Transcendental Titans

Revolt Against Modernity

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No More Brother War?

June 5, 2022 / / 1 Comment

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left” Bertrand Russell

The Dissident Right’s analysis of the on-going war in Ukraine has revealed a significant number of intellectual and theoretical failings. It has been hampered by an inability to unmoor itself from a hyperpolarised, myopically partisan view of the world which is undergirded by misguided sentimentality. The question we should be asking now is not which side is the most moral in this conflict, but rather what will this war mean for Europe and Europeans? To answer that question, we require a realistic assessment of who we truly are. Those who lament the sight of brother fighting brother once again on European soil fundamentally misunderstand that conflict is the central dynamo of our people; as historian Niall Ferguson puts it, competition is one of the killer apps of Western civilisation. With this in mind, we must view this war not only as a crisis but an opportunity to remake Europe in our image.

Undoubtedly, for those affected by this ferocious conflagration it is a source of untold misery. It is understandable that nationalists and liberals alike should mourn the unwarranted casualties who are suffering through horrors of war the like of which have not been seen since dissolution of Yugoslavia. This sentiment is acutely felt by those invested in the preservation of the European people. At a time when we are so demographically imperilled, it seems suicidal madness for tens of thousands of the bravest and best of our people to be killed in a futile neo-imperial struggle. It is reasonable to feel that the Achilles’ heel of Europe has been our fractious, violently quarrelsome nature. It is reasonable to think this – but it is also wrong.

Seventy years of peace and hegemonic liberalism have done dramatically more damage to European demographics and culture than any previous war ever has. Some would contest this point immediately, arguing that Europe exhausted itself fighting two catastrophic World Wars which nearly destroyed not only the continent, but the entire planet. Yet it was not these wars which are themselves the cause of our ills, but the spiritual and psychological fallout in their aftermath. Our total loss of confidence prompted Europe to surrender its primacy on the world stage and to turn inwards, submitting itself to the strait jacket of governance by globalist institutions. The European martial spirit has largely laid dormant since then, and we have been decaying ever since. This is a wakeup call.

Just because the West has viewed war only as an instrument to be utilised when remaking unwilling third world countries in our ideological image, the rest of the world has not taken on that definition. Russia never transitioned from the old realities of geopolitics, its policy makers, many of whom were forged in the Soviet system, still view power as stemming from territory, natural resources, tanks, and missiles. While the Western political elite congratulates itself on the fact our soft power can raise the LGBTQ flag around the globe, Russia never updated its geopolitical calculus. A plethora of explanations have been offered for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but perhaps Occam’s Razor suits best when asking why Putin launched his unexpected gambit. Rightly or wrongly, Russia believed it could invade unchallenged and ultimately gain spoils in land, subjects, and plunder by doing so.

Whether or not this is actually true is another matter. It may well be the case that this has been a colossal miscalculation by Putin. While liberal comparisons between Hitler and Putin abound, one comparison that may ring true is just as Hitler remarked that he had only to kick in the door of the Soviet Union and the whole rotten structure would collapse, Putin may have reached a similar assessment of the West. In reality, the Russian state may have too few troops and too little political will to see this invasion through to the end. It is enticing for some to hope for a total Russian victory, not out of petty animosity towards Ukrainians but because Russia could represent a new traditionalist hegemonic force, an antidote to Western woke tyranny. This is a simplistic and naïve view – Russia is operating out of sheer national interest. Alexander Dugin is offering an honest assessment when he states that Eurasianism is not for export – it is naturally a geographically limited endeavour.

Indeed, it seems laughable to suggest that a nation which is struggling to project power a few hundred miles from its own border could be the next globe spanning superpower. Putin in the end may not be a conquering hero, but rather a kamikaze pilot crashing the Russian state into the aircraft carrier that is Western liberalism.  Putin fancies himself as a modern Peter the Great, however if he mismanages this campaign, he may end with more in common with the doomed Tsar Nicholas II.

Much hay has been made by Twitter armchair generals and gleeful Western media outlets about supposed Russian military ineptitude. The true impact of this on the eventual outcome of the war is likely overstated, after all, war is a series of disasters that results in a winner. Clausewitizian principles have not gone away on the modern battlefield, and if anything, the unknowable variables that cause the friction of war have multiplied in the drone era. The problems of devising and executing new military doctrines in an untested full scale modern war environment most likely affect both sides equally. The Ukrainian military may be equipped with thousands of cutting-edge Javelin anti-tank weapons and Turkish drones, but it is also operating as many as 35,000 World War 1 era Maxim guns.  

The question is not therefore if Russia is making mistakes on the ground, but how much capacity to absorb costly engagements it has. This is not the mass army of the Soviet Union, there is no endless supply of motivated human waves to throw at the enemy. Russia, just as the West, is a demographically depleted nation whose population at large has a limited willingness to fight. The deployment of Chechen fighters to the front outraged nationalists of all stripes, but there is undoubtedly an element of raw Machiavellian pragmatism in this decision. Russia has neither the raw numbers nor the political appetite to win this war with native troops alone. The same impetus that prompted Germany’s Bundeswehr to mull over recruiting Poles, Italians, and Romanians has factored into Russia’s military strategy. This is not the triumphant burst of vitality from a young upstart nation, but rather two decrepit and demographically disappearing states squabbling for scraps.

The defects of Russia’s military machine have been exposed for all to see, but in launching its unexpected assault, Russia has shone a searchlight on the laughable infirmity of Europe’s security apparatus. Germany’s notable handwringing and delay in sending so-called lethal aid to Ukraine is in part a result of the dire state of its own armed forces. Europe’s elite have been left red faced as NATO members bicker over the limited supply of materiel. Germany is scouring its museums for tanks and dispatching mouldy and inoperable boxes of missiles to Ukraine’s frontline. It has failed to deliver tanks promised to Poland. Dissent grows in the alliance as France seeks a negotiated settlement, while nations such as Croatia and Hungary are hedging their bets. A fifth of Ukrainian territory is now in Russian hands, and disunity amongst European states may allow Putin to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Whether Putin succeeds in his bid to annex Eastern Ukraine and beyond will however not be the lasting legacy of this invasion. Whatever else Putin has done, he has thrown a brick through the glass house of European sloth and inaction. Just as Gavrilo Princip’s bullet ended the old order in Europe forever, once the first missile hit Kiev it detonated all the old assumptions and platitudes of our liberal elite. European policy makers and much of the public at large have believed that the borders of Europe which were drawn up in 1945 are immutable facts of life. The truth is nations are living entities maintained not by political abstractions, but by the blood and sweat of patriots on the battlefield. This has always been so, and this iron law of the nature never changed despite wishful liberal thinking. Putin has fanned the embers of the martial spirit in Europe once again. While much ham-fisted propaganda has been disseminated in Ukraine’s favour, it is undeniable that the average infantryman facing down Russian tanks doesn’t believe nationhood is a mere set of abstract theories. He is fighting for hearth and home in a pitiless existential battle. Putin has proven to a Europe subservient to foreign military powers that it cannot rely on them for its security. If European states wish to survive, they must now be defended by Europeans.

While Putin has dramatically exposed the laughably misguided assumptions at the heart of our collective defence, he also put paid to the lie diversity is our strength. The large contingent of Ukrainian citizens who felt themselves to be ethnically Russian have sabotaged their state from within. Minorities have been weaponised, and this model could be applied next to the Baltic states and beyond. This prompts uncomfortable questions when we brooch the topic of divided loyalties in a Europe that houses tens of millions of foreign born and ethnic minority citizens. Our multi-ethnic societies have never been tested by a true crisis, and conflict begets conflict, as old ethnic tensions stir again, with Bosnia being just one example.

It may be hard to imagine that war, destruction, and chaos could lead to anything good for the European people. And yet, the path we were treading was one of our self-extinction; of a slow and suffocating senility. We were heading quietly into night as a new and alien world rose around us. When our race is in the slaughterhouse, anything that disrupts the machinery is a necessity. Europeans have always fought and struggled and sacrificed. The story of Europe is the story of our Janus headed dialectic; pagan fought Christian, Catholic battled Protestant, Royal dynasty was pitted against Royal dynasty, great and terrible modern ideologies squared up against each other. It is this constant reinvention of our continent by these huge battles of ideas that has enabled Europe to be the engine of world history for nigh-on three millennia.

