Neither Wrath, Nor Cowardice

[1]

Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Battle of Anghiari

2,069 words

Anyone who studies the thought and ways of life of our ancestors can only be struck by their manly vigor and toughness. Material comfort and mass miseducation have taken their toll on modern Western man, turning him, with every generation, into a more and more effeminate creature. The ancients knew that without manly courage, political and personal freedom is impossible. One will not take the inevitable risks of living the truth without courage. Today, the great bulk of the men of the West do not have the courage to dare to even think the truth, let alone speak the truth, let alone act upon the truth. For the Ancients, knowledge of the truth meant having the courage to even die for one’s beliefs if that were necessary. Effeminate cowardice was, for them, a great evil.

It is also striking however that the Ancients did not confuse such manly virtue with anger. Whether one turns to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, or later Clausewitz, there is consensus among the wise: a man may feel anger, but he must not be beholden to that dark emotion. One might respond that this reflects the bookish and other-worldly temperament of these philosophers, notwithstanding Marcus Aurelius and Clausewitz’s military experience. One finds however the same point made by that most practical man, Xenophon, perhaps the ultimate writer-soldier, in the Hellenica, his history of Greece. Describing the battle of Olynthus of 381 BC, Xenophon ascribes the Spartans’ defeat to the wrathful impetuosity of their commander, Teleutias. When some of Teleutias’ troops died in a first confrontation, he angrily ordered his forces to retaliate by charging the walls of the city, leading to their coming under missile fire and entrapped by enemy forces. Teleutias himself died in the battle. Xenophon says:

In my opinion . . . disasters such as these teach men this lesson with regard to anger: one ought not to punish even a slave in anger; for masters who have lost their tempers do more harm to themselves than they inflict; but in dealing with enemies it is utterly and entirely wrong to launch an attack under the influence of anger and without deliberation. Anger does not look ahead, whereas deliberation is just as concerned with avoiding harm oneself as with inflicting it on the enemy. (5.3.7)

I am the first to say that Western men have today so much to be angry about. Never before has masculinity been so shamed, never before has our people been so dishonored, never before has our entire genetic and cultural heritage been threatened with submersion and effacement. We heretics know that our genes are the supreme gift from our ancestors, shaped by their triumphant struggles for survival over hundreds of thousands of years. In our blood is contained their life, their spirit, their hard-won wisdom. How could one not be angry at the thoughtless or malicious prospect of extinguishing this heritage? As though our parents, grandparents, and indeed all our ancestors, had lived and struggled and died . . . for nothing. This is the supreme impiety.

This alone is cause enough for anger among us. There is another. The fact is that we are heretics and that our merely daring to express the truth as we see it provokes a great deal of fear and loathing in a large portion of society, who have bought into the established norms, the reigning postwar civil religion of raceless equality. This ideology, we now realize, is leading to the end of nations and the effacement of our breed of humanity. The expression of our beliefs leads many people — including colleagues, friends, and family — to express hostility towards us, and this also naturally makes us angry. We are then liable to retaliate in kind to our critics, to express contempt for the mainstream of society, identifying them as ignorant, uncultivated, pseudoscientific, brainwashed, intolerant, incoherent, etc.

In fact, there seems to me little to be gained for us in this escalatory cycle of anger. What good can come from an angry shouting match or humiliation of another’s ego? I suggest the wise men are right in saying that we must not cede to anger nor seek to provoke it. I believe we heretics are twice motivated in this respect. Firstly, if we cede to anger, we risk harming familial and social relations which are valuable (I have seen and experienced more-or-less severe cases of this). Secondly, the fact is that today as throughout history, an angry conflict between heretic and society is unlikely to be won by the former. The society may be bigoted but it is has far greater means of harming us (whether in terms of social alienation, lost jobs, defamation, open persecution, violence, etc). I say this even as I emphasize that in another sense we are in a position of strength: we hold a knowledge which others do not have and whose false beliefs must to some extent inevitably crumble with the decline of the mainstream media, the passing of the postwar generation, and the accumulation of facts on the ground.

Note, I am not saying that we should always avoid provoking anger in society, which is impossible. Rather, I am saying that our actions should not provoke unnecessary anger, should not be motivated by anger, and should be calculated carefully.

I believe the truth about race and heredity, and of the righteousness of Europeans’ fighting to preserve and cultivate their unique genetic and cultural heritage, will spread. The media-cultural gatekeepers, who either for reasons of ethnic hostility, effeminacy, or miseducation have been dragging our people on the downward path, have seen their power shattered. A new memetic reality is emerging, both good and bad, in which the ability of institutions to set norms is decreased, and individuals can seek out whatever culture resonates with them. In particular, the fraction of our people in whom both the scientific truth and ethnic self-interest resonate, will consolidate into an ever-stronger subculture and movement.

However, I am not confident we could ever return, if we wanted to, to the kind of spirited politics of the first half of the twentieth century. Lack of spirit is a very grave problem. For a society requires a certain amount of manly vigor to impose quality over equality and the common good over individual interest.

