“From time immemorial History has decreed that territory on this Planet Earth belongs to those powerful enough to take it and determined enough to keep it.”
—Ben Klassen
Categories
Category: Philosophy of history
A passage from White Power
by George Lincoln Rockwell
Unless the White Race can find the leadership, the wisdom, and the will once again to police the world, the planet will continue in the grip of increasing chaos and terror, until the jungle reclaims the survivors hiding in caves and holes like frightened beasts. Only a united White Race, supremely conscious of its natural destiny, a destiny bequeathed it in the gift of superior birth, as a master race, a noble race able to create the wonders of Western Cultures—only such a united race can muster the will and the strength to restore order to a world in the process of suicide and disintegration. And yet, faced by the most hideous threat of all times, outnumbered ten to one, we find ourselves disorganized, demoralized, wallowing in defeatism, crawling at the feet of our own destroyers, and losing strength every moment. It is easy to fall prey to despair.
But there is another element in this cosmic crap game which must be taken into account if we are to make a correct judgment about the survival of our people and culture is the fact of the Jewish-Negroid-Mongoloid threat. That element is timing—or, if you will, destiny. The mighty White Race is brainwashed, filled with suicidal self-hatred, crazy about its deadly enemies, trivialized, doped up on drugs and lies, and apparently rushing headlong toward oblivion. But the strength of the blood is still there, as we have shown in every war where the Jews have “turned us loose”.
Whenever as in World War II, the Jews wish us to be our ancient, ferocious, mighty selves, able to smash anything in our way: whenever they allow Natural Law to return to us, even in a temporary and wrong way, our people show themselves still heroes and fighters, not decadent weaklings, or in any way like the people of a dying culture.
The rumors of our death, to quote Mark Twain, are “greatly exaggerated”. They are appearances only. Let only a strong leader appear, let our people once see the real nature of their Jewish and colored “friends” (as is already beginning to happen), and the blood of our Viking ancestors will well up in a berserker rage which will sweep away the miasma of Jewish and colored poison gas from our lives as a lion sends a pack of vultures flapping with one lunge.
It is not yet our “time” to die. Destiny has a way of doing her will in spite of all human efforts to foil her, both when she is creating and when she is destroying.
Destiny brought forth the greatness of Rome when it was time. Arid, when it was time, she cast it aside and made a way for the mightier Barbarians, sweeping down from the cool northern forests.
Destiny brought forth the British Empire, when it was time. And, after centuries of rule, Destiny withdrew her blessing and the British Empire died—when it was time.
Destiny is even now, in America, conceiving the new imperium of our time, the White Imperium—the unification of the White Race and its conscious racial mastery of the Globe.
In spite of all signs of death and disease, deep within the vitals of our race is growing the embryo of that unity and that White Imperium which will last for its thousands of years, and destroy all which stands in its way.
Categories
A lesson
by Jack Frost
As we’ve seen, there is great resistance from certain quarters even on the racial right to the very idea that the Christian worldview is in any way responsible for the current political situation, even when it’s easy to show that the core doctrines of political correctness are quite consistent with Christian teachings, and even when there are so many on the left who are churchmen.
This is no doubt a great help to the system, and more proof, if any is needed, that worldviews don’t change easily. Change is difficult because people become emotionally invested in something that touches them so deeply, and also because a worldview is, in some ways, beyond the reach of reason.
When Christianity took over white civilization so long ago, it didn’t triumph by its skill at argument, or appeals to evidence or logic, but largely by the sword, just as it proclaimed it would. You don’t reason people out of a worldview. You don’t “educate” them out of it.
The lesson of the Christian takeover is that a new worldview may arrive, but if it follows precedent, its arrival will be unheralded, unplanned, and accompanied by great bloodshed.
“Who We Are”
Nordic invasion precedes rise of Classical Civilization
White suicide since Ancient Greece
Non-white immigration in Ancient Rome
White Suicide since Ancient Rome
Germanic People and the Romans (1)
Germanic People and the Romans (2)
Germanic People and the Romans (3)
Germanic People and the Romans (4):
Christianity spreads
The toll of Judeo-Christianity
For the complete text of Pierce’s book, click: here. There’s another complete version of it: here, in several different formats.
by Michael O’Meara
O’Meara’s essay shows beautifully why we believe that the relations between Murkans and Germans lie at the deepest level of the rabbit hole to understand the West’s darkest hour.
The “Judeo-African cacophony” mesmerizing the jitterbugs on the dance floors of the Thirties was part of a larger program to debauch the conservative Christian rhythms of American life. Such at least was the argument Francis Parker Yockey made in his first published work, “The Tragedy of Youth” (1939).
In this early piece, full of promise and prefiguring aspects of his later critique of American life, the 22-year-old Yockey depicted an America whose youth had begun to keep step with the intonations and inflections of its Jewish bandmasters. Besides the folly of their un-European cavorting, Americans, he thought, were acting out the worldview of an alien-minded minority in control of the country’s media and entertainment. Drinking, smoking, and other bad habits glamorized by Hollywood became, in this spirit, marks of sophistication; sports were fetishized; public opinion was shaped and reshaped to legitimate machinations of every sort.
More seriously, God was “replaced by lust, the priest by the psychoanalyst, and the hero and heroine by the promiscuous lounge-lizard and the glittering harlot.” For the more educated, there were books and magazines promoting class war, racial equality, and anti-European (especially anti-German) hatred—aimed at destroying “whatever exclusiveness, national feeling, or racial instinct” still part of the American people.
Institutionalizing these subversions, Roosevelt’s New Deal, the granddaddy of the present anti-white system, took on debts and obligations favoring the Left forces—themselves puppets of the international financiers and bankers responsible for the deception and dissimulation entrancing the jitterbugs.
Against this backdrop of cultural distortion, usurious state policy, and agitations favoring causes alien to American affairs, the country’s youth, Yockey claimed, was being conditioned to fight as conscripts in liberal, Jewish, and Communist causes inimical to their national interest.
The True America
Basic to Yockey’s understanding of America was his belief that it was, at root, an integral and organic part of Europe. Whenever he spoke of “the true America,” as opposed to the America that had been taken over by the “culture distorters” and become “the enemy of Europe,” it was the America that had originated as a European colony—the America whose “culture” was a branch of Europe’s High Culture—the America whose people still bore traces of the noble, heroic, and Gothic character of their ancestors.
