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Category: Philosophy of history

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James Mason Philosophy of history

New witches’ brew

A commenter in the thread of my last post has reminded me an important article on Christian ethics he published online last year (here). Now that I reread some passages of that article this one—:

The doctrine of eternal damnation is surely the most pernicious notion in all the long annals of human history

—makes me think: Can you imagine the level of guilt of a white person who believed this stuff and then abandons Christianity? This is my point: once on a secular level Christian ethics transforms itself into ethnosuicide even if the Jewish help for such ‘assisted suicide’ was not robust. It reminds me my old witches’ brew formula but with a new ingredient (in bold type):
Individualism, universalism, weak ethnocentrism—‘hardwired’ characteristics in the White psyche since prehistoric times—plus egalitarianism, liberalism, capitalism—cultural ‘software’ after the Revolution which ironically strengthened Christian ethics—plus the empowerment of Jewry since the times of Napoleon and the foundation myth after WW2 has created a lethal brew for the white peoples.
This last ingredient proved so fatal that in his interview with Tom Metzger, James Mason said: ‘With the death of Adolf Hitler in the close of the 2nd World War in 1945 Western civilization, as it had existed and is still perceived died once and for all. The only thing that was left now was a gene pool.’

Categories
Ancient Greece Bible Day of Wrath (book) Homer Oracle of Delphi Philosophy of history Pre-Columbian America Psychohistory Psychology

Day of Wrath, 5

Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind


In recent decades several historians without any link to the deMausean school have written about thirty books on histories of childhood. I will mention only a couple of those published in 2005: When Children Became People by Odd Magne Bakke and Growing Up: The History of Childhood in a Global Context by Peter Stearns. DeMause has iteratively complained that books of this sort are presented to history students as if childrearing in the past had been as benign as Western childrearing in our times. Stearns for example is author and editor of more than forty books, but he attempts to absolve the parents by claiming that infanticide had an economic motivation; when it is well documented that in some periods infanticide was more common in well-off families.
Psychogenesis is the process of the evolution of empathy, and, therefore, of childrearing forms in an innovative group of human beings. In a particular individual it is an evolution of the architecture of his or her mentality, including the cognition of how the world is perceived. A “quantum leap” in “psychoclasses” depends on the parents’ breaking away from the abusive patterns in which they were educated; for example, stop killing their children: a prehistoric and historic practice that deMause calls “early infanticidal childrearing.”
A fascinating essay by Julian Jaynes throws light on how, by the end of the second millennium before our era, a huge alteration occurred in human mentality. In 1976 Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes calls “breakdown” the transit of bicameral mind—two chambers or brain hemispheres—to modern consciousness. The transit is relatively recent, and it represents a healing process from a divided self into a more unified or integrated one. Jaynes describes how society developed from a psychological structure based upon obedience to the god’s voices, to the subjective consciousness of present-day man. Like deMause’s psychohistory, Jaynes’ model caused many of his readers to see mankind from a new perspective. He elaborated a meta-narrative purporting to connect the loose pieces of previously unconnected fields—history, anthropology, ancient texts, psychiatry, language, poetry, neurology, religion, Hebrew and Greek studies, the art of ancestral societies, archaeological temples and cuneiform writing—to construct an enormous jigsaw puzzle.
Jaynes asked the bold question of whether the voices that people of the Ancient World heard could have been real, a common phenomenon in the hallucinated voices of present-day schizophrenics. He postulated that, in a specific lapse of history a metamorphosis of consciousness occurred from one level to another; that our present state of consciousness emerged a hundred or two hundred generations ago, and that previously human behavior derived from hearing voices in a world plagued with shamanism, magical thinking, animism and schizoidism.
In the Ancient World man had a bipartite personality: his mind was broken, bicameralized, schizophrenized. “Before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic,” Jaynes claims about those who heard voices of advice or guides attributed to dead chiefs, parents or known personages. “Often it is in times of stress when a parent’s comforting voice may be heard.” It seems that this psychic structure of a divided or bicameral self went back to cavemen. Later in the first cities, the period that deMause calls “late infanticidal childrearing” (Jaynes never mentions deMause or psychohistory), the voices were attributed to deities. “The preposterous hypothesis we have come to is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called god, and a follower part called man. Neither was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us.” Preconscious humans did not have an ego like ours; rational thought would spring up in a late stage of history, especially in Greece. However, orthodox Hellenists usually do not ask themselves why, for a millennium, many Greeks relied on instructions coming from a group of auditory hallucinating women in Delphi. To explain similar cultural phenomena, Jaynes lays emphasis upon the role that voices played in the identities, costumes and group interactions; and concludes that the high civilizations of Egypt, the Middle East, Homeric Greece and Mesoamerica were developed by a primitive unconscious.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind describes the theodicy in which, three thousand years ago, subjectivity and the ego flourished. For the common man consciousness is the state of awareness of the mind; say, the conscious state at walking. Jaynes uses the term in a more restricted way: consciousness as the subjective universe, the self-analyzing or self-conscious mind; the “I,” the will and morality of an individual, as well as the development of the linear concept of time (which used to be cyclic to the archaic mind, perhaps due to the observation of the stations of the year). The man who left behind his bicameral thinking developed a more robust sense of the self, and Jaynes finds narrative evidence of this acting self in the literary record. He examines Amos, the voice of the oldest Old Testament text and compares it with the Ecclesiastes, the most recent one. Likewise, Jaynes scrutinizes the Iliad looking for tracks of a subjective self, and finds nothing. The Homeric heroes did what Athena or Apollo told them; they literally heard their gods’ voices as the prophets listened to Yahweh’s. Their psyches did not display brightness of their own yet. (If we remember the metaphor of my first book, the mentality of ancient man was similar to what astronomers call a “maroon dwarf”: a failed star like Jupiter, not a sun with enough mass to cause nuclear fusion so that it could shine on its own.) Matters change with the texts of Odysseus’ adventures, and even more with the philosophers of the Ionian islands and of Athens. At last the individual had accumulated enough egocentric mass to explode and to shine by itself. Jaynes believes that it was not until the Greek civilization that the cataclysm that represented the psychogenic fusion consolidated itself.
By Solon’s times it may be said that the modern self, as we understand it, had finally exploded. The loquacious gods, including the Hebraic Yahweh, became silent never to speak again but through the bicameral prophets. After the breakdown of divine authority, with the gods virtually silenced in the times of the Deuteronomy, the Judean priests and governors embarked upon a frenetic project to register the legends and stories of the voices that, in times of yore, had guided them. It was no longer necessary to hallucinate sayings that the god had spoken: man himself was the standard upon which considerations, decisions, and behaviors on the world rested. In the dawning of history man had subserviently obeyed his gods, but when the voice of consciousness appears, rebelliousness, dissidence, and even heresy are possible.
Through his book, which may be called a treatise of psycho-archeology, Jaynes follows the track of how subjective consciousness emerged. His ambitious goal is to explain the birth of consciousness, and hence the origin of our civilization. Once the former “maroon dwarfs” achieve luminescence in a group of individuals’ selves, not only religious dissent comes about, but regicide, the pursuit of personal richness and, finally, individual autonomy. This evolution continues its course even today. Paradoxically, when the West reaches the stage that deMause calls “helping mode” in child-rearing, it entails ill-fated consequences such as Caucasian demographic dilution and the subsequent Islamization of Europe (as we will see).
Although Jaynes speculates that the breakdown of the bicameral mind could have been caused by crises in the environment, by ignoring deMause he does not present the specific mechanism that gave rise to the transition. Due to the foundational taboo of human species, explained by Alice Miller in my previous book and by Colin Ross in this one, Jaynes did not explore the decisive role played by the modes of childrearing. This blindness permeates The Origin of Consciousness to the point of giving credibility to the claims of biological psychiatry; for example, Jaynes believes in the genetic basis of schizophrenia, a pseudoscientific hypothesis, as shown in my previous essay. However, his thesis on bicameralism caused his 1976 essay to be repeatedly reprinted, including the 1993 Penguin Books edition and another edition with a 1990 afterword that is still in print.
In the bicameral kingdoms the hallucinated voices of ancient men were culturally accepted as part of the social fabric. But a psychogenic leap forward gives as much power to the new psychoclass as the Australopithecus character of 2001: A Space Odyssey grabbing a bone. “How could an empire whose armies had triumphed over the civilizations of half a continent be captured by a small band of 150 Spaniards in the early evening of November 16, 1532?” The conquest of the Inca Empire was one of a handful of military confrontations between the two states of consciousness. A deMausean interpretation would lead us to think that it was a clash between the infanticidal psychoclass and an intermediate state of ambivalent and intrusive modes of childrearing. The Spaniards were clearly up the scale of “psychogenic leaps” compared to the Incas.
This reading of history is diametrically opposed to Bartolomé de Las Casas, who in his Apologética Historia claimed that in some moral aspects the Amerindians were superior to the Spanish and even to Greeks and Romans. Today’s Western self-hatred had its precursor in Las Casas, who flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In identical fashion, in the 21st century it is irritating to see in educational TV programs an American in Peru saying that the Incas of the times of the Conquest “were much smarter than the Spanish.” The truth is that the Incas did not even know how to use the wheel and lacked written language. They literally heard their statues speak to them and their bicameral mind handicapped them before the more robust psyche of the Europeans: something like an Australopithecus clan clashing with another without bones in their hands. The Spaniards were, certainly, very religious; but not to the point of using magical thinking in their warfare stratagems. According to a 16th-century Spaniard, “the unhappy dupes believed the idols spoke to them and so sacrificed to it birds, dogs, their own blood and even men” (this quotation refers to Mesoamericans, the subject-matter of the next section). The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa believes that his ancestors were defeated due to a pragmatic and basically modern European mentality in contrast to the magical thinking of the natives; and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes wrote that the conquest of the American continent was a great triumph of the scientific hypothesis over the indigenous physical perception.
Jaynes overemphasizes that the prophets of the Old Testament literally heard Yahweh’s voice. Because the minds in the Ancient World, like present-day schizoid personalities, were swarmed with sources of hallucination, humans still lacked an inner space for retrospection and introspection. Bible scholars have debated at length about what could have caused the loss of prophecy gifts in the Hebrew people after the Babylonian exile. I would say that the elimination of the sacrificial practice of infants meant a leap toward a superior psychoclass, with the consequent overcoming of the schizoid or bicameral personality.
But going back to Jaynes: Formerly terrestrial and loquacious, the later mute gods were transported to a heaven, making room for human divination: the consultation of human beings that (for having been raised by more regressive parents I may infer) still heard the fateful voices. Even though the divine voices made themselves unnecessary for the new kind of human, praying continued to a god who was incapable, centuries ago, of communicating through divine voices.

