Religions and Wisdoms are the First Guarantee of Freedom and Peace

A former student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, Henri Hude was Professor of Philosophy at the French Saint-Cyr Military Academy. (Saint-Cyr). His latest book, Philosophie de la guerre (Philosophy of War), is a call for religions to take a philosophical and spiritual leap forward in building peace for the world of tomorrow.

[This interview was conducted by Omnes Magazine, through whose kind generosity we are able to bring you this English version].

Omnes Magazine (OM): Faced with the risk of total war, can we sum up your approach in your latest book, Philosophie de la guerre, by saying that religions are the solution, not the problem, to achieving universal peace?

Henri Hude (HH): Total war requires the use of all available means. Today, it would lead to the destruction of the human race, thanks to technical progress. The terrifying possibility of such destruction gives rise to the project of eliminating war as a condition for the survival of humankind. But war is a duel between several powers. So, to eliminate war radically, there is the need to institute a single World Power, a universal Leviathan, endowed with unlimited power.

Henri Hude.

But plurality can always be reborn: through secession, revolution, mafias, terrorism and so on. To make the world safe, there is the call to destroy all powers other than that of the Leviathan. Not only must we put an end to the plurality of political and social powers, but we must also destroy all other powers: spiritual, intellectual and moral. We are far beyond a simple project of universal imperialism. It is about supermen dominating subhumans. This Orwellian-Nazi project is so monstrous that it has a paradoxical consequence. The universal Leviathan becomes common enemy number 1 of all nations, religions and wisdoms. Previously, these were often at war or in tension. Now, thanks to the Leviathan, they are allies, friends, perhaps. The Leviathan is incapable of guaranteeing peace, but his monstrosity, now forever a permanent possibility, guarantees the lasting alliance of former enemies. Religions and wisdoms are the primary guarantee of freedom and peace. This is another world.

OM: The Holy See’s diplomacy seeks to establish a solid dialogue with Islam in order to build “bridges.” In recent history, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran worked to this end by visiting Saudi Arabia, a first for a Holy See diplomat of such rank. In 2019, the emblematic meeting between Pope Francis and Ahmed Al-Tayeb, Imam of the Al-Azhar mosque, the most important Sunni institution in the Middle East, also marked a further step in this rapprochement (not to mention the successive trip to Bahrain). Do you think this diplomatic policy is a step in the right direction?

HH: I think so, because it is part of this logic of peace through an anti-Leviathan alliance. For who is the Leviathan? Certainly, to become the Leviathan is forever the temptation of every power in this world. The Leviathan is therefore first and foremost a fundamental concept of political science. But it also has a terrible application in the political and cultural choices made by Western elites, especially Anglo-Saxon ones. The Woke is a machine for manufacturing sub-humans. Democracy is transformed into plutocracy, freedom of the press into propaganda, the economy into a casino, the liberal state into a police state, and so on. Such imperialism is both odious and dysfunctional. It has no chance of success, except in the old, more controlled Western countries—and even then… The Pope is right to prepare for the future.

As far as Muslims in particular are concerned, the Leviathan’s strategy is to push the most violent and sectarian everywhere, who are its useful idiots, or its stipendiary agents, in order to divide and rule. Muslim religious leaders, who are as intelligent as the Pope, know this very well. Political leaders know it, too. See how they are taking advantage of NATO’s failures in Ukraine to take their freedom from the Leviathan. It is not at all a question of creating a single syncretic religion, because cheap relativism is the first principle of the sub-human culture that the Leviathan wants to inject into everyone in order to dominate everything dictatorially. It is all about finding a modus vivendi. It is about friendship and friendly conversation between people who are sincerely seeking God, not pseudo “interfaith dialogue” between modernist, relativist clerics or intellectual laymen, guilt-ridden to the hilt by the Leviathan.

OM: In the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, do the links between the Patriarch of Moscow and the authorities, or similar links in Ukraine and internal religions, make it almost impossible for religions to join forces to build peace?

HH: If you want to criticize others, you have to start by putting your own house in order. We might ask ourselves, for example, if we French Catholics do not have an ambiguous relationship with political power. In the face of Woke dogmatism, the canonization of the culture of death, invasive authoritarianism, servility to the Leviathan, the march to world war, we remain as if KO standing. Manipulated and/or careerist, we sometimes wade into guilt, asking forgiveness for existing in the public sphere.

If the Woke culture were to be universally imposed, it would be the loss of all souls and the end of all decent civilization. Resistance to the imposition of Woke culture can be a just cause of war. That is what the whole world thinks, except the West, and that is why Western soft power is evaporating so fast. This is without prejudice to the justice due to Ukraine and charity among Catholics.

OM: Is violence inherent to Islam?

HH: I would like to ask you, is cowardice inherent to Christianity? Christ said he had not come to bring peace on earth, but division. He also said that he spewed out the lukewarm. In many a Sunday sermon, there would be nothing to change if we replaced the word “God” with “Teddy Bear.”

In his book, Ecumenical Jihad, Peter Kreeft (pp. 41-42) writes: “…it took a Muslim student in my class at Boston College to berate the Catholics for taking down their crucifixes. ‘We don’t have images of that man, as you do,’ he said, ‘but if we did, we would never take them down, even if someone tried to force us to. We revere that man, and we would die for his honor. But you are so ashamed of him that you take him down from your walls. You are more afraid of what his enemies might think if you kept your crucifixes up than of what he might think if you took them down. So I think we are better Christians than you are.’”

We call blushing for Christ respect for freedom. We believe we have opened up to the world, when in fact we have abdicated all evangelical freedom. We believe we are superior to our elders, when all we are doing is participating in this lamentable evolution, which Solzhenitsyn called the “decline of courage.” To be a Christian, you must first not be a sub-human. And in order not to be sub-human, you have to be capable of resisting the Leviathan. If need be, by spilling his blood. Bismarck put thirty bishops in prison, and in the end had to abandon the Kulturkampf.

OM: Ten years ago, Pope Francis said: “True Islam and a proper interpretation of the Koran are opposed to all violence.” This phrase continues to provoke debate and divide Islamologists and theologians. What did Francis mean?

HH: I do not know what the Pope meant. The expressions “true Islam” and “proper interpretation” pose formidable problems, so the phrase can take on very different meanings. In the absence of precision, there is no way of knowing. The philosopher Rémi Brague, who knows the subject admirably, has just written a book entitled, Sur l’Islam, in which he displays a truly confounding erudition. He believes he must interpret the sentence as if the Pope were speaking as a historian of ideas. He proves that, if this were the case, this assertion would be wrong. But I do not think the Pope is speaking as a historian of ideas. (In any case, these are subjects to which the Petrine charism of infallibility does not apply).

OM: Should we understand the Pope’s statement as primarily political, confronting Muslim authorities with their contradictions and responsibilities, and inviting them to join him in building a world of peace?

HH: The Pope is no more Machiavellian than he is ignorant. In truth, we need to distinguish between force and violence. Violence is the illegitimate use of force. All the great religions and wisdoms are opposed to all violence, but none is opposed to all use of force. Every society has the right to self-defense. If the use of armed force were morally forbidden to any society in all circumstances, it would be morally obligatory to endure any aggression, by anyone, for any purpose. In other words, it would be morally obligatory to obey even those perverts who would destroy every moral principle. Societies therefore have a right, and sometimes a duty, to self-defense, armed if necessary. Some abusers understand no language but force. So, you draw a red line on the ground in front of them. “This line means that I would rather risk my life and suffer than undergo what you want to impose on me. If, therefore, you transgress this line, you will have to risk your life and suffer.” If you are incapable of this behavior, you are good for slavery.

Featured: The Return of the Crusader, by Karl Friedrich Lessing; painted in 1835.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolution

Patrice Gueniffey is a French historican whose field is Napoleonic studies and the French Revolution. He has published several important books, including, Bonaparte: 1769–1802. He sits down with Christophe et Élisabeth Geffroy of La Nef magazine to discuss the connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, in that the latter carried out a “hold-up” on the Enlightenment. This interview comes through the kind courtesy of La Nef.

Christophe et Élisabeth Geffroy (C&E): What are the main ideas of the Enlightenment?

Patrice Gueniffey (PG): To enumerate them would be to draw up a sort of Prévert inventory, for the activities of the Enlightenment extended to all areas of moral, political and social life. From tolerance to freedom of expression, from the question of education to that of inequality, from the problem of property to political forms, from religious questions to the reform of the penal system and the abolition of slavery, nothing escaped them.

C&E: In what way is the Enlightenment not a homogeneous movement, and what ultimately unites it?

PG: The range of issues addressed is so broad that there is no doctrinal homogeneity that would allow us to consider the Enlightenment as a kind of intellectual party with a doctrine. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau and, last but not least, Condorcet, are not different names for the same thinker. Their divergences, and often their oppositions, in every field, testify to the infinite diversity of what we have come to call the “Enlightenment.”

Patrice Gueniffey © Bruno Klein.

However, they do have one thing in common, which Kant defined very precisely in What is Enlightenment? (1784): “the public use of reason in all things.” This was a revolutionary formulation, since from then on, the most established authorities and venerable institutions would be open to free scrutiny, questioning their foundations and legitimacy. The Enlightenment separated truth and authority.

They invented nothing. They were a continuation of the scientific revolution which, from the end of the 15th century, developing in the 16th and triumphing in the 17th, overthrew medieval science, which found in Revelation the means to understand and explain natural phenomena. At least since Galileo, rational observation replaced the “lights” of Christian science. What astronomers, physicists, chemists and botanists had achieved since the early modern era in the study of the physical universe or the animal kingdom, philosophers were to extend to the realm of social and moral life. “Social science” was born, even if it was not until decades later that Abbé Sieyès gave it this name, thus marking its dependence on the natural sciences, adopting the latter’s methods, based on observation and then the reduction of reality to the laws that affect it, and adding to them the idea that, having discovered the laws that “affect” man in society, it would be possible to reorganize the world on fairer foundations.

Of course, not all the philosophers associated with the Enlightenment followed this path in its entirety. Montesquieu could not be considered an advocate of the “complete regeneration” of society, and while Rousseau thought about it, he stopped short of the consequences of such an undertaking. It would take Condorcet to envisage the complete regeneration of what existed, but Condorcet belonged to the French Revolution. The last representative of the Enlightenment was not the most representative of a movement that placed its hopes more often in enlightened despotism and English-style parliamentary monarchy than in democracy or republicanism.

C&E: What influence did the Enlightenment have on the Revolution? Is the Revolution the daughter of the Enlightenment?

PG: The philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment is certainly to be found in the Revolution—it inspired the establishment of representative government; it was directly behind the reform of judicial procedure; it led to the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of the Jews, and inspired all those concerned with widening access to education. This legacy is also to be found in the French Civil Code, the drafting of which began in 1793 and was completed in 1804.

Where the influence of the Enlightenment is most marked is in the policy of reforming society and the State, to which the Revolution gave a powerful impetus between two political upheavals, but which it did not inaugurate. For the monarchy, at least since the reign of Louis XV, is no stranger to the spirit of reform. There was no shortage of ministers imbued with Enlightenment ideas in the royal entourage, and if reforms did not always come to fruition, it was because the weakness of power prevented them, just as the repeated upheavals of the revolutionary period paralyzed many projects. On the eve of 1789, many reforms had been initiated or planned.

The Revolution carried out a sort of “hold-up” on the Enlightenment. It confiscated it even though its last surviving representatives were reluctant to see the continuation of a political enterprise whose violence had always been very alien to them: Abbé Raynal condemned the Revolution as early as 1791; Fontanes preferred to join the counter-revolutionary camp; and Condorcet, after Chamfort, committed suicide when he realized that the Revolution, whose advent he had hailed, had finally turned against the ideals of the Enlightenment.

In 1789, legitimacy remained on the side of the Ancien Régime. No doubt its religious justification had become a fragile title, but the established order remained strong in its roots in time—history and tradition were on its side. The revolutionaries could not oppose another history to the one to which the thousand-year-old monarchy was boundd. They opposed history with philosophy, and tradition with principles that were independent of all circumstances and superior to all traditions. Human rights—identified with the legacy of the Enlightenment—against the tradition to which the Ancien Regime claimed to belong. The battle was unequal, but not in the way the defenders of the established order thought. The cooking pot was not what it seemed, and the Ancien Régime collapsed.

At the same time, the face of the Enlightenment changed. It became a kind of preface to the Revolution, and was reduced to the most radical, and specifically French, currents that had existed within it. For there is a French singularity in this respect. Nowhere else was the Enlightenment—a European phenomenon before it was a national one—so violently anti-religious as in France. At least, nowhere else than in France were so many philosophers, in Voltaire’s wake, so hostile to the Church and even to Christianity as such. Neither in Germany, nor in Italy, nor, a fortiori, in England, did they believe that to put an end to injustice it was necessary to wipe the slate clean, destroy institutions, customs and usages, and even give birth to a new man—in short, to start history all over again from a blank page. This ambition belongs less to the Enlightenment than to French history. Should we blame Gallicanism, which, by making the Church subservient to the State, ended up compromising religion? Should we blame absolutism, which, by reserving a monopoly on public debate, allowed writers and philosophers to discuss everything without ever having to worry about the consequences of their theories, let alone their practicability? No doubt.

C&E: Did the Revolution betray the Enlightenment by following its course towards the Terror, or was this aspect of the Revolution itself inscribed in the “genes” of the Enlightenment?

PG: The Terror: Rousseau’s fault or the fault of circumstances? The debate is long-standing and never-ending. There is no doubt that the philosophical “artificialism” of the Enlightenment contributed to imagining society, and its population, as a field of experimentation

In the political discourse, or rather in the political speculations, of the eighteenth century, there was an absence of any sense of reality that would prove very dangerous once we moved from theory to practice.

That said, we cannot deny the role played by circumstances, by the sudden and brutal collapse of any authority capable of imposing compromise or even repression; nor the role, too often overlooked, of passions that had nothing to do with philosophy; nor, finally, that of the legacy of absolutism which, beyond the great break of 1789, was to be found in post-revolutionary France—the cult of unity, even unanimity, the assimilation of opposition and dissent, the centrality of the State and the religion of administration, the rejection of all local autonomy and all independence of society from those who govern it—in short, old French tropisms, which became more pronounced after the Wars of Religion. This is not a legacy of the Enlightenment. In many respects, the Enlightenment was the very antithesis of it.

Featured: Taking of the Tuileries, Court of the Carrousel, 10th August 1792, by Jean Duplessis-Bertaux; painted in 1793.

Overcoming the Cage of Civilization: Transgression as Freedom

The recent riots in France served once again to highlight the continuing iterations of chaos that are the consequence of the agendas of the Western ruling class.

French philosopher, Henri Hude, recently sat down with Rodolfo Casadei of Tempi magazine in Milan, to discuss the ramifications for ordinary people living in a society made deeply hostile. This interview comes to us through the kind courtesy of Tempi.

Rodolfo Casadei (RC): What is the cause of the riots that swept through France between June 27 and July 3, 2023, after the killing of Nahel Merzouk? Some say French police brutality. Some say social inequality and the lack of opportunities for young people in the banlieues. Others, like Francophone intellectual Mathieu Bock-Coté, say the cause is the “identity rift” produced by massive immigration that structurally cannot be integrated. Still others denounce a misguided integration policy incapable of offering strong values. Which of these answers convinces you most?

Henri Hude (HH): The four hypotheses you make are not mutually exclusive. Regarding police brutality, one must distinguish objective brutality from subjective feelings of brutality. Objectively, the French police were much more brutal to the Yellow Vests than to the youth in the banlieues. If we ask, “how many people lost an eye in a week of rioting?” the answer is “zero.” The average, at the height of the Yellow Vest demonstrations, was 1.5 per day, although their violence was incomparably less. If, therefore, the brutality was objectively the same, and proportionate to the threat, we would have had dozens of blinded eyes (in the Nahel riots). Subjectively, it is different. This kind of gap between the objective and the subjective is a phenomenon frequently observed by sociologists. In the present case, the reason for the gap is that the Yellow Vests were not questioning the legitimacy of the state and the police. Public force, even excessive and disproportionate force, remained essentially a legitimate force, which was only blamed for abuses. In the banlieues, force is immediately perceived as violence because the state has lost its legitimacy. Hence a hypersensitivity to the slightest use of force, or to the simple request for papers. The first hypothesis therefore is not to be discarded, but it is not sufficient.

Henri Hude.

Regarding inequality and the lack of prospects, the hypothesis is valid but not specific. It would explain as much the Yellow Vest movement or the protest against pension reform as the riots in the banlieues. It is not only the young children of immigrants, but the whole youth that somehow shares the same sentiment. It is a sentiment grounded in reality. The social democratic pact has been broken by the globalization of the economy, and it is impossible to reestablish it or replace it with something else. It is impossible to see how to get out of it. The current marasmus is not sustainable, but it is perfectly in line with the principles of the dominant postmodern culture. Inequality is lower in France than in the United Kingdom or the United States, countries we model ourselves after and systematically align ourselves with. France lives far above its means by printing money and going into endless debt. For the moment we can still spend without doing the math. When the system stalls and we need to return to reality, there will be Revolution. What we have today is nothing but the “Flour Wars” that preceded the French Revolution.

As far as integration policies are concerned, I think that these young people are, unfortunately, much more integrated to the current French culture than people say. They are integrated to the culture of the arbitrary freedom of the deified individual, thanks to an integration policy that works perfectly. We hear the Minister of Justice scolding parents for not exercising their authority, when all politics for decades has organized the destruction of authority and the family! With the family out of the picture, that left the school. Hegemonized by pedagogical leftism, it became a model of an ideal society: without authority, without power, without discipline, without tradition. It perfectly fulfilled its mission to impose and transmit a culture whose result is complete intellectual and moral anarchy. This postmodern culture has a perfectly clear ideological function: it justifies the economic arbitrariness of neoliberal elites and protects them by injecting into the people an impotence to act rationally, organize and decide. It should only be added that it is not the bureaucrat-class that is doing so much harm to the people. It has been content to take advantage of the absurdities, especially pedagogical ones, invented by a “social-traitors” left that, having closed any historical horizon of emancipation outside of increasingly monstrous sexual extravaganzas, retreats into its neurosis and claims to retreat the people into it. Let’s say that postmodern pedagogues are subjectively at the service of their egalitarian neuroses and objectively at the service of monstrous inequality.

