White “Civil Wars”:
Grinding Napoleon’s Axiom

Johann Peter Krafft, The Siege of Szigetvár, 1825.

5,125 words

The bad news is the bad news — the stories we’ve seen and heard in the past few months, years, decades that all keep warning us of more to come. The good news is that these times of transition provide us with opportunities for clarity and fresh perspectives on historical and social phenomena that inspire mental diversions and theory-making. Some of the more compelling central questions that have lately emerged in dissident circles are: “what is a civil war?” and, “are we headed for one (or in one already)?” What follows are my contributions to the discussion, and I mean them to be a starting point, or an opening salvo in a seminar, rather than an ultimate “theory of everything.” My contention is that we can understand current crises through interpretive historical frameworks, even if those frameworks force us to conclude that current crises are, in some ways, major breaks from the past. Still, few things are without their precedents.

In his book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War,” author Patrick Buchanan began by conjuring that quintessential modern warlord:

Every European war is a civil war, said Napoleon. Historians will look back on 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 as two phases of the great Civil War of the West, [when] the once Christian nations of Europe fell upon one another with such savage abandon they brought down all their empires, brought an end to centuries of Western rule, and advanced the death of their civilization. [1] [1]

Francis Parker Yockey said much the same thing in his earlier Imperium, when he emphasized that a political-civilizational power transfer from Europe had occurred and fled to its extreme peripheries: to the east (Asiatic, anti-European Russia) and to the west (essentially anti-European America). [2] [2]

What painting is there that better shows off tradition and its antithesis within the same European ritual?

Designating every European war as a “civil war” is facile; its broadness robs “civil war” of a meaningful definition and history of its clarity. Napoleon’s synthesis of 3,000 years of conflict served to legitimize his own intercontinental campaign of conquest. According to this assertion, Napoleon was simply following a venerable tradition of warfare, even as he engaged in an anti-traditional agenda that involved toppling centuries-old monarchies across Europe and spreading French Revolutionary dogma — a premise made by an opportunist and snatcher of destiny. If we are nationalists, we should distinguish between polities and nation-states (as well as propaganda from reality) and take them seriously as fundamental entities.

At the same time, neither Mr. Buchanan nor Yockey was wrong to view history and its shifts broadly and from a civilizational lens. The twentieth-century World Wars were about nation-states and nationalism — but they were clearly about much more than any one, two, or three individual nations, or even empires. The West entirely (and much beyond it) was at stake.

This dilemma, if it is one, neatly encapsulates what the Dissident Right tries to address. We are nationalists who wish to save peoples and cultures in Europe from homogenization and globalist destruction. We do not want Sicilians to become Swedes, nor do we wish to see either as undifferentiated “Europeans” by eliding them in our historical analyses. At the same time, our mission is to protect all of Europe and its offshoots that Europeans have populated, or the sum of those parts we call “Western Civilization.”

With these considerations in mind, I have attempted a rough classificatory system into which historians could theoretically sort most European conflicts. The primary division between European wars here is the entity of the state or nation-state. Conflicts within two or more fully-fledged states are “Intra-Civitas wars,” conflicts between fully-fledged states I have classed as “Inter-Civitas wars” and finally, conflicts beyond state boundaries are “Extra-Civitas” wars. Sometimes, the one led to the others, and European land empires like Austria-Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire posed difficult questions about statehood and autonomy, but this is a beginning. Let’s explore the long and interesting history of wars between whites. [3] [3]

Intra-Civitas Wars

The first broad category of European wars were “Intra-Civitas wars.” In other words, opponents fought their battles within a given polity or nation-state. Intra-Civitas conflicts were either: A) civil wars, or B) wars of secession. In turn, these exhibited one or more subtypes: i) localized unrest, ii) issues of leadership/dynasty, and iii) ideological struggles. [4] [4]

Civil Wars

Such wars met two qualifications. A civil war must firstly have been a dispute between parties within the same state/country; and secondly, its antagonists’ ends must have aimed to take over the entire polity and/or enforce sweeping reforms on the central government. Civil wars had three basic varieties:

Localized or civil rebellions: Revolts, or uprisings that were more “mobbish” than any type of organized armed resistance, but ones that nevertheless were serious and meant to overthrow or enact significant reforms on the established government (the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794), the Paris Commune (1871); Jack Cade’s 1450 uprising in England). This variant almost always failed to achieve adherents’ goals, which were often only quasi-coherent. The civil unrest instigated by Antifa and BLM seems to be succeeding due to the weakness of the US state and its officials’ willing participation in their own disgrace and abdication of basic civic duties.

