Counter-Currents
Gabriel von Max, “Reading Monkey,” circa 1900
5,363 words
Portuguese translation here
“If one construes a delusion as such, the will — if it wants to continue to exist — must create a new one.” — Nietzsche[1]
After perusing the two American Renaissance review essays posted to Counter-Currents on August 1, 2012, I couldn’t help feeling as I always did when I too was part of the American academy. I was struck dumb by the researchers’ inability to consider the role played by the prevailing order of knowledge in their conceptualization and implementation of research. Most people in the academy speak only of the “intellectual assumptions” of researchers, seeking to root-out the “prejudices and misconceptions” held by those involved in study that might bias their findings. However, the very essential, culture-specific understandings of the human – and what it means to be human – are never questioned, and liberal bourgeois reality (by now monolithically anti-racist, anti-white, and multicultural) adds another boulder to its fortress. Thus, the twin study had no need to critique bourgeois models of achievement; just as the altruism study understood the normalcy, legitimacy, and decency of multiculturalism.
Of course this makes perfect sense when one considers that every form of life[2] has always educated its members to embody its particular criterion of being human. It only becomes a problem when that criterion of being human creates degenerates in mind and body; or when men like us stand beyond the dominant order of knowledge, or episteme, only to be surrounded by the squalid reality it creates.
The subjects of research, especially in anthropology, my former field, are always already assumed to be bourgeois and liberal, even when they exist in one of the few spaces not-yet under the control of bourgeois liberalism, because most Americans at any intellectual level have difficulty contextualizing anything that they know. It’s not that it is just too easy to assume that female genital mutilation is abhorrent and a “problem” for all women; that people in Iran just want to be free; or that Italian fascists are parochial, homophobic, and racist; but that bourgeois American and Western cultural subjects – as human beings – live, believe, conceptualize, and therefore create the world, in the terms of a specific episteme.
For a racialist, race is everything; for a culturist, it is culture; for me, knowledge is everything – especially how it is produced and how it works to motivate behaviors.[3] What about political and economic forces? Materialism is an ideology – a framework that makes some things knowable and possible and other things unknowable and impossible. It is the same for History, biology, physics, psychology and every discipline in the academy. Each discipline and ideology operates within an episteme. Each episteme is a coherent set of values and evaluations that limit and direct the conditions of human possibility. Epistemes do so because of one basic fact about the human animal: we are a narratively driven species. We tell ourselves who, what, where, when, and how, we are. There is not a single aspect of human behavior that is not given content by a narrative. Eating, procreating, defecating, sleeping, just to name the most natural of behaviors, all make sense because of narrative. Saying so does not lessen the importance of the material aspects of being human. Instead, it points to a deeper way to understand why we do what we do.
While others like Alain de Benoist, Alexander Dugin, Pierre Krebs, Guillaume Faye, and Tomislav Sunic (not to mention Nietzsche, Evola, and Sorel) discuss liberalism and the bourgeois form of life epistemically, no one in the North American New Right has provided a framework for understanding how knowledge works and how bourgeois knowledge keeps us entangled in its web. Oddly enough this is a problem inherent in the name “new right” and its contradistinction from the “old right.” For what we point to with such a distinction is nothing less an epistemic shift, or conceptual revolution.
While some academics among us might still cling to the idea that reading the classics or our contemporaries is important just to know what they said (usually to be refuted and improved), seeing our problem epistemically – as a problem of knowledge – makes it important to read New Right thought so as to continue the task – begun by the classic and contemporary European New Right – of creating a new episteme, in short, a new ontology that creates the conceptual possibilities of our greatness. I propose that doing so will give the North American New Right a revolutionary impetus, and as such, a higher purpose than merely whitening America.
In essence, this paper is arguing on two fronts. On the first, it is a rather simplistic explanation of how knowledge is produced and how it functions. It is a short synthesis of an academic lifetime of theory and philosophy of knowledge, power, and transvaluation. It asks us to understand the consequences of our continued use of bourgeois, liberal, and modern concepts of “being human.” On the second, it is asking us to be more like our European brethren, who successfully inherited and built upon the thought of Nietzsche, Evola, and Sorel (my Big Three – feel free to add Schmitt, Ludovici, Jünger, etc.) to fight modern and postmodern man in a war of knowledge and concepts. Why this has never happened here, until now, is made clear in Sunic’s Homo Americanus,[4] and even Werner Sombart’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States.[5] Perhaps Americans “never had it in them” to critique bourgeois man, but I refuse to believe that our New Right wants to be “American.” Otherwise, we would just be campaigning for the Republicans and content to “get our country back.”
Before we get bogged-down discussing epistemes, lets try to understand how knowledge works.
How does knowledge work?
Knowledge is affective. It . . . produces . . . action. Plain and simple, it is the story needed to motivate a narratively driven species – such as our own – to move.
It is the force that molds our daemon into shapes and directions useful for whatever herd we live among. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, French poststructuralists that theorized the impact of capitalism and capitalist desire on the body, used a territorial model to explain how our bodily energy, puissance, or what the Greeks called daemon, is coded and disciplined to long for different forms of expression and redemption, in the form of pouvoir.[6] (It is possible to conceive expression metaphorically as form and redemption as content – but the latter is much more important and value-laden than that. It is moral in content, but more so a question of what process of accumulation is considered optimal in a form of life. It can be argued that Homeric Greek life offered heroic redemption, Medieval Christianity offered spiritual redemption, and bourgeois liberal modernity offers material redemption to those who most fully embrace its system of truths and valuations.) Anyone who has read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality knows that he explained the function of moralistic knowledge in similar terms, but leaving aside the hypnotic postmodern language of Deleuze and Guattari.[7]
This primordial and bodily energy perhaps originally existed as a way to ensure procreation and self-preservation, what is commonly called “fight or flight.” With the development of language, however, it became bound-up with communication and the social manipulation of desire. It was, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialized – brought from its bodily domain of sex and violence – and reterritorialized into something useful for a more complex aggregation of people.