Talking about the identity rift brings us closer to the most important issue, but we need to understand it well. Every society needs a common substantive culture to make strong decisions of general interest. In France there were two, Catholicism and the Enlightenment. They clashed, but both were serious and universalist. Both now have been marginalized for the benefit of neoliberal, libertarian arbitrariness and its ghosts. The “identity-rift” lies here, between two strong, serious, tested cultures and the great absurdity, the great nothingness of the irrational individual living in his bubble, immoral and moralistic, anarcho-Orwellian.

In the absence of a common substantive culture, we need a common political culture that enables a modus vivendi among substantive cultures. Secularism was intended to be something like that. But to tell the truth, in France it was rather a way of establishing the Enlightenment as the state religion of the Republic, at the expense of Catholicism. But some accommodation existed. Having become postmodern (in the rest of the world more generically), secularism no longer holds back as it used to have the decency to do. A purported formalist and procedural culture has become an intolerant substantive culture. And this culture is a dogmatic nihilism. It has, in caricatured form, all the defects that the Enlightenment held against religions: dogmatism, intolerance, persecution, absurd superstitions, etc.

We also need a minimum of dialogue between cultures, which also presupposes a common reference to philosophical principles accepted by all. A certain humanism could fulfill this function. But today humanism coincides with the monstrosity of the Superman and subhumans. So, the real divide lies here: between the self-proclaimed superhumans à la Macron, and the subhumans, the “deplorables,” the “savages,” etc. I am not surprised that the subhumans hate the superhumans who shower them with contempt. It has been said that young people do not express demands. This is true. They practice a barbaric ritual of the barbaric religion they learned in school. They express their will and sheer violence—this is their freedom.

What people like Macron have not understood is that postmodern libertarian deregulation cannot be limited to economics and sex. The Nazis, who were as postmodern as Trotsky, knew this well: libertarian deregulation must release the violence of the beast that suffocates in the cage of civilization. Sex then is no longer an end in itself; it is the warrior’s repose—the right is that of the strongest, amassing quick fortunes and building empires while quenching a thirst for cruel transgression and destruction.

So, if we wanted to reduce the identity divide, we would need nothing less than a new culture. If we preserve the one that currently dominates us, we will die. Benedict XVI said, “We need a new humanist synthesis.”

RC: The magnitude and severity of the riots that followed the killing of young Nahel suggest that there was a widespread expectation of a pretext to unleash a vast riot. Are we dealing with a generic suburban youth malaise, or do these riots have political significance? Is there a political direction? Are there political actors pulling the strings of these riots? If so, what are they aiming at?

HH: A pretext? More like a match thrown on a barrel of gunpowder. The malaise, what Freud called “the malaise of civilization,” is certain. It not only affects the youth of the banlieues—it is general. Postmodern culture makes one mad, because individual freedom no longer accepts objective truth. Intended to free the individual from all constraints, this culture on the contrary develops a fatal set of frustrations in him. Absolutized individual freedom, detached from all reference to the good and the true, the beautiful and God, the Absolute, nature, reason, society—kills love, kills freedom, kills free love and pure pleasure. Law without the divine Lawgiver kills.

The good, then, consists in surviving, in spite of everything, through transgression, which becomes the only form of freedom. The virtual world kills the sense of the real and replaces the real. The art of governing becomes that of administering an asylum of madmen. But the rulers are also insane. So, it is this world that makes us crazy. The youth of the banlieues are merely sharing and expressing in their own way a radically dysfunctional culture that makes all of society sick, and will destroy us if we do not get rid of it.

Does the riot have political significance? Yes, certainly, but on the condition that we understand well the paradoxical character of the radical rejection expressed by the banlieue youth. They are subservient unconsciously to postmodern culture—but on a conscious level they consider themselves rebellious and more or less connected to Muslim culture; but what is truly Muslim about this destructive nihilism and individualism as a Tiktok and Snapchat user? We are a long way from the fury of the “Arab street.” The phenomenon of destruction without political objective is of a typically postmodern transgressiveness, irrationality and arbitrariness. But together, it is also clearly a critique and self-critique of this very postmodernity. Objectively, what is being expressed is a call for reform, or even cultural revolution. What cultural revolution? Certainly not a Salafist revolution. This same youth would not support it in power any longer than Egyptians supported President Morsi. It is a matter of decisively getting out of this system and defining that new humanist synthesis of which Benedict XVI rightly spoke.

As for pulling the strings, there are some who see in this movement a reservoir of energy, and they would like to capture it for their own purposes; they would like to recover it. But this energy is not political, or even economic; it is cultural and spiritual. And I do not think those who want to recover it, without responding to the precise need that aroused it, will be very successful. Some who imagine they are flanking it and directing it actually control nothing. As Jean Giraudoux said, “Because these events overtake us, we pretend to be the organizers of them.” A vast majority of the political world condemns this violence in principle, but without much imagination. A minority, gathered around La France insoumise, the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and the Trotskyists, supports them. Mélenchon benefited from the Muslim vote in the first round of the presidential election in 2022. But this success carries with it a certain ambiguity and thus probable fragility, because the party is simultaneously pro-immigrantion, pro-immigrant, and in favor of all postmodern transgressions. But immigrants also oppose these transgressions overwhelmingly, and very vigorously. Some think the movement may be encouraged from outside, to pressure France on the eve of the NATO summit. But if this were true, it would only be the opportunistic exploitation of an event whose origin is clearly fortuitous.

RC: All observers agree that these young people who have caused so much damage, especially in the neighborhoods where they live, do not feel French. But if they do not feel French, is it their fault or is it France’s fault?

HH: I am not surprised that young immigrants say they do not love France, because postmodern France is anything but lovable. One loves it in spite of everything when one has had one’s roots here for a long time. Otherwise, it leaves one indifferent or hostile. If France were France, the question would not arise: one would be proud of it, love it, feel part of it. The problem is that France is invisible, especially in the banlieues. It is invisible because it is like turned off, asleep. Culturally, politically, economically, France, like all other countries in continental Europe, is tyrannically prevented from expressing its own genius. France captive in the shackles of postmodern culture, and subservient to the Anglo-Saxon model, now transmitted through Brussels and NATO, is not France. The fundamental reason for the misfortunes of President Macron, who goes from crisis to crisis and is hated as Louis XVI and Charles X were, is that he uses the monarchical powers of the president of free and radiant France to destroy France’s freedom, its constitution and its genius.

You can love France or not, but you have to understand it. It is clear that Macron does not understand it. One would think he does not know what it means to feel French. As if his homeland is an English-speaking international social class. France is a great country, with excellent climate and soil, rich, inhabited by property-holding but egalitarian individuals, endowed with a strong state in which a monarchical-type power is allied with the people, while respecting the freedoms of an elite, firmly committed to serve the common good, the Republic. De Gaulle had restored France’s historic constitution and national independence. The constitution of the Fifth Republic is clearly incompatible with a regime of inequality, in which economic elites and special interests rule unchallenged. A president who conducts such a policy is seen as a tyrant, and indeed he is.

Culturally, France is a country of strong reason, of clear and distinct language, where aristocratic freedom must cooperate with monarchical work, popular monarchy serving the common good of a free nation (i.e., the Republic), without which there is no true democracy. To want to impose English-style parliamentarism, postmodern EU institutions, or the cultural delusions of the transatlantic on France is to try to destroy it. But nations are indestructible. France will remain France and I do not think it will be destroyed.

RC: We often hear that two organized groups rule in the banlieues: drug dealers and radical Islamists. We never hear about the “forces of good”: teachers who ask to be assigned to difficult neighborhoods, motivated social workers, volunteers. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the “forces of good” present in the banlieues?

HH: Regarding drug trafficking, senior officers of the gendarmerie told me that it was forbidden, by some prefects, to fight drug trafficking in the banlieues. It is often the only economic activity in these places. Without it, there is no telling what people would live on. In addition, drugs are a cynical means of subjectively solving objectively insoluble problems, and of reducing certain risks by weakening potential rioters. About Islamic radicalism, on the other hand, there would be much to say. My guess is that, in Western countries, it is as much an anti-modern and postmodern ideology for its adherents as it is a religion. When ideologues operate side by side with traffickers, as in Colombia or the Sahel, the ideologues, more violent and stronger, end up taking the place of the traffickers. Eventually, ideologist-traffickers become traffickers tout-court, behind the ideological pretext. It is very likely that this kind of process tends to occur in the banlieues.

As for the “forces of good,” the state has invested quite a lot of money in education, and numerous professors go to these neighborhoods like lay missionaries. But because postmodern pedagogy contradicts all the fundamentals of serious education and effective instruction, and because atheistic and woke dogmatism scandalizes little Muslims and their parents, trust is lacking, tensions are high, and results are poor.

RC: Some politicians and observers are proposing to take away social benefits from the families of minors who took part in the riots—among the 3,486 people arrested for the violence, there were as many as 1,124 minors, or one-third. What do you think of this proposal?

HH: I think it is the prototype of technocratic measures that always tragically remain below the level of the problem. Which depends on three variables: education, family and work. The first two are necessarily defective within the cultural regime we undergo. The third would depend on a recovery of our sovereignty and emancipation from the Anglo-Saxon system. Because we cannot talk about the essentials, we discuss the accessories.

RC: What would have to change in France to reabsorb the malaise and anger that led to the riots of the past days? What would Henri Hude do if he had government responsibilities?

HH: I think that the problems of immigrants are the same as those of all society, of all young people, and that between the banlieues and everything else there is only a difference in degree, not in kind. What is needed today is nothing less than a cultural revolution, in France but also in the rest of Europe, spreading to all spheres of life (couple, family, home, school, economy, health, etc.) to the point of bringing about a complete change of civilization and probably demanding a complete re-founding of the political regime. Without cultural revolution, the probability of such an operation succeeding is close to zero. The people and a large part of the bourgeoisie are kept in almost complete ignorance of the bankrupt state in which our finances find themselves. Reforms are marginal and there is no one with sufficient authority to get people around a table to share the losses fairly.

For the time being, therefore, the French can sustain neither their ills nor their remedies. We will inevitably have to go through a time of chaos, from which another power will emerge. But even such a power will only be able to reset the country if it has the indispensable cultural vision. Because you only have power if you have authority. And authority comes from culture. Postmodern culture only offers authority to deconstruct. We have taken the wrong path. We need to rediscover the Absolute, God, reason, nature, etc. And the true man God, the Christ. He has His full rightful place in a humanist society.

In conclusion I would say this: if France is France, immigrants will never be a danger to her. Not even if they are Muslims. France’s fault is that she is not France. Her mission is to liberate herself to become what she is again, and to play her role without arrogance, without contempt for others, in a noble and fraternal way, in the magnificent concert of the nations of Europe, so that Europe can re-enter History—and this is the condition of world peace.

Sugarcoated Interventionism: A Talk with Régis Le Sommier

Régis Le Sommier is the author of To the Last Ukrainian: An American War, from which we had the great pleasure of providing an excerpt. We are deeply thankful to his publisher, Max Milo, and to Mr. Le Sommier, to be able to bring you this interview.

The Postil (TP): Could you please tell us a little about yourself for our readers who may not be familiar with your work?

Régis Le Sommier (RS): I am 54 years old. I’ve been a senior reporter for over two decades covering the latest conflicts, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Mali and Ukraine. I was also the deputy editor of Paris Match magazine and now I am the managing editor of Omerta, an investigation and documentary digital platform.

TP: You have interviewed various American politicians including presidents. Is there a typical style of politics that stands out as being different from politicians in Europe?

RS: They expect to be challenged. Big difference from European leaders who are used to dealing with friendly journalists. They also prepare the interviews much more and don’t ask to read the print copy of the interview before it is published. Another big difference from Europe.

TP: Why is there such strong loyalty to NATO in Europe?

RS: It comes from memories of WWII. Most of Europe had been devastated by the conflict and a lot of Europeans think NATO is their best protection. Eastern European countries, quite logically, see it as a protection from Russia. In the West, it is true also. After all, the biggest success of NATO so far has been to prevent Stalin from invading Western Europe. And it worked quite well up until 1991 and the downfall of USSR. Now in a country like Germany, there are mixed feelings about NATO; but the common opinion is that Germany should stick to it in order not to be pointed out again as the worst evil, in reference to Nazism. France is the most reluctant country to NATO’s influence. Anti-Americanism is strong, both on the Right, with de Gaulle’s legacy, and on the Left, which stayed in Moscow’s sphere for a long time.

TP: Your recent book, To the Last Ukrainian: An American War (which we have excerpted), is a rather grim account of the deep involvement of the United States in the conflict in Ukraine. What compelled you to write this book?

RS: Intuition at first. I have lived six years in the US, between 2003 and 2009, during which I became aware that beyond the fight against radical Islam, a lot of politicians remained committed to fighting Russia, which, I would say, was their true enemy. Ben Laden and Baghdadi being derogative. Second, what I witnessed on the ground, especially the involvement of a US operator for recruitment at the Ukrainian Legion (foreign volunteers). Add to this, the documented story of Maidan and the war in Donbass since 2014.

TP: As you clearly show in your book, the war in Ukraine is an American project. But why did Europe agree to support America against Russia?

RS: Now not only my book says that but this was revealed to the public in a spectacular manner with the Pentagon leaks. Why Europe did that? I don’t know. Because the continent is weak and can only shape short term policies. The French president, however, with his latest remarks on China, surprised me quite a bit. Maybe Emmanuel Macron became convinced of late that the future of France doesn’t necessarily lie in US hands. We’ll see…

Régis Le Sommier in Ukraine.

TP: There is also the strange rhetoric of armed and financial support of Ukraine, backed by the contradictory claim that such support is not co-belligerence. Why is the West behaving in this way?

RS: Communication. Since, in fact, we are part of this war. Now the public seems to realize that escalation means danger to their comfortable lives. So, support of the war is decreasing.

TP: Why has Europe agreed to participate in Russophobia, even when such hatred is against its best interests?

RS: Because a lot of people have zero memory. Especially young generations who during their studies skip big chunks of history and tend to stick to the present.

TP: Then there is the media. Why does the European (French) media believe that Ukraine is a “good cause?”

RS: I don’t know. A tradition of being respectful of the authorities maybe, driven by our monarchist past? I tend to think that the US press, even biased, is more honest because in the end they stick to facts. When Russians are advancing inside Bakhmut, even the Institute for the Study of War, a neocon think tank, attests that they are. The French press keeps denying it.

TP: You bring a unique perspective—you were embedded with the Ukrainian army (among French volunteers). How would you characterize your experience?

RS: It is always a great thing for a journalist to be able to cover both sides. The war is so inflammatory that you end up almost automatically accused by both sides of being biased. But let me tell you, if both sides hammer you, it means you did your job.

TP: Ukraine and Russia have always been inseparable. But now there is an active drive to separate all traces of Russia from Ukraine. How do you explain this now bitter partition?

RS: This war is intimate. It is a family war. That is why it is so toxic and cruel. And the process to eradicate everything, to deny the other side any human aspect (Russians are Orcs, Ukrainians are Nazis) comes with this deep family feud.

TP: How deep is the neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian military?

RS: It exists at various degrees, especially amongst the elite Ukrainian military. What struck me the most is Bandera’s legacy in Ukrainian countryside. Almost every village, especially in the West, has its Bandera memorial or flags.

TP: Did you meet any military advisors or personnel from France who were helping the Ukrainians?

RS: No, I did not.

TP: Which other countries have the largest number of volunteers fighting on the side of Ukraine? How many have sent military advisors or personnel?

Régis Le Sommier in Ukraine.

RS: I was told by Russian military fighting Ukrainian “Kraken” battalion near Bakhmut that the biggest group was Polish. That needs to be verified though.

TP: Tell us a little about Max and Sabri, the two volunteers you mention in your book. What has happened to them?

RS: The last info I got was that they are still fighting over there. Greg came back to France.

TP: Do you think this involvement in Ukraine by France stems from the “paradox” that you describe in your book which inhabits the French psyche—anti-Americanism along with an open embrace of American culture?

RS: Double standard, yes.

TP: How do you see America—a hegemon or a friendly, benign influence?

RS: I see it as my second home. I have two children living there and whenever I travel to the US, I blend in, in a split second. Now that doesn’t mean I’m not critical of it. On the international level, it is a country that serves its interests and only that. Democracy, freedom and all of this, are just a way to sugarcoat interventionism. And when things go awry, as they do most of the time, the US leaves ruins behind.

TP: “War is an American specialty,” you say in your book. Could you unpack this for us?

RS: The country has been at war for most of its existence. War and violence are not a US monopoly, but both are definitely a behavior pumped up remarkably by Hollywood. I just spent two weeks in Afghanistan. I was amazed to discover that the Taliban police special units are now dressed up exactly like US operators, the very same ones they were fighting against before. I think it speaks volumes about the attraction the US has, even amongst its worst enemies.

TP: War is also a spectacle in America, where people are conditioned, by films, to view conflict a certain way—where America is always on the side of the Good. Do the French also view war in this way?

RS: French public sees war not as a game, or an object for movies, but as something real, that involved their ancestors and that happened on their soil. Americans sees the heroes, who sometimes are their ancestors who liberated Europe. But they have never felt war on their soil. I think it makes a huge difference.

TP: You also went to Russia. Tell us a little of what you saw there?

RS: What struck me most was that contrarily to what the sanctions were aiming at, Russia is not on its knees. The food stores are full and people are buying like in any Western countries. There is no shortage of anything, even in Donbass. I was able to get a genuine original Coke at a Georgian restaurant off the Red Square in Moscow. It was imported from Armenia. This example proves that whatever sanctions you inflict on a country, you can never stop business.

TP: You describe the Russians as being “obsessed with history.” What do you mean by this?

RS: The man in the street, even from very poor background, knows his history. The 20 million or so dead soldiers in WWII is something very present for the Russian public. It is not only Putin’s obsession. It is widespread.