Dynastic civil wars: This is self-explanatory and involved conflicts over kingdoms, in which winning the throne was the goal, rather than doing away with the throne altogether (the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485); Stephen and Maude’s War (1135-1153), the 1845 Jacobite Rising). Though most dynastic civil wars of the past involved hereditary monarchies, today’s dynastic civil wars should include presidencies and dictatorships that other, would-be dictators have fought to overthrow, but who have had no plans to significantly alter, apart from the installation of cutthroats friendly to the new regime. It’s shabbier, sure, without the jewels and anointing oils, but for the purposes of this essay, they are essentially the same concepts.

Ideological civil wars/revolutions: These civil wars involved a wholesale restructuring of polities and were generally the most brutal, total, and wrenching type, and ones in which many soldiers and civilians tended to die (the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the French Revolution, including the War in the Vendée (1789-1799), the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917-1923), the English Civil War (1642-1651)).

Wars of Secession: the rebelling province or sub-federal territory did not want to alter the central polity, but desired to form its own polity by breaking away (the War of Southern Secession (1861-1865), the Second Balkan War (1913), various Scottish and Irish uprisings against the English/British).

A note: this means that the American “Civil War” was not a civil war, once and for all. At no time did the South consider marching on Washington in order to overthrow the government of the United States and/or to install Jefferson Davis in the White House via military junta. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington one hundred years later intended more of a governmental coup than a Southern march on Washington ever would have. Had Southerners somehow seized the US capital, they would have sued for peace terms . . . in order to leave. Neither did the South intend to radically alter the Constitution and innovate a new system. Southerners’ constitution was a virtual copy of the original with only a few specific changes and clarifications.

This is an old hill over which others have fought and refought since 1865, and it may not be the most important one to die on now, but we should not allow this nineteenth-century war, one that our educational system has taught us was a “civil war,” blind us in our evaluation and recognition of the genuine article. The war between the northern and southern factions of American states in the mid-nineteenth century was a classic war of secession. Indeed, I would be more inclined to categorize it with wars of the next section, than into the category of “civil wars,” since the Confederacy had all the trappings and performed all the duties of statehood for almost the entirety of the conflict.

You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here. [5]

Inter-Civitas Wars

As for conflicts fought between separate polities, those fell under the broad scope of “Inter-Civitas” wars and thence into one or more of three main conflict types: A) localized wars/revolts; B) dynastic disputes; and C) wars of ideology that had civilizational consequences.

Localized wars: Combatants fought over disputed territory or boundaries (Russo-Swedish Wars (fought on-and-off during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the Crimean War (1853-1856)).

Dynastic disputes: Two or more states conflicted over who would control one or both of their states, or an entirely different state (The War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), The War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and its reignited and wider conflict, the Seven Years War (1756-1763), the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), Spain’s attempted 1588 Armada invasion of England).

Tota-Europa wars / Ideological wars: Widespread conflicts that had civilizational, often continent-wide consequences; these tended to rip apart the European social fabric and destroy older orders/ancien régimes, resulting in the beginning and ending of eras. They usually exacted hideous body counts (the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), the World Wars (1914-1945)).

Inter-Civitas wars often sparked smaller, Intra-Civitas wars within battling states that manifested as civil wars, secessionist wars, or other wars of independence. The Peloponnesian War provided us the example of the Greek city-state of Corcyra and its collapse into civil war, as all around it, the larger battles in the Aegean raged. Rival democratic and oligarchic factions inside Corcyra’s walls made the disastrous decision to ask the principal antagonists, Athens and Sparta, respectively, to kill their own neighbors.

Continental rivalries did have some benefits for Europeans. They encouraged and maintained true diversity in Europe, while containing diversity’s more negative aspects by giving rise to the nation-state. These developments made it the most richly differentiated continent per square mile of territory, as well as the most ordered and intellectually creative. [5] [6] It spurred the tireless European spirit and its sense of competition, leading to glorious feats in technology and conquest. Men vied for the honor of presenting their innovations to their kings and countries before counterparts in neighboring states could do so. For a time, this made Europeans fiercely proud of both their nations and their race.

