The Political Cesspool: 20th Anniversary Conference

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From Brad Griffin’s The Occidental Dissent via The Political Cesspool. Missed this one, regretting  it.

May 20, 2024 Hunter Wallace Audio, Conservatism, Podcasts, Politics, Populists 31

When James Edwards asked me to speak at The Political Cesspool’s 20th Anniversary Conference earlier this year, I accepted on the spot and cleared my schedule. I knew that it would be a fantastic event. I knew that the finest people that I have met in the movement would be there.

I’ve been critical of the movement on this website, but it has always been from the perspective of love and as an insider. I have been a card carrying member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and League of the South. I have been to dozens of conferences over the course of the past 15 years. I marched into Charlottesville. I’ve been around since the White Nationalism 1.0 days. I saw the rise and fall of the Alt-Right. I’m as deeply involved as ever in whatever we are calling ourselves these days. I’m so deeply involved in the movement that my sons are Gordon Baum’s grandsons. I have watched children grow up and old war horses be buried. I count the leaders of the movement as my closest associates.

The truth is that the leaders of our movement, most of them anyway, are all smart, solid, productive, interesting, wonderful people like James Edwards. It is always a pleasure to be in the same room with them. I can’t speak highly enough of the core of the movement where most people have known each other in real life for decades. You encounter so many cranks and morons online. It is the fine people who I know offline who keep my spirits up. It is essential to develop and nurture these relationships.

The Dissident Right is like the Palace of Versailles. There are so many wings of it which are adjacent to the main building. There are innumerable rooms and gardens where the various subcultures are each doing their own thing. We cross paths with each other. Sometimes we get into arguments over the various points of division. People travel from room to room. James Edwards is unifying figure who is known and liked by nearly everyone. The Political Cesspool conference is a place where White Nationalists, White advocates, Alt-Right people, unreconstructed National Socialists, paleocons, populists, Patriots, Southern nationalists, Southern heritage activists and so on can all feel at ease and have a good time.

When I walked through the door of our hotel, I felt rich, fulfilled and among friends. It was emotional. It wasn’t just the 20 year anniversary of The Political Cesspool. It felt like passing a milestone in my life as well. I have been active for roughly the same amount of time. I have spent my entire young adult life in this scene. I am entering middle age now. I have a wife and two kids. I knew I would be seeing a lot of old friends. I knew that I would be meeting people who I know from the internet, but who I haven’t had the pleasure to meet yet in real life. I knew there would be people there who were at my wedding and who are like family to me. I knew there would be other bright people there who I hadn’t met yet. I knew there would be people there who I haven’t seen in years or who I saw in the blur of Charlottesville.

The 20 year anniversary of The Political Cesspool got me thinking about our ideological journey, not just about political shifts in the culture which I could measure in numbers in my speech, but in the origins and the trials and triumphs that we have all experienced. I thought about my most memorable experiences. I thought about my regrets and mistakes which are numerous. I thought about all the things for which I was grateful. I thought about the areas in which we were successful and the challenges ahead of us. I thought about all the stories that I have a few of which I enjoyed talking about over whiskey.

The title of my speech was “Paleoconservatism: From the Margins to the Mainstream.” It was about how critiques of conservative orthodoxy from men like Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Peter Brimelow in the 1990s and early 2000s have resonated and seem to be gaining a larger audience on the Right. Identity issues have become more salient and now animate the Republican coalition. We live in a time when Joe Six Pack is radicalized enough to storm the Capitol, but also one in which the Republican House has held nearly thirty votes in two months on Israel and “fighting anti-Semitism” on Ivy League campuses.

Warren Balogh of Modern Politics and formerly the National Justice Party circled back to Pat Buchanan’s run on the Reform Party ticket in 2000 in which he defeated Donald Trump. Warren and James Edwards started out in politics in the Buchanan Brigades. I had no idea what Warren was going to speak about, but he also traced our cause back to those crucial years and was able to describe it in greater detail in terms of his first hand personal experience. Paleoconservatism looked finished in the early 2000s. The George W. Bush administration is where history began to bend back in our direction.

Tim Murdock of White Rabbit Radio described his experiences working with Bob Whitaker and their role in injecting the term “anti-White” into the discourse. Bob Whitaker was always trying to use new technology to impose terminology and thus ideology on spaces outside the White Nationalist echo chamber. I will never forget the interview that I did with Tim on White Rabbit Radio in January 2022 which I called “The Tipping Point.” I had spent the first year of the Biden administration tracking the mass radicalization of conservatives across multiple polls. It was clear to me that something huge was happening in the wake of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, but the significance of this wasn’t registering in the wider movement. Tim is one of the few activists who thinks like I do. I define success as our ideas, values, criticisms and concepts permeating the Right. Thus, I saw it as a watershed moment when the “anti-White” genie was let out of the bottle by Tucker Carlson, even if it was being used in boilerplate conservative rhetoric. Whites were given permission to think racially. We anticipated even greater triumphs in the years ahead like the mainstreaming of the Jewish Question. All of this has come to pass in less than two years.

Nick Griffin of the British National Party addressed the conference via video. He was scheduled to attend and had booked his flight and hotel room, but was denied entry into the United States. He spoke about how the political window to turn things around through democratic means had closed in Britain. Much like the Republican Party in the United States, the Tories have spent the last 25 years successfully absorbing, containing, redirecting and dissipating the energies of the Right. As in the United States, mass immigration has reached an all-time high in Britain under Conservative rule, which guarantees a majority-minority Britain by mid-century which will one day resemble Syria or Lebanon. In spite of this bitter defeat, Nick remains optimistic. He spoke at length about the collapse of the post-World War II liberal world order and how it is happening militarily in Ukraine, economically through de-dollarization, culturally through extreme polarization and morally through the end of the Holocaust card thanks to Gaza. Historically, we are at the end of an epoch which has been defined by Germany’s defeat in World War II.

Mark Weber of the Institute of Historical Review and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance were our next two speakers and both spoke about how America deserves to fall at this point. Uncle Jared told us that the America which fought the War Between the States was gone. Similarly, the nation which had reconciled and moved beyond sectionalism to become a Great Power in the 20th century was gone too. We now live in a country which prefers to demonize its founding stock and deconstruct its culture. We live in a country which renames schools and topples men like Robert E. Lee from pillars. It is not our country anymore. We occupy the same geographical space with hostile aliens including those who are related to us. It doesn’t matter who wins the next election because it is too late to “Take Back America.” Instead, we should be thinking about how to salvage a part of it through migration and secession.

Sam Dickson spoke at length about the media shapes the news cycle through selectivity and repetition to fit its preferred narrative. We have all heard the names of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till and so on. No one remembers the names of White victims of even the most gruesome crimes like Daniel Williams who was recently raped to death by black inmates in an Alabama prison. I personally remembered that horrific story, which happened here near Montgomery, but not the name. It didn’t stick with me because I haven’t heard it repeated a thousand times. Lies which are repeated a hundred times like the notion that our current system is based on “white supremacy” are earnestly believed by millions of people. The American education system is also based on lies like this. We recently celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision which failed to erase academic racial gaps.

LISTEN HERE:

Hour One

Hour Two

Hour Three

We closed out the evening with a live three-hour broadcast of The Political Cesspool. I was interviewed along with the other speakers and many of the attendees. Jaye Ryan was interviewed. Unfortunately, I missed Dr. Michael Hill’s speech on Sunday which closed out the conference, which was in South Carolina. I was done in by a familiar foe … exhaustion from traveling, staying up too late drinking and socializing with friends over the previous two evenings. We also brought the baby who wanted to sleep in.

The conference was well done. Hats off to James for throwing such a great event. By the time of the 30 year anniversary, we need to shoot for being so mainstream and normalized that such an event could be open to the public and even our enemies wouldn’t see the point of trying to shut us down. Those tactics aren’t working at a time when tens of thousands of people are participating in Twitter Spaces.

Note: I would like to give a shout out to my new friends at Antelope Hill Publishing. Thanks for the coffee! Check them out!

Review: Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, Part 2

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Review: Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, Part 1 – The Occidental Observer

The Cultural Aspect of the Jewish Problem

Evola opens his treatment of the cultural problem by arguing that Jews have not given up the “instinct for universal domination” contained within Judaism, but “it is just that this deep-rooted instinct disguised itself, assumed tortuous forms and became occult, subterranean activity.” The Jews “created, for the fulfilment of their ideal, an inner united front of deception and treason within all nations.” Two fundamental instruments were employed for this purpose: money and intelligence. Evola explains,

It is not through weapons, but rather through the power of gold on the one hand, and through everything that intelligence can do in terms of spiritual and ethical disintegration, of social and cultural myths generating a revolt against, and a subversion of, the traditional values and institutions of the Aryan peoples and against everything that is connected with the higher part of the human being.