Tactical assessments are infamously difficult to get right – it is almost impossible to know if Putin will win or lose. War is not a zero-sum game and in the short to medium term it may be the case that both sides suffer. What we can predict with more certainty is that we have seen the high watermark of the liberal order. Reeling from their defeats in Afghanistan and Syria, the liberal warmongers and meddlers are now besieged in their heartland. The Asiatic battering ram is at the castle gates, and this chaos might just be the distraction required for the patriots to escape from the dungeons. We do not dream of a Europe under Russian dominion. Those in Eastern Europe who have experienced Russian rule would scarcely recommend it, and the fact that Russia must impose itself by force speaks to the lack of appeal of its system. We want a Europe ruled by Europeans, for Europeans. Our elites are driving us off a cliff, and now is the time for us to wrestle the wheel from them.

Above all, the current conflict has elevated the stakes of all politics. We have no time for frivolity in the face of direct and immediate danger. People across our continent are waking up to the uncomfortable reality that is not enough to simply believe in Europe; you must fight for it too.  In the shockwave of economic and political turmoil to come, masses of disenfranchised and disillusioned Europeans will be looking for new political solutions. It is incumbent on us to be waiting in the wings, ready to offer our vision of the world and to shepherd our misled people back to greatness. War is a terrible thing, but to struggle is to live. There will be much more struggle to come, and we must be ready to make sure we are the victors of that struggle.

A Tale of Two Jonathans

May 23, 2022 / / 0 Comments

“Everything builds on something that existed before you, and without the concrete that is beneath your feet, you’re lost, aimless, and atomised.” – Jonathan Bowden

A decade after his untimely demise, Jonathan Bowden continues to be a cult figure on the dissident right famous for both his political oratory and the incisive nature of his cultural analysis. An artist, filmmaker, writer, tour de force speaker, as well as an irreverent surrealist, his fans and detractors contend he was a one of a kind. Yet as a figure ardently committed to the genealogy of ideas, Jonathan Bowden would undoubtedly have viewed himself in the wider context of a long intellectual tradition. His subject matter often involved the dissection of figures from recent history, delineating their influences and disciples and in so doing creating taxonomies of thought. Yet Jonathan himself belonged to a distinct ideational school, that of the English public intellectual. To better understand Bowden and his unique contribution to the movement, it is worth contextualising him by examining one of his peers.   

Jonathan Meades, born fifteen years prior to Bowden is also a filmmaker, writer, and supreme master of the spoken word. Unlike Bowden however, he enjoyed establishment success, being a regular face on BBC. On the surface it would seem the two couldn’t be more diametrically opposed: Meades is an avowed liberal and militant atheist, while Bowden was a fixture of the most radical elements of the right. Yet both are marked by a series of identifiable characteristics that go beyond their sartorial choices and mostly autodidactic nature. They are characterised by their willingness to engage, and their ability to not let their respective political ideologies delimit their critical faculties.  Too often on the dissident right attempts at cultural critique and analysis fall flat because those attempting to engage in them do not ask “is this good?” but instead, “does this support us?”

Even among the contrarian milieu of the right-wing fringes Bowden was heterodox in his views. Most on the right define themselves by their radical opposition to modernity, but Bowden remained ambivalent towards it. In his view, it was not that technology and progress in themselves were an evil, but rather the forms and applications they have taken in the modern world are wrong. Evola criticised fascism as ultimately a modernist ideology, whereas Bowden viewed its modernism as its essential dynamo. Fascism is kinetic energy, Faustian spirit unleashed. While the paleoconservatives and traditionalists want to return to the past, Bowden wanted to remake the present. Both Jonathans’ are subscribers to the doctrine endemic in the 1960s that the white heat of technology could improve humanity through mechanical and architectural means.

The proof of this is the choice of their medium. Bowden and Meades were both made for television, they are the inheritors of the short-lived belief that TV could provide a platform by which the mass public consciousness could be raised. They are the wayward stylistic progeny of Sir Kenneth Clark, the British art historian whose 1969 ‘Civilisation’ documentary set the gold standard for high brow cultural engagement in a visual format. Yet of course, Jonathan Bowden never was to enjoy any mainstream airtime which he would have richly deserved in a fair world. Instead, he lives on through grainy footage and crackling audio belonging to the dark ages of a nascent internet-savvy dissident movement. This failure of technology ironically adds to his mystique. We value our heroes that never lived to make hot takes in the Twitter age all the more dearly.

In part, he was undoubtedly kept off the air by sneering liberals like Jonathan Meades who were libertarian in their approach to culture, but authoritarian in their suppression of political opponents. Yet despite their outward ideological disagreements, the two were more similar than they would perhaps like to admit. They both draw from and are steeped in a coherent and unmolested Western canon. Their subjects are overwhelmingly white and male, a fact rendering neither of them fit for modern TV. They are both also defined by their Englishness, which lazy pundits would describe as quintessential. The opposite is in fact true, they are both atypical as they are Englishmen who possess an incredible power of introspection and detachment that has enabled them to dissemble Englishness as an outsider looking in would.

They are also both elitists not only in thought, but in practice by the inherent inaccessibility and patrician nature of their output. Neither cared for mass engagement, but instead made a virtue of the hefty implied pre-reading required to understand their works. In the drive to dumb down all media, neither would be welcome now in any cultural forum now. It is perhaps edifying then to see Jonathan Meades in one of his recent columns decrying Islamism, transgenderism, and the attack on white males. Along with Monty Python star John Cleese, those who spent their lives satirising and attacking the defenders of British culture now see the writing on the wall.

Just as Bowden straddling conservatism and modernism may at first seem a paradox, so is there an inherent tension in being a liberal elitist. The dilution of Western societies by dysgenics, affirmative action, and mass migration which liberals promote can only inevitably lead to their own disenfranchisement as they become unintelligible to the new congregation they would preach to. Ultimately this proves Bowden’s view of the world more correct: whatever else the duo may have been, they were both first and foremost Englishmen, who may disagree but can never truly negate their cultural and ethnic heritage.

Ultimately, I respect both Jonathan Meades and Jonathan Bowden as two of the last great public orators and uncowed cultural commentators in the Anglosphere. The idea that learned speakers utilising the mass media could elevate the population has crashed and burned. The promise that the democratisation of the media through the proliferation of private podcasts and social media channels has also failed to produce figures of comparable stature. It is thus up to us to heed their example and strive to broaden the cultural horizons of our movement. While often for our inspiration we look to the venerated writers of the past, it is hard to ignore the reality that we largely live in the era of the podcast, video, and spoken word. We would thus be wise to learn all we can from two masters of modern rhetoric.

The Long Winter of Liberty

December 2, 2021 / / 0 Comments

You are much less free than you used to be just a few short years ago – this an irrefutable fact. Almost daily in 2020 and 2021 we have witnessed scenes of tyranny and repression which we would have not thought previously possible in modern Western states. We have looked on as Australian construction workers were riddled with rubber bullets as they rallied for their right to work without vaccine passes. We have watched tens of thousands of medical workers who were previously vaunted as ‘heroes’ thrown out of their jobs because they did not comply with vaccine mandates. We have had front row seats to the creation of a two-tiered system in Austria, Germany, and New Zealand in which the vaccinated have more rights than the unvaccinated. But this attack on our freedoms goes far beyond COVID-19 and the issue of medical liberty. We are the unwitting victims of an orchestrated and wholesale effort to roll back all our existing rights organised by a malevolent and highly co-ordinated global elite.

It is no coincidence that as the pandemic raged on, world leaders dedicated weeks to the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in which they aimed ultimately to dictate the food you can eat, the vehicle you can drive, and how you can heat and power your own home. At the same time, the gubernatorial race in the state of Virginia was narrowly decided in favour of the continued right of parents to choose what is taught to their children, as voters rejected the state mandated imposition of critical race theory in Virginia’s schools. Though the battle in that instance may have been won, the war for parental choice is by no means over. Even more concerning is the fact that two of the most fundamental rights of all were recently placed on trial in the US – the right to self-defence in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, and the right to assemble and legally protest in the Charlottesville civil case. Regardless of the outcome of these cases, through media and legal intimidation our overlords have done their utmost to give Lady Liberty a black eye.

Some may say that our freedoms are always under threat; that governments continually test the limits of power and that this contestation is a natural and healthy part of the democratic process. Yet it is difficult to dispel the impression that there has been a sudden and paradigmatic shift in the nature of the social contract which has been in place since end of the Second World War. Of course, our freedoms have never been absolute but rather contingent and negotiated. For example, citizens of Western countries implicitly traded away their free speech rights on topics such as immigration and demographics in exchange for material comfort and laissez-faire governance. Yet the COVID era has torn up the unspoken status quo arrangement, while creating a template for ostracising those who object. As British conservative commentator Peter Hitchens has pointed out, the pejorative use of the labels such as ‘science denier’ and ‘climate change denier’ are an explicit effort to weaponize the perceived moral infirmity of Holocaust denial against those who dare to espouse anti-system views.

