the extraordinary mental arabesque that this theory can cast. Somebody said, “Well what about Stalin then, Corin?” And he said “Stalin is the recrudescence of the theory of the class enemy which occurs mentally at the hypostatization within the class that falsifies its ideology and history and is the class enemy at the particular moment of struggle. If you refer to Trotsky’s The History of the Revolution, chapter eight, paragraph 92, he tells you everything that you need to know about it!”

So it is almost an ersatz religion! Now I’ve known a few Polish people in my life, and Poles learnt Marxism-Leninism at school after the creation of the Gomulka’s regime after ’48. I went to a Catholic school, although I’m not a Catholic (not even a Christian), and you had four periods a week of religious knowledge, and they ripped that out and replaced it with Marxist Leninism, the same four periods!

You learnt the Paris Manuscripts the early idealistic stuff in 1844, which he then reverses. You then go on to the scientific socialism (so-called) of The German Ideology and the Groundwork which wasn’t published in East Germany probably under Ulbricht in ’67. Then you go on to Capital volume one and Capital volumes two and three which Engels writes later. Then you go on to Engels’ parallel material, which is slightly different to Marx. Then you look at people like Plekhanov.

The irony about this pure theory is that without the mountebanks, without the political criminals, without the guerrilla terrorist figures like Stalin, they would have never got anywhere, because they married this theory to sectarian propaganda and conspiratorialism by small, violent, and often criminal groups. And this is a rival tradition that goes back to the French revolution. If you look at people like Babeuf in the 1790s, but in particular it’s Blanqui’s tradition in the nineteenth century. Small, close knit, revolutionary bands that almost no-one’s heard of, swim around these theoretical groups, wait for a crisis in society to use armed force at a crucial and strategic moment, and then build a structure on the basis of the theory which often hardens just into a secular theology whilst they’re really concerned with the exercising of pure power.

I saw a thing which interested me recently in Forbes magazine in the United States which has a rich list, and it said that Castro’s personal fortune was 70 million U.S. dollars. Seventy million U.S. dollars! And they described him as a “communist prince.”

And there is an interesting side to these types that often, because they take illicit and semi-secret shares in state owned industries, the families that owned the original sugar and tobacco industries in old Cuba would be shot or heaved out of the state, they would re-appropriate in the name of the masses. Which means? A slice for the Castro family! And of course it might be quite small in terms of equity when it’s taken, but over fifty odd years builds up to an enormous fund.

And yet many Communists or Marxists that I’ve known are in some ways not particularly materialistic people. The whole point in the Communist movement is that you often owned nothing. Often you left very little, except for these monarch types that I’ve just mentioned, because they lived for the re-creation of man! They believed in a total change in almost all areas of society. Probably the most extreme communist experiment of all was Pol Pot’s in Kampuchea.

Now Pol Pot of course wasn’t his real name, it in some ways means political potential which is what Maoist instructors in China called him: “Political Potential,” Pol Pot. He had political potential.

Pot himself was a nerdy little man with a lop-sided smile and a sadistic desire to impose a type of peasant-based, anarchistic Marxist theory.

One of the interesting things is when he was a student — and Indo-China is strongly influenced by French Imperialism of course — when he was a student in Paris he sat in on lectures by Sartre, by de Beauvoir, by a feminist theorist called Kristeva, who was also a Maoist at the time, and he sort of wrote down things that they said but in a sort of cretinous, future sadistic way like: “The family is a gun in the hands of the bourgeois class. Destroy the family! Yes! Destroy the family! Make everyone live in communes, destroy the bond between mother and child, and husband and wife, everyone is therefore part of the masses, and then it’s wonderful!!”

When he got the chance to do it in a society with gangs of terroristic teenagers, many of them out of their minds on drugs and so on, he did it!

He put people in large barns, and if you said you wanted to see your uncle he said: “I’m your uncle.” And the person was dragged out, and their head beaten in with the butt of a machine gun because you weren’t worthy of a bullet.

So that is the sort of sort of high theory, these French Parisian literati types that have hardly ever had a problem in their lives at all, who’re rebelling against the norms of their own culture, almost as play, that they give the language and the sort of action theater to these types who internalize it all. And although most of them just remain Gerard Healy-like idle dreamers on the margins of Western society, if they ever really got the chance to do it, they would impose it because they believe that it’s morally right to make that imposition. And the idea that these theories are “morally right” is important in relation to their reception at a later time, because I believe that contemporary liberalism has recycled a large number of these theories and treated them, purged of nasty Soviet and Maoist and other accretions, as something normative, as something given.

