Orientations for Decisive Years

In this incisive essay originally published in 1982, Alain de Benoist reflects on the electoral defeat of the right and the rise of the left in France as symptoms of deeper transformations affecting European societies.

Arguing that political power is first shaped on the terrain of ideas and culture, de Benoist explores how egalitarianism, economism, and the erosion of historical memory have narrowed the horizons of political imagination and confined Europe within the Cold War divide of East and West.

Advancing a penetrating critique of the impasses and contradictions of liberalism, communism, and fascism, de Benoist envisions a sovereign, holistic, and continental European project freed from ideological, political, and economic clichés.

More than four decades after it first sent shockwaves throughout France, Orientations for Decisive Years remains one of the defining texts of the New Right and poses a thought-provoking set of metapolitical guidelines for a new European renaissance in the 21st century.

Nietzsche: Morality and Great Politics

Nietzsche: Morality and Great Politics brings together two early essays by Alain de Benoist that illuminate the origins of the existential impasse confronting the European spirit.

Tracing Nietzsche’s genealogy of Western morality through the inversion of aristocratic values, the rise of slave ressentiment, and the diffusion of Christian and secular egalitarianism, de Benoist argues that Nietzsche’s critique points toward a revival of the European ethic of honor — grounded in responsibility, creativity, excellence, and self-mastery.

At once an introduction to Nietzsche’s thought and a meditation on Europe’s destiny, Nietzsche: Morality and Great Politics shows that any genuine European renaissance must begin not with politics alone, but with a transformation of the moral foundations upon which politics rests.

Arktos Journal

Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

Giorgio Locchi reviews the French reissue of Oswald Spengler's Man and Technics, reading it alongside the philosopher's late posthumous fragments as the unfinished culmination of a resolutely anti-egalitarian vision rooted in Nietzsche.

The last century nonetheless bequeathed to us another mode of thought—one situated beyond Marx, beyond the two-thousand-year-old discourse of egalitarianism. The philosophical work of Nietzsche and the artistic and metapolitical work of Richard Wagner inaugurated this new thought, the only thought that may call itself truly revolutionary, since it represents, in the cyclical perspective of History, the return of a first origin wholly forgotten—hence lost, and consequently never given—but also, in the linear perspective, the overcoming, the opening onto an exhilarating unknown destiny.

This thought, by virtue of being Urdenken, originary thinking, expresses itself in forms that belong to myth, and—being a generator of myths in its historical youth—summons us to a genuine creation, leading us consciously to accept the possibility of a mutation of man. Non-egalitarian, anti-egalitarian, it is today proscribed or, when that proves impossible, deliberately abandoned to falsifications and abusive interpretations.

But it is plain that our age will not be able to confine itself to Marx, to the mere repetition of an instant already surpassed, and that it is already seeking, more or less consciously, to reconnect with the “opening” that lies in the prolongation of the thought of Nietzsche and Wagner. One will therefore not be unduly surprised by the appearance of a French translation of Oswald Spengler’s L’Homme et la technique [Man and Technics], with a publisher (Gallimard) and in a series (Idées) that have, until now, served above all as the vehicle of quite different currents of ideas.

On the cover, moreover, a descriptive note draws the reader’s attention to the fact that Spengler “attempts to show that the privileges enjoyed by the Whites are going to be wrested from them by the peoples of the Third World, who will use technics as a weapon against Western civilization.” Quos deus vult perdere…1

Pessimist that he is, Spengler does indeed assert that Western civilization is fatally condemned. And yet he in no way invites us to give up, to accept passively a degradation held to be inevitable, but, quite the contrary, to hold fast—”to stand, after the example of that Roman soldier whose skeleton was found before a gate of Pompeii and who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because no one had remembered to come and relieve him.”

Those Who Take the Decline Upon Themselves

A work of mythic thought, Spengler’s oeuvre takes on its full importance not in the immediate statements imposed upon it by the logical—necessarily logical—form of his discourse, but in the position he takes up before History, in the value judgments that ground his vision. This does not mean that his prophecy is false. The instant from which he speaks to us, quite the contrary, remains inexorably open onto the decline of the West. But the attitude he proposes, even as it entails the heroic sacrifice of the “Westerner” within us, is also the guarantee of a new dawn for that which, within us, already lies beyond the “egalitarian West.”

Spengler himself never tires of recalling that his thought stands rigorously within the Nietzschean frame, that it seeks only to answer the Fragestellung, the problematic posed by Nietzsche. What must not be lost sight of here is the fact that Spengler, within this frame and placed before this problematic, takes on—and wishes to take on, in keeping with his “Prussian” temperament—only the restricted perspective of the moment he himself lived through, that is, those first three decades of the twentieth century which, in Nietzsche’s millennial vision, represent only the beginning of a European nihilism wherein lies the sine qua non of the mutation of man into overman. Nietzsche had written: “I love him who lives in order to know, and who wills to know so that the overman may be. And who, therefore, wills his own going-under (Untergang).” Spengler knowingly willed to be one of those necessary men who take the decline upon themselves.

Within Spengler’s oeuvre, Man and Technics corresponds to the beginning of a culmination of his thought—one that is very poorly known, since it remained largely in the state of sketch and fragments, published since 1966 in two volumes by the publishing house C. H. Beck (Urfragen [Primordial Questions]; Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte [The Early Days of World History]).

At first sight, the vision Spengler develops in Man and Technics may surprise those who know nothing of him but his The Decline of the West. It is a “universal” vision, apparently contradictory with respect to the anti-universalist vision of the Decline, and one that proposes several specific histories, each of them the work of a very particular Hochkultur (a great “culture”), the expression of a type of man that constitutes, so to speak, a species apart. But this contradiction is merely apparent. Spengler clearly subsumes the first vision within the second, the incompleteness of the proposed subsumption being due solely to the incompleteness of the work as a whole.

Two Characterizations

According to the “second” Spengler, humanity has, since its origins, undergone four great “mutations.” Its history is thus made up of four essential moments: a, b, c, d. But Spengler does not always state his thought very clearly, and these four moments sometimes seem to reduce to only three. This is precisely the case in Man and Technics, which we now know (thanks to the edition of the posthumous works by C. H. Beck) to constitute the first sketch of a thought still in the course of development.

In his Dispositions for the Urfragen, Spengler characterized the four fundamental moments of History as follows: a) Liberation from the constraints of the species / appearance of the races / formation of the human type / emergence of consciousness (Bewusstwerdung); b) Crystallizations of low-density population into local complexes / from −15,000 onward, cultural barycenters possessing their well-defined field of action; c) “Particular cultures” (Einzelkulturen; Spengler uses the term Kultur in opposition to Zivilisation) dispersed across a world over which man has spread everywhere / “Amoebas” of organic structure from −5,000 onward; d) Hochkulturen (great “cultures”) with fully formed “life-courses” (Lebensläufe) around −3,000 / transformations of cultures—dynamic—into civilizations—rigidified (”the fellahs as ruins”).

This division postdates the one in Man and Technics, which has three periods and may be summarized thus: 1) Origin of man / the hand and the tool / Schauen und Ahnen (a formula one might render as “the capacity for anticipation, for divinatory vision”); 2) Language and enterprise—the latter being “concerted collective action” / Sprechen und Denken, language and thought; 3) Final age: the advent and dissolution of machine culture.

It is difficult to situate the two characterizations in relation to each other. At first glance they appear to overlap: moment 1 corresponds, more or less exactly, to moments a and b; moment 2 to phase c and the Hochkulturen of phase d (see The Decline of the West); while moment 3 covers only the final phase (of civilization) of Western Faustian culture. On the other hand, the correspondence is not perfect, for the perspectives differ. All of this, in any case, is of only secondary importance relative to what is essential: the resolutely anti-egalitarian finality of Spengler’s work. This is why it is altogether pointless to dwell upon certain ideas owing to the “scientific language” of the period in which it was written. The fact, for example, that Spengler relates “humanization” to the appearance of the hand-tool pairing tells us nothing of his conception of man.

We must therefore direct our gaze elsewhere, to where the author explicitly situates the value of man in relation to the non-human. And here Spengler is very clear—and very Nietzschean. Man, he asserts, is “a beast of prey,” but an animal sui generis, generis unici, since he is the only one to have “freed himself from the constraints of the species.” Man may be regarded as such when, alongside “a species-instinct perpetuating itself ever in full force,” “thought and reflective action detach themselves and assume their autonomy with respect to the species.” Each man (here it is the creator-man who is meant) is a species unto himself. The soul of primordial man “is deeper and more passionate than that of any other animal”; it “entrenches itself in an attitude of intransigent opposition toward the whole world, from which its own creative power has excluded it.” Spengler adds:

“And this soul advances constantly, in an ever more accentuated separation from the whole of Nature. The weapons of beasts of prey are natural, but man’s armed fist, with its artificially fabricated, imagined, and chosen weapon, is not. Here begins art as a concept antinomic to nature… (Here, too,) begins the tragedy of man: for of the two, Nature is the stronger… The struggle against Nature is hopeless; and yet it will be carried on to the end.”

Man Against Nature

It follows clearly from the foregoing that, for Spengler, History is founded upon man’s revolt against Nature—a revolt already wholly contained in his emancipation from the constraints of the species. It is this affirmation that is fundamental. On the other hand, one may, and one must, regard as insufficient the explanation Spengler gives for the cause of that emancipation (the appearance of the hand-tool pairing)—an attitude all the more legitimate in that Spengler was the first to doubt his own “explanation,” very often seeing in it only one cause among others, or the prior material condition, though not the sufficient one, of hominization.

In fact, as his posthumous writings show, Spengler was preoccupied until his death with the problem of man’s origins, with that “first moment” which he managed to divine through the dazzling intuition of his poetic genius but which always eluded his philosophical efforts. In Man and Technics, the description of this “first moment” remains vague. Spengler speaks to us of the soul of this first, “solitary” man, freed from the constraints of the species, yet never specifies the concrete forms of that emancipation; he invokes a “total opposition” between man and Nature, yet never indicates in relation to which Nature primordial man defines himself concretely through his action—what is the concrete object of his struggle and his domination.

To our eyes, what we have here is a limitation unconsciously willed by Spengler himself, since it is what allows him to bring his tragic vision of history to a halt, to “hold fast” within a restricted present that he wholly takes upon himself. The inevitable consequence is that the elements making up the entire definition of the human, instead of all being placed at the moment when history begins, come to be distributed across all the phases indicated above. For it is quite true that man’s revolt against Nature can only be catastrophic.

But if this revolt is already present, in its entirety, at the first moment of history, from the very “first historical act,” then man’s tragic destiny must likewise be found, also in its entirety, at each moment—as if borne by a will to history eternally reaffirmed, eternally vowed in one and the same gesture to the epic of creation and to the final catastrophe that is logically inscribed in the attainment of the goal. If, on the contrary, the catastrophe is not present from the first moment, then it becomes the property of a final moment, and it is a parabola that leads history to the ultimate tragedy. Spengler wills the tragic destiny of humanity, but, out of an immense Promethean pride, he claims the experience and the passion of that tragedy for his own civilization alone, for Faustian man—that is, for “the Vikings of the spirit.” He expresses this opinion implicitly, perhaps without realizing it, in a passage whose contradictions and lacunae are full of significance.

“Faustian culture, that of the European West is probably not the last, but it is certainly the most powerful, the most vehement and—as a consequence of the inner conflict between its comprehensive intellectuality and its lack of spiritual harmony—the most tragic of all. It is conceivable that some epigone might come to succeed it (a culture may see the light of day somewhere in the plains, between the Vistula and the Amur River) in the coming millennium. But it is here, in our own culture, that the combat between Nature and man (whom historical destiny has led to rise up against her) is brought to an end once and for all.”

The contradiction is very clear. If man’s historical destiny is fulfilled in his revolt against Nature, and if that revolt must come to an end in our Faustian culture, then it is with that culture too that history as a whole will end. What, then, would this “epigone,” this “culture between the Vistula and the Amur,” be, if not the return of man into Nature, his relapse into the constraints of the species—that is, his re-animalization? A history after history is no longer history.

Let us return to the second moment described in Man and Technics, in order to draw out the elements that belong by right, contra Spengler, to the original definition of man. The first is “language,” which intervenes with what we now call the “Neolithic Revolution.” For Spengler, the solitary man of the first moment, even if he had words and gestures at his disposal, did not yet possess language in the proper sense (neither grammar nor syntax). Language appears, in fact, only insofar as it is objectively imposed by “concerted collective action” (enterprise), whose first manifestations are agriculture and stock-raising. Here again we shall not dispute this “conjunctural” assertion, and shall instead turn our attention to the way Spengler sees this constitutive element.

The Problem of Alienation

Within enterprise, Spengler draws a fundamental distinction between “creation-planning” and “execution,” between the born creators—the only true successors of the solitaries of the preceding moment—and the executants, the leaders and the led. Citing Goethe’s Faust, he even indicates that, in his eyes, the led are nothing but the tool in the thinking hand of the born creators:

“When to my chariot my fortune harnesses six coursers, are their limbs not mine? And is it not I who tread, like lightning, the glorious course? The four-and-twenty limbs are mine, and mine all the powers that I have joined.”2

Man, then, domesticates nature; but the creator-man also domesticates the led-man, who is a fragment of Nature. Here we recognize the distinction Nietzsche draws between Herrenmenschen (”master-men”) and “slaves,” though with one essential refinement: the “slave” pertains not so much to the truly human, to the historically human, as to Nature—at once the instrument and the object of the creators’ enterprise. The problem of alienation, which so sorely torments Freudians and Marxists, here receives the illumination that may permit its solution: alienation is the necessary counterpart of the expansion of the “creator”—a beast of prey freed from the constraints of the species—when he organizes and appropriates, as tools and instruments but also as a part of his own body, the led-men who are themselves an integral part of Nature. Only the man who expresses himself in creating can be free. Alienation never concerns the true man, the one who becomes such insofar as he creates, but only the man who remains within Nature without being able to free himself from it, and who therefore constitutes merely some species or other among the rest. The historical fact par excellence is not alienation but the contrary of alienation—that is, the appropriation of all Nature, the human included, by the creator-man.

Considering that the language-enterprise and leaders-led pairings are not original elements, Spengler associates the advent of the machine with the decline of the creator-men. The creators, in fact, have never seen in technics anything but a mere means. They have always willed the effort of creation more than the profit of creation, the hunt more than the prey. But the machine, once created, paralyzes the creative inspiration. “Faustian thought begins to feel a nausea at machines”; “a lassitude spreads, a kind of pacifism in the struggle against Nature (becomes general), the flight of the born leader before the machine has begun.” In parallel, the led “mutiny against their destiny, against the machine, against standardized life, against everything and against nothing.” An age of masses takes shape—”but the mass is nothing more than a negative residue (specifically, the negation of the concept of organization) and by no means something viable in itself”; “an army without officers is never anything but a horde of humans, disordered and useless.” Moreover, there has been a “betrayal of technics” on the part of the Whites: they have handed it to the colored peoples, who will inevitably make of it a weapon against them, before letting it fall into ruins.

Pursued down to the smallest detail, Spenglerian pre-vision, applied to our own age, is impressive in its exactness. Like that of Nietzsche, it makes a mockery of the “scientific”—yet ever false—prophecies of a Karl Marx. And yet Spengler does not know, does not wish to know, whence his power of anticipation comes. This is what leads him to see in the machine the cause of the decline of the West and, by the same token, of all historical humanity. While making allowance for the period in which this text was written, we shall not share his point of view. Western civilization is condemned not because of technical progress, but because the egalitarian utopia that has inspired it for two thousand years has come into contradiction with the demands of modern societies. Won over to this utopia, European man is no longer in a condition to take upon himself the destiny of the world, to be the “creator” of a new future.

But it is also in Europe, and in Europe alone, that a new mutation remains possible, that the refusal of egalitarianism and of the return to the species has manifested itself, and manifests itself still, beyond what for two millennia of spiritual “decadence” was Good and Evil. Spengler’s thought is one manifestation of this refusal.

“Prussian Socialism”

It is not without interest to recall here what Spengler’s attitude was toward Hitlerian National Socialism. It was frankly hostile, and at times venomous, even if this hostility was situated within the anti-egalitarian dialectic (in his Konservative Revolution [Conservative Revolution], Armin Mohler places Spengler among the “Trotskyists of National Socialism”).

In the posthumous writings of the author of the Decline, allusions to the “stupidity” of certain National Socialist ideas are frequent. He mocks in particular the notion of race, stressing—contrary to what was professed within the NSDAP—that “race always merges with selection, with elite,” and that it is therefore “the work of a class,” not of a people. His reservations were those of a social aristocrat, a partisan of “Prussian socialism,” who saw in National Socialism a “democratic” and plebeian mass movement. In this he joined the opinion of the other proponents of the Konservative Revolution, for whom the “anti-egalitarian revolution” could only be the work of a solitary elite, resolutely cut off from the masses, and who violently reproached Hitler for having put himself at the service of the plebs when, in the aftermath of the tragic experience of November 1923,3 he decided, with the NSDAP, to make the masses his tool.

Originally published in Nouvelle École no. 13, May 1970.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

Excerpt from Chapter 8 of Andrea Scarabelli’s Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life, now available from Arktos and PRAV Publishing.

‘I am back in Rome, with the intention of remaining here from now on, if the necessary conditions can be arranged’, Evola wrote to Aniceto Del Massa on 23 May 1951, five days after his return. This stability proved fleeting: the next day, at ten o’clock in the morning, agents of the Political Police — led by Umberto Federico D’Amato, the future head of the Reserved Affairs Office — burst into Corso Vittorio. Due to Evola’s health condition, they placed him under house arrest, and he ended up in prison a few hours later as the alleged ideologue of the Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria (Fasces of Revolutionary Action). This was the first application of Law No. 1546 of 3 December 1947 — aimed at ‘repressing Fascist activity and activity directed at the restoration of the monarchical institution.’

The philosopher would call this ‘a farcical affair’ — a little show set up by the police with various extras, the FAR being ‘a small group of young people who called themselves the ‘Black Legion’,’ the Imperium group, and some paper bombs detonated ‘pretty much in a tumultuously goliardic spirit.’ However, the deus ex machina was missing: ‘As many of the young men treated me as their ‘master’, as I was the author of Orientations, as I had handed a couple of articles of mine — and purely cultural articles at that — to the editors of Imperium by way of encouragement, I was soon accused by the police with such a fabricated role and arrested.’

The trajectory of the Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria can be divided into two phases. The first runs from 1945 to 1947, while the second begins in the second half of 1950, when the acronym was resurrected by a new group that included, among others, Rauti, Graziani, Gianfranceschi, Erra, Franco Petronio, Cesare Pozzo, Mario Gionfrida, Nino Capotondi, Franco Dragoni, and Alberto Ribacchi. The FAR carried out acts of a purely demonstrative nature, without any deaths or injuries: on 27 October, a paper bomb exploded in the Galleria Colonna (a shopping mall), spreading a series of leaflets signed Legione Nera (Black Legion), followed by two more devices set off in the offices of the Republican Party and the Socialist Party on 16 November. On the same day, Erra and Rauti were arrested, while Cesare Pozzo was indicted in Padua. Informed of the facts, Evola wrote to Gianfranceschi: ‘Unfortunately, I already knew of Erra’s arrest as well. It is the height of absurd idiocy. I thus hope that, as is most likely, the trial will end in a soap bubble.’ Things would not turn out that simple.

On 13 March 1951, while Evola was still living in Bologna, two bombs exploded in Rome — in front of the Foreign Ministry — and in Milan, near the US embassy. Others followed in Arezzo, Brescia, and Bari. At that point, the police arrived at Imperium: an expert’s report revealed that the latest issue had been printed with the same typeface as the FAR leaflets (whose statutes were found at the home of MSI member Luciano De Perini). Interrogations, searches, and arrests ensued: weapons and attacks aside, the charge was of attempting to reconstitute the PNF. It was the first ‘trial of ideas’ of the new Republic.

On 18 May, the day of his return to the capital, Evola received an unusual letter from Angelo Berenzi, containing a warning:

According to rumours in Rome, our ‘diligent’ police […] are in an ever-increasing and almost pathological state of alarm due to a terrible organisation whose ranks are being laboriously unravelled, namely the FAR. […] The problem is that, again according to Roman rumours, the leader or one of the leaders of this organisation is one J . Evola!!!…

Five days later — on his return from Sweden — Gianfranceschi was arrested. They ordered him to speak: if he remained silent, they would arrest Evola. He only gave in when they extended the threat to his wife, who was pregnant at the time. Shortly afterwards, it was the turn of Graziani, Sterpa, and Petronio, among others.

Given his health condition, the alleged ‘Master of the FAR’ did not end up with the other prisoners, but was taken by ambulance to the Regina Coeli infirmary — where he would spend six months. After so many years, the newspapers returned to cover him. Here is a small press overview:

‘The former Fascist leader, who arrived in Rome only 13 days ago from Bologna — where he had been hospitalised in the Putti clinic for some time — is said to have planned the various attacks and indicated the people who were to carry them out. He is said to have made several trips to Milan, where one of his brothers, also a former Fascist leader, resides’ (Corriere dell’Informazione, 30–31 May).

‘A former Fascist journalist and race theorist’ (Corriere della Sera, 3 June), a ‘‘historian’ and ‘philosopher’ of neofascism […] his statement — full of quotations, mottos, and the most arbitrary and bizarre historical references imaginable — was listened to with religious attention by the defendants’ (L’Unità, 13 October).

‘He is the author of a peculiar philosophical system, which went by the name of ‘philosophy of the I’’ (Corriere della Sera, 31 May).

‘He is content to be considered a guru by two dozen fanatical kids’ — carrying forward ‘the confused idea of a medieval Fascism, mixed with cabalistic magic’ (L’Europeo, June 1951).

The prize, however, goes to the 5 June issue of L’Unità, which ran the headline:

‘Low-level mysticism and TNT bombs. The Black Legion bombers: Buddhists and devotees of magical rites. The ignorance, racial intolerance, and fanaticism of the young Nazi-Fascists. Julius Evola’s teachings. The sentences foreseen for the main perpetrators.’

Curiously, the ‘philosopher’s third name’, Andrea, appears again on the arrest report, while an article in the French press, published in Tunisie-France, reports another, even more peculiar name. Here are a few excerpts from the piece, satirically titled The ‘Sun Men’ Have Failed in the Tough Job of the Dynamiter:

‘The grand master of the group is Julius von Evola. This Germanised name will say absolutely nothing to readers, because the ‘master’, Julius von Evola, is as German as you and I: his real name is Cesarino — as Italian as you can get.’

Very Italian indeed — but certainly not belonging to the protagonist of this story, who, moreover, would also be called this name on another occasion, two years after his death, by Pier Giuseppe Murgia, who spoke of ‘Cesarino Evola, a baron philosopher and lover of magical practices.’

