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The European Soul in the Age of Tumult:

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.

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

February 22, 2019 / admin / 0 Comments

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.

Acolytes in the Temple of Iron

April 9, 2018 / admin / 0 Comments

Battle of Augustodunum, Peter Dennis

You may admire the past – but you wouldn’t want to live in it. This is the most basic repudiation of traditionalism. Life before the modern era was painful, squalid and short. It is thus self-evident that to any progressively minded individual that the crowning achievement of modernity is the longevity and painlessness of contemporary existence. More people are living longer than ever, it is an undeniable fact. The once terrifying scourge of plagues and famines have been nullified, and this was achieved without the help of any God. We have abandoned faith in the divine who no longer can harm us and replaced it with our unquestioning belief in the doctor, the medical researcher, and the pharmaceutical company. These are the new high priests and preachers of a transhumanist utopia which promises a future where every human imperfection can be solved and even improved upon by rational and technological means. Adherence to this cult is now so pervasive that healthcare has become a shibboleth which makes and breaks our governments. We have gleefully trampled on the past in the hysterical stampede towards this new promised land, but in doing so have we blinded ourselves to the possibility that modernity itself may be sick?

While on the surface it seems that the inexorable march of modern medical progress has been an objective and linear improvement in the human lot, there is trouble in paradise. We are faced with being the first generation that may not live as long as parents, not owing to some new and insidious disease or cataclysmic war – but largely because the ravages of plenty have overtaken modern medicine’s ability to deal with them. Diabetes and heart disease are exploding as a result of obesity which is a product of our own gluttony and laziness. The addiction to killing the pain in our life has caused many to kill the pain for good, with deaths from legal drugs now surpassing deaths from illicit substances in many regions; a trend starkly demonstrated by recent reports of an epidemic of deaths attributed to the powerful painkiller fentanyl. While polio, smallpox and measles may have vanished from our collective fears, the rise of chronic diseases is becoming more and more apparent. Crohn’s, Celiac Disease, fibromyalgia, asthma, diabetes and Lupus have now become the consumption and venereal disease of our time. They may not kill – but they are leaving a whole generation of youth locked into a life of pain and despair, with no solution from our new medical overlords in sight.

The picture is even darker for young men, who have now been confirmed as on average possessing less grip strength than their grandparents; coupled with testosterone levels and sperm counts which are in dramatic and largely unexplained freefall. These problems almost pale into insignificance when compared to the tsunami of mental health problems which have washed over society, with rates of depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia skyrocketing to the point they have produced the grim and highly revealing statistic that suicide is now the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK. It may be the case that modernity has extended our life span, but in doing so it has created lives which many do not actually want to live. The God of new medicine has proven to be as seemingly arbitrary and unmoved by human suffering as the wrathful Lord of the Old Testament. Modernity has failed to live up to its end of the bargain; the promise of an easy path to self-mastery has proved a hollow one. The acceptance of the lie has been aided by the disingenuous soothsayers of modern leftism who have consistently reassured us that humans beings are raw clay, open to being entirely re-worked by technology and ideology.

It may even be the case that modern attitudes have in fact impeded genuine medical progress. It is widely known that the precipitous rise of antibiotic resistant diseases has sprung from modern profligacy with the overuse of antibiotics. It is also true that the major medical breakthroughs that fuelled the rise in life expectancy: the discovery of insulin, the creation of penicillin, the development of anaesthetics are all breakthroughs which pre-date the Second World War, and whether they can even be truly considered ‘modern’ at all is up for debate. Their discoverers may in fact be the inheritors of the more rigorous scientific standards of the Enlightenment, not the products of the affirmative action riddled, subjectivist, and market driven scientific field of today. A new and compelling medical nihilism is developing among some sections of the former faithful, who are daring to question our secular religion, such as Jacob Stegenga and his upcoming book on the topic.

Yet our crusade against the blind and unquestioning belief in modern medicine is not fundamentally based on its efficacy. It does not derive from sour grapes at the fact it has failed to increase our life span to a hundred fifty years; nor is it grounded in disappointment that not one human organ can be replaced by a better synthetic alternative. Our objection is much more fundamental than that. The entire basis of the modern worship of the physician is rotten, not because they can’t achieve what they claim, but because even if they could it would be meaningless. Life is not a game where living another year is an end in itself. Age is not a scoring system. A long life is not necessarily a good life. The modern obsession with clinging to life at all costs has smothered the flame of the heroic impulse, it has rendered us all cowards. Even more damagingly, modern medicine’s quest to delay death has distracted us from our true foe: human entropy. The human experience is one where we are locked in a constant and unending battle with the limits of our own physical and intellectual capabilities. Life is a series of attacks and counter-attacks by the human will battling against the natural decay which we are subjected to. The heroic path in life is not to pray impotently to the medical monolith, hoping it will cure your problems – it is to take your destiny in your own hands. We cannot transcend death, but we may be able to transcend our own limitations.

This notion is not a popular one in today’s society. We have opted to prostate ourselves, grovelling meekly to foolhardy doctors and amoral pharmaceutical companies because most people today have abandoned the unyielding fight against human entropy. They have not only embraced and accepted their own physical and intellectual failings but have sought to make virtues of them. This is why to point out obesity is ‘fat shaming’. It is why the veneration of disability and victimhood is everywhere manifest in society. It is the reason the quest to seek real and meaningful knowledge and to not hand hold those without the capacity is deemed exclusionary and elitist. Even implying that people create their own problems and are at least in part responsible for managing their own health is considered reactionary. The assertion that it is what you do in life, and not how long you live is an explosive challenge which the coddled and craven find deeply uncomfortable. It is time to re-state a primordial truth which may be deeply troubling for those loyal to the necromancers and butchers of the modern medical establishment. Life has no inherent meaning, it is given meaning by our struggle to achieve self-mastery against the constant whirling tides of misfortune, decay, disease and violent opposition.