Despite such a strong opening, Evola again pulls back from an ethnic focus. He concedes that the modern era has witnessed “the progressive rise of the Jew to the rank of supranational ruler of the West,” but he then adds that “it would be really superstitious to ascribe” this rise and associated cultural degradation “solely to the Jews.” Rather, argues Evola, “the struggle against the Jew often hides a struggle against general structures prevalent throughout modern civilization.” Jews are said to appear to be at the forefront of decay simply because they are vehicles for three non-personal factors Evola holds primarily accountable for the decline of the West — nomadism, rationalism, and materialism.

In the form of their spirit of nomads, of a scattered people, of stateless persons, the Jews would have introduced into the various peoples, starting with the Roman people, the virus of denationalisation, universalism and internationalism of culture. This is an incessant action of erosion of what is qualitative, differentiated, defined by the boundaries of a tradition and of a blood. This is what, in more recent times, we have seen focused mainly on the social plane, in the form of the lever of socialist revolutions of democratic-Masonic Judaised ideology and of their related humanitarian and internationalist myths.

Evola’s analysis again seems to contradict itself, on the one hand offering a very bloodless and bland view of Jews as passive carriers of culturally damaging trends, while on the other hand mentioning very specific and ethnically self-serving political and cultural movements in which Jews were key operators. Evola’s discussion of the Jewish relationship with rationalism is extremely brief and just as weak, with Evola offering only that Judaism was a “religion in which the relations between man and God were conceived as a self-interested and almost contractual regulation of profit and loss.” That may be so, but Evola doesn’t explain why, above many other worthy points of discussion not approached in this text, he feels this should be mentioned.

I found Evola’s treatment of Jews and materialism, and within that mammonism and pragmatism, one of the more interesting sections of the work. For Evola, the obsession with money, or the “deification of money and wealth” and the development of a “soulless economy and a stateless finance,” are bound up with

Everything that, in modern cultural, literature, art and science, owing to the Jews, distorts, mocks, shows as illusory or unfair what, for us, had an ideal value, bringing out, on the contrary, as if it were the sole reality, what is lower, sensual, and animal in nature.

An obsession with the material, and especially with wealth, is therefore in direct opposition to Aryan ideals. Any culture built around wealth acquisition, or which turns upon an axis of purely financial values (e.g., praising immigrants because they are “taxpayers”), is designed to “instil a sense of spiritual dismay that favors an abandonment to the lowest forces and, finally, gives way to the occult game of the Jew.”

One of the most significant developments of the early twentieth century, argues Evola, was the Judaisation of Western economic attitudes, particularly the development of consumerism and the further refinement of commercial capitalism. Evola clearly detests

Protestant-Puritan glorification of success and profit, the capitalist spirit in general, the evangelist-preacher-entrepeneur, the businessman and the usurer with the name of God on his lips, the humanitarian and pacifist ideology in the service of materialistic praxis. … There are strong grounds for thinking that, as stated by Sombart, America in all its aspects is a structurally Jewish country and that Americanism is nothing other than the Jewish spirit distilled.

Based on precedent within the text I expected Evola to take this cue to once more take the conversation away from an ethnic focus, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that he didn’t. I actually agree with Evola that certain Jewish “ways of seeing” have become endemic in the West, and that the values of our age have fallen a great height from the days of Aryan ideals. And yet the present state of affairs shouldn’t lead to confusion as to how we got here. Evola stresses the question posed to all serious thinkers about this problem:

It is the question of deciding to what extent the Jew can seriously be considered as the determining cause and as the necessary and sufficient element to explain all the disruptions mentioned above, and to what extent the Jew appears on the contrary only as one of the forces at work within a far vaster phenomenon which is impossible to reduce to mere racial relations.

Evola believes that general racial mixing owes more to “internationalism”, but concedes that “to a certain extent, even at the present time, most of the representatives of the internationalist tendency in the worst sense originate in Judaism in the field of culture and literature, and to that extent a general anti-Semitic attitude would be justified.” [emphasis added]

By the same token, while Evola points out that rationalism is not a Jewish phenomenon only (Socrates, medieval nominalists, Descartes, Galileo, Bacon et al., being some of the most important European examples), “one can still speak of a disintegrating Jewish spirit expressing itself through rationalism and calculation, ending up in a world of machines, things, money rather than of persons, traditions, lands.”

The Socio-Economic Aspect

Evola argues that it is in the economic and social planes that “the anti-Semitic argument is at its most legitimate.” Beginning with Jewish art, Evola claims it has a “dissolving effect,” since it manifests a “wish to degrade, to soil and to debase all that is considered great and noble.” He sees in Jewish artistic expression “a certain Jewish instinct to humiliate, degrade and dissolve.”

Evola’s use of the word “instinct” is important because his treatment of the socio-economic aspect is based upon the question of whether Jews “dissolve” the societies around them through their intrinsic nature and way of being in the world, or whether they do it through organized conspiracy. He argues that “motives for anti-Semitism in the political and economic field” follow one of two streams. The first stream he describes as extremist and general, in essence built upon a theory of conspiracy. The second stream he describes as practical and nationalist.

Evola was well-versed with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, having edited an Italian edition of the text, and he viewed it as the quintessential text of the “extremist and general” branch of thought. Evola doesn’t appear to believe in the authenticity of the Protocols as the discovered minutes of a meeting held by global Jewish leaders to plot world domination, but he does see value in the text as a creative exploration of Jewish methodologies for socio-political dominance. He stresses, for example, that “the first thing to be conceded is that the course of social and political history in modern Europe seems in fact to meet the objectives set out in the Protocols.” Evola believed there was “without question, a connection between the Jewish tradition and Freemasonry,” the latter having played a part in the French Revolution and “might very well have obeyed Jewish influences.” Marxism, and socialism in general are also “direct creatures of the Jews and the Jewish spirit.” Finally, adds Evola, “as to the active forms of Jewish subversive intervention, certain facts remain indisputable, such as the Jewish influence that has accompanied almost all modern revolutions.”

Evola was certainly aware of even more far-reaching claims within “Nordic anti-Semitism,” pointing out that

Hitler goes even further: he thinks that the Jews, recognizing the fundamental value of blood and race as creators of true civilization, have proceeded to a systematic project of biological contamination of the non-Jewish races, and particularly of the Aryan Germanic race, in order to dissipate the last strains of pure blood.

Keeping with his suspicion and disregard for “Nordic anti-Semitism,” Evola counters the idea of a “systematic project” by arguing that

The most likely hypothesis is that the action of the Jewish element in all the phenomena that have just been described may be more instinctive and almost unintentional, and thus uncoordinated, rather than being governed by a unitary idea in accordance with a plan and a well thought-out and predetermined technique.

Although he lacked the language to express this idea, I think Evola here is grasping at something approaching a social identity theory of the Jews, or possibly even coming alongside something like the idea of a group evolutionary strategy. In these latter cases, however, there is clearly room for both instinct and, at the smaller level, planning and coordination. In fact, one of the standard features of Jewish social, political, and economic activism is organizational clustering. This clustering may be instinctive, in the sense that Jews engage in ethnic nepotism and feel a strong kinship with one another, but once it has occurred then the planning and development of “systematic projects” becomes undeniable, whether in pursuit of legalistic speech restrictions, opening national borders, or other goals advantageous to Jews. An ethnic conspiracy organized at a global level, as seen in something like the Protocols, is hardly necessary when smaller conspiracies proliferate in a myriad of core issues and across multiple nations.

Evola bridges the gap between conspiracy and instinct when he moves to the “concrete and practical” stream of socio-economic anti-Semitism. He agrees that “there is a sense of solidarity among the Jews,” and adds that “there is a Jewish practice of lies, cunning, hypocrisy, exploitation, a skilfulness in gradually climbing into all the key positions.” The Jewish practice of dual ethics (i.e., having one set of morals for interacting with your own group, and another set for morals for dealing with outsiders) “give to the Jews not the features of a religious community, but a social conspiracy.” Evola believes that anti-Semitism is justified, and the Jewish practice of dual ethics demands that this anti-Semitism should entail some form of reduction in the ‘rights’ of Jews. Because Jews are ethnic freeloaders and do not play the game of life in the same sense as Aryans, “to set Jews free [via equal rights] would mean to dig our own graves. That is why the liberal democratic ideology is, for good reason, so dear to the Jews; it is the one that contributes best to their game.”