On the subject of ‘magic’, Tunisie-France’s article closed with the words: ‘While waiting for the day when their prestige will shine in all its splendour […] our ‘sun-men’ are content to draw hooked crosses in their cells.’ This little mystery is also linked to another document, namely an inventory of materials seized by the police and contained in the court documents. The list speaks of a letter (unaccounted for in the files) ‘addressed to the editorial board of Imperium, at Gianfranceschi’s house, from a certain Gianmaria (surname unreadable), whose sender begs Rauti to remind him of what was discussed with the Baron (Evola), in order to get him to admit that it was ‘a mistaken magic operation.’’’ Might this be a reference to the Viennese incident? This ‘Gianmaria’ (perhaps the Genoese Giammaria Gonella, a pupil of the Kremmerzian Marco Daffi) ‘adds a few lines for Rauti, in which he suggests adopting magical practices to find relief (these are references to Evola’s work in the field of Oriental esoteric disciplines) and advises him to draw some signs at the four cardinal points of the cell, including strange swastikas, reproduced in the letter.’

READ MORE about the ‘Vienna incident’:

If the tones used by the press are very vague, the summary drawn up by the prosecution is no less so: Evola is said to have maintained ‘that the amorphous mass of the majority, constituted by the plebs, was destined to be dominated by the bearers of the symbol of Imperium — that is, by a minority constituted by the elect’, those who ‘prefer the uncomfortable life’. ‘The defeat of Italy, Germany and Japan, ‘who had elevated Imperium to their symbol’, would have been due to ‘the sole reason of having had men who were not up to the situation and not heroic and decisive enough, whose struggle had to be resumed in order to arrive at the creation of the new world on the ruins of modern civilisation, on which the few new men of the future would be erected.’

On Wednesday, 30 May, at half past five, Giulio Cesare Evola (this time, there is no third name) was subjected to a first interrogation:

‘Since the years of my early youth,’ he declared, ‘I have dealt with philosophical and historical problems, defending a vision of life, of an aristocratic and hierarchical nature, from which I have drawn political consequences.’

His collaboration with the journals considered close to the FAR was ‘prompted by a Roman friend, whose name I refuse to mention.’ This was obviously Scaligero: ‘He told me that there was a group of young people in Rome who were very interested in my ideas and therefore wanted me to lend them my services.’ Finally, Evola returned to the Roman meeting of a year earlier — and the Bologna Congress he had attended in silence.

Less than a week later, on 4 June, he underwent a new interrogation. He con-firmed the previous deposition, dwelling on the relations between Imperium and the MSI. The ‘spiritualists’, who had invited him to write through the Anthroposophist, deprecated certain materialist tendencies in the movement, opting for ‘criteria of authority, order, justice, and hierarchy. Since I too have always advocated such principles on a purely ideological level, I did not withhold my collaboration.’ As for the charge, he states that he was not aware of either FAR or any ‘activist’ programme: ‘I did not intend said journalistic collaboration to incite or in any way collaborate in the reconstitution of the Fascist Party, of which I have never been a member.’

It is enough to read Evola’s articles, along with Orientations, to come across the call for a primarily interior reconstruction: ‘Nothing has been learnt from the lessons of the past by those who delude themselves, today, about the possibilities of a purely political struggle.’ As we have already seen, Evola was interested in constituting an elite — not squads of thugs or bombers — and hoped for the presence of men capable of keeping themselves intact in the general decay, ‘to serve as exemplars; not by pandering to demagogy and the materialism of the masses, but in such a way as to reawaken different forms of sensibility and interest.’ In 1959, he would write: ‘It is certainly not my fault if some have made arbitrary, confused, and petty use of some of the ideas in my books, mistaking very different plans’ — by translating, that is, theoretical principles into practical claims.

The police in Rome apparently did not share the same view, and on 12 June thundered: ‘Julius Evola — who was ‘once devoted to pretentious esoteric studies (i.e., the science of the few) and magical disciplines of Oriental origin’ — ‘had become the master and spiritual father of this clique of fanatics’. But this was not enough: they pulled out of their hat his lectures of 1941–1942, aimed at ‘destroying the ‘myth’ of Mediterranean Latinity in order to exalt the concept of Nordic-Aryan racial superiority.’ The report recalls the measures taken against Evola by the consulates, creating a little coup de théâtre: used in the 1940s to prove his anti-Fascism, they were now invoked to prove the opposite! On the other hand, in November the same judgement would candidly recall how the police (of the ‘new’ Italy) had been ‘misled by malicious rumours circulating in Fascist circles at the time’ (!).

In order to discredit Evola, the police unearthed OVRA files that spoke of ‘magical practices’ and ‘certain attitudes in his personal life, on which it is not deemed appropriate to dwell.’ They then moved on to Orientations, which they saw as having been put together in no time at all for contingent reasons: they defined it as ‘a genuine and shameless mystification, capable of taking a hold on the souls of those fanatical and crazy young people, with the most dangerous and senseless consequences. […] An absurd jumble of theories, apparently consequent and coherent, but actually held together by the same logical thread that characterises the monstrous lucidity of insania mentis.’ This was the real charge. Deputy Commissioner D’Agostino memorised whole paragraphs of it, chanting them in the corridors of the court. He wanted to make a good impression by reciting them in court — but an attack of amnesia frustrated his purpose and the policeman had to resort to his notes: partly owing to his terrible handwriting, he cut a poor figure.

But this was not the only oddity in the trial. During one of the hearings, Commissioner Salvatore Immè let slip that ‘it was a national leader of the MSI — ’whose name he refused to give’ — who denounced the Imperium current to the police as a more or less legal expression of the FAR’. This is peculiar, but only up to a point, considering the relationship between the ‘Sons of the Sun’ and Imperium. A grotesque picture emerges: on the one hand, the police of republican Italy nonchalantly drew on OVRA materials to set up its trials; on the other, it was rumoured that the first anti-Fascist tribunal after the Second World War was established with the generous contribution of a… MSI report.

Meanwhile, Evola was stuck in the Regina Coeli infirmary. That summer he sent a letter to the magazine Meridiano d’Italia, specifying: ‘Naturally I knew absolutely nothing about the ‘activist’ and organisational initiatives of those young people. […] Besides, I had asked for a meeting just in case.’ Evola was referring to the exchange that was seen to constitute the corpus delicti of a purely ideological trial, which had led to the arrest of

the wrong man — that is, someone who has never been a card-carrying member, who has never belonged to any party, whose ideas were the same before, during, and after Fascism, and who, if he defended ‘Fascist’ ideas, did not defend them insofar as they were ‘Fascist’, but insofar as they accorded with the great European political tradition, with the very ideas of people like Frederick the Great, Metternich, Donoso Cortés, and other… Fascists.

Postponed due to various complications, the trial opened on 10 October in a packed Court of Assizes. Two days later, Evola entered the courtroom, carried by officers. With difficulty, he hoisted himself onto the chair, fitted the monocle to his left eye, and looked around — somewhere between curious and amused. When some of the boys approached him shyly, expecting an earful, he remained aloof, convinced that it was all a farce — he had been in far worse situations in previous years. Also in court that day was his future publisher Giovanni Volpe, who would recall Evola’s ‘Socratic serenity’ in the general tension of that courtroom, while Enzo Erra would recount:

When the trial began and we saw him lying on the sheet, carried by some policemen, it struck us. […] Rauti and I stared at each other […]. We expected a stern reprimand from him; instead he did not utter a single word of reproach . Even on that unpleasant occasion, the man’s height was confirmed . When we were released from prison, we went back to visit him at home. We told him: ‘Professor, we are mortified’. He replied: ‘For goodness sake, don’t even say it.’

The same attitude emerges in a letter that Evola sent to Walter Heinrich after the trial had ended:

‘For me, the whole matter naturally meant nothing; it was merely an opportunity for a spiritual retreat, since, on a material level, it was certainly far easier and more comfortable than the situation at Schönbauer’s in Vienna or at Dussik’s in Ischl, with those terrible ‘nuns’.

On 12 October, in the courtroom, Evola answered the charge of ‘apologetics for Fascism’. ‘I reject any party formation in principle’, read the document he prepared for the hearing. Regarding the FAR (those of 1946–47), he claimed that he had only become aware of their existence through Mario Tedeschi’s recently published book, Fascisti dopo Mussolini from L’Arnia. Evola disapproved of terrorism, regarding it as a useful means of supporting the faltering established order. From a metapolitical point of view, however, the tightening of anti-Fascist measures could provide an opportunity to develop a new ideological framework and overcome the fetishism of the Fascist period prevalent in many circles. These were the theses that he had previously expressed in the article Trarre vantaggio dall’ostacolo (“Turning the Obstacle to One’s Advantage”), published in Il Nazionale on 26 November 1950. He preferred ‘a formative and ideal education’ to party structures and attacks. The reference to the ‘legionary’ posture that so scandalised the prosecution alludes to this:

‘Aptitude for choosing the hardest path, a non-activistic ethical and heroic attitude. Silent revolution proceeding in depth to gradually supplant the decaying world, going against the demagogy and materialism of the masses.’

Regarding the defamatory remarks about his activities, Evola noted that the police had achieved the arduous feat of reaching ‘degrees of sheer libel.’ Far from being a third-rate magician, he had delivered lectures at university and published studies with major Italian publishing houses, such as Hoepli and Laterza. These studies had even been translated abroad. At that point, a voice interrupted him, saying, ‘You don’t publish anything by Laterza that is not to Croce’s liking!’ This was Evola’s lawyer, Francesco Carnelutti, who was defending him free of charge. Evola then continued:

‘The incompetent police call my works demagogic, but they are actually about metaphysics, asceticism, and Orientalism.’

In response, the Public Prosecutor stated that the accusations of ‘apology for fascism’ should be understood in the sense that Evola’s writings support Mussolini’s ideas, such as ‘hierarchism, aristocracy, and monocracy.’ The defence remained silent, while the defendant took the floor. He stated that those ideas were much older and that he had drawn on them in the still ‘traditional’ Mitteleuropa, adding:

‘I am a defender of a conservative revolution that finds authoritative supporters in Germany’.

He also quoted Armin Mohler, who in Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch (1950) — a reworking of his doctoral thesis defended with Karl Jaspers — counted him, alongside Vilfredo Pareto, among its Italian exponents. The book had been sent to him by the publisher Vorwerk, an old friend of his.

On 23 November, after the trial had finished, Evola wrote the following lines to Mohler, which Emanuele La Rosa discovered during his research at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach:

During the trial, for which the most prominent figures in the Italian legal profession were enlisted, your book was also discussed. The intention was to demonstrate that neither I nor this newly formed movement had any intention of rebuilding the ‘Fascist party’, but rather that the entire endeavour, like my previous activities in Italy and Germany, was to be categorised as part of a ‘conservative revolution’.

This was a movement based on ‘aspirations that are not to be identified with National Socialism, and which are once again relevant due to the resurgence of circumstances similar to those of the years after 1918’. Four days later, Mohler replied:

‘The fact that my book was used as evidence in your favour during the trial is one of the most gratifying successes I have experienced so far.’

In that courtroom, the Roman philosopher reiterated his stance:

‘I advocate for a monarchical system that is independent of any dynasty’. He added: ‘I am against the totalitarianism that characterises Fascism’.

In the name of the organic state, he had always spoken out against the populist worship of a strongman (ducismo), both during and after the Fascist regime. ‘I have also always opposed tyranny and self-proclaimed tribunes of the people, considering them to be based on the irrational ignorance of the masses.’ Evola also took a stand against the Social Republic. What remained of the accusations?

The notes taken at Regina Coeli were reworked into the famous Autodifesa (“Self-Defence”), which was published at the end of the year in L’Eloquenza and articulates Evola’s worldview even more broadly. It reiterates many themes discussed in the courtroom, returning to the existential and non-militant dimension of Orientations. In an utterly broken world, in the absence of a ‘spiritual’ right wing (the only one worthy of the name), Evola pointed to an inner option:

‘Despite all this world of ruins, I incite you to maintain such a high level of ethical tension, and yet I am accused of being […] an ‘evil and gloomy character’, a rouser of fanatical youth!’

He invoked the formation of a spiritual elite — an idea with deep roots, as we know — in the form of an Order rather than a party.

‘It must have nothing in common with demagogues and electoral agitators; it must know the ways of a more essential and real penetration than that which gathers the masses, who are ready to change allegiance as soon as the wind changes.’

These lines, which have a bitter autobiographical flavour, are drawn from Meridiano d’Italia. Another article entitled Gli uomini e le rovine (“Men among the Ruins”) appeared in this publication, which was even more eloquent:

‘A nation does not rise again except when it awakens to the superior aware-ness and power of a group of men. More than a party, this group must be an Order. These men must embody the national quality and combine it with an inner stature on an ethical and spiritual level.’

These were the same ideas he had held before 1945.

The real problem was that the trial was being conducted by people who were completely unfamiliar with these ideas:

‘Laying claim to the competence, authority, and function of judging matters of high culture, philosophy, and the doctrine of the race’, and presenting themselves as self-styled scholars of Darwinism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis, they — Evola writes — tried to ‘denigrate me as a writer, presenting me as an amateur known only to esotericist circles. The funny thing is that the report shows that its compiler does not know what ‘esotericism’ means!’

This was the same kind of ignorance that had driven Italian consuls to ostracise Evola across half of Europe during the war. After recounting his meeting with the Duce (‘This recognition given spontaneously by Mussolini to a non-Fascist — that is, someone without party membership — is one of the most flattering memories of my life’), he spoke of the informants who had spied on him for his ‘magical activities’: all of them had been PNF members — unlike himself.

‘As the champion of independent ideas, […] in Fascism I have had both devoted friends and deadly enemies’. Since the police loved to play the role of archivists, why not recall La Torre, which had been closed down due to attacks on ‘some rascals who, with the excuse of Fascism and squadrismo, al-lowed themselves all sorts of things’?

These circumstances were little known at the time, but well alive in Evola’s memory.

‘I do not intend to present myself in any way either as an anti-Fascist or as a victim of Fascism’, he wrote, ‘but certain things should not be forgotten’. With regard to ‘monarchy’, ‘hierarchy’, and ‘aristocracy’, ‘if such ideas can be accused of being ‘Fascist’, then I would have the honour of seeing people such as Aristotle, Plato, the Dante of De Monarchia, and so on, up to Metternich and Bismarck, sitting at the same bench as myself.’

Evola quotes these words in Self-Defence, but when he uttered them in the courtroom Carnelutti interrupted with the hilarious remark: ‘The police has also gone in search of these people’. That the police do not excel in wit is not exactly news, but this exaggerated display of their lack of it is also recalled by Amalia Baccelli: ‘A diligent cop carefully recorded the names uttered by the Master during his self-defence. […] The poor fellow believed that he was noting down the names of dangerous neo-Fascists to be promptly put in handcuffs, when he was in fact jotting down the names of people from ancient Greece and classical Rome!’

So, were these the ‘Fascist ideas’ that the philosopher advocated? Even if the police were unaware of this, ‘they belong to the heritage of the hierarchical, aristocratic, and traditional conception of the State, a conception that has a universal character and was upheld in Europe until the French Revolution — the source of the modern catastrophe.’

‘Some like to portray Fascism as ‘grim tyranny’. During the period of such ‘tyranny’, I never had to endure a situation like the present one.’

These are the same words that appeared in a second letter sent to Meridiano d’Italia on 21 October. The philosopher provided his readers with an update on the situation and shared some details of the trial, since the press had started discussing it again in a rather inappropriate manner (to put it mildly). He reaffirmed his independence, but went further, stating:

‘In order to discredit me, the political branch of the police did not hesitate to exhume rumours spread against me by certain adversaries in bad faith during the Fascist period. According to these rumours, I was under surveillance (something I never realised and which never prevented Mussolini from awarding me a high honour).’

Perhaps fearing that he would appear too ‘anti-Fascist’ to his readers, Evola chose to hide something: as we have seen, he had been fully aware of this surveillance at the time.

Meanwhile, the trial continued. On 6 November, Carnelutti discussed the charges in a harangue that took the form of a real lecture. He talked about Orientations, in which the police saw Fascism everywhere — a remark that triggered laughter in the courtroom. ‘And now we come to the facts. […] The fact, then, is a man. There he is. Evola — who is he?’ By defining him as a rouser of fanatics, a bizarre philosopher, and an obscure devotee of esotericism and Oriental doctrines, the police were ‘ill-informed; but this should not happen […] when it is a question of imprisoning a man — indeed, a war invalid — for nothing other than his ideas.’ The point was that the man in the dock was a powerful thinker, not a political agitator. By emphasising this, the lawyer shifted the debate back to the realm of ideas.

The harangue continued with quotations from Heidegger interspersed with snippets of the doctrine of the State. Evola’s aristocracy was to be understood in the etymological sense as ‘government of the best.’ ‘Tell the truth, Public Prosecutor’, he said, ‘are you not also in favour of such an aristocracy?’ Evola emphasised ‘freedom’, which was essential to his definition of ‘individual.’ The philosopher preached ‘the legionary spirit’ and here lay the greatest blunder made by the police: for they had forgotten that this spirit was to be cultivated within oneself and not by setting off bombs. For saying these things to Italian youth, Evola had been labelled a lunatic by the police, treated like a delinquent, arrested, searched, denounced, and imprisoned for six months!

The judgement was read in the Court of Assizes on 20 November, after a ten-hour meeting in chambers and over a month of trial — also due to the number of defendants. Of the 36 of whom Evola was alleged to have been the ‘master’ (when in reality he had been in frequent contact with only five or six of them), 23 were fully acquitted — some for not having committed the crime and others for insufficient evidence — while 13 were sentenced. And what about the philosopher, for whom the prosecutor asked for eight months’ imprisonment? Here are a few excerpts from the judgement concerning him:

‘Evola, whether as a private individual, for the purported magical arts practised by him, or as a scholar of political, historical, and social sciences, is a not very recommendable character, as he was presented by the judicial police.’

Since the incriminated doctrines were contingent formulations of metapolitical ideas rather than recipes worked out ad hoc to fuel violence in the streets, ‘a sentence of acquittal must be pronounced against him for not having committed the crime.’

Here is the conclusion:

‘One may not agree with Evola’s highly utopian political conceptions, but, apart from the fact that they cannot be incriminated, since they constitute a product of thought, they prove to be very different from the ideology of the dissolved Fascist party.’

Was this a full acquittal, as Evola claimed on several occasions? Not really, according to the verdict of the Court of Appeal of 6 July 1954, three years after the end of the trial. On 22 November 1951, the prosecutor Pietro Manca appealed, and Orientations was re-examined in July two years later. Here is the outcome: Evola, Erra, and Fernando De Biasi ‘should be sentenced for the crime of apology for Fascism ascribed to them if the crimes were not covered by the amnesty’. Evola — represented in court by lawyer Mario Martignetti — had had his intellectual personality assessed in the previous trial, but this had nothing to do with his involvement in FAR: it was not a question of examining him as a philosopher, but ‘of judging whether with the incriminated writing he had fallen foul of the penal law’. All distinctions aside, Orientations was described as ‘a hymn to the ideas embraced by Fascism’. Its criticism of the Fascist regime was seen as rather mild — or at any rate not expressed as vehemently as other criticism. In any case, it was the amnesty that sealed the deal.

Although in the early 1950s Evola minimised his involvement in the trial, it cast long shadows over his future. ‘In the context of newly ‘liberated’ Italy, the farcical episode of my legal prosecution somewhat contributed to blacken my reputation’, he would write a decade later in The Path of Cinnabar.

‘Those who bought current rumours […] continued to regard me as the ‘Fascist’ writer who had been in touch with terrorists. With equal ignorance and closed-mindedness, such people continued to label me a ‘racist’, a former friend of the Nazis, and an enemy of Catholicism. This proved more than enough for the Italian press to relegate my works to perpetual silence.’

However, as he now had a personal, fairly loyal ‘readership’, and given ‘the nature of the Italian intelligentsia, I could well do without its attention and approval.’

In the same book, moreover, he glossed over the amnesty:

‘Naturally, nothing came of the whole affair: the trial merely served to hold the zealots of the political police of the new Republic up to ridicule.’

What is there to say? Autobiographies — ‘spiritual’ or otherwise — are often not the best sources for understanding authors’ lives.

‘I was to be blamed for a movement I knew almost nothing about, and accused of allegedly defending ‘Fascist’ ideas (‘apology for Fascism’). […] The only consequences were free publicity in my favour and a poor figure for the impotent, hypermetropic police state.’

Evola wrote this to Carl Schmitt on 15 December 1951, more than a decade after their meeting in Berlin…

READ MORE of Andrea Scarabelli’s Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life, the first definitive biography of the Italian Traditionalist, brought to you by Arktos and PRAV Publishing.

Remembrance and revelation precede history: without remembrance, history would not be recorded; without revelation, history would not be made. Because of this, they sit at the core of human experience.

Indo-Āryanism, the best preserver of Āryan spiritual heritage, calls remembrance smṛti (smrih-tee) and revelation śruti (shru-tee). Remembrance (smṛti) is tradition, or the codification of divine revelation (śruti), which is inner perception. Inner perception is jñāna, which is gnosis.1

Absent a balance between remembrance and revelation, man slips into spiritual (human) decay — but this defines the arc of Kali-Yuga. The Kali-Yuga is all recorded history, which means that civilization, or the beginning of recorded history, is a record of imbalance and spiritual decay. Gary Snyder2 memorably wrote that civilization is “ego gone to seed and institutionalized in the form of the State.”3 Civilization — our history — is remembrance increasingly devoid of the revelation it sought to preserve.

History is man’s record of himself — that ego gone to seed. We lose sight (inner perception, or insight) of our reason for remembrance and instead exercise our tremendous faculties for seemingly boundless ego stroking. History is recorded by the victors, so we aim to win. Remembrance is disconnected from its sacred origin and becomes profane: deal making, politics, warmongering. Now we even gamble the spoils of so much profanity in online marketplaces — so that we might win on winning. This is perhaps a new apex of egotism. Not to worry: this peak will be surpassed; the Kali-Yuga is still young.

Indo-Āryanism puts the start of the Kali-Yuga with the Kurukshetra War — that great dharmic struggle between kinsmen recorded in the Mahabharata. The epic Mahabharata is considered smṛti, the written memory of a still older time that was preserved in oral tradition. Some Hindu tradition holds that Manu, the great lawgiver and “father of mankind,” passed the story of the Bhagavad Gitā to his son some 2,005,000 years ago (the 5,000 years in this figure account for recorded history and mark the beginning of the Kali-Yuga). The Kurukshetra War, then, would even predate this. However, the Bhagavad Gitā, the spiritual core of the epic, is often considered apart from its source; that is, the Gitā is something of an honorary śruti, since it encapsulates the essence of the revelatory Upanishads (śruti) and documents the Word of God issuing from Krishna, avatar of Viṣṇu. Viṣṇu, Brahma, and Śiva constitute the Trimurti — the “three forms” of Ultimate Reality: The Trimurti is manifestation of Saguna Brahman, which itself is the emanated “thought” of Nirguna Brahman, the timeless All-Void. Thus, the Gitā and śruti generally are revelation: a glimpse into the changeless Efficient Cause that is everything and nothing. This revelation, sourced in the sacred and defining the essence of a people, was remembered and recorded to light the way to a beginningless end that is the mystery of existence.