Although this description makes us visualize a repressive and manipulative process, in fact it is creative and gentle. Nietzsche talked about the mind’s will to order, organize, control, repress, direct, to impose limits upon, and ultimately to discipline sensory information.[8] Deleuze and Guattari subsumed this form of will within the body’s production of desire, thereby explaining that the subordination and ordering of puissance is not a cursory imposition on the ways in which we are expected to live, but the very production of reality and lived experience. From the perspective of desire, life (puissance) and the government of life (pouvoir) are one and the same. With the impossibility of the thing-in-itself in mind, pouvoir would be the only way we can consciously know desire – as a desire for. In other words, knowledge directs, organizes, and disciplines desire, and in so doing normalizes the government of life. Thus, we cannot be liberated from this process, even if liberalism would have us believe otherwise, as I will explain below.
From where does knowledge come?[9]
Knowledge comes in the form of narrative, whether popular, academic, political, artistic, or religious. For epistemologists, besides attempted models of interpersonal knowledge-implementation (for example, why capitalism is able to keep us striving after a never-ending series of “person defining” objects of consumption, to the point that we actually release endorphins when shopping and consuming), the most valuable targets of inquiry are the truth regimes that produce the most useful and important information in the episteme. Thus, in the modern bourgeois world, the sciences attract the most attention. Coming to this highly philosophical form of inquiry from Black Studies, I was always more concerned with the creation of altruism than with the creation of psychological and medical diagnoses.[10] In any case, a truth regime is the methods of producing, enforcing, and protecting truth and the epistemic bases of being human.[11] Foucault coined the phrase “truth regime” in order to make sensible his assumption that science and scientific knowledge are bound to sources of epistemic power. It is not just politics and economics that control what we know but a system that makes our beliefs true and justifies their status as knowledge. Because the vast majority of modern men are not reading Foucault but watching Fox News, they can still assume that the epistemological status of knowledge claims is independent of the operations of power. For us, however, it is imperative that we begin to think of our project as an epistemic break.
Interestingly, Foucault was motivated in his intellectualism by Nietzsche, and was one of the main proponents of “Nietzsche as postmodern democrat.” Nonetheless, what remains of “our Nietzsche” in Foucault is often put to stunning use. For instance, in “Truth and Power,” Foucault explains that the fundamental political problem (facing us, the New Right) is not merely to criticize what currently passes for truth, or to change people’s consciousness, but to detach “the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.”[12] In other words, we must begin the creation of a new regime of truth; and the political question becomes a question of a new narrative itself. Where Nietzsche is present, here, is in the assumption that truth is given power epistemically and that any victory for us can only be grounded in a new episteme.[13]
As we are beginning to see, knowledge works by directing our primal energies, and knowledge is produced in accord with the epistemic bases of forms of life. Knowledge is always a system that makes sense. As such, some things are knowable and others are unknowable. Once, our present condition was beyond the realm of possibility.
Things change, however. There are a small handful of scholars associated with preeminent Stanford University professor Sylvia Wynter that study the epistemic shifts that culminated with the creation of chattel slavery and the racial human. Moving from Papal usage of Aristotle to “make sense” of New World natives, to the transformation of feudalism into capitalism, they read the History of the species as a path toward universalized altruism.[14] For these scholars, modernity is a problem, but not as it is for us. Where we experience modernity as an epoch built on the domestication of European man and the destruction of his traditions and capacities for violent self-defense (among other things), they experience modernity as those who are desperate to believe in the French Revolution. In other words, they want the modern West to be more modern – more free, egalitarian, and universally fraternal. I mention this not only to highlight how it is possible to understand our situation epistemically, but to demonstrate how the truth regime of anti-racism helped their cause. For none of the academic criticism leveled at Wynter and her compatriots ever mentioned the political nature of the research or questioned the morality of promoting universal altruism as progressive. The episteme (and its various operative regimes of truth) made those concerns unknowable.
Linguist Philip Lieberman, one of Wynter’s favorite sources, sought to explain the relationship between valuation and altruism by discovering from where the two entered the human experience. His work is astonishing for two reasons: how clearly he explains the power of narrative and the relationship between altruism and morality, and for failing to contextualize his own work epistemically. Resulting from the biological development of the brain and supralaryngeal tools needed to produce human speech, he surmised that a new type of cognitive capacity evolved. This was the human ability to construct linguistically encoded behaviors such as those controlled by systems of morality and ethics.[15] “These developments enabled us to induce the modes of altruism that bond us together as groups. In consequence, . . . in place of the genetic programs that regulate the behaviors of all organic species, we developed . . . culture-specific programs by which our human behaviors – cognizing, affective, and actional – came to be . . . regulated.”[16]
This is the same conclusion reached by Nietzsche. After first exploring the link between language and consciousness, and concluding that conscious thought, that which takes the form of language, is the shallowest form of thought because it is designed only to connect one person to another, Nietzsche then seeks to understand how consciousness is connected to human social forms. “Consciousness,” he says, “belongs not to man’s existence as an individual but rather to the community and herd-aspects of his nature; it developed only in relation to its usefulness to the herd. Consequently, we may only know ourselves through what is average and knowable from the herd’s perspective. We know exactly as much as is useful to the human herd.”[17]
Lieberman continues his explication of the development of altruism to demonstrate how technology has allowed the human to burst outward from its small (pre-modern) communities to populate every continent and harness the forces of nature. We have done so, however, having surpassed the narrowness of the still operational altruistic models of previous centuries. While slavery, for example, was once a universal component of human forms of life, it is now “universally outlawed” (thanks to our ever advancing moral and ethical systems). Unfortunately, he says, race, the bane of one of its later variants – American racial slavery – is still “unconquered.”[18]
In arguing thus, Lieberman demonstrates not only that ethico-behavioral systems were narratively driven, but also that they continue to be. For nowhere in his book on the evolution of altruistic behaviors and their relationship to morality does he feel the need to quantify his own moral positions – nor his use of these positions to justify the idea that the species is progressing because of its moral-ethical aversion to slavery. Nor, obviously, does he need to explain that “racial prejudice” is abhorrent.