Evola pointed to the necessity of quotas, and other restrictions imposed on Jews in the early twentieth century, given the remarkable rise of Jews in leading positions in several nations. While Evola supported National Socialist legislation towards reversing this dominance, he was scathing of the general way in which restrictions on Jews were imposed. For example, Evola supported quotas and restrictions in certain political and cultural roles, but was very critical of Germany’s ban on Jewish doctors. For Evola, the decision was taken without any assessment of whether Jews were taking such positions for “the aims of domination of his race.” If it were not the case—if Germans were simply banning Jews from medicine in order to favor their own race in a competing ethnocentrism, then Evola claims that “the ban of Jews by National-Socialists would be devoid of any serious justification. … This is why we have called such a form of anti-Semitism practical: a spirit of solidarity is opposed in it to another spirit of solidarity.” Evola does not, however, explain why a spirit of solidarity is justified in removing Jews from government and leading positions in culture and education, but suddenly ceases to be justified in other areas. Setting aside the fact that medicine is a lucrative and socially influential field worth ‘taking over,’ it strikes me that ethnic solidarity is, by its nature, all or nothing. If an ethnic group or nation is going to compete with Jewish ethnocentrism and solidarity, then it makes sense that this would be all-encompassing. Evola thus again left me confused and feeling that his analysis is either poorly thought through, or badly and insufficiently expressed.

Evola continues to waver in this final section of this analysis. He writes that Judaism has played a role in a “monstrous omnipotent apparatus that sweeps away peoples and conditions destinies.” As such, and despite his previous critique of the ban on Jewish doctors, he feels that a universal and all-encompassing “struggle against the omnipotent Jew can be an effective symbol.” Almost immediately, however, he advises against waging war “against Judaism solely in a Jewish fashion, that is to say in the name of a racist and particularistic exclusivism modelled, unconsciously, on the racism of which Israel has given the most typical example in history.”

Evola here prefigures Kevin MacDonald’s analysis at the conclusion of the fifth chapter of Separation and Its Discontents (“National Socialism and Judaism as Mirror-Image Group Strategies”), but Evola fails to explain why such an approach is strategically bad. He merely hints that it is not in keeping with a system of Aryan ideals he never fully describes. Evola therefore presents his readers with an inescapable dilemma — to set the Jews free is to dig our own graves, but to restrict them is to act like Jews and sacrifice our Aryan spirit.

What, then, does Evola suggest in terms of a solution to the three aspects of the Jewish problem? He appeals to the memory of the Roman Empire, and writes

Only the restoration of such a Europe, to the point of a complete restoration of classical Roman forms, gives the right point of reference to those who want to oppose, not only the various concrete, partial, apparent aspects of the Jewish danger in the cultural, moral, economic and social fields, which are really conditioned by race, but also the larger phenomena of decay shown by modern civilization in general and originating in an ‘intelligence’ far more concrete than that to which, on the basis of obscure sensations and transposition, anti-Semitism has referred with its myth of the occult conspiracy of Israel.

In other words, after a lengthy text critiquing Nordic particularistic nationalism, Evola claims the solution to the Jewish problem is resurrecting the long dead empire that just so happened to be based in the city he was born, raised and, ultimately, would die in.

Conclusion

Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem is an interesting historical artefact from a point in time where Europe was convulsing in a general and widespread reaction against Jewish influence. The period witnessed the publication of many thousands of tracts, pamphlets and monographs purporting to explain and even solve the civilizational question posed by this Jewish influence. Evola’s work on the subject, however, hasn’t aged well, and is significantly weaker than other texts of the period such as Hillaire Belloc’s The Jews, or Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Evola’s work is unnecessarily esoteric and, to make matters worse, is proud of this clumsy esotericism, critiquing the works of others as on the one hand “thoughtless,” and on the other as exemplifying a scientific and rational outlook that is said to be anti-Aryan (!). Beyond echoing Evola’s own fantasies of a resurrected Roman Empire, there are no solutions offered here, and the analysis presented in the volume is almost invariably incomplete, self-contradictory, and over-wrought. It is peppered with a sneering and patronizing anti-Germanism. I came to the work already believing Evola to be a great over-estimated thinker, and I finished it more or less confirmed in that opinion.

Review: Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, Part 1

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“As far as we are concerned, we believe that anti-Semitism has every right to exist.”
Julius Evola

Prompted by the rapid rise of the Jews in the West, the early twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of publications intended to expose, explain, or solve ‘the Jewish Problem’ — the acquiring by Jews of excessive influence in host societies and their use of this influence in the pursuit of selfish and destructive goals. Some of these works, such as Henry Ford’s The International Jew, caused an international storm on publication and continue to be well-known. Others, such as Hillaire Belloc’s The Jews (1922), quickly fell into relative obscurity despite representing, in some cases, superior works. One of these more obscure, but thought-provoking contributions, is Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem (Tre aspetti del problema ebraico), first published in Rome in 1936.

Although not considered a primary thinker in matters relating to the Jews, Evola took the Jewish Question seriously and often referred to it in his works, including a chapter of his 1937 The Myth of the Blood. His references to the publications and speeches of others on the subject would suggest that he read widely and deeply in available contemporary sources, and Evola is known to have edited an Italian edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His tackling of the Jewish Question has remained relatively unexplored by mainstream scholarship, despite the fact Evola’s thought has been rising in prominence since the 1970s, when he was especially influential on the French New Right. Some of the notable texts from that period include Julius Evola le visionnaire foudroyé, (Julius Evola, the Devastating Visionary) (Michel Angebert and Robert de Herte, 1977), Julius Evola e l’affermazione assoluta, (Philippe Baillet, 1978), La Terre de lumière. Le Nord et l’origine (The Earth of Light: The North and the Origin) (Christophe Levalois, 1985), L’Empire Intérieur (The Inner Empire) (Alain de Benoist, 1995), and Enquête sur la Tradition aujourd’hui (Research on the Tradition Today) (Arnaud Guyot-Jeannin, 1996).

This attention from the New Right provoked attention from leftist academics, as evidenced in particular in the work of Thomas Sheehan,[1] Elisabetta Cassina Wolff,[2] Stéphane François,[3] and Franco Ferraresi. Ferraresi described Evola in 1987 as “possibly the most important intellectual figure for the Radical Right in contemporary Europe.”[4] It should probably be added that media hysteria concerning Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election focused for some time on Steve Bannon’s stated admiration for the Italian philosopher. Perhaps surprisingly, with the exception of Wolff, who accused Evola of a “ferocious and destructive anti-Jewish racism,” Evola’s attitudes towards Jews are never raised in these works. My own search of works published in the last two decades shows only one serious journal publication on the subject, Peter Stuadenmaier’s 2020 article in the Journal of Contemporary History, “Racial Ideology between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Julius Evola and the Aryan Myth, 1933–43.”[5] Stuadenmaier sees Evola as committed to a campaign “to cultivate a closer rapport between Italian and German variants of racism as part of a campaign by committed antisemites to strengthen the bonds uniting the fascist and Nazi cause.”

Was Evola a “committed antisemite”? And what exactly were his views on Jews and the Jewish problem?

Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem

The three aspects of the Jewish problem identified by Evola are spiritual, cultural, and economic/social. Evola opens by first explaining that

In Italy there is little awareness of the Jewish problem. … The latest laws recently inspired by Göring in Germany, which state that not only marriages between Jews and non-Jews are forbidden, but also cohabitation with Jews, and that Jews or those who are already married to Jews are banned from any organization in the National-Socialist state, indicate the extremely high level of these tensions.

Although Italy was not so obviously subject to the same tensions, Evola reminded his readers that such tensions were universal and that “anti-Semitism is a motif that has appeared in almost every stage of Western history.” Evola claimed that Italy’s less strained and direct tensions with Jews presented an opportunity for a more complete and successful attempt to address the Jewish problem. He writes that

The fact that the special circumstances which have caused the most direct and thoughtless forms of anti-Semitism in some countries are not present in Italy allows us to consider the problem with greater calm and greater objectivity.

Such an approach is necessary, argued Evola, because anti-Semitism elsewhere in Europe, is said to lack “a truly general standpoint,” in addition to lacking “the doctrinal and historical premises which are necessary to really justify, through a deductive procedure, any practical, that is to say, social and political, anti-Semitic policies.”

Evola believed in the development and imposition of anti-Semitic policies. He asserts early in the text that he believes “anti-Semitism has every right to exist.” He also, however, believes that the arguments of many contemporary anti-Semites bear the hallmarks of “weakness and confusion” and are hindered further by a “violent partisan spirit.” He worried that this approach would lead impartial observers to think that “it can all be reduced to one-sided and arbitrary attitudes dictated less by sound principles than by practical contingent interests.”

Evola begins from certain premises, namely that

There is at the present time a Jewish peril, particularly perceptible in the financial field and in the economic sphere in general, there is also a Jewish peril in the area of ethics. Finally, as far as spirituality, religion, and a world-outlook are concerned, everything that is connected with Semitism, and above all with Jews, appears as particularly repulsive to the various peoples of the White race.

Readers familiar with Evola’s other works, in particular Revolt Against the Modern World, will not be surprised to find that the spiritual element takes up the majority of Evola’s attention in this work, and it is this element that begins his study.

