What to Read, Part 4: Hero and Heretic vs. the System — from Literature to Politics
One must make an additional distinction, this time between the mythical heroes in Western literary heritage and the real heroes or heroes hopeful in Western political life. Thousands of mythical heroes, including Achilles or Hector, fighting alongside the walls of Troy, or better yet, the demigod heroes such as Hercules or Theseus, combating the monsters in the underworld, have had a distinct advantage so far of being exempt from modern re-educational process consisting of political criminalization and demonization. The System continues to use their names as positive role models, although, to be sure, the System thought police, with its increasing guilt-tripping process designed to alter the minds of White peoples, may some day remove these mythical heroes from the role model reading list as well. The conclusion one can therefore offer is that any would-be heroic act, any heretical or rebellious deed, regardless of its factual, fictional or factitious nature, is always subject to different reinterpretations in a different political epoch.
The same conclusion applies to literary heroes and their hero-crafting authors such as William Shakespeare, Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and hundreds more, each of them having received, or still receiving, a different accolade by a different ruling class at a different historical and political time. Thus Friedrich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy (1785) is being widely and wildly used today as a trademark of the European Union. Schiller’s stanzas are being chanted today by multicultural transgenderists, pederasts and plutocrats as a call for a mandatory multiracial embrace and as a handy alibi for the free flow of non-European migrant labor.
Endure courageously, millions! /Endure for the better world/ Above the starry canopy/ A great God will reward you/.
By contrast, in National Socialist Germany the same Schiller was praised to the skies, albeit through differently worded official eulogies and different academic interpretations. In his drama The The Robbers (1781), Schiller depicts an armed gang’s leader Karl Moor who is always eager to first dispense the stolen goods to the local poor, yet who by his sheer association with other violent gang members could easily pass off today as a modern terrorist — or, short of that, fall short of some folkish road warrior Mad Max. Schiller’s other medieval hero, widely praised in academic circles all over Europe and whose name is used as an official state symbol of Switzerland, is the crossbow-toting hero from the same drama, Wilhelm Tell (1804) who could also be described as a perfect role model for modern terrorists. With his sneaky, ugly and cowardly weapon, Tell assassinates (from ambush!) the Austrian-appointed governor who rules over his native borough in Switzerland. Between 1933 and 1941 Schiller’s plays were performed all over liberal-weary, communist-scared Europe and particularly in Germany.
The next conclusion one can offer is that any White author, any poet, any writer, any White activist, regardless of his political beliefs or disbeliefs, always runs the risk of having his works or his exploits extrapolated and reinterpreted based on prevalent political whims of the System or the conventional lies of the scribes bankrolled by the System.
Quite different is the story when real historical and political figures, once hailed as finite destiny- ordained heroes, unexpectedly end up in the garbage can of the memory hole. A set of lucky circumstances made Thomas Jefferson and George Washington into American heroes, although, to be sure, if the English colonial troops had been somewhat more agile, Jefferson’s and Washington’s bodies would have been dangling on the gallows in the summer of 1780 in front of London Tower Hill and their names would grace henceforth the European school books as marginal colonial road bandits. Of course, in the contemporary U.S., Jefferson and Washington are now mainly known to schoolchildren as slave owners.
Conversely, the famed politician Adolf Hitler was venerated as the ultimate European hero (Held) by many Europeans during his adult life time. Today, however, Hitler’s name or even the two syllables “hit-ler” have become a synonym and a signifier for a peculiar extraterrestrial species representing an absolute metaphysical evil, surpassing all imaginable cosmic evils. It is therefore a waste of time to talk about Hitler as a hero or ab anti-hero because the two syllables of his name enter into the realm of modern demonology — and not into the realm of dispassionate historiography. In modern liberal demonology, however, different rules and different value systems in regard to hero worship prevail.
Hero’s ‘Weird Sisters’
The hero is not a blank slate. He is often a self-centered and narcissistic figure who loves victimizing himself with endless neurotic self-justifying soliloquies, as seen in Shakespeare’s plays. The hero often imagines himself to be a man of destiny, although, when needed, he calls himself a man of free will. Hero faces a dilemma between these two notions. The factor of destiny carries always more weight for him when his free will is impeded or yields disastrous political results for his community. Usually, a would-be hero prefers to babble about his free will and indulge in an exercise of wishful thinking in the present or the future tense, yet he quickly reverts to the past tense when describing his bad luck and calls it destiny. His tragic destiny is then wished away by his invocations of witches, weird sisters, moirés, fates, or Germanic broom-riding Hexen. One must also note that virtually all Western mythical heroes are husky, good looking White males, with virtually no women ever assuming a role of a hero. However, during extreme emergency, or in the final death hour of the hero, it is no longer gods or good spirits who decide — but always a death spell of a female witch.
