For a Positive Critique, Part 2

1,939 words

Part 2 of 5

Part 1 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here

A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS

Nothing is less spontaneous than the revolutionary consciousness. The revolutionary is wholly conscious of the struggle engaged between Nationalism, bearer of the creative and spiritual values of the West, and Materialism under its liberal or Marxist forms. He is free from the prejudices, from the falsehoods, and from the conditioned reflexes with which the régime defends itself. The political education that permits one to be free of these is obtained by personal experience, of course, but especially through the learning that only study can bring. Without this education, the most courageous and most audacious man is only a puppet manipulated by the régime. According to circumstances, the régime pulls the strings that regulate his behavior: patriotism, blind anti-communism, the fascist menace, legalism, the unity of the army, etc. Through a permanent one-way propaganda, to which everybody is subjected to from childhood, the régime, in its many aspects, has progressively intoxicated the French people. All the nations under democratic rule are at this point. Any critical intelligence, any personal thinking is destroyed. It is sufficient for the keywords to be pronounced to trigger the conditioned reflexes and suppress any reasoning.

Spontaneity allows the conditioned reflexes to remain. It leads only to revolts, so easy to defuse or to divert with a few superficial concessions, a few bones to chew on, or a few changes of scenery. And so it was many times with the French Algerians, the army, and the “nationals.”

In the face of mortal danger, it is possible to set up a defensive front. The Resistance at the end of the last war and the OAS are examples. The issue of the fight was a question of life or death; the physical struggle against the physical force of the visible adversary can be total, without pity. Supposing that the revolt triumphs, as soon as the peril is averted, the front explodes into multiple clans, and the mass of partisans, having no more reason to fight, returns to its familiar tasks, demobilizes, and entrusts the city that had been saved to those who had lost it in the first place.

France and Europe must accomplish their nationalist revolution in order to survive. Superficial changes will not strike what is evil. Nothing will be done until the germs of the régime are extirpated to the last root. For this, it is necessary to destroy its political organization, overthrow its idols and its dogmas, eliminate its official and secret masters, show the people how much it had been deceived, exploited, soiled. Then, reconstruction. Not on paper constructions, but on a young and revolutionary élite, imbued with a new conception of the world. Can the action that must impose this revolution be conceived without the direction of a revolutionary doctrine? Certainly not. How can you oppose an adversary that is armed with a well-tested dialectic, rich with long experience, powerfully organized, without ideology, without method?

NO REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINE, NO REVOLUTION!

Even when it assumes military forms, the revolutionary struggle is above all psychological. How to conduct it, how to convert and inspire new partisans, without a clear definition of the new ideology, without doctrine? A doctrine understood, not as an group of abstractions, but as a rudder for thought and action.

Maintaining the moral offensive of its own partisans, communicating its convictions to waverers, are two indispensable conditions for the development of Nationalism. It has been proved that in action or in prison, when demoralization is close by, when the adversary seems to triumph, the educated militants, whose coherent thought supports their faith, have superior powers of resistance.

A new doctrinal development is the only answer to the infinite division of activists. There is no doubt about the unifying value of action. It is obvious. But this unification cannot be durable and useful without ideological unification around a sound doctrine. The editor of France-Observateur, the functionary of the SFIO, the communist, all have the same ideology in common: Marxism. Their doctrinal reference is therefore the same, their conception of the world is similar. The words they use have the same meaning. They belong to the same family. Despite their profound divisions in action, they all concurrently impose the same ideology. It is not so in the national opposition. The activists do not recognize any common ancestors. Some are fascistic, others are Maurrasians, others are Integrists, and all these categories contain many variants. Their only unity is negative: anti-communism, anti-Gaullism. They do not understand each other. The words that they use—revolution, counter-revolution, nationalism, Europe, etc.—have different, indeed opposite meanings. How can they not oppose each other? How can they have the same ideology? Revolutionary unity is impossible without unity of doctrine.

The works of Marx are immense, unreadable, and obscure. A Lenin was needed to extract a clear body of doctrine and to transform this enormous hotchpotch into an effective weapon of political war. Nationalism has behind it its collective Marx, just as obscure and unsuitable as the companion of Engels could be for the Russia of 1903. It is imperative to create a collective Lenin.

Nationalism is the heir to an infinitely rich body of thought, but it is too diverse, incomplete, and vitiated with archaism. The time has come to make a synthesis and to add the attributes, the qualifying statements, imposed by the arrival of new problems. For example, a documented study on High Finance, or on the Doctrines of Nationalism, would constitute excellent approaches to answering this need.

