Counter-Currents
401 words
Translated by Greg Johnson
Translations: Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
I am healthy in body and mind, and I am filled with love for my wife and children. I love life and expect nothing beyond, if not the perpetuation of my race and my mind. However, in the evening of my life, facing immense dangers to my French and European homeland, I feel the duty to act as long as I still have strength. I believe it necessary to sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that plagues us. I give up what life remains to me in order to protest and to found. I chose a highly symbolic place, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, which I respect and admire: she was built by the genius of my ancestors on the site of cults still more ancient, recalling our immemorial origins.
You can buy North American New Right vol. 1 here.
While many men are slaves of their lives, my gesture embodies an ethic of will. I give myself over to death to awaken slumbering consciences. I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilization. While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.
The dominant discourse cannot leave behind its toxic ambiguities, and Europeans must bear the consequences. Lacking an identitarian religion to moor us, we share a common memory going back to Homer, a repository of all the values on which our future rebirth will be founded once we break with the metaphysics of the unlimited, the baleful source of all modern excesses.
I apologize in advance to anyone who will suffer due to my death, first and foremost to my wife, my children, and my grandchildren, as well as my friends and followers. But once the pain and shock fade, I do not doubt that they will understand the meaning of my gesture and transcend their sorrow with pride. I hope that they shall endure together. They will find in my recent writings intimations and explanations of my actions.
Note
For more information, one can go to my publisher, Pierre-Guillaume Roux. He was not informed of my decision, but he has known me a long time.
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57 comments
I realize this just happened. Do you think Venner’s act might make a difference?
English media seems to be dwelling on his opposition to gay marraige.
From Venner’s final post:
“It will require new, spectacular, and symbolic actions to rouse people from their complacency and and awaken the memory of our origins. We enter into a time when words must be backed up by actions.”
RIP.
Good Lord, how awful. I can’t help but think he chose the wrong target.
This is rather stirring. I hope that it does indeed wake up many people. And I hope the media clarifies that non-European immigration was another, if not the highest, concern he had and which he was protesting against.
I really wish I could understand French so as to be able to read the writings he’s talking about that he has made recently.
Also, what is he referring to when he writes “May 26th protest”? Is there a protest that will be held in 5 days time?
Sylvanus,
I believe there is to be a demonstration in Paris on May 26th against homosexual marriage.
Maybe his act will provide the inspiration that Anders Breivik could not. A few years ago a German veteran flung himself off the roof of a Cathedral in Germany to protest the slander which the Germany had been subjected to. These things wouldn’t work in America. Martyrs are just considered crazy here, though James Kunstler did note that Thomas Ball had some real provocation from the Divorce/Judicial Industry. Perhaps the French still have some feeling for each other and some self respect.
Good point, Americans are too self centered to understand this act. The present Western system destroys all the higher type individuals who can’t live in a society geared to the lowest of the low and glorifying of every kind of perversion. But Americans are quite tolerant of its losers and troublemakers, unlike Europe. Only the zombies will survive, good luck.
Spengler is being proved right more than most intelligent people care to admit. He said that the only things left were murder and suicide. He was a prophet.
The West is beyond repair. We don’t have the brain power or character to recover from these horrendous last thirty years. Better to scrap the whole thing and start again, with Western technology and a significantly reduced and controllable white population.
Just sent this link to everyone in my e-mail list. Make sure people read it, so the sacrifice of this man is not forgotten.
Ecce Homo. Chapeau.
@Sylvanus Carpenter and everyone:
The big French demonstration against gay marriage will be held on the 26th. Here is a good site with information in English:
http://www.lamanifpourtous.fr/en/toutes-les-actualites/425-montee-en-puissance-vers-la-mega-manif-du-26-mai-a-paris-2
Neither being a “Vennerite” nor having read him in his original language I am just one of the crowd and as such regard his death as just another self centered action by an old White geezer. Having said that I fear I am going to learn more about him than I would otherwise wish to.
Suicide is the way of escape for bullied school children, depressed soldiers and the unemployed in our fading economy. I realize that he was trying to make a political statement but I fear it is the wrong example.