Seventy years ago many of the values that face you in the media and elsewhere would, amongst normal and apolitical people, been regarded as abhorrent. Now they are normative and even to speak out against them is to essentially embrace thought criminality.

But there’s a degree to which the reason this has occurred is because a hybrid has developed between post-war secular liberalism and the Marxism of the past, and this is what I’d like to discuss.

The Frankfurt School grew up in Germany as a particular response to modern life. Marxism believes in crisis; everything is in crisis. The family’s in crisis; class relations are in crisis; race — which they don’t accept as a social concept because it’s an anthropological concept and isn’t reducible to economic materialism, but does exist because it exists in the mind of reactionaries and so on.

They think that the endless critique of what has gone before prepares new grounds and vistas of struggle, so the purpose of the Frankfurt School was to critique all Marxism, to bring back a more purified and critically intelligent form of the dialectic, which could be used in modernity.

The Frankfurt School is quite complicated because there’s a strong streak of pessimism and despair in it which is very unusual in Marxism. Another very unusual thing is that very Germanic forms of Marxism such as those proffered by Löwenthal, by Horkheimer, by Adorno, by Neumann and others who were prominent in the school, linked to forms of Anglo-Saxon, American and imperialist thought. Why is this? Because of the existence of fascist governments in central Europe in a certain time, all of these types sought refuge in the United States.

When Adorno was at the University of California and the Frankfurt School had been closed down by a certain notorious government in Germany at that time, he developed various psychological theories which are quite interesting even in relation to this present audience. He developed what he called the “F” scale. (“F” was F for Fascism.) This is a personality test which under a different name we still use quite widely. It’s a test for the authoritarian personality, to see how fascistic you are in relation to trigger words.

Many of these ideas have fed through into the doctrine which is now called political correctness, but they’ve morphed and changed over time: rigidity in relation to prior assumption, ability to follow a leader without question, undue respect for authority (dialectically related to the idea that you want to exercise authority yourself — a sort of love-hate relationship to the police), and this sort of thing.

And Adorno ticks all of these boxes. So he’s very obsessed with the micro side which, on the whole, Marxist theory — which loves grand architectures of theory and great spasms of language for its own sake — usually neglects.

Marx himself of course was a combination. Capital is full of endless detail about the suffering of the poor in capitalist societies. One of the reasons many Western idealists were attracted to it in the early part of the 20th century was because, of course, for every new development there were many victims. Marx, if you read Capital, there’s endless sections of it. Crushed children in machines, people suffering in the early stages of industrialization, but the irony, it could almost be Cobbett! And yet it’s linked to the idea of an enormous theory that can transform the nature of reality.

For human good? Well, the problem with all Marxist theory is that it’s counter-propositional in relation to what we are, what all races are, what humanity is, and all mankind is as a whole. We’re based on nature; we have our being in that substructure. We are not as leftist ideas would have us.

One of the reasons for the extraordinary rapacity of communist terror is, I think, a sense of disappointment, on a cosmic level!

When you get into power you realize that human beings are partly avaricious, partly sexual, partly acquisitive, partly territorial, partly communal, partly group-identifying–everything that your theory said that they weren’t! And there’s a strong element of concealed–and not so concealed in the regime phase–misanthropy in communism, that if humanity can’t be redeemed in that way we’ll fall on them anyway. It’s almost a secularization of the idea of sin. “They’ve disappointed us and so they’ll suffer” and maybe through the infliction of various agonies like Procrustes’ Bed; the man lies on the bed and his arms are over the side and his feet are over the bottom, and you think, “I’ve got to get him to fit the bed, so you cut off the feet and you cut off the hands.” Pol Pot says, the leaders of the Derg, Mengistu in Ethiopia, says: “Look! Our body fits the bed,” but it’s limbless! And that’s how you’ve made it fit!

Now Adorno wrote a whole series of books, Negative Dialectics, Minima Moralia, Aesthetic Theory which is an enormous book, this thick, eight hundred pages; it’s in Routledge & Kegan Paul.

He was a pessimist, Adorno: all the photos used on the Routledge editions of his books show him with one hand over one side of his face dwelling upon the pain and misery of humanity. He believed, in a strange way that has echoes of cultural conservatism to it, paradoxically, that the masses are totally brutalized and dehumanized by capitalist ideology.

