Lee Kwan Yew addresses ancient Grek aristocratic hetairia (fraternity)…plotting…

Nature knew of no right but the right of the stronger and the better. All the moral and political laws which were at variance with this natural law were nothing but an invention of the weak by which they tried to deprive the strong of their natural right and prerogative. The born aristocrat must shake off the fetters of these effeminate moral and political doctrines - and by force or deceit or whatever means he sees fit to use - regain the rule which is his by nature

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This simple and naive sound formula is from a not very profound article written in 1941 during height of war passions against Nazism. The writer was trying in understated way to draw analogy between ideas of ancient Greek anti-democratic factions and the doctrines of Hitler. How important was this view for Nazism actually? Nazism was, like most successful political movements, an incoherent mix of many programs, policies, slogans, half-philosophies, representing the need to keep together factions; or phrases and ideas accumulated over time to mobilize now this part of the population, now that, and so on. It’s mostly useless to judge the truth of a purely political philosophy from its texts; the intellectual base of Confucianism, as of Islam, not to speak of Marxism, are flimsy and rotten, but their weed-growth in the political world is strong. What does Schopenhauer say about Islam?

Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all countries and ages, in their splendour and spaciousness, testify to man's need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable, which follows close on the physical. The man of a satirical frame of mind could of course add that this need for metaphysics is a modest fellow content with meagre fare. Sometimes it lets itself be satisfied with clumsy fables and absurd fairy-tales. If only they are imprinted early enough, they are for man adequate explanations of his existence and supports for his morality.

Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need for countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. Such things show that the capacity for metaphysics does not go hand in hand with the need for it…

Even more so can be said about Marxism, which can never stand on intellectual merit alone and I think never intended to. A grotesque Oriental misreading of Hegelianism refracted through the prism of one man’s ethnic neuroses and resentments against his father: the most complete intellectual takedown of Marxism is in Cuddihy’s book The Ordeal of Civility, supported by unanswerable biographical detail from his letters and so on, which reveal his intentions in own words; but neither this nor its repeated failures when put in practice—unlike Fascism, which at least always has to be violently and quickly suppressed from outside, Marxism flamboyantly always rots from inside—but none of this will lessen its fortunes among a large portion of the new humanity. Because it answers a deep emotional and biological need in many types, so it will always be considered without regard either to inherent intellectual value or to consequences. And where Marxism is rejected by name because Marx himself or his theories fall out of favor temporarily, it’s replaced with still dumber, more incoherent theories from Marx’s successors, interpreted now in terms of gender, now of race, which show themselves flimsy loincloths over the gaping wound—the primal hatred of the defective for the better.

The decline of racial thinking in the European tradition, which was at bottom a revival of the ancient thinking in every way, the thinking about types, which means always biological types, this disappearance of thinking according to nature results in intellectual men and men of letters misunderstanding the role of thoughts, ideas and texts in political life; for example, Samuel Huntington with his idea of civilizational spheres defined mostly by texts, by the texts of Confucianism, or Buddhism, or Islam. If literary traditions alone determined the right demarcations of mankind, the Koran would be sufficient to understand, say, Afghanistan. And I suspect that many intellectuals believed this. In fact the Koran is insufficient to understand even professed Islamic radicals or terrorists; or the Islamic ulema in general. Nothing that reproduces itself through textual pedagogy ever is profound path to understand human character or deep alignments of mankind. This isn’t thought about man and nature, it’s superstition—level of penetration at that of college socialists who are still mad over Lumumba.

Nazism, as a pragmatic amalgamation, was then not defined only by the amoral aristocratic radicalism represented in quotation above, but for a while during the war and right after, this was felt to be its most dangerous idea. The formula is repeated in an even more naive and popular way in the 1948 Hitchcock movie Rope, where it is this time directly associated with the name of Hitler. This was then soon forgotten, or rather, covered up. I think the Allies would have preferred to ban Nietzsche in same way Machiavelli claims the early Christians would have liked to ban Latin and Greek—but they couldn’t and therefore had to preserve also the ideas and traditions of an antagonist. In same way, they couldn’t ban Nietzsche—it would have meant banning Schopenhauer as well, and then so much of European literature and art since the late 19th Century. Maybe they left this mass burning of books and art for a bolder and stupider future descendant. Regardless, having to still reckon with Nietzsche, an entirely defanged castrated version was peddled first of all to academia and then to intellectuals: an ironic, liberal skepticist whose antinomianism was to be strictly applied only to the “individual’s quest for self-realization,” but would otherwise leave egalitarianism and democracy mostly untouched. Distortions of Nietzsche and suppression of those of his followers who truly understood him were typical of Walter Kaufmann’s commentaries, full of half truths such as, “Nietzsche didn’t like nationalism”—which is true, he liked Pan-European racial supremacism. But the abounding distortions, the silent treatment and ultimately if necessary the censorship of the true meaning of Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism or amoralism began in full awareness of this; that it is a politically explosive claim.

There was an earlier frank expression of aristocratic radicalism in the ancient world. After the excesses of the Athenian democracy during the Peloponnesian War an oligarchic faction took over the city, under Plato’s uncle Critias. He and his friends believed and wrote things very much in the spirit of the simple formula: “right in nature is the advantage of the stronger. Laws, customs, and the myths around these were made by the many weak and their shamans to bind the stronger and better, against the way of nature.” Their government didn’t work out and they ended up killing a lot of people; maybe more Athenians were killed during their rule than died during decades of the war. That this event is somehow analogous to the anti-democratic reaction of Hitler is claimed also by Leo Strauss, who quoted Plato’s Seventh Letter when at beginning Plato says that Critias’ anti-democratic government, which he was at first enthusiastic about, ended up making the democracy seem like a golden age. So the moral homily goes, according to Strauss, to Hitchcock—or whoever wrote the screenplay—and a host of other academics and so on, “You see boys and girls if you play with Nietzschean aristocratic amoralist strength-worshipping fire, you get HITLER.” As to the path Strauss himself took from reaction to these events, I think the story of the joke he played on the American “Jewish intellectual proletariat” (to use his own words), a joke of which they still seem to be unaware, this story remains to be told. More interesting is the glimmer of realization here, among various writer around World War II, that the Western philosophical tradition as it ended up—as descent from Plato, Aristotle, the Socratics—developed in decades following an analogous ancient Hitler-like event, that is, in the shadow of its own demonic “Hitler” Critias; and therefore consists in much hedging, much what Nietzsche calls moral tartufferie, otherwise known as moralfaggotry bullshit. “We may say this, but…we are not like THAT evil guy!” Maybe this feels familiar. But later generations didn’t read it knowing this was the constraint under which “Western philosophy tradition” began.

I believe this formula of amoral aristocratic radicalism is the the key solution to all moral and political problems facing us. I am aware of the various theoretical counterarguments advanced against “might makes right” over time, most of which are sophistic; and it would be tedious to get into a back and forth over that. It’s funny though, some say this is already the ideological position of the ruling classes now. That we are ruled by bloodsucking (in some case literally) Globalists who believe in an aristocratic supremacist ideology that manifests itself as “Neoliberalism,” the aim of which is to reduce the world to a homogenous slavery under themselves. Some go even farther and say that through Operation Paperclip the Nazis actually took over the Deep State of America and the West, so that NATO is the Fourth Reich. Others don’t go that far but claim this “elite”—the likes of Bill Gates, Ursula von der Leyen, Gavin Newsom, and similar, are the “true Nietzscheans,” eugenicists who believe in their own supremacy, who live beyond good and evil, and so on. Alex Jones says mostly the same: the “elite” are child-eating vampires with ultimate provenance in Babylon, part of a thousands-years-old plot to subject mankind to demons; they are represented by the European noble and royal houses and by “Nazi eugenicists.” They are blamed simultaneously for the rapid increase in Third World population since the early 20th Century, for mass migrations into the West, but also for a “world depopulation” agenda. I’m so far describing the most vivid such positions but variations exist on both the left and significant parts of the right.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing, never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

This argument is a variation on one of the common attacks on amoralism or “the rule of the stronger,” that it is a tautology, or hard to define, or self-refuting. Thus if one hundred weak and cowardly men can subdue a stronger, smarter individual, this is taken to be a refutation, because an abstract “strength” still then technically ends up ruling. A funny but equally wrong restatement of this argument can be found in Borges’ story “German Requiem.” By this reasoning, the IMF, or international finance, or the banking “elite,” or the vague “Neoliberalism” are taken by these critics to be “the real Nietzscheans” simply because they are in power. By this reasoning “might makes right” becomes a doctrine of social stability: “authority is always just, respect authority.” It would be a strange thing if this trivial kind of Confucianism was the message of Nietzsche or Critias, who were seen as so shocking and explosive in their time. This is a doctrine of social and political instability.

Almost no society in history—almost—openly says it rules by strength and strength is good. This is an exception and a distinction. Almost all societies historically give many other reasons. They are morally good, or more equal, or more pious, or more holy. Nietzschean “might makes right” political skepticism punctures these self-righteous reasons. It shows social and political morality to be a word-game of womanly, priestly, and bureaucratic types of men to try to avoid a confrontation of quality in which individual excellences of supremacy—namely the traditional virtues of bravery, physical strength, and foresight—are given a chance to achieve political supremacy. A rare example of a society ruled by this principle might the Icelandic free state: a eugenic, truly eugenic state based on the duel and the natural right of the stronger. It might look like the Greek city state based on the similar principle of the agon, in this case the formal contest, the duel of natural superiority formalized, ritualized and somewhat pacified. It might look like any one of the traditional warrior junta-led Indo-European or Japanese ministates that have existed from time to time. In other words states that, respecting the intelligence and honor of free men, saw no reason to lie about the fact that their rule was based on strength or excellence, which, however then has to be manifested in acts and achievements to be believed and accepted. Indeed, contrary to what many think, “might makes right” isn’t purely a result of philosophical skepticism or nihilism; there are long traditional roots. Consider this from a Buddhist sutra in Tocharian, apparently still the language of steppe Conans:

The good fame of the strong spreads in the ten directions.

Reverence, respect, obeisance, and honor are to be attained through strength from everyone.

To be conquered quickly (are) enemies. To be obtained quickly (is) prosperity.

Of the strong (there are) great riches; of the strong (are) also many relatives.

Enemies bow down before the strong; to the strong come honors.

The strong (are) the protection of creatures; of the strong there is no fear.

Therefore strength (is) good (and) in every way the best (thing) in my opinion.

By means of strength thus, at an earlier time, the son of king Siddhartha, the Bodhisattva Sarvarthasiddha descended upon the ocean. He went to the island of jewels…

The rationalization arguments against aristocratic radicalism make sense as word games, “if a manikin like Chernenko or Bidan rule, they are the mighty by definition”; but everyone knows what is meant: that men like Nestor, Odysseus, Achilles, or even Diomedes or Agamemnon should rule, but not Thersites, not Helen, and probably not Paris, certainly not a product of the Confucian “meritocracy” or of the still-more-broken modern American one. That this is often not the case, that the weak rule by accident, by misplaced piety, or for any number of other reasons, is no contradiction. The strong are often subject to the weak, the better to the worse. But, as the doctrine states, a violation of this right of nature will have inevitable material consequences, whereas breaking the law of man doesn’t necessarily. There are natural costs to being ruled by the likes of Obama, Alberto Fernandez, Biden, Jens Stollenberg, or the other products of this system of elite selection, a process very different from the duel, the agon, or the roughly equivalent procedures in the few military aristocracies that have existed.

In Singapore a man of strength in every way—bravery, foresight, supreme foresight—ended up ruling and that country turned out probably the best way any modern state has, given its geographical and demographic constraints. It’s entirely possible that Lee Kuan Yew wouldn’t have come out on top though, but it would just have meant that Singapore would look now a lot more like Jakarta maybe. Again, there are material or natural consequences when the right to rule of the stronger is thwarted. I bring Lee Kuan Yew up because there is a certain video of him giving a famous speech, and you should watch not just the well-known end of this brief statement, but the beginning where he somewhat stumbles and seems not to express himself very well. Here is a founder of a state trying to put in words what is very hard to: trying to explain to new generation of Singaporean young, probably the elite young, that they have to find a way to “gel” together and believe in each other, or otherwise this whole project will come crashing down. The state and country is not a mysterious spirit that lives outside the quality and strength of its rulers; it can last for a while with very bad management, in the same way Thyssen-Krupp elevators can keep working for seventy years; but it will break sooner than otherwise if what Lee Kuan Yew calls for in the video doesn’t happen.

It’s hard to put into words, this, because…how do you get a core of men, an elite, to form together, to gel with each other, to be able then to act. This is very hard, maybe the hardest question. In Japan of the warring years, each warlord daimyo domain had two sets of laws. One was the House law, and it ruled the samurai, the retainers; the other was the people’s law, which was generally neglected and not of much concern. At village level and so on they could rule themselves as they saw fit. What was important was not the people’s law but the House law. In small facts like this is contained a lot of important truth for our situation now. The true act of political significance, of foundation: what is it that forms the elite and what is it that keeps it together. This has been my longest and only concern when thinking about politics, not just because of innate preference for elitism, but out of necessity. Many who talk about politics forget that neither we nor they rule a state or a country. We’re not in a position to make policy. The lives of the people are far outside our ability to rule, the reform of institutions outside our reach. We are simply powerless. The only relevant political question is how to forge a Party core, similar to the early Communist International, or to the factions that founded Zionism, and achieve similar success in founding a new order or a new state. Marxism and Zionism were in their beginnings ideologies for new elite formation, not for making policy for a country or a people; many forget this obvious crucial first step. Marxism and Zionism each attracted a certain kind of man. I find the doctrine hinted at here, of amoral aristocratic radicalism, to be an excellent identifying and rallying marker for a different type of man, and for a new counter-elite of our own time.

Our political-moral situation is in some ways very similar to that in which ancient Greek aristocrats in the age of the decline of the Classical era found themselves, and less so to that of the European right wing before World War II. In comparison to material situation of both we are in far more dire circumstances: both had significant sources of domestic or foreign support, while we begin from an utterly routed condition. But we are similar to the ancient Greek aristocrats of Critias’ time in the sense that we face an internal opponent who uses the language of morality, of egalitarianism and democracy, although now of course in a form far more mawkish and stomach-turning. We are like them in that we live in a time of exhaustion: exhaustion of all ideologies, creeds, beliefs, religions, institutions, states, countries, peoples. The exhaustion of our time is far more advanced, but for that reason it’s far more important for us never to place faith, trust or hope in any of these. If you are a nationalist, you must realize the nation you hold dear to is exhausted and “there’s nothing there” in a very concrete sense—if you place your hopes in “the nation” instead of your friends you will be let down; the same applies to those who hold dear to the race, or a faith, a religion, or a state. These are all exhausted now or corrupted. If they are to have a future they must have a new beginning, and that beginning can only be in what Lee Kuan Yew describes between the lines…that new beginning has to be in you and your friends. Simple and naive as it may sound, it was the inspiration that brought together aristocratic fraternities of Greece in its hour of decline, and of Nietzschean brotherhoods in the first part of the 20th Century. The doctrine of aristocratic amoral radicalism is one of new beginnings when the blood of ages is exhausted. It’s the only thing that can be the fuel and the key to restart other things—whether nations, states, or religions. But you may find in practice that it’s better to let some things perish and better form other new things. I promote these views because I see men of high power weighed down by moral baggage and duties to the lesser, who won’t and can’t return the benefit, and who will resent them; who put their trust, bodies, and energy in the service of dead states and institutions that will use them up. And for who it really is simply a conceptual or psychological baggage that holds them back from bonding in an effective junta with their friends and throwing off the shackles of these encrusted scleroses that have endured beyond their time. If you doubt me think of how well Trump or Bolsonaro would have acted and what they could have achieved if they weren’t held back by their pieties, misplaced loyalties, and old fashioned patriotism. They believed in a country or a faith or a system instead of their friends, they acted as governors and kings when they needed to act as fighters and revolutionaries.

It may be that the foundation of new states or the reform of religions is still outside anyone’s grasp for now, at least until some truly great crises come. But even until then it is possible for higher men to reclaim their own sovereignty and not let themselves be at the mercy of gynocracy—under whatever form. I hinted at this path in the last aphorism of my book, and it consists in the formation of mafias.

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I want to thank Claremont for the opportunity to reply to Michael Anton’s review of my book Bronze Age Mindset. Since at least 2015—but in fact from before Trump ever came along—there has been a tremendous intellectual disturbance or ferment online, among both the right and the left, that has escaped the notice or surveillance of the mainstream media, the literary and pundit-political establishment, and all those who imagine themselves gatekeepers of public taste and opinion. Trump’s campaign beginning in 2015 brought this countercultural phenomenon to view of the authorities, who have been struggling to understand it and contain it ever since.

What are the “crazy Pepe frog people” online all about? The terms “altright” and “altleft” have been designed as catch-all categories to describe what is going on, but they’re misleading. There have been a few inadequate attempts to understand this phenomenon before Anton’s article: for example Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies, or a few articles by lesser-known journalists. But Anton’s review of my book is the first big attempt, as far as I’m aware, to really try to understand what’s going on from a sympathetic point of view; which is to say, non-polemically and without the ulterior intention of getting us censored or of bringing the weight of the national security establishment on our backs. I think Anton, whatever our disagreements—and they seem to be considerable—must be praised for realizing that the phenomenon in question isn’t going away and cannot simply be suppressed, but must be understood.

What you are witnessing, I would like to tell the readers of Claremont, is the unraveling of the postwar American regime—or what is mendaciously called by its toadies the “liberal world order”—in a way that is far more thorough than the disturbances of the 1960’s, and with consequences that will be far more dire.

Mike Anton’s review is like crisp mountain air and a respite from the atmosphere of hysteria and denunciation that dominates the polite and educated sectors of American society since 2015. In academia, where the consideration of ideas, of unusual points of view, of political matters, is supposed to proceed objectively and by calm reason, the hysteria is in fact much more intense than in American society at large. This is true even among Mike Anton’s and Claremont’s own “sect,” that of the Straussians, which were supposed to be an exception.

Many I’ve met who call themselves Straussians were reduced to sputtering indignation by the arrival of Trump, incomprehension of what was going on, and desperation that the grift industry that has grown around such people as Bill Kristol was going to come to an end. Many of the younger Straussians are fanatical believers in the public religion of the regime—they’ve internalized “antiracism,” hysteria about “anti-Semitism,” and similar taboos—and their own professors are scared to tell them otherwise even in private. They are regime toadies and kapos, much like the journalists attacking me; or in the case of the older professors, they are simply scared into silence—often shamefully, and failing to make use of their tenure.

It is a great credit to Anton and to Claremont that they have the courage to try to understand this countercultural moment in a spirit of objective consideration, not emotional denunciation.

If I want to emphasize one thing here in my response: I must correct the impression Anton gives in his review—flattering to myself though it may be—that Bronze Age Pervert is the engine of the online disturbances that have been loosely called the “altright” since 2015. In some sense I feel bad because my book has made it easy for Anton and for the audience of Claremont, or otherwise for mainstream and traditional conservatives, to try to cordon off this phenomenon into one that is easier for them to understand: that of “right wing nihilism,” or the “return of Nietzscheanism.”

Nietzsche, maybe more than Marx, is the big bogeyman of the traditional conservative and classical liberal: Nietzsche’s evil influence, the return of “neopaganism,” of “right wing atheism,” is said by some, including Allan Bloom, to be the driving thought even of the modern new left. So here then, you may think, finally is a chance to confront an old enemy that has returned unmasked.

The outrageous Bronze Age Pervert may not be a Nazi, but he’s an unapologetic “German nihilist” of the old kind, and the internet has given him free hand to corrupt the youth. Who knew that if you merely represent the thought of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer in a fun way it would find such an audience? Some things, it seems, are always green.

You could be led to think so, and indeed there is much in my book that exists entirely within that tradition—but you would be wrong. The phenomenon you fear would have happened, and would continue one way or another, with or without me. It is important to understand what it is, something Anton only just touches on in his review.

The “altright” doesn’t exist and has nothing to do with the media representations of it—really attempts to redefine it and control it—as a form of “white nationalism,” “skinheads,” the various public figures they’ve tried to anoint as its leaders (only to make them ridiculous and tear them down), or even—and here is what is crucial to understand—just “white males” or the just “right wing.” The same phenomenon is taking place on the left, and there is much more crossover than older people realize: there is much more involvement also by nonwhite youth and particularly by Latino, Asian, and multiracial youth in this phenomenon than people want to admit. I’m not saying this to run away from a charge of “racism,” but to try to show you that you can’t, and won’t be able to, contain what is happening now by typecasting it as an “angry young white male” thing. That is wishful thinking on your part, if you believe it.

What is going on now is a widespread rejection of the ruling authorities and their beliefs, on the part primarily, but not only, of the American youth at large. This is similar to the rejection of communism by dissidents and youth in the Soviet bloc in the 1970’s and 80’s, and driven by similar causes.

Since 2013 at least, an entire social biome of communication has emerged online outside the control and view of authorities—a space where youth developed a highly individual form of visual communication in images and memes that evolve upon each other, and that present rather high barriers of entry to outsiders. Readers of Claremont must understand: my book is only one part of this “biome” that has surfaced to public view. The reach of this online counterculture is far beyond any one political or ethnic group, but has spread into youth pop culture at large by now.

Insofar as my book is representative of this phenomenon, it is only in the sense that unvarnished, unedited Nietzscheanism, “right wing nihilism,” has been one of the opinions absolutely forbidden by the postwar liberal world order. It has resurfaced in the space of freedom provided recently by the internet, and has spread there with some speed, the way it always will when it is not repressed. But it is hardly the only view present in this world, or even the dominant view. Nor, as I keep repeating, is this phenomenon—I lack a better word to call it—reducible to any view or set of views, but it represents rather a youth counterculture that has rejected the controlled, staged, edited and therefore mendacious form of public discourse that dominates America and the West right now.

Those among you who chose Trump because at least here was a man who wasn’t a marionette stuffed full of consultant-approved public relations talking points should be able to sympathize. It is the same, but on a much bigger scale.

The failure of the conservative establishment to address the insanity of the new left is the chief negative cause of the phenomenon or movement in question. The new left has alienated large swathes of younger men especially who otherwise would have been sympathetic to its causes. Many voted for Obama and were very much of the “green” faction for example. They weren’t doing so because they were antifa or communists or radicals—in temperament, background, profession, many would have probably been young Republicans before George W. Bush—but did so because the Republican party of the time, the party of Romney and Paul Ryan, was bankrupt in ideas and spirit and had nothing to offer. Obama was promising accountability for the extremely destructive financial crisis of 2008 and for the Iraq War before that. But he didn’t deliver; he became instead a protector of a corrupt ruling class, and a racial demagogue.

The anti-male and anti-White rhetoric of the new left is extreme. The racial attacks on whites in particular approaches exterminationist propaganda seen only in, e.g., the Hutu against the Tutsi in 1990’s Rwanda.

For anyone who doubts this, consider the following few examples, which are far from complete:

A columnist for the Huffington Post, a major leftist publication, wrote an article titled “Towards a Concept of White Wounding,” apparently calling for racial violence.

The New York Times hired a columnist who had repeated vulgar racial attacks on whites, calling “whiteness” “awful,” whites “only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” expressed great joy at “being cruel to old white men,” and declared that whites will be “extinct soon.” The Paper of Record stood by her when these attacks were exposed, and only quietly let her go recently when she supported a boycott against her own employer.

Symone Sanders, currently a senior adviser to Joe Biden and previously the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, mocked a disabled white teenager who was tortured on camera in 2017 by a black mob screaming “Fuck Trump! Fuck white people!” and otherwise called cases of antiwhite political violence “a protest.”

The New York Times—again, hardly an unknown blog—published an opinion column by Michelle Goldberg with the eliminationist title “We Can Replace Them,” ostensibly against “white nationalism,” but in fact directed against a demographic white majority as such, which the author seeks to replace with nonwhites for what she imagines to be political advantage.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, a major organ of the Left that pushes the security establishment’s Russia Hoax conspiracy theories, called this summer for “a literal or figurative war” on whites and a “race war” that the DNC must be willing to get “Lincolnesque” about.

Major leftist and establishment media such as Newsweek publish cover stories titled “Is Your Baby Racist”; major publishers promote books titled White Fragility, or The Dying of Whiteness, and CNN—not white nationalist outlets—runs graphics on “The Vanishing White American.”

Again, all this is par for the course these days; as everyone knows, state-funded universities routinely hold “white privilege” seminars and orientation sessions, promoting a concept the plain meaning of which is to dispossess people of property and civil rights based on their biology.

This “Interahamwe Left” should have been opposed by mainstream conservatives and even classical liberals, and it is indeed possible to oppose this vicious and exterminationist hatred on purely liberal and racially egalitarian grounds. But this didn’t happen, which puts the lie to the claims that traditional conservatives care about equality under the law or about any of the ideals they claim to espouse. Instead, we see the absurd phenomenon of conservatives who joined in this hatred.

National Review of all places has repeatedly published eliminationist rhetoric, the most notable example being Kevin Williamson’s notorious piece arguing quite plainly for an end to the white working class. Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol are both on record either objecting, in far leftist style, to the concept of “whiteness,” or otherwise arguing for its demographic replacement. Marco Rubio’s top advisors have called for the same. In the summer of 2015, long before there was any significant “altright” “Pepe” antisemitism or “trolling” of neocons, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, and Bill Kristol, all supposedly “on the right,” engaged in vile racial language—“rednecks,” etc.—to describe Trump supporters. Little remembered is John McCain slandering his own constituents in Arizona, in the most vulgar terms, which preceded Trump’s rhetorical reprisals.

Whether out of loyalty to the generally leftist social sphere in which the conservative intellectual establishment lives, or out of simple fear, mainstream and traditional conservatives have completely discredited themselves by failing to oppose the violent racial hatred and other forms of unprecedented insanity coming from the new left.

I haven’t even yet touched the conservative powerlessness when it came to stopping the destruction of the family; or the new push for the sexualization and grooming of children on behalf of transsexualism and other supposed “sexual identities.” This one crucial matter extends the appeal of the “frog people” far beyond that of any one racial or ethnic group.

