The Cover Spread of Duchesne’s Latest Book, Greatness and Ruin

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Q: Hello, Dr. Duchesne.  Thank you for granting this interview.  If it’s all right by you, I would like to start with a few personal questions, to help the reader get to know you a bit.  Can you tell us a little about your personal background? Anything about your life or career before coming to Canada? I know that you are originally from Puerto Rico. How/why did you end up coming to Canada?

A: I was born in Puerto Rico to parents of diverse heritage. Wikipedia’s biographical information is inaccurate.  My father, a medical doctor, was of Afro-Puerto Rican, French, Spanish, and Portuguese descent. My mother, purely British by ancestry, was born in India, not of “Anglo-Indian” descent. They met at the Sorbonne in Paris, where they studied before relocating to Madrid for my father’s medical training.

At 14, following my parents’ divorce, I moved to Canada with my mother and two sisters. I have pleasant memories of my childhood in Puerto Rico. My father often took us (wife and family of six children) on Sunday outings around the island, or to animated gatherings at my grandparents’ home. My father, one of fifteen siblings, came from a musical lineage; his father is recognized as one of the two great classical-jazz composers of Puerto Rico. His mother would spend most of the day cooking great meals. My mother, quintessentially British, lived in a world of eccentricity and imagination. Though not studious, I was drawn to my mother’s large book collection, captivated by their looks, sometimes wondering about their contents, though I rarely read as a child.

Q: I think it would be interesting to learn a little about your intellectual journey. Was there anything noteworthy in your high school and/or undergraduate days? What made you decide to go into academia, and into sociology in particular?

My early years in Canada, interspersed with nearly a year in Spain, were marked by liberality. From ages 14 to 18, I immersed myself in nightlife, indulging in drinking and drugs, barely scraping by academically. By 19, exhausted by this lifestyle, I was captivated by Plato’s Republic and its vision of a perfected mind. In college, two years before McGill University, I embraced Marxism, committing to a minimum of three hours of daily reading to compensate for my lack of academic background. This discipline led to strong college performance, but at McGill, I reverted to old habits, earning a B- average in my first two years while remaining a keen reader of Marx and contemporary Marxist thinkers, including Latin American politics. I revered Lenin as history’s greatest revolutionary.

A Portrait of the Professor as a Young Marxist

At 22 or 23, after dropping out of university, I contemplated an academic career. While working part-time, I devised a rigorous self-study plan, devouring great novels, philosophy, and works on historical materialism, Nietzsche, Natural Law, economic history, and the history of the sciences. Nietzsche’s ideas, though clashing with my Marxism, kept me thinking beyond my leftist inclinations. For three years, I lived a near-solitary life, cycling, reading in parks, and meeting my girlfriend, whom I would later marry.

Q: What were some of your early intellectual interests and influences? When and how did you begin to develop views that diverge from the academic mainstream? Did you always stand out in any ways from your colleagues and the general intellectual climate, or did you only become “out of place” in academia after expressing your views?

A: My intellectual approach diverged from the mainstream as I pursued broad, historical studies over any disciplinary specialization. I enjoyed the study of the histories of a wide range of subjects, whether mathematics, philosophy, or economics. I was building up a library through purchases in second hand books stores. In retrospect, I can see now—I still have many of these books—how the study of the history of these subjects likely implanted in me the sense that most accomplishments had come from Europe, since in those days most books were naturally Eurocentric. I also read overviews about human evolution, agriculture’s origins, civilizations, modern science, and the Industrial Revolution. Returning to complete my BA, I majored in History, focusing on Europe, while taking diverse courses. My Marxist convictions persisted, culminating in an MA thesis defending a Marxist interpretation of the 1789 French Revolution.

I was lucky to find an interdisciplinary program at York University, Toronto, for my PhD studies. I still did not want to become an “expert” in any particular field. This program was called “Social & Political Thought.” I studied a bit of everything: philosophy, economics, history, political science, and sociology, resisting the fascination of the other students with postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism. Drawn to Hegel’s historical approach, I saw thought (and debates about the ultimate questions) as comprehensible only through their historical development. My dissertation, a phenomenological analysis of the Marxist “transition from feudalism to capitalism” debate, traced how “classical” Marxist claims evolved toward “post-Marxism” in the degree to which the major contenders in this debate were conceptually compelled (in light of the evidence) to incorporate ideas from Adam Smith, Max Weber, and other non-Marxist thinkers.

When I was hired as a sociologist at the University of New Brunswick in 1995, I identified as a liberal cultural Marxist. Sociology gave me ample room to sustain my interdisciplinary interests, allowing me to teach diverse courses—sociology of law, economic development, historical and political sociology—without specializing. This generalist approach, while fulfilling, relegated my publications to second- and third-tier journals. By 1999, I found a huge but definitive subject I could focus on in the “rise of the West” debate, engaging revisionist scholars online who challenged Eurocentric narratives with multicultural perspectives. My defense of Western achievements, infused with Nietzschean, Weberian, and Hegelian influences, sparked much debate among academics advocating inclusivity and multiculturalism.

Even as a Marxist PhD student, I had been uneasy about increasing third-world immigration to Toronto and Montreal in the early 1990s. My further readings on Western history from a comparative perspective, coupled with the multiculturalist push to downplay Western contributions, eventually pushed me towards conservatism, in a quasi-libertarian way. I came to believe that humanity’s highest achievements were at odds with inclusivity and leftist ideologies.

Q: Can you speak to some of the pressures you faced in your career for your views, and the reception of your work among your colleagues and students?

A: I kept my ideas about race, White identity, and immigration private up until about 2018. Mind you, I did show open support for Trump, walking with a MAGA hat around campus, which infuriated a few professors. I also gave a lecture at my university to a packed audience about Trump in early 2017, where I brought up immigration issues.

All in all, however, they still saw me as a conservative who authored a book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011), cherishing this civilization for its cultural and intellectual achievements. It was in late 2012 that I began exploring the links between the devaluation of Western achievements, the rise of multicultural world history, and the politics of diversity and immigration. By early 2013, I frequently visited online platforms such as American Renaissance, Occidental Observer, and Counter Currents. Although Uniqueness addressed the political dimensions behind the push for a multicultural historical approach, I now saw with clarity that this push was not solely about “new findings” or “new methodologies” by leftist revisionist historians; it also aimed to reshape curricula, to produce a new world history at the service of the growing racial diversity in the West.

A striking double standard was apparent in this whole debate around race: revisionist historians readily linked Western global expansion to “White supremacy” but reacted with hostility when I associated Western accomplishments with “White Europeans.” I first observed this in online exchanges on H-World, H-Net’s world history forum, as well as in academic conversations, conference discussions, and email correspondence.

As I explored controversial websites and delved into race realism and White nationalism, I withdrew from discussing politics with colleagues at the university, limiting myself to the non-racial themes of Uniqueness. This was no great loss; I recall only one professor there with whom I had meaningful intellectual exchanges. As I had already been promoted to full professor in 2008, I felt no pressure to publicize my research. Thus, I maintained a low profile regarding my involvement in dissident circles, including numerous activities and invitations, barely saying a word, if any, about my subsequent books, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age and Canada in Decay, when they were published in 2017.

Opposition to my pro-Western views initially came externally through grant rejections and severed ties with former leftist colleagues as I developed the ideas leading to Uniqueness. Later, conservative circles distanced themselves when I began addressing race and immigration. After Uniqueness appeared, I was invited to speak at Princeton University in 2012, and several American conservatives praised its scholarship. However, they disengaged once my critiques of immigrant diversity became clear. Steven Balch, who wrote a long, glowing review of Uniqueness, contacted me about joining Texas Tech University’s Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, which he had just been hired to create. Yet, upon learning of my evolving views, he cut off communication.

Q: Before things came to a head in 2019, did you already have a sense that many of your colleagues and students were against you?

A: Things began to deteriorate with my colleagues during 2018, as they learned about my book Canada in Decay, which was then a best seller, and I told them about it. Opposition to my ideas came earlier from the bigger campus at Fredericton when they learned about a video interview I did on 2014 criticizing academics for their lack of critical thinking about immigration issues. I was on the Saint John campus of the University of New Brunswick. In 2015, members of the sociology department at Fredericton wrote a letter to a major newspaper objecting to my views. They also wrote a formal complaint against me (with many signatures coming from academics from other universities) to the president of the university. University administrations, however, tend to take student complaints far more seriously. There had been no complaints against me from any students.

It was really my effort to push through the dissertation of a student, Clare Ellis, that revived the opposition against me in the Fredericton campus. It is a long, complicated affair. Suffice it to say that they hated the thought that a student had managed to produce a dissertation about immigration replacement in Europe, with very high evaluations from external supervisors, while the Fredericton examiners engaged in petty nitpicking, which I ridiculed in replies. In the end, they were compelled, if reluctantly, to pass the dissertation. They could not deny it was based on extensive research and citations. (Arktos has now published this dissertation, under the title, The Blackening of Europe, in three volumes).

It was a guy named Bernie Farmer, well known in radical leftist activism, and founder of The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, who orchestrated, in 2019, a united opposition against me, first in Fredericton, and then in Saint John. This included an open letter signed by over 100 academics published in the media, a few articles, and some radio discussions.

Q: From my understanding, the university basically pressured you into taking early retirement following complaints from students and staff, and an open letter by your colleagues demanding your dismissal. Were many of the people making these demands people you knew personally? Were there any that surprised you?

A: There were no complaints from students. I was not pressured into early retirement by the administration. I just knew it would not have been possible for me to work in a department where every one of my “colleagues” had signed the open letter, and filed other complaints, including numerous professors in departments below and above the floor where my office was located. This toxic environment compelled me into early retirement. In a way, there were no surprises. I understood the risks I was taking, and expected something to happen at some point. It confirmed my realization around 2013 that the West is absolutely committed to immigration and diversity, and will ostracize anyone who talks about replacement of Whites.

Q: You have written extensively about the plight of White Canadians, and been very outspoken about the downsides of our policies of mass immigration. As an immigrant to Canada yourself, what makes you so passionate about the cause of demographic replacement in this country? Or is it more the case that you are concerned about the demographic collapse of Whites in the West in general, and simply extend that concern to the country you live in now?

A: I am equally concerned about demographic replacement across the West, not just Canada. Native Canadians tend to be concerned about Canada, which is understandable since they have a stronger Canadian identity than I do. While I “feel” for Canada more due to the many years I have spent here since high school, I tend to have a cosmopolitan Western outlook, caring more or less equally for Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Spain, or England. Sometimes I wonder why I care so much about immigration replacement considering that I am an immigrant born on a small island in the Caribbean, with some non-White blood. Perhaps it is my “genetic memory,” my majority European ancestry, combined with my admiration and identification with the intellectual and cultural heritage of Western civilization. Civilizations have declined in the past, like China, Japan, and India, but they have managed to rise again. The West will never again be the West in a few decades if trends are not reversed. The argument for endless immigration, Black and brown pride, and White compliance, goes against my sense of fairness, pride, and dignity.

Q: As you mentioned previously, Uniqueness was less controversial upon its publication than your subsequent works, and even received a mixed but overall balanced reception, with positive reviews in relatively mainstream journals. Do you think this was solely due to the emphasis on culture rather than race, or was the intellectual climate in academia generally less restrictive towards such material back then? How did the intellectual climate change and develop between that time and your retirement?

A: Uniqueness would not have been reviewed, certainly not as favorably, if it had equated Western civilization with the “White race.” Its focus on cultural, economic, demographic, and geographical factors—without drawing on race realism—allowed it to be positively received by reputable journals such as The European Legacy, Journal of World History, Cliodynamics, Academic Questions, Canadian Journal of Sociology, The Independent Review, Policy, and The Dorchester Review. Six of these reviews, of which five were very positive, were extended essays. (It received long reviews in alternative right journals as well). For a long time now, the liberal academic establishment has excluded publications that explicitly link Western achievements to racial categories. Certainly, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, heightened the hysteria of academics against “systemic racism.” Psychology remains the only social science discipline where journals may tolerate race-realist perspectives on IQ, provided they are presented in a strictly scientific, nonpolitical manner within expert circles. However, even in psychology, the intellectual climate has grown increasingly restrictive. Scholars may still explore race realism, but only by adopting a libertarian stance or confining their work to a purely technical lexicon, avoiding political language or affiliations.

Q: Uniqueness was not an explicitly racialist book, and certainly not antisemitic, but you did set up several thinkers as intellectual antagonists, including Frank, Boas, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Wallerstein, all of whom happen to be Jewish—and many would argue that they do not simply “happen to be,” but that in fact their Jewishness is a major influence on their reasoning and a motivation for their intellectual pursuits. Of course, you address many other thinkers, but Jews feature prominently in the intellectual antagonists you address in Uniqueness. Did this occur to you at the time? You mentioned (and it is clear from your books) that your ideas on race largely crystallised after publishing Uniqueness. Is this also the case with your familiarity with the so-called Jewish question?

A: Before writing Uniqueness, I had read two excellent articles by Kevin MacDonald, and was familiar with IQ race realism. While I did not object to these perspectives, though I felt uncomfortable with their political implications, I deemed it unnecessary to incorporate them into my arguments. I also recognized that some Jewish scholars, such as David Landes, whom I discuss favorably in Uniqueness, were supportive of Western civilization. Mind you, in reply to Brill, the publisher of Uniqueness, I actually listed Kevin MacDonald’s journal, The Occidental Quarterly, as a potential reviewer. They did send a review copy to him, and he wrote a long review. We have kept in communication to this day, after he sent me a copy of the review late in 2011. I met him a few times, and consider him a most esteemed academic colleague.

It was only after publishing Uniqueness, as I elaborated in Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age (2017), that I gained a clearer understanding of the relationship between race and the rise of the West. I realized that Eurocentric scholars in the debate over the West’s rise framed it as a “universal civilization” grounded in liberal values, open to assimilation by any immigrant. Initially, I shared this view of the West as a universal liberal civilization. However, shortly after Uniqueness was published, I began to see that this philosophical stance aligned with policies promoting immigration-driven demographic replacement, a position I could no longer endorse. I was convinced that a Western world with a marginalized White population would cease to be Western.