Undoubtedly, at COP26 and beyond governments are feverishly devising new categories of ‘deniers’ as they seek to forge ahead with their total reshaping of human society. It must be understood that our elites are not simply enacting a political or economic programme, they are the acolytes in the cult of modernity attempting to bring about a complete metaphysical revolution. Their vision of the future is one of atomised human beings who have no a priori characteristics. No national allegiance, no race, no family, and no gender. If our present leaders are not stopped, there will be no aspect of human life that will be untouched, and not a single freedom left unmolested. When we understand the totality of our enemies plans for us, it is all the more distressing that many on the right have unwittingly helped them advance their agenda by fundamentally misunderstanding the dissident right’s relationship with freedom.

Faced with overwhelming tyranny on all fronts, some commentators on the right have chosen to side with their oppressors and fetishize authoritarianism as an end in itself. “If only we welded people in their apartments, as China did”, they lament, “this crisis would already be over.” This line of reasoning is founded on the misguided notion that our current predicament can be counteracted by more totalitarianism and statism, not less. This may seem quite an incredible position to advocate, but it stems from two related and incorrect assumptions. Firstly, that this crisis is an epidemiological phenomenon, and not a piece of political theatre. COVID-19 is indeed real, but it is being used as a pretext and a template for radical societal changes. Secondly, those advocating for more central authority and statism believe on some level that they, or people with their values, will one day wield that power. They fantasise that a government with the true citizen’s interests at heart could sweep to power, and the pendulum will swing in our favour. They dream of a world in which all the massive machinery of government will be at our disposal, so that we can use it to remake society. Comforting though this thought may be to some, it will not happen.

It will not happen because we are not opposing merely a national government, but a globe spanning system which has locked itself into a death spiral. Every institution is corroded beyond repair, all political systems are gerrymandered beyond victory. Even when candidates who have a small modicum of sympathy to a part of our political agenda do achieve high office, they are rendered completely impotent by the deep state and the shadow government which subverts and sabotages all their carefully laid plans. This is distressing for collectivists to hear, and the charge no doubt will be laid that individual liberty is no basis on which to fight back against the organised and co-ordinated efforts of our enemies.

This is partially correct, but the question of whether the dissident right is fundamentally collectivist or individualist is moot. We must use a Janus-headed dialectic and accept the answer is not either or, but in fact both. We all have a responsibility to our wider ethnic and national community, but within that polity the engines of European history have been stoked by those practicing heroic individualism. Our ethnic identity is the marble, but the individual is the sculptor of that raw material, choosing whether or not to carve out a place in the immortal halls of our history. Inegalitarianism is engrained in the European soul – a race of great heroes and great villains. A stratified family of families in which some are peasants, and some are kings. A large variance in the average IQ of many European nations maps onto the chasmic differences between the souls of our people. Yet we are all still bound together in our struggle to pursue our collective destiny. We have dreamed the same dream.

We are engaged in a multigenerational battle for liberty. But the liberties we demand are not the same as the liberals and leftists who have gorged themselves on the freedom to be trivial; to identify themselves purely with consumer choices and sexual fads. We demand the freedom not to be ruled by our intellectual and moral inferiors. We accept the responsibility and ultimate liberation that comes from the freedom to succeed or fail entirely amongst our own kind. All modernity is a cage for European man, because our untrammelled freedom sent us to the stars, and reduced nations to nuclear cinders. The globalist project was created as a safety valve against the power of organised and motivated European nations – but it has surreptitiously expanded its remit and metastasised into a giant set of shackles on the human spirit, seeking to dictate and control every facet of life. It has designated all of us who oppose it criminals and undesirables, and for some on the right the persona of the rebel and outlaw sits uneasy. They want to continue to appeal to some distant notion of ‘fairness’, and to continue to revel in their bourgeois respectability.

The time of Evolian detachment is over, however. We are all outlaws now, as Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Government work as an iron triangle to corral us all into their prison planet. Our objective at this time is not a lofty one, we are not in a position to remake the world. First and foremost, we must survive the long winter of liberty, huddled together in face of the tyrannical blizzards and shifting snow drifts of economic ruin and total loss of freedom. But we can take solace in the fact that the globalist project has overreached, it is hurtling over a cliff. It cannot be reasoned with because it is not rational, it is Frankenstein’s monster, coming apart at the seams under the weight of its own contradictions.

Just as the Soviet Union once seemed eternal and monolithic, our commissariat will crumble and suffer the same fate. Each new diktat from the global headquarters alienates more and more people. Centuries ago, French intellectuals met in smoky and crowded salons to discuss the taboo currents of the day, and in the modern era unmoderated Telegram channels and Twitter spaces are springing up with momentous pace. We are outlaws. We are underground. Here in the catacombs a great abused and disenfranchised mass is gathering. All those labouring in the dark to throw a wrench in the infernal apparatus of globalism are here. We are waiting out this long winter – and once these snows melt, we will bring about a new blossoming of freedom. All those who stand for liberty are now my brothers, and this unshakeable fraternity will weather this storm together.

From the Mountains of Kandahar

August 21, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Afghan Withdrawal

Remnants of an Army, Elizabeth Thompson

As the US and their Western allies beat a hasty and shambolic retreat from Afghanistan, it is clear the wheels of history have turned again. The ignominious end to nearly two decades of American occupation has demonstrated that despite trillions in funding and thousands of lives lost on both sides, the promised remaking of Afghanistan as a liberal Western democracy was not even close to being realised. The humiliating scenes of American aircraft scrambling to evacuate stranded citizens was the crescendo in a veritable symphony of foreign policy disasters that have been mounting since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fall of Afghanistan does not simply represent a withering rebuttal to American interventionism, liberal democracy, and the notion of universal human rights, it also quite possibly heralds the end of American hegemony and by extension, the globalist world project.

This at first sight may perhaps seem a bold claim. Though the US defeat in Afghanistan is a severe blow both to national pride and to US prestige around the world, in isolation it is by no means a fatal wound. Comparisons with the Vietnam War abound – and decades after that failed conflict, the US remains the unipolar anchor of the world. Yet though the US may have lost the battle in Vietnam, the strength of its soft power and cultural appeal allowed it to triumph in the ideological war between communism and liberalism. The Soviet Union collapsed because many of its citizens wanted the freedoms and living standards of Western democracies. And while the unending stream of refugees and migrants to the West indicate that the living standards of the first world are still sought after, the ideological and moral appeal of Western civilisation has become ever more infirm.

More and more nations are simply opting not to follow the Western liberal democratic model. Just as the US failed to topple Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, America has been impotent in its efforts to stop the Russian advance into the Crimea, to enact regime change in Iran, and to browbeat European leaders in Belarus and Hungary to liberalise. Some commentators may chalk this up to a resurgent Russia and a rising China rebalancing the global geopolitical dynamics and limiting the foreign policy options open to the US. But while this does partially explain the changing nature of international relations, the US has deeper and more fundamental flaws both in its ability to project its military might abroad, and in the allure of its soft power.

From a purely military point of view, the war in Afghanistan is a stunning defeat for the world’s premier technological power at the hands of a nation whose entire GDP is several orders of magnitude less than the US military budget. While the Vietcong received arms and training from both the Soviet Union and China, the Taliban has had little in the way of superpower support. Many nations have been implicated in its funding – from Russia, to Pakistan, to Saudi Arabia, to the US itself, yet the Taliban did not possess a single tank or aircraft; it had no hypersonic missiles or drones. The Western view of war has become an extension of its view on everything else; war is a technocratic and technological ‘problem’ to be solved by rationality and cold calculation. While the US drone operators in Nevada sat detached and disinterested as they killed from thousands of miles away, the Afghan warrior fought with ruthless determination for hearth and home. For every US technological innovation, the Taliban found a homespun solution. The armoured vehicle was defeated by the IED. The eyes in the sky were rendered useless by knowledge of the local rugged terrain.

War is not simply a rationalistic calculation of which nation has the most firepower and advanced armaments. In struggles of national life and death, there is a Nietzschean will to power, and an ethnic collective self-preservation instinct. After nearly 20 years of the current war, the population of Afghanistan has exploded, and the total fertility rate in the country is one of the highest in the world. Conversely, white Americans for the first time have declined in absolute numbers in the US. The Taliban were guided by a metaphysical and fanatical world view, in which the prospect of death did not intimidate them. They demonstrated an incredible appetite to throw their lives away for the collective good, secure in the rectitude of their cause and the righteousness of their God. Meanwhile, American public and military morale has atrophied completely. From the heady flag waving patriotism of the post 9/11 Bush years to the statue toppling self-hatred of the George Floyd era.