A whole generation of young men have simply rotted and withered away awaiting the transhumanist utopia promised by modernity and the Left. A hundred years ago the flower of European youth died in the blood and mud of the Great War. A century later that youth is fat, weak, depressed, and fundamentally unfulfilled – it has been stultified almost beyond salvation. The death in the trenches has been replaced with the purgatory of spiritual death. Idleness is killing society as surely as warfare did. The human spirit yearns to test itself against the limits of life, to be allowed to strive for greatness, to burn with the brightness of youthful vitality. Modernity offers us only the fear and temptation of death, the goal of doing nothing but simply staying alive for the sake of it and the sweet release of the ending the boredom of a life lived in such way. The average life expectancy of a Roman was 25, yet their lack of longevity did not preclude their greatness – in fact it contributed to it. The choice of a painful death in the service of glory and greatness, or the ‘easy’ death amid clinical surroundings of a local hospital is a false dichotomy. Living entails pain; dying entails pain. It is time to stop buying into the modernist belief it can be avoided, but instead meet the prospect of our own mortality head on.

It is long past time to completely reject the failed church of modernity: its promises have been laid bare. It is now the time to live like the Roman; to embrace the spirit of the youth who a century ago chose to charge machine guns rather than to petrify and decay. It is time to don your robes and become acolytes in the Temple of Iron, to adopt the credo of Yukio Mishima and the Golden One that we must make savage the body and civilise the mind. Step out of the shadows and dispel the fear of death, laugh in the face of those who are vainly demanding clemency and that nature itself abide by the imaginary laws of equality. Wear your body with pride, and always seek self-betterment. Be the first to point out that modernity is sick, and we acolytes in the Temple of Iron are healthy.

Ride For Ruin! European Kamikaze

December 26, 2017 / admin / 0 Comments

Alan Lee, Helm’s Deep

Everything is broken. We have been so utterly severed from our cultural and spiritual moorings that the damage is irreparable. Our administrative, social and political systems are now in terminal decline. Demographically, Europeans who once constituted a quarter of the global population a mere sixty years ago are now barely more than a numerical speck – numbering just over one tenth of the total world headcount and dwindling fast. Oppressive technocratic global institutions working hand in hand with mega corporations have all but succeeded in crushing both individual freedom and the national will. Economically, the system has become so grossly skewed that eight corrupt individuals have succeeded in amassing more wealth than the bottom 50% of the globe while the average taxpayer is asked to pay ever more to prop up the rigged enterprise. Civilisation is beyond repair.

Yet this has not stopped the majority of people from attempting to adapt to this new reality. They have deceived themselves that we can co-exist with chaos; that we can appease entropy itself. They have retreated from truly imagining the implications of the collapse of Western civilisation. No amount of wealth will be able to insulate them either from the insatiable avarice of corrupt and tyrannical government or from the hordes of the envious and alien newcomers we have allowed onto our shores. Their white picket fence fantasy of two children and a nice family car has catastrophically failed to adjust to a world in which governments have cravenly abandoned their duty to stop children being blown up at pop concerts, preyed upon in the streets, or mowed down at Christmas markets. There is no future for children who are to be brought up as an embattled, hated minority in a crumbling country – and there is no future for their parents either. It is as impossible for the individual to co-exist with modernity as it was for the citizens of Pompeii to co-exist with the volcanic eruption. Modernity has destroyed everything.

Most will not accept this conclusion and will continue in their delusions. For others, the realisation will be too painful and will drive them down the road of depression and despair. Yet to the thoughtful, the steely willed and the stout hearted this realisation is not depressing – but liberating. The worst of what could happen to us has already happened. We have been freed from the burdens of worrying about the good life, of attempting to maximise our own pleasure and comfort. We understand that there will be no peaceful rest in this life, that we are men amongst the ruins. We have been given a gift. While many have wasted their lives looking for purpose, we understand that in a ravaged, broken world there can be only one course of action: resistance. We must now turn all our resources, all our strength, and all our creative energy to the total overthrow of modernity and its acolytes. It is an almost impossible task. Our revolt is not simply against political parties and economic systems, but against the fundamental building blocks of reality. A revolt against demography and cold arithmetic, against epistemology and corrupted philosophy, against sterile rationalism and the death of spirit.

Compelling a civilisation to live again would be a difficult enough task, yet we are attempting to do so in a near universally hostile world. To believe we can succeed is fantastical, little more than a comforting dream. Yet we are not calculating utilitarians carefully weighting up the probability of success or failure; we are driven to our desperate rebellion because it is the only morally responsible thing to do. In an irrational, broken and morally ill society the only virtuous course of action is to seek to overturn it. Only by participating in this resistance will we be able to look ourselves in the eye and say truthfully that we are honourable. It is likely not only that we will fail, but that in the struggle we will be destroyed– financially, socially, and physically. Yet what happiness would money, prestige or good health have given us in a world which was not our own – a world in which we are spectators, subordinates and slaves? It is time for us to embrace the credo of Heroic Nihilism. Everything is broken. Everything is beyond repair. Yet we will revolt and sacrifice ourselves anyway, because the act of resistance in itself is heroic; because the greater the odds, the greater the share of glory; and because when we arrive at St Peter’s gates or cross the Rainbow Bridge to Valhalla we can do so with our heads held high, to be ranked amongst the greatest warriors and poets of the ages.

By adopting the credo of Heroic Nihilism, we have already initiated the first phase of our total revolt against modernity. We finally understand that the globalist elite and its collaborators have everything to lose, while we have nothing. It is the hyper rich oligarchs, the corrupt politicians, the protected minorities and the selfish hedonists who are the ones who fear us, not the other way around. Nothing they can do to us is worse than what has already been done. They have pilfered our wealth, ground down our cultural icons, and stolen our future. It is time for us to accept our role as the Generation of Revenge, and to understand it is not modernity that is the wave which is crashing into us, but we are the wave that will crash into modernity and wash it away. We must reimagine ourselves – we are no longer atomised and timid, we are Panzer tanks rolling across the open steppes, all personal tragedy and doubt bouncing off our armoured hulls. We are as fanatical as Japanese fighter pilots, ready to slam ourselves into the aircraft carrier that is modernity. We are as iron willed as Jan Sobieski’s Polish hussars, charging into the Ottomans. We are the European Kamikaze and we are here to destroy the destroyers.