This induced me to think further about the relationship between liberalism and immigration. The view I took in Faustian Man, and elaborated at length in Canada in Decay, written later but also published in 2017, was the standard one within dissident circles: that the West had come under the domination of a cultural Marxist ideology. Liberalism had long existed with strong immigration restrictions, and White identity affiliations. Only in recent years did I reach the view that liberal capitalism has a universalist progressive logic, and that this logic eventually pushed it towards open borders and racial diversity, after past traditional norms and identities were seriously weakened.

Duchesne Speaking at an American Renaissance Conference

Q: As someone who has been familiar with your work for some time, I could kind of observe that shift in thinking between your earlier work and G&R.  Uniqueness reminded me in some ways of another book that was very much in the same vein, namely Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson, though of course Uniqueness was much more academic in tone compared to the sleek pop-historiography of Civilisation, nor did it really share Ferguson’s counter-Jihad (i.e., Zionist) focus on a supposed clash of civilisations between the West and the Islamic world.  Nonetheless, there are similarities.  Ferguson posits several “Killer Apps”—namely competition, science, private property, medicine, consumerism, and the Protestant work ethic—as the defining features of Western culture that led to the rise of the West.  This is also somewhat in same vein as Joseph Henrich’s idea of the West as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic).  In G&R you are critical of Henrich’s almost monocausal attribution of these traits to what he refers to as the medieval Catholic Church’s “Marriage and Family Program” (especially its repression of polygamy and cousin marriage).  I do tend to agree with your critiques of this overemphasis on the church’s role, but at least Henrich offers a plausible explanation, whereas Ferguson offers no explanation of why or how (or even from exactly whom, racially speaking) these “killer apps” might have arisen.  Can you speak to the similarities and differences between their hypotheses and your own?

A: Uniqueness has certain affinities with Ferguson’s Civilisation: The West and the Rest in its endorsement of the “Eurocentric” argument that individual rights, free markets, Enlightenment values. However, in a review I wrote of Ferguson’s book in early 2012, I am quite critical of his book for two reasons: first, I now realized that many pro-Western historians, including Ferguson, were often right-wing liberals or neoconservatives who framed the West’s values as universally replicable; second, as articulated in Uniqueness, the West’s distinctiveness predates modernity, stretching back to ancient times.

Ferguson’s book implies that Europe was an undeveloped backwater until its economic rise in the 1500s, ignoring a rich legacy of intellectual and artistic achievements. These include the Greek invention of dialectics, philosophy, historical writing, and tragic poetry; the Hellenistic advances in natural sciences, such as Aristarchus’s heliocentric hypothesis and Euclid’s Elements; and Roman innovations like republican governance and legal concepts of personhood. By ignoring this heritage, and that of the Middle Ages, Ferguson reduces the West to a set of modern “apps”—liberal values detachable from their cultural roots.

In my review, I rejected the notion that Western liberal values are universal tools that any culture, regardless of history or ethnicity, can adopt. These values, along with the West’s broader achievements, are uniquely Western, inseparable from its historical and cultural trajectory. I also challenged Ferguson’s view of the United States as a “propositional nation” defined solely by universal ideas rather than ancestry, customs, or ethnicity.

The novelty and interpretative power of Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest People in the World (2020) lies in his demonstration that Westerners created very different liberal institutions, or civic associations, freed from kinship networks and norms, because they were psychologically different. Liberal institutions did not create liberal individuals; rather, liberal individuals created liberal institutions. By “liberal individuals,” Henrich means individuals with a greater “neurological and psychological” set of capacities, marked by reduced nepotism, greater trust, fairness, and cooperation with strangers. He maintains that these traits emerged in the Middle Ages after the Catholic Church dismantled polygamous kinship networks, imposed monogamy, and encouraged marriages based on voluntary decisions. This shift fostered civic institutions like guilds, universities, and chartered towns, grounded in impartial rules and merit rather than tribal loyalties.

However, Henrich’s claim that this psychological transformation arose incidentally from the Church’s prudish concerns about polygamy or its self-interested land grabs via excommunication is unconvincing. As I argue in Greatness and Ruin, the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians had long recognized monogamy’s civic benefits, such as reducing blood feuds over inheritance. These earlier arguments suggest a deeper, more intentional cultural evolution toward monogamy, challenging Henrich’s view of it as an “unintentional” byproduct of ecclesiastical policy.

Q: It is clear that, whether we’re talking about “killer apps” or WEIRDness, the consensus seems to be that certain Western cultural traits seem almost destined to bring about liberalism.  There is a logical progression from burgeoning individualism to liberalism, just like there is from liberalism to the West’s predicament today, as you mentioned.  Still, you once believed that liberalism, perhaps in a more conservative form, was basically compatible with nativist policies and White identity.  With G&R, you have come to view it more skeptically, seeing ethnic nationalism as fundamentally incompatible in the long-term with the progressive logic of liberalism.  What precipitated this shift in your thinking?

A: Liberalism is inherently a progressive ideology that seeks the full emancipation of individuals from pregiven collective identities, whether traditional or biological. In other words, liberalism did not actualize its ideals the moment the first liberals came to power with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the French Revolution of 1789. Liberalism initially coexisted with customs, rituals, religious beliefs, and nativist sentiments, which kept its progressive logic in check, and gave early liberal societies a very traditional character by the standards of today. Over time, however, the emancipatory project of liberalism eroded these “backward prejudices,” fostering a purer liberal order that views racial equality and immigrant diversity as essential to achieving equal liberty for all, regardless of sex, religion, or race.

To understand the West, one must adopt a historicist perspective. Particularly since the early modern era, or the Renaissance, the West has been a dynamic civilization defined by continuous change and innovation. Concepts like feudalism, capitalism, individualism, democracy, representative government, and liberalism lack transhistorical meanings; their nature and significance evolve with their temporal context. Judging these phenomena by a single historical instantiation ignores their variability. This lack of historical awareness may explain why scholars like Paul Gottfried argue that the contemporary West is dominated by “cultural Marxism,” a distinct ideology. Gottfried remains attached to the classical liberal version witnessed in the Anglo world of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, though he occasionally equates liberalism with the pre-1960s or pre-1980s West.

This does not imply that all self-identified liberals in our times embrace liberalism’s latest formulation. Today, liberals broadly divide into left- and right-wing camps. Right-wing liberals favor earlier versions of liberalism and view leftist excesses as deviations from the path of liberty. Yet, conservatives have historically accommodated progressive achievements, only recently resisting “wokeness” via a populist rebellion. Most conservatives, nevertheless, still regard ethno-nationalism, immigration restrictionism, and White identitarianism as illiberal ideologies to be excluded from the public sphere.

Consider Eric Kaufmann, a self-described right-wing liberal who critiques woke politics while defending Western civilization for the sake of “truth and freedom above ideology.” Upon closer examination, however, it is clear that Kaufmann opposes only the excesses of wokeness (aggressive censorship, rigid diversity mandates, and open borders) because they provoke populist backlashes that threaten stable, multiracial liberal democracies. He is not alone. Prominent liberal intellectuals like Konstantin Kisin, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Jonathan Haidt, Yascha Mounk, and Niall Ferguson share this perspective.

Q: In G&R, you mentioned that Traditionalists “have been the only ones—think of De Benoist, Kerry Bolton, Alexander Dugin—to carry a frontal attack on liberalism as such, holding its inherent individualism responsible for undermining every cultural, racial and sexual identity in the West.”  You also make several critiques of this school of thought, especially of their failure to address the stagnation of non-Western cultures, stating that they “have not been able to grapple consistently with the ways in which the traditionalism of the West has always coexisted with some degree of individualism, monogamous families freed from polygamous kinship networks, equal civic status, and participation in politics for free adult males—what is now known as a ‘civic-republican’ form of liberalism, in complete contrast to the non-Western world.”  Nonetheless, it seems to me that the total rejection of liberalism in this way of thinking had its influence on your thought, or at least was something you had to grapple with.  I remember listening to previous interviews of yours in which you brought up Dugin specifically, and your main critique of his Fourth Political Theory was that he professed to synthesise a new political theory by borrowing only the best elements from the previous theories, but in fact, you asserted, he had borrowed very heavily from communism and fascism, while taking nothing from Western liberalism.  I think your critique was basically accurate, (and I think part of the reason Dugin does this is simply due to Russia’s historical circumstance, including its age-old inferiority complex towards Europe), but nonetheless he is a very interesting thinker, even if one finds much to disagree with.  Did your views on Dugin change between that interview and when you wrote Greatness and Ruin?  What is your overall assessment of his political thought as it relates to liberalism?

A: In a 2014 review of The Fourth Political Theory, written under a pseudonym, I critiqued his blanket condemnation of liberalism, and his heavy reliance on Marxist and post-modern critiques. In a 2020 interview, I noted that his “fourth political theory” absorbed some “positive” contributions of communism (critique of individualism and capitalism) and fascism (concept of ethnos), but rejected everything associated with liberalism (preferring the concept of “social freedom,” or freedom of the group, over individual freedom). By 2022, however, I recognized Dugin’s insight that liberalism is the West’s dominant ideology. This led me to conclude that wokeness is not a new leftist or “cultural Marxist” phenomenon, but the culmination of liberalism’s progressive logic. Many Western dissidents (race realists and White nationalists) criticize Dugin for dismissing race as a construct, rejecting fascism and White nationalism, and advocating a multipolar geopolitics that some view as “third worldist” opposition to Western hegemony. These critics, I believe, overlook the historical and cultural context from which Dugin’s ideas emerged.

As a Russian cultural nationalist, Dugin views the post-Soviet American push to spread liberal hegemony into Eastern Europe and Eurasia as an existential threat, aimed at fragmenting Russia and imposing liberalism. I view Russia as predominantly European, with 80–85% Slavic peoples and significant Western cultural elements. This is why I support his cultural nationalism against American neoconservative values. Russian Slavs retain a natural ethnocentrism, and both Putin and Dugin embrace Slavic identity within the Russian federation, though not White nationalism, which is incoherent to Russia’s historically-based multiculturalism and its experience fighting the Germans during World War II. Unlike Western multiculturalism, which is driven by a progressive ideology, Russia’s diversity is an organic historical reality.

By the same token, while I appreciate Dugin’s Russian perspective, I also recognize that race realism and White identity are valid approaches in the Western context, where Whites are set to become a minority if the West does not make a decisive break with liberal capitalism.

Q: Great insights.  I could not have summed up my own views on Dugin better myself.

You make frequent reference to Hegel in your work, and both Uniqueness and Greatness and Ruin draw heavily from Hegel’s ideas on the genealogy of reason and the development of man’s intellectual faculties throughout history. You argue convincingly in Greatness and Ruin that Hegel’s philosophy of the development of the human mind is specific to the cognitive experience of Europeans. Do you agree that, especially in light of his attempts to reconcile the contradictions of some of the most important developments in European thought—namely classical philosophy, Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism—Hegel could be considered primarily (if perhaps not self-consciously) a philosopher of the European mind? Would you consider yourself a Hegelian?

A: Uniqueness has a long chapter titled “The Restlessness of the Western Spirit from a Hegelian Perspective” arguing that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) should be read as an account of the developmental experience of the Western spirit rather than of the human spirit as such. This should be obvious enough. The historical allusions of this book are almost entirely to philosophers, literary works, poems, scientific treatises, political and military figures from Europe. In our age of equality of rational capacities and rights, Hegelian scholars cannot but pretend that the Phenomenology is an exposition of “human experience and cognition.”

Granted, Hegel, like every other European philosopher, wrote in terms of the rational essence of “mankind-in-itself” and of the rational nature of humans to become self-aware of themselves as the agents of their conceptual creations and activities. Europeans have always expressed themselves in universal terms, projecting their intellectual experiences onto humanity, and, indeed, presupposing that Europeans, in their higher state of cognition, should be the standard by which to make judgements about humanity in general.

Once we connect this text with what Hegel says in more explicit terms in his “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” which presents a comprehensive view of world history through the lens of his philosophical ideas, it is hard to deny that the basic truth contained in the Phenomenology is that the West is the only civilization in which “freedom” and “reason” have progressed over the course of history.

The Phenomenology of the Spirit is a work that seeks to capture, in a comprehensive manner, the developmental experience of the idea of freedom in its intrinsic association with the developmental experience of reason. What I learned from this text, which allowed me to go beyond the narrow reduction of Western uniqueness to economic growth and modern science, is that the intellectual history of the Western spirit cannot be comprehended as a substance, a state of being, but as an “activity.” Non-Western civilizations can be reasonably identified in terms of one or two major philosophical experiences, “the Confucian worldview,” the “Hindu Mind,” the “Talmudic” world of Jews, or the “Islamic experience” of Muslims, in their essence, with subsequent intellectual variations occurring primarily within these currents, or in combination with a few other relatively static currents, such as Buddhism, or Sunnism versus Salafism in Islam.

In contrast, the mental experience of the West can be known only by knowing it as an experience that engendered in the course of time multiple philosophical schools, through a dialectic of theses, anti-theses, and syntheses. At the base of this dynamism, as I came to understand with greater clarity while writing Greatness and Ruin, is the discovery of the mind by the ancient Greeks: the realization that humans have a faculty that is singular to the human species, which consists in the ability of reason to create methods for proper reasoning, concepts and values, over which it can adjudicate as to their validity and morality.

It was really from the first flowerings of reason in ancient Greece that Hegel detected an inner necessity (a “dialectical” logic) in the philosophical development of humans, which he traced to the nature of reason per se to become actually what it was potentially from the beginning. Prior to the Greeks, humans had barely become conscious of their rational consciousness. Human consciousness started to display a restless disposition—its true potentiality and nature—when it came to “discover” itself as a faculty in its own right in ancient times. For it was then that reason apprehended its capacity for self-reflection, to think for-itself, in terms of its own volitional abilities, ceasing to accept passively the existence of norms, gods, and natural things as if they were “things-in-themselves” beyond its own reflective judgments.

This rational spirit would remain in a state of dissatisfaction and alienation, restlessness and unhappiness, continually seeking a new solution, in its effort to overcome and sublimate every contradiction within its thinking, and every non-conceptualized unknown it encountered. The Western self could not feel “at home” in the world until it got rid “of the semblance of being burdened with something alien.” The Phenomenology views every major Western outlook—Roman stoicism, skepticism, Catholic scholasticism, Cartesian rationalism, British empiricism, German idealism, and romanticism—not as isolated or timeless viewpoints, but as evolving “moments” in the effort of human selfhood to become what it is intrinsically: the free author of its own concepts, values, and practices.

