Homo Americanus

HOMO AMERICANUS: Child of the Postmodern Age. Tomislav Sunic, Foreword by Professor Kevin MacDonald (2007)

Rather than present a general review of Tomislav Sunic's important new book about the foundational myths of the United States, which has already been commendably reviewed by Troy Southgate in NEW IMPERIUM #4, Dr Fredrick Toben, Paul Gottfried, Peter Rushmore and others (Amazon UK,Amazon USA), I will concentrate on just one observation from the book which is largely unknown to the European man in the street, if not European Identitarians. This observation is the parallels between the aftermath of the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the American subjugation of western Europe after World War Two.

Southern Agrarians

In 1930, a group of American Traditionalist writers and poets called the Southern Agrarians published their manifesto I'LL TAKE MY STAND, in response to post-Civil War Yankee domination. In this tract, one of their number, Frank Lawrence Owsley, stated in his essay 'The Irrepressible Conflict': “The rising generation read Northern literature, shot through with the New England tradition. Northern textbooks were used in Southern schools; Northern histories, despite the frantic protest of local patriotic organizations, were almost universally taught in Southern high schools and colleges...”

This behaviour of the anti-Traditionalist Northern Yankees can be seen as a precursor to American political and economic suppression of Europe following World War Two, as Tom Sunic writes, “notably when the American educators introduced into European places of higher learning the curricula consisting of Puritan derived hypermoralism, mixed with atheistic Catholic-bashing Freudo-Marxian scholasticism, and carried out by Frankfurt School theoreticians”. It is the same warped ideology that still rules academia on both sides of the Atlantic today.

By exposing the alien Judeo-Christian/ Puritanical roots of the United States, and their continuing infestation into all parts of the globe, Sunic has done a great service to European Identitarians.

Report: New Right 11th London Meeting

First up was Mr Christopher Chibnall with a fascinating anecdotal talk on the artist and magician Austin Osman Spare, billed as the first postmodern occultist. When I worked at Watkin's occult bookshop off the Charing Cross Road, we kept our Osman Spare in a lock-up glass bookshelf in the basement. Mainly because of their value, but partly also for their content (not that we'd get many kids in the basement, which was devoted mainly to books about Advaita Vedanta Hinduism; kids naturally preferred gawking at the crystals, jewellery, statues and other New Age trinkets on sale upstairs). I'd like to thank Mr Chibnall for elucidating the ideas of this singular individual, who was a fellow south Londoner and instigator of his own Chaos Magic. Mr Chibnall is working on a book about Austin Osman Spare, although I'm surprised that he hasn't already been beaten to it by Peter Ackroyd; this mixture of London, the occult, raw sexuality and consciousness is quintessential Ackroyd territory.

Next up came Norman Lowell from the highly successful IMPERIUM EUROPA movement in Malta. At his last talk at a London New Right meeting a couple of years ago Mr Lowell outlined the spiritual and practical delineations of the coming Imperium; this time he introduced a new element to his thinking, namely Dominion. Just as, like Evola, Lowell associates the ideas of a Solar/Polar Imperium with Masculinity, so Dominion (from Latin “domus” - “home”) is associated with the regional and local, that is, the Feminine, nurturing principle. This concept adds a whole new dimension to the idea of Imperium. As I listened to Mr Lowell I was struck by the thought that I could be hearing for the first time an idea as profound, significant and influential as that proposed by Nietzsche in THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. Mr Lowell has a new book out, aptly titled IMPERIUM EUROPA, this Winter 2007. It's worth putting an order in now because his last book, CREDO, is now a sought-after item, with people emailing to ask me where they can get a copy. Mr Lowell also expanded on his exciting idea of reserving a special space in Russia for eugenic progress, and stressed the importance of Aryan solidarity and the avoidance of fratricidal wars.

Following Mr Lowell came Mr Jonathan Bowden. I always strongly look forward to Mr Bowden's talks; he outlines often complex ideas with astounding lucidity and precision, introducing new facts and new ideas from sometimes obscure thinkers with great flourish. Mr. Bowden surveyed a wide panorama, from the power of intellect, to the commercial elite ruling over us and the insidious culture of victimology. Gay activists in particular have much to learn from his arguments against special pleading. Since I am not a member of the BNP, I am hardly in a position to comment on Mr Bowden's recent run-in with the BNP leadership, save to say that in my opinion the party has lost an immensely accomplished and invigorating speaker.

