From churches and politics in America to wars in the Middle East, Christian Zionism is one of the most influential, powerful, and organized religious and political forces of the 21st century.

In The Messiah and the Third Temple, Paweł Lisicki presents a sweeping overview of Christian Zionist ideology and networks, revisiting the ancient controversies between Christians and Jews and shedding much-needed light on the apocalyptic storm clouds of the present-day Third Temple movement.

Weaving together ancient scripture, historical sources, current events, and theological analysis, this highly informative study uncovers how a complex alliance of religious extremism and ethno-political ambitions has become a deadly driving force in global geopolitics.

Provocative and meticulously argued, The Messiah and the Third Temple challenges readers to reconsider the relationship between religion, land, and the future of Western civilization.

Excerpt from the Introduction:

There is perhaps no other enigma — or mystery, to speak in more classical terms — as extraordinary as the bizarre emergence and ensuing spread of the new theology of Christian Zionism. Unlike many other currents in contemporary religious thought, its significance is not restricted merely to narrow circles of intellectuals, but is a matter of import for the whole world. Furthermore, Christian Zionism, or the belief that it is Christians’ duty to support the State of Israel as if its success were a necessary condition for the coming of the Messiah — preceded by the coming of the Antichrist and a great cataclysm, the true Armageddon — seems to be the only politically significant form of Christianity at present. Christian Zionists currently have at least as much influence on world politics as papal Rome had on medieval states. Going so far as to determine the outcome of who becomes president of the United States, the world’s largest empire, Christian Zionists wield indirect influence over the most important political decisions not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world.

I know that readers might now be shaking their heads in astonishment and thinking that the author has become feverish or fallen into a strange state of excitement about his own topic. Indeed, the matter seems rather peculiar: how could an ideology — and that is exactly what Christian Zionism should be called — be so significant when the broader public doesn’t even know about it? Particularly in Poland, it seems to be completely unknown to Poles, and I say this on the basis of many conversations in which, upon mentioning the power of Christian Zionists in the US, I was met with surprise as if my interlocutors wanted to say, “Is the person telling us this sober?” How is this possible? After all, this ideology’s followers in the US, some 50 million Protestants, are nothing compared to well over a billion Catholics. However, let us not be misled by numbers. A smaller but well-organized community with its own agenda is incomparably more powerful than an amorphous, internally paralyzed community.

So, yes: without a doubt, Christian Zionism has become, whether one likes it or not, the most important, let’s say Christian, ideology of the Western world. Surprise at this — as if we’ve never heard of this beast — can only be resultant of ignorance. Anyone who has read my previous book, The Myth of the Elder Brothers in Faith (in Polish: Mit starszych braci w wierze), will notice that the views I am describing here, and attributing to the majority of American Protestants, are related to the new Catholic, post-Vatican II understanding of Judaism.

In this sense, John Paul II can be considered a precursor of Catholic Zionism, and his gestures and speeches were a Catholic version of what a significant part of Protestants in the US had already been preaching for a long time. The Polish pope introduced key points into the Church’s teaching that were important to Christian Zionists. Firstly, he indicated, albeit not always explicitly, that Israel remains the chosen people; secondly, he maintained quite clearly that the Old Covenant is still valid; thirdly, he repeatedly condemned all forms of antisemitism, without ever attempting to define it, and in the final period of his pontificate he equated antisemitism with anti- Judaism. It bears acknowledging that the pope did not go so far as to draw another equivalence that was so important to his Jewish dialogue partners, namely, to state that contemporary anti-Zionism, i.e., aversion to and criticism of Israel’s state policy, is synonymous with antisemitism; nevertheless, it is easy to interpret some of his gestures in this vein, such as his frequent reference to contemporary Jews as elder brothers in faith.

I did not come up with this myself. Gavin D’Costa, the author of an essay with the highly significant title “The New Catholic Zionism,” published in September 2019, came to exactly the same conclusion that John Paul II was the precursor of Catholic Zionism. In his opinion, the time has come for Zionism to become part of the official teaching of the Church. The author points out that the most important breakthrough for the development of the ideology of Catholic Zionism was the Polish pope’s speech in Mainz in November 1980. I completely agree. I wrote about this a few years ago in Dogma and Tiara: An Essay on the Collapse of Roman Catholicism (in Polish: Dogmat i tiara. Esej o upadku rzymskiego katolicyzmu), where I pointed out that John Paul II’s theological revolution went completely unnoticed in Poland. The recognition that the Mosaic covenant has never been broken, that it is still in force, has been incorporated into the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but it constitutes the most radical denial of the teachings of the New Testament (in particular the Epistle to the Hebrews) in centuries. It has also been upheld by the Polish pope’s successors.

In 2006, Benedict XVI said in a Roman synagogue that “the favor of the God of the Covenant has always accompanied the Jews, giving them the strength to overcome trials.” It is difficult to disagree with D’Costa that Benedict’s words imply that contemporary rabbinical Judaism is a continuation of the faith of the biblical people of Israel. Francis taught the same thing in Evangelii gaudium, proclaiming that the Covenant of the Jewish people with God has never ended. Thus, John Paul II’s error became firmly established in the official doctrine of Rome and became the basis for the construction of Catholic Zionism.

To this should be added many other vague, ambiguous, but always “appropriately” interpretable declarations by various Vatican bodies. All of them, according to D’Costa, suggest that the Church is on the verge of accepting the thesis that Jews have an eternal right to the Land of Israel based on biblical promises, and that it is the role of Catholics, indeed their moral obligation and duty, to give Jews and the State of Israel all possible support. Any criticism of such behavior is a form of anti-Zionism, and therefore anti-Judaism, and therefore antisemitism, which is the greatest (and perhaps the only) sin in history.

The key to understanding this constant submission to the Jewish vision of history — where the history of Christian civilization is a record of constant persecution, oppression, discrimination, injustice, and the oppression of innocent Jews by Christians — was papal meaculpism. There is no doubt that the Polish pope, in the very least, paved the way for a kind of synthesis of post-conciliar Catholicism and Zionism: if the moral task of Christians is to combat all forms of antisemitism, and since it is the Jews themselves who decide what it consists of, and since most of them claim that antisemitism today is expressed in criticism of the State of Israel, then it is easy to see that this would also be the practical effect of the great papal change. By undermining the necessity of conversion — as I have written, in none of the pope’s publicly known statements can a single statement be found that could be interpreted as a call for Jews to convert to Catholicism — and by teaching that Jews are still bound to God by the Covenant of Moses, John Paul (and later his venerable successors on the throne of St. Peter) seemed to actually accept the concept of two parallel paths to salvation. Indirectly, this could lead, as can be seen in many Catholic authors, to the recognition of Zionism. This is logical. If the State of Israel has become the only and most important form of existence for the Jewish people in today’s world, then the dialogue with Judaism, which the Pope strongly and unequivocally called for, has to entail not only recognition of this statehood, but also, in the event of a conflict between Israel and other states, taking its side.

The most important difference between John Paul’s nascent Catholic Zionism and its developed evangelical version is theological in nature. Firstly, the Polish pope did not recognize the bizarre evangelical doctrine of the “rapture” of Christians just before the coming of Armageddon, when the unbelievers and Jews will remain on earth. Secondly, it is impossible to find him expressing any recognition of the salvific function of the present State of Israel. Thirdly, the Polish pope did not comment on the coming of the Antichrist, a topic that is so crucial for Evangelicals, and there is no trace in his statements of the Protestant belief in chiliasm, i.e., the belief that after defeating the Antichrist, Christ will establish a thousand-year kingdom. Fourthly, he did not preach that Israel was fulfilling God’s promise by occupying the land of Palestine. But the last point is unclear. By claiming that the Covenant with the Jews is still valid, does one not then have to accept that they have a right to the land promised to Abraham?

In practice, therefore, the differences between the new theology of Judaism of the post-conciliar popes and the Christian Zionism of American Evangelicals are not so great. Both reject the old belief that the Church is the only true Israel, that the killing of the Messiah deprived the Jews of their right to be the chosen people, that they therefore have no right to the Land of Israel, and that Judaism is therefore a false religion, and its followers, unless they are in a state of insurmountable ignorance, which only God knows, are subject to condemnation. Both Catholic followers of dialogism (or neomodernists) and evangelical supporters of Zionism repeat at every turn what has already been put into words by Matt Schlapp, one of the organizers of CPAC, the largest conservative congress in the US, which Donald Trump regularly attends (the same conference at which the US president found only eight minutes for a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda in March 2025): “We are on the side of Israel and the Jewish people.” Schlapp himself, along with his wife Mercedes Schlapp, are the founders of a center for combating antisemitism alongside Israeli Minister Amichai Chikli.

In this regard, there can be no ambiguity: American support for Israel is not based on pragmatic reasons. It is not the result of a cost-benefit analysis, but a true profession of faith. This is what Jewish partners in dialogue expect from contemporary Christians, and that is why the former must constantly make the appropriate profession of faith. Recognition of Israel and taking its side is not a mere political declaration and does not merely describe sympathy, but has become, in the true sense of the word, a profession of faith, reminiscent of either the Muslim shahada (“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His prophet”) or the Jewish Shema Yisrael (“Hear, O Israel: Hashem is our God, Hashem is One”). Christian Zionists profess: Let us bless the State of Israel, for thus we gather treasure for ourselves in heaven and on earth.

In his interesting and detailed book describing the history of Christian Zionism, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend, Timothy P. Weber writes: “over onethird of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.” This amounts to tens of millions of people which, it is important to note, are not passive sympathizers, but passionate, active supporters. Many of them — and this certainly applies to pastors — live in a state of messianic ecstasy.

Weber sees what all other observers see: “after the founding of Israel in 1948 and its expansion after the Six-Day War, dispensationalists promoted their ideas with the confidence that Bible prophecy was being fulfilled for all to see. Starting in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the popular culture with runaway best-sellers, plenty of media visibility, and a well-networked political campaign to promote and protect the interests of Israel.” Here we encounter the first puzzling word, which sounds exotic to readers: dispensationalists. In short, this refers to a branch of Protestantism that originated in 19th-century Great Britain, which is distinguished by its literal interpretation of the Bible and, most importantly from the point of view of the present book, considers the Church and Israel to be two completely separate, independent entities. The name comes from the word “dispensation,” or a period in which God acts in a certain characteristic, separate way. Well, these mysterious dispensationalists are all Christian Zionists and, as most readers will find hard to believe, they have the greatest influence on current American policy with respect to Israel and, more broadly, the entire Middle East.

Their importance has grown immeasurably since the 1970s. On the one hand, Israel’s power has strengthened the political position of Christian Zionists, and on the other hand, it was Israel that benefited most from their growing influence. This has been an almost perfect symbiosis. Although Christian Zionists, as Protestants, were still conducting missions among Jews at the beginning of the 20th century, they have practically abandoned this activity in recent years. Christian Zionists not only defend the State of Israel, but are also supporters of Greater Israel, which makes their closest allies representatives of the Jewish extreme religious right….

It is not easy to understand all this. Many readers will probably be surprised after reading this book. Let us summarize.

Firstly, readers will ask whether it is possible that, in today’s world, which they believe to be undergoing radical secularization, de-Christianization, etc., religion can play such a significant role as I am trying to show. Even if they agree that it is of great importance to societies that are, to put it nicely, developing, how can one claim, as I am doing, that it determines the policy of the largest and most modern superpower of the 21st century? Well, I can’t help it if that’s exactly how it is. Christian Zionists, who are tens of millions of American voters and constitute one of the pillars of Donald Trump’s victory, really exist and really have enormous influence. How can this be reconciled with the disastrous concept of the radical separation of politics and religion adopted at the Second Vatican Council? Could it be that in its persistent pursuit of aggiornamento (“updating”), the Catholic Church is chasing a chimera? Could it be that the whole concept of the radical autonomy of politics from religion, so praised by most Catholic theologians and bishops, was just a humbug, a clever slogan effectively eliminating Catholics from participating in political life? Unfortunately, it looks like this has been the case.

Secondly, how can we understand that a small group of Jews from Chabad-Lubavitch (statistically speaking, 0.29 percent of the US population), who profess extreme racial theories, wield such powerful influence over the most important American politicians? What is the significance of this group and its doctrine? Why does Donald Trump regularly attend their meetings, and how is it possible that Ronald Reagan was their supporter? I have already written about the latter’s special relationship with the sect. As for the current president, nothing demonstrates the importance of the Jewish community better than the fact that on October 24, 2024, just before the election, Donald Trump visited the grave of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the so-called Ofel, where he met with rabbis, prayed with them wearing a kippah on his head, and asked for their blessing. As reported by the New York newspaper The Forward, Trump received 65 percent of the vote in the Crown Heights district, home to the global center of Chabad-Lubavitch.

Thirdly, who are the completely unknown Christian Zionists in Poland, i.e., Christians whose main goal is to support Israel’s policies? What is the source of their doctrine? Where did it come from?

Fourthly, how should Zionism itself be understood? After all, it is not simply a movement that previously sought to establish the State of Israel and now focuses on its survival and expansion. What is religious Zionism and, in particular, messianic Zionism? How is it possible that many Israeli politicians, as well as Jewish rabbis, call Palestinians animals and praise the killing of women and children? Why is a conflict over which opinions and arguments are otherwise divided portrayed by most Israeli and American politicians as a clash between, to quote the words of the new Israeli ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, “light and darkness, truth and lies, civilization against murderous barbarism?”

Fifthly, why are the end times, apocalyptic visions, and obscure biblical metaphors so important to these various movements and sects? After all, in our rationalist society, there should be no place for them anymore. Or perhaps we are deluding ourselves? Perhaps what often seems to us to be overcome and irrelevant is the real driving force of history, and we, Western Christians, have allowed ourselves to be fooled and blinded by those who predicted the end of history and the victory of global liberalism. Perhaps it is ideas about the Antichrist that fuel the deepest global conflicts?

Sixthly, what is the movement for the Third Temple, and why has what was once considered a curiosity and oddity become such an ideologically significant factor in Jewish life over the past few decades? The Temple Mount, on which two mosques stand, is therefore beginning to resemble a veritable powder keg, with someone repeatedly lighting the fuse. What would such a temple be?

Seventhly, who are the Noahides, the non-Jews who have abandoned Christianity and placed themselves under the care of Jewish rabbis, messianic Zionists? There is no denying that this is one of the fastest growing religious communities in recent times. How does the increasingly frequent search for the Jewish roots of Christianity in Protestant sects and the dialogue with Judaism in the Catholic Church influence its development?

All of these, I believe, are important questions. I will try to answer them one by one. To do so, we need to refer to the sources, statements, and books of various protagonists of the events. In addition, it is necessary to show how different, separate movements and communities cooperate with each other and how ideas born in one place fertilize the minds of members of other groups. Furthermore, it should be remembered that what often might seem to us to be naturally separate — politics and theology, for example — is closely intertwined in the minds of the protagonists of this book. I realize that many of the issues I’m raising might seem exotic, especially in Poland, but this does not change the fact that they are extremely important — not only for politics, but also for religion, especially for the Catholic Church.

How did it come about that, as a result of an unusual and, one might even say, almost alchemical experiment, so many Christians came to preach the cult of secular Israel? Is such an attitude even compatible with faith in Christ as Lord and King? What is the source of this unusual fusion of Christianity and Zionism? Perhaps a good starting point for understanding this new approach would be to describe Jewish expectations of the new Christianity. These are, as one might expect, varied. In the most radical, let’s say traditional, version, these expectations simply boil down to hope for annihilation: the best Christianity is one that will not exist…

ORDER Paweł Lisicki’s The Messiah and the Third Temple: The Heresy and Wars of Christian Zionism, fresh off the press from Arktos:

On April 8-11, the Institut Iliade in Paris accomplished a milestone in the history of the European New Right with the successful hosting of two major events: the international Awakening Europe seminar and the 13th Colloquium of the Institut Iliade, this year themed “Freedoms: Thought — Speech — Action”.

The Institut Iliade Colloquium is not only one event among others, but the much-anticipated yearly congress of the institute which was founded as Dominique Venner’s dying wish to carry on the flame of the French New Right in the 21st century. The Colloquium fittingly took place in an unprecedentedly international profile in the wake of the recent release of the English edition of Venner’s final testimony, Samurai of the West.

For the first three days, the Awakening Europe seminar brought together editorial directors, think-tank leaders, activist executives, academics, and metapolitical figures from across France and as many as 12 countries, including Sweden, Norway, Poland, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, and the United States.

Arktos, the official English-language publisher of the Institut Iliade, was represented in full force by a delegation including Founder and CEO Daniel Friberg, Managing Director Tor Westman, Editor-in-Chief Jafe Arnold, and translator Alexander Raynor.

The unprecedented seminar, which included lectures, workshops, and cultural excursions, represented a unique line of transmission: senior veterans of the French Nouvelle Droite shared their knowledge and experience with representatives of the new generations of Identitarians, who in turn had the opportunity to raise ideological, geopolitical, and organisational questions facing Europeans today. The seminar also displayed Iliade’s growing pan-European and international outreach: based on the Iliade’s domestic Formation courses, these were the first of their kind held in English and focused on invitees from movements across the Continent.

Read the Institut Iliade manifesto, Guardians of Heritage, brought to you in English by Arktos:

The educational program, presented by senior as well as junior members of the Institut Iliade, covered a broad spectrum of European thought, both historical and contemporary. The lecture series included presentations on the Indo-European heritage, the legacy of the Middle Ages, the history of the French Nouvelle Droite, the philosophical foundations of Archeofuturism, and conceptual frameworks of ethnic identity, among other key themes. As a testimony to the depth and profundity of the seminar’s content, the participants selected Friedrich Nietzsche as the symbolic promotional figure of the program.

The conclusion of the seminar culminated with the opening of the Institut Iliade’s 13th annual conference, held in the famous congress centre of the Maison de la Chimie, which was packed with at least 1,500 guests. In the main auditorium, a much-anticipated ensemble of speakers, including major Iliade voices like Antoine Dresse, a.k.a. “Ego Non”, frequently published in Arktos Journal, and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, whose Remigration has just been published by Arktos.

Apart from the keynote speeches, the Iliade Colloquium also provided space for publishers, authors, and businesses with traditional values to showcase their works and network with likeminded operations from across Europe. Arktos had the honour of running two exhibitions, an embassy table in the main hall and a book table by the main auditorium.

The Arktos team was joined by authors, editors, and collaborators, including Tim Vorgens, who signed copies of his book Legitimate Preference, and a featured presentation of the English-language edition of Kineuropa: Cinema as a Reflection of European Identity hand-in-hand with the Italian edition published by Inquadrature Perfette.

Following an action-packed day of Identitarian exchanges, the Institut Iliade hosted its legendary Grand Ball, featuring folk music and dances which celebrated and breathed new life into European traditions.

On the whole, the 13th Iliade Colloquium was impressive and inspiring: it demonstrated with prestige and elegance that the Institut Iliade represents not only the enduring significance of what began with GRECE and the Nouvelle Droite in 1968, but also the vitality of the new generation of advocates of a European Renaissance. Arktos is proud and honoured to play a part in this undertaking for a European Renaissance by bringing the works of leading lights into the English language and to international forums.

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From the Instituto Carlos V - For Long European Memory

The word “aristocracy” comes from the Greek root “aristos” (ἄριστος), which is derived from the term “areté” (ἀρετή) and refers to excellence or virtue. In practice, the aristoi (ἄριστοι) were individuals with exceptional qualities that made them capable of governing. To understand the essence of this superiority, we must ask: in what sense were they better?

This question has been approached from many different perspectives. While some attribute it to a set of spiritual characteristics or ethical and intellectual qualities, others are more critical, suspecting that this terminology is used by the ruling classes to manipulate and justify their power. Without dismissing these interpretations, which can certainly shed light on important aspects of the phenomenon, we will propose an alternative hypothesis here. In other words, we will examine whether it is possible to conceive of aristocracy as a matter of manipulating nature rather than economic status.

To develop our argument, we must first consider the conditions that preceded the formation of our culture. In her book The Goddesses and Gods of Ancient Europe, the archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, based on an analysis of contemporary tribal societies and material remains from prehistory, demonstrates that in “Old Europe” (a term coined to refer to sedentary societies — first hunter-gatherers and later agriculturalists — that flourished during the prehistoric period on the European continent), women’s reproductive capacity was highly valued, as women were believed to be conduits of the cosmic forces that generate fertility. This belief was associated with matriarchal and matrilineal societies, where women held political and religious power and inheritance was passed down through the maternal line.

The oldest archaeological evidence of this system of values consists of numerous figurines dedicated to the “Mother Goddess” or “Great Mother”, dating back at least 25,000 years. Examples include the famous Venus of Willendorf. This trend intensified with the emergence of agriculture during the Neolithic period. Examining the site of Çatalhöyük on the Anatolian peninsula corroborates this hypothesis, as figures discovered there date back to around 6000 BC and depict the Great Mother have been discovered there. Similarly, Minoan religion revolved around female deities such as the Snake Goddess, an example of which has been preserved in the form of a figurine dating to 1600 BC found in the Palace of Knossos. Furthermore, the global spread of this type of deity suggests that it was a cross-cultural phenomenon characteristic of an era when humans were extremely vulnerable to nature.

Conversely, the period in European history when women played a dominant role coincided with a time when the process of gestation was not understood. Men were unable to identify their own role in procreation and attributed pregnancy to a special power women had to communicate with nature and embody reproductive power. In his book The Family among the Australian Aborigines: A Sociological Study, Bronisław Malinowski explains that tribes who maintain a lifestyle similar to prehistoric societies still do not understand the link between sexual intercourse and procreation. In any case, according to Gimbutas, the matriarchal context that flourished in Europe between 7000 and 3500 BC was characterized by peaceful, cooperative and egalitarian existence.

However, this social order failed to stop the migration of Indo-Europeans — or Indo-Aryans — which spread in all directions over a period of between one and three thousand years. This migration had a radical impact on Europe and the rest of the world. These populations emerge in history as nomadic horsemen and herders organized into stratified, heteropatriarchal and warlike groups. According to the Kurgan hypothesis, these invaders were mounted warriors from the south of present-day Russia. Gimbutas describes how they subjugated agricultural societies through three successive waves of migration between 4000 and 1000 BC. Some feminist intellectuals, such as Riane Eisler (author of The Chalice and the Blade), argue that the emergence of Indo-European and patriarchal culture led to the spread of war, inequality, alienation and the destruction of ecosystems, representing a cataclysm that should be lamented. Without delving into the merits of these assessments, we will continue our analysis and return to this debate in the conclusions.

