Spöknippet avslutar året med något så, för vår del, simpelt som ett länktips. Haecceitas publicerar en mycket läsvärd text om Jünger och Mishima, Att ha något vackert att dö för. Detta är kommunism när den är som allra bäst. Vi kan bara hoppas att haecceitas publicerar fler texter om Jünger och/eller Mishima framöver.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Jünger, On Danger
Yet another Ernst Jünger piece stolen from the Weimar republic sourcebook, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). This time an english translation of ”Über die Gefahr,” published in in Der gefährliche Augenblick. Eine Sammlung von Bildern und Berichten. (Berlin: Jünker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1931), p. 11-16.
Among the signs of the epoch we have now entered belongs the increased intrusion of danger into daily life. There is no accident concealing itself behind this fact but a comprehensive change of the inner and outer world.
We see this clearly when we remember what an important role was assigned to the concept of security in the bourgeois epoch just past. The bourgeois person is perhaps best characterized as one who places security among the highest values and conducts his life accordingly. His arrangements and systems are dedicated to securing his space against the danger that at times, when scarcely a cloud appears to darken the sky, has faded into the distance. However, it is always there: it seeks with elemental constancy to break through the dams with which order has surrounded itself.
The peculiarity of the bourgeois’ relation to danger lies in his perception of it as an irresolvable contradiction to order, that is, as senseless. In this he marks himself off from other figures, for example, the warrior, the artist, and the criminal, who are given a lofty or base relation to the elemental. Thus battle, in the eyes of the warrior, is a process that completes itself in a higher order; the tragic conflict, for the writer, is a condition in which the deeper sense of life is to be comprehended very clearly; and a burning city or one beset be insurrection is a field of intensified activity for the criminal. In turn bourgeois values possess just as little validity for the believing person, for the gods appear in the elements, as in the burning bush unconsumed by the flames. Through misfortune and danger, fate draws the mortal into the superior sphere of a higher order.
The supreme power through which the bourgeois sees security guarantied is reason. The closer he finds himself to the center of reason, the more the dark shadows in which danger conceals itself disperse, and the ideal condition which it is the task of progress to achieve consists of the world domination of reason through which the wellsprings of the dangerous are not merely to be minimized but ultimately to be dried up altogether. The dangerous reveals itself in the light of reason to be senseless and relinquishes its claim on reality. In this world all depends on the perception of the dangerous as the senseless; then in the same moment it is overcome, it appears in the mirror of reason as an error.
This can be demonstrated everywhere and in detail within the intellectual and actual arrangements of the bourgeois world. It reveals itself at large in the endeavor to see the state, which rests on hierarchy, as society, with equality as its fundamental principle and which is founded through an act of reason. It reveals itself in the comprehensive establishment of an insurance system, through which not only the risk of foreign and domestic politics but also that of private life is to be uniformly distributed and thus subordinated to reason. It reveals itself further in the many and very entangled efforts to understand the life of the soul as a series of causes and effects and thus to remove it from an unpredictable in to a predictable condition, therefore to include it within the sphere in which consciousness holds sway.
In this sense the securing of life against fate, that great mother of danger, appears as the truly bourgeois problem, which is then made subject to the most diverse economic or humanitarian solutions. All formulations of questions at present, whether aesthetic, scientific, or political in nature, move in the direction of the claim that conflict is avoidable. Should conflict nevertheless arise, as cannot, for example, be overlooked in regard to the permanent fact of war or criminality, then all depends upon proving it to be an error whose repetition is to be avoided through education or enlightenment. These errors appear for the sole reason that the factors of the great equation – the result of which has the population of the globe becoming a unified, fundamentally good as well as fundamentally rational, and therefore also a fundamentally secure humanity – have not yet achieved general recognition. Faith in the persuasive force of these views is one of the reasons that enlightenment tends to overestimate the powers given to it.
One of the best objections that has been raised against this variation is that under such circumstances life would be intolerably boring. This objection has never been of a purely theoretical nature but was applied practically by those young persons who, in the foggy dark of night, left their parental home to pursue danger in America, on the sea, or in the French Foreign Legion. It is a sign of the domination of bourgeois values that danger slips into the distance, “far away in Turkey,” in those lands where pepper grows, or wherever the bourgeois likes to deplore everyone not conforming to his standards. For these values to disappear entirely, however, will never be possible, not just because they are always present but above all because the human heart is in need not only of security but of danger too. Yet this desire us capable of revealing itself in bourgeois society only as protest, and it indeed does appear, in the form of romantic protest. The bourgeois has nearly succeeded in persuading the adventurous heart that the dangerous is not present at all. Thus do figures become possible who scarcely dare to speak their own superior language, whether that of the poet, who compares himself to the albatross, whose powerful wings are nothing more than the object of a tedious curiosity in a foreign and windless environment, or that of the born warrior, who appear to be a ne’er-do-well because the life of a shopkeeper fills him with disgust. Countless examples could show how in an era of great security any profitable life will depart for the distances symbolized by strange lands, intoxication, or death.
In this sense the world war appears as the great, red balance line under the bourgeois era, the spirit of which explained – that is, believed itself capable of invalidating – the jubilation of the volunteer who welcomed the war by attributing to him either a patriotic error or s suspect lust for adventure. Fundamentally, however, this jubilation was a revolutionary protest against the values of the bourgeois world; it was a recognition of fate as the expression of the supreme power. In this jubilation a revaluation of all values, which had been prophesied by exalted spirits, was completed: after an era that sought to subordinate fate to reason, another followed which saw reason as the servant of fate. From that moment on, danger was no longer the goal of a romantic opposition; it was rather reality, and the task of the bourgeois was one again to withdraw from this reality and escape into the utopia of security. From this moment on, the words peace and order became a slogan to which a weaker morale resorted.
This was a war that not only nations but two epochs conducted against each other. As a consequence, both victors and vanquished exists here in Germany. Victors are those who, like salamanders, have gone through the school of danger. Only these will hold their own in a time when danger, not security, will determine the order of life.
Precisely for this reason, however, the tasks that order must accomplish have become much more comprehensive than before; these tasks have to be preformed where danger is not the exception, but is constantly present. As an example, the police force might be mentioned. It has transformed itself from a group of civil servants into a formation that already greatly resembles a military unit. Likewise the various large parties acknowledge the need to adopt means of power that express the fact that the battle of opinions will not be decided solely through votes and programs but also by the stalwarts committed to march in support of those programs. Such facts are in no way to be isolated and regarded as a temporary or transient change in the political landscape. Nor can the inclination to danger be overlooked in intellectual endeavors, and it is unmistakable that new forms of the volcanic spirit are at work. Phenomena like modern atomic theory, glacial cosmogony, the introduction of the concept of mutation into zoology all point clearly completely apart from their truth content, to how strongly the spirit is beginning to partake of explosive events. The history of inventions also raises ever more clearly the question of whether a space of absolute comfort or s space of absolute danger is the final aim concealed in technology. Completely apart from the circumstance that scarcely a machine, scarcely a science has ever existed which did not fulfill, directly or indirectly, dangerous functions in war, inventions like the automobile engine have already resulted in greater losses than any war, however bloody.
What especially characterizes the era in which we find ourselves, into which we enter more deeply with every passing day, is the close relationship that exists between danger and order. It may be expressed in this way: danger appears merely as the other side of our order. This whole is more or less equivalent to our image of the atom, which is utterly mobile and utterly constant. The secret concealed within is a new and different return to nature; it is the fact that we are simultaneously civilized and barbaric, that we have approached the elemental without having sacrificed the acuity of our consciousness. Thus does the path through which danger has penetrated our life present itself as twofold. It has intruded upon us first of all out of an arena in which nature is still more vital. Things, “the likes of which were only possible in South America,” are now familiar to us. The distinction is that danger, from a romantic dimension, has in this way become real. Secondly, however, we are sending danger back over the globe in a new form.
This new form of danger appears in he closest connection having been made between elemental events and consciousness. The elemental is eternal: as people have always found themselves in passionate struggle with things, animals, or other people, as is the case today. The particular characteristic of our era, however, is precisely that all this transpires in the presence of the most acute consciousness. This finds expression above all in the circumstance that in all of these conflicts the most powerful servant of consciousness, the machine, is always present. Thus does humanity’s eternal struggle with the elemental nature of the sea present itself in the temporal form of a supremely complicated mechanical contrivance. Thus does the battle appear as a process during which the armored engine moves fighting men through the sea, over land, or into the air. Thus does the daily accident itself, with which our newspapers are filled, appear nearly exclusively as a catastrophe of a technological type.
Beyond all this the wonder of our world, at once sober and dangerous, is the registration of the moment in which the danger transpires – a registration that is moreover accomplished whenever it does not capture human consciousness immediately, by means of machines. One needs no prophetic talent to predict that soon any given event will be there to see or to hear in any given place. Already today there is hardly an event of human significance toward which the artificial eye of civilization, the photographic lens, is not directed. The result is often pictures of demoniacal precision through which humanity’s new relation to danger becomes visible in an exceptional fashion. One has to recognize that it is a question here much less of the peculiarity of new tools than of a new style that makes use of technological tools. The change becomes illuminating in the investigation of the change in tools that have long been at our disposal, such as language. Although our time produces little in the way of literature in the old sense, much of significance is accomplished through the objective reports of experience. Our time is prompted by human need – which explains, among other things, the success of war literature. We already posses a new style of language, one which gradually becomes visible from underneath the language of the bourgeois epoch. The same, however, is true of our style altogether; it is reminiscent of the fact that the automobile was for a long time constructed in the form of a horse-drawn coach, or that a wholly different society has already long since established itself beneath the surface of bourgeois society. As during the inflation, we continue for a time to spend the usual coins, without sensing that the rate of exchange is no longer the same.
In this sense, it may be said that we have already plunged deeply into new, more dangerous realms, without our being conscious of them.
Among the signs of the epoch we have now entered belongs the increased intrusion of danger into daily life. There is no accident concealing itself behind this fact but a comprehensive change of the inner and outer world.
We see this clearly when we remember what an important role was assigned to the concept of security in the bourgeois epoch just past. The bourgeois person is perhaps best characterized as one who places security among the highest values and conducts his life accordingly. His arrangements and systems are dedicated to securing his space against the danger that at times, when scarcely a cloud appears to darken the sky, has faded into the distance. However, it is always there: it seeks with elemental constancy to break through the dams with which order has surrounded itself.
The peculiarity of the bourgeois’ relation to danger lies in his perception of it as an irresolvable contradiction to order, that is, as senseless. In this he marks himself off from other figures, for example, the warrior, the artist, and the criminal, who are given a lofty or base relation to the elemental. Thus battle, in the eyes of the warrior, is a process that completes itself in a higher order; the tragic conflict, for the writer, is a condition in which the deeper sense of life is to be comprehended very clearly; and a burning city or one beset be insurrection is a field of intensified activity for the criminal. In turn bourgeois values possess just as little validity for the believing person, for the gods appear in the elements, as in the burning bush unconsumed by the flames. Through misfortune and danger, fate draws the mortal into the superior sphere of a higher order.
The supreme power through which the bourgeois sees security guarantied is reason. The closer he finds himself to the center of reason, the more the dark shadows in which danger conceals itself disperse, and the ideal condition which it is the task of progress to achieve consists of the world domination of reason through which the wellsprings of the dangerous are not merely to be minimized but ultimately to be dried up altogether. The dangerous reveals itself in the light of reason to be senseless and relinquishes its claim on reality. In this world all depends on the perception of the dangerous as the senseless; then in the same moment it is overcome, it appears in the mirror of reason as an error.
This can be demonstrated everywhere and in detail within the intellectual and actual arrangements of the bourgeois world. It reveals itself at large in the endeavor to see the state, which rests on hierarchy, as society, with equality as its fundamental principle and which is founded through an act of reason. It reveals itself in the comprehensive establishment of an insurance system, through which not only the risk of foreign and domestic politics but also that of private life is to be uniformly distributed and thus subordinated to reason. It reveals itself further in the many and very entangled efforts to understand the life of the soul as a series of causes and effects and thus to remove it from an unpredictable in to a predictable condition, therefore to include it within the sphere in which consciousness holds sway.
In this sense the securing of life against fate, that great mother of danger, appears as the truly bourgeois problem, which is then made subject to the most diverse economic or humanitarian solutions. All formulations of questions at present, whether aesthetic, scientific, or political in nature, move in the direction of the claim that conflict is avoidable. Should conflict nevertheless arise, as cannot, for example, be overlooked in regard to the permanent fact of war or criminality, then all depends upon proving it to be an error whose repetition is to be avoided through education or enlightenment. These errors appear for the sole reason that the factors of the great equation – the result of which has the population of the globe becoming a unified, fundamentally good as well as fundamentally rational, and therefore also a fundamentally secure humanity – have not yet achieved general recognition. Faith in the persuasive force of these views is one of the reasons that enlightenment tends to overestimate the powers given to it.
One of the best objections that has been raised against this variation is that under such circumstances life would be intolerably boring. This objection has never been of a purely theoretical nature but was applied practically by those young persons who, in the foggy dark of night, left their parental home to pursue danger in America, on the sea, or in the French Foreign Legion. It is a sign of the domination of bourgeois values that danger slips into the distance, “far away in Turkey,” in those lands where pepper grows, or wherever the bourgeois likes to deplore everyone not conforming to his standards. For these values to disappear entirely, however, will never be possible, not just because they are always present but above all because the human heart is in need not only of security but of danger too. Yet this desire us capable of revealing itself in bourgeois society only as protest, and it indeed does appear, in the form of romantic protest. The bourgeois has nearly succeeded in persuading the adventurous heart that the dangerous is not present at all. Thus do figures become possible who scarcely dare to speak their own superior language, whether that of the poet, who compares himself to the albatross, whose powerful wings are nothing more than the object of a tedious curiosity in a foreign and windless environment, or that of the born warrior, who appear to be a ne’er-do-well because the life of a shopkeeper fills him with disgust. Countless examples could show how in an era of great security any profitable life will depart for the distances symbolized by strange lands, intoxication, or death.
In this sense the world war appears as the great, red balance line under the bourgeois era, the spirit of which explained – that is, believed itself capable of invalidating – the jubilation of the volunteer who welcomed the war by attributing to him either a patriotic error or s suspect lust for adventure. Fundamentally, however, this jubilation was a revolutionary protest against the values of the bourgeois world; it was a recognition of fate as the expression of the supreme power. In this jubilation a revaluation of all values, which had been prophesied by exalted spirits, was completed: after an era that sought to subordinate fate to reason, another followed which saw reason as the servant of fate. From that moment on, danger was no longer the goal of a romantic opposition; it was rather reality, and the task of the bourgeois was one again to withdraw from this reality and escape into the utopia of security. From this moment on, the words peace and order became a slogan to which a weaker morale resorted.
This was a war that not only nations but two epochs conducted against each other. As a consequence, both victors and vanquished exists here in Germany. Victors are those who, like salamanders, have gone through the school of danger. Only these will hold their own in a time when danger, not security, will determine the order of life.
Precisely for this reason, however, the tasks that order must accomplish have become much more comprehensive than before; these tasks have to be preformed where danger is not the exception, but is constantly present. As an example, the police force might be mentioned. It has transformed itself from a group of civil servants into a formation that already greatly resembles a military unit. Likewise the various large parties acknowledge the need to adopt means of power that express the fact that the battle of opinions will not be decided solely through votes and programs but also by the stalwarts committed to march in support of those programs. Such facts are in no way to be isolated and regarded as a temporary or transient change in the political landscape. Nor can the inclination to danger be overlooked in intellectual endeavors, and it is unmistakable that new forms of the volcanic spirit are at work. Phenomena like modern atomic theory, glacial cosmogony, the introduction of the concept of mutation into zoology all point clearly completely apart from their truth content, to how strongly the spirit is beginning to partake of explosive events. The history of inventions also raises ever more clearly the question of whether a space of absolute comfort or s space of absolute danger is the final aim concealed in technology. Completely apart from the circumstance that scarcely a machine, scarcely a science has ever existed which did not fulfill, directly or indirectly, dangerous functions in war, inventions like the automobile engine have already resulted in greater losses than any war, however bloody.