Finally, from Croatia, Mr Tomislav Sunic, to elaborate on some of his ideas presented in his excellent new book HOMO AMERICANUS: Child of the Postmodern Age. I finished reading this important book about America's foundational myths and their reverberations into the present just last week, and hope to do it some justice by giving it a proper review on this (Aryan Futurism) blog in the near future. As well as discussing the heroic Prince Eugene, the self-censoring society and martyrology, Mr Sunic urged his listeners to look behind the human rights rhetoric of our democratic leaders, and suggested that a read of a country's penal codes could be far more revealing.

As ever, the meeting was at a superb location in central London with a lively, positive, friendly audience – the largest I've seen at a New Right meeting to date. Between speakers, the crowd was abuzz with subjects ranging from the ongoing credit-crunch financial crisis (hardly surprising, given our location in the heart of the Leviathan) to Michael Wood's current colourful documentary series on BBC2 TV about the history of India, which certainly seems to be a hit with European Identitarians. Troy Southgate, Jonathan Bowden, Jonothon Boulter and all the other organizers and helpers at the London New Right meetings deserve praise for opening up this immensely important new intellectual space, the suitably impressive London salon and ante-chamber for the IMPERIUM, and congratulations for enabling this new space to expand, all the while winning fresh support and acclaim. It is a tremendous undertaking triumphantly fulfilled.

Fascism and the Meaning of Life

Review: MODERNISM AND FASCISM: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Roger Griffin (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2007)

Roger Griffin, Professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, first introduced the idea of 'Palingenesis' to the field of fascist studies over 15 years ago, making him immediately a leading figure in his chosen vocation. He isolated the syncretic fascist core as being palingenetic, populist ultra-nationalism, with overtones of a phoenix-like heroic rebirth. Since then he has extended and elaborated his theory that essential to the definition of the 'fascist minimum' is the notion of national rebirth or renaissance - “myths that generated policies and actions designed to bring about collective redemption, a new national community, a new society, a new man...engineered through the power of the modern state.” - culminating in this masterwork which rightly places fascism at the centre of wider modernist movements.

Epiphanic versus Programmatic Modernism

Griffin's insights have previously been recognized as audacious and perceptive, no more so than here. Part One of the book tackles the at first seemingly tricky concept of Modernism itself, which Griffin clarifies brilliantly. Modernism's “common denominator lies in the bid to achieve a sense of transcendent value, meaning of purpose despite Western culture's progressive loss of a homogeneous value system and overarching cosmology (nomos) caused by the secularizing and disembedding forces of modernization.” Modernization is experienced by those caught up in its slipstream as a relentless juggernaut unzipping the fabric of meaningful existence and leaving in its wake the abyss of permanently unresolved ambivalence. In short, Modernism is defined as a reaction against the decadent* nihilism of intellectual, societal and technical modernization. While Marx, other Leftists and liberals consider modern man's condition as one of angst and alienation induced by class warfare and industrial production, the Right sees anomie as both the cause and the principle symptom of our modern malaise. “It is the black hole of existential self-awareness in all of us, our fear of 'the eternal silence of infinite spaces' that so alarmed [Blaise] Pascal, which produces culture”. This modern culture is further divided by Griffin into what might be called introvert and extrovert reactions: the introvert reaction is generally individualistic and in Griffin's expression an 'epiphanic modernism' – the path of the artist – while the extrovert, collective reaction is defined as 'programmatic modernism'. The latter seeks to change the world and resolve the permanent crisis of modernity (“all that is solid melts into air” - Marx) by a collective act of 'reconnection forwards' (Moeller van den Bruck). It is not difficult to make the short step from 'programmatic modernism' to fascism; the transcendent politics proposed by van den Bruck at the beginning of the Twentieth Century are not so different from Guillaume Faye's 'Archaic Futurism' at its end. Both are, in the phrase of Guy Debord, “technically equipped archaism”.

Amongst the epiphanic modernists Griffin includes Nietzsche, Eliot, Joyce, Proust, van Gogh, Kandinsky and Malevich, but perhaps the truth of Griffin's argument is demonstrated by the man widely-acknowledged as the greatest modern painter: Picasso. In his earlier cubist works, Picasso sought inspiration from the primitivism of African masks, and later in the archetypal Mediterranean symbols of horses and particularly bulls (which surprisingly Griffin doesn't mention).

