The Balkanization of the System: Ernst Jünger and the Endtimes, Part 2
Ernst Jünger (1895 –1998)
Unfortunately, many self-proclaimed White racialists think they can fight the System by violent means. Jünger’s sovereign type of a nonconformist wisely watches from his watchtower and waits for the right moment before he strikes. Perhaps one could learn some lessons from the rebels in the Vendée province during the French Revolution, or from Balkan outlaws during the Turkish occupation stretching from the 16th to 19th century. Those rebellious “sovereign individuals” lived as peasants one day, but were ready, the day after, to take up arms. In a similar vein, one hundred years ago, the Italian anti-liberal sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, obliquely suggested how to confront the feelings of uprootedness in the liberal System: “Whoever becomes a lamb, will find a wolf to eat him.” (“Dangers of Socialism,” The Other Pareto (1980, p. 125).
Naturally, that does not presuppose that a nonconformist must leave a life of the wolf all the time in order to beat the System. Only the time flow will tell which figure of dissent best fits a particular historical moment. The sheep’s clothing can sometimes come in handy.
With the approaching endtimes many Europeans and Americans will be compelled to practice the talent of survival regardless of their wolfish or unwolfish nature. For some this may mean borrowing a type of Jünger’s sovereign individual living in the forest, or somewhere on the marble cliffs in Dover or in Colorado, and contemplate passively the horror of the endtimes. For some, that would entail the detachment from all political or tribal ties, yet remaining constantly on the alert against the intruders. Jünger remained his entire life a very circumspect man, a natural born loner, always on his solitary watchtower, always observing in the capacity of a seismographer the approaching endtimes, yet never actively participating in violent activities and never attempting to arrest or roll back the endtimes.
Of course this may pose a moral problem for would-be young White non-conformists who can barely tolerate the mendacity of the System. One can take again the example of Jünger and examine his role during the National Socialist rule in Germany. Very obliquely he explains his rejection of National Socialism in his allegoric and autobiographic novel On the Marble Cliffs.
Later on, Jünger tacitly supported his colleagues at the High German command in WWII France, who plotted the assassination of Hitler. A timeless question now arises. Must one peacefully abide by the law of the System, even if the System is violent and abhorrent, or should one try to violently remove the very nature of the violent System? Or to put it differently; if Jünger had such a fine foreboding of the allegedly tyrannical times why did he not try to kill Hitler himself? After all, Hitler had a high opinion of his earlier works, and Jünger could have, had he wished, acted accordingly. If the summer of 1944 in Paris was too risky for him, the earlier times, such as the late twenties of the same century offered him a golden opportunity to stage his own violent coup against what came to be described after WWII as “National Socialist tyranny.” After all, Jünger’s earlier martial essays had enjoyed huge popularity among incipient National Socialist leaders and intellectuals in the Weimar Republic and enabled Jünger to cross paths with many future National Socialist bigwigs. Was Jünger just a small coward or a big opportunist?
One might reframe the same question, albeit in a different timeframe regarding the timeless subject of whether one should try to remove the purported evil system by force, or whether one should abide by the rule of the law of the purportedly evil system. Who showed more integrity and civic courage—or evilness? A handful of French Waffen SS volunteers who defended to the last man the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin against the incoming Soviet troops on May 1, 1945 — knowing full well that the endtimes had arrived and that the game was already over? Or Jünger and his likes who had planned the assassination of Hitler, on July 20, 1944 — when half of Germany already lay in ruins? In a similar way, why does Jünger’s alter ago the nonconformist character Anarch, from the city state of Eumeswill socialize and toast with Condor the Tyrant, whom he hates so much, instead of making an extra step to take the tyrant out?
One can tackle the same dilemma regarding ethical obligations vs. lawful behavior and civic respectability — or, to put it poetically, of “self- distancing” or “esthetic aloofness,” when observing the behavior of many White American and European covert nationalist intellectuals, who, behind their anonymous computer screens, burst with self-proclaimed civic courage, but who diligently backpedal when they need to confront the System in public. The fear of the loss of tenure or the anxiety of the pension plans cuts may have a far more gripping effect than the fear of facing the gallows.
The Endtimes of Small-Time Nationalism
The beauty of Jünger’s prose is his rejection of small time White nationalism. Historically, European types of sovereign individuals, each sporting their own brand of nationalism, have never had a convergent effect on European peoples. All of them have been mutually exclusive and harmful to Europeans in general. In the balkanized multiracial Europe of today small time nationalism has no future. Figures of nationalist dissent, under the guise of the terrorist, the soldier, or the anarchist, including all types of nationalist fervor, such as the adherence to one’s tribe, or the craving for an independent statehood at the expense of a neighboring European state or a tribe, as seen among Poles vs. Germans, Serbs vs. Croats, Irish against vs. English, etc., has proved to be suicidal for Europe. Such sectarian figures of rebellion or figures of nationalist dissent are dated. Acts of self -proclaimed patriotic anarchism or terrorism only legitimize the ongoing experiment of the System with stateless multiracialism.