Conservatives pretend to be able to recruit Latinos to their cause with the degraded ideology of Jack Kemp but Latinos see David French call forced “drag queen” visits for schoolchildren “part of free life,” and want nothing to do with it. We are far better at recruiting Latinos, and as the example of Bolsonaro among many others shows, this new, energetic and popular form of the right is a Latino movement, and it is the future.

If we listen to the rhetoric of the left, we can only guess that further restrictions of speech and life, both de facto and de jure, are coming. What is the conservative plan to deal with any of this? The “youth”—but not only the youth, and certainly not only the white youth, although they are the most affected—has seen only capitulation from the conservative establishment, or otherwise outright collaboration. What vision of life do mainstream conservatives have to offer?

Many seem to think that success for example in a white collar job is the key to solving this problem of discontent with the new American regime. But strangely enough today it is the large corporations, Big Tech, high finance and other white collar institutions that promote the most restrictive and aggressive leftism. Conservative ideology, especially that pushed by the incompetent but much-hyped Paul Ryan, rather slavishly seems to serve and support the large monopolies that promote mass immigration, mass surveillance, and the most bizarre type of speech restrictions, not only on its own employees, but now on American society at large. Many are unapologetically censoring Americans and otherwise abusing their civil rights on behalf of foreign powers—Russia, however, generally not being one of these.

And so to sum up the reasons “this frog thing” is going on: because of the smothering restrictions on speech and life, because of absurd, violent and eliminationist rhetoric, many are reasonably reacting and seeking for guidance outside a conservatism that fails to offer any meaningful opposition. This explains in large part the chief negative cause of the phenomenon Anton is trying to explain.

The Internet itself, in providing a space for thought and speech outside the tightly controlled and fake media and academic machine, has provided the positive cause. These thoughts and words extend well beyond “Bronze Age Pervert” or my book, and would exist regardless.

But Anton chose to review this counterculture in the context of my book. And insofar as he addresses the content of my book, and my intention, I find it to be in large part a good and fair review.

If I would have emphasized anything else to people who had never heard of my book, it is that it deals with a large range of topics, from history to literature to my own personal experiences. It is a book written primarily for fun and entertainment: it’s not a philosophical treatise, and it’s not a political manifesto. I wrote it in a mood of revelry and laughter, these being the sentiments principally to be found also in the phenomenon of dissent that Anton seeks to understand.

The media adopts humorlessness as a strategy and pretends to see policy proposals when we engage in fun and trolling—you have doubtless seen this many times when they misrepresent Trump’s humor. They distort what is primarily a movement of irreverence and satire, and if there’s anything I wish to add to Anton’s review of my book proper, it is this: it is a book of laughter.

Now it is true that both Nietzsche and Machiavelli—who Anton states (correctly) are big inspirations for my book—said that the best philosophy should be able to be comedy and laughter as well. But I think I’ve stated my ideas there in the way I want them to appear, and don’t want to elaborate much more on them as such. I will add only that Nietzsche says somewhere that it is the duty of a philosopher to promote precisely those virtues or tendencies of spirit that are most lacking in one’s own time, and even to exaggerate them in the reader, much like a pianist will practice on a piano with heavier-than-normal keys. Of course to be able to do this, you have to have the courage to stand against the religion of the time, which almost no one ever does.

The mention of the religion of our time, which one might think is the unquestioned and absolute worship of human equality, brings me to Anton’s challenge at the end of his review: Anton rightly says that in calling my own book an exhortation and not philosophy, I give myself a pass from dealing with the timeless questions of the best regime; of how honors, goods, and offices are to be apportioned under the best government.

If I read him right, he seems to think that the American regime is the best, especially that conceived by the Founders. He may or may not be right, but he should admit that this form of government would today be called white supremacism or white nationalism, as would Lincoln’s later revision of it, as would indeed the America of FDR and Truman, not to speak of Theodore Roosevelt. Regardless, even the reestablishment of the America of the 1970’s or 80’s is less likely than conservative intellectuals think.

The problem Anton or other conservatives must face isn’t that my audience, or the “youth” in question doesn’t accept the principles of the American Founding, but that the left and thereby a large part of the establishment rejected these principles long ago. The left has been saying exactly what they plan to do for decades. They want to destroy your country, instill a death wish in the white population, set majorities against market-dominant minorities, atomize everyone: the British plan in Malaysia and a few other places but now applied domestically within a country.

But the conservatives didn’t do anything, or anything effective, to counter the left—this is the problem. Many conservatives would rather blame people who point out the left’s explicit intentions. If Hillary Clinton says that Merkel is her role model a year after Merkel made the youth of Germany a minority in their own country, and if we point this out and support any candidate who might prevent this unprecedented madness, it is mainstream conservatives who call us Nazis and worse simply for pointing out the left’s stated goals.

I would be ready to concede that I wouldn’t have an audience, or a much smaller one, if this was the America of the Founding or even that of the 1980’s. Your problem isn’t my audience, but that your analysis and words and ideas are so far from reality that you don’t even see the reasons why I have this audience in the first place.

The left completely abandoned Americanism in the 1960’s; at this point they’ve also abandoned biological reality. Vitalism is all that is left against their demented biological Leninism. Encouraging health, normality, and physical nobility against their celebration of deformity, obesity, and sexual catamitism must be one of the basic functions of conservatism in our time. It is one of the reasons my message is powerful among many who are fed up with the left’s gospel of wretchedness: what is your plan to take that on?

There is a point at which, if you believe in the reality of nature, you must be ready to talk about actual nature as it exists in the world and not just “Nature” as a safe abstraction.

If indeed the religion of our time is the belief in unquestioned human equality, the revolution in the biological sciences, genetics, and population genetics currently taking place will soon completely cut off its legs, even in public. In large part this has already happened, and no one believes in any real biological human equality any longer.

I’m aware that the doctrine Anton refers to, that of the Founders or even of classical liberalism, doesn’t promote an idea of absolute biological human equality, or also “equality of outcome.” But the ideology of the present regime does…in rhetoric if not in practice, and claims that any outcome that leads to group stratification is not organic but must be the result of convoluted conspiracies (“white privilege”). This puts Anton and the classical liberal in a difficult position.

It appears that the previous order was based not just on abstract ideas about rights or justice, but on a very old and firm and very Anglo culture of fair play. And on an agreement that it was not the role of the ruling class to mobilize and demagogue the lower classes against the middle. That’s all gone now, so what is the lover of the Founders’ vision to do?

We are now faced with a left that has embraced a dialectic of racial and class destruction in a context where belief in absolute human equality is professed at the same time that no one believes in it anymore. I don’t see how the vision of the Founders, widely dismissed as white nationalism even by “conservatives” when presented with its reality, has more political potential in our situation than Bronze Age perversion would.

In any case, I find Anton’s demand that I engage in a debate about the rightness or wrongness of the ideas behind the American Founding rather unfair and, for the reasons stated above, somewhat besides the point. If my book doesn’t speak about forms of government it is because that’s not its intention, nor my aim right now.

When Andrei Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn were dissidents against the Soviet regime, when other dissidents wrote their samizdat, would it have been fair to ask them for a complete and total accounting of their vision of the best form of government? The opposition to Soviet tyranny sought regime change, and it would have been unfair and even senseless to demand of them a precise accounting of, say, their vision of what a post-Soviet division of powers or notion of rights might look like. Dissent against the Soviet system united liberals, reactionaries, the religious, the secular, monarchists, ethnonationalists, cosmopolitans, Russians, Latvians, Bashkirs, and any other things besides. They all had one immediate aim.

The purpose of my book is to provide samizdat in the tradition of what Solzhenitsyn was doing in the Soviet Union and to bring into view, unapologetically, the reality of nature that is denied by our regime; a reality that it seeks to repress, increasingly with coercion and violence.

If you fail to see that you live in the Soviet Union of the 1970’s or 1980’s, or rather something slightly even more repressive than the Eastern Bloc of that time, it may be you don’t know about the threats, financial ruin, and mob violence that Trump supporters and anyone really who steps out of line has been subject to since at least 2016—but actually since some time before that.

To give just one egregious example, there is a group, Hamilton 68, that is a plain front for the American security state establishment, dedicated to calling Americans who criticize the state of things Russian agents, and to forcing their identities to be revealed so as to subject them to violent harassment and physical attacks. This is the same function that the figure of the sycophant had in ancient Greece. These attacks are carried out by so-called “antifa,” but what in fact appears to be the establishment’s paramilitary force—the last Democrat vice presidential candidate’s son was a violent member (an impossibility as a “coincidence” for anyone remotely familiar with how Washington DC works)—abetted by police “stand-downs,” as at San Jose in 2016.

This kind of state-supported mob violence is beyond what existed in say, the Czechoslovakia, Poland or Yugoslavia of the 1980’s. But it is supported even by major Republican Senators like Marco Rubio, who have openly excused antifa mob violence for political purposes. Mitt Romney has romanticized them as well. This doesn’t even begin to cover the financial ruin that regime critics face which, again, exceeds the punishment meted out to average dissidents in the Eastern Bloc by the 1980’s, both in frequency and intensity.

The people targeted by Hamilton 68, CNN, and similar “private” organs for this kind of vigilante mob violence and harassment aren’t just “skinheads,” but include, e.g., grandmothers from Florida who happened to support Trump on Facebook in 2016.

It is, I repeat, the tyranny of our time that my book seeks to oppose, and it is written in the spirit of Solzhenitsyn, one of my heroes, who stood against a similar tyranny.

My response to Anton’s challenge regarding the best regime is that my book isn’t intended to provide a complete elaboration of this alternative or a philosophical treatise regarding the best form of government. I would indeed be happy with a state of things where that frank discussion could be carried out, even in private. That isn’t the America or the West of today.

J’accuse

Incisive insight from the top minds of these isles.

I once argue long time ago with moron who comment on science fictions, who claimed worlds imagined by Star Wars and Dune were “betrayals” of science fiction as a genre because reactionary. Science fiction future is supposed to be rid of any mythic, aristocratic or monarchic or heroic even archetypes, except maybe to show them in limited or distorted form as antagonists. His alternative was Star Trek which for some reason he insisted depicted a “diamond-shaped society” as opposed to the “pyramid-shaped” “traditional” one depicted in those corruptions of the Reddit promise of science fiction utopia. He wanted to see a future rationalist, egalitarian, ethical, and scientific. It’s useful to think about some images of utopia and dystopia from imagination modern man.

You consider a few observation on science fictions: in movie Interstellar there is a communitarian soft tyranny of women; teacher decides course of life in service to community—female permission and approval for path of life is said to be necessary to survival. Man’s historical desires for space travel and out-reaching technological progress are rewritten as vicious and as cause of crisis. Life becomes mere survival and therefore falls into the spiritual clutch of women, community, and administrative consensus behavior. Faced with slow-moving extinction crisis, mankind cowers in defensive coil: the behavior of another man faced with mere survival, of a Crusoe, who is his own island and reason, who transcends and conquers a much starker condition of mere survival, this image becomes alien and hated. Man’s Faustian and aristocratic aloneness and longing for space, in this case literal space travel, is deemed immoral and in conflict with social existence and community demand: “we need you here as agriculture scientists, extending this bare existence by a little bit. We are a society. No man is an island.” And they might add—and no man has the right to tame an island by himself.

An equivalent dystopia is in episode of Star Trek Next Generation where Captain Picard is stranded on planet with a village ruled by matriarchal society that has abandoned technology—but maybe not really abandoned it. It has kept enough to allow for relatively comfortable agricultural life under rule of a woman, without war or its needs. Enough technology existed at the time of spacecraft crash to preserve it in stasis under the unnatural rule of woman: this has always been one of my biggest concerns about all so-called “traditionalist” and communitarian solutions to modern dissatisfaction by the way. That it would identify the wrong cause and freeze a state precisely into those aspects most abhorrent about modern life. This is a return to tradition where you could say liberal individualism has been completely abandoned for the needs of the community. Picard’s desire to search for scientific solutions and a way out is seen, again, as threatening to the community consensus and the daily work of mere life necessary for survival; when he rebels, he is put in hot torture room like POW in Bridge Over the River Kwai.

The moral code of this Star Trek village on planet is similar to the society in Interstellar and both I think reflect not only the most likely dystopia toward which man is headed, but already how things mostly are. Another example of this dystopia is in movie The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio and middle-aged hippie woman with rough pussy. This is not science fiction but is nice half-fantasy utopia revealed as dystopia, but where the same woman-led social-based existence smothers men, aloneness, and any longing for greatness: here in the name of a communitarian hedonism, but it was never clear why the communitarian “traditionalist” critics of liberal individualist hedonism believe that there can’t exist an equally empty community-based version of the same.

In our day the rationalist leftists who were hoping for a Star Trek future maybe see themselves that the greatest danger to its unfolding isn’t a “mythical, religious or aristocratic” reactionary fascism, but just this small-time Rousseauean communitarianism which has already deemed science, mathematics and science itself white supremacist constructs. For all the foot-stomping about “belief in Science,” this communitarian anti-scientific bent has been inherent in the left at least from the time of Rousseau: and Rousseau himself of course was only trying to find modern and sophisticated reasons to support the Republic of Pigs from Plato’s Republic, which of course is the “real Republic” of that book; it is abandoned early in the dialogue only because of Plato’s aristocratic interlocutors, who no longer exist today. But anyway: I watch also movie First Man recently and there they depict chant of minority BIPOC, about how space race and whitey on the Moon is incompatible with dem programs and more food for struggling nonwhites. When I saw this I thought it was an unambiguously white supremacist scene, to contrast in explicit racial terms the white man’s Faustian longing and scientific progress with minorities’ earthbound desire merely to fill belly. But of course that’s not how the scene was intended. It was, at least, lip service to the ruling morality of our time, which is already, in full bloom, that depicted in Interstellar and in the dystopias described above. When Bezos or Musk want to go to space, they are confronted with the same outrage about the immorality of space travel in view of the suffering of trans people of color—from their side, not from Heideggerians who worry about technological progress or about “denaturing of substance,” or whatever else the left rationalists imagined about the supposed opposition to Science. In this not to speak of the biological sciences and genetics, where even liberals are united in being retrograde, the left finds that opposition to one of its utopian futures comes from one of its other left-utopian factions; and as always happens, this internal incoherence and struggle is then blamed on a retrograde reactionary right. It’s amusing this is happening too now in vaccine and WuhanBATGRIDS debates: the majority of abstainers are blacks possessed by grotesque conspiracy theories, but this is blamed on something else.

II

The internal debates of the left’s factions—liberals, left-rationalist industrialist Marxists, communitarian social-supremacist hive matriarchalists (they go by other names, but this is what they are)—are interesting, but it’s not my part to argue for one of them. I am just concerned that some of my friends on the right don’t see clearly the danger some of the older left itself sees (though it is forced to distort it for popular viewing). The likely if not the necessary future of mankind is held within the dominant morality of the present, and this is very much the kind of small-time woman-centered communitarianism depicted in these utopias or dystopias, where man uses technology already available to fix himself to a survival-based way of life close to his imagined “animal self” and then freezes there. I am much more concerned about this than about fantasies of “hypercapitalism” and the evils of “liberal individualism,” which this communitarianism also rejects. The dystopia of Elysium is far less likely—Haiti worldwide without any orbital stations is more likely—and the dystopia of Blade Runner is in my view a utopia of freedom and possibility compared to what we already have right now. I am even more concerned about an “orderly, clean and prosperous Haiti,” however, and at least since 2017 but actually from long before, there are factions on the right who unfortunately believe that small-time communitarian “social-based” existence is the most anti-establishment thing imaginable, that all that would be necessary for it to qualify as “right wing” or “traditionalist” would be to make it have an ethnic character, or to put some religious bells and whistles on this kind of primitive socialism. For example, during this pandemic there have been outspoken “traditionalists” who have, without giving any further reason, invoked “the herd” or man’s innate “social duties” as justification for restriction of freedom and imposition of what looks like medical tyranny in the name of safety and continuation of mere life: significant factions on the right, or who impersonate the right, are poisoned by the same mammy “social” morality briefly described above. I am writing this short essay in part to warn frends—there is no destination on this path but a spiritual Haiti.

The economic sides of this argument are too long to address here; I never thought problem of modernity or problem of man in general is primarily economic or will ever have economic solution. But I will say brief: that America or the West is “hypercapitalist” is one of the most absurd claims floating around now. I don’t want to enter these debates very much because it would make me take, however temporarily, the side of “classical liberals.” I don’t believe in liberalism of whatever kind because it is, as Nietzsche say, itself a path to the herd-animalization of man. I believe in Fascism or “something worse” and I can say so unambiguously because, unlike others, I have given up long ago all hope of being part of the respectable world or winning a respectable audience. I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics. I am indifferent to economics as long as economic activity is subordinate to the interest of this caste and their project. In pure capitalism, state and society are subordinate to “the economy,” which is probably borderless; but in socialism also the state and society are subordinate to the economy, which is simply restructured as the administrative meeting of material needs rather than something based on profit. Schopenhauer understood very well the end-goals of socialists:

“…the State is essentially a mere institution for protecting all from external attacks and individuals from attacks within its borders. It follows from this that the necessity of the State rests ultimately on the acknowledged injustice and unfairness of the human race. In the absence of injustice, no one would think of a State, for none would need to fear any encroachment of his rights and a mere union against the attacks of wild animals or the elements would bear only a feeble resemblance to the State. From this point of view, we clearly see the narrow-mindedness and shallowness of the philosophasters who in pompous phrases represent the State as the highest purpose and the flower of human existence and thus furnish an apotheosis of Philistinism…But never has this false delusion been made more mendaciously and impudently than by the demagogues of the present day… They think that, if only governments did their duty, there would be heaven on earth, in other words, that all could gorge, guzzle, propagate, and die without effort and anxiety. For this is the paraphrase of their “end in itself”; this is the goal of the “endless progress of mankind” which they are never tired of proclaiming in pompous phrases.”

You no need agree with Schopenhauer’s Hobbesian and arguably liberal conception of the origin of the State—it would in any case be a “liberalism” very different from the one now or even that of 1848—to see he’s right about leftoids and socialists of all varieties. For all its glorification of State-being and sociality, the end purposes of all Marxism and leftism is in this material plenty, which is simply to be arrived at in a different way from that promised by capitalist society; but both agree on Homo economicus so both are equivalent in spiritual aims. It is only Nietzsche who in modern world shows a way out of this.

The right-wing critics of “capitalism” now mostly don’t take this approach: they only have criticisms of “hypercapitalism,” but they don’t attack socialism, they even embrace it. They believe the philosophy of every collitch faculty lounge, the thought promoted by media and Hollyweird over decades as anti-establishment is actually anti-establishment. They mainly arrive at this by pointing out that there are big corporations, that these make a lot of profit, and that they often push Wokeness, leftism, anti-whyteness and open borders and other such things. This is so, but the straightforward solution to this isn’t higher corporate tax rates or more redistribution, which these corporations in any case would be able to weather and which wouldn’t affect the crucial question of their power over government: the solution is that of Putin, a champion of the awakened people to humble the oligarchs. For whatever reason, this solution is never entertained. There is only desire to talk about impersonal systems, forces, Capital, Neoliberalism—but never names. Other path to see: these types in their theoretical talk of Capital, international finance, impersonal irresponsible corporations and so forth, never propose the alternative of national economy, only socialist centralized economy. Not once have I seen these types—which includes much of Populist Inc and the Santorum wing of the GOP, which is quite old—never do you see them make sensible proposals like the Japanese law that makes it hard for chains to operate in cities but easy for mom and pop’s to do so. I’ve never seen them propose regulations that would tax, degrade, or make it difficult for large international corporations, but easy for small businesses, family farms, small business that produces material goods nationally, and such. Almost never do they embrace protectionism or tariffs. Their solutions are always on the line of “child tax credits” or “medicare for all”—actually quite old proposals among some parts of the GOP, and which would do nothing whatsoever to address the capture of the economy and the sovereignty by the alliance of particular oligarchs (with particular names) and elements in government and media. I can only draw the conclusion that where these are not actually GOP consultants in disguise—and I know of at least a handful of cases where this is what’s going on—they are sincere socialists in their beliefs, and unsincere in their desire to repackage old Marxism in a pill palatable to what they see as the “altright.”

III

The best way to see the emptiness of the supposedly right-wing critics of capitalism is however in their understanding of “sociality.” Their line of thinking goes somewhat like this: “premodern society placed family, group, tribe, society over the individual. Liberal individualism came along and spoiled this. Its primary method in destroying communities and traditions and in promoting open borders has been economic. It is Capital that destroyed Tradition. Therefore all traditional societies were socialist, and we need to adopt socialist policies to return to tradition. Socialism is right wing. Religious traditionalist socialism is the solution to modern political and spiritual problems.” Once in a bar I told people I was monarchist; I was asked if “this is like Game of Thrones. Is this socialism?” I laughed but this is about the level of thinking also on much of the communitarian “right” today. It’s simply the inverse of Jonah Goldberg who believes De Maistre was left-wing because he opposed the universalism of the French Revolution. It is a professor, or more than one, indignantly informing me that Nietzsche could not have been right wing because he opposed Capitalism. This childish ignorance has been either embraced or capitalized on by much of this communitarian “right”—it’s not even correct to call it populist. To mock its simplifications and distortions would take long time; it’s an old academic trick though. Even before this, Quentin Skinner and that whole school of thought tried to pretend premodern civic republicanism was actually Marxism and democratic socialism in disguise, and to resell these under the name of Machiavelli when the name of Marx had been too tarnished as a prophet. I was surprised but not shocked by libertarians and Kochlings who tried to claim the message of my own book was “tribalism”: everyone has been mindfucked by the “individualism equals free market libertarianism” meme. I suppose it’s enough to say modern intellectual “discourse” is low-IQ pedantry, so ignore it.

The “traditionalist” critics of Capitalism miss one important thing about premodern tradition: its “sociality” or whatever resemblance to socialism was a consequence and maybe a tool, but not a cause and not an end goal. You must read Nietzsche “On the Thousand and One Goals” from Zarathustra to understand that premodern peoples were founded by prophets, and were directed each toward a higher task and aim beyond themselves and therefore beyond sociality or mere group-existence: for Persians it was ride well, shoot well, tell the truth (and therefore world-conquest). For Greks it was to excell all other men in conquest personaly; for Jews to honor mother and father. For Germans to command and obey. And many such things. But this implies a hierarchy: all commitment to higher goals will mean some types of men are prized above others, given more honors, given rule, or other kinds of eminence. All premodern tradition is aristocratic and hierarchical, not egalitarian, at least not after it rises above the mammy-village level, at least not once it’s the tradition of any great culture worth emulating: whether it gives eminence to the pious man, or the warrior, and so forth, this is different question. But it is the question. The supposed precedence of the group over the individual, of society over the individual, is a distortion when us moderns, poisoned by liberal economic thought and psychology, look back on those great projects of breeding, the different great world cultures, which didn’t understand themselves in these terms. And which would have shuddered to be called something like “communitarian,” which places simply the benighted village above the man, domestication above freedom, with no justification and no end besides simply just this sociality. Such peoples did exist, but they became slaves and serfs. And the reason modern “traditionalists” who pose as anti-capitalists call themselves “communitarians,” and refuse to place anything other than sociality or “community” as the end aim, is because they know or feel that it would very quickly lead to hierarchy or some form of aristocracy if such aim were genuinely pursued. But their aim is egalitarian in the end. Which is, as I keep say, these are communists in disguise, or maybe even confused communists. Where they pretend to be religious they blaspheme: the purpose of Christianity was not “community” or sociality, but the salvation of the soul, and it placed spiritual men in position of dominion in the feudal military society of the Middle Ages. The “socialist Christian” is a weirdo pervert who needs to repackage his worship of full bellies and momma’s polenta in terms of Christ’s bloody sacrifice, which he can’t begin to understand.

An awakening came to the attention of the world with the campaigns of Brexit and Trump around 2015-6, but this awakening had been happening in secret for some time: it’s not strictly speaking an awakening of youth only, but of all men who wish to think freely. This awakening started some time in the 2000’s on one hand because of the manifest exhaustion of postwar liberalism, but on the other simply because the Internet allowed freedom of speech without scolding gatekeepers for the first time in more than fifty years. World War Two will in some centuries not be remembered as it is now by hysterical people: it will be seen that the Nazis, whatever their value good or bad, were nevertheless by chance the leaders of various European strains and factions. It’s not only Nazis in other words who lost World War Two, but, for better or worse, Europe. And with this loss a variety of ways of thinking, not just Nazi, were thereafter suppressed. In the case of Nietzsche, where his thought had been so influential not only politically but among literary people and artists, and where it was not possible to suppress him, a massive campaign of distortion began in media and academia. With the opening of the Internet, by early 2000’s and very fast after that, these strains of thought, which the “liberal world order” had crushed or lied about for decades, very quickly were rediscovered by free thinkers and lovers of truth, and very quickly made progress. Because their truth is manifest. It is not only the thought of Nietzsche, but Nietzsche, the real Nietzsche was the leader and prophet of all genuinely new thought after 1900 and of all the right wing European factions. A few exceptions like Mishima aside, the awakening since 2005 or so is the first time in decades that free, new thought has existed in the world since 1950 in an explicit and unvarnished way—it would be a shame to throw this away in favour of the exhausted platitudes and lies of the left, promoted by Hollyweird for decades, and repackaged now in an “ethnic” or “traditionalist” brand. I ask frends to reject these mammy-yeast worshippers who come to you selling the same Chomskyite clichees, now with a giant cross for show, now with an “ethnic” cover…

The American Sun

BAP on the Abuse of War

Submitted by BAP…

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4 years ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · The Editors

but I’m putting it on my own as well to put all my older articles together.

European mercs enjoying themselves in Congo. That would be a good war…

Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.

War and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your sympathy, but your bravery hath hitherto saved the victims.

“What is good?” ye ask. To be brave is good. Let the little girls say: “To be good is what is pretty, and at the same time touching.”…

…Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states.

A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples.

A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”

It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.

Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs…

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

This week a “veteran” foreign volunteer for the Ukraine conflict returned to the United States from his vacation and was promptly beaten up by an African-American gentleman on the technofuturist state-of-the-art New York City subways. I can think of no better illustration of the meaning of the liberal world order and the NATO-sphere than this. It’s a slapstick reminder of the condition I described in my book with the term “Iron Prison,” where all overtly available outings for action are in fact meaningless frenetic motion and vacuum behavior in a playpen- sandbox thoroughly delimited and owned by other, hidden hands. It’s enough to make a normal boy become gay. The Ukraine crisis has allowed many bad, stupid ideas to return: much bad and even malicious that had been forgotten for a while is now pushed by war propagandists. I’m writing this article to warn against their lies: although I don’t like to talk about my book, they want to distort it for their own purposes, and to push their fake wars.

I am blamed lately for not supporting a supposedly vitalistic and exciting war in Ukraine and not encouraging my “followers” to volunteer for it. It isn’t just anonymous posters who attack on this line. Real-name journalists with big audience and preftige positions write tweets and thinkpieces disappointed that a supposed believer in “might is right” and “war is the hygiene of the world” didn’t join this social media hysteria. “Bronze Age Pervert and those like him write about manliness, why aren’t they celebrating the obvious not-Hollywood-greenscreen- groomed manliness of Zelensky?” Mary Harrington in Unherd gives maybe the friendliest and fairest criticism of my reluctance to tell friends to join the Ukraine brigades; but even she seems to accept the false premises that this is a real war, that it represents real adventure, that the main antagonist in my book is “modern comfort,” or that Hemingway is a “real man.”

Most of those who attack my “pacifism” are more hostile and lowbrow. They ask, Why are we not defending Aryan Ukraine with its sunny wheat fields against the “Asiatic orc hordes” of Russia? After all, Ukraine even has a yellow and blue flag like sister Aryan nation Sweden. It is “Whyte” whereas Russia is definitely “not Whyte, not Western.” Strangely enough such views, formerly to be found only on white nationalist forums, are repeated also by some EU and NATO officials. I suppose even they realize the “European Common Market” isn’t motivation enough for young men in Europe to get themselves blown up by Russian artillery. But—since we believe in “might makes right” and “war is virtue,” why haven’t “Bronze Age Mindset followers” joined in on this excitement? They’ve been put to shame by leftists who signed up to Do Something about the injustice, proving they are still a reservoir of manliness and initiative. Why at least don’t we cheerlead now for NATO, which can be the “making of Europe,” on a supposedly higher and more virtuous foundation? I know these arguments aren’t made in good faith. Even if I held the views such people claim I do, why, from their point of view, would I tell people to join the Ukrainian side? If I believed war no matter the cause or circumstance was “revitalizing,” why aren’t they blaming me also for abstaining from encouraging friends to join the Russian side?

Knowing these arguments are made in bad faith, I still wanted to write this warning, not just to friends but to many others who are interested in these matters—the nature of war in the modern world, the failures of states and peoples, and what my message regarding these things actually was in my book. I wanted to be as clear as possible so as to prevent what I believe are some genuinely malevolent people from bringing harm to naive but idealistic men who are looking for a way out of this suffocating and aged matriarchy.

RETURN OF THE NEOCON THEOLOGY OF WAR

The Ukraine crisis has allowed many bad ideas from the early 2000’s and late 1990’s to return. Although the true cause of this hysteria is the sequel to the terrible WuhanGRIDs fears, and maybe a need to escape these fears, nevertheless, this true cause is obscure or forbidden to pedestrian intelligentsia. A population “bulge” of obese women, single women in their thirties on SSRI’s and other mental meds, and middle aged shrews who bully their husbands—an unprecedented “bulge” of liberated but underfucked women is the “biological base” of the West’s successive hysterias since the end of Obama’s first term. This demographic is the “weight” of the much-heralded “Western world” or the “liberal world order” right now. Many pundits are oblivious to this emotional sewer as engine of our lives, and are instead busy rehashing the stupid justifications for war that were promoted just after 9/11.

When I wrote Bronze Age Mindset one of the first readers, my good friend the Bureaucrat, warned me that I would be attacked especially for the last aphorism. He thought that our friends—the only audience I really cared about when writing it, because I didn’t think more than 500-1000 copies would even be produced—would react badly to this and call me a Frankist; which some right wing Orthodox Jews had already been doing for a long time. The message “descend into sin to save the world” he said, this would be too much for many on our side who are traditionalists; or too much for any really who most of all want to see some type of strong moral life reestablished in the civilized world. But, he thought, this Frankist-Carpocratian- Gnostic message of “redemption through violation and atrocity,” shared also by some Buddhist sects, this might be too much and make me more marginal than I even was. Since then, some very few on the right have attacked me for this short passage, but they attacked stupidly, so I’ve ignored it: for example, they claim I want to make “right wing porn.” Of course it’s not about the content, or about the inherent worth of sin, none of that concerns me, any more than the value of running the drug trade means you love drugs or think they’re good; because I wasn’t making a religious or a moral or a lifestyle point. It has to do with my opinion that sinews of this Hades world of our time are in the underworld and that it is by grasping the chokepoints of the underworld that victory will be found. I didn’t write the book to tell the average good man in the well-running state how to live well; I wrote it to tell my strange friends, who live in failing states, what it is that opposes them and how to begin to fight it. But overall, very few critics have latched on to this last aphorism of the book or tried to think about it. It was easier for them to try to pigeonhole me into a “might is right, war makes all good” view, which they don’t understand either.

Since I published the book I’ve mostly refused to talk about it or give interviews because I wrote it to be self-explanatory. I am also simply a humble internet humorist poaster and I think it’s too self-important to explain yourself and so on. I break this habit now for the first time in writing to warn friends of a false interpretation that tries to use what I said, which became more popular than I thought it would, to promote stupid wars and actually to get friends physically harmed. This false interpretation is a half truth that can be made to sound very convincing, and it goes something like this: we live in a world where manliness is undervalued and adventure next to impossible. Good times have brought comfort to the people and softened them, so they don’t see the need for hard virtues anymore. Vice and softness and effeminacy are instead promoted and allowed to flourish. Amid the weakening and vice of the world, only war and militarism can revitalize nations. It can shake peoples out of their anomie and give them a higher goal to strive for in common: it can be the “making of a nation.” War can replace the softness of liberal modernity and give pride of place to cunning and strength again. Whether the cause of modern weakness is that it elevates a weak type of man over the rest, or allows us all to become spiritually and physically flabby, or both, is unimportant; war and more war, even regardless of the cause, can be solution to both these problems and be the path to national greatness as well as individual self-perfection. I am making now maybe maximal and half- poetic case, but degrees of this argument are possible, and can even be made to sound half- moderate.

This is an old argument, from before World War I. Since then it’s been repeated by many both on right and left but also by so-called moderate liberals seeking to “defend liberalism.” So although the quotation at beginning of this article, from Nietzsche, is often used to bring some prestige to this point, it need not be a hard right claim: communists and “liberal democrats” have made it too. It’s the point Bill Kristol and others used sometimes to repeat in private and semi-private around the time of the Iraq War, to people who they knew would find the cause of spreading democracy dumb or utopian, and to others who didn’t care about their ethnic particularism. I think many today are unaware of how strong this argument was among intellectuals around 2001 or so; one shouldn’t react emotionally to it just because Kristol held it, because he was not alone. And also, I don’t think his promotion of this argument was cynical; I think he believed it when he said it. People today are mostly unable to be cynical or hypocrites; even when they contradict themselves, they do it “ethically” and believe they are saying in good faith today what they were against yesterday. Many other books of the time and after make similar arguments: for example Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, and many such. There is a letter by Leo Strauss to Karl Lowith written in 1933; although the letter itself is an unabashed defense of Fascism that’s very hard to talk around, Harvey Mansfield defended it with the argument you see here: “Strauss was not a fascist, he was only saying that liberal democracies of the time were weak and needed some of that same sense of resolve you saw in right and left wing extremist regimes.” At the time things like this led to lurid theories by the likes of Shadia Drury and others that the Straussians and “neocons” were crypto-Fascists, cynically advancing the cause of “Nazi” Strauss and “Hitler’s Lawyer Carl Schmitt” in a conspiracy to take over the White House. The left establishment has always been possessed by wild conspiracy theories, whether it was this belief that Mansfield ran a secret finishing school for Nazis and Fascists, or the Russia hysteria that started in 2015 with Trump’s campaign, or many others you see in Hollywood movies of the last few decades. Of course there was no conspiracy, and people like Mansfield and Kristol genuinely believed the argument just made, that liberal democracy is often unable to defend itself against the energetic vitalism of right- and left-wing authoritarian regimes, and needed some of that steel of war virtue to be able to mobilize in its own defense; an argument that many leftists and left- liberals also now make themselves when it comes to facing down Russia.

But if you look through pundit debates of the early 2000’s, you see serious engagement with this view by varieties of neocons and liberals. On the other hand, it may be hard for the European hard right and the American “altright” to accept they’ve ended up sounding a lot like their hated “Jewish neocons.” At the time they were ready to dismiss these arguments with the claim that they were cynically advanced to get American intellectuals and virile men to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of Zionism; on the other hand they reject the idea that also this war fervor against Russia now may be cynically used by some for ulterior political aims. But anyway, cynicism aside, what of the substantive claim here? Kristol’s use of this point isn’t enough to discredit it, because many smarter and better people have made it too: and again I say it’s even possible, actually likely, that he and other neocons were genuine when speaking this belief and not possessed of as much ulterior motive or cynicism as their opponents attribute to them.

But events following that Iraq War and the war on “terror” in general show no national revitalization, but an intensification of modern weakness and rule by spiritual females. Now after my banning from Twatter and other social media, some thought they could safely claim that my book meant just this same, and continue the failed arguments of that time. But it’s not what my book is about at all, and it’s a wrong claim about the world and about war. As depressing as it is, no revitalization of peoples today can take place through war or militarism, or probably through anything else at all.

The reasons why the American war efforts failed to mobilize American virtue or lead to preconditions of “national greatness” are interesting but in any case debatable and less important than the obvious historical fact of this failure. I suspect it had something to do with the war being fake. It was never a war but a pointless and enervating police action. Winning the war would have meant mobilizing hundreds of thousands of American men for a close-quarters assault on Waziristan, which America could have won but at the cost of tens of thousands or more dead. And of course they were never going to do that. Assange but many others said the United States and NATO had no intention of winning the Afghan war: and whether this drawn- out pointless farce of patrols and “supporting the central government” was meant to launder money, as they say, or whether it was carried out just out of stupidity, again it doesn’t matter. Even after a spectacular attack on its soil, destroying historic landmarks and killing thousands of its own citizens, America couldn’t mobilize the war fervor and national enthusiasm some had hoped would redeem the spent liberal societies.

But why they hope this? If rulership remains the same people, there isn’t any event, any cultural shift, any change in system, any opportunity for war and peace that will lead to a transformation of national spirit and morals. In this case whatever was done worked in opposite direction. The supposed “War on Terror” didn’t lead America to put higher value on men of war and manliness, but allowed the opposite kind of person to secure position in American government and society even faster: some of the worst of it came early, with formal changes in chain of command and succession procedure just after 9/11. America’s military had already been purged in the Tailhook Scandal: alpha males had been banned from military leadership. That purge, a real Bolshevik purge of the military, was probably one of the most important and most forgotten events of the last thirty years. The purging of the right men from the military and from the leadership of American society has meant that no revitalization is possible until the new leadership is removed. The 9/11 crisis perversely allowed America to treat manly soldiers as expendable while piously and impotently praising and thanking their “service” in the abstract. Sam Finlay’s book Breakfast with the Dirt Cult shows the betrayal of its fighting men and their fighting spirit, in parallel with the betrayal of its men in civilian society. Whatever new males did advance as a result of this war were astroturfed “This is the Girl” types: Tom Cotton, Eyepatch McCain, and other performing actors of unusual face who were flunkies for the security state. Other examples include Generals Crying Milley and the buffoonish cretin “Mad Dog” Mattis, whose gullibility in supporting the faddish scam Ponzi scheme of Theranos—only because it had a woman CEO playacting as the female Steve Jobs —shows the real measure and intellect of this gerontocratic “war elite.” Worst of all, the Bush administration, driven into a swamp by these delusions of the rhetoric national revitalization and national greatness, led inevitably to the Obama phenomenon. War fervor in America led to the entrenchment of passive-aggressive, feminized priestly technocracy, not to the nation finding its origins again, or a new cadre of manly leaders.

THE AIMS AGAINST US IN THE WAR ON RUSSIA

In World War II Franco achieved a great aim for himself when he sent the Falangist National Socialists to die in Russia. He fulfilled his obligations and debts to Hitler with the volunteer Spanish Blue Division, while maintaining plausible neutrality. On the other hand he got rid of the most fanatical rightists in Spain, who were thorn in his side, a political threat, and an embarrassment. This case is special, “it is as it is”: neither side could have acted any different. If I had been in Spain at the time maybe I would have joined this division as well, because I saw Barbarossa as a crusade on Eastern front against the uprising of the lower orders of the human spirit. But anyway: I say certain factions in the American state and in NATO seek to do to the new “hard right,” or to “our sphere of things” or call it what you will, to do to us what Franco did to the Falangists. The word “factions” must be emphasized: those who I believe are promoting this don’t have control of the American government and must contend with other factions who want different things, or don’t understand their intentions. It’s very hard to speak of a unified policy of any modern western state. Still, I think this has been planned for some time: a perpetual war on Russia’s border, which will harass and degrade—so they believe— their opponent Putin, but also waste this new threat of the “altright,” or call it what you will, waste us in a grinding industrial conflict from which the vast majority will not return.

I offer now my own “conspiracy theory”; I am reluctant to do this because even when “psychological operations” are real, I think it may even be better to ignore them and argue the enemy’s case on its own merits. That said, consider that Ukrainian girls in particular have been very active in the “altright” sphere since the early 2010’s. Olena Semenyaka is one such name; much of “altright” discourse took place in Facebook slapfights between this Ukrainian nationalist and the Russian nationalist “Nina Byzantina,” formerly married to Richard Spencer. Recently there is glut of “hot Ukrainian girls” in Washington DC think tank, NGO and State Department world: Alina Polyakova is another example.The “attractive blonde woman” propagandist is one of the Ukrainian regime’s most frequent weapons now both on social media and in DC political world. That representatives of an ethnic lobby for a nation in which the United States government is interested are entrenched within the incestuous political life of the capital isn’t remarkable on its own. But that these same women have been active, under their own names or anonymous accounts, on the American “Altright” from well before 2015 is.

Since at least 2010 I’ve witnessed the periodic infestation, in typical coordinated social media campaigns, of “Whyte Nationalist Feminist” accounts in the hard right sphere, with consistent messaging of blonde girls in wheat fields, statements on the purity of white womanhood and its vulnerability, combined with hysterical doom-mongering over racial annihilation, violation, and lurid publication of interracial violence and rape. One such account was called Voice of Europe, later revealed to be run by a section of British police. In general some of us have tried to steer people away from this kind of messaging, which is so ineffective that it amounts basically to enemy propaganda. I know of no historical power that advertised its nubile women in this fashion, as a statement of the worth of their people or race or anything of the sort. It’s inconceivable that either Soviet Russia or National Socialist Germany would engage in such messaging, which screams weakness, brittleness: “we are weak victims with beautiful women; come take our women.” To the contrary, these regimes posted vigorous images young muscular naked men, because that is actually threatening and frustrating to the enemy. When I do it, I am called gay in screeching replies, very often by these same so-called “white nationalist feminists.” You’d think after years of repeating these attacks they’d know it doesn’t work against me, but they continue doing it. The purpose of this malicious messaging has always been clear to us, even before this Ukraine crisis: to enrage sexually frustrated young men, to drive them to despair and violent rage, and to create a hyperemotional environment where ideological “women of purity” control the messaging. Although I can’t prove it, I have seen enough circumstantial evidence also that the same women are running propaganda racebaiting pornography accounts under different names (which they often boost on their main with the pretext of opposing them).

With the Ukraine crisis the purpose of this messaging for the last ten years has become to me more or less clear. Consider first of all the bizarre fact that some of these Ukrainian Valkyries have since 2011 or so not only entrenched themselves simultaneously in Washington DC and in the online discourse of the American altright—weird enough on its own—but have become so close to the Altright that they invited many prominent members on trips to Ukraine. Please take a moment to step back and see how strange this is. The costs of flights, lodging, and so on are considerable for one person, let alone however many they’ve invited. Ukraine is not a rich country: where did this money come from? I’ve never heard of this happening on the right. We meet each other when we can but we don’t fly each other out to expenses-paid fact-finding tours. This feels like an organizational project to court influence and develop relationships. Has the American government, directly or indirectly, been paying to cultivate a relationship between the Ukrainian government and the American “altright”?

Some factions within the American government have an interest in promoting nationalism in small nations, to use as a weapon against bigger powers. An example is Bridge Colby’s recent book Strategy of Denial, where the simple aim is discussed of using small nations, like Ukraine and Taiwan, against bigger powers without having to use American troops. Colby and the faction he is part of doesn’t control American policy, but they have some influence on it; Victoria Nuland, the point man for laundering fake anti-Trump “Russia hoax” propaganda through Ukrainian security agencies so it could enter the intelligence record, is his former boss at CNAS. Why potato Ukrainians and Taiwanese are willing to let themselves be used as kamikazes in unwinnable wars just so people like Nuland can have careers is a matter for another time. My concern here is that this faction or people within it probably outsourced a double-prong propaganda campaign. The first purpose would be to intensify neo-Nazi and white nationalist propaganda in the Ukraine, because they know that fighting fervor can only come from something much stronger than the diluted civil religion promoted by America and the EU now. A second purpose would be to have white nationalist elements in Ukraine cultivate a relationship with the American Altright. The intention here would be in Franco style to solve two problems at same time: the troublesome Altright will kill itself off “dying heroically” to “hold back the dark Asiatic orc hordes of Bolshevism,” playacting as if it’s 1942 Stalingrad. I have no way to know of course if the gold-braid wheat-field girls from Ukraine have been led together to the American Altright by this particular faction in the United States government, or if there is any centralized coordinated action at all; it may be simply that alliances of convenience developed over time or at the last minute. In the end, however, the effect is the same. As with neocon “national greatness” propaganda in the early 2000’s this is another attempt to use hard right vitalism, and to take advantage of the same spirit that has in recent years led to newfound appreciation for Ernst Junger, Nietzsche, Mishima, and Celine; to redirect or rather abuse this enthusiasm into service for the American government, and even, in this latest variation, into self-destruction.

I’ve made this case to friends in private and some have told me that if anyone falls for the likes of Olena Semenyaka and the other Ukrainian potato pretend-Valkyries’ lures, they deserve what happens to them. I don’t agree. There are a lot of young, inexperienced, naive and very emotional guys who, even if intelligent, may in a moment of confusion fall for such traps. I’m writing this in part to convince them not to self-sacrifice on behalf of such ghouls. The problem with these two types of misuse of Nietzschean vitalism on behalf of modern countries and states is just that: these are impostor states to begin with. Some European rightists as well as various journalists, to attack my position on the war in Ukraine, and because I encouraged Ukrainian friends to defect and refuse to fight, have at times brought up this supposed “inconsistency”: “Bronze Age Pervert supports war and adventure, war as the hygiene of the world. But he doesn’t support signing up to fight in this war as it happens now, he doesn’t support defending your homeland.” To this I would respond with a resolute “Yes.” And I would give the same advice to Russian friends, even though I support their cause, if I thought they were to be conscripted. There is no inconsistency: Yes to war and struggle for us; No—to anything that has to do with the modern state. War and preparation for war on behalf of what then, and in what circumstances? The mistake or dishonesty of using Nietzsche’s well- known claim about the revitalizing effects of war is in ignoring his other claims about the character of the modern state. But it’s not enough simply to point this out; maybe I need to spell some of it out.

WHAT I ACTUALLY SAY IN MY BOOK ON WAR

The attempt to coopt the vehement youth of the right into self-sacrificing itself in Ukraine is an intelligent if extremely malicious plan of some factions of the American state. I am reluctant to call it evil, but if that word means anything, it applies to this case as to similar where the attempt to hurt others serves almost no purpose and represents what Schopenhauer called active malice or active wickedness, the delight simply in seeing harm done with no real other benefit. Why is so? Compare this program to what may seem similar from decades past, to what often goes by the name “Gladio” during the Cold War, variations of which I’ve supported and even hypothetically recommended. Operation Gladio refers to the attempt by the CIA to use the hard right after World War II in Europe as a weapon against the Soviets, offensively or defensively in form of “stay-behind” networks and armies that would carry out terrorist and guerrilla attacks in event of a Soviet occupation of Europe. From the point of view of left- and liberal-conspiracists this is evidence of the CIA’s secret fascist character. They make much of this, or of Operation Paperclip, while ignoring far more important cooperation with the Soviets such as Lend-Lease, the alliance in the war itself, and the alliance after the war against European colonial empires where America and the CIA and State Department especially often worked together with the Soviets to remove European civilization from the third world.

In fact the extent of “Gladio” has always been overstated, both by the left and by its own supporters in the CIA or journalists adjacent to it. Many of the stay-behind armies in Europe were spontaneous organizations by the local right wing, and these were in fact opposed by the CIA, which tried to replace local versions with its own. In some cases as in north Italy outright conflict broke out, because locals moved to disband the CIA impostor version of the stay- behind army. In general Gladio was as much an attempt to corral the right wing as to use it; it was not an attempt to empower it. Just as NATO’s job was and is to “keep the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in,” in that order, the primary purpose of Gladio was to delimit and surveil the right wing.

That being said, one shouldn’t go too far—as conspiracy podcasters on both the left and the right always do—in exaggerating the power and competence and foresight of intelligence agencies. During the Cold War, the European right were very much aware of the nature of the CIA and of the purpose of Gladio, but still chose to cooperate in many cases because they saw a pragmatic benefit and thought (sometimes rightly) that they could take advantage of the CIA, not the other way around. In general conspiracy theories about the CIA or the machinations of other intelligence services forget that their targets also have agency and can outmaneuver them. The KGB, which has a record of competence and sophistication far above the CIA’s, was itself in many cases still outwitted by its targets. One notable case is the KGB’s extensive infiltration of organized crime and other ethnic gangs, such as the Chechens toward the end of the Soviet Union, discussed in Paul Klebnikov’s The Godfather of the Kremlin. The infiltration and funding of Chechen and other gangs went so well that these gangs ended up temporarily on top, taking the money, resources, and information provided and using it for themselves. It took two physical wars and Putin’s crushing of Chechnya at the end of the 1990’s to dislodge these networks; KGB “infiltration” did nothing here but turn a nuisance into a monster against itself.

Something similar happened with Soviet involvement in Africa. Much of the African dictatorial “intelligentsia,” or rather familist circles, were educated in Russia and the East Bloc; many can speak Russian even now. This was true for much of the ANC in South Africa (which, as it happens, got most of its funding from Sweden, not the Soviets). Just think the kompromat that Soviets had on some of these men; and their nations got funding, advisors, and many other things from the Soviets. This could lead one to assume that the likes of Julius Nyerere and other “Afro-Marxists” were owned agents of the Soviets doing their bidding, but this would be wrong. In fact the “Afro” part ended up being a lot more important than the “Marxist.” Far from the Soviet Union, and with little actual enforcement mechanism, in the end the dictators said “thank you very much,” took the money and the resources and did mostly what they wanted. They replaced “Marxism” with “Afro-Marxism,” which, as students of the Brazzaville School of Economics know, translates into “you give me that,” or a tribal-based spoilage system. In fact given the tribal character of power in Africa, they didn’t even have another path available to them.

This is a persistent fact across history that is lost on people who believe e.g., that Viktor Orban hiring an American lobbyist or PR agent for a project or an ad campaign means that he’s now part of the International Zionist program because the lobbyist happened to have been Jewish. Besides being a disgrace to principle of “follow the money,” which very few people have the judgment to do well, this turn of mind assumes centralized control, foresight of all consequences, near omniscience and omnipotence of political actors who in the end actually have very little foresight and also very little ability to enforce. It is most of all the story of China’s historically inept “foreign policy”: based around rituals of gift giving and displays of generosity to foreign nations and tribes, rituals that were assumed to indicate a patron-client relationship and actual obeisance; but where no such thing followed. In fact China was frequently conquered or sacked by foreigners who felt insulted when the gift-giving stopped. Such things are frequent in imperial history in general though; the East India Company didn’t especially want extensive territorial conquests in India, which were expensive to maintain and didn’t necessarily bring more profit; but it was presented with faits accomplis when local British generals, seeking glory and conquest rather than profit, engaged in battles and took territory against their wishes. They had no way to control so well whatever happened far away and locally. The target, agent, employee or the cat’s paw got the upper hand, and in cases like these, far away from home, did so rather easily.

Both the CIA (as well as other intelligence agencies) and the left—which includes much of the American establishment, possessed always by wild conspiracy theories and paranoia about “dark money”—have an interest in never acknowledging such facts. Reluctant to admit incompetence, the CIA is often eager to take credit for events that spun out of its control, even if it then appears “evil.” It’s preferable to look like a Bond villain than an ineffectual bungler. The same reasoning applies to men like Klaus Schwab and Brzezinski, who are engaged in ostentatious self-publicity stunts to sell themselves as extremely influential eminences grises, when the reality is they’re actors on the make seeking the next contract and position of prestige.

In any case, for these reasons I have always thought that a repeat of “Operation Gladio” would be the best possible thing that could happen to the right today. But I also thought the modern CIA is too stupid and malicious to allow this to happen. On my last account I suggested as much—I suggested a program to make us mercenaries in South America—and was jumped on by paranoid leftists and conspiracy addicts. They claimed the CIA or whoever sent me to become an internet addict fifteen years ago to post on forums with eleven people for years in order to “instrumentalize” “young disaffected men” to be soldiers in the Nazi Deep State’s international fascist wars on behalf of Capital. Neither I nor other frogs of any IQ above 92 post to propose “policy positions”; we realize our powerlessness. Twitter is appropriate as “samizdat” propaganda to humiliate or embarrass authorities; it’s not really useful as a platform to post unironic “what I would do as dictator” fantasies. When I or friends write things of that kind it isn’t to propose plans to the government but to show the gap between what could have been and what is, and thereby to show the petty, cretinous and in this case even malicious character of authorities today.