What especially characterizes the era in which we find ourselves, into which we enter more deeply with every passing day, is the close relationship that exists between danger and order. It may be expressed in this way: danger appears merely as the other side of our order. This whole is more or less equivalent to our image of the atom, which is utterly mobile and utterly constant. The secret concealed within is a new and different return to nature; it is the fact that we are simultaneously civilized and barbaric, that we have approached the elemental without having sacrificed the acuity of our consciousness. Thus does the path through which danger has penetrated our life present itself as twofold. It has intruded upon us first of all out of an arena in which nature is still more vital. Things, “the likes of which were only possible in South America,” are now familiar to us. The distinction is that danger, from a romantic dimension, has in this way become real. Secondly, however, we are sending danger back over the globe in a new form.
This new form of danger appears in he closest connection having been made between elemental events and consciousness. The elemental is eternal: as people have always found themselves in passionate struggle with things, animals, or other people, as is the case today. The particular characteristic of our era, however, is precisely that all this transpires in the presence of the most acute consciousness. This finds expression above all in the circumstance that in all of these conflicts the most powerful servant of consciousness, the machine, is always present. Thus does humanity’s eternal struggle with the elemental nature of the sea present itself in the temporal form of a supremely complicated mechanical contrivance. Thus does the battle appear as a process during which the armored engine moves fighting men through the sea, over land, or into the air. Thus does the daily accident itself, with which our newspapers are filled, appear nearly exclusively as a catastrophe of a technological type.
Beyond all this the wonder of our world, at once sober and dangerous, is the registration of the moment in which the danger transpires – a registration that is moreover accomplished whenever it does not capture human consciousness immediately, by means of machines. One needs no prophetic talent to predict that soon any given event will be there to see or to hear in any given place. Already today there is hardly an event of human significance toward which the artificial eye of civilization, the photographic lens, is not directed. The result is often pictures of demoniacal precision through which humanity’s new relation to danger becomes visible in an exceptional fashion. One has to recognize that it is a question here much less of the peculiarity of new tools than of a new style that makes use of technological tools. The change becomes illuminating in the investigation of the change in tools that have long been at our disposal, such as language. Although our time produces little in the way of literature in the old sense, much of significance is accomplished through the objective reports of experience. Our time is prompted by human need – which explains, among other things, the success of war literature. We already posses a new style of language, one which gradually becomes visible from underneath the language of the bourgeois epoch. The same, however, is true of our style altogether; it is reminiscent of the fact that the automobile was for a long time constructed in the form of a horse-drawn coach, or that a wholly different society has already long since established itself beneath the surface of bourgeois society. As during the inflation, we continue for a time to spend the usual coins, without sensing that the rate of exchange is no longer the same.
In this sense, it may be said that we have already plunged deeply into new, more dangerous realms, without our being conscious of them.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
News and test
Those of you reading this not through some sort of feed will notice some minor changes in Spöknippets layout, most noticeable that (nearly) all post now have tags and that the tags are all available to the right, below the archives. This should improve access to older posts. Additional changes will be made, and possible reverted, over the next few days.
New posts are on their way, although not anywhere near the predicted average of two post per month this year. Those who are patient can look forward to excerpts from René Guénon as well as new ones from Julius Evola and Ernst Jünger.
New posts are on their way, although not anywhere near the predicted average of two post per month this year. Those who are patient can look forward to excerpts from René Guénon as well as new ones from Julius Evola and Ernst Jünger.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
[Excerpts, Swedish] Jünger x 2
Vi hade glädjen att alldeles nyligen se inte mindre än tre bloggposter handlandes om Ernst Jünger på en och samma dag. Ir/Rationell postade även en sammanställning av bloggposter behandlandes Jünger.
De Jüngerexcerpter Spöknippet tillhandahåller idag kommer från Der Kampf als inner Erlebnis samt Feuer und Blut. Översättningen är inte Spöknippets utan de är, med något undantag, hämtade från den värsta politiskt korrekta genusideologiska smörja Spöknippet någonsin skådat. Titel och författare förtigs därför med förhoppningen att de snarast skall falla i evig glömska. Det är dock väl notat och originalkälla kan därmed anges för citaten.
Ögonmänniskan ser att ett av excerpterna nedan kommer från kapitlet "Feuer" i Der Kampf als inner Erlebnis. Måhända kan en svensk översättning glädja någon.
Der Kampf als inner Erlebnis (Berlin 1922)
Åsynen av motståndaren skänker förutom den yttersta fasa även en befrielse från tungt, outhärdligt tryck. Detta är blodets vällust, som hänger över kriget som ett rött stormsegel över en svart galär, i sin gränslösa flykt endast besläktad med eros.
s 8 f
När blodet virvlade genom hjärna och ådror som inför en efterlängtad kärleksnatt, bara ännu mycket hetare och vildare. När man ryckte allt närmare det dånande larmet där framme och nedslagen jagade varandra allt våldsammare, allt hastigare, när överflödet av hetsande tankar fick fälten runt omkring att börja glöda, när man var så fylld av känslor att landskap och händelser senare bara dunkelt och drömlikt dök upp ur minnet. Elddopet! Där var luften så laddad av översvämmande manlighet att varje andetag berusade en, att man hade velat gråta utan att veta varför. O mannahjärtan som förmår känna det!
s 12
Dock har vi barn av denna tid blivit så utleda på dessa nakna fakta. Så utleda.
s 18
En förlamande sekunds tystnad, då ögonen möttes, inträdde först. Sedan sköt där upp ett skri, tvärt, vilt, blodrött, som brände sig in i hjärnorna, en glödande oförgätlig stämpel. Detta skri slet slöjor från känslans dunkla, oanade världar, blev för var och en som hörde det ett tvång att kasta sig framåt för att döda eller bli dödad. Vad betydde då lyfta händer, vad pardon eller kamrat. Då fanns bara ett samförstånd: blodets (…)
Korta, rasande febrar var dessa ursinnets orgier; när de gått över, lämnade de skyttegraven efter sig lik en tillstökad bädd där någon dött i kramper. Bleka gestalter med vita bandage stirrade in i den uppgående solens under, ur stånd att begripa att världen och det de upplevt var verklighet.
s 29
Det var en helt ny ras, förkroppsliga energi, laddad med den högsta kraft. Smidiga, magra, seniga kroppar, skarpt tecknade ansikten, under hjälmen ögon förstenade i tusen fasor. De var övervinnare, stålnaturer inställda på kampen i dess ohyggligaste form. Dess anlopp över de söndersplittrade landskapet innebar en yttersta triumf av fantastisk fasa. Bröt deras oförvägna trupper on i sönderslagna ställningar, där bleka gestalter med vansinnig blick stirrade mot ferm, så frigjordes oanade energier. Som dödens jonglörer, sprängämnenas och eldens mästare, som praktfulla rovdjur förflyttade de sig med fjädrande steg genom skyttegravarna. I sammandrabbningens ögonblick förkroppsligade de det mest kampberedda som jorden kunde bära, det mest slagkraftiga koncentrat av kropp, intelligens, vilja och sinnen.
s 32 f
En kultur må stå aldrig så högt – slocknar den manliga nerven, är den en koloss på lerfötter. Ju mäktigare dess byggnad, desto fruktansvärdare dess fall.
Då kanske någon frågar: ”Låt vara att Gud är med de starkaste bataljonerna, men är de starkaste bataljonerna också med den högsta kulturen?” Just därför är det den högsta kulturens heliga plikt att ha de starkaste bataljonerna.
s 37
Förvisso helgas kampen av saken; ännu mer helgas saken av kampen.
s 47
Ännu ett, ett sista: extasen. Detta helgonets den store diktarens och den stora kärlekens tillstånd är även det stora modet förunnat. (…) Detta är ett rus över alla rus, en frigörelse som spränger alla band Det är ett raseri utan hänsyn och gränser, jämförbart endast med naturens våldsamma krafter. där är människan som den vinande stormen, det rytande havet och den dånande åskan. Därpå smälter hon on i alltet, hon rusar mot dödens mörka portar som en projektil mot målet. Och slår vågorna purpurfärgade ihop över henne, så har hon för länge sedan blivit omedveten om övergången. Det är som gled en våg tillbaka ut i det svallande havet.
s 53
De gestalter av stål, som med örnblick rakt över snurrande propellrar genomforskar molnen, som inklämda mellan stridsvagnarnas motorer vågar helvetesfärden genom vrålande kraterfält, som i dagar, med en säker död framför sig, i omringade nästen med högar av lik runt omkring halvt försmäktade sitter hukade bakom glödande kulsprutor. De är det moderna slagfältets bästa, genomströmmade av hänsynslös kämpaanda, av stark vilja som urladdar sig i en hård, koncentrerad, målmedveten stöt.
När jag iakttar hur de ljudlöst klipper vägar i taggtrådshindren, gräver stormtrappor, jämför klockor med lysande urtavla, tar u riktningen mot norr efterstjärnorna, då går det upp för mig: detta är den nya människan. Stormpionjärerna, Mellaneuropas elit. En helt ny ras, klok, stark, och full av vilja. Det som här i kampen uppenbarar sig som fenomen, kommer imorgon att vara den axel kring vilken livet allt fortare snurrar. Över deras stora städer skall tusenfalt brusande dån välva sig, när de går fram över asfalten, smidiga rovdjur, fulla av kraft. De kommer att bli byggmästare på världens krossade fundament.
s 74
Här förbi flyter viljan till liv, viljan till kamp och till makt, om det så vore till priset av livet självt. Gentemot denna nattliga och aldrig upphörande ström till kampen blir alla värden intiga, alla begrepp ihåliga, man förnimmer yttringen av något elementärt, väldigt, som alltid funnits och alltid skall finnas, även när det för länge sedan upphört att finnas människor och krig.
s 116
Feuer und Blut (Berlin 1929)
…säkert står vi en fiende med ras närmare än varje pacifist och internationalist.
s 64
Först vår generation börjar försona sig med maskinen och se inte blott och bart det nyttiga utan även det sköna i den.
s 81
Ja, maskinen är skön, den måste vara skön för den som älskar livet i dess fullhet och våldsamhet. Och i det som Nietzsche, vilken i sitt renässanslandskap inte hade något rum för maskinen, har sagt emot darwinismen, att livet icke endast r en erbarmlig kamp för tillvaron utan en vilja till högre och djupare mål, måste även maskinen inbegripas. Den får inte vara endast ett medel för att producera, för att tillgodose vår knappa nödtorft, utan den skall skänka oss en högre och djupare tillfredställelse. När så sker, är mången fråga löst. Den konstnärliga människan, som i maskinen plötsligt ser en helhet stället för en ändamålsenlig sammansättning av järndelar, strategen som strävar efter att frigöra sig från produktionskrigets band, de arbetar på denna lösning likaväl som teknikern eller socialisten.
s 82
Ibland har vi ju förnummit det, när vi sett ett expresståg blixtrande och dundrande susa genom landskapet, tävlingsförare skjuta in på banan ur den doserade kurvan, när svirrande fåglar kretsat över våra städer, och när vi i stora glastäckta hallar stått mellan kolvar och sprakande svänghjul, medan manometrarnas kvicksilver pelare stigit och fallit och de röda visarna på de i vita marmorplattor infällda kraftmätarna på väggarna darrat, att här måste finnas ett överskott på liv, en lyx, en vilja att helt och hållet förvandla livet till kraft.
s 82 f
Som ett nästan bortglömt minne blixtrar det till och bländar: Där är ju fienden, där har vi ju människan, och strax skall vi vara framme hos honom! Denna insikt fyller oss med en vild, rasande lust, det är som om allt som till bristningsgränsen nu spänts och lagrats plötsligt såg en utväg och som ett dånande vattenfall störtade sig i purpurfärgade och scharlakansröda avgrunder.
Fort, fort bara, nu måste här dödas! Nu finns det bara en förlossning, en uppfyllelse och en lycka: det flytande blodet. Strax skall man kunna hugga in och man känner en demonisk glad förväntan i medvetandet om att man kommer att uppträda som den starkare, den oemotståndlige. Vänta ni bara, strax är vi där! Jag känner hur min högra hand spänner sig som ett skruvstäd kring pistolkolven och den vänstra kring den korta bambukäppen. Jag känner hur blodet sjudande har skjutit upp i ansiktet på mig, hur tänderna pressas mot varandra och hur klara tårar utan hejd rinner över ansiktet.
s 139 f
De Jüngerexcerpter Spöknippet tillhandahåller idag kommer från Der Kampf als inner Erlebnis samt Feuer und Blut. Översättningen är inte Spöknippets utan de är, med något undantag, hämtade från den värsta politiskt korrekta genusideologiska smörja Spöknippet någonsin skådat. Titel och författare förtigs därför med förhoppningen att de snarast skall falla i evig glömska. Det är dock väl notat och originalkälla kan därmed anges för citaten.
Ögonmänniskan ser att ett av excerpterna nedan kommer från kapitlet "Feuer" i Der Kampf als inner Erlebnis. Måhända kan en svensk översättning glädja någon.
Der Kampf als inner Erlebnis (Berlin 1922)
Åsynen av motståndaren skänker förutom den yttersta fasa även en befrielse från tungt, outhärdligt tryck. Detta är blodets vällust, som hänger över kriget som ett rött stormsegel över en svart galär, i sin gränslösa flykt endast besläktad med eros.
s 8 f
När blodet virvlade genom hjärna och ådror som inför en efterlängtad kärleksnatt, bara ännu mycket hetare och vildare. När man ryckte allt närmare det dånande larmet där framme och nedslagen jagade varandra allt våldsammare, allt hastigare, när överflödet av hetsande tankar fick fälten runt omkring att börja glöda, när man var så fylld av känslor att landskap och händelser senare bara dunkelt och drömlikt dök upp ur minnet. Elddopet! Där var luften så laddad av översvämmande manlighet att varje andetag berusade en, att man hade velat gråta utan att veta varför. O mannahjärtan som förmår känna det!
s 12
Dock har vi barn av denna tid blivit så utleda på dessa nakna fakta. Så utleda.
s 18
En förlamande sekunds tystnad, då ögonen möttes, inträdde först. Sedan sköt där upp ett skri, tvärt, vilt, blodrött, som brände sig in i hjärnorna, en glödande oförgätlig stämpel. Detta skri slet slöjor från känslans dunkla, oanade världar, blev för var och en som hörde det ett tvång att kasta sig framåt för att döda eller bli dödad. Vad betydde då lyfta händer, vad pardon eller kamrat. Då fanns bara ett samförstånd: blodets (…)
Korta, rasande febrar var dessa ursinnets orgier; när de gått över, lämnade de skyttegraven efter sig lik en tillstökad bädd där någon dött i kramper. Bleka gestalter med vita bandage stirrade in i den uppgående solens under, ur stånd att begripa att världen och det de upplevt var verklighet.
s 29
Det var en helt ny ras, förkroppsliga energi, laddad med den högsta kraft. Smidiga, magra, seniga kroppar, skarpt tecknade ansikten, under hjälmen ögon förstenade i tusen fasor. De var övervinnare, stålnaturer inställda på kampen i dess ohyggligaste form. Dess anlopp över de söndersplittrade landskapet innebar en yttersta triumf av fantastisk fasa. Bröt deras oförvägna trupper on i sönderslagna ställningar, där bleka gestalter med vansinnig blick stirrade mot ferm, så frigjordes oanade energier. Som dödens jonglörer, sprängämnenas och eldens mästare, som praktfulla rovdjur förflyttade de sig med fjädrande steg genom skyttegravarna. I sammandrabbningens ögonblick förkroppsligade de det mest kampberedda som jorden kunde bära, det mest slagkraftiga koncentrat av kropp, intelligens, vilja och sinnen.
s 32 f
En kultur må stå aldrig så högt – slocknar den manliga nerven, är den en koloss på lerfötter. Ju mäktigare dess byggnad, desto fruktansvärdare dess fall.