The Spiritual Aspect of the Jewish Problem

Evola begins by asking if there is, in general, “a typical Jewish world-outlook or view on life and the sacred.” He argues that it is wrong to view the Jews as having a specific outlook, but rather that the Jewish world-outlook is better defined as part of the broader “Semitic” sense of the spiritual. In his words:

We will be deliberately using [‘Semitic’] here because we believe that the ‘Jewish’ element cannot be, purely and simply, separated from the general type of civilization that formerly spread throughout the whole Eastern Mediterranean area from Asia Minor to the borders of Arabia, noteworthy though the differences between Semitic peoples may be.

Evola thus promises, instead of a study of the spiritual problem of the Jews, an “overall study of the Semitic spirit.”

In my view this entire premise has aged poorly, and I almost gave up reading the text at this point given how fundamentally flawed it is. With advances in modern genetic studies since the days of Evola, we now know categorically, for example, that Ashkenazi Jews in particular represent a very distinct ethnic group that has become progressively more homogenous over the last seven centuries, with “Ashkenazim the world over carrying essentially the same collection of DNA sequences.” Studies have also shown that Jews are more genetically similar to groups such as Kurds, Turks, and Armenians than they are to their Semitic language-speaking Arab neighbors. Which prompts the question: On what basis is Evola positing a “Semitic spirit?”

Unencumbered by such important questions, Evola departs into overwrought theorizing on the clash between a “solar” Aryan spirit, and a “lunar” Semitic spirit. Although this will be explained below, it struck me that Evola seemed almost entirely ignorant of the history of the very real and very material antagonism of the Jews against Europeans in the realm of spirituality and religion. In How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500, soon to be published by Princeton University Press by Yale’s Ivan Marcus, it’s very clear that Jews have been very singular and deliberate actors in Western history. Marcus writes that “Jews were capable of doing exactly what infuriated Christian officials.” He explains:

Medieval Jewish historians have recently revised earlier narratives that saw the Jews as the victims of the Christian majority’s enmity and harmful policies. … General historians of medieval Europe who do not work on Jewish history still tend to see the Jews as isolated in ghettos and passive victims of persecution. … Contrary to the widely accepted picture of Jewish history, medieval Jews were assertive agents. The Jews of the Middle Ages were convinced of their chosenness, and Christian rulers inadvertently reinforced Jewish solidarity by recognizing Jews as legal, self-governing communities. … Jews were assertive, not passive, even without having the option of coercive force. … Jews went out of their way, when safe, to insult Christian sancta by making offensive wordplays, … Jews denigrated Christian sancta by engaging in private and public gestures of contempt such as placing Christian images or statues in their latrines.[6]

Rather than tackle this clear ethno-religious hostility, Evola informs us that “Aryan” is a “vague racialist foundation.” We apparently need “to define ‘Aryanity’ as a positive universal idea,” rather than look at direct Jewish spiritual hostility. All of which struck me as mystical nonsense.

In order not to do Evola a great injustice, I will at least summarize his approach to the spiritual problem as he sees it. For Evola, the Aryan spirit is solar and virile, whereas Semitic spirituality is lunar and feminine. The Aryan of ancient times had an “affirmative attitude towards the divine.” Ancient Aryans not only believed in the real existence of super-humanity, of a race of immortals and of divine heroes, but also often attributed to that race a superiority and an irresistible power over the supernatural forces themselves. Aryan spirituality was more royal than sacerdotal; more aristocratic than priestly. It valued heroes over saints, since it was the heroes who accessed the highest and most privileged places of immortality, for example, the Nordic Valhalla. Whereas the Biblical Adam is cursed and damned for having attempted to eat from the divine tree, Aryan myths depict  immortal heroes like Hercules, Jason, Mithras, and Sigurd.

True Aryan spirituality is characterised by the emblem of unchanging light, as opposed to the cycles of death and rebirth often seen in Semitic legends. As regards the corresponding ethnical principles, “what is characteristically Aryan is the principle of freedom and personality on the one hand, of loyalty and honor on the other hand.” The Aryan

enjoys independence and difference and dislikes submergence in a heterogeneous mass, which does not prevent him, however, from obeying in a virile way, acknowledging a leader and being proud to serve him according to a bond that is freely established, his nature being warlike and irreducible to any interest than can be bought and sold or in general expressed in terms of money.

By contrast, what characterises the Semitic spirituality is “the destruction of the Aryan synthesis of spirituality and virility.” Semitic spirituality is “coarsely material, sensual or uncouth … an emasculated spirituality.” It is burdened by “the pathos of sin and expiation,” and beholden to “an impure and uneasy romanticism.” For Evola, “the pathos of the confession of sins distorts the calm purity and the ‘Olympian’ superiority of the Aryan aristocratic ideal.” Judaism was steeped in ‘prophetism,’ and whereas the prophet type had previously been seen as a sick man, he was substituted for the ‘clairvoyant’ type. The spiritual centre shifts to him and his apocalypses.

For Evola, the characteristics of the Jewish instinct in general are deceit, servile hypocrisy, and “devious, persistent, disintegrating infiltration.” He praises the National Socialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg for his assessment of the Jewish spirit, but also disparages Rosenberg for employing Christian morality or notions of Germanic religion as a method of criticising Judaism. Evola asserts that it is wrong to focus on the immorality contained in Judaism given “dubious morals exhibited by the Germanic gods.” He believes that critiques of the spiritual contents of Judaism contain little more than a “pot-pourri in which pertinent points are intermingled with rather strange ideas.”

Evola is rather unfriendly towards Germanic paganism and towards Protestantism, and although he was far from a devout Catholic, a defensive tone is detectable here. I do agree with his statement that “it is hard to find an anti-Semite more philosemite than [Martin] Luther,” and his argument that many Protestants, like Luther, critiqued Catholicism via the Jews rather than critiquing the Jews more directly. Yet Evola possesses his own biases, promoting a vision of European spirituality that is more Roman than Germanic, more imperial than independent. One sees this in his statement that

The hidden source of Nordic anti-Semitism gives itself away in its anti-universalist and anti-Roman controversialist, in its confusion between universalism as a supranational idea and the universalism which only means this active ferment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition.

“Nordic anti-Semitism” is therefore presented as something confused, ignorant, somewhat infantile, and definitely inferior to a more Roman, more Catholic, more “supranational” anti-Semitism. “Nordic anti-Semitism” is said to reveal a “mere particularism” which he says is ironically in a Jewish style, for example, “our god, our morals” etc. In other words, Evola is opposed to an anti-Semitism which aims to fight Jewish ethnocentrism with a European ethnocentrism on a continental or national basis. Evola, however, offers no serious argument for why a European ethnocentrism is spiritually or strategically bad, beyond the claim that it is, in his view, “narrow-minded and particularistic.” He claims that to be focussed on “the blood,” in other words to be protective of one’s race, is to adopt a “naturalistic” worldview more suited to the Jews. Evola calls for the adoption of a new Aryan worldview that remains “free from ethnic prejudice” and free from “parochialism.” In other words, Evola seems to assert the opinion that to be an Aryan is something very little connected to matters of biological heritage. He explains

Values must be evoked once again which can seriously be called ‘Aryan,’ and not merely on the basis of vague and one-sided concepts suffused with a sort of biological materialism: values of a solar Olympian spirituality, of a classicism of clarity and controlled force, of a new love for difference and free personality, and, at the same time, for hierarchy and universality.

At the same time, Evola stresses that the “subterranean spirit of obscure incessant agitation, of deep contamination and sudden revolt, is Semitic.”

This section on the spiritual aspect of the Jewish problem then suddenly ends, without any coherent summary or explanation about the relevance of heredity or suggestion for action beyond the adoption of a “solar Olympian spirituality.” Perhaps it’s my Anglo-Scandinavian heritage stunting my appreciation of this kind of philosophizing, but I felt that Evola’s entire discussion of the spiritual element of the Jewish problem was colored by his Italian background (Catholic upbringing; enthusiasm for the Roman Empire) and his resultant antipathy towards any kind of Nordic racialism or national patriotism. Somewhere in the muddle of concepts I do discern the idea of a multi-national Europe embracing a more virile idea of spirituality and world-outlook more naturally hostile to Jews than the Protestant-Capitalist world-outlook he seemed to perceive as dominant. Unfortunately, his definition of the Jewish element of the problem is so loose and poorly thought out that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. Further, Evola’s idea that anti-Semitism shouldn’t be based on a competing ethnocentrism, and his implicit suggestion that Europeans shouldn’t be focused on ‘blood,’ has aged extremely poorly in the context of Jewish involvement in mass non-White migration in White nations, and the demographic crisis facing European-descended peoples more generally. I was therefore glad to move on to what held the potential to be a more interesting treatment — the cultural aspect of the Jewish problem.