He believed that everything has been sucked into the spectacle of mass culture, to such a degree that there is no freedom for the masses at all. Of course he never thought “do we even want to be free?” That’s a question that is off limits essentially.

“Everyone can be free; everyone can be rational; everyone can be equal.” To say otherwise is to render yourself a beast and a demon. A reactionary, outside of the doctrine of progress and enlightenment. So remember that!

His first book was called The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he wrote with Horkheimer, and which is an interesting thesis because like a true Marxist he goes right back to the roots and one of the paradoxes is that although Liberalism has embraced a lot of soft Marxism, this is a ferocious critique of Liberalism! The Dialectic of Enlightenment is now an attack on the Enlightenment! He ferociously lambasts these liberal theorists for their reactionary nature, their desire to exploit man in the name of capitalist progress, their desire to dominate nature. Adorno believed that Fascism was a natural reaction against capitalistic exploitation and the desire liberals, liberals, had to exploit man and nature.

Trotsky by Frida Kalho

Adorno is so far to the left that Liberals are the enemy! Never forget that for a true Communist the liberals are the scum, and the middling ones, to whom you will give enough latitude, you will give enough rope to, before you hang them. I think Lenin in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back said all these social democrats and so on we allow them their time. We allow them the time on the stage to weaken the right, to weaken religious beliefs to open the way for us. And when we’re there, then we hang them, we hang them, and we enjoy it because they are worse than the Bourgeoisie! Because they are traitors to the class in history, and we will deal with them with an utter ruthlessness that we won’t even treat reactionaries with.

That’s the real Leninism talking, but Adorno doesn’t like that sort of talk at all, because although he’s not a humanist he does believe in the Alsatia of forgotten possibilities. Don’t forget, for a Western Marxist — and this theory’s called Western Marxism or Euro-communism as it became — the Soviet experience has been a disaster.

I once had a conversation with E. J. Hobsbawm who was the Marxist professor at Birkbeck, the extramural and evening college of London University, and he said, in private of course; “Well as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain I would never have admitted this, but the entire Soviet experiment has been deleterious!” You know twenty million dead, fifty million dead, multiple wars, dictatorship? It’s been “deleterious.” As he reaches for another drink, you know. He said, “All it achieved was the socialization of the means of production; it’s not enough, it’s not enough!” you know.

And yet when the coup happened against Gorbachev, he supported the coupsters; he supported the coup d’état for reasons of what he called “revolutionary conservatism,” you should hold what you have. Even if it’s totally broken.

Hobsbawm’s interesting because Neil Kinnock was a close personal friend of his, and there’s always been an interconnection not between Communism and elements of the Labour leadership, certainly in the Cold War period, but between Marxism and the Labour leadership and other leaders who are regarded as more liberal, more social democratic, more moderate.

At the beginning of the twentieth century “Social Democrat” meant Marxist. By the end of the twentieth century they were people who were aligned with George Bush 1 and were Atlanticists. Dennis Healey begins in the Communist Party youth wing, ends up a right-wing Social Democrat and Atlanticist supporting the Vietnam War! Something Wilson, slightly intelligently, kept us out of, but the Australians fought on our behalf. So there’s a strange element to which Marxism is “alright” at least when it’s considered to be a theoretical add-on to center-left disputes. Claire Short’s a descendant now in the modern Labour party and is advocating a hung Parliament even as Left [?] Whip in the House of Commons, but when the Soviet Union went down she was asked “Is Communism dead?” by some Independent-type journalist, and she said “Communism may be dead [she probably went; ‘in the West’], but Marxism isn’t!”

Theodor Adorno

And this idea that the theory can be obtained, retained, re-branded, and re-cycled, even though the hardcore vanguard politics has gone down, is something that most of the left still believes.

One of the reasons Liberalism’s triumphed in this society is the mental wetness, the irresolve, fear, and funk of conservatism morally and intellectually and ideologically. And I don’t just mean naked, middle class self-interest and the sort of slightly impoverished range of politics based around that, which is the core of all center-right parties. What I mean is conservatism philosophically and intellectually, unlike the moderate left that’s always looked to the far left for its energy, for its theory, for its radicalism. They repudiate bits they don’t like (particularly the harsher bits) but they’re, “Come in brother, come in comrade.” They take it into themselves.