Prior to 1945, Germany, Italy, and Japan had adopted a trajectory in modernity quite different from the bourgeois democracies. The Axis powers were highly flawed in many respects. However, unlike the bourgeois democracies, they were self-consciously spirited regimes who forthrightly asserted the necessity of hierarchy, community, and struggle. They rejected the idea that one could have a world of peace and equality as one ignorant of the tragic quality of Nature and Life. (Concerning the liberal pretensions of non-authoritarianism and actual equality, which were the deep justification for annihilating the Axis, I will merely recall what Savitri Devi too rightly said: “Modern man is more of a moral coward. He wants the advantages of violent intolerance — which is only natural — but he shuns the responsibility of it.”)

The Axis powers could succumb to rage, one need only think of the brutality of the occupation of China and of Operation Barbarossa. At the same time, these states were not as sadistic, senseless, or megalomaniacal in their use of violence as Allied propaganda claimed. As Mahatma Gandhi himself said of Adolf Hitler in May 1941: “Whether one adopts the method of non-violence or of violence, one can succeed only if one has patience. Can we ever imagine what patience and self-control Hitler and others must be obliged to exercise? ”

In the event, however, the Germany, Italy, and Japan angered the bourgeois powers, particularly the United States of America, and were completely smashed as a result. The spirit of the Fascists, of old aristocratic Prussia and the revolutionary Party, and indeed of the samurai, all that manly virtue was powerless in the face of the sheer material power of the Allies: arming the Soviet Union (whose peoples also had great reserves of manliness left) and blanketing Europe and Japan in a rain of bombs culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The tremendous violence and upheaval of the Second World War was, in my view, a particularly intense and accelerated episode in a wider socio-historical movement: the decline of spiritedness in the age of technological and material progress. At least in a bourgeois society, technology enables both material comfort, and thus a decline in spiritedness, and the raw power to annihilate remaining spirited societies. Beyond the machinations of the hostile elite, France, Britain, and the United States’ decision in that war to side with communism over fascism represented a major milestone in modern, bourgeois Western man’s growing intolerance for forthright inequality and his preference for purely symbolic, false, and even bloodthirsty equality.

We must come to terms with this outcome. In terms of manly virtue, things are infinitely worse today than they were in the 1930s. The “Greatest Generation,” tragically, was already too weak to prevent subversion by a foreign hostile elite and being dragged down by a decadent WASP elite. And how much more effeminate we are than our grandfathers! What is the average Westerner’s life today? First in the classroom, then in the job or welfare office, then in retirement, with an ever-growing share of time spent staring at screens. No more farmers, workers, or soldiers here! And how many fathers? Today’s young men and women are more likely to still live as dependents with their parents and far, far less likely to head their own households [2] and care for their own children. What are our “Western citizens” today compared the Greek hoplite-citizen, the Roman paterfamilias, or indeed the old yeoman farmer, each responsible for his livelihood and family? Yes, “humanity” tends ever closer to the obese blobs of Wall-E or the embryos in The Matrix. Prophetic! (Not to speak of The Truman Show. All exploited by a misanthropic and parasitic hostile elite.)

Hence, both individually and socio-historically, we see the spirited element being crushed by the “liberal” element if they engage in an escalatory conflict of anger.

All this is very humbling. The lesson of all this is that a frontal assault is unlikely to yield results, but rather we must work with the flow of the universe, with our opponents’ weak points. To again use a historical analogy, the most direct way of destroying communism in 1945 would have been invade and destroy the Soviet Union. But, in hindsight at least, can we say this would have been the best approach or the most likely to succeed?

We would all love to openly speak the truth, the really whole truth, every day. But does this not betray a certain egalitarian naïveté? In that case: To what extent can we speak and live our truths without provoking unnecessary anger in our people? To what extent can we overcome anger in ourselves? Could we not then walk with an untold lightness in our step, basking in the truth, living it — neither hiding in cowardice nor exploding with rage — but radiating joy, that joy of being among the select few to be in on in some of the world’s greatest of secrets and of working to share those secrets among those we love who would dare to know.

I believe our movement is really in its bare infancy concerning the care for our souls and the cultivation of spiritual harmony. Even as hard-headed a man of science William Pierce, who had little time for superstition or revelation, was as times inspired to speak transcendental truth [3]. Let us indeed care for our souls every day with the universe, and indeed the unfathomable source of the universe, in mind. For whoever has embraced the whole, who has understood deep in his soul the inevitability of his death and his belonging to the cosmos, that person has no reason to know fear or wrath, but wields the sword and exhausts his life  with equanimity. The forces of darkness are powerless before such a man, a kamikaze for truth, just as the mercantile and democratic mob was, in the highest sense, powerless before Socrates. Perhaps it is too early. But I believe we might, every day, train and enlighten ourselves: sculpt your soul into a diamond, so that you may render your entire existence, that precious flicker of life, as a mindful sacrifice to the great rising fire which is the whole and the best of Life. Then, you will say with Pindar: “My soul, do not seek immortal life, but exhaust the realm of the possible.”