Indeed, language is not epiphenomenal to the social structures in which it acts, but a very part of those structures. Alexander Dugin argues that the human is not derived from any thing-in-itself but from politics. The political system, he says, “gives us our shape.”[19] This is a narratively driven process, given that “the political system has an intellectual and conceptual power . . . to shape the paradigm, integrated in society through state institutions.”[20] This paradigm, or episteme, he continues, is what “constitutes us . . . Politics grants us our political status, our name, and our anthropological structure.”[21] He concludes his epistemic demolition of the primacy of bourgeois man by explaining that the shift from the traditional to the modern state was not only marked by a transformation of political institutions but by a “transformation of man at the most fundamental level.”[22] It is upon us, he says, to similarly move beyond the operative modern (and postmodern) conception of our species. Doing so, however, cannot be achieved materially.
Fernand Hallyn agrees, proposing that “frames of signification” organize “poetically,” that is, through language and grammar, to provide, among other things, the boundaries and boundary markers between “us and them.” He terms this process the “poetics of the propter nos” – the “us” on whose behalf “we” act.[23] To the chagrin of American New Right racialists, Francis Parker Yockey understood that race is a concept that can only be understood in the context of liberalism. As Michael O’Meara explains, “The scientific concept of race arose as the self-interested view of the culture-opposing bourgeoisie, whose materialism denied the significance of spirit, soul, and heritage – dismissed not just as forms of aristocratic privilege, but as mere superstructural offshoots of an inherently ‘irrational’ world.”[24] In other words, the concept of the biologically racial human leaves us irrevocably tied to the form of life that made such a concept possible.
Pierre Krebs takes a similar approach to question of peoples and races. As a European, Krebs has a lifetime of interaction with those close-knit cultural and linguistic groups who understand themselves as a people. These peoples have now become the basis of European resistances to standardization.[25] Taking their perspective, Krebs is able to pick apart various truth regimes – History, humanity, and even race – and show how their epistemic embeddedness not only determines their creative power (think: methodology will always generate the results it is designed to produce) but also problems for those of us seeking to live in a “racial” but not multiracial or multicultural society. In the case of Europe, whiteness is a hard sell. It is too American – too caught up in the capitalist demolition of uniqueness and particularity to make much sense – too epistemically bound to America, that is.
Krebs’ critique of race stems from an epistemic approach to our problem and a fine reading of Nietzsche. Krebs is aware, as Heidegger said, that to name a thing is to call it into being.[26] If we call ourselves into being based on the epistemic truths of the world we seek to destroy, ultimately we may be less successful than we presume. For the concepts we currently use to know and create man and the world are inherently tied to the episteme we fight. In these terms, Nietzsche’s insistence that we think differently from our enemies becomes less abstract, as is Tomislav Sunic’s call for mental decolonization.[27]
With Lieberman and Wynter’s explanation of the origin and functioning of altruism above, we have a decent example of how liberal truth regimes work – and an ironic one at that, given how readily they pick and choose what to castigate in modernity. To move toward a conclusion, I want to contrast how liberalism and fascism understand knowledge. This will also make my position more clear.
How does liberalism understand knowledge to work?
Knowledge, like everything else in the liberal form of life, has been neutered and packaged for mass consumption. It is safe. It is horizontal. It is neutral. It has no value and is disconnected from power, let alone regimes of truth. The assumed neutrality of knowledge is apparent when parents are told “reading is essential to your child’s development.” First, development is one of the favorite concepts of the liberal psychological truth regime. It will unfailingly bring a particular type of person into existence – one whose achievements will be measured monetarily and whose happiness will be measured by a lack of aggression, violence, or overly critical thought. Second, reading is never value neutral. Each and every word that passes our eyes and ears is designed to impact the flow of desire – to get you to move, and usually to a shopping mall. Bourgeois liberalism makes us believe knowledge is neutral, and then has us killing over X-Boxes. In short, liberal knowledge has no function beyond being consumed.
Liberalism inherited what Nietzsche described as the original truth regime: the Judeo-Christian God. Truth was given a source, and one so foolproof that to question it was to burn for eternity. Modern science, with its teleological reasoning and heretic creating power, inherited God’s throne as lone source of truth. Like God, it too creates beings in its own image: psychologized pussies, genetically determined automatons, and ethnically relative but “more real than whites” darkies.
The science that gives us these truths believes without irony that its methodologies are apolitical and unrelated to the results that always miraculously demonstrate that the human is inherently bourgeois. (Oops, see how easy it is to slip? The human MUST by definition be bourgeois, for nothing can pre-exist its conceptualization.) The most obvious and egregious of scientific offenders is History. One may have noticed I never write history. Those with a sense of the “problem of History,” those perhaps only partially epistemically resigned, will say, “[h]istory is what really happened, while History is what we write about it,” but events do not make History – only Historians do; and History is about nothing but valuation.
A perfect example of how the New Right attempts to address this epistemic problem is Greg Johnson’s essay on Holocaust revisionism.[28] First, Dr. Johnson separates “history from Historiography,” a break that I see as superfluous, being prompted, as it is, by a materialist (bourgeois) conception of historical and phenomenological process. Secondly, he brilliantly points out that it is the narrative of the Holocaust that is used as a moral truncheon and not any event associated with it; thus demonstrating that the disciplinary effects of the Holocaust can be understood best as a truth regime. It makes certain things knowable and others unknowable.
Finally, because liberalism assumes that knowledge is naturally neutral and that truth is value free, it has us believe that only its enemies (like us) “manipulate” knowledge. This manipulation they call propaganda. At best, however, propaganda should merely designate knowledge, because how liberal scholars describe it is exactly how knowledge works, period. It is ironic that liberalism accused fascism of propaganda, because far from propagandizing, it merely demanded its subjects understand that knowledge manipulates and to accept the possibilities of manipulation.
