Western Culture

The Testament of a European Patriot: A Review of Dominique Venner’s “Breviary of the Unvanquished” (Part 1)

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Venner

Dominique Venner, Un samouraï d’Occident: Le Bréviaire des insoumis (A Samurai of the West: Breviary of the Unvanquished; Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2013).

All Europeans, whether they are of the Old World or the New, are suffering today. Their very existence is demonized by a reigning culture which would prefer to see them blended into oblivion. Whereas the old beliefs — Christianity, communism, fascism — are dead or dying, no new faith has replaced them. We, ourselves, are dying as peoples, slowly vanishing from the face of the Earth. But some Europeans refuse to go down quietly, notwithstanding the base allures of comfort. So it was with Dominique Venner, an erudite historian and European patriot, who lived, fought, and died by the pen and the sword.

Venner’s last book — which translates as A Samurai of the West: The Breviary of the Unvanquished — presents itself as his political testament and his final attempt to reconnect Europeans with their tradition and thus awaken them ethnically and politically. This Breviary is not a traditional prayer book but rather presents “the substantive core” of the European tradition and is “a collection of writings, thoughts, and examples to which one can turn to every day to nourish one’s thoughts, one’s acts, and one’s life” (34). Venner says that the world-view implicit in this work can form the basis “to build the personal life of each of us, of families, of nations, and of living communities” (36).

The Breviary is then not only a wonderful introduction to Homeric and Stoic wisdom, but also has practical advice on day-to-day life: On establishing one’s own “breviary” of quotes from sacred texts and great thinkers, on communing with nature in the woods, on traveling across Europe like the Wandervögel, on cultivating beauty in one’s own life, or on the reconstruction of one’s family tree. Read more

Southern Civilization: Review of Michael O. Cushman’s “Our Southern Nation: Its Origin and Future”

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Michael O. Cushman
Our Southern Nation: Its Origin and Future
London: Mitre and Crown, 2015

Reviewed by Tom Sunic, Ph.D.

CushmanMany intellectual and political promoters of nation-state building end up on the “wrong side of history.” In fact, these are the code words used by mainstream historians when depicting those who failed in their political endeavors, lost the intellectual or political war, and earned themselves historical oblivion.

This is the main message resurfacing on the first page of Michael Cushman’s book. Being henceforth pushed into the realm of modern demonology, those on the “wrong side of history” and their hapless descendants are stripped of an objective historiographic narrative. Instead, they are forced to learn the language of the victor’s doubletalk: “reconstruction” or “reeducation.” Although Cushman does not venture into historical parallels with other European societies, one can draw a parallel between the post-Civil War South and post-World War II Europe. In his little book Sparte et les Sudistes (Sparta and the Southerners) (1969), French scholar Maurice Bardèche, himself a victim of the judicial “re-educational” process in the aftermath of World War II in France, traces the beginning of the end of Western civilization with the defeat of the South in 1865, which presaged the latter-day apocalyptic fallout in post-1945 Europe.

Cushman is clearly a serious scholar, as evidenced by the large number of footnotes and the impressive across-the-board bibliography containing citations of what are commonly described as “leftist” and “rightist” authors. Nowhere in his text are to be spotted grandstanding epithets on behalf of the Confederate Southerners or disparaging words against the Yankee Northerners. Mr. Cushman’s sober, erudite style will hopefully gain him an enthusiastic readership. Read more

Groupthink in Sweden

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Sweden has become something of a paradigm of what’s wrong with the West, but one doesn’t expect light to be shed on the subject in an article on the false confessions of a Swedish man. However, this article has an interesting observation. The basic facts:

Sture Bergwall … confessed to 30 killings in the 1970s and 80s and to dismembering and eating some of his victims. In trials beginning two decades ago he was convicted and locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.

But, in a story redolent of the darkest Nordic crime fiction, doubts continued to swirl around the case until an investigative journalist, the late Hannes Råstam, demonstrated that the confessions had no basis in fact. (“Lawyers blame groupthink in Sweden’s worst​​ miscarriage of justice“)

The false confessions have led to soul searching in the Swedish legal community and, as the title of the article indicates, the explanation is “groupthink.”

“In hindsight, it is easy to see mistakes in the Bergwall affair,” the commission in Stockholm said on Friday.

Read more

Radical Egalitarianism vs. the Heroic Spirit of the West

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Related to Alain de Benoist’s interview on the Big Mother-Therapeutic state, I recently received an email commenting on a recent Red Ice interview where I talked about two of the major trends in European culture, the Indo-European heroic warrior culture of aristocratic-egalitarianism and the northern hunter-gatherer culture of individualist-egalitarianism. My correspondent writes:

It seems to explain many casual observations that I made.