Surrender is not an option.
Dominique Venner was a great man, an example of authentic intellectual and physical courage, a figure of hope, and he died a hero’s death.
I hope Counter-Currents or Arktos will publish translations of his works soon, beginning, perhaps, with “Histoire et traditions des européens” and “Le siècle de 1914”.
Teiwaz, Arktos has been working on Venner’s “The Shock of History” in recent weeks, which he offered to us since he couldn’t give us “Histoire et traditions des européens,” since the rights are held by the French publisher. It should be available by this summer. I’m not sure how his death may affect future translations, but in our contact with him his family has been quite supportive, so it may not be an issue.
That’s great to hear. Arktos will be filling a very important lacuna. Venner was one of the founders of the French new right and a figure of great stature. His works are not only inspiring and illuminating, but are also very enjoyable to read, written in a beautifully limpid and elegant classical style.
Marine Le Pen showed her respects on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/status/336877763183140864
I’m shocked, saddened and now that I have started to write this and moving beyond my confusion more than a little angry for such an unreasonable act of protest. This suicide will NOT be recognised as a noble act of a defeated man by most of his fellow Europeans, but merely the last over-dramatic gesture of a man who has given up.
Venner is not a Mishma. Europeans are not Japanese. It is true that most Europeans feel under stress and even under attack but they do not yet feel under a state of war, so the self extinguishment of one self-defined combatant will be lost as a meaningful thing. A single man goes kills himself for the sake of his people and his people’s religion? Where have we heard a Muslim so described?
Where were the body of brothers around the living Venner? Where was the fighting plan for the forward action of this lost brother and for his fellow brothers? Or was the life and work of Venner always always merely the cry and struggle of a man alone?
I.H.
Muslims kill themselves all the time, to make a point for their religion, but in a far less noble way than Venner, usually taking bunches of others with them.
Muslims kill themselves all the time, to make a point for their religion, but in a far less noble way than Venner, usually taking bunches of others with them.
Not for our religion, but to fight against the enemies, which are much stronger and have much more sophisticated weapons. This is asymmetric warfare, new kind of a guerrilla, the war of the weaker against the stronger. If you simply want to die, you can take poison without any harm to another people. Here the point is just TAKING bunches of OTHERS with them. And when these others are not civilians, but military, like in Beirut in 1983, this is a heroic feat, not an act of terrorism. Just like Japanese Kamikazes were not terrorists.
I am almost certainly not the person best able to address this, but I have been disappointed by the comments of some online (not here for the most part) to the effect that Venner has thrown his life away, or is acting exactly as “our enemies” would like as all to do, or even that he was cowardly in his choice.
As to why he would have chosen to voluntarily give himself over to death, he states his case rather straight-forwardly in his earlier writing today: “It certainly will require new, spectacular, and symbolic gestures to stir our somnolence, shake our anesthetized consciousness, and awaken the memory of our origins. We are entering a time when words must be authenticated by deeds.”
Furthermore, it is clear that far from “giving up” on life or the cause or anything else, Venner advocated a Heideggerian approach to life: “We should also remember, as brilliantly formulated by Heidegger in Being and Time, that the essence of man is in his existence and not in “another world.” … That is why you must be yourself until the last moment. It is by deciding, truly willing one’s destiny, that one conquers nothingness.”
This was not the sad end of a tired and broken man wanting to escape the problems we face. What Venner did today was a call for greater action tomorrow and beyond.
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods
That was a brave act in a good cause.
There’s nothing particularly tragic about killing yourself at 78. There is no “he had his whole life ahead of him” hand-wringing to be done. He could have died in 6 months of natural causes. Instead, he chose to make death active instead of passive, and give his death to the cause he gave his life to. Respect it. Honor him. End of story.
Agreed. Good point. He was 78. With a few dozen published works to his name, and, more importantly, service in the Algerian War and in the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), he served his time and fought the good fight. Go well.
Hear, hear.
An honourable and selfless sacrifice.