How does fascism understand knowledge to work?
While Capitalism and Communism, the two dominant liberal political philosophies, assume the biological and economic bases of being human, human equality, and the primacy of the pursuit of comfort (Capitalism) or mechanical production (Communism), fascism assumes that the human is a narratively driven creature that must be inspired to sacrifice, commitment, and discipline.[29] For many, seeing Communism described as a liberal political philosophy might seem outrageous. But, when it is studied epistemically, one discovers that there is nothing in Communism that disputes the liberal economic man and his disassociation from Tradition and heroic valuation. Far from “Third Way” economic strategies, this is the crucial difference between liberalism and fascism.
Fascist knowledge is never neutral. It never produces anything accidentally. And it never comes without a price. Derrida coined the expression “logics of parergonality” to name the way in which the establishment of any system as a system suggests a beyond to it; consisting of what the system excludes either by virtue of what it cannot comprehend or of what it prohibits in order to accomplish its systematic objectives.[30] Fascist intellectuals under the tutelage of Giovanni Gentile utilized a similar conceptualization and critique of bourgeois liberal truth. Gentile, then in charge of the creation of a fascist pedagogy – and thus laying the very foundation of a fascist episteme – was concerned with what the liberal understanding of knowledge left out, and more importantly, what it produced with what it included. He determined, as had Nietzsche, that the bourgeois form of life (specifically Anglo-Saxon) was constructing the limits of human possibilities in the most mediocre, base, and vulgar terms, thus normalizing and even lionizing cowardice, greed, and indifference.[31]
Fascism understood that the “Italian people” needed to be created, but only in very certain terms. In order to do so, they set about controlling and directing the truth regimes of the nation. Just as the bourgeois liberal system of truth production insures that we value materialism and comfort above all else, the fascist government sought to limit available knowledge to that which inspires people to pride, responsibility, concentrated identity, and narrowly defined altruism.[32] Through Romanità, the cult of Roman greatness, the fascists literally attempted to implement Nietzsche’s beautiful formulation of History: “History must speak only of the great and unique, of the model to be emulated.”[33] This was no vulgar propaganda or brainwashing, but instead a more noble and heroic use of knowledge.
Recently a Counter-Currents reader admonished me for subjecting my son to a similar restriction and direction of knowledge and desire. His or her assumption, I presume, was that “one cannot think for their children and must set them free to become who they might.” A more bourgeois understanding of knowledge I can hardly imagine. I had to assume as I stared in wonder at the Counter-Currents site that this person believed that handing my son over to liberalism and allowing him – the STANDARD BEARER OF OUR SPECIES, the FUTURE of my family’s name – to drift aimlessly from one multicultural, cowardice-inspiring, strip-mall parking lot to another is somehow more noble, more valuable to our species, than teaching him about Greece, Rome, HIS Gods, and the thousands upon thousands of examples of bravery, honor, decency, brilliance, mastery, and brotherhood harbored by his and our people. No, you are right dear reader, Sesame Street and its multicultural morality serves us much better. But I digress.
“What an extraordinary lack of books exuding heroic force in our time,” mused Nietzsche, as he pondered the “struggle of knowledge against knowledge.”[34] It is this struggle in which we must be engaged – not necessarily the struggle to ethnically cleanse liberal America. Greg Johnson once said “In a White Nationalist society we will still be arguing about drug legalization, gay rights, environmentalism, abortion, etc..”[35] And he is right, unless we epistemically unpack the bourgeois conception of the human that makes the modern nation-state possible. Remember, the truths, the concepts given highest authority in the liberal form of life, are not only designed to maintain that form of life but to create a certain type of human. If we create an all-white liberal state, we will have done nothing to arrest the decline of our species. However, if we can reconceptualize our war in Nietzsche’s terms, with a deep understanding of our true enemy, we will instead create a fatherland where a rights-based man at war with the natural world and his own instincts will be unthinkable and unknowable.
Fascism was founded upon the heroic, aristocratically radical, thought of the Counter-Enlightenment (a debatable but sympathetic term for the threads of European thought that opposed the various moves toward standardization and degradation culminating in 19th Century modernity)[36] and sought to resacralize life through myths, legends, and narratives of greatness, strength, and honor. It created a politics to reestablish hierarchy, the will, and a more natural estimation of the human – all with a will to creating a new man. In other words, it was breaking with the liberal episteme, not in order to liberate a marketplace, but instead to create a more noble, heroic, and virile man. Fascism understood that all knowledge is designed to manipulate understanding and behavior. No knowledge is value neutral.
Some famous Christian said, “the truth will set you free.” We know, however, that it will only set you free to be manipulated by another truth. It is past the time for us to “imagine the unimaginable,”[37] to transvaluate liberal values,[38] and to fully embrace the Counter-Enlightenment – the only epistemic enemy that liberalism has ever known – and the revolutionary power of the New Right. As Evola explains, until a choice and commitment of that magnitude is made, we may be utility to “the democratic, bourgeois, [and] humanistic” episteme that corresponds “with the advent of an inferior human type,” but never to one in which man is natural, hierarchical, or dutiful to the harshness and exactitude in which greatness thrives.[39]
Notes
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 201.
[2] I use form of life in place of the bourgeois concept of culture. It comes from Nietzsche, who used it casually but descriptively, of particular and unique human communities and epistemes. The true force of the Nietzschean concept, however, is in his assumption that forms of life are perpetually at war with each other – one of the material manifestations of the will to power.
[3] Knowledge in this usage means something closer to narrative. Thus it encompasses wisdom, information, and opinion.
[4] Tomislav Sunic, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (Tomislav Sunic, 2007).
[5] See this review essay by American Socialist professor Eric Foner: http://webspace.newschool.edu/~nevesr39/Data/Foner_socialism%20US.pdf
[6] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Hurley, Seem, and Lane. (New York: The Viking Press, 1972).