The entire succession of [Old Testament] works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads. Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from The Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent.

Jaynes’ book is dense, closely argued, and despite its beautiful prose often boring. But the chapter on the Hebrew people titled “The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru” is must reading. If he is right, it was not until the fifth century before the Common Era when the bicameral mind began to be seen as the incapacitating disorder that is presently labeled as psychosis. In contrast to the mystic psychohistorian Robert Godwin, I am closer to Jaynes in that one of the most persistent residues of bicameralism is our religious heritage.
Jaynes, who died in 1997, may be the proverbial author of a single book, but many people continue to read The Origin of Consciousness. Tor Norretranders, a popular author on scientific subjects, expanded the bicameral hypothesis in a book published a year after Jaynes died, The User Illusion, and he cites more recent investigations than those collected by Jaynes.
 
Popperian falsifiability
Despite the book’s popularity and the fact that Jaynes taught in Princeton University and did archaeological work, his colleagues did not pay him much attention. Many academics reject theories that have been presented through literary books. It is understandable that a book with such lyric passages has been ignored by the dry science taught in the psychology departments; by neurobiologists, and by evolutionary theorists. Jaynes, basically a humanist, had not presented his theory in a scientific or falsifiable format.
Adepts of social sciences grant such authority to the hard sciences that, when they run across a text that emphasizes the humanities, they want to see everything translated to the language of science. They do this in spite of the fact that, in the reign of subjectivity, hard sciences are incapable of producing something truly significant. Notwithstanding this scientific demand, I concede that if we humanists make claims that could be interpreted as scientific hypotheses, it doesn’t hurt to present them in such a way that they may be refuted, if per chance they are wrong. Consequently, I must make it very clear that the trauma model is falsifiable.
For instance, it occurs to me that, if the model is correct, in the Israeli kibbutz children cannot be easily schizophrenized. The cause of this would be, naturally, that in the kibbutz they are put farther away from potentially schizophrenogenic parents than the children in nuclear families. Something similar could be said about Jaynes’ ideas. His hypothesis can be presented in falsifiable form always provided that the presentation is done through a deMausean interpretation of it, as we will see almost by the end of this book.
Once it is conceded that even humanists who venture into foreign lands can present their theories in falsifiable form, I must point out that very few academics, including psychologists, are willing to delve into the darkest chambers of the human psyche. To them it is disturbing that prehistoric man, and a good deal of the historic man including their ancestors, had behaved as marionettes of hallucinated voices or nonexistent gods. Jaynes’ ideas represent a serious challenge to history as it is officially understood and even more to religion, anthropology, and psychiatry. He seems to postulate that a scant connectivity of the two brain hemispheres produced voices, and that the changes in consciousness caused the brain to become more interconnected through the corpus callosum. In case I have interpreted him correctly, I am afraid it is not possible to run tomographs on those who died millennia ago to compare, say, the brain of the bicameral pythoness against the brain of the intellectual Solon. Let’s ignore this non-falsifiable aspect and focus on hypotheses that may be advanced by epidemiologists in the field of social sciences. Studying the changes of incidence patterns of child mistreatment through history or contemporary cultures is a perfectly falsifiable scientific approach.
In the book reviews of The Origin of Consciousness available on the internet it can be gathered that the experience of many readers was as electrifying as a midnight ray that allowed them to see, albeit for a split second, the human reality. If the ultimate test for any theory is to explain the most data in the simplest way, we should not ignore the psychohistories of Jaynes and deMause. If they are right, the explanatory power of an unified model would help us understand part of the human mystery, especially religion and psychosis.
 
___________
The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will publish here the section on schizophrenia theorist Silvano Arieti. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.