The media reports are just making it out as a protest against gay “marriage”, but as we can see, Venner’s sacrifice was more than that. Either the media are just that pedestrian they can’t pick up on the wider issues that gay “marriage” was merely symptomatic of, or they have and are frightened by such an erudite and moving articulation of ‘far-right’ views being given attention in the mainstream.
I see it as a fitting bookend to his life as a defender of our people. The first such end being what launched him into the limelight of the French Right, his manifesto “Pour une critique positive” (1962) which inspired Alain de Benoist and so forth http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/venner.html and now this, his sacrifice and the last two writings that went with it.
We have lost a giant. May this final act of will not go unheard by the cadres present and future.
I typically don’t like to assume malice when ignorance is an adequate explanation, but of the two choices you’ve pondered, it seems to be the latter.
Dominique Venner didn’t impact me much, on account of I never read much of his stuff. But from what I know, he was a respectable and decent man, and his last writings leading to his death are very eloquent and thought-provoking.
I respect anyone who can give me pause to dwell upon the importance of every day, every second in life.
RIP.
He took his life in front of the altar, like an ancient hero.
When people start to think that death is better than life under these traitors, then their end is near. The constraints are weakening and disappearing.
The despise and hatred toward the system are replacing the fear and complacency. It clearly marks the beginning of the end for what is the most treasonous regime in the entire history.
It clearly marks the beginning of the end for what is the most treasonous regime in the entire history.
A treasonous regime that will likely be manufacturing “thanatoriums” and encouraging us to use them. As in, “Go now, grandpa, and your grandchildren will get extra rations of soylent green!”
The “right to die”, i.e., the legalization of doctor-assisted suicide that so many are squealing for, is merely the toe in the door. Venner did right to try to make a point with his death; not too far down the road the rest of us could very well be eased into taking the less dramatic, government-approved way out, never having the chance to say anything meaningful with our last breath.
Your fears may be justified, but nobody coerced Monsieur Venner. All the more reason to honour his political act, taken with full faculties.
It is about a pure emotion. When something like this happens the regime looses its legitimacy.
Not Dominique Venner is responsible but the utter corrupt regime that destroys France. He sacrificed himself to put more weight behind his desperate call. It was a man that wanted to be heard, even to the price of his life.
It has nothing to do with Soylent Green. It is to illegitimate hollande. It is saying that the life has become so horrible in France. His blood is on the hands of the political cotterie.
When things like this are happening in Europe, it means the change is necessary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_self-immolations
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania against communism and soviet occupation. Even, if the soviet armies stayed for some more years, the situation was clear. Things were unbearable so they had to make concessions – loose the grip.
It’s happening in Greece, Bulgaria, Spain, now in France. This regime has to go.
Rhondda, I’m not disagreeing with you. I meant that we have to make a distinction between suicides such as Venner’s or the Buddhist monks burning themselves in protest over the Viet Nam war, and those of sick people who don’t have the gumption to off themselves on their own while still able, instead demanding that the government encourage doctors to make it nice ‘n’ easy for them.
Jack Donovan: “Honor him.”
Yes.
“When people start to think that death is better than life under these traitors, then their end is near.”
Just so.
The significance of Venner’s action is not to so much to be measured by its impact on the general public, as by its significance for those who are called to lead it. They are the ones who most of all should feel “addressed” by his gesture.
Throughout his life, Venner set an example of leadership. In this last act, he set an example of total commitment. He showed that there are values higher than the safety, the well-being, and even the life itself of the individual, and that to speak of such values is not merely an intellectual pose or sterile rhetoric. All of his writings will henceforth be read in the light of this last action. The way in which he died will forever serve as a proof and unquestionable guarantee of the authenticity of his work and his struggle.
In this sense, he is now one of the figures through which our conscience speaks to us. All of our acts of compromise must now be seen alongside the standard set by his total commitment. He is a figure of truth and authenticity in an age of lies.
Yes, Yes, and again Yes!
Dominique Venner: “While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.”
That sounds like David Duke to me. That demand for a future for white people placed within a universal affirmation of the right of the world’s diverse peoples to continue to exist is David Duke’s central message.
