Justin Trudeau and the Banderites

A dimly lit hall. Enthusiastic crowd. A screechy harangue from the podium. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s association with Nazism was made manifest a second time!

Fresh from applauding a member of the 1st Galician Division of the Waffen SS in the Canadian Parliament, Trudeau gave a bizarre performance the following day, on September 23, 2023, at the Fort York Armoury, in Toronto.

More importantly, to his left hung a large banner.. It read in Cyrillic, ГЕРОЯМ СЛАВА (Heroyam, or Geroyam Slava), or “Glory to the Heroes!”

It’s a response to a Banderite (Nazi) call; the first part might be more familiar: СЛАВА УКРАЇНІ (Slava Ukraini), “Glory to Ukraine.” The response is, “Glory to the Heroes.”

This cry was popularized by none other than the Ukrainian Nazi, Stepan Bandera, and became his slogan. Both his organizations, the Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA), allied with the Nazis, used this call-response and it is now closely identified only with them. Bandera established it as the “Ukrainian” version of the Nazi call-response, “Heil Hitler-Sieg Heil.”

We just need to recall that both the OUN and the UPA carried out many atrocities against Poles and Jews and the Roma and fellow Ukrainians, while the crimes of Bandera are legend, and need not be repeated here, as I have discussed all this earlier. Suffice to say that it is impossible to speak of modern Ukraine without the Nazis—current Ukrainian national life is saturated by Hitlerism.

Is PM Trudeau again going to say that he knew nothing about the banner hanging right before him? That Anthony Rota, the ex-Speaker of the House of Commons, made his way into the Armoury to hang it up? Or, more likely, in Trudeau’s mind, Putin did it?

What we are really witnessing is the barking of violent rhetoric, all justified by blurting out “Ukraine.” In other words, all manner of hatred can now be concealed by the “morality” of supporting Ukraine. This violence has become a habit of mind among all the Canadian and Western ruling elite—enthusiastically repeated by Trudeau, as this speech bears witness. This is why the members of the Canadian Parliament all stood, cheered and applauded the Nazi visiting them in House of Commons.

The Armoury performance by Trudeau was Hitlerian in delivery as well—the exaggerated gestures, the angry facial expressions, the modulated shouting (though truth be told, Hitler was better at all this than Trudeau can ever hope to be, despite his stint as a drama teacher); and then came the copium and the hopium—handing out $9 Billion is going to defeat Russia. Perhaps in a saner moment, Trudeau might want to ask himself how much winning from the Ukrainians the USA bought with $112 Billion (the real amount is likely a lot, lot more, since the Pentagon is hopeless at math)?

Worse was the applauding crowd before him, listening to his ranting (did all the 338 clappy, happy members of Parliament tag along?), and no one noticed the banner? Truth be told, it was sneaky, being in Cyrillic.

The Russophoba that Trudeau yelled out stems from the deeply neo-Nazi views of the Ukrainian regime in Kiev, and within Ukrainian society itself, which do not see Russians, or anyone East of them, as humans.

For example, on August 4, 2023, Aleksey Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, stated: “I’m fine with Asians, but Russians are Asians. They have a completely different culture, vision. Our key difference from them is humanity.” Ukrainians are humans, while Russians, because they are Asians, are not.

Then, on September 14, 2023, Zelensky’s top aide, Mikhail Podoliak, observed: “What’s wrong with India, China, and so forth? The problem is that they are not analyzing the consequences of their steps, these countries have weak intellectual potential, unfortunately… Yes, they invest in science. Yes, India has launched a lunar rover presently and is now trekking on the surface of the Moon, but that does not indicate that this country fully comprehends what the modern world is about… China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts… It would be in their interest now to distance themselves from Russia as far as possible, take all the resources it has, and take part of the Russian territory under their legal control. In fact, they will do that.” Again, Asians are racially inferior; and since Russians are Asians, ergo, etc.

On September 28, 2023, Vovan & Lexus, the brilliant Russian pranskters, posing as ex-President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, spoke with the transgender Ukraine ex-spokesman, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo (born Michael, now a creature no longer human; merely a “billboard” for Wokery), who very precisely and clearly stated what is commonly believed in Ukraine, because it is taught in their schools: “Russians are not Europeans… Russians are Asian, and ultimately, they do come from the Mongols. They do come from a grouping of people who want to be slaves and want to be led, just as it was from the days of Genghis Khan. I wish the rest of Europe and the Western world understood that Europe ends at Ukraine. We are protecting European values and Western values the same way those did hundreds and thousands of years ago when the Mongols came in…. Every Russian that supports Vladimir Putin’s decisions are not human. These people are not human. They are enemies of humanity, in fact… we’ve been asking the Western world since the days of your presidency, sir, to make certain they understood the threat of these non-humans” (transcript via KanekoaTheGreat).

These are the people Trudeau is paying $9 Billion to. These are the views that ground his own scream-fest: “…because the cost on Canadians, on our lives on our…(?) will be so much greater if Putin wins this war, we will and have to stand every single day until Ukraine wins this war.”

Ukrainians must win because they are humans; Russians are not. Notice the attempt at cleverness with the “cost” involved. If Russians win, they are going to “cost” Canada a lot more. How? Right now, it’s the Ukrainians who are costing Canadians $9 Billion, not the Russians. Rather than pointless gymnastics with economics, it is far easier to explain Trudeau’s words as an extension of Ukrainian Russophobia. For Trudeau, people like Danilov, Podoliak and Ashton-Cirillo must win, because these people can build a better world, a world that he can truly believe in. And he’s ready to put his tax-payers’ money where his mouth is.

Far more sinisterly, it’s better to pay Ukrainians to go and die so that Putin can be defeated (the only goal of the West), rather than send out Canadian troops to get the job done (laugh track, please).

Ukrainians are defending “democracy” and “our values” (Danilov, Podoliak and Ashton-Cirillo), so we don’t have to fight for both over here—and therefore the money we give them is the “best defense investment ever made,” since the Ukrainians are more than happy to die for “us.” You see, the more Ukrainians that die, the more democratic and freer we become. How much Ukrainian blood is your “freedom” worth—just ask yourself. Put another way, how many Ukrainians will Trudeau’s $9 Billion kill? How many Russians? What will Trudeau have really bought?

As noted, Trudeau’s words are an extention of Ukrainian Russophobia that in turn stems from the false assumption of racial superiority, which has been taught in Ukrainian schools for many decades: that Western Ukrainians are racially and linguistically completely different because they are direct descendents of Vikings and therefore Germanic and therefore superior. This myth was cultivated by Banderites in order to endear themselves to the Nazis (it never worked, as the Nazis rightly knew them to be only Slavs, while the Ukrainians went overboard to show assumed “Germanic” kinship, especially when it came to brutality, which often astonished even the Nazis).

More bizarely, versions of this myth are constantly repeated in all of Western media, including independent (sane) media, where Eastern Ukraine is always called “ethnically Russian,” a meaningless term which only strengthens Ukrainian self-aggrandizing racial fables. All Ukrainians are “ethnically Russian.” There are no other kind.

The truth is that the Ukrainian language (previously, and correctly, known as “Little Russian” or Ruthenian) is best understood as a dialect of Russian, therefore firmly and only Slavic. Russian and Ukrainian today are mutually intelligible. Ukrainian is not a Germanic language; no part of it is. It has no Germanic traces; no vestige of Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. In other words, the Vikings left no trace in the Ukrainian language (unlike English, for example, which is richly marked by Old Norse, as is Norman French). Nor is there any Viking (Germanic) DNA to be found among modern-day Western Ukrainians (who claim to be Viking descendents). They are all purely Slavic like their Eastern kinsmen whom they despise for being racially inferior Asians (Russians). Ironically, for these Western Ukrainians, Russians proper have greater racial kinship with Germans than they do. So, it would seem Western Ukrainians deeply hate themselves and take this hatred out on Russians in order to “feel” superior. A variant dialect has been mythologized into a “racial difference;” and, sadly, it is this mythology that is the ideological fuel driving the war being waged by the Kiev regime.

And it is this muddled Banderite mentality that Trudeau wants to win. For him, Banderites embody the “truth” that he can back with other people’s money. This is the world that all of the West is supporting with its money and arms. Why should the Russians, therefore, not see this conflict in Ukraine as the West’s new Operation Barbarossa?

Do we still need to wonder where Nazism is thriving the most in Canada? It is thriving among people like Trudeau and the entire ruling class that stood clapping and adoring an old Waffen SS veteran, because their minds find affinity with the Nazis when it comes to Ukraine, since the entire Western endeavor is founded upon Russophobia, upon a deep racial difference (Russians are not Europeans); and because the West is indeed engaged in a war to annihilate Russians. The longer this war goes on, the more Nazi Canada and the West will become. This is the same Cold War mindset that forgave the Nazis everything because they made good allies against the new enemy, the Russians.

But this overwrought exhibition by Trudeau is also best viewed for what it is—alongside the brilliance of Charlie Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel, because Charlie knew how to skewer such types.

So, here’s to Justin Adenoid Hynkel, who can’t seem to get enough of the Nazis… Geroyam Slava, Mr. Prime Minister!


C.B. Forde writes from rual Canada.


Is Canada now a Nazi State?

Canada today is a monstrous Woke machine, finely calibrated to yield the globalist new world order of green economics and eugenics (aka, gender equality, transgenderism, euthanasia). This machine was constructed by the wildly popular Canadian prime minister, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, the father of Justin.

Political systems do not really disappear; they may fall into disuse for a while, until someone finds a use for them, and they reappear in a fresh iteration. Globalism is a fresh iteration of Nazism, for the two have the same core; they vary only in detail, because they must fit into the time-period in which they exist. Thus, the mistake often made by commentators is a lazy one, whereby Hitler and his Germany become the blueprint for comparison, while the core is never noticed, which defines both. What did Hitlerism seek to achieve? A purified humanity (eugenics), inhabiting a purified earth (environmentalism), a process facilitated by the state.

And what is the core of globalism? Less and better humans (eugenics), on an earth purified from the pollution of human activity (environmentalism).

Both Hitlerism and globalism function on the perfection-imperfection relationship—the former must continually seek out and destroy the latter. This is labeled “progress;” a better definition is the “great replacement,” in which anything marked as “imperfect” is to be replaced by the “perfect.” The agency doing the marking and the replacing is the state.

Eugenics for globalism is the marking of imperfect humanity (European, aka, “white”), which must be severely husbanded so that it can only exist on the margins. The perfect humanity is non-white, which must be given to dominate the earth. The only difference between Nazism and globalism is in the marking: “Jew” is now “white.” The end result is the same—the annihilation of humanity.

Canada is the chief architect and conniver in this globalist program—and thus Canada is now a Nazi state by another name (“democracy” and “our values”), for it seeks to achieve what eugenics and environmentalism will bring about—a green Hell—inhabited by non-white peoples bunched up from all over the world. The original Canadians of British and French origin (Old Stock Canadians), who built the Canada whose reputation whose glow yet lingers in people’s minds, have largely disappeared, having been drowned in legalalized, mass migration (the government imports 1,000,000 people every year, from the third world into Canada; a vast number, given Canada’s small population). And the finest enthusiast that this program has is Justin Trudeau.

To be clear, in the current Canadian political scene, all parties are complicit in the broader program of globalism—all will actively work to serve it well. It matters little whether the label is “liberal,” “conservative,” “green,” “socialist,” and even “communist”—none can escape the machine; rather, none want to. And Canada is eager to take this machine worldwide, for it has just launched a UN declaration to fight “disinformation.” Only people applauding Waffen SS veterans can really know what the truth is. Everyone else is the enemy.

In Canada, politically, there is only one glimmer of hope—the People’s Party of Canada, and its leader Maxime Bernier. But their biggest challenge is how to overcome the monstrous machine.


W.O. Munce writes from Canada.


Overcoming the Cage of Civilization: Transgression as Freedom

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

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

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

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

Henri Hude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Cultural Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism and Cultural Pluralism

We note in the present discussions the effectiveness of a trilemma between whose options it would be necessary to choose (whoever contests cultural relativism will be classified as ethnocentrist or as pluralist, etc.), we denounce what could be the source of this trilemma, and we propose a fourth way through which we can free ourselves from the system of disjunctions noted.

1. The Increase in Immigration Resuscitates the Debate between Relativism and Ethnocentrism.

In recent years, and as a result of the increase of immigrants from the so-called “third world” to the various countries of Europe, the debates between cultural relativists or integrationists and the “intolerant” who demand the adaptation of the immigrant to the culture of the host country have resurfaced with great virulence. And this is without prejudice to the fact that “adaptation” requires, on the part of the one who must adapt, to get rid of institutions considered as “signs of identity” of the culture of origin (for example: the chador, the burqa, polygamy, clitoral ablation, circumcision, the lip disc, voodoo, the institution of visiting husbands, the penalty of stoning or mutilation, vendetta, etc.).