TP: What is life like for ordinary people in the Donbass and eastern Ukraine that is now part of Russia?

RS: Hell, near the frontlines, where a few people decided to stay. In general like in all wars, people strive to make ends meet. They don’t necessarily agree with the Russian invasion but they go along with it in order to protect their family. People live in fear. And it’s the same on the other side. The notion of being pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian often depends on the reality of everyday life in the place where you live. You don’t choose a side. The side chooses you.

TP: What does Europe hope to gain by prolonging this war? By continually supplying arms? Why doesn’t Europe work to bring peace?

RS: Europe remains aligned with the US which is the only country that can stop the war and bring it to a negotiation-phase.

TP: What larger message do you want your book to convey?

RS: Peace!

TP: Thank you so very much for your time.

Our Interview with Seymour Hersh

Recently, Patrik Baab had the occasion to speak with award-winning investigative journalist and writer, Seymour Hersh. We are so very pleased to bring you this interview. [The views expressed remain those of Mr. Hersh and do not necessarily reflect those of the Postil].

Patrik Baab (PB): Thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed. In your Nord Stream story, you named Mr. Biden as the official who ordered the destruction, but now you’re facing a massive cover up. What’s behind that? The New York Times and German publication [Die Zeit] published the same story about a sailing yacht and named the Ukrainian crew as being completely independent from governments. Can this be?

Seymour Hersh (SH): I really don’t know how, but if I were either at The New York Times or Die Zeit I would wonder why two entities 3000-3500 miles away across an ocean had the same idea that Ukrainians did it. I don’t quite understand why. I did ask one of the reporters: if there were traces of dynamite on the yacht, why didn’t they try and find out what happened to the one mine? It’s a mine, not really a bomb. It’s a mine with the plastic to blow it up, but it’s a mining device on the water—so why didn’t they try and find it? And he said, well, because we did. The Swedes and the Danes were there within days. But the Americans had already come and taken the unexploded bomb way and I said, ‘Why do you think they did that?’ And he said, “You know how Americans are.”

They like to be first. What can I do with that? There’s another answer for why they did it. Now everybody’s chasing a piece of pipe that absolutely has nothing to do with anything. And they write stories and stories about that and not about the elephant in the room. The story I wrote, it’s not the way I would run a newspaper. But maybe that’s why I’m not editor of a newspaper or ever wanted to be. So, the answer to your question is, you’re asking the wrong person about that question. All I could do is offer speculation. And you have the same speculation I do. I’m sure it’s the same reason you can sell that story of a yacht. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s day, but it’s a 49-foot yacht. And let’s say it could go out into the Baltic Sea. It could find a pipeline and secondly, it could drop an anchor 260-feet to the bottom so they could secure the boat so divers could dive off from the back end of a boat. You can’t get a ladder on it because that’s where the engines are. And there’s other stuff on the yacht. How do you get past that?

If a yacht had anchors that go 260-feet, it would probably sink, or at least one side would be in the water. But anyway, so there you are. I can’t answer anybody not trying to deal with reality—they are so eager to have a counter story, but this is part of the business. But for each newspaper not to say, how does the other guy get this? And then wonder why I accept the reporter in Germany, who’s a very decent guy, who did come and see me to say that he never talked to the intelligence community. And I said, I changed my story to indicate that he did not talk to the intelligence community. And The New York Times people only talk to people who had access to the intelligence community. But that doesn’t change the fact that something happened that clearly has something to do with the American intelligence community on both sides of the ocean. But I can’t explain why either newspaper, they are two wonderful newspapers, and the reporters in question are perfectly competent. I mean, I know one of them well. Excellent reporter in Germany. I’ve known him for years.

I don’t know why they can’t sit back and say, well, maybe we should do some more reporting on this. But no, it’s not going to happen.

PB: Probably the reason is that the press is not part of the investigation. They are part of the cover-up.

SH: Well, but that’s making an implication that I don’t think exists. I don’t think they have any notion they’re part of a cover-up. That’s the point. I don’t think the whole purpose of having a good intelligence service like you guys certainly do, and you know how closely they work with us. If you don’t, you probably can guess. We’re allies, particularly after 9/11, strong allies. But I don’t think they’re part of the cover-up in the sense that they know they are. There’s something in the world called critical thinking. And I just don’t know why we don’t have more critical thinking on this story than we’ve had so far.

PB: In Germany the Russians were lately blamed for the explosion. Is this possible? Would they destroy their own pipeline?

SH: Well, you have the same answer I do, which is, of course not. First of all, Mr. Putin had already stopped Nord Stream I, which, as you know, has been going since 2011, and making Germany industry great, combine the largest chemical company in the world, BASF, and the great automobile makers. And you’re making Germany warm and wealthy and able to also share the wealth with the rest of Europe. Much of the gas they were getting from North Stream I was far more than they needed.

And by the way, Nord Stream II, the one that was blown up, had so much gas in it, and it had just been built and been approved. And then your Chancellor sanctioned it, I think obviously at the request of America a year and a half ago. So, it was less filled, with 750 miles of methane gas, which is why there was such an explosion.

I had a story which, when they eventually triggered the mines, they had to do with a low frequency sonar because anything high frequency gets burned up in the water. Low frequency can go, and it’s just a series of knocks. It’s not a complicated signal— anyway, the open-source intelligence people, who only see signals not photographs, in the beginning, all made it clear that there was no such airplane. But it didn’t explain why something blew up, because all you have to do is turn off the transponder, the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe System).

When you can turn it off, nobody can see you. It’s a safety mechanism. And certainly, I assure you, the people running the mission for the American president out of Norway, as I wrote earlier, knew all about how to put all the signals they wanted anywhere, and they went away in the Baltic Sea. I joke they could have recreated the Japanese armada sailing towards Pearl Harbor in 1941 to start the war right there.

I spent three months on that story. It wasn’t something I did yesterday. And the fact that they didn’t use sources—you’re talking to a man who’s been doing stories against the intelligence community and other things, let’s see, for 50 years. I think in seven or eight years I worked at The New York Times, I must have written 800 or so stories, maybe five, had a source named. Most of them were just unnamed, of course, and the two stories in The New York Times had no named sources either.

So that’s the irony of all of this.  But you’re asking the right sort of metaphysical questions about what is going on here. I can’t answer what is going on here. There’s some collective panic in the West.

PB: It’s very interesting to me that the cover-up started a few days after a visit of German chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington in early March. Do you find this interesting?

SH: The cover-up started well before Scholz’s visit—it started right away. The bombs went off in late September of last year, and the sanctioning well before the war began in February. This all started in December of 2021 with the meetings I wrote about in that first article; started in the White House or in the building next to the Executive Office Building. They all started these secret meetings looking for options to give the President to maybe get Putin to step down. And the one that came out was the bombing of the pipelines. And President Biden did say that in February 19, 2020, about 13-14 months ago, before the war with Scholz there. And at that point, I was asked immediately, did he know? I don’t know what he knew.

I don’t know whether the President told Scholz, but I know at that conversation that time, he was there, and he was asked afterwards what he thought, and he was complimentary. He said, I’m with the Americans. He didn’t say, “I hope, of course, the pipeline will not be blown up.” That’s for sure. He didn’t say anything like that, and he said nothing else.

And, yes, you’re right. A month ago, he did come and visit the president; a very strange visit. He flew over on the chancellor’s plane with no press—that’s unusual. Also, he had no public events except a 10-minute event with President Biden, where they both told each other how wonderful they were, no questions asked, and then a private 80-minutes meeting. He was treated like somebody who just walked. He’s the German Chancellor. He had no news conference with the president, no dinner. He just slunk in and slunk out. You and your guys in Germany need to worry about him. But at that point you could say, if he didn’t know, he has certainly been a collaborator in the cover-up.

You can’t ask me to guess what was is in his mind. I have no idea. But he certainly knew what the President wanted, even though I have no idea what they talked about privately. I wrote a story the other day for my Substack subscribers. I wouldn’t go to the newspapers with this because I just know the American newspapers don’t want me to write stories. The liberal ones are adverse. They’re so frightened of another Trump coming in, another Republican lunatic, that they can’t look at Biden objectively. That’s my view. But I’ll tell you when I do my reporting. Now, I’ve been around a long time. I’ve hired one of the best editors I work with here in Washington, New York, and also in the London Review. And I have a fact checker. The New Yorker had superb fact checkers. Every line was checked. I hired the very best fact checker that worked with me ten years ago when I worked at The New Yorker.

But that’s a good standard. The media in America has gone haywire. Trump did that. You’re either for Fox News or you’re against Fox News. So, it’s just irrational. What can I tell you?

PB: Could you imagine that German chancellor was blackmailed by US. Secret Services?

SH: You are very metaphysical. I don’t imagine anything; that’s my life. No, I think if anything, I don’t think he’s a dupe. I think at this point we have to assume that he’s aware what happened or certainly has a suspicion. And he’s certainly going along now with the American story that we don’t know anything.

I’ve been in Washington a long time, and Joe Biden was somebody who had a lot of experience. He’s the reason we have Clarence Thomas; he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and ignored the complaints made against him. He also supported his chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. These are big jobs. You don’t get this far by necessarily being wonderful. You get there by staying and being reelected. You outlive others and you get seniority. And he was one of those people who supported the American decision to respond to a Sunni extreme position that Osama bin Laden took: Sunni fanaticism.

We responded to a Sunni attack by bombing and attacking Iraq, which was run by an awful man, Saddam Hussein, who happened to also be as hostile to Sunni radicalisms as we were. And then we went and attacked Syria, under Bashar Assad, who also was someone who had no use for Sunni radicalism. So, you can’t explain this is a pattern. I’m sorry that Joe Biden and his immediate team fits so nicely into—we all hate Communism and we all hate Putin. We all hate Xi and we all hate, hate, hate, hate. We hate, hate, hate. That’s what we get out of America these days. We hate this and hate this. But he was putting pressure on Germany, which, as you know, since World War II has been not interested in rearming.

As much as I have had problems with German leaders, Willy Brandt in particular, the whole idea of German politics towards the East was a fantastic idea. We know we bombed you and did what German armies do, but now we’re going to be good allies. We’re going to be trading partners. We’re going to build ourselves up as an industrial base, and we’re going to prove to you we can be in NATO and we can join Western Europe, and the French can maybe pull back on their hatred of us. And he did that. Egon Bahr, I remember, used to come to Washington. I was a reporter then, I think, with The New York Times. I used to meet with him. There was really good stuff done with Kissinger, too. As awful and as immoral as he was, the whole rebuilding of Europe and putting Germany back in the picture was done very brilliantly in the 1970s and 1980s. And this guy now, my president is so fearful that the independence Germany has had and NATO with the beginning of indifference towards our commitment to the war in Iraq. I think by the time in late September, it was clear, the best America was going to get in that war with Zelensky and the corruption at the top of the military in his office, too, was going to be a stalemate. And we’ve now put $120 Billion into it in a time of inflation.

And look at you guys. Your inflation is going out of sight. It won’t get better. So, what if he told you he killed your pipeline because he was so afraid, as America has been for five generations of Russian gas and oil becoming a weapon, a political weapon in Europe for Russia. That’s been the underlying fear. Biden has given speeches about that when he was Vice-President. Jack Kennedy gave speeches about it. I’ve also written about this. And so the position we had is, well, maybe Germany and even NATO might not go all the way with us in the next six months as this war goes on and costs more money and doesn’t go anywhere. So, I’m not going to give them a chance to do that, to walk away, because I’m going to take away their gas, I’m going to blow up their pipeline. And why Germany to this point is still going along. You got through the winter because it was mild and you had reserves; but look out, it’s going to be a very bad next year for your industry. You could buy alternative gas, but there was nothing like the sweet methane gas you got from Russia.

And you don’t have as much. It doesn’t come as cheaply. You’re going to end up with liquefied natural gas. You’re going to look at renewables a little bit. Your country, BASF, is looking into China, so I understand, talking to them about maybe moving some facilities there where they can be assured of gas. And you have bakeries shutting down—six, eight, if they have a dozen ovens shutting down half of them or eight of them because they don’t have enough gas to produce the bread that they could sell. It’s going to be bad and it’s going to fall on Biden, and I think it’s going to be a disaster for him politically by the middle of this year. So, I’m content to wait. Why aren’t you?

PB: Was there a disruption in the security apparatus in America between the neocons around Biden and the CIA?

SH: Well, watch this space, as they say. I’m writing more about it right now. Not so much about that specific point, but there’s clearly a distinction between what some of the people in the intelligence community think and what the White House does. I don’t think anybody’s in support of the constant White House screaming at Russia and China and constantly exaggerating what’s going on in the war, which is there’s an extreme difference of opinion between the President and the Foreign Secretary, Tony Blinken. I mean, it’s the first time we’ve had an American Foreign Secretary of State refusing to meet with his Chinese counterpart because of a balloon. Tell me about that. What does that mean, a balloon? You’re not going to go because of a balloon that’s been flying around forever? Come on. Come on. I’m an American. I love my country as much as anybody. I’ve had every reason to. Nobody bothers me. I do my job, and I just don’t know why others in the press… I guess it’s because I only can think of it. It has to be some sort of political thing because of what the horrors we all went through with Trump.

There’s the irrational Trump. I think nobody wants that again. And so, Biden becomes the only one that can hold. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why the American Senate, which was so critical when I wrote about the Vietnam War critically, I wrote about the My Lai massacre 50 years ago. And nobody believed it then. So, the idea that the stories I write aren’t believed is not a new idea for me. I’ve been there before. It’ll all come out.

Look, it happened. What I said happened did happen, and they can’t get off it. The White House can commission a new study tomorrow that will come out in two weeks and say we’ve looked at the problem, and we and certain elements of the CIA say that we don’t know what happened; but no sign that America did it. I’m sure that’s going to be the next lie coming. Why not? But why not? But you’re not going to tell me Putin did that. I’ve read Putin’s speeches. I don’t agree with him. You can never support a man who chose war when there were other options. I know he was squeezed, but it was the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II. And we had the Balkans and we had Chechnya but this is nothing like what’s going on in the Ukraine. And Russia and Ukraine. It goes back to so many generations. But in the 1930s, remember, harvests were bad, there was starvation, and we took all of the weeds from the Ukraine and brought it into Mother Russia. Ukrainians died in 1932 while the Russians stood by, taking their food away from them. But anyway, that’s another story.

PB: Who was directly involved in the planning team for destroying the pipeline?

SH: Oh, come on, come on. Human beings. How’s that? Is that a good enough answer? No. I could just tell you on general principles, and I have been as I say, I’ve been writing about this stuff for a long time. In many ways. No, the way you do something like this is as few people as possible know, and nobody in the White House. You have a head of the CIA, and he may know whatever you want to tell him. And if he’s smart, he doesn’t want to know much; but you tell him the minimum. But he’s the one that says the President says, yes, go. The president says, no, don’t go. But how they do it is never committed. You can never trust the leadership to write a memoir and start revealing secrets. The professionals that do this stuff, it’s the very minimum. The big point that everybody misses is Norway was very important. It was Norwegian ships, Norwegian training, Norwegian involvement. We don’t know the Baltic Sea. And you’re suddenly going to have a bunch of divers jumping around the Baltic Sea where there’s been no oil or gas below the surface, ever. What? And the Russians certainly have surveillance.

There’s underwater surveillance, submarines. Everybody watches the Baltic Sea because it’s so close to the good and the bad in the world, the dirty commies and the rest of us. And so, it’s a huge sea. People forget that pipeline, that the two pipelines—one blown up and one stopped—all blown up by now was actually 760 miles long. One straight pipeline from Russia, from right near Leningrad or St. Petersburg now, from that corner of Russia, all the way down into Germany; an amazing production. It must have cost hundreds of millions, if not billions, to build, and to be all blown away. And the law on this is very interesting. I did a lot of work on the law of the sea because there were treaties signed by America and the world in the 1980s, 1984, when the first telegraph lines were made.

And we also signed both treaties. Since then, there’s no specific law saying if an oil pipeline underwater was cut, it’s a criminal act. I mean, it’s clear if a case ever arose, a court would find it to be criminal. But there’s no law. Although, beginning with coaxial cables and the TV cables and the underground cables, we now run, for everything. A lot of stuff is in the air now, too; but 30 years ago, they were cables with communication devices. I’m sure the early 19th century laws applied; but now the one thing that’s sure, if it is found that the United States did it, they’re liable to the companies. Gazprom and another group. One of the pipelines is owned by a consortium that involves the Russian oligarchs—51% oligarchs and 49% Western Europe companies that supply natural gas. I don’t know what the makeup of the second pipeline is, but we’re talking about potential billions in damages and lawsuits. And then you also have the question of whether or not it’s a violation of international law. All those issues are to be decided. And so, I can imagine that wouldn’t be something this White House wants to deal with, particularly when Biden wants to run again in 2024.

PB: Will it destroy the German American relationship?

SH: I don’t think it will. It clearly has it poisoned it on an official basis. And so far, there’s no sign that the average German is convinced that the average American is against them, because that’s absolutely not so. But it does cause diplomatic issues for NATO, too. I mean, NATO countries. This cost and this inflation that you’re now having in Germany is not going to get better. And the lack of gas, I don’t know Western Europe, Germany in particular, but air conditioning is widespread, but not as widespread here. But all of the energy for air conditioning, all of the energy to produce heat, largely the turbines are charged by natural gas because you had it, so you didn’t use coal. Gas was cleaner. Some people in France I know, friends, that are paying five times as much for electricity because it’s powered by turbines powered by natural gas, and the gas is costing more. Same in Italy. With natural gas, it’s three, four times more expensive. And so, they’re talking now in France of putting back two nuclear energy plants into business, which were shut down because of all the problems there are with not so much the mechanics of a nuclear plant, but the people who run it.

They just can’t seem to get it straight. What happened in Chernobyl? What happened in Three Mile Island in America? So, I think we’re going to start going back to, more the issue is, will West Germany go back to more renewables? The Chinese are way ahead of us on that, and that may happen; but that would be a good sign. We go back into renewables with more enthusiasm. But still, to get it done in time to mitigate the cost of not having the gas you did is not going to happen.