To enable their expansion, the Indo-Europeans made use of significant technological advances, such as the bridle and the wheel, and above all, the domestication of the horse. Due to intense migration, the religion of the invading peoples gradually merged with the telluric spirituality of the indigenous European populations. Consequently, deities associated with nature were relegated to the background, as happened in Greece with the chthonic deities and in Norse mythology with the Vanir. The Indo-European cult, centered on Deus Pater, had a celestial character (a “Uranian spirit”, in Julius Evola’s terminology) and was no longer linked to fertility, but rather to the cultural values of an emerging warrior aristocracy. Family structures also changed, giving rise to a patrilineal and patrifocal system derived from the observations of Indo-European herders regarding kinship ties. This system refuted the matriarchal prejudice that men played no role in procreation.

It is worth noting that this phenomenon is not limited to the expansion of the Indo-European language family, but has occurred on every continent throughout history. Consider, for example, the relationship between the Tutsi and the Hutu in Rwanda. Although the Hutu were the indigenous population of present-day Rwanda, the Tutsi established themselves as an aristocratic elite who administered the vast territory until the 20th century, despite representing only 17% of the population. Pierre Van den Berghe analyzed this case in Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (1967), in which he argues that the Tutsi developed racist beliefs that exalted their own physical traits (such as aquiline noses, tall stature and slender builds) and devalued those of the Hutu, whom they defined as inferior.

Similar phenomena can also be observed in China, which was conquered by both the Mongols and the Manchus. Both ethnic groups share a pastoral origin in the mountainous northern regions. Like the Tutsi, the Manchus imposed a system of racial discrimination to preserve their culture and genetic traits, thereby avoiding assimilation by the vast indigenous population, as had happened to the Mongols. As the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun already intuited, there is a constant in human history: nomadic peoples conquer sedentary ones and impose their own laws.

According to Costin Alamariu’s theories outlined in Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, the success of these people can be attributed to three main factors: diet, culture, and environment. Firstly, the diet of nomadic herders primarily consists of dairy products, meat and fruit, obtained from trees scattered throughout their territories. Prolonged intake of high protein levels over generations produces individuals of greater stature with a more robust bone and muscle structure, better suited to military exertion. This diet contrasts sharply with the diet of sedentary communities, which is based primarily on vegetables and legumes with very limited meat consumption and is tied to the cultivation of the land.

Secondly, from a cultural perspective, conquest is more closely aligned with the worldview of herders, who do not view land as a static asset, but rather as someone who owns livestock. Since livestock is more easily taken, herders are more likely to use violence. Finally, living in mountainous areas fosters values closely tied to war. It is no coincidence that mountainous regions have historically been theatres of conflict, from the Scottish Highlands to the Balkans.

Once the origins of the aristocracy have been clarified, its worldview can be better understood. For example, the evidence gathered explains why aristocrats have always looked down on manual and agricultural labour. They also commonly build country residences, as if their blood were driving them away from cities and back to the wild spirit of their ancestors. Hunting and horseback riding serve a similar function in maintaining this connection with nature.

The concern for lineage can be explained by the pastoral origins of the aristocracy. By focusing their efforts on breeding livestock, shepherds discovered the rudiments of eugenics, seeking to produce superior specimens to those of their competitors. This gave rise to one of the fundamental principles of aristocracy: that ancestors pass on characteristics to their descendants. Not only did shepherds learn how to improve livestock through selection, but they also applied these criteria to humans. This resulted in eugenic practices such as marriage restrictions or, as in Sparta, physical examinations to exclude weak or deformed children. Training aimed at enhancing the abilities of the younger generations was also introduced.

In short, when aristocrats descended from shepherds who practiced eugenics, they were simply applying to humans what they had observed in animal breeding. The aristocrat is someone who believes that they are destined to rule, not by chance, but by nature; they are superior to others, who are destined to serve by a natural disposition. These ideas are found in the works of Plato and Aristotle, who recognized the existence of different human natures — an idea that contemporary democratic orders deem irrational and inhumane.

However, these considerations would be fruitless if we did not seek to draw conclusions that are relevant to our own time. As Martin Heidegger asserted, human beings cannot be reduced to a species because they are not a fixed substance, but rather a being-there (Dasein) in a state of constant becoming. In light of this view, some schools of thought propose a return to a sedentary, matrifocal paradigm. However, historical evidence shows that the values attributed to such societies, though celebrated today, resulted in Old Europe being dominated by groups that were better prepared for conflict. Furthermore, the egalitarianism of these communities limited individuals’ capacity for self-realization.

Although the cult of the Mother Goddess is associated with matriarchal societies, this does not imply that they originated concepts such as freedom. Ecofeminist philosophers who advocate a return to nature, envisaging it as the abolition of all exploitation and suffering, perpetuate the illusion of stepping outside of history, in both its eschatological-religious and utopian-materialist forms. In reality, such societies were characterized by scarcity and vulnerability in the face of natural phenomena.

The inherent dynamics of the agricultural economy made life in these communities monotonous and incompatible with the instincts of young men. These instincts were suppressed through social conventions designed to ensure stability. As James George Frazer observes in The Golden Bough, primitive man does not distinguish between custom and nature; to him, unwritten law appears as natural as the cycles of the Earth and the Sun. The inhabitant of prehistoric sedentary societies was therefore not a free man, but the most enslaved person who ever lived.

In contrast, young Indo-European men made vitality their greatest virtue, founding the aristocracy that gave rise to the city-states of the Iron Age. Realizing the power of female reproduction prompted men to reaffirm their own creative capacity through téchne, or artificial production. Thanks to the tools he created, man increased his dominion over reality and reduced his vulnerability to nature. This attitude has characterized the Homo genus since its origins, but it is in Europe — in the Western, Faustian spirit of which Oswald Spengler speaks — that “the struggle between nature and man, who, through his historical existence, rebels against her, has been practically fought to its end”.

The artistic expression that best represents this shift is the Greek Kuroi: statues of victorious young athletes. The new society no longer venerated the Great Mother, but instead celebrated the values of youth and beauty. The European city emerged from an attempt to preserve the freedom of nomadic peoples and barbarian youth within an urban context, celebrating a way of life that nourished the cultural expressions of the pólis. Rather than repressing youthful ambitions, European civilization sought to ennoble and refine them through the gymnasium, the training ground, and the various forms of the agón — understood as athletic, artistic, military, or dialectical competition.

Finally, the selection processes employed by elites since ancient times warrant further reflection. Having domesticated the living world, the aristocracy then turned their attention to self-domestication, thereby consolidating their position as an elite and domesticating the masses. The construction of hierarchical societies therefore hinges on the relationship between the tamers and the tamed, be they inert matter or living beings. Recent events suggest that the growing sophistication of domestication techniques will accentuate the distance between tamers and the tamed in the short and medium term.

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While more at home on the golf course than in the Persian Gulf, Donald Trump had initially presented the war against Iran as a "little excursion." Not known for his strategic patience, he wanted results fast. The original objectives were the fall of the Islamic regime and the complete destruction of its military capabilities. Now, four weeks since hostilities began, none of that has come to pass.

The Iranians have taken control of the Strait of Hormuz, and their coastline — stretching 1,600 kilometers — is bristling with missiles, drones, and military speedboats. The Houthis of Yemen are threatening to close in turn the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, which locks access to the Red Sea. In Lebanon, where one million people have been displaced (one in ten inhabitants), the Israelis make no secret of their intention to militarily occupy the south of the country up to the Litani River. The price of crude oil has surpassed 100 dollars a barrel, a rise from which Vladimir Putin is the principal beneficiary. European countries, which the European Commission forced to cut themselves off from Russian hydrocarbons, are now facing gas and oil shortages that are driving a surge in petrol prices at the pump.

Though severely and lastingly weakened by the massive bombardments they have endured, the Iranians have not yielded — quite the contrary. What we have witnessed is an escalation that looks very much like a headlong rush. The American-Israeli military movements, the contradictory statements from the White House, the continued Iranian strikes, the destabilization of energy markets, the announcement of a ground invasion (special forces?) — all of this sketches out a scenario whose consequences no one can foresee, but which evokes the “oil shocks” of 1974 and 1979: economic and financial crisis, global recession.

The United States, which had hoped for a lightning victory, no longer knows how to extract itself from this hornet’s nest. The Iranians, who were supposed to collapse within days, are holding the initiative in every domain. The balance sheet of Operation “Epic Fury” is a disaster.

How Did We Get Here?

And first of all — why this war? An “imminent threat” justifying a pre-emptive strike? Which one? The nuclear threat? It will soon be forty years since Israel has been announcing, year after year, that Iran will have the atomic bomb “within a few months” — an assertion that has by now generated the same skepticism as the “weapons of mass destruction” attributed to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, announced on 18 March that Iran had not resumed the nuclear enrichment activities destroyed in June 2025. Trump himself had at the time trumpeted that the Iranian nuclear program had been “totally obliterated.” Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), confirmed on his part that there was no immediate Iranian threat in this domain.

Why did Trump launch into this adventure — one that nothing in the current situation justified — displaying a degree of unpreparedness that left all serious military observers dumbfounded? Why did he choose, a few months before the midterm elections (midterms), to risk alienating his electoral base, which has no appetite for such a war — a war that the vast majority of Americans likewise condemns? Marco Rubio has perhaps provided the answer by letting slip that Trump yielded to Israeli pressure applied on him by Benjamin Netanyahu on 11 February in Washington. But that merely shifts the question: why did he yield?

On 17 March, the unexpected resignation of Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, came like a thunderclap. In his letter of resignation addressed to Trump, he wrote: “I cannot, in good conscience, support the ongoing war against Iran. Iran did not represent an imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we launched this war under pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

The war thus began on 28 February — Two days before the feast of Purim (which commemorates, as recounted in the Book of Esther, how the Hebrews escaped a planned massacre at the hands of the Persians) — with a targeted assassination (Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) and the death under bombs of 165 schoolgirls aged 7 to 12 (daughters of Revolutionary Guards), even as negotiations were underway between the Iranians and the Americans which, according to the Sultanate of Oman, were on the verge of succeeding (”a deal was within reach”).

Mark Twain said that “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” Apparently, they have not yet learned it. Trump has gravely underestimated his adversaries. He underestimated the power and resilience of Iranian nationalism. He underestimated Iran’s military strength, its organizational solidity, and its strategic orientations.

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Iran is not Venezuela, nor the Principality of Monaco. Nor is it an Arab country: Iranians are ethnically closer to Europeans than to Arabs, Turks, or Palestinians. Iran is a country of 90 million people, three times larger than France, endowed with a triple identity (Indo-Iranian since Antiquity, Muslim since the 7th century, modern since the 19th century), with a complex society, a high-level academic class (Ali Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, killed by Israel on 17 March, was a specialist in Kant and Descartes), a vast population of engineers (Iran trains 230,000 of them each year), a 3,000-year history, and internal dynamics that escape the comprehension of most Westerners. It is, in the Middle East alongside Egypt and Turkey, the country with the richest cultural heritage. It also holds the world’s 3rd largest proven oil reserves and the world’s 2nd largest proven gas reserves. And in geopolitical terms, the Iranian plateau constitutes the essential pivot territory of the Eurasian landmass.

An Existential War

Having a purely transactional vision of power relations, Trump does not grasp that the Iranians are waging an existential war against him — which is not the case for the Americans. He does not understand their “irrational” refusal to capitulate. He does not understand that there are situations in which no deal is possible. He does not know that the doctrine of martyrdom has been at the heart of Shia Islam (counting 200 million believers) since the massacre of Karbala in 680 CE and the death of Imam Hussein and his companions, and that in the eyes of Iranians, Ali Khamenei weighs far more in death than he did in life.

Bombardment alone cannot enable the Americans and Israelis to prevail. Ground troops are necessary, even when the targeted regime harbors a solidly structured opposition — which is not the case in Iran (let us not even speak of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former dictator, a veritable puppet of the Mossad and the CIA, who has support only within the Diaspora).

The Iranians, for their part, have understood very well that they do not have the means to confront American military power directly, even if they have landed devastating blows against American bases in the region. They therefore adopted from the outset an asymmetric strategy consisting of targeting the weak points of the economy and energy production, with precision strikes against the oil and gas production and storage infrastructure of the Gulf states. To this was added the seizure of control of the Strait of Hormuz, linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman — a strategic passage through which 20 million barrels transit daily, representing 20% of global oil supply, as well as 20% of liquefied gas.

Dragged into a war they never sought, the Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates including Dubai), which had built their prosperity model by entrusting their security to the Americans, now find themselves at a loss. Their security guarantor has become a source of insecurity, since the war also threatens their economic model. They observe with bitterness that the Americans have done nothing to protect them from Iranian strikes, that those strikes target an oil infrastructure that is their only real wealth, and that their image as financial and tourist paradises has been badly tarnished. If the escalation continues and the desalination plants on which their populations depend are destroyed, these countries could even become uninhabitable.

The de facto disappearance of international law has brought with it the disappearance of the laws of war. The targeted assassination of the entirety of the ruling apparatus of a sovereign state and member of the United Nations, at the outset of a war that was never declared, of which no allied country was informed, and which did not even receive Congressional approval (rendering it unconstitutional), is without precedent. It is also a flagrant violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that “it is prohibited to kill, wound, or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy” (Art. 39). The elimination of nearly a hundred Iranian military and political leaders — carried out by the Israelis using intelligence provided by the Mossad — was spectacular, but did not produce the expected effect. By the very next day, they had already been replaced, and for each of those replacements, the names of the next two successors had already been designated.

The only perceptible consequence is that the effective leadership of the Iranian regime has passed from the hands of the mullahs and ayatollahs into those of the Revolutionary Guards, who have their own army and their own economy and who hold firmly to a hard line, declaring themselves prepared to continue the war for as long as necessary. For them, non-surrender is equivalent to victory.

In fact, the Iranians had been preparing for precisely this kind of attack for twenty years. It is this preparation that allowed them to put in place a “decentralized mosaic defense,” a strategic doctrine elaborated by Tehran in the wake of American failures in Iraq and Afghanistan: the 31 command centers (one per province) were equipped with autonomous weapons capabilities and strategic independence. In the event of a first strike decapitating the central command, all command centers switch to autonomous mode and continue to fight. In the meantime, Iran’s military capabilities have been considerably strengthened — notably through precision ballistic missiles and sophisticated drones.

Strategy and Tactics

Mao Zedong, in his writings on revolutionary warfare, observed quite rightly that “the view that strategic victory can only be achieved through tactical victories is wrong.” The United States has, at all times, confused strategy with tactics. They have tactics — consisting of a list of targets to be struck — but they have no strategy, because they have not the faintest idea of the “day after”: that is to say, the kind of peace they wish to establish. “We do not know how to translate our military gains into a political settlement,” Ami Ayalon, former head of Israeli domestic intelligence, declared these past days. This is why, since 1945, the Americans have not won a single war. And it is also why their interventions in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Libya have not brought “democracy” and “freedom,” but civil war and chaos.

Another perennial failing of the Americans is their belief that military and technological superiority automatically confers victory. This is simply false. At the height of the Vietnam War, the number of American soldiers deployed on the ground reached half a million — which did not prevent their defeat.

The cost of the war with Iran is enormous. American air power excels against large fixed targets, but struggles to neutralize small mobile units. Shooting down $20,000 Shahed drones with $4 million missiles is hardly the most economical approach! The United States has used more Patriot interceptors in the first three days of the war than it supplied to Ukraine over four years of conflict. The first two weeks of the war alone have cost twelve billion dollars. The White House now seeks to unlock an additional 200 billion dollars to sustain its offensive. While the Israelis are short of soldiers, the Americans are short of munitions, guided missiles, and air defense systems (they have already recalled systems deployed in East Asia and diverted arms originally destined for Ukraine).

The Birth of an Anti-Western Axis

By launching a war without legal justification, without a solid coalition, and without attainable objectives, Israel and the United States have opened Pandora’s box. Their decision will accentuate the world’s multipolarization and foster the formation of an anti-Western axis oriented toward China and Russia.

One of two things must now follow: either Donald Trump finds an honorable exit allowing him to dress up his defeat as a “great military victory” — in which case it is likely that Israel will wish to continue the war, if not in Iran, then at least in Lebanon — or he seeks to annihilate a country that is heir to a three-thousand-year-old civilization, with all the risks of escalation and quagmire that this entails. In either case, the risk of chaos spreading across the entire Middle East is severe.

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Let us not forget, finally, that in this affair, while the attack on Iran was conducted jointly by Israel and the United States, their objectives have never been the same. Donald Trump’s initial plan was to destroy Iran’s military power in order to then conclude a peace agreement, while Netanyahu seeks both a regime change and the dismemberment of Iran, so as to secure unchallenged hegemony over the Middle East. In other words: Trump does not exclude peace; Netanyahu does not want it. He wants only to continue bombing and killing. For the moment, the State of Israel — which has just reinstated the death penalty for Palestinians alone — is concerned by the emergence of a Saudi Arabia–Turkey–Pakistan–Egypt axis hostile to it. On 1 April, Donald Trump threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Age.” Calm is not about to return to the region.

Originally published in Éléments

Translated by Alexander Raynor

From current geopolitical analyses to deep philosophical reflections, the essential works of Alain de Benoist, the leading light of the European New Right, are available in English from Arktos:

From the Instituto Carlos V — For Long European Memory:

In the age of virtual communities, which should always be complementary and subordinate to real ones — with Plato’s “myth of the cave” always in the background — the space of identity acts as a true beacon of what the militant community wishes to project to the outside world.

Furthermore, it makes the community visible, manifesting its influence or marginality, and acts as a hub for important social networks. Identity spaces are the “forest” of the Waldgänger in the 21^st century, which can return one day to the real forest.

Nevertheless, fewer and fewer places offer genuine living spaces, and it is crucial to reverse this trend, which reflects the individualistic and appearance-obsessed characteristics of contemporary society. Yet, maintaining these meeting points is complex not only in economic terms, but also in terms of organization, operation and commitment.

Therefore, opening new spaces and maintaining existing ones is a goal that should be considered in the short and medium term. In our case, the Instituto Carlos V intends to open at least one physical headquarters within a few years.

However, in terms of aesthetics, which is what really interests us here, quantity often seems to dominate quality. This is evident in the abundance of flags, stickers, portraits of historical figures and posters depicting symbolic actions. There is a certain horror vacui at play, and a visual disorder where it seems that plastering the walls with more or less tasteful decorations, with generally unfortunate results, is enough. Furthermore, one absence in particular is constantly and acutely felt: Art. Even more so, contemporary art. If there is anything that defines Europeans, it is their artistic sensibility and creativity.

Europe has demonstrated enormous and unparalleled potential in art and culture. This potential must be urgently recognized and valued. Both the artistic masterpieces of the past and the present are equally important. When it comes to the latter, it is enough to be selective and have certain criteria, seeking harmony between the various elements. By doing so, we can bring art back to the center of our lives and incorporate it into our community spaces.

After all, the beauty of an environment lies in its ability to inspire and transform those who inhabit it. If an identity space is bland, poorly furnished, and poorly decorated, this will also be reflected in those who work there. As the denigrated Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer said: “The spectacle of beauty, in whatever form it appears, elevates the mind to noble aspirations” (The Poetics of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, 1968)

Once the multifaceted and multiform problem has been identified, there is a need to move from verbalizing the meaning of art, which is usually developed through the written medium, to mobilizing art itself in the various forms and ways in which it manifests, thus giving rise to innovative and cutting-edge dynamics.

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Join the initiative to rediscover and revive European art! Check out Kineuropa: Cinema as a Reflection of European Identity, fresh off the press from Arktos:

To this end, the Instituto Carlos V has developed two operational guidelines.

Firstly, we donate works — originals or reproductions, usually masterpieces of European art — to organizations with limited financial resources but a similar worldview to ours.

Secondly, we create new artistic pieces on timeless themes to be distributed at a symbolic price (see the postcards we have already produced for an example of this).

Additionally, we are considering dedicating ourselves to the publication of prints and graphics, as well as exploring other visual media. In any case, we are keen to support new artists and/or local European businesses. We have also decided to donate books on local and national heritage.

This is just the beginning of a more ambitious project that we will develop in the short and medium term without ruling out other possibilities.

In summary, if we aspire to transform the aesthetics of a nation or a continent, we must first implement this paradigm shift in our immediate surroundings, both militant and familiar.

Let us take advice from those who know best: beauty should be our goal and something to strive for.

Alain de Benoist argues that a reckless "war party" of European leaders and institutions is pushing the continent toward a catastrophic armed confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.

The drums of war have begun to sound again. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, is calling on the countries of the Atlantic Alliance to prepare for a third world war. In France, government decree no. 2025-1030 of October 31, 2025, published in the Journal officiel but gone unnoticed, authorizes the use of private military companies to provide assistance to “a third country in a situation of armed conflict.” A return to mercenaries. Military service is to be reinstated on a voluntary basis, which will make it possible to increase the number of reservists. General Fabien Mandon, Chief of the Defense Staff, announces a war with Russia “in three to four years.” His predecessor, Thierry Burkhard, had already attributed to Russia a (nonexistent) declaration designating France as its “principal adversary in Europe.” For good measure, reserve General Michel Yakovleff coolly assures us that Donald Trump is a “KGB agent” (sic)! An armed confrontation with Russia is now presented no longer as a possibility, but as a certainty.

Marching... Toward the Abyss

For over seventy years, we were told that “Europe means peace.” Today, Europe means war. On the side of the European Union’s comic-opera troupe, we have the vocal stylings of the Estonian Kallas, who mechanically repeats that “Ukraine must win the war”—a war it has already lost—while Ursula von der Leyen (the Hyena?) declares with a straight face that Europe is “ready for action,” when it is ready for nothing at all (and the EU has no competence whatsoever in matters of defense). The geese of Capital!