“All colonials,” Yockey felt, “have a certain plane of their being which is susceptible to the centripetal attraction of the mother-soil.” For they share a common history with “the parent-organism”—no matter how much the distorters might insist otherwise. The true American—i.e., the American whose highest loyalty was to his “mother soil and father culture”—thus instinctively isolated himself from all efforts to betray Europe: like French Canadians and South African Boers who refused to be conscripted by Washington in the Jews’ war against the Third Reich.
A child of European, especially German, culture, Yockey alone among American anti-liberals saw that America’s origin had tied its destiny to that of Europe, and that no matter how many cities the colony built, no matter how many millions of automobiles it turned out every season—no matter, even, how successful it was in reducing Europe to rubble and occupying it—no matter, it (the colony) would never, not in a thousand years, surpass the achievement and destiny of its mother soil and father culture.
To even think it was philosophically absurd.
The Culture of Distortion
Given their shallow culture and the dismissal of the tradition to which they were heirs, Americans were particularly vulnerable to the corrosions of 19th-century rationalism and materialism. Relatedly, they were an easy mark for “culture aliens”—for a world governed by money was a world indifferent to a man’s qualities. Foremost among the culture-aliens were the Jews: product of Spengler’s “Magian” culture, instinctually hostile to the European spirit, and bent on revenge.
In their counting houses, Americans would invariably overlook the Jews’ otherness, though they were of a different “Culture-Nation-Race.” Even before the War of Independence, they treated Jews as Europeans—Jews who had been shunned, ghettoized, and seen by most Europeans as an evil to be avoided.
Beginning in the 1880s, the Jews (these inassimilable aliens rejected by Europe’s High Culture) began their invasion of America. By 1905, they were already a power, evident in fact that the United States, for the first time in its history, severed diplomatic relations with Russia on account of the “anti-Jewish pogroms” that had followed the Russo-Japanese War.
Through its financial acumen and early control of media (the press, movies, radio), and in alliance with the native forces of decadence and degeneration, Jewish power in the New World grew at an unprecedented rate.
In a country where “mass-thinking, mass-ideals, and mass-living prevails,” Jewish propaganda (in the form of advertising, fashion, and a hundred other things) effortlessly reshaped the American consciousness, propelling the jitterbugs onto the dance floor of their world-conquering schemes. Stories of German sadism or Orson Wells’ Mars invasion were peddled with similar success, just as “the ethical syphilis of Hollywood and the spiritual leprosy of New York” infiltrated the larger cultural body.
In 1933, the year of the European Revolution, the Jews acquired outright political control of the United States—something that a thousand years of effort had failed to achieve in Europe.
From this point forward, “the formation of the Jewish-American Symbiosis begins.” Swarming into Washington, Jews and their “sub-American” contractors started dissimulating the Jewish world view and “bringing under control every factor of public expression.”
All who resisted were to be purged or ostracized.
Then, as the country’s racial instincts were worn down by the distorters, America (in accord with the policies of its liberal state and in the programming of its Culture Industry) assumed “a Jewish countenance” in its relations both with the rest of the world and with itself.
For Yockey, Franklin Roosevelt, “the monster who made of his life a study in infamy,” was a creature of the Jews, just as his New Deal was bent on Judaifying American government and society, promoting, as it did, principles of tolerance and universal brotherhood, which were further developed by Rockefeller-funded social-engineers intent on morally disarming the American people.
In this, the prescient Yockey might be criticized for confusing Jewish supremacy with the increasing Judaification of American society (which Matthew Arnold had warned of in the 1860s), for Jewish power in America was arguably not consolidated until the late 1960s (even if its secular low-church market, in making money the ultimate standard, had already Judaicized American life and sentiments).
That Roosevelt, in October 1937, began to maneuver the United States into the coming world war and that this war would be a war of annihilation—i.e., the sort of war fought between racially and culturally alien, rather then related peoples sharing the same civilization—was further evidence, in Yockey’s eyes, of Jewish hegemony and the Jews’ genocidal hatred of Europe.
Despite a certain exaggeration of Jewish power in this period, Yockey was nearly alone in seeing that the United States had become an anti-European power bound to the Jews’ vengeful compulsion to suppress Europe’s destiny.
Unlike other American anti-liberals, anti-Semitism for him evolved, rapidly and logically, into an anti-Americanism.
The Enemy of Europe
As long as America had been ruled by men of European Christian stock, it remained “a European colony.” But the America “distorted by the Revolution of 1933” (a revolution carried out by the allegedly Jewish-dominated New Deal), was now lost to Europe.
America’s Jewified anti-Europeanism was especially evident in the Second World War and in its subsequent occupation of the Continent. For if the United States had possessed a proper ruling class, a tradition, and a regalian state, it would have stayed out of the Second World War, which became a defeat not just for Germany, but for all Europe—and thus, ultimately, a defeat for the true America.
Under its new Jewish-American regime, Washington after 1933 was instrumental in preparing the way for another European civil war—a war it would wage as if the enemy (their European kinsmen) weren’t human. Instead of being the great moral crusade against the absolute evil of fascism, the war in actuality represented a giant step toward the Judeo-plutocratic inauguration of a New World Order, based on American open markets and American economic practices.
To this end, American bombers (supported by their British vassals) reduced every German city to a heap of rubble, intentionally targeting heavily populated working-class residences—that is, “homes and families”; cities in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Eastern Europe were also bombed, adding further hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties to US “kills”; American fighter-pilots similarly sought out civilians to machine-gun and terrorize; vast stores of equipment and armaments, often denied to American troops, were supplied to Soviet Russia to defend the Communist state and encourage its penetration into the heart of Europe; and throughout this most barbaric and punitive war in the white man’s history, the Washington regime talked incessantly of the enemy’s “war crimes” and its “inhumanity.”
Yockey blamed America’s dishonorable conduct in the war on the culture-distorters, whose “motivation derived from the deep and total organic irreconcilability between a High Culture and a parasitic organism” (though I suspect that the country’s latter-day Puritans, given their tendency to dehumanize the enemy, ought also to share a large part of the responsibility).
Even after the guns were silenced, America’s “ghastly dishonor” continued. With the Red Army occupying Eastern Europe and the US Army Western Europe, the looting, raping, pillaging—and ethnic cleansing—began.
The Soviets plundered everything not bolted down; the greatest mass rape in Western history occurred in what became “East Germany”; and 16 million East-European Germans were forced to abandon lands and homes they had inhabited for centuries, two million of whom (mainly the very old and the very young) perished in the process.
