Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Battle of Anghiari
2,069 words
Anyone who studies the thought and ways of life of our ancestors can only be struck by their manly vigor and toughness. Material comfort and mass miseducation have taken their toll on modern Western man, turning him, with every generation, into a more and more effeminate creature. The ancients knew that without manly courage, political and personal freedom is impossible. One will not take the inevitable risks of living the truth without courage. Today, the great bulk of the men of the West do not have the courage to dare to even think the truth, let alone speak the truth, let alone act upon the truth. For the Ancients, knowledge of the truth meant having the courage to even die for one’s beliefs if that were necessary. Effeminate cowardice was, for them, a great evil.
It is also striking however that the Ancients did not confuse such manly virtue with anger. Whether one turns to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, or later Clausewitz, there is consensus among the wise: a man may feel anger, but he must not be beholden to that dark emotion. One might respond that this reflects the bookish and other-worldly temperament of these philosophers, notwithstanding Marcus Aurelius and Clausewitz’s military experience. One finds however the same point made by that most practical man, Xenophon, perhaps the ultimate writer-soldier, in the Hellenica, his history of Greece. Describing the battle of Olynthus of 381 BC, Xenophon ascribes the Spartans’ defeat to the wrathful impetuosity of their commander, Teleutias. When some of Teleutias’ troops died in a first confrontation, he angrily ordered his forces to retaliate by charging the walls of the city, leading to their coming under missile fire and entrapped by enemy forces. Teleutias himself died in the battle. Xenophon says:
In my opinion . . . disasters such as these teach men this lesson with regard to anger: one ought not to punish even a slave in anger; for masters who have lost their tempers do more harm to themselves than they inflict; but in dealing with enemies it is utterly and entirely wrong to launch an attack under the influence of anger and without deliberation. Anger does not look ahead, whereas deliberation is just as concerned with avoiding harm oneself as with inflicting it on the enemy. (5.3.7)
I am the first to say that Western men have today so much to be angry about. Never before has masculinity been so shamed, never before has our people been so dishonored, never before has our entire genetic and cultural heritage been threatened with submersion and effacement. We heretics know that our genes are the supreme gift from our ancestors, shaped by their triumphant struggles for survival over hundreds of thousands of years. In our blood is contained their life, their spirit, their hard-won wisdom. How could one not be angry at the thoughtless or malicious prospect of extinguishing this heritage? As though our parents, grandparents, and indeed all our ancestors, had lived and struggled and died . . . for nothing. This is the supreme impiety.
This alone is cause enough for anger among us. There is another. The fact is that we are heretics and that our merely daring to express the truth as we see it provokes a great deal of fear and loathing in a large portion of society, who have bought into the established norms, the reigning postwar civil religion of raceless equality. This ideology, we now realize, is leading to the end of nations and the effacement of our breed of humanity. The expression of our beliefs leads many people — including colleagues, friends, and family — to express hostility towards us, and this also naturally makes us angry. We are then liable to retaliate in kind to our critics, to express contempt for the mainstream of society, identifying them as ignorant, uncultivated, pseudoscientific, brainwashed, intolerant, incoherent, etc.
In fact, there seems to me little to be gained for us in this escalatory cycle of anger. What good can come from an angry shouting match or humiliation of another’s ego? I suggest the wise men are right in saying that we must not cede to anger nor seek to provoke it. I believe we heretics are twice motivated in this respect. Firstly, if we cede to anger, we risk harming familial and social relations which are valuable (I have seen and experienced more-or-less severe cases of this). Secondly, the fact is that today as throughout history, an angry conflict between heretic and society is unlikely to be won by the former. The society may be bigoted but it is has far greater means of harming us (whether in terms of social alienation, lost jobs, defamation, open persecution, violence, etc). I say this even as I emphasize that in another sense we are in a position of strength: we hold a knowledge which others do not have and whose false beliefs must to some extent inevitably crumble with the decline of the mainstream media, the passing of the postwar generation, and the accumulation of facts on the ground.
Note, I am not saying that we should always avoid provoking anger in society, which is impossible. Rather, I am saying that our actions should not provoke unnecessary anger, should not be motivated by anger, and should be calculated carefully.
I believe the truth about race and heredity, and of the righteousness of Europeans’ fighting to preserve and cultivate their unique genetic and cultural heritage, will spread. The media-cultural gatekeepers, who either for reasons of ethnic hostility, effeminacy, or miseducation have been dragging our people on the downward path, have seen their power shattered. A new memetic reality is emerging, both good and bad, in which the ability of institutions to set norms is decreased, and individuals can seek out whatever culture resonates with them. In particular, the fraction of our people in whom both the scientific truth and ethnic self-interest resonate, will consolidate into an ever-stronger subculture and movement.