In Germany we have how many American troops there right now? We’ve got what, dozens of bases still, don’t we? In Germany? It’s not an occupation. I don’t think we’re going to lose person to person friendship and economic relationships. But politically, I don’t know.

I don’t do politics. I’ve never gone and testified to Congress. I just don’t do it. I’m talking to you in a political way because you’re asking me the questions. But if you’re asking different questions, I talk to you, too, about it. But you’re asking the kind of questions that the newspapers should be asking but they’re not.

PB: Why did the United States involve Norway? Was this a kind of plausible deniability?

SH: No. Norway has been our pet. They’ve been our little pet dog. Norwegian secret services were involved with us in operations in North Vietnam before the war was declared. Norway has always been terrific. Very competent seamen. They have the best PT (Patrol Torpedo) boats in the world. They have the most advanced PT boats after World War II and they were used by us, by the American CIA and the American Seals to run covert operations in North Vietnam. So, we’ve had a long relationship. But don’t forget it’s a border that’s 1400 miles from Oslo all the way to the North Pole where they meet Russia. And we have put probably hundreds of millions into Norway—it’s more in the last decade. We’ve built an amazing synthetic aperture radar—the most advanced radar that can monitor up and near the Arctic Circle.

There’s Kola Peninsula on the other side of it about 220 miles as the bird flies where there is one of the largest Russian missile sites. And we monitor that with the radar. There was a shutdown of a Norwegian submarine base that was used in World War II. We rebuilt it, way up north. This is way up north in Norway. Sweden is very close to the border there. And we built a new submarine-base, state of the art. There’s a major Norwegian air base and navy base we’ve also put money into and have share facilities with. So, they’ve become our boys, our pets. And they were very important. We couldn’t have done this operation without them.

It was the Norwegian ships that did drop the miners off. And so, it’s just a relationship that’s very secure and nobody talks about it. Most of the exercising was done near Norway in the waterways of the Baltic narrow area where there’s a major island, and at various times the pipelines were in a twelve miles limit of waters of both Denmark and Sweden. And I think both of those countries have not been very straightforward about what they know, and what they knew all along. I’ve written about it because I don’t have a piece of paper saying that. But two and two usually is four. Even if nobody counts.

If nobody’s counting, it’s nothing. There’s all this clown game going about investigating the bottom of the sea because of a rusty pipe. I mean, it’s all very silly.

PB: The Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre visited the United States in mid-September 2022 and he met the Secretary of the Navy, Carlos del Toro and the speaker of the White House (at the time), Nancy Pelosi.

SH: None of those; Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, they don’t know about these missions. They wouldn’t know about a secret mission, even if it was going then, which I don’t think it was that early in 2022. Maybe it was. I don’t know. No, of course not. No, the circle is very small. No, you would tell Congress? Are you kidding?

I think the reason that it was so secretive is that so few people knew. That’s the only way you can run an operation. You know how many divers we used for four pipelines? Two. Two very highly skilled American Navy divers. Not from the Seals, not from Special Forces. Because if you use Special Forces, you have to make a different kind of reporting. You have to report it up to Congress. But the Navy, even if the CIA is involved and they bring in the Navy, you don’t have to do that. Just a military mission. Congress doesn’t have to know about it. And they don’t want to tell Congress anyway, anything. No, it’s very few people. The Norwegians had the boats and they had the expertise.

They knew the bottom of the sea. They knew the currents. The Baltic empties every year; there’s a tremendous flow in and out. It’s pretty corrupted now because of pollution. It used to be great cod fishing.

PB: So, the Americans used the Norwegian P8-A Poseidon to verify the explosion after the attack.

SH: No, they didn’t have to verify anything. No. There was a plane used. It was a P8-A plane. It did not have its IFF on. It did not have its transponder on. So, there was no way to see it. The problem, as I said earlier, with all the people who say there was no plane, we couldn’t track a plane, is, of course, they weren’t thinking about the fact there were no transponders. And I remember within days what they called open-source intelligence, people were talking about, there was no such plane. I wrote about a plane dropping a sonar in September to trigger the bombs. But the problem was, they would all report about what they couldn’t find. But then the problem was, something blew up. How did it blow up, if they couldn’t see a plane? Well, but that wasn’t an issue. They would just write about the fact that they couldn’t find a plane, not acknowledging that it’s very easy to hide a plane. You can hide ships, too, by the same thing. They have electronic stuff they can shut down. They have emergency frequencies.

Anyway, even yachts have what they call an AIS system. A yacht of the kind of stature that allegedly was used to do it, as we’ve been reading, would have to have in case you get in trouble, you have to have some way of knowing where you are to tell the Coast Guard. So, they have to have a system that tells them where they are. It’s an electronic system that can be monitored. You can turn it off, too. But anyway, the plane could have been flown by anybody. Whatever I wrote is due to what the information I had. I think it was a P8-A, flown by Americans; in an American P8-A. And somebody said there were no such planes in Norway. Well, not to their knowledge, maybe; but there were. So, there you are. What happened, happened, period.

PB: What will happen in the next weeks? What do you think? Do you have a new aspect of the story, or do you think about new reactions in the press?

SH: Well, no, I don’t worry about the press. I can’t worry about them. Why would I worry about them? I’ve been writing stories that the press ignored all my life. They either come true or they don’t. No, I’m writing more about the whole issue, of course, because it’s my White House and my President, our policy. I’m entitled to do that. I’m surprised you’re so focused on the press, because it is not going to be a friend of this story.

It’s just not going to be; they just have drawn a line that a yacht did it. Or now, what was the other thing? That there was one story in London the other day, a trawler did it. Or they had all these boats doing it. And that’s much more fun for them, than to deal with a story somebody else wrote. I know that when I worked at The New York Times, you wouldn’t dare ask me to chase somebody else’s story. I would say, oh, no, that’s not for me. So, the good reporters at The Times, the reporters that actually do have sources, don’t want to do somebody else’s story. That’s beneath them; so, it just gets done. Some kid will be assigned to check it, and he calls the White House and they say it’s not so. You got a story. In fact, they actually ran the same story two or three times. The White House initially said it wasn’t so, and then two weeks later, another press spokesman who happened to be retired, credible, said the same thing, and they wrote the story just as if the White House had first announced it.

I liked your point of view on this, which is what’s going on here with the rest of the media and the government. Why isn’t anybody talking? That should be the question, but it’s not new to me. When I first wrote my story about a massacre of 500 civilians who were raped and maimed and brutalized, half the country not only didn’t want to believe it, they were calling me. My phone was listed, like I still do. You can still find my house phone. Guys would get in the officer’s clubs, have four or five whiskeys and call me up at three in the morning and tell me what they were going to do to my private parts. I had that for months. So, this is nothing.

PB: Thank you very much.

Pierre Legendre: The Last “Renaissance Man”

Pierre Legendre (1930-2023) was one of the greatest thinkers that France has produced in modern times. His rich and nuanced thought, which encompassed history, philosophy, film, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and the law, he himself characterized as “dogmatic anthropology.” His passing on March 2, 2023 marked the end of an era in that he was the last “Renaissance man,” one learned in so many fields of knowledge, least of which was his mastery of a beautiful Latin style.

The French philosophy, Pierre Musso, author of Introductions à l’œuvre de Pierre Legendre [Introduction to the Work of Pierre Legendre], published just a few days before the thinker’s death, assesses and comments on the monumental legacy that Legendre has left behind. Professor Musso is in conversation with PHILITT, through whose kind courtesy we bring you this interview.

PHILITT (PL): The silence that followed the death of Pierre Legendre outraged some of his readers. Do you share this indignation? How do you explain the relative indifference of the academic world towards his thought and his work?

Pierre Musso (PM): I am not overly disturbed by the low media profile of Pierre Legendre’s death. Legendre himself did not particularly like the media or academic circles, and avoided them as much as possible. When one sees the tributes that the media pay, especially in the audiovisual sector, to various popular personalities—which Legendre was not—one can legitimately think that it is rather to Legendre’s glory that he was not celebrated in this way. Moreover, Legendre has always been a contrarian, on the fringes of academic and, of course, media institutions.

The real cause of this post-mortem silence, in my opinion, lies in the sheer ignorance of Legendre’s work in these circles, and in particular in France. If his work remains important and widely disseminated, notably his first film, La fabrique de l’homme occidental [The Fashioning of Western Man] (1996), with the text published in the collection of the Mille et une nuits [Thousand and One Nights], it is especially known and recognized abroad. There are already translations in German, in part in Italian, in Japanese, and some in English.

Paradoxically, many thinkers have been inspired by Legendre, often without quoting him. Legendre has been, as he himself said, “plundered” a lot, for a long time, including by intellectual luminaries who do not necessarily refer to Legendre’s work when quoting him. This is the fate of important works. His work spanned some sixty years, from the 1960s to the present. He pursued his work with constancy and on the fringes of institutions and disciplines. And this work is immense. Immense not only by its volume—some forty works, including his ten “Leçons [Lessons],” which contain the essence of his thought—but above all by its originality and complexity. I prefer to call it a cathedral work. In other words, a monument with an architecture of great complexity, but which offers several entrances and where one is free to go and admire this stained-glass window, that work of art in one corner, that text in another.

One of the aspects that explains the difficulty of apprehending Legendre’s thought is that he cannot be put away in a compartment, educed to a discipline. Legendre was not simply a jurist, a psychoanalyst, perhaps a philosopher and probably more an anthropologist. He himself would have gladly called himself “founder of dogmatic anthropology,” which is obviously incomprehensible, even dangerous, for most media.

PL: As you write in the introduction to Introductions à l’œuvre de Pierre Legendre [Introductions to the work of Pierre Legendre], “a scholar at the interface between science and poetry,” Legendre stands out from recent thinkers because of his erudite style and his multidisciplinary analysis that spans two millennia of the history of thought. In your opinion, what is Pierre Legendre’s genius—in the sense of the Latin ingenium?

PM: Legendre’s fundamental intuition is that of symbolic determinism. What is it about? Legendre places at the heart of his thought the question of why? This question was formulated, to put it simply, by a Father of the Church, Isidore of Seville, an encyclopedist of the 6th-7th century, who asked both why live and die? And how to live and die? The question of why is that of meaning; and, beyond meaning, that of the symbolic, knowing that the “speaking animal,” as Legendre calls it, constantly asks itself the question of why, and is aware of this constitutive intrigue of its being, transmitted from generation to generation. The stake, to “institute the human animal,” is to build founding narratives, myths or fictions, which answer this question of the why?

Nowadays, in Western society, the question of why is largely evacuated. Either it takes refuge in traditional religions, or society only responds to the question of how, to the question of norms and technique. We are thus faced with what Legendre calls a “wandering of the symbolic” or a “symbolic disintegration;” that is, a phenomenon of de-symbolization. This means for Legendre that there are several forms of “rationality.” That of the principle of non-contradiction, first of all, the rationality of logic in the Aristotelian sense and a fortiori in the Hegelian sense; that is to say, the constant rise in abstraction in rationality. Legendre borrows from Husserl the term of “surrationality” to characterize the West of today, where Bachelard spoke of “surrationalism,” in reference to surrealism.

The second form of rationality, fundamental, is that of the dream or the myth, where the principle of non-contradiction does not function anymore. This is the beauty of dreams, which explains why we spend half our lives dreaming, whether asleep or awake. This second rationality, just as important as the first one, is occupied by beliefs, myths, religions. This word “religion” did not please Legendre very much. In his last works, in the last ten years, since Lessons IX, he preferred the notion of “fiduciary,” borrowed from Paul Valéry. This term introduces the notion of fides, faith, which structures a civilization from its founding myth, which belongs to the symbolic, a term that could also be discussed at length.

The third form of rationality, which has often been buried in the West but which is very prevalent in many societies, concerns the corporeal. This last one gave place to Pierre Legendre’s works on the dance, La passion d’être un autre [The Passion to be Another (1978)]. If one does not have in mind these various forms of rationality of the speaking animal, one locks oneself, as the West does today at the time of the Techno-Science-Economy, only in the surrationalism or the technical, economic and techno-scientific hyperrationality.

In this respect, the accusation of conservatism made against Legendre does not stand up to analysis. Indeed, symbolic determinism is a reaction to what other currents, for example Marxists, have called “economic determinism” or still others “technical determinism.” Basically, as I write in a provocative way in these Introductions, one could link Legendre to a whole neo-Marxist or neo-Marxian current, a current which, against this formula of economic or technical determinism prevalent in Marx, Engels or Lenin, has valorized, within the Marxian matrix, the question of cultures, of the symbolic and of the imaginary. I am thinking in particular of Gramsci, Cultural Studies, the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer). From this point of view, we can make a connection, which I myself sketched out in La Religion industrielle, between Legendre’s contribution and these currents. In any case, to classify Legendre among the conservatives is of little interest.

PL: At what moment and in which work do you situate the birth of “dogmatic anthropology” and the Legendrean project of subjecting the West to a kind of great genealogy or psychoanalysis?

PM: To understand Pierre Legendre’s project, one must first understand the meaning he gives to dogmatic anthropology. Legendre deliberately borrows a word, that of “dogma,” which he describes as “dangerous, sulfurous,” since “dogmatic” is often used to characterize fixed thought. Legendre in fact reinvests the Greek etymology of “dogma” (δόγμα), that is, that which appears and which, in its appearance, is a feint. It is thus a staging, a dramatization of the symbolic which, etymologically too, is the link that separates, according to the image of the dollar bill torn in Western filmss to find itself at the end of a contract. This link that separates refers to the unspeakable and the invisible: God, the Fatherland—one thinks of Kantorowicz’s text on the formula “to die for the Fatherland”—the Republic, Peace, and other beliefs or founding myths of our societies. For example, it seems to me that one of the major myths in the West today is that of scientific progress, established as a myth by positivism in particular. The institutions, their norms and their laws, in a society, are established and founded “in the name” of a symbolic myth, of a founding fiction. Pierre Legendre often quoted in his work this formula from the Middle Ages: Fictio figura veritatis est, i.e., “fiction is the figure of truth.” This aspect is fundamental to Legendre.

The nodal moment in Legendre’s work seems to me to be his thesis, supervised by Gabriel Le Bras and defended in 1957, entitled, “La pénétration du droit romain dans le droit canonique classique : recherche sur le mandat (1140-1254)” [“The Penetration of Roman Law into Classical Canon Law: Research on the Mandate (1140-1254”)]. Legendre was later greatly influenced by historians such as Ernst Kantorowicz or Harold Berman, who showed how the West was built, starting with what Berman called the “Big Bang of Western thought,” namely, the “papal revolution,” i.e., the Gregorian reform. For Legendre, as for Kantorowicz, this rupture of the eleventh and seventeenth centuries is the key moment when Roman law, inherited from the Empire which possessed a powerful normativity without answering the question of why, met Christianity; a kind of faith without law. This encounter was essentially born of the compilation made by the medieval jurist Gratian, an author often cited by Legendre as the founder of Western institutions, in the Decretum Gratiani or Concordia discordantium canonum (1140). This Decree, prolonging the “papal revolution,” maintains that man is governed according to two measures, which, on the level of institutions, will result in the opposition and the hierarchy between the papal authority and the power of the emperor, the spiritual foundation and the normative foundation. It is therefore the meeting of two monuments: the legal block inherited from Roman law and the heritage of Christian spirituality.

The intuition of dogmatic anthropology is really explicit in 1974, with the publication of L’amour du censeur : essai sur l’ordre dogmatique [The Love of the Censor: An Essay on the Dogmatic Order]. The notion of “dogmatic” appears clearly for the first time in the title of the work. With Jouir du pouvoir. Traité de la bureaucratie patriote [The Joy of Power. A Treatise on Patriotic Bureaucracy], these are the two founding texts of Legendre who, until 1982-1985, with the publication of Leçons II. L’empire de la vérité : Introduction aux espaces dogmatiques industriels [Lessons II. The Empire of Truth: An Introduction to Industrial Dogmatic Spaces], gave rise to a dogmatic anthropology. He then extended this reading of the Gregorian reform in the following works, sometimes giving the impression of repeating himself, as Lucien Sfez reproached him for doing when he devoted a long chapter to Legendre’s thought in his Critique de la communication [Critique of Communication]. Legendre repeats himself, in my opinion, because he discovered a fiduciary structure, an invariant throughout history, which he finds, with Kantorowicz and Berman, in the Gregorian reform: the double structure of man governed by the rationality of reason or normativity and that of myth. These two forms of rationality mentioned above were assembled during the Gregorian reform and thus constitute an institutional structure of the West.

Here we enter the second period of Legendre’s work. Indeed, Legendre establishes a junction, notably from Lessons II that led to his film Dominium mundi (2007), between the “Gratian moment,” in the twelfth century, the luminous century of the High Middle Ages, and the hyper-technological rationality of the “managerial revolution” of the twentieth century, named as such in James Burnham’s important book, published during the Second World War: The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941). Legendre notes that management has a relationship to the governance of the world that is faithful to Gratian’s decree but obeys a single measure: efficiency. The why is evacuated at the cost of a de-symbolization: what remains is the how, which Legendre calls the “Gospel of Efficiency,” the dogma of effectiveness that results from the industrialization of the West. His strength is thus to have noticed that from the Gregorian reform came two major institutions of the West: the State based on law, which is at the heart of his reflection, and the Enterprise based on management. His criticism of the disintegration of the State, quite rightly, makes him value management as a new form of rationality in the West.

When Legendre, in this period, tried to think the essence of institutions, he also did so from linguistics, taken up by Lacan. What characterizes the human, the speaking animal, is that he divides words and things. He thus enters, by definition, in the representation and to dissociate himself from the narcissistic image, that is to say from the enclosure, as Lacan underlined it; between oneself and his image, man needs a third party, the Big Other in the Lacanian sense. Any society is structured according to a ternary scheme, which Legendre takes from classical anthropology. But if we leave ternarity to enter a binary structure, as is the case in the contemporary West, where the institution dialogues with rationality alone, the balance of society is threatened. Any society is ternary because the human animal distinguishes words and things by the word. The first symbolic institution is therefore language. Following in Lacan’s footsteps and borrowing from Saussure’s linguistics, Legendre erects the bar that separates the signifier from the signified, a first form of institution of the Third. In the mirror stage of Narcissus, there is also a third term between the subject and his image: the mirror.