Conservatives, even of the Professor Roger Scruton and Maurice Cowling type, there is a permafrost between them and the far right and radical right ideas. This means, theoretically and mentally, they’ve cut part of their own body off. Whatever their much more moderate political views are, they will not take the energy which exists to one side of them. Always in thinking — which is one of the reasons intellectuals often make bad politicians! Thinking goes to the margin of the prospect of a thought. Politics often has to deal with great masses of people, with what they can understand and appreciate, with short attention spans, with people who’ve got a hundred other things to do. Politics is even, in society, a minority sport amongst a minority sport!

People who hate each other but are political, often have more in common psychologically than the anonymous mass of people who don’t give a damn how they’re governed as long as there’s bread on the plate the day after next. And because conservatism has cut itself off from racio-biological, from elitist, from Nietzschean, from radical views –because they regard them in almost a satanic light, they couldn’t fight back against liberalism because they had no mental ammunition!

And because conservatism is an anti-intellectual attitude anyway, often Philistine, often atheoretical, when a Marxist version of center-leftism comes along, they increasingly laughed at it, scorned it, accepted it a bit, accepted it a bit, moved to the side, said they were against it, pushed away an egregious bit, accepted a bit. Then another generation would accept a bit more. Then another generation would accept a bit more.

The average Tory in the 1960s would have regarded race as a fact of social existence. Now you’ll be expelled from the modern Tory party for saying that. That’s fifty, forty years! Its nothing. Half an adult lifetime! And that’s because of what’s up here, particularly amongst relatively sort of unintelligent people, up to a point. But there are many intelligent people in the Tory party. But it is because of the Second World War and its aftermath, and the fear, the self-loathing, and self-hatred in many relatively normal “conservative” people who are the mainstream in any society.

In any society you have to have a mass of people who are a bit stuck, a bit boring, a bit uncreative because they are the bedrock. They’re not going to be exceptional, but you can’t have that in any social order. One of the delusions of Marxism is that everything could be different. Trotsky wrote an extraordinary essay in the early 1920s when the Soviet regime had just been created and was caked in blood. He wrote this essay saying, “When we’ve achieved pure socialism there’ll be a Wagner, yes a Wagner! There’ll be a Shakespeare, there’ll be a Byron on every corner. Everyone can be liberated to be free and creative. But now? The Struggle!” And we’ve stood in our little Bolshevik peaked, flat caps on pyramids of skulls, which is what they were!

Lenin was an extraordinary man in some ways because in the 1921 Congress, he had a Secret Speech to the Congress which wasn’t revealed until the Soviet Union came down. The interesting thing about Communists is because they believe they are the wave of the future, they write down everything they do. And they write down all their massacres as well!

The massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn Forest for example, which was ordered by the Politburo, and they all signed it! Stalin signed it. Khrushchev was next: “yes I’m signing!” And they all signed it, and this was revealed after the breakdown.

Because they believed that they were the wave of the future, and an atrocity is important, it’s not something you should be ashamed of, because you are aiming for the betterment and progress of the whole of humanity. You have to be proud to wade in the blood of reaction in order to achieve the future which is socialism. They called it the “yawning heights.” The “yawning heights of Socialism.” There’s a very satirical, negative, anti-Soviet novel called The Yawning Heights written by a working class university professor of philosophy called Zinoviev who hated the system by the time of its end, because everything creates its reverse you see.

Communism has affected and mutilated the world to an extraordinary degree which most people in the West who believe they were on the winning side in the Cold War haven’t even really begun to understand.

Communism has also, in a Marxist sense, affected their own societies extraordinarily radically whilst appearing to have completely lost in the terms of fringe, leftist sects and groups.

Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia that “after Auschwitz there can be no poetry.” He believed that after this seminal event there could be nothing but sack cloth and ashes forever. And somebody once said to him, “well that’s a pessimistic position,” which is ultimately conservative. Conservatives don’t believe life can be perfect because man isn’t, and therefore utopianism is an impossibility.

Leftists say “Oh we reject all forms of progress,” and the two sort of square up to each other in political terms. Don’t forget I’m talking about the philosophies, not the sordid little compromises of parties that in the Western world are virtually indistinguishable from each other. Now Marxism believed almost with post-religious ardor–as it shot religious people!–that everything could be changed, everything could be reworked, that man himself could be reworked.