The Phenomenology thus exhibits the ways in which diverse but interrelated outlooks held sway and conviction for some time, only to be seen as limited in their inability to provide answers consistent with the demands of beings that are becoming increasingly aware of themselves as the free creators of their own beliefs, laws, and institutions. Europeans, in Hegel’s grand scheme, only became what they are potentially—rationally self-conscious agents—when they came to recognize themselves, in modern times, as free in their institutions and laws, and as the ultimate decision makers as to what is true, rather than relying on “natural laws” mandated from above.

For Hegel, this stage had been reached in his own time, in the post-French Revolution era of Europe. It is not that there would be no more history after him (no further debates about, for example, how widely free speech should be extended). Liberal institutions would continue to develop, improvements and adaptations to different national experiences and events would occur. His point was that Europeans would no longer accept a political order that denied the equal liberty of individuals to express themselves as free rational agents.

Hegel, however, was not a libertarian or a relativist who believed in value pluralism. As I will explain in response to the next question, he was a communitarian liberal who believed that the state should play a key role in creating a sense of cohesion and belonging among citizens, rather than allowing the business world, and freewheeling individuals, to be in charge of the foremost ideals of a society.

I agree with Hegel that only Europeans became conscious of their consciousness. This is the foundation stone from which I try to make sense of the unique historical trajectory of Europeans. In this respect, I am a Hegelian. Of course, as I show in Greatness and Ruin, there are currently many other thinkers, treatises, debates, historical and psychological findings, with keen insights about the “second-order thinking” of Europeans and other unique psychological traits. However, I don’t believe there is a grand purpose in history. We can see meaningful patterns, identifiable stages in Western history, but history is unpredictable. Most humans are barely able to think for themselves; Africans and Indians, non-Western peoples generally, are now a huge majority in the world, and their ways of thinking are very different, even if they have modernized or are modernizing. Apart from Western technology and affluence, the historical experience of the West means very little to other civilizations. Samuel Huntingon was correct that modernization should not be confused with Westernization. AI, globalization, mass immigration, and race mixing inside the West, are creating a world that is unpredictable and very different from the world Hegel experienced.

Q: It is, of course, far beyond the scope of this interview to come up with exactly what it would look like, but do you think Hegelian dialectical methods might be fruitful in reconciling European ethnic self-preservation and cultural coherence with the “liberalising” tendencies of individualism, universalism, et cetera, that seem to be intrinsic to Western culture?

A: In my judgement, Hegel belongs to a group of German thinkers, idealists and historicists, who understood the value of modernity, freedom, the use of reason, and the value of open inquiry, while believing that societies could not be founded solely on the free choices of individuals abstracted from their ethnos and ancestral community ties. They emphasized the “social rights” of the community or ethnos. In chapter 10 of Greatness and Ruin I examine the ideas of German historicists, their critique of liberalism, though not Hegel’s own critique.

Hegel, we can say, is a liberal communitarian who advocated for “social rights” within a political order that would reconcile the individualist aspirations of citizens with the need of humans for community ties, a sense of belonging, ancestral ties and historical rootedness. Today, in the West, liberal communitarians are multiculturalists who identify “social rights” with economic equality, welfare provisions, and the removal of “socially constructed” differences between the sexes and races.

Charles Taylor, one of the major Canadian theorists of multiculturalism, and an admirer of Hegel, has readapted Hegel’s ideas to serve progressive ends, while discarding or suppressing his traditionalism and nationalism. Hegelian scholars generally have put forth a Hegel that views “social rights” as rights for greater equality in a multicultural setting, a Hegel that synthesizes the atomism of free markets and private rights with a state that ensures social rights for diverse peoples and promotes the “collective economic good” of society.

It is true that Hegel argued that being recognized as a citizen while living in abject poverty limited individual self-expression, insomuch as this was a result of the actions of powerful citizens having complete freedom of contract without any social rights protecting workers in the form of state regulations. But there is more to Hegel’s concept of social freedom. When Hegel writes about a shared conception of the good, he does not mean economic goods only; he means as well cultural collective goods, a sense of peoplehood (Volk) that can be guaranteed only by a national state. Hegel appeals to the idea of national identity as the glue that can tie otherwise rational private citizens by virtue of their belonging, through birth and ethnicity, to a single culture.

Current interpreters of Hegel, notwithstanding the merits of their works in organizing and clarifying Hegel’s extremely difficult ideas, rarely mention or willfully misread Hegel’s emphasis on national identity. For example, Frederick Neuhouser, in his book, Actualizing Freedom: The Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (2000), argues that Hegel could not have appealed to a sense of national belonging “akin to bonds of brotherhood” since such bonds would be rooted in a “prereflective attachment,” which is supposedly inconsistent with a post-Enlightenment culture in which individuals accept only communitarian identities that are “consciously endorsed through a process of public reflection on the common good.”

I disagree. Neuhouser should know that the “bonds of love” that unite Western families are not purely “free” and “rational,” even as the union of husband and wife are freely decided rather than coerced by unreflective customs. There is a strong natural bond between parents and children and between men and women as sexual beings who can reproduce children, not to mention the multiple customs that regulate the marriage ceremony and child-rearing. There is also a strong natural (but no longer prereflective) bond uniting people with the same historical ancestry, territorial roots, and language within one nation. This bond is consistent with a rationally free subject. The subjection of “pre-reflective bonds” to rational examination does not necessarily entail the creation of a nation based on “propositional values.” Thinking critically about “prereflective bonds” means that these bonds can no longer be seen as unknowable, mysterious forces that control the affairs of men; it means that we now know their nature, that we can explain why we individuals tend to be more attached to people of our own ethnicity and historical lineage. It means that we have rationally explained studies about in-group attachments, biological dispositions, and genetic determinants.

Q: With the proliferation of technology, rising literacy and rates of education, and the global homogenisation of culture due to American media power, to what extent do you think non-Western peoples might be moving towards Western modes of thought, including individualism and higher-order thinking?

If, as you argue in Greatness and Ruin, the development of the Western mind underwent a process of Piagetian development to arrive at higher-order self-conscious thought, do you think it is likely that certain other peoples might undergo a similar development, perhaps even at an accelerated rate, since Western culture has already “paved the way” towards this level of self-consciousness?

You quote Hegel: “In development, nothing emerges but what was there originally in germ or in-itself.” You assert that the telos of consciousness is “to make consciousness explicit to itself, to reach self-consciousness,” and that “the seed of man’s apprehension of himself as the only being that can become aware of his capacity to self-determine [is] already there inside man as such” (p. 147), but that this “implicit capacity only started to become explicit and actual with the ancient Greeks, and never manifested itself anywhere else.”

Would you say, then, that this germ, this potential for self-consciousness, exists in man as such—that is to say, in all peoples? You give a plausible genealogy of the development of European self-consciousness reaching all the way back to the Indo-Europeans. Is the development of higher-order thinking in Europeans, then, purely a result of this cultural Piagetian developmental process—culture and consciousness building upon itself—and unique to Europeans purely because of the cultural processes that we have undergone? Or is the germ, the potential, different across different people groups, such that, for example, African Pygmies never could have undergone a similar development of consciousness, no matter what cultural experiences and processes they underwent? Do you think it is potentially a case of culture influencing genetics, and vice versa?

And, at the risk of asking an impossible question here: what do you think is the relationship between innate cognitive potential (of a people) and cultural development of consciousness?

A: One would think that, if I agree with Hegel that the potential for self-consciousness exists in man as such, I would agree that Western culture has ‘paved the way’ for second order thinking, self-consciousness, and a high level of creativity among non-western peoples with the spread of modernity. Yet, in Greatness and Ruin, I seem to suggest that the introspective consciousness of Europeans—the disposition to examine one’s own thoughts and feelings, and what Joseph Henrich calls the “WEIRD” Western traits for intentionality, trust of strangers, and lack of ingroup identity—are too deeply wired into the psychology of Europeans to be replicated among non-western peoples simply through proper socialization. Henrich is also ambivalent about this. On the whole, his thesis is that, with modernization, creation of liberal institutions open to merit and based on universal rules and equality of rights, humans will exhibit “WEIRD” dispositions. But he also brings up research showing that second- and third-generation immigrants in Europe from Muslim nations (and other cultures with strong kinship networks) have not assimilated. For Henrich, it comes down to the persistence of kinship networks. If they are “demolished,” then we get “weird” humans.

But it looks like things are more complicated. In China, despite the promotion of nuclear families and monogamy through policies like the Marriage Law of 1950, and the one-child policy (1979–2015), which aimed to reduce extended family networks, kinship systems still remain strong and deeply rooted in Confucian principles, emphasizing filial piety, patrilineal descent, and extended family obligations like ancestor worship and bloodline. Kinship norms remain strong across many other non-Western nations.

I still don’t see the same level of individuality among Asians, Africans, Mestizos, and Muslims, despite adoption of monogamy, some liberal institutions, and modernization. I don’t see the same degree of what Charles Taylor called the “inner depths” of the Romantic movement in Europe, in his book Sources of the Self (1989). This refers to a very uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or “authentic” dimension, feelings and moral sensibilities. The self in Chinese and Japanese cultures remains more tied to social roles and pre-modern philosophies, external rules and expectations.

Genetics matters, of course. Populations with low average IQs can’t attain a profound inwardness, beyond superficial consumerism and narcissistic forms of self-expression. It can’t be denied, however, that nations like China and Japan today exhibit high scientific reasoning and formal operational thinking, with significant achievements particularly in applied science. Japan has won 28 Nobel Prizes in science, making major contributions like the bullet train (Shinkansen, 1964), lithium-ion batteries (1980s), and robotics (ASIMO). China is currently a leader in fields like quantum computing, CRISPR gene editing, and 5G technology.

It can be argued, nevertheless, that China and Japan excel in applied and technical fields like engineering and materials science), but not in more “creative” fields like theoretical physics or biology, where Western scientists still dominate. A 2018 Journal of Creativity Research study found that Japanese students score lower on measures of “creative ideation” compared to American students, which has been attributed to a focus on consensus and rule-following. Japan and China mainly excel in continuous improvement or “iterative refinement” rather than “disruptive innovation,” as witnessed in American tech-driven breakthroughs in Silicon Valley). Similarly, a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that Chinese students show “high convergent thinking” (problem-solving within rules) but “lower divergent thinking” (generating novel ideas), as compared to Westerners.

The West remains the citadel of political liberalism and pluralism. China is an illiberal culture with a surveillance state. China’s social credit system and extensive digital monitoring create a highly controlled environment, which suppresses individual self-expression. While Japan’s post-World War II constitution guarantees freedoms of expression, association, and thought, making it de jure a liberal democracy, its culture remains deeply collectivist, emphasizing group harmony, deference to authority, and social roles over personal expression.

While I can see a high tech, AI/genetic engineering world taking us in directions never anticipated, with the full participation of East Asians, I don’t anticipate seeing again in history the high level of creativity Europeans exhibited in the invention of all the fields of knowledge, multiple philosophical outlooks, exploration, and mapping of the world. This will remain the singular legacy of Europeans.

Q: Earlier, you mentioned the “uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or ‘authentic’ dimension.”  This reminded me of something I’ve been mulling over for some time, and I’d like to get your thoughts on it:

Do you think there is a sort of trade-off between self-consciousness and authenticity?  I sense that White people often understand (intuitively, though often not intellectually) that other people-groups have more kinship-based ways of thinking, and to some extent even admire or envy them for the “authenticity” of their cultures, traditions, and kinship bonds.  Is the White liberal yearning for “authenticity” a mere romanticisation of a lower level of consciousness, a sort of “noble savage” ideation?  Is it, in effect, a yearning for a return to the smothering womb of undifferentiated selfhood, a shirking of the responsibility that comes with higher consciousness?

Anecdotally, as a child growing up in an already very multicultural and racially diverse environment, I often looked at the natural, unexamined (and thus totally self-confident) ethnic identity of my non-White peers with a degree of envy.  It seemed like a source not only of pride, but also of strength, reassurance, certainty, something they could always fall back on, so to speak.  They were just so sure of who they were and what people they belonged to, and I didn’t see the same thing among any assimilated White Canadians.

I agree with your assessment in Greatness and Ruin that this sort of unexamined, purely instinctual, kinship-based tribal identity is probably not possible for Whites to ever truly return to; the collective European mind has undergone a developmental process that makes this type of thinking alien to us, which is both to our advantage and our disadvantage, as you have laid out.  However, I feel that the awakening of ethnic nationalism in the Romantic era was, to an extent, a subconscious response to this problem: a yearning for the authenticity of unexamined ethnic tradition and belonging.  Ironically enough, the rise of ideological Nationalism was largely driven by intellectuals romanticising (and often embellishing) the supposed unexamined traditions of peasants to construct ethnic national identities.  (I do not say ‘construct’ in a dismissive way; the identities of modern ethnic nations had organic roots in history, culture, kinship, etc.; they were ‘constructed’ in the sense of being self-consciously ‘synthesised’ to some degree from diverse regional customs for the political expediency of binding together ethnic nation-states.)  I do see the irony here in the self-conscious attempt to construct unconscious ethnic/national identity, but I do not think it is necessarily a contradiction.  Modern ideological Nationalism, while it is based in organic cultural and kinship groups, is also a liberal idea to some extent, or at least could not have come into being without liberalism.

If self-consciousness and a degree of individualism are inherent to the Western mind, then perhaps ideological Nationalism can strike a balance between these elements on the one hand, and the power (and human need) of belonging and identity on the other hand.  Just because the identity is to some degree self-conscious and intentional, does not mean it lacks all authenticity.  Total universalist individualism is ruinous for us; total, unthinking, kinship-based tribalism is impossible for us; it seems to me that some sort of self-conscious Nationalism is the best way forward, whatever form it might take.  What are your thoughts on this?