Though it has become fashionable to talk of sacrifice only in terms of the ancient East, of Kamikaze, Seppuku and Bushido, we must remember that what we are doing is not alien to the European spirit – but fundamental to it. Whether on the fields of the Somme, Lepanto, or Vienna, being European is a responsibility not a right. Nearly every generation of Europeans has faced its test of mettle, its call to sacrifice, its darkest hour. Ours may seem the darkest of all, because if we lose, we will be the final generation. Yet it also makes our resistance the most meaningful. By embracing Heroic Nihilism, by sallying forth, we are reconnecting ourselves with the great European tradition of self-sacrifice. And though our chance of success seems so slim, the embers of hope seem so faint, if we Ride for Ruin without consideration for our personal safety or prospect of victory, the galloping riders of the European Kamikaze may just prevail- and even if they don’t they will have at least made an end worthy of the greatest of European sagas.

Generation Nomad: Travellers Without Destination

February 7, 2017 / admin / 0 Comments

Bridal Journey, Adolph Tidemand

The youth of today are quite possibly the most decried and despised generation in history. Millennials are regarded as a selfish, entitled generation who believe in neither country, nor God. Despite being the supposedly most educated, wealthy and free human beings to have ever lived, they are also some of the unhappiest and most chronically ill – both physically and mentally. While some attribute this unhappiness to rampant materialism, this claim is misguided. This is a generation that may have easy access to a cornucopia of consumer goods – but one that also willingly accepts tens of thousands in debt for their education; and remains steadfastly unfazed at the prospect of never owning their own home. If the goal of this generation is not wealth, duty, or faith – what is it? On the surface some may be inclined to say that there simply isn’t one – that rampant hedonism and active nihilism have become the modus operandi of today’s youth. Yet there seems in this dissolute cohort to be one unquestioned good remaining; one universally accepted truth. Travel is good. The credo of this age is summarised succinctly by the vacuous phrase: “I would rather have a passport full of stamps, than a house full of things.”

On the surface, though trite, this assertion may not seem altogether a bad one. Wanderlust has always been a part of the human spirit; the innumerable explorers of the past are testament to that. Even the indulgent holidays and vacations of today featured in history for those who could afford them, exemplified by the genteel grand tours of the English aristocracy. To a generation raised on the notion of cultural relativism, literally expanding your horizons by meeting and learning from other cultures is an undisputed positive. And equally, to a mass of rootless existentialists who believe literally this world is all that there is, it makes sense that exploring as much of it as possible should be the primary goal. Yet elevating travel in and of itself to the goal of life – to becoming an entire raison d’être – is a dangerous and ultimately unfulfilling path.

It is somewhat perplexing that travel has become the pathological obsession of the younger generation at this point in time because the prospect of modern travel could scarcely be less appealing or rewarding. This is the first generation that has grown up with perfect knowledge of the earth; with the ability to in an instant conjure nearly any image from around the globe. Every region of earth, no matter how remote, has become a hive of human activity, and has not escaped digital documentation. Every traveller of today thus travels with the knowledge they are simply trekking well-worn and safe paths. And at the same time, the ardent belief in internationalism, in cultural relativism and equality has meant that not only the destinations are tired and cliché, but the cultures upon arrival are more similar than ever. Ironically, in their restless pursuit of an escape from their own roots, the new travelling generation has remade the world in its own image – an entire world of fast food chains, coffee shops, recognisable landmarks, sanitized locations, and interchangeable populaces all adherent to the same view.

What is increasingly apparent is that this generation did not adopt travel as its mode of living by choice, but rather was forced to adopt it by circumstance. They have deluded themselves into believing they are travelling for the purpose of discovery and enlightenment, but in reality, they are not exploring but fleeing. They are fleeing from the rootless and incoherent nature of their own societies. The harsh truth is modernity has made refugees of us all. This fact becomes apparent when one observes that one of the primary destinations venerated by the new nomadic generation is Japan. Japan is omnipresent in the mind of the millennial – from anime to cosplay to the pop culture image of the Samurai and the ninja – Japan holds a sacred place in the pantheon of travel and youth culture. But the idiosyncratic nature of Japan is predicated exactly on its resistance to travel – on a long history of wariness of outsiders. The Japanese culture remains vibrant and unique precisely because, even in the face of demographic disaster, it has steadfastly refused to succumb to the itinerant world and accept migrants, refugees, and settlers. While the Japanese may travel, they also understand that a traveller must in the end, also have a home to return to.

The millennial obsession with Japanese culture is not simply a trivial desire to experience a culture and place different to their own; but symptomatic of a deeper pining for a coherent history, society and religion. The nomadic youth of today travel in distance and physical space because they have been robbed of the ability to travel back in time or upward towards a higher plane of existence. They are victims of a conscious effort to erase their collective history; to make them illiterate in the language of their own built environments. It is therefore natural that they should prefer to roam and carelessly disregard and overlook the local which they can no longer understand. While the world may be an open book to the generation of today, their own history is kept under lock and key, a forbidden knowledge guarded by the dual gatekeepers of revisionist political correctness and forceful cultural relativism. Forget your ancestors for they were not any greater than anyone else’s; nor were they great at all is the refrain of this mode of thinking.

This is the exact reverse of the circumstances the great explorers of the past set out under. Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, and Charles Darwin all took to the sea with an unwavering understanding of who they were, and with the firm belief that their voyages were not simply exercises in moving through space, but were anchored in greater historical processes of science, philosophy and nation. It was the impetus of such people to go forth and create civilization, not simply to travel around and gormlessly spectate it. Even the decadent participants of the Grand Tour partook in it with the higher purpose of observing the civilization and beauty of the enlightened Mediterranean and bringing it home. And further to this, all these adventurers and explorers of the past did so while accepting the dangers and discomforts travel of the age entailed. Travel today is unfulfilling because it is easy – it entails no heroic battles with the elements, the limits of technology, or the unknown and the unexpected.

It is no coincidence that the generation of self-declared supreme travellers have no stomach for the true test of the age, namely space exploration. Despite the theoretical means being in abundance, no popular movement has arisen calling for mankind to traverse the stars – this kind of travel would require personal commitments and mass co-operation beyond the capabilities of the self-interested atomised traveller of modernity. It is this timidity in the face of the higher calling of the age that exposes the superficial nature of people who self-identify as living to travel. Their goal is not exploration and discovery in any real sense, but rather a self-indulgent feel good procrastination around a safe and already charted globe.