Categories
Miscegenation Philosophy of history Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Three-eyed raven, 6

The ultimate downfall of the Nordic conquerors in Asia, just as in the Mediterranean world, can be traced to an economic consideration and to an error in human judgment.
The economic consideration was that a conquered population, just like the land itself or the gold and other booty seized by the conquerors, had real value. Whether the people were enslaved or merely taxed as subjects, they were an economic resource which could be exploited by the conquerors. To drive them off the land or wipe them out completely would, from a strictly economic viewpoint, be akin to dumping captured gold into the ocean.
Such an action could be justified to a conquering tribe of Indo-Europeans only if they were willing to subordinate all economic considerations to the goal of maintaining their racial integrity into the indefinite future—and if they also had a sufficiently deep understanding of history to foresee the inevitability of racial mixing wherever two races are in close proximity. Unfortunately, even where the will for racial survival was very strong, the foresight was insufficient. Measures which were quite adequate to prevent racemixing for a few generations, or even for a few centuries, broke down over the course of a thousand years or more.
The foregoing remarks are especially well illustrated by the fate of a related group of Indo-European tribes whose members called themselves Aryans. Although the name “Aryan” is sometimes used to designate any person of Indo-European ancestry, it applies especially to the tribes which, beginning probably in the third millennium B.C., migrated eastward and southeastward from the ancient Nordic homeland, some going down through Turkistan and into Iran from the northeast—and some into the more easterly foothills of the Hindu Kush, in what is now Afghanistan.
The high Iranian plateau, much of it covered with grass, provided an ideal territory for the horsemen from the northern steppes. They multiplied and prospered, raiding their non-Indo-European neighbors in the Zagros Mountains or on the edge of the Sumerian plain from time to time, collecting slaves and booty. They maintained their racial purity scrupulously enough, however, so that, as late as the middle of the first millennium B.C., King Darius the Great could still proudly and truthfully boast: “I am an Aryan, the son of an Aryan.”
But Semites and other aliens became more numerous in Iran as the might and wealth of the Aryan Persians grew. In the reign of Darius’ son Xerxes, as we know from the Old Testament’s Book of Esther, Jews were already quite influential there. Today, 2,500 yeas later, the Iranians are no more Aryan than their Semitic neighbors, so thoroughly have the genes of the various races in that part of the world been mixed.
_______________
Note: The above quotations of William Pierce’s book are contextualized in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (available: here). If life permits, next week I will quote another passage from the pen of the American ‘Raven’.

Categories
Miscegenation Nordicism Philosophy of history Sparta (Lacedaemon) Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Three-eyed raven, 3

Indented paragraphs are taken from Who We Are by William Pierce:

The Dorians of Laconia organized the Peloponnesian population in a three-layered hierarchy. At the top were the citizens of Sparta, the Spartiates, all of pure Dorian blood, ruled by their kings. At the bottom of the social structure were the Helots, or serfs, consisting of the aboriginal Mediterranean elements as well as many of the conquered Achaeans of mixed blood. No Spartiate could engage in trade or practice a craft. The Perioeci handled all their commerce, and the Helots provided all their other needs…

It is easy to imagine the Spartiates, upon their arrival in Laconia, surveying the moral decadence and the racemixing which had made the Achaeans such an easy conquest for the Dorians, and then instituting a carefully designed program to safeguard themselves from a similar fate. For a time this program succeeded; the moral character and the racial quality of the Spartiates remained famously high. But ultimately it failed in both regards…

They should have done what the Hebrews did with non-Hebrews in Canaan: exterminate them all. And this is still the problem with white nationalism today. American WNsts are not even willing to recognize that in an ethnostate the citizen of the Aryan Republic should not be allowed to marry, say, a Sicilian American. In a true Aryan ethnostate that conquers North America, mudbloods should not even have the right to reproduce. WNsts are committing ethno-suicide as they are reluctant to scientifically define the subject of who is really white. (See the article in The Fair Race, “The new racial classification”.) Pierce continues:

The Spartiates never succumbed to racemixing, but they did succumb to their own lifestyle. They would have been well advised to eliminate the Helots of the Peloponnesus and the Mediterranean population of Crete altogether and to establish a purely Dorian peasant class in those areas. Then they may well have been able to practice a successful eugenics program, maintain their moral health, and have a stable population too. But, of course, they did not have the advantage which hindsight gives us.

The other Hellenic tribes did succumb to racemixing. Their populations did not suffer the decline in numbers which the Spartiates did, but they suffered a decline in racial quality which resulted in their extermination, perhaps more slowly but just as surely—and less cleanly.

Note: The above quotations of Pierce’s book are contextualized in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (available: here). If life permits, next Tuesday I will comment on another passage from the same visionary chapter on Greece coming from the pen of the American ‘Raven’.

Categories
Ancient Greece Miscegenation Nordicism Philosophy of history Portugal Swastika Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Three-eyed raven, 2

Indented paragraphs are taken from Who We Are by William Pierce:

The four centuries between the Dorian invasion and the flowering of the literate Classical civilization are referred to by most historians as “the Dark Age,” for much the same reasons that the period between the fall of Rome, more than fifteen centuries later, and the flowering of Mediaeval civilization is also called “the Dark Ages.”

In both cases a people of an older civilization, who had begun to succumb to racial mixing and decadence, was overwhelmed by a more vigorous and racially healthier but culturally less advanced people from the north. And in both cases a period of gestation took place over a dozen generations or so, during which a synthesis of old and new elements, racial and cultural, occurred, before a new and different civilization arose from the ruins of the old.

Unfortunately, most historians tacitly assume that the records of political and cultural activity which have come down to us from periods of civilized literacy provide all the data needed to yield an understanding of the historical process. The state of development and degree of organization and complexity of city life are taken as a yardstick by which to evaluate the significance or historical importance of a particular period. And if one’s standards of value are geared to such things as the volume of commerce, the gross national product, or even the intensity of scientific, literary, and artistic activity, such a yardstick may seem, at first glance, to be proper.

But there are other standards of value, such as those of the National Alliance, which differ somewhat from the customary ones. For it is not in the external forms of organization and activity of a people that we see the most important criteria for making a judgment as to the significance of a particular period, but rather in the actual racial constitution of a people and in the dynamic processes which, for better or worse, are influencing that racial constitution.

Unfortunately, those are not the standards of white nationalists. For instance, it is common among anti-nordicist WNsts to use the card of the Iberian conquests of the 16th century and the Iberian colonisation in the following centuries as proof that Iberians were equal to the English—completely ignoring the fact that in those centuries Iberians were polluting their blood both in the Americas and in the peninsula itself; in the case of Portugal, even with Negroes.

Although the basic racial constitution of a people is always intimately related to that people’s achievements in commerce, science, industry, art, politics, and warfare, still the two sets of criteria can lead to fundamentally different evaluations of a given historical period. This is a consequence of the fact that race building and decay are usually strongly out of phase with civilization building and decay.

Thus, the long ages between the periods of maximum civil activity—ages which the historian customarily ignores as being of only slight importance—may very well be periods of the greatest interest from a standpoint of racial dynamics.

It is, of course, true that the periods of maximum civil activity are precisely those which yield a maximum of written records, artifacts, and the other raw materials from which the historian builds his tale. But relative abundance of evidence should not be interpreted as equivalent to relative historical significance, regardless of the historian’s value criteria.