The era of post-truth had begun with the Covid-19 crisis, already with the objective of instrumentalizing fear by transforming it into moral panic. On television screens, medal-laden generals taking orders have replaced the quack doctors à la Diafoirus1, but the principle remains the same: making people accept what, without fear, would clearly appear unacceptable.

“We are at war!” proudly proclaims the head of state (not the one who just got out of prison—the other one, the psychopath), a phrase he loves all the more since, never having done his military service, he has never heard a bullet whistle in his life. He too ingenuously declares that “Russia must not win this war”—to achieve peace, one must prolong the war! To rally opinion behind this mad fantasy, he assures us that “Russia constitutes an existential threat to Europeans,” while in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing alike, no one takes his bluster seriously. Detested by the people, incapable of putting together a government that holds or passing a budget while the country’s financial situation is disastrous, of protecting its borders or putting an end to narco-terrorism, Macron no longer has any legitimacy. He is trying to restore some by dreaming himself a garden-variety Napoleon. After “France on the march,” it’s now “France, forward march!”

There exists today, then, a war party. A party that wants to wage war on Russia while accusing Russia of wanting to wage it on us. What is new is that this war party does not occupy defensive positions, as in the era of the Cold War, but offensive ones: it deliberately seeks war and does everything it can to mobilize public opinion. The media naturally take up the relay. Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, we have already been subjected to one-sided information concocted by attack dogs and spread by ghosts. Advocates of peace are presented in litany-like fashion as “Putinists.” Soon they will denounce the “fifth column” (the eternal “foreign party”). In the old days, in the popular imagination, people saw flying saucers; today they see drones.

The war party claims that the best way to achieve peace is to help Zelensky pursue a war he is incapable of winning. It claims that by supporting Ukraine by all means, Europeans would be protecting themselves against the “Russian threat.” It claims that after four years spent reconquering their Alsace-Lorraine, the Russians are going to rush toward the harbor of Brest, before pushing on to Lisbon and Gibraltar! It claims that the French people—who will never be consulted about what they think—must prepare right now to see their children die at the Russian border “in three to four years” in support of, against a nuclear power, a country in which France has not the slightest vital interest. It is simply grotesque. As Luc Ferry put it, this is sheer madness!

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Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

Conquer Europe? The Kremlin has neither the desire nor the means. The “Russian threat,” says Philippe de Villiers, is “the fantasy of someone who has no longer quite got his wits about him.” It is a “belief for which not the slightest proof exists,” adds geopolitical scholar John Mearsheimer. The same people who have been learnedly explaining to us for four years that Russia is about to collapse any day now are now assuring us that it is preparing to invade Europe; in short, that it is losing, but must be prevented from winning—that it is at once a bloodthirsty bear and a paper tiger. Make of that what you will.

The war that has been raging for four years in Ukraine is at once a war of secession, a war of self-defense, a fratricidal war, and a proxy war between NATO and Russia. It has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives among young Europeans, Russians, and Ukrainians. It should never have taken place and could have ended long ago. Its primary cause is well known: the determination of the United States to push NATO up to Russia’s borders. NATO did not do this out of sympathy for Ukrainian nationalism, which it merely instrumentalized for its own benefit, but to break apart the great Eurasian continent, to sever Europe from the Russian power with which it is naturally complementary, and of course to prevent the formation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis. The Americans conceived this project from the very collapse of the Soviet system. The Russians had nevertheless made it known in April 2008, more than fifteen years ago, that the extension of NATO to Ukraine would represent a red line and a casus belli for them. The decision was made to disregard this. It was thus decided to use Ukraine against Russia. The unfortunate Ukrainian people fell into the trap, and here we are.

The Europeans entered this war reluctantly. By taking sides with one of the two camps instead of positioning themselves as mediators—which would have been the only reasonable stance—by seeking to identify “guilty parties” rather than acting in accordance with their own interests, by preferring abstract moral values to the concrete principles of geostrategic realism, by allowing themselves to be drawn into an Anglo-Saxon war in which they had no existential or vital interest of their own, they in turn put their hand into the gears of an escalation to extremes. The more time has passed, the more they have appeared of their own free will as co-belligerents. Today, while the Americans want to disengage and the Ukrainian army is no longer capable of launching the slightest offensive, they are engaging in a bellicist escalation that risks dragging all of Europe into an escalation that could culminate in an armed confrontation with a nuclear power. It is difficult to be more irresponsible.

The hardest thing in a war is knowing how to stop it. The aim of every war is peace, but a ceasefire is not peace (as we can see from what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank). A war only ends when a peace agreement has determined the political conditions for resolving the problems that engendered it.

At a time when all Western societies are on the brink of implosion, a debt-ridden and half-ruined Europe has provided more than 200 billion in aid to Ukraine. This massive aid has served no purpose other than to increase the death toll. It has allowed Ukraine to continue the war, but has never given it the possibility of winning it. Without Western military aid, this war would have ended long ago. Observing that Ukraine has lost the war despite American support, Europeans draw the surrealist conclusion that it will win with their help alone—without even understanding that the longer the war lasts, the less Ukraine will be able to negotiate.

Europe in a State of Intoxication

Europeans complain of not having been included in the peace deal proposals negotiated first between the Russians and the Americans. This complaint would be more credible if they had in the past attempted to interpose themselves or play the role of mediator. They now dream of a peace agreement that would ignore the reality of the balance of forces on the ground—that is, an agreement where the victors and the vanquished would both be winners, something that has obviously never been seen (in 1918, Germany was no longer in a position to dictate its terms). They would like Ukraine, with barely 25 million inhabitants, to be able to maintain in peacetime an army of 800,000 men—more than the British, French, and German armies combined. They speak of “security guarantees” for Ukraine without understanding that the only true guarantee for it is its neutrality.

“We are marching toward war like sleepwalkers,” Henri Guaino had written on May 15, 2022. Four years later, the sleepwalkers have still not awoken. From the very beginning, they have been in denial of reality (Russia is “isolated,” Ukraine is “going to win,” the sanctions are “very effective,” etc.) and intend to remain there. They refuse to see that on the ground, the die is cast—the mass has been said! They still have not understood that international relations are not a matter of moral principles, but of power dynamics. They do not understand that new power dynamics are imposing themselves all across the world. Still believing themselves to be in the era of the Cold War, they fail to realize that the Ukrainian defeat is also that of the “collective West” and that this “West” has already disappeared, along with the Atlanticism that was its foundation.

Europe is today led by ghosts or sleepwalkers converted to bellicism. The three allies (France, Germany, England) stamp their feet and compete in bluster like children in a sandbox, threatening to replay Operation Barbarossa—this time without the Wehrmacht (but with the Bundeswehr). As credible as the frog trying to pass itself off as an ox, they pretend to believe they have the means to influence the situation when they do not have the shadow of a beginning of such means. In fact, they are completely naked. Like little roosters flapping their wings while looking for their muscles, like headless ducks running in every direction, they multiply the gesticulations, the palavering, the posturing, and the incantations, the untenable commitments and the useless meetings. Their “coalition of the willing” brings to mind the extras at the Châtelet who sing “Let us march, let us march!” while staying in place. To “help Ukraine more,” they will cut budgets, steal Russian assets, buy weapons from the Americans that NATO will then give to Ukraine, exempt military spending from the Maastricht criteria, send Rafale jets they don’t have, issue loans payable in funny money, deploy troops who-knows-where, neither why nor how. The truth is that they simply do not have the means to take over—and are nowhere near having them. A pitiful spectacle.

Meanwhile, the French who struggle to make ends meet wonder how it is possible to find so many billions for a foreign country they already have trouble locating on a map, while so little is found to improve their own situation. The more astute among them can also see that the sanctions against Russia have caused an explosion in energy prices and accelerated German deindustrialization, without so much as shaking the Russian economy, and that in France their clearest effect has been to make us buy liquefied gas from the United States at four times the price of Russian gas. As for “threats,” they see only one for the time being: the one that comes not from the East, but from the South.

Donald Trump is a temperamental man, but a realistic temperamental man. Taking the opposite tack from his predecessor, he wants to be done with this war as quickly as possible because he knows full well who holds the cards and what the reality on the ground is. The war prevents him from doing business and delays the reconstruction of Ukraine, from which the American firm BlackRock will be the great beneficiary. What he fears is not the “Russian threat” or the “imperial ambitions” of the Kremlin, but the strengthening of the China-Russia alliance. The Europeans, whom he despises—alas, justifiably—are in his eyes merely a stake in his trade war against China. When the war ends, it will become apparent that there is a minor winner (Putin) and a minor loser (Zelensky), but that the great winner is America, and the great loser the European Union.

De Gaulle said: “Defense is the primary reason for the state’s existence.” He was right. The rearmament that the various European countries now say they are determined to undertake is therefore perfectly justified. But on two conditions. The first is that this rearmament does not decide in advance upon an enemy of principle, but considers all eventualities: Europe has no more vocation to be Americanized than to be Russified, Sinicized, or Islamized. Moreover, it is not Russia but the United States that has recently laid claim to the annexation of a territory under European jurisdiction—Greenland, as it happens. We must return to the “all azimuth” strategic autonomy theorized by General de Gaulle.2

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METAPHYSICS OF WAR: Battle, Victory & Death in the World of Tradition

by Julius Evola

NOW AVAILABLE from Arktos in leather-bound collector’s edition with an original foreword by Kevin DeAnna.

*Limited to only 100 copies*

Order in Europe

Order in the US

In our age of real and fake conflicts, the time is ripe for rediscovering the metaphysical mysteries of war and the warrior ethos. Evola’s Metaphysics of War is and will remain the go-to handbook for cultivating the warrior within our souls. Drawing on the arsenal of wisdom and experiences from Nordic, Vedic, Roman, Persian, Islamic and other traditions, Evola shows how the art of war can lead to transcendence and greatness in everyday life.

The second is to acknowledge the decoupling that has put an end to the Atlantic Alliance, to realize that if Europe is disarmed today, if it has until now devoted so little to its defense, it is above all because it offloaded onto the American “big brother” the task of ensuring its security. NATO, from this standpoint, has never been anything other than the lasting guarantee that no Europe of defense could ever see the light of day. We know today what the reality was and how the American military “umbrella” was for the most part nonexistent.

But the United States nonetheless retains control of virtually all European armaments: all depend to a greater or lesser extent on Washington, which continues to ensure their technical, systemic, or operational control. In 2022, 69% of armaments imported into Europe came from the United States (compared to 43% in 2018). A European rearmament that did not seek to break free of this dependency and sever what remains of the transatlantic link would be meaningless. In other words: no European defense without European preference, no autonomous military power without political sovereignty.

Vassals of America

It is therefore not the Russian threat, but American disengagement that compels Europe to reflect anew on the conditions of its strategic autonomy in matters of defense and on the possibility of arriving at a system of balance and collective security based on an understanding between Europe and Russia—one capable of defusing the turbulence likely to arise in the border zones.

Unfortunately, it does not seem that this path is being taken, since instead of asking themselves what type of power they can recreate by their own means, Europeans are desperately seeking to “restore ties with the United States” and never miss an opportunity to present themselves as eager to remain their allies. Which shows that, once again, they have not understood what is happening before their very eyes. Having abandoned ideological and moral crusades in favor of “pragmatic and transactional realism,” the Americans have given up playing world policeman, but they want to maintain their hegemony over the West. They no longer wish to have allies, but only vassals and clients.

A genuine rearmament of European countries will take at least fifteen years, meaning the situation in Ukraine will in no way be affected by it. It will require a great deal of money (the European roadmap for defense preparation by 2030 is endowed with 800 billion euros), but even more moral energy and political will. As Bill Durodié sums it up: “War is as much a question of mentality as of equipment. Quadrupling defense spending has no consequence if no one is ready to fight.” One of history’s ironies is that those who, for more than seventy years, warned against the specter of “German militarism” now celebrate the fact that Germany—the only country alongside Poland to invest massively in its defense—is on the verge of becoming Europe’s leading army.

At a moment when everyone is citing the maxim Si vis pacem para bellum, it is worth remembering that this famous adage does not mean one must prepare for war in order to wage war, but that one must prepare for it in order to preserve peace. In such moments, the only question worth asking is: where lies France’s interest? Where lies Europe’s interest? The rest is mere chatter.

So, the Russian threat? Let us cite once more that beautiful Georgian proverb: “The shepherd made the sheep fear the wolf all its life, but in the end, it is the shepherd who eats it.”

Translated by Alexander Raynor

Originally published on Éléments on no. 218, February-March 2026

READ MORE by Alain de Benoist, brought to you in English by Arktos:

Laurent Guyénot, the author of The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome, uncovers the Crusade archetype in European culture, tracing its disastrous consequences from the Middle Ages to the present-day Middle East.

At the end of the 11th century, the popes instilled a revolutionary idea in the ruling caste: the Crusade. It was a revelation, a new road to salvation, as well as a paradoxical attempt to unify Europe around Jerusalem. It brought the best and the worst out of the warrior class, it was embraced by the kings as well as by the masses, and it gave the pope unprecedented spiritual and political domination.

The Crusade was such a potent experience that its influence on Western civilization outlasted the fall of papal autocracy, and is still felt today. The Crusade became part of the West’s DNA. Dressed in new clothes, it remains the West’s defining Big Idea: redeeming the world—and itself—through wars in the name of lofty principles. Most recent American military adventures fit Christopher Tyerman’s definition of the medieval Crusades as “wars justified by faith conducted against real or imagined enemies defined by religious and political elites as perceived threats to the Christian faithful.”1 That today crusades are launched in the name of Democracy rather than Christianity is the only difference.

The Impact of the Crusades

Every historian agrees today, notes Norman Housley, that “the crusades played a central rather than a peripheral role in the development of medieval Europe.”2 More than anything else, of course, as Michael Mitterauer insists, “The crusading movement produced a radical change in Western Christendom’s attitude toward war, marking a turning point in the history of Western thinking.” It also set the pattern for European expansionism, which “is a fundamental feature of Europe’s special path.”3

The First Crusade (1095-97) was a success, and it was celebrated by the earliest massive propaganda. It became for Europeans what the Trojan War was for the ancient Greeks.4 Christopher Tyerman writes:

“The scale and rapid production of histories of the First Crusade by eyewitnesses and others eager to interpret the startling events didactically finds no parallel in medieval historiography. Within a dozen years of Jerusalem’s capture, at least four full eyewitness accounts, three major western histories and part of the great Lorraine version by Albert of Aachen were being circulated along with a bevy of other accounts, more or less derivative, imaginative or polemic. … Most of the histories sculpted stirring tales of faith, bravery, suffering, danger, tenacity and triumph. The theologians distilled the message of God’s immanence and Christian duty; the no less artful eyewitnesses provided accessible tales of miracles and butchery. One of the very earliest, the Gesta Francorum, included elaborate scenes with stereotype exotic Orientals declaiming extravagant, bombastic nonsense much in the style of the verse chanson de geste. Naturalistic representation, especially of the enemy, did not feature.”5

A New Religion of Salvation

The impact of these tales was such that, when the Second Crusade was preached in 1145, the response was again overwhelming. “I opened my mouth, I spoke, and at once the Crusaders have multiplied to infinity,” Bernard of Clairvaux bragged to the pope. “Villages and towns are now deserted. You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you see widows whose husbands are still alive.”6 Bernard elaborated the soteriological doctrine the Crusade. He wrote in In Praise of the New Knighthood:

“the knights of Christ may safely fight the battles of their Lord, fearing neither sin if they smite the enemy, nor danger at their own death; since to inflict death or to die for Christ is no sin, but rather, an abundant claim to glory. In the first case one gains for Christ, and in the second one gains Christ himself.”

Blessed if you kill, blessed if you die.

The Crusade was indeed a new religion of salvation. Guibert of Nogent, an enthusiastic chronicler of the First Crusade, noted that before, knights could only attain salvation by giving up their way of life and becoming monks, but “God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in their wake … might find a new way of gaining salvation.”7

While the Roman Church had sought to repress private wars by the movement of the Peace of God in the 10th century, it now declared that the only authorized war was in the Holy Land. The Church which had decreed that even tournaments—“execrable fairs” according to saint Bernard—were a mortal sin, and that finding death there sent you directly to Hell, invented the Holy War which propels each soldier who dies there directly to Paradise.

Blood vengeance, a supreme value of barbarian and feudal ethics, also found its Christian redemption in the Crusade. For Raymond of Aguilers, the First Crusade, in which he participated, was “the enterprise which aimed to avenge our Lord Jesus Christ, on those who had unworthily seized the native land of the Lord and his apostles.”8 Vengez Jésus became a war cry of the French crusaders.9

Making Jerusalem the Capital of Europe

It has been said that the Crusades were “the first unifying event in Europe.”10 The crusades “so stirred and united Europe that we may count them as the beginning of modern history,” wrote Halford Mackinder in his seminal 1904 article on “The Geographical Pivot of History.”11 He was not puzzled by the utter absurdity of aiming to unite Europe around Jerusalem. The popes convinced Europeans that the cradle of their civilization was a city at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, already coveted by two other civilizations (the Byzantine and the Islamic) and asked them to fight for it as if the salvation of Europe depended on it. There could not be a project more contrary to the interests of Europe.

From the time they “liberated” Jerusalem, Westerners saw themselves as the guardians of the center of the world. It became part of their identity. Their obsession only grew after Jerusalem was recaptured by Salah al-Din (Saladin) in 1187, and with every new failed attempt to reverse this fatal development. When the pious king Louis IX died of dysentery during the Eighth Crusade in 1270, his last words were for the city he never saw: “Jerusalem! Jerusalem!”

All Europe, it seems, has been weeping over Jerusalem ever since. Tyerman writes:

“The clerical and lay elites of western Europe found it almost impossible to let go of the Holy Land as a political ambition or vision of perfection. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, governments, moralists, preachers and lobbyists returned again and again to a subject in which practical and moral objectives were fused together.”12

When British General Edmund Allenby entered the city in a solemn procession in 1917, he proclaimed “the end of the Crusades,” and the London Punch published an illustration showing Richard I looking down on Jerusalem, and nodding contentedly, “My dream comes true!”13

That fascination with Jerusalem is, of course, not unrelated to the British and French support for Zionism at the beginning of the 20th century. The sacralization of biblical Israel in Christian culture obviously constituted a key factor in the support given by Christian nations to the “rebirth” of Israel between 1917 and 1948. But it was the Crusade and the memory of it in European culture that played the major role in sealing the sacred bond between Western Christendom and Israel, which has overdetermined world history ever since.

Crusaders saw themselves as imitating the genocidal people of Moses. According to an account by Robert of Reims, Urban II said, in his sermon at Clermont: “Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, rescue that land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves, for that land that, as scripture says, flows with milk and honey was given by God as a possession to the children of Israel.”14 In the version of his speech recorded by Baldric of Dol, Urban II referred to the Arabs as the Amalekites that Yahweh ordered King Saul to slaughter entirely, “man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1Samuel 15:3). “It is our duty to pray, yours to fight against the Amalekites,” Urban said, “With Moses, we shall extend unwearied hands in prayer to Heaven, while you go forth and brandish the sword, like dauntless warriors, against Amalek.”15

As you know, the Iranians have now been officially declared by Netanyahu to be the new Amalek.

A Disastrous Failure Through and Through

As a matter of fact, the unity of the Islamic world did not suffer from the Crusades — quite the opposite. Before the First Crusade, it had fragmented into two rival caliphates (Baghdad and Cairo) and a number of independent emirates and city-states. The Frankish aggression stimulated the reunification. Archbishop William of Tyre complained about this in the early 1180s:

“In former times almost every city had its own ruler … not dependent on one another … who feared their own allies not less than the Christians [and] could not or would not readily unite to repulse the common danger or arm themselves for our destruction. But now … all the kingdoms adjacent to us have been brought under the power of one man [Nur ed-Din].”16

Moreover, before the First Crusade, the Byzantines had been living in good terms with the Shiite Fatimid caliphate, of which Cairo was the capital. “In the middle of the eleventh century the tranquility of the east Mediterranean world seemed assured for many years to come. Its two great powers, Fatimid Egypt and Byzantium, were on good terms with each other.”17 Christians worshiped freely in Jerusalem, and Muslims had their mosque just outside the walls of Constantinople (it was burned by the Franks, and the fire spread to a third of the city). The Seljuks invaders from the East were the common foes of the Fatimids and the Byzantines. But for the unsophisticated crusaders, all Muslims were the same. The Franks’ policy of “normative hostility” against Muslims disrupted the policy of the Byzantines, which was “to play off the various Moslem princes against each other and thus to isolate each of them in turn.”18

As a whole, the Crusades not only dealt a mortal blow to the eastern Christian empire that they pretended to be rescuing (the crusaders sacked Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1205, and the city never recovered). They also ruined the diplomatic relations between Byzantium and the the Shiite caliphate of Egypt, and indirectly caused the fall of this long-standing ally, absorbed by Saladin under the Sunni banner in 1171. They therefore strengthened the Sunni power that they were supposed to fight.

Ultimately, the Crusades dug a trench of incomprehension and hostility between Christian and Islamic civilizations, thus doubly harming Eastern Christians of all denominations (Orthodox, Copts, Nestorians, Armenians, Jacobites, etc.), who had up until then enjoyed freedom of worship under most Muslim rulers.

Ultimately, the Crusades, with their inherent hypocrisy, harmed the West by corrupting its very soul, and harmed the rest of the world by making the West a dangerous, unrestrained predator.