Yes I would be happy if we were given a (starting) budget of $100 million and given free hand to “fight communism” in Bolivia or Argentina or wherever, but the point is that these people in this government would never contemplate a reciprocal relationship like this. SS men who as part of Gladio or Gladio-like cooperation between the CIA and the hard right went to fight in the Congo, the Central African Republic, or even Vietnam: they knew they were being “instrumentalized.” But they didn’t care because they had their own aims, and knew that far from direct control, oversight, and enforceable measures, especially in the Third World, they could achieve their own aims better than NATO’s. When control was actually overt and onerous, as it was for SS men who joined the French Foreign Legion, many deserted or tried to. It’s entirely possible also that the CIA or other NATO intelligence agencies knew they were being taken advantage of to some extent, but saw it as a fair tradeoff. “We get rid of these crazy guys, they go have fun, and maybe they do something that marginally benefits us too.” As such there’s nothing sinister or wrong with this arrangement. Indeed it’s the most ancient and Aryan tradition possible, that of the Mannerbund, which has its origins in the tribe’s realization that rather than breaking and domesticating excess young males grown strong on fat and meat, it’s better to have them go off on their own in a gang to somewhere else and make trouble for others. I see nothing wrong in theory with such an arrangement today, and openly would welcome it. I’d much rather try our hand at becoming our own Rajah Brookes than the drudgery of trying to reform giant unworkable states full of middle aged batshit psychotic women. (The reform of modern states may be a noble goal, and I say so unironically, but “it’s not my thing.”) But we didn’t get this—we got, predictably, attempts to ensnare and set up young naive men to get them to go to jail. The authorities of our day are too ungenerous and, again, malicious in a petty way, to do anything like was tried even with “Gladio.” And now we also got the Ukraine crisis as a fire to which they expect suicidal moths.

Consider for a moment the differences between the Ukraine situation and something like Gladio or similar—adventures that a rightist could have during the Cold War. Unlike a hard right adventurer heading off to the Congo, which is a high-reward low-risk opportunity, Ukraine is high-risk and low-reward. A young rightist heading off for a fight in Katanga under the leadership of white mercenaries has a high chance of survival, a high chance of getting good training and experience, of forming friendships and networking with those like him; he and his friends or group have a decent chance of profit as well. Everything is taking place away from the attention of the world and of the media; the centers of power are too far away really to control what they do. On every point the opposite is true in Ukraine. Again I don’t know if this was so carefully planned by factions in the American and western governments, or whether they just saw at the last minute a chance to corral and kill us off. But volunteers who take part in this conflict are in the world’s eye; their identities will be known not just to intelligence agencies, but to many private third party and media actors. They have no opportunity for plunder. Most of all, they’re unlikely to return re-energized and with experience because they’re unlikely to return at all. I wouldn’t call this the perfect solution for the Deep State only because I think it’s unnecessary and malicious: but apparently they’ve decided that a mutually beneficial relationship is out of the question and they would like instead to get us all killed. Whether this is because they genuinely feel so threatened, or whether it’s because they’re actively malicious people isn’t important.

My book is in fact very clear on these matters and if anyone is claiming that I support going to war as an “ennobling venture,” especially on behalf of “one’s homeland” or any modern state, they are lying. If I had wanted to, I could have used examples of conventional military heroes in the book, but I didn’t. I respect many, and there are great ones, including from the two world wars, from the Vietnam war and so on. But I didn’t use such examples, because my book is not about this or many of the other things attributed to me by people who didn’t read it or read it enraged. The only military men I praised from our time are those like Bob Denard and Mad Mike Hoare. They are people who acted outside the eye of central powers, far away from their effective control, in low-intensity conflicts that had the potential for high payoff in many ways. One must distinguish the feeling of power from actual biological power, which I define in the book as concrete material ownership of space. It’s not about performative military behavior any more than it’s about performative manliness: I go out of the way in the book, in the chapter on the genesis of certain modern homosexuals, to disparage the false and performative image of masculinity promoted by regime media, which provides the simulation of the feeling of power without actual power. There’s no ownership of space possible in Ukraine right now for a volunteer, but there was in 1960’s and 70’s Africa or similar for a mercenary or an SS man turned ronin and so on. If America would have presented a conventional military struggle that contained the possibility for ownership of space, that might be, for example, a war in north Mexico for the cartels, to secure the southwest again and the freedom and power of the American people. In that case maybe I would reconsider advice to my friends and to myself on what we do, but that’s not the struggle on offer. Can you even imagine such a struggle being on offer by a modern state? It says a lot that you can’t imagine these leaders offering something like that…

Even in my praise of mercenaries in the Third World like Denard and Hoare I had to be very qualified because the opportunity for this today is much less real and carries much more risk. Margaret Thatcher’s son tried it but was caught before the venture could be launched; something similar happened when an American group tried to take Dominica. So in the book I go out of my way to emphasize that men today need to use the fox much more than the lion. They need to become experts in trickery and deception more even more than the arts of war. The unipolar world after 1990 strangles whatever little real life was left over from before World War 2. That the most important thing for ending the suffocating slavery of our time is the end of unipolar power is another reason I oppose the hijacked west’s meddling in the Ukraine war and want to see NATO fail; but to be fair, I would also advise Russian friends to refuse to fight for their side in this particular conflict.

Again, the conflict in question here is simply too high-scrutiny and too high-risk and it wasn’t the purpose in my book to offer “directions for thrills.” I see myself and my friends as locked in a mortal struggle against a biological-historical entity that represents a cancerous form of life. My purpose is to reveal this danger to younger friends and to advise as best I could for a means to oppose it. The purpose was not to encourage performative opposition, minstrel feats of manliness or to get yourself killed in a fake “beautiful death” just to have your Masculinity Ticket punched posthumously by an admiring female journalist or some equivalent seal- clapper. Accordingly while I think preparation for war and a military element to the ongoing struggle is a necessity, I remind the reader that in the final section on practical advice, there’s only one short chapter on joining actual militaries and even there I am very wary to recommend this. I only recommend it because it can provide friendships, training, and probably because we do need friends in positions in that institution, if only to provide us information. But the path I recommend most of all is explicitly stated in the last aphorism of the book; it is also hinted at many times before that: and this is to form mafias.

Nothing I recommended involves “service to the homeland,” or to modern states or nations, which I consider egalitarian monstrosities, defunct, sclerotic and senile and ultimately obsolete; and loyalty to which would interfere with what is most important, loyalty to us, to each other, in our great work.

And the material manifestation of these works is, again, a mafia, or a series of such. Is this OK.

The election this year in Argentina has elevated to international stardom Javier Milei. His theatrical performances and comic passion, energy on camera remind people of Trump, Bolsonaro and other anti-establishment manic-charismatic champions in recent years. These rose up mostly as a result of people’s justified desperation at the failure of modern governments to address problem of decline of life: cities dilapidated by crime, economic sclerosis, zombi mass migration. It’s not even completely right to call them “populists,” as when, because of a personal failure of nerve from individuals like Trump and Bolsonaro, many pundits jumped since 2020 and 2021 or so to proclaim “the populist moment is over, the globalist technocrats have won.” Such a frame misunderstands the fundamental modern problem, which is declining human capital, a fact of life that is being felt first of all in governance worldwide.

In some countries it was possible to label critics of stupid government “populists,” but this wasn’t true everywhere and even in Brazil, Bolsonaro wasn’t elected on the votes of the poor and the many, but on campaigning against left-wing Red demagogues who had run the Brazilian economy and life off a cliff, and on behalf of well-to-do farmers and small businessmen. The frame that a “populist moment” that never in fact existed and never was the thing that mattered is “over” is also based on individual accidents — in particular the character, experiences, and decisions of Bolsonaro and Trump themselves. But their personal hesitations don’t mean the problems that led to the rise of these men in the first place have disappeared. Nor are these problems four-dimensional Machiavellian “chess” on the part of an actually competent shadowy “elite” that is in fact “profiting” from the disorder; there is no cynical manipulator of events… things really are that stupid, and there’s no one competent at the wheel of events. Thus there will be Trumps, Bolsonaros, and Mileis going forward every year or so, and not all will have the same personal hangups. The next few decades are likely to be exciting.

Milei becoming a star, however, has led to some uncomfortable moments as many on “antiestablishment” and “dissident” spheres, both right and left, have paid any close attention to content of his words beyond the comedy. Quickly they notice he is “libertarian” and asking for reductions in government spending, government programs and size, and calling for the elimination of government departments. This goes against the Dissident Talking Points that have emerged since 2017, which dismiss Libertarianism as a “basic bitch” ideology, identify all free market rhetoric with the old guard of the GOP that Trump destroyed in the 2015-6 primaries, and are largely based on “economic populist” or “economic nationalist” positions vaguely identified with Steve Bannon or called “Bannonite.” Like all enduring Talking Points, these have some truth, maybe even 60% of truth behind them. Libertarianism, both in the form pushed by theoretical ideologues whether from Cato or Mises Institutes, or in the lite-political form pushed by the Jack Kemp wing of the GOP exemplified by men like Paul Ryan, was largely discredited not just by Trump but by manifest failures in the years leading up to 2016. The failures were of two kinds. A full discussion of these failures of rhetoric, practice, or in the case of genuine and honest Ron Paul-style libertarianism simple inability to contest in democratic political struggle — for whatever reasons — is very interesting but should be left for another time. I want to address for a moment the “Bannonite” and “economic populist” consensus that has emerged on the dissident spheres so-called of the right for the last few years, and which is now being pushed in its major zines and publications acting as the public voice of a supposed “resistance.” It is because of the widespread acceptance of this orthodoxy — really a set of unexamined talking points — that the right increasingly sounds like a version of Chomskyite Marxoid professor in cheap tuna-stained blazer, droning on about the IMF, the WEF, Neoliberalism, the supposed problem of “hypercapitalism” and Capital, “atomization,” “destruction of native and traditional communities”; while stomping with a kind of self-important frisson for “an engagement with socialism,” “class analysis,” “postracial multiracial working class democracy,” as if these things were the newest and most revolutionary ideas and as if there was a genuine prospect of being the vanguard of millions of urban proletarians against the bourgeois “Anglo Liberal” order.

It may be a bad idea to take Paul Ryan at his word that he represents “free markets,” libertarianism or free enterprise, and it may be just as much a bad idea to believe that Jonah Goldberg of Goucher College is correct about the definition of “socialist.” But again, this is a discussion for another time.

Such people have been in power in Argentina for decades, and haven’t delivered what you would think people are yearning for a government to deliver based on the expression of mass direct concern during the time of 2015 and 2016 and before pundits and Intellectuals began their campaign of obfuscation. Argentina has had “Bannonite” or “economic populistnationalist” government for decades, on steroids. They got 100% of what Bannon-types and “conservative socialist” and “dissident right” or whatever edgy name they will call themselves — they got it all these are now demanding, everything that’s being asked for, and much more. For decades, this has been the case in Argentina. Everything in the rhetoric but also the policies, often enforced at point of gun. Peron utterly crushed the Argentine landowning upper classes, and brought in a nationalist and populist economy, freed from English interference in particular, and often invoking family values and traditionalist communitarian language. If you want conservative socialism, here is your example in action, in full — and see then its fruits after some decades…

Consider for example that the doors of Argentina have been busted wide open to mass migration. This has been done despite the economic populist and nationalist language that Bannonites invoke in America and that Peronists have used even more aggressively in Argentina. I find it fascinating that all left-populist and economic populist platform nations or regions have this same result by the way. Ireland did, so does Basque Country in Spain — ETA being the spirit of that region and along with the Kurdish PKK one of the old and dependable factions of the international “nationalist left.” But all are flooded with migrants. To look into the reasons why I will again leave for another time but I suspect that, although when out of power such parties insinuate that migrants are being let in for “cheap labor” as a conspiracy by Capital or devious capitalists who plan to build an orbital station like in Elysium movie; and so they promise — maybe genuinely — the lower middle and middle classes that they will stop this migration and improve the labor market, wages, and their economic condition. But then once in power, left-populist parties discover that the migrants were never being brought in by capitalists for Machiavellian reasons; that at most, the capitalists were being bought off, and not all the capitalists but only some industries, who were allowed to profit and who therefore complied… although it’s unclear their willingness to comply or not would have been at all relevant. That the migrants were in fact being brought in primarily as political clients and political tools for the left and by those who opposed “the rich” — a shifting definition that often comes to include much of the middle class as well. And so the logic of this is irresistible to “economic populist” parties once in power for some time, regardless of their initial rhetoric about the “pauperization of the proletariat finally coming true through the vehicle of mass migration.” If your position is “the poor and conservative many against the decadent and predatory Elite and rich,” why wouldn’t you come to see millions of foreign poor “decent family people” as your allies? Economic populists, even when they have open nationalist and ethnic rhetoric in their beginnings, will always abandon this in favor of importing new clients, and it is rational for them to do so. In many cases they don’t in fact have specifically racial, or national or ethnic-cultural language even by the way: many rightists are dumbly misled when a leftist starts to inveigh against “globalism,” the “IMF,” “international Anglo-Liberalism,” “the transnational elites,” and many such things, into thinking that such a person must surely want to preserve the demographic and cultural characteristics of a particular country or region. But that’s almost never the case: importing millions of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians in Argentina, or migrants in Basque Country or Ireland may actually come to be seen as “yes we are importing good family people who will stand with us in native solidarity against globalism, Capital, and Neoliberal atomization.” And that is in fact what happened.

In Argentina the rhetoric around who is the Enemy subtly but surely shifted from the old guard

Anglophile rich of Recoleta during Peron’s time to the “listless, decadent rich white kids of Buenos Aires who don’t want to do honest manual labor and just want to do intellectual work or be in movies and eat avocado toast; fuck them, I’m a proud Union man and Pachamamita from Bolivia is my ally against these Elites.” In fact it was the same in Peron’s day: only he didn’t have to import foreign nationals at the time. Like other South American “populists” he brought in nonwhite, “working class, salt of the earth people” from the provinces, bought their votes with hospitals, material goods, services, and got them to be his political clients against the Brahmin old guard landowning rich. It’s the story of FDR in another form and the story of the death and senescence of modern nations in general under various forms of mobocracy or “mass democracy.” It should be added also that it was under Peronist “conservative socialist” salt-of-the-earth working class economic populist regime that Argentina became one of the first nations to legalize gay marriage. But as with the matter of national identity, also religious and conservative “collectivist” morality, or moralism in politics, means one thing in the beginnings and rhetoric of such parties and movements, and something else entirely later. In the end it’s always the same leftism that’s been around for decades, and the same results; only the cosmetics of it changes.

The matter of how economic populism and leftism always betrays real nationalism is very interesting, and must be explored in detail; but its failure to deliver specifically its economic promises is the real and big reason for Milei’s rise at the moment in Argentina. Decades of “getting everything the American dissident sphere is now asking for” has left Argentina a nation competing with Venezuela when, given its natural endowments as well as its human capital, it should be competing with the United States. There’s no better example in the modern world of a case where specifically bad government and bad culture has so wrecked a country that otherwise does have both the natural resources and the biological human capital to be not only nice but truly great. Unlike East Europe or other parts of Europe, Argentina has no excuses: no Russian or other occupation, not even any wars; no natural disasters. Paradisiacal climate and isolation; temperate climate, free from disease. A cultured, highly literate intelligent population. All wrecked by bad political decisions, a terrible political culture, maybe bad elements of culture in general.

And all wrecked by “economic populism” that results in crushing taxation, regulations in the name of social justice that destroy all enterprise, and ultimately really the enslavement of the good, intelligent, and talented part of the population in the service of providing goods to the dumb, dusky stupid many so that these many may vote for petty politicians invoking selfrighteous “union” language. It’s that simple. The left is right that libertarianism in Argentina would be “de facto white supremacy.” In fact they’re right about it in the United States too, except that the “dissident right” brain trust has convinced itself that the white “working class,” who are already highly taxed at the local level, would profit not from an elimination of racial legal handicaps against them and their children, as well as a lowering of their taxes—that would be Neoliberalism! Libertarianism!—but through “conservative populist socialism,” that is, taking more taxes from them and then funneling it back in the forms of “credits” or “services” after being filtered and laundered through the hands of various government employees. Who are these employees? Well, not “altright” or altlite Bannonite or “dissident conservative socialist” brain trust people as none have gone into the government bureaucracy, but Shaniquas and Chantelles. Maybe banning porn would help! But it’s just so trite to invoke freedom. You don’t want to be thought of like Paul Ryan, do you?

The corner into which the anti-establishment factions of America and France especially have locked themselves — other parts of Europe too though — a corner from which, after a few years of trading simplified orthodoxies through a retarded telephone game, they’re unable to see plain reality at least in Argentina… and they are unable to see why someone like Milei is ascendant there not despite but because of his rhetoric and promise of freedom… this may be hard to overcome in the coming few years. It is loser rhetoric that obscures the reality of tightly controlled, highly regulated life in America and the West under absurd slogans such as “hypercapitalism” and “atomization” and that wrongly assumes European youth, or frankly any other kind of talented youth, needs government aid and protection rather than needing to have the boot taken off the neck. It is just easier to see it in another country and another world where maybe talking points haven’t so thoroughly covered up what’s in front of your eyes.

Here is briefly, experience in Argentina, a few things I remember vividly: a Croatian Argentineborn businesswoman, owner of a cafe with unusually good coffee and Balkan pastries, who, prompted by warm conversation one morning, burst out crying to me over the prospects of her grandchildren in Argentina. All intelligent, highly educated, working in white collar professions, and all absolutely squeezed dry by a government that took most of their income while berating them for their “atomized” individualist identity and desires, and reminded them of their duty to give to the (helpfully beige, for moral reasons) Community and Society. All had material resources and a way of life that would be considered at best lower middle class in Europe and America, maybe not even that; all impoverished by a government that insists white collar workers are high-paid bloodsuckers who feed on the lifeblood of the Salt of the Earth working man. Every intelligent person who seeks or wants a half-good job complains about the same things in Argentina; crushing taxation, suffocating lack of opportunity, and an arrogant, partlyracially-mobilized “Working Class” that gets paid better than they do and is allowed to act with unending arrogance… bus drivers make double or three times what most white collar workers make there. The squeezing-dry of all money takes place for the sake of a “multiracial working class,” that is, a colored underclass. It is mostly the same in America and increasingly so in Europe, absurd “hypercapitalism” rhetoric notwithstanding. The reality of modern life for any intelligent or ambitious person is to be squeezed dry in the name of the Cycle — I can’t name the Cycle fully in these pages, but, in short, to be squeezed dry so that an obese Chantelle may gracelessly expire in a hospital after heroic efforts by inevitably low-paid medical professionals, and after a lifetime of her fattening up on corn chip. This is the cycle of the modern economy. In Argentina this Cycle has been made inescapable and all-encompassing. The high taxes provide no public services to speak of, no really common social or political life, no clean streets. There are favelas and mini-tent cities of migrants even in good neighborhoods now. Again, somehow decades of righteous economic-populist and moralistic Working Man language against globalist Elites hasn’t stopped any of the ills that Dissidents in the West blame on something called “Neoliberalism,” but accelerated them.

Milei is the latest in a series of last-ditch and probably doomed attempts to stop this, the logic of democracy. It’s possible at times that, under the logic of mass democracy — take from those who have and work to give to those who don’t in exchange for votes, and if you run out of these latter, just import them from somewhere under humanitarian language — it’s possible to stop it for a while. Things under this logic periodically get so bad that various coalitions sporadically form and may elect someone like Milei, or, before him, Macri. But these men soon find that to achieve their aims they would need reforms so extreme that revolution and maybe even civil war would be inevitable. So they give up, and the process then continues until the next crisis. But it doesn’t end and can’t end, until it all ends.

It’s easy to see how a country like Argentina ends, and it is likely going bust as a country. Some territory with that name will exist in maybe fifty years, but I’m not even sure it will still be called that. You can see the final outcome of everything I’ve said already: no intelligent, ambitious young person wants to be enslaved in that type of a thing forever, which is why everywhere you go in Costa Rica or Spain, or other parts of Europe, you see young Argentines who have left.

The insane female-protection laws of the country are another part of this story — and another benefit of decades-long “working man’s antiglobalist economic populist democracy.” To “denounce” a man is the absolute right of any woman, and without any due process a man will have his rights stripped and life destroyed by whatever denunciation, no matter how frivolous or without evidence. (To complain about such things in Dissident Right circles in America has also lately become declasse: you don’t want to be one of those boring Manosphere guys do you? What’s really important is Economic Populism and ending the rule of Global Capitalist Elites…) Thus Argentina may also be the first country where a significant percentage of the men have had to flee because of literal political persecution by militant feminism. It is also, because of the “economic populist” idiocy, the country that has for the longest time learned most expertly to hide wealth, and so the very wealthy again have either fleed, are fleeing, or have learned through corrupt and other means to hide or offshore generational wealth. I can keep going but all these examples are the same thing: the end is the country becomes depopulated, or at least depopulated of a large percentage of its men, its capable European population, and its wealth, along with any other element eventually that gives it its being as the particular country that it is. So my guess is it will eventually, and within this century, stop existing. Someone like Milei could turn it around, but only with a complete abandonment of democracy and a militarization of the government. The United States will likely not allow that. It may allow it in El Salvador to stop gangs and violence, but probably not in Argentina to stop the local version of racial Marxism, which is its own program as well. But history has many surprises lately and some peoples are showing unexpected and hidden founts of energy and ingenuity; I hope I’m wrong, and that Milei or someone else stops this process in South America and gives an example to others… but it’s unlikely.

The likely future — and to a large extent already the present — of Argentina is interesting because the solution is and will be mass migration of its capable, its wealthy, and eventually soon in coming decades in general most of its beautiful, its talented, its non-dwarflike. But where will there be left to flee in the end?

For man in America or Europe, not to speak of Azia, who lives in thickly-settled coasts there is almost no daily escape from the stench and filth of other so-called huemans—where to go to find solitude and quiet? This filthy race lives in cities literally built on piles of garbage and excrement and intrudes everywhere not only with its smells and often—most of world including its new leadership being of peasant stock—bumps into you physically and thinks nothing of it, but also in the persistent noise. You can’t escape the car and bike noise, the slamming of doors, random hammering, construction sites; parties and loud bars are some of few things that don’t bother me because is temporary and at least I can think these people are enjoying themselves…but small “get-togethers” where middle aged Latina woman speaks in loud rasping voice for many hours with unquenching energy, this needs to be forbidden. Schopenhauer has small essay on noise where he explains the hell that modern city even of his time gave to man of thought, for whom any sudden loud noise is an interruption in focus of mind: he singled out the crack of the whip of driver of horses and the slamming of doors, and these same two problems, now made much worse by transportation with engines and by neverending mechanized construction and reforms, are still the worst obstacles to a normal life in city.

I say story before how I met once a Mongol on train, one of his big complaints about life in America was the food: not enough meat! He told me “vegetables are something I’m still trying to get used to.” Yakuts and others from north tundra say the same: vegetables, not to speak of bread, taste to them like wood. What is this spirit that we have to worship bread and the grain? I can never accept that, and everything that goes with it, the way of life, the beliefs that developed around this…and the type of mind that was ultimately bred by the grain.

Anyway my Mongol friend said he could take occasional refuge in Korean restaurants: “at least they have…meat.” This was student on exchange program; America tries to influence and educate scions of important families, and in Mongolia there is special interest because of its location between Russia and Chyna. There is apparently tradition they have by now of playing Russia and Chyna off against each other, to keep their independence; so there is this interest. Then also there are gigantic mines: Rio Tinto owns majority stake in Oyu Tolgoi, one of largest copper mines in the world and biggest project in Mongolia (known) history. So America thinks it will educate or train the youth of some nations to the superiority of its political system like it used to during Cold War, but forgets that Soviet Union no longer threatening peoples like before, so they are less willing to deal with American quirks. But also forgets that end of that conflict let loose all of its own worst habits, which now all the world can see; and much bad was in the open even some years ago when I met this student, with the rentboy Luo robot as president and the Woke stirrings and apeoid hissyfit chimpouts of his second term already in full acceleration.

Is not just that man who thinks he has overcome danger lets himself go, but specifically that in having to oppose international communism, America was forced to keep somewhat its own genetic leftoid tendencies in check. But these were let loose once this theater of having to oppose the Soviets ended; and what was left was this mess of a gynocracy, of an elite or an occupational class who doesn’t know who it is, who almost doesn’t want to be; who wants to elevate the slave and the stagnant as the highest type and ultimately to deny that anything can exist outside of this. The entertainments and ideals of this class, what is most visible—their outward “sell” pitch—doesn’t command respect of foreigners, no matter how much pious dolts on left and right bray about America’s supposed high ideals. This student had contempt for what he was told because he saw firsthand the only America that was actually celebrated was the America of depravity, of obesity and stagnation; whatever was good among Americans was disdained and suppressed, but the absurd and vile, whether a negrified commercial culture or deranged men putting on women’s clothing, this was celebrated. Who wants that in their own country? These efforts to educate the sons of foreign leaders to “liberal values” are now having almost always the opposite effect, especially when they get to see America’s day to day life. Instead he heartily agreed with me when I tell him to seek with his friends to overthrow the corrupt democracy in Mongolia and replace it with their own guardianship.

In this friendly talk, this very cheerful Mongol tell me something I haven’t forgotten, how constrained he felt by having to live only in cities and on set roads, and how in Mongolia you can just take a car and drive out on the open steppe. It’s a kind of feeling of freedom that once you have, you can’t forget and can’t replace. Imagine also the North American savages: not the ones shaped for serfdom in the overpopulated agrarian empires of Central America, but men hunting big game on open steppe of the Midwest. That experience of the majesty of open spaces and the freedom of movement, the quiet, the exploration and conquest—these last two words are in Portuguese the same—can never be replaced; and you can imagine how such a people will experience settled so-called civilization as only the greatest confinement and drudgery. They could therefore absolutely not tolerate slavery, which is often unfortunately rightly confused with civilization.