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[8] Nietzsche, Late Notebooks.
[9] This paper is not directed toward a debate on idealism, empiricism, or transcendentalism. Instead it is designed to promote awareness of the power of knowledge.
[10] For a truly incredible explanation of the creation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, see Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
[11] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power, ed. James D. Faubian. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The Free Press, 2000), pp. 131–33.
[12] Foucault, p. 133.
[13] See Nietzsche’s note “On Combating Determinism,” in Writings from the Late Notebooks, pp. 154–57.
[14] Sylvia Wynter, “1492 A New World View” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Hyatt and Nettleford. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
[15] Philip Lieberman, Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 22–35.
[16] Wynter, 7.
[17]Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) pp. 211–14.
[18] Lieberman, 172
[19] Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, ed. John Morgan, trans. Mark Sleboda and Michael Millerman. (London: Arktos, 2012), 169.
[20] Dugin, 169.
[21] Dugin, 169–70.
[22] Dugin, p. 170.
[23] Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. Donald M. Leslie. (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 55.
[24] Michael O’Meara, “Yockey’s Manifesto of European Destiny,” in Francis Parker Yockey, The Proclamation of London (Indianapolis: The Palingenesis Project, 2012) , p. xxxix.
[25] Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance, ed. John Morgan, trans. Dr. Alexander Jacob. (London: Arktos, 2012), pp. 56–57.
[26] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 198.
[27] Foreword, Krebs, p. 12.
[28] Greg Johnson, “Dealing with the Holocaust” http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/07/dealing-with-the-holocaust/
[29] Benito Mussolini, Mussolini as Revealed in his Political Speeches November 1914-August 1923, ed. and trans. Barone Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1923), p. 11.
[30] Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Bennington and McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
[31] A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), pp. 50–51.
[32] Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 100–101.
[33] Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas. Trans. Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 95.
[34] Nietzsche, Early Notebooks, p. 102.
[35] Greg Johnson, “Smells Like White Guilt: Christian Lander’s Whiter Shades of Pale,” in Confessions of a Reluctant Hater (San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2010) 30.
[36] As such, it can be traced back to the Peloponnesian War, and perhaps farther.
[37] Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age, ed. John Morgan, trans. Sergio Knipe (London: Arktos, 2010), p. 20.
[38] Nietzsche, Genealogy.
[39] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, ed. Michael Moynihan, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002), p 197.
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30 comments
Mark Dyal in blockquote:
“Our true enemy” is, and we defeat them how, at the personal and organizational level?
A first step in our defeating “our true enemy” is to contribute financially to counter-currents, each and every month. The ultimate temporal end to these efforts must be the formation of a Northwest Republic.
I couldn’t agree more about supporting Counter-Currents. We need spaces like this to spearhead our coming renaissance.
As for your question, the process must begin with each of us overcoming the bourgeois self that modernity has made of us. Then, perhaps a true colonial scenario will play out. Covington is only partially correct in saying that it is the accountants that pull the plug. He fails to mention that they only do so after the radicals have liquidated the apologists and then made the situation untenable financially.
Thanks for commenting. This piece was hard – taken from academic sources – so I suspect it is far less clear than I think.
Mark Dyal:
My issue with “deconstructionists” is they are rather like libertarians, in that they never address what happens after “x” is removed. The French deconstructionists certainly had the strength of their analysis undermined by those who filled the power vacuum their philosophy helped foster. So, too, do our libertarians refuse to understand that they will replace government as they know it with corporate governance, and corporate capture of the regulatory mechanisms. The “invisible hand” will be tied behind their backs, on their way to the gallows. Certainly, they would be the first to be placed up against the wall and decimated, the first tenth making excellent examples for the other nine-tenths. So it went in the French Revolution, so it went in the Bolshevik Revolution, and so it will go for the useful, as long as they are useful. Then they will be useless, and eminently expendable, again. as examples.
What must be restored is a primal ordering at a higher level of spiritual development, necessary for the further outworking of the process of Civilization. I suspect that this will be revealed as the Pagan Gnosticism Form of Christianity, the outworking of Christ in a higher level of social development, and a reordering of the complexities of the social order. Collapse functions – and you seem to be describing a personal/group/nation version of the Red Pill – require disintermediation of archaic linkages, supporting obsolete support systems.
We see a lot of this in the historically defined model of White Nationalism, particularly the archaic form we call “NVJ” = “News and Views about the Jews.” This thinking is close enough to monocausalism in practice, as it is used to rationalize personal and organizational impotence in practice. It has led to too many people saying to our analysis, “Yes, you’re right. NOW WHAT?”
THAT formulation is what wins first prize, as organization, no matter how modest, defeats disorganization, every time, ten for ten.
I would argue that this new formulation of Christianity – the Living Spirit of Western Civilization – leads pretty directly to the formation of a new nation, a national Homeland based on a Positive Theory of Race, “Where None May Make Afraid.”
I believe what you are describing is the deconstruction of the Persona. This is what we call Taking The Red Pill. It is, in its own right, an Initiation Event, and opens doors to higher levels of Awareness that can not be closed. Failed, it induces the functional equivalent of soft schizophrenia. Successful, you realize that where Others see the Sunset, YOU see the Sunrise it implies, and work to make the better world manifest in the New Dawn.
Deconstruction is only the first step; Reconstruction, on higher grounds, is the next.
I think that is not inconsistent with what you are saying, and places it in a context that supports North American New Right thinking.
Of course, this requires one and all send money to counter-currents monthly.
Great point about your son. We have to develop the counter revolutionary meme that public school is child abuse.
I think of Liberalism as a Religion before all else. Sociologist Robert Putnam discovered that Multi-Culturalism had horrible effects on individual and social life. People withdrew – not only from the Babel but even from their own ethnic group. So did he change his philosopy? Not a bit of it: she suppressed his findings for years afraid that they would strengthen the Right and the anti-immigration narrative. He vowed that we “must keep on trying”. Why? It’s just wrong. But it doesn’t matter – it’s Faith.