One of the most fanatical postulates is hostility to all biological notions of man and all notions of prior inequality. The idea that, in the end even human rights jargon will always disappoint, because there are always beautiful people and ugly people. There’s always unintelligent people (and there’s many of them) and there’s always very intelligent people and always a range in between. There’s always people of great physical power and people who are weaklings.

A very left-wing socialist friend of mine from years ago said ”The trouble with you” (he was speaking to me) “is you’re against human fairness; you’re against being ‘fair.’” And I said, “Go to a maternity ward, go to a maternity ward, and one’s born without an arm, or without an eye. Others are born hale and hearty. Some are intelligent and will never have a moment’s disease in their lives. Others are crippled from the very beginning. And you talk to me about fairness?”

And he said, “Maybe it’s not like it should be but we must strive to make it so!” And I said, “Well why don’t you just accept the plenitude of that which is created?” and he said “No that’s too passive! We must work on it to change it, to make it better!”

Now most people, in their hearts, in this society believe that making things more equal makes them better. I don’t. I believe making them more unequal makes them better (which means you’re monstrous in contemporary terms). Because the greater the space between people, the greater the prospect of transcendence and the greater the prospect of overleaping the present, means you can actually not evolve physically but mentally and spiritually into something else. If there’s nothing above you, there’s nothing to aspire to; there’s just endless stuff beneath you. But I’m an Elitist.

No contemporary, even right-wing conservative politician, will admit that their party actually stands for inequality. Even in Capitalism, which has endless inequalities of outcome doesn’t it? That’s why you have two big classes. Of course you believe in inequality! But the Majors and the Camerons and the Hagues of this world, the Duncan Smiths of this world, they talk about liberty . . .  “liberty,” and they talk about “‘freedom,” and they talk about “choice.”

Choice, choice of schools, choice of race, choice of gender, choice of where you go to buy stuff and so on. “Choice!” But oh, if you choose one option you deny another! If you radically choose one thing, you disprivilege another variant. All life, even at the moment of small decisions teems with the bias towards inequality, discrimination.

I believe in discrimination. Discrimination is a moral good and a moral law! It’s an aristocratic spirituality. Of course you discriminate. You discriminate over who’s your enemy and who’s your friend. You don’t treat people all as the same except in some universal ninnydom which only exists in the minds of people who’d like human nature to be different from what it is.

People become more right wing as they get older, on the whole. Even within leftist systems, people actually do get more metaphysically conservative as they get older. Why is that? Because death approaches, reality approaches. They can’t live with these deluded, nonsensical views about human life, which is based on inequality and glory and difference. History’s been made by a small group on behalf of and in the name of the groups from which they themselves derive their energy and purpose.

Marxism is false in almost every area of life; that men and women are interchangeable (false); that the family is an enemy construction of man when it’s the basis of human dignity in all groups. That economic activity between human beings is always a form of oppression when in actual fact almost everybody at one level or another gets something out of it otherwise it couldn’t subsist in the first place. That man is nicer than he is, when human nature is dualist. Human beings are kind and nasty. They’re avaricious, but they have a capacity for self sacrifice. They’re endlessly cowardly and lying, but they also have a penchant for courage and glory. That’s what we are!

The great religions actually have always known what we are. They shift utopianism and the desire that we could be different from what we are, to another world. But, the leftist pseudo-religions of modernity have brought it down to this level and tried to counter-propositionally achieve it through violence and political struggle. And the reason that it’s got bloodier and bloodier, until in the end they become sickened of it themselves, the emergence within the Soviet bloc of neo-liberals like Gorbachev who realized the whole system was a fraud, and it didn’t work, and they could hardly produce anything economically, and you went to the West, and you went back home, and people were struggling to get razor blades and bits of cheese and bits of soap and so on, and you thought to yourself “This is a Superpower? We slaughtered tens of millions for this?”

And in a sense I think that the fact that he wouldn’t defend the structure as it shuddered, because you can’t reform a structure like that, it has to go down, and he sort of managed its descent, really, if you look retrospectively on what he did. He’s hated in Russia now, hated because he took away the security of ordinary people, and that generation particularly, their life expectancy went from about 76 to about 53 because they lost everything! When capitalism couldn’t come in they hadn’t even been educated to sort of to write a check! It was sheer terror for them, because they’d never had to survive economically at an individual level, and that generation just sort of died off as a gangster capitalism came in, because they had no lead up time. That’s the great tragedy of Russian destiny, that every system has been imposed in a slab-sided and ferocious way with no softening of the edges. One sort of plate has replaced another one.