The US has poured a massive amount of sand in the gears of its own military industrial complex. As General Mark Milley pontificates on critical race theory and ‘white rage’, the US military has been hobbled by a mammoth programme of affirmative action, the lowering of standards, and performative wokeness. It is popular for conservative commentators to highlight this as the downfall of the US’ ability to project its power across the globe and to ultimately to win wars. Yet the issue of military competency sidesteps the void at the heart of those fighting for America, namely, the question of what they are fighting for. The fact that the armed forces of the US are increasingly filled with transexual soldiers, feminists, quasi-cultural Marxists, and disinterested recent arrivals is not accidental but reflective of the global elite’s Weltanschauung and of modern America itself.

As liberalism has radicalised in both the scope and severity of its proposed social engineering, it has alienated much of the population in its heartlands. The more radically the envelope is pushed in favour of LGBTQ+ rights, diversity, and atheistic hedonism the less the prospect of adopting liberal ideology appeals to nations around the world. As Western countries fragment and collapse under their own contradictions, those nations of the world who haven’t trodden the progressive path have been granted a unique insight into their potential future and have found the results rather unedifying. Just as the loss of the martial spirit and moral purpose has undermined the American capacity to wage successful wars, the increasingly extreme impositions of the ideology the US represents have galvanized its traditionally minded opponents.

It is likely that Trump’s circumspect and largely conciliatory foreign policy was an admission that the dreams of the neoconservative and neoliberal war hawks had already reached their zenith. It is not that there was no longer any appetite for the elite to engage in foreign meddling, it has simply become clear that the US has a rapidly diminishing ability to engage in it. In the vast game of global geopolitical chess, Biden’s only move was to concede defeat and leave the match. It is possible he may attempt to use this period to regroup and re-arm for the next ‘forever war’. Yet the collapsing internal coherency of the US and the threadbare and morally bankrupt ideology that dominates it seems to make this an ever more remote prospect.

Hope in the modern age is like the Edelweiss flower, in that it blooms in mysterious and odd places. The shock of the defeat of the US at the hands of the supposed Afghani barbarians is comparable to the Roman horror at the legions lost when Arminius’ German warriors ambushed General Varus in the dense Teutoburg forest. The coming seismic shift in the balance of global power represents a chance for patriots to reshape the current dysfunctional world order into a saner one. Yet liberalism is nothing if not an adaptive, corrosive, and implacable enemy. The fact that the Taliban is holding press conferences in which it cloaks itself in the rhetoric of respecting women’s rights and unbridled restraint and inclusivity speaks to the continued spellbinding hold liberal ideology has on the world Zeitgeist.

Despite the left’s vitriolic insistence, the traditionalists of the West and the Taliban cannot be conflated. While we can respect the Afghanis’ heroic resistance to occupation, their dogged will to survive and to flourish under their own customs, and their metaphysical sense of purpose, we must chart our own path. The repressive, vicious, misguided, and totalitarian agenda of remaking states that have no desire to be remade has collapsed. It is now our turn to show at home that we will not be remade in the elite’s dysgenic and profane image, just as those abroad have resisted it. While our enemies are distracted with the chaotic collapse of their over-ambitious campaigns abroad, we must labour to undermine these corrupt regimes at home. The example of a foreign nation wrestling control of its destiny back from those who would seek to dominate it should serve as a beacon of hope to us. Our opponents have never been weaker, and though the apparatus of repression they preside over ratchets up the pressure daily, they are losing control of both world events and their own citizens. The Soviet Union dissolved just two years after its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The process of disintegration which started far away in the mountains of Kandahar has come to the Western heartlands now, and it is up to us to reforge the coming chaos to our advantage.

How Coronavirus Took Over the World

March 21, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Skull In Forest

The lexicon of mendacious government platitudes has gained another ignominious entry. “Just three weeks to flatten the curve!” they implored, one long year ago. Yet after twelve months of authoritarianism and state enforced solitude, SWAT teams are swooping in to arrest Miami spring break revellers, and lockdown protests from Amsterdam to Kassel are intensifying across Europe. The much-vaunted vaccines seem to have brought us no closer to freedom. The initial justifications for the suspension of liberty will now undoubtedly rank in history alongside such inglorious slogans as “the troops will be home by Christmas” and “diversity is our strength.” Debates continue to rage about the lethality and the origin of the Coronavirus, but in truth these are largely academic discussions now. The Coronavirus is not primarily an epidemiological phenomenon, but rather a sociological and political one. Our question should not be why has this pandemic happened now, but rather why have governments and societies responded to it as they have?

The truth may be that the Coronavirus did not blink into existence in Wuhan one year ago, but rather it had been incubating in the psyche of modern societies for years. The ease with which populations not only acquiesced to governmental restrictions, but also wilfully demanded more of them, is proof that we had already accepted the premise of the Coronavirus lockdowns into our hearts long ago. It is worth noting that almost all the trends and changes that the Coronavirus has seemingly unleashed are in fact simply an acceleration of what was pre-existing. Atomisation, a retreat from the physical world into the digital, a neurotic collective hysteria in the face of death without a spiritual framework, the expectation that the government will provide, a pseudo-religious belief in experts and scientific redemption, and the hyper-politicisation of communal activity.

In examining the Coronavirus as a social display, rather than as a deadly viral outbreak, it is useful to identify who has consistently resisted the lockdown. Primarily, religious communities within the West have continued their lives largely unhindered. Only a few weeks ago, the Orthodox Jewish stronghold of Stamford Hill in London had the highest rate of Coronavirus in the UK. Likewise, there have been several high-profile cases of Indian and Pakistani weddings and religious festivals being broken up; and it has not gone unnoticed that cities such as Bradford and Leicester with large ethnic minority populations had disproportionately high Covid-rates. It is popular on the right to point to this as an example of the failure of multiculturalism, highlighting as it does that immigrant communities do not abide by the laws of the land, and that governments are too timid to enforce them in any case fearing accusations of racism. These points are of course, both true. But this also perhaps says more about Western host societies than it does about those who have chosen to migrate to them.

Handwringing liberals may attribute this difference in ethnic attitudes to the Coronavirus to a lack of education and resources, or our insensitivity to alternative cultural values. Translated, this simply means that Jewish, Hindu, and Islamic communities have not been morally intimidated by a disease with a median death rate in most cases beyond the average life expectancy; and they also have been unimpressed by the potential for social ostracization if they do not comply. Of course, this may be because they are beyond public reproach in the West, but their response has nevertheless been a perennial, rather than a modern one. Armoured by faith, they have taken a divinely fatalistic view and chosen to continue to celebrate the cycle of life and death – weddings, births, funerals, and birthdays. The shrill cries of moral indignation about the selfishness of killing grandma have much less weight if you have already accepted that your grandparents will die, and you will also. In a world riven by suffering and temporal chaos, they have opted to make lives which are meaningful, rather than to potentially live just that little bit longer in the self-imposed cryostasis of Western societies.

As these religious groupings continue their surreptitious gatherings in the Mosque or Synagogue, hermit Brits dared to leave their womb-like hiding spots to gormlessly clap the NHS, in a pseudo-religious act of worship. Without a metaphysical basis only the quantity rather than the quality of life has any value, and if nurses and doctors are the high priests of this new religion, then they should rightfully be venerated and doted on. The transition from a government of oligarchic middle-managers to the total domination by an unelected scientific cabal was really not that drastic when politics had already been reduced to nothing more than a rationalistic and utilitarian problem-solving exercise. The only thing that political parties seem to disagree on is if the restrictions are tough enough, and if the logistics of policing and vaccination have been sufficiently draconian. No philosophical examinations of the objectives of the lockdown are permitted, but then this is unsurprising in societies which also do not allow the questioning of the sacred cows of demographic replacement, foreign policy misadventures, or the cult of LGBTQ+ rights. The population had already been cowed and pre-programmed to accept new doctrines without question by years of the repression of free speech and independent thought.

This does not however mean that the lockdown is unpopular. If there were to be a democratic vote on it, it is likely in many Western countries it would be sustained well into the future, perhaps even indefinitely. In Japan, huge segments of the population have withdrawn from society entirely, living their lives in their bedrooms, supported by their parents or the state, living in a condition of total social shame, arrested development, and hedonistic consumption. The term for this is Hikikomori. What at first sight may seem an anomaly of Japanese culture, is in fact a glimpse into the future of modern society. We are all Hikikomori now. A significant portion of people are in no rush to return to ‘normality’ because normality for them was simply social isolation and alienation with additional demands placed upon them. What does the outside world offer to these people anymore? The answer for an increasing number is soulless, unnecessary, and unfulfilling corporate jobs in an atomised world where no one around you looks like you, set amid the backdrop of towns and cities which are increasingly globalised and interchangeable.