The record of the rise and fall of pure races constitutes the primary history of mankind, and the rise and fall of civilizations occupy a place of secondary importance. This statement may seem self-evident to those already accustomed to looking at history from a racial viewpoint, but it is by no means generally accepted by historians today. Until it is, much historical writing will continue to be flawed in a fundamental way.

This meta-perspective radically changed my normie POV of History. Now I see that the Early Middle Ages (or early medieval period), lasting from the 5th to the 10th century CE, is pivotal to understand Europe. Without the Raven’s powers of retro-cognition and his chapters on Greece and Rome, it would never have occurred to me that the periods when the race is consolidating in its purity are the fertile ground on which the best Aryan culture will grow. It is enough to compare English-speaking countries in this continent with those speaking Spanish and Portuguese to prove it. (Unlike ignorant white nationalists I don’t use “North America” because this term, in fact, includes Mexico.)

Something similar could be said about Europe. The anti-nordicism among many white nationalists is so religiously blind that they have not even been able to assimilate the genetic catastrophe that happened in Portugal. Anti-nordicism is one of the many reasons why I believe that white nationalism must die in the United States in the pursuit of a new religion for whites that embraces the ideals of German National Socialism.

Changing the subject, on Skype I have discussed with my friends about the Nazi symbols. Correct me if I am wrong: but it seems to me that you do not believe that we should use the symbols of the Germans of the last century.

My answer is that the swastika is a universal symbol for the Aryan race. Why not create a pro-white movement on both sides of the Atlantic using flags with the colours of the flag of each nation? From this angle, the swastika flag of American nationalists will include red, blue and white—in contrast to red, black and white in the flag that Hitler devised.

Note: The above quotations of Pierce’s book are contextualized in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (available: here). If life permits, next Tuesday I will comment on another passage from the same visionary chapter on Greece coming from the pen of the American Raven.

Categories
Democracy Neanderthalism Philosophy of history Zweites Buch

Zweites Buch, 4

Excerpted from “Elements of Foreign Policy,” Chapter 4 of Hitler’s Second Book. The whole chapter includes these subjects: Must learn from the past—Must forge the instruments for change to a fruitful German foreign policy—Correct ideas valueless unless translated into action—The Pan-German League—Necessity of taking risks—Policies must be carried out with vigor even if total success not guaranteed—Breaking the circle of enemies of Germany.
 
It is often terrible to see how little men want to learn from history, how with such imbecilic indifference they gloss over their experiences, how thoughtlessly they sin without considering that it is precisely through their sins that so and so many Nations and States have perished, indeed vanished from the Earth.

And indeed how little they concern themselves with the fact that even for the short time span for which we possess an insight into history, States and Nations have arisen which were sometimes almost gigantic in size, but which two thousand years later vanished without a trace, that world powers once ruled cultural spheres of which only Sagas give us any information, that giant cities have sunk into ruins, and that their rubble heap has hardly survived to show present-day mankind at least the site on which they were located.

The cares, hardships and sufferings of these millions and millions of individual men, who as a living substance were at one time the bearers and victims of these events, are almost beyond all imagination. Unknown men. Unknown soldiers of history.

And truly, how indifferent is the present. How unfounded its eternal optimism, and how ruinous its wilful ignorance, its incapacity to see, and its unwillingness to learn. And if it depended on the broad masses, the game of the child playing with the fire with which he is unfamiliar would repeat itself uninterruptedly and also to an infinitely greater extent.

Hence it is the task of men who feel themselves called as educators of a Folk to learn on their own from history, and to apply their knowledge in a practical manner now, without regard to the view, understanding, ignorance or even the refusal of the mass.

It is noteworthy that innumerable hygienic measures which perforce redound to the advantage of a Folk, and which individually are uncomfortable, must be formally forced upon the main body of a Folk through the autocratic standing of individual persons, in order however to disappear again when the authority of the personality is extinguished through the mass insanity of democracy.

Categories
Abortion Degeneracy Miscegenation Philosophy of history Sparta (Lacedaemon) Zweites Buch

Zweites Buch, 2

Excerpted from “The Necessity of Strife,” Chapter 2 of Hitler’s Second Book. The whole chapter includes these subjects: Territorial conquest is necessary for a people’s security and healthy growth—Morality of conquest: no one owns any part of the Earth—Birth control eugenically unsound—Spartan exposure logical—Emigration sacrifices best elements—Increase in productivity of no help competitively—Export trade vanishing as other nations modernize—Necessity of strife.
 
A Folk’s struggle for existence is first and foremost determined by the following fact: Regardless of how high the cultural importance of a Folk may be, the struggle for daily bread stands at the forefront of all vital necessities.

In general, the merely material interest will rise in exact proportion as ideal spiritual outlooks are in the process of disappearing. But the bread which a Folk requires is conditioned by the living space at its disposal. A healthy Folk, at least, will always seek to find the satisfaction of its needs on its own soil. Any other condition is pathological and dangerous, even if it makes possible the sustenance of a Folk for centuries.

The increase of population can be balanced only through an increase, that is, an enlargement, of living space.

Yet the regulation of the relation between population and territory is of tremendous importance for a nation’s existence. Indeed, we can justly say that the whole life struggle of a Folk, in truth, consists in safeguarding the territory it requires as a general prerequisite for the sustenance of the increasing population.

The sword was the path breaker for the plough. And if we want to talk about human rights at all, then in this single case war has served the highest right of all: it gave a Folk the soil which it wanted to cultivate industriously and honestly for itself, so that its children might some day be provided with their daily bread.

For this soil is not allotted to anyone, nor is it presented to anyone as a gift. It is awarded by Providence to people who in their hearts have the courage to take possession of it, the strength to preserve it, and the industry to put it to the plough.

Hence every healthy, vigorous Folk sees nothing sinful in territorial acquisition, but something quite in keeping with nature. The modern pacifist who denies this holy right must first be reproached for the fact that he himself at least is being nourished on the injustices of former times.

Finally, The present distribution of possessions on the Earth has not been designed by a higher power but by man himself. Anyone who would banish this struggle from the Earth forever would perhaps abolish the struggle between men, but he would also eliminate the highest driving power for their development…

The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses…

The present day European dreams of a living standard which he derives as much from the potentialities of Europe as from the actual conditions prevailing in America. International relations between nations have become so easy and close through modern technology and the communication it makes possible, that the European, often without being conscious of it, applies American conditions as a standard for his own life.

Regardless of how, for example, the land is distributed in Germany, whether in large or in small peasant holdings, or in plots for small settlers, this does not alter the fact that there are, on the average, 136 people to one square kilometre. This is an unhealthy relation. It is impossible to feed our Folk on this basis and under this premise. For the distress is not the result of a wrong kind of land distribution, say, but the consequence of the inadequate amount of space, on the whole, at the disposal of our nation today.

The more pure capitalist interests begin to determine the present economy, the more the general viewpoints of the financial world and the stock exchange achieve a decisive influence here, the more will this system of branch establishments reach out and thus artificially carry out the industrialisation of former commodity markets and especially curtail the export possibilities of the European mother countries. Today many can still afford to smile over this future development, but as it makes further strides, within thirty years people in Europe will groan under its consequences.