Just as Marx wanted! Not the idea of gradual reform, the Blairs and Browns of this world, but total, utter, transfiguring change which will completely revolutionize the nature of man.

One point which is never dwelt upon, and there’s an enormous amount of work on Communism now, because it’s now in the past, people can debate its details openly: the Jewish nature of Communism. That is never, ever discussed and indeed is completely off limits in nearly all academic discourse.

The truth is that nearly always half of the major core intellectuals in all Communist groups are Jews or partly Jews, nearly always half of the Central Committee or the Executive Council, the Revolutionary Vanguard or whatever it calls itself; the rest is made up of Bohemian revolutionary gentiles who are totally hate-filled and despairing and hostile to their own society, and it’s a medley of these two groups essentially. Outsider/insider groups to tear it down, tear it down — in the name of love of course, in the name of love — but as you tear it down you can catapult yourself from the fringe to the center. It’s the Gerry Healy speech, you know in the Worker’s Revolutionary Party of the past, the most fanatical Marxist-Leninist group probably in British post war history. There’s others. There’s Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group. There are various incarnations of the Trotskyist tradition which began in the ’30’s with the Balham Group in South London of the Communist Party of Great Britain and then grew up as a separate tendency.

One of the things that is, of course, interesting is that when they were more powerful, 30 years ago, and if they had known of this meeting, there would be a riot outside. Not just a bit of pushing and shoving, but an absolute riot. The pathological hatred of the radical right by the Trotskyist Marxist-Leninist left needs to be looked at, and there are several reasons for this. Partly they are the most connected to international revolution; they are the most committed to the idea that we have no groups;

“One race, the human race!” One race, the human race, and those who doubt it go under! Reactionaries!  Who can’t be brooked, whose ideas are a menace to humanity! Because you see, ideas are important for these people, it’s not just “oh you’ve got an idea.” You get two English intellectuals ”you’ve got an idea, I have an idea; it’s cricket you know. We debate, one wins the other loses, we draw, we embrace.” No! Ideas are life and death and are the basis of struggle and meaning you see? Because meaning for them is in the “praxis” they call it, the moment of achieved struggle and recognition of truth in ideology.

Now a Marxist intellectual called Malcolm Evans who’s a Marxist Deconstructionist (he told me with extreme pride.) I said, “So you believe in the complete destruction of all Western cultural norms and the replacement of it by a foreign ideology?”

And he said, “You’re only saying that to me because you’re a Bourgeois reactionary of the most hateful sort.” Because he once said to me, “The Bourgeois goes through life with common sense, the Marxist with his theory; theory is truth!” And I said, “And you put to death those who don’t agree with your theory?” He said, “You’re putting words in my mouth.”       But the irony is that these people who believed in this current of theory were near the top in nearly all of our universities between about 1930 and 1980 plus, even in the United States. The University of Texas, can you imagine a more redneck state than Texas? The University of Texas’ Economics Department was Marxist. This is the state of the Bushes and so on. They had achieved an ascendancy in parts of the academic world, part of the mental thinking within Western society, which is difficult for many people to understand.

And conservatism was so weak-kneed in these institutions, and it was terrorized by Trotskyist mobs as well, it virtually disappeared.

I knew a chap who was the head of sociology at the Polytechnic of North London for a period, and Irish chap, he was just a conservative really, a right wing conservative. O’Keefe I think his name was. And every term he moved his office because there would be a brick, from the Socialist Workers through the window, but he knew it was coming. And I said to him, “Why do you put up with it?” he said. “Well why should I give in to these people.” So he had a little bit of spirit but for every one like him a hundred gave up, a hundred went along with it, a hundred resigned, they sort of went into eternal exile within their own institutions. And don’t forget we’re talking about conservatives; we’re talking about people who are well to the left of anyone here so if they haven’t got a chance what do you think the sort of opinions that are canvassed by this group have? Because, since the Second World War, the sort of opinions this group deals with have been outlawed in all institutions of higher education.

I once addressed a BNP meeting, a bloke put up his hand and said, “You’ve swallowed a dictionary mate haven’t you? What’s it all about then?” And I said, “Look, I’m putting forward ideas to you which have been banned, in the auditoriums where they should be heard, for sixty years!” He said, “Oh alright, fair play mate.

But there’s a degree to which that’s what this group [The New Right] really is for, because the reason that we have the society that we have is due to large scale economic and cultural forces admittedly to a degree, but it’s also due to the mindset that accepts them before they’ve physically happened.