Då kanske någon frågar: ”Låt vara att Gud är med de starkaste bataljonerna, men är de starkaste bataljonerna också med den högsta kulturen?” Just därför är det den högsta kulturens heliga plikt att ha de starkaste bataljonerna.
s 37
Förvisso helgas kampen av saken; ännu mer helgas saken av kampen.
s 47
Ännu ett, ett sista: extasen. Detta helgonets den store diktarens och den stora kärlekens tillstånd är även det stora modet förunnat. (…) Detta är ett rus över alla rus, en frigörelse som spränger alla band Det är ett raseri utan hänsyn och gränser, jämförbart endast med naturens våldsamma krafter. där är människan som den vinande stormen, det rytande havet och den dånande åskan. Därpå smälter hon on i alltet, hon rusar mot dödens mörka portar som en projektil mot målet. Och slår vågorna purpurfärgade ihop över henne, så har hon för länge sedan blivit omedveten om övergången. Det är som gled en våg tillbaka ut i det svallande havet.
s 53
De gestalter av stål, som med örnblick rakt över snurrande propellrar genomforskar molnen, som inklämda mellan stridsvagnarnas motorer vågar helvetesfärden genom vrålande kraterfält, som i dagar, med en säker död framför sig, i omringade nästen med högar av lik runt omkring halvt försmäktade sitter hukade bakom glödande kulsprutor. De är det moderna slagfältets bästa, genomströmmade av hänsynslös kämpaanda, av stark vilja som urladdar sig i en hård, koncentrerad, målmedveten stöt.
När jag iakttar hur de ljudlöst klipper vägar i taggtrådshindren, gräver stormtrappor, jämför klockor med lysande urtavla, tar u riktningen mot norr efterstjärnorna, då går det upp för mig: detta är den nya människan. Stormpionjärerna, Mellaneuropas elit. En helt ny ras, klok, stark, och full av vilja. Det som här i kampen uppenbarar sig som fenomen, kommer imorgon att vara den axel kring vilken livet allt fortare snurrar. Över deras stora städer skall tusenfalt brusande dån välva sig, när de går fram över asfalten, smidiga rovdjur, fulla av kraft. De kommer att bli byggmästare på världens krossade fundament.
s 74
Här förbi flyter viljan till liv, viljan till kamp och till makt, om det så vore till priset av livet självt. Gentemot denna nattliga och aldrig upphörande ström till kampen blir alla värden intiga, alla begrepp ihåliga, man förnimmer yttringen av något elementärt, väldigt, som alltid funnits och alltid skall finnas, även när det för länge sedan upphört att finnas människor och krig.
s 116
Feuer und Blut (Berlin 1929)
…säkert står vi en fiende med ras närmare än varje pacifist och internationalist.
s 64
Först vår generation börjar försona sig med maskinen och se inte blott och bart det nyttiga utan även det sköna i den.
s 81
Ja, maskinen är skön, den måste vara skön för den som älskar livet i dess fullhet och våldsamhet. Och i det som Nietzsche, vilken i sitt renässanslandskap inte hade något rum för maskinen, har sagt emot darwinismen, att livet icke endast r en erbarmlig kamp för tillvaron utan en vilja till högre och djupare mål, måste även maskinen inbegripas. Den får inte vara endast ett medel för att producera, för att tillgodose vår knappa nödtorft, utan den skall skänka oss en högre och djupare tillfredställelse. När så sker, är mången fråga löst. Den konstnärliga människan, som i maskinen plötsligt ser en helhet stället för en ändamålsenlig sammansättning av järndelar, strategen som strävar efter att frigöra sig från produktionskrigets band, de arbetar på denna lösning likaväl som teknikern eller socialisten.
s 82
Ibland har vi ju förnummit det, när vi sett ett expresståg blixtrande och dundrande susa genom landskapet, tävlingsförare skjuta in på banan ur den doserade kurvan, när svirrande fåglar kretsat över våra städer, och när vi i stora glastäckta hallar stått mellan kolvar och sprakande svänghjul, medan manometrarnas kvicksilver pelare stigit och fallit och de röda visarna på de i vita marmorplattor infällda kraftmätarna på väggarna darrat, att här måste finnas ett överskott på liv, en lyx, en vilja att helt och hållet förvandla livet till kraft.
s 82 f
Som ett nästan bortglömt minne blixtrar det till och bländar: Där är ju fienden, där har vi ju människan, och strax skall vi vara framme hos honom! Denna insikt fyller oss med en vild, rasande lust, det är som om allt som till bristningsgränsen nu spänts och lagrats plötsligt såg en utväg och som ett dånande vattenfall störtade sig i purpurfärgade och scharlakansröda avgrunder.
Fort, fort bara, nu måste här dödas! Nu finns det bara en förlossning, en uppfyllelse och en lycka: det flytande blodet. Strax skall man kunna hugga in och man känner en demonisk glad förväntan i medvetandet om att man kommer att uppträda som den starkare, den oemotståndlige. Vänta ni bara, strax är vi där! Jag känner hur min högra hand spänner sig som ett skruvstäd kring pistolkolven och den vänstra kring den korta bambukäppen. Jag känner hur blodet sjudande har skjutit upp i ansiktet på mig, hur tänderna pressas mot varandra och hur klara tårar utan hejd rinner över ansiktet.
s 139 f
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Jünger, Feuer
This excerpt is the chapter "Feuer" (p. 72-76) in Ernst Jüngers Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin: Verlag Mittler, 1922). It is taken from The Weimar Republic sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), the translator is however unknown to us.
We have known one another for a long time as bold adventurers, have met on many a hot day beneath the smoke-filled sky of a battlefield where it is simply the spirit of the hour that always brings those similar together. We know we are the select embodiments of a powerful masculinity and take pride in this awareness. Just yesterday we sat together following the old tradition of a final drink and felt how the will to battle, that peculiar lust to cross the front again and again, to leap where volunteers are needed, would not have lost its familiar intensity and this time, too, would cast us into danger. Yes, if only it were time; we are a race that rises to the challenge.
Nevertheless, this discontent, this unyielding chill from the inside out, these portentous thoughts tearing across our horizon like vague, tattered traces of clouds, were not to be banished; not even once we had taken a long, slow drink of cognac. It is stronger than we are. A fog that lies within us and, in such hours, spreads its mysterious nature across the troubled waters of the soul. Not fear – fear we can stare sharply, disdainfully in the eye and frighten into its cave – but an unknown realm in which the boundaries of our capacity to feel melt away. That is where one first notices how little one is at home in oneself. From deep within, something slumbering, drowned out by restless dailiness, rises and, before quite taking form, dissolves into a dull sadness.
Of what help is it that for three long weeks a man has steeled himself for this hour, until he believes himself to be hard and free of weaknesses. Of what help is it that he says to himself, “Death? Ha, what’s that? A transition that can’t be avoided anyway.” All that is of no help whatever, for suddenly, from having been a thinking being, he becomes a feeling one, a plaything of phantoms against which even the sharpest reason is a powerless weapon. Those are the factors we take care to deny because they are unreliable. But in the moment of experience all denial is futile; then every unknown is possessed of a higher and more convincing reality than all the familiar phenomena of a midday sun.
We have reached the most advanced line and are seeing the final preparations. We are eager and precise, for we sense a pressure to be active, to fill the time, to escape from ourselves. Time, which had racked us so in the trenches, a concept that comprehends all conceivable torment, a chain that only death can break. Perhaps in the coming minutes. I know it to be a conscious experience, the quiet flow of an ebbing life into the sea of eternity; I have already stood at times on the border. It is a slow, deep sinking with a ringing in the ear, peaceful and familiar like the sound of Easter bells at home. One should avoid such ponderings, such a readiness to pounce upon mysteries that will never be explained. Everything comes in its own time. Head high, let the thoughts scatter to the winds. Die with dignity – that we can do; we can stride into the ominous dark with a warrior’s cunning and bold vitality. Do not be shaken, smile to the last, even if the smile is only a mask to hide from yourself: that itself is something. A human is incapable of anything greater than mastering oneself in death. Even the immortal gods must envy him that.
We are well armed for our journey, loaded with weapons, explosives, and lighting and signalling instruments, a proper, fighting shock troop, up to the supreme challenges of modern warfare. Not only up to it through joyful dare-devilry and brutal force. Seeing the people this way in the twilight, slender, haggard, most of them almost children, one has little inclination to trust them. But their faces in the shadow of their steel helmets are sharp, fearless, and smart. I know, they do not waver from the danger for an instant; they pounce on it, fast, sinewy, and smooth. They combine ardent courage with cool intelligence; they are the men who clear a severely jammed shell with a steady hand amidst a maelstrom of annihilation, who fire a smoking grenade back at the enemy, who, locked in a struggle for life and death, read the intentions in the enemy’s eyes. They are men forged of steel, whose eagle eyes peer straight over the propeller’s whir, studying the clouds ahead, who, captive within the motorized din of the tanks, dare the hellish journey through the roar of shell-pitted fields, who, for days on end, approaching certain death, crouch in encircled nests heaped with corpses, only half alive beneath lowing machine guns. They are the best of the modern battlefield, suffused with the reckless spirit of the warrior, whose iron will discharges in clenched, well-aimed bursts of energy.
When I observe how they silently cut lanes through the tangles of barbed wire, dig stepped assault trenches, compare their luminescent watches, and orient themselves towards north by the stars, then I am overcome with recognitions: this is the new man, the storm pioneer, the elite of Central Europe. A whole new race, smart, strong, and filled with will. What reveals itself here as a vision will tomorrow be the axis around which life revolves still faster and faster. The path will not always, as here, have to be forged through shell craters, fire and, steel; but the double-quick step with which events ate prosecuted here, the tempo accustomed to iron, that will remain the same. The glowing twilight of a declining age is at once a dawn in which one arms oneself for new, harder battles. Far behind, the gigantic cities, the hosts of machines, the empires, whose inner bonds have been rent in the storm, await the new men, the cunning, battle-tested men who are ruthless toward themselves and others. This war is not the end but the prelude to violence. It is the forge in which the new world will be hammered into new borders and new communities. New forms want to be filled with blood, and power will be wielded with a hard fist. The war is a great school, and the new man will bear our stamp.
Yes, it is now in its element, my old shock troop. The deed, the stroke of the fist, has torn away the fog. Already there comes a quiet joke across the shoulder of the trench. It is perhaps not tasteful to ask: “Well, fatso, are you up to your slaughter weight?” Nevertheless – they laugh, and fatso most of all. Just don’t be moved. The festival is about to begin, and we are its princes.
It is a pity nonetheless. If the advance troops fail to penetrate, if just one machine gun remains intact of the other side, these splendid men will be cut down like a herd of deer. That is war. The best and most worthy, the highest embodiment of life, is just good enough to be cast into is insatiable maw. One machine gun, just a second’s gliding of the cartridge belt, and these twenty-five men – one could cultivate a sizeable island with them – will hang in tattered bundles from the wire, left slowly to decompose. They are students, cadets with proud old names, from whose eyes the Sleeping Beauty dream of some kind of ancient nest has not entirely drifted away. Peasant sons, grown up beneath the lonely thatched roofs of Westphalia or the Lünerberger Heide, ringed by the primeval oaks planted by their forebears around the surrounding fence of stone.
In the neighboring regiment of the left there bursts a storm of fire. It is a feinting maneuver, to confuse and split enemy artillery. It is just about time. Now the task is to gather oneself. Yes, it is perhaps a pity. Perhaps as well we are sacrificing ourselves for something inessential. But no one can rob us of our value. Essential is not what we are fighting for, but how we fight. Onward toward the goal, until we triumph or are left behind. The warriors’ spirit, the exposure of oneself to risk, even for the tiniest idea, weighs more heavily in the scale than all the brooding about good and evil. That is what gives even the knight of the rueful countenance his awe-inspiring aura. We want to show what we have in us, then, if we fail, we will truly have lived to the full.
We have known one another for a long time as bold adventurers, have met on many a hot day beneath the smoke-filled sky of a battlefield where it is simply the spirit of the hour that always brings those similar together. We know we are the select embodiments of a powerful masculinity and take pride in this awareness. Just yesterday we sat together following the old tradition of a final drink and felt how the will to battle, that peculiar lust to cross the front again and again, to leap where volunteers are needed, would not have lost its familiar intensity and this time, too, would cast us into danger. Yes, if only it were time; we are a race that rises to the challenge.
Nevertheless, this discontent, this unyielding chill from the inside out, these portentous thoughts tearing across our horizon like vague, tattered traces of clouds, were not to be banished; not even once we had taken a long, slow drink of cognac. It is stronger than we are. A fog that lies within us and, in such hours, spreads its mysterious nature across the troubled waters of the soul. Not fear – fear we can stare sharply, disdainfully in the eye and frighten into its cave – but an unknown realm in which the boundaries of our capacity to feel melt away. That is where one first notices how little one is at home in oneself. From deep within, something slumbering, drowned out by restless dailiness, rises and, before quite taking form, dissolves into a dull sadness.
Of what help is it that for three long weeks a man has steeled himself for this hour, until he believes himself to be hard and free of weaknesses. Of what help is it that he says to himself, “Death? Ha, what’s that? A transition that can’t be avoided anyway.” All that is of no help whatever, for suddenly, from having been a thinking being, he becomes a feeling one, a plaything of phantoms against which even the sharpest reason is a powerless weapon. Those are the factors we take care to deny because they are unreliable. But in the moment of experience all denial is futile; then every unknown is possessed of a higher and more convincing reality than all the familiar phenomena of a midday sun.
We have reached the most advanced line and are seeing the final preparations. We are eager and precise, for we sense a pressure to be active, to fill the time, to escape from ourselves. Time, which had racked us so in the trenches, a concept that comprehends all conceivable torment, a chain that only death can break. Perhaps in the coming minutes. I know it to be a conscious experience, the quiet flow of an ebbing life into the sea of eternity; I have already stood at times on the border. It is a slow, deep sinking with a ringing in the ear, peaceful and familiar like the sound of Easter bells at home. One should avoid such ponderings, such a readiness to pounce upon mysteries that will never be explained. Everything comes in its own time. Head high, let the thoughts scatter to the winds. Die with dignity – that we can do; we can stride into the ominous dark with a warrior’s cunning and bold vitality. Do not be shaken, smile to the last, even if the smile is only a mask to hide from yourself: that itself is something. A human is incapable of anything greater than mastering oneself in death. Even the immortal gods must envy him that.
We are well armed for our journey, loaded with weapons, explosives, and lighting and signalling instruments, a proper, fighting shock troop, up to the supreme challenges of modern warfare. Not only up to it through joyful dare-devilry and brutal force. Seeing the people this way in the twilight, slender, haggard, most of them almost children, one has little inclination to trust them. But their faces in the shadow of their steel helmets are sharp, fearless, and smart. I know, they do not waver from the danger for an instant; they pounce on it, fast, sinewy, and smooth. They combine ardent courage with cool intelligence; they are the men who clear a severely jammed shell with a steady hand amidst a maelstrom of annihilation, who fire a smoking grenade back at the enemy, who, locked in a struggle for life and death, read the intentions in the enemy’s eyes. They are men forged of steel, whose eagle eyes peer straight over the propeller’s whir, studying the clouds ahead, who, captive within the motorized din of the tanks, dare the hellish journey through the roar of shell-pitted fields, who, for days on end, approaching certain death, crouch in encircled nests heaped with corpses, only half alive beneath lowing machine guns. They are the best of the modern battlefield, suffused with the reckless spirit of the warrior, whose iron will discharges in clenched, well-aimed bursts of energy.