Thus Western Liberalism has exceeded the mind control of the old Commuist Regimes. Party Officials don’t have to ban books anymore – the offenders will do so themselves on themselves.
The blog Cambria Will Not Yield explores this idea from many different angles and mourns the fall of Europe with an unspeakable passion and agony. The intellect and its naturalism are both too thin and pale to be the religion per se. That’s where Blacks come in as the embodiment of “life” and being Mr Natural.
Thanks for the blog plug. I’ll check it out.
I actually forgot to discuss liberalism as the ultimate totalitarianism. I’m sure you’d agree with such an argument.
Cambria will not yield is a Chrisitan Blog – the Christianity of William Blake perhaps. The author might call himself a Kinist or Christian Identity – not sure. But he was a professor of English Literature and one can appreciate his argument, passion, and style without subscribing to his whole world view. For my part, I’m convinced he’s right that Blacks are the epitome of the New Order where the high is brought low and the low, high – and thus they are sacred to Liberals.
He probably doesn’t know that in the Srimad Bhagavatam, a Black about to kill a cow symbolizes Kali Yuga.
Excellent essay! I have never met a “critical thinking” academic — be they followers of Foucault, Derrida or Nietzsche –who questioned “the very essential, culture-specific understandings of the human… liberal bourgeois reality”. To the contrary, they employ Nietzsche in the name of more democracy, less hierarchy, tranquility and feminism. Something to consider is why Europeans broke away from their aristocratic world view. I have sympathy for their doing so, after the extremely violent English Civil War, the senseless destruction of the Thirty Years War…and yet the aristocratic way of life remained influential right into the even more destructive WWI, and after. How else do we explain the rise of Fascism throughout Europe? The cultural Marxist bourgeois episteme is a post WWII phenomenon, and it is worth thinking why Europeans broke so decisively with their aristocratic heritage. The struggle against the cultural and genetic alteration of Europe’s ethnic make up will require a transvaluation against bourgeois values, but a return to a pre-bourgeois world is not possible either.
A great essay.It needs to be read several times over.
Thanks again for the positive responses. I wrote a short explanation of my motivations for writing such a piece. It can be found here: http://markdyal.com/2012/08/22/190/
That short essay also explains why I donate to Counter-Currents and feel honored by its willingness to publish my work.
And Achaean you are absolutely correct in saying we cannot go back. I hope my essay avails itself as to why that is so. But we can use pre-liberal values, ideals, frames of reference, heroes, and concepts as a way to break free of the power of liberalism. Was it Nietzsche or some postmodernist that talked about weightlessness and the earth giving way beneath us as we do so?
I think this is one of the most important essays ever published by Counter-Currents. (In comparison to my own work, I’ll paraphrase Ingmar Bergman’s praise of Tarkovsky: “Mark Dyal swims in waters that I can only muck about in.”) It really cuts to the heart of the matter: we need new values, not just a new order of things that leaves the foundations intact. I will attempt to distribute it far and wide to the worthy. Thanks, Mark.
My one question would be, what is meant by “Fascism”? Is your ideal to reconstruct the Fascist regime as developed by Mussolini in the context of Italian politics in his day, or some ideal Fascism? Because Fascism, as Evola never tired of pointing out, was incredibly bourgeois in its reality, depending on the masses for support as it did and always suspicious of the aristocracy. This would seem to be at odds with the more Classical ideal you simultaneously advocate. Also, I am certain that Dugin, Benoist and the other New Right authors you cite would say that their project has anything to do with resurrecting Fascism (and not merely out of some need to hide the truth, which is one of the mistaken assumptions of many Americans who encounter the European New Right).
I meant to write, “that their project has NOTHING to do with resurrecting Fascism.”
That’s a paper in itself. As you know, I call myself a Nietzschean fascist. In doing so I try to capture the tension between aristocratic radicalism and a politics that seeks to regenerate a more noble man. Fascism’s ideological base was almost completely Nietzschean. Mussolini saw the PNF as a vehicle for creating a counter-liberal (Nietzschean) elite. The problems with implementing that vision were numerous, but nonetheless, the will was there. As far as defining fascism, I will paraphrase the summation of a liberal anti-fascist scholar, Tracy Koon.
Fascism is an intellectual revolt against the 19th Century and positivism. It used Nietzsche and Bergson (among a great host of others, including primarily Sorel) to emphasize spirit over matter, faith against reason, and action over thought. It praised the purifying effects of war and dynamism while it condemned pacifism and neutralism. It saw the future as belonging to the “young, strong, and the living”. Its vision of politics (like D’Annunzio) glorified adventure and struggle. It used sexual imagery of domination and virility and religious rhetoric of sacrifice and duty. It replaced economic man with heroic man. It decried the decadence and corruption of liberal parliamentary systems. It exalted a cult of elite, of force, and of youth. It contrasted the anomie and fragmentation of modern mass society with harmony, belonging, and identity.
Now, looked at in this light, I suggest that there was more going on in the 20 years of Fascism than we, including many of the European New Right, have been allowed to believe. As I suggested in the paper, look at fascism as an intellectual and conceptual break with liberalism, and the rubbish being peddled by the left – still using Trotsky’s tome against Fascism as its paradigm – makes little sense. As far as rehabilitating fascism, as long as we have Sparta and Roma, we have the narrative structure of fascism anyway.
As for Evola, Pagan Imperialism makes it clear that he was simply more fascist, more purely Roman than what the Party was able to present to the mob.
Narrowly, Fascism has been defined as the response of a modern Nation State under attack. This has precedents in many ancient cultures in the “War King” who would take over from the regular King. And of course even the “Democracies” become much more Fascistic during times of war.
But others have realized that Fascism is broader: an attempt to restablist ancient culture and pride in a modern context – obviously no easy thing. And such an attempt inevitably brings down the wrath of those who seek to go the other way. Can there be a peaceful Fascism? Of course, but it has had precious little chance to show itself – thru no fault of its own. So perhaps people can be can forgiven for the narrow definition. Some people that is – not those who know better and seek to crush it in its very hour of birth.