With greater discrimination, the Americans raided German patent offices, steeling their superior technology; they rounded up their rocket scientists, confiscated the libraries they hadn’t burned, and made off with priceless art works. German women, most on the verge of starvation, were not subject to mass rape (except by black American and French African troops), but their favors could be had for a half-dozen eggs, some cigarettes, or a few chocolate bars.
If this weren’t enough, the culture-distorters (whose “fury had been heightened by the European Revolution of 1933”), along with their American accomplices (especially the budding military-industrial complex), introduced large-scale starvation, abused POWs (several million of whom died as a consequence), hunted down anyone who failed to bow to the new conquerors, and imposed laws with ex post facto application.
Adding insult to injury, the “American world-clown and the sadistic Jew” then endeavored to “re-educate” Europeans in the arts of anti-fascism, mammon-worship, and democracy (i.e., “the corruptibility of the government by private wealth”).
The war for Yockey represented a categorical defeat for the “true America”—and a total victory for the Jews over Western Civilization.
Since 1945, the two sides of the Atlantic have ceased to share the same inner experience of feeling, for it was essentially a war against Europe. European Americans who supported it, Yockey contended, were traitors—inner enemies of their own culture.
Then, after being reduced to “a beggar colony of America,” Europe’s pre-1945 elites were replaced by “Michel elements” (liberal philistines embodying “the sum of European weaknesses”), who could be trusted to do the Jews’ bidding.
In the name of democracy, press rights and free speech were henceforth abrogated; political parties were required to obtain licenses; any expression of nationalism was criminalized, just as all anti-liberal formations critical of the occupiers’ regime were driven to the political fringe.
America-Jewry in this way sought to sever Europe’s roots, suppress her will to power, and deprive her of a sense of destiny.
In no meaningful political sense did Europe, in fact, continue to exist after 1945, thanks almost entirely to this monstrous entity with the Jewish head and the American body.
America-Jewry’s anti-European vengeance was especially evident in comparison to its generous treatment of defeated Japan.
Indeed, the entire nonwhite world was soon made to know that the United States had conquered Europe and that the colored outer-revolt, encouraged by the distorters, was ready, at last, to triumph over its former white masters. More than Soviet Communism, Yockey argued that Jewish-controlled America was the “enemy of Europe.”
And this made America an enemy of “true America,” for the Jewish idea of America—as a land of immigrants, creedal propositions, and universal brotherhood—stripped it of any “national-spiritual significance” it may have once had, doing so, ultimately, for “the enslavement of the world by big business.”
Every European-American loyal to his ancestral homeland—loyal to his own inmost being—was, Yockey concluded, duty bound to be disloyal to what America had become (even as he struggled to return it to Europe).
The American Vabanquespieler
Yockey believed the 19th-century Age of Materialism and Rationalism, which had shaped America’s cultureless civilization and opened the way to the culture-distorters, came to an end with the First World War (1918), as a new age struggled to succeed it—a new age that would be animated by the same primordial sources that had brought about the European Revolution of 1933.
If not for America-Jewry’s Old Testament war on Europe, German-Prussian Ethical Socialism (in rejection of liberalism’s individualistic Reign of Quantity) would have inaugurated a New Age of Authority, Discipline, and Faith, bringing the whole world under Europe’s influence. Instead, the very opposite occurred.
But even though the America of the culture-distorters had emerged victorious from the war, it changed not in the least the fact that America (this apotheosis of the 19th-century rationalism and materialism born of liberalism) still represented the past—and the past, Yockey held, could never defeat the future latent in Europe’s High Culture.
The barbarian victory of America’s 19th-century capitalism over the Germans’ Ethical Socialism had, indeed, already spread chaos and disorder throughout Western Civilization, heightening the imperative for a revolutionary transformation.
* * *
For the Vabanquespieler, the creation of a new European order (in the form of a continental imperium stretching “from Galway to the Urals”) would entail a great, heroic undertaking, as the White men of the West—in allegiance to a new transcendent idea—rallied to overthrow an exhausted, putrefied, but nearly insurmountable Jewish-American system.
The Last Men of America’s consumer paradise may think that the barbarians and the distorters had tamed the forces of history and quieted the demands of destiny, but the American apostate knew better. He also knew that Americans could do better.
Thus inspired, the Vabanquespieler stood against the Jewish- dominated, liberal-capitalist, anti-European Mammon System that had become America.
In anticipating the next cycle of Western Destiny, Yockey’s life work has bequeathed to European Americans a legacy affirming that “the old Gothic religious idea” is still latent in them and that the 21st century will be an age of European peace and order, if they are willing to fight for it.
The “American ideology” may therefore have no future, but “the soul of the American people,” born of Europe, has.
Editor’s note:
The above piece has been excerpted from Michael O’Meara’s “The Jitterbugs & the Vabanquespieler: On Yockey’s America” (The Occidental Quarterly, Winter, 2010-2011).
Most commenters and bloggers in the white nationalist scene are like the Hobbits. They want to comprehend what’s happening to the West with a worldview that can be understood by homemakers. That’s why the single-cause hypothesis is so popular among them, even among German hobbits. The trouble with the monocausal hypothesis is that it makes the movement look silly. Yesterday for example, a monocausal hobbit stated on The Daily Stormer that there are signs that ISIS could have been spawned by the Mossad.
Don’t take me wrong. As in the novel, which by the way I read in the luxurious 50th anniversary edition, I believe that white nationalist Hobbits will play a pivotal role to destroy the One Ring.
However, unlike Tolkien’s characters, white nationalist hobbits don’t always want to take advice from the Gandalfs of our time—Sunic, O’Meara, MacDonald. Instead, they are becoming increasingly enchanted by the simplicities of the single-cause explanation for everything.
Like Bilbo Baggins, Hobbits should become humble with their intellectual superiors and see that the world beyond the Shire is a little more complex than their bucolic and simple life of farming, eating and socializing. That was my intention by compiling The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, of which I reproduce below an abridged version of the piece “Liberalism” by Francis Parker Yockey that I chose for the book. But be warned: it’s too abstract for the housewife level!
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Why Rationalism follows one spiritual phase, why it exercises its brief sway, why it vanishes once more into religion—these questions are historical, thus irrational.
Liberalism is Rationalism in politics. It rejects the State as an organism, and can only see it as the result of a contract between individuals. The purpose of Life has nothing to do with States, for they have no independent existence. Thus the “happiness” of “the individual” becomes the purpose of Life. Bentham made this as coarse as it could be made in collectivizing it into “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” If herding-animals could talk, they would use this slogan against the wolves. To most humans, who are the mere material of History, and not actors in it, “happiness” means economic well being.