However, I am not confident we could ever return, if we wanted to, to the kind of spirited politics of the first half of the twentieth century. Lack of spirit is a very grave problem. For a society requires a certain amount of manly vigor to impose quality over equality and the common good over individual interest.
Prior to 1945, Germany, Italy, and Japan had adopted a trajectory in modernity quite different from the bourgeois democracies. The Axis powers were highly flawed in many respects. However, unlike the bourgeois democracies, they were self-consciously spirited regimes who forthrightly asserted the necessity of hierarchy, community, and struggle. They rejected the idea that one could have a world of peace and equality as one ignorant of the tragic quality of Nature and Life. (Concerning the liberal pretensions of non-authoritarianism and actual equality, which were the deep justification for annihilating the Axis, I will merely recall what Savitri Devi too rightly said: “Modern man is more of a moral coward. He wants the advantages of violent intolerance — which is only natural — but he shuns the responsibility of it.”)
The Axis powers could succumb to rage, one need only think of the brutality of the occupation of China and of Operation Barbarossa. At the same time, these states were not as sadistic, senseless, or megalomaniacal in their use of violence as Allied propaganda claimed. As Mahatma Gandhi himself said of Adolf Hitler in May 1941: “Whether one adopts the method of non-violence or of violence, one can succeed only if one has patience. Can we ever imagine what patience and self-control Hitler and others must be obliged to exercise? ”
In the event, however, the Germany, Italy, and Japan angered the bourgeois powers, particularly the United States of America, and were completely smashed as a result. The spirit of the Fascists, of old aristocratic Prussia and the revolutionary Party, and indeed of the samurai, all that manly virtue was powerless in the face of the sheer material power of the Allies: arming the Soviet Union (whose peoples also had great reserves of manliness left) and blanketing Europe and Japan in a rain of bombs culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The tremendous violence and upheaval of the Second World War was, in my view, a particularly intense and accelerated episode in a wider socio-historical movement: the decline of spiritedness in the age of technological and material progress. At least in a bourgeois society, technology enables both material comfort, and thus a decline in spiritedness, and the raw power to annihilate remaining spirited societies. Beyond the machinations of the hostile elite, France, Britain, and the United States’ decision in that war to side with communism over fascism represented a major milestone in modern, bourgeois Western man’s growing intolerance for forthright inequality and his preference for purely symbolic, false, and even bloodthirsty equality.
We must come to terms with this outcome. In terms of manly virtue, things are infinitely worse today than they were in the 1930s. The “Greatest Generation,” tragically, was already too weak to prevent subversion by a foreign hostile elite and being dragged down by a decadent WASP elite. And how much more effeminate we are than our grandfathers! What is the average Westerner’s life today? First in the classroom, then in the job or welfare office, then in retirement, with an ever-growing share of time spent staring at screens. No more farmers, workers, or soldiers here! And how many fathers? Today’s young men and women are more likely to still live as dependents with their parents and far, far less likely to head their own households and care for their own children. What are our “Western citizens” today compared the Greek hoplite-citizen, the Roman paterfamilias, or indeed the old yeoman farmer, each responsible for his livelihood and family? Yes, “humanity” tends ever closer to the obese blobs of Wall-E or the embryos in The Matrix. Prophetic! (Not to speak of The Truman Show. All exploited by a misanthropic and parasitic hostile elite.)
Hence, both individually and socio-historically, we see the spirited element being crushed by the “liberal” element if they engage in an escalatory conflict of anger.
All this is very humbling. The lesson of all this is that a frontal assault is unlikely to yield results, but rather we must work with the flow of the universe, with our opponents’ weak points. To again use a historical analogy, the most direct way of destroying communism in 1945 would have been invade and destroy the Soviet Union. But, in hindsight at least, can we say this would have been the best approach or the most likely to succeed?
We would all love to openly speak the truth, the really whole truth, every day. But does this not betray a certain egalitarian naïveté? In that case: To what extent can we speak and live our truths without provoking unnecessary anger in our people? To what extent can we overcome anger in ourselves? Could we not then walk with an untold lightness in our step, basking in the truth, living it — neither hiding in cowardice nor exploding with rage — but radiating joy, that joy of being among the select few to be in on in some of the world’s greatest of secrets and of working to share those secrets among those we love who would dare to know.