Since all great nations today are industrial nations, the so called peaceful economic conquest of the world is nothing but the struggle with means which will remain peaceful for as long as the stronger nations believe they can triumph with them, that is, in reality for as long as they are able to kill the others with peaceful economics. For this is the real result of the victory of a nation with peaceful economic means over another nation. Thereby one nation receives possibilities of survival and the other nation is deprived of them. Even here what is at stake is always the substance of flesh and blood, which we designate as a Folk.

The danger to a Folk of economic activity in an exclusive sense lies in the fact that it succumbs only too easily to the belief that it can ultimately shape its destiny through economics.

A special danger of the so called peaceful economic policy, however, lies above all in the fact that it makes possible an increase in the population, which finally no longer stands in any relation to the productive capacity of its own soil to support life.

This overfilling of an inadequate living space with people not seldom also leads to the concentration of people in work centres which look less like cultural centres, and rather more like abscesses in the national body in which all evil, vices and diseases seem to unite.

Above all, they are breeding grounds of blood mixing and bastardisation, and of race lowering, thus resulting in those purulent infection centres in which the international Jewish racial maggots thrive and finally effect further destruction.

Precisely thereby is the way open to decay in which the inner strength of such a Folk swiftly disappears, all racial, moral and folk values are earmarked for destruction, ideals are undermined, and in the end the prerequisite which a Folk urgently needs in order to take upon itself the ultimate consequences of the struggle for world markets is eliminated.

They have no strength to break the chains of the enemy, and no inner value with which to bear their fate with dignity. Once they believed they could live, thanks to their peaceful economic activity, and renounce the use of violence. Fate will teach them that in the last analysis a Folk is preserved only when population and living space stand in a definite natural and healthy relation to each other…

Politics is the art of carrying out a Folk’s struggle for its earthly existence.

Foreign policy is the art of safeguarding the momentary, necessary living space, in quantity and quality, for a Folk.

Domestic policy is the art of preserving the necessary employment of force for this in the form of its race value and numbers.

Categories
Philosophy of history Zweites Buch

Zweites Buch, 1

Excerpted from “War and Peace,” Chapter 1 of Hitler’s Second Book. The whole chapter includes these subjects: History is the story of peoples’ struggles for existence—Peace and war as means of waging the struggle—Neither should be the sole means—Too much war kills off the elite—Too much peace leads to submissiveness and emigration.
 
In the times before man, world history was primarily a presentation of geological events: the struggle of natural forces with one another, the creation of an inhabitable surface on this planet, the separation of water from land, the formation of mountains, of plains, and of the seas.

Later, with the emergence of organic life, man’s interest concentrated on the process of becoming and the passing away of its thousandfold forms.

And only very late did man finally become visible to himself, and thus by the concept of world history he began to understand first and foremost only the history of his own becoming, that is, the presentation of his own evolution. This evolution is characterised by an eternal struggle of men against beasts and against men themselves. From the invisible confusion of the organisms there finally emerged formations: Clans, Tribes, Folks, States. The description of their origins and their passing away is but the representation of an eternal struggle for existence.

If, however, politics is history in the making, and history itself the presentation of the struggle of men and nations for self preservation and continuance, then politics is, in truth, the execution of a nation’s struggle for existence. But politics is not only the struggle of a nation for its existence as such; for us men it is rather the art of carrying out this struggle.

Since history as the representation of the hitherto existing struggles for existence of nations is at the same time the petrified representation of politics prevailing at a given moment, it is the most suitable teacher for our own political activity.

If the highest task of politics is the preservation and the continuance of the life of a Folk, then this life is the eternal stake with which it fights, for which and over which this struggle is decided. Hence its task is the preservation of a substance made of flesh and blood. Its success is the making possible of this preservation. Its failure is the destruction, that is, the loss of this substance.

Consequently, politics is always the leader of the struggle for existence, the guide of the same, its organiser, and its efficacy will, regardless of how man formally designates it, carry with it the decision as to the life or death of a Folk…

Therefore, wise political leaders of a Folk will never see in war the aim of the life of a Folk, but only a means for the preservation of this life. It must educate the human material entrusted to it to the highest manhood, but rule it with the highest conscientiousness.

If necessary, when a Folk’s life is at stake, they should not shrink from daring to shed blood to the utmost, but they must always bear in mind that peace must one day again replace this blood.

Wars which are fought for aims that, because of their whole nature, do not guarantee a compensation for the blood that has been shed, are sacrileges committed against a nation, a sin against a Folk’s future.

The culture of European Folks rests on the foundations which its infusion of Nordic blood has created in the course of centuries. Once the last remains of this Nordic blood are eliminated, the face of European culture will be changed, the value of the States decreasing, however, in accordance with the sinking value of the Folks…

The peasant youth who emigrated to America 150 years ago was as much the most determined and most adventurous man in his village as the worker who today goes to Argentina.[1] However, the positive gain for the new country is thus a loss for the mother country.

The fundamentally peaceful policy, with the subsequent bleeding to death of a nation through emigration and birth control, is likewise all the more catastrophic the more it involves a Folk which is made up of racially unequal elements.

For in this case as well the best racial elements are taken away from the Folk through emigration, whereas through birth control in the homeland it is likewise those who in consequence of their racial value have worked themselves up to the higher levels of life and society who are at first affected. Gradually then their replenishment would follow out of the bled, inferior broad masses, and finally, after centuries, lead to a lowering of the whole value of the Folk altogether. Such a nation will have long ceased to possess real life vitality.

Thus a policy which is fundamentally peaceful will be precisely as harmful and devastating in its effects as a policy which knows war as its only weapon.

Politics must fight about the life of a Folk, and for this life; moreover, it must always choose the weapons of its struggles so that life in the highest sense of the word is served. For one does not make politics in order to be able to die, rather one may only at times call upon men to die so that a nation can live.

The aim is the preservation of life and not heroic death, or even cowardly resignation.

___________________

[1] Between 1885 and the First World War, more than 100,000 German speaking immigrants settled in Argentina.

Categories
Ancient Rome Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (book) Hellstorm Holocaust Nordicism Philosophy of history Vladimir Putin

Ahistorical simpletons

The following is the introduction
to the seventh part of the forthcoming
2017 edition of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour.

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Part VII:

National Socialism

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK:

Ahistorical simpletons

 
Richard Spencer, a white nationalist leader who coined the term “Alternative Right,” drew considerable media attention in the weeks following Donald Trump’s election.

Spencer wants a sort of New Roman Empire throughout Europe that would admit any European of Caucasoid background. In a December 2016 interview by Millennial Woes Spencer said that a southern Italian with European consciousness was whiter to him than an Afghan Aryan. He added: “We should not get into these tedious discussions about who is and who is not white. I definitely have a broader definition of that and this includes Slavs; it includes obviously central and western Europeans, Latins, Germans. It is a big family in my view.” Take note that the “Latins” Spencer refers to would not be considered such by the genuine Latins, the patricians of Republican Rome (cf. the essay “Were the Greeks and Romans blond and blue-eyed?” by Evropa Soberana reproduced in this book).