All things in the political domain were transvalued by Liberalism. War was transformed into either competition, seen from the economic pole, or ideological difference, seen from ethical pole. Instead of the mystical rhythmical alternation of war and peace, it sees only the perpetual concurrence of competition or ideological contrast, which in no case becomes hostile or bloody.
Because Liberalism views most men as harmonious, or good, it follows that they should be allowed to do as they like. Since there is no higher unit to which all are tied, and whose super-personal life dominates the lives of the individuals, each field of human activity serves only itself—as long as it does not wish to become authoritative, and stays within the framework of “society.”
Twenty-first century readers will find it difficult to believe that once the idea prevailed that each person should be free to do as he pleased in economic matters, even if his personal activity involved the starvation of hundreds of thousands, the devastation of entire forest and mineral areas, and the stunting of the power of the organism; that it was quite permissible for such an individual to raise himself above the weakened public authority, and to dominate, by private means, the inmost thoughts of whole populations by his control of press, radio and mechanized drama.
They will find it more difficult yet to understand how such a person could go to the law to enforce his destructive will. Thus a usurer could, even in the middle of the 20th century, invoke successfully the assistance of the law in dispossessing any numbers of peasants and farmers. It is hard to imagine how any individual could injure the political organism more than by thus mobilizing the soil into dust, in the phrase of the great Freiherr von Stein.
But—this followed inevitably from the idea of the independence of economics and law from political authority. There is nothing higher, no State; it is only individuals against one another. It is but natural that the economically more astute individuals accumulate most of the mobile wealth into their hands. They do not however, if they are true Liberals, want authority with this wealth, for authority has two aspects: power, and responsibility. Individualism, psychologically speaking, is egoism. “Happiness” = selfishness. Rousseau, the grandfather of Liberalism, was a true individualist, and sent his five children to the foundling hospital.
Law, as a field of human thought and endeavor, has as much independence, and as much dependence as every other field. Within the organic framework, it is free to think and organize its material. But like other forms of thought, it can be enrolled in the service of outside ideas. Thus law, originally the means of codifying and maintaining the inner peace of the organism by keeping order and preventing private disputes from growing, was transmuted by Liberal thought into a means of keeping inner disorder, and allowing economically strong individuals to liquidate the weaker ones. This was called the “rule of law,” the “law-State,” “independence of the judiciary.” The idea of bringing in the law to make a given state of affairs sacrosanct was not original with Liberalism. Back in Hobbes’s day, other groups were trying it, but the incorruptible mind of Hobbes said with the most precise clarity that the rule of law rule means the rule of those who determine and administer the law, that the rule of a “higher order” is an empty phrase, and is only given content by the concrete rule of given men and groups over a lower order.
This was political thinking, which is directed to the distribution and movement of power. It is also politics to expose the hypocrisy, immorality and cynicism of the usurer who demands the rule of law, which means riches to him and poverty to millions of others, and all in the name of something higher, something with supra-human validity. When Authority resurges once more against the forces of Rationalism and Economics, it proceeds at once to show that the complex of transcendental ideals with which Liberalism equipped itself is as valid as the Legitimism of the era of Absolute Monarchy, and no more. The Monarchs were the strongest protagonists of Legitimism, the financiers of Liberalism.
But the monarch was tied to the organism with his whole existence, he was responsible organically even where he was not responsible in fact. Thus Louis XVI and Charles I. Countless other monarchs and absolute rulers have had to flee because of their symbolic responsibility. But the financier has only power, no responsibility, not even symbolic, for, as often as not, his name is not generally known. History, Destiny, organic continuity, Fame, all exert their powerful influence on an absolute political ruler, and in addition his position places him entirely outside the sphere of base corruptibility. The financier, however, is private, anonymous, purely economic, irresponsible. In nothing can he be altruistic; his very existence is the apotheosis of egoism. He does not think of History, of Fame, of the furtherance of the life of the organism, of Destiny, and furthermore he is eminently corruptible by base means, as his ruling desire is for money and ever more money.
In his contest against Authority the finance-Liberal evolved a theory that power corrupts men. It is, however, vast anonymous wealth which corrupts, since there are no superpersonal restraints on it, such as bring the true statesman completely into of the service of the political organism, and place him above corruption.
It was precisely in the fields of economics and law that the Liberal doctrine had the most destructive effects on the health of the Western Civilization. It did not matter much that esthetics became independent, for the only art-form in the West which still had a future, Western Music, paid no attention to theories and continued on its grand creative course to its end in Wagner and his epigones. Baudelaire is the great symbol l’art pour l’art: sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose. Man as individualist, an atom without connections, the Liberal ideal of personality. It was in fields of action rather than of thought that the injury was the greatest.
Allowing the initiative in economic and technical matters to rest with individuals, subject to little political control, resulted in the creation of a group of individuals whose personal wills were more important than the collective destiny of the organism and the millions of the population. The law which served this state of affairs was completely divorced from morality and honor. To disintegrate the organism from the spiritual side, what morality was recognized was divorced from metaphysics and religion and related only to “society.” The criminal law reflected finance-Liberalism by punishing crimes of violence and passion, but not classifying such things as destroying national resources, throwing millions into want, or usury on a national scale.
The independence of the economic sphere was a tenet of faith with Liberalism. This was not subject to discussion. There was even evolved an abstraction named “economic man,” whose actions could be predicted as though economics were a vacuum. Economic gain was his sole motive, greed alone spurred him on. The technic of success was to concentrate on one’s own gain and ignore everything else. This “economic man” was however man in general to the Liberals. He was the unit of their world-picture. “Humanity” was the sum total of these economic grains of sand.
The type of mind which believes in the essential “goodness” of human nature attained to Liberalism. But there is another political anthropology, one which recognizes that man is disharmonious, problematical, dual, dangerous. This is the general wisdom of mankind, and is reflected by the number of guards, fences, safes, locks, jails and policemen. Every catastrophe, fire, earthquake, volcanic eruption, flood, evokes looting. Even a police strike in an American city was the signal for looting of the shops by the respectable and good human beings.
Thus this type of thought starts from facts. This is political thinking in general, as opposed to mere thinking about politics, rationalizing. Even the wave of Rationalism did not submerge this kind of thinking. Political thinkers differ greatly in creativeness and depth, but they agree that facts are normative. The very word theory has been brought into disrepute by intellectuals and Liberals who use it to describe their pet view of how they would like things to be. Originally theory was explanation of facts. To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.