A: Since about the 1960s, you are correct, a lot of progressive Whites have come to identify “authenticity” with non-Western cultures, holding an idealized image of Native American “environmentalism” or African tribal vibrancy, echoing Rousseau’s noble savage and the Romantics’ nostalgic imaginings of the Middle Ages as an Eden of organic unity. They have identified the West, by contrast, as “artificial” and “soulless” in its corporate-driven consumerism and careerism.

However, when I write about the “uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or ‘authentic’ dimension,” I have in mind another aspect in the Romantic longing for authenticity as the expression of one’s unique, inner self. Behind Rousseau’s imagining of the “noble savage” and the Romantic longing for the organic unity of the Middle Ages, I find a modern rebellion of the individual against the Enlightenment’s cold rationalism and the stultifying effects of industrial mechanization. The Romantics framed their rebellion as a return to an imagined natural authenticity in pre-modern man, unaware that they were a product of Western modernity, expressing a novel variation of the Western longing to be oneself, to create one’s aesthetics and values, rather than to conform to societal expectations and prescribed social roles.

The idea of living an authentic life is essential to the philosophy of existentialists like Sartre and Camus. With the collapse of monarchy and religion, followed by increasing scepticism about the ability of reason to create universal values to ground human societies and give meaning to one’s life, existentialists, including Nietzsche, radicalized the meaning of authenticity as the complete transvaluation of all prior beliefs and the creation of one’s lifestyle in a world that was otherwise absurd and meaningless. We are condemned to be free. We have a choice to be either free in an authentic way, original and true to one’s chosen purposes, or to follow the average man’s predilection to accept external dogmas and remain unoriginal (“bad faith”).

Liberal pluralism, in its own political way, accepts the meaninglessness of the world, the inability of Western peoples to reach consensus about the “good life” or the “highest” values. The state should simply create a public sphere in which everyone can do their own thing without infringing on the rights of others. The only commitment can be to the plurality of values in a state of tolerance.

The current Western projection of an authentic organic life to non-White cultures is a reflection of the alienation Westerners feel in their hyper individualized societies. Humans, including Westerners with their individualist psychologies, have a longing to be rooted somewhere, to belong in a community. As liberalism eviscerated every tradition which hitherto sustained our liberal societies for many centuries, until recent decades, leaving Western individuals alone in the “absurd” world Camus wrote about, they were drawn to seek communitarian ties in the pre-modern world and in more traditional non-Western lands.

Liberal multiculturalism, which is based on a school of thought identified as “liberal communitarianism,” is a product of this mindset. Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka effectively told White Canadians that bringing vibrant and authentic cultures from the non-White world would give Canada a communitarian identity that Anglo-capitalist liberalism could not provide. By not demanding assimilation from foreign immigrants and from the nationalistic Quebecois, and allowing them to enjoy certain collective rights to their cultural traditions and folkways, Canada would become a more culturally vibrant nation. Immigrants and Quebecois would in turn be encouraged to join this multicultural liberal order, agreeing to respect the rights of individuals to free expression rooted in Anglo liberalism—that is, to be open to the right of members of their ethnic communities to make their own cultural choices. For a time, most Whites bought into the idea that attending multicultural festivals and the like would give them some collective meaning and authenticity. But with the outright swamping of the nation with endless streams of new immigrants, many are feeling more alienated than ever, as their neighbourhoods and cities have turned into ethnic enclaves and rootless melting pots without substantial ties. This is happening across the West.

Just a few years ago, as one can read in my extended review of Joseph Henrich’s The Weirdest People, published in June 2022, I believed that nationalism, the creation of ethnic-cultural states by Europeans, could strike a balance between their individualism and the inescapable longing humans have to belong to a community of people with strong ethnic and cultural bonds. The nation states of the West, after all, were quite liberal a few decades ago despite their White-only immigration policies. As you point out, nationalism emerged within evolving liberal states; and in its inception after 1789, nationalists did not call for civic liberalism alone, but insisted that the creation of nationalist states should be grounded on the actual historical reality that territorial states in Europe were rooted in common ancestral ties and historical experiences. They were not mere constructs of the imagination. Liberalism was compatible with ethno-nationalism. I defended this view in my book Canada in Decay.

I now think it will be very hard to recreate national ethno-cultural states within the framework of our liberal institutions. It is not accidental that across the West, not in only one or two Western states, liberal governments eventually agreed, after World War II, to delink their states from any ethnic group and even any cultural tradition. We are now in a “post-national” stage, in which calling Canada a “liberal Western nation” is deemed to be exclusionary. In Canada in Decay, I attributed this to the “march through the institutions” of cultural Marxist ideologues. But now I see it as the progressive unfolding of liberalism. A state that prioritizes an ethnic group is simply incompatible with the principle of individual rights.

I can’t see how, in our times, the state of France, for example, would abolish Article 1 of the Constitution, which emphasizes equality before the law for all French citizens “without distinction of origin, race, or religion.” This would entail a restoration of the Vichy fascist regime, which would entail a declaration of war against the existing order. I can’t see either how the United States would reject integration (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). Integration is rooted in the 14th Amendment (1868), which provides a constitutional basis for laws ensuring equal protection for everyone regardless of race. Rejecting the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education would entail a huge upheaval.

It would also entail accepting a prolonged breakdown in the capitalist economy, which would require a very strong political movement to stand up to global capitalism, which would require, moreover, a sizable proportion of White men with high levels of “V” and “C”. Australian millionaire Jim Penman writes (in his 2014 book Biohistory) about two temperamental traits, labeled “V” (vitality, high testosterone, aggression, risk-taking) and “C” (sexual restraint, control of children, family orientation, work ethic), which are both essential for the creation and maintenance of civilizations. These two traits have declined considerably in the West. I have a hard time envisioning a rejection of liberalism under low levels of V and C.

However, liberalism is decomposing, tensions are rising, and a climate may be emerging in which V levels will rise among White men, and that may open unanticipated possibilities.

Q: Do you think it will be possible for the West to walk back from the precipice it is on and achieve a better balance between its universalism and individualism, and reverence for its heritage? What do you think this might look like?

A: My hope comes from the expanding failures of liberalism. We were promised—rooted in the moral ideals of liberalism—that Western nations could overcome the divisions and conflicts associated with World War II, racial segregation in the United States, and millennia-old ethnic tensions across Europe, with the implementation of immigrant multiculturalism, the promotion of equal cultural rights to “disadvantaged minorities,” the elimination of White-only immigration policies, and the creation of societies in which everyone, regardless of racial and religious identities, would eventually enjoy equality of liberty and opportunities as individuals. Diversity was inherently a good: the more diversity, the more progressive and liberating Western nations would become.

Well, for some years now many Western leaders have been compelled to admit, if implicitly, that increasing diversity does not necessarily entail increasing harmony. Racial and cultural tensions have grown across the West. Blaming “systemic racism” and “White supremacists” no longer carries the same powers of persuasion among large segments of the population as it has for the last two or three decades. In Greatness and Ruin, I outline many other failures of liberal capitalism. This ideological order, after bringing great dynamism and prosperity for many centuries, has reached a moral dead end, notwithstanding continuing innovations and GDP expansion.

But now that liberal progressivism has eaten up, deconstructed, and trashed the traditions, customs, and rituals that sustained this society for centuries—attachments to family, country and God—things are falling apart. When William Butler Yeats wrote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” in his poem The Second Coming, published in 1920, he could not have imagined a breakdown of liberal societies permeated with foreign immigrants educated to identify native Whites as targets for permanent reparations. We are rapidly reaching civil war-like conflicts. I agree with David Betz, a mainstream academic at King’s College London, that Britain could see civil war within five years.

This is the source of my optimism, which is rooted in my pessimism about the ability of Whites to break away peacefully, through elections and reforms, from this liberal reality. As far as Western elites see it, the die is cast; the West has been racially diversified; liberalism guarantees equality of rights for everyone. Racism is basically illegal. The West is a multicultural civilization based on the separation of culture (not just religion) and the state. Culture is a choice. The state has no right to impose any values other than the value that everyone has a right to choose their values as long as they accept the equal rights of others. In other words, the state has a right to ensure that everyone accepts multicultural liberalism in the public sphere. Those who reject this order can be marginalized.

Even conservatives don’t see it as a problem that the White populations of many Western nations are already set to become a minority within a few decades. They think it is quite insulting to insinuate that non-Whites are “less Canadian” or “less American” or “less British.” As long as non-Whites embrace “German values” or “Swedish values,” it will be the same. That is, as long as immigrants embrace the values of multiculturalism and equality of choice, the West will remain the West.

It is true that White citizens in Western nations never voted to become a minority. Many want immigration to be reduced. Our liberal order allows voters to ask for less immigration. Remigration, however, is not allowable. I think the Trump administration, as it is, understands that deporting 20 million or so illegals is extremely difficult within this order. Expedited mass deportations will require illiberal measures incompatible with legally established American values. Stephen Miller’s “narrow interpretation of liberalism,” which prioritizes rule of law and national sovereignty for deporting criminals, seems to work only for non-working illegal immigrants, but not for working illegals.

So far, as of June 2025, Trump’s deportation numbers are less than 200,000. Most of these deportees had criminal records. These deportations were justified in terms of Miller’s arguments, as a proportionate response to lawbreaking. But deporting 20 million would require authoritarian measures, such as sweeping raids, detention camps, and “legal shortcuts,” which counter liberal principles like due process, pluralism, and individual rights. “Targeting” communities of “Latinos” would “undermine equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.” Deporting working “undocumented” immigrants (those integrated into the economy and paying taxes) would clash with free market values. Identifying and detaining millions in workplace raids would be seen as invasive authoritarian surveillance measures. Liberal capitalism cherishes free markets, diversity, and mobility. Deporting 20 million would require invoking something like the Insurrection Act or declaring a national state of emergency to deploy military forces.

We see a similar situation in the actions of the Italian leader Giorgia Meloni. The liberal media identifies her as “far right,” and, accordingly, it set into motion a way of reabsorbing her into the liberal order away from radical measures; indeed, it has managed to use her populist beliefs to strengthen and streamline Italy’s role within this regime. Since taking office in October 2022, only 50,000 illegal migrants were deported. Yet, at the same time, a 2023 decree regularized 450,000 undocumented migrants already in Italy in order to meet “labor shortages.” Legal immigration quotas have been expanded. Some estimate that 280,000 “irregular” migrants, mainly Africans, have landed over the last 32 months. The “Mattei Plan” has bribed African rulers (for example, in Tunisia, Ethiopia, Nigeria) with a payment of 5.5 billion euros to encourage voluntary returns and “address migration’s root causes.” Today, Meloni is being celebrated for her “economic pragmatism,” E.U. alignment, labor policies, tax cuts and “digitalization.” She is “optimizing” Italy’s needs within the global liberal order. In appreciation, she obtained 194.4 billion euros from the E.U.’s Recovery Fund.

To the question “What do you think this (taking on liberal multiculturalism) might look like?”— let me respond by way of what Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, has accomplished. Keep in mind, though, that Bukele has been dealing with criminals, not legal citizens, and that in El Salvador liberalism has not penetrated deep into the psychology of the population, and that many illiberal customs remain strong. What his actions show me is that a Western leader will have to act in even more authoritarian ways if he is to clean up the mess liberals have caused with mass immigration and wokeness. Bukele successfully accomplished his goals (while gaining the support of over 90% of the population) by suspending some constitutional rights and limiting due process. He had no choice, indeed, but to declare a state of emergency multiple times, curtailing the right to legal counsel, freedom of association, and privacy in communications. His administration conducted mass detentions of over 85,000 on the basis of “uncorroborated allegations,” going against the “presumption of innocence and due process.” (I am quoting the words liberals in the West have used condemning his actions.)

He had to restrict judges’ ability to offer alternatives like bail or house arrest; to impose virtual hearings often involving hundreds of defendants at once, with little opportunity for effective defense. Detainees have been frequently unaware of charges, with lack of access to legal representation. Bukele had to limit judicial autonomy, replacing corrupt Supreme Court individuals with loyalists, a policy he extended to lower courts. These actions are “contrary to liberal ideals of an independent judiciary protecting individual rights.” There have been many “human rights violations,” with families often denied information about detainees’ whereabouts, “undermining equal protection under the law.”

Moreover, Bukele’s government had to curtail freedom of expression by criminalizing reporting on gang activities, with journalists facing surveillance. He had to employ the military to “intimidate” political opponents, once threatening the legislature with armed forces to pressure lawmakers. He had to use propaganda to encourage citizens to report suspected criminals, which “fostered a climate of fear and informant culture, undermining liberal values of privacy and community.” His “unconstitutional pursuit of re-election in 2024” further eroded “democratic norms.”

This is what allowed him to be successful: authoritarian control over all branches of government and civil society, controlling key institutions like the Supreme Court and Attorney General’s office, and thus the weakening of the system of “checks and balances.” This is what allowed El Salvador to escape decades of corruption, violence, and fear.

My optimism, then, is based on the failure of liberal multiculturalism, though I don’t see a way out within the order of liberalism, and believe the West must experience the most revolutionary changes witnessed in history to transcend its current reality. History, however, is full of surprises, and we can’t anticipate what AI and genetic engineering will do.

Q: It sounds like what you see as a possible way for the West to correct course, pragmatically speaking, are more authoritarian policies within the framework of liberal democracy to curtail immigration and deport illegal immigrants and criminals on a large scale. This is certainly plausible and desirable to those concerned with the demographic future of the West.

What about in the realm of ideas? What do you think is the likelihood of illiberal ideas gaining mass acceptance? Anecdotally, in both online discourse and casual conversation with everyday people, I see racial awareness and even the beginnings of familiarity with the Jewish issue spreading rapidly, the latter especially among young people. I don’t have any numbers on this, nor do I believe some sort of “great awakening” is right around the corner, but I do believe that every year, more people are becoming open-minded to these ideas; the sacred cows of liberalism are losing relevance; the holocaust begins to be seen not as a unique evil that grants the Jewish people special victim status for eternity, but as a historical anecdote, a tragedy of war like any other, and its narrative and claims are even coming under more scrutiny, closer to the mainstream than ever before. Instead of kumbaya cultural harmony, we see, as a result of mass immigration, ethnic conflicts being imported from the motherland to play out on Canadian soil (see for example the conflict between Sikh and Hindu nationalists over the issue of Khalistani separatism). This also disproves the left-liberal notion that all non-Whites share common interests opposed to those of the “White oppressor.” As Whites become a plurality in their own countries, instead of the mainstream or the “oppressor,” we become just another racial group among many. The youth of both the hard left and right see “liberal” almost as a slur, and put little stock in the promises of democracy or the “rules-based international order.” Do you think that, eventually, illiberal ideas and more group-oriented ways of thinking could begin to supplant liberal individualism among Whites, or is it too deeply rooted in the Western mind for anyone but fringe tendencies to move beyond it?