Sweden is perhaps the most advanced case of this terminal decay of modernity, yet it had the lightest lockdown restrictions in Europe. This at first seems paradoxical, yet in many ways it only bolsters the analysis. With its huge migrant population that for reasons outlined earlier would not respect any restrictions, and with its completely atomised and self-censoring society in which nearly 40% of people live alone, formal legal restrictions were perhaps thought to be unnecessary when the vast majority of the population would self-police following the Jantelagen, and the migrant communities would never be compelled to obey anyway.

All of this illustrates one fundamental realisation: the incentive structures for Western societies have drastically altered over the past few decades. Wealth acquisition, passing on your genes to the next generation, and gaining social standing in the local community has been replaced by virtue signalling and climbing the ladder of social clout in the global, digital community. We live online. Our community is our Twitter feed, our gaming group, our curated Instagram photos. This is of course not a particularly original or compelling assessment by itself, but we must also understand that the nature of digital life has changed. Where once social media was pitched as a medium to connect with and keep in touch with real world friends, it is now a vehicle for conformity, groupthink, and passivity. This is underscored by one subtle, but very important change in the language of social relations. No longer are others friends as they were at the dawn of social media, but are instead now merely followers.

Online social interaction has ceased to be bi-directional and reciprocal; it is that of the devotee and the cult leader. It is a slave and master mentality. It is therefore unlikely a sudden revolt against the popular consensus will spring from those who even in their private online domain are passive cheerleaders. The fact is the physical world has lost its grip over the modern imagination. Going out to earn a living is an almost archaic activity when we are inching towards states so all encompassing that they will provide a universal basic income driven by fiat money printing. The rise of Bitcoin is a reaction to the feeling that our economies are a giant fiction, running up debts that are never intended to be repaid, presided over by a handful of oligarchs with more wealth than we could ever even imagine. Under these conditions, heading outside and into the office seems terribly outmoded. Likewise, in the digital age sex has been relegated to a solo activity as pornography supplants procreation for the Onlyfans generation. In the West there are fewer and fewer communal anchors, as pubs and churches close. All of this contributes to the feeling that there is nothing out there in the world of any value, and so the loss of the freedom to go outside and to associate for many has been more an inconvenience than a matter of life and death.

Life and death, and mortality salience however does play a huge role in the current crisis. Preying on health fears to instil compliance with governmental policy has proven so wildly successful precisely because the population is already so primed to believe that it is at risk. This is because in many ways, it is. An obese, ageing, mentally and chronically ill populace is already well versed with an internalised fear of their own incapacitation and demise. Playing on that is the perfect PR strategy, one that would have been inconceivable in a strong and virile society.

All of these factors have contributed to How the Coronavirus Took Over the World and collectively they spell a long winter for human liberty. The freedoms we have lost may possibly be incrementally restored in the coming months and years, but we have shown ourselves amply willing to abandon our rights and painstakingly slow to ask for them back. There is no reason to believe an event like the Coronavirus could not happen again. We live in an era of chronic, rather than acute politics where narratives linger on for months and years. The underlying cultural and societal malaise, the collective neurosis, and the spiritual death of vast swathes of the West will not quickly be reversed. Our only recourse is to begin to re-root ourselves in a Heideggerian authentic life, to seek out like minded individuals, and to build robust and resilient communities that can thrive in this bleak existential landscape. As others live their lives in stasis, we must instead embrace the world with vigour, and work to take back our collective reality.

2021: David Will Defeat Goliath

February 7, 2021 / / 0 Comments

 

Forgotten Warrior Joseph Freely

We live in indisputably dark times. Everywhere we look, the foreboding shadows of authoritarianism, globalism, and the imprisonment of the human spirit seem abundantly evident. 2020 demonstrated more than ever the naked and brazen power of the elites that misrule us, whether they were banning a sitting US president from social media or governing our lives entirely by technocratic diktats under the pretence of Covid-19. Nearly a year after the initial outbreak of the disease, untold millions across the globe are still virtual prisoners in their own homes, deprived of the small vestiges of community and human interaction that made the modern world bearable. The news cycle is an unending daily attack on liberty, rationality, the natural order, whiteness, and Western civilisation. One could be forgiven for thinking that 2020 was the final victory of the deep state, globalist politicians, and the tech oligarchs over the citizens they purport to be answerable to. The prospects for a reversal of this situation in 2021 at first sight seem bleak.

As the MAGA movement fades into obscurity the notions of personal liberty and free speech appear to have vanished along with it. Initially constituted as a populist outpouring that exuded energy and potential, picking through the wreckage it is hard to identify much of lasting value. It could be said that the idealism that inspired this revolt was also its fatal weakness, as political naivety hindered its success again and again. The MAGA adherents truly believed in Trump as the man alone who could drain the swamp; whereas in reality he remained mired in it, despite his fitful efforts to free himself. As their faith in their leader wavered, they retreated into an increasingly distorted reality viewed through the lens of Q-anon, a sunshine cure that promised redemption in the end for the movement. Even in their final act, the storming of the US Capitol building was based on the naïve and fundamentally misguided assumption that power still resided there. The political frontmen have long been supplanted by their billionaire masters.

Yet though lacking a clear political strategy, the storming of the US Capitol nevertheless had a value. In every movement for human renewal, symbols are important. And this symbolic act revealed several underlying truths. The shambolic lack of security at the heart of the most militarised state in the world exposed the hubris of the elites; they simply were unable to conceive that such a thing could happen. The people who had for so long been servile and dormant, reasserted themselves and delivered a catastrophic blow to the credibility of the American Empire around the world. The images of a Confederate flag flying in the halls of the Capitol building provoked splenetic outrage from those same elites who had declared war on Confederate history years earlier. They may have succeeded in destroying hundreds of Confederate statues and markers, but in the end the spirit of defiance rests not in cold stone, but in the people. They have always been terrified at the power of the stars and bars to animate resistance, and seeing it paraded through the halls of government confirmed their worst fears that it may well rouse resistance again. General Lee, in the end, had the last laugh.

The true lesson of 2020 was not the consolidation of suffocating state power, but of the primacy of random events and how they can be capitalised on for political ends. Whether it was the death of George Floyd or the Coronavirus, the elites utilised these chance encounters to fully advance their agenda. But events also cause unintended consequences, and we cannot look at the political landscape purely from a deterministic point of view. In a simple mathematical calculation if we measure the state’s power versus our own, the outcome seems plain to see. The state with all its military, technological and legal might will ruthlessly crush those who oppose it. Yet only a few short weeks after the Capitol insurrection, our overlords suffered another unexpected black eye as a group loosely organised on Reddit known as Wall Street Bets decided to play the elites at their own game.

By massively increasing the price of flagging retailer Gamestop’s shares, the group managed to wipe as much as 53% off the value of Melvin Capital, one of the largest hedge funds in the US which was profiting from shorting the ailing company’s stock. While the Capitol insurrection ultimately only caused a mild panic among the financial masters of the universe, the reaction to this economic populism was telling. Trading platforms almost immediately suspended the ability to make purchases and forced many users to sell at a loss. This was a clear effort to unlawfully intervene in a free market, and to intimidate those engaged in fiscal resistance. However, those buying the shares were largely not attempting to speculate and profit as vulture Wall Street capitalists do. This was a moral act of defiance by Generation Revenge, who bore the losses gleefully because the 1% were losing more. They deftly executed a guerrilla manoeuvre, and a war of attrition played out over several weeks, which spread to other stocks such as AMC and Blockbuster, as well as the commodities such as silver. In the end, the markets may have largely returned to normal, but the monetary and psychological damage to the so-called masters of the financial universe will remain.

Journalists quickly drew comparisons between the Capitol unrest and this financial insurrection. For once, their assessment was honest: these were two interrelated efforts to unnerve and unseat an increasingly corrupt and authoritarian global regime. When the dust settled, it had been proven those in power can neither defend their Capitol or their capital. And these two acts of defiance were joined by another episode where it seems David has triumphed over Goliath. The much-beleaguered UK now finally nominally free of the EU was expected to sink beneath the waves. Yet instead of sinking, it has joined the populist tremors by exposing the lethargy, inefficiency, and ineptitude of that bureaucratic behemoth. As the UK races ahead in terms of vaccination, the EU was left red faced and impotent as it failed to secure vaccines for its own citizens. It transpires that due to interorganizational infighting, the EU was vastly slower at ordering and securing the vaccines it desperately needed.