The vapid gypsies of modernity will gain no solace from their travels however. Even in the very limited goal of making the individual happy, modern travel singularly fails to deliver. Just like wealth, travel is a goal without end and with diminishing returns. The more of the globe viewed, the more an individual will be inclined to ask about their own place within it; the more of a spectator rather than a participant they will feel. It is not that travel is inherently morally bad or degrading, but simply that it is not expansive and fulfilling enough to fill the void of a true transcendental purpose. Purpose and destination are not fixed geographical points on the map to be discovered, but rather come from within. It is self-discovery rather than searching the globe that will bring about true fulfilment. It is high time that this generation reconnected with the philosophical currents of the past and began to ponder the meaning of Destination, rather than seeking new destinations in vain. It is time once again to become – Travellers with Destination.

Europa Wept Blood

December 27, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

The Parting, Eskil Winge

2016 will go down as a year of tumult and astounding political upheaval; a year remembered for an unprecedented electoral rebellion on both sides of the Atlantic. The turmoil these shock decisions wrought has dominated the thinking of both the global elite and the masses; creating a daily political saga. Yet amid this atmosphere of jubilation, consternation, and the cautious optimism of new possibilities another 2016 unfolded. In the 13 months from November 2015 to December 2016, over 250 Europeans were killed in terrorist attacks; with hundreds more injured and traumatised. As the Western world was convulsed by political strife, it paid scant and fleeting attention to the savage campaign of bombings, shootings and vehicular slaughter that unfolded in its heartland. The total death toll for Britain’s decade long involvement in the Iraq War was 179 combat troops dead. In a single year, Europe suffered more civilian casualties – often killed in crueller and more shocking ways – and scarcely more than a sheepish and insincere note of grievance has arisen from the political class. Why has this sustained attack gone unanswered?

It is certainly not that case we don’t have the means to prevent these attacks. We live in some of the most heavily surveilled and policed societies ever to exist. The technological and legal means at the disposal of governments to track the individual are now greater than ever. To the freedom lover, this is a very worrying prospect. It is indisputably the case that governments have cried wolf on the issue of terrorism many times before in an effort to grab freedoms; not just in our own time but throughout history. The threat of terror both prior to and in the medium term aftermath of 9/11 was played up relentlessly. It was the PATRIOT Act (as well as comparable European laws such as the British 2001 Security Act) which allowed nationalistic sentiment to be usurped for neo-conservative foreign policy aims. And therefore perhaps it is simply that this display of transparent manipulation awoke a generation of citizens who are alert to government attempts to steal liberties, and determined to frustrate the use of anti-terror powers.

However, a cursory glance at the use of counter-terrorism powers proves that this is not the case. Under the doctrine of militant democracy, the German government infiltrated the far right NPD party and ensured the majority of its higher echelons were state agents. In the United Kingdom, fringe ultranationalist movements such as National Action have been banned under terrorism powers; and the state has consistently attempted to gather more surveillance power through legislation such as the Snooper’s Charter. Spain and France ruthlessly prosecuted their war against the separatist terrorist group ETA, and ultimately prevailed in the struggle. So if the state has proved far from shy in exerting its legal and technological muscle to stop militant nationalists, why has it been so impotent against this wave of Islamic terror?

The answer is that the problem of Islamic terror in Europe is not a question of means, but of political will. And the political will to fight against this concerted attack has been undermined not by governments, but by an insidious and ubiquitous political philosophy: the cult of relativism. It is under this credo that when we view the blood soaked cobbles of grand European squares, we can be assured that terrorism in relative terms is much less of a danger than smoking or driving. It is this Job’s comforter pseudo-philosophy that permits the timid and apathetic to view the carnage and proudly declare that terrorism, year on year, has decreased. It is this sizable minority of vocal collaborators who have allowed London Mayor Sadiq Kahn and French Prime Minister Manuel Vallas to nonchalantly declare that we must live with terrorism; that being bombed and crushed is an acceptable price to pay for modernity.

And many relativists are not simply acquiescing in the terror sweeping across Europe; they are welcoming it. To them – our years of marauding in the Middle East, the burning husks of Basra, Baghdad, Kabul and Aleppo justify these retaliations on our soil. We do not simply suffer these attacks, but we deserve them. In their eyes we are all guilty and therefore warrant this secular biblical punishment for our foreign policy sins. In the view of a relativist human life is shorn from all context; and the lives of people who we can neither know nor ever ensure the security of are just as important as our own. When confronted with these views it is clear that Europe has not been set aflame by the conflagration of Islamic terrorism, but is instead rapidly drowning in a sea of subjectivism.

It is now up to true patriots to forge our own salvation. The relativists’ prescriptions of inaction and self-flagellation will not save us. While even if it is true that the amount of terror fluctuates, the goals of today’s terrorists are fundamentally different to that of the past. The IRA, ETA, even the Red Army Faction and Al Qaeda had aims linked to territorial ambition, foreign policy, and governmental changes. The foot soldiers of ISIS’ Jihad have terror as both a means and end in itself, and seek to destabilise and overthrow our entire civilization, powered by a metaphysical zeal. While the relativist will continue to argue terror is atypical and remote, current events will pile many more bodies on its ideational altar.

In turn governments will continue to ignore these bodies as politically inconvenient. It is now high time for the patriot to take up the mantle and view them as a righteous rallying cry, because if we fail to do so, we could share their fate. We cannot allow these atrocities to fade from the public imagination as the government and relativists eagerly hope they will. Our task is thus two fold, firstly to wrestle the narrative from the hands of the relativists who are driving us off an ideational cliff; and secondly to safeguard against malicious governments who wish to use this crisis to seize powers without preventing it. It is our duty to speak out firmly and loudly, and above the political din to forever remember the year that Europa wept blood.

The Long March of the Patriots

November 13, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

Washington Crosses the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze, 1851

Britain’s accession to the European Economic Community in 1973 represented the culminating triumph of globalism and liberal institutionalism in the West. In the wake of the Second World War, nationalism had been deemed too dangerous to be left untamed; and the majority of its proponents were laying in shallow graves across Europe. History henceforth would simply be the process of ever increasing integration and global governance, of the vanishing nation state and the gradual creation of one world government. Each year seemed to reaffirm this assertion as the EU expanded its remit, the UN led international government by consensus, and each generation was raised with a strengthening belief in internationalism and a global way of thinking. It seemed after millennia of strife and failure, the conclusive best formula for organizing human life had been found – and all future politics was simply the process of its refinement.