“Third Witch: All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter! (Macbeth; Act I Scene III)
There is more to that. Hero’s self-abnegation and his full-fledged idealism and commitment to superhuman goals often morph into fanaticism. Many mythical real or once-upon-a-time heroes, including the conventionally demonized and the proverbial Hitler, are depicted today in the System as certified fanatics and certainly not as heroes. In retrospect and from the modern liberal and rational point of view, the 10-year siege of mythical Troy, or thousands of real wars that have raged in European history amidst and between tribes and peoples that are virtually identical racially can be described as an exercise in White man’s savagery. From the point of view of liberals, any war-exalting hero is an irrational psychopath — other than when liberal theoreticians conduct wars in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” If we follow this liberal logic that wartime heroic dying does not make much sense, one must conclude that living does not make much sense either.
The line of demarcation between heroism, fanaticism and idealism is very thin, as observed on countless occasions in the intellectual and military history of the West. A hero’s sacrifice for a political or religious goal often clashes with an equally heroic goal he is poised to challenge. In Pierre Corneille’s drama Polyeucte, Pauline, a pagan lady from a distant part of the Roman Empire in Armenia, is trying to dissuade her convert husband Polyeucte from sacrificing to an obscure Semitic deity known as Jesus Christ. The young nobleman Polyeucte, however, in his ecstatic fervor decides to lay down his life for his new heroic inspiration and renounce his community, his wife Pauline, and his entire family.
Pauline: Oh, leave illusions! Love me!
Polyeucte: Thee I love/ Far more than self, but less than God above! (Polyeucte: Acte IV, Scene III)
Moreover, Polyeucte does not hesitate to desecrate the statues of ancient heroic gods in a Roman temple — a very serious political offense in the pagan Roman Empire. Polyeucte, like other early Christian heroes or would-be saints/martyrs, could not, however, anticipate that his self-serving heroic deeds on behalf of his newly discovered superhero Jesus Christ, would, over the next thousand years become a pattern for incessant inter-Christian, inter-White wars, Inquisitions and barbarism. At the moment when Corneille was in the process of finishing his play Polyeucte, a gigantic inter-Christian, inter-White carnage, known as the Thirty Years War, was taking place in the heart of Europe, resulting in millions of the German dead. Well, what counted for the poet Corneille was cozying up to his pious protector, the Christian King Louis XIII, and thus secure his literary fame on the winning side of the theological and political barricades in Europe.
The morale one can deduce from Polyeucte’s iconoclastic behavior, irrespective of his love for his hidden Semitic mentors Yahweh and Jesus, may be a lesson for all contemporary self -proclaimed “White heroic leaders” tapping incognito on their computer boards, waiting for a miracle to happen without incurring any personal risk. Their alibis must be always ready. If a White hero hopeful goes viral with the display of his heroic insignia, his mama can raise hell, his lady can ask for divorce, or worse he may get fired, or even much worse his mugshot can be posted at a local police precinct. The seventeenth-century author Pierre Corneille was on the safe ground with his narrated hero Polyeucte, being himself already on secure Catholic turf in France. This was not the case with his cherished Christian hero model, the early third-century Polyeucte who had dared to rock the boat of political correctness and paid a heavy price for it in the pagan Roman Empire.
A bit later, in the eighteenth century, with conventional Christian heroes going slowly out of literary and political vogue, Polyeucte would no longer be considered a model for heroes. He would have likely ended up as a fanatical hero, as his counterpart from the Middle East, the Muslim prophet Mohamed did. Mohamed was described as such by the very anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic author Voltaire in his play, Mahomet:
Mahomet: On every side inglorious; — let us raise/ Arabia on the ruins of mankind:/ The blind and tottering universe demands/ Another worship, and another God. (Mahomet; Act II, Scene V.)
With cultural mores changing, the notion of hero changes too. Today, in multiracial France, staging Voltaire’s Mahomet is already causing official concerns and increasing demands for its ban. Modern racial diversity oblige — even if it requires the System to clamp-down on free speech.
Hero’s Genie Unbottled
With all heroes’ gods and home-grown spirits being well stored and secured, nobody can guarantee a hero that his invisible ghostly protectors may not take a sudden revenge on him. Even if a hero is absolutely devoid of hubris and truly thinks of himself as a man of character, his unbottled spirits may act out in an unpredictable fashion. And then the hell breaks loose — which can last for eons. Even his best insights into the secrets of the stars, which the Habsburg warlord Albrecht von Wallenstein excelled at during the Thirty Years War in Europe, could not prevent him from getting assassinated by the very same people who days earlier had pledged to protect him from all political vagaries.