The accusations that the defenders of cultural relativism, or the defenders of pluralism, direct against those who do not share their points of view, are usually channeled through something they consider to be the most terrible denunciation: “ethnocentrism.” To be accused of ethnocentrism is as much, practically, as to be accused of being intolerant, intransigent, archaic, racist, violator of human rights, “puppet of the most conservative right wing”, and ignorant of the ABC of modern Anthropology, characterized ad hoc precisely as a discipline constituted from the perspective of pluralism or cultural relativism.

And, in fact, Anthropology, as a scientific discipline, began in the 19th century (Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, etc.), not to mention its precedents (Joseph François Lafiteau, Charles de Brosses, etc.), recognizing the plurality of cultures (understood as “cultural spheres”); a plurality that seemed to be linked to the comparative methods characteristic of the new discipline.

Cultural pluralism, at the stage of anthropological evolutionism (Morgan, Friedrich Engels) often seemed compatible with the postulate of a possible confluence of the various cultural spheres in a universal Civilization. A postulate that many considered as concealing a cultural monism, and even an ethnocentrism of European sign, given that “Civilization” was generally conceived in the image and likeness of “European Culture,” which also found in this ideology the justification of colonialism (colonialism, understood as the only way through which the cultures of the present, situated in the epoch of savagery or barbarism, could reach, without the need for centuries or millennia to elapse, the superior stage of European civilization).

In the anthropological schools after “evolutionism,” for example, in the functionalist schools (represented by Bronislaw Malinowski) and later, in some variables of structuralism (represented by Claude Levi-Strauss), cultural pluralism gradually slid towards a radical relativism: each cultural sphere would have its own internal structure (emic), which would be impossible to understand from the outside (etic). Therefore, with Levi-Strauss, it could be said: “Savage is he who calls another savage.” In this way, cultural relativism began to be associated with a “modern spirit” (which some would interpret Pascalianly as an esprit de finesse), the spirit of understanding, of tolerance, of respect for the “other” and for his “sensibility,” which is opposed to the esprit géométrique, rigid, intolerant, “imperialist,” blind to everything that does not presuppose universal evidence, above any individual or group sensibility.

2. We are not Faced not with Alternatives, but with Disjunctions: The Trilemma.

The most serious aspect of the matter is that these three attitudes or philosophies of culture, which we designate as cultural monism (“ethnocentrism,” for their adversaries), relativism and cultural pluralism, are not presented as mere alternatives, but as disjunctions among which we must choose. From where does the disjunctive disposition of these three ways of understanding the relations that cultural spheres can supposedly maintain among themselves derive?

Undoubtedly, in our opinion, from the very concept of “cultural sphere,” understood as a relatively closed totality (a “complex whole,” in the attributive sense), self-sufficient, without prejudice to the benefits and influences that it may receive from the remaining cultural spheres that constitute the distributive whole or totality of culture, understood as a cultural sphere. As a paradigm of the concept of “cultural sphere,” in this sense, one could consider each of those “superorganisms” that Oswald Spengler precisely called “cultures.”

However, perhaps the best way to show to what extent the scheme of cultural spheres is alive and active today, even among people who do not even use this denomination, is to analyze the expression “signs of identity,” so often used by politicians, journalists, intellectuals or radio broadcasters to refer to what they consider “their own culture.” Because the innocent formula—”signs of identity”—in reality only makes sense in terms of a presupposed cultural sphere; that is to say, of a sphere whose identity (of a substantial nature) is presupposed, and of which the “sign of identity” considered would turn out to be a mere indication. Thus, the sardana would be a sign of identity of a supposed Catalan culture or cultural sphere, and the aurresku would be a sign of identity of a supposed Basque culture or cultural sphere. What is equivalent to say that the importance, the meaning, the scope, etc., of the sardana (or that of the aurresku) cannot be grasped by itself, not even by the similarities that it can maintain with institutions of other cultural spheres, but by what it has of revelation, indication or sign of a presupposed identity, which is applied precisely to the culture of reference, and not to the sign of identity in itself, in its material supposition.

Now, by placing the various cultural spheres on a plane of confrontation, in terms of value, consistency, dignity, originality, etc., it is possible to give a “logical reason” for the system of (disjunctive) alternatives that we have established; for this system has to do with the system of quantifiers of predicate logic, linked to the {1, 0} values of truth:

(1) Either we assert that, among the various cultural spheres of the distributive whole of cultures, only one cultural sphere can be considered as supporting authentic values; that is, that there is only one cultural sphere that deserves to be considered as authentic or true culture (the other cultural spheres would be reflections, de-generations, or mere appearances or phenomena of the “true culture”).

(2) Or we affirm that all cultural spheres are of equal value, as cultures that find their meaning precisely in the concavity of their own sphere: “All cultures are equal,” we read on a huge plaque installed in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

And this statement is developed in two other dichotomous versions (since equality does not imply connectedness):

(2A) “All cultures are equal,” except in a regime of disjunction, of separation, even of “megaric” incommensurability (which can reach the situation of incompatibility). It is evident that the formula of this option is equivalent to the opposite formula: “All cultures are unequal,” without being able to speak of logical contradiction, because the postulated equality refers in some cases to equality in dignity, in rights, etc., of the spheres that, however, are considered unequal in contents or in numerical or substantial identity.

(2B) “All cultures are equal,” except without the need to presuppose between them a regime of separation; on the contrary, postulating the possibility and convenience of a coexistence or juxtaposition of men belonging to the various cultures (this was the scheme that Americo Castro used to describe the supposed coexistence, under Ferdinand III the Saint, of the three religions—Jews, Moors and Christians—which today it is customary to translate as the coexistence between “the three cultures”).

Option (1) is that of cultural monism (which from the other options will be perceived as ethnocentrism); option (2A) is that of cultural relativism; and option (2B) is that of cultural pluralism or multiculturalism. It would seem that a choice must be made among these three options.

3. Critical Illustrations of each of the Members of the Trilemma

Cultural monism (practically ethnocentrism, if we leave aside, for the moment, the attempts to create a “universal culture” obtained by recasting all cultural spheres) is certainly, without needing to be called in this way, the most traditional perspective, without prejudice to the interpretations of Protagoras’ principle of homomensura—”man is the measure of all things”—as a man shaped by each culture (in the sense of cultural relativism). However, cultural monism can be presented and “justified” from two quite different sources:

The first wants to remain in the realm of facts, i.e., outside of value judgments. If it is only possible to speak of one cultural sphere of reference, of which all the others were reflections or even degenerations, it is because all the cultural spheres that really exist on earth would have been originated by an original culture, and would be like pulsations of that mother culture, identified with the Egyptian culture. Such was, as is well known, the monistic vision of culture defended by the school of so-called radical diffusionism, of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, or of William James Perry (The Children of the Sun, 1923).

The second does not hesitate to vindicate cultural monism, even ethnocentrism, but in the name, not of realities that are perhaps only demonstrated by science fiction, but in the name of values, no longer past but future, that are imposed from a given cultural sphere on those who identify with it. For Pericles or Plato, the values of the “paideia” (or Greek culture) were the only values that could oppose the barbarian peoples; for the Spaniards who entered America, Christian values (which were not only religious values, but also moral, ethical, ceremonial, political, artistic), were usually seen as the only values that should prevail over the barbarian gods, inspired by the devil; for most Western scientists and engineers (and not only those of the positivist era), the values of “Western culture” (which include both scientific values and democratic values) are the only values that can be accepted and that must be offered to other peoples; within this same perspective Richard Rorty has recently defended the need to assume the “ethnocentric” position in everything that concerns the values of truth and other criteria proper to our culture.

Now then, cultural monism, as ethnocentrism, is difficult to defend today, and many of the arguments of relativism and multiculturalism can serve to reduce it to its fair limits. But neither do we consider cultural relativism defensible, insofar as it faces the evidence of the superiority of some “cultures” over others, in the technological, scientific and even political fields. What about the option of cultural integrationism? If it is interpreted as a mere coexistence or juxtaposition of different peoples or religions, it seems obvious to us that such an option is, in reality, empty, rather a wish, of an irenistic nature. It cannot be said that social groups with different cultures coexist, or that they coexist, even peacefully, unless some remain in their ghettos, in the face of those who hold the dominant positions. Effective integration will only be apparent (an integration by juxtaposition), until the social groups in the dominated position either reach dominant positions or get rid of their institutions incompatible with those of the host society. This is what happened with Moors, Jews and Christians in medieval Seville: the myth of coexistence put into circulation by Américo Castro is being challenged in our days (Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, Serafín Fanjul García).

4. The Myth of the Cultural Spheres as the Source of the Trilemma

But how could we reject each of the three options of the trilemma (monism, relativism, pluralism) without rejecting the trilemma itself? For it is evident that once we have accepted the trilemma (in our case, the bifurcated dilemma), we would have no choice but to embrace one of its options. It is evident that, once the trilemma has been accepted by a critic, if he rules out that the author he criticizes is a relativist or pluralist, he will have to launch against him the dreaded accusation of ethnocentrism.

It is therefore a question, for my part, of going back further behind the trilemma, that is to say, it is a question of denouncing the assumption on which the trilemma is running at full speed in our days, without journalists, intellectuals, politicians and radio broadcasters, but also historians, sociologists and anthropologists, being aware of it.

And this assumption is that of cultural spheres, understood as substantive entities that offer the researcher very diverse “signs of identity” of their substance (of what else?); of a substance that is supposed to come from the most arcane times and that pretends to maintain its identity, considered as the supreme and sacred value. But there are no cultural spheres in that sense. Cultural spheres are only ideological constructions, purely and simply myths.

This will allow us to add a fourth option to the system of the three options, (1) (2A) (2B), which we have established on the basis of the assumption of cultural spheres: that not one or all cultural spheres can be taken as subjects or supports of value, not one.

And if there are no cultural spheres as entities endowed with a substantive identity (idiographic, numerical, delimited in the distributive whole), then the options, or the very concepts of ethnocentrism, cultural relativism and pluralism of cultural spheres dissolve. Cultural spheres are not entities endowed with a substantial identity of their own; at most, they are phenomenal entities, delimited perhaps over the centuries (when not invented ad hoc by groups, peoples or nations in search of a state), by isolation from other phenomenal spheres, or by a mixture of some of them. And by this we mean that the diagnoses (or accusations) of ethnocentrism, relativism or pluralism, are impossible diagnoses or accusations, if we keep to a scientific or philosophical terrain. They are diagnoses or accusations that can only be maintained in the doxographical terrain of confused and obscure opinions about the ideological nebulae that are formed at a given juncture. Can possession or diabolical obsession be admitted, in the scientific terrain, as a psychological or psychiatric diagnosis? But, according to our thesis, the diagnosis of ethnocentrism or relativism, in the field of anthropology, does not go further than the diagnosis of diabolical possession or diabolical obsession, in the field of psychiatry.

5. Reduction of Substantive Cultural Spheres to Phenomenal Cultural Spheres.

There are no cultural spheres endowed with a substantive identity. These spheres only have a phenomenal identity, enough to begin to organize the relevant ethnographic and ethnological descriptions.

Phenomenal identities, because their unity is resolved in a system, conglomerate or concatenation, whether of cultural traits (patterns, institutions, elements) but also natural (racial, for example) or tertiogenic (such as the Pythagorean relations of the right triangle, which are neither natural nor cultural, and this is said in the face of dualists who continue to consider as a fundamental principle that of the distinction in the Universe between Nature and Culture, perhaps a last pulsation of the ancient distinction between Matter and Spirit).

Now then, the reduction of cultural spheres, endowed with substantial identity, to the condition of cultural spheres endowed with phenomenal unity, should not be confused with the reduction of the theory of cultural spheres to one of the aggregationist theories of culture (to the theory of cultural mosaics, for example). The key to the latter theories can be found in a process of “substantivation of the parts” (of traits, patterns, elements) confronted with the process of “substantivation of the complex whole” that leads to the substantive cultural sphere.

But the substantivization of the parts would also be gratuitous—a cultural sphere is not the result of the aggregation of supposedly pre-existing cultural elements (which some call memes). Cultural elements or features are figures that are shaped from the phenomenal totalities themselves, and precisely at the moment when these are decomposed or broken down into formal parts in the very process of cultural shock. Nor did eyes, or foreheads, as Empedocles thought, pre-exist the animals that could have been formed from the union of those “solitary limbs” that would have given rise, first, to hideous monsters that adaptation to the environment would have had to polish little by little. A femur bone does not precede the vertebrate organism; but once formed it can be extracted from the animal, becoming a figure, element, value or countervalue of the organic factory. The elements, traits, cultural institutions—are not prior to the phenomenal cultural spheres, but can be taken apart, transported and incorporated, with eventual deformations, into other cultural spheres, either as elements with the capacity of integration with other parts of their own, or as elements with the capacity to dissolve the phenomenal whole constituted by a given cultural sphere. And all this without prejudice to the fact that the incorporation of an element or trait from a given cultural sphere into another is not always “clean,” since it will almost always drag along other elements, splinters or traits from the cultural sphere of origin.