For example: why  we can’t  rent a horse to run full gallop? And not only in California but also in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Apparently this is because of the disdain which herb gatherers feel for the nomadic horse which symbolizes oppression for them. One can retort that it is because of the lawsuits for injuries. But what motivates the lawyers? Mere greed? It could also be hatred for horse and horseman. And why do the people let it happen? I should add that the only place  in the USA where I could gallop was Tennessee. And you actually said in your interview that the South is different.
Why can’t we solo Mount Rainier? [Actually, it is possible to solo Mt. Rainier, but it requires written permission from the superintendent.] Messner soloed Everest. But in this great country on God’s green Earth we are not even allowed to solo Rainier. Genuine concern for our safety?  Or, perhaps, this is the wish of the duck hunters [egalitarian hunter-gatherer types] to pull down anyone who stands out? You spoke at length about this trait in your lecture.

And why was Snow Summit closed for downhill biking for over five years?  I could continue for an hour, but this may get boring.

I have written several articles on extreme sports as a context for implicit Whiteness (e.g., here and here). Putting this all together, the nanny state described by de Benoist and my correspondent has the effect of suppressing a critical aspect of traditional European culture — death-defying deeds in pursuit of personal glory. This restless Faustian spirit of the West is linked to exploration, invention, military exploits, and conquering the unknown.  Read more

Big Mother and the Therapeutic State

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Gustave_Doré-L'Enfance_de_Gargantua

‘Pantagruel  with his father Gargantua and mother Gargamelle” (watercolor); by Gustave Doré (1832–1883)

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic.

Below is the interview Alain de Benoist gave recently to Boulevard Voltaire.

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Q: “Eat your five servings of fruit and vegetables every day!”; “Do some sport!”; “Quit Smoking!”; “Drink one glass, but not two!”; “Buckle up when driving!”;  “Do not eat too much fat!”; “Do the proper garbage recycling!” After Big Brother, have we now arrived at Big Mother?

A: Starting with the nineteenth century the welfare state has been progressively put in place in order to compensate for the disappearance of organic and community solidarities which, with the rise of individualist ideology, have become dissolved.  Today the welfare state it is morphing into a sort of “therapeutic state”— if we were to borrow an expression by Christopher Lasch. This therapeutic state can be defined as an unholy alliance of the medication process and the state, setting up all sorts of unjustified obstructions to our freedom. The authority is becoming more and more maternal, albeit maternal in a way of a possessive mother eager to maintain its subjects in total dependency. The unilateral relationship with the state replaces the ancient social bonds. This hygienic control augurs social control. Medicine itself, when taking part in the control of populations, becomes totalitarian.

Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist

The dominant human type of today is the immature narcissist, ignoring all realties other than his own, and who, above all, wishes to satisfy all his cravings. This infantile type of a human being, predictably of liberal-libertarian orientation, is perfectly in line with a system which, as Marx wrote, drowns everything “in the icy waters of egoistic calculation.” What follows is a therapeutic civilization centered on the “Me” only. Pierre Manent  rightly stresses that liberalism means primarily renouncing to apprehend human life in terms of its own good and its own finality. In a society ruled by the entertainment industry in which nobody asks himself about the meaning and significance of his presence in the world, body-care of the Self becomes the alpha and omega of human life.  Not only does it signify being of good health, but also “feeling good about oneself,” and thus forgetting one’s own finitude. While expecting immortality in this world, the dream of eternal youth grips all those who have never become adults, and who conceive now of their life as a maternal fusion defying any symbolic order, while thriving  in a culture of the present tense that has expelled any meaning of historical continuity. Henceforth society functions according to the principles of mimetic rivalry, as a form of “ego rivalry” (in Freudian terms), i.e., with  the Self  being stripped off of its “id” and its  “superego,”  convinced now it is the center of the universe. This only facilitates the war of all against all. Read more

What to Read, Part 4: Hero and Heretic vs. the System — from Literature to Politics

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Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

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.

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

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. Read more

What to Read, Part 3: Hero and Heretic vs. the System — from Literature to Politics

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The article below is based on the speech given at the “London Forum,” London UK, May 16, 2015).

The nouns ‘hero’ and ‘heretic’ are used as frequent figures of speech in daily communication. Every day, almost every minute of our time, either consciously or subconsciously, we refer to the notion of hero and heretic, albeit by using often different words and expressions. The highly generic nouns ‘hero’ and ‘heretic’ lack a precise common denominator. What may be considered a heretical behavior today may be viewed as heroic behavior tomorrow. The meaning of the noun ‘hero’ is further complicated by its semantic shifts and its awkward equivalents in other languages and cultures. Thus the German word for hero is ‘Held’, although this word conveys a wider meaning in Germanic languages than the English word ‘hero’ or the French ‘héros’, deriving from the ancient Greek, and largely associated with political and military prowess only.

One must also refer to some well-known authors who dealt with the study of heros, such as Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book still serving as a primer in religious science courses at universities in the USA, but also a book which influenced many Hollywood moguls.  Although Campbell never addressed the notion of the hero from a racial perspective, the fact that he sat on the editorial board of the Mankind Quarterly  and that he had once upon a distant time allegedly cracked a small joke in front of his colleagues about the Jews earned him the title of “anti-Semite,” , a label not usually associated with heroism. Read more