A: It’s true that an increasing number of prominent X “influencers” and conservatives, like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk, are now, in the last month or so, calling for an end to legal immigration, admitting that anti-Whiteness is widespread, and suggesting that the United States must remain majority White. A very noticeable momentum against immigration replacement is palpable on X and among everyday Whites. Saying that I don’t see a way out of this mess “within the framework of liberal democracy” may seem out of step. To be clear, I believe it is possible to “curtail immigration and deport illegal immigrants and criminals,” though not “on a large scale” without a strong re-evaluation of our liberal values and adoption of authoritarian measures.

This effort, to deport 15 or 20 million illegals, will produce a groundswell of opposition in the U.S., creating a civil war-like situation. Now, add to this, a plan to remigrate millions of legal Muslim, Asian, and African immigrants, with families, in all the largest territorial areas of the West. These possibilities are nowhere in the horizon of nations like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Never mind efforts to deal with the failure of integration in the U.S.. We can’t avoid widespread societal conflicts. Liberalism is deeply entrenched in all the institutions, the schools, universities, publishing houses, newspapers, law courts, political parties, Google, AI, police departments, and the military. Mere feelings, online posts, and the revitalization of dormant ingroup instincts among Whites are not enough. We need organized movements, political parties, with clearly articulated illiberal ideas, principles, and policies. Liberal populism is not enough. As I indicated in the case of Meloni’s Italy, populism lacks a cohesive ideological alternative; it cannot but operate within the framework of liberalism, easily softened and employed by those in power to meet the larger ends of liberal diversity. Things will unravel and skid out of control. Opposition to deeply held liberal institutions and beliefs will grow. Alternative ideological outlooks may emerge.

Q: Great answers, and a lot to think about.  Dr. Duchesne, thank you for your time.  And to the reader, in addition to Greatness and Ruin, please check out Duchesne’s earlier books, and his website https://www.eurocanadians.ca/ .

9095 words

Everybody, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come
Haruki Murakami, ‘1Q84’

‘Don’t Look Now’[1]: Psycho-Historical Antecedents

For Western Europe, this current unhappy year 2025, not only marks the 80th anniversary of its Anglo-Saxon occupation, but also the 50th anniversary of the release of Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma). Undoubtedly, ‘Salò’ constitutes the most shocking cinematographic evidence of the cultural ‘reorientation’ of Eurasia’s Atlantic Rim, after the final victory of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Crusade against Europe’ ended its independence in that even unhappier ‘Zero Year’, 1945.[2] Although the film’s utterly depraved pornographic content and its deliberately antinomian director decisively preclude their inclusion in the canons of Western high art (the post-1945 sum total of which is remarkably meagre in any case), they still hold great diagnostic value for those few historians still inclined to study the current putrefaction stage of the ‘Decline of the West’. Even the outer circumstances of the film’s release, which took place some weeks after the death of its director, are heavy with appropriate symbolism: in a remarkable example of ‘life imitating art’, the gruesome details of Pasolini’s murder are seamlessly aligned with the psycho-dramatic program proposed in his final script, radically inverting and, of course, purposefully perverting what is commonly accepted as the West’s greatest literary creation: Dante’s Divine Comedy.[3] With the benefit of two generations of hindsight, its content may now be profitably projected on the course of recent Western psycho-history:

(1) Il girone delle manie ‘the circle of manias’ of 1970-1995, for which the prerequisite cultural tabula rasa of Stunde Null and economic consumer paradise of les trente glorieuses had been created by, respectively, the Greatest and Silent Generations (cohorts born 1890-1915 and 1915-1940). This ‘circle’ is realized by the Boomer Generation (cohort born 1940-1965), whose rise was heralded by the LARP-revolutions of ‘1968’, making Western Europe’s civilizational regression irreversible by the mid-1980s. Elsewhere, the author has suggested that, after the Boomers’ ‘march through the institutions’, the ‘ABBA’ years 1978-1980 mark the actual civilizational ‘point of no return’,[4] but the neoliberal scorched earth policies of the Reagan-Thatcher-Lubbers regime took some time to take full effect. The loss of techno-idealistic drive and basic geopolitical realism in Western civilization as a whole are most dramatically illustrated by two collapses on the Western frontiers: the Challenger disaster of 1986, effectively replacing the ‘Space Age’ exploration with ‘Star Wars’ megalomania, and the assassination of Rabin in 1995, effectively ending the decolonization era outside the West and marking the start of an all-out Anglo-Zionist crusade for global hegemony.

(2) Il girone della merda ‘the circle of excrement’ of 1995-2020, during which the now-maniacal Boomers, having descended into collective narcissism and unbridled consumerism and having abandoned the religious and ethical precepts of the Western Tradition, rule without checks and balances.[5] Beyond a shadow of a doubt, they have proven Kierkegaard’s words: remove the anguished conscience, and you may as well close the churches and turn them into dance halls. Rejecting Western Tradition, the Boomers have adopted a structurally inverted Weltanschauung, hence radically antinomian and overtly nihilistic, with all classical hallmarks of a (self-)destructive cult: behavioral and personality changes, loss of personal identity, cessation of scholastic activities, estrangement from family, disinterest in society and pronounced mental control and enslavement by cult leaders.[6] This internal ‘cultic’ condition has its counterpart in an aggressively proselytizing external ‘mission’ (exporting ‘values’ such as ‘liberal democracy’, ‘DEI’, ‘LGBTQ rights’, the ‘free market’, the ‘Rules Based Order’), resorting to forced conversion wherever necessary (ranging from soft-power ‘colour revolutions’ in the post-Soviet space to the ‘humanitarian interventions’ in the former Yugoslavia and the ‘Arab Spring’ bloodbath in the Middle East).

Under the Boomer regime, the West’s Weltanschauung, which may defined as cultural nihilism applied internally and satano-globalism applied externally, is also characterized by distinctly millenarian overtones: slogans such as Bush’s ‘New World Order’ and Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ point to the ‘doomsday cult’ aspect of regime now ruling the ‘Collective West’. With the Boomers safely ensconced in privileged safety ‘bubbles’ (‘uniparty cartels’, ‘tenured positions’, ‘trust funds’, ‘gated communities’), the soul-crushing internal manifestations of this cultic regime, including neo-Victorian labour and housing conditions (‘deregulation’, ‘privatization), wholesale ethnic replacement (‘asylum seekers’, ‘labour migrants’) and the perversion of law and order (‘affirmative action’, ‘hate speech legislation’), are primarily borne by the Boomers’ children and grandchildren (Generation X, cohort 1965-1990, and the Millennials, cohort 1990-2015). The even more horrifying external manifestations, including IMF/World Bank-imposed debt slavery across the Global South (‘privatization’, ‘austerity’), mass human trafficking into the West (‘smuggler’ networks, ‘NGO’ facilities) and systematic violence to subdue anti-hegemonic resistance anywhere (engineered ‘extremist terrorism’, tailored ‘forever wars’), are primarily borne by the masses of the ‘s**thole countries’ of the Global South, whose psychological dehumanization precedes their necropolitical decimation. During this quarter of a century, which more or less equals the ‘Unipolar Moment’ in international politics, the internal and external victims of the Boomer elite’s New World Order found themselves caught drowning in this deliberately created ‘circle of excrement’.

(3) Il girone del sangue ‘the circle of blood’, starting in 2020, represents the final ‘Age of Consequences’ in Western psycho-history: with the ‘Covid Scamdemic’ and the follow-up ‘Vaccinocaust’, obviously aimed at tearing down the pillars of Western socio-economic life and culling the Western population, the once Boomer-based and West-centred New World Order project has crossed a historical threshold. Elsewhere, the author has pointed out that the ‘Ten Months That Shook the World’, between the ‘Covid’ lockdown of March 2020, through the ‘BLM’ summer and the ‘Biden’ coup autumn of the same year, and the ‘January 6th’ episode of 2021, effectively mark the final Fall of the West.[7] From that point onwards, the West is effectively defunct as a historically distinct Kulturkreis, leaving its remnant peoples and remnant institutions ‘captured’ (in older words: ‘possessed’) by unmitigated satano-globalism, creating a state of ‘zombification’ in which the name ‘Western’ is reduced to a highly deceptive place-holder term bereft of the cultural and civilization content and continuity that it once covered.[8] With the fading out of its carrier cohort, the Boomer Generation, the satano-globalist New World Order project itself is now undergoing a radical transformation, characterized by demographic metastasis as well as eschatological acceleration. Demographically, its predominantly White, late-stage paternalist and ‘culturally Christian’ demographic carrier is now replaced by a new rabidly anti-White, fiercely (f)emocratic and militantly anti-religious successor generation of hand-picked, ‘Manchurian Candidate’-type Young Global Leaders and a host of DEI minions, preferably proudly incompetent, unabashedly narcissistic and openly hostile to the interests of the ‘mass formation’-shaped slave populations that they are to rule.

Thus, ‘Europe’ is now ruled by the ‘power women’ likes of Finland’s ‘rainbow family’/‘topless office’ Sanna Marin, Estonia’s ‘war at any price’/‘hate Russia but not rubles’ Kaja Kallas and Germany’s ‘trying everything’/‘phizergate’ Ursula von der Leyen. Ideologically, the Boomers’ New World Order project is now rapidly shifting towards its only logically consistent end-state, which combines a techno-totalitarian surveillance state (abolition of civil rights) with a bio-leninist caste system (inversion of meritocracy) and a transhumanist agenda (bio-technical control) and which, given its pursuit of the ‘immanentization of the eschaton’, is perhaps best described by the term ‘satano-globalism’. Its necessary corollary in the domain of domestic and international Realpolitik is the normalization of what Achille Mbembe has aptly termed ‘necropolitics’, i.e. the state-sponsored condemnation to various (physical, psychological, cultural) forms of death and existential liminality of specific, greater or smaller, target populations in the pursuit of biopolitical aims. The most logically consistent application of necropolitics equals the ultimate application of transhumanism, i.e., the (technological) supersession of the whole of humanity, which in turn equals the aim of satanism, completing the ‘circle of blood’.

The sacred scriptures of the world’s great religions record several instances of whole nations caught up in vicious cycles of psycho-historical decay. Thus, on the boundary of recorded history, there is the dismal record of the days of Noah, when few heeded the gathering clouds. But there is no need to look back further than the more recent record of the days of Lot, when the first Sodom and Gomorrah went up in smoke:

Then the Awful Cry overtook them at the sunrise
And We utterly confounded them, and We rained upon them stones of heated clay
Lo! therein verily are portents for those who read the signs
– Quran 15:73-5

Sycorax’ Hour[9]: Necropolitical Preliminaries

Moving into the final phase of the three-circle trajectory, Western Europe now finds itself shorn of its existential essence, effectively bereft of the civilization, the culture and the identity that once defined it as the heartland of the West: it has now entered a post-Western existential state. During the first circle ‘mania’ phase, which corresponds to the Boomers’ 1970-1995 heyday, Western Europe abandoned its culture, inverting its Nomos archetype by adopting anti-ethics and anti-aesthetics. Moving through the second circle ‘excrement’ phase, which corresponds to the Boomers’ 1995-2020 decadence, Western Europe abandoned its civilization, inverting its Evangelion archetype through the coercive and violent pursuit of globalist-nihilist hegemony (geopolitical ‘Unipolarity’). Now entering the third circle ‘blood’ phase, starting with the Annus Horribilis of 2020 (the Covid-BLM-Biden operations resulting in the Fall of the West), Western Europe faces the inversion of its Techne archetype, as evidenced by the redirection of its φαρμακεία from life-saving medicine to transhumanist sorcery and by its redirection of its οἰκονομία from ploughshares to swords. The direct physical violence attendant on the inversion of the Techne archetype, rapidly expanding internally (‘gender surgery’, ‘vaccine damage’) as well as externally (‘Ukraine’, ‘Gaza’) and increasingly depersonalized through new technologies (‘drone warfare’, ‘AI targeting’), is compounded by novel forms of non-physical violence, particular to a new age of ‘hybrid’ and ‘multi-dimensional’ war and to a new reality of a ‘technologically framed’ world in which most of humanity is already (partially) absorbed in a matrix of multiple ‘alternative realities’ (‘virtual workspaces’, ‘digital communities’, ‘online dating’), such as ‘deplatforming’, ‘geofencing’ and ‘algorithmic censorship’. Rapid advances in information technology, nano-technology and bio technology, allowing for an unparallelled degree of real-time surveillance, subconscious manipulation and custom-made intervention in the lives of entire nations by nebulous forces entirely beyond the control of obsolete institutional ‘checks and balances’, are even now giving rise to a techno-totalitarianism of unprecedented scope and depth — the preparation of this ‘System of the Beast’, complete with a Palantir panopticon and a CBDC dungeon, is now approaching its final stage. At a whim, these techno-totalitarian forces can impose pandemics, create wars or disrupt supply-lines, unleashing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of plague, war, hunger and hell on a global scale, by simply choosing some convenient ‘narrative’, ‘locking down’ the economy, imposing ‘mass formation’ conditions, ‘deplatforming’ critical voices and, where necessary, moving dissenters ‘off the grid’. The Covid-BLM-Biden-vaccine narratives of 2020-21 were a successful test of how easily the population of the (ex-)West can be manipulated into self-destructive behaviour by these means and the Ukraine-Gaza narratives of 2022-23 showed how they can also be used to ‘weaponize’ whole nations against any designated external enemy, be it the greatest military power in the world (Russia) or a defenceless refugee population on a strip of desert land (Gaza). As a result, millions have already died without as much as a dent in the infernal mechanisms perpetuating the ‘circle of blood’.