There was however, one small problem. Despite the burgeoning of global prosperity, despite the unprecedented years of peace in Europe, there were the nay-sayers and reactionaries. The perennial pessimists who believed that this great global hubris would come before an even greater global fall. Yet in all great movements of human progress there are the sceptics and the sour people, and these vocal doubters were never estimated to be more than a passing minority. Their world view would gradually disappear from history just as those of the Luddites who were washed away with the inexorable tide of progress. Election after election simply reaffirmed the minority status of this view, and states moved towards finally silencing these views forever by a dual approach: legal and demographic.

To safe guard this nascent new world order from its reactionary critics, an increasingly intricate web of hate speech laws and quasi-governmental bodies dedicated to monitoring and enforcement were created. This system proved to be more successful than its architects could have imagined, with states rarely needing to directly enforce the new rules of the game, as enthusiastic supporters of the globalist agenda acted as vigilante guardians keeping the forces of nationalism from ever being able to articulate themselves or organize effectively. In any case, this system only had to preserve itself in the short term – the longer term plan meant that those who advocated a return to the homogenous nation state would be silenced forever, as a globalised government demanded a globalised population and the unprecedented free movement of people would make sure that national characters would be irreversibly altered forever. Quite simply, the nationalists would have no nation to return to, even if they were in a position to attempt it.

With the threat of a reactionary revolt supressed, the new order now set its sights on expanding itself truly to global proportions. Despite its professed global reach, up until now it had mostly taken true root in the West, and large portions of the globe still remained beyond its reach in backward nationalistic and theocratic strife. To cement its primacy and to prove once and for all that it was the correct form of political and social organization, liberal institutionalism set its sights on transforming the intractably war torn Middle East into a model of tolerance and prosperity. On paper, this seemed an easy task – the rudimentary military forces of Afghanistan and Iraq were swiftly overwhelmed and the process of populace embracing the ideals of outward looking internationalism would surely follow thereafter. The downtrodden, oppressed, and impoverished citizens of the Middle East were now free. But it had come at a cost.

The ferocity and barbarity of the extreme violence both during the invasion and in the following occupation had disillusioned moderate supporters of liberal institutionalism who had been promised it was a panacea to end war. This was exacerbated by the astronomical costs of this undertaking, which was in turn compounded by the return of volatile economics which proved global economic interdependence could be a danger as well as boon; and for the first time brought into question the dictum that liberal institution would bring ever increasing prosperity. On top of this, the distraction of attempting to expand the cause of globalism to the wider world had allowed the reactionaries to gain power at home, emboldened by the growing array of weaknesses that this failed expansion had shown.

The biggest catastrophe for globalism however was not squandered blood and treasure, but its loss of its monopoly on internationalism. In toppling the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, the globalists broke the dam of the balance of power, inflaming a Pan-Arabic internationalist revolt that quickly swept over the arbitrary bounds of borders and engulfed the entire region in rebellion and at the same time created an alternative global power structure. This simultaneously drew the globalists into a clash of ideologies that they were ill-prepared for, and presented them with the grim realisation that if they were to adhere to their principles of free movement, they would now need to accommodate the millions of displaced and impoverished refugees they had just created.

Worse still, something completely unexpected had happened in the liberal institutionalist heartland. Not only had the Arabs combined in an international effort, but so too had the reactionary forces of Europe. Previously it had been easy for the global order to squash nationalistic sentiment in one state or another when it reared its head, because of its necessarily geographically delimited focus. This meant globalism could simply bring all its resources to bear and crush nationalist movements in a whack a mole, ad hoc fashion. The reactionary forces had learned bitter lessons from this – each instance of repression and failure had instilled in them an ever more collective consciousness that the problems facing an unemployed Ohio steelworker were the same as an out of work former dock worker from Sunderland. Inconceivably, the nationalists had internationalised.

The supposedly one true iteration of international thought was now besieged by two alternative conceptions of global life; and it was still embroiled in economic crisis, facing a refugee tidal wave, and rocked by the increasing incidence of shocking terrorist attacks. In response to this disastrous situation and loss of authority, it was time for liberal institutionalism to once again reassert itself by going straight to its most troubled heartland – Britain – and proving once and for all that it was the only game in town. Britain had been the slowest to embrace the international revolution having not directly suffered the total ruin of the Second World War, and had remained a bastion of reactionary doubt about the whole project. Yet once again, on paper, a referendum on remaining in the EU, the gold standard of international institutions, should be an easy victory for the internationalists. They had the almost unanimous full backing of the British establishment, a recently re-elected internationalist leader, and decades of legally mandated internationalist thinking and mass migration.

But deep beneath the surface, trouble had been brewing. The rapid increases in absolute GDP growth had masked the reality of globalised life for many; as the unemployed and forgotten took stock of their gutted former industrial towns and took aim at the liberal institutionalism that had sacrificed them for ideological reasons. The horrifying attacks of Nice, Brussels and Paris had reminded the many that the nation, not the supra-national institution was the guarantor of security, and without being able to call on the national will to fight external threats, global institutions were impotent to combat the zealous adversaries they themselves had a hand in creating. And most crucially, the images of vast columns of refugees heading towards the European continent finally alerted many even moderate nationalists to the plan of the globalists who intended to internationalise the populace into being unable to mount a unified resistance. They came to realise that this may be the final chance to save the notion of a homogenous nation.

So as the globalists confidently sat down to watch what they had thought would be their show of power unfold, there was increasing consternation. This may be a closer run thing than they had expected. The reactionaries – the backward people, those on the wrong side of history, the small minded and the bigoted had flourished in their absence on foreign adventures. But as all previous elections and polling had suggested, these people may have become a larger minority, but were expected to remain minority nonetheless. Yet as the night unfolded – something unprecedented happened. Without centralised leadership, often independent of one another, a silent majority of voters firmly resolved to overthrow the order that had held sway in Europe for the last 43 years. The global elite watched with growing horror as the patriots who up until now had been nowhere, were suddenly everywhere. With wide eyed disbelief they witnessed the revenge of the forgotten, the disenfranchised, and the forward thinking as the nowhereville of inconsequential periphery villages and towns united in their millions to assert that localism is superior to globalism; that homogeneity is superior to diversity; and that democracy is superior to inaccessible technocracy.