I believe our movement is really in its bare infancy concerning the care for our souls and the cultivation of spiritual harmony. Even as hard-headed a man of science William Pierce, who had little time for superstition or revelation, was as times inspired to speak transcendental truth. Let us indeed care for our souls every day with the universe, and indeed the unfathomable source of the universe, in mind. For whoever has embraced the whole, who has understood deep in his soul the inevitability of his death and his belonging to the cosmos, that person has no reason to know fear or wrath, but wields the sword and exhausts his life with equanimity. The forces of darkness are powerless before such a man, a kamikaze for truth, just as the mercantile and democratic mob was, in the highest sense, powerless before Socrates. Perhaps it is too early. But I believe we might, every day, train and enlighten ourselves: sculpt your soul into a diamond, so that you may render your entire existence, that precious flicker of life, as a mindful sacrifice to the great rising fire which is the whole and the best of Life. Then, you will say with Pindar: “My soul, do not seek immortal life, but exhaust the realm of the possible.”
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13 comments
A very interesting and thoughtful article, thank you Mr. Durocher. I particularly was impressed and intrigued by this paragraph containing a very perspicacious and insightful observation in my opinion.
“The tremendous violence and upheaval of the Second World War was, in my view, a particularly intense and accelerated episode in a wider socio-historical movement: the decline of spiritedness in the age of technological and material progress. At least in a bourgeois society, technology enables both material comfort, and thus a decline in spiritedness, and the raw power to annihilate remaining spirited societies. Beyond the machinations of the hostile elite, France, Britain, and the United States’ decision in that war to side with communism over fascism represented a major milestone in modern, bourgeois Western man’s growing intolerance for forthright inequality and his preference for purely symbolic, false, and even bloodthirsty equality.”
How to solver or overcome the paradoxical question that a society of advancing technological power and material progress dislikes, demeans and destroys the spiritedness cherished by us nationalists is of great philosophic and practical significance to our movement and is worth deep consideration and contemplation of our most able intellectual minds.
Riki-Eiki. The question you pose in your last paragraph is a very important one – and one that few outside nationalist circles seem to consider at all. If we are to avoid the Wall-E future alluded to by the author, how do we harness technological advances to build greater nations, rather than weaker, less adventurous ones?
It’s ironic that we squander the time freed up by our multiple labour-saving devices to work longer at dead-end jobs, producing suburban bric-a-brac with no lasting value. Or poisoning our minds with the gibberish that passes for TV program content.
There would seem to be solutions to this problem on several levels.
At the micro level, there is a need to showcase inspiring examples of people who have lived great lives, without wealth or other advantages unavailable to ordinary folk. Not just people who have served their organic, tribal nations with excellence (though they are well worth celebrating) but those who have managed to live big lives of adventure, spirit and achievement – while holding down a day job and raising a family too.
At the macro level I see a role for the state in creating new frontiers. ‘Frontier pressure’ is something that indelibly shaped the cultures of the US, Canada and Australia. It provides a positive outlet for the adventurous, exploratory spirit of our peoples. It’s true that new land frontiers are no longer available in the way they once were, but the seabed and space remain open prairies for future generations. Consider the national focus and heroic achievements associated with the post-WW2 space race, then compare and contrast to the bland consumerist market-existence that came afterwards. The arguments against such endeavours (‘there’s no money for those things, look at the deficit’) should be dismissed out of hand for the economically illiterate drivel that they are.
IMO, much of the anger expressed by white people today is frustration at having no outlets for the energy and creativity that makes us potentially great. We need outlets – and having some would go a long way to answering your excellent question.
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Thanks for your valuable input. Your suggested solutions, on both the micro and macro level, to the paradox raised in the article, are very interesting and excellent worth considering, exploring and experimenting and have a bright prospect to succeed once put to practice in my opinion. But unless we can thoroughly reform and perhaps replace our current corrupt, inept and feckless political and educational systems, it is hardly realistically possible for our society to adopt your suggested new directions. In the end, to substantially shift our society to yearning for these exciting and idealistic pursuits, it fundamentally boils down to rightly educating and inspiring our people and carrying on with our racialist and nationalist struggle wisely, effectually and steadfastly so as to eventually win real political power of governing our own countries for ourselves. Let’s all do our respective part within our utmost capacities for that glorious aim.
Do you really think we have that kind of time? Or to put it more bluntly, do you really think they’re going to give us that kind of time and opportunity? I think they’ll be going towards final solutions of the White problem instead.
If by ‘they’ you mean the state apparatus as it currently exists, then no, of course not.
But there are things ‘we’ can do for ourselves. We can celebrate and honour those who live glorious lives under difficult circumstances. We can point out, relentlessly, the vapid pointlessness of the globalist, capitalist society we have created.
There is a role for the state in marshalling the best instincts of our peoples, but the state as currently constituted is not interested in any such thing – being wholly invested in a one-world corporate future where organic nations are a memory.
A profoundly calming article. The adjunct of anger, for us at least, is despair at the glacial slowness with which our people are awakening when the destination is now so obvious for all to see.
This was a great read- the last paragraph in particular recalls Emerson. The articles on WN that take high ground seem to be diminishing. I am not a WN, but it is articles like these that originally got me interested in the movement- articles that paint the movement as something more than mere tribalism.
