In Part One of “An Act of State Terrorism,” our article examining the decision by the United States to drop a plutonium bomb on the largest Catholic community in Japan in 1945, we explored five aspects of this tragedy and this crime.
We discussed the 400 year old Catholic heritage of Nagasaki; the frightful death toll and ghastly material devastation wrought by the detonation of the 21 kiloton Fat Man bomb over that city; the unresolved question of how Nagasaki appeared, suddenly, almost at the last minute, and by an anonymous hand, on the target list for nuclear incineration; the opposition of many American military leaders to the use of atomic weapons against civilians; and, finally, the false narrative of bomb proponents who claimed that the Soviet declaration of war against Japan was unexpected, reactive and opportunistic.
In Part Two, I propose to begin the examination of those, in the United States government, who were responsible for the unprecedented decision to terrify an enemy into surrender, by utilizing the then unimaginable destructive force of nuclear weapons, and using it on civilians, resulting in the deaths of perhaps two hundred thousand innocent human beings.
Our focus in this installment will be on the Cabinet official under whose authority the bomb was developed and deployed, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson.
An Act of State Terrorism, Part Two
At the end of 1945, following the conclusion of the Second World War, the Armed Forces of the United States of America had eight five star officers, four Fleet Admirals — William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz and William Halsey — and four Generals of the Army — George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Henry “Hap” Arnold and Dwight Eisenhower.
Leahy and MacArthur would later express moral objections to the atomic bombing of civilians. Halsey called it “a mistake.” Eisenhower thought the first use of such weapons by America was inexpedient. All, with the exception of Marshall, thought their use was unnecessary.
Even Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, who would later defend the dropping of the two atomic bombs, initially advocated for their deployment against military targets only. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Marshall urged that the atomic bombing of cities be halted, as America’s limited supply of these new bombs needed to be conserved as potential tactical weapons, for battlefield use, in the invasion of Japan.
It was America’s political leadership, not its military and naval commanders, who wanted and decided to use nuclear weapons in 1945.
A Very Different Government
Hilaire Belloc warned of the danger of “reading history backwards,” of assuming that the standards, structures and practices of today obtained in the past. Compared to 2023, America had a profoundly different federal government in 1945.
At the end of the Second World War, the vast civilian architecture of the modern national security state had not yet been created. That creation would come in two phases, the first in the immediate post-war period, and the second, after the 9/11 attacks.
When the U.S. government considered the military application of atomic power in 1945, those advisory, policy making, and executive institutions so preeminent in our own time — the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council and the Department of Defense — did not yet exist.
There was no Cabinet level Ambassador to the United Nations, and there was, certainly, no all powerful Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, who could, like Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, rival or displace the Secretary of State in influence.
The National Director of Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security would be 21st century constructions.
That contemporary Colossus of centralized power, the Executive Office of the President, with its cabinet department size and its myriad councils and agencies, was unknown in 1945. Nor was there a prime ministerial White House Chief of Staff, who could treat Cabinet secretaries as functionaries, and control, or even restrict, their access to the President.
In 1945, the Vice-President had no voice in the counsels of the Executive branch, and no presence or staff in the White House. In fact, he had, virtually, no staff at all, only a small office in the Capitol, from which he would emerge to discharge his constitutional obligation to preside over the Senate.
As the 25th Amendment, governing presidential and vice-presidential succession, was only proposed after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the office of Vice-President was vacant during the first Truman administration.
In the eighty-two days, from January 20 to April 12, 1945, during which time Harry Truman served as Vice-President of the United States, he only met with President Franklin Roosevelt, alone, on two occasions. On neither of those occasions, did FDR bother to tell him about the Manhattan Engineer District Project, a.k.a., the atomic bomb.
Three Civilian Advisors
At the end of the Second World War, the President of the United States had just three principal civilian advisors in matters of foreign policy and national defense. These were the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy.
Their significance in the government was underscored by their proximity to the President. Their offices were located in the Old Executive Office Building, colloquially referred to, simply, as the State, War and Navy Building — that great, 19th century Second Empire edifice next to the White House, and connected to it by an underground passageway. It is now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
In 1945, the U. S. Secretary of State was James F. Byrnes. The Secretary of War was Henry L. Stimson, and the Secretary of the Navy was James Vincent Forrestal. Both Byrnes and Forrestal were baptized Catholics. Only one however, still adhered to the religion of his baptism.
The Grey Eminence
The actual management of the atomic bomb project was in the hands of the War Department.
Seventy-seven years old in the summer of 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was the U.S. government’s most distinguished and experienced grey eminence. Harry Truman was the sixth American President whom he served.
By birth, ancestry, religion, economic status and education, Stimson was an archetypical member of the American nomenklatura, sometimes called the Eastern Establishment.
Born in New York City in September of 1867, to a family of pious Presbyterians, he was the son of a surgeon and the grandson of a banker. His father sent him to Phillips Andover Academy, Yale University (where he joined Skull and Bones) and Harvard Law School.
A successful Wall Street attorney with the white shoe firm of Root and Clark, Stimson, by the time he was in his mid-thirties, was earning an annual income of $20,000, the equivalent of nearly $700,000 per year today.
Appointed, by President Theodore Roosevelt, as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1906, Stimson served until 1909, prosecuting antitrust cases. In his only attempt at elective office, Stimson became, with Roosevelt’s endorsement, the Republican nominee for Governor of New York in 1910, losing in the general election to Democrat John Dix.
From 1911 to 1913, Stimson served in the Cabinet of President William Howard Taft as the U.S. Secretary of War, the same office he would hold thirty years later in the Second World War. As a Regular Army Colonel in the Field Artillery in the First World War, he spent nine months in France, from 1917 to 1918, at the American General Staff College in Langres.
After the war, Stimson resumed his law practice, was made a Brigadier General in the Reserves, and became, in 1921, one of the founders of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge named Stimson an Envoy Extraordinary to the Republic of Nicaragua — then a de facto American protectorate — to settle that country’s electoral dispute. Later that year, Coolidge appointed him Governor-General of the Philippines.
In 1929, President Herbert Hoover recalled Stimson to Washington to confer upon him the highest gift in the providence of the Presidency. Hoover appointed him U.S. Secretary of State.
Serving until the end of the Hoover Administration in 1933, Stimson was the American delegate to the London Naval Conference in 1930, and would later proclaim the Stimson Doctrine, a policy of sanctions and non-recognition, aimed at containing Japanese aggression in Manchuria.
In July of 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, intent on running for an unprecedented third term, and seeking bi-partisan support for his foreign policy of all aid to Britain short of war, returned the 72 year old Henry Stimson, after an absence of 27 years, to the War Department.
For Roosevelt’s purposes, Stimson was an inspired choice. Although a prominent Republican with an impeccable reputation, Stimson was an internationalist, and therefore an interventionist, and more significantly, was an old retainer to the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family.
A Bureaucratic Interest
No cabinet official had a more compelling bureaucratic self interest in the successful use of atomic weapons than Henry Stimson. After all, he had just spent more than two billion, in 1940’s dollars, ($33 billion today) on the Manhattan Project, and he spent it surreptitiously, without the direct knowledge of Congress.
One of the congressional officials from whom he concealed the details of the project was the Chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, the junior Senator from Missouri, one Harry S. Truman.
Stimson then spent another three billion dollars ($49 billion in today’s money) on the development and production of the delivery system for the atomic bomb, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the most expensive weapons system in the history of the planet up to that time.
The B-29 proved to be a spectacular triumph of American aircraft design and engineering, a veritable quantum leap in aviation technology. It remained a front line American aircraft into the jet age of the Strategic Air Command, and was the principal U.S. heavy bomber in the Korean War.
In the middle of World War II however, Stimson had no way of knowing that. So, hedging his bets against the possible failure of the B-29 program, he then spent another $124 million ($2 billion in 2023 dollars) on a second delivery system, the now forgotten Consolidated B-32 Dominator.
In total, Stimson’s War Department expended $84 billion, in real dollars, to develop and deliver the atomic bomb.
Far from being an enthusiast for his own creation, Stimson was afflicted with a moral ambivalence about the bomb that bordered on schizophrenia. In policy terms, Stimson’s position was one of protracted inconsistency about the use of the weapon.
The Targeting of Civilians
In May of 1945, the Truman Administration established an inter-departmental Committee, known as the Interim Committee on the Military Use of the Atomic Bomb, to formulate policy about the deployment of the bomb, and to craft public statements explaining its existence to the American people.
The Chairman of the Interim Committee was Henry Stimson. The Committee was advised by a technical body called the Scientific Panel.
From its very beginning, the committee determined that civilian losses concomitant with the use of the bomb were not to be viewed as collateral casualties. The bomb was specifically intended to be a terror weapon which explicitly targeted civilians and maximized civilian deaths.
The second of the committee’s first three recommendations, adopted unanimously and issued on June 1, 1945, was: “It should be used on a dual target plant surrounded by or adjacent to houses and other buildings most susceptible to damage;”
The Target Committee, headed by the Director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves, had already come to the same conclusion. On May 12, 1945, that committee decided that the bomb should be used against “important targets in an urban area of more than three miles diameter,” — area bombing on an immense scale.
On June 6, 1945, Stimson met with President Truman to discuss the Interim Committee recommendations. According to Stimson’s memorandum on the meeting, Truman, already briefed by his aide, (and soon to be Secretary of State) James Byrnes, expressed no concerns with the committee report, beyond what to tell the Russians in the upcoming Potsdam Conference.
Nor did Stimson register any objection to the targeting of homes in a nuclear attack. At the very end of the meeting, however, Stimson, in a reference to the conventional firebombing of Japanese cities, told Truman “I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.”
It makes no sense, of course, to support the atomic bombing of civilians while condemning conventional area bombing as Hitlerian. Was Stimson reluctant to challenge the findings of his own committee? Why did he not raise this issue in the committee which he chaired? Was this remark a subtle means of implanting doubt in Truman’s mind?
Stimson Begins To Dissent
Twelve days later, on June 18th, President Truman held a meeting at the White House, with both his military and civilian advisors, to discuss the invasion of Japan. While most of those present supported a landing in the Japanese Home Islands in November, Stimson, seconded by his Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, suggested that an invasion would solidify Japanese resistance in a fight to the death.
An even more dramatic intervention was made by Fleet Admiral William Leahy, who told the President that the unconditional surrender of Japan was not necessary to the successful conclusion of the war.
Truman, revealingly, told Leahy that he could leave the issue to Congress, but he could not change public opinion in this matter.
On July 2nd, Stimson sent a memorandum to the President, entitled a Proposed Program for Japan. It is a remarkable document. While arguing, ostensibly, against an invasion of Japan, Stimson raises issues directly related to the use of atomic weapons.
Stimson told Truman that Japan was under blockade, had no allies and no navy, and was increasingly vulnerable to air attacks. He went on to say, contrary to the pervasive racial hatred of the time, that “Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours.”
Addressing the policy of unconditional surrender, Stimson asserted that a Japanese surrender could be facilitated if we “do not exclude a constitutional monarchy under her present dynasty.”
In a seeming repudiation of his own committee, Stimson concluded the memorandum by stating that “Our own bombing should be confined to military objectives as far as possible.”
Stimson would lose the first of these arguments, and only prevail, belatedly, in the second. The bomb would be used on civilians, and Truman would only agree to the preservation of the monarchy after the destruction of Nagasaki.
With the successful test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo in New Mexico on July 16th, the bureaucratic momentum for its use became inexorable. By the beginning of August, 1945, Stimson, the Administration loyalist, was busy monitoring last minute preparations for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Saving Kyoto, Sacrificing Nagasaki
Henry Stimson’s last known intervention about the use of the atomic bomb, prior to the bombings, was his direct appeal to President Truman on July 24th to spare the city of Kyoto, the historic center of Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan, by removing it from the target list. It was immediately thereafter that Nagasaki was added to the list.
Was Henry Stimson the anonymous decision maker who selected Catholic Nagasaki for destruction to save pagan Kyoto? The archival record offers no clues, but we do know that Stimson embraced all the prejudices of his time, his class, and his religious sect.
As a young lawyer in the 1890’s, Stimson was a committed “goo-goo,” a member of the Good Government Club of New York, dedicated to stamping out patronage and corruption in local government, i.e., Irish control of municipal politics.
Stimson entered government as an appointee and a disciple of Theodore Roosevelt, a President notorious for his nativism and bigotry. As a diplomat and colonial administrator, Stimson believed that Catholic Filipinos and Latin Americans were incapable of democratic self-government, requiring, instead, the firm hand of Anglo-Saxon tutelage.
Like every other rich WASP in the FDR Administration, Stimson had a visceral animus against the Catholic leader of Free France, once telling Harry Truman that Charles De Gaulle was “psychopathic.”
In his last public comments, a few months before his death in 1950, Stimson, in a letter to the editor of The New York Times, denounced Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The Tragedy of Henry Stimson
An attorney represents the position of his client. A mandarin — a high civil servant — learns the values of obedience, discretion, compliance with the institutional consensus, and acquiescence in decisions, once made.
Stimson was both of these in his long career. The tragedy of Henry Stimson was that he was inclined to do right, in a vague, Protestant/humanitarian sort of way, but lacked the moral clarity that the Catholic Faith would have imparted.
He had principles, and personal probity, but no concept of unbreachable moral prohibitions, rooted in Divine and natural law. In the end, everything was negotiable, where compromise was permitted and expected.
Like Pontius Pilate, Henry Stimson was morally discomforted by the decisions confronting him, and like Pilate, he preferred the acceptance of a crime to the uncertainties and unpleasantness of political discord.
On two occasions in his career, Stimson rejected the elite consensus. He argued against the vengeful Morgenthau Plan, which would have destituted the German people and depopulated the country by de-industrializing Germany.
Like General George Marshall, Stimson believed that American support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine would be inimical to U.S. interests in the Middle East.
On August 10, 1945, the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Stimson, with the support of the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, appealed to the President to halt all attacks, both atomic and conventional, on Japan, to give that country an opportunity to surrender.
Stimson and Colonel William H. Kyle (right) arriving at the Gatow Airport in Berlin, Germany to attend the Potsdam Conference (July 16, 1945). Source.
After the war, towards the end of his life, Henry Stimson’s institutional loyalties and ruling class sensibilities proved impossible to discard. In a February, 1947 article in Harper’s Magazine, Stimson not only defended the killing of innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but assumed responsibility for carrying out the decision: “I approved four other targets including the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Ironically, Stimson, one of the few cabinet officials who expressed moral reservations about the killing of civilians in wartime, would, in this article written in his retirement, provide the official narrative justifying the use of atomic weapons on the innocent as “our least abhorrent choice.”
C. Joseph Doyle is the Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. Doyle is also the Director of Communications for the Friends of Saint Benedict Center.
Featured: Henry Lewis Stimson, by Ellen Emmet Rand; painted in 1933.
Note to self: The Nazis are no longer the bad guys, the Russians are.
So, why is it so surprising that Justin Trudeau honored a former Waffen SS veteran (Yaroslav Hunka), in parliament, on September 22, 2023? There is no point in insulting our own intelligence by even considering that it was solely the fault of one man (Anthony Rota), and no one else even knew what Rota was up to. The fact is, Canada has long protected and nurtured Ukrainian Nazis and many other extremists. It is a venerable Canadian tradition.
As well, it is also a long tradition that Ukrainians very closely police their history, to make sure that their Nazism is played down, and Russia’s is always vilified. So, Mr. Trudeau’s honoring of Hunka is the way things are done in Canada. Hunka was honored back in 2007, by the Canadian Congress of Ukrainians, which is closely associated with Mr. Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland, his Deputy Prime Minister and Canada’s Minister of Finance:
🚨‼️BREAKING: Yaroslav Hunka received a Medal of Merit from the Canadian Congress of Ukrainians in 2007!
-> This organisation is directly connected to Trudeau and Freeland!
So, the whole drama of never knowing who Hunka is, that he was foisted upon the well-meaning, unsuspecting parliamentarians by Rota is simply false. The man was moving about a lot in government circles.
This honoring of a Ukrainian and Canadian “hero” appears to be carefully scripted to please the neo-Nazis in Ukraine who are the real powers broker in that sad country. Hunka was Trudeau’s bowing to that power.
As well, it is an old custom among Ukrainian nationalists to mitigate the Nazis and deflect to Russia as evil. This is something that the West has been doing ever since the war in Ukraine began, where it has become an attempt to rewrite history: not all Nazis were bad, while all Russians are evil, always have been and are the natural enemy of mankind, ever since Adam and Co wended their way east of Eden.