When I observe how they silently cut lanes through the tangles of barbed wire, dig stepped assault trenches, compare their luminescent watches, and orient themselves towards north by the stars, then I am overcome with recognitions: this is the new man, the storm pioneer, the elite of Central Europe. A whole new race, smart, strong, and filled with will. What reveals itself here as a vision will tomorrow be the axis around which life revolves still faster and faster. The path will not always, as here, have to be forged through shell craters, fire and, steel; but the double-quick step with which events ate prosecuted here, the tempo accustomed to iron, that will remain the same. The glowing twilight of a declining age is at once a dawn in which one arms oneself for new, harder battles. Far behind, the gigantic cities, the hosts of machines, the empires, whose inner bonds have been rent in the storm, await the new men, the cunning, battle-tested men who are ruthless toward themselves and others. This war is not the end but the prelude to violence. It is the forge in which the new world will be hammered into new borders and new communities. New forms want to be filled with blood, and power will be wielded with a hard fist. The war is a great school, and the new man will bear our stamp.
Yes, it is now in its element, my old shock troop. The deed, the stroke of the fist, has torn away the fog. Already there comes a quiet joke across the shoulder of the trench. It is perhaps not tasteful to ask: “Well, fatso, are you up to your slaughter weight?” Nevertheless – they laugh, and fatso most of all. Just don’t be moved. The festival is about to begin, and we are its princes.
It is a pity nonetheless. If the advance troops fail to penetrate, if just one machine gun remains intact of the other side, these splendid men will be cut down like a herd of deer. That is war. The best and most worthy, the highest embodiment of life, is just good enough to be cast into is insatiable maw. One machine gun, just a second’s gliding of the cartridge belt, and these twenty-five men – one could cultivate a sizeable island with them – will hang in tattered bundles from the wire, left slowly to decompose. They are students, cadets with proud old names, from whose eyes the Sleeping Beauty dream of some kind of ancient nest has not entirely drifted away. Peasant sons, grown up beneath the lonely thatched roofs of Westphalia or the Lünerberger Heide, ringed by the primeval oaks planted by their forebears around the surrounding fence of stone.
In the neighboring regiment of the left there bursts a storm of fire. It is a feinting maneuver, to confuse and split enemy artillery. It is just about time. Now the task is to gather oneself. Yes, it is perhaps a pity. Perhaps as well we are sacrificing ourselves for something inessential. But no one can rob us of our value. Essential is not what we are fighting for, but how we fight. Onward toward the goal, until we triumph or are left behind. The warriors’ spirit, the exposure of oneself to risk, even for the tiniest idea, weighs more heavily in the scale than all the brooding about good and evil. That is what gives even the knight of the rueful countenance his awe-inspiring aura. We want to show what we have in us, then, if we fail, we will truly have lived to the full.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
[Poem] Marinetti, F. T. - To my Pegasus
This poem was first publish 1908 in the volume The Sensual City. It's translated by Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme and taken from Marinetti, F. T. (2002) Selected Poems and Prose New Haven and London: Yale University Press
To my Pegasus
Vehement god of a race of steel,
space-intoxicated Automobile,
stamping with anguish, champing at the bit!
O formidable Japanese monster with eyes like a forge,
fed on fire and mineral oils,
hungry for horizons and sidereal spoils,
I unleash your heart of diabolic puff-puffs,
and your giant pneumatics, for the dance
that you lead on the white roads of the world.
At last I release your metallic reins…You leap,
with ecstasy, into liberating Infinity!…
At the sound of the pound of your voice…
see how the setting Sun hounds
your bounding steps, accelerating its bleeding
palpitation along the horizon…
It’s galloping there, down in the woods…look!…
What is the matter, handsome demon?…
I’m at your mercy…Take me!
On the ground deafened despite its echoes,
under the sky blinded despite its golden stars,
I go fueling my fever and my desire
with sword blows right in the nose!…
And from moment to moment, I straighten my back
to feel winding round my quivering neck
the cool downy arms of the wind.
It’s your alluring distant arms that draw me!
this wind, it’s your engulfing breath,
fathomless Infinity absorbing me with joy!…
Ah! Ah!…suddenly the gangling black windmills
seem to be running
on their whaleboned canvas wings
as if on gigantic legs…
Now the Mountains get ready to throw
cloaks of drowsy coolness no my flight…
There! There! look! at that sinister curve!…
Mountains, O monstrous Cattle, O Mammoths
trotting heavily along, arching your huge backs,
you are outrun…drowned…
in the maze of mists!…
And dimly I hear
the whirring of your colossal legs
pounding the road in their seven-league boots…
Mountains with cool cloaks of azure!…
Beautiful rivers breathing in the moonlight!…
Shadowy plains! I pass you at full gallop
on this racing monster…Stars, my Stars,
do you hear his bounds, the sound of the pound
of his brazen lungs endlessly exploding?
The bet is on…with You, my Stars!…
Faster!…faster still!…
And no respite, and no rest!
Release the brakes!…You can’t?…
Smash them then!…
Let the engine’s pulse centuple!
Hurrah! No more contact with the filthy earth!…
At last, I break loose and fly freely
over the intoxicating abundance
of Stars streaming in the great bed of the sky!
To my Pegasus
Vehement god of a race of steel,
space-intoxicated Automobile,
stamping with anguish, champing at the bit!
O formidable Japanese monster with eyes like a forge,
fed on fire and mineral oils,
hungry for horizons and sidereal spoils,
I unleash your heart of diabolic puff-puffs,
and your giant pneumatics, for the dance
that you lead on the white roads of the world.
At last I release your metallic reins…You leap,
with ecstasy, into liberating Infinity!…
At the sound of the pound of your voice…
see how the setting Sun hounds
your bounding steps, accelerating its bleeding
palpitation along the horizon…
It’s galloping there, down in the woods…look!…
What is the matter, handsome demon?…
I’m at your mercy…Take me!
On the ground deafened despite its echoes,
under the sky blinded despite its golden stars,
I go fueling my fever and my desire
with sword blows right in the nose!…
And from moment to moment, I straighten my back
to feel winding round my quivering neck
the cool downy arms of the wind.
It’s your alluring distant arms that draw me!
this wind, it’s your engulfing breath,
fathomless Infinity absorbing me with joy!…
Ah! Ah!…suddenly the gangling black windmills
seem to be running
on their whaleboned canvas wings
as if on gigantic legs…
Now the Mountains get ready to throw
cloaks of drowsy coolness no my flight…
There! There! look! at that sinister curve!…
Mountains, O monstrous Cattle, O Mammoths
trotting heavily along, arching your huge backs,
you are outrun…drowned…
in the maze of mists!…
And dimly I hear
the whirring of your colossal legs
pounding the road in their seven-league boots…
Mountains with cool cloaks of azure!…
Beautiful rivers breathing in the moonlight!…
Shadowy plains! I pass you at full gallop
on this racing monster…Stars, my Stars,
do you hear his bounds, the sound of the pound
of his brazen lungs endlessly exploding?
The bet is on…with You, my Stars!…
Faster!…faster still!…
And no respite, and no rest!
Release the brakes!…You can’t?…
Smash them then!…
Let the engine’s pulse centuple!
Hurrah! No more contact with the filthy earth!…
At last, I break loose and fly freely
over the intoxicating abundance
of Stars streaming in the great bed of the sky!
Saturday, January 07, 2006
[Excerpts] Evola, Men Among the Ruins
Excerpts from Evola, Julius (2002) Men Among the Ruins Inner Traditions: Rochester, Vermont
The reason the first excerpt is from page 112 is because most of the previous pages is taken up by an introduction to Evola written by Dr. H. T. Hansen.
Recently, various forces have attempted to set up a defense and a resistance in the sociopolitical domain against the extreme forms in which the disorder of our age manifests itself. It is necessary to realize that this is a useless effort, even for the sake of merely demonstrative purposes, unless the disease is dealt with at its very roots. These roots, as far as the historical dimension is concerned, are to be found in the subversion introduced in Europe by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. The disease must be recognized in all of its forms and degrees; thus, the main task is to establish if there are still men willing to reject all the ideologies, political movements, and parties that, directly or indirectly, derive from those revolutionary ideas (i.e., everything ranging from liberalism and democracy to Marxism and communism). As a positive counterpart, these men should be given an orientation and a solid foundation consisting of a broad view of life and a stern doctrine of the State.
p. 112
It is curious how words evolve: after all, revolution, according to its original Latin meaning (re-volvere), referred to a notion that led again to the starting point, to the origins. Therefore, the “revolutionary” force of renewal that needs to be employed against the existing situation should be derived from the origins.
p. 113-114
However, if one wants to embrace the idea of “conservatism” (i.e., a “conservative revolution”), it is necessary to proceed with caution. […] Obviously, it is necessary to first establish as exactly as possible what needs to be preserved, especially as far as social structures and political institutions are concerned.
p. 114
What needs to be “preserved” and defended in a “revolutionary fashion” is the general view of life and of the State that, being based if higher values and interests, definitely transcends the economic plane, and thus everything that can be defined in terms of economic classes.
p. 114-115
For the authentic revolutionary conservative, what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to the principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions, adequate for a specific period of time and in a specific geographical area.
p. 115
Tradition, in its essence, is something simultaneously meta-historical and dynamic: it is an overall ordering force, in the service of principles that have the chrism of a superior legitimacy (we may even call them, “principles from above”).
p. 115
[E]very true political unity appears as the embodiment of an idea and a power, thus distinguishing itself from every naturalistic association or “natural right,” and also from every societal aggregation determined by mere social, economic biological, utilitarian, or eudemonistic factors.
In previous eras it was possible to speak of the sacral character of the principle of sovereignty and power, namely of the State. For instance, the ancient Roman notion of imperium essentially belonged to the domain of the sacred. This notion, in its specific meaning, even before expressing a system of territorial, supernational hegemony, designated the pure power of command, the almost mystical power and auctoritas inherent in the one who had the function and quality of Leader: a leader in the religious and warrior order as well as in the order of the patrician family, the gens, and, eminently, of the State, the res publica. In the Roman world, which was intensely realistic (or, I should say, precisely because it was intensely realistic), the notion of this power, which is simultaneously auctoritas, always retained its intrinsic character of bright force from above and of sacred power, beyond the various and often spurious techniques that conditioned its access in different periods.
p. 122
A power and authority that are not absolute, are not real authority or real power […]
p. 123
In particular, the positive essence of the principle of sovereignty has rightfully been recognized in the power of making absolute decisions, in exceptional or emergency situations, beyond any duties and discussions, whenever the existing right and laws are suspended or their suspension is required.
p. 123
In the best period of the Roman civilization, the dictatorship was conceived and allowed as a temporary remedy; far from replacing the existing order, it was its reintegration. In every other regard, dictatorship equals usurpation.
p. 124
The state is under the masculine aegis, while “society” and, by extension, the people, or demos, are under the feminine aegis.
p. 126
Thus, even in the ancient Roman world, the idea of State and imperium (i.e., of the sacred authority) was strictly connected to the symbolic cult of virile deities of heaven, of light and of the super-world in opposition to the dark region of the Mothers and the chthonic deities.
p. 126
The notions of nation, fatherland, and people, despite their romantic and idealistic halo, essentially belong to the naturalistic and biological plane and not the political one; they lead back to the “maternal” and physical dimension of a given collectivity.
p. 127
“[M]en” uphold the idea of State, while feminine natures, which are spiritually matriarchical, side instead with “fatherland,” “nation,” and “people.”
p. 129
In reference to this, we could say that a nation exists and overcomes geographical and even ethical boundaries wherever we find the reproduction of the same “inner form,” namely the consecration or the imprint bestowed by the higher political force and its representatives. Thus it would be absurd, for instance, to call ancient Rome a “nation” in the modern sense of the word: one could refer to it as a “spiritual nation” or as a unity defined by the “Roman man.” The same applies to the creations of the Franks and the Germans, as well as the Arabs who spread Islam, just to cite a few examples. Maybe the most significant case is the Prussian State, which originated from a knightly Order (a classic example of a Männerbund), namely the order of Teutonic Knights, which later became the structure and the “form” of the German Reich,
p. 129-131
[T]he demos, which is feminine by nature, will never have its own, clear will.
p. 130
The Idea, only the Idea, must be the true fatherland for these men: what unites them and sets them apart should consist in adherence to the same idea, rather than to the same land, language, or blood.
p. 131
Just as communists and socialists find it useful and agreeable to brad anybody and anything it does not agree with the label of “fascism,” likewise the confusion about totalitarianism is employed in a tactical fashion by various parties in democratic regimes, and is exploited in order to try to discredit and portray the traditional view of the true State in a heinous way.
p. 148
A State is organic when it has a center, and this center is an idea that shapes the various domains of life in an efficacious way; it is organic when it ignores the division and autonomization of the particular and when, by virtue of a system of hierarchical participation, every part within its relative autonomy performs its own function and enjoys an intimate connection with the whole. In an organic State we can speak of a “whole” – namely, something integral and spiritually unitary that articulates and unfolds itself – rather than a sum of elements within an aggregate, characterized by a disorderly clash of interests. The Stats that developed in the geographical areas of the great civilizations (whether they were empires, monarchies, aristocratic republics, or city-states) at their peak was almost without exception of this type.
p. 149
[O]rganic and traditional are more or less synonymous.
p. 149
However, totalitarianism merely represents the counterfeited image of the organic ideal. It is a system in which the unity is imposed from the outside, not on the basis of the intrinsic force of an common idea and an authority that is naturally acknowledged, but rather through direct forms of intervention and control, exercised by a power that is exclusively and material political, imposing itself as the ultimate reason for the system.
p. 150
Totalitarianism, though it reacts against individualism and social atomism, brings a final end to the devastation of what may still survive in a society from the previous “organic” phase: quality, articulated forms, castes and classes, the values of personality, true freedom, daring and responsible initiative, and heroic feats. An organism of superior type includes multiple functions retaining their specific character and a relative autonomy, all the while mutually coordinating and integrating each other, converging into a superior unity that never ceases to be ideally presupposed. Thus in an organic State we find both unity and multiplicity, gradation and hierarchy; we do not find the dualism of center and formless mass typical of a totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism, in order to assert itself, imposes uniformity. In the final analysis, totalitarianism rests and relies on the inorganic world of quantity to which individualistic disintegration has led, and not on the world of quality and of personality.
p. 151-152
Last but not least I wish to make a few comments about a formula that is often associated with totalitarianism in the polemics of a democracy: the one-party system. Fascism claimed that the State was the only party “governing the country in a totalitarian fashion.” This is an unhappy and hybrid formula, to say the least, and it is a residue of the partisan-parliamentary view, though an instance of a higher order is also present within it.