Revolution hangs in the balance

The consequences of this revolt were harsh and immediate. The globalist government of Britain was swept away, and the European heartland of liberal institutionalism was plunged into panicked disarray. Slowly the global elite began to come to terms with this national revolt and started to amass their usual powers of coercion against it. They brought their economic threats to bear, they tried to divide the populace, to convince them they hadn’t really meant what they had done. Above all, they tried to play for more time to finish their project completely. In previous decades these tactics may have succeeded – but the global elite realised too late the international nature of this revolt. As the race for the American presidency entered the final stage, they clamoured to try and derail the second prong of the revolt in the form of US Republican candidate Donald Trump. But it was too little, too late. The momentum which had been gathering had reached critical mass, and could not be undone.

The scale of the revolt soon became apparent. 78 million people had voted either for Trump or Brexit. When they had been given their chance, the denigrated patriots who had been subjected to the heavy artillery of mass media intimidation, economic threats and legal and social stigma came out in an unstoppable tidal wave. They came from wind swept Welsh valleys, from blighted Northern industrial centres, from sleepy middle English shires, and from rural American farming towns to unite as one and to say loudly and clearly that the current world order was a disaster for them. The long march of the patriots which had begun as uneasy opposition to the direction of global politics in 1973 had culminated in a peaceful electoral revolution in 2016 that is unprecedented in world history.

It is likely that the swarm of patriots who emerged from the hated backwaters of terra incognito have dealt a probable fatal blow to the status quo. In the minds of the remaining enthusiastic supporters of the globalist project, these reactionaries have undone peace and prosperity. Yet as has been shown, the over extension, mismanagement and arrogance of the globalists themselves were the key factors in fermenting and allowing this revolution to take place. What lies ahead is as much on their failure as it is on the success of the mainly moderate majority driven to revolt by their policies. But historians of the future will look back at this period and forever remember – the long march of the patriots.

Of Titans and Pygmies

June 21, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

Georg Osterwald (German, 1803-1884), “The Father’s Grave”

Since the end of the Second World War Europe has operated on an unspoken consensus. The genie of nationalism that proved itself to be too dangerous for the world has been put back in its bottle, and in its place independent states have willingly relinquished their sovereignty and agency in exchange for security and stability. The distinct character of European nations now lies dormant under a permafrost; content to allow themselves to be governed by mediocracy and bureaucracy as long as economic progress is maintained and citizens can sleep safely at night. To a naïve multitude this formula seems to have banished strife and war from the European continent forever. They are wrong.

What the short sighted have failed to realise is that Europe may have muzzled itself, but the rest of the world has not. While Europe slept the globe has been engulfed in a tumultuous nightmare – and we are now being drawn into its wake. As tens of thousands of the destitute and the war ravaged struggle to our shores, the continent looks on horrified. As gunmen rampage through the former splendour of Paris again and again, the globalists try and assure themselves these incidents are simply a one off, a blip. As politicians desperately try and rewrite the unspoken consensus to tell us that Europeans are interchangeable economic units with all other peoples of the world, a fundamental split has occurred in the European psyche. The old politics of left and right has been swept away, and has been replaced by two competing schools of personality – the titan and the pygmy.

The political pygmy looks upon the chaos engulfing Europe and responds by flocking to bolster the status quo; to present every reason for inaction as noble, and to demonise every effort to regain control as destructive and regressive. To the pygmy, the world before our new consensus was a barren and dangerous one riven with risk and conflict. It was a world where nation states lived and died by the ingenuity and character of their leaders and citizens, where responsibility couldn’t be willed away to the faceless collective of the unelected technocrats. It was an era that demanded personal involvement and responsibility, where the entire nation bore the consequences of their actions. To the pygmy a return to this world is simply unthinkable. In their minds the surrender of fundamental freedoms is a small price to pay for the transient gains here in the now – they couch their arguments in terms of economic growth, barriers to hedonistic travel, and uncertainty in the short term.

The ultimate driving force of the political pygmy is self-doubt. Using obfuscation and relativism they seek to convince Europeans that Europe isn’t worth fighting for. They point out that European systems were never fully democratic, that we still may be ruled by politicians and bureaucrats that we despise, that we are too few and too divided to navigate this world alone. Yet what really underpins all these complaints is a fear within their advocates that a return of Europe would make personal demands upon them; that it would interrupt their leisure and their pursuit of wealth. The political pygmy doesn’t believe European states could survive alone because they themselves fear they couldn’t survive in the harsh realities of the world outside Europe’s tranquillity and prosperity. It is thus with horror that the pygmies look upon the newly vocal champions of European freedom and ask the question, why would anyone choose hardship over luxury?

The titan understands there never was a choice. It is not the economic, migrant and terror crises that are the anomaly – Europe of the last seventy years is. Europe believes that it fundamentally re-wrote human nature to do away with risk and competition; but the world outside continued on as it always has. The enthusiastic believers in more Europe are wilfully blind to the fact European governance cannot legislate away terror attacks; it cannot stem the flood of refugees by parcelling them out to all the far flung corners of Europe. These policies are appeasement, and appeasement has always failed. The titan isn’t swayed by arguments of transient losses in economics or minor inconveniences at the borders, because they understand that eternal principles are at stake – freedom and survival.

By redefining Europeans as merely economic units, both the freedom and survival of Europe have been put in peril. Europe at once demands that it loses its old national character by declaring that Syrians and Eritreans are as European as everyone else; yet it naively hopes that these groups will lose their own national characteristics. Its response to the increasingly frequent terrorist attacks has been to simply view them as an inevitable teething process, a new phenomenon like extreme weather; a simple case of bad luck. The pygmies gleefully participate in this wilful inaction because they believe it will allow them to continue their European dream of unfettered pursuit of wealth and personal pleasure unhindered; if some have to be sacrificed on the altar to allow the continuation of that dream, so be it. To the pygmies, the certainty of Europe’s decline is preferable to the uncertainty of national self-determination.

To the titan such a response is suicide. Every successful terrorist attack only signals to the world that Europe is a soft target; every boat full of accepted migrants begets five more. The reassertion of national identity and a return to old European values is already well underway. Every foot of Hungarian steel fencing, every Austrian vote for Freedom Party candidate Norbert Hofer, every determined outer in the British EU referendum represents a reawakening of the European titans. It is true that we will return an uncertain and dangerous world after the collapse of the European project; but it is better to live and die by our national wits than to shackle ourselves to the seductive slow and easy death of false union. While Europe has slept, the world around us has not. It is now time to wake up to this fact and ask yourself what you will be in this new European struggle – titan or pygmy?