Review: Julius Evola’s Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, Part 2 – The Occidental Observer

[1] Thomas Sheehan, “Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist,” Social Research, Vol. 48, No. 1, (Spring 1981), 45-73.

[2] Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, “Apolitìa and Tradition in Julius Evola as Reaction to Nihilism,” European Review, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Ma/y 2014), 258 – 273; and “Evola’s interpretation of fascism and moral responsibility,” Patterns of Prejudice, 50:4-5, 478-494.

[3] Stéphane François, “The Nouvelle Droite and “Tradition””, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2014), 87-106.

[4] Franco Ferraresi, “Julius Evola : tradition, reaction, and the Radical Right,” European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 28:1 (May 1987), 107 – 151.

[5] Staudenmaier, Peter, “Racial Ideology between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Julius Evola and the Aryan Myth, 1933–43,” Journal of Contemporary History, 55(3) (2020), 473-491.

[6] I. Marcus, How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800-1500 (Princeton University Press, 2024), pp.2-18.

Rushton Vindicated: Intelligent People Learn to Walk Later, Just as He Predicted

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For those who are fascinated by what is sometimes called “Based Science” — science which fearlessly examines the empirical evidence no matter how “controversial” the findings might be — a breakthrough took place recently: “Rushton’s Paradox” was solved at last, using genomic data. To those who are not initiated, this may sound rather abstruse and academic, but it is massively important: It is a breakthrough.

The theory of one of the most “controversial” scientists ever to live has finally been proven correct: At the individual level, intelligence — the ability to solve cognitive problems — is associated with a slow Life History Strategy, i.e., developing more slowly because you are evolved to a more difficult and highly specific environment, in which you need a long “learning period” — a long childhood — to be taught how to navigate. The implications of this are enormous, but, before we explore them, let’s have a look at the broader theory.

Even though he’s been dead for 12 years, there are few social scientists more loathed by the Woke than J. Philippe Rushton (1943-2012). As I have discussed in my biography of him, J. Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective, the Canadian government tried to prosecute this British-born Canadian when, back in 1989, he presented his Differential-K model of racial differences at a conference. This model placed Blacks at one end of a spectrum and East Asians at the other, with Whites intermediate in terms of intelligence, psychopathic personality, age at puberty, interest in promiscuous sex over investment and nurture, and much else, but closer to East Asians.

In the resulting furore, students invaded Rushton’s department at the University of Western Ontario and scrawled “Racist Pig Lives Here” on his office door, the premier of Ontario declared that Rushton’s views were “morally offensive” to how people of his state think, newspaper cartoons portrayed Rushton in Ku Klux Klan robes, his lectures were invaded by protestors, his faculty dean tried to wreck his career with a politically-motivated “unsatisfactory” rating and he required a security escort while on campus. Even so, there was no legal case against him and, in 1995, he doubled-down, publishing Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective which set out his theory in depth.

According to Rushton, an r-strategy develops in an unstable yet easy environment. In such a situation, you could be wiped out at any moment, so you evolve to “live fast and die young.” You invest all your energy in mating—in order to have as many offspring as possible with as many partners as possible in the hope that some will survive. You invest very little energy in nurture, because such energy could easily go to waste. Any individual child could be killed at any moment.

This r-strategy is reflected in every aspect of your “life history”—you’re born younger (less developed), you reach developmental milestones younger, you go through puberty younger, lose your virginity younger, you age more quickly, you go through the menopause younger and you die younger. You also advertise your genetic quality as conspicuously as you can—as the end is always nigh—leading to large sexual characteristics, strong body odor, and so on. Rushton presented some of these data in Race, Evolution and Behavior and I added to them in my biography of him.

As the environment becomes more stable and also harsher, the carrying capacity for the species is reached. So, its members start competing more against each other to survive, moving towards a K-strategy. In such a harsh but predictable context, if you invest all your energy in mating then you may find that all of your offspring die. Hence, you have fewer offspring and fewer sexual partners but you invest more in them; you “nurture” them. There develops an arms-race where the species becomes increasingly adapted to the (predictable) ecology.

It does this by learning about the ecology and learning how to cooperate (bonding) and thus becoming higher in altruism, empathy and impulse control — and, perhaps most importantly, by becoming more intelligent. The result is that the offspring can learn about the environment and how to cooperate—and “life history speed” begins to slow down. Parents invest more energy in nurture of a (smaller number of) offspring and less energy in mating. They go for “quality over quantity.” With limited bio-energetic resources, secondary sexual characteristics also become smaller.

As they become more K-strategy, in a stable environment where they can trust that tomorrow will come, litters become smaller, offspring are born later, they develop more slowly, they go through puberty later (learning a great deal in their long childhood), they lose their virginity later, they age more slowly and, for genetic reasons, they die older, giving them more time to pass on their genes. Rushton showed that what he called the “three Big Races” occupy different positions on the r-K spectrum. Northeast Asians are the most K-evolved, Caucasians (a combination of Europeans, South Asians, Arabs and North Africans) are intermediate and Blacks are the most r-evolved.

Rushton’s Paradox was always that evidence could not be found that intelligence correlated with Life History Speed at the individual level, even though it did at the group level. This was so puzzling — and such a problem for the cleanness of Rushton’s model, that he may even have falsified data or otherwise manipulated his results to prove that such a relationship did exist, as I explored in J. Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective.

I also note there that, as appears to be the case with many genius or semi-genius (highly original) scientists, Rushton’s life evidenced a combination of a very high intelligence and fast Life History traits such as sub-clinical psychopathology [see F. Post, Creativity and Psychopathology: A Study of 291 World Famous Men, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1994]. This meant he didn’t care about offending people (which new ideas always do, as they challenge vested interests), and he was low in rule-following (so could think the unthinkable). Consistent with this, he was divorced three times, had extra-marital affairs, knocked his third wife about, had an illegitimate child by a relationship with a Black woman, dropped out of school and got a girl of about 15, and possibly younger, pregnant.

But if Rushton did falsify data, he needn’t have done so. A new study has proved him correct. The preprint “Genome-wide association meta-analysis of age at onset of walking” by Anna Gui and colleagues has presented a meta-analysis of age at onset of walking, using data on 70,560 European infants. It looked at the relationship between age of onset of walking and alleles that are associated, via very high educational attainment, with intelligence. It found that the age at which you start walking is positively correlated with polygenic scores for intelligence: Kids who are eventually more intelligent learn to walk later; their childhood is longer.

And as if Rushton — with his penchant for “controversy” — laughing from beyond the grave, even this has stirred things up. Researcher Emil Kirkegaard has noted that this new study was originally tweeted out by a mainstream academic. He then deleted the tweet stating: “Unfortunately, it has attracted many racist responses that abused the study to make ugly, racist claims.” There were no racist claims, but it did vindicate Rushton’s theory.

It also adds credence to an idea I have been toying with for quite a while. Why is it that, in advanced societies, intelligent people desire fewer children and why are they less religious than the less intelligent?

One possibility is that these are in-built instincts that are induced in our “evolutionary match” of high mortality salience and the desire to have children. As I explored in my book Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, we’ve been surrounded by high child mortality for most of our history. This is our “evolutionary match”: We desired many children because it was quite probably that many would die before adulthood. You would expect the more intelligent to be lower in “instinct” because solving problems involves rising above instinctive reactions and calmly and logically reasoning. It would follow that intelligent people would be more environmentally sensitive; they would be K-strategists, needing to be put on the correct road-map of life to adapt to a specific niche. If this didn’t happen — if they were in a mismatch — they’d become maladaptive, such as by not desiring children. So, the new finding is in line with this theory.

There may have been much to dislike about Rushton personally, but this is part of why he was a highly original thinker. With this new research, his grand theory has been vindicated.

 

Bright Future for Whites? A Young Sun Is Rising to Shine on the West

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“The West is doomed!” “France is finished!” “Britain is over!” I’ve never understood expressions of despair and defeat like those. They’re obviously self-indulgent and harmful things to say, so how could people with any common sense and self-control utter them? Unless those people aren’t what they pretend to be, of course. No genuine friend of the West should announce that “The West is doomed!” Or announce the same of any part of the West, whether they happen to live there or not. But it’s exactly what enemies of the West will like to say, while pretending to be friends.

Fortuna favors the brave

Defeatism has been a capital offence in times of war with very good reason. Saying what your enemy wants you to say is very obviously stupid and self-defeating. I have never felt despair about the future of the West myself, but I would never have expressed such despair even if I’d felt it. Feelings are not infallible guides to the future. But expressing one’s feelings to others can certainly alter their behavior, whether for the better or the worse. What one says or does now alters the future. And so a subjective feeling of despair can lead to the objective reality of defeat. But if negativity can breed defeat, then positivity can breed victory. As Vox Day says: “[R]elentless positivity of mind, the determined avoidance of negativity, and the refusal to live in fear are vital for the Christian. … Remember, the ancients’ idea that Fortuna personally favored some individuals and disfavored others wasn’t an invention ex nihilo, it was an observation.”