Strictly speaking, party means faction. In that case, “one party” is either a contradictory or an aberrant notion, almost as if a faction wished to be the whole or dominate the entire system. Practically speaking, the notion of “party” belongs to parliamentary democracies, and it signifies an organization that defends a given ideology against other ideologies upheld by other groups, to which the system recognizes the same right and the same legitimacy. In these terms, the “one-party system” is that which, in one way or another, whether “democratically” or through the use of violence, succeeds in gaining control of the State and, once in a position of power, no longer tolerates other parties, using the State as a tool and imposing its particular ideology on the nation.
p. 155
So we must say that a party that becomes the “one and only party” should cease to be a “party” de facto. Then its representatives, or at least its most qualified ones, should present themselves and the rule as some sort of Order, or as a specifically political class, not creating a State within the State, but rather protecting and strengthening the State’s key positions; not defending their particular ideology but rather embodying in an impersonal manner the very pure idea of the State.
p. 155
Nowadays it is possible to speak of a demonic nature of the economy, because in both individual and collective life the economic factor is the most important, real, and decisive one. Moreover, the tendency to converge every value and interest on the economic and productive plane is not perceived by Western man as an unprecedented aberration, but instead as something normal and natural, and not as an eventual necessity, but as something that must be accepted, willed, developed, and praised.
p. 165
As I have said before, when the right and primacy of interests higher than those of the socioeconomic plane are not upheld, there is no hierarchy, and even if there is one, it is only a counterfeit; this is also true when a higher authority is not accorded to those men, groups and bodies representing and defending these values and interests. In this case, an economic era is already by definition a fundamentally anarchical and antihierarchical era; it represents a subversion of the normal order. The materialization and the soullessness of all the domains of life that characterize it divest of any higher meaning all those problems and conflicts that are regarded as important within it.
p. 166
And as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence – then we are not even close to what is essential, even though new theories, beyond Marxism and capitalism, might be formulated.
p. 166
What must be questioned is not the value of this or that economic system, but the value of the economy itself.
p. 167
It is not entirely correct to say that Marxism arose and took hold because there was a real social question that needed to be addressed (at best this may have been the case during the early stages of the industrial revolution); the opposite is true – to wit, that for the most part the social question gains precedence in today’s world only as a result of the presence of Marxism.
p. 169
In both Marxism and free-market economies we find the same materialistic, antipolitical, and social view detaching the social order and people from any higher order and higher goal, positing what it is “useful” as the only purpose (understood in a physical, vegetative, and earthly sense); by turning the “useful” into a criterion of progress, the values proper to every traditional structure are inverted.
p. 170
The term work has always designated the lowest forms of human activity, those that are merely exclusively conditioned by the economic factor. It is illegitimate to label as “work” anything that is not reduced to these forms; rather, the word to be used is action: action, not work, is what is performed by the leader, the explorer, the ascetic, the pure scientist, the warrior, the artist, the diplomat, the theologian, the one who makes or breaks a law, the one who is motivated by an elementary passion or guided by a principle.
p. 174
After acknowledging the fundamental principle of the primacy and sovereignty of State over economy, the State can then produce an action of limiting and ordering the economic domain; this action will be able to facilitate what derives from the essential and unavoidable factor, that of detoxification, the change of mentality, and the return to normalcy for people who have learned anew what is sensible activity, right effort, values to be upheld, and loyalty to oneself.
p. 176
Given these precedents, we cannot ignore the meaning that fascism had: a break with the past, a different and bold choice of traditions, and the will to undertake a new direction, solely upon which the reference to Rome as a political symbol could be legitimized (“We dream of a Roman Italy,” Mussolini once said).
p. 191
During the first half of this century, so-called Prussian militarism has been a thorn in the side of democracies, since the perceived it as the prototype of the phenomenon they deprecated. What we have here is a characteristic antithesis that does not refer to the relationships between groups of rival nations, but rather two general views of life and of the State, and even to two distinct, irreconcilable forms of civilization and society. Historically speaking, such an antithesis is reflected in the opposition between the view of the Germanic-Prussian tradition and the view that first emerged in England and America, and later in all democratic nations; the latter view is characterized by the predominance of economic and mercantile values and by their development in the context of capitalism. The origins of the former view can be traced to an ascetic warrior organization, the ancient Order of Teutonic Knights.
p. 193
The view of modern democracies that first emerged in England, under the aegis of mercantilism, is that in society the primary element is the bourgeois type and the bourgeois life during times of peace; such a life is dominated by the physical concern for safety, well-being, and material wealth, with the cultivation of letters and the arts serving as a decorative frame. Thus, according to this view, the “civilian” or “bourgeois” element is usually, and as a matter of principle, entrusted with running the State. It is this human type that engages in politics; when politics – that is, international politics – must be continued with other means, to use the famous expression of Clausewitz, the armed forces are then employed. In this view the military and warrior element has the subordinated meaning of mere instrument: it should have no particular influence or exercise any interference whatsoever in daily social life. Even if it is acknowledged that the military element has its own code of ethics, it is not desirable that this code be applied to the normal, overall life of a nation.
p. 193-194
According to the most recent formulation of the corresponding ideology, armies should be used only as an international police force to maintain the “peace”; in most cases, this amounts to allowing wealthy nations to live undisturbed. Otherwise, aside from any pretense, what is repeated is the example of the East India Company and similar enterprises: the armed forces are used by modern democracies to impose or retain an economic hegemony; to gain new markets and to acquire aw materials; and to create new space for capital seeking investment and profit.
p. 194-195
Love for hierarchy; relationships of obedience and command; courage; feelings of honor and loyalty; specific forms of active impersonality capable of producing anonymous sacrifice; frank and open relationships from man to man, from one comrade to another, from leader to follower – all these are the characteristic, living values that are predominant in the afore mentioned view, These are the values found in what I have called the Männerbund.
p. 195-196
There is no antithesis, but rather identity between spirit and superior civilization on the one hand and the world of war and warriors on the other, according to the general sense I have pointed out.
p. 196
Contrary to what the bourgeois and liberal polemics claim, the warrior idea may not be reduced to materialism, nor is it synonymous with the exaltation of the brutal use of strength and destructive violence. Rather, the calm, conscious, and planned development of the inner being and a code of ethics; love of distance; hierarchy; order; the faculty of subordinating the emotional and individualistic element of one’s self to higher goals and principles, especially in the name of honor and duty – these are the elements of the warrior idea, and they act as the foundations of a specific “style” that has largely been lost.
p. 196-197
The Prussian style did not apply only to the military: by defining itself as “Fredrickianism,” it shaped one of the most austere and aristocratic European military traditions, but also manifested its influence in everything that is service to the State, loyalty, and anti-individualism. This style educated a class of government officials according to principles very different from mere bureaucracy, petty clerical spirit, and the irresponsible and lazy administration of the affairs of the state.
p. 197-198
A warrior tradition and a pure military tradition do not have hatred as the basis of war. The need to fight and even to exterminate another people may be acknowledged, but this does not entail hatred, anger, animosity, and contempt for the enemy. All these feelings, for a true soldier, are degrading; in order to fight he need not be motivated by such lowly feelings, nor be energized by propaganda, smoky rhetoric, and lies. All these things have come into play with the plebeianization of war, since men who were shaped by an aristocratic warrior tradition have been collectively replaced by the “nation in arms,” that is, the masses recruited indiscriminately through a mandatory draft. This happened right at the time when the traditional State began to decline and the national State arose, the latter animated by passions, hatred, and pride. In order to mobilize the masses, it is necessary to intoxicate or deceive them, with the consequence of introducing emotional, ideological, and propaganda factors into the war that have conferred and continue to confer on it a most heinous and deprecable character. Traditional States did not need all this. They did not create a chauvinist pathos and near psychosis in order to mobilize their troops and boost their morale. This was obtained by the pure principle of the imperium and by the reference to principles of loyalty and honor. Clearly defined goals were established for a necessary war, which was waged in a detached manner, hence without any room for hatred and contempt among the combatants.
p. 202-203
First of all, the true traditional spirit acknowledges a superior, metaphysical unity beyond the individual religious traditions, a unity of which they represent various historically conditioned expressions, more or less complete and “orthodox” (hence, a higher standard for “orthodoxy”). Despite the fact that every religious form has the right to claim a certain exclusivity in the area of its pertinence, the idea of this higher unity (although it is an “esoteric” truth – that is, not reserved for the ordinary people, to whom it may be confusing) should be acknowledged by its most qualified representatives.
p. 204-205
The occult war is a battle waged imperceptibly by the forces of global subversion, with means and in circumstances ignored by the current historiography. The notion of occult war belongs to a three-dimensional view of history: this view does not regard as essential the two superficial dimension of time and space (which includes causes, facts, and visible leaders) but rather emphasizes the dimension of depth, or the “subterranean” dimension in which the forces and influences often act in a decisive manner, and which, more often not than not, cannot be reduced to what is merely human, whether at an individual or collective level.
p. 235
To the former [the forces of cosmos] corresponds everything that is form, order, law, spiritual hierarchy, and tradition in the higher sense of the word; to the latter [the forces of chaos] correspond every influence that disintegrates, subverts, degrades, and promotes the predominance of the inferior over the superior, matter over spirit, quantity over quality.
p. 236
It would be a real abandonment to fantasy to suppose that the leaders of the great conflicting powers – the United States, the USSR, and the Red China – receive orders from an international center of Jews and Masons (almost nonexistent in China), and act accordingly in view of the same goal.
p. 243
There are actually no civilized peoples or nations composed of pure individuals belonging to the same single race. All peoples are composed of more or less stable racial mixtures. We go from the theoretical domain to the practical one, or to “active racism,” whenever we take a position before the racial components of a given nation, refusing to acknowledge to all of them the same value, the same dignity, and the same right to impart the tone and form to the whole. At that point a choice, an election, and a decision are necessary. One of the components must be given preeminence, by referring to the typical values and the human ideals that correspond to it.
p. 257
In the political domain we need to take a stand against the myth expressed in the formula: “There is power in numbers.” Attempting to base an imperialistic policy on a demographic campaign was one of the serious mistakes of the Fascist ideology that must be denounced without hesitation. The power of numbers is the power of the mere brute masses; this power is in itself very relative, because even herds need to be guided. Every true empire is born from a race of conquerors who conquered lands and peoples, not because they suffered from overpopulation or did not have “a place in the sun,” but on the basis of a higher calling and qualification, which allowed them to rule as a minority in foreign lands.
p. 267-268
The fact is that the inferior races and the lower social strata are the most prolific ones. Thus, we can say that while the number of superior, more differentiated elements grows in arithmetic proportion, the number of inferior elements grows in geometric proportion, the result being a fatal involution of the human race.
p. 268
As far as a revolutionary-conservative movement is concerned, there is a need for men who are free from these bourgeois feelings. These men, by adopting an attitude of militant and absolute commitment, should be ready for anything and almost feel that creating a family is a “betrayal”; these men should live sine impedimentis, without any ties or limits to their freedom.
p. 271
When talking about the great majority of our contemporaries, it is absolutely irresponsible, considering the collective consequences that result from it, to beget other beings who will repeat the same inconsistency, the same vacuity of a life lacking any real meaning; in other words, it is absolutely irresponsible to feed the threatening avalanche of the formless world of quantity only because one is passive toward the natural part of himself and toward the most primitive sexual urge, or because one is enslaved to prejudice.
p. 272
In order to head toward a united Europe, the first step should consist of a concerted exit of all European nations from the United Nations, which is an illegitimate, promiscuous, and hypocritical association. Another obvious imperative should be to become emancipated in every aspect and in equal measure from both the United States and the USSR. However, this would require a very subtle and prudent political art, for which today’s politicians are hardly qualified.
p. 275
In a united Europe, fatherlands and nations may exist (ethnic communities have been partially respected even in the totalitarian Soviet Union). What should be excluded is nationalism (with its monstrous appendix, namely imperialism) and chauvinism – in other words, every fanatical absolutization of a particular unit.
p. 276
The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) was previously displayed in the European medieval world, which safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity.
p. 277
It is possible to enclose that which is “modern” in a well-controlled material and “physical” domain, on the plane of mere means, and to superimpose upon it a higher order adequately upheld, in which revolutionary-conservative values are given unconditional acknowledgement.
p. 282
[F]ascism and National Socialism were movements and regimes in which different and even contrasting tendencies coexisted; their development in the right, positive, conservative-revolutionary sense could have occurred only if circumstances had allowed for an adequate, further development, which was stricken down by the war they ignited and by their ensuing defeat.
p. 283
The reason the first excerpt is from page 112 is because most of the previous pages is taken up by an introduction to Evola written by Dr. H. T. Hansen.
Recently, various forces have attempted to set up a defense and a resistance in the sociopolitical domain against the extreme forms in which the disorder of our age manifests itself. It is necessary to realize that this is a useless effort, even for the sake of merely demonstrative purposes, unless the disease is dealt with at its very roots. These roots, as far as the historical dimension is concerned, are to be found in the subversion introduced in Europe by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. The disease must be recognized in all of its forms and degrees; thus, the main task is to establish if there are still men willing to reject all the ideologies, political movements, and parties that, directly or indirectly, derive from those revolutionary ideas (i.e., everything ranging from liberalism and democracy to Marxism and communism). As a positive counterpart, these men should be given an orientation and a solid foundation consisting of a broad view of life and a stern doctrine of the State.
p. 112
It is curious how words evolve: after all, revolution, according to its original Latin meaning (re-volvere), referred to a notion that led again to the starting point, to the origins. Therefore, the “revolutionary” force of renewal that needs to be employed against the existing situation should be derived from the origins.
p. 113-114
However, if one wants to embrace the idea of “conservatism” (i.e., a “conservative revolution”), it is necessary to proceed with caution. […] Obviously, it is necessary to first establish as exactly as possible what needs to be preserved, especially as far as social structures and political institutions are concerned.
p. 114
What needs to be “preserved” and defended in a “revolutionary fashion” is the general view of life and of the State that, being based if higher values and interests, definitely transcends the economic plane, and thus everything that can be defined in terms of economic classes.
p. 114-115
For the authentic revolutionary conservative, what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to the principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions, adequate for a specific period of time and in a specific geographical area.
p. 115
Tradition, in its essence, is something simultaneously meta-historical and dynamic: it is an overall ordering force, in the service of principles that have the chrism of a superior legitimacy (we may even call them, “principles from above”).
p. 115
[E]very true political unity appears as the embodiment of an idea and a power, thus distinguishing itself from every naturalistic association or “natural right,” and also from every societal aggregation determined by mere social, economic biological, utilitarian, or eudemonistic factors.
In previous eras it was possible to speak of the sacral character of the principle of sovereignty and power, namely of the State. For instance, the ancient Roman notion of imperium essentially belonged to the domain of the sacred. This notion, in its specific meaning, even before expressing a system of territorial, supernational hegemony, designated the pure power of command, the almost mystical power and auctoritas inherent in the one who had the function and quality of Leader: a leader in the religious and warrior order as well as in the order of the patrician family, the gens, and, eminently, of the State, the res publica. In the Roman world, which was intensely realistic (or, I should say, precisely because it was intensely realistic), the notion of this power, which is simultaneously auctoritas, always retained its intrinsic character of bright force from above and of sacred power, beyond the various and often spurious techniques that conditioned its access in different periods.
p. 122
A power and authority that are not absolute, are not real authority or real power […]
p. 123
In particular, the positive essence of the principle of sovereignty has rightfully been recognized in the power of making absolute decisions, in exceptional or emergency situations, beyond any duties and discussions, whenever the existing right and laws are suspended or their suspension is required.
p. 123
In the best period of the Roman civilization, the dictatorship was conceived and allowed as a temporary remedy; far from replacing the existing order, it was its reintegration. In every other regard, dictatorship equals usurpation.
p. 124
The state is under the masculine aegis, while “society” and, by extension, the people, or demos, are under the feminine aegis.
p. 126
Thus, even in the ancient Roman world, the idea of State and imperium (i.e., of the sacred authority) was strictly connected to the symbolic cult of virile deities of heaven, of light and of the super-world in opposition to the dark region of the Mothers and the chthonic deities.
p. 126
The notions of nation, fatherland, and people, despite their romantic and idealistic halo, essentially belong to the naturalistic and biological plane and not the political one; they lead back to the “maternal” and physical dimension of a given collectivity.
p. 127
“[M]en” uphold the idea of State, while feminine natures, which are spiritually matriarchical, side instead with “fatherland,” “nation,” and “people.”
p. 129
In reference to this, we could say that a nation exists and overcomes geographical and even ethical boundaries wherever we find the reproduction of the same “inner form,” namely the consecration or the imprint bestowed by the higher political force and its representatives. Thus it would be absurd, for instance, to call ancient Rome a “nation” in the modern sense of the word: one could refer to it as a “spiritual nation” or as a unity defined by the “Roman man.” The same applies to the creations of the Franks and the Germans, as well as the Arabs who spread Islam, just to cite a few examples. Maybe the most significant case is the Prussian State, which originated from a knightly Order (a classic example of a Männerbund), namely the order of Teutonic Knights, which later became the structure and the “form” of the German Reich,
p. 129-131
[T]he demos, which is feminine by nature, will never have its own, clear will.
p. 130
The Idea, only the Idea, must be the true fatherland for these men: what unites them and sets them apart should consist in adherence to the same idea, rather than to the same land, language, or blood.
p. 131
Just as communists and socialists find it useful and agreeable to brad anybody and anything it does not agree with the label of “fascism,” likewise the confusion about totalitarianism is employed in a tactical fashion by various parties in democratic regimes, and is exploited in order to try to discredit and portray the traditional view of the true State in a heinous way.
p. 148
A State is organic when it has a center, and this center is an idea that shapes the various domains of life in an efficacious way; it is organic when it ignores the division and autonomization of the particular and when, by virtue of a system of hierarchical participation, every part within its relative autonomy performs its own function and enjoys an intimate connection with the whole. In an organic State we can speak of a “whole” – namely, something integral and spiritually unitary that articulates and unfolds itself – rather than a sum of elements within an aggregate, characterized by a disorderly clash of interests. The Stats that developed in the geographical areas of the great civilizations (whether they were empires, monarchies, aristocratic republics, or city-states) at their peak was almost without exception of this type.
p. 149
[O]rganic and traditional are more or less synonymous.
p. 149
However, totalitarianism merely represents the counterfeited image of the organic ideal. It is a system in which the unity is imposed from the outside, not on the basis of the intrinsic force of an common idea and an authority that is naturally acknowledged, but rather through direct forms of intervention and control, exercised by a power that is exclusively and material political, imposing itself as the ultimate reason for the system.
p. 150
Totalitarianism, though it reacts against individualism and social atomism, brings a final end to the devastation of what may still survive in a society from the previous “organic” phase: quality, articulated forms, castes and classes, the values of personality, true freedom, daring and responsible initiative, and heroic feats. An organism of superior type includes multiple functions retaining their specific character and a relative autonomy, all the while mutually coordinating and integrating each other, converging into a superior unity that never ceases to be ideally presupposed. Thus in an organic State we find both unity and multiplicity, gradation and hierarchy; we do not find the dualism of center and formless mass typical of a totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism, in order to assert itself, imposes uniformity. In the final analysis, totalitarianism rests and relies on the inorganic world of quantity to which individualistic disintegration has led, and not on the world of quality and of personality.
p. 151-152
Last but not least I wish to make a few comments about a formula that is often associated with totalitarianism in the polemics of a democracy: the one-party system. Fascism claimed that the State was the only party “governing the country in a totalitarian fashion.” This is an unhappy and hybrid formula, to say the least, and it is a residue of the partisan-parliamentary view, though an instance of a higher order is also present within it.