The Beginning of Colonization

In The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, Joshua Prawer presents medieval crusading as a foreshadowing of later European colonialism. He contends that the institutions and economy of the Latin states are best understood in the light of their colonial status:

“Though colonization is not a new phenomenon in European history, only since the Crusades is there continuity and filiation between colonial movements. … it is justified to regard the Crusader kingdom as the first European colonial society.”19

The Northern Crusades in the Baltic regions, launched in the early 13th century with the full benefit of papal indulgences and privileges, also fit modern definitions of colonization very well. The appeal of Archbishop Adalgot of Magdeburg in 1108 makes this clear:

“These gentiles are most wicked, but their land is the best, rich in meat, honey, corn and birds, and if it were well cultivated none could be compared to it for wealth of its produce … And so, most renowned Saxons, French, Lorrainers and Flemings and conquerors of the world, this is an occasion for you to save your souls and, if you wish it, acquire the best land in which to live. May He who with the strength of his arm led the men of Gaul on their march from the far West in triumph against his enemies in the farthest East give you the will and power to conquer those most inhuman gentiles who are nearby and to prosper well in all things.”20

The filiation between the Crusades and the colonization is clear in the Americas. In Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, Carol Delaney reveals a little known fact:

“The quest for Jerusalem was Columbus’s grand passion; it was the vision that sustained him through all the trials and tribulations he felt, like Job, that he endured … He had dedicated his life to the liberation of Jerusalem; on his deathbed, realizing he would never see his project fulfilled, he ratified his will that left money to support the crusade he hoped would be taken up by his successors.”

With the gold he hoped to plunder in the Americas, Columbus hoped that a new crusade could be financed. He wrote in his diary, December 26, 1492, that he wanted to find gold “in such quantity that the sovereigns … will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulchre.”21

The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors that followed on Columbus’s trail had been immersed all their lives in the ideology of the Reconquista, a series of crusades against the Muslims of Iberia. As Norman Cantor explains:

“The Reconquista was the dominant, almost the exclusive, theme of medieval Christian Spanish history, and some historians have seen it as the determining factor in the molding of the peculiar Spanish character. All Iberian society originated in a grim war of five centuries against Islam, and the Spanish institutional structure was organized around the warlord and the necessities of aggressive warfare.”22

No wonder, then, that the conquistadors saw themselves as crusaders and behaved as such.

Conclusion

In the 19th century, after having accomplished its “Manifest Destiny” and pushed its Frontier to the Pacific Ocean at the expense of the Mexican Empire, the U.S. remained overflowing with crusading spirit. President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1912: “We are chosen, and prominently chosen, to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the path of liberty.”23

Dwight Eisenhower titled his WWII memoirs Crusade in Europe, which is ironic if we think that Europe, which had launched so many crusades to the East, now became the target of a crusade from the new West, to be “liberated” from Germany and thereby turned into an American colony.

NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999 also fits the crusading pattern, as Diana Johnstone remarks in her book Fools’ Crusade.24 And it was not innocently that, coming from church on the Sunday following September 11, 2001, George W. Bush made this televised declaration, broadcast worldwide: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”

And now we have the author of a book titled American Crusade as the warmonger in chief.

Laurent Guyénot’s The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome, fresh off the press from Arktos, is available to order from Arktos and on Amazon.

Why has Europe remained divided, restless, and often at war with itself? In The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome, Laurent Guyénot argues that the root cause lies in the transformative — and destructive — role of the medieval papacy.

From the Crusades and the struggle with emperors to the shaping of Western individualism and global ambitions, Guyénot draws on history, theology, and geopolitics to explore how the popes’ religious and political projects have intertwined to prevent the rise of a unified European Empire.

Provocative, deeply researched, and featuring an original foreword by Alain de Benoist, The Papal Curse challenges readers to confront the hidden origins of Europe’s modern crises.

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

Arktos Journal

Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

Radio Sputnik Host, Escalation Show: The topic of today’s programme is inevitably tied to the Middle East. Whatever global context we consider, every issue today—be it the economy or high politics—is, in one way or another, tied to events in this region. Let’s start with the most hotly debated aspect at the moment: the likelihood of a ground operation by US forces against Iran. We are no longer talking just about the islands. Predictions of a possible attack on the coastline or even on strategic targets directly on the mainland are becoming increasingly common. The situation is paradoxical: from a military standpoint, Iran’s leadership has repeatedly stated that they are literally ‘waiting’ for this invasion so they can deliver a decisive blow. Tehran’s political leadership is projecting confidence, emphasising that it is not afraid of direct aggression. In your view: how realistic is a US ground operation in Iran? Is this a deliberate plan, a bluff, or a risky game with extremely high stakes? And, if it actually takes place, what fundamental purpose might such an attack serve?

Alexander Dugin: Here, one must consider the broader context. American operations involving invasion and regime change in recent decades have succeeded only under one condition: there had to be a layer within the leadership of the target country that had already concluded a traitorous agreement with the Americans. Without this, they never succeeded in anything — such operations did not even begin.

The scenario is always the same: first, threats are issued, troops are deployed, and air strikes are launched. Then — whether by the Americans, their local allies, or ‘their own’ hands — the figure embodying resistance, sovereignty and consolidation is eliminated. They are either discredited or physically eliminated.

And then comes the inevitable betrayal. I am referring to what I call ‘the sixth column’. This is not the ‘fifth column’ that takes to the streets to protest — in repressive regimes, such as China or Iran, they can simply be arrested, and that is the end of the matter. The ‘sixth column’ is the Americans’ main strategy and the greatest danger. These are people in the highest echelons of power, close to the sovereign state ruler. There is always someone ready to strike a deal with Washington in order to rise from second or third in command to first. Since the Americans declare war specifically on the leader, those next in line enter into negotiations in order to drastically change their social status.

That is the only thing that has ever worked. Ever.

In Iran, however, the situation is different. Ironically, the potential ‘sixth column’ — those who, in theory, could have struck a deal with the Americans — was swept away by the very first strikes by the US and Israel. There is simply no one left in the leadership who is prepared for separate negotiations.

Identifying the ‘sixth column’ is extremely difficult: formally, these people are absolutely loyal; they swear allegiance to the state, yet in reality they play secret games with the enemy. It was precisely on them that Washington relied in Iraq, Libya and Syria; all the ‘colour revolutions’ from Venezuela to the Middle East were built on this principle. But today, there is no such scenario in Iran. For the first time in a long while, the Americans will have to fight for real.

They face a country with a population of 90 million and a landscape even more impassable than Afghanistan’s. The Iranians will not forgive the deaths of their leaders and children — the killing of 165 girls by missiles has united people against the aggressor, even those who disliked the regime. Defeating such a people in high-altitude terrain, following such monstrous crimes by American imperialism, seems an impossible task. America simply lacks such experience. If they decide on a full-scale invasion, it will become a second Vietnam for them, only far more terrible and protracted. This campaign will drag on for years and is highly likely to end in disaster.

Moreover, the US has virtually no allies for a ground operation. Israel is on the brink: the IDF is suffering colossal losses in Lebanon, the ‘Iron Dome’ intercepts only a small fraction of the rockets, and the country’s territory itself is gradually turning into a version of Gaza under a barrage of strikes from Hezbollah and Yemen. Israel is on its last legs; a mass exodus of the population is about to begin there – they have no time to help an ally. As for the Arab monarchies, their infrastructure has been undermined, and they themselves are too accustomed to a life of luxury and financial speculation to go to war. Some of them, such as Qatar, may well refuse to get involved in this adventure altogether.

Resistance in support of Iran will flare up in at least four major hotspots: Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and the Lebanese Hezbollah. What the Israeli occupiers are doing today in southern Lebanon is provoking revulsion not only among the Shia, but also among the whole of Lebanese society, which was previously prepared to make any deal with the West. In Syria, the situation is no less tense: even if al-Sharaa was brought to power with the involvement of the CIA and Mossad, he is compelled to respond to the people’s aspirations, and the Syrian ‘streets’ are fiercely anti-Israeli.

This anti-Zionist sentiment is capable of stirring up the Sunni world, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Algeria. All it takes is a spark — for example, an attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Yesterday, the Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa was barred from entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This is an unprecedented act (the first in a thousand years), which has sparked a wave of outrage across the Catholic world. If the Zionists take radical steps against Islamic holy sites, Israel will find itself at a critical juncture. How can there be any talk of a ‘Greater Israel’ when the very existence of the state is in question?

And so, in this catastrophic situation, having failed to protect its allies in the Middle East and secure its ‘Oil-Epstein’ Gulf monarchies, Trump’s America is preparing to launch a ground operation. This is taking place against the backdrop of a global energy lockdown. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is dealing a colossal blow to the economies of China, Japan, India and Europe. We, too, cannot — and, to put it bluntly, we have no burning desire to — supply our enemies with resources.

Trump is trying to justify the invasion with the need to ‘open’ the strait, but the reality is far more dire. Last night, Iranian forces struck desalination plants in Israel which supplied 47% of the country’s water. In the Middle East, water is more valuable than oil, and now similar facilities in Kuwait and the UAE have also been put out of action in response to the strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure.

Launching a ground operation under such conditions is geopolitical suicide. Trump lacks consolidated support at home: he faces opposition not only from the Democrats but also from a significant portion of his own electorate. His approval ratings are at rock bottom, and once the first coffins start arriving in America, the political context will become utterly unbearable for him.

Host: I fully share your scepticism about the success of such an operation. If we look at the figures: in Afghanistan, the peak strength of the US contingent reached 110,000 troops, and we know the outcome. Here, however, the force barely numbers 50,000, and yet Iran is a task many times more complex, both strategically and geographically. It looks like a deliberately unsolvable equation. In the context of your remarks about the Tomahawk strikes on civilian targets, a logical question arises: surely Washington could not have failed to understand what reaction this would provoke in Iran. The whole country came together in a single outpouring of grief at the funerals of the children who died, and hatred for the aggressor became absolute. So, is this strike not a mistake, but a matter of clear logic? Was the true aim not to provoke the very total chaos in the Middle East that we are now witnessing, following Tehran’s retaliatory actions? In your view, is this conflagration an end in itself for the US and Israel, or have they simply lost all control over the consequences of their actions?

Alexander Dugin: That is precisely the case. But I would like to add one more factor that makes any ground operation today extremely problematic: it is the radical change in the very technology of warfare. Over the past four years, we have realised from our own experience that unmanned systems — both in the air and, no less importantly, at sea — are completely altering the balance of the use of traditional means.

Today, an army of 50,000 men, with modern drones at its disposal, can effectively be reduced to the capabilities of a 5,000-strong unit. We’ve encountered this during our Special Operation: this is war for which no one was prepared; it is changing its parameters right before our eyes. Where are those much-vaunted Abrams tanks that everyone was counting on so much? They were burnt out in a couple of weeks; nothing remains of them. And now they are keeping quiet about them. Why send multi-million-dollar ‘iron’ to its doom against a small plywood drone?

The same applies to the navy. Modern underwater drones allow a multi-billion-dollar destroyer to be sunk for a paltry 10,000 dollars. This technology was used against us, and we, much to our regret, suffered losses. But this is a game for two. The Iranians are studying our experience closely. It might well be possible to capture Kharg Island, but on the Iranian shore, American troops would be as plain as day. The number of casualties they would suffer is incalculable. We ourselves went through something similar with Snake Island: it is easy to capture, but to hold it means suffering losses that are incomparable to the benefits of maintaining a presence there. It is suicide.

Moreover, Trump has no positive objectives in this war, apart from attempting to ‘open’ the Strait of Hormuz, which he himself closed. Even if one were to imagine this dubious success, it is difficult to call a situation a victory when you first break everything and then, at the cost of colossal expenditure, try to repair it just a little. Trump, of course, will count anything as a success.

I have been asked to assess the actions and statements of the American president with restraint, and I am complying with this request. I think our people have enough metaphors to describe his behaviour appropriately. We shall adhere to diplomatic norms, but everything Trump does seems less like a ‘cunning plan’ and more like the systematic suicide of the West.

Some Western analysts, among Trump’s opponents, have suddenly remembered ‘Russiagate’. They say: ‘We warned you that Trump is Putin’s agent! Look at what he’s doing: he’s destroying the Western economy, undermining the power of the United States and turning the very institution of the presidency into a laughing stock, mocked by the whole world.’ I do not wish to pass personal judgement on him — that is what his opponents say. Perhaps some consider him a great man, worthy of worship, but it seems that today no one thinks so at all — neither in America nor in the rest of the world.

In fact, under the guise of strengthening American hegemony, Trump is destroying it once and for all. The question arises: how did this become possible? I have only one explanation: an eschatological factor has come into play. This is what in the West is called prophecy. Today, a huge number of serious analysts are using this term to analyse the geopolitical situation in the Middle East.

Netanyahu and his entourage, especially radicals like Ben-Gvir, sincerely believe that the coming of the Messiah is near. They are preparing the ground for the Third Temple and the ‘Greater Israel’ project — and this is no metaphor, but a direct call to action. In America, Christian Zionists have succumbed to the same impulse: for them, the war in Israel is the final battle before the Second Coming of Christ. Pete Hegseth, head of the Pentagon speaks openly about this. He tells the troops: ‘You are going to die for the Second Coming; you are going on a Crusade.’

Most of humanity — including many Americans and Israelis — does not believe this. But it becomes an irrational, powerful motivation for key forces in the West. The geopolitics of prophecy is the only factor that explains a host of inconsistent moves. If one accepts this factor, everything falls into place: chaos and destruction are not to be feared, for they are a necessary stage of the tribulation (another term from Christian Zionism). From the perspective of Christian Zionists, a cataclysm besetting humanity is a necessary prologue to the Second Coming of Christ, and for Jews, to the first coming of the Messiah.

Host: The exchange of strikes against critical infrastructure is not merely continuing; it is intensifying: according to the latest reports, an oil refinery in Haifa is on fire, Iranian petrochemical facilities have sustained serious damage, and yesterday one of the largest aluminium plants in Bahrain was attacked. But what is truly alarming is that university buildings in Iran have become targets. Tehran has already promised a tit-for-tat response against similar educational centres in the Gulf states. Against this backdrop, a highly resonant statement was made by Iranian MP Alaeddin Boroujerdi: he emphasised that Iran’s membership in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) no longer makes sense, given that the US and Israel are effectively ignoring any international norms. This raises a logical question: if Iran is serious about withdrawing from the treaty, does this not mean that the ‘nuclear threshold’ has already been crossed? After all, logic suggests that one withdraws from an agreement when it begins to hinder the realisation of existing potential. Do you believe we are on the verge of officially recognising Iran as a nuclear power?

Alexander Dugin: Here are questions to which no one has been able to give a direct answer for decades.

Only very recently did Donald Trump openly acknowledge Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, although analysts had been discussing this for years, whilst Tel Aviv itself had merely hinted at it. Whether Israel will use them or not — nobody knows. Nuclear status may remain in a ‘grey area’ for a long time, until certain circumstances force the cards to be laid bare.

Does Iran possess nuclear weapons? We can see that Tehran possesses excellent missile systems with a vast range. Technically, it would not be particularly difficult to transport one, twenty or a hundred nuclear warheads by sea from North Korea, whilst this route is not yet under total control, or to transport them across the Caspian Sea from our territory, or to deliver them from Pakistan.

If the Iranians were a backward people fighting with bows and arrows, one might argue about the time needed to develop the technology. But with such a powerful military infrastructure, superb missile technology and a deeply layered security system, it is merely a matter of will. The war has been raging for a month; the airspace is largely controlled by the Americans, yet missiles are methodically raining down across the entire Middle East from concealed mountain tunnels, and Iran remains unshaken.

For a long time, the fatwa of the late Imam Khomeini banning the possession of nuclear weapons remained in force. The Iranians are a wise, spiritual people; they understood that this is a hellish weapon, a weapon of Satan, bringing only self-destruction. They had compelling spiritual reasons not to resort to it. But in a critical situation, when the very existence of the country is at stake, they will either retrieve the warheads already hidden away or obtain them at any moment. Attaching a ready-made warhead to an Iranian missile, which is guaranteed to reach its target, is a matter of ‘an arm’s length’.

I do not possess classified information, but as an analyst and philosopher I’ll venture a guess: they have them. And they will use this weapon if the need arises. It will most likely not reach US territory, but a strike will be launched against American bases in the Middle East – which are already half-destroyed – and against Israel. Tehran is capable of ensuring that for a hundred years there is nothing left on this land but Chernobyl and mutants. They are capable of this – if not now, then in time.

Those people in the US and Israel who are pushing for escalation have no positive prospects whatsoever. Even if one were to imagine a local victory over Iran — which I doubt, given Iran’s defences — the outcome would be catastrophic: the Middle East and Israel in ruins, the global economy in a coma, and the image of America evoking nothing but the deepest revulsion in mankind. Israel is hated by everyone. In the US itself, a storm of antisemitism has arisen the likes of which was not seen even in Henry Ford’s day.

The level of hostility towards the Israeli lobby, AIPAC and Christian Zionists is unprecedented today.

What has Trump gained? — Instead of strengthening Greater Israel and his own hegemony, he has been dragged into a war he has already lost — morally, politically and economically. Pete Hegseth, head of the Pentagon, floated the idea of Greater America, including Greenland and Canada — apparently to divert attention from the Middle Eastern fiasco. But this is a scandal with no basis in reality.

Instead of solving domestic problems, Trump has found himself in a trap. Unless one believes the hypothesis that he is deliberately undermining the foundations of Western dominance, there remains only one explanation: he and his entourage have become hostages to a prophecy. These are suicidal actions. There are successful wars, such as the short-term capture of Iraq, although even that turned into a protracted dejection. The destruction of the Iranian leadership was a tactical success, but the backlash has exceeded all expectations. In the long term, there is not a shred of positivity here for the US.

It is self-destruction. If we recall ‘prophetic geopolitics’, then all the current catastrophes fit logically into the eschatological scenario of the dispensationalist Protestants who are now in charge in the White House. The place is run by people like Paula White – a female pastor who speaks in demonic tongues and practises hypnosis. These fanatical figures, in alliance with Israeli politicians gripped by messianic mania, are creating a completely irrational bloc at the head of the collective West. Europe recoils in horror from this: even such loyal politicians as Viktor Orbán admit that barring Cardinal Pizzaballa from entering the temple is simply beyond the pale.

Host: Incidentally, Netanyahu did eventually issue a permit allowing the cardinal into the temple. Admittedly, he did so only the day after Palm Sunday.

Alexander Dugin: For Catholics, today is already Holy Monday, the first day of Holy Week, whilst our Orthodox Easter this year will be a week later than the Catholic one. But in spiritual matters, it is vital to do everything at the right time. If a person is not allowed to attend the holiday feast or, say, is promised access to the Holy Fire the following day — that is a cold shower.

To explain what is happening by anything other than maniacal ‘prophetic geopolitics’ is, in my view, simply impossible. But look: there is an internal logic to this madness. If one sincerely believes in the messianic moment — as do the Christian Zionists, such as those surrounding Trump, like Pete Hegseth, Paula White and Lindsey Graham, or as the Israeli radicals around Netanyahu believe — then every action they take is justified.

They are living ‘on loan’ from the coming eschatological times. They are spending the ‘capital of the Messiah’, who, in their deep conviction, is about to appear. All their actions are performed on the verge of a foul. It is like jumping from a high tower in the hope that they will be caught at the last moment. Remember how Satan tempted Jesus Christ: ‘Cast yourself down, for it is written: He will command His angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands’.

What Trump and Netanyahu, America and Israel are doing now is precisely that leap from the tower. They believe that the angels of hell will catch them in their fall and grant them world domination. This is a very real satanic temptation. Therefore, the geopolitics of prophecy is not fantasy, but an active and extremely dangerous force.

Host: Let us turn to a figure whose stature is incomparably lower than that of the aforementioned leaders of the West and the East, but who constantly tries to stay on the news agenda. I am referring to the outgoing President of Ukraine, who suddenly travelled to the Middle East and even signed certain agreements in the United Arab Emirates — ostensibly concerning the supply of diesel fuel and other matters. It is clear that on a global scale this issue is far less significant, but for us, for Russia, in the context of the ongoing Special Military Operation, it remains relevant. What is your opinion on Zelensky’s appearance in the Middle East — at this very point of global upheaval and bifurcation? Why did he go there, and what political goals is he pursuing in the current situation? And most importantly — will he achieve them? After all, many experts agree that people have simply stopped paying attention to him against the backdrop of global upheavals.

Alexander Dugin: Firstly, people have certainly stopped paying attention to him. When the giant demons entered the fray, nobody cares any longer about the minor devils and non-entities like Zelensky. He is trying to fit into the coalition of these big demons by reminding people of his existence, saying that he too can cause trouble and kill. But these are merely desperate attempts. Previously, when the main forces were only just approaching, a huge magnifying glass was placed before him; he was projected like a hologram onto the world’s screens; parliaments applauded him. That was just a warm-up. Now, however, with the arrival of the big demons, he has, of course, proved to be insignificant in comparison to them.

His ‘help’, of course, has no effect whatsoever. Some drones arrived — the Iranians immediately destroyed them along with the Ukrainian crew.

It is one thing to fight us on familiar territory, where they have been digging in for years in defiance of the Minsk Agreements. In the Middle East, the landscape is different: there they are as plain as day; there, eliminating their experts and Zelensky himself is easier than easy. After all they have been through, the Iranians have dispensed with unnecessary formalities.

You have touched on an important topic: why are the Americans and Israelis, like true butchers and maniacs, striking at universities, destroying thinkers, scholars and students? Because this is a war of the spirit, a war of darkness against light. They understand: Iran’s strength lies not only in missiles, but in hearts and minds, in education and culture. We too should take note of this. The enemy is well aware that sovereign science and education are the fundamental resources of society, upon which everything rests.

Attacks on universities are not merely madness or a breach of conventions. The enemy strikes at the very heart, because this is a war of ideas. On one side lies their prophecy; on the other, the Iranian, or our own vision of where Russia should stand in this critical era of the end times. The idea of prophecy is no empty concept. They have framed it one way; the Iranians another. We, however, have our own mission: the role of the Katechon, the one who holds back the coming of the Antichrist. Our rulers inherited this role from Byzantium.

Every participant in the current conflict — both in Ukraine and in the Middle East — has their own map of this final battle. And if the enemy is targeting universities, it means that independent thought is a crucial component of this war. We need to draw many conclusions from the events in the Middle East, but this one — about the significance of thought and spirit — is, in my view, of paramount importance.

Host: And finally, an interesting question that has come to us via our Telegram channel. It concerns the possibility of a so-called ‘Easter truce’: What do you think, Alexander Gelyevich, could this great holiday — be it Catholic Easter, which is currently being celebrated in the West, or our Orthodox Easter — have any impact on the intensity of the fighting? Are any gestures from Iran or Israel connected with these dates possible, or are such respites now unthinkable given the current eschatological tension?