But we should also acknowledge inter-European warfare’s negative consequences.

Some of the most damaging Inter-Civitas wars were those of the third type. They were comprehensive and often ideological, and we should call them “Tota-Europa wars,” because antagonists of those conflicts sought to profoundly shift European religious, social, political, or economic fundamentals. The Peloponnesian War once again gave us a model with which to use in comparison. It engulfed much of the Mediterranean and pitted the rising, democratic Athenians and their sea empire against an older, oligarchic Sparta and its land empire. It ended the Greek golden age and devastated a large portion of the civilized European world.

Historians believe that the Thirty Years War — an Inter-Civitas religious and dynastic conflict with smaller but savage civil wars — may have wiped out one-third of Central Europe’s population. Of course, the two World Wars, from under whose shadows we have never emerged, outdid even that war in their horror and scope, and ended the Christian era of Europe. These came the closest to being “the great Civil War[s] of the West” that Buchanan and Yockey described, but using the term “Tota-Europa war” is more appropriate and emphasizes their civilizational impact while still preserving the definition of “civil war” as one fought solely within a defined “civil” state or nation. I admire Mr. Buchanan and mean him no disrespect, but perhaps he meant to say that whites from 1914-1945 collectively signed an intra-racial suicide pact that looked like a sound decision to irresponsible war-mongers like Winston Churchill, who still operated as if nineteenth-century “balance of power” politics was a sound foreign policy. We need to quit being afraid of words like “white” and “race,” if our arguments require them.

By far the most devastating consequence of Inter-Civitas conflict was an unquenchable thirst for non-white empires among Europe’s powerful nations that created, but never fully satisfied, a European addiction to non-white labor. Unchecked competition compelled European countries to gobble up more and more territory in the scramble for the non-white world, all for the purpose of gaining an advantage in a geopolitical chess match played against their neighbors. The desire for extracting wealth and luxury through colonial slavery left a burdensome legacy from which the white world seems destined to carry on into perpetuity. Worse, constant Inter- and Intra-Civitas wars fought between whites before the age of imperialism primed European powers to use nearly any method to gain an advantage — even if that meant using non-whites from their developing empires to undermine other white imperial powers. Sometimes, they even unleashed this havoc on their own colonists — racial manipulation that became tragically common. The French sicced Amerindian groups on the British and their colonists throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The British mustered Africans and Indians from their empire to fight the Germans during the World Wars. And after those latter wars, sagging and spent, imperial European countries felt obliged to dissolve the empires that pride and vainglory had once compelled them to build, and then to accept the inundation of the non-white people they once called “subjects” and “slaves” into their diminished lands as “citizens.” These were the terrible effects of Europe’s unending Inter-Civitas clashes. Let’s turn now to look more closely at the wars European empires wrought.

Extra-Civitas Wars

The third type of conflicts fought on European-controlled territory and between Europeans were colonial/imperial wars, and they deserve their own section for two reasons: 1) these conflicts took place outside Europe-proper, or beyond the “metropole,” though colonies were technically considered on soil belonging to the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, etc; and 2) Almost every war fought by Europeans over their colonial possessions involved a racial component that altered the character of such wars, making colonial conflicts either “wars with race” and others fully “race wars.” At times, colonial battles began as the former and ended as the latter. “Race wars” tended to be nastier, but both forms were bitter feuds.

Colonial wars with race: These wars were fought primarily between white peripheries and white metropoles (the Boer Wars (1880-1881, 1899-1902), the American Revolution (1776-1783), Chilean (1808-1817) and Argentine (1810-1826) wars of independence). Despite being primarily intra-racial, colonial struggles for independence almost always had some racial element that involved metropolitan use of non-whites against white colonists and settlers.

Colonial race wars: conflicts that were primarily racial struggles between European colonists/colonialists and non-white “natives” in which white settlers and white officials from the mother country often opposed one another in their aims (Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Rhodesian (1964-1979) and South African Border Wars (1966-1984), Angolan-Congo Wars (1961-1974)).

Colonies Versus Metropoles: Past Betrayals

As readers may have gathered, the above analysis has assumed a primarily white West, even if Western empires were not so. What does it all mean for today’s discord, since the troubles are occurring in Western countries that now suffer from unprecedented levels of multiracialism? Labeling what we are seeing as simply one, huge “race war” seems incomplete. As commentators have pointed out, much of the animus is intra-racial. Jewish and white (along with a smattering of non-white) elites lead a hodge-podge, but still mostly white, brigade against European populations wherever they reside.