The causes that precipitated, at the end of the nineteenth century, the birth of Nationalism as a political ideology (and not simply the awakening of the national consciousness in a narrow sense) have not varied much from that time. Nationalism was born from the critique of the liberal society of the nineteenth century. Later on, it was opposed to Marxism, the illegitimate child of liberalism.

Coming after the counter-Encyclopédistes, after the Positivists, after Taine and Renan, of whose teaching a part remains in Nationalism, Drumont and Barrès have outlined the permanent characters of this ideology, to which Charles Maurras, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Robert Brasillach, Alexis Carrel, and many others in Europe gave the collaboration of their own genius. Founded on a heroic conception of life, Nationalism, which is a return to the sources of popular community, intends to create new social relationships on a community base and to build a political order on the hierarchy of merit and value. Stripped from the narrow envelope imposed by an era, Nationalism has become a new political philosophy. European in its conceptions and its perspectives, it brings a universal solution to the problems posed to mankind by the technical revolution.

NATIONALIST PERSPECTIVES

The passivity of public opinion and the cowardice of traditional élites in the face of the events of Algeria have opened the eyes of all the men capable of reflection. Often at the price of painful revisions, of rupture with their past convictions, they regroup around a new definition of Nationalism. This is not the place to attempt a doctrinal test. Studies and confrontations will be necessary. It is, however, possible to outline the fundamental propositions.

CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM AND MARXISM

Liberalism could charm, for a time, by its appearance of generosity. Reality has dissipated this dream. This dead idea is today the camouflage of the hypocritical dictatorship of international capitalism encompassing all Western democracies.

The capitalist oligarchy was born at the end of the eighteenth century. The liberal ideas spread in that era in France were used to justify the combined interests of the high aristocracy and the rich against the authority of the central power that for a long time had kept them in check. This struggle of the large interests against the popular power (in this case the French monarchy) is found consistently over the ages. In organized societies, once the institutional envelope of monarchical or republican forms that hide realities has been stripped, one can discern two principal types of power: the first one is based on the people so as to contain the large interests, feudal or financial, the second is in the hands of the large interests so as to exploit the people. The first one identifies with the popular community and becomes the servant of its destiny, the second subjects the popular community for the sole satisfaction of its appetite.

Modern democracies, which belong to the second type, followed the evolution of capitalism, of which they were only the political emanation. Capitalism having lost its personal and national form to become financial and stateless, the democracies came under the control of the international financial groups. The few differences that remain between the latter cease as soon as the threat of a popular awakening appears. If the lies and the ruses in which they have become masters prove to be insufficient, they employ the more deadly weapons, the more violent restraints. They have never recoiled in front of genocide, atomic bombings, concentration camps, torture, and psychological rape.

The capitalist oligarchy is indifferent to the fate of national communities. Its goal is to satisfy an insatiable will to power through the economic domination of the world. Mankind and its civilizations are sacrificed for its purely materialistic designs, which parallel those of the Marxists. For the technocrats as well as the communists, man is an economic animal endowed with two functions: produce and consume. What cannot be measured by a slide rule is classed as superfluous. The superfluous must submit to the essential: economic output. Individualist tendencies, which are an inconvenience for the edification and the application of plans, must disappear. In the materialist societies, there is only room for the perfectly docile, homogeneous, and standardized masses.

Those who do not accept the conditioning of minds and the castration of the masses have to wear the label of “fascists.” To doubt the sincerity of the masters of opinion in a democracy or to challenge the contradictions of the “line” in a communist régime, refusing to compare the culture of the West to the prehistoric wailing of negritude or the morbid decomposition of a certain modernism, despising the “universal conscience,” smiling when one talks of the right of peoples to self-determination, are the proofs of a suspicious and rebellious spirit. Rebellion leads to physical elimination in a communist régime and to social elimination in a liberal régime. Thus, the one and the other destroy creative individualism and popular roots, the very essence of mankind and its community. They commit humanity to a dead end, to the worst kind of regression.

The history of mankind is one long effort to liberate itself from the laws of matter. Religion, art, science, and ethical rules are all conquests of the spirit and of the human will. The permanence of these victories has given birth to civilizations. Arbitrary creations of the sensibility, of the intelligence, and of the energy of peoples, civilizations develop and mature for as long as they maintain their creative power. The peoples who gave them birth lose the strength to defend themselves against external assaults when their original virtues and their vital energy disappear, and in turn their civilization follows into annihilation or decadence.

Such is the logical result of the exploitation of mankind by the caste of technocrats or by the “new ruling class.” These two forces come from the same philosophy.

Liberalism and Marxism have taken different paths which have brought them to oppose each other but which lead to the same result: the subjection of peoples first misled by the democratic myths. Democracy is the new opium of peoples.

Source: http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/venner.html