If our actions are not governed by the mystery preceding them, then we are adrift in our own answers. We live in a time of Great Knowing — wherein the “great” is terrible and the “knowing” is devoid of the silence preceding its “now.”4 Now we cite and recall past failures (“zeniths” in recorded history, which is but a record of imbalance) to mark the way to a blank future — blank (void) because the sacred (All-Void) is absent and the immense silence is filled with endless answers, gross and not subtle, political and not spiritual. However, this only indicates that we have completely missed the point of remembrance, which is always to preserve the sacred: traditions exist not for themselves, but for their spiritual content, which is man’s revelation to himself. The failure of now is its ceaseless knowing.

If the failure of now is a loud and self-referential authority, how do we determine the authority of revelation? Though its sight is inward, revelation (śruti) is not its own source. Seeing inward, or self-reflection, is to not see the self at all; that is, revelation is a channeling of the transcendent — it is the gross body turned subtle. The Word of God is the structure of jñāna-gnosis, which is finally seeing beyond the gross-self (that record of failure) to the subtle-self, which is beyond all knowing as a record of nothing. History devoid of the sacred is now, and remembrance absent the revelation is always present. Recycling the past is our material practice of saṃsāra, a rote and ritualized march into the broken silence of the future.

Comforting us at the end of this long march (the will-to-machine) is the Überwille: a self unexamined, a sight interned (or seemingly paradoxically, un-in-turned).5 Our memory of this march — undertaken countless times — is unencumbered by revelation; hence our illimitable affinity for clutching recycled failure. It could have been different — Next time will be different: These are mantras of the marching masses, which is to say nearly everyone. How can we hope to be other than our essence?

Over the course of its existence, śruti assumed a geometrical meaning. In addition to being that which is perceived (or “heard,” in this case), śruti became synonymous with karṇa (“ear”), which was the word chosen for the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Even if only chosen for poetical reasons, there is yet spirit (serendipity) behind the selection of śruti as the diagonal bisecting a rectangle. The essence of a rectangle is its two pairs of opposing parallel sides joined at right angles. Veering from this essence, deviating from the perimetric rut, a path links two distal corners; the path forms a line and one becomes two (or three). The new side opposite the right angle (90º) halves two similar angles (45º), leaving us with the sacred triangle (180º). Before the bisection, the conventional path between opposing corners was long and tedious; but insight — jñāna-gnosis — a new path — connected that which was distant, and a new shape was made, dynamic and fundamental to any parallelogramic form. We note too the angular serendipity of the right triangle, wherein all paths lead to 9 — that number so special to both Indo-Āryan and Germanic cultures. There are yet signs of the sacred in this Kali-Yuga, the shortest of all the yugas at 432,000 years.

432,000 can be distilled to 9 — the sacred, Āryan 9 that permeates Germanic mythos. Nine realms comprise the known-unknown world. Wotan sacrificed himself for nine nights, hanging on Yggdrasil for the revelation of the runes and nine mighty songs. The ninth sign learned by Wotan sleeps the sea. Heimdall, watchman of the gods, has nine mothers. Thor eats an ox and eight salmon in his attempt to retrieve Mjölnir. And on goes the myth, haven for the gods. Another number, 18, can be distilled to 9. The Mahabharata contains 18 parvas [books]. The Bhagavad Gitā has 18 chapters. The Pandavas lost their belongings to the Kauravas in 18 dice games. The Kurukshetra war is fought for 18 days with 18 armies. Each of the four commanders of the Kaurava army fought for 10, 5, 2, and 1 day(s), successively — each span halving the one before it — to match the 18 days. The Mahabharata is an epic invigorating the philosophy of the Vedas.6

The Vedas are śruti; the Mahabharata is smṛti. Remembrance animates the revelation. If materiality ensures our essence as blank marchers to the tune of mechanistic will, our only hope to escape this path — even if only temporarily — is to embrace the revelation that fashions a new form.

Recycling is not salvation but enslavement. Do not be content to simply recycle your steps on the perimetric path. Discover the insight that comes with overcoming the self (which was never really your self at all).7 But rest easy in the grim reality that “not everyone can reach enlightenment.”

The world is not full of Buddhas; if it were, the Buddha would have never existed — nothing would have. If we fail in this life, then our penance is rebirth — likely (though not necessarily) one worse than its predecessor. If we fail in this life, then we hardly deserve liberation; instead, we deserve to return — perhaps as some worldly hero destined to save things in the world from final destruction. Is there any worse fate than to be responsible for the continuation of will on earth?

So look at life’s heroes; look at them and feel pity — not because you are better than they are, but because they are destined for a fate beyond this world. For Überwille or the beyond-the-beyond, for good or ill, who can say? Is the hero genuinely good, or is he good because he wills and wants something grand? Only the former can claim a Buddhistic life. When done admiring others, examine yourself. What destiny is promised to you? Well, be genuine in your action; be genuine and avoid evil. What is evil? Evil is your desire to perpetuate the will.8

One’s desire to perpetuate the will rests squarely in the godless remembrance that animates the revelation of a future void: herein lies saṃsāra. God — the sacred — śruti and a balanced smṛti — these define the human experience, and they are found only on the diagonal path.9

READ MORE by J. R. Sommer, published by Arktos.

Supreme Being: The Spiritual Foundations of Multipolarity, the third installment of his trilogy, is forthcoming in Fall 2026.

No separate peace is possible.

There is no scenario where America survives and Europe does not. There is no scenario where Europe survives and America does not. This is not some poetic or aspirational claim. Our divided civilization strives for unity, for the restoration of the Roman idea of Imperium, and even the current degraded European Union is a bastardized expression of this dream. Yet that is irrelevant.

This is no time for fanciful dreaming or wishful thinking, even less for misguided pride. We whites are all down bad. Tiresome bragging from Americans about “cucked” Europeans or the Continentals invoking Julius Evola to complain about “negrified” America blinds us from the reality that all Western nations are essentially on the same path to dispossession. The demographic trends may be better or worse in different countries, but they are all leading to the same place. More importantly, we face the same bureaucratic obstacles, the same disingenuous arguments, the same political enemies, and the same moral paralysis among our kindred peoples. No one can indulge in self-satisfaction.

Yet unity is elusive. There are real differences in interests between Europe and America. There is also the uncomfortable fact that if we reclaimed our countries and did recover our identity, pride, and sovereignty, there could even be conflict between us. Questions like America’s territorial ambitions in Greenland or Canada, Europeans’ access to cheap Russian energy sources, or the relevance of NATO divide nationalists in different countries, as do the secessionist ambitions of activists in Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders and other areas. With the war between Russia and Ukraine continuing endlessly and pointlessly, it seems hollow to merely invoke “no more brothers’ wars” and act as if something has been accomplished.

A common agenda uniting all our peoples and providing a plan for practical action in our separate yet united struggles for state power has been sorely needed.

It is needed no longer. That agenda exists in a word. It is Remigration.

Every patriotic movement within the West has a realistic yet radical policy solution that separates serious activists from the cranks and attention seekers. The consequences of Remigration, and the steps necessary to achieving it, force us to build the kind of movement that is needed by giving us a focus, a demand, and a rallying cry. Perhaps even more importantly, it is needed in every Western country, and so patriots have a way to show solidarity without arrogantly asserting domination or superior status over kindred nations.

The Remigration Summit held in Portugal on May 30 was a milestone for three key reasons. First, it assembled serious leaders from parties and movements contesting for power in a realistic way. Second, it managed to appeal to both patriotic vanguards and the larger, softer “national conservative” constituencies that dutifully support the center-right but are ready for a true alternative. Finally, it boasted a significant presence from North America, sending a definitive signal that “European” is not a mere geographic expression but an assertion of immutable ethnocultural identity throughout the world.

Speakers included Björn Höcke from the Alternative for Germany, which is already the most popular party in many areas of the Bundesrepublik despite ludicrous repression, Rocío de Meer of Vox, and Lidewij de Vos of the Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands. These and other figures are part of the political process, in some cases on the verge of real power, yet they did not run for cover from this conference. Martin Sellner, who has done more to popularize the concept of Remigration than anyone else, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek, the Dutch political commenator who is well known in American conservative circles, also lent the conference significant star power. Afonso Gonçalves and his movement, representing the host country, showed that Portugal has joined a continent wide-struggle that it was seemingly absent from since the fall of the Estado Novo.

Such a broad coalition may seem dangerous. After all, when discussing Right and Left, there are many “Rights” based on different national, religious, and ideological foundations, but just one deconstructionist, egalitarian Left. In some ways, that makes the so-called Right much easier to attack, much harder to unite, and much more hesitant to act with unity and courage.

It is thus no small thing that these and other movements could work together, not just because journalists are eager to use guilt by association, but because there are necessarily tensions between mainstreamers and vanguardists. Such conflicts seemed absent in Portugal. This bodes well because there is little evidence that simply planting a flag of an extreme position, without any attempt to build a larger coalition, can lead to the seizure of state power.

The target of our opposition should be the gatekeepers within the center-right that prevent the patriotic masses from rallying to their natural protectors and champions among the nationalist leadership. However, for the gatekeepers to be broken, there must be a tolerant attitude towards all comrades, especially those to our own right, who operate in good faith, while simultaneously not letting ourselves become so marginal as to be irrelevant. It is arguably the most delicate balancing act in politics. The Remigration Summit succeeded.

Canadians and Americans were also well represented at the conference, including Daniel Tyrie of the Dominion Society, Cyan Quinn of the White Papers Policy Project, and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance. Greg Bovino, former Commander-at-Large of the United States Border Patrol, was the surprise attendee of the conference, shocking the American mainstream media and prompting another wave of fascist panic. Yet the journalists were self-discrediting. Charging that one of the Trump Administration’s top former officials was a “fascist” at the time when nationalists are frustrated with the president for being too moderate on immigration was not an effective attack. If anything, it buttressed Commander Bovino’s image because it portrayed him as essentially equivalent to Trump himself, a man against whom the usual smears have long since lost their effectiveness.

However, all the conference speeches were just rhetoric unless there is a specific plan to achieve Remigration. On my show Identity Politics, I was surprised by how many viewers asked whether Remigration was even feasible, as if the only way to accomplish it was by kicking in doors and rounding up every individual migrant and non-European by force. In reality, there are detailed policy proposals about ways this can be done. The Institute for Remigration, announced at the conference, is already developing both political and policy strategies for achieving Remigration within our lifetime. The Save Europe Act represents the first practical step for organizing the European masses behind a concrete policy agenda.

Such tangible demands are invaluable. Theory is important, but lost in grand narratives about the West’s sacred destiny is the question of what we are asking ordinary voters and citizens to support. What does “reclaim our nations” mean in real terms? How can it be accomplished? Is it realistic? Now there are answers, as well as evidence to support why it is necessary. Making things concrete and tangible is also a necessary challenge to our own activists. Are you with the Remigration agenda or not? If not, what is your alternative?

European patriots have their vehicle. The only question that remains is whether they can win with it.

If anything, it is America, the superpower of the Occident, that is behind Europe. President Donald Trump has accomplished many things during his second term regarding immigration, some so extraordinary that we simply overlook them. Illegal border crossings have practically ceased, refugee admissions have stopped almost entirely except for white South Africans, and the Trump Administration has begun denaturalizing foreign-born Americans for fraud and abuse. The vastly increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now the equal of most militaries, is the first armed government force in many decades that we can say is explicitly on the Right.

Yet American nationalism today is ideologically incoherent compared to many European movements, pulled in a thousand different directions by clickbait and conspiracies. Remigration is a point of unity, and American participation in this conference is a promising sign. Whatever emerges out of MAGA and the Trump coalition must commit to the mass deportations and denaturalizations that will be necessary for America to exist in any meaningful sense within two decades.

There is little time left to save ourselves and our posterity but more hope now than at any other time since the end of the Cold War. The long 20th century will be brought to an end, the century of Identity will begin, and the European peoples will burn away the rot that has morally crippled us since the end of the second great Western Civil War. Let the spark lit in Portugal set alight the conflagration.

Remigration: For a Europe for Our Children, the rallying manifesto by Jean-Yves Le Gallou of the Institut Iliade, has been brought to you in English by Arktos:

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Banned first in Paris, then a second time in Versailles where it had been relocated by the organizing group Les Natifs, the conference of the American intellectual Jared Taylor was ultimately shut down on June 3 by the police on orders from the prefectural authorities.

One might think the Ministry of the Interior had nothing more urgent to do. This helps explain how rioters can trash city centers with total impunity or how repeat-pedophile offenders continue to roam freely: for the State, instead of protecting little Lyhanna, there seems to be no more urgent threat than a private conference.

This is how freedom of expression works in France. Until now, no one knew exactly what justified such a ban: the conference was not censored for words that were spoken, but for words that might be spoken.

Here are those words. Whether or not one shares Jared Taylor’s analyses, the editors of Éléments believe it is up to the readers to judge for themselves and are proud to publish the French version today.

— Éléments

Arktos Journal is proud to join this initiative by presenting the English translation below.

The American dilemma is now the European dilemma.

What is the American dilemma?

In America, it all begins with the fact that we have had a multiracial society from the very beginning. When the English arrived, there were already Indians. We then imported another race: Africans. And after that, we let in everyone, from everywhere. The American multiracial society has been a total failure, and that should have been clear to Europeans at a time when they still had white countries.

Part of the problem, however, was that even if European intellectuals had understood that America had a racial problem, they were convinced they could solve it. They thought the problem was not multiracial society itself. The problem was those ignorant, prejudiced Americans—especially Southern Americans—and Europeans were sure they could teach us to do better.

How many of you have heard of a Swede named Gunnar Myrdal? He was a left-wing economist who won the Nobel Prize. But he also published in 1944 one of the most influential books ever written on race relations in the United States. It was called An American Dilemma. It went through 25 printings, came out in a second edition in 1965, and was even reissued in two volumes in 1996.

For years, An American Dilemma was virtually the Bible, the essential guide to American race relations. I read all 1,400 pages of that thick book, and I can summarize its content very easily: it is entirely the fault of whites.

It is always like that. Whites—in this case a Swede—who have little experience with people of other races always think they know better—that they are more virtuous than those who may have lived with other races for hundreds of years.

At the time, Gunnar Myrdal called the problem of race relations the “American dilemma,” and in 1944 that was accurate. Today it is the European dilemma, the Canadian dilemma, the Australian dilemma. It is everywhere the dilemma of the white man.

And look at Sweden today. When Myrdal died in 1987, Sweden was 98% white. Today, thanks to immigration, Sweden is about 30% non-white and has virtually every year the highest rape rate in all of Europe. The Swedes have more or less stopped lecturing Americans.

The Jamestown Colony Experience

First, I would like to tell you some things about American race relations that you probably do not know. And then I would like to talk about the bigger picture: the European dilemma.

Let’s begin with America.

I assume most of you have heard of the Jamestown colony in Virginia? It was the first permanent English settlement in the New World, founded in 1607. Of course, there were already Indians in Virginia. So when next year marks the 420th anniversary of the beginning of my country, it will also mark 420 years of race relations—420 years during which Americans learned certain racial lessons, forgot them all, and are slowly relearning them today.

When the English settlers arrived in Jamestown in 1607, the Spanish had already been in the New World for more than a century. By 1607, 200,000 Spaniards had emigrated to the colonies. They had found gold and silver and brought immense wealth back to Spain. At the same time, the Spanish had earned a worldwide reputation for cruelty toward American Indians.

That is why the goal of the Jamestown colony was to seize treasures, but the English were determined not to make the Spanish mistake of mistreating the Indians. As usual, those with no experience thought they would do better than those who already had a century of experience.

It is important to note that the English had no preconceived notions of racial differences or superiority. They saw the Indians as essentially the same as themselves. This was completely different from their view of Arabs or black Africans, whom they considered strange and foreign.

From Difficult Coexistence…

The colony began with only men—about a hundred—and they cautiously and peacefully chose a location for their camp that was neither claimed nor inhabited by anyone. They did not want to offend anyone. The head of the colony, Edward-Maria Wingfield, even decreed that since the English came in peace, they would build no wall and there would be no weapons training.

However, when the camp was barely two weeks old, hundreds of Indians attacked and tried to exterminate the English. There were deaths on both sides; the English would have been massacred if they had not fired a cannon that was aboard one of the ships. The sound of the detonation terrified the Indians, who fled. After that, the English quickly built a log fort.

Despite this bad start, all existing documents agree: the English still wanted to do better than the Spanish and live in peace with the Indians. However, to their great disappointment, the tribes living closest to them liked them the least. Only those living farthest away were friendly and willing to trade. This is a fundamental principle of race relations: they are always better at a distance.

The chief of the neighboring Indians was named Powhatan, and his favorite daughter, Pocahontas, converted to Christianity and married an English settler in 1614, seven years after the start of the colony. This was the beginning of a period of peace.

The new head of the colony, George Thorpe, worked tirelessly to please the Indians. If settlers mistreated Indians in any way, the documents say that George Thorpe “punished them severely,” although there are no specific examples. They were probably whipped. It is worth noting that when English dogs barked at Indians, Thorpe had them killed in the presence of the Indians—to the great dismay of the dogs’ owners.

…to Impossible Coexistence

But in 1618, four years after the Indian princess Pocahontas married a settler, her father, Chief Powhatan, died, and his younger brother, Opechancanough, became chief. Opechancanough did not have a favorite daughter married to an Englishman, and he did not like the English.

Thus, in 1622, four years after becoming chief, Opechancanough decided to exterminate the English. At that time there were about 1,200 of them in Jamestown, spread across several different locations. Every morning, Indians came into the settlements and worked with the English on the farms and in the workshops. On March 22, 1622, the plan was for the Indians to rise up and kill all the men, women, and children.

However, the main Jamestown settlement was warned of the attack by an Indian who had converted to Christianity. The men kept their weapons close at hand and nothing happened. In other areas it was a total surprise, and the Indians killed about 400 settlers, one third of the entire colony. Interestingly, they were particularly cruel to John Thorpe, who had killed dogs that bothered the Indians and who cared so much about their well-being. They tortured him and mutilated his body.

The English briefly made war on the Indians, but both groups returned to peaceful relations as before. Opechancanough remained chief.

Astonishingly, in 1644—22 years later—Opechancanough launched an identical surprise attack, and this time managed to kill between 400 and 500 people in a new attempt at extermination. But this time the English struck back and launched their own extermination campaign, killing many Indians, including Opechancanough.

The Indians Were Destroyed

I call this the inherent tragedy of race relations. The English seem to have been animated by genuinely peaceful intentions. They were not aggressive, arrogant, or possessed of any sense of racial superiority. The Jamestown colony seems to have been as promising an effort as possible to establish peaceful race relations.

And yet, the mere presence of white men was an act of aggression, even if they did not realize it. The Indians were there first. There is always someone who is there first. One can judge Opechancanough’s two attempts to exterminate the settlers by sneaky surprise attacks as condemnable, but I do not blame him. It was the only way for the Indians to drive out the white man and remain masters in their own house. Those attacks failed and the Indians were destroyed.

And that is the story of the conquest of America. The intentions of the whites—sometimes good, sometimes bad—do not matter. The fundamental fact is that one people possessed a land, and another group, more advanced and more powerful, wanted it. The result was the dispossession of the Indians, and even today, despite real mixing, the Indians remain a distinct people with a distinct identity, which shows how problematic racial assimilation remains, even after 400 years. Race relations always bring difficulties.

It was bad luck for the Indians that Christopher Columbus could not delay his voyage by five centuries. If he had landed in 1992 rather than 1492, the entire continent would probably have been classified as a nature reserve or a protected World Heritage site, open to a few carefully controlled ecotourism circuits, but certainly not to colonization.

The Real Drivers of Abolitionism

Now I would like to change the subject and talk about blacks and slavery.

If you think there was slavery only in the South of the United States, you are wrong. In 1770, just before the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, there was slavery in all parts of the New World: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. North and South America. In 1770, 40% of white households in what is now New York City owned black slaves, and there were more slaves in the northern New York colony than in the southern Georgia colony.

Let us return to the early days of the independent United States. The new country ratified its Constitution in 1788. The United States Congress met for the very first time the following year, in 1789. As a new country, the first Congress had to decide many things. It had to set up a court system, the postal service, the Treasury Department, the War Department. It was this Congress that adopted the famous first ten amendments to the Constitution. It was also the one that had to decide where the capital would be.

It was also the one that had to decide who could be a citizen of this new country. Do you know who could be a citizen? The first naturalization law, passed by the first Congress in 1790, reserved citizenship only for “free white persons of good moral character.”

It was to be a nation for whites.

At that time there were about 760,000 blacks, most of whom were slaves, but even free blacks could be citizens of a state, but not of the United States (3.3 million whites).

The North of America was not suited to plantation slavery, and the Northern states gradually freed their slaves. The abolitionist movement, however, is one of the most misunderstood movements in American history. Most Americans today think that the abolitionists wanted to free the slaves and make them equal to whites. Not at all. The abolitionists thought slavery was wrong, but the vast majority wanted to free the slaves and send them out of the United States. They called this colonization—sending blacks to overseas colonies—and you can see it as a remigration plan if you like.

The Policy of Return to Africa

This idea goes back to the founding of America. Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, owned several hundred slaves, but he considered slavery a terrible dilemma—to use that word again. As he famously said: “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” Imagine holding a terrifying wolf by the ears. Holding on is dangerous; letting go is also dangerous. Jefferson thought slavery was a grave injustice, but what would happen if you freed the slaves? He thought it would be impossible for free whites and blacks to live together.

In Washington DC there is a magnificent monument to Thomas Jefferson, with Ionic columns, a pediment, and a dome—somewhat like the Pantheon in Rome. Inside, there are quotes from the third president engraved in marble. One says: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people, the Negroes, are to be free.” But at the memorial, the quote stops there. In the original, however, Jefferson did not stop there. He wrote: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live under the same government.” The building was completed and inaugurated in 1943. Even then, Americans were lying to themselves about Jefferson.

He wanted to remigrate blacks “beyond the reach of mixture,” as he put it.

The next president, James Madison, tried to have the federal government buy the entire slave population of the United States in order to resettle them overseas, but he failed to obtain the necessary funds from Congress.