The Gates of Dawn (1900), Herbert James Draper

Genetics must play some role in the positivity of individuals like Vox Day, but genetics is not destiny. Whatever our genes predispose us to be, they don’t dictate our thoughts or control our choices. We can choose to be more positive and we can choose not to surrender to despair. And we can certainly choose not to express our subjective feelings of despair to others. But positivity is helped by good news. And I think that there is more and more good news offering hope to true friends of the West. I didn’t expect to see some of it expressed by the professional curmudgeon and pessimist John Derbyshire, so this section of his “April Diary” at VDare was a pleasant surprise:

Chatting the other day with Jared Taylor, [I found that] he reinforced an impression I’ve been getting — a happy impression.

Thirty years ago, said Jared, when he had started up American Renaissance and invited people to come together to discuss race realism and white advocacy, the people who’d responded to his call were mostly an older crowd, with a good mix of pop-eyed weirdos and cranks. His followers nowadays, he said, were much younger and more normal.

Just so. I see the same thing. Last month, March, I was invited to attend a gathering in New York City to hear Chris Rufo talk about his recent book. The gathering was of a regular dissident-right club that I’d never been aware of.

It was a big crowd; friendly, cheerful, lively, smart, and… young. Sitting there among the happy noise in the socializing period before Rufo spoke, I tried to estimate the median age of attendees. If it was over thirty, it wasn’t by much.

P.J. O’Rourke’s Babe Rule came to mind, too. P.J. wrote in regard to a demonstration against homelessness he’d attended that no social or political movement in the U.S.A. is going anywhere much unless it has a good component of attractive young women, which the homelessness demo didn’t [Among The Compassion Fascists, by P.J. O’Rourke, American Spectator, December 1989].

If P.J. got that right, my hosts there on the Lower East Side in March definitely have a bright future.

I hear similar things from like-thinking friends all over. There’s a new, fresh, normie National Conservatism coming up — even, I have it on good authority, among card-carrying Young Republicans! All strength to them; and a belated thanks to my March hosts at the Rufo event. (“DERB’S APRIL DIARY: [11 ITEMS!] Eclipse In Cleveland, Eclipse On Mars?; Middle East Disavowal; VDARE Conference; The Young Ones; ETC!!!!,” VDare, 1st April 2024)

Like a flourishing rose-bush on top of a trash-heap, positivity from John Derbyshire has a special power. He isn’t an optimistic or positive person, so I’m very glad to see him succumbing to the bright side. I’m also very glad to see the truth about race relations beginning to dawn in the mainstream right. This is from American Renaissance and F. Roger Devlin’s excellent review of Jeremy Carl’s The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart (2024):

Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, served as deputy assistant secretary of the interior under President Trump, and has been associated with the Hoover Institution. His other books have dealt with energy policy. In a chapter on religion, he describes himself as “an actively engaged Christian of Jewish descent.” That a writer with solid connections to “respectable conservatism” is publishing a book with “anti-white racism” in the subtitle is a sign of changing times. Moreover, the author does not try to tell us that the problem with hostility towards whites is merely “divisive” or supposedly incompatible with Martin Luther King’s “dream.” He states forthrightly that it leads to injustices against whites, and that whites must fight back.

As Mr. Carl writes, white Americans today “suffer from downward economic mobility, declining fertility, rising drug addiction and depression, and narrowing opportunities, all piled onto a false presumption of privilege.” Any vestigial advantages they may still derive from belonging to America’s historical majority are “informal and evanescent cultural legacies,” whereas “the discrimination they experience is . . . increasingly legal and formal.” […]

The endgame of the current system is “the expropriation of land, property, and other wealth from whites” and the institution of “a permanent regime of anti-white employment and legal discrimination.” As of now, he writes, “appeals to expropriation are usually indirect,” but over time they “will become more direct and in need of less justification as the political power of white Americans continues to decline.”

It is whites’ failure to organize in defense of our own interests that had made the anti-white regime possible. As Mr. Carl writes, “non-whites have organized and made powerful demands, while whites have focused on broad, gauzy appeals to . . . universal rights” that have proven “almost completely ineffective.” It is time for us to make strong demands.

As noted, we have looked here at only a few of the twelve realms of anti-white discrimination Mr. Carl discusses. The reader should get the book itself for the full story. I am unaware of any mainstream book on race published since American Renaissance was founded 34 years ago that pulls so few punches. (“The Respectable Right Discovers Anti-White Hostility,” F. Roger Devlin, American Renaissance, 10th May, 2024)

The publication of The Unprotected Class is a very positive sign. As Jeremy Clark himself says: “The environment is vastly freer than it was just a few years ago. To speak of anti-white racism is no longer universally taboo.” The left have been waging war on Whites and Western civilization for decades, but the “respectable right,” as Devlin calls them, have refused to even recognize the war, let alone take up arms to fight back. Now the respectable right are recognizing the war and the fight-back has started. As I described in “High Hope and Damnable Despair,” there are never any good reasons to despair. But there are always good reasons to feel hope. John Derbyshire and F. Roger Devlin have just supplied more of them.

Traditionalists of all countries, unite!

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Dugin is absolutely right. This is why so many on the dissident right support Russia in the current war:

Of course, each civilisation has its own traditional values. But today, all of them are under attack from one aggressive, intolerant, deceitful, and perverse civilisation, which wages a ruthless war against any tradition — against tradition as such. In such a situation, Putin’s Russia can openly declare itself the bearer of the opposite mission — to become the defender of tradition and normality, continuity and identity. …

We should not be shy, ashamed, or conceal this. The more confidently we embark on this path, the faster and more reliably our influence in the world will grow. Having chosen an orientation towards multipolarity, we must be consistent in this.

Traditionalists of all countries, unite!

by Alexander Dugin

Alexander Dugin asserts that President Putin’s inauguration marks a new stage, emphasising traditional values and multipolarity while rallying allies like China and India against Western hegemony.

The inauguration of President Putin marks a new stage in Russia’s history. Some lines from previous periods will surely continue. Some will reach a critical threshold. Some will be curtailed. But something new must also emerge.

I would like to draw attention to the ideological aspect, which could become a fundamental vector for Russia’s further development in the international context.

In our fierce confrontation with the West, teetering on the brink of nuclear conflict and a third world war, the problem of values is becoming increasingly apparent. The war in Ukraine is not merely a conflict of states with their quite rational national interests but a clash of civilisations, with all of them fiercely defending their value systems.

Today, it is already clear that Russia has decisively committed to defending traditional values and sees them as integral to the fundamental processes of strengthening its civilisational identity and geopolitical sovereignty. This is not just about the various interests of individual subjects within the same — Western — civilisation, as the escalating conflict between Russia and the collective West could have been interpreted until recently. It is now obvious that two value systems are clashing.

The modern collective West staunchly defends:

  • Absolute individualism;
  • LGBT and gender politics;
  • Cosmopolitanism;
  • Cancel culture;
  • Posthumanism;
  • Unrestricted migration;
  • Destruction of all forms of identity;
  • Critical race theory (according to which previously oppressed peoples have every right to oppress their former oppressors in turn);
  • Relativist and nihilistic postmodern philosophy.

The West ruthlessly censors its own history, bans books and artworks, and the US Congress is preparing to remove entire passages from the Holy Scriptures, allegedly offensive to certain groups of people based on ethnicity and religion. Moreover, the development of digital technologies and neural networks has raised the issue of transferring global governance from humanity to artificial intelligence — and several Western authors already hail this as an incredible success and the long-awaited arrival of the singularity.

In contrast to all this, Putin’s Russia offers an entirely different set of values, many of which are legally enshrined in Decree No. 809 of 9 November 2022. Russia firmly defends:

  • Collective identity against individualism;
  • Patriotism against cosmopolitanism;
  • Healthy family against the legalisation of perversions;
  • Religion against nihilism, materialism, and relativism;
  • Humanity against posthumanist experiments;
  • Organic identity against its dilution;
  • Historical truth against cancel culture.

There are two opposing orientations, moreover — two antagonistic ideologies and worldviews. Russia chooses tradition — the West, on the contrary, everything non-traditional and even anti-traditional.

This makes the conflict in Ukraine, where these two civilisations have clashed in a fierce decisive battle, much more than an ordinary conflict of interests. There is indeed a conflict of interests, but it is not the main point. The main point is that two models of humanity’s further development have entered into confrontation — the liberal, globalist, anti-traditional path of the modern West or the alternative, multipolar, polycentric path preserving tradition and traditional values, for which Russia is fighting.