A political theory seeks to find from history the limits of the politically possible. These limits cannot be found in the domain of Reason. The Age of Reason was born in bloodshed, and will pass out of vogue in more bloodshed. With its doctrine against war, politics, and violence, it presided over the greatest wars and revolutions in 5,000 years, and it ushered in the Age of Absolute Politics. With its gospel of the Brotherhood of Man, it carried on the largest-scale starvation, humiliation, torture and extermination in history against populations within the Western Civilization after the first two World Wars. By outlawing political thinking, and turning war into a moral-struggle instead of a power-struggle it flung the chivalry and honor of a millennium into the dust. The conclusion is compelling that Reason also became political when it entered politics, even though it used its own vocabulary. When Reason stripped territory from a conquered foe after a war, it called it “disannexation.” The document consolidating the new position was called a “Treaty,” even though it was dictated in the middle of a starvation-blockade. The defeated political enemy had to admit in the “Treaty” that he was “guilty” of the war, that he is morally unfit to have colonies, that his soldiers alone committed “war-crimes.” But no matter how heavy the moral disguise, how consistent the ideological vocabulary, it is only politics, and the Age of Absolute Politics reverts once again to the type of political thinking which starts from facts, recognizes power and the will-to-power of men and higher organisms as facts, and finds any attempt to describe politics in terms of morals as grotesque as it would be to describe chemistry in terms of theology.
There is a whole tradition of political thinking in the Western Culture, of which some of the leading representatives are Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Fichte, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Hippolyte Taine, Hegel, Carlyle. While Herbert Spencer was describing history as the “progress” from military-feudal to commercial-industrial organization, Carlyle was showing to England the Prussian spirit of Ethical Socialism, whose inner superiority would exert on the whole Western Civilization in the coming Political Age an equally fundamental transformation as had Capitalism in the Economic Age. This was creative political thinking, but was unfortunately not understood, and the resulting ignorance allowed distorting influences to fling England into two senseless World Wars from which it emerged with almost everything lost.
Hegel posited a three-stage development of mankind from the natural community through the bourgeois community to the State. His State-theory is thoroughly organic, and his definition of the bourgeois is quite appropriate for the 20th century. To him the bourgeois is the man who does not wish to leave the sphere of internal political security, who sets himself up, with his sanctified private property, as an individual against the whole, who finds a substitute for his political nullity in the fruits of peace and possessions and perfect security in his enjoyment of them, who therefore wishes to dispense with courage and remain secure from the possibility of violent death. He described the true Liberal with these words.
The political thinkers mentioned do not enjoy popularity with the great masses of human beings. As long as things are going well, most people do not wish to hear talk of power-struggles, violence, wars, or theories relating to them. Thus in the 18th and 19th centuries was developed the attitude that political thinkers—and Macchiavelli was the prime victim—were wicked men, atavistic, bloodthirsty. The simple statement that wars would always continue was sufficient to put the speaker down as a person who wanted wars to continue. To draw attention to the vast, impersonal rhythm of war and peace showed a sick mind with moral deficiency and emotional taint. To describe facts was held to be wishing them and creating them. As late as the 20th century, anyone pointing out the political nullity of the “leagues of nations” was a prophet of despair. Rationalism is anti-historical; political thinking is applied history. In peace it is unpopular to mention war, in war it is unpopular to mention peace. The theory which becomes most quickly popular is one which praises existing things and the tendency they supposedly illustrate as obviously the best order and as preordained by all foregoing history. Thus Hegel was anathema to the intellectuals because of his State-orientation, which made him a “reactionary,” and also because he refused to join the revolutionary crowd.
Since most people wish to hear only soporific talk about politics, and not demanding calls to action, and since in democratic conditions it matters to political technics what most people wish to hear, democratic politicians evolved in the 19th century a whole dialectic of party-politics. The idea was to examine the field of action from a “disinterested” standpoint, moral, or economic, and to find that the opponent was immoral, unscientific, uneconomic—in fact—he was political. This was devilishness that must be combated. One’s own standpoint was entirely “non-political.” Politics was a word of reproach in the Economic Age. Curiously however, in certain situations, usually those involving foreign relations, “unpolitical” could also be a term of abuse, meaning the man so described lacked skill in negotiating. The party politician also had to feign unwillingness to accept office. Finally a demonstration of carefully arranged “popular will” broke down his reluctance, and he consented to “serve.” This was described as Macchiavellism, but obviously Macchiavelli was a political thinker, and not a camouflageur. A book by a party-politician does not read like The Prince, but praises the entire human race, except certain perverse people, the author’s opponents.
Actually Machiavelli’s book is defensive in tone, justifying politically the conduct of certain statesmen by giving examples drawn from foreign invasions of Italy. During Macchiavelli’s century, Italy was invaded at different times by Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards and Turks. When the French Revolutionary Armies occupied Prussia, and coupled humanitarian sentiments of the Rights of Man with brutality and large-scale looting, Hegel and Fichte restored Machiavelli once again to respect as a thinker. He represented a means of defense against a foe armed with a humanitarian ideology. Machiavelli showed the actual role played by verbal sentiments in politics.
One can say that there are three possible attitudes toward human conduct, from the point of evaluating its motives: the sentimental, the realistic, and the cynical. The sentimental imputes a good motive to everybody, the cynical a bad motive, and the realistic simply seeks the facts. When a sentimentalist, e.g., a Liberal, enters politics, he becomes perforce a hypocrite. The ultimate exposure of this hypocrisy creates cynicism. Part of the spiritual sickness following the First World War was a wave of cynicism which arose from the transparent, revolting, and incredible hypocrisy of the little men who were presiding over affairs at that time. Macchiavelli had however an incorruptible intellect and did not write in a cynical spirit. He sought to portray the anatomy of politics with its peculiar problems and tensions, inner and outer. To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them. A tiny politician of the Liberal type even sought to prevent talk about the Third World War, after the Second. Liberalism is, in one word, weakness. It wants every day to be a birthday, Life to be a long party. The inexorable movement of Time, Destiny, History, the cruelty of accomplishment, sternness, heroism, sacrifice, superpersonal ideas—these are the enemy.