Now Marxism in a sense advocates two contradictory things, but it believes it’s contradiction holds together in struggle. It believes everything is economically determined, and yet if you theorize about the way in which it’s determined enough you can actually change the nature of the determination. There was a theorist called Gramsci at the beginning of the 20th century who was in the Italian Communist Party ranks who split the idea of the superstructure–culture, society, the arts, intellect, media–from the base; economics. Then Marxism can go completely cultural and just swim around. Not linked to proletarian movements, not linked to trade union politics, not linked to working class political struggle as defined by the far left.

Marx was quite funny about the working class actually because he said, “When I meet these German trade unionists, I like them less,” he said because they were stroppy individuals who’d contradict “Professor” Marx! as he insisted on being called. Don’t forget he was giving the proles their theory. The structural relationship between the intellectual master and the working class followers was quite apparent.

And Marx fancied himself as a politician not just a theorist because he founded a group called the International Working Men’s Association which is the 1st International. Communists talk about “Internationals”: first, second, third, fourth. The Trotskyist one’s the 4th, tiny little Trotskyist “four men in a kiosk” groups who’d “struggle” about which one represented the 4th International which was out in Mexico.

But of course a Stalinist agent killed Trotsky by penetrating his brain with an ice pick through the skull. Luis Mercador I think his name was, and he crept into his study and stabbed him through the skull. Anarchists to this day wear tee shirts saying “ICE-PICK A TROT!” because you know anarchists just love being offensive to everyone, even on their own side. And as the spike penetrated his brain, Trotsky’s last words were his hysterical Ashkenazic shriek in which he said, “You’ve been sent by him, him!, HIM!”  (namely Stalin). And he had! And he had! He went out in the light and in the dark one could say.

I once had a walk round one of these areas where they have these plaques, you know these blue plaques, and if somebody famous lived in the house there’s a white writing, and I was with a right wing intellectual called Bill Hopkins at the time, and we looked up at this house where Engels had lived.

“Friedrich Engels” it said, and the dates “Economic Theorist.” That’s a bit tame isn’t it? “Economic theorist?”, I thought You have to consider… Consider in the “percussion of ideologies” Nietzsche said “the idea has an effect after the stone is thrown.”

Consider the destructive impact these individuals have had on our civilization and “economic theorist” doesn’t cut it does it? Perhaps you could scrub that out and say “The Destroyer of a World” The destroyer of a world, and that’s largely what Marxist-Leninist ideology amounted to, the destruction of the norms of pre-existent Western civilization. Done in its name, done as a revolutionary detritus, brought to power by tamed theorists and political criminals who saw their way to a main chance. And it’s dominated the thinking of our peoples in one form or another to such a degree that if you meet somebody in the arts now who’s a fluffy liberal, and they say “Ooh all races are equal, all men are equal, anyone who says otherwise is a reactionary beast, I’m for aid to Africa, I’m for saving the planet,” they are mouthing the tenth rate approximation to this theory.

The hardcore theory would appall them!  Ten stages back: Fanon saying whites should be killed because they incarnate the guilt of the oppressive, imperialist, capitalist classes, which is based on Lenin’s book in 1916 called Imperialism whereby you have to explain the fact that socialism hasn’t come about. That capitalism hasn’t led organically to socialism,  imperialism, and the defamations of the persons of color by (although he didn’t call it this) “the White Economic Colossus” which is still the justification for many Third World radical groups even now.

This mixture of sentimentality, high theory, a Jewish desire for power, an extreme misanthropy which has used — because it’s secularized and no objectivist moral basis –  any means to bring itself in, has almost at times brought our entire culture and civilization almost to the point of disaster.

Their armies dominated a half of Europe until relatively recently. Tens of millions of white people grew up under their structures, lying, evading the truth, just surviving. If you did Marxist-Leninism in Warsaw when I was at school in the ’70s, it wasn’t a joke! You didn’t write sort of ironic, quizzical, and deconstructive ideas about the Founding Fathers, you knew that it was a secular religion, and you toed the line or things would happen to you, a file would go to the secret police about you.

In Rumania, in Bulgaria, in Hungary, in East Germany. Dissidents would go to the shops in East Germany and there’d be eight  Stasi behind them in a car, an amazing degree of surveillance. Why? Because you need to impose dialectical purity on the masses. Because if they are allowed their own way they’ll just drink, fornicate, consume, and do what they want. You have to hold them to the mark, even by terror and you have to build a wall around your country to keep people in! The classical thing is you build a wall to keep enemies out don’t you? You don’t keep them in.