We can safely surmise that Spencer has not reflected about William Pierce’s Who We Are, excerpted in Part III, or about the whys of the decline of Sparta in previous pages: identical causes of the decline of Rome, as we saw also in Part V. Nor does he seem to know that some “western Europeans” (his term), the Portuguese, stained their blood with Negroes, as we saw in Ray Smith’s “The black man’s gift to Portugal.” Like most white nationalists, Spencer repudiates any distinction between genuine whites and those Europeans who have their bloodline seriously compromised. They ignore that Rome fell because it became a machine of miscegenation during its imperial stage. If implemented in a new European empire, as Spencer dreams, his “big family” amnesty would result in the extinction of the remaining whites of Scandinavia, Germany, Britain and those small European nations with predominately White Nordid and Red Nordid genes.

Alt-Right and white nationalism, the steppingstones at the middle of a very dangerous river, can easily become fatal traps if dissidents from the other side remain there more than enough. Spencer himself, who wants to dismiss Nazism and reinvent the wheel, has married a woman who clearly is a mudblood. But Nazism cannot be dismissed so easily even while the controlled media continually demonizes it. As implied in Part II of this book, to reach the solid ground we must read the revisionist literature about what really happened before, during and after the Second World War. Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, also reviewed in Part II, will detonate an atomic bomb in the shocked reader. Only after emotionally assimilating Hellstorm, and perhaps The Gulag Archipelago, will the reader be ready to close the gap across the dangerous river. (Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus will sober up those incredibly naïve white nationalists who have become infatuated with Russia.)

Instead of jumping off from the steppingstones as a result of a serious reading of the disturbing literature mentioned above, Spencer et al remain stagnated at the middle of the flowing watercourse. I am writing this page the month prior of the inauguration of Donald Trump, and I’m not prepared to judge his presidency before his first hundred days in office. But many white nationalists have become infatuated not only by Trump but by Vladimir Putin: a man who, if we apply the criterion of the new racial classification, clearly shows an Armenid chin and eye mongolization.

The non-Aryan Putin has passed regulations proscribing “Holocaust denial” while discouraging discussion about the Ukrainian Holodomor committed by Bolshevik Jews, a discussion that his government calls Nazi revisionism. Putin has also been accused of bringing masses of Central Asians into traditionally Russian lands: precisely the tactics of the western elites to genocide their native population. A dissident voice that at The Occidental Observer has been trying to communicate with mentally blinded nationalists once told them: “Russian imperialism, like American imperialism, Christianity and Islam, is a mighty engine of miscegenation: an engine that has been chugging along since the Middle Ages. Like the First Rome and the Second Rome, the Third Rome is not a nation: it’s a machine that liquidates every nation it captures.” In other words these “Romes” committed ethnosuicide, and the extreme reluctance of white nationalists to study the histories of their own race turns them all into ahistorical simpletons.

My essay “Ethnosuicidal nationalists” can be read in my blog. Instead of the suicidal tendencies endemic among white nationalists, what the remaining White Nordids need is a great mythological narrative. The narrative is none other than National Socialism, and we could start our First Class with the very first page of a booklet addressed to the German children and adolescents when, psychogenically, Europe reached its peak.

Categories
Arthur de Gobineau Charles Darwin Hans F. K. Günther Miscegenation Nordicism Philosophy of history Racial studies

The Nordic ideal

by Hans Günther

 
Editor’s Note: “The Nordic ideal: A result of the anthropological view of history,” is the last chapter of The Racial Elements of European History by Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, translated to English in 1927. Günther was professor of race science in Berlin during the Third Reich.  

______ 卐 ______

 
guntherIf degeneration (that is, a heavy increase in inferior hereditary tendencies) and denordization (that is, disappearance of the Nordic blood) have brought the Asiatic and south European peoples of Indo-European speech to their decay and fall, and if degeneration and denordization now, in turn, threaten the decay and fall of the peoples of Germanic speech, then the task is clearly to be seen which must be taken in hand, if there is still enough power of judgment left: the advancement of the peoples of Germanic speech will be brought about through an increase of the valuable and healthy hereditary tendencies, and an increase of the Nordic blood. The works on general eugenics show how the valuable hereditary tendencies can be increased. Here, therefore, we will only deal with the question of the renewal of the Nordic element.

The French Count Arthur Gobineau (1816-82), was the first to point out in his work, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-5), the importance of the Nordic race for the life of the peoples. Count Gobineau, too, was the first to see that, through the mixture of the Nordic with other races, the way was being prepared for what today (with Spengler) is called the “Fall of the West”. Gobineau’s personality as investigator and poet (“all the conquering strength of this man”) has been described by Schemann, and it is, thanks to Schemann, through his foundation in 1894 of the Gobineau Society (to further Gobineau’s ideas), and through his translation of the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, which appeared 1898-1901, that Gobineau’s name and the foundations he traced for the Nordic ideal have not fallen into forgetfulness. The very great importance of Gobineau’s work in the history of the culture of our day is shown by Schemann in his book, Gobineaus Rassenwerk (1910).

It is evident that Gobineau’s work on race, which was carried out before investigations into race had reached any tangible results, is in many of its details no longer tenable today. The basic thought of this work, however, stands secure. From the standpoint of racial science we may express ourselves as to Gobineau’s work in somewhat the same way as Eugen Fischer, the anthropologist: “The racial ideal must and will force its way, if not quite in the form given it by Gobineau, at any rate from the wider point of view quite in his sense; he was the great forerunner.”

The turn of the century, when Schemann’s translation appeared, may be said to be the time from which onwards a certain interest in racial questions was aroused. About the same time, too, in 1899, appeared the work which for the first time brought the racial ideal, and particularly the Nordic ideal, into the consciousness of a very wide circle through the enthusiasm, and also the opposition, which it aroused: this work was The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by H. S. Chamberlain (born 1855), at that time an Englishman, now a German. On this work from the standpoint of racial science we may pass a judgment somewhat like that of Eugen Fischer: “Undeterred by the weak foundations of many details, and recklessly changing even well-established conceptions to serve his purpose, he raises a bold structure of thought, which thus naturally offers a thousand points for attack, so that the real core of the matter escapes attack—and it would stand against it.”

Since the works of Gobineau and Chamberlain appeared, many investigators, in the realms of natural and social science, have devoted themselves eagerly to bringing light into racial questions, so that today not only the core of the theory both of Gobineau and of Chamberlain stands secure, but also much new territory has been won for an ideal of the Nordic race. A new standpoint in history, the “racial historical standpoint,” is shaping itself.

The Nordic race ideal naturally meets with most attention among those peoples which today still have a strong strain of Nordic blood, of whom some are even still very predominantly Nordic—that is, among the peoples of Germanic speech in Europe and North America. It is unlikely that Gobineau’s thought will find a home among the peoples of Romance speech, even though the first scientific work from the racial historical standpoint, L’Aryen, son rôle social (which likewise appeared in 1899), has a Frenchman, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, for its author. Denordization has probably already gone too far in France also. Any great attention towards race questions is unlikely, too, among peoples of Slav speech.