Gardening State

Following the exhaustive and enlightening dissection of modernism in Part One, Griffin explores the implications and applied politics in Part Two, where “modernity turbocharged by the conjuncture of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of three absolutist regimes and a powerful monarchy, with an influenza epidemic that killed as many as 100 million people world wide had made the modernist drive to ward off the terror of the void – cultural, social and political – a phenomenon of mass culture. The new era would be a creatio ex profundis, an act of creativity defying the void.” Fascism aimed for a complete overhaul, in accordance with Emilio Gentile's observation of totalitarianism as “an experiment in political domination undertaken by a revolutionary movement.” Griffin introduces the idea of the pre-War Fascist and National Socialist regimes as 'gardening states' striking a successful balance between idyllic ruralism and technocratic modernism, the “compelling new imperative” that it obeyed “to clean up, to sterilize, to re-order, to eliminate dirt and dust” (Frances Saunders). Or neatly, if flippantly, summed up by Lars Lindholm, “For example, the Aryans (i.e. Germans, the blond and blue-eyed) are direct descendants from the Atlantean root-race, whereas the Jews, Negroes, Slavs, and anyone else for that matter, are unfortunate mutants, further away from Homo sapiens than the snottiest gorilla. The reason for all the troubles in this world is the presence of these unsavoury species that the master race should mercifully do away with so that peace and quiet could be restored and life imbued with a bit of style.” PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT: Pathfinders of the Magical Way (Llewellyn, St. Paul MN, 1993). It was this same vision of hygienic modernity which inspired the building in London of bright new health centres in Peckham and Finsbury during the 1930s. But mild English pragmatism was no match for German determination, where public buildings were “an act of sacralization symbolized in the toned bodies of Aryan workers showering in the washrooms of newly built hygienic factories or playing football on a KdF sportsground, their camaraderie and zest for life expressing the hope for a young, healthy nation.”

Fascist aesthetics

Included in the book are illustrations of art and architecture not usually associated with the pre-War Fascist and National Socialist regimes: from the soaring arch designed by Adalberto Libera for the aborted EUR '42 exhibition in Rome (later ripped-off by Eero Saarinen for the St. Louis Gateway Arch), to the cool steel and glass structure designed by Morpugo encasing the Ara Pacis of Augustus, the 1933 blueprint for the new Reichsbank in Berlin by Gropius, or Baron Julius Evola's painterly experimentations with Dadaism. Goebbels is revealed as a fan of Edvard Munch and Fritz Lang, while Le Corbusier submitted plans for the new town of Pontinia in the recently-reclaimed Pontine Marshes. Fritz Todt celebrated Aryan technocratic power in his construction of autobahns and later the Atlantic Wall. Irene Guenther is quoted extolling 'Nazi Chic' with fashion displaying “another countenance, one that was intensely modern, technologically advanced, supremely stylized and fashionably stylish” and the Bauhaus influence on the new, burgeoning market in consumer durables is emphasised. Unlike previous historians of fascism with their simplistic and inflexible frameworks, Griffin admirably demonstrates that “fascism, despite the connotations of regression, reaction and flight from modernity it retains for some academics, is to be regarded as an outstanding form of political modernism”, encapsulating a “deadly serious attempt to realize an alternative logic, an alternative modernity and an alternative morality to those pursued by liberalism, socialism or conservatism”.

Ambition

Griffin is well aware of the boldness and ambition of his arguments. “Post-modern” academia is notoriously hostile to transdisciplinarity and historians today are loath to erect grand structures of interpretation and meaning. Few historians are less fashionable than Oswald Spengler, or even Samuel 'Clash of Civilizations' Huntington. Griffin is well aware of this problem, and in the introduction he specifically places MODERNISM AND FASCISM within the context of 'Aufbruch' (a breaking out of conventions). For this reason Griffin's style is reflexive: he is conscious of the fact that in proposing a new syncretic historical worldview he is in some ways mirroring the dynamics of fascism itself. Of course, European Identitarians and New Rightists will have no problem with the concept of evolutionary synthesis (it's no accident that one of the principal English-language New Right websites is called Synthesis), nevertheless Griffin is correctly keen to show and stress that his work is non-totalizing. Overall his style is extremely lucid and arguments that may appear at first to be mere flights of fancy are revealed as having firm foundations, unlike the convoluted, almost impenetrable and until recently-fashionable critical theory style of, say, Andrew Hewitt's POLITICAL INVERSIONS: Homosexuality, Fascism and the Modernist Imaginary (1996) or the late Lacoue-Labarthe's HEIDEGGER, ART AND POLITICS (1990).