This sort of re-imagining of history has been done before (and successfully) with ancient Egypt, which has been transformed into a sub-Saharan (Bantu) civilization, which it most certainly never was. In the same way, the Nazis are being re-imagined as fighters against the Russians, the new bad guys.
Mr. Trudeau’s honoring of Hunka was mirrored later in Mr. Anthony Blinken’s recent Tweet, in which he mentioned the slaughter at Babiy Yar—in order to vilify Russia. Here is what he said:
As we remember the 1941 massacre of Jews at Babyn Yar in Ukraine, Russia’s claim that Ukraine must be “denazified” insults all who suffered, and those who bravely resisted, during the Nazi regime. Distorting the history of the Holocaust undermines efforts to prevent atrocities.
The Nazis are being erased from atrocities so that Russians can be photo-shopped in, because the past is fluid, like gender. Therefore, like Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Blinken must de-emphasize the truth of history in order to traduce the Russians—even though it was Ukrainian Nazis (men like Hunka) who played an integral role in the slaughter at Babiy Yar.
Maria Zakharova, representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, gave the perfect response to all this re-imagining:
Anthony Blinken allowed himself to lie about one of the most horrific tragedies of the Second World War: the execution of the civilian population of Soviet Kyiv on September 29-30, 1941 in the Babi Yar tract. Then the Nazis, having occupied the territory of the city, began “cleansing” operations. Within a few days, tens of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war were killed. On the 29th and 30th alone, the German fascists brutally literally destroyed 34 thousand people – this is exactly what Blinken remembered, cynically lying (more about this below) about the memory of this tragedy in the USSR, and also “forgetting” that executions continued until the liberation of Kiev by the Red Army in November 1943.
Also, on September 20, 2023, Ursula von der Leyen gave a speech to the Atlantic Council, in which she indulged in the same re-imagining of history:
Distinguished guests, there is a Japanese proverb that tells a lot about the country and about its prime minister. It says onkochishin and it means “explore the past to learn new things.” You, dear Prime Minister, showed me the meaning of this proverb during the G7 summit in Japan last year. You brought us to your hometown of Hiroshima, the place where you have your roots and which has deeply shaped your life and leadership. Many of your relatives lost their life when the atomic bomb razed Hiroshima to the ground. You have grown up with the stories of the survivors. And you wanted us to listen to the same stories, to face the past, and learn something about the future.
It was a sobering start to the G7, and one that I will not forget, especially at a time when Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons once again. It is heinous. It is dangerous. And in the shadow of Hiroshima, it is unforgivable.
Onkochishin, indeed. “Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons once again.” This time the USA has been erased and Russia photo-shopped in. In Ms. von der Leyen’s mind, the Russians dropped two bombs on Japan, and we cannot let them do that again, can we. And the USA comes out smelling like a proverbial rose, like the Ukrainians. This is not historical revisionism at all, but a complete erasing the recent past, all played out for a public that is brainwashed by Hollywood as per fare like Inglourious Basterds.
Returning to our “hero,” notice how carefully he was scriped: seated, front-and-center in the gallery where all could easily see him. Notice the Canadian army officers, smiling and clapping (impossible that even they knew no Canadian history).
The careful packaging of Hunka is also evident in the introduction that the now ex-Speaker of the House, Anthony Rota, gave before the yappy seals, aka, members of Parliament. Here’s the script that he was handed, and which, to his great credit, he read very awkwardly. These were not words that he was not comfortable with, but was forced to perform them:
We have here in the Chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian World… veteran, from the Second World War, who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians, and continues to support the troops today, at the venerable age of 98 (spontaneous standing ovation and cheering). His name is Yaroslav Hunka. And I was going to say that he’s in the gallery, but I think you beat me to that (self-congratulatory laughter). But I am very proud to say that he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming (more applause). He’s a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service. Thank you. (More applause).
The official state propagandists, the CBC, blithely reported that while Zelensky’s “speech received at least a dozen standing ovations. There was also one for this man (a shot of Hunka sitting in the gallery), a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians during the Second World War” (CBC News). Notice the same careful scripting: dim the Nazis and in order to asperse the Russians.
And this packaging nearly worked. Who wouldn’t feel grateful to a 98-year-old war veteran? And the general public wouldn’t even know when World War Two happened.
Enter Warren Thornton, in Britian. It was he who first noticed as to what had happened in the Canadian Parliament. He just pointed out the obvious: in World War Two, the only ones fighting the Russians were the Nazis and their ilk, because the Russians (or Soviets at that time) were “our” allies. Ergo, Hunka could not be anything other than a Nazi.
Unwittingly backing up Mr. Thornton was AP, which non-chalantly noted that Hunka had been a member of the “First Ukrainian Division.” Sounds harmless enough and armyish, as befits a veteran. AP just threw this bit of information out there, confident that their readers would nary blink an eyelid.
Those who know a little about such things will immediately spot the problem: “First Ukrainian Division” was a later name for the 1st Galician Division , or the 14th Grenadiers of the Waffen SS. The Division had a lackluster career as a fighting Nazi unit, and it was involved in various atrocities, largely against Poles, Jews and other Ukrainians.
Back in the day, there was also much controvery when these Ukronazis were brought into Canada in the late 1940s and 1950s; for various reasons, the government supported and protected them (the Cold War, in which Nazis were now friends and the Russians the enemy). With great loyalty, Canada has always protected Ukrainian Nazis. For example, in 1986, a Commission, looking into the “alleged” crimes of the 1st Galician, concluded: “If the only allegation against a resident of Canada is that he was a member of the Galicia Division that is not an individual which we consider should be made the subject of an investigation by your Commission. If the allegation is that while he was a member of the Division, he committed atrocities at such-and-such a place, if there is evidence of the committing of atrocities alleged in the information which was conveyed to us, then that person becomes of interest to your Commission.”
The logic of this conclusion is still prevalent, where simply being a member of the Waffen SS does not automatically make you a criminal. Crime has to be proven first, since we all know that the majority of the SS were just regular guys doing doing charity work. And the Banderite stalwarts at the BBC agree: “The Galicia Division has been accused of committing war crimes, but its members have never been found guilty in a court of law.” So, there. What’s the problem of honoring a Waffen SS veteran? They were doing great work in Europe against the Russians, and they still are!
Back in Britian, Mr. Thornton was rewarded for all his hard work by being promptly arrested for spreading “malinformation.” This is information that is true but which the government feels can cause “harm.” So, British authorities were busy protecting Hunka, since we can’t have anyone maligning the Nazis, can we? Thankfully, Mr. Thornton was released because he hung tough.
Having been caught in the ensuing ruckus that Mr. Thornton started, the Canadian MPs, including Mr. Trudeau, gave vent to all manner of condemnation—of an event that they themselves planned and implemented, and in which they themselves enthusiastically participated.
Video evidence clearly shows that they were all applauding—including Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party (and all his MPs) and Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the lefty New Democratic Party (and all his MPs), and of course Trudeau and all his crowd.
In fact, all 338 MPs (no matter what their affiliation) were on their feet applauding Hunka of the SS, who, it must be said, rather masterfully controlled his instinct to give a “proper” salute from the balcony, and went instead with a raised, clenched fist.
Yarosalv Hunka in the Canadian parliament (September 22, 2023).
And this same Mr. Poilievre, now so outraged, had this to say to Christine Anderson of the German AfD, who was visiting Canada back in February 2023: “Frankly, it would be better if Anderson never visited Canada in the first place. She and her racist, hateful views are not welcome here.”
But Mr. Poilievre gave Hunka two standing ovations, because Hunka’s “racist, hateful views” are perfectly welcome, and belong in Canada’s House of Commons, since they are against a common enemy (Russia). Like Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Singh (the less said about him, the better), Mr. Poilievre understands perfectly which side his globalist bread is buttered on.
The concerted outrage came two days late and a dollar short, because it was so convenient and thus contrived.
Why did all these now-outraged MPs not loudly boo and hiss the presence of Hunka on September 22nd? Why did none of them angrily storm out of the chamber? Why did none of them refuse to stand up? Why did none of them refuse to clap? Why did none of them denounce Hunka precisely when Rota introduced him? Why only after Mr. Thornton’s revelations? Only when their gamble failed, for they were rightly counting on the public’s ignorance. Notice it was only Mr. Thornton who noticed. No one else.
The Government House Leader, Karina Gould, explained what truly, truly (honestly) happened:
Mr. Speaker, like all members of this chamber, I am incredibly disappointed in the fact that this individual was invited, as you yourself, Mr. Speaker, have confirmed by you, was recognized in the gallery. I found out just like every other member in this house at that time that this individual was present. This is deeply embarrassing for us as parliamentarians, as Canadians, and it is something that I think all of us take extremely seriously, and I would ask my honorable colleagues not to politicize this moment. Thank you, Mr. Speaker… Mr. Speaker as a descendant of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, I am personally very hurt by the fact that this chamber recognized this individual, and I am sure that everyone feels the same way in this chamber. The Parliamentary Protective Service had the appropriate screening in place to ensure the security of last Friday’s event and that is what I was referring to. Mr. Speaker. But what I can continue to say is that we all must take this seriously because it is hurting many communities.
Translation:
Look. We’re all guilty as Hell. We all clapped like trained seals. But since we’re all birds of a feather, let’s put this behind us, and let’s just stop talking about it, and soon the Great Unwashed will forget that any of this ever happened. Why pee and pooh in the trough where we all feed. The more you talk about this, the more Putin wins. Is that what you really want? Let’s move on and do what we’re really here to do, which is to bring about the New World Order. Besides, can you imagine what it’s going to be like for me at my synagogue now? Have a heart. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Her claim of not knowing who Hunka is, is very odd, since there is a selfie of her warmly clutching Hunka’s hand and smiling with much joy (a selfie that she has since deleted… and which is now being scrubbed from the Internet, so we’re saving it). Ms. Gould’s Jewishness was not an issue at the time of the selfie.
Can anyone still argue with a straight face that there are no Nazis in Ukraine because Zelensky is a Jew?
And if Ms. Gould is now so upset, why not simply resign? In fact, the entire 338 members of Parliament should resign—starting with Trudeau, and they all should never be allowed to set foot inside the Parliament buildings again. They have thoroughly sullied them.
Karina Gould, a relative of Mr. Hunka, Anthony Rota, Mr. Hunka (seated).
Later, Ms. Gould introduced a motion to strike Hunka from the parliamentary records—to wash the slate clean; nothing happened. Zelensky came, we gve him tons of cash, and he left. Yawn. Cancel culture is a Canadian “value.” And how quiet is Zelelnsky about all this…
Another egregious example of this outrage is one Ya’ara Saks, a Liberal MP from a Toronto riding, and who is also Jewish. Back when the Truckers’ Protest was labeled a “Nazi-rally” by Trudeau, Ms. Saks (a Trudeau stalwart), angrily stood up in parliament and declared that when truckers honked their horns, it actually meant “Hail Hitler.”
So, what does Ms. Saks applauding (thrice) for Hunka actually mean for Ms. Saks? There are other MPs who are Jews (including Melissa Lantzman, a Conservative)—all of them applauded. Only after being exposed are they now outraged. Ah, yes, Jews can’t be Nazis.
Some context: Back in April 7, 2022, Zelensky was invited to speak, via video, to the Greek parliament. Part of his speech included exhortations by two members of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. All the Greek parliamentarians at once condemned what Zelensky had done, since he had foisted Nazis upon them without forewarning. They did not applaud and did not take two days to be outraged.
Why did the Canadian parlimentarians not behave this way? In fact, why did Zelensky say nothing; instead he was fist-pumping and beaming, since he knows who keeps him in power; or rather who holds him hostage.
One might wonder, why was this done? The official version—it was entirely Rota’s doing, and Hunka is from his riding. And, dutifully, Rota assumed the posture of the scapegoat, apologized and resigned (doubtless he will be amply rewarded down the road). Of course, had Trudeau and his MPs known what Rota was up to, they would have kiboshed the whole thing at once, because Mr. Trudeau’s moral compass is second to none when it comes to spotting Nazis, especially among people he dislikes.
But this “defense,” this evocation of ignorance by all 338 MPs, just does not wash. Rota very clearly announced what he was about to do—and only then did all 338 of them leap to their feet in Russophobic zealotry, and before Rota could even finish the introduction proper, which even he found a tad surprising: “You beat me to that.” What, a Ukrainian “freedom fighter” battling the evil Russians from long ago, living right here in Canada? Huzzah!
This appeal to ignorance is given the lie by a photo, taken by a granddaughter of Hunka’s, in which she explains that he is waiting to meet both Zelensky and Trudeau. Who are we to believe? Trudeau or the rather innocent remark of granddaughter? What a tough choice!
The image in full, in case the photo also disappears:
But then, the Nazis and the Trudeaus are old acquaintances. His father (Pierre Eliot), during the Second World War, rode around on a motorbike wearing a Nazi helmet to stick it to the Anglos, since their war against Hitler was not his war. And the current Deputy Prime Minister (the eminence grise behind Justin), Chrystia Freeland, her grandfather ran a pro-Nazi newspaper in Ukraine during those years in which Hunka was a “hero.” And her uncle (Myroslav Shkandrij) has just published a book defending the actions of the 1st Galician Division and whitewashing all their atrocities as “unstantiated,” unproven in any court of law (see BBC above), and therefore claims of Ukrainian brutality are nothing but… you guessed it, “Russian propaganda.”
In Trudeau’s Canada, the government has also been busy removing and, yes, destroying statues that might be reminders of the many achievements of Old Stock Canadians—but try defacing a monument to Roman Shukhevych, the man deeply involved in the Holocaust in Ukraine, and you will be arrested and charged. There are various Ukronazi monuments in Canada, a country in which 4 percent of the population is of Ukrainian origin: after the Second World War, 45,000 Ukrainians were brought into the country, and many thousands of these were from disbanded Nazi units.
Trudeau’s affinity for Nazsim gets darker yet. Why does he believe that to say there are Nazis in Ukraine is Russian propaganda? In his visit to Ukraine, in June 2023, he met with Andrij Melnyk, who is the lead proponent of this school of thought, where history must be reimagined in order to malign the Russians and who has famously said: “That is the narrative [Nazi-Ukraine] that the Russians are pushing to this day, and that has support in Germany, in Poland, and also in Israel.” History is just a narrative. History has no facts. From his actions in Parliament and elsewhere, it would seem that is is also what Mr. Trudeau believes.
Mr. Trudeau further echoed Melnyk when he came out in his own defense in Hunkagate: “It’s going to be really important that all of us push back against Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation, and continue our steadfast and unequivocal support for Ukraine.” We will soon discover that it was the Russians who brought Hunka to the House of Commons; it was the Russians who forced Mr. Trudeau to clap and nod his head approvingly; it was the Russians that forced all 338 MPs to jump to their feet and applaud wildly. The depth of Russian connivance knows no bounds, but they’re also weak and stupid.
NEW – Justin Trudeau blames Russian propaganda for Canadian Parliament honoring a Nazi.
“Obviously, it’s extremely upsetting that this happened… this is something that is deeply embarrassing to the Parliament of Canada…
This statement by Trudeau is also a directive to the Canadian legacy media, which he richly funds. He is tellng them to now drop the whole matter, bury the story and move on. If you keep repeating this story, you are working for Putin. Many have gotten the message: “Canada just made Vladimir Putin’s day, a chance for him to try to claim he’s fighting Nazis in Ukraine, an idea dismissed as nonsense by most of the world but a favourite topic of the Russian leader” (Rick Bell, Calgary Sun). Notice the lie, which is not even subtle… “dismissed as nonsense by most of the world.” Amazing how one reporter, in one Canadian newspaper, can speak with authority for “most of the world.” Ignorance—the most vital ingredient for success in propaganda.
So, the message to the legacy media is that if you keep repeating this story, you will prove Putin right—Ukraine does indeed have a serious and deep-seated Nazi problem. Stay on narrative… In Mr. Trudeau’s world, the only Nazis are the Trucker Protestors, and anyone else who disagrees with him. Therefore, “honk-honk” really does mean, “Hail Hitler,” and it’s OK for a Jew to clutch a Nazi’s hand for a heart-warming selfie. This is why Hunka is a Canadian hero—for the real enemy of Canada is not the Nazis, they never were; it’s the Russians. The jig might be up for Hunka as Poland wants him extradited for crimes his Division committed there. But Hunka need not worry. Canada will never extradict him.
And by the time elections come around (2025), all this will be long forgotten, and Canadians will once again blithely vote for the Uniparty agenda: climate change and gender equality. Hunka can live out his days in peace. But who will speak for the victims of his SS Division?