Mark, this essay is one of the year’s best at C-C. Thank you so much for raising the topic of “epistemology” in a manner which links with “our cause”. Some people may think that philosophy is a disconnected and dry subject, but they’re wrong. This stuff cuts to the heart of the “knowing” we must access and propagate (propaganda?) in order to re-create ourselves in this new and amazing time, what with the media creating a “global village” in our minds.
At some point, I wish one of the C-C worthies would link this (the above) thinking with the insights of McLuhan and Bruno Latour. The latter has a unique “philosophy of science” which is about the creation of networks … in fact, his idea of a “truth regime” is pretty much a network which has “gotten legs”. I suggest his long essay “Irreductions” as an entry point to both understanding and how networks come into being in order to “create reality”.
Great essay! Thanks!
Michael Levin, in his book, Why Race Matters, points out that “Medieval Arab slave traders regarded blacks as rhythmic, highly sexed, unintelligent and prone to ‘merriment.’ ” But of course that doesn’t mean that they had a concept of “race” anything like that of- for example- 19th Century white Americans.
A good essay Mark. I am so glad I triggered it. I too dislike Kahil Gibran. I only said it was another point of view, not that I subscribed to it. Not too discerning are you?
I have this sense I am about to step in it, but I will weigh in with my question anyway. This essay seems as informed by Leftist thought as it does by Rightist thought, and not just any Leftist thought but highly problematic thought. Left social scientists will often claim, for example, that reality is socially constructed, historically situated, and mediated by language, customs, or social norms. Therefore, there is no truth, only interpretations enforced by the power structure. From here, they move to ideas like “race does not exist” and from there to ideas like “there is no such thing as white.” So how does your rejection of a biologic understanding of race differ in principle from the left academic understanding of race, namely, that it doesn’t exist. The idea that “race” is a concept that can come and go depending on the prevailing “epistemic regime” doesn’t seem that different in principle.
This is a valid question. Does Mark Dyal recognize that there are “hard facts”, independent of the episteme? On the one hand, he talks about “the thing in itself” as being an impossibility. On the other hand he talks about things that are unknowable or impossible in a certain episteme, which at least suggests an independent reality. This whole discussion between nominalism and realism is of course very old.
I would say that the basic assumption that humans are driven by a grand narrative is a fact, a “hard fact” even (sic!).
Liberals misuse this fact to discredit the views of their opponents, for example about race. They say that “race” is just a certain interpretation of “hard facts”, if they even acknowledge the existence of these facts. However, they never consider the fact that they themselves are also driven by a certain narrative, which imposes limitations on knowledge.
Liberals do not have to do this because they wield the power in our society. And besides, they do not want to because they would feel threatened by a loss of orientation. As a man who has gone through such a major paradigm shift myself, i.e. from liberal to fascist, I can confirm that such a change entails a lot of soul searching, grave uncertainty, a feeling of moral ‘Angst’. In fact I am still sometimes haunted by it.
I think the New Right ( I like to use the term ‘New Fascism’ ) can have a major scholarly edge over the liberals if we acknowledge that we are driven by a certain narrative, and that we are consciously trying to make this into the ruling paradigm. But unlike the liberals we can give good reasons why our narrative should rule. We can show that our narrative would lead to human greatness and a more peaceful and just society.
The best source for the New Right narrative on race would be Evola, I think. Here we have a man who honestly searches his way, trying to do justice both to the “hard facts” of biology and his own, spiritually oriented narrative. Sometimes it may lead him into paradoxes, but maybe that is a sign of a genuine investigation of our world. It reminds me of the “Holzwege ” of Heidegger.
By the way, would it not be a wonderful sight the see future New Right college students wear t-shirts with the text “Equality is just a social construct”?
Wonderful piece. Indeed, in an age where Truth is no longer held by most to be transcendent and aspatiotemporal, we are left only with extreme materialism, nihilism and nominalism. And this has only one possible outcome: Power manufactures “Truth” to suit their own political, social, economic agendas and feed their egos and mundane appetites. It is merely about control.
Nicolas Berdyaev expertly discusses this at length in his corpus. His name and work should be added to the “must read” pile along with those you mention.
In wondering whether a new type of Fascism can arise from a new episteme, I would suggest going to Giorgio Locchi’s work, especially his essay “The Essence of Fascism,” which discusses the archetypical foundations of the doctrine. Locchi was one of the founders of the European New Right, a close collaborator of Alain de Benoist, and his philosophy, which he called “suprahumanism”, was profoundly Nietzschean. Needless to say, he is a must read and I think many of his ideas are a perfect complement to this excellent essay by Mark Dyal. I have a Spanish version of Locchi’s complete works and I could translate the essay I reference above if there’s any interest. Naturally, it would suffer from being a translation of a translation (the original is in Italian) but it would at least present some of Locchi’s ideas to a new audience.
A translation of Giorgio Locchi’s essay “The Essence of Fascism” would be very welcome. I haven’t read it myself, but I have read Guillaume Faye’s introduction to it, which indicates that it’s extremely interesting.
I presume you’re referring to Locchi’s Definiciones published by Ediciones Nueva República. This might not be a complete collection of Locchi’s writings, as it seems to exclude the long article on American “civilization” he wrote with Alain de Benoist for Nouvelle École.