The sky is falling on our heads

At the end of his book, Griffin draws attention to a BBC News report from September 1998. “The sky is falling” it announces dramatically (shades of Asterix and Obelix here) “The height of the sky has dropped by 8km in the last 38 years, according to scientists from the British Antarctic Survey. Greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide are believed to be responsible for creating the effect.” He goes on to speculate, “Had Nietzsche been philosophizing at the beginning of the twenty-first century instead of the end of the nineteenth, amidst Swiss glaciers shrivelling under skies where the abstract art of vapour trails punctures illusions of transcending Good and Evil, maybe he would have 'rethought all his ideas' in a different, greener 'framework'. Instead of railing against the advent of 'nihilism', 'decadence' and 'the last man', he might have realized that the time for any sort of 'eternal return' is rapidly running out in a literal, not symbolic sense.” In the intervening 9 years since that ominous BBC report, our carbon emissions have escalated tremendously while our climate has deteriorated further, thanks to global capitalism, free market economics, liberalism, population increase, mass migration across borders and above all the profound weakness and myopia in confronting the issue which is inherent to liberal democracies. We need to get a grip.

*not the frivolous, glamourized Sally Bowles Weimar “decadence” that the word conjures up in the minds of many gay men, but rather the very real awareness of decay; that all our greatest achievements as a civilization – the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Moonshots – are behind us.

Pagan Regeneration

REVIEW: ON BEING A PAGAN. Alain de Benoist (Ultra, Atlanta, 2004)

My initial impression of reading Alain de Benoist is of being pleasantly accosted by the archetypal French philosopher and being taken to a Paris café where the author engages in vibrant, passionate argument across a table stacked with bottles of red wine while gesticulating with a Gitane. By the end of the first few chapters this impression of frivolity has dissipated as the force of de Benoist's argument takes over. His style is vivid, knowledgeable and playful – but the ideas he plays with are profound and soon the idea and the power of his position take dominance. The chatty French voice is overwhelmed by the strength and depth of his arguments and insights.

In the bulk of the book, de Benoist compares and contrasts Europe's original Aryan spirituality with the later infestation of Semitic monotheism from the Middle East. Here is a polemic for anyone who desires to understand how truly corrosive Semitic monotheism has been in Europe, not just on homosexuality and sexuality generally, but more profoundly and shockingly on the deepest strata of Aryan (here called Indo-European, presumably out of politeness) psyche and culture. Jews/ Christians/ Muslims are shown as introducing an alien antithesis to the core beliefs of our culture. Whatever the prevailing Aryan cultural values of any particular time, you can be sure that the Semitic monotheists believed the opposite.

Towards the end of the book, de Benoist embarks on a description and history of non-dualist mystical philosophy in Europe. Non-dualism is a tricky subject: it is the one mode of thought that forever slips from the grasp of expression (like trying to explain the 4-dimensional space-time continuum, or quantum mechanics). When I worked at Watkins esoteric bookshop off Charing Cross Road, we had a whole floor dedicated to non-dualist/ advaita literature. So much to say so little! Alain de Benoist’s last few chapters are no different, yet he makes a better bash of it than most, and importantly puts the subject into a European cultural context.

Once again in a recent book review, I feel compelled to say a word about what I consider to be a mis-matched front cover, that reminds me more than anything of the rather lurid covers favoured by American publishers Llewellyn to adorn their pagan book titles ten years ago. Some people may enjoy the artwork of Madeline von Foerster, with its graphic depiction of Odin flanked by his totem animal symbols of wolf and raven, lifting in his one hand a drinking horn and in the other gesturing the reader to accept the offering of an eye of wisdom. I would prefer a cover inspired by 1930s political poster art, or a science-fiction-style spacescape depicting Imperial battleships patrolling a hazardous solar system at the further reaches of our galaxy, bringing order to chaos. Both alternatives would be just as fitting.

GAPS IN GERMANY'S NEW RIGHT

REVIEW: GERMANY'S NEW RIGHT AS CULTURE AND POLITICS. Roger Woods (Palgrave, Basingstoke 2007)

In this clear and workmanlike report and assessment of the New Right in Germany, Roger Woods first of all examines the cultural background, then goes on to explore the problematic Conservative Revolutionary and National Socialist legacy, New Right values and programmes, before reaching a somewhat downbeat conclusion. “The New Right project of providing itself with a cultural dimension as a solid foundation for new political thinking has not gone according to plan” says Woods, early-on.

Woods outlines three phases of New Right development in Germany since 1968; firstly as a meta-political movement taking its lead from the French New Right interpretation of Gramsci and culture combined with 1970s ideology, then the period 1982-1989 when the New Right served as a right wing corrective to right wing German Federal and Land governments and also in the historians dispute, and finally from 1989, after the collapse of socialism, when issues of national identity came to the fore.