We need to do a mental experiment and imagine what else—other than a nuclear strike—could the West at war with us do to us? What sanctions to impose? Who to expel? How to humiliate? Kick us out of where? Deprive us of what? (We are not considering a nuclear strike, because they won’t, and if they do, it won’t matter, because we will).
Well, the West will do it all. And nothing will stop it.
And there is no need to build illusions here—in fact, the West does not depend on us for almost anything substantial. And if it does, it is intensively looking for a replacement. And more often than not, it finds one. Trying to pin it down with some natural resources or something else is unlikely to have any effect. It is good that we have stopped reassuring ourselves with “severe European winter, which Europe will not survive, allegedly, without us.” It survived the last one and it will survive this one. And Ukraine will not collapse and surrender by itself—until we ruin it and force it to surrender. By will, by force and by relying on ourselves. Only on ourselves.
We have to learn to live without the West. Completely.
We simply discard everything that binds us to it. Radically cut off all contacts, cut off all forms of dependence, stop all transactions, stop all interaction in the technical, economic and humanitarian spheres.
No grain and no fertilizer. No publications in Western scientific journals, withdrawal from SCORUS, revision of RINC criteria. Not waiting until Russian scientists are given an ultimatum: either betray your homeland or you are no longer scientists. And even now it is already practically so.
In sports that is how it is. In politics, it’s even more than that. In economics and finance—everything is moving in the same direction.
The West is cutting us off from itself, and putting forward conditions as to not cut us off further—betray the country, the people, the society, Russia, betray Putin. And then we will see whether you are still an oligarch or no longer an oligarch, a scientist or no longer a scientist, a politician or no longer a politician. Anything that they can hit us with, the West will hit us with it. With whatever it has already; and with what it does not yet have, it will hit us gradually.
It’s easy to imagine. And if you imagine it, prepare yourself.
We are condemned henceforth to live without the West.
It’s completely unexpected. But it makes perfect sense.
Everything Western is deeply toxic from now on (frankly, it always has been). It is, after all, an addiction to what we do not control, but what the enemy controls. Any hint of liberalism, any recognition of Western universalism, any acceptance of the normativity of anything that comes from the West, any acceptance of Western rules, criteria, practices, anywhere and in anything, is already a step toward betrayal, if not betrayal itself.
That’s what it means to be a Civilized State.
Not to depend in anything and in any way on another civilization, and above all on the one that is waging a merciless war against us.
Once we completely sever all relations with this global model (of degeneration and dehumanization) called the modern “collective West,” we can focus on establishing our own civilizational foundations.
Frankly speaking, we have not looked in this direction at all yet. Everyone has tried to integrate into the West while preserving sovereignty. It is impossible, unrealistic and pointless. And that is exactly what it was at once. The West does not need any “corporation Russia,” even if it is loyal to the West. The good Russia for them is the absent Russia. It is not even Yeltsin’s Russia; it simply does not exist.
It is costly to prolong this process. It is time to cut this thread, because these are civilizational fetters, not the desire to join the “mainstream of development.” The West is a dead end. But that is their business. For us it is just an enemy, death and the end.
Russia will live only in a world where the West does not decide and means nothing. At least for us. In any other cases, it will be the torture of the Etruscan bride, when the criminal was tied alive to a decomposing corpse. There is nothing more horrible than such torture. A man dies slowly, necrosis enters his body cell by cell.
The modern West, too, is a decaying, rotting corpse tied to humanity.
It is not enough for it to perish; it wants to drag everyone else with it into the abyss.
Look at Ukraine, what they have done to it—a poisoned, twisted, psychologically broken people. A destroyed state. Massively crushed on the fronts of a senseless and obviously lost war, or a distraught society fleeing the country. The dead bride of Western control is firmly bolted to that still (barely) breathing country. But death in Ukraine is winning. Staring out of the eyes of its rabid rulers—already crossed over to the other side, already dead but still outwardly alive.
Complete liberation from the West is the only way to salvation. Everything bad in modern Russia is from it. Its miasmas have eaten away our politics, economy, culture, science, psychology, everyday life, youth. This is a carcinogenic process. And the faster and harder we cut off the affected cells, the more chances for salvation and revival of our Motherland, the great Russia.
Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.
Featured: Disparate n. 7, Disparate matrimonial, by Francisco Goya, ca. 1816 and 1823.
Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the State Duma, made a really important post on his Telegram channel, on September 25. Because of its importance, we will cite it in its entirety:
Seven facts that Washington and Brussels have lost the “war of attrition” against Russia.
Biden, Stoltenberg, and other Western officials, referring to the conflict in Ukraine, have started calling it a “war of attrition.” Huge amounts of money have been poured into militarizing the Kiev regime.
What has this led to? Just the facts:
1. Western arms and ammunition shortages. In June this year, British Defense Secretary Wallace said that Western countries had run out of national stocks of weapons that could be supplied to Kiev. For his part, Biden admitted in July that the decision to give cluster munitions to Ukraine was made because conventional shells had been exhausted.
2. Public confidence in politicians in Europe and the U.S. has been lost. Ratings of distrust towards the heads of state of the EU and the USA are at a historical peak. 57 percent disapprove of Biden’s actions, 69 percent disapprove of Macron’s actions, 72 percent disapprove of Scholz’s actions. The majority of people in the US and European countries oppose supplying arms to Ukraine.
3. The failure of the Kiev regime’s counteroffensive. The Ukrainian military, backed by NATO, has suffered huge losses in equipment and manpower. The lack of any results has disappointed Western sponsors.
4. Economic problems of Europe and the USA. Eurozone economies are in recession. Germany is forced to cut social payments to poor families because of the costs of militarization of the Kiev regime. France has reduced the number of aid recipients; food packages are no longer distributed to those in need, and reimbursing of the purchase of medicines has been cut back. International agencies, expecting deterioration of the financial situation of the United States in the next three years, downgraded the long-term investment rating of the United States.
5. Shortage of Ukrainian army personnel. The Kiev regime is mobilizing men over 50 years old, as well as those with tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, HIV, and others. From October 1, 2023, women will also be enrolled in the military register. Nurses, doctors and pharmacists will be barred from leaving Ukraine.
6. Ukraine is bankrupt. Ukraine’s GDP in 2022 fell by 30.4 percent—the worst result in the country’s history. Without help from Washington and Brussels, Kiev cannot fulfill its obligations to its citizens. Ukraine has lost its financial autonomy.
7. Demographic catastrophe in Ukraine. More than 10.5 million people fled from Ukraine. Another 11.2 million residents of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Zaporizhya and Kherson regions made their choice to be with Russia. Since 2014, Ukraine has lost 53.7 percent of its population.
These 7 facts speak for themselves:
Either the Kiev regime capitulates on the terms of the Russian Federation
or Ukraine will cease to exist as a state.
It is the conclusions that are important. The fact that Volodin says this means that the position of the authorities set out here is clear and unambiguous: unconditional surrender or the complete liberation of Ukraine with the abolition of its statehood.
But… Obviously, both require impressive and convincing forceful military backing. The fact that Russia survived and Ukraine lost half of its population is important and correct, but for the rabid horde of obsessives it is no argument at all. They are fighting, supplying tons of new fighters to the front lines, trying to advance. They have no hesitation, no despair, no sense of defeat. So far, they haven’t even flinched. And they certainly won’t flinch at Volodin’s statement.
In order for Moscow’s ultimatum (and Volodin is the speaker, that is, the voice of Moscow) to be taken seriously, forceful and visible arguments must be made. These could be:
immediate destruction of the political and military top brass in Kiev; an effective blow to the centers of decision-making; infliction of such damage to the enemy’s military and economic infrastructure that every Ukrainian would immediately feel it; massive offensive of the Russian army with visible and considerable results.
Then the formula, “surrender or death,” would be taken seriously. And, so, too often we have threatened the enemy and did not back it up with substantial and convincing (for him, and for us) actions. This is very dangerous for a great country: to threaten and then pretend that nothing happened, without answering for what was said. Great countries don’t do that. The hysteria and lies of the enemy should not be compared to us: our superiority is that we are not like the demonic creatures on the other side of the front. Even the comparison is humiliating. So, we need to take quite concrete steps. And they must be substantial and verifiable—both for the enemy and for ourselves.
Once again in the history of the Special Military Operation, we have come to a critical line. Volodin made his statement at the right time. This needed to be said clearly and precisely. But then there should be concrete actions that follow.
And the absence of such actions will have a negative impact—why then should we give serious people more than serious ultimatums if we are unable to back them up? This discredits the country, makes it seem weak and incapable. And it is not.
I believe it is necessary to gather an army of millions, to awaken society to the end, to stop threatening and to start winning. Nietzsche said, “I love those who throw golden words in front of themselves and cover them with even more golden deeds.”
Volodin threw golden words. The absence of golden deeds will not just devalue them, but turn them into their opposite—from gold to lead.
And it is time to engage in patriotic re-education of society in earnest. From top to bottom—and especially from the top. Because the behavior of the elites increasingly resembles a simulation—ersatz patriotism.
Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.
Featured: Feat of Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, Bogdan Willewalde; painted in 1884.
In order to interpret the present political situation, Carl Schmitt’s thought is still topical; regardless of the many insights that can be drawn from it, at the present time some theses advocated by the Plettenberg thinker in the late 1920s and early 1960s, well before the contemporary “epoch,” following the collapse of communism, the “rise” of globalization (and the death of the jurist), are particularly interesting.
First, it is appropriate to explain the extraordinary increase, a few years after the collapse of communism, of populo-sovereign-identitarian parties, by recalling what he wrote in his speech, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierung und Entpolitisierungen” (“The Era of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations“), (of 1929).
Schmitt argues in this text that European spiritual life has developed over the last four centuries (i.e., in modernity) by changing centers of reference (from the theological to the metaphysical, from this to the moral-humanitarian and finally to the economic): “If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain—they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved. In a theological age, everything runs smoothly if theological questions are in order; everything else is “provided” by definition. The same is true of other ages” (86).
This center of reference is decisive and prevalent” “Above all the state also derives its reality and power from the respective central domain, because the decisive disputes of friend-enemy groupings are also determined by it” (87).
He continues: “As long as religious-theological matters were the central focus, the maxim cujus regio ejus religio3 had a political meaning. When religious-theoretical matters ceased to dominate the central domain, this maxim also lost its practical import. In the meantime, however, it moved from the cultural stage of the nation and the principle of nationality (cujus regio ejus natio) to the economic domain, where it came to mean: one and the same state cannot accommodate two contradictory economic systems, i.e., capitalism and communism are mutually exclusive (87-88).
After the collapse of communism, the last exculpatory of the “political” (i.e., that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) disappeared. Fukuyama wrote that after the victory of liberal democracies, the end of history had come. This prediction is wrong because it presupposes the exhaustion of all reason for conflict; which is impossible because the element of conflict and struggle (Machiavelli and Duverger among many) is a presupposition of the political that is connatural to it (Freund). To think that man, zoon politikon, can exist without a political dimension presupposes changing his nature, which is what the young Marx thought he could do and has instead turned out to be impossible.
Rather, the bourgeois/proletarian justification has been replaced by a different one. The transition between one friend/foe justification and the next, Schmitt wrote, has a decisive political effect: “The succession of stages—from the theological, over the metaphysical and the moral to the economic—simultaneously signifies a series of progressive neutralizations of domains whose centers have shifted” (89). In this process, “The former central domain became neutralized in that it ceased to be the central domain,” but at the same time and progressively “in the dialectic of such a development one creates a new domain of struggle precisely through the shifting of the central domain. In the new domain, at first considered neutral, the antitheses of men and interests unfold with a new intensity and become increasingly sharper. Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral domain, and always the newly won neutral domain has become immediately another arena of struggle, once again necessitating the search for a new neutral domain” (90; italics mine). Which appears to be precisely what has happened in the last 30 years. After a (brief) phase in which “post-communist” globalization was thought of as a stable and “peaceful” era, given the planetary hegemony of the U.S., the first cracks, evenly distributed in two categories, were glimpsed: humanitarian wars and, even more, the emergence of antagonists—enemies—of the globalized order. Both converged in supporting the thesis that history—and conflicts—were far from over. As for the “humanitarian” wars, mostly denominated as such in English and qualified as international police operations, definitions aside, they remained wars nonetheless; nor even very appreciable according to the intentions expressed, since already four centuries ago Francisco Suarez warned against such wars. As regards the enemy of the “new order,” at first Islamic fundamentalism, the whole thing proved that an order, however desirable, cannot disregard the fact that some group of men do not appreciate it, and to such an intense degree that they go so far (always) as to fight it politically, and in extreme cases, with arms.
It was so evident that the “new order” was dialectically generating new hostilities, new enemies and new conflicts.
It remained, and in part remains, unclear on what spiritual center of reference the opposition, internal to the Euro-Atlantic West, between populists and globalists is based. What is clear, however—and can serve to identify the center of reference—is that sovereign-populist-identitarians on the one hand and globalists on the other refer to opposing pairs of values/ideas that we list below (without claiming to be exhaustive), of which the first column refers to sovereign-populism, the second to globalization:
NATION/HUMANITY EXISTING/NORMATIVE COMMUNITY/SOCIETY NATIONAL INTEREST/GLOBAL INTEREST
It is barely worth mentioning a few examples. For existing/normative, I would refer to what I wrote about the Hungarian Constitution. As for the community/society opposition, it is less obvious but begins to emerge from the constitutional declarations of “sovereigntist” countries (see the Polish and Hungarian Constitutions).
That the term a quo and ad quem of these is the nation and not humanity is quite obvious and needs no explanation.
When it comes to the national interest, it is also evident as a government objective, apart from the recent events of Diciotti and Interior Minister Salvini, which have brought it back to the center of the political debate. And it could be referred to as a “re-establishment” because it has always been the compass of the modern state (and ancient political syntheses).
To find a phrase that sums up the position of the sovereigntists in a few words, one can just go back to Sieyès’ statement: “The Nation is all that it can be by the mere fact of existing.” A statement that would surely shock a globalist.
And continuing the abbot’s quotations, among many: “The nations of the earth are to be regarded as individuals devoid of all social ties, that is, as they say, in the state of nature. The exercise of their will is free and independent of all civil forms…However a nation wills, it is sufficient that it wills; all forms are good, and its will is always supreme law…a nation can neither alienate nor interdict to itself the faculty of will; and whatever its will may be, it cannot lose the right to change it should its interest demand it.”
The second conception to be considered in assessing the contemporary political situation is the one that emerges, among Schmitt’s writings, from Land and Sea (Land und Meer). The foundation of this text is that human existence is determined by the space in which it lives, its perception of it and the opportunities space offers. Therefore, this determines or co-determines political, economic and social relations—in particular, law. Maurice Hauriou wrote that the law known, elaborated, and applied by jurists is that of sedentary societies, based on the relationship with the land (and thus, also with territory as an element of the political institution, particularly—but not only—of the modern state). While the French jurist contrasted sedentary societies with nomadic ones and explained much of the institutions of the former with the relationship with the land and with an existence oriented to regular production, Schmitt deepened the diversity between maritime existence and land existence, and in particular that “universal history is a history of the struggle of the power of the sea against the power of the land.”
What was new in modern history, Schmitt argued, was that Britain, in the 16th century, decided on a maritime existence, far more than maritime powers such as Athens or Venice and to some extent, even Carthage had done in other eras. Hence the English commercial (and industrial) expansion. Hegel also emphasizes certain different types of activities, and tying the development of industry and trade to the sea (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §247).
This fact was considered by Schmitt to be decisive for both international law and the Westphalian European political order. The resulting balance, he derived from that of land and sea (continental powers and maritime power) and between European states. None of which were capable of hegemonizing the others, because they would not have the strength to impose themselves on a coalition of them, somewhat as Machiavelli noted for the Italian states (and the balance among them) of his era. In this sense, the sovereignty of the states, built around the legal equality of the states—disregarding the factual equality, made some sense, precisely because the factual equality among them—or at least among the major ones—was not so far off; and, on the other hand, the disparity could be compensated for by a shrewd policy of alliances (and conversely of neutrality).
This all came into crisis with the 20th century; Schmitt argued that “in international law, generic and universalistic ideas are the typical weapons of interventionism;” and that “A legal conception coordinated with an empire spread over the whole earth (i.e., the British empire) naturally tends toward universalistic arguments.” He continues: “Such a conception does not concern a determined and united space nor its internal order, but in the first instance the security of communications between the scattered portions of the empire” (Völkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus).