For a modern American man or Western man an equivalent experience is in hiking, mountaineering; but if you live in city any readily available hiking trails, you will encounter harridan often on these attempts to find solitude. And so quiet and nature is maybe above all available only in sailing and the sea. I’ve long thought that the maritime beginnings of the Anglos and Americans—its great poets and prophets are Melville, Conrad, Mahan, and similar thinkers of the sea—as also in fact of almost all Indo-European peoples in remote antiquity…I’ve often speculated that these maritime roots are not only spiritually analogous to the life of the steppe, but ultimately that both have the same origins. And that the ranging, exploratory, conquering mindset of the West, which it shares with many of the peoples of the steppe almost uniquely, was simply transferred from there, from the Great Earth Sea, to the great Ocean, but that the way of life of the two, and also the ultimate aspirations and thoughts, are the same.

According to Herodotus, the Phocaeans were the first Greeks to make long sea voyages: he claims they abandoned an older round merchant type ship for what is called the pentekonter, the fifty-oared sailing vessel. This is a precursor to the trireme, and both these ships were capable of achieving very high speeds, maybe not matched until the age of steamboats and engine boats. The pentekonter is the ship of the archaic Greeks, of the age around 800-600 BC when much of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and even beyond, was colonized. The Phocaeans were especially adventurous: from two harbors around the city in middle of Anatolian coast, they ventured out in great spirit and seeded colonies as far as Spain and were the founders of Massalia, the precursor of Marseille, plus quite a few others in Corsica, Sardinia, southern Italy. In Spain they made contact with the mysterious Tartessians whose king, a descendant of Atlantis, invited them to settle and join his city; and when they refused, he nevertheless liked them so much he send them moneys to build strong walls around Phocaea at home.

One episode from Herodotus that always stayed with me was when Phocaea was facing Persian domination, they decided simply to leave their city rather than submit. Packing their ships they took off with their women and children and left the city to the Persians, but empty. Their odyssey around the Mediterranean to find a new home is its own exciting story—could be miniseries better than made-up Netflix fantasy!—but after many adventures and wars including an attempt in Corsica, they founded the city of Elea in southern Italy, you can still visit ruins. It was to be a great city and birthplace of genius: Parmenides and Zeno were both from Elea, and city gave its name to philosophical brotherhood, the Eleatics. For sure in modern times you also find immigrants who leave motherland to escape oppression, but a whole nation packing up and resettling abroad is very rare. Maybe you can make a case for the Americans: it is possible the best Saxons left the English isles to escape Norman domination. But who knows. Such things are very rare: it shows so much however about the Greek understanding of what the city was…not the buildings, the location, the territory, but the men who held it together, their desire to live in power and liberty and in their own distinct way of life and by their own laws. And it reminds me of another telling anecdote from Herodotus.

When Darius attempted to conquer the Scythians who had been harassing his domains, and crossed over into Europe and ranged north of the Danube around 513 BC in great effort to subdue the people of steppe, his efforts came to nothing. He was never even able to close with them. What Herodotus says about them is so striking I should quote it here:

“The Scythians were more clever than any other people in making the most important discovery we know of concerning human affairs, though I do not admire them in other respects. They have discovered how to prevent any attacker from escaping them and how to make it impossible for anyone to overtake them against their will. For instead of establishing towns or walls, they are all mounted archers who carry their homes along with them and derive their sustenance not from cultivated fields but from their herds. Since they make their homes on carts,. how could they not be invincible or impossible even to engage in battle? They were helped in making this discovery by their land and their rivers, which foster and support this way of life. For their land is flat, grassy, and well watered, and the rivers running through it are not much fewer in number than the canals of Egypt.”

How not possible to remember the Phocaeans in reading this? Who also left their home for the flatlands of the open sea—and by the way returned to Phocaea to kill off the Persian garrison before setting on their searches for a new harbor. But they weren’t the only ones; other Ionian city, Teos, did the same and settled in Thrace founding city Abdera. This turn of spirit ran very deep in Greek life and most striking is when Athens herself took as a city entirely to the sea to fight the Persians in an image very much “Scythian” in feel. War with Persia approaching, Athens asked the god at Delphi what do—and the Pythoness answer to take trust in the “wooden wall.” Some thought this referred to old wall around the acropolis, citadel on the hill and take refuge there; but most decided it must mean themselves, that they—their ships—were to be the wooden wall that is salvation of the city. Themistocles persuaded them this was so and also to spend great moneys from recent silver mine to build many more ships. Through this one man saved the city: entire city became seaborne in wooden wall of the fleet, like Scythian nation lived in wooden fleet of carts on the move on the plains. In such way both defended themselves from and ultimately conquered the Persians: as Persia was at different times sacked from both sides, from west by Greeks, from east by steppe Massagetae and later by Parthians. In remote antiquity the Persians themselves had come from the steppe, but settled life will make you weak.

This readiness to turn to the sea and leave for new lands and conquests must have been very old in the Greek spirit: the Ionians and Aeolians themselves had in remote history left the Greek mainland to escape domination by the Dorians, or so it is claimed. I say claimed because the real reason for Greek presence on the Black Sea for example is possibly much older. Of all the Indo-European peoples, the Greeks are the ones whose earliest origins we know of most clearly, in written myths, in the stories of other peoples, and in an archaeological record that can be cross-checked more easily than in other cases. And it is likely an origin as seaborne adventurers, as literal conquistadores. The story of Jason and the Argonauts, of the great sea voyage not to but from the Caucasus—it was later only inverted—is the founding tale of the Greek nation. The worship of Mount Olympus in Thessaly, and the origin of so many Greek mythological heroes in Thessaly—Thessaly as the land of gods and heroes—corresponds again to the earliest beehive tombs in that fertile land, and the likely landing spot of the Aryan seaborne armada, originating in the Caucasus, that would in time become the Hellenes. They arrived in other words by sea and not by land, following stories of a pacific and fertile land of docile workers, ready for the taking. A wonderful book on such things is Robert Drews’ The Coming of the Greeks, which he has since updated with the likely story of the colonization also of temperate Europe.

But it is without doubt that the origins of the Greeks are literally of a steppe adventurer people that took without interruption to the other steppe of the sea and in fact never left it. Even Hellenic assertion in new homeland could only take place after the destruction of a pre-existing thalassocracy, that of the Minoans, and the struggles between the two peoples—ultimately they would merge—but the struggles left behind the dreamlike and unforgettable tale of Theseus and the Minotaur, Theseus’ rescue of Ariadne, his abandonment of the princess, and her exaltation on the island of Naxos by Dionysos. This primal myth which is the source of the most important and mysterious strain in Western imagination…I can only leave it be for now. But Dionysos the god of wine and quite a few other things—is also very much a god of the sea. If you do not believe this, read Homeric Hymn to Dionysos: a short vignette of the sea, where, captured by pirates who don’t know his divine powers, he is tied to the mast of ship. But he makes wine flow through the ship, and the mast sprouts vines and flowers! They are amazed. And he turn into a lion and the pirates into dolphins. And this is repeated in the myth of Arion, the inventor of the dithyramb Dionysiac poem style, who is also captured by pirates; they throw him in the sea but he is saved by a dolphin. The earliest recorded imagination of Aryan man is one of the deepest friendship with the beings of the sea: maybe not even need ships! Atlantis Directorate forces rode dolphin.

There is speculation that after a sojourn in Mesopotamia, this same people arrived in the Indus Valley—also by ship. But there is no speculation, only certainty, that the earliest history of for example the Germanic and Norse peoples is also that of seafaring nations. The early settlement of the English Isles, long before the global adventures of the Vikings, shows this is so, and was in fact only part of a larger pattern of people-wanderings that happened at least in half through watery ways. When the Scandinavian Vandals joined forces with the steppe Alans to first sack Rome, then take Spain, and finally and very quickly set up a seaborne pirate kingdom where Carthage used to be in North Africa, this seamless and natural transition is only a repetition of what I’ve talked above so far, that the steppe and the ocean are for certain peoples a “continuous biome.” The south and the sea, adventure, conquest and the tropics, called to the Vandals as it had repeatedly to other Aryan peoples of the north and the steppe, and as it would continue to.

Even when knowledge of the sea and sailing is lost, it is quickly regained by such peoples, whereas others—living on places with long coastline, even on islands—never think so much as to float a log or build a canoe. The Portuguese, when they first put their sights on nearby North Africa, they made moronic mistakes, had no knowledge of navigation. They quickly relearned it and through superhuman efforts of Henry the Navigator, in a few decades refounded this science once again and launched the age of exploration and colonization, the worldwide expansion of Europe. Portugal was not before this a sea power; it had only recently gained independence from Arab rule. It could have easily remained a stay-at-home “ethnostate.” But being a stay-at-home has never been in the Gothic blood. You look at how immediately they embarked on the most wide-ranging plans and searches away from home…you see…this is a matter in the blood. You look how a tiny country with as yet no seafaring tradition decide to send men like Pedro de Covilha and Afonso de Paiva, both very young, to explore as far as Ethiopia and India, places they in fact reached, as preparation and knowledge-gathering for great conquests: and you see the amazing adventures of these two men to undertake such travels in those times of danger; they embarked on these separate ventures alone—when they knew they could never return home—you see once again the Gothic lust for wandering and adventure and conquest reasserted. What is in the blood can never be forgotten.

Other peoples, the Chynese, when they briefly turned to the sea—they very quickly shuddered at what they found. They turned away from it very fast, the emperor shut it down. It frightened them or at least it frightened their rulers and mothers and senilocracy: because on the sea, as on the steppe, it is in one form or another the mannerbund, or the brotherhood of young warriors that determines the success of the venture. And for some peoples, for most peoples in fact, it is unacceptable, it is death, to allow such brotherhoods to form. But for others it’s impossible to prohibit this because the lust for conquest, adventure and broad horizons is too great. It remains to be seen if enough seed of Hyperborea remains in the world.

An observation from Nietzsche I always loved, regarding artists—they are advised to stay away from trying to render their sensuality in direct or explicit way, whether in music or painting or anything such. He says, for an artsy type, “their sensuality begins where the People’s ends”: it doesn’t translate. And so to a popular taste (and the sexual instinct is always “popular” on a basic level) the artist’s sensuality appears otherworldly, ethereal, “elvish.” The best examples are in those fin de siecle composers who didn’t take Nietzsche’s advice despite both being his disciples, either because they didn’t know about it or because they couldn’t help themselves: Debussy and Scriabin. Both tried to render eroticism and sensuality in music most directly, but neither succeeded. You can hear this failure for example in Debussy Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune; it’s great music, but not because it inspires or reminds of eroticism of lust, though that was the intention. At most it renders languor and loss in a haze of dreamy feeling, which at best precede certain erotic states. But the feeling of sexual stimulation, there is none—to its benefit maybe. In Scriabin’s music this same “failure” is even more explicit. He tried many times to go for the sensual feeling openly, for example in his Poem of Ecstasy. But what he achieves is again to render the feeling of a dreamy languor and then, insofar as there is ecstasy, it’s that of the otherworldly mystic in a fit of religious divine rage. It feels, like the end of his fourth piano sonata, or the insane piece Towards the Flame, like an alien wrote it bringing alien fire and mad passion for a new and alien god—not like anything sexual; and that is good.

None of Scriabin’s music feels sensual in the popular sense, even though maybe a third to a half of it was composed as accompaniment to masturbation. I encourage you to his various so-called “languid dances.” And it all came from the inspiration of a philandering man amorous of women and affairs, as many artsy types often are. But even so it translates as a highly spiritualized sensuality, even too precious. The stodgy English musical traditionalists of the early 20th Century, representing a culture some say less vulgar than our own and maybe less vulgar than myself, did feel, however, a crude and dangerous eroticism in Scriabin’s art and were outraged and shocked by it. Their denunciations sound very funny now: banned from the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1930’s as “evil music” and denounced by one meddlesome parvenu Gerald Abraham as “erotic and egotistic to the point of mania.” Whether these Church lady denunciations were indeed motivated by a sensibility more sensitive than mine—I don’t myself see the crude eroticism in his music—or whether they were politically motivated because they felt something rather different...maybe a kinship between Scriabin’s mystical ecstaticism and the then awakening of the European peoples to a new political vision...who knows?! But it made me think to ask the question, what is the relationship between the right and classical music.

CAN THERE BE MARXIST MUSIC?

What could be “left wing” music? If by this is meant music of the Reds, such as the Bolshevik battle hymn The Red Army is the Strongest, this is a nothing answer. This is militarist exciting music, and could be the music of any militant state or organization, or any revolutionary group. It’s actually indistinguishable from the militant music of the SA or the Fascists or anthems like Cara al Sol, the hymn of the Falange, or for that matter English or American military songs like the Battle Hymn of the Republic, of which the Red Army Choir has one of the best recorded versions. It has nothing to do with the left wing spiritually. Beethoven is also music of the French Revolution. But for all of Beethoven’s supposed later anger at Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor, it’s obvious that his music is glorification not so much of the egalitarian program of the French Revolution, but of its redeemer in Napoleon. It is the setting for the greatness of life and vision of a classical man of violence and energy who appeared in the middle of a mediocre democratic age like an out of place surprising comet, and who overcame it. It’s not and it can’t be the music of Jacobin egalitarianism and moralfaggotry. Young people often love this spirit and these musics but only because they love revolution and violence; they don’t love or don’t even know what left wing revolution is actually supposed to bring. That would mean the music of the Marxist End State, or a music in anticipation of it. In the Marxist End State that covers the globe there can’t be music like “Red Army is the Strongest,” or like Shostakovich wartime symphonies, or anything else of this kind. War, struggle and all necessity has ended. If there could be a classical or in other words—a refined and higher spiritual music that evokes this, it would be one of the end of all struggle, all passion, all suffering, all intense necessity. But Marx’s End State feels like hell on Earth, the domain of total boredom. To use his own dystopian words, after all that struggle and blood what is left is to paint in the morning and fish in the evening. But is possible to imagine that for someone who desires this end of all tensions, longings and hierarchies of the spirit...there could be a refined reflection of all this in a kind of pleasant music, pleasant in its own way. It would have to be a music where the self or soul feels like it disintegrates into a pleasant indifference. I’m not sure this is possible. You can try listening even to white noise on headphones, but white noise is true and natural power and after some time a great chimp madness takes hold of you.

Good music is as such a reflection of the inner being of the world and of existence itself and will therefore always in some way act as a recall and an enticement to the intensity of existence. “Without music life would be a mistake”—yes; music is the genius of the species made sensible and concrete. Which is why in the end there can’t be an antilife, antibiological, or same thing, purely left wing or communist music. As long as music is good, it excites to something beyond mere life. It can never be the program to an ideology of mere life.

MUSIC AND THE REACTIONARY

Music as a program to a religious or philosophical doctrine has been successfully done many times and is the rule historically when it comes to “classical music,” or music refined into a high art with a tradition of craft passed on from one generation to the next and refined into forms that please consistently. As a rule such musical tradition develops around religious or political centers of patronage and cultivation. These seek to have the unity of their vision of life expressed in various arts and literary productions. Culture is “unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people.” Classical music in seeking to preserve this or that particular tradition is almost by definition “right wing.” But this view of “right wing” is to be rejected because it is too broad a definition of the right. Shintoism for example may be “right wing” by this definition but that doesn’t as such make it aligned with other “right wing” phenomena like Hindu-Brahman nationalism or Zionism. I like to ask American conservatives who praise Zionism as “right wing”: “but what is it to you? By that definition so is Shintoism.” Guenon as well as many other religious traditionalists are misleading many that all traditions are equivalent in being Tradition as opposed to modern materialism. But traditions are interesting most of all when their differences from each other are considered. Each has a different vision of man, of his ends and his life and of what is great and good, and mostly these are incompatible with each other. Each favors different passions and habits so each ends up breeding over time a different type of man, with different tastes. A closely related fact is that tradition doesn’t experience itself always or just as “tradition,” as veneration for the ancestral and what has been passed down, although they do all have this in common; there is also veneration for the content and vital truth of what is claimed, which is something modern Traditionalists often forget as much as modern leftist, liberal and many American conservative Intellectuals forget that cultures are held together primarily by ties of mutual loyalty, common habits, blood and respect for ancestors. Both elements are necessary.

So in a sense all types of “classical music” are “right wing.” But this is not so useful to say, first of all because defining “right wing” simply as faithfulness to some particular tradition is too vague; but most of all because nearly no one today lives fully and passionately and with true belief within such a tradition. We live in a time when almost all traditions have been run over by something traditionalists denounce as modernism or modernity. Whether this can be reversed or should be are different questions, but the first step on this matter must be—uncompromising honesty with oneself at least, that no in fact, you weren’t raised with genuine belief and practice in a tradition in the way almost all men were some centuries ago. Maybe in some corner of Bhutan, or among tribesmen of Yanomami, but even there...observe tribesmen where “traditional styles” and ways of life are preserved and even there, as long as they’ve actually heard of modern life, there’s something deliberate and artificial about it that wasn’t true for their grandfathers who didn’t know about us. “We won’t join this strange new world, its risks are too great, let’s cleave to our ways instead”—but that very act of reflection of seeing our ways as something separate from the way, of at least having that doubt...and all modern men have very strong doubt on this whatever they may say; that’s something their ancestors didn’t know. The innocence of “traditional life” is lost for now.

The modern world, whatever it may be, is in practice a kind of apocalypse: an “uncovering” or exposure because it tears away the protective local shadow under which particular traditions protected and cultivated this or that type of man and life. Some say it is science and reason dispelling the salutary enchantments under which man developed locally; others say it’s a false homogenizing materialism that does away with truth and the divine as it shows itself to man historically in multiple places according to their own abilities, characters, and destinies. I’d say it comes down to popularized or mass-propagated Socratic skepticism—what Nietzsche called Alexandrian scientific civilization. For better or worse, when it spreads as it does now with modern technology, wealth or its promise, and ideologies, it really does tear down beautiful and salutary local “umbrellas” under which different tribes of men have been able to cultivate themselves. But it doesn’t replace them with a genuinely human or natural culture built in the light of science; its very presuppositions, its false understanding of man as a creature of reason, are anti-artistic and anti-cultural. It can be a spiritual edifice for a society of human multiplication, but not cultivation or culture. This is the problem.

It’s at this point that the reaction against this uncovering and exposure-left-barren takes a more or less typical form and can be brought under a less vague concept of “the right.” The reactionary wants to reestablish tradition and even though these traditions differ from each other in what they want, many reactionaries have more or less the same wounds. So their methods and orientations are often very similar. Sayid Qutb and Mohammad Iqbal of Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan foundation respectively are similar to each other not just because they’re broadly Muslim but because they’re reactionaries against modernity...so they are also similar to Shinto reactionaries and in certain arguments also to Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortes Christian reactionaries and to many others. In the non-European reactions to modernity, it is added also the humiliation that modernity was introduced by foreigners, which twists the knife in the wound, and gives the reactionary ideology often a character of extreme rancor.

In the arts, however, it’s hard to think of a purely reactionary artist who was successful. Here you have to distinguish between an artist’s political views, which may be purely reactionary and not entirely relevant, and his actual art—which, if good, is very rarely purely reactionary. Even the most self-consciously reactionary good art has to engage with modernity. In speech and politics purely reactionary walking back like a crab is more possible to; in the arts if the final product works and pleases a good taste, it can’t hide behind speech, concepts, or the other lies of reason and human self-deception. It has to engage the senses and provide a direct intuitive understanding to perception, which either absorbs you or it doesn’t. And so here roleplay and pretense comes off as contrived and quaint, or “cringe” even. “No one is free to walk backwards like a crab”: yes but you can pretend to, and this is harder if you try to make good art.

Attempting to reproduce the feelings of the court of Louis XIV and continue the—forget the style!—just the vision of life of Couperin, as if the last hundred or two hundred years hasn’t happened, would be a wonderful act of defiance but ultimately it could only work as some very cruel parody. I have many bad memories of driving through the desolation of the northeast United States and looking out the window at this mud-colored bleak world, abandoned by everything beautiful, with just senseless jumble of dilapidated almost-Soviet shingled shacks and grim utilitarian shops, and disjointed architecture built according to no plan; or worse, with a thin rape of agricultural production spread widely across the land...and of trying to listen to Couperin with this gray apocalypse out the window. I always had to turn off such music. It’s an insult to the music and to yourself. It’s worse in other parts of America—imagine looking out now on obese lardmother with mystery meat kid sweating at bus stop. And you listen Rameau while you see this...I encourage you do this; listen to his “Cyclops” while you look this. You will only wish for total nuclear wipeout; I mean the contrast is so severe. I am exaggerating. There were scenes of desolation and poverty in Couperin day too, maybe even worse than now. But the music would feel inappropriate as a program even to the greatest opulence of today. “It doesn’t fit.” It’s like trying to wear powdered wig; I know such things are titillating for many men now who call themselves reactionaries. They have other motivations. But at its worst the “reactionary mind” is just this vulgar pretense, in the middle of our total desolation, that you can just carry on going through the motions and that merely aping the past and its forms is going to revive it.

At its worst and most vulgar, the “reactionary” relationship to classical music is a symphony hall, itself a contrivance now, serving as a meeting place for families of Orthodox Jews to take their daughters for “cultural enrichment experience.” It has driven me to a rage to think that this is what a great musical heritage has been reduced to, and I walked out of music hall cursing it and feeling worse than if I had gone to porn jackoff booth. Beethoven and Couperin didn’t write for this...for a museum experience and to be “cultural enrichment.”

You must understand I didn’t start listening to such musics until I was maybe thirteen or so, and then it wasn’t because I wanted a “historical experience” or to feel traditional, but because this music, which I began to listen to by chance, the music of the classical tradition spoke to my deepest longings for another world, a transfigured world. I had one or two friends who I discussed such musics with in great detail and with eagerness, and unlike me they became musicians. Now they either play for such audiences as I just said, or as a luxury “guest chef” type gig in the houses of the very rich, but in all cases this is not really what I had in mind or hoped for when I was discussing this music with them. This music like all high art has no home anywhere today because it’s never there as a setting, program, or spur to the great feelings and great pressures under which it was created. It’s now just a sad ornament to an unworthy existence. The incongruity between the greatness of feeling in these composers and the tawdry bleakness of modern life turns Couperin or Beethoven, when set to any modern life scene, as —well, the only “setting” I can imagine here, the only resolution, is the total destruction of this mistake. The total violent erasure of this entire so-called modern world of teeming, purposeless insect life: that is the meaning of Beethoven when set to any scene of now. A redemption through orgy of destruction. This is the only type of “reaction” that I can imagine and that wouldn’t be a complete joke museum reenactment or historical roleplay.

I don’t mean to insult all reactionaries, some are good people, they’re not all Hasids or Chinese taking their daughter to education symphony hall hour. I rather like Donoso Cortes and Franco, and would prefer that kind of government greatly to whatever exists now; they would at least not censor me and my friends. And in the arts, there are genuinely great reactionary authors and composers, for example Tolkien and Rachmaninoff. That’s probably what reactionary art looks like at its best. Rachmaninoff continued not just the style, but stubbornly stuck to reproducing the feel of the world he had loved around 1900-1910, and lost completely in 1917. If you want to hear and feel not just the court of the Tsar, but of the international European aristocracy of around that time, you can see it in Rachmaninoff. This appears most clearly in his second sonata, which is just very high class lounge music, or in the Etude-Tableau opus 39 number 5, a flight dream of fin de siecle glamorous decadence remembered and exalted to otherworldliness by a man in exile from it. It was real and vital in him even after 1917 because it was animated by a nostalgia for something he had known and loved, and remembered dearly as something lost. A similar nostalgia and sense of loss I am told is throughout Tolkien’s books. But even he engaged with modern styles and feels in his later music, and so did a reactionary author like Tolkien. And in any case, the European aristocracy around 1900 was already modern and changed by modernity, and this is reflected in his music from the beginning. It’s the reason his music is an appropriate setting to the decades later Old Hollywood and in fact to almost any half-glamorous scene in Western modern life up until around the time suits stopped being worn as universal style in polite society.

CLASSICAL MUSIC AND THE RIGHT IN THE EYES OF THE LYING PRESS

The mention of roleplaying and affectation brings to mind the political and social uses of classical music, which unfortunately is something that accompanies and often perverts all the high arts. This is especially true now when they really no longer exist as anything but preservative traditions and historical reenactments, and are therefore separated from their natural dwelling. The natural dwelling of any high art is an audience with high taste, which feels a genuine need for them. Genuine connoisseurs are few, where before they were many; so now the arts have become something else. Much has been made of how visual art is used as a status marker, as an investment to store wealth, as a form of money laundering, and as an edifice on which are built the careers of many academics and critics, most of them onanists.

What it lacks now in number that it had before are genuine lovers. Classical music can be used in a similar way. Some like it or pretend to like it for bad reasons. For example: modernity is vulgar and democratic and frankly low-class, whereas European traditional society is aristocratic and high class. Classical music was the music of the aristocracy and then the haute bourgeoisie (not the “upper middle class” of today who are paupers by comparison both in wealth and in education or taste). And so in some cases there is the motivation of status signaling, “I’m not one of the rubes so I listen to Mozarts”: this motivation exists even among the left and liberals. And it’s very frequent among minorities looking to assimilate to or appropriate the symbols of a civilization that no longer exists in order, again, to signal status and high class branding. This is a bad motivation, but it is “reactionary” in a vulgar sense.

At a somewhat higher level there is the youth who senses that modern music is or tries to be erotic. This is actually a misunderstanding of modern pop music on the part of certain types of reactionaries and conservatives; it’s not true, as Allan Bloom alleges, that rock music is about stimulating eroticism—it’s just not felt this way by the listeners. When he adds in the Closing of the American Mind that youth only like Ravel’s Bolero among classical musics for the same reasons, he’s shooting off target. That’s just not the feeling Ravel’s piece inspires, its rhythms notwithstanding. Aside from certain forms of hip hop, which in some cases is just retarded black locker room music, there are very few forms of modern pop music that succeed or even try to inspire erotic feelings in the listener (and this doesn’t even describe most of hip hop as it exists now). But a certain kind of conservative again thinks modern pop music is about this; for example the kind who wears a bow tie and who imagines himself a reviver of the Stuart monarchy and the empire of Our Lady of Guadeloupe and many such things; or Evelyn Waugh pretend scotch and cigar parties in Washington DC. Often sexually confused or repressed—the left is unfortunately correct about certain rightist types—they lean to classical music because they wrongly feel it is “less erotic” or less connected to a “hypersexualized” modernity. The “stuffed shirt” associations of this musics appeals to them. This is a somewhat higher motivation than the Chinese immigrant’s status hunger, but it’s still a deformed reason to “like” classical music. In all these cases it’s a form of social and political signaling. If it starts this way and moves beyond that to an appreciation of the content itself this can be good though; and there are cases where even political signaling can be good, for example when convenience stores use classical music on radio megaphone to make a certain element not loiter outside in the parking lot.