As things stand now, it looks like the West’s psycho-historical trajectory will have to run its full course, with the lazy passivity and shameful apathy of the (ex-)Western masses gradually giving way to enthusiastic support and undisguised sadism, much like the exhaustion of the Roman Republic gave way to the cruelty of the Roman Empire. This psycho-historical devolution, by which the (ex-)West is now descending into a state of neo-atavism, is guided and exploited by those advocating it and profiting from it, but, once set in motion, it also has an autonomous, self-reinforcing dynamic: the systematic projection of collectively held complexes onto convenient scapegoat populations is a basic psychological mechanism that finds its ‘natural’ (viz. non-anagogically corrected) outlet in bloody sacrifice and ritual sadism (damnatio ad bestias, malleus maleficarum). Thus, it is not surprising that the neo-Christian, tradition-respecting, martially minded and nationally cohesive Russian people are maligned and assaulted by the nihilistic, anti-traditional, decadent and identity-less masses of the West. Similarly, it is not surprising that religiously open, ethnically open, history-immersed and spiritually minded Palestinians are despised and massacred by the religiously closed, ethnically closed, history-falsifying and materially oriented Zionist colonists who came to the Holy Land on an ‘inverted crusade’ mission from the West.

The start of the second Trump presidency, in January 2025, likely marks the point at which the last restraints on the rising blood lust of the West are removed in the international arena: the last remnants of the ‘rules based order’ (OSCE, ICC) and the ‘international institutions’ (WHO, UNWRA), already long obsolete, irretrievably biased and deeply corrupted in any case, are being relegated to the dustbin of history and the last pretences at professional diplomacy and balanced journalism are being discarded as superfluous relicts of an irrelevant past. Within the West, these are not, however, being replaced by the known — and safely predictable — modalities of earlier ages, such as hard-headed realism and brazen self-interest. At the inter-state level, neither imperial Realpolitik nor mercantilist calculus have staged a comeback in Western international politics: instead, chaos reigns supreme. A tipping point has been reached: after decades of deliberate miseducation, constant media propaganda, systemic corruption and anti-meritocratic programming, the inner decay of Western societies, thus far hidden by generational delay and institutional prestige, is finally starting to show on the outside, cracking the thus-far shallow but smooth outer façade in the international arena. Shamelessly, Tinder-quality ‘power women’, ‘openly gay’ golden boys, ‘affirmative action’ non-Westerners and ‘double-citizenship’ Zionists now claim to ‘represent’ ex-Western nations — without any thought for the most basic interests, or even survival, of the states that they claim to ‘lead’.

The leaders of the Eurasianist East and the Global South would make a grave mistake in assuming that these Western ‘leaders’ are seeking the peace, prosperity and well-being of the Western nations and states, or even that they are pursuing rational goals and calculated profits. On the contrary, pursuing sub-rational ‘emotions’ and pursuing non-calculable ‘experiences’, both exclusively related to narrowly narcissistic egos and exclusively derived from specific psychopathologies, these malignantly diseased predators, much like the vampires and zombies of literary and cinematographic fiction, should be assessed according to the mortal danger they pose to their prey, the latter category comprising all still authentically human individuals within the (ex-)West as well as all still authentically human societies across the rest of the world. These vampiric and zombified creatures may incidentally serve certain specific political agendas and certain specific economic interests, most transparently those of the ‘big banking’, ‘big business’, ‘big pharma’ and ‘big tech’ sectors which unleashed them on the world in pursuit of certain short-term projects, but they can and do run amuck, much like the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein. The world’s Witching Hour has begun.

Tis now the very witching time of night
When churchyards yawne and hell it selfe breakes out contagion to this world
– Shakespeare, Hamlet

‘15 Minutes’[10]: Demonological Perspectives

Unfortunately, the vampiric and zombified nature of the Western ‘leadership’ does reflects, to varying degrees across various areas of the West (less so in the still-Catholic and Orthodox part of the EU than in its ex-Protestant part and the overseas Anglosphere), the ‘katagogic’ metamorphosis that a significant part of the populace has undergone since the 1960s. These ‘lost soul’ masses, suffering staggering rates of obesity, body dysphoria, drug addiction, mental disease and ‘vaccine’ damage, provide a limited but dependable electoral base for the West’s vampiric and zombified ‘leadership’: thus, the intensely psychopathic[11] and increasingly grotesque characters currently representing the ‘Collective West’ do externally reflect the true inner state of the West. To the extent that other, less affected sections of the Western electorate still vaguely recognize the diseased nature of their society, however, they tend to vote for ‘controlled opposition’ figures that are only marginally less diseased than the fully vampiric and zombified ‘mainstream’ candidates and that have been carefully screened for their ability ‘compromise’ when the time is right.

Thus, all across the West, a whole host of ‘populist’ and ‘civic-nationalist’ false prophets are biding their time in the opposition benches, waiting in the wings of institutional power and standing by to take their turn at ‘leadership’. The moment their turn has come, however, they fall in line with the ‘establishment’, nudged by ample rewards and co-opted by the ‘powers that be’: their essential role is to serve as ‘lightning rods’ for societal discontent and to ‘put on a good show’. Since the early 2000s and all across the West, this mechanism has proven its efficiency, time and again, with ‘populists’ coming to power and nothing ever changing. Obscene income disparities, chronic housing shortages, generational income insecurity, wholesale ethnic replacement, intermittent terror waves, rampant grooming gangs, imploding family structures, collapsing education systems, woke-weaponized judiciaries, maliciously micromanaging bureaucracy, ubiquitous social media pornification, staggering addiction rates, unchecked transgender cultism — all these things are only getting worse. Over time, the accumulating weight of injustice, decadence and ugliness is creating a wave of suffering, disgust and despair that not many can bear. As the social, legal and political order dissolves under the combined aegis of kleptocracy (the banksters’ elite), pornocracy (the women’s rights’ elite), ochlocracy (the consumer mob) and idiocracy (the whore-nalysts of the media class and the mid-wits of the academic class) and as the number of ‘lost souls’ increases, daily life itself becomes surreally perverted until finally a tipping point is reached: the point beyond which reality itself breaks down, giving way to collective madness.

For… globalists, leftists and run of the mill psychopaths, free will means the ability to choose not to believe in archetypes, or morality or even objective truth. They choose nihilism, but this is only part of the problem. The defiance of truth goes beyond some misguided attempt to be free from societal judgment. Instead, [these] people define freedom without responsibility as the ultimate state of being. In other words, they view the capacity to inflict suffering and destruction without regard as an evolutionary advantage. They think their lack of humanity makes them superhuman. It’s no mistake that leftists and woke activists are obsessed with power dynamics; their new religion ensures that they cannot see the world any other way. For woke ideologues everything revolves around which groups hold power and how they can take that power for themselves. Thus, questions of right and wrong never enter into the equation. Power is the end that justifies all means. They see moral order as an artificial construct that oppresses them, because they want to do evil without consequence. Moral relativism at its core requires the victimization of others as a form of rebellion against order.

Of course, the injustice of this mentality is hard to dismiss but leftists have a way around that. There’s no shortage of woke activists who have displayed a contempt for the law and for morals when they’re being judged, but they will joyfully embrace morals and the law when they think these things can be used against their enemies. Hypocritically, leftists like the idea of rules, but only for other people. Rules are a shield to prevent retribution from the people they victimize. That’s the only purpose rules serve for the woke. To summarize, leftists are total relativists. The rules do not apply to them. The law does not apply to them. Morality does not apply to them. Conscience is non-existent for them — or it exists but they have trained their minds to ignore it. Biological reality does not apply to them. They think they are special and that boundaries should only exist for the people they don’t like. This is pure evil. There’s no other rational way to look at it.[12]

Thus, within the West, the second Trump presidency, following the ‘Biden Era’ socio-economic and legal-moral bankruptcy of its system of governance and reflecting the post-‘9/11’, post-‘Covid’, post-‘QAnon’ implosion of its public trust, may be said to mark a perceptual tipping point: this is point at which the boundary between reality and fiction breaks down and at which the audience and the actors merge. The line dividing the carefully choreographed LARPs of the Washington spin-doctors and the Hollywood mind-benders from real-life psychopathy and kinetic violence has been crossed. Ironically but appropriately, this emerging ‘alternative reality’ is ushered in by former reality show and talk radio host Donald Trump, now appointed Entertainer-in-Chief. At the sounding of this second ‘trump’, in the twinkling of an eye, all is changed: nightmarish forces, including demonic entities and ghoulish dispositions long ago cast out into the outer dark by Christian morality, are now pouring back into waking reality through the crumbling ‘walls of the world’. Taking possession of the ‘lost souls’ of the West, they will inflict their ‘15 minutes’ of triumph on an unsuspecting humanity: ab occidente tenebrae.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here
– Shakespeare, The Tempest

Operation Pandemonium: Kakistocratic Mechanisms

Outside the West, it is now widely recognized that the deliberate promotion of degeneracy and the targeted application of terror have been key strategies in imposing globalist-nihilist hegemony over the Eurasian East and the Global South ever since the end of World War II. The twin strategies of ‘hearts and minds’ and ‘shock and awe’ to demoralize and destroy non-compliant populations and enemy states may be nothing new as imperialist tools, but the globalist-nihilist versions of both are characterized by two significant innovations: the scientific mass-application of social engineering and the ‘inverse engineering’ of societal structures and state institutions to achieve an antinomian end-state. Inside the West, these same twin strategies have also been applied, but with greater sophistication and in different dosages: whereas the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilian enemies was required outside the West (e.g. the Phoenix Program in Indochina and Operation Condor in Latin America), the surgical removal of the occasional high-profile (semi-)dissident sufficed in Europe and North America (e.g., Malcolm X in America in 1965, Veronica Guerin in Ireland in 1996, Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands in 2002, Udo Ulfkotte in Germany in 2017). The submission to globalist-nihilist-dominion of indigenous Western populations, posing a potential but permanent political threat to the hostile elite within its geographic home-base territory, was primarily achieved through subterfuge – at least till the point that these populations were sufficiently reduced in relative demographic weight vis-à-vis the Third World colonists that they ultimately were to be replaced with (a process formally begun with the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965). Thus, side by side with the policies of anti-natalism (‘women’s rights’, ‘sexual liberation’, ‘birth control’) and mass-immigration (‘guest labour’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘family unification’), an unprecedented program of miseducation, disinformation and gaslighting was gradually put in place, based on psycho-social deprogramming, socio-economic conditioning and culture distortion. The result is a multi-layered system of institutionalized deception, reaching from collective longue durée culture (foundational mythology, archetypal identity, deep history) to individual day-to-day experience (news cycle, bureaucratic status, financial security).

Arguably, the important mechanism underpinning this full spectrum deception is the manipulation of language because truth has to be spoken to power and the most efficient way to repress the truth is by controlling speech itself: if a man cannot say what he means, he will never mean what he says. The long-term effect of systematic Orwell-type linguistic manipulation, exploiting basic cognitive mechanisms such as psychological bias, confirmation bias, reflexive thinking and apophenia and enhanced by sophisticated marketing strategies such as demographic targeting and subliminal messaging, is to reduce the meaning of words to highly exploitable placeholder variables, resulting in highly manipulable collective states of cognitive dissonance and paranoia.

The deliberate weaponization of various forms of modern art is an important element in this process of language manipulation: art shapes language and perception by creating association shortcuts and artfully crafted propaganda can perform a very efficient ‘thought crime stop’ function. Properly ‘marketed’ and artfully crafted, propaganda can induce collective states of irrationality and infantilization, creating a buffer of ‘protective stupidity’ between the rulers and the ruled, eliminating the individual reasoning and maturity on which collective rationality and civic responsibility depend. Deliberately blurred, the boundary between reality and fiction can thus be ‘artistically’ adjusted in either direction: prime examples of how such adjustments on the sliding scale from ‘historical fact’ to ‘conspiracy theory’ are taking place over time are the many Hollywood-Pentagon co-production ‘files’, ‘disclosures’ and ‘investigations’ covering the ‘controversial’ subjects of JFK, UFOs and 9/11 — all incomplete in terms of information given to the public. But such boundary adjustments do not only take place retroactively, as in ‘rewriting the past’, but also proactively, as in ‘shaping the future’, through a clever combination of artistic precognition and cultic protocol: prime examples of this ‘predictive programming’ are Hollywood-Pentagon co-produced movies such as ‘Contagion’ (2011, ‘pandemic preparedness’), ‘Transcendence’ (2014, ‘transhumanism preparedness’), ‘Finch’ (2021, ‘climate change preparedness’), ‘Leave the World Behind’ (2023, ‘hybrid war preparedness’), ‘Civil War’ (2024, ‘Trump preparedness’) and ‘Zero Day’ (2025, ‘deep state take-over preparedness’). These retroactive and proactive manipulations of language and art, in which virtual and alternative realities are created, must be understood as essential elements of the information warfare, now broadening to cognitive warfare by which the Western hostile elite is seeking to maintain and enhance its power: cognitive warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce or thwart knowledge.[13] As the Western hostile elite shifting into ‘flight forward’ mode both at home and abroad, its use of tricks, pranks and fakes to achieve ‘full spectrum dominance’ is becoming increasingly obvious: the ‘news’ and ‘analyses’ put out by the Western legacy media are now so transparently biased and absurd that the West’s cognitive bubble can now be properly described as an ‘Empire of Lies’. This output is also starting to show remarkable similarity, in reality-bending technique if not anagogic intent, to the propaganda output of the Third Reich, including straight-forward Nazi-era parodies such presenting NATO as fighting the barbaric hordes on a new Eastern Front for Lebensraum (read: raw material and real estate collateral for Black Rock and Vanguard) and European civilization (read: the sacrosanct rights to have gay discos and transgender surgeries), and the EU as promoting media Gleichschaltung for the protection of values. [A] wave of repression [is] sweeping the major Western states. … It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930s. … The now-threadbare mantle of ‘public intellectual’ in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.[14]

The effect of full spectrum deception is to induce a state of highly manipulable ‘fluidity’ at all levels of human existence, a ‘we will never know the truth’ state at the collective and at the individual level, befitting the ‘Age of Aquarius’ spirit permeating the Western public sphere at the time when the techniques underpinning it were perfected in various ‘MKUltra’-type experimentation programs. This state of fluidity, in which all collective forms of identity (religion, ethnicity, caste, lineage, gender) were first ‘critiqued’ and then ‘deconstructed’ in all experiential domains, gradually caused the atomization of the collective and the alienation of the individual. As the traditional concepts of the church, the nation and the family as collective reference points were demolished and as the natural hierarchies of age, gender and ability were denied, community gave way to ‘society’, culture was replaced by ‘entertainment’, vocation was exchanged for ‘career’, artisanship shifted to ‘production’, aesthetic values were superseded by ‘consumer choices’, knowledge was reduced to ‘opinion’ and private morality abdicated to ‘public opinion’. As this process reached its logical conclusion, a collective state of malignant narcissism came to reflect the individual state of counterfeit identity adopted by the rootless masses of the ‘collective West’, as reflected in the ‘modernized’ public institutions catering to their new need. Thus, ‘modernized’ churches turned anti-transcendental, reflecting the exclusively here-and-now ‘life style choices’ of their ‘liberated’ members (hence their feminist and woke-oriented personnel, their vernacular and sentimentalized services and their politicized and activist messaging), ‘modernized’ academia turned anti-meritocratic, reflecting their new ‘equal opportunity’ clientele (calculating tinder girls preparing for post-age 30 sinecures, ambitious metrosexual soy-boys pursuing laptop-career bubble lives, and resentful BIPOCs bent on ethnic vengeance), and ‘modernized’ state institutions turned anti-justice, reflecting the narrow interests of the West’s bankster elite, which seeks to nullify all political and legal checks and balances on its power to exploit the masses domestically and the non-West internationally. The latter inversion of state power, which meant that state institutions abandoned the Katechon principle (protection of the weak and encouragement of virtue), effectively resulted in politicide and kakistocracy, shielding the predatory and parasitic globalist hostile elite from political repercussions and legal accountability.