6. There is no Conflict of Cultures, but neither is there Integration of Cultures or Cultural Relativism.

According to what we have said, therefore, it is not possible to speak of conflicts of cultures, or of conflicts of civilizations; nor is it possible to speak of integration or expansion of cultures. All these expressions would have to be restated in terms of conflicts of cultural elements, or of integration, or of diffusion of cultural elements or traits. Therefore, whoever considers a cultural element (let us take the democratic system, for example) as universal cannot be accused of ethnocentrism. Even less can anyone be accused of ethnocentrism (or of cultural monism) who recognizes and defends the universality of the Pythagorean theorem, as a detached element, no longer of Greek culture, but of all culture, as a structure valid for all cultures, above any relativism.

Niembro, March 23, 2002


Gustavo Bueno Martínez (1924-2016) was a foremost Spanish philosopher who has had a deep influence among thinkers of tradition. This article comes courtesy of El Catoblepas.


Featured: Still life with musical instruments on a laid table, by Pieter Claesz; painted in 1623.


From the American Dream to the American Nightmare

Higher education has transitioned from a focus on affirmative action (AA) to a focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). How did this come about and what does it mean?

In the minds of their advocates, both AA and DEI are aspirational public policies focused on rectifying “underrepresentation” in the workforce of groups historically subject to inequalities in education and in the workforce. The former policy (AA) was initiated in 1965 and focused on improving equality of access (opportunity). It was subject to lengthy and controversial legal litigation over the use of quotas. By 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court held that “States may choose to prohibit the consideration of racial preferences in governmental decisions.” (DEI) is a later version and continuation of (AA). It arose from several sources including Higher Education and Immigration Law. It is seemingly focused on training of current employees in the workplace, but job applicants are required to subscribe and committed to achieving some version of equality of outcome.

The following account traces the long and circuitous route by which these policies came about. My account of this transition has three interrelated elements: the intellectual origin, the institutional context or evolution of higher education in America, and finally the larger political context. It is important to keep in mind that these controversial policies originated within and were welcomed by the academy, and these policies remain aspirational in the sense that they have no firm legal standing either in legislation or in the U.S. Supreme Court. My contention is that (AA) and (DEI) seek to replace the American Dream of a meritocracy with the Nightmare of egalitarianism.

Part I: Intellectual Origin

The modern context of egalitarianism originated with the success of Newtonian physics and its ability not only to explain and predict natural phenomena but to give us control over them. As Bacon and especially Descartes expressed it, it helped to make us the “masters and possessors of nature.”

Inspired by Newton, the French philosophes developed the idea of the social sciences. Specifically, they sought not only to explain and to predict social phenomena but to gain control over the social world. They proposed to pursue a social technology as a reflection of their Enlightenment Project. Such mastery was not only intended to achieve power but to bring about a social utopia.

(Isaiah Berlin characterizes the Project as follows: “…there were certain beliefs that were more or less common to the entire party of progress and civilization, and this is what makes it proper to speak of it as a single movement. These were, in effect, the conviction that the world, or nature, was a single whole, subject to a single set of laws, in principle discoverable by the intelligence of man; that the laws which governed inanimate nature were in principle the same as those which governed plants, animals and sentient beings; that man was capable of improvement; that there existed certain objectively recognizable human goals which all men, rightly so described, sought after, namely, happiness, knowledge, justice, liberty, and what was somewhat vaguely described but well understood as virtue; that these goals were common to all men as such, were not unattainable, nor incompatible, and that human misery, vice and folly were mainly due to ignorance either of what these goals consisted in or of the means of attaining them—ignorance due in turn to insufficient knowledge of the laws of nature… Consequently, the discovery of general laws that governed human behaviour, their clear and logical integration into scientific systems—of psychology, sociology, economics, political science and the like (though they did not use these names)—and the determination of their proper place in the great corpus of knowledge that covered all discoverable facts, would, by replacing the chaotic amalgam of guesswork, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy and ‘interested error’ that hitherto did service as human knowledge and human wisdom (and of which by far the chief protector and instigator was the church), create a new, sane, rational, happy, just and self-perpetuating human society, which, having arrived at the peak of attainable perfection, would preserve itself against all hostile influences, save perhaps those of nature” (The Magus of the North, pp. 27-28).

Thus, the intellectual origins lie specifically in the French version of the Enlightenment Project. The Enlightenment Project was the attempt to define, explain, and control the human predicament through science and technology. This project originated among the French philosophes during the eighteenth century, among whom the most influential were Diderot, d’Alembert, La Mettrie, Condillac, Helvetius, d’Holbach, Turgot, and Condorcet. The philosophes were inspired by Bacon’s vision of the liberating power of science, Hobbes’ materialism, Newton’s physics, and Locke’s empiricist epistemology. The Project was epitomized in the nineteenth century by Comte and in the twentieth century by positivism. Denying the Christian concept of sin but still choosing to play God, these philosophes initiated the modern hubristic search for a secular utopia. What the Enlightenment project did was to change our idea of what knowledge is and what it is for.

The legacy of the French Enlightenment persisted throughout the nineteenth century in the works of Comte and Marx. Voegelin maintains that this is a form of Gnosticism, the Christian heretical attempt to achieve heaven on earth. “In the Gnostic speculation of scientism this particular variant reached its extreme when the positivist perfector of science replaced the era of Christ by the era of Comte. Scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western Society; and the immanentist pride in science is so strong that even the special sciences have each left a distinguishable sediment in the variants of salvation through physics, economics, sociology, biology, and psychology” (Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, p. 127).

Egalitarianism is based upon a False Analogy to Physical Sciences

Our first claim is that affirmative action and DEI are policies based on the contention that there are such things as social sciences (Social studies, or the attempt to study and to understand the human/social world is not committed to the assumption that understanding means prediction and control. Nobel laureate Hayek’s understanding of economics and the market economy explicitly precludes prediction and control)—and specifically social technology able to explain, predict, and control social phenomena. The agents of this policy are deeply embedded in the social science programs of the modern university.

As we shall see, the most influential variants of this policy are Marxist in origin. Karl Marx believed not only that he had found an explanation of the social world but that he could predict its future evolution and identified the working class as the agents of reform through violent revolution. All of Marx’s predictions turned out to be false, so Marxist theory had to be revised. (It is worth noting in this context the modification introduced by Lenin, namely “colonialism,” the exploitation of non-western countries for their raw materials and low cost of labor. This alleged “exploitation” indirectly helped workers in the developed world to enjoy a higher standard of living and therefore not revolt. The same kind of argument can be read back into the domestic economy). The important relevant revision was provided by Antonio Gramsci in his doctrine of the “long march” through the institutions, specifically a revolutionary party needed the working-class to develop organic intellectuals who articulated an alternative hegemonic ideology critical of the status quo. Gramsci maintained that the agent of change was not the working class but the class of intellectuals and that the latter would bring about a peaceful revolution through the gradual take over of the major institutions in society like the university.

A. Hidden Structure Fallacy

Two features of “social” science allegedly analogous to physical science are worth noting. Modern physics does not explain phenomena (e.g. color) by reference to what is directly observable. On the contrary, modern physical science explains what is observable by reference to an initially hidden substructure, not visible to the naked eye (e.g. microbes, molecules, quarks, etc.). Subsequent experimentation gives us access to this initially hidden substructure by means of sophisticated equipment.

In an attempt to replicate this feature of physical science, the alleged “social” sciences explain the surface by reference to an initially hidden substructure (Marxist economics, Freud’s ego, id, etc., choices made behind Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”). So, today, for example, we are told that there is such a thing as “institutional racism.” However, there is a disconnect here. Instead of a hidden substructure that later gets verified or observed, the social sciences present a cornucopia of rival theories with no way to choose among them (libertarian, liberal, socialist, Marxist, Feminist, Critical Theory. Etc.).

To make matters worse, if one social scientist disagrees with another both can dismiss the other by claiming that the rival is a victim of a hidden bias. There is thus an infinite regress of hidden structures: your account, my account, your account of why my account is wrong because it reflects a hidden structure, my account of the hidden structure that explains why you cannot overcome your account (e.g. why “white” people who have not suffered “discrimination” cannot understand “black” people but “black” people can somehow understand and explain “white” people; likewise, “white” people can understand that “black” people suffer from the mental disorder of racial paranoia, etc.). This not only brings civil discourse to an end but it also gives enormous rhetorical advantages or power over the debate. The only social technology produced to date is the power to control debate.

B. No Replication by other Scientists

There is one final twist to the argument. A number of philosophers of science (e.g. Kuhn, Feyerabend, even Wittgenstein) have pointed out, rightly, that a theory in physical science is deemed “true” or in some sense viable if the theory meets the criteria (tests) agreed upon by the community of physical scientists. In short, intellectual acceptability depends upon a prior professional social consensus. Even Hayek pointed out that physical science rests upon assumptions that science cannot establish. Armed with this insight (anticipated by Vico in the 18th century and even to be found in Gramsci), social scientists contend that agreement amongst the community of “social” scientists is sufficient to establish the validity of a hidden structure account about the social world.

The foregoing analogy does not work. To begin with, physical scientists do not merely have conversations but engage in replicable experiments that do identify something “out there” independent of us. Moreover, the physical sciences have allowed us to extend human life, conquer diseases, engage in space exploration, etc. whereas, the “social” technologists to date have wrecked economies, engaged in needless wars, promoted social unrest, and provoked destabilizing mass migrations.

C. Concepts are not Things

In the “social” sciences, we meet only concepts and not things. Microbes and molecules are real; “systemic racism” remains a linguistic expression. There is also the question of who are the authoritative members of the community of social sciences (e.g. tenured members of the Harvard sociology department?). This may begin to explain why the contemporary university seeks to silence dissent and to discredit if not prevent certain kinds of research. Worse yet, the purveyors of this view need to appeal to a grand social consensus outside of their disciplines in order to identify their specific disciplines. Either they deny, for political reasons, that a valid social consensus exists (NO GRAND NARRATIVE) or they invoke an infinite regress. In practice, what this amounts to is that you only speak with others who already agree with you and shun, dismiss, or silence those who do not.

D. IAT Test: An Example of Unreliable Pseudo-Science

Let me give an example of pseudo-social-science. The implicit-association test (IAT) is intended to detect subconscious associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. Its best-known application is the assessment of implicit stereotypes such as associations between racial categories and stereotypes about members of those groups, e.g., associations involving racial groups, gender, sexuality, age, and predictions of the test taker. The IAT was introduced in 1998 and has been used as an assessment in implicit bias trainings (e.g. in diversity training) designed to reduce unconscious bias and discriminatory behavior.

IAT is the subject of significant debate regarding its validity, reliability, and usefulness in assessing implicit bias. Arkes and Tetlock offer “three objections to the inferential leap from the comparative RT (Reaction Time) of different associations to the attribution of implicit prejudice: (a) The data may reflect shared cultural stereotypes rather than personal animus, (b) the affective negativity attributed to participants may be due to cognitions and emotions that are not necessarily prejudiced, and (c) the patterns of judgment deemed to be indicative of prejudice pass tests deemed to be diagnostic of rational behavior.” (In press: H.R. Arkes, “The Rationality, Interpretation, and Overselling of Tests of Implicit Cognition,” in J.A. Krosnick, T.H. Stark, & A.L. Scott, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Implicit Bias and Racism (Chapter 11, pp. 319-330). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Part II. Institutional Context: Evolution of Higher Education in the U.S.

Historically the modern American university emerged in the 19th century from a variety of sources: religious affiliation, local communities, and private benefactors. From the beginning the university consisted of factions with competing paradigms. The oldest paradigm, the Ivory Tower so to speak, originated in the small liberal arts college with a religious (usually Puritan) affiliation and famously romanticized by Newman. The purpose of liberal education was to preserve, critique, and to transmit our cultural inheritance. In seeking to subordinate itself to the outside world, the university would only compromise itself and become an instrument for commercial or political exploitation.

A teacher is one who initiates a student into a cultural inheritance. The inheritance only comes alive when exhibited in the living embodiment of an instructor. The teacher exhibits academic virtues by consistently and coherently organizing intellectual judgments and inviting the learner to share in that process. Teaching was successful when students learned how to construct a self-understanding inclusive of the inheritance, a particular way of ordering or appropriating the inheritance, and to do so in a way that leads to the acquisition of an intellectual personality of their own.

A second paradigm is the German research model of the university with its emphasis on the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, the graduate school and the training of professionals. In this model, knowledge cannot be in the service of special interest groups because knowledge knows no political boundaries. Although non-political, the spectacular success of this model in science and technology eventually encouraged government subvention.

The third paradigm is utilitarian, wherein the university is seen as an institution for solving various and sundry social problems. In this model, the university exists as a means to social ends defined externally to the university itself (e.g. an A&M).