From a popular cretin’s or journalist’s point of view, what I just described is “the relationship between the right and classical music.” It explains the political and social signaling as well on the left when they force, for example as this week, a four hundred pound mocha manatee type to play Madison’s crystal flute at some Camacho Idiocracy music obesity mega-event; the intention being to profane (as they see it) one of the symbols of the oppressive white order. Or, on the other hand, when journalists get the airs over the “problematic” phenomenon of young white men who lift weights, listen to classical music and possibly harbor retrograde or fascist racist tendencies. In all these cases it’s a question of the political use of art, but only of its outward symbol status as maybe a gang sign. I had to address something this obvious; but here I’m concerned only with the inner significance of the music and how it actually affects the spirit of those who genuinely listen and like, and of what it inspires in them.

WHY CLASSICAL MUSIC DOESN’T EXIST NOW

The difference between classical music and popular is in ability of classical to access a wider range of emotions, including ones that don’t have precise names; or some exist in shades not quite captured by word language. A popular song can be good, especially in the melody just as good as any classical composition. But because of relative lack of accumulated skill modern music can mostly affect you only in one-note way. At the opposite end you have the pinnacle of classical music, the symphony form, which can be a world into itself and tell the story of life, nature and man in its vicissitudes and many changes, and make you feel many different and contradictory things in many varying shades. The melody part of music is the pure work of genius and inspiration; consistent ability to find good and striking melodies is really something of the blood and can’t be learned. Others can find a good melody very rarely by luck only. So ability to find good melodies isn’t dependent on a tradition or learned skill, and can be found just as much among popular as among classical music historically.

Musical genius can exist today and I hear there is “popular” music composed now that is equal to any great classical piece both in the inspiration of its melody and even in the refinement of how this is orchestrated and developed. But it’s by necessity very rare for two reasons. First the young musical genius finds himself alone and having to start almost from scratch; he is not introduced to a wide variety of forms, learned “tricks,” and traditions of composition through mentorship which could give him a way to develop his skills in a sophisticated way. Even a cook with great taste and native skill would be lost and at great disadvantage without the accumulated knowledge and skills of a great culinary tradition. The second reason is the very one such a tradition of mentorship and skill refinement and memory no longer exists: it’s no longer needed. There isn’t a class of people of taste such as the European aristocracy, who have the emotional and cultural sophistication to need this music or any other high art for that matter. Accordingly classical music exists only as a museum taste to preserve a dead tradition for many of the reasons listed above, mostly having to do with affectation; occasionally you will find people who genuinely love it and need it, but not enough to create a demand, market or patronage structure for new art to be created. Audiences who attend classical concerts today don’t need it and don’t want new music. A musician trained in that tradition would in the best case become like John Williams if he wants to compose something new. Others are advised to compose in the popular style, where acclaim and appreciation of some kind can still be found for the innovation of genius as opposed just to preservation. But as the people are peasants with crude tastes, the best music won’t necessarily find its proper audience or be rewarded, not with enough consistency to lead to the existence of a high art tradition or something with consistent production standards; and so, being without the support of a tradition of composition, even the greatest genius will be able to hit on something good only occasionally now.

For this reason I am here concerned only with the classical music tradition and its relationship to the right. The “states of soul” accessible by modern and popular music are too narrow or too inconsistent to be considered for now. But even in addressing what is now a dead tradition I hope to show to anyone interested the possibility of a rebirth of music as a high art. Such an art will only develop when there is an audience who needs and wants it, and which is big and secure enough. There is no reason why certain modern popular forms couldn’t at that point be refined anew into a high art. Some elements of the classical tradition itself will no doubt be incorporated, but for example, as far as the instruments go, there would be no need to limit a new music to the instruments of the classical tradition. These were changed and added over time anyway; it would be only out of historical affectation that one excludes for example certain electronic instruments and other musical technologies. Actually these are to be welcomed because they give the individual composer greater independence. A half-autist very much concerned and absorbed with musical notes and sound will find the process of musical production with modern electronic instruments, computer, and visual representations alone in a studio much more congenial to his nature than anything from the past. But the important question is what ultimately is the spiritual purpose of music as a high art, and what does it mean in the life and education of an audience able and ready to receive it.

CLASSICAL MUSIC AND THE RIGHT

The difference between the reactionary and the new or Nietzschean or radical right in politics is mirrored in the difference between “classical music” understood as right wing in the reactionary sense I tried to describe above, and then in a quite different sense. In politics the difference is clear to state in theory although in practice the two wings of the right are never so discrete: on one hand there is the throne and altar conservative, who seeks to preserve the ancien regime of Europe in some form. On the other hand there are the various rightist factions who mostly come with Nietzsche and after, who are secular or atheist, and who embrace modernism and technological progress. These usually have an orientation based around the State or around race and biology, or both; in the modern world after the failures or rather the military defeat and suppression of Fascism and associated movements, there’s also the interesting possibility of a radical right based around biologism that is not however connected to any State or statist project, especially in a time when large states might fail because of decreasing lack of human capital. But anyway: in reality there are again many hybrid cases of the “two sides of the right” and in practice there is cooperation more frequently than there is conflict, because both share the communist left and to some lesser extent also the liberal mainstream as enemies. As to the ultimate foundations of each of these rightist sides or factions or flavors, this is a big topic worthy of a big book—but it’s fair to say that to qualify as right wing, both must reject egalitarianism. Whether they reject egalitarianism in favor of the traditional hierarchies of an old order, or whether they seek to create a new order based on a natural hierarchy such as that of biology or race, they have rejection of egalitarianism in common. But this ultimately translates into rejection of mere life, or the “human being as a walking stomach” idea of mankind, which is shared by both liberal capitalism and communism, and which explains their frequent historical alliances against European man.

In music it’s easy to point to Wagner as the template for composer that is “radical right wing” both in form and in spirit. Like any man of the radical right he saw the old order was failing and insufficient. Just as a disciple of Nietzsche might see that the foundation of the old hierarchies is withering, both spiritually and intellectually, while these are materially unable to hold back the forcefulness of the mob and of the left; and then see however in the new discoveries of Schopenhauer and Darwin, in the remembrance of biology and in general in the progress of science an opportunity to refound anew a project of mankind to reach beyond itself. Or in other words to found new hierarchies and orders based now, not on salutary lies, but on the true rank of values as found in nature. In same way Wagner sought a new kind of music, that would give birth to new gods and itself serve as the program for a new human life and a new political state that exists as a work of art.

Analogous to how radical right wingers are often viewed with suspicion by the reactionary right, Wagner was abhorred by the old guard in music. For a funny example see Arthur Rubinstein’s autobiography where he complains about his reactionary piano teacher. He complains about this teacher’s antisemitism and grouchy behavior, but his peculiarities were most marked in his opinions on music, with which he tried to tyrannize his student: music was to have stopped with Brahms. Playing a few bars of Wagner on the piano was enough to make a musical reactionary throw a fit, and this was a common joke in musical circles at the time. Something changes with Wagner, there is a big break: Nietzsche says that whereas before all music strove to follow the form of the dance, for Wagner it was to seek the sensation of floating in an ocean.

The stylistic break is only the vehicle to the spiritual and programmatic break: there is a revolution in Wagner’s spiritual program. Previous great classical music is understandable on the basis of generally conventional political and moral programs. Mozart and Haydn reflect courtly taste still, and in them the feeling of Enlightenment ideology of balance and reason... this is all compatible with Christian feeling and program. Beethoven’s revolutionary fervor and exaltation of Napoleon as the great man doesn’t seem to explicitly call for a civilizational break; the nationalist Romantic composers celebrate national feeling and style—Grieg instantly feels Scandinavian even to someone who doesn’t know who the composer is—but while all this is interesting and in many cases new and always beautiful, it doesn’t intend or reflect a break in civilization.

In Wagner there are by contrast birth pangs of entirely new gods, and in men like Siegfried, a totally new morality and vision of life, previously unknown in the Christian world, or at least submerged and suppressed since antiquity. There is with all this the effort to create a “total work of art” that goes beyond the symphony and becomes an entirely immersive experience combining theater, music and staging that goes beyond traditional opera and involves the audience essentially in the recreation of a participative Dionysian passion play. It is on one hand music meant to break in spirit with civilization as it had existed and meant to birth an entirely new civilization and new gods; and on the other hand it is a music that was to be a total work of art that in style unifies different arts and in essence absorbs the audience entirely as something more than an ironic spectator. These two related aspects of the new art were taken to their natural conclusion by Scriabin, a disciple both of Wagner and of Nietzsche. His last unfinished work, Mysterium—he died on Easter Day as he had been born on Christmas Day—was to be performed on several mountaintops in the Himalayas, and to mix music, colored lightings, speech, whispers, smell, many other thing. Its performance was intended to cause the end of this world and age, which I have no doubt it would have. More even than Wagner he attempted, explicitly in his intentions, to call forth new beings and gods to be born and to enter our world. Thus the fourth sonata, where he says the vision was a faraway blue star that got closer and closer to him one night until he was engulfed in an ocean of ecstatic blue light; or the fifth sonata, a Poem of Ecstasy which he claims was his complete apprehension of an other-dimensional being, and which is dedicated with this poem:

I call you to life, hidden desires!

You, who have sunk into the dark depths

of the creative spirit, you fearful ones.

You germs of life, to you I bring boldness!

It was to be the birth of a new god and a new world. An accompanying political-moral event of foundation you can see in the venture of Gabriele D’Annunzio in Fiume in 1919. D’Annunzio formed his spirit and mind during this same time as Scriabin was writing this music. Also a disciple of the prophet Nietzsche, D’Annunzio after having proclaimed himself Duce, announced music as the central governing and spiritual principle of his new state. It was to be a Wagnerian opera set into action on a grand scale, an entire state organized as a Wagnerian Dionysian rite, as an organic work of art and theater. It was a true vitalist state. The unity of art and politics.

The people would be mobilized into an artful whole and the primary means would be a new music, a post-Wagnerian magnificent music through which the state is organized in an ecstatic frenzy. The entire pageantry of later Fascism and Nazism is inherited from D’Annunzio’s efforts in Fiume...this is well known. But you don’t need to buy into the full political program of either Mussolini or Hitler to appreciate the perfect aesthetics of their creations. However much else Mussolini and Hitler may have dumbed down D’Annunzio’s attempt (or been forced to by necessity and the capacities of the people), they preserved the aesthetic project beautifully and almost flawlessly. Hugo Boss, Porsche and Chanel worked for the Nazis and Dali was an admirer of Franco; I hear even now there are lingering sympathies in the fashion world and that founders of Dolce & Gabbana were involved in some controversies. The left doesn’t like this, but Fascism and Nazism were entrancing for artists, nurtured many, and continues to. As such Hitler’s state and Mussolini’s would be the only modern states that Plato would approve of—it’s no accident that Mussolini himself is one of the most important readers of Plato in the 20th Century. The attempt to bring music and art back to the forefront of the education of a people and the foundation of a culture and of political life, the need for its inculcation prior to any reason or rationalization to effect a spiritual awakening...music and pageantry as the foundation of a people’s habits and of the national community itself—this attempt to resurrect antiquity in our time is shocking. It is a great experiment.

While any state-based solutions to our present problems and direct mimicry of these just-named examples is outdated for now, the kernel they carried, that of the reorganization of life on aesthetic and biological, rather than moral and commercial foundations is the most amazing innovation and resurrection of the ancient spirit of nature; and it is open to any number of uses and opportunities in the near future. Many for example have been confused about anonymous anime accounts on Internet social media sites. Some of these use anime avatars, and are interested in the magical aesthetics of various anime things and series...who are interested in catgirls and much such things. These enterprising accounts promote enthusiastically the aesthetics of the Third Reich and Hugo Boss and so on. It is a political program entirely based on the promotion of anime, of catgirls, and of the aesthetics of National Socialism. This is one of the most amazing uses of the Internet of our time, and very successful. It has amazed and confused many.

If you begin backward, if you start first with the music of Wagner and Scriabin, sense their intentions and spirit, and from there reconsider the classical music tradition from before, it starts to sound different. If you listen to Beethoven and Bach with what comes later in mind, then you see something hidden. You start to see that yes, the composition of polyphony and even much of Baroque music still was almost entirely within the Christian-Alexandrian synthesis that is known as “Western civilization.” But within German music in particular there is an undercurrent that is not of it, it is from somewhere else. It’s not always honestly and explicitly expressed, but it’s there in the bass harmonies of Beethoven and already of Bach, and often also in their thematic melodies that recall an uncanny, impulsive and brutal spirit that says again and again: here is nature, here is the brute surface of the rock face deep inside night forest...you’re in the wrong neighborhood, Alexandrian, you came to the wrong neighborhood Socrates you…

This is the deep insight of Nietzsche’s early book The Birth of Tragedy, which he never really repudiated. Western civilization since Socrates, also called Alexandrian scientific civilization, in synthesis with Christianity which is its popularized form, is striking, new and revolutionary because it was a first attempt to discover or posit a universal basis for man’s culture or cultivation. But the version of nature on which this attempt was launched was edited and false. It depended on a ruthless editing out of the pre-Platonic philosophy of nature and life. This earlier and less edited version of philosophy was in conversation with and drew sustenance from the Dionysiac rites of Greek culture, which perceived and honored the true sources of human nature. The Socratic-Alexandrian successor civilization by contrast falsely posited reason as the moral foundation of human life. “Reason” here refers not to science, or investigation, but to a false moral formula that edits out the truths about what it is that motivates and cultivates men, and replaces it with an inadequate insistence that conceptual education and moral piledriving can make them better. But this Alexandrian civilization of the cult of Reason and Moralism, all of which depended on an edited vision of human nature that excised the Dionysian and the Tragic, this was never able fully to tame the Teuton. The Teuton received the outer forms of this civilization, but as to its inner meaning, there is a reason that area of Europe is the source of so many heresies in the same way that Persia was for the Islamic world. It was unwilling really to take to the seed of Alexandrian civilization and reacted against it frequently.

The question of to what extent European man’s world-conquering success was because of this Alexandrian-Socratic-scientific civilization or in spite of it, this is interesting. This is all very interesting and big question; but for another time. It is indisputable though that the degradation of modernity, the multiplication of damaged life, and of its accompanying ideologies of revenge against higher forms, a revenge masked under doctrines of egalitarianism, human rights, or compassion, that all this is the evil late flower of just this Alexandrian-Socratic rationalist “scientific” civilization. And that the untamed, half-barbaric spirit of Dionysus, which is the same as of Wotan, survived as a rival undercurrent expressed most dangerously in German music...yes, even in the days of Bach already. German music never really was a part of traditional Socratic civilization, but something different, and something meant to destroy it and break its shackles on European man. It is for this reason Nietzsche and his followers had such high hopes that out of this music would emerge the foundations of a new world culture, this time based together with a new science of evolution on the tragic but grand truth about nature and man as opposed to a half-lying edit of this truth.

I hope this has been a fruitful introduction to what I see as the meaning of the classical music tradition and its potential reemergence. It could one day once again become a platform for the rebirth of the spirit of the real Greek antiquity and of nature in our time.

I used to call myself a monarchist in public. In part I was honest, but it was also for self-protection. My real views were far worse to a normalfag, but no one really takes monarchism seriously: it has steampunk smell. It’s a way to advertise a kind of quaintness and safety, like historical reenactment carnival. So I stopped calling myself this. Spiritual cleanliness should stop you whenever you realize you’re getting “two bird one stone” effects like this or becoming performing clown…it’s a sign something is off. In one move you get to set yourself against modern dysfunction, to carve out a unique social niche in your near circle, to advertise your harmlessness, and to distinguish yourself from those lowly peasant middle American types—after all no one would ever associate a monarchist and especially a Traditionalist Monarchist or most of all a Catholic Monarchist with a lowly snakehandling redneck MAGA chauvinist. How convenient! This repulsed me, when I realized why others were doing it. It’s become another pose of the insecure bowtie conservative and reactionary. Well, I guess it was at this point I stopped doing it, when I realized it amounts to showing off a gay hanky code for lavender DC crowd; I didn’t want to know what goes on at integralist cognac and cigar parties behind closed doors.

There are two factions that claim to take “monarchism” seriously in America today, the integralists or “Catholic monarchists,” and the “neoreactionary monarchists” who follow Moldbug usually in some way. I don’t take the former seriously because I’ve known the genuine French kind for a long time, and I recognized the American DC version as another gay striver snob group. Just one difference: whereas almost all the French monarchists are sedevacantists or members of SSPX who consider post-Vatican II church to be traitors, the American “integralists” – almost all of who are converts, by the way – believe somehow that the gay bouncer Pope, or any other of the post-Vatican II impostor popes, whose purpose is to defend the liberal social state, will bless a pan-American reactionary “Empire of Guadeloupe”. I will believe them when they follow Bishop Richard Williamson. But even then they will still not understand what is monarchy.

And as for the neoreactionary version, it’s more genuine because it does make an attempt to go to the root of what monarchy is and what keeps it going; but while I consider Moldbug a friend, I find the analogy neoreactionaries make to a corporate executive or a startup chief to be both unrealistic in practice, and as a historical matter “incomplete,” or a misreading of what is monarchy and what its prerequisites are. Sovereignty can’t be understood in terms of property rights, or even by analogy to these; kingship and rule speak to another order of life ignored by both these groups.

But it’s not my style to engage in hairsplitting argument on this or anything else, but to show something else entirely; so I thought I’d try to give small introduction here to what I think is kingship in its beginnings and ends.

No one today except maybe in Bhutan, in dark nooks of Japanese imperial palaces, or similar fossil pocket holdouts has any right to the luxury of continuation of tradition. The reason conservatives and especially social conservatives appear to be both disingenuous and also losers—to always lose, to always play a caricature or foil of the left, ultimately to play the cuckolded husband who is being mocked by adulterous mistress and her lovers and all the audience—is because of what we call roleplaying or LARP’ing, but which is the pretense or even worse the belief that you are upholding traditions or institutions when these have been violated, impregnated, and transformed by interloping others into something else. And therefore you are reduced to a steward and protector of your enemy’s aims and offspring, which is after all the definition of the cuckold, in this case with the added buffoonish humiliation of having the trappings and airs of the patriarch and Head of the Household. This describes almost all social conservatives (for example when they scold men to “man up” and marry aged ladies with cunts smelling of rotten meat and with the body counts of prostitutes of former ages).

In our time the question can’t possibly be about the continuation of any traditions, which have almost all been inseminated by rogues, but about the foundation of new traditions: which immediately brings questions, what traditions are for, and how are they founded and why. As these are subjects for big books, and as I like to skip many steps I will tell you small other secret; once you think long enough about these things you will come to this conclusion: that founding traditions isn’t even possible in our time, not at this moment, but that you must work for something that must exist even before the foundation of a new tradition. What is this something? Maybe I leave it this vague and general for now: work for conditions where “foundation of traditions” in a real sense, in a real political and social sense, where this becomes possible. What this looks like?

But I talk here of kingship, and it comes in a few kinds. As for the types of kingship that exist after many generations of foundation, this is very interesting subject, and totally irrelevant to our possibilities today. Anyone who talks of reestablishing any of the European royal houses, the Habsburgs, the Stuarts, or whoever, is, like I say, a roleplayer. The Habsburg family for example as a whole right now supports the European Union project, meaning not just the European Union as a political structure, but the social-spiritual project of that miserable mesquin creature, the New Man of the European Common Market who Leon Degrelle realized had inherited the nations by the 1970s. All of these royal houses lost title to rule, sometimes ignominiously as in the case of the unfortunate Tsar Nicholas II, who looks dashing in a hussar outfit—and who I too like to remember as a symbol of what was done to Europe by its enemies; and nevertheless, he was a stupid man who is to be blamed for what he lost. In 19th Century Donoso Cortes already realized the modern world allows only for Catholic dictatorship, not monarchy: as in Franco, a stopgap, an emergency holding position for a time, until saner age arrives. Thus in this view all of modernity, as a Satanic project, presents a long-enduring “emergency,” until it passes.

Maybe this is good plan, good response to modern crisis. It’s a plan, at least. American integralists, however, as roleplaying pussies playing to a leftist sensibility, can never admit to position like this, which is why magazines like First Things run pieces slandering Franco, pretending that his holding regime had no long-term effect. Anyone who visits Spain today, however, can tell it had quite some strong effect, as did Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal. It saved these nations from the worst of the rot affecting the rest of Europe. This is seeping in now in Spain and Portugal as well after decades of leftism, but not in same way—overall they are spared the worst of mass immigration and modern faggotry, and their men and women look better, act better, have more vitality. Spanish cities are almost the only real cities left in Western Europe, that don’t feel like museums and nursing homes.

Phenomenon of early kingship is distorted by the propaganda of two hundred years of liberal republicanism. Absolute monarchy was its original antagonist. Carl Schmitt say formula “liberal democracy” developed in response to absolute monarchy, but the liberal part opposed the absolute, and the democracy the monarchy. In the long run democracy and communism won out over liberalism. Liberal democracy tries to take credit for the great scientific and technological progress European man has given mankind since 1800. But it’s just as possible that such advances were accelerating before 1789, because of some other third reason, and that the modern regime even retarded this acceleration. Prussia-Germany had the best science, best technology, best universities, most sophisticated industrialization before 1945, and it was one of the least liberal and least democratic—isn’t this what Anglo historians say? Nietzsche denounced the Reich as too democratic, and maybe it was: maybe it would have done even much better with less democracy. Lee Kuan Yew didn’t develop Singapore so fast with liberal democracy. Maybe liberal democracy arose because certain classes of men got a glint in the eye, saw this great acceleration of scientific-technological progress, and sought to hijack it. Maybe these factions under the banner of “liberal democracy” noticed they could promise the great bounty created by this technological acceleration, they could promise to siphon this to “the people” and use this as slogan for political agitation. If you look now at hysteria over a weird man like Bezos going into space, with demands that his money should be used to advance “the disadvantaged” and “them programs,” it certainly doesn’t look like “liberal democracy” is something that favors wild acceleration in technology and science, but the retardation of it for “the social good.” This is made explicit during recent years, when Oboma election in America significantly and symbolically scrapped the space program: how dare people suggest that the brightest minds of the nation should be dedicated to spacefaring? The brightest should instead be sent to rural Alabama to build skrewls for black teens—oh what scholars! It doesn’t look like the dysfunctional government-media-academic clerisy-oligarchy that goes under the name “liberal democracy” has any right to take credit for great technological progress since 1800; or that it has a right to attack absolute monarchy as backwards. If Europe had retained absolute monarchy for the last two hundred years, mankind would have colonized the solar system by now, and likely beyond.

But it’s not enough for the demagogues of “liberal democracy” to slander absolute monarchy, they also try to smear early kingship. Early kingship is very different from absolute monarchy. The Spartan kings led the armies in battle, but had little power outside of military leadership. Sparta was a republic of course, and there was line, when Spartan law calls, the kings run. But Aragon was not a republic: when king of Aragon accepted position, the nobles had line, we support this king if he upholds the law, and if not, we don’t. This is very common in European history. In Homer the Greek kings are of course little more than tribal chieftains, constrained not only by their small holdings, but often insecure power even in what they have: Odysseus’ son is not guaranteed succession, and only repeated assertions of physical might and violence can secure the rule in archaic Greece and probably before. There are many debates about the words basileus and anax in Homer, but it’s obvious these were kinglets constrained in many ways by custom, by retainers, by local rivals with claims to rule. Maybe the only time they had stronger leadership was when they returned to their pure function, leading men into battle, like wolf at head of wolfpack on task. The image of Saxons electing king under the oak tree was very important to Anglos, even into the American Revolution; as in, bottom-up elective kingship versus top-down imposed Roman rule: and this derived from model of kingship or chieftainship you see in Germanic world, described by Tacitus:

“On matters of minor importance only the chiefs debate; on major affairs, the whole community. But even where the commons have the decision, the subject is considered in advance by the chiefs. Except in case of accident or emergency, they assemble on certain particular days, either shortly after the new moon or shortly before the full moon. These, they hold, are the most auspicious times for embarking on any enterprise. They do not reckon time by days, as we do, but by nights. All their engagements and appointments are made on this system. Night is regarded as ushering in the day. It is a drawback of their independent spirit that they do not take a summons as a command: instead of coming to a meeting all together, they waste two or three days by their unpunctuality. When the assembled crowd thinks fit, they take their seats fully armed. Silence is then commanded by the priests, who on such occasions have power to enforce obedience. Then such hearing is given to the king or state-chief as his age, rank, military distinction, or eloquence can secure- more because his advice carries weight than because he has the power to command. If a proposal displeases them, the people shout their dissent; if they approve, they clash their spears. To express approbation with their weapons is their most complimentary way of showing agreement.”

This is a very conditional kind of rule. Even the Byzantine emperor, who approached an Oriental despot in his autocracy, or some think so, but he often “ran when the law called”; and enormous respect was paid in Constantinople court at least to the idea of the law; in a dispute with Byzantine king you could invoke the law and he had to listen.

European kingship is restrained because it begins and continues only as military command. But military command is rule primarily over a retinue of friends. Here Tacitus describe German kingship in action:

On the field of battle it is a disgrace to a chief to be surpassed in courage by his followers, and to the followers not to equal the courage of their chief. And to leave a battle alive after their chief has fallen means lifelong infamy and shame. To defend and protect him, and to let him get the credit for their own acts of heroism, are the most solemn obligations of their allegiance. The chiefs fight for victory, the followers for their chief. Many noble youths, if the land of their birth is stagnating in a long period of peace and inactivity, deliberately seek out other tribes which have some war in hand. For the Germans have no taste for peace; renown is more easily won among perils, and a large body of retainers cannot be kept together except by means of violence and war. They are always making demands on the generosity of their chief, asking for a coveted war-horse or a spear stained with the blood of a defeated enemy. Their meals, for which plentiful if homely fare is provided, count in lieu of pay. The wherewithal for this openhandedness comes from war and plunder. A German is not so easily prevailed upon to plough the land and wait patiently for harvest as to challenge a foe and earn wounds for his reward. He thinks it tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be got quickly by the loss of a little blood.