In the paper, “Great Space against Universalism,” (“Großraum gegen Universalismus“) the Plettenberg jurist reiterated, with reference to the Monroe doctrine, the contradictory nature of the universalist interpretation to the original enunciation of that doctrine. Schmitt writes, “It is essential that the Monroe doctrine remain authentic and not falsified, as long as the idea of a concretely determined great space, in which powers foreign to space cannot meddle, is fixed. The opposite of such a fundamental principle, conceived from concrete space, is a universalistic world principle, embracing the whole earth and humanity. This naturally leads to intrusions of everyone into everything. While the idea of space contains a point of view of delimitation and division and for this reason enunciates an ordering juridical principle, the universalistic claim of world intromission destroys all rational delimitation and distinction” (italics mine).
Schmitt continues: “In effect, the original American Monroe doctrine has nothing to do with the fundamental principles and methods of modern liberal-capitalist imperialism. As a true doctrine of space it stands, on the contrary, in pronounced opposition to a transformation of the earth into an abstract world market of capital without regard to space… That such a falsification of the Monroe doctrine into an imperialistic principle of world trade was possible will remain for all time a striking example of the intoxicating influence of empty buzzwords.” As for the interpretation given it by Woodrow Wilson: “he did not mean roughly a conforming transference of the spatial, non-interventionist thinking contained in the true Monroe doctrine to other spaces, but on the contrary a spatial and unlimited extension of liberal democratic principles to the whole earth and to all mankind. In this way he sought a justification for his unprecedented interference in non-European space” (italics mine).
Scmitt continues that the two Roosevelts and Wilson made “a specifically American spatial thinking a world ideology above states and peoples; they attempted to use the Monroe Doctrine as an instrument of Anglo-Saxon capital’s domination of the world market.”
This has resulted in converting “a spatially conceived principle of non-interference into a general system of delocalized meddling” and thus has become an ideological tool of democracy and “the conceptions associated with it, particularly ‘free’ world trade and ‘free’ world markets, in place of the original and true Monroe principle.” Combining for the purpose status quo and pacta sunt servanda, “that is, a simple contractual positivism,” with the ideological principles of liberal-capitalism.
The overall result is that the Monroe Doctrine, as interpreted in the years between the two world wars, gives the measure “of the contrast between a clear spatial order resting on the fundamental principle of non-intervention by foreign powers in space against a universalist ideology, which turns the whole earth into the battleground of its interventions and stands in the way of any natural growth of living peoples” (italics mine).
The situation today is different: the evolution of the international order with the UN (and the UN Charter), the prohibition of the use of force (see Art. 2, 4 of the UN Charter), the powers of the Security Council, the doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” peacekeeping operations, and especially the “defense of human rights” (and more) have complicated the situation.
What can the lessons of Carl Schmitt and, in particular, the doctrine of “large spaces” be used for?
It seems to be possible to answer that two conceptions (explicit and implicit to the same) and yet intersecting can be usefully applied. The first of which is political realism in relation to the concept of sovereignty. As the German jurist writes, the problem of sovereignty, arguably the main one, is to reconcile the political aspect with the legal aspect. For if the distinctive feature of sovereignty is legal absoluteness (not being conditioned by law but being “above” it), it must be combined with factual limits (with the familiar problematic issue of how much absoluteness applies internally and how much absoluteness can apply externally, i.e., with respect to subjects of international law (states and “order in fieri” distinguished by Bodin early on). As Schmitt writes “In political reality there is no supreme power, that is, greater than all, irresistible and functioning with the security of the law of nature… The reconciliation of supreme power in fact and in law constitutes the basic problem of the concept of sovereignty. Hence all difficulties arise” (italics mine). For another is the sovereignty of the U.S.A. or China, another that of San Marino or Liechtenstein. Transposed to the contemporary situation, this means that while one censures—rightly—violations of “human rights” or genocide (e.g., of the Kurds in Iraq) and goes off to wage a “just war” on the Rwandans or Saddam, one is careful not to wage war on Putin over the Donbass or Crimea, nor on China over Hong-Kong. It should be noted that while Hong-Kong is under Chinese sovereignty—and at least the classical territorial character of this may apply—this is not the case for the aforementioned territories in Eastern Europe, both of which—prior to annexations and occupations—were part of Ukraine; which has thus suffered a violation of (its own) sovereignty—as opposed to China. At this point, given the “double standards, double measures,” one wonders whether the criterion of “big space” does not apply as a concrete criterion of behavior and decision: while Russia was (in fact) granted intervention in a republic formerly part of the USSR, i.e., its own “big space,” the same was not exercised to protect populations, human rights, and in the case of Ukraine, territorial integrity. Hence the realism intrinsic to the Schmittian conception (registers) and rules much more than the idealism of such. (Idealism, which in practice, is often the fusion of interests and patronage).
The second conception that appears to underlie the concept of “great space” is one that links Max Weber’s concept of power (and of authority) and “law” understood here as “order.” Weber writes in defining it, that “power designates any possibility of asserting within a social relation, even in the face of opposition, one’s will.” Shortly thereafter, he writes: “The State should be understood to mean an institutional enterprise of a political character in which, and to the extent that, the administrative apparatus successfully advances a claim to a monopoly of legitimate physical coercion, with a view to the implementation of orders” (Economy and Society).
In current usage, until a few decades ago, states were called powers, at least those capable of exercising command internally and thus protecting their independence, even without (or with minimal) external political hegemony. In factual terms, it is the ability to assert one’s will that determines being a power. Which by applying Spinoza’s formula, tantum juris quantum potentiae, determines the factual limits of powers and thus of the legal capacity to exercise them. As the Dutch philosopher wrote, “If therefore the power by which natural things exist and operate is the same power as God, it is easy to understand what natural law is…. By natural right I therefore mean the same laws or rules of nature, according to which everything happens, that is, the same power of nature; therefore, the natural law of the whole of nature, and consequently of each individual, extends as far as its power” (Theologico-Political Treatise; italics mine). And within the “great space” it is relatively easy for the hegemonic power to exercise it. Likewise, for the most part, it has an interest in doing so because of the connections and relationships that join it to its neighbors or satellites. Respecting them is the condition for a state of peace to be easily achieved. Far more than trying to impose a unity of the world, without that unity being achieved in peace by the only historically possible way: by maintaining the pluriverse, conforming to the arrangement of interests, powers and borders; that is, by limiting and determining it with objective criteria that can be easily perceived and applied. For as Schmitt wrote, the unity of the world is not the unity of the ecumene, but “of the unitary organization of human power, the purpose of which would be to plan, direct and dominate the earth and the whole of humanity. It is the great question whether humanity is already ripe to endure a single center of political power” (Concept of the Political).
That there is a religion, a theology supporting such a hypothetical center, which has the capacity to resist elementary objections and criticism, Schmitt does not believe so. Certainly not the ideology of progress, since technical and moral progress “do not walk together” (neither among the rulers nor the ruled). Nor can rationalism bring us comfort, if only, I would add, because De Maistre’s judgment that man “by the fact of being simultaneously moral and corrupt, just in intelligence and perverse in will, must necessarily be governed” (so that reason is not enough) still applies; moreover, technical progress has the drawback of increasing the power of government. As Goethe wrote, “it is dangerous to man that what makes him more powerful, without making him better.
Nor do we see it today in that (attempt/project) of world unity in which still find ourselves, even though it now seems to be drawing to a close. Behind the unity of a world, dominated by the victorious power in the bourgeois/proletarian opposition, it must be acknowledged that the Plettenberg thinker saw the political future well: a new friend-enemy opposition, a constant land/sea dichotomy, a peace through the balance of (and between) large spaces. That is, everything opposite of what mainstream propaganda spreads.
Teodoro Katte Klitsche de la Grange is an attorney in Rome and is the editor of the well-regarded and influential law journal Behemoth.
In politics, whether we know it or not, we are always fighting against an enemy, whether stationed on our borders or camouflaged within the city. But there is also another form of enmity, much more subtle than the one that bubbles at ground level, incarnated by men who have an ideology or a culture, perhaps a religion or a barbaric anthropology, incompatible with our own. It is the enmity derived from political concepts, polemically handled and exploited against the “moral element,” the criterion by which the true capacity of resistance to the hostility and offenses of the enemy is measured.
What I want to say, now by way of example, is that certain assumed definitions, transformed into taboos, enervate the will, having previously worked the intelligence by “brainwashing,” an expression that, suspiciously, has ceased to be used at a time when political pedagogy is dedicated only to that. Some pontificate on the benefits of ethnic, religious and cultural pluralism—the pluralism of values, in short—and others suffer its consequences: loss of cultural identity, social conflict, babelization. Nor is it strange that the same people who praise “miscegenation”—vaguely in the legal system, but with more determination in public universities and in the Press and Propaganda Section of the mass media—then maintain that races (or cultures) do not exist. It has also become normal for the zealots of “defensive” pan-Melanism—Black Lives Matter is not new, it was previously invented in the 1920s—to promote as just and necessary an anti-white racism and to demand that we finance our own re-education.
War, even in its current “pacifist” variants, takes place in space, that is to say, on the earth, because to control it and to reasonably order life on it is the primary object of politics. The much more decisive and brutal quarrels over concepts are settled in time. The struggle for the meaning of words, for the “story” that obsesses all modern princely counselors—today called “political analysts” or “advisors,” young people with no experience of life, generally coming, as Jules Monnerot used to say, from an educational system dedicated to “the mass production of artificial cretins”: as opposed to those who are so by a natural disposition; those who flourish massively today are “cultivated cretins, like a certain type of pearl.” Once the political logos and dictionary have been colonized, that is, the national “political imaginary,” any capacity for resistance is radically diminished. Then, and only then, the defeat of the external or internal enemy can be presented as a victory or a political and cultural “homologation” with the executioners. Indeed, a few days ago we in Spain spoke, with a sense of opportunity, of the “afrancesados,” Spanish archetype of a colonized political imaginary.
It is therefore necessary, in a certain sense, to “decolonize the imaginary” and give back to political concepts their precise meaning, which is neither invented nor developed in a Think Tank, but is part, however modest its aliquot, of the truth of politics. It is necessary, in order to know where we stand. I do not know if “political realism” has a specific mission; perhaps, some would say, the elaboration of a “decalogue” or program that can be implemented by a political party, a faction or a movement, but I do know that its raison d’être lies in the demystification of political thought. One of the concepts that needs this mental cleansing is “dictatorship,” a frightening notion about which the greatest confusion reigns—a self-interested Confusionism, exploited by those aspiring to power, presenting their rivals as vulgar supporters of authoritarian regimes and themselves as “democrats”—as if that term had a precise meaning beyond the mental tropisms that adorn the demo-liberal right.
Everything conspires against the reputation of political demystifiers. However, writing about the war-phenomenon does not presuppose a bellicose personality; probably only a meek man can write a theory or a sociology of war. A theory of decision… an indecisive one. And a theory of dictatorship is perhaps only within the reach of someone incapable of exercising it.
It is not easy to look “dictatorship” in the face, a highly inflammable political concept that gravitates over particularly intense political situations and which is entangled with legislation of exception, states of necessity and coups d’état. People believe that a dictatorship is what the “anti-Franco vulgate” teaches, but they do not lose sleep over a government that can illegally shut down Parliament and deprive the whole nation of freedom of movement. Anti-parliamentarism has many forms and those of today are nothing like those of a century ago. It would be very interesting to write a palingenesis of dictatorship, for it is periodically reborn and its singularity should be recognized. To turn one’s back on its reality is to culpably ignore the momentary concentration of power, a reality that happens outside our moral or ideological prejudices, independently of our will. Not knowing what it consists of compromises our position vis-à-vis the enemy who does know what it is and how to use it.
Dictatorship is a fundamental institution of Roman public law. It consists of a lifting or suspension of the juridical barriers in order that the dictator, generally pro tempore, faces the exceptional political situation (sedition, civil war, foreign invasion) and restores the public tranquility to the city. Once restored the order or expired the foreseen period, the extraordinary powers of the dictator are cancelled, whose prototype is Cincinnatus. But there are also in Roman history examples of dictators of undefined undertaking (Sila) and those lifelong (Caesar), even omnímodo or, as we would say today, constituent (lex de imperio vespasiani).
Roman pragmatism had grasped the political essence of dictatorship: it is a concentration or intensification of power that opposes the pernicious effect of the impotence of the established power, besieged by the enemy, generally internal. From a conceptual point of view, it is not strictly speaking a “political regime,” but a “political situation,” transitory by definition. Any manifestation of power always generates criticism from rival parties or factions, but in a particularly intense way criticism is aroused by dictatorship, secularly associated with the personal usufruct of command.
Every dictatorship constitutes a political fact, imperfectly subjected to a legal status. Jean Bodin’s notion of sovereignty is, in this sense, the attempt to make normative a particularly intense moment of command. Such is the glory of Bodin and of the French legists of the 16th century.
During the 19th century, dictatorship gradually lost all its former respectability, as a consequence of the generalization of a new juridical ideology: constitutionalism. Liberal historiography, in its fight against the “enemy,” the absolute monarchies, reworked the classical political tradition and generalized the denigration of the dictatorial institution, arbitrarily associated with tyranny and despotism.
However, the constitutional movement has always recognized, implicitly, that political necessity knows no law when it modulates states of exception, siege and war, denominations which push dictatorship into the background. Dictatorship became a political taboo after the coup of Louis Napoléon (December 2, 1851), the most important coup of the 19th century. But the technical meaning of dictatorship remained and developed in the constitutional states of exception. For the first time, the raison d’être of the classic dictatorship was legally enunciated, but without mentioning it by name: the suspension of law to allow its subsistence. Otherwise, liberalism, which at the time was never, to a certain extent, a “neutral and agnostic” doctrinarism—a legend spread by conservative illiberalism—would never have built the prepotent European nation-states.
Dictatorship formally denies the rule it wants to ensure materially, a doctrine established by Carl Schmitt in his research on the evolution of the institution: Dictatorship (1921), a book of conceptual history, diaphanous and without equivocation, whose non-readers (a very interesting intellectual fauna) figure, against all odds, that it is an apology for Nazism. According to the German jurist, “the essence of dictatorship from the point of view of the philosophy of law consists in the general possibility of separating the norms of law and the norms of the realization of law.” At the same time, dictatorship also implies an effective suppression of the division or separation of powers. Schmitt, being in need of the necessary conceptual demarcation as a jurist, contrasts commissariat dictatorship with constituent dictatorship, categories currently received in the healthiest part of the theory of the State and constitutional theory. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will plays a crucial role in the transition from one to the other.
Hermann Heller, a brilliant jurist, like Carl Schmitt, politicized by his leftist militancy and also committed to national socialism—but the opposite side of the other national socialism—was equally concerned about legal taxonomies. Less perspicacious than his colleague, rival and friend when political or juridical realism (concepts) come into conflict with ideology (positions), for Heller, dictatorship, condemned en bloc, is nothing more than a personalistic and corrupt government (“individuality without law”) opposed to the rule of law (“law without individuality”); in short, “a political regime manifestation of anarchy.” Simplifying a lot, this is the idea of dictatorship generalized among constitutionalists since 1945, the heyday of the “Potsdam democracies.” Carlos Ollero Gómez explained very effectively the constitutional “archaism” that weighed down these regimes.
The commissariat type of dictatorship, an updated formula, at the beginning of the 20th century, of the Roman dictatorship, presupposes a prior mandate or commission, spontaneous (royal call or invitation of a parliament or national assembly to assume extraordinary powers), or forced (pronunciamiento, coup d’état). The commissioned dictator’s mission is to restore the violated constitutional order without going outside the constitution or questioning its essential decisions (form of government). A good example of this is the Spanish dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, the “iron surgeon” expected by all. Have political and legal historians ever stopped to think why dictatorship got such a good press after World War I? They should read more Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, for example, a left-liberal constitutionalist, and think less about the ANECA, cancer of the Spanish university.
Sovereign dictatorship, on the other hand, pursues the establishment of a new political order, using for this purpose a power without legal limitations and operating as a constituent power. Charles de Gaulle in 1958 (dictator ad tempus). This type of dictatorship is associated in the 20th century with totalitarian regimes (total states and popular democracies), while the commissariat dictatorship falls more into the field of authoritarian regimes (Boulangism, authoritarian states and, however bizarre the term may sound, “Catholic dictatorships”). The possible effects of revolution having been limited by the experience of the Paris Commune, the lessons of which led to a turning point in insurrectionary techniques, the alternative to violent subversion is from then on the surgical coup d’état or legal revolution.