Finally, a last period of his work stands out after 2009, in the last fifteen years of his life. This moment of his thought is devoted to the question of the religious. Legendre wanted to produce a film on religion, following his three famous documentaries: La fabrique de l’homme occidental [The Fashioning of Western Man], Miroir d’une nation: l’ENA [Mirror of a Nation: Ecole Nationale d’Administration] and Dominium Mundi: l’Empire du Management [Dominium Mundi: The Empire of Management]. Having run out of time, he left us only one work, Les Hauteurs de l’Eden [The Heights of Eden] (2021). In the texts of this period, he shows a preference for the word “fiduciary,” deeming that the word “religion” is worn out. As he often wrote, one does not know a society that does not have a fiduciary architecture, a staging in aesthetics, music, theatrics, etc.; and this, whatever the society and not only in the West.

This interest in the fiduciary leads him to make one last great discovery, in Leçons IX. L’autre Bible de l’Occident : le monument romano-canonique [Lessons IX: The Other Bible of the West: The Roman-Canonical Monument]: the idea of “Schize” [“split”], according to a term borrowed from Lacan. Just as the Gregorian reform provides the link that separates, the foundation of the symbolic, the Schize designates the moment when, while the juridical block, that is to say the structure of rationality and normativity with which the West is endowed—that of management and law today—remains indestructible, the symbolic enters into complete erosion. The West can substitute a myth for the other, pass from God to the Republic, from the Republic to the Nation, to Progress, etc. At the time of the Schize, the link that separates is separated: separation prevails over religion which, etymologically, designates both the reading (religere) and the link (religare). The knot that held the two aspects, distinguishable during the papal revolution, is broken.

PL: Aware of the de-civilization that is taking place, in the light of the Techno-Science-Economy, in the “managerial West,” Legendre seemed, in his last works, to be definitively leaving a ship that is sinking more and more at each “bifurcation,” according to the term you use in Le religion industrielle. How did the author of l’Avant-dernier des jours [The Penultimate of Days] envision the next decades of the West?

PM: In several places in his work, Legendre criticized the Durkheimian approach to religion. According to Legendre, a great rupture took place from the moment when religion became an individual and subjective choice. Hence his preference for the term fiduciary. Originally, religion designates that which founds and governs the whole society which is held together by this foundation: myths, beliefs etc. Legendre criticized, for example, the existence of a free market of religions, the “to each his own belief,” which has as a consequence that the answer to the why is in the individual sphere. This de-symbolization leads, according to him, to a social disintegration, since the foundation of society, which makes it constitute and transmit itself from generation to generation, comes from the collective answer to the why, which constitutes the identity of the West and the genealogy of each society.

From the moment when religion becomes an individual matter, a free market, contemporary beliefs, in the light of the Techno-Science-Economy, come under hyper-rationalism and technical or techno-scientific hyper-rationality. The “In the name of” has moved towards Progress, Performance and Efficiency. Now, the idea of Progress being, for a while, debated and in the process of disintegration, there remains the technocratic and techno-scientific hyper-rationality. The future of the West, according to Legendre, is the capitalism of the New Age, the technolatry of Silicon Valley, transhumanism; that is to say, the myth of immortality, calling into question all the limits that are at the foundation of the symbolic. Everything that is technically and scientifically possible must be realized—such is the great myth of Silicon Valley. We are entering into a pure positivist functionalism, driven by the mythology of techno-scientific progress. In this respect, for Legendre, the West is heading for disaster. A society that frees itself or abandons the symbolic is condemned to social decay. From this point of view, Legendre is rather pessimistic.

Legendre saw what the West does not want to see of itself, according to his formula, and therefore looked at it from the perspective of foreign cultures, especially those of the South: Japan, Asia and especially Africa, which he visited a lot. There are therefore other civilizations that have not abandoned the why, or that have given it a different content: community and territory in the case of Africa, for example. Through positive globalization, the concert of nations, the West brings to light the values of other civilizations called “of the South.” In this respect, if he feared an “end of the West,” like Spengler or an “end of philosophy” in cybernetics like Heidegger, Legendre emphasized that this decline valorizes other forms of civilization and seems to call for another positive globalization in the concert of civilizations.

PL: If he willingly recognized, with Blumenberg, the “legitimacy of modern times,” Legendre exposed, on the other hand, the “medieval crucible” of this same modernity. In the “secularization quarrel,” which goes back at least to Hegel, and in which he takes part in spite of himself, what is Legendre’s position?

PM: One cannot have a society without symbolism, without a foundation of beliefs and myths; this is, as I have already expressed above, the starting point of dogmatic anthropology. This is why, according to Legendre, there is no society that can be secularized. Religions or fiduciary structures remain, even if they become secular with the industrial religion of the “techno-science-economy.” In dogmatic anthropology, it is institutions that hold a society together. Now the institution, Legendre explains, is what makes the collage between the why to live and the how to live; that is to say between the symbolic and the norm. If institutions no longer produce this “glue,” according to a term borrowed from the neo-Platonists, the structure of societies collapses. Legendre often resorts to the architectural metaphor and describes the structure of societies, built like monuments. Hence the importance, for Legendre, of genealogy and the link woven between the “medieval melting pot,” where the foundations of this monument that is the West are laid, and contemporary Management, the current face that this same West gives us to see. Since his vision of history is not linear but sedimentary, what is deepest in history, like the lava at the bottom of a volcano, can become the most burning actuality.

What interested Legendre is the invariant structure of the institutions that make up society. If today the West is faltering, this means that its institutions, starting with the State, still a major institution in the organization of nations in the democratic West, are no longer doing their job of “bonding” faith and law. Thus, the balance of the dogmatic edifice of the West is threatened. This disintegration of the state institution is a distant consequence of the Schize. At the time of the Schize, the State “recovered,” so to speak, the symbolism of the Church by transferring the theological to other Referents. Then, according to the great revolutions of its history, those identified by Harold Berman—the Papal Revolution, the Reformation, the English, French, American and Russian revolutions, as well as the managerial revolution (end of the 19th-20th century)—the West was constituted and the State borrowed different “founding References.” Today, the West speaks in the name of efficiency, borrowing the managerial doctrine, which I call in a book the State-Enterprise.

But this collapse of the edifice goes back further. In the last millennium, the Church was the great founding institution and the State largely took over the Church model. This model of the Church-State became a nation-state from the 16th century, with Machiavelli, etc. It triumphed with the Treaty of Rome. It triumphed with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), the acme of the State model, until the French Revolution and the beginning of the 19th century. Moreover, the State constitutes, especially in France, the pivotal institution, to which Legendre devoted his very first works, in connection with the history of administrative law for example. When Legendre sees the State becoming a “ghost,” as he writes in Fantômes de l’État en France [Phantoms of the State in France], he obviously had in mind the French model, where the State is the institution of reference. The “lassitude of the state” and its disintegration was a major concern of Pierre Legendre. I hypothesize, in several of my books, that business and management could perhaps replace, and are already serving as crutches for, this decaying state.

PL: A scholar perched on the shoulders of other scholars whose heir he readily acknowledged himself, Pierre Legendre was first and foremost a scholarly reader. If one had to make—a legendary exercise par excellence—the genealogy of his thought, with whom would you compare the author of the Leçons [Lessons]?

PM: Beyond the contribution of psychoanalysis, law, history and anthropology, Pierre Legendre was first and foremost, in my opinion, a great scholar, therefore an encyclopedist, a walking library, such as no longer exists. Legendre spent his life not only in conversations with the greatest, but in libraries all over the world, his nose in manuscripts. One can compare him, of course, to historians such as Kantorowicz or anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss, from whom he certainly drew inspiration when he thought up his dogmatic anthropology, a reference to structural anthropology. Legendre himself cited his exchanges with André Leroi-Gourhan, who studied the relationship of the human to the world, both technical and symbolic. This duality crosses, under different forms, the work of Legendre.

Moreover, we know that he knew Lacan, that he met him frequently, that the latter helped him to publish in his book series. Legendre insisted, moreover, that his work completed a subject that the Paris Freudian school did not want to tackle, namely the institution, a blind spot in Lacan’s approach according to Legendre. However, Legendre descended more immediately from Freud. From the latter, he retained a sentence that is essential to his reasoning, found in Civilization and Its Discontents (or The Discontent in Culture), published in 1935: “If the evolution of civilization presents such similarities with that of the individual, and if both use the same means of action, would we not be authorized to make the following diagnosis: have not most civilizations or cultural epochs—even the whole of humanity perhaps—become “neurotic” under the influence of the efforts of civilization itself?”

Legendre was mostly in the line of great scholars. I am thinking of Athanasius Kircher, the German Jesuit and encyclopedist who, in the 17th century, was more important and better known than Newton. This great scholar in all fields—mathematics, astronomy, medicine, archaeology, etc. – was, for Legendre, a personal friend, whom he met and left every day, in his library. This was not limited to the producers of texts, so to speak, but concerned many artists, in literature—J.L. Borges for example, whom he met; in cinema—Chris Marker, whom he knew well and quoted in his work; in painting—Magritte, whom he often commented on. Text and image were, for Legendre, inseparable. He cherished and quoted a formula of Saint Augustine: without knowing it, man “walks in the image,” starting with his own.

Legendre’s books are, for this reason, full of images, from medieval paintings to more recent advertisements. This is not an artificial juxtaposition or gratuitous erudition; it is a way for him to show how the thought structure of a society is transmitted across generations, or beyond the medieval melting pot. From the beginning to the end of his work, his task was to detect the structure of the invariant beyond the variations.

Among Legendre’s references, one can also think of Gratian, a great jurist scholar who compiled biblical, patristic and legal texts in the 12th century. Closer to home, we can better understand Legendre by thinking of the figure of Paul Valéry: philosopher, poet and writer. In short, Legendre’s references were always other encyclopedists combining science and poetry; whatever their personal approach and the historical moment of their work.

PL: During the last twenty decades of his work, Pierre Legendre paid particular attention to young students, to whom he devoted certain essays. The Introductions, on the other hand, also testify to the diverse receptions of his work. Did Legendre seek to become a school, or at least to have an intellectual posterity?

PM: Pierre Legendre was concerned with his heritage, it seems to me, since his first film, La fabrique de l’homme occidental, that is, since 1996. The film, when I showed it to my Master’s and DEA students at the Sorbonne, was a revelation and an enlightenment for many. The documentaries that followed, the small books he published after conferences at the École des Chartes (L’inexploré [The Unexplored], 2020) or at the Lycée Louis le Grand (La Balafre: À la jeunesse désireuse [The Scar: To the Desiring Youth] 2007), for example, where he addressed a young audience, also prove that. His latest works show a concern for popularization, insofar as his work and his style are often dry and difficult.

Nevertheless, Legendre’s first concern was that of transmission: to transmit the enigma of why? The great schools and universities bathed in positivism and scientism are primarily interested in efficiency, in performance; everything appears transparent and clear. Another anthropologist, Georges Balandier, also noted that the West is in a “technological and scientific hyper-power” that avoids the economy of the why, in other words a power without meaning. Legendre left, in his own way, the same message.

Moreover, we now see international readings of Legendre, cultural appropriations of his thought. The Introductions show it well: a great scholar like Osamu Nishitani, in spite of the complexity of understanding the West from Japan, has an original and profound apprehension of Legendre’s thought. The same is true of certain German and Italian scholars. The borrowings—I spoke earlier of plundering—sometimes give way to real appropriations. Like a Michel Foucault, Legendre will in my opinion be truly recognized when he is more widely translated into English. That is also what the West is all about. That is why Legendre preferred to conduct his scholarly conversations in Latin.

“Why Ballet?” Questions from Iran

This very interesting exchange between an Iranian, Esfandiar, and Julie Cronshaw on the topic of ballet, points to the importance and necessity of the arts to properly cultivate the ground of culture so that it may yield good fruit.

Julie Cronshaw is a graduate of the Royal Ballet School’s Teacher’s Training Course and has danced professionally in ballet companies in Germany, the United States and Russia. Currently, she is the Artistic Director of the Highgate Ballet School in England. She gained her Cecchetti Teaching Diploma in 2009 and Fellowship (the highest teaching award given by the ISTD) in 2010. Julie guest teaches regularly in Paris. She is a founding member of the Auguste Vestris Society, a non-profit, Paris-based teaching organization which is dedicated to promoting classical ballet, particularly the work of great ballet masters such as Enrico Cecchetti and August Bournonville.

Esfandiar (Es): Hello Miss Cronshaw. This is Esfandiar here in Turkey but I am from Iran. My friends in the Lebanon have told me about your film Ballet’s Secret Code, on the teacher Enrico Cecchetti, and that now it has 460,000 views after two years on YT.

We have no ballet in Iran since 1979 but I like it. I feel happy when I see the people dancing to that beautiful music and I would like to do it too. Also, the Russian people here always talk about ballet and their favourite dancers. I read about it, I have learnt names for steps and watched many films. These are my questions to you about Enrico Cecchetti.

Julie Cronshaw (JC): First of all, thank you for taking the time to write to me.

It has been quite a surprise, to follow the rise in audience figures of Ballet’s Secret Code, since its release in January 2021. The project evolved from a ‘light-bulb’ moment which distilled the Method of Cecchetti’s Days of the Week into a few simple principles, and which I felt needed to be shared. When the project was finally finished I could say to anyone who asked: if you want to know, it’s on film and the information is freely available to all.

What has been even more of a surprise is to receive and read the hundreds of interesting comments and questions from across the world. There have been some lively debates on aspects of ballet as an art form and how the principles relate not only to other kinds of dance and sports, but also to society in general.

Es: What is the difference between what they teach in Russia today, and Cecchetti ? Is Cecchetti too old-timer for stage-dancing now?

JC: To be honest, the only ballet classes in Russia that I have seen recently are on the internet and the last time I watched a Russian ballet company live in London was when the Bolshoi Ballet visited a few years ago. Their dancers are so superb technically and artistically, and the love, reverence and understanding they have for the art form is palpable, I don’t wish to criticise…that would be petty and small-minded of me! Cecchetti -and a decade or two before him, August Bournonville- were not wrong when they said that the light of Terpsichore would shine again in Russia when it had dimmed in Europe.

Still as we say here, ‘A Cat may look at a King’ and when I watch a Russian ballet class sometimes it is interesting to see how the dancer’s anatomy is pushed far beyond what I believe to be aesthetically and morally acceptable. This is a personal observation! I state it clearly on the documentary, a dancer’s body is their instrument, don’t trash it! Do you not wince in empathic pain when you watch unnecessary contortion and the extreme stretching? This is in their classes and onstage as much as it is in so many other companies and schools around the world.

Also I notice the ‘international style’ combinations one sees in so many ballet classes everywhere (Jean-Guillaume Bart of the Paris Opera refers to them as ‘McDonalds’ ballet’) are creeping into some of their company classes too.

When I danced briefly in Russia in 1994, the company classes were full of ballet steps I recognised from my Cecchetti ballet training and had not otherwise seen for a while – I was living in the USA at the time and not studying Cecchetti Method. The Vaganova style is different but the principles are the same, exactly as they were back then, as far as I experienced for the short time I was there in that company.

The Russian dancers are otherwise so fabulous and they deliver what an audience expects these days, which would be a short answer to the second part of your question: is Cecchetti too much of an old-timer for today’s stage dancing? I fear “Yes, at the present time”. This could all change and hopefully for the better, because we can all see how the Western world is descending into a very dark place at a very fast pace.

Artists have always reflected the society around them and this includes its moral, cultural, philosophical and spiritual aspects. Whether one likes or loathes what a choreographer puts onstage, it usually reflects some of these aspects in his creations. I discovered just how prescient a well-known contemporary choreographer is, when I gave a presentation on ballet, ballet training and the arts in the summer of 2021 and showed an excerpt on video. I’m not sure if the piece was intended to be for or against trans-humanism and the war on women, but it was quite frightening and some of the audience asked me to switch off the video as it made them feel sick.

If one can be optimistic about the future of humanity then there is a place for Cecchetti’s Method in the ballet companies of that world. Cecchetti’s training is moral, as well as anatomically sound, and of great artistic merit. The old laws of England tell us: Be honest, do no harm and cause no loss. Cecchetti would surely agree.

Es: I do a lot of sports, but I would one day like to try ballet. I see that the Italian man in your film does not have today’s special ballet physique. But he can do the steps. The ballerina is quite old and can still do all the steps. You are quite old and can do the steps, too. So, is it necessary to be young and have special ballet physique to dance Cecchetti correctly?

JC: How does one define “old”!? When you watch those of us with maturity who can dance those Cecchetti combinations, we do not feel “old” because the enchaînements (step combinations) do not require us to push our muscles, ligaments and joints beyond their limits. We enjoy and appreciate the sophistication of these wonderful combinations, where younger dancers cannot, yet. And we do not need to compete with the ballet-gymnast who can kick up their legs for effect when we are instead, whether consciously or not, exploring the geometric shapes and Platonic forms within an adage set to a Beethoven sonata. There is of course a minimal necessary technical requirement and a very high bar is set for some of the combinations, but this is classical ballet and an art form to be studied for years, decades, not just a jog around the gym.

It is recommended that if one wishes to become a competent practitioner of anything, better to start when one is young – but Cecchetti Method does not preclude beginners who are adults or dancers with less than perfect physique. As it is a Method based on the efficient mechanical actions of the human body in motion, it can be taught to anyone who is willing and reasonably able to learn it.

Es: I notice that Cecchetti seems very decent, I think it’s the word, compared to today’s ballet. There seem to be more steps to the music, difficult, fast steps; it is less exhibitionist, less putting the body on show. In the Middle East, we don’t like it when private things are shown in public. Cecchetti could be more popular in the Middle East because of decency. Do you think?

JC: Cecchetti lived and worked at a time when people were more modestly clothed and classical ballets favoured elaborate costumes, a story, and step combinations.