Now, in closing, I’d like to say that there’s been an extraordinary cowardice amongst Western intellectuals in the adoption of these sorts of views.

Robert Conquest, who was a minor poet in Hampstead, used to go to all these salons in the ’40’s and ’50’s. And this is Hampstead! Ultra rich, creamy bourgeois types, many of whom have never suffered anything in their lives, and many of them were Stalinists at this time, never mind Trotsky, or never mind the revolutionary alternative, but actual Stalinists, people who’d read hagiographies (and there’s plenty of them) written to Stalin; “Oh Great Leader, we are not worthy to kiss the feet of the son of the real proletariat.” All this sort of stuff. People laugh at it now but in those societies then, it wasn’t a laughing matter

And Conquest was revolted about this wrote two sort of revisionist books The Great Terror and [The Harvest of Sorrow] about the Ukrainian famine as a response to that. He also wrote the Lenin book in the Fontana Modern Masters, and although he got facts wrong and although he was a pioneer in rolling back the mystagoguery of that sort of thing.

Don’t forget that when Sartre was told there were camps in the Soviet Bloc he said, “Ohhhh! … but they’re based upon love!” Based upon love, and that makes it alright of course. This is the idea that you torture them on their graves, you know, we’re doing it to redeem the soul of man, but they don’t believe man has a soul, so that’s a bit problematic.

The one thing I would think, looking back on Marxism after a hundred and fifty years in all of its variants, is the extraordinary cowardice of some of the most privileged people in Western societies who would not stand up to this type of theory, which is how it always begins, and didn’t realize that in the end it would destroy everything they loved and everything they wanted.

You even see it in Oxford recently don’t you? Irving and Griffin. Griffin’s not a pal of mine, you know. But Irving and Griffin are there at the Oxford Union. They’re speaking for us really, whatever we may think about them as individuals. The mob is outside seething, you know, maaaad staring eyes! all the rest. Smaller than in the past, but still there though! If they could they’d get in and tear them to pieces! And they’d burn down the library as well, they really would. And yet, the ninnies at their Oxford tables will say the day afterwards, “Terrible riot y’know! These people Irving and Griffin coming along and provoking these people, bringing this mayhem and this mess into our lovely little Oxford streets, these . . . monsters!”

Where in actual fact, the theory of the mob is the street version of what their ideas would be in power, and these people would have no status. And what they really believe in culturally and spiritually–sensitivity, the Western way, listening to alternative arguments, basing things on empirical knowledge–they’d be out the window!

And they’ve gone along with this out of corruption and being almost too pleasant for their own good, being too comfortable, and flirting like an adult teenager with ideas of rebellion that are half-disbelieved in as they brook them, and not thinking that they will be used, and used again and again and again to basically destroy nearly all of us. And it’s because they haven’t realized this that–in a slightly softer version–we’re in the plight that we’re in.

But everything has its eras, and these ideas are breaking down, and I’ll leave you with the fact that recently there has been an attempt in France to revive Sartre’s reputation. Sartre was an Existentialist and a Marxist. He wanted to bring together two enormous areas of theory. He wrote a book called The Critique of Dialectical Reason. He could only write volume one. It’s 750 pages. It’s in New Left Books, and it’s a real, real ripper of a read! New Left Books produce it. He wrote it on amphetamine, high in jazz cafés, speeding away like this.

He was going to try and find a humanist justification for Stalinism. Yes he was! That was going to be volume 2, but he could never get the theory right, and volume 2 never appeared. And at the end of his life Sartre and his common law wife De Beauvoir joined a Maoist group, Maoist group. These are Western intellectuals, don’t forget, joined a Maoist group and sat with all these Chinese in these little garages. He edited a paper at the end called The People’s Fist or something like that, you know . . . “the people’s fist.” He’s totally persona non grata in contemporary France, intellectually.

They had a big exhibition recently, at the Sorbonne, the big Bourbourg Centre, these sorts of things. And no-one went! And no-one went! And that is genuinely interesting. So people thought — because Sartre’s famous existential line is “Hell is other people” — maybe people thought as they didn’t attend those galleries “Hell is Jean Paul Sartre’s theories!”

Thank you very much!