Alexander Dugin: I don’t think so. Absolutely not. As for Orthodoxy — it is our faith, the faith of our peoples, and Orthodox Christians are not directly involved in this particular escalation in the Middle East. As for Catholics, they condemn this war, and persecution against them is now effectively beginning in America. Catholics are once again being accused of antisemitism, being turned into a sort of scapegoat within the framework of the US’ new radical-messianic policy. Hence the bans, hence the mockery directed at them.

The Pope recently issued a strict ban on praying for those who unleashed this carnage.' ‘Their hands are stained with blood,’ said the pontiff, ‘we do not pray for them.’ This is a very important point: the universal Christian tradition implies prayer for all, for the soul and heart of a person are a mystery, and it is the Lord who must judge, not us. But if the head of the Catholic Church – the largest denomination, uniting one and a half billion believers – has acknowledged that it is forbidden to pray for Trump, Netanyahu and the Zionists who started this war, then this is an extremely serious signal. In such an atmosphere, there can be no question of any ceasefires.

Host: So, to summarise: Easter will not stop Iran’s strikes on Israel, and we should not expect any lull?

Alexander Dugin: The Jewish tradition fundamentally rejects Christ, so Christian holidays have no bearing on that side. Muslims, for their part, do not celebrate Easter — they have their own calendar and their own holy sites. Thus, the key players in this process are not mentally or spiritually connected to Easter. And ‘the civilisation of Epstein’ in the form of the modern United States has absolutely no connection whatsoever to this great holiday. I am convinced that Easter does not hold any sacred significance for any of the direct parties to this conflict. Within their frame of reference, there is no point in ceasing hostilities in this context. The Christian calendar is by no means a factor for this war.

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

From Christian Chensvold, the author of Gothic Olympus, hot off the press from Arktos, comes this 10th installment in the Decadent Chronicles series, summoning us to explore the depths and heights of the existential situation facing the European soul amidst the modern hellscape.

I like to spend time in the cemetery because I feel like the dead are the only people who understand me. My soul belongs to the 1890s, to Parisian parlors where decadent dandies and femmes fatales exchange absinthe-flavored kisses. In my twenties I hermetically sealed myself in this world and ingested enough books, movies and paintings for it to run on auto-pilot in my imagination like a steampunk aero-plane on the wings of fancy.

And now, with the West facing its greatest crisis, this incredible period — of unrivaled opulence contrasted with the sense of impending doom — serves as the foundation of this very column.

I didn’t choose this world; it chose me. And that’s probably because one of the recurring themes of the era is the sense of having been born in the wrong time.

In reaction to changes brought about in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, poets, artists and penniless aristocrats from ancient families whose blood had grown thin and fortunes even thinner sought escape from everyday life through occultism, mystical erotic imaginings, refined pleasures inspired by corrupt and ancient civilizations, myths of gods and monsters, and the dark caverns of the subconscious. These aristocrats of the soul of the Decadent Movement, like the penguin that has captured the spirit of Western men, sought to forge an ancient path to higher truth. The central work of the period, after all, is J.-K. Huysmans’ 1884 novel, often translated as Against the Grain, whose rallying cry echoes Baudelaire’s longing for states of mind that are “anywhere out of this world.”

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A tiny few with the means and temperament have always been able to live as wealthy eccentrics walled off from the outside world. Ludwig of Bavaria became the Fairy Tale Prince, self-isolated in a dreamworld of legend, building flamboyant castles that later served as models for the architects of Disneyland. Michael Jackson created his own hermitage-amusement park called Neverland. Both the king of pop and king of Bavaria were touched by madness and died before their time, but one can nevertheless admire their ingenuity.

Most of us cannot completely sever ties with a world gone mad, however, and are forced to adopt coping strategies for navigating it. In fact, given the topsy-turviness that grows more disorienting with each day, you may be at higher risk for going crazy by NOT retreating to your own private dreamworld.

There are four paths for dropping out of society marked with the footprints of those who’ve hiked these roads before. We’ll start with art, whether creation or appreciation. Through the suspension of disbelief, art transports you to other worlds. You can probably remember seeing a film so powerful that it took time to readjust to reality. In the 2004 film Being Julia, Annette Benning plays a stage actress in the 1930s who recalls the wisdom of her acting coach, who told her that her world is the theater and that for her the outer world does not exist. The moment she forgets this is the moment she ceases to be a great artist.

The realm of nature provides out next time-tested escape route. Here a Gestalt shift in perception reveals that Mother Nature is a dimension of reality entirely separate from 21st-century civilization. Take a stroll into the woods, find a spot beside the warbling waters, and evoke a meditative state in which the tendency to automatically equivocate nature and society is revealed as an illusion. The sound of passing cars with their mufflers and stereos, the wandering zombie-like people, the garbage and graffiti — all that merely belongs to the realm of the social organization at this particular moment in time. It is now held in stark contrast to this other world that lies before you, the world of sunlight and cloud, of tree-roots climbing out from creek-beds just as they’ve done for millions of years, of dragonflies and butterflies and flowers swaying in the breeze. One world is temporary, the other eternal; one lesser, the other greater.

The spiritual path, our third escape route, passes through nature in search of what lies beyond. This is the path of the Buddha, a prince who renounced his palace and family to wander for six years, starving himself until he could find the answers he sought, and of Jesus of Nazareth, who provided the world stage with the tragic drama of a spirit-filled individual against the powers of society. In the confrontation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate, as interpreted by philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, never before had the world of fact — Roman civilization, social order — squared off in such opposition to the world of Truth, and a man who dared to say that his kingdom was not of this world. “The unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, a world that is non-actual but true,” writes Spengler, “Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this.”

Lucius Beebe may have been an urbane bon vivant, but in the grand scheme of things perhaps not so different from the spirit seeker, as he too sought a personal paradise beyond time and place. Beebe belongs to the fourth means of escape, that of time travel to an age which the soul feels it more properly belongs. Beebe landed on the cover of Life magazine in 1937 dressed like a gentleman of 40 years earlier with top hat and watch fob. As man-about-town columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, Beebe became a character from the Old West, spending his days sipping cocktails from the comfort of the Virginia City, the private railcar he and partner Charles Clegg purchased in 1954 and rode back and forth through the Rocky Mountains, cut off from the world of suburban sprawl and Cold War paranoia.

These four paths can be undertaken to varying degree in order to maintain one’s sanity and follow one’s personal star when faced with the encroaching demands of the collective. All it takes to make your great escape is a certain magical formula.

Creativity is fueled by a blend of two cosmic forces: will and imagination. It is what gave life to all fortunes, empires, inventions and works of art. This magic combination can also transform your life into whatever you want it to be. Huysmans’ seminal Decadent novel introduced the archetypal anti-hero who retreats from society to live in his own dreamworld.

“He believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience,” Huysmans writes. “In his opinion it was perfectly possible to fulfill those desires commonly supposed to be the most difficult to satisfy under normal conditions, and this by the trifling subterfuge of producing a fair imitation of the object of those desires..... By transferring this ingenious trickery, this clever simulation to the intellectual plane, one can enjoy, just as easily as on the material plane, imaginary pleasures similiar in all respects to the pleasures of reality.”

The novel Somewhere in Time, source of the popular 1980 film adaptation starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, can be read as a metaphor for augmenting reality through auto-suggestion. The protagonist falls in love with the image of a woman who lived 80 years before in the Edwardian era. To unite with his dream lover, he goes into ever-deeper meditative states until he actually arrives in her place and time. Think of it as actively engineering a dream which goes on to run itself just like a normal dream, which is experienced as if it were real.

“Dropping out” implies escape by sinking below, since dropping something sends it downward. What we really want is liberation by rising, to be physically in the world, since we have no choice, but to mentally be not of it, to be oriented to the superior principles of art, nature, spirit or golden age. This is why imagination is so important, because the realm in which imagination operates is actually superior to the world of actuality. According to ancient doctrines, material reality is only the realm of effects, not of causes, which come from a higher reality of laws and principles. And imagination is the primary mediating faculty between them, and the instrument by which fantasy can turned into reality, even if that reality operates primarily on an invisible plane.

In the world of today there are times when it feels like some kind of tidal wave is cresting and you’re trapped in its shadow. And while I’m a creative idealist when it comes to personal destiny, I remain a pessimist in regards to external conditions. The forces of contraction and dissolution in play are cosmic, irreversible and unstoppable. The polarization on social and political issues is irreconcilable, and the battle lines being drawn will be with us for the rest of our lives.

The Stoic philosophers taught that we cannot control external circumstances, only our reaction to them. Contemporary conditions are not something that can be conquered, but they can be internally overcome through Herculean effort. You’re pinned and powerless and then suddenly something inside you ignites, something you didn’t even know was there, and you flip the opponent over. Now you’re on top, where you can breathe and see the sky. This inner act comes from the depths. It is the source of all hero mythology in which the individual slays the dragon that wants to castrate him back into place among the blob-organization of his peers, the undifferentiated mass without names or faces.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and it’s likely that the degree of inner counterbalancing necessary to keep our spirit free may need to be much more extreme than anything we’ve even conceived of yet. As for me, I still feel like my only real friends are dead authors and fictional characters. But when I imagine telling them that, they just reply, “Then how lucky you are to have us as lifelong companions.”

***

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.

Explore the Decadent Chronicles series, brought to you by Arktos Journal:

1: Introduction

2: The Serpent

3: Unemployed Hercules

4: Imagining Reality

5: Heart Laid Bare

6: A Season in Hell

7: LARP Against the Modern World

8: Fallen Empire

9: Dead Regent

Arktos Journal

Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

With regard to the ticking time bomb in the Middle East and the Gulf, it is misleading to pin the blame solely on President Trump or Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu. Many experts on the Middle East overlook a significant factor: the century-long American, Bible-inspired mission to regenerate the world—today playing itself out in Iran. This messianic mindset sheds light on the current situation not only in the Middle East, but also within the EU and the U.S. political class.

Early American settlers saw themselves as God-anointed dissenters, and their new homeland as a gift from the Jewish god Yahweh. America was cast as a new Israel — a Promised Land, a new Canaan for its chosen people. Pilgrims, settlers, and later even secularized Enlightenment politicians — all saw themselves as an elect people who had left behind a sick, corrupt, and tribally torn Europe. One might quote the German sociologist Werner Sombart in his book The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1913, p. 44):

“What we call Americanism is nothing else, if we may say so, than the Jewish spirit distilled.”

The American attack on Iran is merely a logical follow-up to this extended political theology aimed at remaking the world in the American image. This Bible-inspired policy, now playing out in Iran, rests on ideas borrowed from early Judaic thought. The notions of a “city upon a hill,” “God’s own country,” and Manifest Destiny all draw on the Old Testament. The biblical idea of predestination served early settlers as a springboard for their own concept of democratic uniqueness. Biblical Israel was destined to serve as the matrix of America’s Promised Land worldview, and therefore has to be militarily protected at all costs now. Moreover, for millions of Christians, the Second Coming of Jesus will not take place in some village in the Ozarks or in the Croatian-inhabited hinterland of Medjugorje, but only in Jewish Jerusalem.

Different variants of this Bible-inspired urge to “improve” the world have long stood at the center of U.S. foreign policy, even when dressed up in secular language. These ecumenical impulses now go by liberal and communistic labels such as human rights, the fight against evil, moral righteousness, tolerance, and multiculturalism. Modern Jews are the last to blame here, given that millions of Christian Zionists try to outdo and “out-Jew” the Jews — craving, in turn, to transform themselves into the “true Israel” (verus Israel). The monotheistic Christian love-hate mindset vis-à-vis Jews can be described as a kind of neurosis. It is bound up with a theological — and later ideological — system that presupposes a single truth while shutting out all others. A system built on one single jealous god must, by definition, reject all other competing gods—and all rival truths.

The war against Iran follows in the footsteps of this political self-chosenness and theological exclusion of the Other, as already laid out in the Jewish Old Testament. Hence the recurring demonization of political or religious opponents in U.S. foreign policy: first the Indians, then the proverbial “pagan” German “Nazis,” then the “evil” atheistic Communists, and most recently the “evil” Islamists in Iran. All have been cast as subhuman or terrorists. And terrorists, to be sure, are not to be negotiated with — they must be eliminated, or, failing that, re-educated.

It is almost a truism that the EU keeps a low profile regarding the U.S.–Israeli politico-theological bond: Europe has functioned as an American vassal for eighty years. The most visible example of this deference can be seen in the behavior of German politicians, who occasionally voice mild criticism of U.S. military engagements, but never venture into criticism of Israel—let alone make critical statements about Jews. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, in March 2008, stated in her speech at the Israeli Knesset:

“Each federal government and each chancellor before me were committed to the special historical responsibility of Germany for Israel’s security. This historical responsibility of Germany is part of the reason of state (Staatsräson) of my country. That means that Israel’s security is never negotiable for me as German chancellor.”

Germany stands out as the most grotesque example of this masochistic mimicry. Current German policy toward U.S. military engagement in Iran carefully steers clear of any criticism of Israel. Afraid of being labeled fascists, European politicians are expected to keep rolling out antifascist mea culpas—on cue, as it were, from Washington, D.C., and Tel Aviv. In the same vein, and within the framework of what might be called a policy of “White man’s atonement,” Germany and the entire EU are expected to take in so-called non-white refugees, while constantly showcasing their role as historically wicked “perpetrator nations” (Tätervolk).

The condescending posture of the EU ruling class toward U.S. and Israeli military engagement has deeper roots. Shortly after World War II, the communist-leaning think tank known as the Frankfurt School — many of whose members were of Jewish origin — played a key role in shaping the new European crypto-communist culture. Waves of American, left-leaning Freudo-Marxian psychoanalysts — who turned into tenured shrinks — poured into Europe after WWII, setting out to reshape the European mindset. Alongside them came a host of biblically hyper-moralistic preachers, eager to foist the American model of democracy onto European public life.

Following the Israeli carnage in Gaza, things may soon turn ugly for Jewish identity and its enablers in the U.S. A kind of negative dialectic has set in. The Left and Antifa — unlike the quasi-neutered right wing — have begun to slam Israel and its lobby in increasingly harsh terms. This is hardly surprising. To be sure, the Left, both in the US and EU, and its rabble-rousing sidekick Antifa, now have more room to maneuver when criticizing Israel. It is difficult to label them antisemitic, given that they have historically been influenced by a significant number of Jewish Freudo-Marxian academics. The leftist progeny is turning now against its godfather. Right-wingers and white nationalists, on the other hand, cannot afford that luxury. Long suspected of antisemitism, they are turning more and more into Aesopian shapeshifters — with many doubling down on fake philosemitism, and some right-wing politicians staging ritual pilgrimages to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

German political elites across the board, while mimicking the U.S.–Israeli bond, have gone a step further. In their zeal to display democratic antifascist credentials and signal their obedience to Israel, they resemble the character of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s ballad The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The young apprentice, eager to show off, decides to imitate his master’s skills in handling the magic broom, ultimately unleashing forces that he cannot control, thus bringing about his own demise:

Can I never, Broom, appease you?

I will seize you,

Hold and whack you,

And your ancient wood

I’ll sever—

With a whetted axe I’ll crack you!

The good news is that public language in the EU and the U.S. following the joint Israeli–U.S. strike on Iran is becoming less constrained by politically correct woke norms. In the eyes of the mainstream media, even intellectuals previously dubbed right-wing radicals now voice open criticism of Israel — something unimaginable just a few years back.

Yet the grip on free speech and academic inquiry still persists. President Trump, despite his commendable moves in dismantling the communist-inspired DEI agenda and calling out EU elites over their tightening grip on thought control, was likely forced to cut a deal with the domestic Israeli lobby, which pushed him into the ill-fated campaign in Iran.

Contrary to widespread belief, political sycophancy toward Israel — including its fellow travelers among millions of fervent Christians awaiting the coming Apparition of Jesus — is not the result of a violent ideology imposed by a handful of Jewish conspirators. Rather, long-standing, Bible-inspired guilt feelings had already created fertile ground for the erosion of freedom of thought. Coupled with the illusion of endless capitalist growth, alongside Christian “love thy non-White neighbor” ecumenism, a belief has taken hold that everything will somehow sort itself out. It won’t. At its core, the spirit of Christian-inspired self-denial amounts to a loss of Spirit itself.

READ MORE by Dr. Tomislav Sunic, brought to you by Arktos:

Against Democracy and Equality was the first book ever published in the English language on the European New Right, and it remains an indispensable introduction to a school of thought which remains a vibrant force in the understanding of European politics.

Dr. Sunic examines the principal themes which have concerned the thinkers of the New Right since its inception by Alain de Benoist in 1968, such as the problematic nature of the label ‘New Right’ for a school which sees itself as being beyond traditional concepts of both the left and the right; its revolutionary political philosophy; its conception of history in terms of cycles; its attitude toward democracy, capitalism and socialism; and its endorsement of ‘pagan’ spirituality. He also discusses the significance of some of the older authors who have been particularly influential on the development of the movement, such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt and Vilfredo Pareto.

This new edition of Against Democracy and Equality has been completely re-edited, and offers new prefaces by both Dr. Sunic and the principal theorist of the European New Right, Alain de Benoist. Also included for the first time is the Manifesto for a European Renaissance, which highlights the positions of the New Right as it enters a new millennium.

It is just as utterly absurd and unnatural to justify all war as it is to condemn war outright. Both are hubris, a form of pathology. All those who hide behind pacifism, as well as those who constantly call for war against someone — no matter who — represent mental and psychological extremes.

Sometimes, war is inevitable. In other cases, it is entirely possible not to start a war. Any generalisation leads to absurdity.

The theory of just war emerged a very long time ago. Its purpose is to distinguish between when war is legitimate and when it is not (that is, when it is hubris).

Cicero formulated the concept of bellum iustum et pium (just and pious war), asserting that war is permissible only in retaliation for harm that has been inflicted or in defence of allies, with a formal declaration and without excessive cruelty. In a sense, this theory is reactive (war in response to war) and confined within ethical boundaries.

Blessed Augustine believed that war is permissible if it is waged for the sake of peace, has a just cause (restoring a broken order, defence against aggression), and a right intention (love, not hatred or a thirst for power) . Augustine permitted war as a lesser evil to prevent a greater one. Once again, reactive war is legitimised – but now within a Christian context (they started it, we will finish it, with love).

In medieval Catholic culture, Thomas Aquinas provided the classic formulation of the criteria for a just war: auctoritas principis – only a legitimate authority may declare war; causa iusta – the war must have a just cause; recta intentio – the war must have a right (ethically and religiously justified) intention. He also introduced the principles of proportionality and distinction (jus in bello).

Nevertheless, the Crusades – including the most savage of them, the Fourth, against Byzantium, which was essentially against us, the Orthodox – were justified.

In the 17th century, Hugo Grotius transposed this theory from the theological to the secular plane of natural law. Grotius identified three just causes of war, all of which derive from natural law (ratio naturalis) and the law of nations (jus gentium).

• Self-defence (defensio sui): against an imminent and real threat to life, limb or property. Lethal force is permissible even in the event of an attack without the intention to kill (for example, rape or maiming), because the aggressor’s intentions cannot be trusted. But only in the face of immediate danger – a preventive war based solely on suspicion is prohibited.

• Restoration of rights (reparatio iniuriae or recuperatio rerum): the return of seized property or territory, the fulfilment of contracts, and compensation for damage. This also includes rights to trade and navigation. War here is analogous to a legal action when there is no common judge.

• Punishment (punire): for the deliberate violation of natural law (piracy, cannibalism, refusal to trade). The right to punish originally belongs to all, but is usually exercised by sovereigns. Grotius even allows for intervention against ‘crimes against nature’, but with reservations: only serious crimes and taking the consequences into account (so as not to harm the innocent).

What is important here is that the theory of just war, in all its versions, attempts to define which wars are legitimate and which are not. There is a catch here. Whoever sets the rules embeds their own interests within them. And if someone does not wish to play by these rules established by others, they can easily be accused of violating the rules of ‘just war’ and, on that very basis, war can be declared against them.

Grotius himself faced the situation where the British Empire, then on the rise, declared the World Ocean the property of the English Crown, and the Dutchman Grotius (at that time the Netherlands was still a powerful maritime power) was outraged. This was unjust! But in whose eyes: in the eyes of a rival.

It is clear that a ‘just war’ is also a highly relative concept and depends on who is speaking about it – for whom it is ‘just’, and for whom it is not.

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The Third World War, which is now beginning and which could lead to the destruction of humanity, raises the question of war and peace with renewed urgency. However, in order to avoid getting bogged down in demagoguery and propaganda, we should speak specifically about this war without generalising about any other wars.

A couple of days ago, Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi paid her respects at the grave of the pilot who dropped an atomic bomb on her people. It is clear that for a Japan like this, the only thing that will be ‘just’ is whatever the big American daddy says.

It is more important to understand who is involved in this war and on whose side they stand. The Third World War is a war between the unipolar world and the multipolar one. The unipolar world is represented by Trump and Israel, as well as the other blocs of the collective West (Britain, the EU and globalists in general). Some of them do not wish to enter this war, others are not opposed to it, but all of them will be forced to do so. This same pole also includes the West’s numerous vassals from among various civilisations – in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

No matter what others say, for them this war will be entirely ‘just’. They are defending global dominance, which has been shaken by the pressure of an emerging multipolar world. It is important to bear this in mind: if one puts oneself in the shoes of the decision-making centre of unipolarity or unipolar globalism, then it is acting, on the whole, rationally. The Third World War aims to preserve, or at the very least prolong, the unipolar world order – in any of its forms:

• pure North American hegemony – aggressive and making no secret of its goals – world domination – Trump;

• regional dominance in the Middle East (on behalf of ‘Western civilisation’) – the case of Israel;

• the preservation of the global capitalist model (globalists);

• opposition to the growing sovereignty of Russia and, to some extent, China (the EU and the UK).

All five poles of the collective West (the US, Israel, the EU, Britain and the globalists), despite their individual differences, stand on the same side. They have different understandings of unipolarity and global hegemony, and they differ ideologically and on a number of specific issues, but overall they are historically and civilisationally united.