Looked at from our contemporary perspective, it is now clear that Newman’s moral model of the university has evaporated or has been marginalized; the research model has been corrupted and coopted; the notion of the college graduate as a civil servant has evolved into the notion of a special class which aims to run society. It is the politicized utilitarian model that has triumphed.

At first glance it is clear that institutions that were supposed to be the locus of higher education have become entwined with and encompass an enormous range of social, economic, and cultural activities. In the process, they have become big businesses with vested interests. In attempting to encompass all of these activities, institutions of higher education have abandoned learning. In so doing, such institutions have evolved into fraudulent enterprises. This is not to say that everything that occurs within institutions of higher education is fraudulent; nor is it to say that this outcome was planned or even foreseeable. It is to say that institutions of higher education have evolved, and in the course of that evolution factors internal to and external to the institution, intellectual and non-intellectual, have contributed to the rise of a Tower of Babel, meaning that the experts can no longer communicate with each other and have no clear common purpose. Symptomatic of this problem is a lack of consensus on the meaning of concepts like “learning,” “higher education,” “university;” no one seems to know what “teaching” is as opposed to “instructing” or how to evaluate it; no one seems to know the difference between “research” and “scholarship.” We have, in short, lost all sense of purpose. The fraud consists in maintaining that all of the activities that occur within present institutions of higher education are legitimate, consistent with each other and capable of forming a coherent whole under the rubric of the pious rhetoric that appears in mission statements and commencement addresses.

Although seemingly serving these external interests, universities have become a home for the adversary culture, for all those groups that are hostile to the very activities the university seeks to encompass. What are we to make of this contradiction? Schumpeter has observed that most modern intellectuals (including clergy and media people) are generally at odds with the representatives of the business community even though academics are dependent upon commerce for their own existence and comfort. Part of this opposition is reflected in the firm commitment of the academic world to socialism even when it has been repeatedly shown that centrally planned economies woefully and of necessity underperform free market economies. Schumpeter attributes this opposition to jealously on the part of academics who resent the fact that the leadership of modern culture emerges from the business community instead of the academy. Here we have a clue as to what has happened, namely, something was transformed in the evolution of the university from a medieval to a modern institution.

Higher education is the initiation into an inheritance, and it was from the beginning institutionalized in universities. As medieval institutions, universities saw themselves as the elite defining institutions of the culture, as superior to and independent of the state, as playing both a Socratic role with respect to the culture as a whole and a potentially adversarial role with respect to individual institutions such as the state. The source of our difficulties lies in the conflict between these roles, the conflict between the Socratic initiation into the inheritance and the adversarial relation between a self-defined elitist institution and the rest of the culture.

As Western Civilization evolved the content of the inheritance evolved. Unfortunately, certain historically contingent aspects of the medieval world became mistakenly identified with the content. Given the late medieval context, academics believed in a collective, holistic, and hierarchical common good, a good to which the good of individuals was subordinate, a good that encompassed both the church and the state. Intellectuals, in short, see themselves as the high priests of the collective good The university as agent of the church not only articulated that good but enlisted the subordinate state to promote the conditions necessary to achieve that good.

The modern world is not the medieval world. There are two elements in the medieval view that are at odds with modern culture. The most distinctive institutions of modern culture are individual rights, the rule of law, a republican form of government, and a market economy. First, modern culture is post-Reformation and therefore does not believe in a holistic common good. There is, instead, the individual good rooted, at least initially, in the relationship of individuals to God. There is no holistic common good over which academics may preside, only a cultural inheritance. Universities, however, may still perform the functions of providing a context for learning and maintaining a Socratic role vis-a-vis the rest of the culture. Second, there is no one institution, and therefore no one group, that authoritatively articulates the cultural inheritance. Without a collective good, intellectuals in the modern world are merely trained communicators who might be spokespersons for a particular interest group. Schumpeter’s observations and diagnosis are not only accurate, but we can explain the situation further by reference to the medieval origins of Institutions of Higher Education. The now mythological holistic common good is the metaphysical phantom behind central planning.

The Enlightenment Project allowed academics to reassert the cultural hegemony of the university. College graduates were no longer mere civil servants but definers and implementers of the good. The good was understood as the medieval cosmic order now accessed by physical and social science. Since media people are trained by the academics, they too become advocates of the project. It should come as no surprise that the press is no longer Socratic but adversarial.
How did this happen?

The internal transformation begins with how the Puritan Ivory Tower underwent a remarkable secularization. Inspired by 19th-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau (environmentalist, author of “Civil Disobedience,” and whose support of John Brown turned abolitionism into a civil religion), these “heretical” Puritans (now a sect of Presbyterians) surrendered the concept of “original sin” and replaced it with a moral universalism in which it was assumed that all people were naturally good and corrupted only by their environment. As Santayana allegedly remarked, “Thoreau was impervious to the evidence of evil.” What began as WASP Hegemony evolved first into Wilsonian (President of Princeton University became President of the U.S.) Progressivism that assimilated all Americans in the 1920s but by the 1960s had evolved into liberal-egalitarian idealism applicable to the entire multicultural world. This view is expressed in a speech given by Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger to the American Historical Association (1942) titled “What Then is The American, This New Man?” Schlesinger declared that: “The American character … is bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish.” In his 1989 essay, The End of History, Francis Fukuyama argued that American liberal democracy and modern technology had produced the final form of political association. Henceforth, all societies would, in time, inevitably take on the form of liberal democracy.

What will probably strike some readers as an aside or a remarkable coincidence, worth noting is that the 16th century English theologian Richard Hooker’s critical portrait of Puritan methodology in his Ecclesiastical Polity aptly catches what has become today “Woke” methodology in higher education and its attendant “witch hunt.” Puritans exhibited a Millenarian vision of spiritual redemption through worldly reform; severe criticism of social evils and the conduct of the upper classes; they are virtue signalers; experience themselves as the elect and distinguish themselves from the damned; concentrate popular ill-will against the establishment; recommend a new form of government as the “sovereign remedy of all evils;” turn a blind eye to any part of our intellectual inheritance that is incompatible with their doctrine; anyone who uses tabooed instruments of critique will be socially boycotted and defamed; there is a special role for women: emotionally more accessible, tactically well placed to influence husbands, children, friends, more inclined to than men to serve as spies/”commissars” concerning the state of affections in their circle, and more liberal in financial aid; they are impermeable to argument and have their answers well drilled – beyond shaking by argument; sacred documents had to be carefully chosen and the interpretation standardized; propaganda is a form of political action not a search for truth; where they control the means of communication, all theoretical argument is prohibited (Voegelin, pp.135-144).

Going back to the medieval origin of universities focused on educating the clergy, the faculty had always viewed itself as the moral and intellectual elite. The Puritan roots of higher education in the U.S. always had as its aim the notion of the college graduate as part of a special class which aims to run society. Heretofore, it had been assumed that knowledge cannot be in the service of special interest groups because knowledge knows no political boundaries. In the 1960s, the secularization of Puritanism came to mean that colleges promoted a specific political agenda, namely liberal-egalitarian idealism associated with transcendentalism or humanism. That agenda emerged from the so-called “social” sciences.

The alleged “social” sciences, acting as a kind of “fifth column” starting in the 1960s, achieved intellectual hegemony over the entire university curriculum. The humanities were social-scientized under the aegis of “deconstruction” seeking the hidden structure meaning of texts so that Shakespeare, for example, was now read not as someone who had important insights into the human condition but perhaps as a racist or homophobe. Here is a typical itinerary that reflects a forced interdisciplinarity: the student registers in a philosophy department; instead of the Truth for which she was searching all that she is offered is tiresome analysis; bored, she changes disciplines and ends up writing a thesis entitled “The Phenomenology of Moby Dick” or “How Class Struggle is related to Paternalism.” Following all this, she will be hired in a department of literature, or social sciences, or psychology and will satisfy in turn the disappointed philosophical aspirations of a new generation.

“Deconstruction” became the origin of the view that there are multiple but no authoritative narratives or grand theory. (According to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the postmodern condition rejects universalizing theories. Lyotard argues that we have outgrown our needs for metanarratives that bring together social practices. Any narratives we tell to justify a single set of norms are inherently unjust. Little narratives have now become the appropriate way for explaining social transformations and political problems. This is easily translatable as a rejection of Huntington’s “creed” and the promotion of multiculturalism). By a not so strange coincidence with Rousseau’s elusive “general will,” the substitute for an authoritative narrative was whatever the majority, or those who spoke in the name of the majority, voted for or agreed to. As we shall see, this had important implications for immigration policy.

The American Historical Association (the national professional organization for academic historians), issued a statement supporting the removal of Confederate monuments from the public square because the 1861-1865 War was about slavery. American historians and legal scholars acting now in a post-modern idiom for whom the “realities of race and slavery” stain and color nearly all events in antebellum history, just as Marxists stained and confounded everything they touched from an obsession with class struggle, will ignore or dismiss constitutional claims about the right of secession and by an act of will confer “factual” status on the official doctrine that the War was about slavery. And since most academic historians subscribe to that thesis, it is presented as something determined by “experts.”

In philosophy, John Rawls (winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award) was a barometer of the direction of academic thinking. In his youth, Rawls was influenced by Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question, criticizing the idea that inequality in ability justifies the distribution of wealth in society. G. A. Cohen, used Rawls’s writings to inaugurate Analytical Marxism in the 1980s, and the same can be said of Habermas and the Frankfort School. In the Law of Peoples (1999) Rawls embraces a form of multiculturalism)—eschewed and replaced even the historical account of our norms by articulating the method of “reflective equilibrium” to undercover the alleged “hidden” structure of our moral intuitions. Rawls’s theorized, in a series of articles written between 1957 and 1963 and a book in 1971, that justice meant “fairness” which really meant equal basic liberties, “fair” equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur.

(The qualification “fair” opens the Pandora’s box that leads ultimately from equality of opportunity to equality of result. See below on Hume’s discussion of “fair.” Notice as well the difference between a society which maximizes benefits for all and one which is focused on maximizing benefits for the least well off. The former defines itself in terms of its “most” successful while the latter defines itself in terms of its ‘least’ successful).

Rawls’ sympathizers and critics pointed out that he had not gone far enough. Even in a system of perfect equality of opportunity there would be some inequality of result. The children of super-achievers would have gained privileges that the children of others did not. Such inequality and the resulting resentment was, as Marxists argued, the root of all other social problems. It is at this point that cultural Marxists hijacked the liberal-egalitarian agenda in the academic world.

(Just as Hooker had in the sixteenth century exposed the logic of Puritan Gnosticism, David Hume had in the 18th century in the Enquiry Concerning Morals exposed the logic of inequality. First, there is no consensus on what is a fair distribution; second, you cannot in advance assign resources to who will make the best use of them because this is not something anyone can know in advance {refutes central planning}; third, if in the beginning you give everyone equal resources this will be followed by interactions that will lead to a new inequality of result; finally, all of this will require an all-powerful central authority to maintain the ongoing equality).

An important transition had occurred. Rather than demanding that Americans live up to their norms, it had now been revealed that those norms, the entire history behind them was inherently evil and exploitative. If so, then against that standard Western Civilization was a fraudulent form of exploitation. What followed was a scholarship of endless denigration of Western achievement. Not even the physical sciences could resist. Western physical science had, unbeknownst, all this time operated within a flawed set of moral foundations. Something, later, like Covid became a social/political/ideological problem and not a medical problem.

This intellectual voyage provided an opening for Frankfort School cultural Marxists like Marcuse. Rawls had to be supplemented by Dworkin who in turn gave way to critical race theory. Pre-law students usually majored in political science (subtly conceptualizing law into applied politics) and when they arrived at Law Schools were introduced to the U.S. Constitution as a document written by white males who had owned slaves. Social technologists turned law schools into preparing graduates to be federal bureaucrats, activist judges, and regulatory agents.

To recruit more like-minded faculty for Gramsci’s “Long March through the Institutions,” a succinct mission statement coined by Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s, whole new disciplines of inequality grievance studies were introduced. John Ellis (2020), in his book, The Breakdown of Higher Education, shows how Antonio Gramsci inspired Marxists and Students for a Democratic Society, the latter publishing in 1962 the Port Huron Statement. In that document, Students for a Democratic Society “decided . . . their only choice was to “wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy…(and) consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power” (Ellis, pp. 48-52). They went on to use universities to convert young people to their ideology. Radicals patiently built their numbers until they had achieved a 5-to-1 left-right faculty ratio by the turn of the century (2000). That dominance allowed radicals to control most new faculty appointments, and the left-right ratio accelerated dramatically, reaching about 12 to 1 by 2016. The affected institutions include law schools and business schools. The best discussion of Marxism in higher education is American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas, by Dario Fernandez-Morera (1996).

Part III: Political Background

As we shall see the political context was both a cause and an effect of the growth of affirmative action and its transition to DEI.