By chance, I received a used copy of Michel Schneider’s short book Principles de l’action fasciste today. This looks like a very learned, lucid, and interesting work, and has been translated into Spanish by Ediciones Nueva República. A rough translation of its title of contents follows:
Introduction
Part I. Necessary Clarifications
Part II. The Fascist Vision of Man
1. A Spiritualist Realism
2. A Tragic Vision of Man, a Heroic Ethic
3. A Non-Conformist, Anti-Bourgeois Vision of Action
4. An Elitist Vision of Social Relationships
Part III. The Fascist Vision of the Political Community
1. A Realist Vision of Democracy
2. A Total, Organic State
3. A “Solidarism”
4. Beyond Antagonisms, Corporatism
Part IV. The Fascist Vision of History
1. A Non-Messianic Vision of History
2. An “Activist” Vision of History
3. An “Imperialist” Vision of the Nation-State
Conclusion
Bibliography
Complementary Bibliography
Some of Schneider’s quotations from the French translation of Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins — such as those relating to whether the Jews form a race or not — indicate that the English translation may have been bowdlerized. However, it has been reported that Evola softened some of his statements, such as when he removed the following from the second Italian edition of Men Among the Ruins: “Our adversaries would undoubtedly want us, in a Christian spirit, under the banner of progress or reform, having been struck on one cheek to turn the other. Our principle is different: ‘Do to others what they would like to do to you: but do it to them first.'” This is what I call good timing.
My mistake. Although Locchi wasn’t very prolific, the book doesn’t include all his works. As you point out, it doesn’t include the long essay on America he co-wrote with Alain de Benoist, “Il male americano,” nor the only book he wrote, “Wagner, Nietzsche e il mito sovrumanista.” By the way, I believe a better translation for the philosophy Locchi espoused would be overhumanism instead of superhumanism (the latter sounds irreparably progressive and it’s definitely less accurate). I will get to work on The Essence of Fascism and see how well it translates from Spanish to English. I’m going to try to get the original version as well.
It’s nice to see you bring up Ediciones Nueva República. The ENR crowd works under the worst constraints and thanks to Europe and Spain’s own draconian anti-free speech laws they’ve had their books seized and destroyed and some of their editors put in jail. Nonetheless, they still manage to publish a wide array of first rate books on national revolutionary doctrine, philosophy and literature. They’re certainly an example worth studying and emulating, especially here where relatively well-funded operations can’t even manage to put out a bulletin anymore.
Going back to Locchi, were you aware that he broke with GRECE in the early ’80s over what he saw as deviations from certain core principles and concessions to the dominant ideology? He essentially did what Faye did some two decades later, although maintaining a firmer stance on certain issues. BTW, do you know where I can find Faye’s comments on The Essence of Fascism?
I read this great essay again.
There are some ideas that liberalism promotes but it seems to me that they are only selectively applied.
Does “promoting universal altruism’ apply only to whites?Is the animus that other races openly display justifiable?
Excellent!
Excellent work Mr Dyal. FORZA ROMA!
Ciao tutti, Just getting back to CC after a mini-vacation and have wonderful comments, as well as Matt Parrott’s essay response, to ponder. Let me see if I can help:
1. Rhondda: I guess I am not too discerning at all. I apologize if my ire got the best of me. Becoming part of a community, after so long atop the mountain, is sometimes difficult for me. Please don’t take my shortcomings out on CC.
2. Truth: I don’t find it to limit the value of truth to say it is not transcendental. To suggest instead that it is created with a purpose – what the leftist sources I use say – only allows us to understand that we must create our own truths (if we need them) and work to give them the force of power – which the leftist sources do not say. Beyond the left, Nietzsche’s critique of truth is brutal. He destroys it as a tool of the weak and degenerate mind that must have certainty – a weakness that allows the priests/scientists their earthly power. In his “model,” anyone seeking to move beyond man must leave truth in the dustbin. This is why he posits perspectivism and the classical model of wisdom as a bulwark against a very modern, weak, and debilitating form of knowledge.
Again, I’m not saying there is no such thing as truth, but that it is human and thus serves particular needs/perspectives.
3. The left: I’m bummed no one else saw the irony of having some kid who is looking for someone else’s understanding of Foucault find his way to CC. Seriously though, the left’s (Foucault’s) critique of knowledge, power, and capitalism is legitimate across political lines. We can read Foucault into Nietzsche’s Genealogy, but I took the chance to show former colleagues that both Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari articulate a relationship between power, knowledge, and the body that shines a more positive light on fascism than liberalism. In combining the two, however, I was hoping to have people contemplate the body as site of knowledge/power/conceptual implementation.
4. RACE: The big one. My critique of race is not a holdover from my leftist days. It is more recent than that. Remember: I came from Black Studies – no one in Black Studies is rejecting race! It is their bread and butter. My critique is thus:
a. Race is a concept. Do racialists really believe that an idea born in the late-18th C can transcend the order of knowledge that makes it knowable?
b. I only reject race because I reject that order of knowledge. This got me in trouble in Black Studies as well, because I asked, “If we are to reject the intellectual basis of the racial human, why do we not also reject culture and the idea/system of representation?” When you start thinking about representation – the very modern notion of an intellectual process linking the ideal with the material (based on the binary opposition of those two realms) – as did Deleuze and Guattari, even grad school in the humanities is a dark place.
c. To say that race is not connected to science but nature seeks only to deny the culture-specificity (another way of saying it is produced by an order of knowledge) of the nature concept.
d. Under no circumstances can we base the New Right on whiteness. Whiteness is liberal and bourgeois, full stop. It is the normalized American man, without tradition, wisdom, or value. It is, as the left and multiculturalism tell us, empty. It is precisely why we believe in the validity and culture of all other peoples but our own. And, when our people go to Europe, they don’t see racial whiteness, but instead peoples and traditions. This makes me wonder how useful race can be to our movement.
That being said, the race of Evola, Yockey, and the New Right I can get with because it is not purely biological. It allows for the logocentric nature of how the human interacts with the world. I’m a white survivalist at this point. I’m not prepared to say that Roma will be Roma when it is populated only by Chinese and Indians, even if they embrace Evola’s code of Romanness. Thus, my main political argument in the paper: we must create a new narrative – a new behavior motivating narrative, that is – that prompts us to destroy modernity and save ourselves. Nietzsche said it best: WE NEED A NEW WHY. Off to the Parrott essay.
Thanks Mark. I finally get what God was getting at in Hosea 4:7: My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, a quote that some Christians are prone to throwing around.
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