Mere tribalism? No. But Tribalism, absolutely. No apologies. We must become a kind of Ummah or Super Tribe. Within that, separate nations of Whites can exist, whether historical or new, whether based on ethnicity and shared history or ideology and/or religion. But all must be the separate fingers that can close to make a White Fist against a hostile world.
Communism and Cultural Marxism was spearheaded by the woman’s right to vote which begot socialism and today’s SJW movement, without those we would never have ended up where we are today, even a lost world war would not have caused such devastation if it could not have been politically exploited.
An excellent essay, which brings us emphatically back to the true and necessary fount of every specific goal that we would accomplish: manly self-mastery of the soul.
It is a rare point of perhaps even universal accord throughout ancient philosophy that manliness entails command of the passions. Stoics, Platonists, Aristotelians, Skeptics, and Epicureans alike agree to it. This point was revitalized in Nietzsche, whose various suggestions to strengthen one’s passions were always predicated on the idea that one must be able to master them to harness their enormous force. But it is agreed upon everywhere one chooses to look in the entire noble tradition of philosophy that a man who is the slave of his passions is not a man at all. Nor do even the poets of antiquity dispute this. One of the opening scenes of the Iliad has Achilleus standing before the tyrannical injustice of Agamemnon. In his wrath—that virtue most famous to him, which is even the opening word of the entire poem—Achilleus ponders drawing his blade and stRiki-Eiking the king down. But Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, descends to him and stays his hand. It is the weak man who submits in his soul.
Mr. Durocher is also a hundred times right in his indication of the necessary metaphysical and spiritual ground which we must cultivate in order to prepare our souls for such strength. It is a real question if thoroughgoing scientistic materialism does not undermine the very preconditions for inner power from the start. Apropos this point, the following observation by Mr. Durocher seems to me of utmost value, and I believe it could well bear extended analysis:
“The tremendous violence and upheaval of the Second World War was, in my view, a particularly intense and accelerated episode in a wider socio-historical movement: the decline of spiritedness in the age of technological and material progress.”
Yes, on both points. One can also think of Arjuna’s despair on the battlefield and Krishna’s Gospel of Duty, however unpleasant.
And how could the West feel good about WW2? They destroyed their Culture on behalf of Merchants and Bankers, the Allies fighting against themselves. A few years, ago many elderly British veterans regretted their service, saying they wouldn’t have fought if they knew the Victors planned to turn Britain over to Muslims and Non-Whites.
Hello Mr. Leonard. Thank you for the kind comment.
Question: Where does Nietzsche discuss this?
The decline of the West’s spiritual life is definitely a topic that should be explored more..
Hello, Mr. Durocher. Nietzsche’s analysis of passion in the soul is extremely interesting to my mind—and characteristically difficult to pinpoint. As always with Nietzsche, there is no particular work or particular chapter in which he dedicates himself exclusively to this question. In a way it is implicit to the very idea of “will to power,” for the man who most perfectly embodies the will to power must of course have power first and foremost over himself. Nietzsche is very far from rejecting the ancient view that the man who is a riot of the passions is a slave; only that he radically reconsiders the relation between reason and passion. Consider Nietzsche’s constant (and not altogether derogatory) references to “tyranny” in the soul (c.f., for instance, “The Problem of Socrates” in Twilight of the Idols; “Morality as Anti-Nature” in the same work is also of interest).
Although it is dangerous to take anything from The Will to Power as pertaining necessarily to Nietzsche’s philosophy, the frequency of his references to the problem of passion therein, and the consistency of these references with the body of his published work, justifies its use in this case. Consider §§ 120, 387, 773, 778, 933, and 1025. Of these, §§ 778 and 1025 in particular are very clear and very interesting. The last is worth quoting in part: “The ‘great man’ is great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service.” Though this is surely very different from the Platonic teaching, it is perhaps not so different as might at first seem; the Allegory of the Chariot in the Phaedrus for instance portrays the passionate part of the soul as a steed driven by the soul and accompanied by another steed, rationality; by this metaphor, it is clear that a strong and masterly charioteer with two powerful steeds at his disposal will go farther than a weak driver pulled, say, by two ponies.
In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche broaches the theory of “soul as social structure of the instincts and passions” (§12); given his own ideas of society, it is clear what form a good soul would take. In that work, see also §§ 188, 212, 230. § 284 is also clear on this point, and is one of Nietzsche’s most elegant formulations on this question. (And incidentally, Mr. Durocher, though it is only partially related to the present issue, you in particular might find § 293 of the same work to be congenial…)
See also Speech 5 of the First Part of Zarathustra, “On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions.”
I’ve written too much—and not enough. I hope it is of service.
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