Insofar as the king becomes less of a warband leader his absolute power in some cases will greatly increase, because there is no peer warband or powerful nobility to check him. But in time he will become less of a king because of this: he will be relegated in not too long to a ceremonial position of some kind. Those elements of the tribe or nation that are misrepresented as “the people,” but which I’ve more accurately called the matriarchal longhouse—which includes not just women, but the mass of feminized males, the old men of certain kinds, the types of huemans who seek to use words and language to weaken and denature, and which form institutions to support the obfuscations of language, this faction of hueman nature begins its ascent when king ceases his function as lord of armies.

This is not merely a historical peculiarity; it is meaning of kingship as such, and it can’t be substituted by other kinds of “utility,” such as economic arguments, arguments about rights, even ultimately Hobbesian arguments about security or safety, although these latter deceptively try to “impersonate” the mystery of kingship. In regard to the Hobbesian distortion: a king who is there to quell the fear of death of every “unit of biomass,” who is there to guarantee the lives of spinsters, prostitutes, half-prostitutes, to make them feel safe by having clean, well-lit streets…that may be one of the functions of the king, but cannot be the main one. Insofar as the safety of the weak is provided for, it is as a side effect, intended or not, to the king’s leadership of the assembly of armed men, which is to say, the nobility. In considering a “king without nobles” or without nobility, certain thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes were in fact doing away with kingship as such. Because a king can only be understood as “the most noble of the nobles” and has meaning and continuity only in a society ruled by nobles, which is to say, by armed men who are also able to lead other men. I try to show why this in different way now.

Early kings are always given a religious sanction and function: whether they are blessed by a god, or whether they are living gods. Is this a big difference? Japanese Emperor, Pharaoh are living gods; Babylonian Hammurabi king, Persian king, many others rule by divine blessing. Ancient traditions are not unified things. Rome is well known to have been syncretic Mediterranean religion by end of Empire, it accommodated many different gods and religious sentiments and traditions, some opposed to each other. Orphic rite is not the same as Apollonian, giving respect to Persephone isn’t the same as to Zeus: it isn’t just that these support different types of priests and oracles who will have opposed spiritual and material interests but even that they correspond to different types of human and therefore different factions in a state. In Athens certain old families who traced origin to Phoenician heroes had their own, separate Phoenician shrines: that is very clear example of ethnic or racial difference; similar, Dorian and Ionian paid respect in different way to different deities and heroes. Class or caste differences, if they are long-lasting, almost always have origin in racial difference. In some cases mythological fight between gods or dual pantheons, like Aesir and Vanir or Olympians and Titans, are maybe because conqueror and conquered population had different gods: then story gets retold as one of divine conquest and subjugation, or of reconciliation, or of something in between.

The king’s holiness is the triumph of the warband and of the principle of force and of blood over the priesthood, the institutions of the matriarchy, especially over the principle of the word and language, of ancestral custom that is embodied in the council of old men. That the priesthood then is either coopted or comes to an understanding with the warband leader, that for a time it may even be transformed or gotten rid of altogether as warriors themselves perform sacrifices or other religious functions, or that these two factions may even for a very long time have common interests: none of this contradicts that as human types they have fundamentally different natures and interests and can therefore just as easily come into conflict. In Egypt the famous conflict between the Pharaoh, a living god-warrior, and the clerics or scribes led to the funny episode in Herodotus where the mouse-god saved the nation: a scribe became king, disrespected the warrior class. So they refused to fight against Hittites. The scribe prayed to Apollo the mouse-god who sent rats to chew the Hittites’ bows before a battle. This is a priest’s fantasy and earthly paradise.

But usually when priesthood takes a country, when men who rule through the obfuscations of language get the upper hand, national degeneration and weakness comes soon after. This is almost always the case in republics and democracies that become “advanced,” meaning, legalistic and procedural. Here a class of unholy priests soon neuters the nation and lays it open to conquest.

In Christendom the king may be blessed by God: and his majesty is in role of Defender of the Faith. Frog frend tells me the religious majesty of such a ruler far exceeds that of pre-Christian sacral and divine kings. This is possible, but the king’s divinity can’t result only from a religious declaration of a belief in a proposition. It’s not a doctrinal matter: this is the point. Is maybe point of this essay to try to show you: but is very hard for modern to see because, no experience of kingship, and no real religious experience for most, ever. A king’s holiness has nothing to do with the particular content of this or that one religion, or how they go about proving this divinity or blessing, through what genealogies or myths. That comes after, that’s an afterthought. It is the king’s being or body itself that is the holy experience for the people. It is his presence and magic aura that is holy. This is not abandoned in Christianity. Regardless of the content of Christian religion, the older understanding of what is kingship is never lost so long as actual kingship existed; or else it would have stopped existing. If you want to see Christian preservation of this older view read Ernst Kantorowicz books The King’s Two Bodies and especially his biography of Frederick II Hohenstaufen. The Germany of his time was attempting to rebirth this being of the king-savior.

Schopenhauer words on monarchy are very good. This is the meaning of kingship:

In general, the monarchical form of government is that which is natural to man; just as it is natural to bees and ants, to a flight of cranes, a herd of wandering elephants, a pack of wolves seeking prey in common, and many other animals, all of which place one of their number at the head of the business in hand. Every business in which men engage, if it is attended with danger—every campaign, every ship at sea—must also be subject to the authority of one commander; everywhere it is one will that must lead. Even the animal organism is constructed on a monarchical principle: it is the brain alone which guides and governs, and exercises the hegemony. Although heart, lungs, and stomach contribute much more to the continued existence of the whole body, these philistines cannot on that account be allowed to guide and lead. That is a business which belongs solely to the brain; government must proceed from one central point. Even the solar system is monarchical. On the other hand, a republic is as unnatural as it is unfavourable to the higher intellectual life and the arts and sciences. Accordingly we find that everywhere in the world, and at all times, nations, whether civilised or savage, or occupying a position between the two, are always under monarchical government. The rule of many as Homer said, is not a good thing: let there be one ruler, one king; How would it be possible that, everywhere and at all times, we should see many millions of people, nay, even hundreds of millions, become the willing and obedient subjects of one man, sometimes even one woman, and provisionally, even, of a child, unless there were a monarchical instinct in men which drove them to it as the form of government best suited to them? This arrangement is not the product of reflection. Everywhere one man is king, and for the most part his dignity is hereditary. He is, as it were, the personification, the monogram, of the whole people, which attains an individuality in him. In this sense he can rightly say: l’etat c’est moi. It is precisely for this reason that in Shakespeare’s historical plays the kings of England and France mutually address each other as France and England, and the Duke of Austria goes by the name of his country. It is as though the kings regarded themselves as the incarnation of their nationalities. It is all in accordance with human nature; and for this very reason the hereditary monarch cannot separate his own welfare and that of his family from the welfare of his country…

Nietzsche say similar somewhere else that power draws all around it in a kind of magical remote effect. There is monarchical instinct in man, yes. For rooster if you present oval spheroid wood shape, they will try to copulate: so strong is the male instinct to mate. But it would be stronger for a hen. Female will respond to “general maleness” less than to something more specific: Schopenhauer say of women’s desires,

Nature has appointed that the propagation of the species shall be the business of men who are young, strong and handsome; so that the race may not degenerate. This is the firm will and purpose of Nature in regard to the species, and it finds its expression in the passions of women. There is no law that is older or more powerful than this. Woe, then, to the man who sets up claims and interests that will conflict with it; whatever he may say and do, they will be unmercifully crushed at the first serious encounter…

They are less attracted to Chuck Schumer. As the people is a woman, so its instincts for monarchy are much stronger for the more suitable object: will accept even a child or a woman, but both are far from the proper type. People can’t think clearly about Trump because of emotion. He’s not a military leader and maybe not even a leader, but more than anyone in recent decades he make clear the magic of power, the allure of the one man in time of crisis. He had no ruler’s skills but had consummate skill in image, and trained long in media career. It doesn’t matter here, his achievements or failures outside of this: he reminds world of the magic of power, and how one savior-king can draw peoples in orbit around him, with strong gravity of loyalty, by magic remote effect. This is maybe more frightening to the pretend technocracy than Trump’s substantive program. Their view of political life is devoted to erasing this possibility and repressing this part of human nature. Their whole post-World War II religion is there to prevent emergence of Caesars or tribunes of the people like arose in the emergencies after 1917. To suppress this is for them as important as is for old husband to suppress his young wife’s desire for handsome muscular Chads, and as useless. But, one fears, if she is kept locked up long enough, will she grow too old for real passion? Western nations are captive to a jealous old Scrooge.

None of the reactionary factions who call themselves monarchist today pay attention to either of these prerequisites of kingship: the magical body of the king, or the king’s origin and most important function as military leader. For Integralists it is a matter of doctrine and Church sanction; for neoreactionaries, it is a matter of the systemic analysis of monarchy, how it would work as independent machinery, independent of the raw human material you put into it. It is the forgetfulness of the raw human material or the biological reality that is mistake in both. Integralists and neoreactionaries can agree to elevate Joe Pesci to “kingship” and deem members of the machine state’s bureaucracy “nobles,” but they will find that people and events disagree. Actually, unlike what Kant or others thought, you can’t have a republican machinery indifferent to the human material either…but obviously much less so for kingship. The most important question for understanding monarchy, how it arises, what keeps it going is, “What kind of a man is the king? Who is he? Where from? How does his kingship continue?” This last question brings up mechanism of succession, which is also ignored by the monarchist doctrinaires, because if they thought about it and its tremendous practical problems, they would see it is inseparable from the question of human quality. They might see that the decision to settle on hereditary succession isn’t tyranny or arbitrary caprice but a reasonable practical measure to increase likelihood of transmission of quality substance in person of the king. I once had argument with naïve republican. For some reason I pointed out, “At such time in the past, a great soldier arises in a border fortress; he is able through courage and intelligence and charisma to repel invaders. As a reward the king gives him rule over the fortress, then over the eastern March. He founds a great noble lineage. One day becomes king of new kingdom. This is the origin of all European nobility.” In Reddit way he replied that he didn’t see why an ancestor’s military success two hundred years ago should entitle his descendant to rule. I also don’t see why Elena Kagan or Sonya Sotomayor, or any of their lady counterparts in the “technocracy” of the European Union bureaucracy, why their taking a class on “Law and Economics” should entitle them to decide “the public good” and questions of daily life for millions. In the options available on menu for right to rule, continuous descent by blood from feats of warrior greatness, and consummate training to rule since birth are pretty good. It’s what got Europe to the 1800’s, by which time its world-rulership in the next century was already guaranteed. Other systems in other parts of the world, including “meritocratic” and bureaucratic, didn’t fare as well.

Monarchy thus appears as political manifestation of the principle of blood or heredity or breeding, as these are the only ways known to mortal humans to cultivate and transmit quality across generations. The continuity of monarchy rests on the presence of a culture of biological breeding, even if this should be limited only to the warband and its lineages, meaning to the nobility. The king exists as king—and not, for example as a cloistered figurehead—only so long as he remains “the most noble of the nobles,” the head of his warband. It is this type of ruler especially who is able to be target of the people’s passions, to “trigger” the monarchical instinct in the people, who are able to respond to his remote powers and spontaneously organize themselves in orbit around him. It could be added also that it is only through the king and his retinue that a nation in the proper sense exists as a political as well as organic unity. Outside of this there are only agglomerations of individuals vying for supremacy, but no political or hive order.

I don’t want to address here the counterexamples of Sparta or ancient Greek republics of virtue, as they are too alien for moderns, and have nothing to do with modern republics. I just say that the proportion of what I’ve been calling “high quality raw human material” was so high in those places as to make even kingship superfluous. But you are very far from them, and in the opposite condition, where we are overwhelmed by biological refuse. It is the overwhelming presence of billions of refuse that makes me think reestablishment of kingship in our age is a lot of pointless talk. The dysfunction and stupid oligarchy currently leading nations to ruin will have to be stopped, as a practical matter. But as I said in my book, the prospects even after their complete defeat are not good. I don’t believe this world of refuse is salvageable. The best will have to excise themselves, to amputate themselves off this cancerous mass of huemanity. In remote Aryan antiquity, the youths were cast out from the tribe, and had to find their fortunes elsewhere: it was an interesting tradition that led to much expansion, many foreign conquests and adventures. In modern time it is the youth who will have to cast themselves out if they don’t want to be suffocated by giant nursing home. How do you plan to save a giant nursing home or barnstable longhouse village and make it not depressing? It is for this reason that task that will present itself for a long time to come will have nothing to do with good kings or good realms, but only…what does it take to resurrect the warband? How can warband exist again?

Jabotinsky relaxing on a beach while Israeli settler colonial scouts plant orange groves outside Ashkelon, 1955

Some on dissident right troll about Israel as ethnostate or unapologetic nationalist state. It’s stock argument on the non-neocon right. It’s very strong. There is yet no answer to this trolling at least from those who would support Israeli nationalism but use extreme and immoderate language—“Nazis,” “nativists”—to refer to the same in other parts of the world. Richard Spencer confounded an Israel apologist with this argument in public, and it was a great embarrassment for the upholders of this double standard. (Spencer, who is not my fan, nor I his, must be given this credit nevertheless, and it must also be said: he was physically attacked soon after this episode, swamped with antifa).

There can’t in principle be an exception for Israel, or any acceptable reason for the idea: “nationalism only in Israel”. But this isn’t whole story and there is value beyond trolling in thinking about Israel’s foundation and Israel’s troubles. One can learn from its problems. It isn’t as healthy and vibrant a nationalism as some think.

To understand the Israel problem is important to look at Israeli history and its founding. The problem is that its founding principles are in theory no longer accepted either inside or outside the country. But they’re rejected for different reasons by Israelis and by liberal Westerners. Israeli nationalists are in the difficult situation of trying to set this right somehow.

Israel was founded in the ideology of Herzl as Ashkenazi supremacist state. Some in Israel still desire this. The idea of Herzl was simple: the Jews seemed to him to be an exceedingly gifted people in many areas, and very creative, but their potential was squelched by having to live in others’ countries where they were oppressed and where furthermore they were degenerating into an unacceptable creature. Herzl and the early Zionists largely agreed with the anti-Semites on the bad way that diaspora Jews had turned out, especially in the Ashkenazi world, at least from a moral and physical point of view. Max Nordau, an early Zionist, was also a promoter of eugenics and was an avowed racialist. Israel as an independent nation would correct these faults: Israel would make vigorous and courageous men out Jews again. Not Woody Allen, but Moshe Dayan and Samson were to be the models of the Israelis in the 20th Century.

More important, Herzl’s new state of Israel would free up Ashkenazi creativity and allow them to shine finally: but is important to remember here what he meant by shine. For Herzl, the shining of the Ashkenazi was to be an entirely European shining. With maybe certain qualities of its own: maybe is possible for example to hear in Mahler this or that Jewish sensibility, but he is a European composer through and through, inconceivable outside European civilization, and for Herzl and those like him, the early founders, Israel was to be a shining exemplar of European culture and European civilization. Israel’s contributions were to be to European science and culture, and Israel itself an extension of European civilization, an outpost of European colonialism. This attitude is especially marked in Nordau and others like him. The brilliance of the Jews is taken to be the brilliance of the Ashkenazi who became what he was because of Europe; the history of the Yemenite or Georgian Mountain Jew or other such is unedifying and shows what Jews would have been without European civilization and European culture. In Herzl’s words from his manifesto on the Jewish State, when he is considering the advantages of Palestine versus Argentina as a refuge:

“We should [in Palestine] form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well-known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfilment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish Question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.”

Ashkenazi creativity aside, it should be emphasized that for Herzl, as for later Zionists, Israel was to be a solution to the plight of the average Jew, and the Jewish common man, not for the benefit of the Jewish leadership.

To this early strain of Zionism was later added another that introduced however only minor modifications from a public relations point of view: that of the kind of ethnic nationalism that became powerful in central and eastern Europe in the early 1900’s and through the 1930’s. Out of embarrassment this is often called, uncomfortably, socialist nationalism but the distinctions between this and German national socialism are trivial at least in the case of Israel.

The main organ of this was the Hashomer Hatzair youth guard movement, openly modeled on the German Wandervogel youth movement, and indistinguishable from other nationalist European scouting movements of the time. In the intellectual and political work of men like Jabotinsky and Abba Ahimeir, and organizations such as the Irgun and the Palmach, this strain had its full development: and Jabotinsky was proud above all that the Ashkenazis were proving to be the colonial people par excellence, the consummate European colonialists. (In this sense, as a colonial, settler, and conquering enterprise, closely tied with the British Empire, Israeli socialist nationalism is entirely unlike Kurdish or Basque varieties of the same, and can’t be easily aligned with the international left…and in practice it’s never been really aligned with the international left but with the colonial settler right, e.g., South Africa.) The purely theoretical distinction between leftist socialist nationalism and rightist German national socialism was never very clear anyway, and Israel’s specifically colonialist version places it much closer to the German type.

I must repeat a historical peculiarity: both these strains of Zionism, that of Herzl, and that of later Jewish national socialism, had tremendous contempt for the weak Jewish diaspora shtetl being, and leftists to this day resent them for “perpetuating anti-Semitic stereotypes”. It is alleged even by some on both the left and the right that the Zionists worked together with the Nazis to promote migration to Palestine, which was, by the way, the original intention of the Nazis themselves until Britain closed the sea ways. The point man for this collaboration would have been Adolf Eichmann, a man fluent in Hebrew, whose role in World War II is then said to have been somewhat distorted by the mainstream accepted version of history. That is to say, it seems that Israel targeted him later in Argentina not for his supposed role in the murder of millions of Jews (there were several other more prominent living in South America and elsewhere that Israel could have targeted), but because he had knowledge of this intimate collaboration. This isn’t the place to treat this problem, but there is plenty of evidence for it. Consider, for example, just one very small peculiarity that can never be explained away: Eichmann’s strange situation in Argentine Nazi society, his very low and marginal status in that society at the time Israel apprehended him. He was foreman at a Mercedes factory, living in extreme poverty in a hut outside town without electricity, and openly under his own name fearing no retribution.

In any case, the main two currents of Israeli or Zionist secular nationalism were the two: Herzl and his vision of an Ashkenazi supremacist colonial state where the Jews would be free to contribute at the heights of European civilization and culture; and the second, east or central European Yiddish national socialism, based on the ideology of national socialism in almost every point, and founded on the need for racial survival, for living space, and on a pride of the Jews as among the finest colonialists, to use Jabotinsky’s own words.

Whatever protestations exist abroad, anyone who has known Sabras furthermore knows their extreme pride at having dispossessed the Arabs of their land. This Israel is therefore a part of European world civilization. In its colonial aspect it is an extension of the Anglo colonial project and can be understood in multiple ways, physical, spiritual, intellectual, as an outgrowth of the British Empire. In its national socialist strain, of Jabotinsky and Abba Ahimeir, it is an outgrowth of a later European ethnic or racial nationalism that was both in theory and in practice opposed to English internationalism or globalism, but not, however to the colonial aspect, nor to a European civilization from which it continued to draw spiritual and intellectual legitimacy as well as physical support.

Among Israel’s first champions are those like Richard Meinertzhagen, flamboyant English adventurers and Arabists of the type Nietzsche at one point praises as men who replenish vital spirits within civilization: “exploration is an excuse…” Such men didn’t particularly like Jews from the diaspora and only changed their mind in the Sinai and Palestine. The cooperation between such extremely English adventurers, neo-Richard Burtons, and the early Zionists was important and was recognized by the Israelis themselves, who continue to see them as great men and champions of their cause. In this and other ways, Israel is but a foothold and leftover of the British Empire. This cooperation was stupidly ended by America during the Suez Crisis.

Israel has become a “spiritual anachronism.” It is a nation very much of the 1930’s and has been scrambling to find a justifying principle, or at least some public relations principle, outside of that world that is now gone.

In the Third World, Israel is hated because it is perceived as a Western and white colonialist state, not because it is specifically Jewish. This is the way it has always been perceived and denounced in the third world and in the Arab world. In fact, the Jews had quite good relations with Arabs and Muslims before the foundation of Israel, and in history were frequent collaborators against European civilization as, I hear, at Toledo, at Marseille, and elsewhere. And it is for this collaboration that the Jews of Spain in part were punished (the other reason is more interesting, and has to do with the converso priests’ attempted modulation of the Catholic teachings, a matter I will treat another time). But modern Israel is hated as a white settler supremacist state, whatever the attitudes of the diaspora Jews may be in their own countries.

Here exactly is Israel’s problem. Israel is a European colonial state dependent on a civilization that now at least in rhetoric abhors explicit “settler colonialism.” Worse even: the moral foundation of the “liberal world order,” that is “Western civilization,” after World War Two is rejection of Nazism and in particular it is founded on the international laws implicit in the Nuremberg trials. The definition of evil, the opponent, of the Western world is national socialism; a national socialism that is the dominant intellectual strain in Israel’s foundation. Israel has been given an exception under Nuremberg—indeed it is the only state after 1945 to be given such an exemption.

It’s easy to come up with all kinds of arguments here that this isn’t true: that, for example, Israel has a supreme court that is quite leftist and that often checks the executive. That furthermore, such an institution is anything but Nazi; that Arabs are allowed to serve in parliament, that they enjoy a higher standard of living than in Arab countries, and so on. I would add even worse things: the Western rot of globohomo and sexual license, and many other such things, have hollowed out Israeli society as much as anywhere else. It’s very far away from its period of healthy nationalist scouts in shorts planting orange trees and singing over campfires. It’s very far from a healthy nationalist society, whatever both Israel skeptics like Steve Sailer believe, and Israel defenders like Hazony proclaim. These are all nonsequiturs. Israel’s reason for existence continues to be the reason it was founded: it is a state founded for the sake of racial survival. As such it doesn’t matter that it experiences cultural decay, political instability, or that it has grafted on some other institutions, borrowed from Western liberalism, which it had to borrow primarily for public relations purposes, and which all Israelis recognize as alien and as part of what makes them weaker, not stronger. Its spiritual foundation and reason for existence is national socialist through and through, and it is in the realm of the spirit that the fight I’m discussing here is taking place.

The problem the well-promoted neo-grifter Yoram Hazony faces, which I’ve sketched out so far, exists in Israel itself and has existed at least for twenty or thirty years. The Labor movement that inherited one part of secular Zionism discredited itself during the Second Intifada. Netanyahu’s strain is that of Jabotinsky and Abba Ahimeir. There are also religious parties that want religious policies enacted. Israelis had no more patience with the left or with approaches to Western liberalism after the Second Intifada. Western liberalism was firmly rejected in Israel in the 2000’s as much as it was rejected in Russia in the 1990’s, for different reasons, but ultimately because both saw it couldn’t solve an existential crisis. But the problem in Israel, as elsewhere, was deeper than this, and had to do with a spiritual crisis as well: the public ideology of the state became no longer accepted, or at least, it inspired no further enthusiasm.

The nihilism that came upon Israel during the Second Intifada in particular is hard for Westerners to grasp. I remember meeting left-wing Israeli immigrants at the time who talked like Schmitt and who were relieved that they could talk frankly, finally, to an avowed nihilist nutcase like myself. Others who weren’t on the left told me the settlers on the West Bank felt broken and were hoping for a messiah. In this terrible condition arrived various apologists: Alan Dershowitz was an apologist for Israel, and sought to make the case that only the New Left could provide a moral defense of Israel. The tiresome arguments about Israel as a beacon of human rights are still repeated now, but convince no one. His argument is totally rejected inside Israel itself, however, and Hazony as well as the Netanyahu wing is as supreme there as Orban is in Hungary or as Netanyahu’s friend Putin is in Russia.

What they seem to have settled on eventually was a kind of “religious Zionism.” I don’t pretend to understand it, and from what I can see it’s exceptionally poorly thought out, but public principles have to correspond to feelings, not to intellectual demands, and there’s no feeling like the desire for survival. Israel is hardly a theological state now, nor could it be unless it is ruled by judges of the Talmudic law. But public authorities as well as the people at large seem to have settled on a religious flavor, if not exactly a full or clear religious justification, let alone a pious religious life, for Israel’s existence. A religious state looks like Iran; it doesn’t look like Orban’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia, Salazar’s Portugal, or Netanyahu’s Israel.

It is interesting to think in this connection about the much-vaunted role of “Biblical religion” in promoting strong government. Israel has a relatively easy time justifying itself in a religious way, but not as easy as some think. The unity of the Jewish religion with the Jewish nation has often been remarked upon. But the question of establishing an actual state is a little different: the religious authorities in the modern Jewish nation—I speak now not of modern Israel but of the Jewish nation as it’s existed in known history since around 600 AD or so—are not the Captains of Spinoza’s “ancient Hebrew Republic,” not military leaders or kings, but priests, rabbis. The Karaites, who follow directly the Torah and not the rabbis, used to be many in number but were almost bullied out of existence by the Talmudic Jews. And if earnestly pursued, the establishment of a “religious state” in Israel would empower a council of such rabbis at the expense of actual leaders. It was always the criticism of traditional secular Zionists—the ones, after all, who founded Israel not waiting for religious deliverance—that it was precisely the rabbis, the priests, that had corrupted the Jewish nation to weakness and that made impossible its ability to establish a state. It was the religious organization of the Jewish nation that made it powerless according to the founders of Israel (perhaps it is for this reason that Hazony keeps talking Torah, which is hardly ever directly read in Jewish religious tradition, and never Talmud, which is to his people what the New Testament, or even the catechism, is to traditional Catholics).

The truly religious fanatics in Israel don’t serve in the military and are resented by the rest of the population: insofar as Israel is a “religious state,” it is so only in a symbolic way, where religion is used as a matter of social utility or public relations or as inspiration for identity. That is so only from the point of view of public government: in private, there is a religious Orthodox revival worldwide among Jews, and especially in Israel, and the piety there is genuine. But a religious population, however good it may be for the preservation of public morality and as a buttress to a strong state, doesn’t make the state itself religious, nor its reasons for existing.