But the result was bound to be that in all those peoples who came to know Gobineau’s theory there were some persons who were deeply moved by them. Since the end of last century we can, as was said above, even speak of a growing interest in race questions, although we cannot yet speak of a spread of clear ideas. Following the terms used by Gobineau and Chamberlain, we come here and there upon more or less clear conceptions of the need for keeping the “Germanic” blood pure, or (following Lapouge) of keeping the “Aryan” blood pure. In this way the door is always left wide open to the confusion of race and people or of racial and linguistic membership, and a clear definition of aims is impossible. What was (and still is) lacking is a knowledge of the conception of “race”, and a knowledge of the races making up the Germanic peoples (that is, peoples speaking Germanic tongues) and the Indo-European peoples (that is, peoples speaking Indo- European tongues). There was (and still is) lacking a due consideration of the racial idiotype (hereditary formation) of the Nordic man, as the creator of the values which characterize the culture of the Indo-European (“Aryan”) and the Germanic peoples. A racial anthropology of Europe could not be written in Gobineau’s time. Many detailed investigations were still needed.

But more was (and is still) wanting: Gobineau, like his contemporaries, had as yet no knowledge of the importance of selection for the life of peoples. The Nordic race may go under without having been mixed with other races, if it loses to other races in the competition of the birth-rate, if in the Nordic race the marriage rate is smaller, the marrying age higher, and the births fewer. Besides an insight into the “unique importance of the Nordic race” (Lenz) there must be also a due knowledge of the laws of heredity and the phenomena of selection, and this knowledge is just beginning to have its deeper effect on some of the members of various nations.

Maupertius (1744, 1746) and Kant (1775, 1785, 1790) had been the first to point out the importance of selection for living beings. But the influence of the conception of selection only really begins to show itself after the foundations of modern biology were laid by Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. The conception of selection was bound to have an effect on the view taken of the destiny of the peoples. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911), the “father of eugenics,” was the first to see this. He was the first to show that it is not environment but heredity which is the decisive factor for all living beings, and therefore for man too, and drew the outlines of a theory of eugenics in the knowledge that the improvement of a people is only possible by a sensible increase of the higher hereditary qualities. But it took nearly forty years for Galton’s importance to be rightly understood and for his work to bear fruit.

Galton’s views had as yet no scientific theory of heredity on which to build. This was created in its main outlines by Johann Mendel (1822-84), an Augustinian father in Brünn (in religion he was known as Gregor), whose life-work, after its recovery in 1900, had so deep an effect that research after research was undertaken, and today a wide-embracing science of heredity stands secure.

Through researches such as these Gobineau’s teachings received a deeper meaning, and found fresh support from all these sources, from the sciences of heredity, eugenics, and race: the Nordic movement was born. It had to come into being in those countries where there was still enough Nordic blood running in the peoples to make a Nordic new birth possible. Thus in Germany societies have been founded aiming at the propagation of the Nordic ideal; thus societies of the same kind have been founded in the United States; and such societies would seem sometimes to go beyond these countries.

If the Nordic ideal in Germany has been active longer than in other countries, it would seem, owing to the splitting up of its followers into small groups, and to put a bar on the unwished-for immigration from south and east Europe. Immigration from Asia, and the immigration of undesirables in general, is forbidden. Grant himself has been chosen as vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League. It may be presumed that the Immigration Laws as now passed are only the first step to still more definite laws dealing with race and eugenics. In North America, especially, where there is the opportunity to examine the races and racial mixtures of Europe from the point of view of their civic worth, the importance of the Nordic race could not stay hidden. Leading statesmen have seen the importance of this race, and are proclaiming their knowledge. In North America a significant change is taking place in our own day: Europe as an area of emigration is no longer looked at in the light of its states or peoples, but in the light of its races. How Germany (or the pick of German emigrants) in this regard strikes America, may be seen from the fact that Germany, as a land of emigrants, is the most highly favoured of all European countries.

The peril of denordization (Finis Americae, Grant) has been recognized by many Americans since Grant’s book appeared. Associations have been formed among the Nordic and predominantly Nordic Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent, such as “The Nordic Guard,” and among Americans of German descent (“The Nordic Aryan Federation,” and so on). Some of the Nordic-minded North Americans seem to have joined together in co-operative unions, so as to make themselves gradually economically independent of big capital in non-Nordic hands. It would seem as though the Nordic-minded sections of North America had begun with great forethought and efficiency to take steps for the maintenance and increase of Nordic blood. A better insight, however, is perhaps still needed into the importance of the birth-rate for all such aims.

When it is remembered that the Nordic ideal in Germany had taken root here and there as long ago as the end of last century, we do not get, on the whole, from the Nordic strivings of this country that picture of unity and purpose which is shown by North America. However, we must not overlook the economically very straitened circumstances in which the German followers of the Nordic ideal, who in greatest part belong to the middle classes, find themselves—circumstances which are always piling up hindrances to any forward striving. The hindrances, however, in the path of a Nordic movement lie partly in the German nature itself, in the splitting up into small exclusive groups each with its own “standpoint,” which is found over and over again. This splitting up is the reason why the “societies for the defence of the Nordic race” (Ploetz) in Germany can only be looked on as the beginning of an interest in race questions, and why we must agree with Ploetz when he speaks of these “defensive societies” as being “considerably poorer in membership and influence than those of the Jews”; indeed, we cannot yet speak of any “influence” of the Nordic ideal.

These endeavours along Nordic lines, however, are not to be undervalued as tokens of an awakening attention to race questions. Those among the youth who have been gripped by the Nordic ideal have already done much to spread their views, even under the crushing conditions of today in Germany, and in spite of the lack of money. The beginnings may be humble, but the deep change is full of importance; “Individualism,” so highly prized in the nineteenth century, and still loudly proclaimed by yesterday’s generation, is coming to an end. The stress laid on each man’s individuality, which up till yesterday was proclaimed with the resounding shout of “Be thyself,” has become a matter of doubt, even of contempt, to a newer generation. It set me pondering, when, during the writing of this book, the statement of the aims of a “Young Nordic Association” reached me, in which I find the following sentence: “We wish to keep the thought always before us that, if our race is not to perish, it is a question not only of choosing a Nordic mate, but over and above this, of helping our race through our marriage to a victorious birth-rate.”

Up to the other day such a view of life would not have met with any understanding, and to yesterday’s generation it must still seem beyond comprehension. The present age, indeed, was brought up amidst the ideas of the “natural equality of all men,” and of the distinct individuality of each one of us (“Individualism,” “Cultivation of personality”). When we look back today, we are astonished to see how long the biologically untenable theories of the Age of Enlightenment and of Rousseau (1712-78) could hold the field, and how, even today, they determine the attitude towards life of great masses of men, although men like Fichte and Carlyle had already gone beyond such views. Although really discredited, the ideas of equality and individualism still hold the field, since they satisfy the impulses of an age of advanced degeneration and denordization, or at least hold out hopes of doing so, and yield a good profit to those exploiting this age. If, without giving any heed to the definitions of current political theories, we investigate quite empirically what is the prevailing idea among the Western peoples of the essential nature of a nation, we shall find that by a nation no more is generally understood than the sum of the now living citizens of a given State. We shall find, further, that the purpose of the State is generally held to be no more than the satisfaction of the daily needs of this sum of individuals, or else only of the sum of individuals who are banded together to make up a majority. The greatest possible amount of “happiness” for individuals is to be won by majority decisions.