Liberalism is an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity into femininity, from History into herd-grazing, from reality into herbivorous dreams, from Destiny into Happiness. Nietzsche, in his last and greatest work, designated the 18th century as the century of feminism, and immediately mentioned Rousseau, the leader of the mass-escape from Reality. Feminism itself—what is it but a means of feminizing man? If it makes women man-like, it does so only by transforming man first into a creature whose only concern is with his personal economics and his relation to “society,” ie. a woman. “Society” is the element of woman, it is static and formal, its contests are purely personal, and are free from the possibility of heroism and violence. Conversation, not action; formality, not deeds. How different is the idea of rank used in connection with a social affair, from when it is applied on a battlefield! In the field, it is fate-laden; in the salon it is vain and pompous. A war is fought for control; social contests are inspired by feminine vanity and jealousy to show that one is “better” than someone else.
And yet what does Liberalism do ultimately to woman: it puts a uniform on her and calls her a “soldier.”’ This ridiculous performance but illustrates the eternal fact that History is masculine, that its stern demands cannot be evaded, that the fundamental realities cannot be renounced, even, by the most elaborate make-believe. Liberalistic tampering with sexual polarity only wreaks havoc on the souls of individuals, confusing and distorting them, but the man-woman and the woman-man it creates are both subject to the higher Destiny of History.
_____________
Yockey’s views on liberalism appear in Imperium (1962), 208-223.
Adapted and abridged from Kevin MacDonald’s foreword to the 2011 book Raciology by Vladimir Avdeyev (read MacDonald’s entire review here or here).
Philippe Rushton once commented that science moves forward, continuing to gather data and refine its theories—with one important exception. A century ago, there was a robust Darwinian science of race differences, from differences in head shape and cranial capacity, to differences in intelligence and behavioral restraint. However, this young science was nipped in the bud.
But not because it was displaced by a new, powerful, empirically-based theory. Rather, the demise of racial science came about because of intellectual movements dominated by ethnic Jews and tightly linked to the political Left—the topic of my book, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in 20th-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Kindle edition now available).
This was a case of science being replaced by ideology—an ideology designed to oppose the idea that Europeans were in any way unique or superior. Ultimately, it was an ideology that rationalized the decline of Europeans and their culture that we see all around us today.
The new ideology decreed that humans were infinitely malleable creatures of their culture. It eventually became defined by the view that “race does not exist.” Franz Boas, the high priest of the new cult, was a strongly-identified Jew and committed Leftist. His famous study purporting to show that skull shape changed as a result of immigration from Europe to America was very effective propaganda weapon in the cause of eradicating racial science.
Indeed, it was intended as propaganda. Based on their reanalysis of Boas’s data published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (pdf), physical anthropologists Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz, while not quite accusing Boas of scientific fraud, find that his data do not show any significant environmental effects on cranial form as a result of immigration. (See summaries here and here). They also claim that Boas may well have been motivated by a desire to end race-realist views in anthropology:
While Boas never stated explicitly that he had based any conclusions on anything but the data themselves, it is obvious that he had a personal agenda in the displacement of the eugenics movement in the United States. In order to do this, any differences observed between European- and U.S.-born individuals will be used to its fullest extent to prove his point.
As a result of the massive success of this Leftist onslaught, the science of race differences languished. Whatever truths it had uncovered were forgotten.
In Raciology, the Russian journalist Vladimir Avdeyev resurrects the vast tradition of research on the physical anthropology and psychology of race differences. His book is an exhaustive summary of research in the field from the 18th century to the present. It includes a great many summaries of the research of individual scientists, many of whom have been virtually forgotten.
But Raciology is far more than a compendium of research. It also vigorously defends the idea that, as Avdeyev puts it, “the problem of race is the nerve center of world history.” It is intended to influence how people think about race in the context of history and current events.
Several themes recur throughout Raciology.
Race is overwhelmingly the result of biological inheritance, not cultural programming.
Beginning with Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, this body of theory and research proposed that the biologically-based racial characteristics of Whites have led them to be originators of superior cultures. The White race evolved in the north of Europe and spread south and east to be the main force behind the ancient cultures of Greece, Rome, Egypt, India, Persia, and the Hittites.
The ancestral type of the White race—called the “Nordic” race originally by Joseph Egorovich Deniker—is characterized by blond hair, blue eyes, light skin, tall stature, and dolichocephalic (long-headed) skull with a well-developed prefrontal area (the area of the brain associated with intelligence, impulse control, and decision making).
Houston Stewart Chamberlain may be considered paradigmatic of a theorist who proposed that northern Europeans are a superior people.
All outstanding peoples that appeared starting in the 6th century in the role of true deciders of the fate of humanity as founders of nations and creators of new thinking and original art, were mainly of German origin. The creations of the Arabs stand out for their short duration; the Mongols only destroyed but they created nothing; the ingenious Italians of the Middle Ages were all émigrés, or of the north which was saturated with Lombard, Gothic, or Frankish blood, or they were Germano-Hellenes of the south; in Spain, the creative element was the Visigoths. The awakening of the Germans forms the foundation of European history, for their worldwide historical significance as founders of a completely new civilization and a completely new culture. [Introduction to The Foundations of the 19th Century]
Nevertheless, Avdeyev notes that, despite Chamberlain’s views on the centrality of the Germanic peoples, he advocated a union of Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples in defense of the White race. Indeed, a theme of Raciology is that “the scientists of Germany well understood that the differences between the Germans and the Russians were extremely insignificant.” In fact, Avdeyev notes that Russians have a higher percentage of light hair and eyes than the European population generally.
Naturally, the idea that Whites had superior traits went along with eugenic ideas of racial betterment. In the words of German racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther, quoted by Avdeyev, the question is “whether we have enough courage to prepare a world for future generations, [by creating a race] that has purged itself in racial and eugenic terms.”
Geneticist Fritz Lenz, writing in 1934, viewed creating and maintaining a superior race as the ultimate struggle:
Undoubtedly, one may lead our race to such an ascent and flowering like it has never achieved before. But if we lose heart, our Nordic race will utterly die… Before us stands the greatest task of history.
That is, active efforts must be made to preserve the best elements and to rid the race of detrimental elements by discouraging reproduction of those who are prone to criminality, low intelligence, or psychiatric disorders. Avdeyev expresses the fundamental goal of eugenics as follows:
Our main goal is crystal-clear: the creation of a new, super-perfected White Race, the moral and physical degradation of which has reached its limit.