The opposing camp consists of us: Russia, China and Iran. And also the spirited and sovereign North Korea. These four countries form the core of BRICS. They represent almost fully-fledged civilisation-states. Iran’s desperate and successful resistance to American-Israeli aggression is elevating this power from the ranks of ordinary Islamic countries to a more sovereign and independent entity. North Korea lives within the sovereign Korean sphere with complete confidence and security.

In fact, it is the sovereignty of these powers that has created the conditions for the emergence of a multipolar world. Supporters of a unipolar world have responded to this with war. For the multipolar world, this war is entirely ‘just’ – iustum et pium. It was imposed on us by those who could not come to terms with the redistribution of the balance of power in the global architecture. We consider unipolarity ‘unjust’; they are repaying us in kind.

Thus, the Third World War is ‘just’ for its main participants, although everyone interprets ‘justice’ in their own way.

At the same time, both in the West and within the multipolar world, there are those who do not support the war. In the West, this essentially refers to those who, in one way or another, reject unipolarity and hegemony and therefore recognise multipolarity. Moreover, some take a softer line towards Russia, others towards Iran and Palestine, and others towards China.

Some believe that Netanyahu has dragged Trump into aggression against Iran. Some are convinced that supporting Ukraine against Russia has nothing to do with either American or European interests. And some consider that China is not a global adversary of the West. Opinions diverge on these matters, but this is a vast segment of Western societies that will undermine the West’s confidence in the ‘justness’ of the Third World War, as was the case during the Vietnam War in the US and Western Europe.

But we will certainly see something similar from the multipolar camp as well. And here, anti-war social groups will emerge. They would be the ones who are quite content with unipolarity, or, seeing no possibility of resistance and faced with the growing risks of humanity’s destruction, will propose surrendering to the enemy. For them, multipolarity and civilisational sovereignty do not represent decisive values, so fighting for them is ‘unjust’.

Those countries that do not belong to the Western world and are not its full vassals, and those who intuitively gravitate towards multipolarity or are directly part of BRICS, will find themselves at a crossroads. For them, the Third World War itself will be unjust, as they do not strictly link their fate to either unipolarity or multipolarity, but instead waver depending on the situation and the regional balance of power. The largest and most decisive player is India – a fully-fledged civilisation-state.

But the position of most Islamic countries, African states and Latin American nations has yet to be determined.

The Ukrainian conflict is merely one of the fronts in this war. For us, this war is not merely just, but sacred. For the collective West – especially for globalists, neocons, the EU and Britain – it is quite the opposite. And although this front is not the top priority for either Trump or Netanyahu, as the situation escalates and if they succeed in achieving their aims in the Middle East, and Trump implements his plans for the complete subjugation of Latin America to US interests (as set out in the new version of the National Security Doctrine), then Russia is the next target. And then China will follow.

For the West, these are all legitimate objectives in the war to preserve global dominance, unipolarity, and hegemony. The globalists preferred to conceal this behind ‘liberal-humanist’ rhetoric. Trump has cast aside these formalities as unnecessary hypocrisy and is waging war for the West practically openly and without restraint. For the West as a system, this is a ‘just’ war.

For a multipolar world, the war against the West is a just war. The West is on the offensive. Evidently, most participants in the multipolar process, including Russia, had hoped to avoid this direct confrontation, to postpone it, and to strengthen multipolarity gradually and step by step. But this has not succeeded. The situation in Ukraine has already led to direct military conflict with the West, whil Netanyahu’s radicalism and Trump’s full support for him have blown up the situation in the Middle East.

Now we must focus entirely on how to win this war, the Third World War. And, of course, in order to do this, we must first and foremost develop a global strategy. After all, those countries that are targeted by the collective West (with all five of its poles) essentially belong to our camp – this was true of Assad’s Syria and Maduro’s Venezuela, and it holds true for Iran and Iraq, for Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. The situation is more complex when it comes to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the conflicts in Africa and Indochina. This requires further investigation.

All global and even regional players in the Third World War will have to define their position. Otherwise, others will define that position for them.

It is precisely in this context that we should understand talk of ‘war and peace’ and ‘justice and injustice’, of ‘us and them’ in the current circumstances.

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

Excerpt from Chapter 7 of

Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life

by Andrea Scarabelli

COMING SOON — April 2026 — from Arktos and PRAV Publishing

‘Towards the end of the last world war, apocalyptic bombings had turned Vienna into a kind of hell, where the marriage of iron with fire seemed to suspend time, abolishing all the limits of reality. The old imperial capital of Habsburg Europe went up in flames.’

These words were written by the Romanian Traditionalist Jean Parvulesco to introduce the last act of the philosopher’s vita activa – Evola’s final secret mission. Like any proper mission, this one came with a codename: as yet unknown, it is unlikely to have been ‘Carlo de Bracorens’, the name he adopted while in hospital and only dropped after returning to his home country. Remaining incognito, as far as we know, he did not send even a single letter to Italy – which is why it is not easy to reconstruct the circumstances of his journey.

One thing is certain: in the 1920s, Vienna had served as the barometer of the end of a world – the traditional world of the Central Empires, disintegrated by the Great War. It served the same function now, in even more dramatic circumstances. Massacred by joint Soviet and American bombing, the former symbol of Austria Felix was but a memory. It was during these dress rehearsals for the Apocalypse that Evola reached it, to carry out the research commissioned to him in Verona. Before discussing this, however, it is worth saying a few words about the commissioners.

‘It is the most mysterious of the departments of the RSHA [Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Security Main Office], and almost certainly the smallest’, states a booklet from the Counter Intelligence War Room in London about Amt VII. It had about 50 staff members, whose work was more historical and cultural than strictly political; many were not even members of the SS, nor were they party members, and the results of their research were not kept secret — as is the case in other offices — but were disseminated in publications and at annual conferences. This is also why the organisation would gradually lose its importance — and resources — during the war, as wartime urgencies imposed a strict Realpolitik. While bombs were falling, its members were discussing the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the origins of Freemasonry (Evola’s longstanding interests), effectively condemning themselves to marginalisation behind the front lines.

In short, it was a cultural institution that frequently touched on ‘frontier’ topics. There were sub-departments dedicated to Freemasonry (VII B1), ecclesiastical politics (VII B2), and churches (VII B3). Also related to Freemasonry are the archive (VII C1) and the museum (VII C2), which Evola may have visited in the late 1930s. Department VII C3, directed by Rudolf Levin, was dedicated to witchcraft, magic, and popular superstitions, linked to Sonderauftrag H (Hexen, ‘witches’). Twenty specialists studied the records of ‘witch trials’ in Germany and Austria, along with documents from private libraries and archives (17th-18th centuries), often working in collaboration with the Ahnenerbe, with the aim of compiling a monumental Bibliography of Witchcraft, a project which remained only at the embryonic stage.

According to the Counter Intelligence War Room, Amt VI and Amt VII often worked in tandem on the occupied territories between 1943 and 1944, which might explain how, in Verona, the philosopher was able to ‘pass’ from one to the other without too much difficulty. The same booklet speaks of ‘political whispering campaigns’ initiated by Amt VII as a cover for the activities of Amt VI, involving ‘some of the most cultured, respectable and less prominent men of Amt VII.’ This sounds like Evola – although, let us reiterate, he never became an agent, but was hired for different reasons.

In his memoirs, Evola is quite succinct in recalling those months: ‘thanks to an extraordinary set of circumstances, while living in Vienna, I came across some precious and rare material on the basis of which I intended to write a book entitled The Secret History of Secret Societies (Storia segreta delle società segrete).’ This is the same text he had come up with in 1939, when he asked to see the archives of Amt VII. Having arrived in northern Italy in 1943, he met the men of the ‘occult department’, who knew very well who he was, were familiar with his interests and, needing to carry out Masonic research, entrusted it to him. […]

In those turbulent months, as Europe headed towards catastrophe, Evola constantly asked himself the age-old question ‘what next?’ He did so in Rome, with the Movimento per la Rinascita dell’Italia (Movement for the Rebirth of Italy), and he did so in Vienna, drawing on the many connections he had made in the 1930s. ‘I moved […] to Vienna’, he wrote, ‘where I had already been summoned. In that city, in a different circle, we tried to work in a similar way to how we had in Rome.’

These sparse lines, written 15 years after the events they describe, have nothing to do with Sonderauftrag C, but they do conceal a maze of names and a powerful metapolitical action carried out with the collaboration of various milieux: the conservative-revolutionary circle, but also Walter Heinrich, Rafael, and Othmar Spann.

In 1946, he wrote to Scaligero: ‘A certain work along our lines in Vienna, which had attracted me and to which I had devoted myself, has been suspended for contingent reasons.’ While the philosopher remains vague, reducing the defeat in the war to ‘contingent reasons’ (!), the declassified OSS reports trace a dense network of people connected to him. It cannot be ruled out that it was precisely these people who were responsible for Evola’s ‘summoning’, mentioned en passant in The Path of Cinnabar, a summoning that preceded his arrival in Verona and was therefore unrelated to Amt VII. Let us try to clarify matters.

In November 1941, a Free Austrian Movement was formed to protect Austrian exiles – particularly those who had fled to Great Britain – and two years later it intensified its activities. Although monopolised by communists – which led to endless divisions and splits – it welcomed all those who opposed National Socialism and its hegemonic ambitions. Its members included military personnel and members of the SD and RSHA. In addition to Spann and Heinrich, who were close to the movement but never joined it, one of its members was Werner Göttsch, Evola’s likely ‘employer’ who, according to OSS sources, had a house in Vomperberg in the Inn Valley, where he could hide resistance fighters.

Taking advantage of Berlin’s lack of control over the occupied territories, Grimsted writes, ‘Göttsch claimed to have formed an independent group of influential members of the RSHA who wanted to liberate Austria from Nazi rule’, establishing ‘relations with non-Nazi and anti-Nazi groups in Austria, which would send peace messages to the Allies.’ It seems that news of the plan reached Kaltenbrunner in December 1944. Refusing to join, he let it go, having become disillusioned with the outcome of the war. In contact with Masonic lodges in many countries, Göttsch frequented a certain ‘Dr. Doppler’ in Vienna, who was close to Heinrich and the Spanns, involving Freemasonry and Western churches in the anti-Nazi struggle, with their approval.

The coincidences multiply: Göttsch worked with the conservative-revolutionaries frequented by Evola, as well as with SS-Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Höttl, a former Viennese professor of modern history, member of Amt VI and... of the Italian Invasion Network, now acting as head of a circuit that coordinated various resistance groups, infiltrating agents into the German Armed Forces, establishing foreign radio contacts, sending men undercover to the Adriatic area and organising propaganda. The aim was to negotiate a separate peace with the enemy for anti-Soviet purposes – attempts that were rejected by the Allies as contrary to their post-war hegemonic ambitions.

Without ever receiving a reply, throughout 1944 the conservative-revolutionaries tried to communicate with the British through Major Christie, a member of the London Traveller’s Club linked to Heinrich since the time of the Sudeten Question, when the Spann-Kreis mobilised the Sudetendeutsche opposed to National Socialism – an operation that may have involved Evola himself, encouraging his ‘European explorations.’ In a completely changed context, the philosopher’s collaborators sent dozens of letters signed with the code name Vater der Schloss Kinder, using the mediation of a certain Krausburger, a native of the Sudetenland and friend of the ‘Kronid’ Rafael.

That the conservative-revolutionary esotericist was involved in the delicate operation emerges from another OSS document, dating back to the summer of 1944, a few weeks after the attack carried out in Rastenburg by Colonel Stauffenberg and the arrival of the Roman philosopher in Austria. The report reads:

Some time after 20 July 1944, Göttsch discussed with Franz Popek and [Rafael] Spann the possibility of assassinating Hitler. Everyone agreed that the Wehrmacht’s support was necessary and that the operation would only succeed with the backing of Western forces. Spann was also planning an uprising in Vienna, but took no action as there was no support from the West.

Many American reports list Rafael and Heinrich (‘Nazis in 1934, but later arrested for anti-Nazi activities’) among the members of another group, together with other personalities... linked to Evola. For example, the Christian socialist Friedrich Schreyvoegl, one of the leading figures of conservative Vienna and author of Diorama Filosofico, or the conservative Theodor Blahut, who invited Carl Schmitt to give various lectures in Rome in the 1930s, where Evola met him on several occasions at the German embassy, often mentioning him in Bibliografia fascista. After the Night of the Long Knives, Blahut distanced himself from National Socialism and took refuge in Rome, where he encountered a whole series of Austrian dissidents, aristocratic opponents of Hitlerism, and proponents of the Corporative State, which had been dismantled after the Anschluss. His encounter with Evola dates back to that period and was so influential that it led him to study Hinduism. But the two remained in contact even after the Second World War: not only did Blahut visit the philosopher in Rome, but, together with other intellectuals, he secretly held ‘Evolian seminars’ in Soviet-occupied Vienna.

For the record, during those months in Vienna, the philosopher frequented diplomats and politicians, including Alfons Knaffl-Lenz (1878–1957), Austrian ambassador to various Latin American countries, and Countess Elsa von Thurn (1886–1974), who would visit him in Rome after the Second World War.

Even though – once again – there is no trace of Evola’s presence in the archives mentioned, nor of a ‘code name’ attributable to him, it is nevertheless difficult to believe that he was unaware of these activities.

Close to the ‘internal faction’, he worked for Amt VII, classifying and cataloguing dozens of periodicals and volumes until the tragic accident we will mention shortly. He changed residence several times, always remaining in the Innere Stadt, the ‘inner citadel’ surrounded by the Ringstrasse; shielded by the Sicherheitsdienst and his code name, he carried out his duties – but not as a mere ‘outside observer.’

After the Second World War, during a French journalistic controversy, he said that he had gone to Vienna having been ‘commissioned to study Masonic rituals […] and to supervise the translation of certain esoteric texts.’ Which translationwas he referring to? The answer is contained in a letter addressed to Massimo Scaligero: it was the Ur Group’s writings. Speaking of the material intended for Introduction to Magic, in 1947 Evola wrote to the Anthroposophist: ‘It had already been largely translated into German, but the translation was lost in the events of the war, which at the same time caused the dissipation of an interesting and vast combination to which this translation also belonged, and in which you too could have been profitably involved.’

It is evident that the Ur Group’s ‘operational documents’ have little to do with the political activities of 1944, the attempt to establish an alternative Europe to Hitler’s. If anything, they may fall within the framework of the ‘Hermetic politics’ of Sonderauftrag C ‘Project Leo.’ Could they be linked to the mysterious ‘call’ that preceded his arrival in Verona? We know nothing about it, but we can make some guesses.

From OSS documents, we know that the esoteric manoeuvres carried out by the SD began in 1943, in the same weeksduring which the philosopher – whose financial situation was not the best – suddenly bought back all the files of Ur and Krur and began to revise them (‘Having had a lot of free time’, he wrote to Bocca, as we have already seen, remaining vague). On the run – called – to the north, he put them in his cardboard suitcase, along with a few clothes and basic necessities. Did he take the rare esoteric files with him not to pass the time, but because he knew he would need them once he crossed the Alps?

A sea of enigmas to which future research may offer convincing answers – capable of shedding light on Evola’s delicate situation, who, while a world was about to end, was approaching the most radical turning point of his life.

Under the American and Russian bombs that contended for the shreds of disfigured Vienna, as the Axis powers suffered a long series of defeats and Europe was on the verge of collapse, Evola’s typewriter rattled on unceasingly: between the whistle of sirens and the crack of anti-aircraft fire, he revised Ur, ordered and systematised dozens of Masonic files... The circles he frequented were a constantly boiling cauldron, but no concrete results were visible at the time. Conspiracies upon conspiracies, secret plots, communications with the Allies, double and triple agents… but nothing came of it. He continued to work. In all likelihood, he attended the traditional New Year’s Eve concert on 2 January: that year, at the Musikverein, the conductor Clemens Krauss performed a series of waltzes by Johann Strauss’ son, including the famous On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

Evola’s activism, however, was incapable of exorcising the general uncertainty. Beyond the various initiatives he followed – tireless as ever – a turning point was urgently needed. But what kind?

21 January 1945 was a Sunday. When yet another firestorm raged over Vienna – orchestrated by 170 American B-17 bombers stationed in Foggia – Evola asked himself a question. It was the darkest moment of his entire ‘adventurous life.’ He would spend the next few years trying to remember it, in vain. The Russians were approaching, Germany and Italy were about to collapse, but he had only that question in mind, and tried to answer it by questioning fate – certainly not for the first time. He did not rely on the safety of air-raid shelters, but... left the place where he was staying, a guest of two spouses located in the Third District, and went for a walk. As Gianfranco de Turris has written, rather than relying on complicated lucubrations, Evola wanted to ascertain experimentally what the future held in store for him: ‘To survive, yet how and for what reason? To be swallowed up in the furnace of fire like so many Viennese, physically disintegrated, transforming into ashes and to vanish into the ultimate Nothing without leaving a trace of oneself other than one’s own writings?’

Immediately after lunch, he left his house – which would be razed to the ground – and, after wandering a bit through the bombed-out streets, reached the very central Schwarzenbergplatz, named after Austrian Marshal Karl Philipp, who had distinguished himself in the Napoleonic Wars (today it houses a Monument to the Heroes of the Red Army, dedicated to the ‘liberators of Vienna’). He lingered for a while: between the whistling of the sirens and the general stampede, his whole being was focused on that question. Then something happened that was destined to mark his life forever – a watershed between before and after.

A bomb fell next to him, hurling him against the wooden structure protecting the Schwarzenberg statue – it was perhaps this that saved him.

He lost consciousness for some time and, waking up in the square, realised two things: he had an intense burning in his chest, and he could no longer feel his legs. He had the sensation of a ‘free fall’ – the kind one experiences during intercourse (more on this later) – while he told Scaliger that he distinctly saw his own soul hovering above his body, taking the form of a shining jewel at the centre of a white sheet. After that, he descended again into the most sidereal silence.

All in all, one thing is certain: perhaps the question had not been properly formulated. A ‘subtle’ trace of it remained in what Evola asked as soon as he woke up, after eight hours of unconsciousness. His face and limbs were cyanotic; he was wheezing; and he had a persistent burning sensation extending from the pit of his stomach to his chest, which would last three days.

‘Where is my monocle?’

The question resounded in a room at the Schönbauer Clinic, where he was immediately taken. If, in the months before, he had lived in the capital incognito, he now found himself facing the authorities. When they asked him for his personal details, he replied, without much thought: ‘Karl von Bracorens.’ It was the name of a count who had fought alongside Victor Emmanuel II.

‘Date of birth?’

‘27 October 1899’, he whispered, making himself a year younger.

Instinctively, he realised that it was better to conceal his identity. The Soviets were at the gates – you never knew...

‘To tell the truth’, he wrote, ‘the fact was not without relation to the norm, which I had already followed for some time, of not dodging, but rather of seeking out dangers, in the sense of a tacit questioning of fate. […] Even more so had I adhered to the rule then, close to the collapse of an entire world.’ This has given rise to a vast amount of literature: according to some, Evola went off to fight against the Russians, being wounded in the third chakra; according to others, he enlisted in the Waffen-SS, or was maimed in a magical or tantric operation... ‘This, of course, is sheer fantasy’, he would write, ‘not least because, at the time of the accident, I had long interrupted any work in the realm of the supernatural.’

Guénon shared a memorable interpretation with Evola on 28 February 1948, stating it could not be ruled out ‘that ‘something’ has taken advantage of the opportunity provided by this injury to act against you.’ Figuratively speaking? Not at all:

‘There are things in what you tell me that remind me of what happened to me in 1939, […] when I lay in bed for six months without being able to turn around or make any movement. We all thought it was a rheumatic crisis, but in reality it was something quite different, and we knew very well who unwittingly served as the vehicle of this evil influence; […] measures were taken to make the person leave and never return to Egypt, and nothing like that has happened since.’

We do not have the response, which Evola summarised as follows:

‘I told Guenon that a similar attack would be an unlikely cause in my case, not least because an extraordinarily powerful spell would have been necessary to cause such damage: for the spell would have had to determine a whole series of objective events, including the occurrence of the bombing raid, and the time and place in which the bombs were dropped.’

When they found Evola lying on the ground in the square, he had no serious external injuries or broken bones. On 26 February, they took a marrow sample from his spine, while four days later they performed an X-ray, which did not reveal any pathological changes, although he had great difficulty moving. One thing was unequivocal, however, as his medical papers revealed: after the accident, he could still walk.

As already mentioned, Evola provided no ‘magic’ explanation. As for the ‘meaning’ he attributed to that 21st day of January, matters are more complex. To Girolamo Comi, for example, he wrote that he had put himself to the test, asking, through ‘a methodical exposure to danger, to what extent ‘one’ wished that I remain in a meaningless world and continue a life already lived in all its essential possibilities, and to what extent, instead, ‘one’ wished me to go ‘beyond.’’ Destiny’s answer, however, was not as clear: ‘Neither one thing nor the other happened, but rather something that I would call a bad joke, if I were not prevented from doing so by my faith in the profound meaning that is hidden in every event – a meaning that cannot always be deciphered down here.’

What we are dealing with here is Evola’s practical metaphysics – based on the Guénonian ‘continuity of states of being’ – according to which life has a much broader dimension than the so-called ‘material’ one, and our anagrammatic birth is the result of a pre-birth decision. ‘Nothing comes from nothing’, Evola wrote in Diorama Filosofico on 24 January 1937, and accepting one’s destiny does not mean assuming an attitude of passivity, but achieving the ‘fulfilment of a profound harmony between ourselves and something transcendental and superterrestrial.’ This ancestral heritage guides our existence at the level of family, lineage, caste, and so on. Whether one is born a man or a woman, whether one belongs to a certain people or environment, is not the result of chance, but is ‘due to the fact that one already was or wanted to be a man or a woman, of one race or another, etc., […] in the sense of a transcendental inclination or deliberation that we, for lack of adequate concepts, can only understand through its consequences.’ All consequences, none excluded.

This ‘decision’ never manifests itself in pure form; rather, we must discern it in everything that happens to us — however traumatic it may be. Evola condensed this wisdom when speaking of the ‘differentiated man’ in Ride the Tiger, whose purpose is to remind himself why, while hating the modern world, he freely chose to be born into it. There is much of Julius Evola’s adventurous life in the final pages of Ride the Tiger, which represent his metaphysical apex — the summit of that vertigo. And it is no coincidence that the author viewed this book as an encapsulation of his own life.