While some may say that vaccination in itself is an assault on liberty, and that the UK’s success in vaccination has more to do with its centralised and authoritarian nature than anything else, this nevertheless remains an interesting case study in the resurgent power of the sovereign nation. The EU is a deadening influence, a safety valve and a parasitic cadaver sprawled across the nations beneath it. By freeing themselves, EU members will once again unleash the power of the untrammelled and free sovereign state, for good and for ill. Thus while 2020 may have seemed a consummate lesson in the invulnerability of the globalised, authoritarian, and unaccountable elite, 2021 in just a little over its first month has provided three shining of examples of their inherent weakness. Whether we make our resistance at the political, economic, or national level we have been re-endowed with agency.

Each one of these acts of defiance is a stone catapulted from the populist David’s sling towards the monstrous liberty crushing Goliath. And these are only the warning shots, the unsteady but enthusiastic stirrings of a greater will to resist. Each loss of face, each vivid reassertion that the emperor has no clothes, will spur on more acts of collective disobedience. We have once again discovered our individual and collective potential. While our enemies must totally control every lever of power to succeed, we require only a few organised individuals to disrupt their plans. And we have something even more powerful in our favour: the nature of who we are.

The hated and abused Western minority are the architects of the system that the elite are now immorally presiding over. It is our Faustian and Promethean nature that created the modern world, that allowed the current regime to usurp its power. Yet latent within us is the strength to reforge that world; to re-write our collective reality. Whether it is the physical courage to resist in mass actions such as the Capitol siege, or the ingenious economic fightback, we are a tenacious and stubborn adversary. 2020 was a concerted attack on humanity, an effort to accelerate the trends of atomisation, loneliness, hysteria, and state power over our lives. 2021 will not go as our masters expect, because all their overreaching and meddling has reawakened the slumbering rebel nature of those committed to a free, human, moral, and Western world. Let us all now organise and work together inspired by these acts of selfless resistance to make 2021 the year that David Defeats Goliath.

The European Soul in the Age of Tumult:

May 30, 2020 / / 0 Comments

European Soul, Europeans

The first manned rocket in over a decade has blasted off from US soil bound for stars aiming to dock with the International Space Station. Yet the country it leaves behind is set aflame, riven by racial strife in some of the most widespread unrest in recent memory. The world emerges from months of stasis and pseudo-imprisonment, facing an uncertain political and economic future in the wake of the Corona virus. In 1992 Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history as the liberal order triumphed against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. For a time, it may have seemed he was correct, and the fundamental questions of ordering human society were answered. However, contemporary events have proven him ultimately wrong. Globalisation is the compression of time and space, and our world is accelerating. Shocking history is being made almost daily. Unprecedented events are shaking our civilisation to its core.

We are the pivot generation – those born at the confluence of the greatest crises our society and way of life have ever known. More than ever, we need to know who we are and what we believe in. To overcome and to triumph as a group we must be unwavering in our identity and our purpose. It is clear to see from our leaders that we are not. In Minneapolis at the height of the nascent race riots in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey ordered that police were to abandon their posts and allow looters to destroy their precinct. Buildings were merely symbolic, he opined. That is exactly correct; this act is exemplary of a ruling elite that has lost its nerve in the face of great events.

Canute-like, the global order tried to turn the tide of the Corona virus. They placed the entire globe under a state of house arrest, attempting to minimise the number of deaths. Strategies such as ‘herd immunity’ where some would die for the overall well being of the group were roundly rejected, by both the citizens and leaders. This is not surprising in an age where self-sacrifice is almost completely absent, where a secular neurosis has come to form the basis of decision making. We have suffered a catastrophic loss of confidence; the centre of our vapid world could not hold. In an irreligious, post-ideological era, only consumption and survival are valued. It seems almost inconceivable that these are the same societies who twice in the last century sacrificed millions of their own in World Wars for power and grand beliefs. Atomisation, self-doubt, and fear have corroded the very fabric of our souls.

Like the late Romans, we live in a state of resigned anxiety. We understand that the world that preceded us is collapsing, and we enjoy no comforting consolations either from belief in a divine presence or from the knowledge we will pass the world on to our descendants. There have been plagues before, but the unprecedented response to the present pandemic could only have happened at this juncture. Illegitimate rulers are managing the decline of decaying systems, overreaching their powers to maintain the illusion of stability and immortality. They live in a state of almost unmanageable terror, hoping they will never be called to account for their crimes – either by their constituents or by the Gods. Contemporary man, following his leaders suffers the same anxiety. He is haunted by the total environmental death of the planet, the demographic replacement of his own people, and ultimately by his own mortality in a Godless world. Modernity offers no answers to these questions, but simply shouts from the battlements to retreat, to hide, to abandon your post and capitulate.

The struggle we now face is not that of a singular country or community. The European, wherever he dwells is engaged in a cataclysmic battle for his own soul. Whether in squatter camps of the dispossessed Boers of South Africa, or in the rubble of his family store in Minneapolis, we are the embattled few – the thin white line. At the middle of last century, Europeans constituted 25% of the global population, they are now fewer than 11.5% globally and the figure is falling rapidly.  We, we unhappy few now face a stark choice about who we are, about the content of our soul. In human life, the Grim Reaper is ever present and the prospects of loss and failure are something we must overcome within our own psyche. The Reaper has mouthed boo to our elite, and faced with this they have abandoned us, content to fill the void at their spiritual centre with profit, falsehoods, and flattery to those who would destroy us. Many have joined them. They live life as a purely singular atom, consuming in their darkened rooms – denouncing their race and nation, negating their gender, denying who they are and what they could become. The unending stream of history and world events has tested their mettle, and they have been found wanting.

This is the biggest problem facing us. It is not a question of material conditions or demographics, but of answering the living and constantly renewed question, what is the European soul? While our leaders and their acolytes recoil in the face of this existential riddle, there are those who have taken up the broken shards of the mirror that once reflected who we are back at us, and seek to repair it. As our craven comrades flee the field, there are still some willing to fight for our future. This fight begins by re-rooting ourselves in world history. It begins by accepting that we are outnumbered and beleaguered, that everything is against us, except for the fact that we are the inheritors of the greatest treasure that one can possess. We are the custodians of thousands of years the European spirit, passed from generation to generation and bequeathed to us at this inauspicious hour. The question of the European soul can only be answered with the simple assertion that its purpose is to be continued, that we cannot let that great flame be extinguished.

While others dim their fires, hoping for their light not to be noticed by those who would extinguish it, the differentiated man, the true European, burns like the Black Sun. We dedicate ourselves to living in the style of our forebears – we turn our lives into a heroic epic, we live in tune with the land and commune with our Gods. Once we understand that physical death is a mere trifle compared to the death of the soul, we will once again take up our destiny as the engine of world history. We cannot shrink from what is demanded of us in this crucial hour, we cannot be cowed by the shadow of our own mortality.

We must accept privations with glee. We must look upon the challenges of the world and acknowledge that the greater the depth of crisis, the greater the share of glory for overcoming it. We must learn to revile those who plead for us to retreat, and instead soar upwards like that star bound rocket. This is the European soul, the world defining essence that has reappeared again and again in our darkest hours. Our primary struggle now is not external, but internal. Only by transcending our lesser selves and by becoming stronger, wiser, more spiritually attuned and more versed in those who came before us can we develop the mental fortitude required to win the struggle.

We are the pivot generation. We are Europeans. Stoke the internal fire of your own Black Sun, shine out as an example that will rally others to your cause. Lock gaze with the Reaper and dispel his power, embrace Dasein and accept your mortality willingly. Transcend by seeking a place in eternity by transforming yourself into a hero in the unending saga of European history; a history fused into our very soul. To those who waver in this age of tumult, only oblivion and ignominy await. To those who embrace the European soul as their shield in the coming battles, whether in this life or the next we will have our victory.

 

Der Feldweg: Mutiny Against the Machine

June 23, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Spengler, Heidegger

“The flight of the born leader from the Machine is beginning”

– Oswald Spengler

There is a false dichotomy at the heart of modern politics. It is an almost unquestioningly accepted fact that the political left is the ideology of the environment and the planet, and the political right stands simply for profit and uncaring avarice. Though mainstream conservative politicians may pay lip service to environmental concerns, this transparent spiritual indifference is plain for all to see. Yet can it really be true that the heirs of Marxist-Leninism, the ideology of billowing proletariat factories and materialistic determinism are the undisputed guardians of the environment? How has this seemingly self-evident binary split of good and evil come to be?