Transcendental Titans: The Identitarian Credo

March 5, 2016 / admin / 1 Comment

To the uninitiated, to be an identitarian in this age seems to be an anachronistic and borderline masochistic endeavour. Every day presents more evidence that the notion of having a fixed historical identity is a dying one. From the removal of the Confederate flag from civic centres across the South, to the throngs of migrants crossing European borders only to be welcomed with open arms; it is plain to see group identity as we know it is disappearing. This change is not merely a consequence of shifting political priorities, but signals a much deeper change in the philosophical zeitgeist of the West. The unprecedented political upheaval we see today has been made possible because all fixed identities have been rejected by an increasingly individualistic and fluid society. In the mind of nouveau-man, fixed identities such as race, gender, nationality and religion are baggage to be cast out and to be replaced with the blank slate of individual preference. In such a philosophical climate, it is no surprise identarianism is regarded by outsiders as a both futile and unnecessary doctrine. Who really needs the burden of identity anymore? This essay seeks to argue that the answer to that is, we all do – and we need it now more than ever.

Before any defence of the credo of identitarianism can be attempted however, the idea itself must be defined. That is no easy task considering the multitude of definitions and reinterpretations of the concept offered in recent years, so I will instead offer my own vision of what identitarianism means. At its most basic level, identitarianism is the belief that an individual belongs to a fixed historical tradition. Their loyalty is not to a political party or even a state – but to the ethno-cultural group which they were born into and with which they self-identify. The primary driving force of an identitarian is not transient political and economic change; they do not seek to amend tax laws or reduce carbon emissions. Their central objective is to defend, continue, and tirelessly better the group of which they are a part. The identitarian steeps himself in the cultural morays of his group; he treasures the historical inheritance he is the custodian of and takes it as his duty to enrich and transmit that inheritance to future generations. To some, that definition may seem perilously close to conservatism. Yet to conflate these two ideologies is a grave mistake.

The conservative seeks to turn back the clock – to constantly hark back to an age when things were better and the people were much wiser. But to the modern conservative who those people were and which ideas are worth conserving has become a confused issue. They have slipped into the fallacy of believing ideas exist independently of the groups which created them, and this misjudgement has led to their political irrelevance. We have watched modern conservatism fight, and lose, a series of culture wars on drug control, immigration restrictions and gay marriage. The reason they have lost these battles is because shorn of its true objective – conserving a way of life and strengthening the identity of the ethnic group that devised these views, these arguments simply appear to be rules without reasons. If modern conservatives cannot answer who they are conserving, and why they are worth conserving, their world view becomes moribund. Their ideas simply become one set of values amongst many subjective value sets.

What modern conservatism lacks is a transcendental purpose; an aim over and above making minor political changes in the here and now. While conservatism retreats from addressing the true issues of today to expound on tax laws and state rights; idenitarianism takes up the mantle of seeking a higher purpose. It is this transcendental element which differentiates identitarinism from all other political ideologies today. We do not derive our worldview from the whims of changing moral and ethical fashions, but from continually asking ourselves the question: does this decision strengthen and improve our group, or does it weaken it? We understand, unlike the conservatives, that technology and society move on, and we cannot live in a moral museum. But at the same time, the considerations of what may be fashionable in modernity can never come over and above staying true to our identity – and to the thousands of years of development that have gone into its formation.

Many commentators make the criticism that identitarianism is simply an attempt to co-opt the achievements of the past and present them as your own. That merely belonging to a group identity by accident of birth does not entitle you to a sense of superiority, and that in a liberal individualistic world it is personal achievement, who you are, not what you are that counts. In their view to present yourself as superior because of what others have done is lazy; and to limit yourself only to your own group is an arbitrary and needless restriction. These two criticisms are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the identitarian credo.

Identitarianism is not an ideology for the feckless or the weak minded. The achievements of the past should not be taken for granted as a positive reflection of your character; but as an aspiration to emulate those who have lived meaningful lives. We venerate the members of our own group not simply because they just so happened to be members of it, but because their personal acts of physical and mental fortitude make them worthy of praise and remembrance. Identitarians feel a constant sense of duty and expectation; an urge to live up to those figures of the past and to ensure a future for those to come. Identitarians of all people know that it is both who you are as well as what you are that counts – because we are grounded in a history that respects great figures of the past rather than those who seek to cast the past aside and start from zero.

As for those who say identitarianism is a restrictive ideology – they are right. It is one of the few ideologies which exists today that makes demands on the conduct of your day-to-day life. Other ideologies try to explain away personal failure and political shortcomings as stemming from the all-powerful state, the apathy of society or the structure of the economy. We do not have a Marxist sense of the historic inevitability of our own success; we cannot be complacent and sit on our hands waiting for the day of the spontaneous revolution. We have an acute understanding that our very reason for existence is under attack, and if we fail it is our own fault. The identitarian response to personal adversity and political setbacks is not to blame others, but to draw on our own psycho-spiritual reserves to try and better ourselves. To harness a Nietzschean will to self-evolution and self-improvement. To look up to the esteemed figures of the past, and to seek to learn from them by responding to hardship with personal heroism, in all circumstances.

This makes identitarianism a personally demanding ideology, and one not suited to mass movements and the multitude. It can be a hard and lonely road, and one which will not win you respect amongst your peers; nor make you personally wealthy. But what is moral and right is never easy, and the successes of our movement are always more rewarding because of this. We are not trying to achieve small-scale political change, which will be washed away in a few years or decades. We are trying to re-awaken the spirit of collective identity and champion a whole revolution in the thought of contemporary man. This means we may not have the instant gratification of immediate political breakthroughs and the superficial successes of electoral victories. Our mission is a deeper, more fundamental one.

Speaking to people on this level, on this higher plane, is an ultimately more worthwhile cause however. Following the path of identitarianism, hard though it is, makes life meaningful. When we reach out to people and furnish them with an understanding of who they are, and what they should aspire to be, we free them from the destructive psychic prison of modern liberalism. Contemporary society tells them that by denying who they are, and by attempting to appease and intermingle with other groups they will eventually lead a richer, more fulfilling life. But that is the greatest lie of our age. Because no matter how hard they deny themselves, no matter how many Confederate flags they rip down or apologies for past colonial indiscretions they make, they can never truly become a clean slate. They cannot and will not be absolved from their history; other groups will simply make more and more extreme demands for public signs of acquiescence and self-denial.