The utilitarian conception of the university understood as serving an external political agenda was facilitated by federal funding. In an important sense, there is hardly any longer a totally private institution of higher learning. The external sociological origin of this triumph lies in the commercial exploitation of the university’s research resources, in the political appropriation of the university’s scientific research capacity commencing with the Cold War, and in the vast expansion of the number of people accepted into the institution during the 1960s. It’s always about the 1960s.

In the immediate post WWII period, both major political parties, Democrats and Republicans, shared different but overlapping narratives. Both supported what I shall call the “American Dream,” namely the view that through hard work and merit (talent) any American could become economically successful. It was always understood that a meritocracy meant inequality of result, but this was accepted on the grounds that all were then better off (“a rising tide raises all boats”). Republicans wanted to protect this Dream for those who already had achieved it and for their posterity; and Democrats wanted to extend it to those (unionized workers) who felt that they had been unfairly excluded.

Heretofore, Blacks, when allowed to vote, had, for historical reasons, supported the Republican Party going back to Lincoln and Reconstruction. All of that was about to change. The 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court outlawing segregated schooling and the 1964 Civil Rights Act protecting voting rights, among other things, convinced Black leaders that their path to the American Dream was paved by increasing the power of the Federal Government, the favored tactic of the Democratic Party. What Democrats discovered was that their power base was no longer with the working class but with groups who perceived themselves as previously excluded (i.e., “victims”). Post WWII economic growth had already lifted many members of the working class into a share of the American Dream, and this led to a steadily increasing movement away from the Democratic Party (e.g., “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s and many Trump supporters in 2016). These changes did not go unnoticed by cultural Marxists who had already perceived that the great revolution would not be accomplished through the working class. In due course, the cultural Marxists would take control both of the Democratic Party and even the leadership of the Black community. By 1991, the NAACP had, according to Andrew Young, achieved its civil rights goals. But it was losing members, revenue, and influence, so a new direction had to be taken. Blacks formed an alliance with other groups who perceived themselves as victims.

Two other interrelated political phenomena are worth noting, namely multiculturalism and immigration. Prior to the 1960s, immigration rules favored Europeans from north-western Europe (U.K. and Scandinavia). In addition, immigrants had been encouraged/required to assimilate to the dominant culture. The dominant culture was, according to Huntington, Anglo-Protestant. The dominant culture encompassed a specific set of norms or “creed” (individual liberty, rule of law, equality before the law, limited government, and market economy).

Elsewhere, it has been argued that those norms, including the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial and technological economy, had empowered Western Europeans, in general, to colonize (dominate) the globe, allowed Britain to create a global empire in the 19th century on which “the sun never sets,” enabled the U.S. to “win” the Cold War against the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, and ultimately become the world’s superpower. “English” is now the world’s universal second language (certainly the major language of commerce, politics, and academe). Assuming this to be the case, success within the U.S. (and economic success as a “developing” “country”) depended upon already possessing or mastering those cultural norms.

Within U.S. politics, Democrats characterized good government as democratization understood as majority rule; Republicans characterized it as limited government or a Republic with a Constitutional legal system that protected individual rights. Post WW II and in response to the Cold War, both major parties promoted decolonialization (self-rule) and democratization, as opposed to Soviet centralization of all power, in international affairs.

The counter-narrative, i.e. the cultural Marxist narrative, is that the success of north-western Europeans and their heirs (Anglo-American world) was the product of the denigration and exploitation of the “non-white” colonized world. The remedy was not revolution (original Soviet Marxist theory) but democratization and multi-culturalism. Multiculturalism is not just about the wide availability of ethnic restaurants but “is about the proper terms of the relationship between different cultural communities.” This is understood to mean that the standards by which the communities resolve their differences, “the principles of justice must not come from only one of the cultures but must come through an open and equal dialogue between them” (Parekh, p. 13).

This has two major immediate implications. Domestically, it means that politics is now about negotiation among different “cultural” groups wherein each group’s culture enjoys equal dignity and respect. The older notions of success and meritocracy through competition are to be discarded as remnants of bias. “Cultural appropriation” occurs when a member of a majority group assimilates a cultural element of a minority group without due regard for its original meaning and thereby implies the subordination and disrespect of the minority culture.

The Democratic Party embraced this view in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The latter act removed “de facto discrimination” against Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans and other non-North-Western European groups.

“Discrimination” simply means making fine distinctions. This is usually a good thing. “Discrimination’ has taken on a largely negative connotation when associated with irrelevant or counterproductive criteria. Several waves of immigrants had been successfully integrated into the creed of Anglo-Protestant culture largely because of assimilation policies. It was now assumed by an ignorant public without any serious discussion or debate that anyone coming to America would fit in simply by osmosis. We were told that America was a “land of immigrants,” something that is impossible. You can only immigrate into a country that already has a culture; and the U.S. already had an Anglo-Protestant culture because of its English settlers. The original settlers were not immigrants but settlers. Of course, if one claims that the misnamed “Native American” tribes were a country, then the English settlers were just another immigrant group. What was overlooked was the deliberate intention of cultural Marxists to welcome those who might resist assimilation to the creed. It all depends on one’s “narrative.”

The Immigration Act of 1990 rescinded the provision discriminating against members of the LGBT+ community. It also introduced for the first time a “Diversity Immigrant Visa” to be determined by the Attorney General to rectify imbalances. “Diversity” has the clear meaning here of referring to cultures or countries. In essence, this transferred authority to deal with immigration issues from the judiciary to the unelected civil service (staffed largely by university trained attorneys). This Act also clarified but extended “family reunification” immigration visas to immediate family members. For immigration purposes, immediate family is defined as one’s spouse, parents, or unmarried children below age 21. Demographically this increases the percentage of the population that is not derived from north-west Europe.

With regard to immigration, it means that all cultures are to be equally respected (= given equal weight). Hence, there is to be no favoritism for north-west (i.e. “white”) Europeans. This reflects the replacement of what Huntington (2005) had called the “creed” by the norms of cultural Marxism (instead of transforming the earth you must repair the damage of climate change, instead of a free market economy you advocate a managed global economy where the difference between crony capitalism and socialism disappears, instead of limited national government you espouse unlimited leadership by the UN, instead of the rule of law you advocate rule through law, and finally, you are defined by membership in a group).

(As Michael Oakeshott put it, “The emergence of this disposition to be an individual is the preeminent event in modern European history… there were some people, by circumstance or by temperament, less ready than others to respond… the familiar anonymity of communal life was replaced by a personal identity which was burdensome… it bred envy, jealousy and resentment… (it developed) a new morality… not of ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination,’ but of ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’… not… the ‘love of others’ or ‘charity’ or… ‘benevolence’… but… the love of ‘the community’…(the anti-individual or mass man, i.e., those attracted to identity politics) remains an unmistakably derivative character… helpless, parasitic and able to survive only in opposition to individuality.” See also “Pathology of Identity Politics”).

The alarm bells were beginning to ring. As Schlesinger pointed out:

There remains however a crucial difference between the Western Tradition and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes…to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry and expression…that continent is also…the unique source—of those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law,… These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.

From Affirmative Action to DEI

The undefined expression “affirmative action” began innocuously enough in executive orders issued by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It soon began to take on a variety of evolving meanings.

Definition 1 (open-search): Affirmative action consists of those policies designed to advertise all openings as widely as possible and to monitor appointments and promotions processes in order to insure that the process is open, nondiscriminatory, and promotes excellence. (As we shall shortly see, this was clearly the intention and extent of the original legislation).

Definition 2 (punitive): Affirmative action consists of any policy, private or public, ordered by the court to redress proven cases of individual discrimination. The remedy may involve a specific numerical objective, but the numerical objective is limited to a specific time and place.

Definition 3 (backward-compensation): Affirmative action covers any policy designed to redress alleged cases of discrimination against a group by placing members of the group in the positions they would have allegedly held if the alleged discrimination had not taken place. This is a contrary-to-fact conditional: it claims to identify what would happen if something else had not happened. (This was exactly what the original legislation was designed to prevent by adding 703 (h) and 703 (j)—see below).

Definition 4 (backward-compensation): Affirmative action covers any policy designed to redress alleged cases of discrimination against a group by placing members of the group in the positions they would have allegedly held if the alleged discrimination had not taken place. This is a contrary-to-fact conditional: it claims to identify what would happen if something else had not happened.

Definition 5 (forward-preferential): Affirmative action designates any policy in social planning, without any causal claim of what would have been, designed to produce a democratic and diverse society in which all power, resources, rewards, etc. will reflect the percentage of the population of the officially designated groups. Instead of equality of opportunity we shall endorse equality of result. The Hidden Agenda.

Legislative History

It is useful to cite the legislative record concerning these definitions. As then Senator Hubert H. Humphrey put it, “Title VII does not require an employer to achieve any sort of racial balance in his work force by giving preferential treatment to any individual or group.” Senator Harrison Williams noted that Title VII “specifically prohibits the Attorney General or any agency of the government, from requiring employment to be on the basis of racial or religious quotas. Under this provision an employer with only white employees could continue to have only the best qualified persons even if they were all white.” Senator Joseph Clark stated, “Quotas are themselves discriminatory.” If anyone still has any doubts, then recall the words of Representative Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the congressman responsible for introducing the legislation:

It is likewise not true that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would have power to rectify existing “racial or religious imbalance” in employment by requiring the hiring of certain people without regard to their qualifications simply because they are of a given race or religion. Only actual discrimination could be stopped.

Original Legislation

Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unequivocally outlaw compensation or preference (see definitions 3 and 4 below). Two provisions spell this out:

703 (h) it shall not be unlawful employment practice… for an employer to give and act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

703 (j) Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer… to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number of percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex or national origin employed by any employer.

As we all have come to understand, what a law means depends upon how unelected federal bureaucrats choose to understand it. The labor department had its own definition: Definition 3 (backward-compensation); see above.

Court History

In the pivotal Alan Bakke case (1978), Justice Powell, in the plurality opinion, specifically attacked and rejected the backward-looking argument for compensation (definition 3). “…But for this discrimination by society at large, Bakke “would have failed to qualify for admission” because Negro applicants…would have made better scores. Not one word in the record supports this conclusion. (italics added)… (it) offers no standards for courts to use in applying such a presumption of causation to other racial or ethnic classifications….”

Although Powell urged “strict scrutiny” to be applied to affirmative action programs, in a second opinion he suggested that schools might take race, as one factor, into account in order to achieve a “diverse” student body. Powell did not clarify what he meant by “diversity.” Powell did not link “diversity” to cultures or ethnicity, and he could not link it to egalitarian outcomes because that would have contradicted his official opinion.

Mercifully, the latest Supreme Court decision has ended the waffling and reasserted the primacy of meritocracy.

It is now almost 60 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It has been 60 years during which the university as an institution has been thoroughly taken over by cultural Marxists; during which every institution in the U.S. (civil service, military, medicine, sports, entertainment, etc.) has bent over backwards to root out any vestige of discrimination; during which even the business community has adopted or at least paid lip service to the “woke” agenda; during which we have seen that the top household income positions are held by Indians (India), Taiwanese, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Lebanese, Iranian, Turkish, and Nigerians as opposed to whites. Nevertheless, the household incomes of Blacks (as a whole) and Hispanics (as a whole) continue to lag. Rather than question the original diagnosis for this lag, cultural Marxists have doubled down on outlawed policies of compensation and preference by changing the names.

(Hundreds of thousands of Blacks and Hispanics have achieved economic, social, and professional success. There are several plausible hypotheses about why some prosper and others fail to do so. These alternative explanations and possible alternative policies are dismissed without discussion because they do not fit the cultural Marxist narrative).

Federal Bureaucracy at Work: From Affirmative Action to DEI

Institutions of higher education, seized upon the term “diversity” and linked it to what we have identified as the fourth definition and justification of affirmative action. Borrowing from the Immigration Act of 1990, “diversity” was linked to multi-culturalism (see the online definitions from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and Cambridge dictionary) and the assumption that federal bureaucrats could engage in post-hoc rectification. (For examples of how Federal bureaucracies misrepresent legal decisions see N. Capaldi, “Twisting the Law,” in Policy Review, Spring (1980), pp. 39-58).

“Diversity” and “Inclusion” were specifically derived/defined from immigration law. Immigration law, going back to the 1920s attempt at assimilation had focused on domestic nation retention/maintenance; but specifically the debate surrounding the 1965 ACT, was focused on future nation building. Coupled with America’s foreign policy in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and The End of History conception of remaking the world in our own image, it was a short step to imagining a world homogeneous in all respects. Therefore, the U.S. had to “look” like the UN. Nation building applied to or was retroactively imposed upon the the U.S. “Globalization” came to mean much more than doing business internationally.

The key point of conflict was “equality.” Either the world would aim for a meritocracy (Huntington’s Anglo-Protestant core) with its inevitable version of inequality of outcome or the world would aim for something vaguely egalitarian (cultural Marxism). Hence, the concept of “equity.” Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity is different for it recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact (additional?) resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. The term “equity” refers to fairness and justice and is distinguished from equality: Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances. The process is ongoing, requiring us to identify and overcome intentional and unintentional barriers arising from bias or systemic structures. In such a world, meritocracy becomes a form of unintentional systemic bias (racism?).