A cursory survey of history provides no hint that right wing ideology is either practically or theoretically oppositional to preserving the environmental. On the contrary, it was eugenicist and anti-immigration advocate Madison Grant who was largely responsible for saving America’s redwoods and developing its National Park system. Both Heidegger and Ernst Jünger expressed their yearning for a return to traditional, authentic and bucolic lives in tune with nature. Heidegger retreated to a simple peasant existence at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, while Jünger expounded allegorically on the subject in his work Der Waldgang; the Forest Path. Anti-urbanism has always been a key tenet of the right, with Richard Wagner describing Victorian London as the twisted dwarf Albrecht’s infernal dream of Nibelheim realised on earth. It thus seems unlikely from this intellectual wellspring wedded to blood and soil that the inspiration for the degradation of either could be found.

And yet this is exactly what has happened. Capitalistic profiteers who are self-professing rightists have all across the Western world become advocates for oil and gas pipelines, fracking, vast housing schemes, uncontrolled population growth, GMO crops and a myriad of other destructive practices. The populist and the mainstream right alike abhor talk of climate change and environmental taxes. There are very real and practical reasons for this opposition. As largely initiatives of the left, these schemes are impingements on liberty which in the modern leftist formulation hold Western nations to an extreme standard, while failing to engage with globalised environmental degradation from developing nations. Put simply, the right sees the transparent bad faith in which these capers are designed: they are centralised power grabs, vehicles for warped anti-Western rhetoric and ultimately doomed to failure. The right understands we cannot economically determine our way out of environmental catastrophe, nor can we fix it everywhere at once. Our efforts require specificity and rootedness, not naïve universalism.

But these are ultimately only superficial oppositions. They beg the question that if it is so transparent that leftist environmental solutions are merely tyrannical ploys, ill-conceived to the point of revolt in the case of the Yellow Vest movement in France, then why has there been no wholesale right wing green manifesto? The answer to this requires the input of Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. While it is true that the rhetoric and thought of the right has been draped in yearning for harmony with the environment, the history of right-wing political movements in 20th and 21st century sits often at odds with this. Here we uncover an inherent tension at the core of right-wing philosophy: as Spengler explains, man is an unnatural being and everything he does is in opposition to nature itself. No other being seeks to subjugate its environment, no other creature possesses Technik; defined as the process of conceiving and developing technology to master its environment and increase its power. A colony of bees creates their hive as they always have done. Humanity’s hives are ever evolving as a result of Technik. Where once there were only agrarian gatherings of mere mud daubed huts now the glistening Blade Runner-esque glass and concrete jungles of the modern world rise. The notion of Technik sets humanity at odds with its environment, it dooms humans to ever exist at least partially outside of the natural realm.

If Spengler describes the process, then Nietzsche provides the justification. Man possesses a will to power, an unyielding urge to transcend his mental and physical capacities, to go beyond simply being human. This impulse is not to be fought, but to be embraced. The Faustian spirit of Western man is exactly what enabled us to be in a position to make any pronouncements on the future of the environment at all. Europeans have earned their place in history through their mastery of Technik, their superior will to power, their Viking blood lust turned to technical solutions. We have constructed a technologically based machine for power – one that was for centuries superior to all other cultures on earth, and we have used that machine to assert our primacy in the world. This is in adherence with the primordial core of rightist thought: a belief in hierarchy. Man is simply above animals and nature. And for centuries European man was likewise held to be above all others.

Yet in our privileging of Technik at the expense of all other beliefs, against all calls for moderation, and in the face of all advisement of its potential perils we have precipitated the greatest crisis in history. The scales of right-wing philosophy have been tipped beyond all natural balance. By focusing purely on the will to power, political leaders were convinced to share our Technik with other nations of the world; to believe that we could harness them as we had harnessed the environment. If leftism reduced itself to a mere theory of economics, then rightism shrank down to a stunted technocratic theory. Where once it saw waterfalls, it now only saw hydroelectric dams. It envisaged panzers rolling across the open steppes. It unleashed the earthshattering destructive power of the atomic bomb. In its megalomania it reduced itself to ruins. By unmooring itself from its wider philosophical foundations, the right became obsessed simply with power advanced through technological means.

Spengler predicted that the born leaders of men would eventually come to realise the Machine for power we have created must be destroyed. The so-called right-wing politicians of today are the vestiges of those that haven’t accepted this fact. They are the bankrupt, corrupted and warped scions of a failed philosophical programme. They are engaged in the futile effort to maintain their hegemony through pure technology; to advance the Technik Weltanschauung in the nuclear age. They are unaware that the fundamental paradigm has shifted, and that a raw will to power alone cannot advance our cause any further. Leftism has joined them in their doomed crusade, by attempting to fuse economic determinism with technological solutions. They fail to understand no amount of state mandated solar panels or carbon capturing devices will rescue humanity from its current path to disaster. Technology alone cannot help us navigate the nuclear age.

The philosophical and practical project for the right wing in the 21st century therefore is not to join the battle of left against the right as they struggle for the levers of the Machine of power; but to destroy it altogether. We must all engage in a Mutiny Against the Machine, we must take Heidegger’s Feldweg – the field path, the dirt road, the linden lined avenue and march OUT of modernity. For neo-pagans and anti-urbanists, this may entail a physical removal from the hubs of Western society. Yet we do not all have to take such drastic steps. While modernity has become an all-encompassing iron cage, it has given us the tools to visit the last remaining patches of nature with unprecedented ease. It is incumbent on all of us to visit these last wildernesses, to spend time on our soil and in our forests and to re-orientate our thinking back in line with those environmentally minded philosophers who acted as balance to an unmitigated will to power. From the forests and the fields we will come to understand that the restoration of sanity and hope to the modern world will require spiritual and metaphysical solutions, not economic or technical ones. To save the planet, we must take the Feldweg and plant the seeds of a new beginning.

 

Men of Steel Rust From the Inside: A Manifesto for Manhood

February 22, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Masculinity, Men's Rights

Ferdinand Knab, Southern Landscape

To be a man is to walk alone. No matter how many friends or colleagues he has around him, the challenges of his life will ultimately be borne in solitude. In the end, it is the force of his character that will determine his achievements and his failures. His successes will be measured neither in money nor in fame, but in his capacity to weather the challenges life relentlessly presents; to overcome tribulations both mundane and monstrous. Yet in this age where masculinity is toxic, and manhood is held to be worthless, men are instructed daily in a thousand shrill voices that they should manage their lives by committee, not rely on themselves. They are told they should outsource their emotions to others. They are encouraged to meekly file appeals in the mythical court of equality and fairness. They are enjoined to prostate themselves at the altar of the state, and to vociferously deny and denounce their own nature while they grovel. These have become modernity’s unquestioned nostrums for the vexed problem of manhood.

The results are plain to see. In most Western countries, suicide has become the biggest killer of young men – in the United States alone, white males accounted for 77.97% of suicide deaths in 2017. Antidepressants and opioids have become endemic among men. The very biological nature of manhood is breaking down, with skyrocketing rates of transgenderism, catastrophically plummeting sperm counts, and chronic illnesses and obesity running rampant. Modernity’s response to this disaster has not been to reverse course, but to prescribe an even higher dose of the poison. Feminists who regularly harangue men who dare to opine on what women should do with their bodies are gleeful in advising men that the root of their problem is masculinity itself. Masculinity is simply toxic. It’s a construct which imprisons men’s feelings until they die. Masculinity makes men unwilling to subserviently interact in the new world. It prevents them from being stay at home dads. It imposes expectations on them, expectations they can’t possibly meet.

It is simply unfathomable to the state mandated feminists and globalists who are engineering the newly feminized world that it is not masculinity that is toxic to modernity, but that modernity that is toxic to masculinity. It is not a coincidence that those mouthing the unending chorus which extols men to ‘open up’ are also the same voices most ardently in favour of anti-hate speech legislation, shutting down men from ever expounding on the true causes of their unhappiness. It is not permitted for men to criticise the new sexual market place with its lexicon dominated by phrases such as polyamory, gender-queer, non-binary, sex-positive, ethically non-monogamous as a creation of toxic modernity. It is not permitted for men to point out the atomised, deracinated, impersonal and ethnically heterogenous living conditions of today are by-products of toxic modernity. It is beyond the pale for men to state plainly that the erosion of male only spaces and the forced injection of females into male work places and hobbies is a destructive imposition by toxic modernity. This kind of ‘opening up’ is not the one which is intended.

Not content with making the lived experience of being a man more confused, hellish and lonely than ever, modernity also seeks to destroy one of the greatest coping methods of men in a harsh world – a strong connection to and healthy veneration of the great men of the past. In nearly every public square and park in the Western world stand statues to commemorate those men who rose above the rest: General Robert E. Lee, Admiral Horatio Nelson, Presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson, Cecil Rhodes – the list is unending. Yet all those mentioned have been earmarked for reassessment and removal, as their actions are deemed unsavoury by the standards of the newly feminized world. These granite men shine out as beacons, as examples to men everywhere that by struggle and sacrifice a man can become greater than himself. They are a stark reminder that no matter the problems you have in your own life, they shrink into insignificance when compared to the magnitude of pure suffering, sacrifice and hardship of the past.