It is time to note that a multipolar world, to which Russia declared its loyalty during the previous stage of Putin’s rule, only makes sense if we recognise each pole. Each civilisation (as represented in BRICS today) has the right to its identity, its tradition, and its value system. Multipolarity becomes meaningful and justified if we proceed from the plurality of existing cultures and recognise their right to preserve their identities and develop based on internal principles. This means that the poles of the multipolar world, unlike the globalist unipolar model, where Western values dominate as universal by default, follow Russia’s path to some extent but utilising their own — each of them different — traditional values.

We see this clearly in modern China. Not only does it reject globalism, liberalism, and global capitalism as dogma, retaining many features of the socialist system, but it increasingly turns to the eternal values of Chinese culture, reviving the political and social ethics of Confucius, which have inspired and organised society for thousands of years. It is no coincidence that one of the leading theories of international relations in modern China is the ancient idea of Tianxia, where China is thought of as the centre of the world system, with all other nations surrounding the Middle Kingdom on the periphery. China is its own absolute centre, open to the world, but strictly guarding its sovereignty, uniqueness, and originality.

Modern India (Bharat) is moving in the same direction, especially under Narendra Modi’s rule. Again, here the deep identity, Hindutva, dominates, reviving the foundations of the ancient Vedic culture, religion, philosophy, and social structure.

The Islamic world even more categorically rejects the value system of the collective West, which is in no way compatible with Islamic laws, rules, and regulations. In this case, the emphasis is on tradition.

African nations are also moving in this direction, entering a new round of decolonisation — this time of consciousness, culture, and mindset. More and more African thinkers, politicians, and public figures are turning to the origins of their indigenous cultures.

Latin America, too, is gradually discovering these new horizons of traditionalism, religion, and cultural roots, increasingly coming into direct conflict with US and collective Western policies. The peculiarity of Latin America is that the anti-colonial struggle was long carried out mainly under leftist slogans. The situation is now changing: the left is discovering the traditional and conservative roots of their struggle (for example, in liberation theology, where the Catholic factor dominates), and the conservative anti-colonial front is growing (for example, the theology of the people).

But so far, none of the civilisations oriented towards multipolarity and preferring tradition has entered into direct armed conflict with the West, except for Russia. Many are hesitating, waiting for the outcome of this dramatic confrontation. Although most of humanity potentially rejects the hegemony of the West and its value systems, no one besides us is ready to enter into direct confrontation with it yet.

This gives Russia a unique opportunity to lead the global conservative turn. The time has come to openly declare that Russia is fighting against Western civilisation’s claim to the universality of its values and stands entirely and wholly for tradition, both its own (Russian and Orthodox) and all others. For they too face inevitable destruction if globalism triumphs and Western hegemony persists.

All civilisations of the world are conservative; this constitutes their identity. And they are becoming increasingly aware of this. Only the postmodern West has decided to radically break with its classical Christian roots and has begun to build a culture of degeneration, perversion, pathology, and the technical replacement of humans with post-human organisms (from AI to cyborgs, chimaeras, and genetically engineered products). Even within the West, a significant part of society rejects this path and increasingly and vehemently opposes the course of the ruling postmodern liberal elites towards the final abolition of the cultural-historical identity of Western societies themselves.

In Putin’s new presidential term, it would be quite logical to proclaim the protection of tradition — in Russia and worldwide, including the West — as his main ideological mission. Vladimir Putin is already seen by humanity as a great leader playing this role, heroically resisting Western hegemony. Now is the time to declare Russia’s global mission, consisting of protecting civilisations and their traditional values. Enough of playing along with the West and using its strategies, terms, protocols, and criteria. Civilisational sovereignty consists of each nation having the full right to accept and reject any external directives and to develop in its own unique way, regardless of someone else’s dissatisfaction.

Recently, on 7 May, the British newspaper The Mirror declared ten words from President Putin’s inauguration speech a ‘chilling threat to the West’. These words were: ‘The destiny of Russia will be determined by ourselves only.’ Any hint of sovereignty is perceived by the West as a declaration of war. Russia has embraced this and is ready to support all those who will stand as decisively for their sovereignty as it does.

Of course, each civilisation has its own traditional values. But today, all of them are under attack from one aggressive, intolerant, deceitful, and perverse civilisation, which wages a ruthless war against any tradition — against tradition as such. In such a situation, Putin’s Russia can openly declare itself the bearer of the opposite mission — to become the defender of tradition and normality, continuity and identity.

In the 20th century, Russia’s influence in the world was primarily based on the leftist movement. But today, it has gradually faded away — either absorbed by liberalism or exhausted itself (with rare exceptions, often allied with anti-colonial conservative trends). Now it is time to bet on conservatives and supporters of civilisational identities. And so, a new slogan is born: Traditionalists of all countries, unite!

We should not be shy, ashamed, or conceal this. The more confidently we embark on this path, the faster and more reliably our influence in the world will grow. Having chosen an orientation towards multipolarity, we must be consistent in this.

Everyone already considers Putin a key figure in the conservative revival. It is time to proclaim this openly. Criticism from the West is inevitable in any case, but now the decisive factors in relations with it are entirely different. And our allies — actual and potential — will support Russia with new vigour. They will clearly understand our far-reaching goals and objectives. They will trust us and, without any doubt or hesitation, begin to build a fair and balanced world together with us in the interests of greater humanity.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)

Author’s Commentary on “Destination Unknown: Can You Feel the Resistance?”

/in , /by

“Destination Unknown: Can You Feel the Resistance?” carries both maritime and musical motifs. This short article explains some of the euphemisms, metaphors, symbolism and messaging of the fictional story’s details. While much if it may seem confusing, twisted or odd, that is the author’s intent in stressing the chaotic world we currently live in. Much of our culture today is entirely nonsensical. And so many with a keen eye for reality these days wonder why so few can see what is happening, what is going down (as the ship is similarly going down).

The Vikings dominated the European continent and high seas prior to Christianity taking firm hold of its people’s religious and spiritual direction. “The West” is the larger ship that represents the greater civilization of the European peoples and their colonial nations around the world since the demise of the Vikings, roughly the last thousand years as described by Oswald Spengler’s four seasons—spring, summer, fall and Winter—of our European culture. Perhaps this story will spur the great seafarers (metaphorically) of our time to begin building new ships and boats so as to regain command of our own Destiny as opposed to having our vessels and people commanded by forces hostile to our interests, those of Orange Star and Clown World who are clearly sinking our fleet. In this regard, the West obviously contained many flaws that were consistently exploitable. Hopefully this euphemistic storyline will inspire any future Heroes (Yockey liked this term) to begin engineering our more seaworthy boats and ships that could result in a stronger and more efficient fleet, much like we have seen new materials and technology vastly improve upon today’s transportation vehicles.

Music has been credited to initiating peaceful revolutions in some countries like the Baltics’ resistance against the Soviet Union/communism and advocating for nationalism. Apparently their choirs sang themselves into freedom! Music culture has also been philosophically critiqued, again by Spengler, as a measure of a culture’s season and artful spirit. The different types of music referenced in the author’s story, the musicians themselves, and the lyrics symbolically tell a story on its own. Reading history of the 1930s shows how fearful many Europeans were of the new “Jazz” from America that was penetrating the old continent. So should there be concern for us today on where music is now going and how little control our own musical talent has in steering it? The music motif, after the reader listens to the samples linked in the storyline, also expresses a critique on the modern technological world, compares it to the serene song at the story’s end, and hopes that the new maritime fleet will include musical composers that will entertain our people with aural sensations akin to the Ride of the Valkyries, or as soothing as Edward Grieg’s Norwegian folk classic, Morning. Can music bring us salvation? Now for some symbolism on the bands and songs:

The band King Crimson of the time frame featured (1982) consisted of Robert Fripp, Bill Bruford, Adrian Belew, and Tony Levin (two Brits and two Americans, with one of the Americans being a highly liked and respected Jewish musician and the non-Jewish American from Kentucky — the South — where the South has always been over-represented in our military: Thank you Southerners!) This band is comprised of immensely talented individuals, but the “progressive rock” (also known as “art rock”) usually only appealed to the fans of esoteric instrumental music. These are the same fans that might appreciate Wagner’s symphonic music today, but are culturally chained to the product of the modern music industry. Just as the fans of King Crimson music are considered to be on the fringes of popular music, it is men like Erik who appreciate historical research and esoteric (or non-mainstream) writings that find themselves on the fringes of society for the educated viewpoints they hold. This doesn’t make them crazy (or lunatics, as the story would later reveal), but places them statistically in the one percent of the far-right bell curve, whether analyzing musical tastes or political opinions.