Strictly speaking, party means faction. In that case, “one party” is either a contradictory or an aberrant notion, almost as if a faction wished to be the whole or dominate the entire system. Practically speaking, the notion of “party” belongs to parliamentary democracies, and it signifies an organization that defends a given ideology against other ideologies upheld by other groups, to which the system recognizes the same right and the same legitimacy. In these terms, the “one-party system” is that which, in one way or another, whether “democratically” or through the use of violence, succeeds in gaining control of the State and, once in a position of power, no longer tolerates other parties, using the State as a tool and imposing its particular ideology on the nation.
p. 155
So we must say that a party that becomes the “one and only party” should cease to be a “party” de facto. Then its representatives, or at least its most qualified ones, should present themselves and the rule as some sort of Order, or as a specifically political class, not creating a State within the State, but rather protecting and strengthening the State’s key positions; not defending their particular ideology but rather embodying in an impersonal manner the very pure idea of the State.
p. 155
Nowadays it is possible to speak of a demonic nature of the economy, because in both individual and collective life the economic factor is the most important, real, and decisive one. Moreover, the tendency to converge every value and interest on the economic and productive plane is not perceived by Western man as an unprecedented aberration, but instead as something normal and natural, and not as an eventual necessity, but as something that must be accepted, willed, developed, and praised.
p. 165
As I have said before, when the right and primacy of interests higher than those of the socioeconomic plane are not upheld, there is no hierarchy, and even if there is one, it is only a counterfeit; this is also true when a higher authority is not accorded to those men, groups and bodies representing and defending these values and interests. In this case, an economic era is already by definition a fundamentally anarchical and antihierarchical era; it represents a subversion of the normal order. The materialization and the soullessness of all the domains of life that characterize it divest of any higher meaning all those problems and conflicts that are regarded as important within it.
p. 166
And as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence – then we are not even close to what is essential, even though new theories, beyond Marxism and capitalism, might be formulated.
p. 166
What must be questioned is not the value of this or that economic system, but the value of the economy itself.
p. 167
It is not entirely correct to say that Marxism arose and took hold because there was a real social question that needed to be addressed (at best this may have been the case during the early stages of the industrial revolution); the opposite is true – to wit, that for the most part the social question gains precedence in today’s world only as a result of the presence of Marxism.
p. 169
In both Marxism and free-market economies we find the same materialistic, antipolitical, and social view detaching the social order and people from any higher order and higher goal, positing what it is “useful” as the only purpose (understood in a physical, vegetative, and earthly sense); by turning the “useful” into a criterion of progress, the values proper to every traditional structure are inverted.
p. 170
The term work has always designated the lowest forms of human activity, those that are merely exclusively conditioned by the economic factor. It is illegitimate to label as “work” anything that is not reduced to these forms; rather, the word to be used is action: action, not work, is what is performed by the leader, the explorer, the ascetic, the pure scientist, the warrior, the artist, the diplomat, the theologian, the one who makes or breaks a law, the one who is motivated by an elementary passion or guided by a principle.
p. 174
After acknowledging the fundamental principle of the primacy and sovereignty of State over economy, the State can then produce an action of limiting and ordering the economic domain; this action will be able to facilitate what derives from the essential and unavoidable factor, that of detoxification, the change of mentality, and the return to normalcy for people who have learned anew what is sensible activity, right effort, values to be upheld, and loyalty to oneself.
p. 176
Given these precedents, we cannot ignore the meaning that fascism had: a break with the past, a different and bold choice of traditions, and the will to undertake a new direction, solely upon which the reference to Rome as a political symbol could be legitimized (“We dream of a Roman Italy,” Mussolini once said).
p. 191
During the first half of this century, so-called Prussian militarism has been a thorn in the side of democracies, since the perceived it as the prototype of the phenomenon they deprecated. What we have here is a characteristic antithesis that does not refer to the relationships between groups of rival nations, but rather two general views of life and of the State, and even to two distinct, irreconcilable forms of civilization and society. Historically speaking, such an antithesis is reflected in the opposition between the view of the Germanic-Prussian tradition and the view that first emerged in England and America, and later in all democratic nations; the latter view is characterized by the predominance of economic and mercantile values and by their development in the context of capitalism. The origins of the former view can be traced to an ascetic warrior organization, the ancient Order of Teutonic Knights.
p. 193
The view of modern democracies that first emerged in England, under the aegis of mercantilism, is that in society the primary element is the bourgeois type and the bourgeois life during times of peace; such a life is dominated by the physical concern for safety, well-being, and material wealth, with the cultivation of letters and the arts serving as a decorative frame. Thus, according to this view, the “civilian” or “bourgeois” element is usually, and as a matter of principle, entrusted with running the State. It is this human type that engages in politics; when politics – that is, international politics – must be continued with other means, to use the famous expression of Clausewitz, the armed forces are then employed. In this view the military and warrior element has the subordinated meaning of mere instrument: it should have no particular influence or exercise any interference whatsoever in daily social life. Even if it is acknowledged that the military element has its own code of ethics, it is not desirable that this code be applied to the normal, overall life of a nation.
p. 193-194
According to the most recent formulation of the corresponding ideology, armies should be used only as an international police force to maintain the “peace”; in most cases, this amounts to allowing wealthy nations to live undisturbed. Otherwise, aside from any pretense, what is repeated is the example of the East India Company and similar enterprises: the armed forces are used by modern democracies to impose or retain an economic hegemony; to gain new markets and to acquire aw materials; and to create new space for capital seeking investment and profit.
p. 194-195
Love for hierarchy; relationships of obedience and command; courage; feelings of honor and loyalty; specific forms of active impersonality capable of producing anonymous sacrifice; frank and open relationships from man to man, from one comrade to another, from leader to follower – all these are the characteristic, living values that are predominant in the afore mentioned view, These are the values found in what I have called the Männerbund.
p. 195-196
There is no antithesis, but rather identity between spirit and superior civilization on the one hand and the world of war and warriors on the other, according to the general sense I have pointed out.
p. 196
Contrary to what the bourgeois and liberal polemics claim, the warrior idea may not be reduced to materialism, nor is it synonymous with the exaltation of the brutal use of strength and destructive violence. Rather, the calm, conscious, and planned development of the inner being and a code of ethics; love of distance; hierarchy; order; the faculty of subordinating the emotional and individualistic element of one’s self to higher goals and principles, especially in the name of honor and duty – these are the elements of the warrior idea, and they act as the foundations of a specific “style” that has largely been lost.
p. 196-197
The Prussian style did not apply only to the military: by defining itself as “Fredrickianism,” it shaped one of the most austere and aristocratic European military traditions, but also manifested its influence in everything that is service to the State, loyalty, and anti-individualism. This style educated a class of government officials according to principles very different from mere bureaucracy, petty clerical spirit, and the irresponsible and lazy administration of the affairs of the state.
p. 197-198
A warrior tradition and a pure military tradition do not have hatred as the basis of war. The need to fight and even to exterminate another people may be acknowledged, but this does not entail hatred, anger, animosity, and contempt for the enemy. All these feelings, for a true soldier, are degrading; in order to fight he need not be motivated by such lowly feelings, nor be energized by propaganda, smoky rhetoric, and lies. All these things have come into play with the plebeianization of war, since men who were shaped by an aristocratic warrior tradition have been collectively replaced by the “nation in arms,” that is, the masses recruited indiscriminately through a mandatory draft. This happened right at the time when the traditional State began to decline and the national State arose, the latter animated by passions, hatred, and pride. In order to mobilize the masses, it is necessary to intoxicate or deceive them, with the consequence of introducing emotional, ideological, and propaganda factors into the war that have conferred and continue to confer on it a most heinous and deprecable character. Traditional States did not need all this. They did not create a chauvinist pathos and near psychosis in order to mobilize their troops and boost their morale. This was obtained by the pure principle of the imperium and by the reference to principles of loyalty and honor. Clearly defined goals were established for a necessary war, which was waged in a detached manner, hence without any room for hatred and contempt among the combatants.
p. 202-203
First of all, the true traditional spirit acknowledges a superior, metaphysical unity beyond the individual religious traditions, a unity of which they represent various historically conditioned expressions, more or less complete and “orthodox” (hence, a higher standard for “orthodoxy”). Despite the fact that every religious form has the right to claim a certain exclusivity in the area of its pertinence, the idea of this higher unity (although it is an “esoteric” truth – that is, not reserved for the ordinary people, to whom it may be confusing) should be acknowledged by its most qualified representatives.
p. 204-205
The occult war is a battle waged imperceptibly by the forces of global subversion, with means and in circumstances ignored by the current historiography. The notion of occult war belongs to a three-dimensional view of history: this view does not regard as essential the two superficial dimension of time and space (which includes causes, facts, and visible leaders) but rather emphasizes the dimension of depth, or the “subterranean” dimension in which the forces and influences often act in a decisive manner, and which, more often not than not, cannot be reduced to what is merely human, whether at an individual or collective level.
p. 235
To the former [the forces of cosmos] corresponds everything that is form, order, law, spiritual hierarchy, and tradition in the higher sense of the word; to the latter [the forces of chaos] correspond every influence that disintegrates, subverts, degrades, and promotes the predominance of the inferior over the superior, matter over spirit, quantity over quality.
p. 236
It would be a real abandonment to fantasy to suppose that the leaders of the great conflicting powers – the United States, the USSR, and the Red China – receive orders from an international center of Jews and Masons (almost nonexistent in China), and act accordingly in view of the same goal.
p. 243
There are actually no civilized peoples or nations composed of pure individuals belonging to the same single race. All peoples are composed of more or less stable racial mixtures. We go from the theoretical domain to the practical one, or to “active racism,” whenever we take a position before the racial components of a given nation, refusing to acknowledge to all of them the same value, the same dignity, and the same right to impart the tone and form to the whole. At that point a choice, an election, and a decision are necessary. One of the components must be given preeminence, by referring to the typical values and the human ideals that correspond to it.
p. 257
In the political domain we need to take a stand against the myth expressed in the formula: “There is power in numbers.” Attempting to base an imperialistic policy on a demographic campaign was one of the serious mistakes of the Fascist ideology that must be denounced without hesitation. The power of numbers is the power of the mere brute masses; this power is in itself very relative, because even herds need to be guided. Every true empire is born from a race of conquerors who conquered lands and peoples, not because they suffered from overpopulation or did not have “a place in the sun,” but on the basis of a higher calling and qualification, which allowed them to rule as a minority in foreign lands.
p. 267-268
The fact is that the inferior races and the lower social strata are the most prolific ones. Thus, we can say that while the number of superior, more differentiated elements grows in arithmetic proportion, the number of inferior elements grows in geometric proportion, the result being a fatal involution of the human race.
p. 268
As far as a revolutionary-conservative movement is concerned, there is a need for men who are free from these bourgeois feelings. These men, by adopting an attitude of militant and absolute commitment, should be ready for anything and almost feel that creating a family is a “betrayal”; these men should live sine impedimentis, without any ties or limits to their freedom.
p. 271
When talking about the great majority of our contemporaries, it is absolutely irresponsible, considering the collective consequences that result from it, to beget other beings who will repeat the same inconsistency, the same vacuity of a life lacking any real meaning; in other words, it is absolutely irresponsible to feed the threatening avalanche of the formless world of quantity only because one is passive toward the natural part of himself and toward the most primitive sexual urge, or because one is enslaved to prejudice.
p. 272
In order to head toward a united Europe, the first step should consist of a concerted exit of all European nations from the United Nations, which is an illegitimate, promiscuous, and hypocritical association. Another obvious imperative should be to become emancipated in every aspect and in equal measure from both the United States and the USSR. However, this would require a very subtle and prudent political art, for which today’s politicians are hardly qualified.
p. 275
In a united Europe, fatherlands and nations may exist (ethnic communities have been partially respected even in the totalitarian Soviet Union). What should be excluded is nationalism (with its monstrous appendix, namely imperialism) and chauvinism – in other words, every fanatical absolutization of a particular unit.
p. 276
The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) was previously displayed in the European medieval world, which safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity.
p. 277
It is possible to enclose that which is “modern” in a well-controlled material and “physical” domain, on the plane of mere means, and to superimpose upon it a higher order adequately upheld, in which revolutionary-conservative values are given unconditional acknowledgement.
p. 282
[F]ascism and National Socialism were movements and regimes in which different and even contrasting tendencies coexisted; their development in the right, positive, conservative-revolutionary sense could have occurred only if circumstances had allowed for an adequate, further development, which was stricken down by the war they ignited and by their ensuing defeat.
p. 283
Sunday, January 01, 2006
Old year, new year, same Spöknippet
Almost a year and a half has passed since our first post. According to Statcounters not entirely reliable data Spöknippet had almost 5500 unique visitors this far. About one quarter of all visitors have not been from Sweden.
About half of the posts have been written by Spöknippet. Admittedly, a fair number of those have been rather short. If we are to commit self-criticism it must be said that Spöknippet has failed to produce syntheses.
In addition it must also be said that the excerpts has leaned a bit more to the “right” than first intended. Therefore the posts if treated statistically does not reflect Spöknippets standpoint. There is however a very simple explanation to this, the availability of socialist and communist original texts is far better than the availability of “fascist” original texts. When it comes to conservative revolution and third position the situation is even worse. He who on the other hand wishes to read Marx or Lenin need look no further than Marxists.org, Spöknippet has no rôle to play there.
Looking back over the past eighteen months our slogan “Metapolitics, march music and militaria” might be considered false marketing. In fact, only one post has dealt with march music (combined with metapolitics).
The next twelve months will probably look pretty much like those that have passed. So, to the disappointment of Spöknippets friends (and our more self hating enemies) we can only say that the frequency of posting is unlikely to increase. Those who are hoping for more than an average of two posts a month will probably be disappointed.
Other than that, Spöknippet will of course, as always, continue to act as a beacon of Preußentum and as a bulwark against modernity.
Finally it can be mentioned that the CIA graced us with a visit some time ago.
About half of the posts have been written by Spöknippet. Admittedly, a fair number of those have been rather short. If we are to commit self-criticism it must be said that Spöknippet has failed to produce syntheses.