Let us return to the Diorama article. Recourse to pre-existence excludes the idea of freedom as the mere absence of limits, but neither does it imply absolute determinism. Rather, it imposes the exercise of a kind of memory that transcends life and death – that of the myth of Er (Republic, X) and of the Delphic ‘know thyself’ – based on the remembrance of having wanted to be what one is. Life thus acquires meaning as a ‘mission’ (the ‘occult mission’ of which Parvulesco would speak). This is not a matter of theoretical disquisitions, but of an awareness destined to shake one’s being to its very foundations: ‘The free breath of the heights and the open sea is reawakened, the sensation of having come here from afar, from other shores, from other seas, so much so that everything that may appear tragic, anguishing, and definitive here is played down.’ Once we remember that we have chosen ourselves, the most distressing features of life turn into trials we have deliberately chosen. What appears empty or meaningless becomes the foundation of the ‘mission’ of being who we are. To exemplify this, Evola quotes a Far Eastern saying we have already encountered: ‘Life is a journey in the hours of night.’

It was in the light of such a worldview – formulated before and reiterated after 21 January 1945 – that Evola framed his own Viennese misadventure. ‘To remember why I had wanted it, and yet to grasp its deeper meaning for the whole of my existence: this would have been the only important thing, much more than ‘getting well.’ This awareness alone could form the basis for a hypothetical ‘recovery’: if ‘such a ‘memory’ had surfaced — or were to surface — there would certainly also be the possibility of removing the physical fact itself, if one so wished.’ But in the 1960s and 1970s, Evola saw no trace of such an awareness: ‘the fog which clouds my memory has yet to lift. For the time being, I have come to adapt myself to the circumstances. Occasionally, I am humorously led to believe that it is gods who might be responsible for the situation, having used a little too much force when playing with me.’

It is rare to encounter such a close melee between Evola’s worldview and his concrete life. And the fact that these are not ex post facto reconstructions is borne out by two documents, in addition to those already mentioned.

The first is a letter to Scaligero dated 3 January 1949:

‘Regarding my affair, it should be framed in a slightly different way. When I faced dangers, I did so not in a spirit of defiance or arrogance, but in a spirit of ‘offering’ (almost in a religious sense). In both the secular and domestic spheres, I considered meaningless an existence that would continue after the war.’

The point is that he put his own existence on the line, with a result that is difficult to decipher:

‘As far as vital and natural force is concerned, I am ready to step forward as soon as a foothold emerges, but as far as ‘fire’ is concerned, I feel absolutely none […]. I remain in a state of active indifference, which has affected the various peripheral domains, including the field of certain subtle instruments, which have curiously proven to be paralysed, unlike the ordinary intellectual faculties.’

The second document dates from the same period. Once back in Italy, Evola resumed contact with Goffredo Pistoni, who asked Father Clemente Rebora to visit the philosopher and offer him ‘spiritual assistance.’ This is precisely what he wrote to the priest, who replied in the affirmative on 2 May (on the same day, he asked his superiors for permission to bring his ‘aid’). The two finally met on the 10th, and two days later, back in Rovereto, Rebora wrote to Pistoni: ‘He told me of an interior event that occurred to him during the bombing of Vienna, and he added that it still remains mysterious to him, with this trial of his in progress.’ In the letter, he adds that he had also suggested that Evola go to Lourdes, to ask for a grace and thus be cured of his infirmity.

We discover the outcome from the letter sent by Evola to Rebora on 14 May 1949:

‘I would have to go to Lourdes to ask – on the level of grace – that the physical impediment be removed. Now, I have already told you how little this means to me, and even if the illness were far more serious, it is not for such things that a man worthy of the name should turn to the supernatural. […] If I were to ask for a grace, it would rather be that of understanding the meaning – on the spiritual level – of what has happened.’

The accident ‘was like an enigmatic answer to my question, posed by exposing myself to danger, as to whether there might be an end to my earthly life.’ Evola then abruptly concludes: ‘Nothing would have changed in me if I had been ‘healed’: the real problem, namely the growth of the inner light, would not have been resolved.’

In short, the philosopher put forth a far more radical anamnesis than a priest could offer — one based on the Platonic and Orphic idea which founded a European vision of metempsychosis. […]

Perhaps in an effort to find a way out of his condition, that summer Evola travelled the 500 kilometres between Bad Ischl and Budapest. Bizzarri assumed that Evola had gone to the Hungarian capital to receive András Pető’s avant-garde treatments, which aimed to rehabilitate patients through ‘breathing exercises, education, motor therapy, and special gymnastics.’ These treatments were rather famous in the West from 1945 onwards and rumour had it that they worked miracles, but this was not the case for Evola, who returned to Austria in mid-August. Interestingly, this brief visit is not referenced in any of the aforementioned medical documents.

From Evola’s correspondence, however, we know that he spent a couple of months in Budapest: he resided at Vàczi-utca 23, the most important street in Pest. It was a private house, possibly owned by Countess Zichy, who had previously hosted him. He always used a false name, as Hungary was now under Soviet occupation – a fief of Moscow. While there, on 15 June 1947, he resumed contact with Carlo Torreano di Bocca in an attempt to piece his publishing business back together. He was concerned about the fate of his books and wanted to ‘put them in a safe place’, rescuing them from oblivion by ‘placing’ them in a publisher’s catalogue. A year and a half later, he wrote to Torreano: ‘Given my uncertain future, due to my physical state, you will understand my ‘fatherly’ concern to ensure the future of my ‘creatures.’’

A letter dated 15 June discusses some of these books: The Yoga of Power, Meyrink’s The Angel at the West Window, and The Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism. Evola also mentions Introduction to Magic, stating his willingness to give it to the publisher for free and warning him that ‘if he showed up, he would have to deal with a minor collaborator of the group whom I had expelled at the time.’ It is unclear whether this was Reghini, who died two weeks later in Budrio, or Parise. Evola indicated Countess Fernanda Crotti, with whom he remained in contact until the end of his life, as the intermediary for handling the correspondence and concluded: ‘I intend to move to Austria, hoping that the specialists will understand more about my handicap.’ This is an unusual conclusion, given that it was from Austria that Evola had arrived in Budapest.

On 17 July, Torreano replied, offering a deal for all these works. The Yoga of Power and The Angel at the West Window would be published in 1949, while Laterza would print Mask and Face that same year.

Regarding Introduction, he wrote: ‘I hope in the coming winter to begin the typesetting. As you know I do not have the original’ – i.e., the glossed and hand-corrected Ur and Krur files, which Evola had travelled halfway across Italy with four years earlier and had been working on before the bombing, in the context of the aforementioned ‘Hermetic-political’ operation.

Another letter, dated late 1947 and again addressed to Torreano, contains further details about the manuscript of Introduction, which ‘miraculously escaped destruction in the battle of Vienna.’ It was not at Evola’s home, unlike perhaps the ‘German translation that was being made’ for the League of Kronids, which ‘was lost.’ Regarding the fee, Evola only requested compensation for the substantial revision work he had carried out. ‘Several less important articles in the new text have been replaced with translations of essays by R. Guénon, the greatest living authority on the subject.’ The vast majority of the excised essays were signed ‘Ea’, i.e., Evola. These were articles written in a lively style and devoted to magic; the remaining articles revised and, so to speak, ‘anaesthetised.’ In addition to many Glosse varie (Miscellaneous glosses), he also did away with parts included in The Hermetic Tradition, along with the essay L’albero, la serpe e i titani(“The Tree, the Serpent, and the Titans”), which was also merged into the same book.

However, Evola wrote other essays, using the pseudonyms ‘Ea’ and ‘Arvo.’ They covered topics ranging from Guénon’s teachings and counter-initiation to the Grail, Roman sacredness, Christian esotericism, and the Hyperborean tradition. In Vivificazione dei «segni» e delle «prese» (“Vivification of Signs and Grips”), he shared the results of his mysterious research on Freemasonry in Vienna. Many additions in italics and anonymous pieces are also attributable to him, as well as the decision to include analyses of Meyrink and excerpts from Crowley’s works. Notably, Evola included excerpts from the Liber Aleph, which was not officially published until 1961. It is hard to say who might have given him a copy of the manuscript, as well as to clarify the origin of the numerous discrepancies between the text in Introduction to Magicand that printed in the 1960s. Did Evola make these changes himself? Or did he receive a different version?

Let us return to the curious fate of the files. Evola wrote to Torreano to inform him that he had come into possession of the material. However, this was not the case, as in April–May 1949, he had instructed Heinrich to retrieve it, adding a few details:

‘To aid the search: these are not three volumes, but rather three bundles of loose files. There are 12 files in each bundle and 53 in total. They are printed in Italian and contain handwritten notes and additions, as well as typescripts. The title is Ur. Introduzione alla Magia, Quale Scienza Dell’Io (“Ur. Introduction to Magic as a Science of the ‘I’”). The format is 8^vo, the paper is yellowish, and the whole work is, I think, unmistakable, not least since it is unlikely that other Italian manuscripts of this sort would be found in the flat. [Rapha]El [Spann] at the time reassured me that all the files were there.’

What flat was this? Perhaps the headquarters of the League of Kronids, to which Spann obviously had access? It certainly wasn’t Evola’s own apartment, which had been reduced to rubble shortly after he took his enigmatic stroll under the bombs, seeking answers from fate.

Grappling with a body that no longer obeyed him, and a stranger in a foreign land, ‘Carlo de Bracorens’ resumed his former activities – within the limits imposed by his new situation. He began, first of all, to translate again. His new project was Nietzsche e il senso della vita (“Nietzsche and the Meaning of Life”), a book devoted to the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whom he reinterpreted in a manner strikingly similar to his own. His analysis of the text seems to foreshadow the pages of Ride the Tiger, evoking a man left to his own devices who, unable to find salvation outside himself, seeks it within. The problem of the self-determination of values – the cornerstone of all ethics in a secularised world – emerged clearly in the book he was translating. ‘It is mainly philosophical in nature, but accessible’, he wrote to Laterza, proposing its publication – in vain – ‘and touches on vital issues, especially in these times, when there is little meaning to be found in existence.’

He managed to contact the publisher, Braumüller, and secured the rights for 1,000 schillings (less than 15,000 lire) – most likely through the author himself, Robert Reininger, a university professor in Vienna and a member of Othmar Spann’s circle. A scholar of Western philosophy, Reininger also had a strong interest in mysticism and Hinduism – he gave several lectures on Vedanta in Vienna in the 1930s, much to the indignation of his colleagues. It is not out of the question that he followed the translation personally, perhaps even visiting Evola in the hospital.

It was difficult for the translator not to identify with passages such as this:

‘To love life because it is painful and because we hate it – this is either an unparalleled perversity or the dictate of another duty: to overcome even that which revolts us most, in the awareness of a higher inner necessity.’

These were more than mere words for someone who was translating the text into Italian under desperate conditions – struggling to balance body and mind, using a copying pencil and a wooden reading rest, surrounded by the moans of the sick and tormented by an indecipherable affliction. Only in Italy did he transform the manuscript into a typescript, sending it to Laterza, who ultimately rejected it – at a time when the philosopher of Zarathustra did not enjoy a strong reputation in Italian cultural salons.

While still confined to his hospital bed, Evola prepared the German edition of Mask and Face, which had never been published. He had even secured a publisher – An den Kompass Verlag, where Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss worked – who re-established contact with him in early 1949.

He also took on some more ‘frivolous’ translations to pass the time – one such example is Heinrich Spoerl’s Die Maulkorb (The Muzzle), published in 1936 and set in a small Rhineland town during the imperial era. It is a humorous novel with a simple yet ingenious plot: the ruler of the country is said to have delivered a speech – one that no one actually heard – in which he fiercely criticised his subjects. Rumours about this supposed oration spread, stirring widespread indignation, until one morning it is discovered that someone has muzzled the ruler’s monument in the town square. The perpetrator turns out to be the very public prosecutor assigned to the case. The twist: he committed the act while drunk, after an evening spent in a tavern railing against the mysterious speech – and he remembers nothing of it! Still unpublished in Italian, the novel was quite popular at the time, thanks in part to a 1938 film adaptation. After completing the translation, Evola contacted Neff Verlag in Vienna to request the rights, attempting to initiate a collaboration that ultimately never materialised.

During his Austrian seclusion, he also began revising his books, which he had been told were sold out and in demand in Italy. As a result, in 1948, the second edition of The Hermetic Tradition was published, followed the next year by Mask and Face and The Yoga of Power. That same year, he undertook one of his most challenging revisions: in March, his brother sent him a copy of Revolt Against the Modern World – specifically, Massimo Scaligero’s copy. Since Hoepli was in financial trouble, the new contract was signed with Bocca on 9 December, and the book went to press on 15 April 1951.

Evola reread, rewrote, simplified, and corrected his texts. Fifteen years separated him from the first edition – an abyss not only political but existential. He had to make choices. What to do with the hundreds of notes? Back in 1934, they contained the most up-to-date texts on the subject. Add new ones? Impossible, under those conditions. Besides, that would have meant writing a different book altogether. After all, Revolt is a closed universe – ‘it is what it is’, as they say. Moreover, the later German edition contained many more sections than the one he was working on. After some Viennese friends brought him a copy, he translated the additions, inserted them into the text, and standardised everything. He eliminated references to issues that had been topical in 1934, thus completing the metamorphosis – finally realised in 1969 – of a bellicose manifesto into the hieratic monument of a worldview. The judgments became less categorical; the tone, more impersonal.

He once again asked Guénon to review the drafts – something Guénon was not particularly enthusiastic about: ‘He asks me to reread this book to indicate the points that I would think need editing’, he wrote to De Giorgio on 19 June 1949. Around the same time, the two also resumed discussions about Introduction to Magic, in which Evola hoped to include some of the Frenchman’s essays. In the end, only one was published, under the pseudonym ‘Agnostus.’ The issue was that many of the texts requested by the Italian had already been used in other works intended for translation, such as the seminal The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.

Not only did the philosopher go to great lengths to find a copy – which was not easy in Austria – but after reading it, he wrote to Torreano, calling it ‘a remarkable book, if a little heavy-handed, of which it seems you yourself intend to publish an Italian translation, which could serve as a sort of complement to Revolt.’ And indeed it is. Compared to The Crisis of the Modern World, it goes further, anticipating what we now commonly refer to as postmodernity: the dissolution of materialism, social fluidity, the inversion of symbols...

In the meantime, he worked on the language of Revolt, and indo-ariano became indo-ario; the idea of ‘passing on tradition’ becomes the need to ‘keep standing’ in a world quite different from that of the 1930s. He also changed the titles of some chapters: La divinità regale (Royal Divinity) became La regalità divina (Divine Kingship). The appendix on the Grail was omitted, as it had already been developed in the 1937 book.

He decided to retain the chapter “The Sceptre and the Key,” dedicated to Janus, although it would instead disappear in the third edition. Interestingly, most of the time the word tradizione (tradition) was given with a lower-case ‘t.’ It was not until the 1960s that Evola began to refer systematically to Tradizione.

This revision speaks volumes about Evola’s intellectual evolution. The same holds true for The Yoga of Power, a new version of his 1920s book on Tantrism. Atanòr, newly re-established, was about to reprint it as it was, but Evola intervened at the last moment, resulting in a thoroughly revised edition – drier, more ‘academic’, with less Nietzsche and ‘Absolute Individual.’ Alongside its emphasis on power, the new version introduced a different question: in the name of what can one wield this power without being consumed by it? What kind of man is capable of this?

However, the horizon remains the same, as is evident in an essay from that period, Il significato del tantrismo per la moderna civiltà occidentale (“The Meaning of Tantrism for Modern Western Civilisation”), which stresses the centrality of Tantric practice in the Kali-Yuga. As the teachings valid in other ages – ‘snakes deprived of their venom’ – wane, the powerful Left-Hand Path gains ground. It achieves transcendence not through devotion but through the voluntary breaking of order. In the geography of modernity – which sees the collectivisation and mobilisation of the masses, the spread of acephalous and obscure irrationalism, and the elemental forces unleashed by technology – Tantrism is proposed as the path for ‘a Western elite that does not want to become the victim of those experiences, while civilisation as a whole is on the verge of being submerged.’

These are the theses of The Yoga of Power. In the nocturnal heart of the Kali-Yuga, only Tantra and the Āgama can lead man beyond himself, ‘transforming poison into medicine.’ The pitfalls are not to be denied but used for a liberating purpose, following a path ‘as difficult as walking on a razor’s edge or as riding a wild tiger.’ The reference to the book published in 1961 is hardly coincidental, given that Evola was completing it in those very months. This theme also appears in another article from the summer of 1950, where, once again discussing Tantrism, the Oriental principle of ‘riding the tiger’ is evoked – an approach that enables the overcoming of the human condition and a form of liberation not rooted in renunciation, but in ‘possession and enjoyment – through inner detachment, an inner sovereignty – of everything the world offers.’

Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life by Andrea Scarabelli — the first definitive biography of the legendary Italian Traditionalist — is forthcoming in April 2026 from Arktos and PRAV Publishing.

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Arktos is proud to announce the release of American History Z: Gen Z’s Journey to the Far Right by Joey Oliver, also known as The Right Wing Coalition with over 40 000 subscribers on Youtube, and with a foreword by Jared Taylor of American Renaissance.

I had always assumed that everything was going to work itself out. Liberalism was supposed to win. But as I continued to get routinely let down, I was eventually forced to reassess all the suspiciously pleasant presumptions instilled in me. I soon realized that I was not alone in that process.

Though all our individual stories may differ in their details, they have the same destination. This book documents the decade-long saga of how the young men of Gen Z broke every single one of the spells so meticulously cast by the liberal world order.

American History Z is not some guy’s memoir. It is a matter of record. It is the founding mythology of the Generation Z American Right. Its purpose is not to persuade. It doesn’t seek to win people over. It merely offers an explanation—one that nobody else seems willing to give. Whether you agree with our conclusions or not, if you walk away from this book claiming you still don’t understand what’s going on with the young men of Gen Z, you are being dishonest.

- Joey Oliver

For years, one assumption dominated political commentary: Generation Z would be the most liberal generation in history. Raised online, shaped by social media, immersed in a culture of constant messaging, they were expected to deepen and secure the ideological trajectory of the previous era.

That did not happen.

Instead, something far more volatile emerged.

American History Z follows that break from the inside. It documents how a generation that largely began in indifference found itself pulled into political life, often reluctantly, as events forced a reassessment of what it had been told and what it could observe for itself.

The strength of the book lies in its proximity to the subject. Oliver is not reconstructing events after the fact or imposing a framework from above. He is describing a lived transition, one that took shape across online spaces, cultural flashpoints, and shifting loyalties. The tone reflects that immediacy. The perspective remains grounded in experience rather than abstraction.

What emerges is a portrait of a generation that did not begin with a fixed worldview but arrived at one over time, shaped by friction with the surrounding environment and a growing sense that the official narrative no longer held.

The volume features a foreword by Jared Taylor, placing the work within a broader historical context and emphasizing the significance of this generational development.

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In this interview with Éléments, Jean-Yves Le Gallou presents remigration not as a fringe provocation, but as a civilizational imperative.

ÉLÉMENTS: You speak of a “Copernican revolution”: in what sense does remigration allow us to radically rethink the migration question?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: It is quite simple: until now, the migration question has been posed exclusively from the point of view of the immigrants themselves — of those arriving. What was good for them? How would they be welcomed, housed, cared for, educated? I am not saying these questions do not exist, but they unfortunately push to the background another question that is, in my view, far more essential: the perspective of the native population, the perspective of the indigenous people, the perspective of those already on the ground.

The priority questions to ask are therefore: What are the consequences of immigration for them — in terms of quality of life, peace and quiet, security, access to housing, quality of schooling, taxation? One is compelled to observe that in all of these areas, immigration is not a boon but a burden, a scourge, a catastrophe. This is what emerges from daily experience (”open your eyes,” Renaud Camus tells us) as well as from the remarkable statistical studies produced by the Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie (Observatory of Immigration and Demography) and by Marc Vanguard.

ÉLÉMENTS: In short, you are saying: our own people before others?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: Yes — “Big Us” rather than “Big Other,” but viewed within the long arc of history. If we do not today remigrate those who are foreign to us, then demographic evolution — additional arrivals, the demographic pyramid, differential fertility rates — will be such that young white Europeans will become a minority on the land of their ancestors. And I do not wish upon our descendants the fate of white South Africans, who have been reduced to seeking political asylum in the United States. Remigration is indispensable because it is doubly legitimate.

First, because we are not obliged to accept a settler colonization — with all due respect to Monsieur Bagayoko, the new mayor of Saint-Denis, for whom Saint-Denis belongs more to Black people than to kings.1

Second, because Europeans are the original people of Europe. Our ancestors shaped and landscaped the land of Europe. Europeans are the descendants of a long ethnogenesis: they are the heirs of the hunter-gatherers of the Ice Age — Chauvet Cave, Lascaux — who have occupied European territory for 40,000 years; they are the heirs of the Anatolian farmers (the Megalith builders) who arrived 7,000 to 8,000 years ago; and of course the heirs of the Indo-Europeans, who arrived 5,000 years ago — Indo-Europeans who themselves descended from the hunter-gatherers, and who brought us our languages, our worldview, and our social organization.

Thus, for 5,000 years — 200 to 250 generations — European peopling remained stable, right up until the beginning of the migratory invasion in France and Great Britain from the 1960s onward. The primary objective of remigration — and its most legitimate one — is to defend the right of the historical people not to be subject to the Great Replacement, and to keep alive its civilizational framework, built on harmony, balance, and a spirit of enterprise and adventure. Long live European civilization!