The treadmill of political correctness and self-policing becomes ever faster and faster, more and more rules of playing nice must be internalised, and yet it will never end. Because the truth is – group existence is resistance. While our identity is still undiluted enough to serve as a rallying cry to free and uncowed individuals, it will always be a threat to the liberal and multicultural elites. By accepting who we are, and being proud of it, we free ourselves of the crushing weight of the contrived expectations of others. The ever increasing demands of forcing disparate and incompatible groups together ceases to be our problem; and the productive work of moving towards a healthy, homogenous and upwardly thinking society can begin.

The truth of the matter is that multi-ethnic societies always make the individual less free; because policing such an unnatural arrangement always requires a monolithic apparatus to suppress inter-group hostilities and tensions. By embracing our own group identity, we opt-out of all the bureaucracy and implicit force needed to make living with other groups tolerable. We do away with anti-hate speech laws, politically motivated governmental organizations, media witch-hunts about offhand comments and Soviet style censorship of creative expression. We can instead create a society free of these personally burdening and unproductive endeavours and work instead to become better, happier and freer individuals.

Neither liberalism nor socialism has the power to achieve this new, freer and healthier society because both have become impotent in the face of modern political arrangements. When liberalism is applied to a society of many groups, its calls for freedom will always be subordinated to maintaining unity in a state of many faiths and group identities. It can only fight for the freedom of the trivial – the false gains of minor personal freedoms in the face of slavery to the omnipresent state intent on keeping people together. The freedom to make more money, to take part in more previously taboo activities, and to live more comfortable lives in the short term is a pursuit that lacks all meaning if the individual is not free to be who they are.

Equally, Marxism has already triumphed in a cultural sense while conceding its economic doctrines are incompatible with modernity. This renders it only able to demand more of what already exists – to constantly cry for more ‘equality’, which in reality only presents itself as more privileges for favoured out-group identities at the expense of true group identity. It means an ever increasing array of laws, more restrictions on what can and what cannot be said, and no improvement in the overall condition of the average individual. Marxism fails to understand that the problems we face today are not material ones; even the poorest in advanced society have access to a cornucopia of material things. The problems we face today are philosophical and spiritual, and an ideology that has no grasp of life in these terms can only demand more of the same. Marxism, the supposedly most revolutionary of ideologies – has become status quoist. It has lost its revolutionary zeal, and works only for the interest of groups which are not our own. It is not simply that identitarianism is the better option for overcoming our present depredations; it is the only option. And whether you are an identitarian or not, group identity is certainly not dead in the contemporary world. Other groups are rapidly discovering its power.

The rise of militant Islam and its many political and military manifestations has brought sharply into focus that a self-aware group, harnessing its identity as a rallying cry is a powerful and dangerous thing. Modern liberalism is losing on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, and if we fail to develop our own sense of group identity and self-preservation, it will soon be losing at home in our European and American heartlands. What modern ideologies, shorn from the moorings of the groups that created them have failed to realise is, abstract political values will always be defeated by tangible groups operating under arms. Nations and states are built on the collective will of the people who inhabit them, not vague political notions. If you change the composition of the inhabiting group, you will swiftly change the values that prevail in the land. As much as our political elites try and deny it, groups with an unshakable sense of who they are, and why they are fighting, will always defeat those held together only by the tenuous bond of an artificial and hollow idea.

We stand now at a crossroads. The mass exodus of refugees caused by the advance of militant Islam has more starkly than ever demonstrated the ideational gulf between identitarianism and the old ideologies. In response to a worsening crisis, the old ideologies have intensified their self-denial and public self-flagellation. Not content with breaking the social contract by the continued policy of mass migration of disparate peoples into formerly homogenous societies without a democratic mandate; they now seek to literally invite strangers directly into their households and communities under the guise of re-homing refugees. The reasoning for this is not a moral one, but a political one. They believe the faster group identities are diluted, the sooner they will fade as a factor in political life. But this response is a deeply misguided one. The importation of other groups will not foster the identityless carte blanche society they dream of; it will simply mean their own group and cultural values are more rapidly and violently supplanted by that of another.

The identitarian response to this present disaster is not to weaken ourselves, but to seize this opportunity to reassert ourselves more firmly than ever. Resolving this crisis is not a question of economic and organizational resources; but a question of political will. Before we can solve any external crisis, we must first solve our internal problems – the problems of who we are. Though the idea of group identity has been much undermined in the past fifty years, this is not solely because the notion of doing away with identity has resonated with people on a philosophical level. It is also because, once decided upon this course, the old ideologies had to enforce their decision by controlling the unwilling and uncertain elements of the population through social stigma and economic threats. But the power of present political elites is imagined, not real, and it is up to the identitarian to prove that the psychic prison has no guards. By speaking out, unintimidated by the prospect of social and economic reprisals, we will give others the courage to do so, and together we will soon see how few the true supporters of the current system number.

Once we have re-established our sense of identity, the solutions to our current problems will become apparent. A community with a clear cut sense of self-preservation will have no difficulty in finding the necessary economic and organizational resources to deal with the rise of militant Islam, the refugee crisis, or any other challenge that may face it. It is high time now to stop believing a policy of appeasement, of self denial, and subordination to the status quo will save us or make us freer and happier. The identitarian credo is one which precipitates personal hardship and sacrifice. It offers no certain prospect of victory or easy successes. But we are motivated to speak out because what we have to say is too important to be left unsaid; our truth goes beyond economic and social fashions. And perhaps, if enough of us join together, the future generations will say that when almost all were abandoning who they were, and retreating from fighting for a truly progressive future, there were a brave few. A brave few who saw civilization was teetering atop a narrow bridge, and squared their shoulders to make sure it did not fall; despite the slings and arrows of personal attacks and economic depredations they had to face. This brave few will be remembered not as the characterless middle managers of today’s politics; but as an intellectual vanguard that sought to reawaken the people and lead them back to a freer, greater and happier society. These brave few will be remembered as – the transcendental titans.

Transcendental Titans

Revolt Against Modernity