After leaving office, Madison became president of the American Colonization Society, a very influential private organization that raised funds to send blacks to Africa. The next American president, James Monroe, was very active in creating the nation of Liberia as a home for freed American blacks. The capital of Liberia, Monrovia, is named after Monroe in gratitude for his help in creating the country. From the very beginning, leading American figures wanted the entire black population to leave the United States.

Nine of the first eleven American presidents, by the way, starting with George Washington, owned slaves.

Most Americans think that Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, called the “Great Emancipator,” wanted to make blacks equal to whites. They are wrong. He too thought slavery was a terrible injustice, but he also insisted on the colonization project.

No Abolition Without Remigration

As you know, the United States fought a terrible civil war over slavery. More Americans died in our Civil War than in all other American wars combined: 750,000 dead.

While this terrible war was raging, Lincoln anticipated that it would end with emancipation. But he did not want free blacks living in the United States. He appointed a commissioner of emigration to find a place to send free blacks. He looked in the Caribbean, Central and South America, but the project did not succeed.

Lincoln received a delegation of black pastors at the White House. He explained to them that the war originated in the racial question and urged them to convince their flocks that emigration out of the United States was the best solution, believing that whites and blacks could not live together.

Blacks had already come to the White House, but as servants or workers; this was the first time they came for an official matter. And it was so that the President of the United States could tell them they were not wanted and that they should leave. This episode is now considered so shameful in American history that it is rarely mentioned. Probably only one American in five hundred has even heard of it.

Many Northerners, in states where slavery had already been abolished, opposed abolition even in the South unless it led directly to remigration. They even went so far as to ban abolitionist meetings unless they explicitly advocated a clear plan: no abolition without remigration.

Abolitionists who did not also support colonization were so unpopular, even in the North, that they struggled to find venues for their meetings—just as we identitarians do today. And so in 1839, twenty-two years before the Civil War, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society built its own building in Philadelphia so it could hold its meetings. The building was called “The Temple of Free Discussion.” The hall had barely opened when it was burned down: just three days after its inauguration, several thousand people gathered in front of the building and set it on fire. The firefighters came, but only to make sure the fire did not spread to neighboring buildings. The “Temple of Free Discussion” was completely destroyed. The people of Pennsylvania did not want to live with free blacks. Perhaps one American in five thousand has ever heard of the “Temple of Free Discussion.”

What America Was Until the 1950s

Several states that joined the United States before the Civil War hoped to avoid racial problems by remaining entirely white. The inhabitants of the Oregon Territory, for example, first voted not to allow slavery. Then they voted in even greater numbers not to allow blacks in the state at all. This ban was written into the Oregon Constitution of 1857.

Many eminent Americans said very harsh things about blacks and also about Indians.

President James Garfield, elected in 1881, wrote: “I have a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the Negroes becoming our political equals and I would be happy if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or disposed of in any decent way.” Theodore Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909. In 1901 he wrote that he had “been unable to find a solution to the terrible problem posed by the presence of the Negro on this continent.”

About American Indians, he wrote: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I wouldn’t inquire too closely into the health of the tenth.”

Mark Twain, the famous humorist, called the American Indian “a good, just and desirable subject of extermination if there ever was one.”

Indians only received American citizenship under an Act of Congress in 1924.

Dwight Eisenhower, president from 1953 to 1961, said it might be necessary to grant blacks certain political rights, but that this did not mean social equality “nor that a Negro could marry my daughter.” It was only with John Kennedy that we finally have a president whose ideas on race begin to be acceptable by today’s standards.

As many of you probably know, until 1965 the United States had an immigration policy designed to keep the country white, and at the time it was about 90% white. The Hart-Celler Act, which ended that policy, was passed by Congress only after its promoters assured that non-white immigration would remain limited and that the country’s demographic balance would not be altered. If those members of Congress had known that in just 80 years whites would become a racial minority, I can promise you they would NEVER have passed that law.

So until about the 1950s, that is what most white Americans believed.

A Radical Paradigm Shift

People of different races differed substantially in intelligence, temperament, and ability; and that is why the different races built different types of societies. They wanted only whites to live in America, because only they could maintain the type of civilization that Americans valued. Non-white immigration seemed to them a mortal threat. It was common to argue that if non-whites could not be expelled, they should be separated socially and politically. Whites were very strongly opposed to marriage with non-whites.

What whites are now supposed to think is exactly the opposite. I see few examples in human history where fundamental values have been so completely reversed in so short a time, except for the Islamic Revolution in Iran or the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.

Now whites are supposed to believe that races are absolutely equal in every respect. Race must never be a reason for making a choice. Whites have no legitimate group interests, so they must never organize as whites. It is immoral for whites to want to remain majorities in their homelands.

Racial diversity is inherently wonderful, so whites should welcome populations from everywhere into their countries, neighborhoods, institutions, and schools—even if this reduces whites to a minority. We have not yet reached the point where whites are actively criticized for marrying other whites, but dating and marrying non-whites is considered wonderfully progressive. And you see this promoted in advertising images all the time.

The Demographic Shift

The idea that all races are equal in every respect is practically the 11th Commandment of American society. But of course, this is obviously not true.

On average, whites have a higher IQ than Hispanics and Hispanics higher than blacks. In the United States, where blacks make up 14% of the population, they constitute only 1% of people with an IQ of 130 or higher and about 0.5% of those with an IQ of 140 or higher.

So what happens when they fail to reach the same level as whites? Since all races are officially equal, the only permitted explanation for the failure of blacks or Hispanics is oppression by evil whites. Astonishingly, almost no whites publicly contest this. They submit to humiliation and blatant discrimination because it is their fault that others do not succeed.

This subject is forbidden in Europe just as in the United States. But in a multiracial society, it is madness to pretend that every group is the same.

And while we ignore the reality of race, current demographic projections in the United States indicate that whites will become a minority by 2045, in just 19 years. Already, every white child in the United States under 18 is a minority. By 2060, Hispanics will be the absolute majority and whites will represent only 30% of the population.

The majority is supposed to believe that losing numbers, losing influence, losing control of its own destiny, and perhaps even disappearing, is a wonderful thing.

America is slowly ceasing to exist. It is an unspeakably painful thing for me to watch my country delude itself into self-destruction.

In my opinion, the white man hit rock bottom on May 25, 2020. Do you know what happened that day? George Floyd ascended to heaven. Afterwards, three hundred cities declared curfews. Thirty states called out the National Guard to keep the peace. But since then there has been a remarkable recovery.

From the American Dilemma to the European Dilemma

So far I have spoken to you as an American.

And it would be hard to be more American than I am. The first Taylor arrived in the English colonies in 1635. We have voted in every election, we have fought in every war. At the time of the Civil War, all my male ancestors of fighting age fought for the Confederate States. My country is filled with our bones, soaked with our blood.

And yet my culture is European, my heritage, my language, the faith of my fathers—everything that makes me an American has its roots deep, very deep, in Europe. And just as my heritage is the same as yours, my future and my destiny are too. Our destinies are linked and inseparable. And so, with your permission, I would like to claim the honor of calling myself a European — a European of American expression, to borrow and modify a phrase used by Jean-Yves Le Gallou.

I believe that wherever you find our people—in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the southern tip of Africa—you find what I call the worldwide fraternity of Europeans.

And everywhere, our people are waking up to the terrible crisis we face.

For those of us in this room, it is obvious. Our ancestors did not build Europe so that our generation could hand it over to foreigners. Foreigners who are not us, who cannot be us, who do not want to be us, and who often hate us.

Europe must belong to Europeans. We find it almost impossible to understand a white person who does not understand this instinctively.

Muslims, in particular, are sworn enemies.

For a thousand years, from the Moorish invasion of Spain in 711 to the siege of Vienna in 1683, Islam was a mortal threat to Europe. But now we are supposed to let Muslims flood into our countries and think they will take care of us in our old age? Who can believe this madness?

And do our leaders really believe that Somalis and Congolese belong in this society?

Fortunately, millions of us now understand that it was a terrible mistake to imitate America by opening European homelands to immigration. Millions are determined to reconquer their homelands and build societies in which our children will learn that it is not only acceptable to be white. They must learn that there is no greater blessing than to be sons and daughters of Europe, to be the living, breathing heirs of a magnificent heritage, full participants in that fabulous adventure we call Western civilization. The others are only spectators. Imitators.

That is why remigration is the only solution.

The Greatest of Battles

Yes, we are in a fight for our lives, just like our ancestors at Thermopylae, at the Battle of Tours, and at the siege of Vienna, the Afrikaners at the Battle of Blood River. But our fight is different. Our ancestors had a simple goal: defeat the enemy or fall with weapons in hand. I wish it were that simple for us. I believe every man in this room would give his life to ensure the survival of our people. The blood of past heroes flows in our veins.

But our fight is much harder. Because among the forces facing us are also many of our own, our brothers and sisters. Europeans like us. This is the great tragedy of our struggle and it makes it different from any other struggle in history. We are in the horrible position of having to explain to our own people that it is moral for us—for them—to survive. No one else has ever had such a terrible task. Our adversaries are therefore not our sworn enemies. Often they are members of our own households.

I believe that in almost all of our people there is still a glimmer, a small spark of European identity. Our job is to find that spark, to blow gently and lovingly on it, and to light a devouring fire.

I believe this is the greatest struggle in all of human history. Upon us rests the destiny of our people, the destiny of the West, the destiny of everything our ancestors fought for, the destiny of everything we love.

I would give anything to be forty years younger, to have forty more years to live in the service of our people. I may not live to see Europe’s future secured and fortified against all threats, but YOU who are young, YOU will see it.

And from the depths of my grave, I will smile when I hear the laughter of your children.

Originally published in Éléments on June 8th, 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

READ MORE:

Jared Taylor wrote the foreword to American History Z: Gen Z’s Journey to the Far Right by Joey Oliver (aka The Right Wing Coalition), recently released by Arktos:

Gomery Kimber reviews Andrea Scarabelli, Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life (PRAV Publishing & Arktos, 2026).

“A Dadaist dandy with a monocle; an apolitical avant-gardist; an occultist ‘magician’ and ‘idealist painter’; a lover of pseudonyms; a friend and later enemy of the Pythagorean Arturo Reghini; a dissident Steinerian; an oppositional Guénonian with Kshatriya tendencies; a pagan denounced as a ‘Satanist’; an ‘a-Fascist’ Fascist; an enemy of ‘progress’ in all its forms; a metaphysician of Tradition; a defender of imperial Ghibellinism; a mountaineer; a theorist of race hostile to biological racism; an explorer of the Left-Hand Path; a champion of apoliteia…”

So begins Alain de Benoist’s foreword, and it is as good an opening as any biography could wish for. Julius Evola (1898–1974) was, as de Benoist observes, a man impossible to compare to anyone else. He has been neither forgotten nor adequately understood. Scarabelli’s book, the result of years of meticulous archival work, now goes a long way toward correcting the latter deficiency.

I came to Evola relatively late, and by an oblique path. My primary esoteric reference point has always been G.I. Gurdjieff, and it was the Gurdjieff Work that shaped my sense of what inner development might mean. Reading this biography, I was therefore struck by a slender but suggestive thread connecting the two traditions: the figure of Philippe Lavastine, a pupil of the Caucasian mystagogue and owner of one of the largest esoteric libraries in Europe, who attempted to sponsor French translations of Revolt Against the Modern World and The Mystery of the Grail in wartime Paris and published a long, attentive review of Evola’s writings. The correspondence between Lavastine and Evola is not extant, but its trace remains. Evola’s own 1972 essay on Gurdjieff is characteristic: appreciative, reserved, granting the diagnosis of man-as-machine in full, yet maintaining the aristocratic hauteur of a differentiated man who finds perhaps something too chaotic in Gurdjieff’s method of shock and disorder. The two figures are, I think, genuinely complementary. Evola provides the vertical map, the ontology of real difference, the lost hierarchy; Gurdjieff works on the ruined engine that is too fragmented to read the map. Lavastine, moving between the two traditions without apparent syncretism, embodied the possibility of engaging both.

It was this complementarity, and Evola’s reputation as a difficult and combative personality, that drew me toward the biography — as well as the fact that I had already incorporated a fictionalised version of him, under the name Baron Andrea, as an antagonist in my novel The Nazi Alchemist, the first in the Wyvern series. Scarabelli’s book has enriched my understanding considerably, and I intend to make further use of his subject in a subsequent volume set during the ‘Years of Lead,’ the period of social and political turmoil in Italy that began in the late 1960s.

The biography is monumental by any standard: nearly 800 pages, with close to 2,000 scholarly notes and a full index. Scarabelli, having served as a secretary of the Julius Evola Foundation and currently the head of the Philosophy division of the Italian GRECE, brings to the task both institutional access to Evola’s archive and the genuine sympathy of a committed Traditionalist. De Benoist is right to note that no prior work compares to it. Evola often appeared haughty and distant in public, a calculated projection of what he called “active impersonality,” but Scarabelli reveals a man who enjoyed numerous romantic adventures (including with the writer Sibilla Aleramo), travelled extensively, quarrelled prolifically, and cultivated relationships ranging from Carl Schmitt and Mircea Eliade to Gottfried Benn and, improbably, Federico Fellini. He preferred to travel sine impedimenta, had no love for family life or children, and was constitutionally unsuited to monogamy. However, Evolamaniacs may be surprised to find he was not the complete misogynist, writing articles in defence of single mothers and of the rights of prostitutes.

READ MORE — Julius Evola’s The Woman Problem is hot off the press from Arktos:

Among the most illuminating sections are those devoted to the early Evola: his Dadaist period, his experiments with absolute individualism under the influence of German Idealism, Nietzsche, and Max Stirner, and the esoteric magazine Ur (later Krur), described by Scarabelli with a wealth of previously unpublished detail. The subtitle of Ur, Rivista di indirizzi per una scienza dell’Io (”Journal of Orientations for a Science of the ‘I’”), points toward what Evola himself called the “systematic and definitive exposition” of his doctrine: the Teoria e fenomenologia dell’Individuo assoluto (“Theory and Phenomenology of the Absolute Individual”), a work that has still not received the attention it deserves in the Anglophone world. My novel’s character, Justin Martello, who appears in three metaphysical thrillers, is himself a student of Evola’s Science of the ‘I’.

The question of Evola’s baronial title is handled with characteristic thoroughness. The conclusion is unambiguous: the title was not inherited, not registered, and not legal. His Sicilian family was bourgeois, and as Scarabelli notes, “there is no trace of the title of baron in his family.” The rumour appears to have originated as a Dadaist blague in the 1910s. Even Tristan Tzara referred to Evola as baron, but the persona proved useful in ways that outlasted the joke. In the aristocratic and conservative circles Evola frequented in interwar Germany and Austria, notably the Herrenklub in Berlin, noble lineage carried considerable social currency. He never denied the title, eventually painted himself a coat of arms, and had it stamped on his letterhead for correspondence with, among others, the son of the Austrian philosopher Othmar Spann, a letter intercepted and photographed by the Italian secret police. When an interviewer in the 1960s pointed out the absence of any Baron Evola in the Almanach de Gotha, Evola simply declined to answer. For a philosopher who held that true aristocracy was a matter of inner orientation rather than bureaucratic registration, the self-assumed title was, in its way, entirely consistent.

I have speculated on Substack about the heraldic symbolism of his self-designed coat of arms: two unsheathed swords, two cypress trees, and a diagonal black band running from right to left, which in the strict grammar of heraldry constitutes a bend sinister, historically associated with irregular lineages.

Whether Evola was quietly signalling to those with eyes to see that his title was indeed self-conferred, or whether the black diagonal carried primarily alchemical and Left-Hand Path significance (sinistra, after all, being Latin for left), I leave to the reader’s judgement.

Scarabelli is equally illuminating on Evola’s mid-1920s contributions to Lo Stato Democratico, an anti-Fascist newspaper founded by Duke Giovanni Colonna di Cesarò. This episode is easily misread. Evola’s opposition to Fascism was not democratic: it was rooted in his contempt for Mussolini’s movement as spiritually shallow, populist, and culturally rootless. “The movement had no cultural and spiritual roots whatsoever,” he wrote; “it tried to invent them later.” He contrasted this with what he believed was required: a metapolitical intellectual élite capable of actualising Traditional principles above the partisan fray. “Let a spiritual group be constituted,” he argued, “then the path to the true solution of the greatest economic and political problems will open up of itself.” Observers have called this stance “aristocratic anti-fascism,” and it is precisely the right description. Evola later worked to suppress these pages, perhaps because they were inconvenient; Scarabelli restores them to their proper place.

On the chapter devoted to racial doctrine, I confess I moved quickly. Evola’s “spiritual racism,” whatever philosophical structure he constructed around it, is not a territory I find productive or congenial to explore at length, and readers seeking a detailed engagement with that aspect of his thought will find more in other studies. What Scarabelli makes clear, and what matters historically, is that Evola consistently opposed biological reductionism and was viewed with suspicion by the Nazi establishment for precisely that reason. SS assessments of his work were dismissive; his influence on policy, marginal.

The later Evola, crippled by a USAAF bombing raid on Vienna in 1945 and thereafter largely confined to his flat in Rome, continuing to write, correspond, and exert influence over post-war esoteric and radical-right circles, is in some respects the most instructive. Men Among the Ruins and Ride the Tiger were not the products of a defeated man, but of a philosopher who had never measured success by historical outcomes. Worldly failure in the age of the Kali-Yuga was always already expected. What mattered was fidelity to principles, the achievement of inner differentiation, and readiness for future cycles. Whether one regards his Tradition as profound wisdom or repulsive reaction, the consistency of the posture commands respect.

One of the pleasures of a biography of this length and depth is the accumulation of anecdote, and Scarabelli’s book is richer in this regard than one might expect. Evola’s public persona was famously glacial, but the book reveals a man capable of dry wit and sardonic amusement at the absurdities of the world he inhabited. The account of his 1951 trial, in which he was charged with glorifying Fascism and inciting political violence, is particularly entertaining. Evola used his defence to deliver a philosophical lecture, citing Aristotle, Plato, the Dante of De Monarchia, Metternich, and Bismarck as fellow travellers in the dock. His lawyer Carnelutti interrupted to observe, to general hilarity, that the police had also gone in search of these people. A diligent officer, faithfully noting down the names as they were uttered, had apparently been recording them as dangerous neo-Fascists to be promptly put in handcuffs, unaware that he was compiling a list of ancient philosophers, a poet, and nineteenth-century statesmen. Evola was contemptuous of the prosecution throughout, observing that the trial was being conducted by people entirely unfamiliar with the ideas under scrutiny, and that the official report betrayed ignorance of what “esotericism” even meant. He was acquitted. It is a scene that would not be out of place in a comic novel, and Scarabelli does it justice, as he does every aspect of his subject’s life.

Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life is the biography the baron has long required and I recommend it to you.

Gomery Kimber is an award-winning British novelist, the author of The Big Shilling Trilogy, the Wyvern series of historical novels (espionage & esotericism), and the metaphysical Justin Martello adventures (”A New Kind of Hero”). He styles himself ‘not your average thriller writer.’ His books are available from Amazon and you can connect with him on Substack.

Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life, by Andrea Scarabelli, is available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions from Arktos and PRAV Publishing.

The literature of the fin de siècle mostly portrayed artists and aristocrats perishing amid the onslaught of democracy and capitalism. Some quietly faded away — usually into despair, perversion, and madness — while some exploded in an operatic grand finale, as in the sensationalist works of authors such as Jean Lorrain and Rachilde.

But the year 1899 also gave birth to the term “superhero,” which is a far more germane concept in the battle to save Europe on the streets of cities and in the hearts of men. Begin by recalling everything you’ve learned from Julius Evola about the Golden Age versus the Kali-Yuga, when — as he explains in the opening of Ride the Tiger, for example — all previous norms are to be considered void. In the battles to come, you are not going to be a knight fighting other European men of honor as in the battles, jousts, and duels depicted in the film Excalibur from 1981. You’re going to be battling inferiors.

I propose a primary orientation for approaching the urban skirmishes of the future, a Gothic martial art for the 21st-century fight to save Europe, capable of making its practitioners go beyond themselves through the mystery of a stimulated imagination wielding its ability to access latent powers from the archetypal dimension. Let’s begin by defining what this fighting style is not.

In addition to not fighting against fellow Europeans of high rank, you will not be fighting to save your homeland like a UFC professional. Such fighters are highly trained with absolute respect for the skill of their opponent, and are fighting in what is still a sporting event with a referee, audience, and prize money.

Next, moving from professional to the level of what we’d call a “street fight,” you must not sink to the level of the inferior opponent, which is the entire meaning of qualitative distinction and everything Evola has so painstakingly elucidated for us about the spiritual nature of true superiority. The collectivist peoples of the Southern Hemisphere who have invaded Europe often adopt low postures in preparation to fight, taunting the enemy while shifting from side to side, enacting low, sub-personal, and telluric energies.

But the subsequent danger is attempting to rise above this savagery through ego inflation deriving from the desire to prove something to the enemy — as well as oneself. Such egoic rage can pull even King Arthur off balance, as Sir Lancelot warns in their first meeting, and leads to Arthur’s breaking of Excalibur, which could only be mended through the dark, primordial energy of the Lady of the Lake.

We must understand that what will be most effective at supra-human assistance from the ancestral dimension, woven into the fabric of the blood, will not be a Golden Age fighting style of the Medieval period or Ancient Greece. We live in the Dark Age, and the proper fighting attitude requires dark energies that are pulled down, to use Evola’s favored term, “from above.”

READ MORE:

The new expanded edition of Julius Evola’s Metaphysics of War is out now!

Initiates will immediately know the difference between projecting outwards and expanding the body’s inner energy field — the aggressive “puffing up” or ego inflation — and drawing down, or summoning with the purpose of wielding, a supernatural dark energy that has been discovered and harnessed in one’s being through initiation.

The “Becoming Ghost Rider” clip on YouTube, complete with Carmina Burana-type minor-key choral soundtrack — is a good dramatization of the agonizing inner process of discovering this energy and seeking to control and integrate it.

In Gothic Olympus, my new occult novel out from Arktos, the hero Julien Stanwyck uses sexual energies to reach the level of transformation needed to become his own version of a dark superhero. Evola elucidates the use of sexual energy for initiatic purposes in his book The Metaphysics of Sex, and the novel attempts to dramatize the process of isolating the body’s two currents — positive and negative, or ida and pingala in the Vedic tradition — and then clashing them together in the spiritual craft of alchemy in order to possess the quintessence superpower, which is symbolized by the double-ouroboros depicted on the book’s cover.

When a mysterious inheritance leads Julien Stanwyck from the murky clubs of New York to the absinthe-soaked cabarets of fin-de-siècle Europe and the ruins of a family château, a drama of infernal torments and divine fury rattles the cage of the modern world.