In its modern (Baroque) meaning, coups d’état are “audacious and extraordinary actions that princes are forced to undertake, against common law, in difficult and desperate affairs, relativizing the established order and legal formulas and subordinating the interest of individuals to the public good.” Thus speaks, in a secret book, Gabriel Naudé, so mistreated by political ignorance. Naudé, a librarian by profession and a harmless spirit, considers coups legitimate and defensive. Their usefulness depends on the prudence of the prince and, above all, on his ability to anticipate, for “the execution always precedes the sentence”: thus “the coup is received by the one who weighs to give it.” The reputation of a coup d’état depends on those who exploit it: it will be beneficial if it is carried out by friends or allies (salus populi suprema lex esto) and disturbing if it is plotted by enemies (violation of the constitution, counter-coup). Judgment thus depends on the relative position of the observer and his commitments and objectives.
The contemporary sequel to Naudé’s Considerations politiques sur les coups d’Estat (Political Considerations on Coups d’Etat), (1639), is Curzio Malaparte’s Tecnica Del Golpe De Estado (Technique of the Coup d’Etat), (1931). Malaparte, on whom the opprobrium of the right and the left falls indiscriminately, discusses the nature of coups in order to teach how to defeat them with a paralyzing “counter-coup” (coup d’arrêt) and defend the State.
Triumphs like Mussolini’s March on Rome (1922), wrapped in an aura of political romanticism, may never happen again… in the same way. After World War II the general impression was that the coup d’état is an infertile technique. All the more reason why, because of its congenital romanticism, the pronunciamiento can no longer have any effect. From all this we can only expect, as the theoretician of the State Jesús F. Fueyo used to say, an “acceleration of disorder.”
The violence of the coup is logically unacceptable to public opinion in pluralist constitutional regimes. However, that same “public opinion,” by inadvertence or by seduction, can willingly accept what Malaparte calls a “parliamentary coup,” in the style of the one executed by Napoleon Bonaparte on the 18th Brumaire (1799). Carl Schmitt calls it “legal revolution” in a famous article of 1977, written against the non-violent and electoral strategy of the Western communist parties (the Eurocommunism of Santiago Carrillo, a senile disease of Marxism-Leninism, a political religion then beginning to decline, although they, the Western communists, do not yet know it). In reality, the same result can be reached without going through the “legal revolution.” For this, it is necessary to count on the artful political strategy of occupying the constitutional courts—much more than a “negative legislator”—to turn them into the architects of an unnamed constitutional mutation, the greatest danger for the constitutions they are supposed to defend.
But it was not these communists, neither the Soviets nor those of the West, but Adolf Hitler, who, almost half a century before the publication of Eurocommunism and the State, set up the leverage to build a constituent dictatorship with totalitarian roots. Unlike dictatorships of the other species, the authoritarian, the totalitarian dictatorship pretends to have a mission not only political, but also moral, even religious: to give birth to the new man—Bolshevik, Aryan or Khmer Rouge—by disenfranchising the old.
The futility of the Munich coup of 1923 instructed Hitler on the tactical convenience of the electoral struggle and the possibility of legally attaining power in order to activate from the government the de facto abrogation of the constitution. It is a matter of exploiting the “legality premium” to revoke legitimacy. It is precisely against this process of constitutional subversion that Carl Schmitt warned, once again the Cassandra, in the summer of 1932.
The history of the Weimar system is well known and its last gasps have a name: the Authorization Law or Ermächtigungsgesetz (1933), a bridging constitution that suspended and emptied the Weimar constitution of content, opening the door to a constituent (totalitarian) dictatorship that ended up becoming a political oxymoron: a permanent regime of exception.
One of these bridge-constitutions, the Law for Political Reform of 1977, also served as a fuse for the “controlled explosion”—as it was called during the Transition—of the regime of the Fundamental Laws. The truth is that in Spain no one was fooled at that time; or, to be more exact, only those who allowed themselves to be fooled were fooled: “From the law to the law, passing through the law.” It portrays a generation of constitutionalists that no one has dealt with that bridging constitution. In reality, these jurists have powerful reasons to avoid it, since in very few European constitutional processes its character of supreme political decision is so evident, beyond the Kelsenian supercheries and fictions about the Grundnorm or fundamental normal on which everything hypothetically depends. Another fantastic exception to constitutional normativism is found in De Gaulle, playing, for the love of France, the Solon of the Fifth Republic.
The same school as the German National Socialist law of 1933 has held the Hispanic American populism since the end of the 1990s. The case of Hugo Chavez is a paradigm that transcends Venezuelan politics: from the failure of his 1992 “coup d’état” to the success of the “legal revolution” that began with his victory in the 1998 presidential elections and his famous oath of investiture on “the dying constitution” by virtue of which he had been elected.
The politically neutralized constitutionalist has no answer to this political challenge exported to almost all Latin American republics. He is paralyzed by the paradox. It is the ankylosis of Karlsruhe.
Jerónimo Molina Cano is a jurist, historian of political and legal ideas, translator and author. He is a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas in Madrid. This article appears through the kind courtesy of La gaceta de la Iberosfera.
Featured: Cincinato abandona el arado para dictar leyes a Roma (Cincinnatus Leaves the Plough to Dictate Laws to Rome), by Juan Antonio Ribera; painted ca. 1806.
Some observers may have thought that, with the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union in 1991, war would cease to be a major problem, at least for Europe. Of course, conflicts would remain (as we have seen: Mali, Syria, Afghanistan), but far from home, and of little consequence to us. This was the dream of a peaceful world. At least for those countries lucky enough to have leaders from the “circle of reason.” In other words, liberals who favored the continuation and acceleration of globalization—onwards to an increasingly uniform and smooth world, despite a few inevitable bumps in the road. Such was the outlook.
One wonders whether this was a complete mistake. In other words, was the Cold War not precisely what prevented hot wars? The war in Ukraine in 2022 shows that Europe is not immune to war. Moreover, we have quickly forgotten the wars in Yugoslavia and NATO’s bombing of Serbia, an action too quickly assimilated to a simple “correction” administered to a country complacent towards nationalists “from another age.” We are all familiar with the formula proclaimed by the ruling caste to all rebels to a new world order that is both geopolitical and moral: “We’re not in the Middle Ages anymore!” Which means: “You’re wrong to believe in the existence of anthropological constants.”
And yet… Chase away reality, and it comes galloping back. War is back, in Ukraine; and its economic consequences—to the detriment of Europe—make this reality more sensitive than ever. But since 2015, (the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, then Nice, etc.), war has taken on new, extra-state forms. It is partisan warfare, it is terrorism; it is also informational, technological, industrial warfare. These wars are not always declared, but they are nonetheless very real. One side wants to weaken another and bring it to its knees. By any means necessary, even legal ones—the production of laws, for example in the international arena, is also a form of war. Example: war, or at least sanctions, against a country “undemocratic” and not “LGBT-friendly.”
We are rediscovering a constant in the history of peoples and civilizations: the world is in conflict. How could we have forgotten this? How can our leaders still remain blind to this obvious fact? How can Macron’s talks on foreign policy (for example, on the website, Le grand continent) be so distressingly insignificant, and his actions so appalling or counter-productive? Unless, of course, these soothing yet worrying speeches are yet another means of waging war against the peoples of the world, in order to conceal from them the fact that there is indeed an oligarchic project of global governance—a project that is perfectly assumed and in line with an ideology that we can contest, but whose coherence is real from a universalist point of view—and that there is only one international policy possible.
Clausewitz’s “Formula
The specter of war hung over Europeans. A war-zone always spreads. A localized war is never guaranteed to stay localized. It is time to think again about what Clausewitz told us about war. First of all, we must not misunderstand Clausewitz’s project (1780-1831). He did not provide a “doctrine for winning wars.” Not even the wars of his time. Rather, Clausewitz provides a series of observational lessons. Not the same thing. Lessons for understanding different situations. His aim is to show us what characterizes a war conflict in relation to other socio-historical phenomena. What is it about war that is specific to human activity? How can we know war, and what is there to know about war? Beyond the diversity of wars, we need to determine what is common to all wars. It is as vital an undertaking as trying to determine the essence of economics, or the essence of politics.
Much of the discussion revolves around what Raymond Aron called Clausewitz’s “Formula”: “War is a simple continuation of politics by other means.” Considered too brutal by some political scientists, they have proposed either reversing or correcting it, at the risk of stripping it of all its force. Or resorting to pirouetting. What if the question were not to invalidate this formula, but to read it properly, and understand its full explanatory power? War as an expression of politics? Of course, but what kind of politics? According to Clausewitz, war is both a tool of politics and a form of politics. A continuation of politics by other means. A tool and a new tunic. For that matter, should we understand the formula: “by other means [than political means]?” Or “by other means [than the means of peace]?” Hence the question: are all non-directly political means of changing a balance of power, war? The same question applies to all means that are not directly peaceful, i.e., those based on coercion (financial, moral, etc.): technology, mass mobilization, propaganda, intoxication, destabilization, etc. Clausewitz’s simple definition readily opens up the possibility of diverse interpretations.
So, is war just a confrontation between two armies, or does it encompass all means—diplomatic, ideological, moral, economic—designed to make an adversary submit? Thus, war can be—in a restricted version—the sole confrontation between armies, or—in a broad version—all means, military or otherwise, designed to submit an adversary to our will and alter the balance of power in our favor. War can therefore be defined according to two interpretations; one restricted, the other broad. War is: a) only when weapons speak; or b) when all levers are mobilized to exert violence on the adversary and make him bend, without armies necessarily coming into action. In both definitions, war presupposes a conflict of interest between two powers, and an awareness of this conflict, at least on one side, and a feeling of hostility, even if unevenly shared. In other words, war is a matter of politics as a means of managing conflict.
War as a Form of Public Relations
One of the difficulties in reading Clausewitz is precisely this: although he is “both a strategist and a thinker of politics” (Éric Weil), he does not always define politics in the same way. It is “the intelligence of the personified state” (On War, Book I, chap. 1), Clausewitz tells us. It is also that which represents “all the interests of the entire community” (Book VIII, chap. 6). These two definitions are not mutually exclusive—understanding where the interests lie in order to defend them; Clausewitz’s two propositions complement each other. Let us rephrase this in modern terms: politics is the pursuit of the interests of the state as the representative of the nation. Is war, then, solely the result of politics as a rational analysis of the nation’s interests? No. This is the answer Clausewitz suggests. He writes: “War is nothing other than the continuation of public relations, with the addition of other means” (On War, Book VIII, chap. 6). This means that war always has a political dimension, but is not always the result of a political choice by a historical subject. War partly escapes the subject-free choice-act dialectic (Descartes’ dialectic). It is an interaction. It is a mode of public relations. This is why, when we study the chain of events leading up to a war, we can rarely attribute full responsibility for a conflict to a single side. War occurs when both protagonists want it. If one side simply accepts the war (otherwise, it means surrender), there is also war. But can there be war when neither of the protagonists wants it? That is the hypothesis of an unwanted fatal chain of events. Clausewitz considers both scenarios: the war that is planned and assumed, and the war that partly escapes us.
An example of the rational Clausewitz is the “Formula,” already cited above. The rational Clausewitz is also the one who says: “Political intention is the end, while war is the means, and the means cannot be conceived independently of the end.” But the irrational comes in when Clausewitz writes: “Let us not start with a heavy-handed, pedantic definition of war; let’s confine ourselves to its essence, to the duel. War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale.” In a sense, this is a second “Formula,” other than “war, the continuation of politics by other means.” A second “Formula” that takes us away from the rational. Everyone knows that duels are often a question of honor, much more than a question of interest or rationality. And when the duel is taken to the level of organized groups—from duellum to bellum—it remains an interaction and a relationship, with its share of irrationality. “I am not my own master, for he [the adversary] dictates his law to me as mine dictates to him,” writes Clausewitz. As Freud put it, “the ego is not master in its own house.”
War is no Accident
Thus, war is a will applied to “an object that lives and reacts.” Clausewitz sums it up: “War is a form of human relationships. The proof of the relational nature of war is that it takes two to resort to violence. If one of the sides under attack responds to violence with non-violence—as Denmark did against Germany in 1940—there is no war (there is, however, occupation and subjugation of the country. The nation is therefore defeated and risks its political demise). War can sometimes be avoided; but if a country designates you as its enemy, you are its enemy, whether you like it or not. Thus, we see that Clausewitz thinks rationality, and hopes for rationality. But he also envisages the possibility of irrationality. Depending on the quotation, the emphasis shifts from one register to the other. For Clausewitz, the rational precedes the irrational. But it does not suppress it.
As we saw earlier, it is sometimes questionable whether a war exists without the protagonists really wanting it to happen. We need to be more precise. War is always the result of decisions: those of the attacker, and those of the attacked, who decide (or not, as we saw with Denmark in 1940) to defend themselves. The idea of war as a simple chain of events has its limits. In Les Responsables de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Paul Rassinier explains that there is no evidence that Hitler wanted war in Europe in 1939, because he thought he could recover the Danzig corridor without war, control Romanian oil without war, even collapse the Soviet Union without war, and so on. Apart from the fact that this thesis appears very fragile, given Hitler’s belief in the “virilizing” virtues of war (a form of “free and undistorted competition” between peoples), it is quite obvious that one cannot argue his desire for peace on the assumption that everyone will capitulate to his demands. However, the relational nature of warfare, as discussed by Clausewitz in chapter 6 of Book VIII, suggests that accident—by which we mean war as accident—is not necessarily impossible. The relationship takes precedence over the subjects of the relationship. On the basis of a misunderstanding, everything can go wrong. But this does not mean that there are not perfectly identifiable responsibilities in the outbreak of war, even if those responsible have sometimes acted or decided in the fog of contradictory or imprecise hypotheses. Take the example of Imperial Germany in 1914: it was rightly said that Wilhelm II did not want war. Maybe he did not. Psychological reality. But the essential point is that he nevertheless decided to give in to pressure from the General Staff, notably by agreeing to invade Belgium, despite its status of international neutrality.
To sum up: accidents can influence decisions, but war does not happen by accident. Another, more burning example. Let us imagine that Putin had thought that, following the launch of the “Special Operation,” the Ukrainian government would immediately be overthrown and would negotiate with Russia in a way favorable to Putin’s plans, assuming they had been very clear in his mind. There would be no war. That is true. But this was only a hypothesis, and in fact it did not come true: Zelensky’s government did not collapse, for one reason or another. Putin therefore took the risk of war. He is therefore responsible. On the other hand, he is not the only one responsible, because it is well and truly true that the pro-Russian populations of the Donbass had been bombed since 2014, and that the Minsk agreements (2014) had not been applied. Yet again. There is an element of accident in war, but war is not an accident.
The Notion of Total War
Clausewitz’s definition of war as a “continuation of political relations” is enlightening not only in itself, for what it says about the dialogical nature of war, but also for what it shows about Clausewitz’s conception of politics. Politics is trade between states and nations. Trade is not, of course, simply the trade in goods and money. It is also the trade in ideas. Politics is the relationship between nations as determined by the intentions of each and every one, and by reciprocal interactions. Domestic politics is the same, except that it concerns relations between social groups. For Clausewitz, war is the continuation of politics by means other than peaceful ones. But precisely because it is a continuation of politics, it does not make politics disappear, any more than the other means of politics do.
War does not absorb all politics. “We say that these new means are added to them [to peaceful means] to affirm at the same time that war itself does not make these political relations cease, that it does not transform them into something entirely different, but that they continue to exist in their essence, whatever means they use.” This is why war does not exclude parallel negotiations. Raymond Aron (Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, vol. 1, 1989, p. 180) writes: “We wage battle instead of sending notes, but we continue to send notes or the equivalent of notes even as we wage battle.” The notion of total war (Erich Ludendorff, 1916) expresses the idea that war is more than armed violence. It is the mobilization of everything, including the imaginary (idealization of the self, demonization of the enemy). It is the mobilization of the entire population, including the elderly and children.
If Nazi Germany increased the pensions of its citizens in 1944, it was not because it underestimated the priority of the military, but because it believed that the rear had to hold out if the front was not to collapse. Mobilizing everything and everyone: that is why strategy is not a narrowly military concept, but is the management of all the economic, demographic, political and technological aspects that can lead to victory, as General André Beaufre explains (Introduction à la stratégie, Pluriel-Fayard, 2012). War includes armed violence and its use, but goes beyond it to include peaceful means. Both peace and war are matters of political relations. These relationships are relationships of power, but also asymmetrical relationships between world views. When Napoleon told Metternich in 1813 that he could not return defeated to France, unlike legitimate sovereigns who can return defeated to their country without losing their throne, it is a subjective truth that becomes an objective truth. Insofar as Napoleon himself said that he would be too weakened in front of the French if he accepted defeat, the Allies (then France’s enemies) did not want to deal with a weakened ruler who would not guarantee the duration of the peace on the terms they had obtained.