By 2020, after four decades of West-led liberal neo-imperialism (the post-WWII bipolar era) and three decades of West-based globalist hegemony (the post-Cold War unipolar moment), the twin strategies to achieve globalist-nihilist hegemony, i.e., the full spectrum promotion of counterfeit values and ideas and the necropolitical application of war and terror, had resulted in the de facto end of effective resistance inside the West as well as the de facto submission of most states outside the West. Domestically, real dissident voices had been silenced and replaced by controlled opposition LARPs. Internationally, sovereign state power outside the West-led ‘rules-based order’ had been significantly reduced: a few minor anomalies (Serbia, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela) aside, only the military molochs the Eurasia (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea) and some of their direct neighbours (Belarus, the -stans, Vietnam, Laos) retained any trace of true sovereignty. At this point, however, the West’s ruling elite fell victim to the great bane of all would-be rulers of the world: hubris. About its the decision to ‘go for broke’, the why question may, up to a point, be argued: perhaps the ruling elite’s ‘flight forward’ was triggered by a ‘Nature Bats Last’-style calculus of looming ecological collapse, or by a ‘Georgia Guidestones’-style calculus at global population billions reaching the magic number 8, or by the approaching biological expiry date of the boomer core of the hostile elite, or simply by the need to conquer the immense resources of Eurasia to provide additional collateral for the banksters to be able to continue the global financial Ponzi Scheme — it does not matter.

The how question, however, is beyond dispute: in March 2020, the globalist elite decided to impose fully fledged techno-feudalism within the West (the ‘Covid’ psyop, enabling socio-economic lockdown and massive wealth transfers to the top, the ‘Biden’ coup, ending residual free speech and residual legal recourse, the ‘vaccine’ roll-out, culling the masses and paving the way to transhumanism) and, in April 2022, it decided to take down Russia, the most powerful remaining sovereign state remaining outside the West, through a combination of military pressure (Project Ukraine), political subversion (terror campaign and black propaganda), economic starvation (sanctions and blockade). Once again, both of these agendas were pursued by the twin strategies of counterfeit concepts and necropolitical violence. The domestic agenda combined an artificial narrative (‘Covid’), a counterfeit crisis (‘lockdown’) and a convenient scapegoat (‘unvaccinated’) with unabridged democide, viz., the Vaccinocaust.

Similarly, the international agenda combined an invented nationality (removing the sub-category ‘Ukrainian’ from the overall category ‘Russian’), an artificial state (claiming rule over the Bolshevik SSR territory for the Majdan regime) and a fictitious narrative (projecting imperialist design and aggressive intent to the Moscow government) with prolonged, large-scale military conflict, viz., the Ukraine War. In the Western masses, both agendas induced a permanent state of ‘mass formation’, achieving a level of collective psychosis and hallucination unprecedented in recorded history but entirely compatible with their preceding decades of scientifically engineered conditioning. In such a society, characterized by institutionalized cognitive dissonance, where sexual perversion substitutes biological gender, administrative citizenship overrides birth nationality and individual grievances prevail over the common good, literally anything is possible — including the unopposed rule of undisguised evil. After the completion of Operation Mockingbird, which achieved the cultic ‘deprogramming’ of the Western masses, and Operation Mindf**k, which achieved their cultic ‘immunity’ to reason, the globalist-nihilist ruling elite is now free to unleash its final offensive to conquer the world: Operation Pandemonium.

Exploiting the NBICs (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Sciences), the globalist West’s ability to wage cognitive war has been exponentially enhanced, approaching the point at which a shift from artificial intelligence to artificial identity and from trans-humanism to anti-humanism can and will be made. As the cognitive-domain global arms race heats up, the Eurasian East will be forced to speed up its counter-measure response time as well as reinvent its innovation cycle – this is the era of dromocracy.[15] Operation Pandemonium is about to commence.

Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
Pray the Lord my soul to take
Hush, little baby
Don’t say a word
Never mind that noise you heard
It’s just the beasts under your bed
In your closet, in your head
Exit light, enter night
Take my hand
We’re off to never-never land
– ‘Enter Sandman’, Metallica

The Cainite Strain: Antinomian Continuities

The previous paragraphs sketched the psycho-historical, necropolitical, demonological and kakistocractic trajectories of the Crisis of the Modern West, which is now obviously closing in on its dénouement. At this point, an attempt should be made to address the question as to its probable outcome. After all, even if the West itself is assumed to be irrevocably lost, the Rest still will have to face considerable (geopolitical, macro-economic) fall-out and would have to deal with significant (material, human) debris. As Western civilization approaches its ‘event horizon’, to be either utterly destroyed or fundamentally transformed, its overall historical arc is becoming increasingly clear and an educated guess as to its final destiny becomes feasible. Preliminary to providing ‘guestimate’, this paragraph serves to more precisely sketch out the historical arc to be followed.

If the Christian Tradition that has essentially shaped Western civilization is taken as its ‘factory settings’ reference point and if the Crisis of the Modern West is analysed according to the ‘thesis-antithesis’ dialectic method, then many of the structural inversions characterizing that crisis appear as entirely logical — even predictable. The overall historical trajectory becomes clear: as its original Christian world vision and its Christian mission statement are structurally inverted, the West comes to adopt a diametrically opposed world vision and mission statement. Thus, the West does not merely become post-Christian or non-Christian: it becomes anti-Christian, espousing values and aims that are antithetical to those of the Christian Tradition. The Church’s negative anthropology (‘original sin’) is replaced by a positive anthropology (‘human rights’), its prescription for individual world-overcoming (time-independent transcendence) is replaced by a push towards collective world-absorption (history-bound materialism) and its anagogic socio-cultural structures (disciplined hierarchies promoting good works) are replaced by anti-meritocratic anarcho-tyranny (hedonist atavism inhibiting good works). Essentially, the Christianity-shaped archetypal idea(l) of the Nomos, once guiding the West in the abstract (religious conscience) and the concrete (worldly law), is replaced by its logical counterpart: antinomianism.

Throughout its history, Christianity has always faced antinomian challenges, either embedded within ‘non-own’ (old, external) religious forms or within ‘home-grown’ (new, internal) heresies, but the greatest of these challenges came with the eighteenth-century rise of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the West. Although the founders, thinkers and adherents of the ‘Enlightenment’, which caused and includes all of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical-materialism (liberalism, anarchism, socialism, communism), claim that they stand aside from religion, their ideas and movements all necessarily take the form of heresies of Christianity: they originate in, are shaped by and relate to an entirely Christian society. This is implicitly and sufficiently shown in their stand for ‘secularity’ (i.e., an antithetical position vis-à-vis religion), ‘science’ (i.e., an antithetical position vis-à-vis revelation) and ‘humanism’ (i.e., an antithetical position prioritizing creation over the Creator). But the discursive power of the ‘Enlightenment’ heresies is precisely located in their (apparent) lack of engagement with Christian doctrine — or any other religious doctrine. Neither the older ‘Gnostic’ heresies besetting early Christianity (e.g., the Nicolaitans, Borborites and Carpocratians) nor the newer ‘doctrinal’ heresies plaguing institutional Christianity (e.g. the Pelasgians, Almaricians and Dulcinians) ever came close to the success of these ‘Enlightenment’ heresies. From a Traditionalist perspective, the success of these ‘Enlightenment’ heresies can be explained by their radical rejection of the most basic foundations of all religious life, which are the quest for transcendence, the experience of the numinous, and the knowledge of the Sacred: this rejection befits the current state of the human world, now entering the Kali Yuga, which is the final phase of the Great Cycle of the Ages. The current physical, intellectual and spiritual state of humanity is so much degraded that now, for the average person, even the simplest requirements of traditional religion are too great a burden, numinous experiences are beyond the range of perception and transcendence is impossible, if not inconceivable.

This is not to say that the many heresies besetting Christianity, past and present, small and great, do not also possess a time- and place-independent common dominator, which can be deduced from their effect, which is antinomianism, i.e., their incompatibility with the wellbeing and continuance of humanity. Because, in the final analysis, antinomian practice, taken to its logical conclusion, does not merely serve ritual ‘deprogramming’ (as in child abuse grooming), ceremonial ‘counter-initiation’ (as in masonic degree transition) and cultic ‘dehumanization’ (as in adenochrome harvesting), but also the realization of a larger, long-term aim: human extinction. The promotion of anti-natalism, trans-sexualism and trans-humanism, which are among the final practical outcomes of ‘Enlightenment’ heresies irrespective of their initial theoretical precepts, is a recurrent feature in all antinomian movements. As an adjunct to trans-humanism, there may also be noticed the promotion of sub-humanism, through the idolization of theriomorphy, in which humans abandon the human state and are transformed, voluntarily or involuntarily, into chimaeras, such as vampires, werewolves and zombies. In 2021, the mere propagandistic promotion of this sub-humanization agenda was augmented by the imposition of coercive laws, prompting large sections of the Western masses to accept mRNA injections and submit to altering their genetic codes. Another, more obvious sign that physical alterations to the human form, preliminary to the eventual elimination of humanity as a whole, are gaining ‘mainstream’ acceptance throughout the West is the exponential rise in the visibility of body-altering tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery and transgender operations.

Consistently, antinomianist movements set out to ‘free’ women from the ‘curses’ of marriage, childbearing and motherhood, and the method of ‘freeing’ them is to flatter them by ‘equality’ (i.e., ignoring female weaknesses), to talk them into ‘emancipation’ (i.e. eliminating male protectors) and to make them aspire to the status of ‘hierodule’ (i.e., separating the sexual and procreative functions). It should be noted that, within such movements, women tend to have very prominent leadership roles: leaving aside the mythological record of female archons, such as Adam and Eve’s forgotten daughter Norea, who tried to set fire to Noah’s ark, there were as many female heresiarchs in pre-modern times (Marcellina, Helena, Philomena, Flora, etc.) as there are in modern times (Fatemeh Baraghani, Helena Blavatsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, etc.). From this perspective, it is no surprise that, in the increasingly antinomian West, a strikingly high number of women have recently come to occupy the (at least formally) highest positions of political leadership. There is no need to repeat the short list of female political ‘luminaries’ given in the first paragraph: this femocratic role call is part of emo-history rather than psycho-history. In short: modern Western matriarchy in its counter-cultural and neo-atavistic manifestations, including exogamic ‘open borders’ in politics, home impulse-driven ‘conspicuous consumerism’ in the economy, all-pervasive pornocracy in the social media, all-levelling idiocracy in education, ‘virtue-signalling’ taboos in the public square and ‘open relations’ in the private sphere, are predictable side-effects of the victory of antinomian heresy in the West. Thus, the ‘Enlightenment’ has plunged the West into a new Dark Age.

For convenience, the antinomian common denominator of the host of heresies faced by Christianity over the centuries may be referred to as the Cainite Strain, after those — supposedly fictitious — followers of humanity’s first assassin. Such reference has the advantage of allowing the sacred scripture of the Abrahamic religions to shed light upon the obscure origins and the hidden continuities of antinomian heresy. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, the gradual spread of ‘Enlightenment’ heresy across the Christian world, disguised as socialism, communism and liberalism, triggered substantive investigations into canonical and apocryphal scripture to discover the nature of the Mark of Cain and the identity of the Serpent Seed. Undoubtedly, some of these investigations led to over-simplified conclusions and race-determinist distractions (including the ‘update’ from the Calvinist predestination doctrine to the contemporary ‘reptile class’s’ conspiracy theory), but, as a collective endeavour, they had the advantage of raising public awareness that the ancient curse of antinomian heresy had returned to the Christian world and its ultimate origins had to be properly understood before it could be effectively combatted. In this matter, the mythopoeic nature and psychosocial functionality of the specific origin myths and cultic customs adhered to by various antinomian heretical groups should not be allowed to distract from the very real effectiveness of the resulting ‘constructed identities’ in gaining political and economic powers for these groups. Because, hidden in the shades of the secularist and scientific ‘Enlightenment’ heresies of socialism, communism and liberalism, very real political and economic power was being accumulated by a loose conglomerate of cultic groups adhering to non-secular and non-scientific myths and customs, from eighteenth-century Free Masonry and nineeenth-century-century Anglo-Saxon Israelism to twentieth-century Zionism and twentieth-first-century nihilist globalism.[16] Important common features shared between these various iterations of this cultic conglomerate are the recurring themes of unchallenged global hegemony to be ruled by a Chosen People, the re-establishment of an Ancient Covenant, the building of a New World Order and the rebuilding of a Temple. The increasingly open messaging of this of this ethnic-cultic conglomerate, which has recently begun exiting its self-spun shade and is about to take centre-stage in world affairs, now allows for a realistic estimate of its progress along its collective Nigra Peregrinatio — and its final destination:

Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves
That ye are the children of them which killed the prophets
Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers
Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?
– Matthew 23:31-3

Nigra Peregrinatio: Holocaustological Horizons

The Crisis of the Modern West proper may be said to have started at roughly the same time in the geopolitical as well as the numino-political realm: the U.S.-U.S.S.R. military occupation of the European heartland was completed in May 1945 and the discovery of the ancient heretical texts at Nag Hammadi took place in December 1945. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the fatal weakening of its worldly and spiritual Katechon forces meant that Europe no longer had any defence against the spread of antinomian heresy: gradually, its political, economic and social system became distorted, until a point of no return was reached in all domains of life. At the same time, another, ‘cultic’ war was waged on Europe aimed at the inversion of its religious identity and values, by the rewriting and overwriting of the history and doctrine of its identity-shaping Christian Tradition. Synchronized with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi and Qumran heretical texts (1945, 1947), the New Israel identity of old Christian Europe was eliminated through the establishment of the Zionist ‘State of Israel’ and the Holocaust Claims Conference (1948, 1951). Thus, ex-Christian Europe, which had once sent out mighty crusader armies to conquer the Holy Land and colonize the Near East, found itself militarily and psychologically conquered by the same cabal of the largely Anglosphere-based Cainite heresiarchs that ran the Zionist colony in Palestine.