Inclusion means the practice or policy of including and integrating all people and groups in activities, organizations, political processes, etc., especially those who are disadvantaged, have suffered discrimination, or are living with “disabilities.”

It is worth noting that people with disabilities surely are victims (perhaps of the “genetic lottery” in some cases), but they are not usually victims of social or institutional policies or arrangements as is alleged in the case of other (racial, ethnic, etc.) groups. However, they are likely to be economically disadvantaged and therefore beneficiaries and supporters of proposed democratic party policies of the redistribution of wealth and positions of power.

All of this sounds like a way of improving productivity by adjusting distribution. It slides easily into equality of result. But there is something even more ominous. To achieve the foregoing noble ends, a new class of administrators needs to be created. The concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion must apply to them, i.e., the members of government bureaucracies and the leaders of every private institution have to mirror the general population. This becomes a sort of bizarre version of what Tocqueville warned us were the dangers of a “democratic” culture. Recall here, as well, Hume’s warning that a specially empowered class is required to maintain the egalitarian structure. To conclude, Bertrand de Jouvenel said it best. Redistribution strives to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, but all that we have ever accomplished is to transfer power from the individual to the state. The new world of DEI focuses on distribution not production, on equality and not individual excellence, on specially identifiable groups and not autonomous individuals. Nevertheless, the leaders or spokespersons of the groups will enjoy power, prestige, and perks not available to the rest of the group. The end product is neither a classless society nor an egalitarian one. Some are always more equal than others.

Keep in mind that universities, largely influenced by the social science faculty, had already been practicing some forms of affirmative action in the post WWII era and had since then openly welcomed and promoted it. Moreover, the demographics of university personnel has consciously strived to reflect an international demeanor.

The business world soon followed suit. In order to obtain some specific government contracts, private companies had to submit to the Department of Labor not only a bid but an affirmative action plan and show “good faith” in implementing it. The easiest way to “show” good faith is to adopt hiring quotas. It became part of the overhead of conducting a business. Moreover, in order to avoid being harassed, sued and absorbing enormous legal costs by a government agency, even if you are innocent and committed to the most rigorous meritocracy, is to adopt a quota hiring policy. Always remember, the “long march” through the institutions is designed to achieve revolutionary results by gaining control of institutions and government bureaucracies whose employees were all educated in institutions of higher education run by cultural Marxists and their allies and fellow travelers.

The number of well indoctrinated cultural Marxists is further increased and embedded (another “fifth column”) even in the business world by requiring or expecting companies to hire affirmative action officers and diversity training specialists. Diversity training is any program designed to “facilitate positive intergroup interaction, reduce prejudice and discrimination, and generally teach individuals who are different from others how to work together effectively” (“The Impact of Method”).

The Race Issue(s):

Hierarchy: Every society and every social entity has an elite who get privileges. There is no way to avoid a hierarchy. Even egalitarians themselves need, and insist upon, an elite to maintain the proposed equality.

The important question is whether the hierarchy has Functionality. What makes a hierarchy functional or dysfunctional? Answer: if the hierarchy serves to maximize the interests of all relevant parties. Traditionally, Anglo-American societies has aspired to achieve meritocracy because the pursuit of excellence benefits everyone. It benefits everyone because outstanding individuals create things (entrepreneurs, technology, medicine, sports, arts, etc.) that benefit everyone and actually create more opportunities for everyone. American Blacks as individuals have many examples (hundreds of thousands) of being part of the elite—success stories. This refutes every claim that the history of slavery and ‘Jim Crow’ necessarily hold people back.

The Black elites are not mathematically analogous to White elites. However, there is no reason to believe that any talent is proportional to a group’s size. History seems to confirm this. The greatest obstacles to more Black success are fatalism, the assumption that individuals are not responsible for their decisions, poor family structure, poor education policies and teacher union activism, previous government programs of welfare and affirmative action, the greed and corruption of some Black political and cultural elites, misguided liberal political and social theories and policies.

At the same time, a large percentage of American Blacks are dysfunctional (illegitimacy, unemployment, literacy, numeracy, imprisoned, etc.). THIS IS A FACT! Apologists automatically assume that (a) everyone is born ‘good’ and corrupted only by their environment (same way they presume that gun deaths are caused by guns not by people), (b) claim America is inherently racist or anti-Black achievement, (c) that the solution requires non-Blacks to make unending concessions (now its reparations), and (d) just in case equality of outcome is still not possible in a meritocratic society, then meritocracy has to be surrendered, OR replaced by egalitarianism and we as individuals are all to be conceptualized by group membership (class, race, culture, whatever). This is the hidden agenda of cultural Marxists.

Many Americans have believed, even before 1776, that Blacks (sub-Sahara African origin) as a group would never fit into American society. Even as late as Lincoln, Americans considered the policy of repatriating or emigrating Blacks to another less challenging environment (originally, e.g., Liberia). Affirmative action and DEI policies in a “woke” environment are beginning to exhaust the public’s patience and trust. It is time to consider that this may be the only viable alternative. Other countries are also beginning to learn that mass migrations often bring people from other cultures and subcultures that reject or resist assimilation.

Summary

The seamless transition from affirmative action to DEI reflected a series of public policies that challenged the Anglo-Protestant norms of America’s original settlers (liberty) and set in motion the current conflict with the norms of cultural Marxists (equality). That conflict originated in institutions of Higher Education with the domination of the social sciences by the utopian vision of a social technology. It was aided and abetted in institutions founded by Puritans under the influence of Transcendentalist millenarianism. The conflict spread beyond the universities when cultural Marxists gained control of the Democratic Party.


Nicholas Capaldi is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University, New Orleans.


Featured: Dante and Virgil in Hell, by Filippo Napoletano; painted ca. 1619-1620.


Up Next—Constantinople

Blas Infante (1885-1936), father of the Andalusian homeland, revered by all the partitocracy, from the PP to the communists, explained in an interview, two months after the proclamation of the Second Soanish Republic (in 1931), the objectives of the Andalusians:

The liberalists [synonym for Andalusians], having demolished that barrier of slavery [the large estates], we go even further—to unite, for Andalusia, in a common heartbeat, 300 million human beings whose culture was destroyed by ecclesiastical tyranny.

Do you see that moment as imminent?

A crash in Europe, for example, a new war, would automatically produce it. Then 1.200.000 Andalusians who live their nostalgia from Tangier to Damascus, and the 300 million men of Afro-Asia, who dream for our culture, would take action to destroy once and for all the influence of the North.

Sixty years later, in 1993, Moroccan King Hassan II declared the following to a French television station:

Interviewer: Would you want Muslims to integrate in France? Are you for or against the principle of integration?

Hassan II: I would not want them in any way to be the object of an integration attempt because they will never integrate.

Do you believe that they will not want to, or that it will be the French who will refuse them?

They will not be able to. It would be possible among Europeans, because their world is the same, their religion, etc. European movements throughout history have been between East and West. But this is between continents, and there is nothing to do: they will be bad French.

So, do you advise us not to try to integrate?

I advise you, as far as my Moroccans are concerned, not to try to change your nationality, because you will never be 100% French. I can assure you.

In October 2020, religious leader Nidhal Siam made the following statements from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem:

The civilization of France and the West is a civilization of lies and sin, of atheism and heresy. They hate the true religion of Allah, the religion of monotheism. Theirs is the civilization of prostitution, promiscuity and homosexuality. That is why they hate the Prophet Mohammed. Take note, Macron! With the holy war we will destroy your honor and your bad life! Tomorrow we will conquer Paris! From the Al-Aqsa Mosque we say to Macron, the enemy of Allah and his prophet, that soon there will be a caliphate led by the Prophet Muhammad. His great armies will advance to the cry of “Allah is great!” and “There is no God but Allah!” to invade France and conquer Rome and thus implant justice and light. Soon, Macron, we will destroy your corrupt civilization and purge the earth of capitalist garbage. With the help of Allah, we will soon rule you with justice and the magnificent civilization of Islam. Then the peoples of Europe will realize all the evil brought to them by the French Revolution. The only answer to France and its president is to declare holy war in the name of Allah.

The Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, perhaps protected by his status as a black African which allows him to speak with a freedom dangerous for a white European, has stood out in recent years for his frequent statements warning Europe of its early demise for having abandoned its roots and for having allowed the arrival of millions of immigrants who will destroy it from within:

My greatest concern is that Europe has lost its awareness of its origins; it has lost its roots. A tree that has no roots, dies. I am afraid that the West is dying. There are many symptoms. There are no births and you are being invaded by other cultures, by other peoples who are going to outnumber you and totally change your culture, your convictions, your values.

Two years ago, in April 2021, a thousand French military officers, including twenty generals, published an open letter to the president, governors and parliamentarians, warning of the serious danger of disintegration and civil war in France, caused by Afro-Asian immigration:

The moment is serious. France is in danger. Numerous mortal dangers threaten her… Our honor demands us to denounce the disintegration that threatens our homeland. Disintegration which, through a certain anti-racism, has only one aim: to create on our soil unrest, even hatred in society. Some speak today of racism, of indigenism and decolonizing theories, but what these hateful fanatics are aiming for is racial warfare. They despise our country, its traditions, its culture, and want to destroy it by uprooting its past and its history… Disintegration which, with Islamism and the hordes of the peripheries, implies the separation of multiple parcels of the nation to transform them into territories subject to dogmas contrary to our constitution… The dangers increase, the violence grows day by day. Who could have imagined ten years ago that one day a teacher would be beheaded when leaving the classroom?… Those who lead our country must courageously eradicate these dangers. To achieve this, it is enough to apply without weakness the laws that already exist. Do not forget that, like us, a large majority of our fellow citizens are exasperated by your indecision and your guilty silences… If nothing is done, laxity will continue to spread inexorably through society, eventually causing an explosion and the intervention of our active comrades in a dangerous mission to protect our civilizational values and safeguard our compatriots on the national territory. As we can see, it is no longer time for contemplation; otherwise, this growing chaos will lead to civil war, and the dead, for which you will be responsible, will number in the thousands.

We could go on with a thousand more testimonies, but these will suffice. What is happening these days in France has been going on all over Europe for a long time. And while chaos is knocking at our doors, in Eastern Europe thousands of young Russians and Ukrainians are killing each other. And in Western Europe, thousands of freaks wiggle through the streets dressed as baboons, showing their multicolored asses to the children.

Times change, certainly, though some things remain the same. With Turkish cannons battering down the gates of Constantinople, the last Byzantines entertained themselves, discussing the sex of angels. The last Europeans of today prefer to discuss the sex of the human being, a creature much closer and easier to observe but much more difficult to define given its eight hundred sexes.

What is knocking on our decayed doors today is not an Ottoman army, but hordes of French vandals with French passports and born in France but who, given their Afro-Asian roots, hate a France and a Europe they wish to see destroyed. And with the help of pure-blooded Frenchmen who, like our patriotic leftists, are delighted to collaborate in their self-destruction.

Today there will be no more Constantinoples, nor Covadongas, nor Poitiers nor Lepantos. Because there are no more strong peoples, nor great men, nor anything worthy to defend.


Jesús Laínz is a jurist by training and writer by vocation, in Spain. This article appears through the kind courtesy of El Manifiesto.


Featured: Siege and Fall of Constantinople, by Panagiotis Zografos, under the guidance of Makriyannis; painted ca. 1836-1839.


Civilize

The media narrative and sociology produce victims—and a culprit: France, the French state, systemic racism. It’s a familiar refrain. On the contrary, it’s the crisis of the State, the crisis of institutions, the vacancy of authority that creates the conditions for insurrection. On the contrary, it’s the State that needs to be rebuilt, and France with it, provided it isn’t swamped by immigration.


Jean-Louis, sixty-something and somewhat balding, tucked away in the semi-darkness of his studio, stared feverishly at his cell phone. Suddenly, the long-awaited hour appeared. This was his moment. He grabbed his wheeled shopping bag, took a deep breath and opened the door to his apartment. Recalling the exercises he’d learned during his military service, he made his feline way down the stairs and into the hall. Littered and tagged, with a gutted sofa and a pungent smell of urine, it was just as he’d hoped: empty. At this hour, he was safe in the knowledge that “they” were asleep.

Walking along the sidewalk, keeping as close as possible to the buildings in order to remain unnoticed, Jean-Louis could only deplore the damage caused by the riots in his suburban town over the last few days. Burnt-out buses and cars, ransacked street furniture, broken glass and omnipresent garbage were now his daily routine. Long reclused at home, he had resolved only to go out and fill his empty fridge.