Is there another source where Dominique Venner would have found the vital demand for a future for our people contextualized and balanced in just that way?
If David Duke is an influence, then he is getting his message out to people of the highest intellectual and moral caliber, and persuading them to take it seriously.
If David Duke and Dominique Venner arrived at this balanced affirmation independently, that says something about the spirit of our age, as far as racially aware white people are concerned. If such a universal affirmation would have been thought unnecessary and soft by some white men in past ages, today it’s something white men of different nations and backgrounds but a common commitment to our race can agree on, and it’s as hard as Dominique Venner’s military record.
I know I am taking what Dominique Venner had to say more seriously just because he chose to say it. In the opinion of a first-class man, this is part of a message worth dying for, and it should not be mistaken for some mere rhetorical tactic or a concession. A serious man does not die for a concession.
The New Right in France has long had the same message as David Duke on this subject. They have independently arrived at the same conclusion.
Please, find Russian translation here – http://vk.com/wall-39340950_30676
IN MY COUNTRY IRELAND; PEOPLE WHO TRY TO GIVE THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ARGUEMENT AS REGARDS THE EVILS OF MASS IMMIGRATION ARE NOT TO BE GIVEN “THE OXYGEN OF PUBLICITY”. THIS FROM THE MOUTH OF THE LEADER OF THE JOURNALIST UNION. THE NATIONAL BROADCASTER SAYS THE SUICIDE LETTER WAS NOT PUBLISHED. A BLATANT LIE. EITHER WAY THE FEW OF US SOLDIER ON. MAY THIS VISIONARY REST IN PEACE. ……. COME THE EVOLUTION.
Greg, you once wrote at Mangan’s that the West’s fate was sealed at Stalingrad, or words to that effect.
I bagged you out for it.
I’m sorry.
You were right, I was wrong.
But, it’s not over yet.
Pretty much. Götterdämmerung on the Volga. Radical WNists always seem to be vindicated. Why is that? The truth is on their side. Pierce and Rockwell saw it in the 60s. I hope more Mangan’s readers wise up. We may yet get another bite at the apple. It must be getting hard for the Hitler hand-wringers to deny he was right.
I vaguely remember that thread.
Yes, “The war’s not over as far as I’m concerned.”
No one, excepting our crowd, cares at all.
I find his suicide to be pointless and tedious. We need men to stay ALIVE, and FIGHT for our Race. Not fall, however exquisitely, on their beautiful swords.
Did Vlad Tepes write a Pretty Farewell Address, and pack it in?
No. He did not.
Are you suggesting that White men should start impaling our enemies? Sort of like what happened today in London where some men from another race chopped up a British soldier?
Our men are too smart for that outdated tactic.
They are not pretty words. For those who can read, they are the beginning of getting it. I found a fish bonker at a local tack shop. I thought that should come in handy. Cast iron frying pans are a good thing. Monsieur Venner was not looking for imitators.
War is never outdated. Don’t confuse premature with outdated. In the end, we will have to fight them. Surely you don’t think they’re going to go peacefully? But we have to wait until the foundation is laid and more people are awake and ready to act. The Leftist/Islamic coalition is a marriage made in hell. The White Leftists will just double down – admitting they were wrong is death to them and they will never do it. Sure maybe in some places there will be a “political solution” – but that will be based on the ability and willingness to crush the Coalition. And if we become that strong we may not want to settle for anything but deportation.
Denise: “No one, excepting our crowd, cares at all.”
When King Leonidas led his 300 companions into a self-chosen violent death, the world did not care. But the Spartans did.
When Prince Kürşad, known in Chinese chronicles as Ashina Jiesheshuai, raided the palace of Chinese emperor with only 40 Türkic warriors, he surely wanted to win, but when he lost, he and his followers died as heroes. Their death was not in vain anyway. 42 years later, in 681, the Second Türkic khaganate was established.
Topless FEMEN activist mocks Venner’s suicide, FEMEN suggests all “fascists” commit suicide: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/topless-femen-activist-notre-dame-dominique-venner_n_3320165.html
Certainly not unexpected.