Taken together, this suggests that we are seeing a low-grade type of Intra-Civitas civil war in America and in many other Western nations, paired with an approaching Tota-Europa civilizational struggle that touches on profound issues of history and identity. The peculiar combination of the two has created what looks most like Extra-Civitas wars as they appeared in the former colonies. Wars of this kind might be a novelty to most white-majority nations, but they were familiar to whites who lived on the outskirts of Western civilization and in colonial outposts. Those vulnerable settlers had to contend not only with non-white violence but also subversion from within their own ranks. Anyone who believes that white anti-whiteness was a twentieth-century phenomenon that appeared in force only after that “unnecessary war” in 1945 needs to consult the history and conduct of Western imperialists. Long before the misadventures in Rhodesia and South Africa, Westerners had both suffered from and perpetrated racial betrayals.

The British, for example, infamously promised in Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 that black slaves in the colonial South could earn their freedom if they served the British army and helped put down their rebellious (and even Loyalist) white masters. It was a craven and transparent stunt designed to cow Southerners and instill fear in what was a largely loyal region. British officials also contracted and armed Amerindian “allies” to raid their colonists’ frontiers and towns during and after the American Revolution. The most notorious example of this backdoor intrigue was the British support and outfitting of war chief Tecumseh and his various tribes in the Ohio Valley up to the War of 1812.

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, etc, etc.

The French Revolution and Europe’s subsequent plunge into the first modern Tota-Europa war of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was just as damaging and “unnecessary” as were the World Wars one hundred and more years later. One of the most egregious examples of this damage and its ripple-effect was the catastrophe that took place in France’s wealthiest Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue from 1791-1804. Decades before the French Revolution, free blacks and mulattoes who ventured to the Parisian metropole from its colonies “were greeted with sympathy and consideration by an increasingly large section of [French] society.” Anti-slavery clubs became fashionable with the salon set, who welcomed their kind and fueled black resentment (radical chic had its precedents, too). A governor of Saint-Domingue admitted that once, he also was “filled with all the European prejudices against harsh treatment of the negroes. But [he] quickly [became] convinced that there must be a discipline, not only severe, but severe in the extreme” in order to maintain control of the island. [6] [7]

His remark perfectly illustrated the unhealthy dynamic between Frenchmen living in the metropole (and who depended on Caribbean sugar plantations to sweeten their morning cafés) and Frenchmen living cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of thousands of black slaves on the periphery of French civilization. When the metropole in Paris descended into revolutionary chaos in 1789, “the conquerors of the Old Regime laid hands upon [the] social fabric” of Saint-Domingue, and all hell broke loose. By 1804, every white person who had lived on the island of now-Haiti had either absconded themselves from its shores or died gruesomely at the hands of black killers. Many French revolutionaries cheered the massacres as comeuppance against their class enemies and hailed it as a sign that equality was on the ascent. [7] [8]

John Brown didn’t emerge from a vacuum to go on to murder whites with broadswords in “Bleeding Kansas” and then to attempt Haiti 2.0 in Virginia. An entire generation of Northern radicalism had nursed his anti-white hatred (note: I do not mean the free-soilers and whites of the farming and laboring sorts who opposed slavery out of their racial and economic interests). True, Brown had few Northern supporters at the time of his hanging in 1859 (though notable Yankee transcendentalists compared him to Christ, the Martyr), but they completed his mission well and willingly enough within a decade, and they did so while using tens of thousands of black troops against their white counterparts. Unsatisfied even with total victory and the millions of freed slaves roaming the ravaged Southern countryside in 1865, Northern radicals took out their vengeance on the white South and humiliated its people by instituting black-run Reconstruction governments. At that point, the South was essentially a Northern colony.