The most interesting parts of the book deal with the ambiguous inheritance of Conservative Revolutionary thinkers of the Weimar Republic and the background of cultural pessimism. Woods emphasizes the uncertainty many German New Right thinkers betray despite promoting traditional values such as the Church, Family, Nation/ State. The cultural pessimist insight is that all these ideas have been tried, and failed, and that modernity in all its aspects is irreversible. With the current ecological crisis of climate change and industrial pollution, as Botho Strauss points out, not even nature can be relied upon. The quest for institutions that can embody transcendental values is abandoned. It is this feeling of resignation that allows German New Right thinkers like Martin Schwarz to contemplate compromise with Islam: “In a speech to the right wing organization Synergon Deutschland Martin Schwarz declares that if Europeans were to adopt the principles of Islam their nations would flourish”. “We live in a time of chaos and disintegration. If we wish to survive we must not convince ourselves that our main aim is to confront those people who are being uprooted and tossed around as the old order disintegrates...There is no Islamic conspiracy to bring down the West!” - Martin Schwarz.

Opposed to this defeatism are a minority including Pierre Krebs of Thule Seminar: “In the land of Nietzsche and Wagner, Bach and Kant, Clausewitz and Thomas Münzer a single word could fan the red glow of history back to life, smash to pieces half a century of dictatorial 'reeducation' that thought it could displace this word from the mind of a whole people without encountering any resistance”.

From an English perspective, this cultural pessimism may seem a result of over-intellectualizing and the particular, awkward memory for Germans of the NSDAP. If, as it is commonly held, Europe is a Symphony of Nations, then we have already heard the majesty of Mussolini and the sombre, expressionist tones of German National Socialism; yet England, the Celtic lands, Scandinavia, central Europe and Russia have so far remained silent. Let Russia sing and England and France take up the reprise! (Britain's particular excuse for European dis-engagement has been its global empire, its invention of the modern world, and currently its maintenance through force, financial power and flim-flam of that same decaying world).

Unfortunately, there is a significant oversight of which this book is guilty. I would argue that the major fault with the German New Right, and Woods account of it, is a lack of awareness of our true, shared pre-Christian Aryan heritage. As for Christianity, there seems little point in falling back on the tradition of a religion if that religion is wrong; and not only wrong, but destructive. German religious traditionalists are still mainly Christian, thereby continuing the Semitic monotheist intrusion into Aryan spirituality. How can Germans “return” to a faith that caused them so much physical and mental harm, from encouraging Charlemagne to slaughter thousands of pagan Saxons in order to force conversion, or that wasted Germany for generations after the carnage of the Thirty Years War?

Neither Roger Woods nor the examples he cites have much time for the insights of European paganism and the apparent pre-Christian Aryan ideology uncovered by Indo-Europeanists like Georges Dumezil and Alby Stone. European pagan metaphysics in conjunction with the ideas of Western philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger and the political outlook of Evola and Yockey can provide meaning, to resist the onslaught of nihilist modernism and the doubts and uncertainties expressed by New Right thinkers in Germany. This is where the German New Right, and the New Right across Europe, will find the “fixed points”, the traditions, the models for a functioning society, and the new elan – the new spirit of adventure, hope, and destiny – for which the German New Right, and many Europeans more generally, have been searching.

This new spirit must originate from and embody the European Faustean sensibility; it must embrace synthesis, science and technology: “The fascist is obsessed with an ideal of Modernity and youth: he wants to create a new man, a lover of sport and autosport, living in a new city which has been given new life by futuristic architecture. He is an admirer of Le Cobusier, Marinetti, Gropius. He loves motors, mechanical engineering and speed.” - Zeev Sternhell, quoted on p68.


I have just two caveats for a book that is otherwise fair as far as it goes:
- for a book published in mid-2007, the references don't extend beyond Summer 2004 at the latest, as far as I can see. I don't blame the author for this; publication schedules are often delayed.
- secondly, the front cover appears to be a (totally uncredited) photograph of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. According to the text within, “For the New Right, however, the Holocaust memorial is 'the last testament of the generation of 68'. Before they retire they want to deal Germany a blow which will shake it to its core. Junge Freiheit quotes Rudolf Augustein's view that the memorial is aimed against the newly emerging Germany in Berlin and the sovereignty that Germany had taken so long to restore”. To choose this particular image to illustrate the cover of a book on Germany's New Right is singularly inappropriate, almost a calculated insult directed at the book's readers.