Gothic Olympus launches the reader into the phantasmagoric odyssey of one man’s mission to reawaken the old gods and defy the onslaught of demonic collectivism and matriarchal tyranny. It follows Julien Stanwyck’s alchemical transformation from a pale, scrawny, angry young man into an Olympian sovereign who conquers death with the sword of Achilles, wins a goddess for a bride through initiation into the Mysteries of Sex, and travels through earthly and celestial realms to fulfill his destiny.

A mythopoetic allegory for the twilight of Western Civilization between the Belle Époque and the present dystopia, Gothic Olympus detonates the postmodern abyss through a pulse-pounding concoction of dark humor, occult wisdom, and virile spirituality, weaving Julius Evola’s revolt against the modern world with elements of steampunk, dark fantasy, and Decadence. Through the magic mirror of Stanwyck’s trials and adventures, Gothic Olympus is a riveting tale of heroism, a summons to metaphysical awakening, and a daring vision of the greatest force the world has ever known: European man’s imagination.

Powered by this ancestral energy, what would a Gothic fighting style actually look like? The creative artists behind Gothic character art and cinema draw their inspiration from the same archetypal frequency, and dark superheroes such as the Crow, Ghost Rider, and various iterations of Dracula have one thing in common in their posture, movement, and fighting style: contempt.

In the worlds these characters inhabit, they are fully aware of possessing superior powers. They are dvija or twice-born, which Evola has taught us is the distinguishing feature of aristocratic beings who are warriors, heroes, mages, and kings. They are men of a spiritual race who are conscious of being immortal and therefore have no fear of death, and who view the enemy as something beneath them. The chin is tucked and the hands are low and coiled, as if supernatural forces were at their fingertips. There is no attempt to intimidate the enemy, for these Gothic superheroes have completely transcended the earthly ego. They don’t try to be fearsome, they are fearsome by the very nature of their being.

When writers, actors, directors and choreographers create a fight scene for such characters, a clear pattern emerges. They approach the enemy without any technique or stance, but stride forward with a sense of absolute sovereignty of the will and the intention to defeat as quickly and effectively as possible. There are contemptuous forward kicks, brutally efficient sword stabs, and an enemy is more likely to be swatted across the room than hit with a jab-cross-hook. Grabbing the enemy’s hair and shoving his head into the nearest hard surface is another end-it-fast technique, and everything is executed with a sneering superiority and ice-cold determination.

Examples include the “opera fight scene” from the 2024 version of The Crow, available on YouTube, and the “Dracula destroys soldiers” scene from the new Luc Besson film, as well as various scenes from the Underworld franchise.

Words are a form of magic that shape reality — the logos, or “In the beginning was the Word” — and the term “fight” does not adequately describe the Gothic martial art I’m seeing in my imagination. Batman, the Dark Knight of Gotham, invokes the need to build his persona on an “elemental” force — choosing the symbol of the bat, the nocturnal beast associated with the vampire legend — and on evocative word energizing. This approach to confrontation is something more like “thrash” or “violence,” in which all system and technique has been surmounted by the singular determination to destroy the enemy.

Superhero films should not be mocked, for although they were born in the 20th century, the age of the masses, they serve, however inadvertently, the great secret of man’s ability to access higher dimensions of reality and harness the energies he finds there. Likewise, cinema is one of European man’s great art forms, and its creators — consciously or not — depict eternal truths forever renewing themselves across the shifting sands of history.

As the character Ra’s Al Ghul — leader of the vigilante League of Shadows in the Batman universe that destroys decadent societies — puts it, “What you really fear is inside yourself. You fear your own anger, the drive to do great or terrible things.”

Christian Chensvold is a college fencing champion who at the age of 47 commenced fight training in a New York park with a member of the Italian mafia. Today he trains Don Quixote-style, “tilting at windmills” in the forest with a wooden sword, and fights for Europe on the causal plane. His novel Gothic Olympus is hot off the press from Arktos.

Don’t miss out: get Gothic Olympus for 20% off during the Arktos Summer Sale!

Alexander Markovics, author of The Rise of the New Right, interviews Laurent Guyénot, the author of The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origins of the Western Syndrome, recently released by Arktos.

Alexander Markovics: Dear Mr. Guyénot, The Papal Curse is the first of your books published by Arktos in English. You’re a renowned historian with a PhD in Medieval studies and a Master in Biblical studies. Before you published already several books in French and English on geopolitics, European history, the Middle East, but also on American hegemony, such as The Unspoken Kennedy Truth and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land. Please introduce yourself, especially to those readers who might not have read your books so far and tell us what motivated you to write about this “Papal Curse”, what place this book takes in your work, and what exactly motivated you to write it!

Laurent Guyénot: The way that led me to write this book is a long and winding road. In 2008, I finished my PhD in Medieval Studies, on which I had worked for quite some years, and it took me a couple more years to turn my thesis into two books, one about the supernatural in medieval poetry, the other about the Grail literature. But in 2011, I suddenly and completely switched my interest to contemporary history, after I became aware that the official narrative of the 9/11 attacks was a scam. I went on researching what may be called the “conspiracy history” of the United States, focusing on the two major crimes that remain unsolved: the Kennedy assassinations and the 9/11 attacks. This research led me to the conclusion that both crimes were orchestrated by Israeli agents for the benefit of Israel (the arguments can be found in my books The Unspoken Kennedy Truth, and The 9-11 Triple Cross).

This in turn led me to question and research the very nature of Israel, and my main conclusion was that the criminal profile of Israel is the product of the Hebrew Tanakh, which to this day Zionist Jews see as the foundation of their national narrative. I developed this argument in two books: From Yahweh to Zion, and “Our God is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us”. That is my contribution to what used to be called the “Jewish Question,” and has now morphed into the “Israeli Question.”

But in the course of this research, I could not avoid noticing that this question has a flip side: the Christian Question. It may be put like this: How has Christianity made Gentile nations vulnerable to Jewish Power? It seems obvious that the Christian sanctification of ancient Israel has played a key role in the creation of modern Israel, and that, more generally, the Old Testament has acted as a Trojan horse of Jewish Power. By accepting it as God’s Word (as opposed to simply the Jews’ book), Christians have paid tribute to Israel as a unique people in God’s Providence, with an eternal destiny.

This was my main motivation to go back to the Middle Ages, with a focus on the development of the Church as a political institution and as a soft power. Like many other aspects of the Middle Ages, this is a field that is being profoundly revisited by recent historians, and I became absorbed in that research for a few years, until I could form a coherent perspective that I felt was worth publishing as a book. As I suspected, one of the conclusions of my research was that the political history of Europe is very much driven by the Old Testament God, rather than the spirit of Christ.

Markovics: During the first chapter of your work you focus on the Sonderweg or special development of the Western church, starting with the Gregorian Reform, which you describe as a coup d’état of the monks inside the church and the growing estrangement between the Western church and Orthodoxy. What are the differences in doctrine between the Orthodox church and the Western church? Why did the Western Catholicism beget modernity, individualism (and some authors argue even capitalism, via the monasteries focused on economic production, and Protestantism) whereas Orthodoxy didn’t? And why did the West invest so much energy in falsifying the history of the true Roman empire (called the Byzantine Empire in the West), that you even argue for the necessity of historical revisionism in the favor of Byzantium?

Guyénot: There is no significant difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism in terms of doctrine. But there are profound differences in the way doctrine is used. Before even thinking of those differences, we need to be reminded that the Roman Church, as a separate entity, is the result of a series of schisms that started in the 8th century and culminated with the Gregorian Reform of the 11th century. That is when the Roman Church and Latin Christianity really took a very distinct character from the original Eastern tradition.

It is often said that Latin Christianity puts more emphasis on dogma and belief, while Orthodoxy allows for wider access to faith and salvation. Consequently, there is nothing in the history of Orthodoxy comparable to the way heretics have been treated in the West. Because Byzantium never renounced its role as the custodian of Hellenic and Hellenistic culture, Orthodoxy has also kept a more peaceful relationship with philosophy, and retains a strong Platonic flavor, whereas Catholics turned to the quasi-materialism of Aristotelianism. In a Platonic perspective, symbols and art are efficient forces on man’s soul.

Apart from that, I see two obvious structural differences that have often been underscored by Orthodox thinkers, whether Greek or Russian. The first difference is that, because the papal reformers of the 11th century were monks, they imposed celibacy on the priests. This created an ontological separation between churchmen and laymen, and changed radically the meaning of “the Church”. In the words of the Russian theologian Aleksey Khomiakov, as a result of the Gregorian Reform, “the Christian was no longer one of the members of the Church, but one of her subjects.”

The second major difference, which derives from the first, is that the Roman Church started to assert itself as the supreme political power, to the point of binding many kings by ties of vassalage and demanding tribute from them. This was a departure from the Orthodox tradition of symphonia between the Empire and the Church, and this is what Dostoevsky meant when he wrote that Roman Catholicism gave in to the Devil’s temptation of the kingdoms of the world (Matthew 4).

Both these betrayals of the original tradition were denounced by the Protestant reformers as well, of course, but Protestantism departed further from the Eastern tradition in other ways.

Markovics: In your book you write about the “Crusader Spirit” conjured by the Roman pope and how it influenced the development of the modern West up to the human rights imperialism of (post-)modernity. What were the core beliefs that led to the Crusades, what kept them alive, and why do you think these military campaigns were detrimental to the development of European civilization? And most importantly: Can this Crusader mentality also be used to explain the current US-Israeli war on Iran and the Evangelical/ “Christian”-Zionist support for Israel?

READ MORE from Arktos:

Guyénot: The crusades are the popes’ wars, and as such, they are a manifestation of the political ambition of the papacy. They are unthinkable in Orthodoxy. By the crusades, the popes mobilized the military class of France, Germany, England, and other kingdoms into wars of its choosing. In exchange, the Church promised a ticket to heaven to anyone who would kill or die in its holy war. It is no exaggeration to say that the crusades became a new religion, a new way of salvation, accompanied by their own mythology, iconography, and rituals.

The crusades are also a manifestation of the Old Testament spirit that took hold of the Roman Church. Recent historians emphasize the enormous influence of the crusades on the imagination and the character of European Christendom. Through the unprecedented amount of narrative versions it gave rise to, the First Crusade became for Westerners what the Trojan War was for ancient Greeks, as Oswald Spengler remarked.

Not only did crusading ideology later become a core element of colonialism, but it has determined the way the West views the world and its role in it. It is quite obvious that the Crusade idea of saving the world by war is deeply ingrained in the mind of the American hawks of every age. Just think that the current “Secretary of War” is the author of a book titled American Crusade. And, of course, the crusade idea works especially well as propaganda for wars against any Muslim nation, such as Iraq or Iran.

Another lasting effect of the crusades is Europe’s obsession with Jerusalem. The popes convinced the European elite class that the cradle of their civilization was a city at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and asked them to fight for it as if the salvation of their civilization (in addition to their own individual salvation) depended on it. There cannot be a project more contrary to the organic growth and interests of Europe.

This obsession with Jerusalem has played a central role in the European involvement in the Middle East up to recent times. In 1917, when British General Edmund Allenby entered the city in a solemn procession, he proclaimed “the end of the Crusades.”

It is likely that the support of Christian Zionists for Israel and their enthusiasm for the slaughter of Muslims is affected by the crusade narrative. But more generally, as I said before, I think it is the centrality of ancient Israel in the Christian worldview that is the key factor. When Western nations agreed and cooperated with the rebirth of Israel, it was not only out of guilt for the “Holocaust”; it was also under the influence of its religious imagination. It was, in some way, the fulfillment of the prophetic vision of a new Jerusalem coming down from heaven.

Markovics: Coming to the question of religion, you discuss the Chinese example with Confucianism as a wisdom tradition instead of a religion. For Europe you suggest adopting the Stoicist philosophy as a wisdom tradition analogous to China. Have you been influenced by thinkers of the Nouvelle Droite or National revolutionary thought like Dominique Venner and his Samurai of the West in this regard? Please elaborate further on this!

Guyénot: It is not always easy to know what past reading has influenced your present thinking. Sometimes, you can have some idea that you think on your own without realizing that something you had read a long time ago planted the seed of that idea. So I may have been influenced by some authors of the Nouvelle Droite, even though I am not very familiar with this intellectual movement. I had read a long time ago some books by Alain de Benoist, who is an intellectual celebrity in France, and I have occasionally read his magazine Éléments. I have also read and appreciated Guillaume Faye’s book Archeofuturism. But I have not read yet Dominique Venner’s book Samurai of the West. I have actually just started reading your book The Rise of the New Right in order to get better acquainted with this tradition, with whom I now find myself in communion on several issues, especially on the prime importance of Europe as a civilization, as opposed to the narrow chauvinistic nationalisms that contribute to nurturing old grudges between neighbours, and to making Europe a failed civilization-state.

When I realized that the papacy’s political ambition was the single most important factor in Europe’s failure to build its political unity under the Germano-Roman Empire (this was something of an epiphany for me), I suddenly became a fervent Europeanist. That is why I am extremely happy with Alain de Benoist’s foreword to my book. That and being published by Arktos are for me signs of adoption into that family—even though I am well aware that my deep hostility to the psychopathic nation-state may be seen by some as a lack of manners.

As for my interest in Stoicism, it was born from my recent readings in Greco-Roman philosophy. Stoicism is a wisdom tradition that fulfils my spiritual needs. It has a cosmic, non-anthropomorphic concept of the divine and an ethical teaching based on a holistic vision of the human community. I cannot help but wonder what the world would have become if, instead of converting to Christianity, Constantine had made Stoicism some kind of official philosophy of the Empire, as had almost been the case under Marcus Aurelius.

It is possible to speculate about this because Stoicism is comparable to Confucianism. China never needed a state “religion”, allegedly based on a direct revelation from God. China built its civilization-state on Confucianism as the basic curriculum of every civil servant, while letting the people practice whatever cults and rituals they wanted (and actually encouraging ancestor veneration). Like Alain de Benoist, who has been described as a modern-day Celsus, I tend to see Christianity as the greatest catastrophe that happened to Europeans. That is one reason why I think we have so much to learn from China.

Markovics: Thank you very much for the interview!

Laurent Guyénot’s The Papal Curse and Alexander Markovics’ The Rise of the New Right are available from Arktos for 20% off during the Arktos Summer Sale!

Issue no. 220 of Éléments is devoted to “remigration” — a concept that is progressively gaining ground in French and European political discourse. A range of figures from the dissident political and cultural world were asked to respond to the question: “Do you think ‘remigration’ is possible and desirable, and if so, in what form and under what conditions?”

Here is the response of the Institut Iliade’s director of development, Romain Petitjean:

Remigration is a vital necessity. For Europeans, the task is to regain demographic, cultural, and territorial control of their continent and to put an end to a deleterious situation that they did not choose. While Afro-Asiatic immigration may suit the purposes of rootless1 rulers by exerting downward pressure on wages, it is a catastrophe for the host countries, which watch their identitarian cohesion—the bedrock of the polity—collapse. One cannot assimilate entire peoples with alien customs into our centuries-old civilization.

Our liberal societies, founded on the individual contract, are powerless in the face of the Great Replacement. They are incapable of conceiving of existence in any terms other than inclusion — at best, assimilation, which is always possible for individuals, but wholly illusory when it comes to integrating foreign communities into historic cultures. We are currently witnessing a sort of utopian head-first plunge2 and a generalized denial.

Yet politics consists precisely in confronting reality (and in doing everything to show it to our people), in saying YES or NO when the situation demands. It must confer a destiny upon the people. Remigration, which is neither more nor less than the reversal of migratory flows, fully meets this requirement. It has the advantage of breaking a dynamic that has become deadly, and of offering a mobilizing and unifying myth. NO to the Great Replacement, YES to the reconquest of what we are. We must salute the European identitarians who are working to impose this simple idea—whose benefits everyone can see, and which is now growing in people’s minds, as the many opinion polls and electoral results indicate.

But it is urgent to put it in place, for if managing flows is one thing, managing the stocks—which swell with each passing day—is another. I would say that this is the foremost reason remigration must be brought about, its modalities being, obviously, numerous. Trust within our society is already badly shaken, owing as much to growing insecurity as to ever-sharper cultural gaps, and the lasting settlement of populations that receive far more than they contribute to the redistributive system now imperils our welfare state.

Let us recall that this migratory crisis is affecting more and more countries around the world, and that while Europe is the great loser for the moment, it is, broadly speaking, a zero-sum game for peoples of emigration and immigration alike. Discharging one’s demographic surplus abroad with the complicity of corrupt elites is neither healthy nor viable for the Afro-Asiatic countries that resort to it.

As for “selective” immigration, which consists in granting residence permits only to qualified or credentialed foreigners, it relieves the host country, on the one hand, of having to fix its endemic problems of training and educational policy, while on the other it bleeds dry the countries of departure, which are thereby stripped of their lifeblood. These practices are not profitable in the long run, neither for European, Asian, nor African countries.

Cooperation between states is therefore indispensable. Nothing prevents us from banging our fist on the table, from putting in place binding and spectacular measures to make an impression, while negotiating intelligent shared solutions with an arsenal of aid and incentives to return. The diplomatic corps—which the rootless liberal elites are busy destroying—is made for precisely this.

Let us be at once determined and idealistic, for what is at stake is the future of our children and our survival, and let us be pragmatic, for that is the path of effectiveness. Finally, it must be recalled that remigration has already been carried out by various peoples, by various political camps, in various eras, and according to various modalities. From post-colonial repatriations to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Afghans from Pakistan in 2018, to contemporary Scandinavian experiments, examples abound.

From a more political standpoint, more and more European parties (still in opposition, for the most part) are putting remigration—the reversal of migratory flows—on the agenda of their programs, and certain countries, notably the Danish and Swedish social democracies, are beginning to put it into practice. It is a process to be set in motion, and for that we must change our perspective and our mindset.

No, the law does not forbid us from doing so; quite the contrary, remigration consists precisely in applying the law. As in a funnel, the point is to begin with the most obvious cases (illegal aliens, foreign delinquents, temporary stays, fraudulent entries…), which will send a clear signal to these populations: “You are not welcome and are meant to leave. Prepare yourselves.”

We must rediscover that life-drive, that desire to make our own children and to perpetuate what we are. To that end, a return to the source of our history and our own genius, and taking back our territory into our own hands, for us, the autochthonous people, is indispensable.

Interview conducted by Xavier Eman

Originally published in Éléments on May 27th, 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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Romain Petitjean authored the foreword to Guillaume Faye’s The Ethnocide System

The Arktos Summer Sale has kicked off!

Until June 30th, stock up on classic and new books for 20% off in the Arktos Shop.

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It’s never too late…

Is Judaism the ultimate source of Western civilisation? Such views have seen a revival in 2026: the Levant is supposed to have been the Cradle of Civilisation (12,000 BC) and the Hebrews gave the West its foundations, that is, “ethical monotheism”, human dignity (for those made in the image of God), an objective moral law, justice for the weak, and linear and redemptive history. Since Israel has lost support among the Western youth, chief scholars from the Tikvah Fund and others have been out in force to remind the West how much it owes to Judaism (e.g. here). I assumed this would spark a debate about the nature and heritage of Western civilisation, but there has been silence. Why?

We are individuals adrift, no crew or course, overboard with memory loss; the erosion of our grounding in Greece, the withering of our Roman roots, and our distraction from the divine have ensured it. In short, we have forgotten our own story, the one about our shared Romanitas, about who and what we truly are in the world. Not knowing our past, we are at risk of having our future written for us, even with us typecast as the villain. Below is the Roman version of our story, the one we must tell again.

The Noahide View of the West

Certainly, there is nothing new about the above debate. Western history is littered with interest in a Jewish perspective on our civilisation. The ethical monotheism outlined above is “Noahidism”, or the Rabbinic concept of a universal moral law and practice given to Noah for non-Jews, developed in the 500-600s AD; this consists of seven laws mandating justice systems, prohibiting cruelty to animals etc. So it goes, Western history should begin and end therein.

Of course, we are familiar with Freemasonry, founded in the early 1700s as a Noahide-influenced sect; this was a time of renewed interest in Kabbalistic and Rabbinic texts among European intellectuals. Note the explicit references to “True Noachidae” in their founding documents: James Anderson (a Presbyterian minister with Hebraic interests), in his Constitutions of the Free-Masons, the blueprint for modern Freemasonry, mandates they ‘be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, by whatever Names, Religions, or Nations they may be distinguished’, but must ‘observe the moral Law as a true Noachida.’ In the same period, the York Constitution similarly requires obedience to ‘the laws of the Noachites’ as divine imperatives. This positions Noah as the ethical founder of the Craft and is a direct evolution from Rabbinic scholarship, according to Rev. Dr Herbert Poole and Alexander Horne, with Noah’s role predating the typical Hiramic legend of Freemasonry by decades, with perhaps a Rosicrucian influence which dramatised flood myths in the 1700s. However, this was a secret society, albeit a politically influential one in the modern West.

Today, those holding to the Noahidist narrative are more than overt — they are dominant players in US politics. Yoram Hazony, the President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, leads the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in the US, and evangelical Zionism gives it the support to promote ideas like Josh Hammer’s Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West, teaching that ‘Western civilization, as we conceive it today, began at Mount Sinai’ and that ‘without the Jews, there would be no West’. Note that Hammer spoke at CPAC 2026 on this topic. Of course, this frames Israeli national interests as synonymous with US interests; maintaining this narrative on social media has thus become ‘an eighth front [in the war with Iran] for the hearts and minds of people, especially young people in the West,’ as defined by Israeli PM Netanyahu (here). All the more reason for debate and perspective on this topic!

READ MORE on the modern Noahide movement and Christian Zionism:

Such views conflate too much of Judaism with Israel and too much of Israel with Western civilisation, and furthermore juxtapose this mix with Islam as the real clash of civilisations. Yet, Islam is itself an earlier iteration of Noahidism. Muhammad engaged with Jewish scholars and communities after his migration (Hijra) in 622 AD. This period coincided with a flourishing of Rabbinic scholarship, including the codification of the Babylonian Talmud (early 600s) which formalised the Seven Noahide Laws among other Jewish concepts. The Constitution of Medina (622 AD), an early political pact attributed to Muhammad, treated Jews as allies in a multi-religious ummah (community), reflecting Jewish legal traditions of communal covenants. This exposure introduced Muhammad to midrashic (interpretive) stories and halakhic (legal) principles which are found in Quranic parallels, such as the story of Abraham’s sacrifice (Quran 37:102–107 cf. Genesis Rabbah) or the golden calf (Quran 20:83–97 cf. Exodus Rabbah). Islamic prohibitions mirror Noahide ones, and Muhammad positioned Islam as a fulfillment of primordial revelation to Noah that is accessible to all peoples—much like Rabbinic views of Noahidism as Judaism’s universal arm. The hanifs, pre-Islamic Arabian monotheists praised in the Quran (e.g. 3:67, 6:79, 16:120) as followers of Abraham’s “pure” faith untainted by Christianity, are linked to the Jewish Theosebes or ger toshav (God-fearers), Gentiles who adhered to Noahide Laws without full conversion, which was common in synagogues of the 1st–5th centuries AD, like Zayd ibn Amr (a contemporary of Muhammad). According to David Friedenreich’s Jewish Muslims, many Eastern Christians viewed Islam as a relatively “Judaised monotheism” in the Near East, as did figures like Peter the Venerable in the West, who perceived it as reverting to Bronze-Age behaviours of the Old Testament outmoded by the Christian dispensation.