In addition it must also be said that the excerpts has leaned a bit more to the “right” than first intended. Therefore the posts if treated statistically does not reflect Spöknippets standpoint. There is however a very simple explanation to this, the availability of socialist and communist original texts is far better than the availability of “fascist” original texts. When it comes to conservative revolution and third position the situation is even worse. He who on the other hand wishes to read Marx or Lenin need look no further than Marxists.org, Spöknippet has no rôle to play there.
Looking back over the past eighteen months our slogan “Metapolitics, march music and militaria” might be considered false marketing. In fact, only one post has dealt with march music (combined with metapolitics).
The next twelve months will probably look pretty much like those that have passed. So, to the disappointment of Spöknippets friends (and our more self hating enemies) we can only say that the frequency of posting is unlikely to increase. Those who are hoping for more than an average of two posts a month will probably be disappointed.
Other than that, Spöknippet will of course, as always, continue to act as a beacon of Preußentum and as a bulwark against modernity.Finally it can be mentioned that the CIA graced us with a visit some time ago.
Monday, October 24, 2005
[Excerpts] Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler’s priestess
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (1998) Hitler’s priestess. Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan myth, and Neo-Nazism. New York and London: New York University Press
Spöknippet is obviously no great admirer of Savitri Devi. Her ideas on Men in Time, Men above Time, and Men against Time is however an exception. Goodrick-Clarke's description of the Hindu doctrine of ages is a good introduction to the Hindu, and indeed Traditional, perception of time in its own right. Also, it should help those less familiar with the Traditional view of time to understand Savitri Devi's thoughts on the three types of Men.
In the Mahabharata these ages are described in some detail. The Krita Yuga is characterized as an age in which righteousness is eternal. In this the most excellent of Yugas everything had been done and nothing remained to be done. Duties did not languish, nor did the people decline. There was no buying and selling, no efforts needed to be made by men, the fruits of the earth were abundant. No disease of decline of the organs of sense arose through age, there was no malice, weeping, pride, or deceit, no contention, lassitude, hatred, cruelty, fear, affliction, jealousy, or envy. All creatures were devoted to their duties, all the castes were alike in their functions, they were devoted to one deity and used one rule and one rite. During the Treta Yuga righteousness declined by a fourth. Men now acted with an object in view, seeking rewards for their rites and gifts, while still being devoted to their duties and ceremonies. The decline became more marked in the Dvapara Yuga, when righteousness was diminished by two quarters. The Veda became fourfold, and with this proliferation of rules, rites, and ceremonies people no longer knew unity. Once men had fallen away from goodness, many diseases, desires, and calamities assailed them and these in turn drove men to practice austerities.
The Kali Yuga, or Iron Age, represented the cosmological and moral nadir in the Hindu cycle of ages. Only a quarter as much righteousness prevailed in comparison with the Krita Yuga. Sacred practices were neglected, calamities, diseases, fatigue, and faults such as anger, distress, anxiety, hunger, and fear became commonplace. Political and social order collapsed, cities became violent, civilization receded. Evil was everywhere evident and triumphant. The Vishnu Purana describes many aspects of this moral and social decay in the Kali Yuga. The observance of caste and order is neglected with promiscuous intermarriage among all classes and peoples; women are unfaithful and consort with worthless men; the family and other blood ties lose their meaning; the acquisition of wealth, commerce, and money govern all men’s actions and aspirations; liberalism and moral relativism prevail so that any idol or authority is revered on the basis of popularity and individual choice. The rulers oppress and plunder the masses, who then dessert the intolerable cities and settle in remote places. There they live in scarcity and want, suffering exposure, and subject to decreasing vigor and longevity. In due course, the entire race is destroyed.
p. 112-3
Armed with the Hindu cyclic theory of time, Savitri Devi believed that “human history, far from being a steady ascension towards the better, is an increasingly hopeless process of bastardisation, emasculation and demoralisation of mankind, an inexorable ‘fall.’” Against the dismal cosmological background of the Kali Yuga, she developed her own doctrine of Men in Time, Men above Time, and Men against Time. These three types of historical actors represented three quite distinct responses to the bondage of time as understood in the cycle of the ages. Of the three types, Men in Time are the essential and most active agents of the Kali Yuga. Their conduct and aims typify the dark age and all its vicissitudes. Men above Time are properly at home in the perfection of the Satya Yuga, or Golden Age, and Men against Time act with ruthless violence in an attempt to restore the conditions of the Satya Yuga, at the end of the Kali Yuga, by violent means, these martial heroes work to redeem the world from the thrall of the dark age and to initiate a new time cycle.
Men in Time, according to Savitri Devi, are those few strong individuals who wholeheartedly accept the iron law of history and act entirely in their own narrow self-interest. Whether in lust for personal enjoyment, in greed for gold, or in the search for honors, position, and power, this selfish drive is shameless and undisguised by such “noble” ends as the ideas of 1789 or the solidarity of the international proletariat. In seeking only their own personal ends with the utmost intelligence, unscrupulousness, and energy, These Men in Time are “the most thorough, the most mercilessly effective agents of the Death-forces on earth … working without hesitation and without remorse in the sense of the downward process of history and, for its logical conclusion: the annihilation of man and all life.”
Men in Time represent the most naked and powerful expression of egoism in the benighted era of the Kali Yuga, an age that is given over to the play of atomistic individual wills striving for their materialistic gratification with no understanding of the wisdom or higher collective goals of happier ages. By seeking their own individual advantage in a constant war of wills, Men in Time drive history along that oppositional path that is the hallmark of the dark age and its decline. Their gains, profits, or victories are entirely personal; even if they bring wider fortune and prosperity, this I quite incidental to their motive of self-gratification. And all the while they are fighting and struggling and winning, the world around them is violated, thereby growing older, wearier, and less abundant until it is exhausted and reaches the end of the time cycle.
p. 115-6
Men above Time are those individuals who have attained the highest enlightenment describe in the Upanishads. In recognizing the fundamental unity of the divine Self (Atman) and the all-pervading God (Brahman), the represent the spiritual authority in the Satya Yuga, or Age of Truth, in which complete perfection and righteousness prevail. In ancient India the Brahmins were the counselors and mentors of kings and warriors who were anxious to act in accordance with the commands of timeless wisdom. However, as the world proceeds through the time cycle with increasing disorder and decay, such Men above Time enjoy less and less authority. During the Kali Yuga they just seem to be unworldly mystics whose entire outlook and conduct barely equips them to survive in a world of struggle and conflict, let alone to act as guides and rulers of men. These lonely ascetics abstain from all violence and cannot change the collective conditions of mankind. At best they can offer personal salvation in breaking the time bondage of individual souls; it is not within their power to re-create the Golden Age before its due time.
p. 116-7
In Hindu chronology the Kali Yuga suddenly and momentously gives way at its lowest point of degradation, suffering, and evil to the opening of a new Satya, or Krita, Yuga, which begins the cycle anew. According to Savitri Devi, Men against Time play a crucial role in the struggle to restore the Golden Age as the Kali Yuga nears the completion of its term. Although possessed of the sunlike qualities and mystical ideals of the Man above Time, the Man against Time employs the practical means, ruthlessness, and violence of the Man in Time for the achievement of collective salvation and the regeneration of the world. In her scheme of things, Men against Time combine the qualities of “Lightning” and “Sun” as the real heroes of history, the builders and defenders of all new churches who devote their whole life and energy to the reshaping of tangible reality on the model of their vision of truth. These divinely inspired militant mystics are rare individuals who suddenly intervene in the downsweep of time with the promise of redemption and the return to the Golden Age. The revolutionary implications of the Man against Time are obvious. Like a fiery comet from the heavens he bursts through the gloomy pall surrounding the earth in the Kali Yuga to herald the spreading sunshine of a new order of perfection, divine justice, and righteousness.
p. 117-8
Spöknippet is obviously no great admirer of Savitri Devi. Her ideas on Men in Time, Men above Time, and Men against Time is however an exception. Goodrick-Clarke's description of the Hindu doctrine of ages is a good introduction to the Hindu, and indeed Traditional, perception of time in its own right. Also, it should help those less familiar with the Traditional view of time to understand Savitri Devi's thoughts on the three types of Men.
In the Mahabharata these ages are described in some detail. The Krita Yuga is characterized as an age in which righteousness is eternal. In this the most excellent of Yugas everything had been done and nothing remained to be done. Duties did not languish, nor did the people decline. There was no buying and selling, no efforts needed to be made by men, the fruits of the earth were abundant. No disease of decline of the organs of sense arose through age, there was no malice, weeping, pride, or deceit, no contention, lassitude, hatred, cruelty, fear, affliction, jealousy, or envy. All creatures were devoted to their duties, all the castes were alike in their functions, they were devoted to one deity and used one rule and one rite. During the Treta Yuga righteousness declined by a fourth. Men now acted with an object in view, seeking rewards for their rites and gifts, while still being devoted to their duties and ceremonies. The decline became more marked in the Dvapara Yuga, when righteousness was diminished by two quarters. The Veda became fourfold, and with this proliferation of rules, rites, and ceremonies people no longer knew unity. Once men had fallen away from goodness, many diseases, desires, and calamities assailed them and these in turn drove men to practice austerities.
The Kali Yuga, or Iron Age, represented the cosmological and moral nadir in the Hindu cycle of ages. Only a quarter as much righteousness prevailed in comparison with the Krita Yuga. Sacred practices were neglected, calamities, diseases, fatigue, and faults such as anger, distress, anxiety, hunger, and fear became commonplace. Political and social order collapsed, cities became violent, civilization receded. Evil was everywhere evident and triumphant. The Vishnu Purana describes many aspects of this moral and social decay in the Kali Yuga. The observance of caste and order is neglected with promiscuous intermarriage among all classes and peoples; women are unfaithful and consort with worthless men; the family and other blood ties lose their meaning; the acquisition of wealth, commerce, and money govern all men’s actions and aspirations; liberalism and moral relativism prevail so that any idol or authority is revered on the basis of popularity and individual choice. The rulers oppress and plunder the masses, who then dessert the intolerable cities and settle in remote places. There they live in scarcity and want, suffering exposure, and subject to decreasing vigor and longevity. In due course, the entire race is destroyed.
p. 112-3
Armed with the Hindu cyclic theory of time, Savitri Devi believed that “human history, far from being a steady ascension towards the better, is an increasingly hopeless process of bastardisation, emasculation and demoralisation of mankind, an inexorable ‘fall.’” Against the dismal cosmological background of the Kali Yuga, she developed her own doctrine of Men in Time, Men above Time, and Men against Time. These three types of historical actors represented three quite distinct responses to the bondage of time as understood in the cycle of the ages. Of the three types, Men in Time are the essential and most active agents of the Kali Yuga. Their conduct and aims typify the dark age and all its vicissitudes. Men above Time are properly at home in the perfection of the Satya Yuga, or Golden Age, and Men against Time act with ruthless violence in an attempt to restore the conditions of the Satya Yuga, at the end of the Kali Yuga, by violent means, these martial heroes work to redeem the world from the thrall of the dark age and to initiate a new time cycle.
Men in Time, according to Savitri Devi, are those few strong individuals who wholeheartedly accept the iron law of history and act entirely in their own narrow self-interest. Whether in lust for personal enjoyment, in greed for gold, or in the search for honors, position, and power, this selfish drive is shameless and undisguised by such “noble” ends as the ideas of 1789 or the solidarity of the international proletariat. In seeking only their own personal ends with the utmost intelligence, unscrupulousness, and energy, These Men in Time are “the most thorough, the most mercilessly effective agents of the Death-forces on earth … working without hesitation and without remorse in the sense of the downward process of history and, for its logical conclusion: the annihilation of man and all life.”
Men in Time represent the most naked and powerful expression of egoism in the benighted era of the Kali Yuga, an age that is given over to the play of atomistic individual wills striving for their materialistic gratification with no understanding of the wisdom or higher collective goals of happier ages. By seeking their own individual advantage in a constant war of wills, Men in Time drive history along that oppositional path that is the hallmark of the dark age and its decline. Their gains, profits, or victories are entirely personal; even if they bring wider fortune and prosperity, this I quite incidental to their motive of self-gratification. And all the while they are fighting and struggling and winning, the world around them is violated, thereby growing older, wearier, and less abundant until it is exhausted and reaches the end of the time cycle.
p. 115-6
Men above Time are those individuals who have attained the highest enlightenment describe in the Upanishads. In recognizing the fundamental unity of the divine Self (Atman) and the all-pervading God (Brahman), the represent the spiritual authority in the Satya Yuga, or Age of Truth, in which complete perfection and righteousness prevail. In ancient India the Brahmins were the counselors and mentors of kings and warriors who were anxious to act in accordance with the commands of timeless wisdom. However, as the world proceeds through the time cycle with increasing disorder and decay, such Men above Time enjoy less and less authority. During the Kali Yuga they just seem to be unworldly mystics whose entire outlook and conduct barely equips them to survive in a world of struggle and conflict, let alone to act as guides and rulers of men. These lonely ascetics abstain from all violence and cannot change the collective conditions of mankind. At best they can offer personal salvation in breaking the time bondage of individual souls; it is not within their power to re-create the Golden Age before its due time.
p. 116-7
In Hindu chronology the Kali Yuga suddenly and momentously gives way at its lowest point of degradation, suffering, and evil to the opening of a new Satya, or Krita, Yuga, which begins the cycle anew. According to Savitri Devi, Men against Time play a crucial role in the struggle to restore the Golden Age as the Kali Yuga nears the completion of its term. Although possessed of the sunlike qualities and mystical ideals of the Man above Time, the Man against Time employs the practical means, ruthlessness, and violence of the Man in Time for the achievement of collective salvation and the regeneration of the world. In her scheme of things, Men against Time combine the qualities of “Lightning” and “Sun” as the real heroes of history, the builders and defenders of all new churches who devote their whole life and energy to the reshaping of tangible reality on the model of their vision of truth. These divinely inspired militant mystics are rare individuals who suddenly intervene in the downsweep of time with the promise of redemption and the return to the Golden Age. The revolutionary implications of the Man against Time are obvious. Like a fiery comet from the heavens he bursts through the gloomy pall surrounding the earth in the Kali Yuga to herald the spreading sunshine of a new order of perfection, divine justice, and righteousness.
p. 117-8
Monday, September 26, 2005
[Excerpts] Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar republic
Excerpts from Woods, Roger. (1996). The conservative revolution in the Weimar republic. London: Macmillan
Perhaps someday there will be a proper review. Until then it should be enough to look at the last excerpt, the very last words in the book, to see what Woods tries to “prove”. Consequently Woods is unable, or simply does not want, to see, for example, Ernst Jünger’s development during the Weimar years. By 1933 Jünger is no longer a nationalist in any of the meanings normally given to the word.
Ernst Niekisch and other “National Bolsheviks” are given precious little space. All in all, everything that doesn’t help Woods to make Conservative Revolutionaries to look as much as Nazis as possible is left out. To those who are lucky enough to understand Swedish Spöknippet recommends Carl-Göran Heidegren's Preussiska anarkister instead, or at least first.
In common with other Conservative Revolutionaries, Moeller [van den Bruck] then goes on to develop his vision of an alternative socialism for which Nietzsche supposedly provides the model: not ‘that socialism which is a doctrine, but socialism as the vital expression of an emerging humanity with its instincts still strong, healthy and intact’ (p. 175).
p. 37 Quote from Das dritte Reich
The Conservative Revolutionaries projected themselves as the young generation of German nationalists, with their sense of mission and shared identity growing in large part out of the First World War which so many of them had experienced at first hand during their formative years. The First World War had ‘given birth’ to ‘new nationalism’, and, according to its supporters, this new nationalism was fundamentally different from the forms of nationalism which had preceded it.