Napoleon’s argument backfired. As we can see, the rational dimension of war and politics, which is based on calculation, always intersects with an irrational dimension, which is based on subjectivity. But for there to be war, and not stasis (civil war, violent discord) or terrorism, there must be organized groups, nations or federations of nations—but not ephemeral tribes. In this sense, the post-modern era is bringing with it conflicts that will not—and probably less and less so—be wars in the traditional sense, but which will nonetheless be very violent, and will elude conventional settlement by negotiation: The prospect of increased chaos.
Pierre Le Vigan is an urban planner who has also has taught at the universities of Paris XI-Orsay, Paris XII-Créteil, and at the IUP Ville et Santé in Bobigny. He has also worked in adult education. This article appears through the courtesy of the revue Éléments.
Featured: Battle of Avay, by Pedro Américo; painted in 1879.
“In nature, in the cosmos, there is a divine, sacred dimension. In this sense modern “neo-paganism” is a hasty conclusion or, at least, a transitional phase” (Ernst Jünger, The Coming Titans).
When one speaks of the ideas of the “ND” (Nouvelle Droite/New Right), the intellectual current that emerged in France in the 1970s, there is a recurring theme: its position on the question of religion and in particular its option for “paganism.” What exactly does this paganism mean? Where did it come from? Are the ideas of the ND incompatible with a Christian confession? Where, intellectually speaking, has the paganism of the ND led? Here are the answers of someone whose intellectual formation is inscribed in the Nouvelle Droite/New Right and who, nevertheless, is Catholic. A text for debate.
The “Nouvelle Droite/New Right” was known—and is now less and less known—as the school of thought, led by Alain de Benoist, that was born in France in the 1970s and which, since then, has described a trajectory similar to that of meteors: on an unknown course, illuminating the night firmament, attracting attention, also arousing fears—even omens of catastrophe—and, along the way, shedding fragments of disparate behavior, depending on the atmospheric conditions. I am one of those fragments. I entered the intellectual orbit of the “Nouvelle Droite / New Right” (hereinafter “ND”) around 1982. I read absolutely everything published by the ND (which was and has continued to be a great deal), I attended its international colloquia and summer universities (very few Spaniards passed through there) and, for some time, I tried to see that here, in Spain, something similar to what arose there might emerge. This is to underline that these lines, which are intended to be a dispassionate analysis, nevertheless contain an important part of personal confession.
The ND and its Context
The ND was so called because it was a way of thinking different from what was in force at that time—in the 1970s and 1980s—which was the ideological monopoly of the left. It must be repeated: a way of thinking; that is, an intellectual attitude, not a political attitude. Since it was not left-wing, it was called “right-wing.” And since it did not fit into the usual molds of the ordinary right either—because it was neither traditionalist nor liberal—it was called “new.” Given the oppressive atmosphere that the Marxist intelligentsia had imposed on European thought and on the media since the 1960s, the attitude of the ND, uninhibited, intelligent and without complexes, represented a real breath of fresh air for many temperaments, and especially for those who, being by convictions on the right, needed (we needed) to think things in a new and deeper way.
What the ND contributed was a very extensive and intense critique of contemporary civilization, and it did so with a very broad philosophical base—there is no author whose ideas have not served it well, from the Frankfurt School to the great French reactionaries, and from the mystics of medieval Germany to postmodern sociologists—and with a properly multidisciplinary projection; that is to say, it applied to economics as well as to psychology, biology as well as to politics. Someday we will have to recapitulate this immense work, ignominiously reduced by hostile critics to a mere emanation of the “radical right,” and we will see that it is a real reservoir of ideas. As with all deposits, here too there are inexhaustible veins and others that are soon extinguished; galleries of infinite expanse and others that lead to dead ends; valuable materials and others that vanish on contact with the air. In any case, the deposit is there: in the huge collection of texts gathered in the volumes of the journals Nouvelle École, Éléments or Études & Recherches, not to mention the numerous publications published on the periphery of the ND, as well as in the overwhelming books by Alain de Benoist, and in the very long list of texts that have emerged around this initiative. It is a pity—and this says a lot about our times—that most of those who criticize the ND do so without having read a single page of this properly encyclopedic work.
What were the main lines of the critique of the ND? Synthesizing to the bare essentials—and, therefore, simplifying to the point of abuse—we can describe them in three vectors. The starting point was a triple refutation. In the first place, the reprobation of the social culture imposed since the 1960s—much before, in fact—by the left-wing intelligentsia, a social culture that translated into a singular mixture of forced egalitarianism, ideological materialism, generalized moral abdication and infinite hatred towards European identity. Secondly, a deep nonconformism towards the economic civilization imposed by the capitalist order in the West, that type of civilization where no other form of individual or collective life is understood, except through the selfishness of “best interest” and “profitability.” Thirdly, a very characteristic issue of the final years of the Cold War: the weariness of a Europe subjected to the despotism of a bipolar world and the anxious search for its own, European, way to regenerate the spirit of the old continent in the new and threatening world of the great superpowers.
From these three points of origin, the reflection of the ND unfolded in vectors that led naturally to identify; first, the root causes of the evil being criticized, and then to try to think of an alternative to the situation.
The critique of the cultural model of the left led to a dissection of egalitarianism, namely, that dogma of the essential equality of human beings. Such a dissection departed from the usual liberal critique of egalitarianism (that equality undermines efficiency because it inhibits ambition) and focused instead on underlining the anthropological foundations of difference, both among men and among peoples; difference which, in the discourse of the ND, was not so much aimed at creating a new legitimacy for this or that hierarchy as at proposing ways of thinking about diversity: of social functions within a community, of cultural identities, of forms of development, etc.
The second point, the critique of economic civilization—and its corollary, technical civilization—led to the identification of individualism as the origin of the process: Individualism, that is, the conviction that the ultimate horizon of all reflection and action is the individual; his autonomy identified as his “best interest;” his search for happiness interpreted in terms of material success, according to a pattern of behavior that extends from economic life to any other field; from politics to family relations. The need to propose a critical alternative to individualism—without falling, on the other hand, into the annulment of the individual typical of egalitarian systems—led to the search for an alternative sociality, a task in which materials as diverse as the “tribal” sociology of the postmodernists, Christian personalism or the theses of Anglo-Saxon communitarians were brought together: systems of life in common, where the person and the group are not antithetical elements, but complementary realities.
As for the third vector, which stems from dissidence with respect to the world order born of the Cold War, it took the form of a critique of universalism—although it would have been more accurate to speak of “globalism”—which led to a rejection of the idea of a planetary convergence around the North American model and the proposal of a sovereign Europe in the military, diplomatic and economic spheres, the defense of the cultural identities of all peoples, and an alliance of this sovereign Europe with the Third World.
These are, roughly speaking, the elements from which the thought of the ND developed. It would be too long to go into the derivations of each line; for example, the critique of the concept of “humanism,” the distrustful look towards technical civilization, the recovery of elements of the traditional ecological discourse, the proposal of an alternative conception of democracy and the State, the critique of nationalism as a “metaphysics of subjectivity,” etc. It would also be excessive to enumerate the theoretical materials that contributed to support this work; all of them can be found in the publications of the ND and to which we referred.
Criticism of Christianity
Within this work, there was a specific line of reflection that some consider fundamental and others secondary, but which in any case has had the virtue (or rather the defect) of absorbing attention to the point of obscuring the rest of the theoretical ensemble of the ND: the question of religion, resolved in an acerbic criticism of Christianity and in a vindication of a new kind of paganism.
Before explaining this point, it is necessary to point out that, in reality, the sources from which the attitude of the NR towards religion draws are very plural, very diverse, also contradictory: among the names that supported the birth of the Nouvelle École—the first great theoretical review of the movement—there are, for example, quite a few Christians. These sources, moreover, have not led to a homogeneous position, but to different attitudes, which, in turn, have undergone modifications over time. A perfect example of such heterogeneity is the survey, “Avec ou sans Dieu / With or without God,” organized by the magazine Éléments, where different authors related to the heteroclite galaxy of the ND (including myself) and explained their position on the matter. More than fifty years after the ND began its work of reflection, the balance in this matter is very abundant in terms of points of view and potentially rich in openings to other currents, but rather disappointing if one is looking for a solid and well-defined intellectual position. The “pagan drift” is an important feature of Alain de Benoist’s thought and, in this sense, it can be considered “canonical” with respect to the whole of the ND, since he is undoubtedly its main theoretician; but not even in this author can one speak of a continuous position over time, but rather of an evolution that is not always predictable. For the rest, the different strands that built the framework of the thought of the ND on religious matters have ended in dead ends or in an uncomfortable impasse. And this is what we must now examine.
When does the polemical question of Christianity—of anti-Christianity, rather—enter into the general discourse of the ND? It enters at the moment of genealogies, when we try to find the intellectual origin of egalitarianism, individualism and universalism. Christianity, in fact, has an important egalitarian component, since it endows all men equally with a soul of identical value for all, regardless of the place each one occupies in the world of the living; and all men equally will be submitted to divine judgment. Moreover, the Gospel message, abundant in formulas such as “he who humbles himself will be exalted and he who exalts himself will be humbled,” or “the last will be first,” seems designed to nourish subversion. Christianity also has an individualistic component, since salvation is entirely individual, affects only and exclusively the soul of each person and places man’s relationship with God on an eminently personal level. Christianity, finally, is a universal religion, where, as St. Paul preaches, after Revelation there are no longer Greeks or Jews, barbarians or Scythians, but we are all one in Christ, so that belonging to a community is expressly devalued and, in its place, a properly universal consciousness emerges: We are all one, in fact.
In this act of pointing to Christianity as the origin of the essential values of the modern world, it is easy to trace the influence of Nietzsche, both in the Genealogy of Morals and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But, in the specific case of the ND, perhaps even more important was the influence of the positivist philosopher Louis Rougier, who had recovered the old allegory of the Roman Celsus against Christians. Thus, it was that towards the end of the 1970s, Christianity was characterized in the discourse of the ND as “the Bolshevism of antiquity.” In an environment such as that of European culture in the 1970s, where a Church disrupted by the Second Vatican Council was openly playing the “progressive” card, this criticism seemed to be quite in line with reality.
Let us talk a little more about Louis Rougier, because his role in this story is important. With Rougier (1889-1982), the logical empiricism of the Vienna circle entered the early ambit of the ND (early 1970s). This source brought, from the outset, a scientistic attitude towards reality: empirical truth—read, experimental—became an efficient alternative to the prevailing “ideological” truths of the time, generally derived from the Marxist-Leninist paradigm. Remember that this is the time when biology seemed to be dominated by the environmentalist model of the Soviet Lyssenko and psychology was dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis, both schools which, in their translation into social philosophy, coincide in proposing egalitarian doctrines. As opposed to these doctrines, the ND claimed, in psychology, the experimental work of Eysenck, Jensen or Debray-Ritzen, and in biology, the contributions of ethology (Lorenz, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, etc.) and of the first sociobiologists (Wilson, Dawkins), who coincided in proposing differentialist, i.e., non-egalitarian, models. From this period dates also, by the way, an old error of the interested critics of the ND—the assimilation between their positions and those of sociobiologists. But the ND very quickly distanced itself from sociobiology because it considered that its approach was nothing but a reductionism to genetics. In its place was adopted the vision of Konrad Lorenz, based on a much more elaborate, non-reductionist philosophical anthropology, which perfectly integrated the biological dimension of the human and his cultural dimension: the anthropology of Arnold Gehlen.
From the scientific point of view, it is obvious today that the ND was betting correctly: genetics has proved to be a key discipline, while Lyssenko’s environmentalist delusions are no longer remembered. However, this position had a drawback from the philosophical point of view: it made the discourse of the ND gravitate around a scientistic materialism that vetoed an objective approach to the sacred. And this, despite the fact that some of the inspirers of this scientific position were avowedly Christian, as in the case of Konrad Lorenz.
Louis Rougier is also important in the forging of the discourse of the ND for another contribution, this one in the field of the history of political culture: his book Du paradis à l’utopie (From Paradise to Utopia), which is an explanation (very remarkable, by the way) of how the egalitarian messianism of the left derives directly from a secularization of Christian eschatology, from an earthly-ization of the message of salvation. The thesis of From Paradise to Utopia is, in general terms, unassailable: most of the redemptorist concepts of the left in general and of Marxism in particular find their antecedents in equivalent concepts of the Christian heritage. Thus, Providence is transformed into the Necessity of history and the ultraterrestrial Paradise is transmuted, through utopia, into paradise on earth. The fact that this supposed paradise has led to the Gulag only goes to show the absurdity of the transposition and the correctness of Rougier’s criticism. Now, from this point on, Rougier’s thesis reproaches Christianity for carrying, in germ, the seed of subversion; and in this sense, he will recover—later on—the warnings of the Roman Celsus against the threat that Christians represented for the empire. If Christianity could be secularized into a revolutionary ideal, it is because the Gospel message carried within itself this virtuality. This is the aforementioned characterization of Christianity as “the Bolshevism of antiquity.”
In this way, the anti- or post-Christian line of thought that stemmed from the 19th century came to connect with a general philosophy of scientific matrix, very typical of the 20th century. The “pagan rebellion” that can be traced in certain streaks of German and French romanticism, in the philosophy of Nietzsche and even in works such as Wagner’s (before his Parsifal), went hand-in-hand with the logical critique of the Christian mental model and ended up giving birth, in the ND, to a position of simultaneous rupture with Christianity and with modern ideologies, which were seen as nothing but secularized prolongations of the evangelical message.
The Weakness of the Philosophical Critique of Christianity
Now, to focus the critique of modernity on Christianity was an intellectually risky operation. First, because Christianity, although it is not only a doctrine of the afterlife, is above all a doctrine of spiritual salvation, in such a way that its concepts cannot always be understood as principles of an intellectual-ideological order, ready to be applied materially to the social or political terrain. It is true that preaching an equal soul for all men can be understood as a form of egalitarianism, but it is also true that, according to Christian doctrine, some of these men are saved and others are not, and there are few things less egalitarian than this difference. On the other hand, the theme of man created unanimously in the image and likeness of God is opposed by the parable of the talents, which is a metaphysics of inequality.
The same is true of the other modern “ideologemes” that the critique of the ND attributes to Christianity. For example, in Christian discourse, the theme of individualism—the soul is an individual attribute and salvation is also a matter of the individual—is opposed by the theme of the negation of individuality, expressed in terms that lead to proposing the radical renunciation of all things in the world. The same contradiction is found in the theme of universalism: if in the proclamation that “we are all one” there is an evident affirmation of the unity of believers above the earthly powers, it is no less true that this unity leaves out non-believers; and, on the other hand, the doctrine itself exposes a clear separation of the earthly and spiritual spheres, according to the formula “to God what is God’s, and to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” In other words, Christianity can be reproached for one thing and also for the opposite. Focusing the discourse on only one of the facets means deliberately hiding the other and, in that sense, falsifying the whole. To put it bluntly, it is as if the ND, in its critique of Christianity, were describing an object other than the one it intends to criticize.
Let us stress the question of egalitarianism, which is crucial. In general terms, the identification between Christianity and egalitarianism suffers from an initial error, namely—from metaphysical equality does not necessarily derive physical egalitarianism. It is true that the Church, in other times—and precisely in the 1970s—did not fail to fall into this error, allowing or encouraging (depending on the strands) that the doctrine of metaphysical equality (all men are brothers because they all have a soul that is an equal child of God) be “recovered” by the dominant egalitarian discourse (all men are equal). But what the ND does is methodologically debatable: it does not combat the error of these ecclesial strands, i.e., it does not examine the initial premise, but takes it as valid—that is, it accepts the identification between metaphysical equality and political egalitarianism—and from there deduces a general critique of Christianity as the matrix of all egalitarian thought. All subsequent discourse is affected by this methodological error of departure. The results are intellectually very fragile: the equality of souls before God cannot be identified with the equality of men in the State, if only because, in the first case, some are saved and others are not; neither can Christianity be identified with egalitarian thought, if only because, historically, all egalitarian thought has tended to burn down churches and de-Christianize those societies where it triumphed.
In the end, the ND is criticizing a false, phantom Christianity, a mistaken idea of Christianity. Naturally, it could be objected that what the ND criticizes is not Christianity as a religion, but Christianity as a worldview. But the objection itself betrays the error: Christianity is first and foremost a religion, and it makes little sense to criticize an object as something other than what it is. Another thing is that forces arising from the Church itself have desacralized Christianity—for example, turning it into a very materialistic theology of liberation. But here the error is in the executioner; that is, in those who have executed the desacralization, not in the victim, that is, in the desacralized Christianity.