Putting cat back in the bag is very hard; cats don’t like! Hazony’s “religious Jewish nation” has been tried before, in the diaspora, and was rejected by secular Zionists for a reason. It is powerless. Similarly, Hazony would like to promote a Protestant “religious nationalism” in the Western nations and in America specifically, a Protestantism that no longer exists. Even if this militant Protestantism of the past still existed—is he counting, still on the evangelicals?—its relationship to the main concerns of nationalists in the West now is unclear. Hasn’t evangelical mobilization already been tried under Karl Rove? Why does Hazony think that pushing Karl Rove’s neocon-evangelical alliance is the path forward and is “nationalist,” when it led to the manifest disasters of the Bush years?

What does religious state have to do, for example, with mass Third World migrations? Finally supposing the solid Protestant nationalism of the past could be revived in the West, its relationship to Talmudic Judaism now and also historically is a complete fantasy—and insofar as an evangelical-Jewish alliance is promoted it relies on the former’s total ignorance of the Jewish religion as it’s existed for centuries. But in any case that “religious nationalism,” such as it was, existed already according to Hazony and, if so, it was insufficient to confront liberalism. It lost that struggle. What concretely is Hazony offering that is different from the failures of the past?

It is not out of perversity that the modern right rejects a religious approach, but because of traditional religion’s demonstrable inability to oppose liberalism and communism or indeed to provide any coherent political organization at all. Again, this is true for Hazony’s nation as well…secular Zionism was adopted out of felt political necessity. And for all the fears about “Islamic radicalism” the example of ISIS among many others shows that when given the chance to lead, it’s politically extremely weak and in fact much weaker than secular Arab nationalism and Baathism. It’s easy to imagine that a “religious state” must be very powerful for people who don’t study history of actual states. A religious state must surely be so certain in itself, so fanatical, that it must be strong? But no. Islamic radicalism has been promoted by factions in Israel because it is indeed so much weaker than secular Arab nationalism when given leadership.

For Hazony and his modern Israel, “religious Zionism” is little more than a pep talk—at most it is not an idea of state or of the meaning of Israel or of nationalism, but an electoral strategy. It means in practice next to nothing but an alliance between the racial socialism of the Jabotinsky wing of Netanyahu and the religious parties in Israel who are needed for a coalition; and this “alliance” amounts to Likud throwing out the occasional bone to the religious demands of the Mizrahi and other Jews, who are genuinely religious in their private and social lives. Without religion the Mizrahi Jews would indeed come apart as a people, but not for reasons usually said.

The right, the true Right which found its roots in Nietzsche’s radical philosophy in the early 20th Century, never really thought to look to the Bible to solve the problem of state and religion, and certainly never thought to look at the dispossessed and stateless rabbinic Jewish nation as a model. In truth, neither did the Zionists, as I keep repeating: they rejected that model of existence entirely. The true right of which I consider myself also part, the Nietzschean new right after 1900, found inspiration rather in Shintoism, and it is for this reason that they had and continue to have so much respect for Japan historically. In the person of the Emperor, Shintoism solved finally and completely the problem of unity of religious and national political life. The Japanese thinking on sonnoron, of reverence for the Emperor that reached its peak in the 19th Century, and all the practices that came from this, are the perfect model of national political life and national identity to a man of the right.

The only thing like it that had existed in our world was the Roman Emperor, but even that only in certain very brief periods; and also somewhat in the theory of sovereignty developed by the Byzantines. Otherwise the entire “Biblical” framework for relationship between religion and political life has often proven very unstable, whether in European history or Jewish history, and it has led to political weakness as much as political strength. It has empowered religious authorities and critics at the expense of secular necessity as often as it’s given religious legitimacy to the ruler and the state. It’s been nearly impossible to predict where the Biblical model of political life will lead, and in our present circumstances it has no relationship whatsoever to a workable model of sovereignty, and certainly not in the Christian world.

The mention of the Roman Empire brings up the enduring source of Western self-understanding. The West has understood itself as Rome or as heir to the Hellenistic project of Alexander’s followers, which Rome also inherited. Western nationalism didn’t abandon Roman models in favor of Biblical or “Davidic” ones, as Hazony or his friends pretend in order to construct a nonsense story about “religious nationalism.” The Western theory of national sovereignty has roots older than Westphalia, and emerges in the high Middle Ages in struggle between Pope and Emperor. It is in “Ghibelline” political thought and in Machiavelli that the idea of a mobilized people on the Roman model is resurrected in full. European princes after about late 1200’s or so and especially in Italy began to understand themselves as Caesars in their own domain: hence the many varieties of Kaisers and Tsars all over Europe.

The Ghibelline theory of state that is root of modern national state closely mirrors the Byzantine theory of state and secular sovereignty, which is ultimately based on Roman law and possibly on Aristotelian ideas through a different channel. The pretensions of some sovereigns, like the French, to “Davidic” this or that was window dressing, like claiming descent in the Trojans and so on. Modern republican nationalism in France and America understood itself with reference to Roman models of state and law, or otherwise to Medieval traditions of liberty, common law, and Germanic tribal law or bonds of fealty. There’s no historical basis for claiming that principles of Western government, national or not, are to be found in the Bible, “Hebrew” or not, as much as its spiritual life may have been. The only religious state in the Thirty Years’ War was the Anabaptist revolt of Munster (they became the Amish after they were crushed and are now peaceful, though still LARPing as Jews much like Hazony and other “white nationalists” admire).

On the personal level, Hazony is a “political theorist” as an academic and like many people of color has likely felt slighted by having to study old white men and “them homo Greeks” as the root of Western political thought. His output, such as I can tell, is directed toward idea of “We Wuz Kangz”: it wasn’t you see Plato, Aristotle or Cicero who discovered principles of Western governance, let alone (shiver) Rousseau, Locke or some German (!) but the “Hebrew Bible.” It was really the Jews, you see, and them philosophers were possibly also secretly Jews. Leo Strauss or at least some of his followers have a similar attitude, though slightly more subtle. In this same way, Hazony has preserved an identity of grievance and a historical mythology of Israel as just a nation minding its own business that imperial “bullies” have always picked on out of perversity and sadism. (Serbs and other Balkanoids have a similar attitude by the way).

Hazony sees the Roman model—to which all Western peoples have looked up to—as his antagonist and enemy. As in Nietzsche, he understands the Jews as the eternal and mortal enemies of Rome, that is, of the West. Abba Ahimeir was an avowed Jewish national socialist and called himself a Fascist. He was the mentor of the Netanyahu family and also I believe the intellectual idol for Hazony: like Hazony, Ahimeir modeled his opposition to British colonialism in Palestine on the ancient Jews’ opposition to Rome. His organization Brit HaBirionim was named after a group of rebels against Roman rule. Hazony has himself openly stated, going far back and on many occasions, that the model he believes in is Roman globalism versus Israeli or Judaean nationalism, that is, Ahimeir’s conception. With this scheme, which he may genuinely believe in, he means to oppose the current incarnation of Western globalism, based on ideas of international law and human rights, through which Israel could eventually be declared an outlaw state for its unabashed colonialism, its pursuit of living space, its avowedly racial foundations, and its plentiful de facto and de jure discrimination of racial and religious minorities. It is this element in the West, its continuing worldwide or imperial ambitions, that is Hazony’s external concern, as much as buttressing a “religious Zionism” idea is his internal concern.

What then to make of all these efforts to modulate Western nationalism at this turning point? I believe that Zionists of Hazony’s bent, those of the Netanyahu faction, don’t really care what politics exist in the West as long as they promote a frame of mind favorable to Israel. In practice, Hazony would promote open white nationalism if he thought he could, or whatever—anarchosyndicalism, constitutional monarchism, distributism, ice cream nationalism, and so on. It doesn’t matter. Maybe they liked my book too, who knows? People who think Hazony is an existential antagonist who wants to negate the ethnic basis of America as such are as wrong as those who think he has any fundamental interest in America’s welfare. He’s fundamentally indifferent. But I do think white nationalism has been covertly promoted by this faction online since 2015. I can’t prove it but for those who have been trolling since that time, it’s been obvious. Israeli nationalism and white nationalism are the same thing. As I have argued many times, white nationalism isn’t your friend, and it’s not even white: it’s a small-time ideology unlike liberalism, which is a form of white supremacism that scares Hazony’s faction. But a broader acceptance of white nationalist principles in the West would be to Israel’s advantage. I don’t know what percentage of white nationalist trolls online have been Israelis or Israeli NGO-based, but it’s been significant since 2015…it’s Israel, not Russia that has been doing this, if anyone has. And that’s OK. Some are very good people.

In principle, Western nationalists should be indifferent maybe to Israel as well. Disengagement from Israel and from the Middle East should be the path forward: if Israel wants to commit suicide, or if it wants to set up a neo-Canaanite empire from the Nile to the Euphrates, let it do as it will. Let that region have its own history. But in practice we face severe opposition from Jewish organizations in the West and Jewish leadership in the West. It hardly matters to me if Israelis are “based nationalists” in their own country (they are not). Their cousins in the West, on who Hazony and Netanyahu could have some influence, are possibly the most effective anti-nationalist faction of any, phenomenally aggressive and very well organized. A confident American nationalism would demand that men like Hazony and his funders first of all solve this problem for America before they try to modulate America’s vision of itself or make demands regarding Israel’s international standing. There is already a war simmering between the Netanyahu faction and the Jewish left and financial diaspora, and this is good…we should encourage it. But where possible, in private, American patriots should lean on Hazony and especially his donors and handlers to call out, in public, and denounce and disavow the anti-nationalist Jewish leadership in America and Europe. And these must be called out as Jews, namely Hazony, his funders, and Netanyahu should openly say that these very destructive organizations and individuals are a shame to the Jewish nation and are disavowed, and call upon average Jews in the West to reject them.

But in the end this whole debate…it’s also a matter of overkill. Hazony’s theory is convoluted overkill to avoid the obvious and although I went on some tangents here that I thought readers might find interesting, you don’t need to know about Biblical or Greek theories of state, nor about medieval history or the history of Israel, to confront the main problems facing Western nations at this moment. These are very clear and simple: mass migration, which is the signature matter; deindustrialization; and engagement in losing wars and interventions. Hazony & co.’s focus on “religious nationalism” is a nonsequitur in theory; and in practice, again, an evangelical-neocon coalition has already been attempted and, with Trump, has been rejected.

Solving these problems doesn’t require a return of “Biblical statehood.” Somehow secular Japan manages not to have these problems. I don’t see how a religious theory or indeed any kind of theory is necessary to simply stop doing idiotic and self-defeating things. You shouldn’t need to convert America to “traditional Tel Aviv Protestantism” or “CIA-edited Catholicism” to say, “We don’t want to admit a million Sudanese to groyp our daughters.” To the extent you need a religious belief, in such matters at least, it’s only to arrive at the opposite: cultists, for example, like David French have a Gnostic religious belief in antiracism and the justice of oligarch-funded Sudanese and Oaxacan rape…normal people don’t need religion one way or another to see that’s bad; you simply need to want to survive, and simply need to feel entitled to secure the means of your survival.

After Trump won there were left wing Witch Covens that tried to place a hex on him or Pence. The altright warlocks, those who roleplay Himmler, meanwhile wish people hokey “Happy Yule to You” and such things. Didn’t you know Christmas was really Teutonic and only belongs to Are People? I know many of you enjoy Ted Kaczynski, I myself haven’t studied him deeply, but I think he made fun of the pagans of our time. They don’t seem to believe it, but to be playing a part, and not very well. Someone else—or was it him?—mentioned they all like only the nice and tame female deities. But the male gods and demons who ask for blood and sacrifice? Well it’s like with the Carpocratians that I mentioned before: were you to promote this in public you’d be quickly crushed by the feds. Same also with the decaf Satanists who have tamed and edited their fearsome god into new age self-help. So neopaganism as understood now seems to many a joke, or to others an embarrassment.

I know the theories of Alex Jones and others, we all want them to be true…at least it’s more flattering to think we’re being fleeced by an international cabal of sexcrazed child-eating real Satanists than what we actually see. The sexless husks who run the American and European permanent states…there has to be something more, or a more fearsome power behind them, no? But what if there isn’t. What if there is no pagan conspiracy thousands of years old, but instead only the gray and beige subhuman species of today, the hueman bred for centuries by Christianity for subjection, just like Nietzsche said? What if this dour atheist detritus is the legacy of historical Christianity, that has receded only to leave behind this rat-being?

And on this matter, the believing Christians of now have little to be proud of as a group when they compare themselves to the neopagans. No I don’t believe pope faggot has any genuine belief in the truth of his own religion: he refuses the red shoes…the red shoes that would signal his readiness for martyrdom, which is the surety of faith. Well, he’s a Jesuit. The Lutherans and many of the Protestants have churches that are just as debased, Anglican churches are nothing but LGBT community centers for exhibitions of Hindoo dance and so on. How is the roleplaying about Jesus being a lame modern ghey pacifist, and Christianity being “noble” spiritual cuckoldry, any less embarrassing than the neopagans? And among the online “Trad Cath” brigades there are just as many embarrassing roleplayers, and as many active feds, as among the neopagans. Many of you have hope for the Orthodox, not knowing that this church has always been submissive to the state: if change in regime in Russia as the globalists want, church would switch its beliefs.

As for the many altright Jews reading this, you know very well that your religion and the Jewish nation as a whole is less cohesive and more pozzed than followers of Kevin MacDonald claim. The Reform sect is a gay social club, the chief of Conservative variety declared that being a homo is cool if there’s no buttsex (his daughter is a dyke). Orthodox grils believe that sodomy with negros is OK before marriage because of rules and loopholes. For now the only hope for you is with the Haredi, just like among the Christians it is with the Amish, the Mennonites and similar hermit peoples. But Ron Unz says he hired student to verify Israel Shahak’s claims, and that they are true: such people worship multiple deities and use spells. So they may be after all the real pagans.

What then? Among all this confusion and degradation of modern sects I make brief explanation of old paganism and neopaganism, so that you see the real thing, and the varieties, and don’t judge it by the embarrassing things you see around us and online.

For all the jokes about it, there is a reason many, and many on the right are attracted to it, who seek rejuvenation of the West, or who seek a new path. And in history it comes back, in real and luminous form, at certain times…so…it will not go away…

The spiritual father of neopaganism of the true and powerful variety is Nietzsche. He had many followers in the first part of 20 th Century all across Europe. They understood what he said, where the academics and idiots after 1950 mostly do not, but try to obfuscate. In our own time there are men like Dominique Venner who also understood what Nietzsche said, and the meaning of neopaganism. The scholar Karl Lowith, who was Jewish but a Nietzschean (as many were), said somewhere that neopaganism is exoteric Nietzscheanism. And it was so in his time. What this means?

In suicide note Dominique Venner speaks of our European memory that goes back to Homer. And this is what means, both him, and Nietzsche. It is what meant also for ancient Greeks, who used Homer as traditional Christians have used the Bible. Homer and his heroic and luminous vision of the Bronze Age is the hope of this kind of neopagan. Such men reject the small-souled liberal and democrat and the spiritual shopkeeper and Last Man and slave of modern age. They admire the great men of antiquity and see various periods—Archaic Greece, republican Rome, parts of imperial age Rome—as the apex of mankind. The time when the highest human specimens and happiest human life was possible. They see Caesar and Alexander and Scipio and all the great heroes of antiquity, both of history and from Homer—how can they not be amazed! And how is such life possible now? But maybe it’s possible. This is their guide, and its regeneration in their own time is their task. The best among such neopagans know that a full revival of this vision is impossible, at least not directly, so they try to adjust what is possible in their own age. This is the true meaning of “neopaganism” and it has nothing to do with pretending to scream to Wotan in forest, roleplay worship of a piece of holy dung, or any such things; those are at most an occasional cosmetic flourish or affectation. When you see the glory of Diomedes and his transfiguration into lion of divine light in Iliad, then question comes to neopagan, how to recapture this height in our time.

This is what might be called moral-political neopaganism and it has a long tradition in the West. It is not just modern phenomenon. What else is the Renaissance? And if you don’t believe this, see Machiavelli:

In thinking, therefore, of whence it should happen that in those ancient times the people were greater lovers of Liberty than in these times, I believe it results from the same reason which makes men presently less strong, which I believe is the difference between our education and that of the ancients, founded on the difference between our Religion and the ancients. For, as our Religion shows the truth and the true way [of life], it causes us to esteem less the honors of the world: while the Gentiles [Pagans] esteeming them greatly, and having placed the highest good in them, were more ferocious in their actions. Which can be observed from many of their institutions, beginning with the magnificence of their sacrifices [as compared] to the humility of ours, in which there is some pomp more delicate than magnificent, but no ferocious or energetic actions. Theirs did not lack pomp and magnificence or ceremony, but there was added the action of sacrifice full of blood and ferocity, the killing of many animals, which sight being terrible it rendered the men like unto it. In addition to this, the ancient Religion did not beatify men except those full of worldly glory, such as were the Captains of armies and Princes of Republics. Our Religion has glorified more humble and contemplative men rather than men of action. It also places the highest good in humility, lowliness, and contempt of human things: the other places it in the greatness of soul, the strength of body, and all the other things which make men very brave. And, if our Religion requires that there be strength [of soul] in you, it desires that you be more adept at suffering than in achieving great deeds.

And he says many other similar things. (Of course he goes on to say that Christianity has been “misinterpreted” in his time according to weakness and wickedness, and so to excuse real Christianity from that practiced in his age. His abuse is directed mostly against the priesthood and the priestly type and priestly spirit, not the religion itself. But whether he believed this, or whether he couldn’t go so far as to embrace Hellenism fully, who knows?) And in any case you see how Schopenhauer mentions the examples of Giordano Bruno and Spinoza, men who as he says “had their home on the Ganges,” ancient pagans reborn in their time, abused and burned or persecuted by vulgar and bigoted priests. I mean to say that there were many like Machiavelli and Bruno, on various points of this spectrum, who sought a revival of the spirit of antiquity. And all the paintings and sculptures of Venus and the other gods and goddesses and heroes of Homer and the other Greeks, what else was this?

Well that’s real neopaganism, not the kind that can be attacked as roleplay or kitsch. If you are truly inspired by Wotan, work to be Wagner or Botticelli, don’t try to replicate rituals to which you have no direct connection. It is great artists who can awaken this luminous vision and who can rekindle heroism and beauty in its right forms.

This moral-political-artistic neopaganism is often accompanied by a kind of philosophical neopaganism. And you see the first of this variety among the ancient pagans of Roman time who were reacting against Christianity. Its main public figure was Emperor Julian, called “the Apostate,” but there were a few others. Emperor Julian grew up a Christian but rejected this new religion in favor of the old gods of Rome and Greece. He was maybe the “first” neopagan. But he could never actually return to that primal faith in any innocent way. Instead he reinterpreted the gods in a philosophical sense, you can think of, as “symbols” of various physical phenomena or psychological states, or you can think of as “archetypes.” This is what Jungians and people like Peterson also do, of course in very different way.

I am not too fond of this kind of neopaganism. But it can work to make it “understandable” and “respectable” to people who are secular and also actually to believing Christians and those of other religions, who can now appreciate a kind of philosophized or psychologized version of pagan belief. The reason I don’t like this kind of neopaganism is because it’s rationalized and therefore in embracing it you miss both the full aesthetic and direct experience that an ancient pagan might have had, the spiritual aspect is actually completely gone. And also because this approach can be uncoupled entirely from the very potent moral-political revival I mentioned above. In fact Emperor Julian attempted, with full political and military force, to reestablish paganism as the state religion. And if you read his writings you see he also believed in what I have called the moral-political neopaganism: he extols the great men and generals of Greco-Roman antiquity, and contrasts this to the small men and slaves of the Old and New Testaments. But as to this approach of reinterpreting the gods rationally by itself, this “philosophical and rational neopaganism,” this can in principle be compatible with almost any other religion (as historical “oddity”) or political arrangement. Even the modern liberal bugman can embrace this charming vision. Why of course “Apollo” only represents order and measure and self-restraint, and Kronos is just the force of “Time”… and so everything becomes a toothless allegory and symbol.

Thus you see three attempts at neopaganism: the very ancient, starting with Emperor Julian and some others. The Renaissance itself. And the early 20 th Century and late 19 th Century where various artists and men of action followed Nietzsche and a couple of others (it had already begun before Nietzsche, with Wagner musics and others, but he made it explode). And all three were primarily a moral-political force, an attempt to reestablish the moral vision of Homer, and also an artistic and aesthetic force, an attempt to reestablish the luminous and brilliant art of Archaic and Classical Greeks, or to establish new art forms based on the pagan sense of heroism, speed and action. There was also a philosophical component that was very serious, but it wasn’t the part about trying to find rational explanations for the gods and myths, or to reinterpret them as allegories and life stories. No, the philosophical vision of Nietzsche and others sought to reestablish the pagan sense of time as cyclical, and to find the very primal ideas of matter and thought unmolested by the strains that had led to modern decay. To rediscover again unspoiled nature.

As part of this concern with modern decay the neopagans of all three periods I mentioned have great hostility to Christianity. They don’t see how Christianity can offer a different path from the decay they see around them. Many like Nietzsche and Venner have great respect for Christianity of Europe in its time of ascent. But the modern bugman in some sense “triumphed” over Christianity while in another sense he was not its negation but its son and child. The medieval European military aristocracy, the knighthood was Christian but as Venner and Nietzsche and many others never tire of saying, they had very deep quarrel with the priests and their role in this religion was very uncomfortable. We like to roleplay about Deus Vult. But look at how the priest Bartolome de las Casas throws abuse on the Spanish knighthood for their conquest of the New World. Well that attitude was very common and the quarrel between king and church, knighthood and priesthood ran deeper than the “jocks vs. nerds” meme. There is then the feeling among the many neopagans that Christianity favors the dumb, the small in spirit, the bugman and that it hates and wants to corrupt and destroy the higher specimens. This is why they’re hostile. But I’m not here to beat this old path. Neopagans reject Christianity, but reject it for very different reasons than the atheist or liberal does.

I believe that in this last point may be found basis for a truce. As the neopagan vision of Nietzsche and Venner hasn’t completely conquered the right and the youth, and since the majority of men who stand for manliness and excellence are believing Christians, I believe it is foolish for neopagans or those who seek the revival of Greece to continue anti-Christian diatribe. But also on the other side the Christians must recognize a cousin in the neopagan and an ally in fight against common enemy. True traditional Catholics must learn to hate the atheist, the liberal, and the bugman more than the bogeyman of “the pagan.”

There is in this also personal story. I grew up without any religion. It is hard for Americans to understand this, because all Americans, especially atheist, grow up with very strong religious moral code. Or, I don’t know where they think “human rights” and their morality, to which they have fanatic devotion, comes from. But I grew up without any of this. Some time around when I was thirteen I began to read Plato and others, and later Nietzsche. I never had any feeling for or against Christianity to begin with, from my upbringing. I was simply indifferent to it, and its theology and ideas and imagery never appealed to me. I became hostile to an idea of Christianity from reading Nietzsche and the other writers I named. But this hostility was never personal. Then I was shocked when later I met people, most of them Jews, who expressed similar ideas as Nietzsche, or somehow glommed on to this neopagan sensibility, or some of its varieties. But then I found out such people were not genuine, but only hated Christianity out of ethnic animus and resentment, because they had grown up that way. Theirs was not a genuine and objective position, but a carry-over of a childhood family teaching and parochial bigotry. I found this highly disgusting and sought to distance myself from this. Therefore I have a personal dislike and distrust of anti-Christianity. And in our time when Christians are attacked by the Last Man, I think it is important for neopagans not to join in such attack…whatever we may believe about the historical origin of the Last Man.

It is also true that Christianity itself preserved much of ancient pagan aesthetics and sensibility in the Middle Ages. Even today Catholic festivals continue pagan festivals, and the devotees and days of saints are much like ancient feasts to various gods and their cults; especially in the Mediterranean, where the warm climate made the demands of life easy so the people had plenty of time to beautify life this way. Also the faith is somewhat versatile, and at least in theory open to a reinterpretation.

I now mention a third variety of “neopaganism,” which is one that I myself hold dear, but which is hardly ever mentioned in these fights. Maybe because so few have access to it and because it’s not easily propagandized one way or the other. And the people who do have access to it are often too shy to talk about it, for good reason. I’ll try not to be too indiscreet.

You could call this an innocent apprehension of the hidden demons and gods inside nature and things. Maybe it is the precursor, this feeling, to the artistic revival of paganism, I don’t know. But it is an innate sensation, a natural animism. I tried briefly to discuss it in book. I have had images appear to me in daydreams since I was small boy, that were very vivid and specific. I know others who have had the same. Then also a sensation of spirits inhabiting animals and inanimate objects too, with a reverence for some, and a pity when others are mistreated — Houellebecq mentions his pity for a line of coats. This is not a sensation informed by any rational doxy or theoretical or theological belief. And I’ve always firmly rejected any such interpretations of these events because I found they didn’t fit. So to such sensibility it is very offensive or stupid when people try to actually go to forest and pretend they worship Wotan or Hermes or whoever…nor have I seen those old gods or any other such specifically that I can name. Those gods are dead or asleep. If you want to see what this feeling is like, watch some of David Lynch. I believe that is what this natural, innocent and innate paganism looks like in our time, when presented naïvely: he simply shows the demons and acknowledges them, doesn’t pretend to know who they are, what they want, or even how to worship or assuage them. And they look terrifying and surreal for us, and not at all like what you’d expect.

I have seen some things like this since I was small boy, and have felt the presence of one in particular. I feel that he will make a great show one day and erupt into the world.

But for any old paganism to be restored, one must let go of the hokey opinions about what real pagans believed in, and what they thought important. When Diocletian was convinced to wipe out Christianity, why did he do it? The Oracle at Delphi told him the god could no longer give direction and no longer answer: because the world was too full of the impious. Then if you read Mishima and other genuine pagans with true understanding of how this natural religion works, you see the great attention he pays to oracles and divination and augury. It is the foundation also of the highest and most sacred rites in Shinto, as of every other natural faith. The first step then, for genuine neopagans, if they seek actually the religious aspect, would be the reestablishment of a genuine and accurate oracle. The establishment of genuine oracle is first step to any new faith.

Then much later the demons and gods will show themselves, but not in any way you would expect, nor by any names you recognize. And it will be they, not you, who will make signs and establish the proper form of worship, and even the meaning and purpose of such worship.