Claiming to represent the ancient ‘Israelites’, either by ‘Jewish’ birth descent or by ‘Judeo-Christian’ ideological allegiance (both categories representing historical frauds according to authoritative historians), these Cainite heresiarchs then proceeded to claim a ‘blank cheque’ from history based on a holocaustological narrative custom-designed to fit the collective Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome of the European peoples after World War II. Soon enough, the European peoples found themselves in the role of willing ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ accomplices to all crimes perpetrated by their heresiarchical hostile elite. These include not only the crimes committed overseas against the peoples of the Middle East (Naqba, Arab Spring, Gazacaust)[17] and the Global South (‘austerity program’ neo-colonialism, ‘shock-therapy’ disaster capitalism, ‘humanitarian intervention’ war), but also those committed at home against the peoples of the West themselves (ethnic replacement through mass immigration, family breakdown through social engineering, debt slavery through neo-liberal usury). Within the West, the now decades-old holocaustological narrative, perpetuated by educational dogma, media censorship and lawfare blackmail, has resulted in a mass cult of ‘judeolatry’ impervious to historical fact, rational argument and legal procedure. Its cultic symbols pervade the entire West, from ubiquitous Stolpersteine and Noahide rainbow flags in the street to endlessly repeating holocaust-themed films and talk shows in the mass media.

The very first Stolperstein, set on 16 December 1992 in front of Cologne City Hall, with Heinrich Himmler‘s order for the initiation of deportations

Here it should be explicitly and emphatically stated that, from a Traditionalist perspective, the self-identification of the heresiarchs ruling the West with any authentic Tradition or any authentic religious or ethnic identity, as it attempts vis-à-vis ‘Judaism’ and the ‘Jews’, represents nothing but a shallow counterfeit — an abomination short and simple.[18] The fact that the consistent attempt by the heresiarchs ruling the West to associate themselves (either directly or indirectly) with the Mosaic religion (i.e., Judaism, a remnant form of earlier Abrahamic religions) and the Jewish ethnicity (i.e., the Israelites, a polygenic population formerly defined by Mosaic religious practice but now lacking any such delineation) is a transparent fraud, as shown by the fact that they do not adhere to any religious Tradition and do not practice any citizenship allegiance except to that of the ‘State of Israel’, i.e., their own self-invented and entirely artificial Zionist colony in Palestine. Judaism, a religious Tradition only still authentically adhered to by small remnant groups such as Neturei Karta, is so entirely hostile to any collective project of worldly dominion and any personal indulgence of antinomian freedom as to be entirely incompatible with the heresiarchs’ globalist-nihilist project. To the contrary, it may very well be argued that within authentic Judaism, just as in any other authentic religious Tradition, lies the key to the redemption of the Mark of Cain assumed by the heresiarchs. Specific to Judaism is the concept of the ba’al tshuva, or ‘master of the return’, referring to the personal redemption of sin by the acknowledgement of guilt (‘atonement of shortcoming’), and its pre-emption by conscientious orthopraxy (‘walking in righteousness’). Without a doubt, Judaism is the most Nomos-detailing of all of the Abrahamic religions: as such, it is diametrically opposed to the antinomianism practiced and propagated by the heresiarchs now ruling the West. In that sense, Judaism invites those heresiarchs claiming ‘Jewish’ heritage to repentance — now and here, before it is too late.

It is usually said that Judaism is the standpoint of the law. However, this could also be expressed by saying that Judaism lies in anxiety. But here the nothing of anxiety signifies something other than fate. It is in this sphere that the phrase ‘to be anxious-nothing’ appears most paradoxical, for guilt is indeed something. Nevertheless, it is true that as long as guilt is the object of anxiety, it is nothing. The ambiguity lies in the relation, for as soon as guilt is posited, anxiety is gone, and repentance is there. The relation, as always with the relation of anxiety, is sympathetic and antipathetic. This in turn seems paradoxical, yet such is not the case, because while anxiety fears, it maintains a subtle communication with its object, cannot look away from it, indeed will not, for if the individual wills it, repentance is there.

That someone or other will find this statement difficult is something I cannot help. He who has the required firmness to be, if I dare say so, a divine prosecutor, not in relation to others but in relation to himself, will not find it difficult. Furthermore, life offers sufficient phenomena in which the individual in anxiety gazes almost desirously at guilt and yet fears it. Guilt has for the eye of the spirit the fascinating power of the serpent’s glance. The truth in the view of attaining perfection through sin lies at this point. It has its truth in the moment of decision when the immediate spirit posits itself as spirit by spirit. Contrariwise, it is blasphemy to hold that this view is to be realized in concreto. It is precisely by the anxiety of guilt that Judaism is further advanced than Greek culture, and the sympathetic factor in its anxiety-relation to guilt may be recognized by the fact that it would not at any price forego this relation in order to acquire the more rash expressions of Greek culture: fate, fortune, misfortune. Kierkegaard

As outlined in the first paragraph, the West crossed the psycho-historical threshold of the ‘circle of blood’ in 2020. Their ‘culture distortion’ program having run its course, the antinomian heresiarchs have now effectively made the Western masses complicit in their crimes, including those crimes perpetrated against themselves. The sado-masochistic shift from victim to perpetrator has been completed and the Western masses now identify with their rulers, to the extent that antinomian heresy has become the norm and even open genocide has become accepted practice whenever deemed necessary to uphold the cultic narrative, as in Gaza. As befitting antinomian heresy, that cultic narrative, however, is as flexible in content and form as the heresiarchical elite itself: both the narrative and the elite can and do shape-shift with amazing alacrity, ditching used-up stories and people and absorbing new stories and people to suit the final aim of the movement. The recent ‘radicalization’ of the narrative and leadership throughout the West proves the point: the media shift to the justification of ethnic cleansing and open genocide in the Holy Land and the policy shift to ‘Israel First’ governance in the United States and Germany indicate the rapid Zionization and Israelization[19] of the West.[20] The absence of any substantial resistance to these developments proves that the West, as a whole, has fallen into unapologetic evil, encouraging the ruling heresiarchs to hasten their ‘inverse crusade’ against those still resisting their Griff nach der Weltmacht across the Eurasian East and the Global South. They may very well overreach as they resort to this Flucht nach Vorn, but those opposing it, whether still resisting their rule inside West or fighting it in the Eurasian East and Global South, should never forget that, ultimately, they are merely representatives of a much older and much more dangerous, viz. non-human enemy. They should also remember that the program the West-based heresiarchs are ultimately working for is not at all concerned with human power – or any human purpose. Rather, this program is essential inhuman and anti-human: it is to immanentize the eschaton and realize the rule of the antichrist. In that sense, the heresiarchs should not only be fought by worldly means: they should also be fought by spiritual means. First, they should be called upon to repent and turn away from their pilgrimage to Chorazin. Finally, those still refusing should be exorcised, by all possible means, and cast into the Outer Darkness.

Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum

Coda: Occidentalist Epilogue

Because the author hails from the fallen West and because his fate is linked to its fate, it is appropriate that this epilogue should serve the edification of his fellow Westerners. The question, however, arises as to what is still worth saying.

The handful of colleagues and comrades who, over the last years, tried but failed to prevent and remedy the Fall of the West do not need words of solace and support — they ‘know the score’ and have, accordingly, either made themselves scarce or resigned themselves to the approaching final judgement. The rest of the Dissident Right, now effectively defunct but until recently the only movement conceivably capable of altering the political trajectory of the West, has either betrayed or abandoned the cause. Most of its ‘White Nationalists’, now amply subsidized by NATOstan agencies, have aligned themselves with the most psychopathic Russophobe elements of the Kiev regime. Most of its ‘Civnat Conservatives’, now comfortably co-opted by the new ‘right-wing’ governments of the West, have resorted to the richer pickings of militant Zionism and populist islamophobia.[21] Most of its ‘intellectual leaders’, already compromised by their failure to stand up and be counted on the Great Reset issues of ‘Covid’, ‘vaccines’, ‘Ukraine’ and ‘Gaza’, have been deceived and discredited by the trompe-l’œil of the Trump Moment.

On the Western masses, now hopelessly mired in irredeemable decadence and wilful ignorance, no more words should be wasted. Unworthy of their ancestors, they flounder.

Entartet Geschlecht, unwert der Ahnen! Wohin, Mutter, vergabst du die Macht über Meer und Sturm zu gebieten? O zahme Kunst der Zauberin, die nur Balsamtränke noch braut! Erwache mir wieder, kühne Gewalt, herauf aus dem Busen wo du dich bargst! Hört meinen Willen, zagende Winde! Heran zu Kampf und Wettergetös’! Zu tobender Stürme, wütendem Wirbel, treibt aus dem Schlaf dies träumende Meer! Weckt aus dem Grund seine grollende Gier! Zeigt ihm die Beute die ich ihm biete! Zerschlag es dies trotzige Schiff, des zerschellten Trümmer verschling’s! Und was auf ihm lebt, den wehenden Atem, den lass’ ich euch Winden zum Lohn!

‘Degenerate race, unworthy of your ancestors! How, o mother, did you dispose of the power of ruling sea and tempest? O feeble art of the sorceress, now only cooking up curative potions! Raise up in me once again, bold power, rise up from my breast where you have lain concealed! Give ear to my will, half-hearted winds! Off to battle and storm! Into the raging tempest and furious vortex, raise from her slumber this somnolent sea! Awaken from her depth her malevolent greed! Show her the prize that I have to offer! Let her smash this insolent ship, let her gorge on her shattered wreckage! And whatever has life on her, that faint breath. I leave as reward for you winds!’ – Wagner, Tristan und Isolde

Notes

[1] Title of an occult-themed thriller film (Nicholas Roeg, 1973), artistically depicting the effects of clairvoyance and precognition – appropriate to the Biblical record of the fate of Lot’s wife Ado, who was turned into a pillar of salt when she turned during her family’s flight from Sodom.

[2] Skewed reference to the wartime memoir Crusade in Europe by Dwight Eisenhower,  former Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, published in 1948.

[3] For the author’s short-hand ‘top five’ of European high literature, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, Twelve Futuro-Fundamentalist Essays (Arktos: London, 2024) 572-81.

[4] Cf. Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, 21-7.

[5] The author’s aetiology of the Crisis of the Modern West, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, Alba Rosa. Ten Traditionalist Essays about the Crisis in the Modern West (Arktos: London, 2019).

[6] Florence Kaslow and Marvin Sussman, Cults and the Family (Haworth, 1982).

[7] For the author’s full analysis of the Annus Horribilis events of 2020, cf. Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, 35-118.

[8] For the author’s sphere impressions of the direct aftermath of the Fall of the West, cf. Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, 119-45.

[9] Reference to the sea witch Sycorax, the ‘Scythian Raven’, mentioned in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest as the mother of the mooncalf creature Caliban, both inhabitants of some unspecified ‘cannibal isle’ in the Atlantic – appropriate to the black arts-practicing Neo-Atlanticist heresiarchs ruling the West.

[10] Title of a thriller film (John Herzfeld, 2001), artistically depicting the effects of ‘applied antinomianism’ in the context of a collectively narcissist society, set in NYC, the West’s ‘heart of darkness’. The title itself refers to Andy Warhol’s quotation ‘in the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes’, accurately capturing the narcissist megalomania characteristic of the West’s ‘Century of the Self’.

[11] Bert Oliver, ‘When “Psychopathic” is No Exaggeration’, Brownstone.org 22 January 2024.

[12] Brandon Smith, ‘The NWO Religion: How the Woke Postmodern “Faith” Glorifies Evil’, Alt-Market.us 17 April 2025.

[13] François du Cluzel, ‘Cognitive Warfare’, Innovationhub-actorg 2020, p. 5.

[14] Craig Murray, ‘This Hell’, The Unz Review 9 April 2025.

[15] Aleksandr Dugin, ‘Dromocracy. Speed as Power’, Geopolitika.ru 18 October 2022.

[16] For the author’s cultural-historical analysis of the occult origins of Western Modernity, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War (Cambridge Scholars: Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018) 88-126.

[17] For the author’s eschatological analysis of the Gazacaust, cf. Wolfheze, Globus Horribilis, 554-70.

[18] For the author’s take on the ‘Jewish Question’, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, Rupes Nigra. An Archaeo-Futurist Countdown in Twelve Essays (Arktos: London, 2021) 247-78.

[19] Humaira Ahad, ‘Dark Abyss: How Israeli Settler Society Became a Sanctuary for Rapist, Pedophiles’, Presstv.ir 14 April 2025.

[20] For the author’s assessment of these phenomena, cf. podcast ‘Alexander Wolfheze on the Amsterdam Psy-Op’, Truth Jihad / Kevin Barrett, Unz.com 19 November 2024.

[21] For the author’s take on the ‘Islam Question’, cf. Wolfheze, Rupes Nigra, 373-88 and 431-44.