In all this, let us emphasize that the thesis that modernity is a secularization of religious concepts remains valid: modern discourse is really incomprehensible if we do not understand it as secularization. Here we are approaching that Schmittian formula of “political theology”: modernity transfers to the political terrain numerous concepts that were once part of the theological terrain. That is to say that the general pattern of Du paradis a I’utopie (From Paradise to Utopia) is objectively correct, as is much of Louis Rougier’s analysis (think of Le génie de l’Occident /The Genius of the West). But what can be deduced from this pattern of analysis is not so much the secularized triumph of Christianity as its corruption: the supernatural has been translated as natural and thus its essence has been distorted.
The Problem of Paganism
Faced with this Christianity secularized by modernity and supposedly unmasked as “Bolshevism of antiquity,” the ND did not opt for atheism or agnosticism, for that would have led it to a materialism similar to that of liberals and Marxists, but dug into the romantic trunk and revived the term “paganism”: A paganism reconstructed somewhat to contemporary tastes, braided with strands of heroic vitalism, sacred sense of nature, religious dimension of the political community, aestheticizing eroticism, “trifunctional” image of social life according to the model discovered by Georges Dumézil in the Indo-European pantheons, elements of “traditional thought” (Evola, Guénon) and of the “philosophia perennis” (Huxley), models of interpretation of the sacred extracted from Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade, and so on…
The mixture was of the most heteroclite, but it was very suggestive. At a time when either the flatter materialism or the neo-spiritualist sects were spreading everywhere, the paganism of the ND offered a beautiful and attractive panorama. Above all, it offered a way of understanding the sacred at a time when churches were becoming empty. De Benoist expounded this paganism in Comment peut-on être paien (How to be a Pagan) and then underwent successive reformulations. The most brilliant is undoubtedly the dialogue between De Benoist and the Catholic thinker Thomas Molnar (another of the Catholics who supported De Benoist in the founding years of the ND), in the volume, L’éclipse du sacré (The Eclipse of the Sacred), which is a fascinating exploration of the universe of the spirit. Of course, the pagan option of the ND allowed for the shaping of an alternative spirituality from positions that were not egalitarian, but differentialist; not individualistic, but communitarian; not universalist, but identitarian.
The problem was that, in reality, this paganism had no real correlation with European antiquity, but was an intellectual construction twenty centuries later. It would be more appropriate to speak of a “neo-paganism.” It was a matter of updating pre-Christian ways of thinking the spiritual in relation to the social. The ND does not “resurrect” the ancient gods; that of “resurrection” is a widespread argument among critics of the ND, but it does not fit the reality of the texts. What the ND does is to recover the pre-Christian mental structure, which is interpreted as an essentially pluralistic and diversifying structure, and to oppose it to the Christian mental structure, which would be supposedly monistic and homogenizing. The context of this recovery was not of a strictly religious nature (replacing some gods with others), but of identity: to recover a specifically European way of thinking. In this context, the aesthetic rehabilitation of pagan forms—from the Greek column to the Celtic interlace—does not have a theological function, but a symbolic one; it is a matter of manifesting the validity of a deep-rooted, specifically European cultural world. And in this rehabilitated neo-paganism, where was the sacred, religion, properly speaking? It was left out of the game—and this is the big question. Generally speaking, the paganism of the “de Benoist strand” was enclosed in a “sociological” interpretation. Now, we can talk about the gods, but, if we do not believe in their real existence, are we not in an empty discourse? To interpret the plurality of gods as a poetic representation of the plurality of social, natural and human forces is a valid option; but, ultimately, it is no more scientific than to represent all these things not with gods, but with saints or constellations. Why resort to the pagan pantheon? Out of loyalty to the European tradition? Fine, but why should the pagan pantheon be more “traditional” than the Christian one, because it is autochthonous, uncontaminated by extra-European elements? But are not St. George, St. Benedict or St. Bernard, the processions of the Virgin or the spirit of the Crusade, or the German and Spanish mystics exclusively European?
A similar contradictory atmosphere appears in one of the “aestheticizing” features with which the ND wrapped its pagan strand, namely that of the “liberation of customs.” In the context of the 1970s and 1980s, the theme of “pagan liberation” enjoyed a certain social presentability—as opposed to the caricature of a Christianity drawn with the thick strokes of sexual repression, intellectual narrowness and social egalitarianism, the pagan imaginary represented a lost paradise of freedom of customs, vital joy, intellectual pluralism and political health. Undoubtedly, the second picture is much more sympathetic than the first. The problem is that the portrait is arbitrary.
In the history of pre-Christian Europe, we find as many examples of intellectual pluralism as of fanatical closed-mindedness, of political health as of generalized corruption, of vital joy as of dark superstitious terror, of freedom of customs as of moral austerity. Conversely, in the history of Christian Europe there is no lack (on the contrary, there are plenty) of examples of relaxed social customs, existential joviality, bold thinking and healthy political institutions; especially if we make the prescriptive differences between the colorful Catholic Mediterranean universe and the gloomy Anglo-Saxon Protestant world, for example. All this without going into other considerations, such as, for example, the usual conjunction of political decadence and intellectual splendor, so frequent in history; or, to stick to religious matters, the wide gap that exists in pagan Europe between “religious” thought (where it is possible to speak of such) and popular religiosity. Thus, the radical distinction between the luminous pagan world and the gloomy Christian world does not cease to be somewhat arbitrary. This distinction comes, in reality, from an inverted intellectual process: two series of values are chosen—one positive, the other negative—and are projected a posteriori on referents that contain a lot of imaginary, fantastic and mental construction. The resulting picture is attractive, as usually happens with imaginary creations; but it cannot seriously support a philosophical interpretation of the History of Religions.
On the other hand, and concerning the specific point of freedom of morals, in the discourse of the ND a not minor contradiction arises—even accepting that the pagan moral world is a “liberated” world (which in itself is debatable), how does one combine the defense of freedom of morals with the critique of the narcissistic hedonism of modern Western civilization? For one of the essential characteristics of modern Western civilization is hedonism, the existence of the masses for mass pleasure; and the ND, quite rightly, rebukes that hedonism with such endorsements as Christopher Lasch’s critique of the “Narcissus complex.” The current hedonism is a direct consequence of individualism, of that way of living—typically modern—which consists in the fact that the individual tends to cut all links with everything around him in order to privilege the narrow interest of his own “I”, something that the ND rightly criticizes. What does this “freedom of customs” have to do with that other elementary religiosity of sex as it occurs in primitive societies? Strictly nothing, one thing and the other correspond to different mental worlds. This should warn us against choosing certain contemporary values and projecting them onto past worlds; this will inevitably be an exercise in decontextualization, i.e., a lax construction.
It is not possible to defend freedom of customs and at the same time reprove the narcissistic hedonism of Western civilization. In the same way that it is not possible to defend the importance of one’s own cultural tradition, the validity of the sacred and the European historical identity, and at the same time to proscribe Christianity, which in its Catholic form—more than in its Protestant form—is the form in which the sacred has traditionally manifested itself in the sphere of European identity.
But perhaps the point from which the inadequacy of the ND critique of Christianity is most clearly perceived is precisely that of the charges of the accusation; that is, all those themes in which the anti-Christian discourse of the ND believed it saw the origin of modern evil. For it turns out that those themes—individualism, egalitarianism, universalism—are not exclusively Christian. The idea of the immortal soul breathed into all men appears, in Europe, at least with Pythagoras, that is, in the 6th century BC. Likewise, the idea that there is an inherent quality in the individual, something that singles him out and makes him unique, appears in the Greco-Latin sphere and finds a concrete expression in the concept of “person” developed by the Roman jurists. Finally, the concept of the universal appears, in philosophy, with Plato’s theory of ideas, and in politics, with the praxis of the Roman Empire. Thus, those three “ideologemes” of modernity—egalitarianism, individualism, universalism—which in Christian doctrine appeared in an ambiguous and contradictory manner, appear with much greater clarity in the pagan cultural tradition. Nietzsche himself, in The Birth of Tragedy, did not so much point against the Nazarene as against Socrates, inventor of the “spirit itself.”
And even more, within the presumably pagan arsenal that the ND recovers, there are essential elements that, nevertheless, belong equally to the Christian order. This is the case, for example, of the trifunctional scheme that Dumézil interpreted—brilliantly—in the Indo-European pantheons and that structured at the same time the world of the gods and the world of men around three functions: the first, that of wisdom, identified with priesthood, kingship and law; the second, that of vital force, identified with war, the nobility of arms; the third, that of production and sustenance, identified with agriculture, work, craftsmanship. It is true that the pagan gods of the Indo-European peoples can be structured in these three families, and it is true that the scheme is likewise reproduced in the social order of ancient Europe. It is, moreover, the model that, as Plato tells us, Socrates imagined: a society of human aspect where there is a head (first function, ruling), a chest (second function, warrior) and a belly (third function, producer). Now, this is exactly the same model that Catholic Europe will maintain for a millennium and a half—with the degenerations we know—from the fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution, on the basis of the three medieval orders: oratores, bellatores, laboratories. Where is the Christian subversion?
Theoretical Ellipses
These things are so obvious that, evidently, they could not escape the attention of those who worked in the field. Whether one held a strictly religious view, that is, of belief in supernatural realities, or whether one defined the sacred in philosophical-sociological terms, that is, as a way of representing a worldview, the pagan option was no less problematic than the Christian one. From this point on, the discourse of the ND began to describe theoretical ellipses that did not fail to raise interesting reflections, but which inevitably returned—by definition—to the starting point. We can mention some of them by way of complementary illustration.
A first ellipse was the scientific one: the reflections derived from subatomic physics—Heisenberg, Lupasco, Nicolescu, etc.—led to the identification of a sort of underlying order in the realm of matter and, therefore, to the perception of a sacred imprint in the world. Anne Jobert expounded this in her study, Le retour d’Hermès : de la science au sacré (The Return of Hermes: From Science to the Sacred). The question was of enormous interest and was linked to one of the great contemporary debates. It could have meant a way of thinking the sacred in intimate relation with the scientific interpretation of the world. However, no one in the ND—apart from Jobert herself—went further along that line. On the contrary, from the 1990s onwards, the inspiration of “spiritualist physics” disappeared and was replaced by a pure neo-Darwinism, a position represented in particular by Charles Champetier. Where the strand “scientific spirituality” was followed, so to speak, was no longer in the French ND, but in Italy (Nuova Destra Italiana), in particular with the work of Roberto Fondi, on organicism.
Another example of theoretical ellipsis was the opening of the ND—especially through the journal Krisis—towards Christian personalism, with an interesting debate between Alain de Benoist and Jean-Marie Domenach, Mounier’s intellectual executor—since the ND had marked a position contrary to modern individualism and mass society, nothing more natural than to converge with a current of thought that had arrived at the same position from a different starting point. But Christian personalism is, by definition, Christian, and its concept of the person is built on the conviction that all individuals possess a transcendent value that is identified with the soul. Perhaps the ND could have taken its cue from this convergence with Christian personalism to recover the Roman concept of “person,” but there was no such convergence. On the other hand, around the same time, Nouvelle École published a long work by Alain de Benoist on (against) Jesus of Nazareth, which in reality was nothing more than a recovery of the old and hostile Jewish literature against the “false Messiah.” Another road closed.
More ellipses? The philosophical one, for example. The ND emerged from the Nietzsche impasse by incorporating Heidegger into its theoretical stock. The Heideggerian critique of Western metaphysics—a critique to which the concept of the “will to power” does not escape—could be interpreted as a definitive diagnosis of the modern disease. And the Heideggerian imperative to “think what the Greeks thought, but in an even more Greek way” could well be interpreted as a demand for a return to the pagan origin. Now, Heidegger’s own interpretation, with its denunciation of the “forgetfulness of Being,” carries an implicit longing not only for the sacred as “enchantment of the world” (Weber), but also for the divine as an active presence in the realm of matter. This explains that famous statement to Der Spiegel: “Only a God can save us.”
Personally—and may I be excused for summarily dismissing a matter so subject to discussion—I believe that Heidegger tried throughout his life to speak of God, obstinately trying to do so without pronouncing the word God and personifying Him in the concept Being, and his last breath was precisely to say that only a God can save us. It is a similar path to that of another of the key thinkers for the ND, Ernst Jünger, with the relevant exception that he discovered the divine imprint with less makeup, invoked it frequently and ended up, as is known, converting to Catholicism, despite being from a Protestant background. The discourse of the ND, in this sense, returns once again to its own starting point: it does not hurry the reasoning, it stops before the necessary logical leap—thinking the sacred as divine presence—and goes back to the same place where the first question had been posed.
It is not difficult to suspect that these elliptical developments obey an objection of principle, a mental reservation, a prejudice of departure: the line of thought developed by Alain de Benoist, so fruitful in other fields, so ready to venture into diverse territories—so capable, for example, of reaching convergences with a certain intellectual left on the critique of the market or on the praise of the idea of community—nevertheless suffers from a clear taboo on religious matters, a kind of insurmountable inhibition. This taboo, this inhibition, is no mystery, but is a substantial part of modern thought. It is simply the impossibility of thinking of God—or, more generically, the divinity—as Someone endowed with real existence. The ND shares this modern prejudice that consists in discarding the hypothesis of God. It is interesting—the ND, which has criticized so much—and so rightly—the Western model of thought, both scholastic and Cartesian, because it desacralizes the world, because it separates the sacred from nature, nevertheless remains subject to that same model by implicitly discarding the hypothesis of God.
This is not a new phenomenon in the history of ideas. Let us recall the scene: University of Tübingen, 1791; three young students named Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling attempt to enlighten a philosophy so spiritual as to satisfy people of a religious temperament and, at the same time, a religion so exact and systematized as to satisfy people of a philosophical spirit. The result was philosophically estimable, but, from the religious point of view, it was an entirely artificial construction. For religion necessarily demands the participation of mystery, and to create mystery is not something within the reach of men.
But let us stop here, because it would take us too far. We can limit ourselves to stating the ultimate conclusion of this journey through the religious problematic of the ND, namely—we are facing a dead end. Consequently, it is valid to think that the itinerary was badly traced from the beginning.
In the end, work in the field of the History of Ideas always runs the risk of Ideas emancipating themselves from History, so that we end up with formally estimable constructions, but with no real basis. To put it in a few words: if Christianity were really the seed of the modern world—materialist, egalitarian, etc.—it would be necessary to explain how it was possible for Christianity to reign in the West for a millennium and a half without the emergence of the modern order, and even more, it would be necessary to explain why the first providence of the modern order, wherever it arose, was always and unfailingly to proclaim the death of Christianity. Since it is impossible to explain these two things and maintain logical coherence, there is no choice but to think that the analysis of the ND, on this point, is wrong.
This does not prevent us from thinking that Christianity faces a major challenge, and this concerns Catholicism more specifically, because it is the last great reservoir of sacredness in the West. This challenge does not concern theological discourse, which is impregnable by its very nature, but the philosophical discourse with which the Church presents itself in the world of secularization; that is, in that world where the sacred has been confined to a corner and religiosity is an individual choice like any other. Before the explosion of modernity, religion, Western metaphysics and political order tended to be one and the same thing; on the contrary, after the revolutions, the Enlightenment—and its glories and its ruins—the triumph of technical civilization and the great wars of the twentieth century, world order goes one way, culture goes another and religion seeks a place in the sun. If in the past Western metaphysics was inseparable from ecclesiastical cathedrae, it is obvious that it has long since ceased to be so; if in the past the order of the world was inseparable from the authority of the Papacy, it is equally obvious that today there is nothing of the sort; if in the past culture and the feeling of the sacred could maintain a relationship of close intimacy, today it is also obvious, finally, that this bond has been broken.
In this regard, Rome has come a long way since the 19th century, and Christian thought (or, if one prefers, the thought of Christians who have dedicated themselves to thinking) has not failed to provide very interesting insights. But the major forces guiding the culture of our time—criticism, suspicion, doubt, uncertainty, fragmentation, nihilism—have shaken the Church as they have everything else, creeds and certainties, ideologies and philosophies. If it was difficult to make faith survive in the world of scientific positivism, as was the case in the 19th century, the task seems even more difficult in the world of technical nihilism, which is the one in which we live. Thus, Christian thought seems fundamentally problematic in matters such as man’s relationship with nature, the presence of religion in the political and social order or the validity of tradition in a culture of permanent change, to give just three examples of daily debates.
However, in this atmosphere of aftermath, where everything seems to have been pushed to its ultimate extreme, as if dragged by the hair by a demonic force, this is precisely where the fundamental questions come back to the fore. No one wonders what is on the other side of the river until their feet touch the shore; today we are already soaked to the waist. This, in any case, is a matter for another reflection. The only thing to be regretted, to return to the thread of our theme, is that the ND or the French New Right, due to its own inhibitions, is no longer in a position to attend this event.