Indeed, much of the South had, in some ways, always seemed like a colony to the North. They considered the region strange, backward, and indolent. To most Northerners, the South existed in books, and they cried over imaginary black characters and shook their fingers at fictional white villains (Kirk Herbstreit and white liberal tears, anyone?). Then, they attended their Christian reform societies to “discuss” it all in antebellum book clubs. They happily sewed anti-white discord in lands remote enough for comfort and in places they used like milch cows to finance projects with tariff monies. Only when their own cities began to fill with a new kind of Southern export — black men, instead of white cotton — did some begin to feel uneasy. The problems and perils of the Southern periphery had invaded their Northern centers. Southern addiction to black slave labor and Northern WASP, and later, Jewish, indulgence of anti-whiteness and black misbehavior throughout this nation’s history has resulted in countless farces and tragedies, both.

Peripheries Versus Centers: Future Battles

In an opposite reactionary force to the phenomenon described by Yockey, in which Western civilizational power bled away from its beating European heartland to its oppositional peripheries, the problems of peripheries — of those colonial outskirts, and their reliance on non-white labor, their fraying law and order, and searing anti-white resentment — have migrated now to the centers, mirroring what occurred in nineteenth and twentieth-century America during the Great Migration. Once, the outgoing flow of civilizational fortitude broadcasted a confident Britishness, Frenchness, Teutonism to all corners of the world; once, Europe sent the literal representatives of her surety in the form of her nations’ sons and daughters. These children of empire embraced a mission to enrich Europe, to populate the globe, and to lighten its darkest thickets.

But this is the crucial point: it is clear through historical examples that in the midst of this optimistic purpose, there was also, running through it like a malicious virus, a streak of anti-Western and anti-white feeling that first gestated in the metropolitan centers of European nations and that malcontents directed this sickness toward their imperial peripheries. Few whites had a greater pro-white racial consciousness than those living on the edges of white civilization and among large populations of racial aliens. The fact that most of these places (Saint-Domingue, the American South, southern African colonies), peoples, and attitudes no longer exist is due to the fact that those peripheral whites were either killed, pushed out, or vanquished in war, while metropolitan whites either actively or passively engaged in their dispossession. The conspiracy against whites in Rhodesia and South Africa, in which one of the chief agents was their own mother country of Great Britain, demonstrated a recent and especially rotten example of this process.

Indeed, there always existed among whites of central metropoles the sniffing and self-righteous disdain for their colonial or backwoods brethren (observe our slick, coastal elites and their superior attitude toward Middle America for a modern manifestation). This innate tendency assumed an especially noxious and charged form when the colored races — that alien element — was involved. War among Europeans changed during the age of empires. Non-white outsiders became useful bludgeons with which metropole authorities beat their own countrymen and ruined fellow-Europeans when fighting their wasteful wars. Unlike sabers and pistols, however, conscripted non-whites were not content to collect dust on the walls and languish away in war-chests, waiting to be taken up again at their masters’ need. They demanded a share in the prizes of white lands, wealth, and political power. Black soldiers of the Union Army, for example, expected full American citizenship as the price for their service, and the ongoing project and propaganda campaign that has tried since then to convince both blacks and whites that Africans are Americans continues to be as ineffective as it is expensive.

Now Western nations hide themselves behind the thinning walls of their delusions, while their sons and daughters abandon the posts that guard the borders of their countries. Civilizational power has indeed shifted to the anti-Western and non-white world, and the world has begun projecting its own visions onto Europe. It sends its black and brown masses to populate and darken every corner of the white West. Once, whites were confident that Westerners would inherit the earth. The new migrants are confident, too, that they will inherit the West. They want what all conquering invaders have wanted throughout history: land, horses, and women. The Alps, those stirring peaks and hills in the heart of Europa that have thrilled the blood of Europeans for hundreds of generations, have become a haven for black African “refugees.” It may be less dramatic than Hannibal and his thundering herd of elephants storming the mountainous gates of the Ancient Boot, but it’s no less alarming.

Occupied Italy. [8] [9]

I conclude then that it was not simply an “unnecessary war” that lost the British her empire and Europa, the world; it was an unnecessary empire that cost the British people their country and Europeans, the West. The raison d’être of the British nation had become the Empire, and when it collapsed, Britain was left a shell of itself. It is doubtful that Europe’s Second Thirty Years War of 1914-1945 would have dealt European civilization such an ugly blow had competition-driven world empires and entitled non-white “subjects” on the West’s peripheries stayed out of metropolitan affairs. Tota-Europa wars of the past had leveled whole sections of the European continent before, but never had they resulted in the stunning betrayal and sacrifice of white homelands on the altar of racial and alien appeasement.