The difference between old and new nationalism and the difficulty of finding a unique pace for new nationalism in the political landscape of the Weimar period are set out in Deutsches Volkstum in 1929. Here it is argued that after 1919 everyone had assumed that any attempts at a coup d’êtat from the conservative camp would be preoccupied with restoration. But ten years on, the political discussion had transcended such primitive thinking and had left ‘conservative reaction’ behind. On the other hand, the political discussion had still not reached the stage where it could present a clearly formulated alternative.
p. 61
If one branch of the Conservative Revolution was intent on redefining socialism but regularly lapsed into a tradition of right-wing thinking, another branch seemed intent on dragging the right closer to traditional socialism. The main groups involved in this enterprise were Ernst Niekisch’s Widerstand circle and Karl Paetel’s Group of Social Revolutionary Nationalists which in turn had links with the group within the Nazi Party around the Strasser brothers.
These groups generally favoured an alliance between the Soviet Union and Germany against the capitalist West. Whereas the ‘German socialists’ we have looked at so far were unable to state by what method they would achieve the all-embracing social and economic community which they saw as the ultimate goal, Karl Paetel calls upon young nationalists to take a stand with the proletariat. He asks nationalists to say exactly what they will do when proletarian revolution breaks out, for this will be the day of reckoning for the revolutionary nationalist movement.
p. 70
Conservative Revolutionaries in fact go through distinct phases in their attitude towards political programmes. They switch away from a call for clarity over political aims towards anti-programmatic activism and the ideal of the strong leader is one of the major developments in their thought in the Weimar period: Ernst Jünger’s words on self-sacrifice […] have their political parallel in his assertion in 1929 that programmes are not needed and that the young generation of nationalists must learn to march without flags. Ernst Niekisch suggests firstly that the Conservative Revolution failed to overcome the left-versus-right split, and secondly that the result of that failure was a withdrawal from the problem.
p. 74
This call [in the article “Schluss”, Die Standarte, 20/27 December 1925, p. 3] for a clear statement of aims and programmes as the nationalists’ primary task is resumed two weeks later when Jünger writes that nationalists are waiting for the great programmes and the nationalist manifesto. In the coming year the ‘four pillars’ of modern nationalism – the national, the social, the military and the dictatorial – have to be provided with their intellectual foundation. The will to power already exists and it has just to be shown its goals.
The contrast between these thoughts and those expressed some three-and-a-half years later in an article for Widerstand is striking. For the task of working out a programme is no longer of prime importance. Indeed, such a task is now the ‘last stage of nationalism’. The beginning of nationalism, declares Jünger, is not marked by establishing a party or a programme. This retreat from the call for a clarification of nationalist aims is taken one step further in September 1929 when Jünger responds to an invitation from a left-wing journal, Das Tagebuch, to write about his ‘young nationalism’. Jünger begins with a by-now familiar rejection of the traditional tenets of German nationalism and immediately goes on to state:
Part of the explanation for the change of attitude is to be found in a debate on what the contents of a nationalist programme should be – a debate initiated by an article Jünger wrote in June 1926 and in which he calls upon nationalists to form a united front. The new nationalists clearly felt pushed into formulating a political programme in the mid-twenties after the failure of the military assault on the state in the form of the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.
p. 74-5
In his call for a programme Jünger says that after the war nationalists saw the things the stood for apparently sink to miserable depths. They needed to retain their belief that the sacrifices they had made served some profound purpose. Jünger goes on to say that the resolved to cling to tradition, but now he strikes out in a new direction by asserting that nationalists have found a new meaning to the word ‘tradition’: it is no longer a ‘fixed form’ but the ‘living and eternal spirit’ which each generation must shape anew. The idea of a fixed form seems to hark back to Spengler, for whom it is a feature of a moribund civilisation, and by using it Jünger is pointing out the futility of upholding traditional nationalism in the postwar world. The race that was transformed by the war must fight to establish a new state based on the four pillars of nationalism. This state will be radically different not only from Weimar but also from the old Kaiserreich, for nationalism is not reactionary but revolutionary. Jünger sees the four principles of a future nationalist state becoming a basic feature of all non-parliamentary nationalist groups, and he declares that the finer points f these principles are still being clarified. Individual nationalist movements are not large enough to operate independently and the time is therefore approaching when they must form a nationalist front around a clear and decisive programme.
A social programme must be worked out since its absence is causing concern to nationalist workers’ leaders: Jünger suggests hat nationalist workers should be left to conduct the economic battle while nationalist soldiers lead the struggle for power. The workers will be supported in their battle by nationalists who took leave of ‘bourgeois ideology’ in the war. Former bourgeois and Marxists will thus stand shoulder to shoulder. Finally, in the absence of a single great leader, a central council of leaders should be formed in order to maintain the purity and clarity of the movement.
In short, Jünger is attempting to make the nationalist groups confront what he saw as the crucial problem of cutting loose from traditional nationalism with its monarchist beliefs and founds a new nationalism which would set out to win over the workers.
p. 75-6
In an attempt to take the revolutionary nationalists beyond a purely negative stance, their leaders repeatedly call for the single great personality who can provide the movement with unity and direction. But, in the absence of such a leader, aims remain vague and centre upon Germany recovering its position as a leader in world politics; the frequently invoked terms ‘new beginning’ and ‘turning-point’ merely underline the inability of the writers to generate a positive programme.
p. 81
Moreover his [Jünger’s] original call for a united nationalist front around a clear programme gives way in his concluding article to a nationalism which is a ‘single movement’ but progressing ‘along different routes’. Nationalism is now an aim which cannot be defined in a programme but is ‘engraved in the heart’ of every committed nationalist. Here Jünger is taking a step back from rational debate, and it seems reasonable to conclude that this step reflects his realisation that the nationalist debate has largely failed. Indeed, in his closing article he reaches the point where debate and action are practically alternatives: words and blood, programmes and fighting units are set against each other, and the former lose too the latter. The attempt to evolve a revolutionary programme gives way to a revolutionary stance whose aims are not articulated.
p. 82
In ‘Die zwei Tyrannen’ [Arminius, 13 March 1927] he [Jünger] looks back to the calls for unity of the previous year and says that it was both right and wrong to assume that there was basic agreement about the aims of the nationalist movement. In domestic politics there was certainly no agreement, yet Jünger does see unanimity about the aim of foreign policy: a strong, independent Reich, secure against the outside world. If the threat of an attack from abroad will always be the greatest force for unity within Germany the second greatest force is an outstanding personality.
p. 83
In what can only be a criticism of National Socialism Jünger goes on to state that the present attempts to find new values are welcome but they are not succeeding. One cannot assert superiority by an act of will since superiority is basically existential. Nor can one artificially cultivate or proclaim a heroic philosophy, for what is innate in the hero degenerates when seized upon by the masses. The same is true of race and the “total state”.
p. 120
Regardless of individual Conservative Revolutionary criticism of the Nazis, the deeper commitment to activism, strong leadership, hierarchy and a disregard for political programmes persists. These features suggest that the detail of the responses to National Socialism which we have traced in Jünger and Spengler are significant for the Conservative revolution as a whole. Unresolved political dilemmas result in an activism and in an interest in hierarchy which means that there can be no fundamental objection to the National Socialist assumption of power.
p. 134
Perhaps someday there will be a proper review. Until then it should be enough to look at the last excerpt, the very last words in the book, to see what Woods tries to “prove”. Consequently Woods is unable, or simply does not want, to see, for example, Ernst Jünger’s development during the Weimar years. By 1933 Jünger is no longer a nationalist in any of the meanings normally given to the word.
Ernst Niekisch and other “National Bolsheviks” are given precious little space. All in all, everything that doesn’t help Woods to make Conservative Revolutionaries to look as much as Nazis as possible is left out. To those who are lucky enough to understand Swedish Spöknippet recommends Carl-Göran Heidegren's Preussiska anarkister instead, or at least first.
In common with other Conservative Revolutionaries, Moeller [van den Bruck] then goes on to develop his vision of an alternative socialism for which Nietzsche supposedly provides the model: not ‘that socialism which is a doctrine, but socialism as the vital expression of an emerging humanity with its instincts still strong, healthy and intact’ (p. 175).
p. 37 Quote from Das dritte Reich
The Conservative Revolutionaries projected themselves as the young generation of German nationalists, with their sense of mission and shared identity growing in large part out of the First World War which so many of them had experienced at first hand during their formative years. The First World War had ‘given birth’ to ‘new nationalism’, and, according to its supporters, this new nationalism was fundamentally different from the forms of nationalism which had preceded it.
The difference between old and new nationalism and the difficulty of finding a unique pace for new nationalism in the political landscape of the Weimar period are set out in Deutsches Volkstum in 1929. Here it is argued that after 1919 everyone had assumed that any attempts at a coup d’êtat from the conservative camp would be preoccupied with restoration. But ten years on, the political discussion had transcended such primitive thinking and had left ‘conservative reaction’ behind. On the other hand, the political discussion had still not reached the stage where it could present a clearly formulated alternative.
p. 61
If one branch of the Conservative Revolution was intent on redefining socialism but regularly lapsed into a tradition of right-wing thinking, another branch seemed intent on dragging the right closer to traditional socialism. The main groups involved in this enterprise were Ernst Niekisch’s Widerstand circle and Karl Paetel’s Group of Social Revolutionary Nationalists which in turn had links with the group within the Nazi Party around the Strasser brothers.
These groups generally favoured an alliance between the Soviet Union and Germany against the capitalist West. Whereas the ‘German socialists’ we have looked at so far were unable to state by what method they would achieve the all-embracing social and economic community which they saw as the ultimate goal, Karl Paetel calls upon young nationalists to take a stand with the proletariat. He asks nationalists to say exactly what they will do when proletarian revolution breaks out, for this will be the day of reckoning for the revolutionary nationalist movement.
p. 70
Conservative Revolutionaries in fact go through distinct phases in their attitude towards political programmes. They switch away from a call for clarity over political aims towards anti-programmatic activism and the ideal of the strong leader is one of the major developments in their thought in the Weimar period: Ernst Jünger’s words on self-sacrifice […] have their political parallel in his assertion in 1929 that programmes are not needed and that the young generation of nationalists must learn to march without flags. Ernst Niekisch suggests firstly that the Conservative Revolution failed to overcome the left-versus-right split, and secondly that the result of that failure was a withdrawal from the problem.
p. 74
This call [in the article “Schluss”, Die Standarte, 20/27 December 1925, p. 3] for a clear statement of aims and programmes as the nationalists’ primary task is resumed two weeks later when Jünger writes that nationalists are waiting for the great programmes and the nationalist manifesto. In the coming year the ‘four pillars’ of modern nationalism – the national, the social, the military and the dictatorial – have to be provided with their intellectual foundation. The will to power already exists and it has just to be shown its goals.
The contrast between these thoughts and those expressed some three-and-a-half years later in an article for Widerstand is striking. For the task of working out a programme is no longer of prime importance. Indeed, such a task is now the ‘last stage of nationalism’. The beginning of nationalism, declares Jünger, is not marked by establishing a party or a programme. This retreat from the call for a clarification of nationalist aims is taken one step further in September 1929 when Jünger responds to an invitation from a left-wing journal, Das Tagebuch, to write about his ‘young nationalism’. Jünger begins with a by-now familiar rejection of the traditional tenets of German nationalism and immediately goes on to state:
Let me just say for the benefit if those who cannot do without having it put into words that nationalism, inasmuch as it is a political phenomenon, has as its goal a state which embraces all Germans and which is based on national, social, military and authoritative principles. These are of course words which must be given meaning by life itself, I am convinced that nationalism has enough energy at its disposal to get by without any dogma at all.Jünger thus reaches the point where he feels obliged to suggest that nationalism is in part something other than a political force, and where even the four pillars – the most constant element of his nationalism – are restated only reluctantly and appear to be ranked with the dogma he repudiates. Why should Jünger and his fellow new nationalists change their minds on these central issues between 1925 and 1929?
Part of the explanation for the change of attitude is to be found in a debate on what the contents of a nationalist programme should be – a debate initiated by an article Jünger wrote in June 1926 and in which he calls upon nationalists to form a united front. The new nationalists clearly felt pushed into formulating a political programme in the mid-twenties after the failure of the military assault on the state in the form of the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.
p. 74-5
In his call for a programme Jünger says that after the war nationalists saw the things the stood for apparently sink to miserable depths. They needed to retain their belief that the sacrifices they had made served some profound purpose. Jünger goes on to say that the resolved to cling to tradition, but now he strikes out in a new direction by asserting that nationalists have found a new meaning to the word ‘tradition’: it is no longer a ‘fixed form’ but the ‘living and eternal spirit’ which each generation must shape anew. The idea of a fixed form seems to hark back to Spengler, for whom it is a feature of a moribund civilisation, and by using it Jünger is pointing out the futility of upholding traditional nationalism in the postwar world. The race that was transformed by the war must fight to establish a new state based on the four pillars of nationalism. This state will be radically different not only from Weimar but also from the old Kaiserreich, for nationalism is not reactionary but revolutionary. Jünger sees the four principles of a future nationalist state becoming a basic feature of all non-parliamentary nationalist groups, and he declares that the finer points f these principles are still being clarified. Individual nationalist movements are not large enough to operate independently and the time is therefore approaching when they must form a nationalist front around a clear and decisive programme.
A social programme must be worked out since its absence is causing concern to nationalist workers’ leaders: Jünger suggests hat nationalist workers should be left to conduct the economic battle while nationalist soldiers lead the struggle for power. The workers will be supported in their battle by nationalists who took leave of ‘bourgeois ideology’ in the war. Former bourgeois and Marxists will thus stand shoulder to shoulder. Finally, in the absence of a single great leader, a central council of leaders should be formed in order to maintain the purity and clarity of the movement.
In short, Jünger is attempting to make the nationalist groups confront what he saw as the crucial problem of cutting loose from traditional nationalism with its monarchist beliefs and founds a new nationalism which would set out to win over the workers.
p. 75-6
In an attempt to take the revolutionary nationalists beyond a purely negative stance, their leaders repeatedly call for the single great personality who can provide the movement with unity and direction. But, in the absence of such a leader, aims remain vague and centre upon Germany recovering its position as a leader in world politics; the frequently invoked terms ‘new beginning’ and ‘turning-point’ merely underline the inability of the writers to generate a positive programme.
p. 81
Moreover his [Jünger’s] original call for a united nationalist front around a clear programme gives way in his concluding article to a nationalism which is a ‘single movement’ but progressing ‘along different routes’. Nationalism is now an aim which cannot be defined in a programme but is ‘engraved in the heart’ of every committed nationalist. Here Jünger is taking a step back from rational debate, and it seems reasonable to conclude that this step reflects his realisation that the nationalist debate has largely failed. Indeed, in his closing article he reaches the point where debate and action are practically alternatives: words and blood, programmes and fighting units are set against each other, and the former lose too the latter. The attempt to evolve a revolutionary programme gives way to a revolutionary stance whose aims are not articulated.
p. 82
In ‘Die zwei Tyrannen’ [Arminius, 13 March 1927] he [Jünger] looks back to the calls for unity of the previous year and says that it was both right and wrong to assume that there was basic agreement about the aims of the nationalist movement. In domestic politics there was certainly no agreement, yet Jünger does see unanimity about the aim of foreign policy: a strong, independent Reich, secure against the outside world. If the threat of an attack from abroad will always be the greatest force for unity within Germany the second greatest force is an outstanding personality.
p. 83
In what can only be a criticism of National Socialism Jünger goes on to state that the present attempts to find new values are welcome but they are not succeeding. One cannot assert superiority by an act of will since superiority is basically existential. Nor can one artificially cultivate or proclaim a heroic philosophy, for what is innate in the hero degenerates when seized upon by the masses. The same is true of race and the “total state”.
p. 120
Regardless of individual Conservative Revolutionary criticism of the Nazis, the deeper commitment to activism, strong leadership, hierarchy and a disregard for political programmes persists. These features suggest that the detail of the responses to National Socialism which we have traced in Jünger and Spengler are significant for the Conservative revolution as a whole. Unresolved political dilemmas result in an activism and in an interest in hierarchy which means that there can be no fundamental objection to the National Socialist assumption of power.
p. 134
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