Compare American writer Lothrop Stoddard, writing in 1920:
The eugenic ideal is… an ever-perfecting super race. Not the “superman” of Nietzsche—that brilliant yet baleful vision of a master caste, blooming like a gorgeous but parasitic orchid on a rotting trunk of servile degradation, but a super race, cleansing itself throughout by the elimination of its defects, and raising itself throughout by the cultivation of its qualities.” [Lothrop Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man; emphasis in original]
However, despite the great flowering of culture emanating from Europe, and despite the knowledge that Europeans and their culture dominated the planet, there is also a pessimism that pervades this literature—the idea that White racial elites tend to become eroded over historical time because of admixture with lesser types.
It was common among these thinkers to assert that the depletion of the Nordic racial stratum accounts for the decline of Greece, Rome, the Hindus, the Persians, and other Nordic civilizations. For example, Ludwig Woltmann:
The blonde element of the people defines its cultural worthiness, and the fall of great cultures is explained by the dying out of this element.
[In Greece] the death of the families of fully-vested citizens and the admission of the descendants of slaves and the aboriginal population as citizens, led… to collapse. Rome died of race mixing and the products of degeneracy.
And finally, Otto Reche, writing in 1936:
That which we call “world history” is in essence nothing more than the history of the Indo-Germans and their achievements; the powerfully rousing and simultaneously tragic song about the Nordic race and its idealism; a song which tells about how the strength of the race did what seemed impossible and reached for the stars, and how the strength quickly dried up when the “law of race” was forgotten, when the Nordic man ceased to preserve the purity of his blood and strongly mixes with races [that are] less gifted in cultural terms.
The psychological traits attributed to Nordics are principled moral behavior and idealism, high intellect, inventiveness, and, in the words of Gustav Friedrich Klemm, a proclivity to “constant progress” and science:
Members of that race most often strive for the unknown, for the sake of a pure idea, driven by the thirst of knowledge, and not self-seeking interest.
[Here MacDonald extensively summarizes his views on the handicaps of Nordic individualism before Semitic collectivism and ends his review thus:]
Raciology is a most welcome development. The anti-racial theorizing of Boas and his followers continues to overshadow the current era. Such views are in their essence political movements against European peoples masquerading as science, designed to disarm Europeans—to make them defenseless against the onslaught of other peoples and cultures.
The reality is that the racial science that thrived in America until the 1920s and in Germany until the end of WWII coincided with an era of racial and cultural confidence among Europeans. It occurred at a time when Europe dominated the planet and was spreading its people and culture to all corners of the world.
On the other hand, the assault on this body of research has coincided with an unprecedented retreat of Europeans, not only from outposts like South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but even in Europe itself, which is now being overrun by non-Whites. Countries like the United States and Australia that that were at least 90% European in 1950 are undergoing demographic transitions which predict that Europeans will be a minority with a generation or two.
During this ongoing disaster of European retreat, racial science has remained undeveloped and largely forgotten. It is to be hoped that a resurgence of racial science as outlined in Raciology will be part of a general resurgence of the European peoples. It is certainly a step in the right direction.
Abridged from Vanguard Renaissance, one of the
sites administered by Sebastian Ronin:
As stated in previous entries, White Nationalism is an inherently flawed ideology, doomed to fail, amounting to little more than multiculturalism for white people. Rejecting White Nationalism as a rallying point in favor of Ethno Nationalism does not imply support for multiracial nations. The Renaissance Party [Ronin's party] simply recognizes that there are irreconcilable ethnic and cultural differences among White Euros, all entitled to their own space and institutions, with ethnic divisions being the foundation of nations. There’s no such thing as a singular “white culture” or identity; Whites are not interchangeable cogs. To ignore the differences and resulting implications between North American continental White Euros is beyond stupid.
On that same note, there’s no such thing as an “American Ethno Nationalist”; “American” isn’t an ethnicity. It’s an abstraction built around liberal-enlightenment premises, leading it to gradually broaden to include a greater range of ethnicities, and eventually, races, while remaining logically consistent in accord with its foundational principles. These flaws made it possible for the Jew to take root with greater ease and less resistance than in Europe. America, from its inception, was hardwired for Jewish takeover, delivered on a silver platter. Hardwired to become New Zion. Hardwired to become the unrepentant harbinger of world kikery. Hardwired to fail. No point in replicating failure—whether it’s a futile attempt to save America, or to “restart America” in pseudo-secessionist breakaways. If a supposed Ethno Nationalist secessionist thinks that “the problem” is limited to ZOG, then they have already missed the boat. This isn’t an attack on just the current American government, but on American identity, the American ideal itself. It’s all trash…
“America” is absolutely meaningless and unsalvageable, with collapse permeating mainstream discourse more and more. “American” dies a much-deserved death on all possible levels. As such, we owe it to our constituencies to facilitate a transition away from “America” towards healthier directions, as opposed to sending mixed messages and reinforcing ethnically-undermining American identity…
Of course, the old guard is unwilling to listen to anyone besides themselves while attempting to shoehorn an entire condition (collapse) and related generation which they don’t understand into their uninspiring and irrelevant vision for resurrecting 1950’s America. Scratch your average White Nationalist and you’ll just find a typical faileocon / Teabagger with more pronounced racial sentiments and the same pitiful, polite wailing about some past bygone age nobody else fucking cares about. Apparently, they think this is the future standard of racial politics, the aegis and salvation of the White European Race, the Aryan ideal™! Absolutely pathetic…
To the old guard of White Nationalism: your strategy sucks, your country sucks, your constitution sucks, your tired old nostalgic platitudes about “the good ole days” suck. Your inability to get over your misplaced sense of propriety—to see or admit any of this, sucks, as does your resulting inability to work with others toward any relevant solutions. You suck. You’ve had numerous chances over the course of 50 years, and fumbled the ball every single time. Get outta the way because you are in the way. It’s time for something better.
Essai Sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines
“We (Wagner and Cosima) have done nothing but talk about you and your Essay since noon, when my husband came to tell me of the pleasure and interest he has found in reading chapter thirteen, which has absorbed him since he began it. Parsifal has been cornered into reading your books!! I am not able to express how much we love and admire this masterpiece…”
Letter of Cosima to Gobineau of March 27, 1881
The Essai Sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), of which only the first volume is available in English, is a book published in 1853 and 1855 by the French philosopher Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. It is considered the initial work of racialist philosophy. Below I reproduce an abridged translation of the introduction by Adriano Romualdi.
There are books that act on the reality of many of the political events and, out of the narrow circle of the discussion, become a powerful idea, myth and blood supplying historical processes. The most typical is undoubtedly Marx’s Capital, a historical-economic study that has become religious dogma, battle gun and gospel. To these books belongs the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races of Count Gobineau, ignored during the time the author lived but released in Germany after his death.