I don’t know the physical or emotional state of this man that drove him to this sad act, but I think he could be of far more use for his and our cause alive than dead. At least he could have written an open letter to the president, by preference together with several of his kindred spirits. That would have been far more effective than his suicide.
Or he could have tried to start a movement of the right intent on making a “long march through the institutions”.
Now, his death will be a useless as that of Yukio Mishima, whose “heroic” suicide didn’t change Japanese culture either.
Have you ever heard of existentialism? How do you know that Mishima has not changed the culture? Why then were his books so celebrated? Oh, it must be all that other stuff that White people can use to condemn. (0h he was a homosexual, let’s dismiss him, only his wife says no) Are you starting a movement? Sorry to be so cynical, but really do you want the White race to survive? What are you doing about it?
Have you heard of the Frankfurter School? That was a collective of (mainly Jewish) intellectuals that was highly effective in undermining our Western culture (by attacking its basic values). Venner and kindred spirits could have founded a similar institute with the opposite purpose : saving the West. Suicide has no saving value.
As for Mishima, his “coup d’etat” and subsequent suicide was farcical at best. His books became popular by their own merit, not by his suicide.
Venner was 78 years old. He was the author or editor of close to 50 books and countless articles. It is absurd to think that in the time left to him he could have done anything more as a writer that would have made a difference. He decided to kill himself to bring publicity to his ideas and to awaken the vast crowd assembled to protest gay marriage to a far greater danger, the Islamic conquest of Europe.
I think that a lot of specious critiques of Venner are motivated by an irrational opposition to suicide and hostility toward those who choose to take their lives.
He was the author or editor of close to 50 books
But nobody read them. This is like Pierre Krebs with his “methapolitical struggle”. In his age (76 years) real revolutionaries like Che Guevara, or Lenin, or Hitler, or Mussolini, or Trotsky, were long dead (yes, Mao Zedong and Castro were exceptions).
German translation here: http://www.europaeische-aktion.org/Artikel/de/Dominique-Venners-Erklaerung_227.html
Polish translation: http://xportal.pl/?p=8482
Dominique Venner I only knew through some articles I read on Counter-Currents. Now that I learn about his biography I am very impressed. He was not only a historian, but also a real man of action, a fighter. He even plotted to take out De Gaulle! The end he has chosen was therefore completely appropriate.
I have never understood how people can honestly think that suicide is cowardice. It takes a lot of courage to take your own life, no matter how old you are. You are dealing with primordial, existential Angst here. Possibly, the accusation of cowardice is just a cloak to hide a Christian objection to suicide.
Talking about Venner’s death in terms of usefulness seems almost a sacrilege to me. He made a statement for his ideals, sacrificing the most precious man has, his life. We should contemplate this like a piece of music, not burst into a debate on how we could use it.
Still, Venner’s death is one of the symbols that can inspire us. Larger than life, greater than death. We are like Tertullian, who proclaimed that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. Preaching to the choir IS useful, because we still need inspiration in our struggle, facing day-to-day troubles, the constant brainwashing, doubts and despair.
Maybe due to some vestiges of Christian thinking in my mind, Venner’s suicide makes a far deeper impression on me than any physical attacks on the Matrix, however couragious. The self-immolation of the innocent, the martyr, is the ultimate confirmation of Truth and Goodness in our culture. The brainwashing of today is coached precisely in these terms extolling the innocent martyrs (“The eternally innocent Jew”). Venner has used this archetype and turned it on its head, to confirm OUR views. His last deed was the ultimate metapolitical subversion of the reigning ideology, using its own weapons against itself.
I feel a keen sense of obligation to Venner. Confronted with someone who gave everything to our cause, I feel that I must work harder. His death must not be in vain. Our time will come.
Possibly, the accusation of cowardice is just a cloak to hide a Christian objection to suicide.
The Christian objection to suicide is that it is self-murder. If you really want to do it God gave us Samson (Judges 16:21-31) as an example to follow. I would judge Venner’s political statement as being somewhere in the ballpark.
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