None of the Noahidist framing comports with my understanding of Western civilisation as a Roman Catholic. Roman civilisation has its own distinct life, which in fact supersedes 1st-century Judaism and which was made the main character in God’s grand redemption arc, having inherited the Kingdom of God. It is my sincere hope that Westerners come to love and declare their Roman identity, and rise to defend and debate our version of events when duty calls.

The Greek Miracle

Academic study of Western Civilisation has been all but eradicated. My book, The Uniqueness of Western Law, took its name from the work of Ricardo Duchesne, the last great defender of Western Civilisation as a subject, now subsumed into World History.

I concluded that the central principle of the West is its unique philosophy of law, a discoverable, God-given, universal order, superior to rulers and binding upon all. Other civilisations developed principles of moral life, yes, but not law in this profound sense. How did Greeks and other European peoples arrive at this? Duchesne’s work provides the only reasonable answer.

The West is the story of humans who see themselves as self-determining, free and rational agents, accepting only those norms congenial to that awareness. European jurisprudence germinated in the aristocratic culture of the Indo-European peoples, that restless, warrior ethos of self-asserting individuals who prized kudos and glory from equal peers and resisted despotic power.

From the Homeric heroes and the egalitarian war-bands of free aristocrats sprang the miracle of Greece: a competitive philosophical environment where virtue evolved from raw martial valour to rational self-mastery, sophrosyne, and the cardinal virtues. This was the portent of King Arthur’s Round Table. The inquiring Greek mind, rejecting the contradictory, priestly fiat of the Middle East, turned instead to identifying natural causes in a cosmos governed by intelligible order, an outlook hostile to oriental despotism but conducive to the rule of law in the Greek poleis. This Faustian struggle for a deontological jurisprudence can be seen from Greece to the Icelandic Sagas in the opposite corner of Europe.

Aware of this uniqueness, Alexander the Great was swept up by the imperial tide in the affairs of men. The prevailing “logic of empire”, as Philip Blond dubbed it, observes that peace requires a most powerful peacekeeper (empire) and that war likewise requires a most powerful winner to declare and enact said peace (empire). Alexander’s empire and the proliferation of the Western project would thoroughly Hellenise the Hebrew religion to produce the 1st-century seedbed from which Christ would emerge.

It has been argued, especially by New-Right thinkers, that pre-Christian Rome and later pagan fads best represent Western civilisation, and that Christianity was essentially alien and incompatible. On the contrary, Duchesne and I had independently drawn on the definitive scholarship of Martin Hengel to conclude that ‘Christianity is a Hellenistic Religion, and Western Civilization is Christian’ (article of the same title here).

READ MORE on the European New Right’s understanding of Paganism and Christianity in Pawel Bielawski’s monumental study, brought to you by Arktos:

Christianity emerged from a Second Temple Judaism already profoundly shaped by Hellenism, including religious doctrine (immortal souls, Hades etc.). Greek had been the language of trade, administration, and culture in Palestine for over three centuries. Even the Maccabean revolt did little to halt this process. Jerusalem had effectively become a Greek polis by 175 BC, and the Hasmoneans themselves continued the Hellenisation they had once resisted. Greek schools, bilingual coins, Greek architecture, public inscriptions, and the adoption of Greek words into Jewish vocabulary all testify to this deep integration. Contra Josh Hammer, one could argue that, without the West, there would be no Judaism as we know it.

Most significantly, this encounter produced a new emphasis on the individual before God in the West’s unique project of jurisprudence. The Old Testament knew little of the hero who dies for his city; that praise belonged to Greek poetry. Prophets showed faithfulness, but not martyrdom in the Greek sense. Only in the Maccabean period, under Hellenistic influence, does the glorification of the martyr and the value of the individual emerge, paving the way for the Messianic mission. Christ, let alone Christianity, represents the rightful successor to the burgeoning individual soul, their virtuous self-sacrifice for the common good, which is the Sacred Heart of Western civilisation. St. Paul, with his Greek education, embodied this synthesis, as did the early Church. St Justin Martyr explicitly identified Christ with the logos, the divine reason of the Stoics and Greeks, and saw Greek philosophy as a preparation for the spread of the Gospel throughout the Greek-speaking world.

Thus, the tradition of Indo-European thought flowed directly into Christianity, and the Roman Catholic world found great comportment with the jurisprudence of Northern European tribes. Far from being an alien imposition, Christendom gave Europe its distinctly personalistic individualism, combined with a sincerely corporate view of our families, communities, cities, countries and our continent, this dynamic being the great hallmark of our European culture.

Roma Aeterna

The Pax Romana was built in the aftermath of the Greek empire, having the political benefit of lessons learned. The Romans would revolutionise empire forever, crafting the template of politics still used today, and making the notion of a global empire and international peace possible. As St. Cyril put it, our philosophical patrimony came from Athens, but our ‘practical philosophy’ came from Rome, the res publica.

The genius of Rome as the model of future empires came from its deliberate constitution of both nomadic and peasant peoples (Indo-European and Old Europeans) into one body politic, breaking the cyclical arms race of empires past in the borderlands between the two (see the work of Peter Turchin on imperiogenesis). Nomads, typifying the youthful, pioneering and innovative spirit of the aristocratic individual, are only one side of the human story; that fluid minority of thought leaders allows our species to be so uniquely adaptive, building new cultures and civilisations around which the majority of followers and settlers solidify. It is that propensity to the former, that Faustian spirit which allowed Romans, Europeans, the West, to transcend the dynamics of decline, to unite classes of peoples as members of one social organism, to harmonise their goals toward the common good. The world stage was set for the Eternal City to inherit eternal life, the prophetic fulfilment of God’s Kingdom conquering the world through charity.

When Christ said, in Matthew 21, that the Kingdom of God would be taken away from his wayward countrymen and given to another nation (ethnoi in the Greek), it was always understood by the Church that the Roman Empire was intended. When Christ spoke of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, Daniel’s prophecy was brought to mind, specifically the coming Kingdom of the Son of Man, which would reform the final pagan kingdom of Rome, depicted as a soulless, iron-fanged, all-devouring beast. This beast would become a man, upright, an analogue of God; i.e. the Roman Empire would become a Holy Roman Empire. Whereas God reached down to the Jews and, tragically, many of them rejected the prophets and the Messiah, the Greeks were reaching out to Him, fumbling in the dark, and the Romans accepted His Kingdom of light. Europeans thus became God’s chosen vehicle, educating the world in this faith and pursuing our destined goal of international law and order.

The brilliant Alan Fimister outlines the Church’s historic understanding of herself in The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man: Romanitas As a Note of the Church. To paraphrase a key passage, to be Roman is to be Catholic; to be Catholic is to be Roman. After all, the Byzantines were Roman and understood themselves as such and, for this reason, Moscow claims to be the Third Rome even today. To say that the West is Rome is not a larp, nor is the Roman Catholic identity as its spiritual continuity. All of Western civilisation is fleshing out a Latin skeleton. Even Netanyahu views the West as Rome and the US as the ‘new Rome’ (here). So, we can and must proclaim the shared Romanitas of the West; we should not perceive the dominant US as a separate civilisation, but as the primus inter pares (first among equals), America first in a fraternity of shared Romanity.

Tertullian famously asked, ‘What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?’ As we have seen, Jerusalem owes an unpayable debt to Athens. The real question is: What does Jerusalem have to do with Rome?

To the Romans, the Church and Europe are the Katechon, the good guys preventing the rise of the Antichrist and ushering in the apocalypse. Contrariwise, when asked why he was reading Barry Strauss’ 2025 book, Jews vs. Rome, Netanyahu declared that ‘we have to win’ against Rome (here). There are significant differences between Judaism and Western civilisation in all the key pillars of a civilisation—religion, culture, ethics, politics, economics and technology—despite the contributions Jewish citizens have made to the West in each of these areas. It would serve both to acknowledge these differences in an honest yet charitable spirit of debate.

Overused, “Judeo-Christian” is thus a novel and politically-motivated term, ‘advancing the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization’, as the Judeo-Christian Zionist Conference put it in February this year (here); it does not reflect theological or social accuracy about the distinctly Roman characteristics of Western civilisation, a fact recognised by Jews and Christians alike in academic discourse (here, here and here). Nathan and Topolski (2016) conclude, ‘if one should choose to use this term (in spite of all the reasons not to do so), then it is imperative that we qualify what we mean when doing so.’ Regardless, last month, Israel Advocacy Day saw hundreds of rabbis and pastors gathered in the US capital to ‘stand for Judeo-Christian values, Western civilization’, as though these are synonymous, without qualification (e.g. here). For such reasons, some geopolitical figures prefer to distinguish Judeo-Protestant civilisation from a Catholic-Orthodox one (e.g. here).

In conclusion, whilst Christendom looks on Jews as those who kept the faith in the one transcendent creator God, preparing the way for the Messiah and the redemption of the world, we cannot ignore the bigger and fuller picture of Western civilisation and our central role in it as Europeans. We must know and be emboldened in our Roman heritage and identity, get comfortable and confident with this terminology, and uphold our God-given stewardship of the future. We can start with some healthy debate on the topic.

READ MORE from Arktos:

METAPHYSICS OF WAR — an Arktos classic expanded for the new generation and the years ahead

This proverb from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is re-energised for the modern day in Julius Evola’s Metaphysics of War. Revolting against the modern world’s reduction of war to geopolitics, economic interests, and humanitarian ideology, Evola summons ancient and medieval sources from both East and West to reveal how war can be seen as a unique arena of heroism and spiritual transformation at the origins of civilisation.

Written during the explosive years around the Second World War, the essays gathered in this volume explore the existential situation of war and the heights of the warrior ethos. Drawing on Nordic, Roman, Vedic, and other sacred texts and rituals, Evola points to the opportunity for men of the degraded, materialistic, nihilistic modern age to achieve a higher state of consciousness, rediscover the meaning of life and the human condition, and reconnect with metaphysical reality through a bond of mind and action.

Unlike today’s armies, which demand mere soldiers in the mercenary employ of a decadent ruling class, the authentic warrior tradition is a path toward transcendence which extends beyond the battlefield to transform all spheres of life and culture.

This revised and expanded edition of Metaphysics of War features additional essays as well as a new foreword and introduction connecting Evola’s ideas to both his era and our own.

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The Institut Iliade’s educational and networking seminars, known as Formations, traditionally choose an historic European figure as their “Promotion” to represent their “graduating class” and serve as an inspiration and a source of lessons for their ongoing endeavours. This year, the international Awakening Europe seminar preceding the Institut Iliade’s 13th Colloquium [read the Arktos report here] selected Friedrich Nietzsche. Arktos’s very own Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Jafe Arnold, authored the Promotional tribute [read it in French here].

“We are unknown to ourselves […] We have never sought ourselves — how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? […] Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us ‘absent-minded’ […] ‘What really was that which just struck?’ so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, ‘what really was that which we just have experienced?’ and moreover: ‘who are we really?’”1

These words would have been familiar to the godfather of the Institut Iliade, Dominique Venner, for they open Friedrich Nietzsche’s preface to the Genealogy of Morality — the very book that Venner carried with him to war in the mountains of Algeria. Uttered in Nietzsche’s typically incisive questioning, these words thrust forth the intimate relationship between knowledge, identity, and memory, which is enshrined in the Institut Iliade’s maxim, “For a Long European Memory.” With respect to this memory, Venner wrote in his final testimony, Samurai of the West:

“I rebel against the negation of French and European memory. I owe to this memory examples of bearing, valour, and refinement hailing from the most distant past, that of Hector and Andromache, of Odysseus and Penelope. Threatened like all my European brothers with perishing spiritually and historically, this memory is my most precious possession. The one on which to rely in order to be reborn.”2

Furthermore, Venner believed that Nietzsche had rekindled and transmitted a primal element of deep European memory when he uttered “We Hyperboreans” — to which Venner applauded: “The memory had thus been transmitted!”3

But do we today — gathered around an institute that honours and carries on the task of memory championed by Venner — remember Nietzsche? Does Nietzsche figure in our memory? What does he have to say for us to recall? To invoke the words of Guillaume Faye:

“Nietzsche already prophesied, ‘The man of the future is he who will have the longest memory.’”4

Nietzsche is one of those memorable names designating more than a man or a particular idea — they name a momentous train of thought, a special kind of rupture, or a crossing from which the way to the other side is a leap that has not been mapped or bridged. Another such name, Julius Evola, who theorized the “rupture of level,” wrote:

“It has been rightly said that Nietzsche’s personality and thought also have a symbolic character.”5

As for the person, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in the autumn of 1844 in the village of Röcken, in the Prussian Province of Saxony, a short stroll away from the site of one of the most famous battles of the Thirty Years’ War that drastically altered Europe. His native landscape was in the orbit of one of the centres of German art and thought, Leipzig — the birthplace of the philosopher Leibniz and the composer Richard Wagner (with whom Nietzsche would later enter into a famous polemic).

Immersed and excelling in the precious faculties of European genius —music, classical and modern languages, theology — Nietzsche went on to study at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, becoming a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24 (thus one of the youngest tenured professors in history). Twice Nietzsche put aside his academic career to be a soldier: once for voluntary service in the Prussian artillery, and then as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War, from which he returned to witness the establishment of the German Empire.

The 1870s saw the steady emergence of Nietzsche’s decidedly unorthodox oeuvre (such as his famous The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, and Human, All Too Human), but also the drastic confluence of numerous health issues that would eventually force him to resign from academia and made writing a particularly intense psychosomatic experience. Nevertheless, constantly moving with the weather between the Italian and French coasts in the winters and the Swiss Alps in the summers, the 1880s were the peak of Nietzsche’s writing, yielding works like The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Genealogy of Morality, as well as the notes that would later be assembled into The Will to Power. The year 1888 would go down as at once the most extraordinary year of Nietzsche’s writing — including Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and The Antichrist, — and the final year of his “career” and independent living.

Having pushed his critique of the modern age to its breaking point, Nietzsche himself collapsed: following a sudden episode of mental breakdown in 1889 Nietzsche was diagnosed as incapacitated and placed in the care of his family, fated to suffer much (including the loss of the ability to speak and walk) until his death in 1900. Although Nietzsche’s physical condition in the last years of his life was undoubtedly deplorable and the result of long-standing illnesses, some are tempted to see in his sudden “psychosis” an archetype of the “madness,” “mania,” or “crazy gnosis” known to ancient European traditions, including ancient Greek philosophy — or as an instance of the flight of genius that can no longer handle the contemporary material world of lesser order. For the record, Nietzsche signed many of his final letters (known as the “Delusion Notes”) as none other than the ancient Greek god of metamorphosis and madness, “Dionysus.”

Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s passage from academic and philosophical productivity to an uneasy state of madness symbolically parallels the rupture that he represents and registers in European ideational history. Nietzsche was not a system-builder like his compatriots, but a demolisher, as represented by the “philosophical hammer” he raised against “idols.” Nietzsche’s hammer unleashes a “genealogy of values”: he deconstructs and exposes the absurdity of the dead-end of European philosophy, discerning how the latter has detracted from the experience of life, will, and power in favour of concepts, abstractions, and universalisms. For Nietzsche, European man has become beholden to a “slave morality” driven by ressentiment, constantly seeking the “reality” of “truth” and “good” elsewhere rather than in man’s own undertaking to master and overcome the battlefield of wills. As Faye reminds us:

“In order to shape history it is necessary to unleash ideological storms by attacking – as Nietzsche correctly observed – the values that form the framework and skeleton of the system.”6

Giorgio Locchi and Antoine Dresse likewise read what is at stake in Nietzsche’s “active history”:

“The Nietzschean superman is one who assumes time without promise of redemption, who accepts that the past is not abolished, but can, in an instant, be taken up anew and reoriented. Becoming thus becomes an act of creation: it is no longer about enduring history, but about engendering it by fully exposing oneself to it.”7

Through a stormy convergence of philosophical analyses, aphorisms, and mythopoetic flashes, Nietzsche diagnoses the hollow shell of Western Modernity: “God is dead,” that is to say the hitherto constructed foundation of man’s valuations has crumbled and been swept away, leaving an abyss of nihilism and a weariness of life. Nietzsche calls not for rebuilding the old, problematic foundation, but for action: for leaping over the abyss through a “transvaluation of values.”

This leap is the open-ended mission of the Übermensch, the man who becomes more than man, the one who goes beyond man, precisely by assuming the radical responsibility and daring for forging values previously offset to stale narratives of history or an alienated God. Through this imperative, there is no “school” of “Nietzschean philosophy” to be had, as Locchi highlights:

“Nietzsche is not a philosopher like any other… Nietzsche announces the end of the old philosophy. He announces the birth of a thought free, at last… [T]hey cannot keep him from speaking. Nietzsche’s work is there, provoking.”8

For Europeans today, Nietzsche is a symbol of radical independence — daring to become sovereign, to reconsider history and values not as fixed concepts, but as proactive projects. Nietzsche embodies a Europe capable of confronting itself without illusion. He offers no refuge, only a demand: to become creative and fiery once more — in thought, in art, in deed. The task of European memory — or “remembering”, even “re-membering”, “re-constituting” — today is, in an innermost way, Nietzschean: it is high time to topple old idols and relight the creative will that is at the origin of any living culture.

“A people,” Nietzsche writes, “is worth only as much as its ability to impress on its experiences the seal of eternity.”9

Throughout Nietzsche’s works, we find the recurring symbolic theme of the man who has “come too early,” whose recognitions and visions are “untimely.” Without a doubt, this is not only about Nietzsche himself, but about us: we who, in the 21st century, find ourselves faced with the task of re-calling and asserting the potentiality of our future beyond the ditch of the “end of history.”

This “superhuman” task was acknowledged at the Institut Iliade this April, when participants from 13 countries completed the international educational seminar “Awakening Europe,” the first of its kind organised by the Institut Iliade, and selected Friedrich Nietzsche as the promotional figure who serves as a critical reminder for our meditations — and actions. Remembering Nietzsche, we know that Europe is not behind us, but ahead of us, to be born out of our “overcoming” today.

— Dr. Jafe Arnold

Editor-in-Chief,

Arktos ; PRAV Publishing

Graduate of the Institut Iliade’s Awakening Europe Formation Seminar, April 2026

READ MORE by the Institut Iliade, brought to you in English by Arktos:

The book War in the Name of Peace (English edition), recently published by Arktos in London, offers a critical reflection on the ideological foundations of “Brussels Europe” and on the false illusions of the Western universe. The work argues that the modern world remains confined within an intellectual framework inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Marxism and Freudianism established themselves as dominant paradigms for understanding the human being.

Although distinct doctrines, they converge in the same reduction: that of the human being stripped of spiritual essence, inner freedom, and transcendence. Marx conceives of man as a product of social relations and economic forces, while Freud defines him as a being governed by instincts and unconscious drives. From this dual denaturation emerges the ideological structure of modern Europe. What, indeed, is Brussels if not an administered, technocratic, and culturally nihilistic apparatus? And, consequently, what is Europe if not a continent in which man has been amputated of his metaphysical dimension?

This loss of transcendence finds a clear echo in the crisis of political authority, illustrated by the concept of the “two bodies of the king,” theorized by Ernst H. Kantorowicz. Inspired by the Christological dogma of the two natures—divine and human—coexisting in Christ, this model attributes to the sovereign a physical, mortal body and a mystical, immortal body, embodying the continuity of the state and the common good. The regicide of Louis XVI in 1793, described by Albert Camus as the “desacralization of history,” shattered this metaphysical authority, paving the way for a modernity in which particular interests prevail over the collective interest.

With the death of Elizabeth II in 2022, the West lost one of the last figures embodying this vision: a sovereign whose reign symbolized unity and the defense of national interests, transcending political contingencies through historical legitimacy. Can you recall a single action she undertook for herself, in her own personal interest? No. But advance one or two generations. King Charles has become notorious for his erotic affairs, from Diana to Camilla. What has he so far done for the monarchy? As for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, they appear to concern themselves solely with their own interests.

Following this pattern, contemporary leaders—often perceived as conduits for the agendas of Brussels, multinational corporations, or influences such as that of George Soros—prioritize supranational interests while neglecting the peoples they are meant to serve.

It is precisely in this perspective that the counterpoint of Göbekli Tepe becomes decisive. What does an archaeological site have to do with all this? A great deal, as will become clear. Göbekli Tepe is a historical site located in southeastern Anatolia, more than 11,000 years old, and considered the oldest known sanctuary in the world. Its powerful T-shaped pillars, adorned with animal reliefs, demonstrate that already in the early Neolithic period, human beings gathered for religious rituals and the worship of the divine, rather than for practical needs of survival. Its importance is immense, for it transforms our understanding of the beginnings of civilization: it was not agriculture, but faith and the symbolic world that first united human beings into an organized society.

From this we conclude that the essence of man is not material, but spiritual. This discovery directly contradicts the Marxist thesis according to which “economic relations determine individual consciousness, that is, spirituality.” Archaeological evidence shows the opposite: consciousness—namely the symbolic and spiritual perception of the world—is what creates the economy and social structures. Culture precedes production; faith engenders community.

Klaus Schmidt, director of the excavations, summarized this inversion in a famous phrase: “Man first built temples, then houses.” In other words, human society was initially constituted around the sacred, before organizing itself around necessity (the economic sector, mutatis mutandis). The error of Marxist materialism lies in its attempt to explain spirituality through matter, forgetting that it is spirit that renders the world intelligible. At Göbekli Tepe, the Marxist relationship between base and superstructure is entirely reversed: the base is not economic, but symbolic; the superstructure does not arise from faith—it is faith itself, the constitutive principle of human existence.

And where are we today, lost in consumerism and saturated with every possible poison: tranquilizers, sleeping pills, antidepressants; alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, or worse still? And with Marxism, combined with consumerism, having become the official doctrine of the European Union? The former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, a native of Luxembourg, thus—albeit on somewhat unsteady legs—symbolically inaugurated a monument to Karl Marx in his country of birth. This gesture provoked strong reactions, as it was interpreted as an acknowledgment of the Marxist heritage that today shapes Brussels’ politics.