Racial and eugenic insight brings a different idea of the true nature of a people. A people is then looked upon as a fellowship with a common destiny of the past, the living, and the coming generations—a fellowship with one destiny, rooted in responsibility towards the nation’s past, and looking towards its responsibility to the nation’s future, to the coming generations. The generation living at any time within such a people is seen by the Nordic ideal as a fellowship of aims, which strives for an ever purer presentment of the Nordic nature in this people. It is thus only that the individual takes a directive share in the national life through his active responsibility. But in this fellowship of aims it is the predominantly Nordic men who have the heaviest duties: “O, my brothers, I dedicate and appoint you to a new nobility: ye shall become my shapers and begetters, and sowers of the future” (Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra).

The striving that can be seen among the youth for an “organic” philosophy of life—that is, a philosophy sprung from the people and the native land, bound up with the laws of life, and opposed to all “individualism”—must in the end bind this youth to the life of the homeland and of its people, just as the German felt himself bound in early times, to whom the clan tie was the very core of his life. It could be shown that the old German view of life was so in harmony with the laws of life that it was bound to increase the racial and eugenic qualities of the Germans, and that, with the disappearance of this view of life in the Middle Ages, both the race and the inheritance of health were bound to be endangered. And a Nordic movement will always seek models for its spiritual guidance in the old Germanic world, which was an unsullied expression of the Nordic nature.

In the nations of Germanic speech the Nordic ideal still links always with popular traditions handed down from Germanic forbears whose Nordic appearance and nature is still within the knowledge of many. Unexplained beliefs, unconscious racial insight, are always showing themselves; this is seen in the fact that in Germany a tall, fair, blue-eyed person is felt to be a “true German,” and in the fact that the public adoption offices in Germany are asked by childless couples wishing to adopt children far oftener for fair, blue-eyed, than for dark ones. The Nordic ideal as the conception of an aim has no difficulty in taking root within the peoples of Germanic speech, for in these peoples the attributes of the healthy, capable, and high-minded, and of the handsome man, are more or less consciously still summed up in the Nordic figure. Thus the Nordic ideal becomes an ideal of unity: that which is common to all the divisions of the German people—although they may have strains of other races, and so differ from one another—is the Nordic strain. What is common to northern and to southern England—although the south may show a stronger Mediterranean strain—is the Nordic strain. It is to be particularly noted that in the parts of the German-speaking area which are on the whole predominantly Dinaric, and in Austria, too, the Nordic ideal has taken root, and unions of predominantly Nordic men have been formed.

Thus a hope opens out for some union among the peoples of Germanic speech; what is common to these peoples, although they may show strains of various races, is the Nordic strain. If the Nordic ideal takes root within them, it must necessarily come to be an ideal of harmony and peace. Nothing could be a better foundation and bulwark of peace among the leading peoples than the awakening of the racial consciousness of the peoples of Germanic speech. During the Great War Grant had written that this was essentially a civil war, and had compared this war in its racially destructive effects to the Peloponnesian War between the two leading Hellenic tribes. The Nordic-minded men within the peoples of Germanic speech must strive after such an influence on the governments and public opinion, that a war which has so destroyed the stock of Nordic blood as the Great War has done shall never again be possible, nor a war in the future into which the nations are dragged in the way described by Morhardt, the former president of the French League for the Rights of Man, in his book, Les preuves (Paris, 1925). The Nordic ideal must widen out into the All-Nordic ideal; and in its objects and nature the All-Nordic ideal would necessarily be at the same time the ideal of the sacredness of peace among the peoples of Germanic speech.

In the war of today, and still more in that of tomorrow, there can no longer be any thought of a “prize of victory” which could outweigh the contra-selection necessarily bound up with any war. For any one who has come to see this, it seems very doubtful whether even the most favourable political result of a contest deserves to be called a “victory,” if the fruits of this “victory” fall to those elements of a nation who, as a result of their hereditary qualities, have slipped through the meshes of the modern war-sieve. The real victims in any future war between the Great Powers, whether in the losing or in the “winning” nation, are the hereditary classes standing out by their capacity in war and spirit of sacrifice. It will be one of the tasks of the followers of the Nordic ideal to bring this home to their peoples and governments.

If this prospect of a political influence wielded by the Nordic ideal seems today a very bold forecast, yet the task of bringing about a Nordic revival seems to arise very obviously from the history of the (Indo-European) peoples under Nordic leadership, as the most natural ideal to set against the “decline” which today is also threatening the peoples of Germanic speech. There is no objection against the Nordic ideal which can be given any weight in the face of a situation which Eugen Fischer (in 1910) described as follows for the German people: “Today in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, the Germanic blood, the Nordic race, has already disappeared. Decline, in part insignificance, is the result. France is the next nation that will feel the truth of this; and then it will be our turn, without any doubt whatever, if things go on as they have gone and are going today.” And since this utterance there has been the dreadful contra-selection of the Great War.

This being the situation, the problem is how to put a stop to denordization, and how to find means to bring about a Nordic revival. How are Nordics and those partly Nordic to attain to earlier marriages and larger families?—that is the question from the physical side of life. How is the spirit of responsibility, of efficiency, and of devotion to racial aims to be aroused in a world of selfishness, of degeneration, and of unbounded “individualism”?—that is the question from the spiritual side of life.

Once this question is seen by thoughtful men in the peoples of Germanic speech to be the one vital question for these peoples, then they will have to strive to implant in the predominantly Nordic people of all classes a spirit of racial responsibility, and to summon their whole nation to a community of aims. An age of unlimited racial mixture has left the men of the present day physically and mentally rudderless, and thus powerless for any clear decision. There is no longer any ideal of physical beauty and spiritual strength to make that bracing call on the living energies which fell to the lot of earlier times. If selection within a people cannot be directed towards an ideal, unconsciously or consciously pursued, then its power to raise to a higher level grows weaker and weaker, and it ends by changing its direction, turning its action towards the less creative races, and the inferior hereditary tendencies. Every people has had assigned to it a particular direction of development, its own special path of selective advance. The selective advance in the peoples of Germanic speech can have as its goal only the physical and spiritual picture presented by the Nordic race. In this sense the Nordic race is (to use Kant’s expression) not given as a gift but as a task; and in this sense it was that, in speaking of “the Nordic ideal among the Germans,” we necessarily spoke of the Nordic man as the model for the working of selection in the German people, and showed that no less a task is laid on the Nordic movement than the revival of a whole culture.

The question is not so much whether we men now living are more or less Nordic; but the question put to us is whether we have courage enough to make ready for future generations a world cleansing itself racially and eugenically. When any people of Indo- European speech has been denordicized, the process has always gone on for centuries; the will of Nordic-minded men must boldly span the centuries. Where selection is in question, it is many generations that must be taken into the reckoning, and the Nordic-minded men of the present can only expect one reward in their lifetime for their striving: the consciousness of their courage. Race theory and investigations on heredity call forth and give strength to a New Nobility: the youth, that is, with lofty aims in all ranks which, urged on like Faust, seeks to set its will towards a goal which calls to it from far beyond the individual life.

Since within such a movement profit and gain is not to be looked for, it will always be the movement of a minority. But the spirit of any age has always been formed by minorities only, and so, too, the spirit of that age of the masses in which we live. The Nordic movement in the end seeks to determine the spirit of the age, and more than this spirit, from out of itself. If it did not securely hold this confident hope, there would be no meaning or purpose in any longer thinking the thoughts of Gobineau.