Arthur de Gobineau was born in Ville d’Avray in 1816 to a family of ancient Norman origin. Shortly before his death, in his Histoire d’Ottar Jara he would relive the events of the Viking conqueror that reached the coast of France, giving rise to his family. Gobineau’s father was a captain in the Royal Guard of Charles X. After the revolution of 1830 he departed to live in Britain while the son went to study in Switzerland. There Gobineau learned German and peered into the vast prospects opened by Germanic philology in those years. Since Friedrich Schlegel in his Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder taught affinity between European languages and Sanskrit he assumed an Aryan migration from Asia to Europe. In 1816, Bopp, with his Greek grammar, compared Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin and founded Indo-European philology. Meanwhile, the Brothers Grimm rediscovered Edda and Germanic poetry, reviving the old heroism and primordial mythology while Kart O. Müller found in the Dorians (Die Dorier, 1824) the Nordic soul of ancient Greece. Thus Gobineau was familiar from his adolescence with a world that European culture was slowly assimilating.
In 1834 Gobineau went to Paris. He was not rich and tried to steer through as a writer and journalist. Of his literary works, many pages of Le Prisionnier Chancheux, Ternote, Mademoiselle Irnois, Les Aventures de Nicolas Belavoir and E’Abbaye of Thyphanes have withstood the erosion of time.
An article in the Revue de deux Mondes put him in touch with Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous author of Democracy in America, also of old Norman lineage. This friendship joined them through a lifetime despite their strong differences: Tocqueville, the aristocrat, resigned with melancholy by accepting democracy as a reality of the modern world while Gobineau, another aristocrat, rebelled and identified civilization with the work of a master race.
Tocqueville was appointed Foreign Minister and called his friend as his chief of staff. On the eve of the Napoleonic coup Tocqueville resigned but Gobineau put on a brave face to the Caesarism. He entered diplomacy and was the first secretary to take the delegation of Bern. It was in Berne where he wrote the Essai Sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines. The first two volumes appeared in 1853, and more in 1855.
The book incorporates the movements of the great discovery of the Indo-European unity, i.e., a large extended Aryan family from Iceland to India. The Latin word pater, the Gothic fadar, the Greek patér and the Sanskrit derivations are revealed as originating from a single word. But if there has been a primary language of which several languages have branched, there must be a major lineage that existed, moving from its original home, and spread this language in the vast space between Scandinavia and the Ganges. It was the people that named themselves Aryans, a term with which the rulers are referred to themselves as opposed to the natives of the conquered lands (compare the Persian and the Sanskrit for arya = noble, pure; the Greek àristos = best , the Latin herus = owner, the soldierly Germanic Ehre = honor).
This is where Gobineau’s reasoning is channeled, mobilizing for his thesis ancient Indian texts revealing these prehistoric Aryans—tall, blond, with blue eyes—piercing into India, Persia, Greece, and Italy to make the great ancient civilizations flourish. Every civilization comes from an Aryan conquest, from the organization imposed by an elite of Nordic lords over a mass population.
Comparing each of the three great racial families the superiority of the Aryan appears to us evident. “If his [the black man’s] mental faculties are dull or even non-existent”—writes Gobineau—“he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, which may be called terrible. Consequently, the black race is an intensely sensual, emotional radically race, but lacks of will and clarity of the organizer.” The yellow race stands before the black but it differs from the true creative will. Here we also have a race of second order, a kind infinitely less vulgar than the black but that lacks audacity, toughness and that sharp, heroic intelligence expressed in the gracile Aryan face. Civilization is thus a legacy of blood and is lost with the melting pot of blood. This is the explanation that Gobineau offers us about the tragedy of world history.
Gobineau’s key concept is degeneration, in the proper sense of the word, which is expressed in the growing apart from one’s own original type (the Germans would speak of Entnordung or denordization). Ancient peoples have disappeared because they have lost their Nordic integrity, and this can occur to modern man as well. “If the empire of Darius had, at the battle of Arbela, been able to fill its ranks with Persians, that is to say with real Aryans; if the Romans of the later Empire had had a Senate and an army of the same stock as that which existed at the time of the Fabii, their dominion would never have come to an end.”
The fate that overwhelmed ancient cultures also threatens us. The democratization of Europe, which began with the French Revolution, represents the revolt of the servile masses with their hedonistic and pacifist values against the heroic ideals of Nordic aristocracies of Germanic origin. Equality, that for a time was just a myth, threatens to become reality in the infernal cauldron where the superior mixes with the inferior and what is noble is bogged down into the ignoble.
If today the Essai Sur L’Inégalité des Races Humaines appears aged in many features, it retains a substantial validity. Gobineau has the great merit of having first addressed the problem of the crisis of civilization in general and the West in particular. In a century stunned by the commoner myth of progress, he dared to proclaim the fatal decline of every culture and the senile and crepuscular nature of the citizens of a rationalist civilization. Without Gobineau’s work, without the serious, solemn chiming bumps in the prelude of his Essai, all of modern literature about crises by Spengler, Huizinga and Evola is unimaginable.
Gobineau’s great work on the inequality of the races was completed, but the French culture did not take notice. Tocqueville tried to comfort Gobineau prophesying that his book would be introduced into France from Germany.
Gobineau died suddenly in Turin in October 1882. Nobody seemed to notice his disappearance. It was the Germans who valorized him. Wagner opened its columns of the Bayreuther Blätter; Hans von Wolzogen, Ludwig Schemann and Houston Stewart Chamberlain announced his work. It was Ludwig Schemann who founded the cult of Gobineau by instituting an archive near the University of Strasbourg, then in Germany. In 1896 Schemann founded the Gobineau-Vereinigung, which would spread Gobineauism throughout Germany. In 1914 Schemann had an influential network of friends and protectors and the Kaiser himself subsidized it.
On the trail of the work of Gobineau, racialism was born: Vacher de Lapouge, Penka, Pösche, Wilser, Woltmann, H. S. Chamberlain and after the war Rosenberg, Hans Günther and Clauss retook Gobineaunian intuitions and amplified them with a vast doctrinal body. In 1933 National Socialism, assuming power in Germany, officially recognized the ideology of race. Thus what Wittgenstein had prophesied about Gobineau was fulfilled: “You say you are a man of the past, but in reality you are a man of the future.”
This piece has been moved
to a single entry: here.