Nobody knows well what will be the form of the new balkanization in Europe and America and which type of dissent a White individual will need to borrow from Jünger’s arsenal. One should again recall a polymorphous type of the Anarch from Jünger’s autobiographic novel Eumeswil. The protagonist, Martin Venator (alias the Anarch, alias Ernst Jünger) lives his double life of academic Gelassenheit — i.e., of “aloofness” and of “self- distance” in the vicinity of the multicultural Kasbah. Anarch is neither a rebel, nor a partisan, nor an anarchist. However, at a given moment, he could engage in all three of these types of conduct. For the time being Jünger’s Anarch is just a respectable person who blends well with the System he despises.
Jünger’s novels can be regarded as the Bildungsroman for today’s postmodern White Europeans and Americans living in a multiracial and balkanized world, however with one serious exception: in today’s balkanized endtimes the enemy has acquired different features, which requires learning entirely different codes of conduct and waging an entirely different type of war.
The Anarch vs. Multiracial Mass Murder
The consequences of balkanized Europe and America may be dreadful indeed. Time does not have a stop, as Jünger notes. One must keep crossing the Wall of Time both frontwards and backwards in order to project oneself beyond the time flow and possibly foresee when open rebellion needs to commence. This may help avoid further cataclysms. In this respect one could draw a parallel between the current times of multiracial mass murder designed by the liberal System and the serial killings designed by the Communists in the aftermath of WWII. In retrospect, the former happens to be more effective than the latter, simply because it prevents the observer from making a clear-cut distinction between friend and foe.
One must bear in mind that communist genocides in the aftermath of WWII had a serious impact on the decline of the cultural and genetic heritage of White Europeans and Americans. For example, the Croatian and the ethnic German middle class, in what became communist Yugoslavia, including a large number of academics, were simply wiped out by the new communist class in the summer of 1945.Thus they could not pass on their heritage, their intelligence and their creativity to their offspring.
Today, however, in view of the System-induced “soft” mass murder of Whites, former communist mass killings may sound trivial. What the late communist commissars had failed to achieve with physical terror, the present-day liberal “super class” of the System is achieving with its own substitute ideology of “multiculturalism.” The constant influx of non-Europeans has already caused the impoverishment of the European gene pool and can be comparable to a soft self-induced genocide of White peoples.
It must be born in mind that the terror unleashed by the Communists after the Second World War did not just have ideological reasons under the guise of the purported “class struggle.” Communist serial killings were fueled by envy as well as by the awareness among their perpetrators of their own physical and spiritual inferiority. Similar attitudes of envy and racial resentment can be observed today among non-European immigrants, although they must hide them for obvious reasons. For the time being, neither physically nor logistically are Third World immigrants in a position to convert their resentments against Whites into a large scale conflict. For that matter, even the word “multiculturalism” can work miracles for them as it happens to be an apt euphemism used by the System. It is a handy code word for its ersatz ideology of discredited Communism. Both systems are popular among immigrants from the Third World, for the simple reason that both Systems offer them a lifestyle which is not conceivable, let alone acceptable in their home countries. In addition, multiracial balkanization flatters the ego of leftist intellectuals, who are aware that the denomination ‘communism’, after having been severely discredited, must be now replaced by the code word of ‘antifascism’ and ‘multiculturalism’. Communism fell apart in the East because it had fully achieved its goals in the West.
The Racial Sovereign and the System
Capitalism must share a major portion of the blame for the balkanization of Europe and America. It is in the interest of Western capitalists to import the army of cheap labor into Europe and America. They show no compunction in cutting down the wages of their own domestic White workers and in outsourcing national wealth. Moreover, imported immigrant workers, having lower IQ and little social or class consciousness, can better be manipulated than White workers by the new masters. They can better serve the interest of the capitalist super class and of leftist opinion makers who posture as their moral protectors. A German stockbroker or an East European ex-communist, who has recently recycled himself into a bank speculator, could not care less where his home is — as long as he makes money. Should one be surprised? The founding father of capitalism, the infamous, yet highly praised Adam Smith wrote long time ago: “The merchant is not necessarily the citizen of any country.”
Dr. Tom Sunic (tom.sunic@gmail.com) is author, translator, former US professor in political science and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Third Position. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald (2007). The third edition of his book Against Democracy and Equality; the European New Right, prefaced by Alain de Benoist, has just been released.
Comments are closed.