When he arrived at his usual supermarket, he found it wide open, its windows smashed after yet another looting incident. After a hasty look around, he rushed in through the gap. Inside, he heard shouts and laughter. “Youngsters” were knocking over displays and vandalizing merchandise, filming themselves and staging the most bestial scenes. Crawling towards the untouched beer aisle, he helped himself before heading home. If he couldn’t feed himself, he could drink himself into oblivion.

Victimization

To his detriment, Jean-Louis had become the actor in a film that closely resembled the latest dystopian series he’d been watching on Netflix.

A young Frenchman died a few days ago, accidentally killed by a policeman during a traffic stop. Hardly anyone knew him, his story, his troubles with the authorities. Yet everyone claimed to speak on his behalf and on behalf of the “young people of the banlieues;” everyone, from the media to the political class, wanted to make sense of this tragedy.

Once again, the infernal machine was set in motion. Journalists spoke of the structural racism of the French police and drew parallels with the United States. Politicians, from the President to the Insoumis, immediately condemned the policeman, without knowing the facts. A ten-second video was enough. The young man had the right to a minute’s silence at the National Assembly, like a soldier killed in an OPEX (overseas military) operation.

His death led to riots which, in their scale and violence, surpassed those of 2005. Faced with the initial destruction of public property and facilities—schools, cultural centers, town halls, buses, tramways—as well as scenes of looting, the media and politicians tried to explain or rather justify the chaos. It’s a familiar refrain: “People in these neighborhoods are discriminated against and immediately identified with this young man, the victim of yet another police blunder. By their violence, they wanted to respond to the violence done to them, excessively, but understandably.”
When Rioters Film Themselves

This argument does not stand up to close scrutiny of the situation in these neighborhoods, which are poor but benefit from a much larger-than-normal public handout: urban renewal, new facilities, increased school resources, etc.

And if you look at the rioters, you’ll see that they’re quite happy to go about their business. Looting and ransacking are staged, filmed and broadcast live on social networks. Everyone seems to aspire to their own little minute of fame, and to take pleasure in assuming and propagating acts that are criminally reprehensible.

It’s hard to discern any political content in these attitudes, or in the targets (tobacconists, public facilities, high-tech or sports stores), or any desire to honor the memory of the young man who disappeared, and who is hardly ever mentioned again.

Yet all this makes sense, or rather, is the mark of a deeper problem, beyond that of suburban youth.

It was not the excessive and unjust force of the police and the state that led to the death of the young man and the chaos we are now struggling to contain, but their weakness, and that of our institutions.

The events leading up to the tragedy are symptomatic: a thirty-minute chase, multiple failures to yield, hit-and-runs and reckless endangerment by the driver, who was finally stopped by—traffic. The police officer clearly couldn’t get a 17-year-old to listen to reason. To be taken seriously, he was reduced to drawing his weapon. Drama ensued.

It’s the State that Needs Rebuilding

The asymmetry between the two protagonists was obvious. On the one hand, a policeman, bound by rules, subject to a hierarchy that pushes harder than anything else to avoid contact and who knows he won’t be supported in the event of an incident. {The “Little angel gone too soon” had a clean record, despite some fifteen arrests. He had never been punished. By tolerating all his transgressions, we fostered in him a feeling of omnipotence). On the other, a young, self-confident delinquent with a strong sense of impunity. He, too, knows that if he commits a serious offence, he will receive a warning or, in the worst case, a suspended sentence. The police officer knows that the offender is not afraid of him, and fears that he will try something against him. A fatal spiral. The good-old fear of the gendarme, which no longer exists for some, would probably have saved the young man, paradoxically the victim of lax justice.

This disrespected police force is just one of the many avatars of the collapse of the State. We could just as easily talk about teachers, firefighters or nursing staff, victims of what we modestly call “incivilities,” but who cannot respond with a weapon.

To counter this disintegration and restore civil peace, it won’t be enough to mobilize tens of thousands of police officers and finance everything that’s been burnt down.

The State needs to rebuild the institutions that held our society together.

In a country that has become multi-ethnic and multicultural, in the process of becoming a community, and within which populations with different mores coexist, subsidies and “the social” will not be miracle solutions. The only way to avoid definitive separatism and confrontation with a second people on our soil is for the native French to exert assimilation, or for recent immigrants to return en masse to their countries of origin.

The Programmed Destruction of Institutions

The deleterious process we’re facing today is only partly linked to immigrants, however, and affects all social classes. The clashes we are seeing, particularly in the “ZADs” where immigrants are poorly represented, illustrate a more global phenomenon.

The rejection of state authority has its origins in the great deconstruction that followed the events of May 1968, and the seizure of power by social classes who have been relentless in their efforts to demolish the foundations of the old order.

Since the 1980s, the development of a society based solely on the logic of the market, the collapse of structures (mass unemployment, widespread divorce, the collapse of education) and the desire to give precedence to the interests of the individual-as-king to the detriment of the collective have led us to the impasse we find ourselves in today.

Our President likes to use words that are not his own and that he doesn’t understand. Recently, he spoke of the process of “decivilization” that our country was undergoing. For him, “decivilization” boils down to the violent acts of a handful of people who need to be brought back into line.

Wouldn’t decivilization be better characterized by the destruction of institutions that set limits to the omnipotence of individuals, and guaranteed the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence as the sole authority transcending individual interests?

What Are We Passing on Today?

It’s no coincidence that today’s young people set fires and pillage while their elders look on. This younger generation has known nothing but the uncivilized society in which it lives.

For them, fed on mass consumption, in a world where individual success, under the sole prism of money, is set up as an ideal, within decaying family structures, with vulgar TV programs taking the place of civics classes—everything justifies their acts.

It’s not a question of exonerating young people from their responsibility or reducing the seriousness of looting. But we would do well to ask ourselves the right question: what are we passing on today?

Our social model, which contains the seeds of a war of all against all, produces empathy-free monsters who film themselves looting.

A firm and implacable response to this violence is the first step. It will be of no use if we don’t deconstruct the deconstructors and rebuild a collective project capable of uniting the growing centrifugal forces in our country.

To do so, our elites will have to find it in their interest to push for such a project.

In the French banlieues, as everywhere else in France, decivilization is underway.


Pierre Moriamé writes from France. This article comes courtesy of Revue Éléments.


France: Islamist Hordes and Leftists Declare Civil War

Our headline might be incomprehensible to those who limit themselves to following the news through the official, mainstream media of the System. It is only thanks to alternative media that one can learn that the fire that is sweeping France is not a matter of mere disorder provoked by groups of “youths” from the suburbs—the famous “banlieues” full of emigrated masses.

For four days now, every night the same thing has been happening:

  • fires of all kinds and in particular hundreds of cars belonging to French workers are burned
  • attacks against the police and firemen (several police stations set on fire)
  • devastation of schools, town halls and libraries
  • assault on stores and stores
  • attacks against the Church (an 80-year-old Catholic priest, stripped and beaten, an evangelical church destroyed)
  • dead and wounded (two policemen—of whom nobody speaks—killed yesterday, along with 300 of their colleagues injured)

And all this, not only in the “cités” of the banlieue, where the police dare not even enter, but all over the country, from Marseilles where the Islamic implantation is getting stronger and stronger, to the Nordic Lille, passing, of course, through Paris.

Everything exploded, as usual—as also happened in the USA with the Blacks Live Matter—following the death in Nanterre of Nahel, a little Arab who at seventeen years of age had already been arrested several times (oh, that’s right, only petty crimes, thefts, drug trafficking, that sort of thing). When last Tuesday, during a traffic control, the police stopped the high-end car he was driving, despite not having a license, little Nahel tried to flee, by running over a policeman, who shot to defend himself and avoid being run over—and Nahel thus was killed him.

That’s when it all started. The Afro-Islamic mobs, accompanied by the white left-wing collaborationists, took to the streets. But don’t think that they were motivated by a deep feeling of grief for the death of one of their own. If this death has obviously been the spark that has set everything on fire, it is not what is driving them to loot and devastate everything in their path. It is not with grief wringing their hearts that such outrages are committed. Only those who are moved by a deep hatred for the world that has welcomed them and which they would like to destroy can plunder in this way.

Of course, this world deserves to be destroyed. But for reasons diametrically opposed to those that motivate the mobs. If our world deserves to be destroyed, it is to save, to enlarge civilization—our white and European civilization. Not to destroy it. Not to implant in its place the laws of Islam.

It is all the more necessary to put an end to such a world because the softness of its rulers prevents them from acting with the firmness required on occasions of exception, such as the present one. “It is the sovereign who decides in a state of emergency,” said Carl Schmitt. But so far Macron has not dared to decree any state of emergency, no state of alarm, not even curfews. And this when, at the time of writing, we are entering the fourth night of the most serious riots that France has known since the Paris Commune in 1871. And Macron (apart from surely planning for a helicopter to take him out of the Elysée, as he foresaw when the Yellow Vests rioted) has limited himself to throwing his policemen and gendarmes as bait into the hands of the mobs that attack them. He and his people believe that, with a scolding and a few gentle slaps on the hand, such people can be calmed, soothed, softened. Softening—they imagine—like the softies that such leaders are.

The French people, terrified and locked up in their homes, meanwhile see their cars and their buildings being set on fire by the pack. And the people do nothing. What can they do? Get themselves massacred?

Apart from the fact that their own softness prevents them from taking any action of any sort of risk, it is not up to the people, but to the forces of order to put things right. Including the army, whose intervention, according to a survey by the C-News television channel, is desired by 70% of the population.

A different matter is that later, when normality returns to the streets (if it returns), these same people will vote again for Macron & Co. They are really good at this, and so much more.


Javier Ruiz Portella, journalist, essayist, writer and publisher, in Spain, whose recent book is N’y a-t-il qu’un dieu pour nous sauver? (Is There No God to Save Us?). This article is through the kind courtesy of El Manifiesto.


Romulus and Remus, or the Sacred Importance of the Border

Although with some differences of nuance, Titus Livy and Plutarch tell the fratricidal story of Romulus and Remus. The former, in the founding act of Rome, is in charge of tracing with the plow the furrow of the new city, following the Etruscan rite. Suitably attired for the sacred event, Romulus prepares the plow with a bronze ploughshare and attaches it to the yoke, joining it to a bull on the outside and a cow on the inside, both completely white. Holding tightly the rudder of the inclined implement, so that the excavated earth faces inwards, he skillfully traces the sulcus primigenius in a counterclockwise direction. The urbs is built on the basis of the sacred border, which perimeters its space, distinguishing it from the other part of itself.

Remus, who had emerged defeated from the augural dispute, tries to hinder the operations by mocking his brother: “Finally,” Plutarch recounts, “he crossed the moat, but fell, struck down at that very point, according to some by Romulus himself, according to others by a companion of Romulus named Celere.” Titus Livy also directly relates the words uttered by Romulus at the height of his anger, after having committed fratricide: “From now on, anyone who dares to climb over my walls shall so die.”

The myth poses, in its own way, a possible solution ante litteram to Antigone’s dilemma formulated by Hegel. For Romulus there is no doubt—the law of the urbs takes precedence over the family ethical bond, especially when the latter violates the just measure, instead of respecting it. But, above all, the mythological narrative speaks of the sacredness of the frontier as a limit that defines an identity—in this case, the political and cultural identity of Rome—delimiting it and differentiating it from what it is not. Without a border there can be no identity, which is the very basis of the existence of difference, which always presupposes the plurality of non-coincident identities and, therefore, separated from one another. In turn, without identity there can be no relation either, which is, by its essence, a relation between identities with precise limits. The latter mark the end of the one and the beginning of the other, as well as the possibility of a relational nexus, different from that derived from the abuse of the one to the detriment of the other that occurs when it perpetrates its invasion.

The civilization of markets without borders gives rise to a permanent invasion that is certainly not intended to favor the relationship between those who are different, not even in the form of dialogue. This, as the Greek word (διάλογος) unequivocally suggests, always implies a distance and, therefore, a clear threshold separating the dialoguers, who are nothing but different identities placed in a friendly relationship mediated by language. On the contrary, the invasion of the market, which is the imperialism of the undifferentiated neutral, aspires to produce the suppression of differences and identities, so that everything falls into the abyss of sameness and the globally homologated. Strictly speaking, globalization itself could well be conceived as the neutralization of differences and identities, and as the transit of the whole planet towards the global neutral, without material or immaterial, national or identity borders. It is the post-mortem revenge of Remus and his drive for invasion, for the neutralization of the limits that make one identity different from another.

In this sense it is valid for the existing nexus between identities and differences, what we have explained on other occasions in relation to the connection between national states and internationalism. The friendly relationship of internationalism presupposes the existence of sovereign nation states, freed from their nationalist impulses in a regressive sense: the suppression of sovereign nation states does not lead to internationalism, but to the reified open space of market globalism, which is the unification of the world under the banner of the market economy, freed from the limits of sovereign politics.