As the 20th century wore on, what became “acceptable” in society (or rather, it has been proposed, what has been thrust upon us by influential people intent on pushing their own agenda) also became acceptable on the stage. As I mentioned above, artists reflect what is going on around them, so ballet styles have changed too. Of course you can argue, times have to change, but one should always strive for better in any age, or leave that which is good and true to serve as a baseline from which to begin to explore the new.

The classical ballet can so clearly express the most noble expressions of humanity in form and movement and yes, simply through steps! It’s a language.

We have now reached a point here in the West where we are scraping the bottom of the barrel culturally and morally, and it’s in the arts as well. There is a profound disgust that many of us feel when we are subjected to the unmentionably vile ugliness of modern art. As spectators we must distance ourselves from it or we will suffer emotional and spiritual abuse, which causes us long term psychological damage and leads to societal moral decline and degradation.

Es: I study physics. You write on your Website The Cecchetti Connection that Cecchetti knew about the physical principles that he put into each day of class for one week. Why is that important? Instead of just thinking up nice moves to keep students happy?

JC: Without standing upon the basic physical principles of movement that correspond to natural law, dancers would, almost literally, not have a leg to stand upon.

The beauty of Cecchetti’s Days of the Week is that each day concentrates both the dancer’s body AND mind on a specific set of steps with similar movement qualities, and builds upon their complexity and variety as the dancer’s competency and artistry develops. As a result, the dancer’s competency and artistry also develop through the repetition and increase in complexity of the original basic step of the day—and the following week this step returns to provide the theme for that day’s class.

Just as the ballet class is structured with a barre and centre work, Cecchetti took the structure and development of basic movement principles one by one, and taught them in their most obvious order, across six days of the week. They begin on Monday with the notion of aplomb and progress to the Saturday class of bouncing allegro.

It’s a very disciplined and highly organised method of working that constantly scales up the dancer’s capacity to improve technique and movement possibilities. Just kicking up the legs, doing multiple turns and throwing oneself across the floor with a few fancy circus tricks is not only hazardous, but also eventually stagnates the mind and will have the opposite effect on any thinking dancer whose level of artistry would otherwise grow with maturity, even as their pliancy and strength starts to decline.

Es: You are a Fellow of the Imperial Society of Dancing, Cecchetti branch. Someone told me that it is harder than getting a PhD, so many years of study and theory, and you have to dance all the steps well too. How did you learn all the things that you know about Cecchetti ? Who are the teachers who were your guides?

JC: I could not comment on a comparison of the difficulties of becoming a Fellow in the Cecchetti Method with the challenges of attaining a PhD! When one has danced classical ballet all one’s life, and then teaches, at some point it becomes either an obvious or natural progression to study in depth the Method learned for so many years.

I am thankful to all my many ballet teachers for sharing their years of experience, knowledge and wisdom. I was not Cecchetti-trained as a child, and when I lived in the USA I was a professional dancer, working with my former husband, whose career was with American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet.

As a student at the Royal Ballet School, I studied with the internationally-renowned Cecchetti teacher Richard Glasstone and then trained on and off with him over many years.

Roger Tully has been the most profoundly influential ballet teacher I have ever worked with, and he taught a completely different style of ballet class, but always stated the principles.

It was because of his teaching that I put two and two together and realised the underlying principles behind Cecchetti’s Days of the Week. In 2007, I was lucky enough to be asked to join the Société Auguste Vestris, a not-for-profit teaching society in Paris, whose founder is a woman of exceptional intellectual and practical capabilities, Katharine Kanter. The extraordinary people that Katharine knows from around the world and has brought together—either to become part of the society or to give presentations and workshops—has stimulated a quest for knowledge, and for certain it sparked off a latent intellectual predisposition that sent me down the path I’ve been on ever since!

Thanks to Katharine, a series of lucky happenstances, useful contacts and the financial support from the AV Society, I was able to persuade two dancers to take part in the film and find the spaces and the time to rehearse them. Then the film itself gradually came together! I read all I could find on Cecchetti and his contemporaries. His life story often provides a background context when I am occasionally asked to write an article for a Cecchetti or other dance journal.

Es: I have watched many films from the 50s and 60s. For example, Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes in The Swan Lake, 1960. The music is very fast, faster than today. But she can do all the steps in time, very fast “inside” turns and very fast backbend, or else tilting sideways or forwards on one leg off-balance. She was old then, 40, but she doesn’t seem worried. Her muscles are pretty; she doesn’t look athletic. Today, the girls look like sportswomen with big muscles, they are tense and push the steps hard. Why is that? Is ballet a sport?

JC: Margot Fonteyn was not only an artist of the highest level but also a very special human being, according to the anecdotes of those who knew and worked with her. The artist reflects their state of being and doing through their art. Dancers today are not educated to think and act either inside or outside of the studio, in the way that Fonteyn did.

During the decades that Fonteyn was a prima ballerina, Cecchetti Method was still being taught extensively in London, for example at the Royal Ballet School even though the Founder and Director of the Royal Ballet company at that time, Dame Ninette de Valois, was already looking around internationally for teachers and dancers to enhance the technical level of the company, its prestige and global appeal. The style of the Royal Ballet, exemplified by the choreography of Frederick Ashton, showed intricate footwork, lyrical lines and fluid port de bras. It developed as a combination of the teaching of the first and second generation of Cecchetti trained dancers, Ballets Russes emigres, and other independent ballet teachers from around the world.

This style of dancing depended upon step choreography and gestures to convey a story or sometimes an abstract idea. It was the way things were done in those days, and it wasn’t the fashion to dance onstage in one’s underwear. Nor to kick the legs up and perform ballet tricks for sensational effect. This is maybe why dancers today push so hard and have the big muscles and dance like it’s a sport: the training encourages effect and show, not so much anymore the crystallisation into form of an idea or ideal from the realm of the imagination, and projected through the highly contrived – and perfectly suited for it- environment of the theatre stage.

As a side note, one cannot say that dancers from those mid 20th century decades could not do the tricks, like the fouettés and so on, of course they could, but there was another aesthetic that took precedence over the effects. Technique was used as a means to an end not its end. Ballet is an art not a sport.

Es: I have also watched the Russian ballet films from the 50s and 60s. I enjoy to see the girls like Svetlana Efremova or Gabriela Komleva. Other girls are good too. They could do anything, jump high, criss-cross very fast with the feet, also doing very hard steps on their toe-tips. They seem better than the girls today, stronger, telling about the music, and also, making it look easy. Why is that?

JC: They are fabulous yes aren’t they? The technique taught in those days was more likely focused on step combinations and different kinds of steps rather than stretching and effects, as I’ve tried to explain in replying to your previous question! When one takes up more time in class stretching at the barre, obsessing over the height of an arabesque, hitting those numbers for pirouettes and wondering how one is going to look wearing not much more than a leotard or shorts that evening onstage, it must surely change one’s approach to training!

I have a theory that the rampant narcissism in society and especially in the ballet, is in no small part, brought about by the ongoing unpleasant cultural changes being forced upon us at all levels, the abusive, un-education system, the horrendous global situation, political lawlessness and the pervading sense of uncertainty in the world that dancers pick up upon because they are artists and reflect that which is around them.

Es: I have watched films with American men dancing classical ballet now. Their leg muscles seem bulged up, especially the quadriceps, and they seem to put the weight to their toes. I am a sportsman and I don’t put the weight on my toes. The American men are thin but they look heavy. Why is that?

JC: The body is a heavy and solid object! When one puts weight over the toes the direction of force is directed downwards and the effort required to shift it is more than when the weight is distributed about the central axis – and where the musculature in the torso can be more efficiently directed.

When the legs do more work proportionately to that of the torso it becomes obvious that the muscles in the legs will develop disproportionately to the muscles in the torso.

Es: Does Cecchetti have special steps, special training, for men ? Do the feet have to be pointing outwards as much as in modern ballet which is 180°?

JC: There are lovely combinations for the male dancer including long, sustained adages, some choreographed and complex others using simple repetition of movements and poses in the basic directions of the body. There are slow adagio pirouettes (turns) and fast, virtuosity pirouettes, for which the Maestro was renowned in his dancing years, and all sorts of jumps, not just the big leaps across the stage but bouncing combinations (in the style of Bournonville), petite and grande batterie (criss-crossing the legs in beats close to, or farther off the floor)) and unusual, off-balance combinations that wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary class!

No, the feet do not have to be turned out to 180 degrees, and Cecchetti’s 5th position doesn’t over- cross, which helps to keep the legs turned out at the thigh and facilitates speed.

Es: I saw your “Tips for a Ballet Teacher.” You talk about renversé (bending strongly and turning upon oneself, either towards (en dedans) or away (en-dehors) from the standing leg). I don’t understand how you can hold off-balance like that while moving downwards or turning. You don’t fall down. Is it special muscles you use? Or is it the move that helps you?

JC: It’s the momentum of the turn generated by the torso, the correct carriage and use of the head as it’s heavy, and the coordination of the legs and arms, all of which are vital for carrying the momentum of the renversé and enabling the recovery, especially if it’s into a position of extension en l’air (the gesture leg is fully stretched and held in the air), as in renversé en dedans.

Es: I saw that Lebanese teenagers have sent you a video of a ballet they made up, to honour Cecchetti, after they watched your film. Please tell about that.

JC: The YouTube video made by this couple (who were young but not teenagers, if I recall!) was made during one of the Covid lockdowns. They rehearsed and produced a pas de deux in the summer heat, in a ruined building which was little more than a shell, and the piece they created, was very simply and honestly done, sincere and very artistic. I was contacted through the Ballet’s Secret Code e-mail address and sent the link. It reminded me of what Roger Tully used to say in class sometimes, and it would be said not in irony, but as a high compliment:

“It could almost be dancing!”

Featured: Anna Pavlova in the Ballet Sylphyde, by Valentin Serov; painted in 1909.

Socrates on the Radio

It’s eleven o’clock on Tendencies Radio. It’s time to hand it over to George Waddle for his program “Open Mind.” Hello George.

Hello, Armanda. Hello all. Welcome to this new edition of “Open Mind,” along with Claudine Idiotintown. Good morning, Claudine. How are you this morning?

Good morning, George. That’s a beautiful shirt you’re wearing!

Isn’t it? Today we welcome the philosopher, Socrates. Good morning, Socrates.

Socrates greets kindly.

“He’s really ugly.” Claudine whispers in the host’s ear. “Thank God we’re not on TV.”

Hello, Socrates. Hello…!

Why doesn’t the clown answer? thinks Waddle. But like the good professional he is, he continues.

So, Socrates, you are a famous philosopher. You have written a lot.

No, by Zeus, I have not written anything.

You haven’t written anything?

Not one line.

But, but, OK. Well, I really want to ask you your opinion on something that concerns us all. Yesterday, as you certainly know, the prestigious site Manip-Media published a damning report about the minister, Constant Waffler. Let’s recall what happened. The young Waffler stole three or maybe it was four marbles from Stephanie Gasbag when both were in kindergarten and, when latter complained, Waffler replied, “Girls don’t know how to play marbles!” The association Stop Girlphobia immediately denounced this slip of the tongue and demanded the head of the minister, and the leader of the opposition followed suit. In short, here we are in the middle of Wafflergate. What do you think, Socrates?

I don’t know. I am not able to answer that question.

But come on, Socrates, such a violation of equality, of justice!

What justice are you talking about?

Well, justice, you know, justice!

But isn’t justice a difficult question?

Yes… no…. And you Socrates, what is your definition of justice?

I don’t know. Justice is lived rather than defined. I talked about it with Thrasymachus and we agreed that injustice is a vice and justice a virtue.

Thrasymachus, Thrasymachus, who is this weirdo? But then Waddle said to himself that he had found a good angle of attack and continued.

A vice, a virtue. Those words sound a lot like what a reactionary would say. You wouldn’t be a reactionary, would you, Socrates?

I don’t know. What do you mean by reactionary?

You know, those narrow-minded people, those backward-looking people, those populists.

You know, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. I wouldn’t be able to answer that.

Well, then would you be on the side of the populists?

I don’t know. What do you mean by populist?

This guy’s impossible, thought Waddle. But bravely he continued

You know, Socrates, these people who criticize the elites, these narrow-minded, these reactionaries.

No, I don’t know.

Well, finally, to which side do you belong?

Which sides are you talking about?

But Socrates, did you just crawl out under a rock? I’m talking about the opposition between people of progress, the people of the Enlightenment and the conservatives, the retrogrades. And Socrates, will you stop answering my questions with questions?

Why? Is it forbidden to ask questions?

No, but the rule is that the journalist asks questions and the guest answers

Yes, but is that a good rule?

Oh, that’s not the point, Socrates.

I mean, why don’t journalists want to be asked questions?

Because that’s how an interview should be. But tell me, Socrates, aren’t you one of those people who scapegoat journalists, who constantly criticize them?

You know, I’m new in this country. I wouldn’t want to pass judgment. But why can’t we criticize journalists?

That’s a different question entirely! But the answer is easy—because journalists embody freedom of expression, because to criticize them is to undermine freedom, democracy.

What freedom are you talking about?

There you go again! Freedom of expression at all costs! This is obvious.

For example, does the freedom of expression of journalists include the freedom to say uncertain or erroneous things?

Uh, what are you talking about? No, of course not.

Does it include the freedom to say untrue things?

No, no, no. Look, I’m asking the questions!

Let me finish. I will be brief. So, you agree that the freedom of expression is based on something beyond it?

Maybe, maybe not. But, please, Socrates, let’s get back to the subject. Let’s go back to… I don’t know.

Let’s go on, if you don’t mind. What is freedom of expression for?

Now you’re getting annoying. But how should I know. They never talk about these things in journalism schools.

What freedom of expression is based on, wouldn’t that be the real thing?

Yes, maybe, if you like.

So, the freedom you claim is the freedom to tell the truth?

Yes, that’s it, that’s it.

So, if a journalist does not tell the truth, is it not reasonable to criticize him?

If you want to, yes, but that never happens.

Are you saying that journalists are infallible and that they abhor cheating?

Oh, that’s too much! Thank you, thank you, Socrates! This was Open Mind, a program by… by… Waffler George. Next week, …well…, you’ll see. A few ads up next.

As he left the studio, a gaggle of journalists were all over Socrates. He managed to escape, but one of them, the fastest, the youngest, caught up with him.

“Please, Socrates, please, a word. If I come back empty-handed, my editor will fire me. Besides, I know you. I’ve read your disciple, Plato.”

Socrates stopped.

“I work for Time,” said the young man with pride. And he quickly continued:

“Here, here is my question. I’m sure it will interest you. You say in the Phaedrus that the written word is inherently defective because one cannot know to whom one is speaking, whereas the spoken word allows one to tell each person what it is good for him to hear. So, why did you agree to speak on the radio? You will tell me that you spoke without a doubt, but radio has the defects of the written word—you could not know precisely to whom you were speaking.”

Yes, yes, I congratulate you. But can you say that I said many things on the radio?

“Yes, well, no. I mean you asked a lot of questions.”

That’s my usual way. But do you think we’ve gone too far?

“I suppose you’re going to blame the journalists again.”

I’m just asking if an ordinary radio interview lends itself to dialectic, I mean to a real dialogue.

“But it certainly does. The microphone was all yours.”

Isn’t it true that radio journalists usually stay on the surface of things?

“You are very severe!”

That they shy away from developments?

“But that’s the law of the genre!”

That they like to make a show of things and play the arbiter of elegance?

“Now, you’re exaggerating!”

And that the best thing to do is to make the journalist pass an examination that is useful to him and to those who listen?

“Ah, that’s it. You went to the radio to say bad things about the radio! Or rather, to show off. But, but I can’t write what you say. My editor would have a fit. Tell me something I can write. I don’t know, about… about… OK. What advice would you give to a young man?”

But, my young friend, I don’t know anything. I am only trying to give birth to the mind of the one I am talking to.

“Go ahead, go ahead, I am ready.”

I would be happy to, if it were possible, but time is too short. I have to be at the Champs Elysees this afternoon.

Philippe Bénéton is Professor emeritus of Rennes I and is the author of Le dérèglement moral de l’Occident, Les fers de l’opinion, Introduction à la politique, Le conservatisme. This interview appears courtesy of La Nef.

Giorgio Locchi and the Suprahumanist Myth

Philosopher, journalist and essayist, Giorgio Locchi (1923-1992) was one of the tutelary figures of non-conformist thought, which deeply influenced two streams: the New Right and Neo-paganism (with the myth of the Suprahuman). In this interview, his son Pierluigi Locchi explores the essential ideas of his father. The interview, conducted by Eyquem Pons, appears through the kind courtesy of Revue Éléments.

Eyquem Pons (EP): Many readers are unaware of the very existence of Giorgio Locchi. Can you resituate who he was? His life, his struggles, his passions?

Pierluigi Locchi (PL): I will answer your question by mentioning some key stages in his life.

Born in Rome on April 15, 1923, my father entered the Nazareno College by competitive examination at the age of ten. Four years later, his Italian and Latin teacher, Padre Vannucci, gave him a book on his fourteenth birthday with these words: “This book is on the Index, but as you will get there one day anyway, I want to be the one who gave it to you. This book was The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music by Friedrich Nietzsche. My father remembered it all his life: “Thanks to him,” he confided to me one day, “I discovered that others felt the same things as me!”

At the end of the war, just 22 years old, my father had to give up higher studies in philosophy that he would have liked to pursue, since he had to provide for his parents quickly. Having opted for a doctorate with a faster course, in philosophy of law, he had nevertheless been chosen by his professor to succeed him in the chair of philosophy of law at La Sapienza University in Rome. Unfortunately, for financial reasons, he could not afford to wait the necessary number of years and took up a career as a journalist. This took him to Paris in 1957, as a correspondent for the Roman daily Il Tempo, where he remained until the end of his life.

The 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s saw Girogio Locchi holed up in his office, but he did end up finding the audience that the University of Rome had not been able to give him, initially in the circle of young French intellectuals frequenting the Librairie de l’Amitié and gathered around the magazine Europe-Action by Dominique Venner and Jean Mabire, among whom a certain Alain de Benoist already stood out, and then especially in the community gathered around GRECE ( Research and Study Group for European Civilization) of which he was one of the co-founding members. Though my father was also a member of the editorial board of the magazine Nouvelle École, to which he contributed very regularly until 1979, his role was rather different. Being the thinking head of this new movement, Locchi was more than a philosopher, journalist, essayist and thinker; he was, as Guillaume Faye rightly wrote, “an awakener and a dynamiter,” exactly in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche.