José Javier Esparza, Soanish historian, journalist, writer, has published around thirty books about the history of Spain. He currently directs and presents the political debate program “El gato al agua,” the dean of its genre in Spanish audiovisual work. (Thank you to Arnaud Imatz for all his wonderful help).
As soon as President Néstor Kirchner took office in May 2003, and accompanied by the lawyer of many unions, Carlos Pizzolorusso, I had the opportunity to talk to him for a while at the Casa Rosada and there I told him that the plans for the social organizations or piqueteros had to be administered by the unions, because they know better than anyone else who are unemployed and who are not. I also added that the army and the Church had to participate in the reconstruction of Argentina. At that time, the current president, Alberto Fernandez, was private secretary. I also gave President Kirchner a book, Ensayos de Disenso (Essays of Dissent)—who knows where it ended up.
His answer was clear and forceful: I want the piqueteros in the streets. No more unions. I will replace the army with journalists and the Church with others (he did not tell me by whom). I saw the answer years later on the wall surrounding the Policlinico Bancario in Plaza Irlanda, where an irreverent hand wrote: “Kirchner fights with everyone, except with the Jews.”
Twenty years have passed since this anecdote and today I can verify that Kirchner’s theory is fully valid.
Today, the Argentine army is made up of journalists, those loquacious illiterates who all think the same. 95% of them think, select and explain topics in the same way. The indoctrination received by these people, who are thousands in Argentina and in the world, is truly admirable.
The production of the meaning of the news is born not in them but in the international centers of production of meaning. Almost no one escapes this international vise. Themes are reiterated over and over again until they become established as indisputable truths. For example, “global warming,” for which it is claimed that man and industrial gases are responsible. Today, August 2023, it has just been discovered that 1200 years ago in the Middle Ages, with no machines involved, there was a global warming similar to the current one. And likewise, we can give the example of the Covid vaccines, the war in Ukraine, anti-Christianity, the sugar-coated vision of the millions of illegal immigrants, the exaltation of consumption, the progressive catechism of Agenda 2030 and a whole lot of etcetera.
Semantic warfare is superior to military warfare. The logos prevailed over the polemic.
What happened?
This explanation stems from the observation I made about the sense of the proximate origins of trade unions. The ancient origins go back to the Middle Ages and that is already part of consolidated history.
When the French Revolution takes place in 1789, the first thing the revolutionaries, so praised and pondered in all the history books, do is to cut off the heads of their opponents (e.g., La Vendée: un génocide légal proto-industriel—a legal, proto-industrial genocide)—and this was called Jacobinism: that is when a government only governs for those its own and persecutes all others. One of the Jacobins, Isaac Renéde Le Chapelier, in 1791, suppressed all the guilds in France, with the reasoning that there could not be intermediate organizations between the individual and the State, because that was against democracy.
This was copied, with variations, by all the European nations; and then we witnessed the period of the most atrocious exploitation of the worker, which went, approximately, from 1790 to 1860. As a reaction to such heartless exploitation, socialism and its communist and Trotskyite variants arose, as well as Catholic social thinkers. Some find their expression in the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and many others; while others do so through the writings of Albert de Mun, François-René de La Tour du Pin and the encyclicals of the Popes.
That is to say, the so-called “social question” is raised in politics, which is the relationship between capital and labor, that of the worker and the employer. And this was the main issue that the different governments tried to solve for a century and a half.
The primacy of the social question over politics lasted until the 1970s, when the Welfare State began to crumble. It was then that “the anthropological question” emerged, as a more intense political problem. Its intellectual birth certificate can be traced back to the French May ’68, whose slogan was “forbidden to prohibit.” A purely cultural slogan. And it is from there, when socialism stops thinking about the proletarian revolution in order to think about the cultural revolution. In those same days, the Church of the Vatican Council 1965/68 stops doing theology=saving souls, and to do sociology.
Within this framework of belonging appears what today we call “progressivism,” which is an ideology without ideas; or rather, a mixture of socialism, Christian democracy and liberalism.
An ideology that is no longer focused on changing reality but on changing man; or rather, man’s conscience.
And in this, journalism, the army of loquacious illiterates, fulfills the function of the philosophers of ancient Greece.
Man is no longer a nature; he does not have an essence, but only a historical becoming, a choice.
Progressivism is the ideological presupposition of Agenda 2030, which, since it has not yet been implemented, will be extended to 2050.
Thus, progressivism as liberal, Christian Democrat or social democrat is internationalist—like journalists—and therefore it goes against the idea of nation, which is the contemporary political-cultural form.
The essential of a nation is its ethos, its proper spirit, its moral form. And the political objective of progressivism is to dismantle the historical nation, either by replacing its symbols, its flags, its anthems, its national songs, its language, its native art with its dances and music, its manners, customs and habits. In a word, its values. The nation is what identifies one State with respect to another, which is why the manuals define the State as the legally organized nation. Progressivism ends up going against the nation-States and their sovereign character, in order to go after the establishment of a World State, the ultimate goal of what today we call “globalization.”
Thus, the replacement of “the social question” by “the anthropological question,” as that great Spanish thinker, Dalmacio Negro Pavón, rightly affirms, is the Copernican turn of our time. The government and the nation that resolves it will remain standing—otherwise it will perish.
Alberto Buela is an Argentinian philosopher and professor at National Technological University and the University of Barcelona. He is the author of many books and articles. His website is here.
Featured: Subway, 14th Street, NYC, by Reginald Marsh; painted in 1930.
David R. Carlin is a former Democratic state senator who was once a leading figure in Rhode Island politics. In his new book, Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church, he explains that the “mind” of the Democratic Party has been converted to atheistic humanism, an ideology (or worldview) that is the deadly enemy of Catholicism. It is this ideology that has given America its present-day culture of sexual freedom, abortion, gay marriage, and transgenderism. More and more this atheistic ideology controls the chief propaganda organs of American culture, that is the entire Media-Education-Entertainment Complex, and of course the Democratic Party itself.
This excerpt from Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church comes through the kind courtesy of Lectio Publishing.
When I had finished writing about ninety-nine percent of this book, I happened to be driving through my neighborhood one day (I was driving home following a periodic visit to my cardiologist) when I noticed a colorful cloth banner, rectangular in shape, hanging on somebody’s front porch. It said:
Pro-BLM
Pro-science
Pro-choice
Pro-feminism
Pro-LGBTQ
Pro-humanism
Pro-immigrant
I slammed on my brakes in order that I might pause for a moment or two to admire the banner, which is a nearly perfect summary of the dangerous anti-Christianity mentality I am denouncing in this book, a mentality I call atheistic humanism. The person who made the banner is, I suppose, an atheistic humanist, and so, very probably, is the person who owns the porch in question.
If you know how to read the language of atheistic humanism, you will know how to interpret the many “pro” labels listed above.
“Pro-BLM” means “the USA is a systemically racist society, ruled by white supremacists”
“Pro-science” means “we don’t believe in the Bible or any other divine revelation”
“Pro-choice” means “pro-abortion”
“Pro-feminism” means “we deplore toxic masculinity”
“Pro-LGBTQ” means “we endorse an immense variety of sexual perversions”
“Pro-humanism” means “anti-Christianity and pro-atheism”
“Pro-immigrant” means “pro-open borders”
Atheistic humanists are smart people, at least usually, and so when making propaganda they know how to clothe their dangerous ideas in harmless, often even attractive, words and slogans. And so, instead of saying, “Let’s mass-murder unborn babies,” they say, “Let’s defend a woman’s right to choose.” And instead of saying, “Almost all white Americans are racists,” they say, “Black lives matter.” Instead of saying, “The Bible is bull***t,” they say, “We believe in science.” And so on.
*****
Great civilizations sometimes collapse. If we have any doubts about that, we can read Arnold Toynbee’s multivolume work, A Study of History; or another multivolume work, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the second and third and fourth centuries AD, the old pagan civilization of the Greco-Roman world gradually but (as we now can see in retrospect) inevitably collapsed and was replaced by a new civilization based on Christianity.
It is possible that those of us living today are passing through a somewhat similar crisis of civilization, a crisis in which an old way of life is dying while a new is being born. If in those ancient days paganism, an old thing, was being replaced by a new thing, Christianity, so in our time Christianity, which is now an old thing, is perhaps being replaced something new, a worldview based on atheism. It is not easy for those living through one of these great transitions to know what is happening. Only after the transition is complete, only after the old thing has quite definitely passed away, can we be sure that it is truly dead and that it is therefore too late to save it. As the philosopher Hegel, meditating on the mysterious course of history, once said, “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” So I’m not quite sure that our civilization is crumbling; perhaps we are simply going through a bad patch; maybe we’ll have to wait five hundred years before making a definitive judgment on that.
*****
But something is happening, something momentous, whether we call it a bad patch or a collapse of our old civilization. Christianity is under severe attack by a great enemy, and it is this enemy—along with its political arm, the Democratic Party—that I plan to examine in this book. Although this attack is underway in many places, not just in the United States of America…
…But what is this new thing, this new thing that is a great enemy of Christianity? What should we call it? Many Christians, both Catholics and others, like to call it a new paganism, a neo-paganism. I think this is a great misnomer. The ancient paganism of the Roman-Greek world, quite unlike today’s anti-Christianity, was religious. All paganism is religious, paganism being the generic name for polytheistic religions. Ancient paganism certainly wasn’t religious in a Christian or monotheistic way, but without question it was religious. It had multitudes of gods, altars, rituals, and holy days. By contrast, this new thing, this candidate to replace Christianity, is not at all religious. Either it involves outright atheism, or it leans strongly in the direction of atheism. It is a decidedly secular or non-religious faith; more than non-religious, it is anti-religious; very specifically, it is anti-Christianity. At the same time, it is humanistic; or at least in its outwardly most attractive form it claims to be humanistic. A more or less accurate label for it would be secular humanism. A more accurate name still would be atheistic humanism—for atheism is the most thoroughgoing kind of anti-Christianity, and atheism lies at the core of this new and superficially benign faith.
There are various kinds of atheists. Some of them are beastly; they give vent to their basest, most animalistic impulses (think of violent criminals). Others are demonic; they love evil, not for the eventual good it may produce, but for its own sake (think of Nazis). The atheists I will be focusing on in this book are the (apparently) best kind, the humanistic kind. They are neither beastly nor demonic. They make an honest attempt to be human and humane. They even make an attempt (albeit a very unsuccessful attempt) to mimic what they imagine to be the ethic of Christianity. It is atheists of this kind—the “good” atheists, so to speak—that present the greatest danger to Christianity in general and to Catholicism in particular. I should point out, however, that once these “good” atheists are in command of society, the way will open for the entry of atheists of the beastly and demonic.
*****
Ideological Structure of the Democratic Party
To understand today’s Democratic Party we must understand its ideological structure, and to understand this structure we have to see (a) who produces the party’s ruling beliefs and values, (b) who distributes these beliefs and values, and (c) who consumes them.
We may picture this structure as a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are the producers, relatively small in number. Below them are the distributors, much larger in number. And at the base of the pyramid are the consumers, the enormous number of rank-and-file Democrats. The beliefs and values move downward, as with the force of gravity. They begin with the people at the top of the pyramid; they are eagerly seized upon by the people in the middle; and these middle people energetically pass these beliefs and values on to the party’s rank-and-file…
The producers of these strongly leftist beliefs and values are people who are commonly referred to as intellectuals, but who more correctly should be denominated as ideologues. “Intellectual” is a very broad category; it can refer to any highly educated person who has a lively and continuing interest in some field of thought. For instance, a Shakespeare scholar would be an intellectual, and so would a physicist, and so would a professor of constitutional law. But not all intellectuals are ideologues; in fact most of them are not. An “ideologue” is a sub-category of intellectual. He (or she) is an “activist” intellectual; an intellectual who is promoting a political agenda; an intellectual whose commitment to a more or less revolutionary outcome shapes his (or her) perception of political reality. The pure intellectual studies reality to see what conclusions ought to be drawn. The ideologue already “knows” the conclusions prior to beginning the study; he then shapes the evidence to fit his a priori conclusions.
The producers of the beliefs and values of the Democratic Party are ideologues, leftist ideologues—progressives they like to call themselves. They have a kind of ideal society in mind, and they believe that the Democratic Party is the political vehicle that can, if guided correctly—which is to say, if guided by themselves—contribute greatly to bringing this ideal society about.
Only rarely are these ideologues elected officials. Far more often they are professors at colleges and universities, including law schools; and these are often America’s very best colleges and universities and law schools. They can also be found in significant numbers at leftist “think tanks.” On some occasions they are journalists. Or they are writers of political or historical or sociological books (this last category largely overlapping with the earlier categories).
The distributors of these beliefs and values are persons who may be described as “passive ideologues” in contrast to the “active ideologues” just described. That is to say, they don’t create the leftist beliefs and values they adhere to, but they receive them with enthusiasm. These are the people who dominate what may be called the “command posts” of American popular culture—or what may alternatively be called America’s “propaganda industry.” I have in mind the leftists who dominate such fields as journalism (both electronic and print), the entertainment industry (Hollywood, TV, popular music, etc.), and our colleges and universities. It is also common for public school administrators to be distributors of these beliefs and values, less common (though far from unknown) for classroom teachers to be so. Minsters of liberal churches and theologian-professors at liberal seminaries are also distributors. Finally, we must count the great majority of Democratic elected officials, from local town councils up the President of the United States, as distributors—along with the political activists who help these officials get elected.
Some of these distributors are more enthusiastic in their leftism than others. Those who are very enthusiastic—an enthusiasm that sometimes, especially among young persons, verges on fanaticism—call themselves progressives, while the more temperate leftists prefer to call themselves liberals. Whether progressive or liberal, however, they take their beliefs and values from “above” and pass them along to the common people “below.” They are like missionaries, spreading a gospel they deeply believe in even though they didn’t invent it.
The producers and distributors of these leftist beliefs and values are of course also consumers of their beliefs and values. But the great majority, indeed the overwhelming majority, of consumers are rank-and-file Democrats who are for the most part non-ideological—or would be if left to their own devices. Their motives for adherence to the Democratic Party are various. Sometimes it is a matter of family tradition: “My parents were Democrats, my grandparents were Democrats,” and so on. Sometimes it is a matter of racial identity: “Most blacks are Democrats, I am black, therefore etc.” Sometimes it is a matter of labor union membership: “My union supports the Democrats, therefore etc.” Sometimes it is a matter of economic interest: “The Democrats are good for my paycheck or my welfare check, etc.” Sometimes it is a matter of personal inertia: “I have always voted Democrat, etc.”
Very often it is a matter of imagining that the Democratic Party today is essentially the same thing it was decades ago: “This is the party of FDR and JFK, so how can I not vote for it?” This is what may be called “the fallacy of essentialism.” Some things—geometrical figures, for instance, or numbers—have eternal essences. They never change. A square always was, is now, and always will be a plane figure with four equal sides and four 90-degree angles. Some people imagine that their favorite political party is rather like this; that it remains essentially what it was in its golden age.
Even though these Democratic voters are for the most part non-ideological, and even though they have little or no personal attachment to the leftist values of abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, recreational drug use, and euthanasia, and even though they don’t believe that the USA is a “systemically” or “fundamentally” racist society, and even though the whites among them (most of them are whites) don’t believe it is racist to assign heavy penalties for crimes of violence committed by blacks and other “persons of color,” and even though they have no wish that public schools should teach little kids to adopt an attitude of tolerance toward a variety of sexual perversions—even though all this, these rank-and-file Democrats are willing to go along with the ideological agenda handed down by the ideological rulers of the party. Why? Because it is their party. It is a party they are in the habit of trusting, a party they are in the habit of supporting. Besides, they don’t like the other party, the rival party, the Republicans—just as Red Sox fans don’t like the Yankees. Like good team players, they operate on the assumption that if the captains of their team say ABC while the other team says not-ABC, they will have to agree with leaders of their team; they too will have to say ABC. To do otherwise in the midst of battle would be an act of disloyalty.
In sum, that’s how a small number of people (the ideological leaders of the party), having persuaded a much larger number of people (the propaganda arm of the party), can shape the political preferences of a vast number of people (the rank-and-file members of the party). And that’s how an intellectual elite whose ideas and values are far out of the mainstream can shape the destiny of a nation. A small number of leftist ivory tower intellectuals/ideologues (at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, great state universities, etc.) win converts at vital propaganda outlets (the New York Times, MSNBC, Hollywood, etc.), and these leftist propagandists in turn tell ordinary Democrats what political and cultural agenda they should support.