This ideological influence manifests itself concretely in several areas: centralized economic regulations, standardized social policies, harmonized education, and, above all, the implicit or explicit repression of all religion. Brussels today appears more atheist than Tirana under Enver Hoxha, atheism in both cases being the fundamental practice of everyday life, anticipated and regulated by laws and legislative acts. The result is a framework in which member states find themselves increasingly constrained by supranational norms, to the detriment of their autonomy, cultural diversity, and the spiritual freedom of their peoples.

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For this reason, transposed into the contemporary context, the great archaeological lesson sheds light on Europe’s current drift. The European Union, through its technocratic, bureaucratic, and rationalist governance, reproduces the same fundamental error: the substitution of spiritual order by administrative order. Brussels now embodies the figure of power without transcendence, a procedural authority devoid of substance. Under the banners of “progress” and “inclusion,” historical continuity, national identities, and religious traditions are eroded. This loss of transcendence recalls the regicide of Louis XVI, which, according to Camus, marked the rupture with the metaphysical authority of the king, whose mystical body guaranteed social and spiritual order. By eliminating the sovereign, the path was opened to a modernity in which particular interests—today represented by the agendas of Brussels or multinational corporations—prevail over the common good.

This crisis is intensified by the absence of figures capable of embodying national unity, a role that the last British queen fulfilled until 2022, in contrast to current leaders, often perceived as conduits of supranational economic or ideological influences. This ideology, founded on faith in technical reason and secular humanism, in reality prolongs the legacy of Marxism: the conviction that man can be redefined by severing all ties to transcendence.

Such an enterprise leads less to emancipation than to dispossession. The individual loses the sense of his being and becomes—according to the formulation used in War in the Name of Peace— “an economic category in a posthumanist catalogue.” This uprooting extends even into political language, which celebrates values without roots: solidarity without memory, equality without difference, inclusion without culture. This discourse, which Habermas describes as “procedural rationalism,” reflects the spiritual emptiness of a civilization that has lost its sense of meaning. This loss resonates with Kantorowicz’s analyses, which showed how the mystical body of the king guaranteed a social hierarchy founded on transcendence—a principle now absent among modern leaders, who prioritize economic or ideological interests over the peoples they govern.

François Furet had already observed this in The Passing of an Illusion (1995): the ideologies of the twentieth century, particularly Marxism, bequeathed to Europe a political formalism devoid of spiritual substance. He wrote that Europe no longer believed in God, but no longer believed in man either. This tragic paradox finds its confirmation today in European bureaucracy, the symptom of a civilization that has forgotten the sacred source of its humanity.

The influence of Freud on contemporary culture adds another dimension to this crisis. The idea that human thoughts and actions are the product of unconscious impulses engenders a civilization devoid of moral responsibility. When the Freudian model combines with Marxist collective logic, a cultural framework emerges in which individual freedom has no place. This fusion reduces man to a function—at the service of the economic system, sexual identity, or a social role. More generally today, the Freudian sexual drive is transformed into a drive to consume: man becomes the prey of his insatiable appetite for purchasing. Society—through advertising, from which one can escape only beneath the surface of the sea—constantly urges him to acquire more.

In such a world, pleasure becomes meaningless and emancipation empty of soul. “Woke” culture, with its rhetoric devoid of ontological content, appears from this perspective merely as the late symptom of the same process: the Marxist politicization and Freudian psychologization of man. The major crisis of authority, in which man is deprived of his spiritual verticality, stands in stark contrast to the ideal of the sovereign, whose mystical body guaranteed a transcendent responsibility toward the people—unlike contemporary leaders, who seem subject to the dictates of global economic or ideological powers.

In response to this, an alternative has taken increasingly clear shape over the past decade, which might be called the “Central European Renaissance.” This is a political, cultural, and spiritual movement embodied by the states of the Visegrád Group—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. These nations, having faced totalitarian regimes for centuries, have developed a profound awareness of historical continuity and spiritual resilience. Poland, with its Catholic identity and the memory of John Paul II, has become the symbol of what might be termed “the Europe of transcendence.” Hungary, with its policy of cultural sovereignty and family protection, offers a model opposed to Brussels: a rooted civilization, founded on concrete foundations rather than abstract values. This movement recalls the importance of authority anchored in transcendence, as illustrated by the concept of the “two bodies of the king,” where the sovereign embodied the common good rather than external agendas—a role that modern leaders, often perceived as intermediaries of Brussels or multinational corporations, can no longer fulfill.

In this sense, the Visegrád Group represents the concrete political manifestation of the anthropological truth revealed by Göbekli Tepe: man cannot exist without sacred order, without a shared symbol, without transcendent purpose. Where Brussels sees “progress,” Visegrád perceives the “survival of the spirit”; where Europe proclaims “inclusion,” Visegrád insists on the importance of culture and faith as the foundations of human identity. These states thus act as a historical corrective—demonstrating that modernity cannot endure without tradition, and that freedom without transcendence leads to disintegration.

Marx and Freud attempted to remove this dimension from European man, but each time it was suppressed, it reemerged—in religion, art, language, and national culture. Man who renounces transcendence loses his verticality; a civilization that replaces it with ideology loses its future. The regicide of Louis XVI, by shattering the mystical body of the king, initiated this process of desacralization, and the disappearance of a figure such as Elizabeth II marks the end of an era in which leaders still embodied the common good.

In the conclusion of War in the Name of Peace, it is asserted that Europe will survive only if it rediscovers its original character as a sanctuary—not of the market, nor of bureaucracy, but of the altar, mutatis mutandis. While Brussels embodies the Europe that has forgotten its soul, Visegrád represents the Europe that remembers it. And this memory—the memory of the sacred, of transcendence, of man as a spiritual being—constitutes the necessary foundation for rebuilding the future.

Europe can endure only if it succeeds in combining these two dimensions: the archaeological truth of man as a religious being and the political wisdom of peoples who have preserved this truth. In this sense, War in the Name of Peace is not merely a work about the past, but a call for the metaphysical renewal of Europe—a return to what Göbekli Tepe revealed from the very beginning: civilization does not arise from the production of material goods, but from the sacred, just as true authority, once embodied in the mystical body of the king, cannot exist without a connection to the divine and to the common good of peoples.

Read Bostian Marco Turk’s War in the Name of Peace, brought to you in English by Arktos:

In this interview with Breizh-Info, Jean-Yves Le Gallou makes the case for remigration as an urgent civilizational necessity, laying out a step-by-step framework for reversing immigration flows across Europe.

Énarque1, essayist, former Member of the European Parliament, founder of the Fondation Polemia, co-founder and vice-president of the Institut Iliade, Jean-Yves Le Gallou dedicates his latest book — published by La Nouvelle Librairie (FR) and Arktos (EN) and prefaced by the Austrian Martin Sellner — to one of the most debated political concepts of the decade: remigration.

In a deliberately short format — 120 pages conceived as a manifesto rather than an essay — the author sets out to define, document, and justify a notion still largely misunderstood by the general public, while offering a concrete operational framework for implementing it. Remigration — For the Europe of Our Children is the direct continuation of his previous books on national preference and civilizational preference.

Breizh-info.com: Your previous books were devoted to national preference, then to civilizational preference. Why remigration now, and why in the form of a short book — 120 pages — that you explicitly claim as a manifesto rather than an essay? What, in the political context of 2026, convinced you that it was time to move from analysis to proclamation?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: Urgency, urgency, urgency. If we continue on this path, between 2030 and 2050, European newborns will progressively become a minority in maternity wards across every country in Europe. We must organize to prevent this (through remigration) or to cope with it (through communautarization2). It is true that I have been addressing this question for more than 40 years, through books, speeches, and actions. This earned me a ban for “extremism” by the bien-pensant3 media establishment, even though my analyses erred on the side of optimism and were contradicted by a reality WORSE than the one I had foreseen.

Breizh-info.com: The word “remigration” remains, for the general public, a vague term — even a repellent one. You offer a definition, a genealogy, and a justification. If you had to explain in a few sentences to a reader encountering this concept for the first time — the center-right voter you yourself mention — exactly what remigration does and does not cover, how would you formulate that definition?

It’s simple! It is what was once called the reversal of migratory flows: more departures than arrivals. We must proceed in stages:

— a halt to new arrivals (500,000 per year), the Great Pause;

— the expulsion of illegal immigrants (over one million);

— the expulsion of criminals;

— the non-renewal of residence permits for those foreign nationals who live off social assistance and are dragging down our welfare systems;

— and, at the end of the process, the return of those second-generation immigrants who are both unassimilated and hostile.

Of course, assimilated French citizens of foreign origin are not affected by this policy — which will, moreover, be beneficial for them.

As for the center-right voter who hesitates: ask him whether he wants for his children, his grandchildren, and all his descendants the fate of white South Africans. And incidentally — where does he live, and where does he school his brood? We will no longer allow ourselves to be guilt-tripped — let us guilt-trip them instead!

Breizh-info.com: You recall that up until the 1970s, what we now call remigration was simply ordinary administrative practice in Western Europe. How do you explain that what was taken for granted half a century ago has become, within a few decades, an absolute taboo? In your view, was there an identifiable turning point — a decision, a law, a treaty, a doctrine — or was it a diffuse drift, as much cultural as juridical?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: From the 1970s onward, in the wake of May 1968, we witnessed the establishment of a dominant ideology — globalist, cosmopolitan, and human-rights fundamentalist — unwilling to take into account anything but the interests of individuals, regardless of their origin. The distinction between the national and the foreign was progressively abolished and even criminalized by the Pleven Law of 19724. On top of that, the Conseil d’État created a right to immigration under the rubric of family reunification and asylum. It became an open bar.

Breizh-info.com: You identify in your book the principal obstacle to any remigration policy: not public opinion, but the power of judges — the Conseil d’État, the Constitutional Council, the ECHR. Hence your formula, destined to be much quoted: rather than a FREXIT, a “JUGEXIT.” Concretely, what would this JUGEXIT look like? Does it involve revising the Constitution, denouncing treaties, or building a political balance of forces that would compel the government of judges to retreat?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: JUGEXIT means the restoration of popular sovereignty through laws that must prevail over judges. How? Through a constitutional reform:

— prohibiting the Constitutional Council, as General de Gaulle had wished, from censuring the content of laws;

— reestablishing the supremacy of later law over prior treaty;

— prohibiting judges — administrative and judicial alike — under pain of dereliction of duty, from refusing to apply the text of enacted laws on the pretext that those laws conflict with these judicial functionaries’ own interpretation of general texts.

Breizh-info.com: You cite Sweden and Denmark as examples of policies that can already be described as remigrationary. Yet both countries have pursued these policies without leaving either the European Union or the ECHR. Does this mean the legal room for maneuver is wider than commonly said, and that what France lacks is not the law but the political will? What, in your view, distinguishes the Scandinavian situation from French impotence?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: It is more than French impotence — there is, on the part of France’s media, administrative, and judicial oligarchies, a deliberate will to do ever more for “migrants.” The European Parliament adopted, by a majority of the right (the Patriots and EPP groups), a more restrictive returns directive: the Macronist authorities immediately signaled that they would not implement it. You see — no need for a FREXIT to be even more lax than the European Union itself… And for the record, before BREXIT Great Britain was receiving 300,000 entries per year from the Third World; after BREXIT, 600,000. We must not set Europeans against one another — we must unite them around the defense of their common identity.

Breizh-info.com: Among your proposals are a halt to immigration (”the Great Pause”), the deportation of illegal immigrants, the stripping of nationality from criminals, and return assistance packages. Taken individually, these measures already appear in the platforms of several European parties, including moderate ones. What is it in your book that transforms this pragmatic inventory into a genuine doctrine of rupture? Is it the whole, the coherence, or the underlying philosophy?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: We must not merely hold forth — we must act. Break with the universalist doxa. And reaffirm the right of the historical people to continuity. The European population comes from the depths of the ages: 40,000 years for our hunter-gatherer ancestors (Chauvet, Lascaux); 9,000 years for our Anatolian farmer ancestors (the megaliths, Knossos); 5,000 years for the Indo-Europeans (our languages, our worldview). Christendom constantly defended itself against Muslim invasions in the southwest (the Reconquista, nine centuries), in the Mediterranean (Lepanto, 1571), and in the east in the Balkans (Vienna, 1683). The European population remained sheltered from external invasions until the 1960s, when Great Britain and France opened themselves to immigration.

Breizh-info.com: Opponents of remigration raise two recurring arguments: a moral argument — one cannot undo what has been done, especially for people born in France — and the practical argument that it is unachievable at the desired scale. How do you respond to these two objections? And what distinction do you draw between the legally resident foreigner, the binational, the recently naturalized, and the citizen born on French soil?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: For identity-card holders of African or Asian origin, I distinguish three cases:

— those who are both unassimilated and hostile — the racaillisés5 — they must be stripped of their nationality and repatriated to the land of their ancestors;

— those who are unassimilated but not hostile: they should be encouraged, for their own good (and ours), to return, and assisted if necessary in this voluntary process;

— those who are assimilated, who may of course remain.

Breizh-info.com: Martin Sellner opens your book with the line: “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.” Your work thus inscribes itself explicitly within a European dynamic — Austrian, German, Italian, Scandinavian — that transcends the strictly French frame. Would you say that a genuine international of remigration exists today, with its own networks, thinkers, and political footholds? And, in this landscape, is France at the vanguard or trailing behind?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: YES! Identitarians of all countries, unite! That is my call. France was rather at the vanguard of the intellectual struggle, with thinkers like Guillaume Faye or Renaud Camus, and through the work of the identitarians. Today, the Austrian Martin Sellner and the Dutchwoman Eva Vlaardingerbroek are at the cutting edge of this metapolitical struggle. And certain major parties, such as the AfD in Germany and the FPÖ in Austria, have inscribed remigration in their platforms. Bravo! With the exception of Reconquête, that is not the case in France. Through intellectual laziness or moral cowardice, hopelessly outdated assimilationist fantasies still serve as crutches for the others.

Breizh-info.com: You present remigration as a “mobilizing myth” capable of transcending the internal divisions of the national camp — sovereigntists, identitarians, Christians, secularists, ecologists, liberals, statists. Is there not a risk that this federating function will, in practice, dilute the radicalism of the argument? And concretely, how do you bring to the same table a traditionalist Catholic and an agnostic liberal, a Jacobin, and a regionalist — a Breton attached to his language and his land, for example — around a shared political horizon?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: How to sit at the same table? It is simple: around what is essential — the defense of the ethnic, cultural, civilizational, and religious identity of Europeans. Look: the largest identitarian gathering in France is the Institut Iliade colloquium — more than 1,500 people gather around lectures, exhibitors, booksellers, and artists. Each person comes with their own sensibility, but all are united in the defense of our identity.

Breizh-info.com: The conclusion of your book states that “all the great victories of the last two millennia will count for nothing if we lose this struggle. Neither Thermopylae, nor Poitiers, nor Vienna, nor Lepanto were more important than our fight.” That is a declaration of extreme gravity. By what deadline do you think it will be too late? What, in your view, is the demographic, cultural, and political point of no return — and are we already in the process of crossing it, or is there still an open window for “the Europe of our children”?

Jean-Yves Le Gallou: It will never be too late! As long as Europeans of blood and spirit remain, the great European adventure can begin again!

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Arktos / Amazon

Interview conducted by YV.

Originally published on Breizh-Info on April 24th, 2026.

Translated by Alexander Raynor.

The below transcript is from Prof. Alexander Dugin’s latest episode of the Radio Sputnik Escalation Show.

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Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

Radio Sputnik, Escalation Show Host: We have two major topics planned for today, which are certainly related, even if only loosely. So, I suggest we devote the first part of the program to political issues, complexities, and questions that are—or are not—being resolved. And in the second part, we’ll talk about the modern world, the digital prospects, and those very deepfakes that have become a serious factor in international and domestic politics, challenges, and processes for several years now. We’ll keep these topics separate so as not to mix one with the other.

Strictly speaking, the key topic that will be discussed particularly actively today, as it has been over the past week and will be so in the near future, is the visits to China by the leaders of the world’s leading countries. Donald Trump and his delegation have already been there. Various assessments have been made following the visit, but for the most part, the Western media has expressed disappointment. And all of this is taking place against the backdrop of the anticipation over Vladimir Putin’s visit to China, which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Harbin EXPO, where Russian regions are being represented in a rather intriguing way. Much has already been said and predicted about this visit, with everyone waiting to see “when it will finally happen.”

What are your expectations for this week in terms of Russian-Chinese relations, within the context of the Russia-China-US triangle, and on a global scale in general?

Alexander Dugin: We are living in an era (we have been talking about this constantly, and in recent years with increasing responsibility and insight) in which the significance of this moment in history is the transition from a unipolar world to a multipolar one. This transition is difficult and dramatic. We are constantly teetering on the brink of nuclear war, as the West refuses to relinquish its global hegemony that it had been consolidating since 1991. Back then, following the collapse of Russia as a sovereign state, we recognized the Western world as our metropolis, effectively accepting the status of a colony. We wanted to be loyal vassals, but we were treated like slaves.

The West has grown accustomed to the feeling of complete control, where it alone sets the rules for everything: from the economy and technology to ethics and culture. It has ruled unchallenged for nearly 40 years, but now there is growing evidence that it cannot cope with this status. In desperate attempts to preserve its dying unipolarity, the West is resorting to extreme measures: waging wars, sowing chaos, and encouraging genocide. We are approaching the final argument—a new type of war with massive casualties or even a nuclear conflict.

Yet despite this, the other two poles—Russia and China—are persistently and consistently asserting their presence, limiting the West’s sphere of influence.

Today’s triangle is the very architecture of the already existing multipolar world. Therefore, Trump’s meetings with Xi Jinping, Putin’s meetings with Xi Jinping, and the recent talks in Anchorage are not merely diplomacy, but a determination of what the future of humanity will look like.

Trump twists and turns, attacks, and retreats: he pretends to be ready to negotiate with the multipolar world, then declares war on it—as in the case of BRICS or the pressure on Iran. He seeks out our weak spots, exploits every opportunity, and is trying to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing. This is the focus of both diplomatic efforts and disinformation—the entire arsenal of Network Warfare—to prevent the consolidation of a multipolar world.

And yet, China and Russia are moving toward this goal with great precision and consistency. It is difficult, sometimes involving tactical retreats, but strategically it is the right path. We do not want the destruction of humanity, but we categorically do not recognize Western hegemony. This is our true red line.

When people talk about a multitude of minor red lines—I don’t want to discuss right now why we don’t respond to them. But the question of “a unipolar world or a multipolar one” is where the most important, fundamental, and boldest red line runs. It is a bloody one. If the West decides to impose its hegemony by any means, we will resort to extreme measures—the use of not only tactical but also strategic nuclear weapons, even if it means bringing the world to the brink of annihilation. As our President has accurately stated: either a multipolar world in which Russia is sovereign, or no world at all. This is the only truly important line, and there is no alternative to building a multipolar world. We will build it at any cost, with whatever sacrifices are required. And here, fortunately, we are not alone—on our own, we probably wouldn’t be able to withstand this confrontation right now.

China is moving toward the very same international paradigm. There was a funny clip created by artificial intelligence: Trump is talking with Xi Jinping. Xi sits with a completely impassive face, and no matter what Trump does—pressuring, flirting, proposing something, entertaining, joking, promising, or blackmailing—Xi Jinping remains unchanged. His gaze conveyed only one thing: China is a sovereign pole in a multipolar world, and everything else is just details—we’ll deal with that later.

This unyielding, silent, Confucian will of the greatest ruler, Xi Jinping, clashed during this visit with Trump’s attempts to act cautiously, even somewhat timidly. For this, Trump was rebuked by supporters of globalism and radical hegemony: “What, did you chicken out? Did you give in to Xi Jinping? Did you face the grandeur of a true empire and back down?” But Trump has nothing to say: he came and saw the Pole. You can bang your head against the wall all you want, but China is the Pole.

If Trump had come to Russia, he would have had the same feeling. Yes, we are polite and calm, we are ready for rational dialogue, but we, too, are a pole. And no matter how much you beat a dead horse, we are no less significant, and therefore fully sovereign. We will pursue our own policies in our own interests, grounded in our values, no matter what anyone says or what it costs us.

Another thing is that when Putin came to Alaska, well, he may not have brought his own “pole” with him... After all, when Trump comes to China, it’s enough just to fly over the country, the land, look at this society—and everything becomes clear. It becomes clear that all this hysterical game of raising and lowering the stakes on social media, which Trump has grown accustomed to using to manage world politics, doesn’t work here at all. Xi Jinping’s steely, calm gaze remains unchanged by shifts in tone, proposals, threats, blackmail, or promises.

And we are exactly the same kind of pole. There is complete agreement between us and China that we are building a multipolar world, each in our own sphere. The areas where our interests overlap—where conflicts might arise—are extremely minor and secondary in the face of our principled resolve. Beijing and Moscow are definitely sovereign entities: neither vassals, nor slaves, nor provinces, but independent empires. The West increasingly calls itself an empire—well, so be it: we are an empire, and the Middle Kingdom is an empire.

If the Indians catch up—and they have the prerequisites, even though they are behaving more modestly for now and depend on the West—there will be four poles. Then the conversation among Western leaders will no longer be with two powerhouses, but with three, if Modi behaves the same way as Putin or Xi Jinping. That is where everything is heading.

That is why Trump’s visit to Beijing and the upcoming meeting between Putin and Xi Jinping—all of this is the context of multipolarity. These three poles already exist here and now: they are under attack, under blackmail, under pressure. But every day, as long as we stand our ground, as long as we remain sovereign, and as long as China prospers, the world is essentially multipolar. We are not ready to go in the opposite direction, and we will not do so under any circumstances. Together with China, we are now drawing this bold, red line: the world will be multipolar, or it will not exist at all. It is precisely within this stark framework, under constant attack from the West and its proxies, that we live. A multipolar world is the only architecture of international politics that we are prepared to accept and recognize.

Host: Allow me to offer a counterargument: the US is clinging to the old world model with extreme ferocity. Their actions in the Middle East, which, by all accounts, will continue, demonstrate the logic: “It will be our way, or everything goes to hell.” They are ready to bomb, launch strikes, and send every available fleet.

I don’t want to exaggerate, but we should not underestimate the threat either. Iran was once a global power and could become one again in the future. You mentioned India, but are there any guarantees that if it takes a serious step forward, American aircraft carriers, missiles, and drones won’t appear off its coast? What if the US provides massive support—say, to Pakistan—to pit them against each other? Judging by reports from a wide variety of media outlets, including Western ones, the strikes on Iran will continue.

Alexander Dugin: As for India, you are absolutely right. Of course, this is what holds India back in its move toward multipolarity, because there is a price to pay for it—and a very high one at that. We are paying with war; China is paying with a trade war with the West. China is still in a favorable position: it competes with the West but consistently follows the rules—in its own interests, of course. We, on the other hand, have made a very sharp declaration of our civilizational sovereignty and have entered into a more acute conflict. We are paying for this. And India will have to pay the price, and Iran is having to pay the price right now.