And a whole generation of intellectuals has drunk from the spring of this master, who, after having evolved within or around GRECE and then branched off, still constitutes today the spearhead of non-conforming thought, starting with Alain de Benoist, today the undisputed leader of the New Right. And “old-fashioned” master, my father transmitted a lot orally. I remember in particular the two years when he received on Tuesday evenings in our house in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, a whole assembly of students and young workers, eager for knowledge, gathered in particular for two training periods, one dedicated to Richard Wagner and the other to Friedrich Nietzsche. Who would have believed that? On this double filiation rests a good part of the intellectual formation of those who played and still partly play a preponderant role in European nonconforming culture.

Another great passion of my father was music, and perhaps above all the work of Richard Wagner. I will be eternally grateful to him for letting me discover Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Bayreuth at the age of eleven! Among his other areas of interest, some, such as history, linguistics, our Indo-European past, are well-known. Others, such as quantum physics or logic, are less so. All his knowledge, all his passions, however, were always put by him at the service of a work of unveiling, with Giorgio Locchi holding particularly to his role as historian.

If the history of which he speaks to us is clearly part of a suprahumanist perspective, which I will have the opportunity to speak about, he has always insisted on the role which must be that of any historian, which is to carry out an analysis, sine ira et studio, without hatred or passion, as Spinoza said, that is to say without letting his own necessarily partisan positions influence the way in which this analysis is presented; therefore without taking sides in the exposition of the facts, or more exactly, specifying each time in what perspective, from what point of view the facts are presented. From there, the fight of his whole life became one of working for the understanding of what the suprahumanist myth is, what are the different forms in which it has successively manifested itself for more than a century and a half, and in what it carries within it, which is the renewal of our civilizational heritage. It is a work of both historian and philosopher, the same myth taking each time, from Wagner to Nietzsche, from Heidegger to Locchi, to name but a few, a new form in whoever carries it within him, by the laws of becoming.

EP: What does it bring to this family of thought?

PL: I am always wary of exaggerated enthusiasm and grandiloquent assertions, but I have to repeat the terms used by Guillaume Faye in his “Archaeofuturist reflections inspired by the thought of Giorgio Locchi”: “I weigh my words carefully—without Giorgio Locchi and his work, which is measured by its intensity and not by its quantity, and which also rested on a patient work of oral formation, the real chain of defense of European identity would probably be broken.”

It is therefore a major contribution in two ways, and major for looking to the past, for considering our present, or for projecting ourselves into the future. Major, first, for looking to the near past, considering his work of formation of the new generations of the 1970 and 1980s, generations which in France and in Europe carry today the most radical alternative and innovative thought in face of the system in force, a true system “to kill the people,” as Guillaume Faye rightly wrote. Second, major for looking to the distant past, considering the centrality, that he was the first to grant in the post-war period, to the significance of the Indo-European fact. Regarding our present, we owe him the highlighting of the epochal conflict, recently appeared, between the opposite historical tendencies, irreconcilable and irreducible to each other, which are the egalitarian bimillennial tendency and the suprahumanist tendency. This is a particularly valuable key to understanding. Moreover, the suprahumanist perspective allows the definition of what is common to the various sensibilities and organizations that compose it, beyond the visions and the individual or partisan specificities. As for the future, it is by this same suprahumanist perspective that Locchi allows us to think the alternative to the anthropological decline that Europe is experiencing and to aim at a rebirth of Europe that is only conceivable by the regeneration of our history.

EP: What is the importance of the two works, Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste (Wagner, Nietzsche and the Suprahumanist Myth), and Définitions (Definitions) by Giorgio Locchi?

PL: First of all, a clarification. Only the essays that appeared in Nouvelle École some fifty years ago are being “reissued” in Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste—and the half-century that has passed is in itself an answer to your question. Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste remained unpublished until now. Even though it takes up the theme of Nouvelle École, no. 31, this book is entirely reformulated in the perspective of the author’s open theory of history, which constitutes a key to interpretation briefly sketched out in one or two writings published in France in the 1970s, and brought out here for the first time. This is therefore its first presentation to the French public.

Giorgio Locchi’s work is central for those who want to think about the new European renaissance. It even constitutes a true unveiling, Locchi allows us to understand how and why, after having passed through pagan antiquity and the Western Christian cycle, European identity finds itself today, in a world undergoing profound change, in the midst of forgetting itself, for some, and in the midst of rediscovering itself, for others.

Even unfinished, his work represents for me a true cornerstone of our vision of the world, in the same way as the works of Wagner, Nietzsche or Heidegger, which is why I am delighted that the Iliad Institute is committed to publishing in the coming years the complete texts written by the Roman philosopher.

EP: What is the place for suprahumanism today? And what is the difference between anti-egalitarianism and transhumanism?

PL: I will answer in one or two sentences, by affirming first of all that the suprahumanism corresponds to the crossing of a new stage by the European man and the European civilization, and that by this very fact it is situated in a stage of conscience superior to the one of egalitarianism—which cannot be the case of the simple anti-egalitarianism that is satisfied with inverting a scale of values that would not be convenient for it in egalitarianism. I will also add that transhumanism corresponds to the egalitarian way, to face the anthropological mutation that we know today, and a way whose harmful consequences can be fought only by the suprahumanist vision.

EP: Could you elaborate further?

PL: Certainly, I am well aware of the innovative aspect of the “suprahumanist principle,” and it is therefore necessary, here more than ever, to define the terms we use.

Suprahumanism is this new historical tendency whose founding myth appeared almost at the same time in Wagnerian dramas and sacred scenic representations and in the Nietzschean philosophy and poetics. The suprahumanist tendency spread like wildfire throughout Europe, which in the second half of the 19th century was largely ready to welcome it, in all artistic, cultural and political circles. The founding myth that animated this tendency carried with it a new vision of historical time, the one that Heidegger would define as “authentic temporality,” in which man expresses his historicity, his being-for-history, and that my father named the “three-dimensional conception of historical time,” a spherical vision of historical space-time.

This conception was consubstantial with the work of the authors of the German Conservative Revolution, as with that of a Gabriele d’Annunzio and even of a Charles Maurras. I quote Giorgio Locchi:

“The suprahumanist conception of time is no longer linear, but affirms the three-dimensionality of the time of history, time inextricably linked to that one-dimensional space which is the very consciousness of every human person. Every human consciousness is the place of a present; this present is three-dimensional and its three dimensions, all given together as the three dimensions of physical space are given together, are the actual, the become and the to-be.

“This may seem abstruse, but only because we have been used to a different language for two thousand years. Indeed, the discovery of the three-dimensionality of time, once made, turns out to be a kind of Columbus egg. What is indeed human consciousness, as a place of time immediately given to each of us? It is, on the dimension of the personal becoming, memory, that is to say the presence of the past; it is, on the dimension of actuality, the presence of the spirit in action; it is, on the dimension of the future, the presence of the project and of the pursued goal, project and goal which, stored and present to the spirit, determine the action in progress.”

Giorgio Locchi’s first contribution is precisely to highlight this kinship beyond the strong specificities of each one; this common vision of history; this way of feeling man as a historically free being, which constitutes an absolute novelty: “What we have called up to now the past, the historical past, exists in fact only on the condition of being in some way present, and present to consciousness. In itself, as the past, it is insignificant, or more precisely, ambiguous: it can mean opposite things, have opposite values: and it is each of us, starting from our personal ‘present’, who decides what it should mean in relation to the foreseen future.”

Likewise, Locchi notes, suprahumanist authors “always attach the idea of ‘myth’ to that of ‘revolution,’ within the framework of a conception of history in which the linearity of historical becoming is no longer more than an appearance, in which the ‘origin’ returns in each ‘present,’ is born from each ‘present’ and rises from each ‘present’ toward the future in a project.”

Suprahumanism, as defined by my father, is therefore not an expression or a trend among others, but the common matrix of all artistic, literary, cultural, political or metapolitical expressions aiming at the rebirth of our European civilization, whenever the latter is seen as having come to the end of a cycle and condemned to “rebirth or death.” Another definition—in a way, the term “suprahumanism,” was chosen by Locchi in homage to the Zarathustrian myth of Friedrich Nietzsche.

EP: We are indeed moving away from anti-egalitarianism.

PL: If every suprahumanist is, by definition, in the camp opposed to the egalitarian tendency, every anti-egalitarian does not necessarily belong to the suprahumanist camp, since there is also an anti-egalitarianism that claims egalitarian values simply inverted, such as Satanism, for example.

It should be noted here above all that the appearance of the new suprahumanist historical tendency has allowed the two-thousand-year-old egalitarian tendency to become aware of itself and its unity beyond the differences of the religious, philosophical and political currents that compose it. This explains the ever-increasing “unnatural” rapprochements between the Church and communist unions, between financial oligarchies and anarchist or revolutionary “ecologist” movements, and so on.

There remains the question of transhumanism. Independently of the lexical proximity with the term of suprahumanism, which readily creates at times a confusion, what makes the question particularly complex, is that one meets supporters and detractors of transhumanism in the egalitarian camp and in the superhumanist camp, each one going off its own definition, privileging this or that aspect, and ignoring others.

Let’s try to see more clearly.

Here too, the work of Giorgio Locchi is of great help, but I must once again move the cursor and refer first this time to his description of the three great stages passed by man in the course of his history, and which correspond to three types of social organization. There is no question of going into detail here about hominization, the Neolithic revolution and the contemporary technological revolution. I refer, in particular for the first two, to the second part of the study on ” Lévi-Strauss et l’anthropologie structurelle [Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology],” in particular in Définitions.

However, I point to an essential observation: where man transforms his environment, he transforms himself. The first man created himself by giving himself, through culture, the means to live in spite of his incomplete biological condition—indeed, where the animal is inscribed in the specific environment given to each species, benefiting from a mode of use inscribed in its genetic code, man is born incomplete and defenseless, exposed to the hostility of the world. No fur to protect himself from the cold, no claws to defend himself, etc. In other words, where the animal has received everything by its own inheritance, where it is born finished, man, in addition to his own biological inheritance which leaves him unfinished, needs a period of extra-uterine gestation, then a long period of education, to appropriate the cultural inheritance, starting with language, which will make him become man. If, as an unfinished mammal, man survived, it is because he forged himself, by forging his own culture, that is to say the weapons that allowed him to create his own environment; he adapted to his needs according to the objectives that he set himself. These can obviously differ according to the types of man and the latitudes, but a constant is common to this first hunter-gatherer man—he is himself both subject and object of his own domestication.

EP: Then the Neolithic revolution.

PL: Things changed radically with the Neolithic revolution, when man added a new string to his bow, that of domesticating living nature. Now, domesticating living nature implies sedentarization and specialization, and therefore a radical modification of the social organization. Locchi indicates in several essays, short and concise, of a crystalline clarity, how our Indo-European ancestors faced this revolution, making their own this new type of man, assuming this splitting of the originally unique man in different types of men and solving the problem through the communitarian link and the assumption of a common destiny. They thus projected a pantheon in which the gods, human and too human, embody the ideal of a world where man has become multiple, while reflecting in their functional trilogy—Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus to put it in the manner Roman—the three social functions (priestly, warlike and productive) of Neolithic society, which the Indo-Europeans therefore conceive of as a community of destiny, chosen and even desired, with its uncertainties. The acceptance of this becoming, in which divided man rediscovers his original unity, is what we call the tragic meaning of history. But Locchi also indicates how, for another part of humanity, this revolution was, on the contrary, a curse, a bitterly regretted loss of the original unity of the first man, a metaphysical unity that must be rediscovered. For this part of humanity, history is to suffered; it is the consequence of a transgression, an evil that must be rid of in order to reconnect with unity, to rediscover the uniqueness of the first man. This other humanity therefore ideally sees itself as One—and expresses it in monotheism. We see here how, already, by redrawing the picture of this previous revolution, we are led to speak of the meaning of history, and of opposing visions of history.

Which brings us back to transhumanism, which is perhaps the most striking symbol of the third great stage just taken by man, that of the domestication of matter-energy, and where man is once again transformed into transforming his environment.

We must of course start by agreeing on the term. This can be understood (at least) in two ways. Either we mean by transhumanism all the new techniques of appropriation, including of man himself by man, that the domestication of matter-energy now allows—biotechnologies, genetic manipulations, but also artificial intelligence and techniques of influence, for example—and in this case transhumanism is an objective fact, a concept that can sum up in one word the new human situation; either we see in transhumanism the objectives that some think they can achieve thanks to these new techniques—and in this case transhumanism is defined according to subjective data specific to the one who judges it “immoral,” because of transgressing or even aiming at abolition of “natural” and “eternal laws.” Now, the key to the domestication of matter-energy enables us to understand that we have no choice but to “deal with” its consequences; and the key to the epochal conflict between opposing tendencies enables us to understand that we find ourselves faced with the same alternative as during the Neolithic revolution—accept the transformation of man or reject it out of nostalgia for the previous state. Our Indo-European ancestors took up the challenge and adopted this transformation. This is exactly what the suprahumanists intend to do, faced with the challenge of modernity.

EP: What can a young reader find in Locchi’s demanding texts?

PL: I remember how, on reading these texts, different elements of my vision of the world, of my way of feeling things, of my analysis of past or recent events found an interpretative key that satisfied both my intellect and my heart, and how they have allowed me to structure my thinking and guide my action throughout my life.

I can only wish the young reader to experience the same sense of unveiling that I experienced for myself many years ago. As a young auditor of the Iliade Institute’s training cycle told me, Locchi’s thought is a “radically modern thought, turned towards the future and which intellectually equips anyone who appropriates it, whatever the field in which he will exercise his talents: artistic, literary, cultural, political or metapolitical.”

EP: Giorgio Locchi developed the idea of “interregnum,” a transitional phase in our history. What does that mean?

PL: As mentioned, we are witnessing the emergence of a third man, even more specialized and socially divided, and therefore, from our European point of view, even more under the obligation, on pain of pure and simple disappearance, to find his unity, his fulfillment in a community of destiny based on a new origin, just as there was a new origin for the second man, a new origin expressed with Homer, with Greek tragedy, the Germanic Edda, Indo- European in its various forms.

This new origin naturally claims continuity, the appropriation of our European heritage, but also requires its overcoming. This new origin—and the Locchian teaching takes on its full meaning here—appears in the form of a new myth. And just as the works of Homer, or the Eddas, or the Rig-Veda embody the European worldview of the Second Man, the suprahumanist myth, as represented by Richard Wagner and formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche, embodies the worldview of the European Third Man. This is the subject of the second book published by the Iliad Institute, Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste (Wagner, Nietzsche and the Suprahumanist Myth).

EP: The Interregnum we are experiencing today corresponds to the period when the two epochal tendencies mentioned above clash without one or the other having really won.

PL: The interregnum will last as long as this conflict between the egalitarian tendency, certainly the majority, but shaken, and the suprahumanist tendency, minority but more determined than ever, is not resolved. We can also say that the interregnum will last as long as the partisans of a European response to the challenges of modernity rise up against the very people who use transhumanist techniques to cause peoples to regress to a stage comparable to that of the animals, enclosing them in an eternal materialistic and hedonistic present which is none other than the end or exit of history. The interregnum will cease only in the event of the total victory of the suprahumanist tendency, or the complete eradication of its representatives.

Contrary to a Dominique Venner who, even if he did not know when it would take place, did not doubt the awakening of Europeans, Giorgio Locchi does not pronounce on a final outcome, and limits himself to indicating that the choice is always possible as long as men will carry within them the suprahumanist myth. In this he is on the same wavelength as Nietzsche, who gave us a first vision of this interregnum by describing man as this bridge stretched between the Beast—the last man—and the Superman, whom he calls for.

EP: Since one of the two books is a collection of definitions, is there a quotation that could summarize or introduce Locchi?

PL: Just one seems difficult to me to find. So, I’m going to skip this.

EP: In spite of a certain mutual affection, Nietzsche nevertheless wrote a pamphlet against Wagner. Isn’t it problematic to present them both as the fathers of suprahumanism?

PL: On the value of these pamphlets (The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner)I refer to the entire chapter Locchi dedicates to the “Nietzsche Case,” which answers your question in a detailed and even “definitive” way, according to Paolo Isotta, an Italian musicologist and author of the afterword entitled, “La Musique, Le Temps, le Mythe” [Music, Time, Myth], where a Stefan George, for example summarizes rather dryly: “Without Wagner, there would be no Birth of Tragedy; without the awakening provoked by Wagner, there would be no Nietzsche…. The Wagner case is in reality the Nietzsche case itself.”

I will limit myself here to quoting two extracts from this chapter:

“Nietzsche drew in philosophical terms the structure of the suprahumanist myth and, by a new language, conferred the first evidence of the implications of this myth. But this myth already existed, because it was represented by and in the Wagnerian drama. Nietzsche did nothing more than give it a ‘name’ and a ‘philosophical’ formulation.”

And further on:

“The fact that Wagner and Nietzsche, one by representation, the other by formulation of an identical myth, create the ‘mythical field’ of suprahumanism and insert it concretely into history, does not mean, moreover, that below the respective representation and formulation of the same myth, they do not have divergent ‘reflections’ on the retrospective opened by the myth and, consequently, on the strategy with which to pursue the ‘goal’ of the suprahumanist tendency.”

EP: In the current debate on the notions of the West and Europe, what place can the thought of Giorgio Locchi take?

PL: You asked for a quote earlier, I’m giving you one as a prelude to my answer: “Europe only exists, and is only possible, when it ceases to be the West of the world. As long as the Europeans do not renounce this logic, any political project will have the effect of nailing them to the historical destiny that stems from Yalta.” Locchi says so in the last of the twelve Definitions brought together in the work which has just appeared, named, following the example of the first Italian edition of the Definizioni: “Europe is not heritage but future mission. If we look more closely, the whole current debate on the notions of the West and Europe can be resolved by adopting this perspective, which is none other, once again, than that of Nietzsche, for that Europe is “Land der Kinder,” land of children and not of fathers, and of Heidegger, when he calls for the “new beginning” of Europe (for example in his first course in the lecture course, Introduction to Metaphysics).

