What follows is the text of my speech given at the Generation Identity conference in London, UK, July 27, 2019.

Words such as “sovereignty” and “identity,” both belonging to the family of patriotism, have become trendy words among European nationalists of different stripes. They are even used as synonyms along with their new derivatives “sovereignists” and “identitarians” respectively. Many of these verbal derivatives did not even exist in the English language until recently. In the German language these words, which are of Latin origin, have also come into use recently—words such as der Patriot, der Identitäre and der Souveränist, although they often sound odd and un-German to traditional German ears. These replacement words for the old word “nationalist” owe their birth to two political and historical factors: 1) The German language, shortly after World War II, was subjected to a profound cleansing process carried out by the occupying Allied forces and their re-educational apparatchiks, the latter mostly recruited among academics of the newly re-established, Jewish-dominated Marxist Frankfurt school. Their task was to impose on the German people a new political vocabulary, a new way of communication — and a new identity. 2) The old German words associated with the notion of patriotism such as the German adjective “völkisch” or the compound noun “Volksgenosse,” which stands for a fellow patriot, or the unique German word “artfremd,” which means an alien of different biological stock, or the word “gleichrassig,” meaning someone of the same racial stock, vanished overnight in 1945. Ever since they have become crimethink words banned from public discourse. Henceforth many modern German and other European nationalists, burdened by the stigma of the National-Socialist past, prefer to use imported words such as “patriots” or “identitarians” instead, well aware that these new words can provide them with a modicum of political legitimacy in the mainstream media.

The new word “identitiarian” sounds quite romantic and is often used by patriots today all over Europe and America although it is not specific enough. Our identity cannot be unitary; it can have multiple facets. How should we define our identity? In singular or in plural? For example, in my case, which identity comes first and which one comes second? Am I first a Croat or an American? Or a hyphenated Croat-American? Or a European-White-American? On the professional level I can also display triple or quadruple identities; I can first define myself as a writer, as a professor, a translator, or as a political activist. On the religious level, my identity may first be Catholic or agnostic. And finally, there is also my racial identity, which is being dismissed as a social construct today by the majority of System-friendly scholars and the mainstream media. There are, fortunately, a few prominent scholars today who consider race the first marker of man’s identity. Even a half-blind man when stepping out of this London hotel can notice swarms of individuals of different races milling around.

So which identity should I pick first in my case? Should it be based on my racial, national, political, religious, sexual, or professional preferences? Read more

“Any appeal to the white working class, as in today’s alt-right populism, betrays class struggle.”
Slavoj Žižek, The Philosophical Salon, 2019.

Commenting on the political aspects of Shelley’s life and poetry, Virginia Woolf asserted in 1927 that the poet’s England “has already receded, and his fight, valiant though it is, seems to be with monsters who are a little out of date, and therefore slightly ridiculous.” Woolf was referring to Shelley’s nineteenth-century opposition to a system in which journalists were imprisoned for being disrespectful to the Prince Regent, men were stood in stocks for publishing attacks upon the Scriptures, weavers were executed upon the suspicion of treason, and boys (Shelley included) were expelled from Oxford for avowing their atheism. Dramatic in its own time and context, by the decadent mid-1920s such activism had indeed become a little anachronistic on paper, even if I disagree with Woolf that it had become slightly ridiculous. The exertion of political power, after all, is a monster that may change costume and migrate in certain seasons, but is also a fixed reality of human relations and therefore no more ridiculous, in any guise or era, than the people it rests upon.

The profundity of Woolf’s comment, for me, therefore lies less in its discussion of Shelley’s poetry than in its exposure of Woolf’s own interwar sense of political security. It is this sense of political security that today seems the more out of date, and therefore slightly ridiculous, especially as we live in an age where the monsters of the past, present, and putative future, are perpetually invoked in all areas of life. Today, people are imprisoned for being disrespectful to certain races, men are stood in the postmodern equivalent of stocks for attacking certain ideologies, workers are today arrested more often for patriotism than treason, and children are threatened with expulsion for the new sin of ‘racism.’ Woolf’s smug security, and not Shelley’s poetic demonology of the political, thus seems quaint at a time when everything in the tumultuous present is discussed via reference to monsters that may at any moment return from their slumber or drop their mask, and are certainly not to be laughed at.

How does one fight today’s monsters, and who is fighting them? One of the most interesting aspects of the persistent Yellow Vest protests, about to enter their tenth weekend and once more growing in size, is that they have been claimed by almost everyone on the political spectrum. As such, no-one is yet clear as to what monsters the Yellow Vests fight, or which monsters the movement itself may give birth to. Although coming from an avowedly Marxist/Maoist perspective, Slavoj Žižek is almost certainly correct is his recent assertion that:

The yellow vests movement fits the specific French Left tradition of large public protests targeting the political, more than the business or financial, elites. However, in contrast to the 68’ protests, the yellow vests are much more a movement of France profonde (“deep France”), its revolt against big metropolitan areas, which means that its Leftist orientation is much more blurred. (Both le Pen and Melenchon support the protests.) As expected, commentators are asking which political force will appropriate the energy of the revolt, le Pen or a new Left, with purists demanding that it remain a “pure” protest movement at a distance from established politics. One should be clear here: in all the explosion of demands and expression of dissatisfaction, it is clear the protesters don’t really know what they want. They don’t have a vision of a society they want, just a mix of demands that are impossible to meet within the system, even though they address them at the system.

Attempts to define the protesters in simple terms appear doomed to failure. Not only have factions of French Yellow Vest protesters been filmed fighting each other in Paris, but in almost every attempt to export this protest model there have been similar splits and fights, as competing groups attempt to see themselves, and only themselves, in the Rorschach of riotous assembly. Most recently, in London, pro-Brexit Yellow Vest protesters and anti-Brexit Yellow Vest protesters clashed at Trafalgar Square, with reports of both sides calling each other ‘Nazis.’ Both the collapse into Yellow Vest vs Yellow Vest, and the mutual use of the ‘Nazi’ pejorative, are illustrative of the wider confusion of ideology and childish terror in the face of name-calling in postmodern politics. These phenomena also illustrate the fact that, as Žižek points out, none of these groups have a vision of a society they want (or will admit to wanting). One guide to characters in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is titled “Who’s Who When Everybody is Somebody Else?” — a question that could as easily be put to the labyrinthine and evasive nature of a postmodern political activism in which identities are claimed and simultaneously disavowed by all concerned. Read more

The Hungarians recently celebrated the sixty-second anniversary of their 1956 Revolution against communism, which was cruelly put down by the Soviet Union, to which the West responded with purely verbal opposition. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán took the opportunity not only to commemorate the Hungarian struggle for freedom but to explicitly warn his fellow Europeans about the single most important issue facing our civilization and family of nations this century: the reduction of our people to vulnerable minorities in their own historic homelands. As far as I am aware, this is the first time a European head government has explicitly spoken out to defend the interests of “indigenous Europeans”: this ground-breaking and historic event which was under-covered by the mainstream media.

Orbán’s speech makes for inspiring reading and listening. In his opening, he noted that:

According to one of the laws of mathematics, if we multiply two negative numbers, the product is always a positive number. This is a truth which is difficult to comprehend. If we translate this strange truth into the language of history, the main lines of Hungary’s past are suddenly revealed to us. Almost all our revolutions and freedom fights have ended with a negative result: defeat, victims, reprisals. But somehow from all this a positive result has eventually emerged: survival, nation and freedom. 

We should recognize this truth whenever we feel downcast or discouraged at the course of events. I personally am confident that our people can only learn from their mistakes: the greater the suffering, the greater will be our self-correction and our renewal. Read more