In fact, good spirits, if invoked by a hero too often, can speed up mayhem and chaos, as witnessed recently in European history. Different was the self-perception of nationalist heroes in Europe in 1933 from that in 1943. Conjuring up one’s good White nationalist spirits, as many White nationalists often do, can easily lapse into the deadly opposite, with the White ghosts no longer wishing to return to the bottle or getting stored away in the back of Pandora’s Box. In Goethe’s poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the much invoked magic spell of the enchanted broom, designed initially to help the young hero apprentice in his domestic chores, after a period of fun time turns the whole world upside down:
Flow, flow onward / Stretches many / Spare not any / Water rushing / Ever streaming fully downward / Toward the pool in current gushing.
Can I never, Broom, appease you? / I will seize you / Hold and whack you,/ And your ancient wood / I’ll sever / With a whetted axe I’ll crack you. (transl. by E. Zeydel, 1955)
The hero is frequently invoked during times of extreme emergency. In real life his profile is elevated in times of war. He will forever be the subject of mutually exclusive beliefs, and the final assessment of his deeds will hinge on the spirit of different times. Some past historical hero may appear to future generations either as an idiotic individual or as a man of exceptional intelligence. Once upon a time, thousands of great European intellectuals were swayed by the hero model as put forward by the earlier Marxist mystique and its subsequent political institutionalization in Bolshevik Russia. By the late twentieth century, after the collapse of communism, few would take those heroes seriously today and even less people would bother reading Marx’s books now.
Similar is the case with thousands of American and European intellectuals who thought that heroic life could be best achieved by embracing National Socialism or Fascism. Many outstanding authors projected their own autobiographic examples on a future world-improving hero. Many of those White writer heroes could masterfully handle both the pen and the gun. The authors George Orwell and Ernst Hemingway are still viewed by many liberal and leftist commentators as outstanding heroes who combined the soldier’s prowess with literary talent in their fight against what were alleged to be the fascist dark ages. Conversely, the ideal of the heroic man was equally a trademark of thousands of talented nationalist writers and warriors, such as Léon Degrelle or Ernst Jünger, with each in his own peculiar way, depicting the coming end times of the European White man.
A renowned communist, the French novelist Henri Barbusse, the author of the novel
Inferno, is an outstanding visionary source for a better understanding of the spiritual drama faced by a young couple on the treadmill of a merciless capitalist system. Barbusse, with his former soldier’s skill and his literary background placed therefore high hopes in the communist super hero Stalin:
This is an iron man. His name depicts him: Stalin — steel. He is as unflinching and as adaptable as steel. His power is his formidable good sense, the extent of his knowledge, his amazing internal skill of sorting things out, sharpness of passion, his relentless consistency, his swiftness, his self-assuredness, and intensity of his decision, as well as his constant obsession to choose the right people. (p. 311)
Amidst thousands of perceptive European and American thinkers who had embraced the figure of the nationalist hero, one must single out Kurt Eggers, a poet, an acclaimed essayist in National Socialist Germany, a political activist, but also a Waffen SS soldier who had chosen to die on the Eastern front. Eggers sees military combat as “the father of all things” — i.e., the ultimate purpose of life, as opposed to the nothingness of bourgeois life that deprives White man of all sense of purpose.
Placid life creates its own standards of unreality: what brings pleasure is viewed as good; what causes unease is considered evil. (Man) is keen to wish away reality and through his wishful thinking he bans from his life: struggle, the sense of the tragic, bleakness and pain. (p. 37)
How then to figure out in our forthcoming titanic future the right role model of the hero? The self-perception of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or the characters in the killing spree of his Titus Andronicus, or the behavior of the real historical Stalin or any historical or mythical hero, is often at variance with contemporary public perception of their former deeds. Prime examples are the many modern nationalist sycophants or “Hollywood Nazis” — or for that matter, a number of cultivated White nationalist scholars and heretics in the USA and EU who are inclined to mimic their historical heroes not along the patterns of how those heroes actually were, but rather on the surreal patterns of how they wish to see those heroes behave today. Hypothetically speaking, and provided that the White nationalist hopeful hero was given power on a golden platter by the System, nobody can reassure us that all Whites will be happy thereafter. White mythical heroes or White real historical heroes have always been far keener about killing their own kind, starting with their own family members, than killing off non-European invaders. Civil wars among Whites, starting with the siege of Troy all the way to World War II, have been far bloodier than any single war fought by Whites against non-White intruders. Whites are rightfully concerned today about the big and scary racial replacement taking place in Europe and the USA. Yet they need to offer a more persuasive answer as to how to achieve their unity in front of the common threat.
Dr. Tom Sunic is the author of Homo americanus; Child of the Postmodern Age (2007).
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