The allies of the West during WWII mainly consisted of the British and the Americans, with considerable warm-nudging influence by the Jewish community of America (as suggested in a famous 1939 Des Moines speech by Lindbergh, who is mentioned in the story). These three elements are found in the composition of King Crimson. In the story we find a link to a video clip where King Crimson is playing Munich (1982), the city that launched the resistance to Jewish internationalist influence in the West. The first song of this videotaped concert is “Waiting Man,” and two interpretations found on the internet as to its meaning are (1) The song is from the point of view of a person going to a funeral and then coming home. Home is forever changed by the loss, but retains its integrity. What is he waiting for? What we all wait for after losing a loved one; their return. Something irrational and impossible, yet what we wait for all the same as we grieve; OR (2) It seems pretty obvious to what this song’s about. I think it’s about a guy who falls in love with a girl, the girl goes off to a new (possibly better looking, richer, but not nicer) guy, and the waiting man knows that their relationship will end, so he just sits and waits for her to come back to him. Really a deep and touching song. The story’s author leans towards the first interpretation regarding Western Man returning home. But strangely enough, the opening of Waiting Man sounds like drum beats and melodies more attune to an African vibe, symbolizing the musical and even cultural trends of our last seven decades or more in the West. Is he returning to his home in the West from his modern Africanized cultural enrichment? Did King Crimson re-conquer Germany and the West with its Americanized modern music and all it entails?

The second featured song from King Crimson is Elephant Talk, which alphabetically presents the myriad types of talk we receive in our daily lives. While effective communication are important in our lives, we are unnecessarily inundated with “too much talk” (as the song emphasizes), and at this point in our civilization the bicker bicker bicker, the commentary, controversy, criticisms, and double talk are simply unhealthy for us all. Or so this author suggests. We are overwhelmed with it, and King Crimson’s song suggests the absurdity of what we have grown to tolerate! The guitar solos of the band might sound incredible to the one percent of listeners, but to the majority — especially those women who largely look at music for its danceable aspects — the unique electric guitar effects from Adrien Belew represent noise to ears of the masses, noise that might as well be coming from an elephant, and if an elephant were in the room nobody would recognize it today because the masses only absorb what the system emphasizes. And they don’t want you to notice the big elephant, and you are not allowed in polite society to notice or analyze patterns. And patterns are a great part of King Crimson’s songs, especially the tape-looping and complex Frippertronics of guitar player Robert Fripp. The average music listener in the West could never appreciate Fripp’s guitar work, but the protagonist Erik’s mind is wired with more critical and insightful senses, and watching a King Crimson concert from the front row could equal the fascination he might find in discovering the patterns contained in the books of the web page www.Samisdat.in as found linked in the story. Finally regarding King Crimson music, the author finds it extremely technically advanced and modern for its time period of the 1980s, and we are heading towards technical complexities that will inevitably cause us all profound problems, as great as those constructed by Orange Star/Clown World, and maybe together with them, just as King Crimson was probably under the sway of record-company management.

Red Rider’s Lunatic Fringe signals the messaging mastery of the music and entertainment industry, in that Erik never paid much attention to the lyrics of the song, but loved it his entire life for the rock-styled instrumental elements, just as he probably would enjoy King Crimson purely for the instrumental works while caring little at all for the lyrics. Not only does he hear the introductory slide guitar sounds three times, but the wolf-howling is repeated three times for reasons unknown. There is an inner-wolf residing in all of us of the West, but for now Westerners are droning in repetitive manner to the tunes of their media masters, socially engineered by Orange Star and media controlled by Clown World. Even Erik, with his razor-sharp mind and experience, falls prey to the collective drum beat found in the song.

Lunatic Fringe was written as political commentary (and the word “commentary” being found in the song “Elephant Talk”) that chooses a side that most likely supports those who are destroying the lives of university anti-genocide protestors these days (in 2024), because Orange Star can do no wrong and America is the land of the free. The 2021 interview of the songwriter linked in the article clearly indicates his influences, those being his readings of a Swedish historian, and a particular girlfriend. The author of the story ponders if the songwriter might have had different feelings if he knew of another Swede, Count Folke Bernadotte and the terrorists that assassinated him during his negotiating efforts for Middle East peace after having saved thousands of prisoners from WWII prisoner camps? Did the songwriter’s girlfriend even know about the Count —  few Americans or Canadians ever heard of him because our history is consolidated into a neat little package of approved content suitable for a sixth grader.

Lunatic Fringe is a song that incites hatred against the well-learned, history-revisionists or history aficionados, and hatred for the reader with the critical eye and mind that can score a perfect 1600 on an SAT like Ron Unz did as a high school junior. The lyrics are intended to instill fear in anyone considering to think outside the Orange Star/Clown World box, because they’re on to them now and “can hear you coming.” The lyrics “this is open season, but you won’t get too far” seem to at least tacitly condone the vigilante violence and terrorism so prevalent with the anarchists of today and witnessed a few years ago across our nation. While the songwriter uses the phrase “your final solution” as an obvious reference to WWII villainy understood by all the masses in their Western imperial education, the author of the story suggests that if left unchecked, the final genocide will be of the masses in the West themselves, and what we really need is a “final resistance” (or “waking up”) as a defensive and peaceful measure to this slow-going and insidious attack (as many these days compare to boiling frogs very slowly in a pot).

The name of the lifeboat, “The Savior,” and its listing to the left while it is sinking is an overt reference to how Christianity has morphed sharply in favor of leftist politics, while the right-wing flavor of evangelical Christians favors an end-times eschatological narrative to bring back their savior once and for all. Both of these religious paths are, in the author’s view, detrimental to nationalism and the future of “The West,” and probably are contributing to its sinking. But if it all needs to sink in order to start fresh, that nightmare is becoming more plausible for each new generation.

The passengers on the lifeboat are all like NPCs — non-player characters (such as in a video game) — of the famous internet meme and image included with the story, in that it is tremendously difficult to express views outside what is approved by Orange Star and propagandized by Clown World. To do so would incur ostracism or worse, and maybe even hostility from loved ones who find the repetitive pattern recognitions as representing a rather pessimistic attitude towards the comfortable lives we live today (compared to that of our past). And honestly, most people invest too much of their time working to- make-ends-meet to begin a truth-seeking journey that exposes uncomfortable facts. The sum total of our masses reflects the repetitive picture of the NPCs, since the depths of critical investigation fall statistically to the one percenters of society with exceptionally critical and curious minds.

Erik’s noticing the same behavior in the other lifeboats is comparable to the decline of all Western nations simultaneously while “The West,” the ship representing the greater civilization of European ancestry, is almost sunk as a larger collective. The passengers having their backs to “The West” foreshadows the paragraph that exposes the true attack on America’s Navy ship USS Liberty in 1967, where even lifeboats were strafed by Israeli fighter jets, 34 servicemen were killed and 174 wounded — and hardly anybody knows! This is well concealed from the general public, even Navy personnel, by Orange Star and Clown World and off limits for discussion. The ultimate betrayal capping this off is the downplaying of the Medal of Honor ceremony for its skipper, Captain William McGonagle, and by patriotic museums like the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center (Chattanooga, TN) ignoring requests to honor today’s Liberty survivors. The masses represented in the lifeboat also are betraying the West by reinforcing the unwritten ban on having pride in their European heritage and people, the only people and interests one is not permitted to advocate for today — thanks to Orange Star. Just ask former congressman Steve King and look into his inability to speak positively about Western Civilization without becoming snared in a media trap or reprimanded by his congressional peers (and ultimately removed from his job). This furthers the point made in the author’s storyline that these NPC passengers have their back facing to “The West.”

The mojitos reference points to our addiction and abuse of alcohol, and how it tends to motivate our regular activities and behaviors, to the point that we can’t function in society without it. Henry Ford had a great deal to say about control of the liquor trade in America. But that’s unauthorized reading. The fact that the mojito is a Caribbean drink emphasizes our drift into the culture of the islands like Jamaica. Consider the impact of reggae on Western culture. Has the laid back, pot-promoting music scene been all positive on Western man? Don’t we all see a slow drift into a drug culture that has the entire population entranced and dysfunctional?

The story ends with Erik waking up to the Nordic folk song with natural orchestral instrumentation — one that everyone associates with “the Morning” as the song title indicates. The “Morning Song” by Grieg signals that it is a new day, and perhaps it signals a return to his roots after the noise of the post-modern-civilization Decline of The West (as Oswald Spengler might suggest): The great beginnings of a new culture, but with our same people just as it was the same Vikings who became Christians. Can we (once again) become who we are?

As the ending dedication states, we are all in the same boat that is largely under the command of the Orange Star and Clown World international corporations (representing social engineering and entertainment/mass media respectively), and so the maritime euphemism encompasses this point that these entities have global control. And for today’s political circumstances it further asserts that we are all Gazans. Today’s political news misrepresent “the resistance” just as the song Lunatic Fringe does in its lyrics. Few realize how long ago this all began, but this author’s article on 1922 gives some clues. Will the real, authentic “resistance” please stand up!