This realisation about the true nature of manhood is compounded by visiting the vast forest of crosses in any war cemetery; by taking a simple trip to the village memorial dedicated to those who made the ultimate sacrifice. For men, the nature of life has often been short and brutal. A century ago an entire generation of men struggled and fought and died in the mud and filth of the trenches of the Somme and Passchendaele. The generation after perished frozen in the rubble of Stalingrad and on the beaches of Omaha. Scarcely a generation later, the youth were sweating in the jungles of Vietnam and after that rubbing the sand of Afghanistan and Iraq from their eyes. This unbroken chain can be traced back thousands of years from the Roman to the Viking, from the crusader to the Confederate. To be a man is to live always in the knowledge that at any moment you may be called upon to do your duty and fight for your country, your ideals and your people. No amount of revisionist historical meddling in video games and movies, or female tokenism in the armed forces can alter this primal truth.

War renders abundantly apparent the utility of the masculine traits of stoicism and bravery. Yet we live today in an age totally devoid of heroic opportunity, where immediate danger is all but absent. That is not to say we do not face trials, competition, and stresses as we always have. But we do so in a sterile, aspiritual and petty context. Every man has become a Steppenwolf, neurotic, uncertain and introspective in the extreme. What men must realise is that while it is the duty of some generations to die gloriously in battle, to give themselves as wheat to the scythe, to consign themselves to a fate of feasting and fighting for evermore in Valhalla, the struggle of our generation is a different one. We are not contending with the mud and horror of the trenches, but we are every day wading through the ideological filth of modernity. It coats us completely, it corrodes us from the inside. It has poisoned every aspect of life. It wants us to submit utterly. Modernity is a siren song that tempts those men who can no longer tolerate it to destroy themselves, to take the only way out they can see. If we are to reverse this, men must understand the unpalatable truth that while for some generations it is heroic to die, for us it is heroic to live.

We must not only live, but we must thrive. Men must come to know that it is not they who are toxic, but it is the ideology of modernity that is the true pollutant. To survive and prosper in this desolate landscape we must first turn ourselves into men of steel; we must focus on developing ourselves mentally and physically. We must reconnect with the masculine traditions of the past. We mustn’t take the false paths presented to us and engage in futile battle of the sexes or sink into the slime of depression. We must look upon the ravages of modernity as the men looked upon the horrors of war; we must not flinch or show self-pity in the face of carnage and ruin. Modernity it is destroying us as surely as machine gun fire destroyed generations of the past. The heavy artillery of the mass media and state repression supplemented by the biological warfare of big pharma and industrial agriculture is eroding us mentally and physically.

There will be many more casualties in the contest of man versus modernity before the war is over. We will see many more young men commit suicide, die of overdoses, mutilate themselves with hormones and surrender to nihilistic despair. It is time for us to stem that flow, to throw out a rope to all those drowning in the swamp of modern life. It is time for us to state clearly that it is not only okay to embrace your natural masculinity, it is the only way to survive the maelstrom of contemporary life and its unending trials. We must redirect the self-loathing and hatred of modern men into the divinely ordained pursuits of self-mastery and transcendental thought. We must make clear to them their problems will not magically go away, and that even men of steel rust inside. But we must also make clear to them that strong, independent men have always been the engine of world history. There is no power on earth that can break the spirit of a truly free man.

Crusaders, Colonists & Confederates: Trifecta of the European Soul

January 23, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Rhodesia, Templar, Confederate

 

Since Dylann Roof’s 2015 deadly attack on a black church congregation in South Carolina, the largest wholesale rewriting of collective memory in American history has taken place. Despite the tumultuous and violent clashes at Charlottesville in protest of this state enforced amnesia, the disappearance of Confederate history has continued at feverish pace – with some now calling for the ‘Confederate Rushmore’ in Stone Mountain Park Georgia to be dynamited and sent into oblivion and thereby join the hundreds of statues and memorials that have already vanished. It is less well known that Dylann Roof was also sporting the flag of the former rebel British colony of Rhodesia on the day of his attack. No dismantling of collective memory was necessary here, as the story of Rhodesia’s ignominious transition into Zimbabwe had already been thoroughly selectively forgotten. Nevertheless, both the Confederate battle standard and the flag of Rhodesia have now been labelled symbols of hate and white supremacy, earmarked for deletion from history.

This process is not exclusive to the United States – in the wake of Andres Breivik’s 2011 attack in Norway, his use of the cross of the Knights Templar and the heraldry of the Crusading Orders was widely reported. It is a much harder task for Europeans to expunge the crusades from collective memory, but a significant amount of state mandated disfavour and public self-flagellation has been duly applied. Now the Templar Cross, the Confederate battle standard and iconography of the Rhodesian state all stand in an eternal limbo – at the very fringes of legal acceptability, associated in the public imagination (if they are remembered at all) only with terroristic mayhem and some vague notion of white supremacy. Yet if they are symbols of white supremacy, they are an odd choice. There are no Confederate States of America. The Crusader Kingdoms of the Outremer have vanished from the Middle East; and Rhodesia and those who settled it have become a mere footnote in history. In short, one could argue in each case they represent white failure, not white supremacy.

Yet the eagerness with which governments around the world have attempted to consign these epics of Western history to the dustbin belies a goal beyond simply outlawing hate. They want these stories to go away, because each one represents a counter narrative to the global elites’ carefully crafted world view. One only has to look upon President Emmerson ‘The Crocodile’ Mnangagwa’s rioting and destitute Zimbabwe and compare it to the clean and orderly streets of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia to begin to question the party line that decolonisation was an unequivocal good. One only has to view the eye watering demographic and cultural change that has swept away the ‘Old South’ to gain an inkling into why the Confederacy’s instinctual defence of their way of life may have had some justification. And with every truck and bomb attack an Islamist perpetrates in Europe, the unavoidable conclusion that the Templar Orders were combating an ideology that fundamentally threatens the West seems inescapable.

Upon closer inspection, each strand of these complex and heroic struggles reveals something about the nature of Western civilization. They are struggles born from the primordial characteristics of the European spirit: our unbreakable desire to fight for metaphysical ideals, to dream an impossible dream, to defend what is ours at all costs, to rebel against perceived tyranny and injustice; or to sometimes simply revolt against the very material realities of life itself. The Templar did not venture forth simply for plunder and gain but sought to create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and didn’t fear to die in the process. The Rhodesian wanted to see the desolate wastes of Africa bloom into life and civilization. The Confederate, roused by the inarticulate but gut-felt notion that economic progress and expansive government were about to extinguish a way of life, took up arms to defend his liberty. All made mistakes and perpetrated evils. All were guided by an unachievable ideal and a blind stubbornness in the face of reality. And they were all, ultimately defeated.

Some may say these episodes represent a dark cloud in the European psyche – they are tales from the outer rim of Western history, perhaps best forgotten. Yet in forgetting these tales we have also forgotten a crucial emotion necessary for survival: the will to resist. The Templar, the Confederate, the Rhodesian were all prepared to die far from Europe for an ideal, a defence of what they had nurtured and fostered, a divine belief. Now we have no far-flung corners to die in, no colonies or fantastical dreams to defend. Europe itself is under attack by authoritarian rule, demographic replacement, Islamist aggression and spiritual decay. Governments want these chronicles of Western history to conveniently vanish, not because they fear a rise of hate, but because they don’t want Europeans to rediscover their will to resist.

Smash through the walls of the historical quarantine zone and gaze upon the mirror of history and you will find looking back at you not outlaws and brigands, but a reflection of yourself and your ancestors. Take a ride with General Lee, relive the Templar’s thunderous charge for glory at the Siege of Antioch, fall into the ranks of the 270,000 Rhodesians who defied a whole continent and global order. Raise your Confederate battle flag, don your Templar cross, listen to a Rhodesian folk song – don’t allow the state to try and steal your heritage and your soul. No matter how many history books they rewrite or mountains they dynamite, they cannot extinguish the European story because it lives on in us. Yet if we do not rediscover our will to resist, that story may have reached its final chapter. The Crusader, the Colonist, and the Confederate are all manifestations of our excesses both of valour and stubbornness. They are a trifecta of the European soul. Learn from their successes and discard their failures, because while they didn’t succeed in reaching their dreams – we must march ever onwards towards our own.

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