Similarly, it is a pure non sequitur to think of being able to favor dialogue among the different by dissolving identities. Under this premise, only the monotony of the indistinct arises, which is given as a consumerist homologation of identities and, jointly, as a planetary triumph of the Unique Thought as the only admitted thought. The different that does not accept to disidentify and homogenize with the other of itself, is declared, sic et simpliciter, illegitimate and dangerous. And as such he is treated—he is neutralized and reeducated to the point of indifferentiation. Therefore, even in this case, this dialogue between the different ones, which always presupposes that the different ones are different and that they have their specific identity, does not prevail. On the other hand, the same thing triumphs on a global scale—the same language, the same thinking, the same way of being and producing, of living and relating to others.

On the level of identities, as in the case of nation-states, the identification of two abstractly opposed and concretely complementary poles is also valid. Regressive nationalism and market globalism are fulfilled in each other: regressive nationalism, which has within itself the drive to attack the other in the name of one’s own, is realized in globalism. The latter is the final stage of nationalism, since it coincides with the subjugation of the entire planet under the domination of the one triumphant nation, whose currency is the dollar and whose language is Wall Street English. Nationalism is fulfilled in globalism, which presupposes it.

The link which can be established between regressive identitarianism and anti-identitarian cosmopolitanism is no different. The former aspires to deny the identity of others, and therefore difference, through the universal imposition of what is their own. The second coincides with the evil universalization of an identity that in reality is not such because it does not admit difference and therefore, like Remus, does not respect the frontier that, separating from the other, defines what is its own. Regressive identitarianism is fulfilled in anti-identitarian cosmopolitanism, which presupposes it; and which has in common with the former the denial of the right to difference, suppressed in the name of the imperialism of particularity itself.

And this, as we know, is another name for ideology, which is the “abstract will of the universal” and the concrete triumph of the particular. But the universal, in its authentic sense, is never the part that imposes itself as universal—it is, instead, that which exists as a concrete universal, which does not annul the particularities but is realized in them and by them. This allows us to affirm, once again, that identity can only exist in the presence of difference and that, consequently, it is given by definition, declined in the plural, as a nexus between different identities.

The task of culture, which is undoubtedly also and not secondarily to educate in identity, can be said to be successfully accomplished only when it produces respect for differences and for the consequent connection that is generated between difference and identity. In short, nothing could be more sidereally distant from both the petty tribal identitarianism, which denies the other in the name of its own, and the “empty bottom line” of anti-identity cosmopolitanism, which sells the fantasy of favoring dialogue among the different while denying their identity and, therefore, the very premise of all dialogue. Culture is, in the proper sense, to educate in identity and, therefore, in self-consciousness—well understood that this is only possible if at the same time one educates in the recognition of difference.

The latter must be interpreted neither as an unwelcome survival of the foreign, which must be made identical and therefore neutralized, nor as a strange reality, with which any comparison is impossible a priori. Difference asks, au contraire, to be thought of Spinozianly, as one of the diverse attributes of the unique substance, differentiated in itself—an attribute which, therefore, must not be denied in the name of undifferentiated identity, but valued in its being as a different manifestation of the substance itself. From which must follow then the need for an education in polyphony and difference, which can only be recognized and appreciated if one possesses one’s own identity.

In antithesis to the perspectives of regressive identitarianism and anti-identitarian cosmopolitanism, humanity exists as a singular collective; if one wishes, also as an articulated Unity and as a differentiated Totality, as a plurality of identities and differences, in which the unity of the human race is expressed in multiple forms. To truly love humanity means, then, to love the differences and identities that compose it—above all from the love for one’s own cultural identity, for one’s own people, for one’s own language, for one’s own territory. It means respecting the border as a symbol of identity and of the right measure, and therefore as a barrier against invasion, against disidentification and against the unlimited.


Diego Fusaro is professor of History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the IntellectualThe Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns[This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].


Featured: Romulus marking the Limits of Rome, fresco, Sala dei Horatii e Curatii, Rome; painted by Giuseppe Cesari, 1638-1639.


A Journey to Two Frances

Recently, I was in Bergerac for the funeral of a childhood friend. It’s always sad to lose a dear friend, even if, as Marcel Pagnol so rightly wrote: “Such is the life of men, a few joys quickly erased by unforgettable sorrows.” But my sadness was amplified when I discovered what had become of this small Perigordian town. Bergerac, a small town whose name is closely linked to that of Cyrano, whose statue stands in the old town square. And yet, as I wandered around this little corner of France for a few hours, I didn’t feel any of the panache, grandeur and pride so characteristic of Rostand’s character. Worse still, I found there a sample of what our country will be like if nothing is done to stop the movement that is underway.

In my opinion, Bergerac is the meeting point of two “Frances.” The first is the France I love, that we love, which was forged in the baptism of Clovis and built up through its beautiful churches, including the Madeleine church in Bergerac, where my friend was baptized, married and chose to end his life. A France full of charm, with its old medieval houses still standing proudly, their half-timbering adorning the narrow streets where we like to stroll and remember a country bathed in the chivalric romanticism of Cyrano. This is the France that gathers at the market in the morning, looking for a few good local products, so rich and so delicate, or at Café Vedry, one of the oldest French bistros, where it’s good to live and chat with a few Périgourdins while enjoying a good glass of Montbazillac, whose aromas and freshness are always an explosion of flavor.

It’s the France of beautiful encounters in the old town square, with French people talking about a time when Bergerac was still a little corner of paradise bathed by the Dordogne, where it was so pleasant to stroll until late at night. We’re proud of this little corner of France, we’re attached to it because, as General Charette, hero of the Vendée wars, said: “Our homeland is our land, our villages, our churches, our altars, our tombs, everything that our Fathers built and loved before us.”

The New “France”

And then there’s the second France, the one I’d rather not come across in these sad moments, the one we think we only see in our big cities, but which is unfortunately increasingly to be found in our hitherto untouched countryside. This France, if you can call it that, is home to a particularly well-established Muslim population, with its cafés, kebab shops and halal businesses. A population that imposes its own dress codes, with men in qamis and veiled women strolling by the statue of Cyrano, giving Bergerac an air of souk. This other France is also one of architectural ugliness, with low-cost housing blocks being built next to bourgeois houses from the early 20th century, and Gothic paintings adorning the peaks of medieval farmhouses. It’s a strange artistic encounter that makes me think that mixing genres is a source of confusion, and that beauty only exists in the arts if it resists the dominant culture and is preserved in its original freshness.

I finally discovered this other France when I went to the little Madeleine church on a Thursday morning. No priest to say mass, just a layman adorned with a cross to welcome us, before we were invited into the choir to say a few words about hope, about what we believe in… or don’t believe in… about the need to search for a God or something else… This other France has lost its Catholic faith, just as it has lost the ethics of dress. No one in the assembly deigned to wear a suit, if only out of respect for God or at least for the deceased. Sad France, which has lost its sense of the sacred, of beauty, of the grandeur of its land and its history.

So, in Bergerac, two Frances rub shoulders. How did we get to this point in just a few decades? I can think of several explanations, which I’m sure won’t be exhaustive, but which nonetheless seem essential to me. The first, the cause of all our ills, is a strong desire on the part of our successive leaders to wipe the slate clean and erase the Europe of nations. This globalist political class, trained in the Young Leaders sessions, sees France only as a global village that needs to be connected and merged with the rest of the world. For them, France is just an idea, bathed in a world where God is dead and only hedonism and consumerism matter. According to them, a foreigner can be French, because in any case they don’t believe in our country, its identity or its sovereignty. Nor do they believe in European civilization, in what has made its long memory and greatness, but rather in the European Union and its regional superclass. To make us citizens of the world, uprooted and replaced… that is the objective of this globalist caste, the better to enrich and enslave us. Cyrano’s courage, honor and panache have given way to the so-called humanist values of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Towards an Islamic Caliphate

The second explanation is the intersection of two currents that are gradually erasing our France, the one we cherish and the only one we believe in. The first is the forced Islamization of our country. Many French people still either don’t see it, or refuse to see it. Halal products are filling supermarket shelves, veiled women are increasingly numerous in our streets, and very few French towns of any size don’t have their own cathedral-mosque. Everything is being done to facilitate and accelerate the spread of Islam on European soil: ever-massive arrivals of mostly Muslim migrants, the collaboration of European institutions with Muslim Brotherhood networks, the compromise of elected politicians with Islamist movements.

France is sinking little by little into a veritable partition of its national soil, but this doesn’t seem to worry most French people, too busy at each presidential election with their purchasing power, lulled to sleep by the media and annihilated by a state that can no longer guarantee them any protection in their own country. Taking advantage of the weakness of part of the political class and the compromise of many elected representatives, Islamist networks have long had a clear and coherent strategy. One of the early thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood wrote: “Islam will return to Europe as a victorious conqueror… This time it will not be a conquest by the sword, but by the preaching and dissemination of Islamic ideology… This expansion will be the beginning of the return of the Islamic Caliphate.” Bergerac is proof that this strategy is on the way to success.

This profound Islamization is catalyzed by the erasure of the figure of the white, French man, and more generally, of the European, through the increasingly strong influence of Woke ideology. This ideology claims to perceive “systemic” evil and to denounce the injustices suffered by minorities because of populations enjoying privileges due to their “whiteness” (i.e., their skin color) or their dominant sexual orientation (i.e., their heterosexuality). In reality, the sole aim is to deconstruct and destroy everything that is beautiful, good and great about our Europe and our country, by playing the indignation and victimization card. In short, to give power to minorities, no matter how degenerate their ideas.

The sources of influence are numerous, be they elected representatives, LGBT+ lobbies, the political and media class, or the global superclass of which the Soros family is the tutelary figure. Imbued with this cancel culture, today’s generations, fed on Netflix series, influenced by the effects of fashion and aggressive advertising that infuse the totality of their perceptions, will shape the future of our civilization and our country. France is gradually losing its soul, its identity, annihilated by domineering and destructive ideologies. Caught in a vice between Islamization and wokism, the French are losing their bearings, cowering and submitting.

From Gallic Village to Global Village

Finally, if this other France is gradually gaining the upper hand over the first, it’s because the French have lost all sense of the sacred and all spirit of resistance. The sacred, the elevation of souls, was the prerogative of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, where Corpus Christi was still the occasion for beautiful processions in small villages like Bergerac, and where people still respected religion and the dead enough to dress up for funeral masses. Unfortunately, the Council dragged the whole Church down the slope of modernism, so decried by Pope John XXIII’s predecessors. The Church had to adapt, whatever the cost, to societal progressivism and to the world’s evolutions, even the ugliest ones, stooping to every compromise rather than elevating itself and transcending souls. It has to be said that this vast enterprise to de-Christianize France has had the desired results. In 2023, the French no longer believe and have become nihilistic.

We can’t hold it against them; only reproach them for not having had the spirit of resistance. The French have indeed lost the flame of resistance, the same flame that inspired Charles Martel at Poitiers, Joan of Arc at Orléans, General de Vassoigne at Bazeilles and so many other illustrious Frenchmen. Today, France is dying, our European civilization is on the brink of the abyss. A few courageous people dare to revolt from time to time, as during the Manif pour tous to denounce the profound societal drifts of the political class, or during the Gilets jaunes riots, bloodily put down by the police. But this small resistance is very little, random, nipped in the bud by an implacable political machine that crushes brains and bodies and arbitrarily decides France’s future with the strength of 49.3. Without a charismatic leader, without solid organization and strategy, without a real mass awareness among the French of the fundamental importance of rising up at last and renewing with the spirit of resistance of our Fathers, the France we love will never rise again. Worse, it will be replaced by this other France, swept away by the waves of globalization and Islamization, drowned under the waves of the global village.

Reborn with Cyrano

Should we resign ourselves to this fate? No, of course not. This is not what our forefathers would have demanded of us, this is not what our children expect of us. Bergerac must remain Bergerac, France must remain the France we love and that so many French people have loved before us. As Jean Raspail so rightly wrote: “When you represent an almost lost cause, you have to sound the trumpet, jump on your horse and try the last exit, otherwise you die of sad old age at the bottom of the forgotten fortress that no one besieges anymore because life has gone elsewhere.” The Camp of the Saints is here, before our very eyes, and we need to react quickly if we want to change the end of History. This is our duty as French people. We must not be afraid to reclaim our sovereignty, our identity, our Christianity, our security, our culture, our traditions, our families. Let’s dare to raise our heads. Let’s stop being afraid and resigned. Life is a struggle, and we must accept this and commit to it without delay, each according to his or her qualities and skills.

There’s no shortage of opportunities to do so, whether in politics, in cultural life and associations, in identitarian or Catholic youth movements, or in institutes such as Iliade, which are committed to defending the long memory of our Europe and our country. Let’s not give in to the temptation to wait and see, to pessimism and cynicism. Let us be courageous. Let us have faith in our country, in its future and in its newfound freedom. Let’s be Cyranos in our turn, so that there is only one France, the one we have always cherished and that we must summon with all our strength and soul for our children.


Alix Le Kalonec writes from France. This article appears courtesy of Revue Éléments.