It is also clear that today’s struggles in the white West have more in common with colonial Extra-Civitas conflicts than any other internal European wars of the past. Now that Europe, Australia, and North America have all but become colonies of the Third World, the peripheries have shifted, as well. They have moved from Calcutta and Kenya, Ceylon and Guinea, and are now located in nation-states of the West, while the managerial centers that dictate their fates are the globalist metropolises of capital, trade, and politics. Native whites find themselves existing on the economic and social fringes of their own countries. They are the often-unnoticed and always-necessary working and middle classes who live in small towns, rural areas, and suburbs. They resent the new “white codes” levied by the chattering elites and the miseducated urbanites in their efforts to convince legacy whites that they and their histories are disposable. They instinctively cling to nationalism as a bulwark against the cosmopolitan sewage oozing from Washington, New York, London, and Brussels. They are often the ones who must live close to areas darkening with the torrents of new immigrants flooding their schools and turning their hometowns into barrios and bazaars.

Metropoles and metropolitans are what they have always been, but rampant multiracialism so near to Western civilization’s historic centers has made their campaign against their own countrymen especially charged and intense. They are breaking white civilization on the wheel of race. The worrying situation about all of this is that those on the peripheries, if they remain there, always seem to lose their battles and find themselves dispossessed and despised, for the multicultural centers depend for their survival on keeping the white peripheries out and stigmatized, slowly starving them of their political and, eventually, physical will. To maintain this hegemony, there is no vile act that they will not commit and call a “necessary war” against hate; no limit to their machinations that they will explain as praise-worthy action in the service of bending history toward the arc of “justice.”

National battles between peripheries and centers may be the next great civil wars of our time. The only way now to correct several centuries of white mistakes is to commit to the very necessary crusade to save ourselves. There are only two options from which native whites and their nations can now choose: 1) a risky civil war of redemption fought by whites in their respective nations, and for which they will need both a dynastic takeover and an ideological campaign that reverses the anti-white rot. In short, they must collapse the centers of bureaucratic power, or take it over from within. Or, 2) a less total war of secession in which whites may do more lobbying and community-building than fighting in order to carve out separate states from their original nations, thus cutting off the power of cosmopolitan centers to affect them. Above all, race must no longer be a factor in Western states, something that by definition will require the kind of racial homogeneity present in Europe before imperial wars polluted it.

I’ll be honest: neither scenario seems likely in the foreseeable future. . . and yet, events are moving at great speed. I remind myself that history is not merely the record of catastrophes, but of great men and great peoples, who challenged both the gods and history, slaying unbeatable beasts and snatching away crowns from old regimes that once seemed invincible, just to spite them all. After Greece, there was an Alexander. After Alexander, there was an Augustus. After Augustus, there was a Corsican, who took on the old metropoles and kings of Europe and changed the continent irrevocably. For good or ill, I cannot decide, but I can certainly admire. Intra-racial in-fighting and “pathological altruism” may be uniquely strong white traits.

But so, too is defiance.

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Notes

[1] [12] Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War”: How the British Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (New York: Random House, 2008), xvii.

[2] [13] Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, Paul Bondarovski, ed. (Creative Commons Attribution License, 2017).

[3] [14] I am inclined, for instance, to view nineteenth-century Hungary as a fully-fledged state within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while I am less inclined to view Croatia-Slovenia as one.

[4] [15] See Stanley G. Payne’s Civil War in Europe, 1905-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) for his first chapter on “Revolutions and Civil Wars as Forms of Conflict” and subsequent analysis of the, here, criminally-understudied Spanish Civil War. Based on his sympathetic portrayals of the Spanish nationalists and Francisco Franco (as well as his enthusiasm for fascist symbolism and regalia), I suspect that Professor Payne might be a fellow-traveler.

[5] [16] Historians have classically dated the era of nation-states as beginning in 1648, after the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War. Negotiators aimed at their creation in order to avoid the kind of disorganized melee of statelessness in central Europe, exacerbated by diversity and incompatible religious groups living within the same territories.

[6] [17] Lothrop Stoddard, The French Revolution in San Domingo (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 48.

[7] [18] Stoddard, 39, 59.

[8] [19] This appetite-killing image is brought to you by Taylor Lindsay, “Michele Amaglio Photographed the African Refugees Living in the Alps [20],” Vice, March 16, 2017.