Once again, the distinction between the spherical vision of history, specific to the suprahumanists and the linear, parabolic vision specific to the egalitarians, makes it possible to better understand the distinction between Europe not-heritage-but-mission-future and a Western Europe doomed to disappearance or to the triumph of the annihilation of our civilization.

The fact remains that there is still debate between Europe and the West in the suprahumanist camp. This is due above all to reasons of a semantic order and generally comes from the absence of a possibility of precise expression, because many are still those who feel things in a suprahumanistic way, but remain prisoners of a vocabulary and terms which I hope Locchi’s thought will make it possible to understand to what extent they belong to the opposite tendency. In his study “History and Destiny”, the second of the Definitions, Locchi speaks of a “modern schizophrenic West,” in majority “Judeo-Christian West which ended up discovering itself as such” and where “only the small minorities, scattered here and there, look with nostalgia on the achievements of their oldest ancestors… and dream of resuscitating them”—recalling however that such a return “can never happen” (“we do not bring back the Greeks”), but… can turn into a regeneration of history. And he who says regeneration of history, says regeneration of Europe, uncoupled, therefore, from a now ambiguous and mostly enemy “West.”

The West, with which Europe was certainly able to merge in the past, and to which most of the current leaders of European nations claim to belong, has in fact today become egalitarian and now seems above all to aim for the establishment of a new leveling and populicidal world order. From the Locchian perspective, Europe is opposed to this egalitarian West which no longer has anything to do with the Europe that the suprahumanists are calling for (and it is moreover not without interest to see that more and more, and even within the European Union, a tendency is emerging which, in the name of European sovereignty, opposes the dominant vision which aims to include Europe in the sphere of influence of the United States, rightly perceived as the new center of the West).

EP: How do we apply the “Locchian” reading grid in 2023?

PL: I believe I have already given a certain number of examples, and the last just now. In summary, I would say that with Locchi, any fighter for a new European renaissance has a precious compass allowing them to distinguish, beyond the appearances of a major and complex epoch conflict, what is the responsibility of their own tendency: suprahumanist, within the scope of the opposing egalitarian tendency.

Health, Freedom, Politics: An Interview with Pedro Morago

A Spaniard by birth, Pedro Morago is a leading light amongst contributors to the Italian and Spanish alternative news media. After practising as a solicitor in Spain, where he specialized in criminal and constitutional law, Morago uprooted his career path and moved to England to study the methodology for evaluating scientific research, a subject he now teaches.

As a devout Catholic, his pondered views on the current Pontificate—expressed on the very eve of the death of Pope Benedict XVI—are perhaps unsurprisingly, borne out by other Catholic observers such as François Asselineau, head of the UPR in France or the author of Benoit et moi.

In clear, simple terms, Morago’s interview also sheds light on the circumstances of Mario Draghi’s departure, which may seem impenetrable to a foreigner, and on whether Georgia Meloni might not be putty in the hands of the Usual Suspects.

Interview conducted, and translated from the Spanish-language original, by Mendelssohn Moses.

Mendelssohn Moses (MM): You teach Methodology of Scientific Research at Teesside University, I believe. That must have helped you to see through the Scamdemic pretty quickly! Tell us about how you realized what was going on back in 2020.

Pedro Morago (PM): Indeed. I’m Senior Lecturer in Research Methods and Evidence-based Practice (clinical area).

Pedro Morago.

In early 2020, I was still in a bit of a fog, but on November 9th of that year, the very moment I heard Biden the President-elect, announce that “vaccines” for COVID-19 were about to become available, I rushed to examine the manufacturers’ clinical data and the authorization process by the FDA in the USA and the MHRA in the UK. With that before my eyes, along with articles by the likes of Professor Peter Doshi and Dr. Diana Zuckerman in the British Medical Journal, by February/March 2021, I was fairly clear in my mind about glaring methodological flaws in the studies the manufacturers put out, as well as disturbing irregularities in the so-called emergency use authorizations issued by the regulators.

MM: How did you meet up with Riccardo Rocchesso and start contributing to 100 Giorni da Leoni?

PM: As 2020 drew to a close, and by early 2021, re-information channels and media sprang up all over Italy, and began to play a major role—not only in knocking the scales from the citizenry’s eyes as to what was really being hatched, but in preventing millions of those resisting (the Resistants) from being cut off and isolated. Whereas, one of the Plan’s main objectives was precisely to bell-jar dissidents.

That said, on listening to the alternative media, I began to note a great lack in precisely my own area of expertise, that is, in evaluating evidence from scientific research studies. Accordingly, I fired off e-mails to twenty or so leading contributors to those media, and offered my help on a volunteer basis.

To my surprise and delight, within 48 hours I heard from Riccardo Rocchesso at 100 Giorni da Leoni, from Dr. Loretta Bolgan, from Carlo Dalmasso of the Federazione del Popolo Sovrano, Fabio Frabetti of Rinascimento Italia, from the writer and politologist Cosimo Massaro, with whom I straightaway began to work. Through them, I became acquainted with Dr. Barbara Balanzoni, the conductor Andrea Colombini, the admirable Ornella Mariani, Professor Alessandro Meluzzi and other prominent Resistants in Italy.

By working regularly with 100 Giorni da Leoni for nearly two years, on programmes which attracted on average 130,000 viewers each and sometimes 200,000, including Youtube and the two Facebook channels, I became sufficiently well-known to get in touch with various citizens’ groups from Easter 2022 on, mainly in Central Italy. And recently, Spanish channels, which had been following 100 Giorni, like Baleares Acción, Scabelum.com and Hyper Halcón (the latter has quite a large audience), have asked me to take part in their programmes regularly.

MM: You have lived and worked in Spain, England and Italy. How did you decide to leave practising as a constitutional lawyer in Spain, and move to England to study and then teach in a totally different field?

PM: A rather gradual process in point of fact. For some years, I did volunteer work in the Mental Health area, while also practising as a solicitor. At the end of the day, I decided to retool, as it were, and moved to England where I had the great good luck to study at Oxford University for three years, specialising in evaluating scientific research. On graduating, I was straightaway offered a position with Robert Gordon University at Aberdeen, where I lectured (2004-2008) on how to evaluate the efficiency of social policies. From 2008 on I have been lecturing at Teesside University, where I have focused more on research methods and evidence-based practice in the clinical field.

MM: I would like to ask one or two “left field” questions. Carl Schmitt, the NSDAP ideologue, is a very big cheese amongst Spain’s constitutional lawyers who will of course blithely refuse to discuss THE issue.´

Schmitt’s theory of the State of Emergency as the normal modus operandi for what he called “the State,” and his theory of the “State” as being literally founded upon the Friend-Enemy opposition, stands as the polar opposite to the humanist, optimistic notion of law espoused by Aldo Moro, who, one forgets, was amongst the drafters of the Italian constitution of 1946.

By the bye, Carl Schmitt is most likely the “spiritual father” of Emmanuel Macron’s new foreign policy spokesman, Miss Anastasia Colosimo, who teaches Political Theology (sic) at the Institut de Sciences Politiques.

As for ex-Prime Minister Mario Draghi, his modus operandi in all fields, was to call out a state of emergency on myriad sophistic pretexts.

Would you like to comment on Aldo Moro as a constitutionalist, as opposed to the Schmittians?

PM: Throughout the “Western world” an attempt is underway to suspend constitutional arrangements and replace them by a regime where every decision, whether or not it be legal, may be waved through in reliance upon a public health emergency.

More specifically, freedom of speech, of movement, the freedom to demonstrate in the streets, are all subjected to a systematic onslaught on the basis of a purported right to health on the part of society.

Most perplexing, perhaps, in terms of this attack on constitutional rights, is the docility with which a sizeable chunk of the citizenry has simply acquiesced. I would venture to opine that this attitude has arisen through several decades of relative well-being, and an ever-more pronounced craving for both physical and socio-economic comfort.

In that respect, contemporary society does appear strikingly similar to that Carl Schmitt describes, where a specious security becomes the supreme value in many citizens’ eyes, one for which they willingly delegate to the “sovereign,” the powers to decide, and to manoeuvre within a state of exception, over-riding the principle of lawfulness, all by reference to an alleged emergency.

On the quite other end of the scale, former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was a fervent advocate for our citizens’ constitutional rights, which he knew must be upheld even and especially where these may contradict public interest. As I have just said, this ideal of freedom, one which prevailed for decades throughout most of the West, has been frittered away by meretricious “security” criteria. Globalist-leaning leaders are hell-bent on making of the state of exception a standing rule of government, in a manner that would make Carl Schmitt himself green with envy.

MM: Another “left field” question. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has been very outspoken on major strategic issues and strongly opposes the “Great Reset.” He is almost unknown in France. Could you say a few words about his work?

PM: Monsignor Viganò is a Catholic Archbishop who, until he retired in 2016, held high responsibilities, most lately as Papal Nuncio to the USA. He first came to general attention through his August 2018 Letter to La Veritá, protesting at what he believed to be a protracted cover-up by Bergoglio and other eminent Churchmen, of alleged sexual misdoing by US Cardinal McCarrick. Furthermore, in recent years, Monsignor Viganò has acquired considerable international notoriety amongst dissident circles, owing to his comments on video and in geopolitical journals, where he has scathingly and very precisely outlined the Great Reset, of which the so-called pandemic was merely the opening shot. For those who so wish, I would suggest they consult Viganò’s statements, which appear on countless Telegram channels.

MM: As a non-Christian, I have no business discussing Church business. However, Pope Francis’ decisions concerning the “vaccines,” so called “climate change” and the extremely bizarre Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican, are all highly political.

You are a Catholic. How would you evaluate these manœuvres ?

PM: As a practising Catholic, I have known the Pontificates of Paul VI, Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and the very brief Pontificate of John Paul I, acknowledging in all the figure of the Vicar of Christ.

When Benedict XVI resigned however, many Catholics were thrown into dismay, all the more so that although Benedict was modest and retiring, he had quickly become known as a bulwark against the dictatorship of relativism: his firm defence of non-negotiable principles made him the reference for hundreds of millions, doubtless billions of people who reject the tyrannical new world order.

Many observers, including myself, opined that the moral and intellectual authority gained by Benedict made him the globalists’ perfect target; they wanted him out, and someone else—namely Bergoglio—in, someone who would cheerfully embrace their pseudo-religion’s dogmas. From the moment Bergoglio was elected, his conduct unleashed grave concern amongst many Catholics.

Insofar as I’m concerned, although I’ve had to listen to interventions by Bergoglio which tend to systematically desacralize Catholic faith and tradition, I had refrained from expressing an opinion on his person, to avoid horrifying my entourage. In recent years, however, Bergoglio’s role and that of “his church” relative to the COVID-19 business and the so-called “vaccines” has compelled me to speak out on his true role.

With a modicum of discernment, from Bergoglio’s tone and from what he has said against those Catholics who rejected the vaccine mandates (egregiously cruel those mandates were, in Italy), one readily concludes who was the true and only Pope of the Church of Christ.

Not to speak of the latest Feasts of Nativity and Easter of Resurrection, where one finds Christ’s salvific action brazenly replaced by that of the COVID-19 “vaccines.”

MM: What were the true reasons Mario Draghi stepped down as President of the Council?

PM: The mainstream recounts a tale of Mario Draghi’s great mission, sabotaged by irresponsible political parties, notably the so-called “sovereignist, extreme-right wing Lega.” The reality is otherwise.

Carpetbagged into Italy by his supremos at Davos, Draghi’s task was to turn our country into a test-tube for the Great Reset. Once his government had been installed, with the backing of every party, save for Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, it rammed through vaccine mandates on April 1st, 2021 for all healthcare workers, and then drastically slashed constitutional rights via measures like the Green Pass, theretofore unheard of in any Western democracy.

The initial plan had been for Draghi to enjoy a lightning-swift tenure as Prime Minister, followed by his shoo-in election to the Presidency of the Republic in January 2022. Late in 2021, this seemed a done deal to many, above all to Draghi himself; he would then have become the anointed Carl-Schmittian, steering the state of emergency as the new, standing form of rule.

But things got nasty for Draghi during the elections. Some parliamentary groups like Lega, Fratelli d’Italia and the Conte faction of Movimiento 5 Stelle failed to reach a consensus, whereby not only did Draghi fail to get himself elected President—he garnered support so minute as to be ludicrous. That spelled his end. Draghi’s ego has been dented to a degree that little has been heard from him since.

My own view is that in Italy, despite the cruelty of the state of exception, a great many citizens never took their third shot of “vaccines,” thereby snarling up an injection campaign which was to end by January 2022 and smooth Draghi’s path to the Presidency.

Despite being embedded in the institutions, parties such as Lega, Fratelli d’Italia and Movimento 5 Stelle picked that up on their radar screen, and unlike the hard-core globalist parties like the PD, they kept a look-out for unrest in the streets. As a result, Draghi’s position as Prime Minister began to totter, until in July 2022, Lega, backed for the occasion by Forza Italia and thanks to the calculated ambiguity shewn by Conte, gave the Draghi project its coup de grâce.

Nevertheless, I must stress that, contrary to what the mass-media imply and what many citizens imagine, Draghi never lost his Parliamentary majority. It was not want of that majority which led him to step down—but rather the fact that he lost the backing of ALL political parties (though Meloni’s party was not in the Government, its opposition had always been symbolic, and thus useful to the regime). However, no stowaways are admitted on a mission like that assigned to Mario Draghi; the fact that some parties jumped ship and set up an oppositional front obstructed a project that was inherently totalitarian in nature.

MM: As Pino Cabras never tires of repeating, NOTHING can be done in Italy until the country withdraw from NATO, the EU and the Euro.

Giorgia Meloni has however made it clear that she will do none of the above. What game is she playing? Who owns her?

PM: Throughout what is by now a lengthy political career, Giorgia Meloni first appeared as a decent and rather courageous individual, the usual nonsensical attacks from militant “progressives” notwithstanding. That said, Meloni appears to be wanting in substance with respect to various political, legal and cultural matters, making her pretty malleable from the standpoint of certain factions. Since she joined the Aspen Institute and became Prime Minister, her manner in public has notably altered. For those, like myself, who had entertained some hopes of Giorgia Meloni, it has been disheartening to see her unsure of herself in press conferences, or striving to please journalists who only a short while back were praising Draghi to the skies, and now eagle-eye her every utterance, seeking a flaw.

On the plus side, Giorgia Meloni’s government, perhaps riding the wave of international events, has rather swiftly dismantled most of the Draghi-era constraints. While some, plausibly enough, like to think that she’s playing a double game, i.e., paying lip-service to globalism so long as it holds up, while keeping the lines to the streets open in the event the Davos crowd stumble or even crash altogether, that would mean having a thick hide and a kind of cunning that Meloni may lack—unlike Pedro Sánchez in Spain.

MM: The US Biolaboratories in the Ukraine having to be withdrawn owing to Russia’s discoveries, the Pentagon would now appear to be moving the P3 (doubtless, de facto, P4) labs to Italy. The Municipal Council of Pesaro (Marche) has just voted to sell a huge swathe of municipal terrain to a P3 lab. Only ONE Councillor voted against: Pesaro, L’Acquila, Livorno, Sigonella… and there are others. Who is financing this? Where does the money come from? Is anything known of the pressures on the local or regional Councils?

Italy’s first capital, Turin, is about to be turned into NATO’s capital, with the Pentagon’s weird DIANA project set to take over the city’s labs, universities and businesses.

How did the Pentagon swing that decision? Who in Turin’s Municipal Council voted for this? Who or what in the Italian Government approved it? Has money been changing hands?

PM: This is not an area where I have any special insights. Overall, let’s just say that historically, Italy has been a battlefield over-run by foreign powers, all seeking to stake a claim. This has ratcheted up since WWII, when Italy, at the centre of Cold War manoeuvres, owing to her strategic and political importance, has been turned into a Euro-Atlanticist colony.

That said, Italy also happens to be home to a people who, relative to many other Western countries, for historical and cultural reasons, entertain a great affinity with Russia. Accordingly, what happens on the Ukrainian front in the coming months, and its impact on the Atlanticist West in terms of the de-globalization now ongoing, will be most interesting.

MM: As many as 3 or 4 million Italians voted on September 25th for the anti-NATO, anti-vaccine mandate parties. Re-information news channels, blogs and websites are self-financed and garnering millions of views.

Are things starting to move? Is there hope?

PM: Doubtless on account of the massive onslaught on freedom in this country over the past few years, there have sprung up in Italy resistance networks and alternative news channels, deploying through social networks, which are likely amongst the best-organized in the world. Several channels actually have over 200,000 subscribers.

The time came when the founders and contributors to those news channels may have thought that their visibility was henceforth such, that political leadership was around the corner; they thereupon decided to stand for election in the Parliamentary elections in September 2022. Given that the potential electorate likely represented something in the range of 6 to 8 million votes, the dissident candidates would indeed have had a fairly good crack at entering Parliament.

The problem is however, that having never come to an agreement amongst themselves, four or five parties stood separately for election. What is more, a good number of dissidents saw the want of a constituent process, that should have led to a clear idea-platform, headed by people elected by the major resistance movements’ grass-roots. Consequently, those individuals decided not to vote, none of the so-called “anti-system” parties got into Parliament, and their influence has somewhat declined.

Bearing in mind as well, that with Meloni’s arrival, there’s been something of a return to Business-as-Usual, which has tended to douse the fighting spirit which had sprung up during the worst of the Draghi era.

At the time of writing, while public interest has never slacked in 100 Giorni da Leoni, Visione TV, La Finanza sul Web, and so many others, I do have the impression that the dissidents’ social and political activity has slightly fallen off. It will probably spring back to life only if those who run the country on behalf of the globalists try to mount a fresh, desperate attack, a thing one cannot entirely rule out—given the less-than-hopeful outlook for the globalists at this time.

Featured: “Ace,” by Robert Dean Stockwell; created in 2005.