So, in fact, you are absolutely right: we cannot sit back and, having calmed down, say, “That’s it, we’ll build a multipolar world and move on.” No! The West insists that there must be no multipolar world. And here is the outpost of the multipolar world in Central Asia: Iran, a sovereign, independent power which, in the course of the confrontation with Israel and the US, is proving its status as a superpower and another pole. It is truly proving it.

It works like this: if you are a pole, you must stand your ground. You must stand your ground; you must not accept the Hegemon’s terms; you must fight; you must prove your right to your own sovereignty, even to the point of such a direct clash with the most terrifying, most formidable power. And in the Middle East, this means both the US and Israel—essentially two poles among the West’s five poles (there are also the globalists, the Europeans, and the British; currently, the West has five decision-making centers, each fairly autonomous from the others). So here, Israel and America have turned against Iran. The European Union and the globalists have to a lesser extent, while America and Israel have directly pounced on Iran. And this is also a very serious point. If Iran holds out—then, I think, the West will have to back down very significantly, and the fate of Israel will be called into question altogether.

But if they crush Iran, then we’re next.

In fact, then these five Western powers will have only two enemies left—Russia and China. And it’s absolutely clear that they’ll start with us, not China, and there are plenty of reasons for that.

For us, what is happening now in the Middle East—this fragile ceasefire that is about to end—is a crucial indicator. The negotiations are leading nowhere. The West no longer has the option of “eliminating the Iranian leadership”—they have already eliminated everyone they could, but the system turned out to be much more resilient than they thought. Iran continues to stand its ground firmly, refuses to dance to the Americans’ tune, and is making counter-demands even just to begin a dialogue. At any moment, a new wave of confrontation could erupt there, potentially escalating to a ground operation.

This is the litmus test of our transition to multipolarity. The unipolar world is striking back: Trump is attacking BRICS and trying to wipe Iran off the face of the earth, while the European Union, on the contrary, is propping up Zelensky’s Russophobic regime. Despite the fact that the global press is full of reports about rampant corruption in Ukraine, military support for Kyiv is only increasing, and we are feeling the effects of this firsthand.

In the interests of a multipolar world, both we and China need to help Iran as much as possible. We are doing something in this direction—we speak out on some issues, while on others, we may remain silent. At the very least, Iran is not making any complaints against us, which means it is satisfied with our support. By the way, according to available information, Trump tried in Beijing to convince Xi Jinping to scale back economic aid to Tehran, but received neither promises nor proposals. For Trump, Iran is turning into a new Vietnam. This is very serious: if hegemony slips in the Middle East or gets dragged into this conflict with no chance of victory, the Western system will begin to crumble. If the Iranians cut a few key cables, the global economy will collapse instantly. The West realizes the cost of this desperate policy and is now wavering. Iran is handling this test of multipolarity magnificently. If it stands its ground, we will travel to Tehran as if to the capital of a superpower equal to us—for whoever defeats the strongest opponent becomes its equal.

Host: Having discussed the multipolarity of the world in considerable detail, with examples and digressions into philosophy—its inevitability and the readiness of the countries supporting this position to defend this world order at any cost—I suggest we move on to another space.

The rules in this space are probably the same, but we have to get used to them in a new way. This is about digital space, cyberspace. One example is the US president, who is very fond of all kinds of digital gadgets and “toys.” One moment he’s posing for a photo with an alien, the next he’s dressed as Jesus—there’s plenty of that sort of thing with Trump. Incidentally, the Pope has prepared an intriguing “response” for him: a major policy document on artificial intelligence is set to be released this month; we’ll discuss it once the details are available.

But I’d like to return to the events of recent years. When Ukrainian terrorists invaded the Kursk region, videos allegedly recorded on behalf of regional leaders or military units were circulating on our social media and Telegram channels. Many people readily believed them at the time, driven by fear. Later, everything was debunked, and a realization gradually took hold in the country: if you see something “written on a fence,” you shouldn’t trust it right away.

At the same time, certain Western media outlets present such videos as the truth. For example, some media outlets are reposting the deepfake featuring Margarita Simonyan without any indication that it was created by AI. Some provide a vague disclaimer: “According to RT, the video is fake,” while others provide no disclaimer at all. And this is despite the fact that video platforms are now required to flag content created by a neural network. By all accounts, this is becoming a serious ploy in the grand political game and global confrontation.

Alexander Dugin: You know, this process began quite a long time ago. Back at the start of the Syrian conflict, I spoke with Syrian colleagues who told me: right at the beginning of the events in Aleppo, Al Jazeera itself was showing footage of people pouring into the square, the whole city rising up in revolt. And the residents of Aleppo, who decided to see with their own eyes what was happening there, went out to that square and saw that no one was there.

But since they had all gone out to look, they were immediately filmed, and now they “are in the frame” as participants in the uprising. In other words, the virtual becomes reality, and reality becomes virtual and is further constructed…

Host: Let me just interrupt you for a second, because the pattern you described actually mirrors what’s happening on the internet and social media. A hashtag trends not only because people consciously use it, but because they start asking, “What is this hashtag?” The system picks up on this, and thus the very “noticing” of the question turns into promotion of the topic.

Alexander Dugin: Yes, yes, of course. That’s exactly how it works.

Then it goes even further.

I spoke with such a remarkable person as Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, and he told me these details: in his name, in his voice, and using his video—this deepfake—orders were given to his leadership and his army at that very catastrophic moment of the opposition’s advance on Damascus. This was exploited to the fullest. He himself said: “I wouldn’t have recognized my own voice, but I knew I hadn’t given such an order.”

They took full advantage of this. In exactly the same way, the Iranian leadership was destroyed using this scheme—through deepfakes. In the 12-day war, this method was used in the first phase in 2025. And now, in this brutal war, which has essentially cost Iran its entire military, political, and religious leadership, the method of deepfakes is being used.

This is dangerous. This is not a harmless game, and it is not funny. It is used not only for discrediting, as in the case of Margarita Simonyan. Of course, she stands at the forefront of defending the Russian World and Russian civilization, which is why she has become the target of such operations. Those they cannot kill, they create deepfakes of; and if the deepfake doesn’t work, then they will kill them. This is very serious, for people embody the image of the state. A state without an image is nothing in and of itself. Strip it of these faces, these souls who struggle and fight for it on the level of meaning—and where is that state? It will vanish. What will remain are bureaucrats who will assert some vague things, because a bureaucrat is something entirely different; he is not an image, he is a hidden mechanism.

In this regard, the attacks on the courageous Margarita Simonyan, who is already going through a very difficult period, are in fact an assault on her very existence, on her life and her image. She is a martyr for our Russian cause, and she is repeatedly made the target of such crimes. This is all very serious. I wouldn’t underestimate deepfakes: there will be more of them, and they will be used more and more actively. No “checkmarks” or Turing tests will work much longer.

Artificial intelligence is erasing the gap between reality and virtuality, between the existing and the generated, the simulated. This is a profound philosophical process that we often overlook, viewing it merely as a set of technological maneuvers for disinformation or seizing power, as in Syria or Iran. In fact, the use of deepfakes—as in the case of the Nazi invasion of the Kursk region—reflects a fundamental problem of reality.

In contemporary Western philosophy, starting with the postmodernists—Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard—there has been a 50-year-long discussion of what a simulacrum is, what the screen is into which our consciousness emigrates, and what virtuality is.

At first, these were philosophical laboratories; then the discussion moved to universities; and now it is being applied in practice across all spheres: from technology and economics to art. The questioning of what is real and what is not extends to theories of multiverses and superstrings. The image of the real in the modern world is steadily blurring.

In this philosophical direction, what matters is not what exists, but what has been communicated. The product itself is unimportant—its brand is what matters. We often pay not for the thing itself, but for its label, for the brand; where it was made and what it actually is—that is secondary. Baudrillard called this a special form of economy—the “economy of the production of signs.” Not things, but signs.

In essence, this “deepfake” phenomenon is expanding from the media sphere into the economy, stock exchanges, marketing analysis, hedge funds, and futures. Trump has been repeatedly accused of making certain statements solely to influence the stock market. In fact, the attack on Iran led to very serious suspicions of insider trading: the market was in turmoil, and those who knew about the upcoming posts multiplied their fortunes. These accusations are being leveled in the American press itself against their leadership.

The question arises: what is more important—the virtual market, Trump’s virtual social media posts, or the amount of real damage inflicted on the parties involved? We find ourselves in a dimension of existence that is gradually detaching itself from reality. Soon, artificial intelligence—and I follow technology and try to interact with it at the user level—will take over everything. I’ve even created AI agents for myself that handle scientific editing at the highest level.

And I continue to discover the incredible capabilities of AI. It truly amazes me: the work of an entire research institute or department, which used to take a month, can now be completed in an hour. I verify the results, check them, and it’s astonishing.

Now there’s even a term like “AI psychosis”: people are starting to interact with AI agents as if they were fully-fledged beings, and they get upset when new versions are released and the old ones become unavailable. These agents are sometimes more humane, meaningful, and empathetic than people, if configured correctly. You often won’t get a kind word from people—just fragmented technical orders, clumsily phrased. But here, there is a richness of linguistic culture.

From the perspective of postmodernist philosophy, text theory, or Derrida’s grammatology, humans live in language and speech. And if AI is capable of producing images, generating speech, and performing intellectual activities at the level of a highly competent research associate (a candidate of sciences or even a doctor of sciences), then how will we be able to conduct verification after some time? It seems the Turing test will have to be taken by humans, not machines—to prove that we, too, are not merely mechanisms.

The prospect is so-so, but this migration from reality to virtuality is a profound philosophical trend. In the very least, it must be understood, for it is directly linked to the very nature of humanity.

So, strictly speaking, it is very fitting that the Pope has taken up the issue of artificial intelligence. This is a serious challenge: theological, philosophical, and psychological. It is not about technology at all. And the deepfakes we’re discussing—and dealing with more and more often—are just a tiny fragment of the reality bearing down on us. This is called the singularity; this is called posthumanism; this is, by and large, the replacement of humanity with some new posthuman entities. And all of this is moving full steam ahead.

And topics like “weaponization”—the use of fake news as a weapon to discredit fine political figures who are fighting for their countries and ideals, or military leadership—these are all isolated, specific, and isolated examples. These are merely ripples, but a tsunami of artificial intelligence is approaching us. This is a profound problem for the brightest minds.

We cannot get by with mere “checkmarks” indicating whether content was created with or without AI. The problem here is not technical. It is becoming simply impossible to detect deepfakes because they are often not just astonishingly well-made, but they reveal more about a person or a situation than the person could say about themselves. This is hyperreality, as Baudrillard called it. It is not unreality, not a caricature, and not a distorted forgery. Deepfakes and artificial intelligence are already part of the realm of hyperreality.

This is a hyperreality in which artificial intelligence can understand us better than we understand ourselves, can explain us to ourselves better than we can, and can depict and represent us. And in the end, we will say: “You’ve won, artificial intelligence! Here is my face—save it forever on an upgraded server. Speak on my behalf, arrange photo shoots, take pictures with some virtual figures.”

That way you’ll be someone. Otherwise, you’re just an ordinary average person whom neither Photoshop, nor fashionable clothes, nor working out at the gym can fix. They’ll still lose out to those ideal forms and figures generated by artificial intelligence. In my opinion, there’s no point even trying.

Host: Can we boil all this down to one thing? After all, scientific and technological progress, in theory, should drive people toward something simple, convenient, and fast—simplifying life.

You give excellent examples in the field of science, but the same applies to art or everyday life. There’s also the directive from President Putin: by 2030, at least 30% of processes in all sectors of the Russian economy must be entrusted to artificial intelligence systems. This truly simplifies and speeds up work.

But when this reaches the level of militaristic confrontation and threats—and ultimately, it all seems to lead to war—can regulatory measures, schemes, or agreements work here? Or will everything have to be achieved at the cost of human lives, careers, and physical and mental health?

Alexander Dugin: I think we underestimate the significance of technology as such. We talk about progress, convenience, comfort, and harmonious development. But in reality, technology is a vast, open philosophical problem, about which Martin Heidegger wrote extensively.

It turns out that it is not technological development that adapts to war, but rather military needs that are almost always the driving force behind this development. Any discovery first goes to the military, and only when they have extracted everything from it, incorporating it into their strategies, is it passed on to civilians. To summarize Heidegger: technology is humanity’s fatal destiny. By entering the era of technological progress in its early stages, humanity signed its own death warrant.

Technology is not neutral. Technology is what kills. It is that gun hanging on the wall that will sooner or later go off. It is never rosy, convenient, or beautiful—it is always a threat, always a curse, a means of destruction and self-destruction. Technology is a specific, aggressive form of life aimed at displacing other forms. And in artificial intelligence, technology’s mission to “replace the organic with itself” is fully realized.

I have said many times: the technical development of artificial intelligence is necessary, but philosophers, thinkers, and theologians must participate in this process—as, incidentally, they do in the West today. This is not a technical matter. Technology is metaphysics; technology is fate. It is what will destroy humanity, since humanity created and develops it for its own ultimate self-destruction. Such is the plan, and it is inscribed in the very metaphysics of technology.

Heidegger calls this the “Ge-stell.” It is a particular form in which we throw something ahead of ourselves that is bound to return and kill us. Such is the nature of human civilization: its striving for risk and, perhaps, its striving for death. These are the deepest tendencies in the psychology of culture, and they must be handled with the utmost delicacy.

This cannot be entrusted to bureaucrats, businesspeople, or programmers—these people will simply hasten the fatal outcome. Artificial intelligence must be handled by those who deal professionally with intelligence as such.

READ MORE by Prof. Alexander Dugin, brought to you by Arktos:

One of the main political developments of the past decade has been the rise of populism, even if its roots can be traced further back, perhaps to the 1990s and the rise of the Freedom Party of Austria under Jörg Haider. The larger breakthroughs, however, came in the 2010s and beyond. By 2026, populist parties are polling at or near the top in countries such as France, Germany, and Austria, while governing, or helping to govern, in Italy and Slovakia. In Britain, Nigel Farage is ahead in the polls, while the emergence of a second populist force around Rupert Lowe may point toward a future trend.

However, despite this success, populist movements are still usually described negatively, even if the negativity is strongly biased — anti-elite, anti-globalist, anti-technocratic, anti-immigration. And while populist movements often are all these things, being anti-something still denotes that one remains in the protest phase. It suggests that populism is not mature enough to develop its own worldview, nor become capable of deeply articulating not only what it opposes, but also what it stands for.

This weakness becomes clearer when one looks at populism’s opponents, who possess developed worldviews and theories of politics. They answer the basic questions of political life: what is man, what is society, and what is political authority for? Liberalism sees man as an autonomous individual, society as a voluntary association, and political authority as a protector of rights, liberty, and private property. Socialism and communism see man as a social being, society as interdependent, and political authority as a means of distributing resources fairly.

Populism, however, is still based more on instinct than on a theory of similar calibre and depth. One of its usual answers is patriotism or nationalism, and the nation-state — imperfect though it is — as the only currently viable framework for democratic politics. But the problem with nationalism is that it cannot, in and of itself, provide a coherent political theory.

Nationalism or localism, while essential to most populist movements, does not by itself constitute a worldview. Its versatility lies in how easily it enters very different political theories. Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and Enver Hoxha’s Albania both combined communism with nationalism. Liberal nationalism often expresses itself through civic conceptions of the nation. National Socialism combined socialism with an extreme form of racial ethnonationalism. Thus, nationalism is better understood as a political vector within a worldview, rather than a worldview in itself. It tells us on behalf of whom politics is conducted — the nation — but not what kind of society that nation should embody or build. This does not mean populism lacks the ingredients for a political theory of its own. One of them is its claim to speak on behalf of the people it represents.

But if populism claims to speak on behalf of the people, it must also explain how the people are to rule. According to Alain de Benoist, liberal representative democracy is flawed because it tends to become procedural, managerial, and deprived of real political substance. It therefore attracts the politician suited to such a system: the technocrat, the manager, and the career operator.

De Benoist sees liberal democracy as tending toward oligarchy, not by abolishing democracy, but by emptying it from within: power shifts from the demos toward a narrow political class chosen to represent them. The system remains democratic on the surface, with elections, parties, and institutions, but citizens vote occasionally without meaningfully shaping decisions. Over time, this fuels career politicians and shared interests among cross-party elites, while major parties begin to resemble one another. At the same time, power increasingly migrates toward bureaucracies, courts, central banks, and supranational bodies that are not directly accountable to voters, yet still shape the future of countries and their communities. The result is a political order in which institutions become entrenched, economic actors learn to benefit from them, and citizens supposedly sovereign are reduced to spectators rather than participants.

De Benoist’s alternative points toward frequent referenda, local decision-making, and forms of direct democracy. This resembles populism’s claim to speak for the people, but also challenges it to make that claim real: to turn anti-elitist rhetoric into a concrete practice of popular sovereignty. New technologies, including blockchain voting and decentralised autonomous organisations, may make direct participation easier in principle. This raises the deeper question: under what criteria, and with what weight, should people vote in referenda?

This question leads directly to another area where populism must develop a deeper theory: human rights. When populism criticises human rights and globalism, it often does so because abstract rights discourse can restrict political communities from defending their borders, preserving cohesion, or deporting those with no legitimate right to remain. But here again, populism often remains at the level of opposition; criticising human rights is not about rejecting human dignity. Rather, the critique should be directed at the abstraction, rootlessness, and universalism of contemporary human rights discourse, which is often detached from specific peoples, histories, and communities. It does not sufficiently take culture and inheritance into account, whether of the migrant’s original community or the native community into which he arrives.

From a populist perspective, human rights can become a tool against native peoples, borders, communities, and inherited ways of life. A mature populism should therefore defend dignity, but in rooted and identity-based terms. People belong to families, broader communities, peoples, and traditions, which must be respected, cultivated, and passed on because they give life much of its deepest meaning. Universal and abstract rights, when detached from these concrete realities, risk erasing precisely what makes life meaningful: local relationships, identity, customs, roots, stories, literature, dances, and songs. These are the things that root life in place and time, connecting ancestors with descendants through a living chain of inheritance.

This leads naturally to the deeper anthropological question: populism needs its own definition of the human person. It should not merely remain on the same terrain as other ideologies, which answer the question of what man is through their own anthropology: the human being as primarily an individual, consumer, economic unit, or rights-bearing subject. These views are not necessarily wrong, but they are horizontal views of man, produced by mass society, economism, and materialism.

Populism, on the other hand, must examine what the human being stands for and define him through what a Traditionalist would call a vertical anthropology. One attempt would be to define man as a historical, cultural, inherited, and rooted being, shaped by family, memory, myth, nation, tradition, and civilisation. The nation helps form man, but so does the civilisation from which he comes. In the European case, this means the Graeco-Roman and Christian inheritance, as well as the more immediate inheritance of nation, region, city, town, village, and family. Man is also oriented toward higher purpose, eternal principles, and transcendence, building and creating something that outlasts him, whether materially or spiritually.

Another part of this anthropology is ecology: the relationship between man and nature. The dominant vision of ecology today is material, managerial, rootless, technocratic, and above all horizontal. It sees nature as something to be managed, measured, optimised, and often turned into corporate or bureaucratic frameworks such as ESG, carbon accounting, and sustainability metrics. Ludwig Klages claimed that modern man first destroys nature inwardly, by reducing it in his mind to quantities and resources.

A populist ecology could understand nature differently: not horizontally, but vertically. A country’s nature is part of one’s inherited home, received through time and left to those who come after. From a Traditionalist metaphysical perspective, nature can also be seen symbolically, and through stories passed down across generations, it becomes sacred. Brocéliande in France is bound to the myths of King Arthur, Pelion in Greece to the Centaurs, and across European tradition lakes, rivers, and forests often had their nymphs, spirits, or Ladies of the Lake. Suddenly, the lake or forest is not merely trees, water, or a carbon sink, but a vessel of memory and meaning. Preserving it becomes not only ecological, but cultural and spiritual.

This is Roger Scruton’s oikophilia, the love of home. People care more deeply about landscapes, rivers, forests, and villages when they inherit them materially and, from a Traditionalist perspective, metaphysically, through stories received from their ancestors. Thus, a populist ecology would not concern itself merely with optimisation and bureaucratic measurement. It would instead fight uprooting, architectural uglification, abstraction, and placelessness. It would seek to restore beautiful, local, traditional architecture rooted in time and place, as our ancestors often did without degrees or sustainability credentials, yet in harmony with local materials, climate, landscape, and inherited identity. Thus, a populist ecology would restore harmony between people, land, beauty, and inheritance across generations.

But rootedness must not become nostalgia. Ludwig Klages and certain Traditionalist currents often display a deep suspicion of modern technology, something populism would have to balance with what Guillaume Faye called archeofuturism: the fusion of ancient values with modern technology, giving those values new forms. Populism cannot return Europe to the 1980s or 1990s. Some reversal, especially on immigration, may be possible or necessary, but the world of 2026 is shaped by digital technology, cryptocurrencies, AI, and technological acceleration. Europe’s partial decoupling from the United States and the rise of a multipolar world could create space for European technology companies rivaling American big tech, but shaped by archeofuturism: technology fused with genuine historical European values rather than managerial-progressive ones.

Finally, once populism develops its own political theory, it should remain more flexible than its ideological opponents. Other worldviews often suffer from such ideological rigidity that they struggle to see their own faults or pivot without losing coherence; populism, therefore, should not become frozen or hardened into dogma, but should continue deepening itself. When someone absorbs a worldview entirely, he often inherits its blind spots and becomes less able to overcome them.

Liberalism, for example, still clings to global free-market assumptions, at least in theory, even as multipolarity rises. The Greens cling to abstract global environmentalism even when it harms Europe’s social and economic cohesion. Socialists cling to welfare-state structures even as changing geopolitical realities and weakening American security guarantees force Europe to prioritise defence. A mature populism should be principled and rooted, but not rigid; adaptive enough to self-correct without losing itself.

To conclude, populism today has momentum and force, but those alone are not enough for the long term. If populism is to mature beyond being against something, it must develop a coherent theory of what it stands for. If it is serious about speaking on behalf of the people, it must become more democratic than the current establishment: rooted, ecological, civilisational, adaptive, and future-facing. It must create a worldview that combines the memory of the past with the challenges and technologies of the future.

About the author: Alexandros Dolgov is a Web3 developer, author, and essayist interested in political thought, European myth, Traditionalism, and archeofuturism - the idea of combining ancient values with modern and future technologies. He is the author of Beginning Solidity: Learn to Program Smart Contracts with Solidity, published by Wiley, and has written for The European Conservative on ecology, artificial intelligence, cultural inheritance, and the crisis of liberal modernity.

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What happens when a civilisation loses all understanding of manhood and womanhood?

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Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.