READ MORE from Arktos — and enjoy 20% off during the Spring Sale until March 31:

ÉLÉMENTS: Is remigration first and foremost a concrete political project, or a “mobilizing myth” designed to structure action and the collective imagination?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: As I conceive it, remigration is first and foremost a mobilising myth: recovering our consciousness of ourselves, of our ethnic inheritance, and of our cultural, religious (Christianity), and civilisational heritage. In political matters, the why is always more important than the how. Before knowing by what means immigrants will depart — by boat or by plane, by Airbus or by Boeing, willingly or by force — one must first articulate the principal reasons why they must depart: for the peace and tranquillity of Europeans today, and out of fidelity to the heritage received from our ancestors. So that our children may live peacefully on the land of our forebears. That is the justification for the legitimacy of remigration. The why is the precondition of the how. Let us not forget that politics is not the art of the possible, but the art of making possible what is necessary — and remigration is infinitely necessary.

ÉLÉMENTS: How does one move from the diagnosis — demographic change, and so on — to a realistic implementation that is juridically and politically viable?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: One must adopt an approach that is at once progressive and radical.

ÉLÉMENTS: Explain yourself! What do you mean by a progressive approach?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: One must distinguish between different stages according to different situations. Let us proceed by degrees.

• Act 1: The immediate halt of all new immigration as an indispensable prerequisite, in order to stabilise the situation.

• Act 2: Priority given to the juridically clearest cases — undocumented migrants, foreign offenders, expired residency permits.

• Act 3: Review of the residency permits of those foreign nationals living on welfare or unemployment benefits.

• Act 4: Review of the situation of those dual nationals who are simultaneously unassimilated and hostile, and who in effect do not possess an “effective nationality,” in the terms of international conventions.

• Act 5: Encouragement of voluntary return for unassimilated — though not hostile — dual nationals, with financial or administrative incentives.

ÉLÉMENTS: And assimilated dual nationals?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU. They are obviously outside the scope of remigration.

ÉLÉMENTS: That seems reasonable. Where, then, is the radicalism?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU. In the politico-juridical diagnosis. Today, in whichever European country you look, it is not the people who decide on immigration through their elected representatives (or directly by referendum) — it is the deep state, acting through its administrative apparatus and above all through its judges. Family reunification was not decided by politicians; it was imposed by judges — in France, by the Conseil d’État since 1978. The right of asylum is likewise not determined according to the popular will, but by judges over-interpreting the 1951 Geneva Convention (which was conceived at the time solely for Europeans), thereby making it possible for entire tranches of population to enter the country: (all) Afghan women, (all) Somali women, (all) Togolese or Ugandan homosexuals, (all) Sri Lankan Muslim women, (all) Congolese albinos, not forgetting (all) Peruvian transsexuals. That amounts to quite a crowd! The Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie has calculated that on one ground or another, 600 million people could claim asylum in France. To accommodate them, one would need to turn half the national territory into one vast Seine-Saint-Denis.

The rule of law, in this form, is a ship of fools. The judicial dictatorship must be broken. We must exit the religion of the rule of law, which is nothing other than the dictatorship of judges, and return power to the people. The solution to the migratory invasion is not technical — it is political. I call this the JUGEXIT [Translator’s note: a portmanteau of “juge” (judge) and “exit,” modelled on “Brexit”] — it is a key chapter in the book. And this applies to every European country, as I demonstrate therein.

ÉLÉMENTS: Can remigration become a shared horizon at the European level, or does it remain dependent on national sovereignties?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: Let us first recall that, as regards non-European immigration, nothing has been worse for Great Britain than Brexit. Let us be clear-eyed about that! In the current state of affairs, pretending to seek salvation in “national sovereignties” is a pleasant sovereignist fiction: from the North Sea to the Strait of Gibraltar, it is the same small oligarchy of judges, media figures, and senior civil servants that implements the migratory invasion in every country and opposes any reasonable policy.

We must therefore neither lay everything at the door of the European Union (a convenient alibi for inaction), nor — above all — set peoples against one another. On the contrary, we must call upon all the peoples of Europe to rise together and struggle against the dominant oligarchies — media, judicial, and administrative.

Faced with the deep states that seek to impose immigration upon them, salvation can only come from a revolt from below, provided that each person becomes aware that without remigration today, the Europe of tomorrow will no longer be European. European identitarians of all nations, unite! Think of your children. Men of the West, rise to defend the continent-civilization of your ancestors…

Originally published on Éléments on March 19th, 2026.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

ORDER Remigration NOW, brought to you by Arktos:

Kineuropa — from the German Kino, “cinema”, and the ancient Greek kinesis, “motion” — reflects the profound, dynamic relationship between film and the European spirit.

In this unique collection of essays by authors from diverse backgrounds and six different countries, the Seventh Art of film is explored beyond the planes of entertainment and propaganda, rediscovered as a civilisational force for identity and creativity.

From the mythic roots of storytelling to the philosophical and symbolic dimensions of modern film, Kineuropa revisits how European cinema has emerged from an ancient continuum of theatre, literature, religion, and visual art, shaping collective imagination over the centuries and ever endeavouring to seize the Zeitgeist.

In the “Netflix era” of globalised media’s dissolution of culture and banalisation of film, Kineuropa calls for reviving cinema to foster authentic European visions of the past, present, and future.

From the Foreword by Marco Scatarzi:

When we think of cinema, our minds more or less consciously turn to Hollywood. There is no conceptual superstructure that can prevent us from associating cinema with Californian studios; it is an automatic fact, corroborated by the decades-long global domination of the entertainment and show business industries, and it occurs regardless of our will, tastes, and inclinations. The American industry has been able to ride the wave of the Seventh Art to spread its way of life to every corner of the globe, permanently moulding that which some understood on the Old Continent long ago: “Cinema is the strongest weapon.”

On a trip to the United States, I had the pleasure of visiting Warner Bros. Studios and experiencing firsthand the technical prowess of this system, which combines professionalism and vision to forge narratives that serve as the soft power of American primacy throughout the world. The visit was impressive: we entered a vast space containing dozens of pavilions used as sets against the backdrop of a real city that had been meticulously recreated. Among the neighbourhoods of this “cardboard metropolis,” which was actually built at great expense, there were specially cultivated green spaces, ready to serve as the backdrop for any kind of film. In fact, I came across a corner of feudal Japan, built for The Last Samurai, which had the power to immediately transport me to the Land of the Rising Sun while I was still a stone’s throw from downtown Los Angeles. In one of the many warehouses, we watched the creation of a film set on California’s white beaches: entire truckloads of sand had been brought inside the hangar and powerful, state-of-the-art lights faithfully reproduced the sun’s effect, allowing the actors to film in comfort, free from the strong coastal winds.

This perfect fiction – a characteristic which is intrinsic to cinema – has replaced reality, creating an image of the planet for use and consumption: a genuine product, exported with meticulous precision and used to conquer souls. After all, we must admit with regret that not a single European generation in the last half-century has escaped imagining themselves as a Hollywood star or rock star across the Atlantic. German director Wim Wenders put it bluntly: “The United States has colonised our souls.” From yellow school buses loaded with students to long beaches populated by surfers; wide avenues lined with palm trees; fast-food restaurants with colourful signs; huge pickup trucks; and terraced houses with well-kept lawns and white picket fences – when visiting California for the first time, everything seems familiar. Rather than being a discovery, the trip is a confirmation: you experience firsthand what your mind has already absorbed over the course of your life, to the point of feeling a sort of latent “proximity” that leaves you bewildered and confused.

The infamous “American Dream” – which appears grotesque and hypocritical to the attentive observer, much like the society that created it – has imposed itself under this modus operandi. This exaggerated cult of the “self-made individual,” with its myriad petty-bourgeois confirmations, has effectively contaminated our horizon of meaning to such an extent that certain Europeans – perhaps more royalist than the King himself – now plead its cause with a vehemence that would make even the Yankees pale. Marco Tarchi explains this well in Contro l’americanismo (“Against Americanism”):

The idea of a global market promoted and pursued by the supporters of that model of mercantile society of which the United States of America is the most perfect and refined embodiment cannot, in fact, be separated from the uniformity in attitudes and behaviours of its potential customers and consumers. This automatically promoted the American way of life to the status of a paradigm to which every conception of collective life would have to conform in order to appear acceptable, as has indeed happened.

Werner Herzog said something similar to this effect, yet in less suspicious times, when justifying the setting of Where the Green Ants Dream among Australian Aboriginals threatened by rampant standardisation: “I fear that, in a few years, nothing will remain on this Earth but the culture of McDonald’s.”

However, the purpose of the excellent publication before you now, whose message is of fundamental importance in the battle for the rebirth of Europe currently being undertaken by certain cultural avant-gardes, goes beyond much-worn criticism of US supremacy, which, while unpleasant, is part of normal power dynamics. Our task, rather, is to promote a European resurgence in all areas, including cinema. This process may seem unrealistic, but it is nonetheless vital and necessary for the future of our continent. After all, many around the world have recognised this, and cinema often acts as a vehicle for the changes taking place. China invests vast sums in blockbuster productions celebrating its imperial past, reviving what Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” had erased. Turkey uses film to promote renewed Ottoman influences, rediscovering its deep identity against the grain of the secularisation process initiated by Atatürk. Russia celebrates its grandeur and attempts to present itself as strong and unified on screen. South Korea, like Japan, maintains a significant presence in the industry and is developing its own unique style. Therefore, cinema is the antechamber and megaphone of a historical phase; it has the power to spread a mindset much more effectively than social networks and the many technological tools that have emerged since its inception. Because, today as yesterday, making films means, above all else, wielding a narrative. As the founding European poems teach us, those who narrate set the course of history: they recount an experience, express meanings, and spread a message. Possessing this power undoubtedly shapes the present and makes one a protagonist in ongoing processes.

Although Europe still has enormous cinematic potential, it has also experienced a decline that has rendered it subordinate in other areas: the Old Continent, once a beacon of civilisation to the rest of the world and therefore the main actor of every upheaval and conquest, is now merely a passive observer of other people’s stories, often forgetting its own origins and destiny. One of these omissions concerns the birth of cinema itself: not only its creation by the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, but also the historical and cultural conditions that led to this discovery through the evolution of oral tradition, literature, art, technology and theatre over the centuries. If it is true that the Seventh Art is a creative act, it is also true that it needs a spark to unfold: a vocation for conquest and a vision of the world. Europeans have lacked that spark for the last eighty years. Dominique Venner recognised this when, through his sacrificial act in the shadow of Notre-Dame’s vaults, above the remains of ancient Gallic temples, he urged Europeans to “rise up against fatalism,” to awaken from the spiritual lethargy that has left Europeans weak, masochistic and resigned.

The crux of the matter is this: we must rise again, with nature as our foundation, excellence as our goal and beauty as our horizon, through the reaffirmation of an empowering myth that can invigorate our instincts, actions, processes and arts. In their original meaning, now distorted by globalist subversion, the arts always embody an ascetic path, because they elevate those who create and enjoy them. They link the real and the ideal in an organised cosmos that projects upwards and connects with the sacred. Understood in this way, cinema’s meaning also changes: rather than being a banal vehicle of entertainment, such as it has been reduced to by an industry primarily devoted to profit, it must return to being a source of verticality and beauty. This “doing” is not only “technical reproducibility,” but also and above all “the search for truth.” This revolutionary process, in which the term “revolution” returns to its original meaning of a “return to the origin,” can only manifest itself in Europe. It is here that the immovable source of this immortal heritage resides. It is no coincidence that the iconoclastic fury of cancel culture – whose woke excesses have primarily affected cinema, distorting its parameters and asserting a grotesque and psychotic aesthetic – has targeted European identity: behind the delirious accusations of “patriarchy,” “slavery,” and “racism” lies the fear of a much more complex legacy. This is the only legacy that has truly transformed humanity and survived even in the absence of its former global domination and real continental political unity.

This mystical force, which continues to flow like a karst river despite the forced uprooting of its “sacred citadels,” must be the driving force behind a new Renaissance. It is a long memory that turns into action, transforming heritage into commitment, suggestion into process, and will into power. Only in this way can we ultimately return to history. In our era, this return presupposes a coherent cinematic reaffirmation, for the Seventh Art has always been the vehicle, stimulus and confirmation of every change.

The pages that follow, being the first to address the issue head on, offer the ideas needed to inspire a radical reimagining of our culture and the practical revival of our arts. The enemies of our civilisation, both internal and external, would like to relegate our cinema to permanent sterility and passive, standardised entertainment. On the contrary, we envisage it like Albrecht Dürer’s knight, as described by Jean Cau: “Alone, at the steady pace of his destiny, with his sword at his side, the most famous rebel in Western art rides towards his destiny through forests and our thoughts, without fear or prayer. The embodiment of an eternal figure in this part of the world called Europe.”

Let the reconquest begin.

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Legal, Truthful, Guilty is the story of how British nationalist, husband and father Sam Melia became a political prisoner.

The ‘crime’ for which he was handed a hefty two-year sentence? Producing stickers containing pro-white slogans such as ‘It’s OK to be White’, criticisms of multiculturalism, refutation of multiculturalist dogma — ‘Diversity did not build Britain’ being one example — references to anti-white mass crimes such as the Pakistani rape gangs, and various other messaging related to the worldwide war on Whites.

For this he was investigated and prosecuted by the police Counter Terrorism division, despite his eventual conviction being for charges completely unrelated to terrorism — specifically, publishing material intending to stir up racial hatred, and encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage. An extremely generous view is that this shows bizarre incoherence in our legal system — but it seems more accurate to call it a gross abuse of the law.

As Sam explains in the book, by the time of the initial investigation he’d already stopped work on the sticker project, known as the ‘Hundred Handers’, feeling he’d devoted enough time and energy to it. He’d initially decided on the stickers for White advocacy for two reasons — the first being disillusionment with some of the in-person meetups he’d attended organised by avowed patriotic and nationalist groups. The other was a massive increase in online censorship of pro-white, right wing voices in the wake of Trump’s shock 2016 election, and so Sam decided that stickering, and making the sticker designs available online for nationalists around the world, would prove an effective method of spreading pro-white messaging.

The prospect of being found guilty seemed unlikely given the stickers fell into the category of protected political speech, so when the jury declared a guilty verdict, it came as a surprise. Even so, it seemed things were tilted against him from the start. Sam describes the prosecution being permitted to make a series of unfounded accusations against him without interruption — he’d try to interject, raising objections via the judge as is common in American trials — only to be slapped down and told that he had to wait his turn to present his case. In this manner the prosecution got to plant a succession of ideas in the heads of the jurors in a long, unbroken stream of slander - that the stickers had been fitted with razor blades, that Sam had fraternized with violent extremists - without being challenged. He describes an American lawyer friend present at the proceedings, disgusted at this lack of fair due process.

The greatest shock was to come during sentencing as the judge, who Sam had perceived as sympathetic throughout much of the trial, handed down the two-year sentence. He described Sam’s views as ‘corrosive to our society’, branding him a ‘racist’, a ‘White supremacist’ and an ‘antisemite’ with ‘Nazi sympathies’, while openly declaring that the prison sentence was necessary as a deterrent. This was in spite of a pre-sentencing report recommending a non-custodial sentence, indicating that Sam posed no immediate threat to society.

I remember Sam’s wife Laura Towler describing the wait for sentencing to Mark Collett, the leader of White advocacy group Patriotic Alternative (Laura is the deputy). What was already an agonising wait was prolonged further when sentencing was postponed by another hour, after which she described the judge’s demeanour as having completely changed. Hearing this, alongside the judge’s decision to overrule the pre-sentencing report’s non-custodial recommendation, it sounded to me like the judge had been ‘spoken to’ just before delivering the prison sentence. We may never know, but one thing is clear; that day, Sam Melia became a political prisoner.

The investigation, trial and conviction form the first part of Legal, Truthful, Guilty, but the meat of it takes the form of the diary Sam kept during his sentence, ten months of which he spent behind bars, the remainder on licence at a supervised probation hostel.

To the majority of us with no experience of prison, it’s a fascinating topic. Few haven’t at some point wondered how we’d find life inside — your world reduced from near-endless possibility to the bare basics, with little beyond the minimum required to stay alive.

From the start, despite the shock of unexpected incarceration, Sam adapts well. Although not an experienced lag he is mostly aware of the unwritten rules of prison, such as never snitching / grassing and avoiding nonces wherever possible. As he soon learns, the main cause of problems on the inside relate to drugs and debt. The substance of choice in each prison he spends time in — and presumably most British prisons — is ‘Spice’, a synthetic cannabinoid made into paper sheets, generally consumed by smoking inside a vape. Partly for this reason, vapes and vape cartridges are valuable currency in prison, with even near-expended vape cartridges sought after by the desperate.

As you’d expect, Sam encounters all sorts of characters, many of them unsavoury, but he forms friendships along the way. Despite being forced to live alongside some very amoral people and behaviour, he never loses his own humanity - indeed one thing that repeatedly comes across is Sam’s big-heartedness. It’s a moving moment when, offered the opportunity to upgrade to a bigger shared cell, he decides to stay because his nervous younger cellmate, having just begun his sentence, doesn’t want Sam to leave, having already grown comfortable with him. In another kind gesture Sam leaves a written note for the autistic occupant of a cell he was tasked to clean, explaining why some objects might be in unfamiliar places, despite his best efforts not to disturb things.

Food takes on unprecedented levels of importance. With so little going on, even the basic prison fare is a highlight of the day. Sam works hard to accumulate extra credits and privileges just to be able to obtain better and indeed healthier food - a surprising amount of it seems to be junk.

Needless to say, throughout his sentence the biggest highlights for Sam are the visits from his wife Laura and their two children. One of the cruelest aspects of Sam’s imprisonment was being deprived of the birth of his second daughter. He describes the emotions overwhelming him during the visits, his older daughter visibly upset when parting, and the smiles from his new baby daughter. Interspersed and connected with these visits are increasingly excruciating dealings with various people and bureaucracies related to probation, rehabilitation and social services. As we soon learn, this was to continue for some time beyond the end of the prison sentence.

Sam does his best to be useful and productive while inside, taking jobs on the wing wherever he can - cleaning, distributing laundry and toiletries, and most memorably in the prison canteen, otherwise known as the servery. When he finally attains the position he wanted, serving food to his fellow lags, he soon becomes disillusioned. Several of his colleagues at the servery routinely hand out extra portions to their friends. Amounts of food and condiments are based on the number of prisoners, so this results in many going without. Here he finds himself in a tough situation. To challenge this practice would cause friction and make him enemies, and reporting it is out of the question - in any case the screws, AKA prison staff, seem to look the other way. Ultimately he’s unable to stomach the unfairness and amorality of it and leaves the position.

Reflecting on this, it occurred to me that Sam’s servery experience had much in common with multiculturalism. You can only have a high-trust society with high-trust people. When surrounded by those like yourself, behaviour like waiting your turn, queueing, a basic sense of reciprocity and fair play are taken for granted. Throw in just a few who aren’t like you, people who don’t share those values, and it all falls apart. It happens so often that policing it becomes too much hassle, so the authorities turn a blind eye, hence it becomes normalised and an unofficial part of the system. The selfish and amoral benefit, while those who abide by the rules effectively get stolen from and live as second-class citizens. Sound familiar? No wonder it sickened him so much.

Some details of life in these prisons - HMP Leeds and Hull respectively, surprised me - one being how easily and often people move cells by request or mutual agreement. It was also novel to learn how contraband, usually drugs, was frequently delivered to prisoners via drones, with prisoners accessing their payloads by cutting holes in the perspex(!) cell windows.

Naturally while inside Sam has a lot of time to think, and he reflects deeply upon multiculturalism, demographic replacement, the evil of the British state and the worldwide war on Whites. Major change from the current trajectory is vital - without it the future looks bleak. Though without Internet he has access to television, so has a limited window onto the world, albeit via the distorted prism of the mainstream media. He sees Israel’s slaughter of vast numbers of Gazans in relation for an attack on a few hundred Israelis, an Islamic terror attack in Moscow, and in Britain, the infamous slaughter of three little girls by the Rwandan immigrant Axel Rudakubana. He sees patriots smeared as evil in documentaries on the ‘far-right’, TV programmes endlessly blackwashing our history and culture, politicians demanding ‘safe passage’ for greater numbers of third world immigrants.

It’s hard to fathom the thought process which concludes that persecuting a White man for speaking out about the persecution of Whites will result in him changing his views - but aside from petty punishment, this really does seem to be the aim of the authorities.

The main villain at the heart of the story is of course the anti-white British state, but one individual stands out - not from prison, but from the Probation Office. Richard, dubbed ‘Dick’, reveals himself to be a truly contemptible character. Throughout their exchanges, both in person and via email, he engages Sam in political discussion, often in what seems like an attempt to goad him into incriminating himself. Reasoned debate goes nowhere - contradictions in his leftist worldview are simply brushed over, and Dick goes out of his way to make it clear he loves multiculturalism and open borders. Unbelievably, at one point he quizzes Sam about his sex life with his wife. Whether this reflects the grotesque overreach of the British state into the personal lives of its citizens, or Dick being a twisted pervert isn’t quite clear. I’d wager it’s a mix of both.

Sam is forced to have even more dealings with these state officials when he is released to the Approved Premises (probation hostel) a shared house with other ex-prisoners, where he is subjected to nightly curfews and electronic tagging. What really comes over throughout this section is the crushing, Orwellian bureaucracy of it all. It’s hard to keep track of exactly what all these people do - variously they represent the Probation Office, the anti-radicalisation program Prevent, and departments related to rehabilitation and child protection services. Aside from what seem to be frequent screwups, such as clerical errors or communication failures adversely impacting Sam’s degree of freedom and time with his family, there is an astonishing amount of meddling. Shrouded in the harmless-sounding, banal verbiage of officialease are non-stop attempts to interfere in Sam’s life, especially regarding his children.

Thankfully, in no small part due to the resolve of his wife in battling the meddlesome bureaucracy, Sam’s licence ends and he is finally allowed to properly rejoin his family. Now on the other side of the ordeal, he reflects on everything he has been through and unsurprisingly, emerges more resolute than ever. Having dealt with all manner of officials tasked with ‘reprogramming’ him, he is almost surprised at just how ineffectual they are. Not one of the officials is able to present anything like a coherent counterargument. As Sam puts it, none have arguments any more sophisticated than the standard shitlib (leftist) - only deflection, contradiction and denial. There are no great minds here - just hatred of White people and herd-mindset midwittery.

Jewish involvement at virtually every level of the war on Whites is no secret, but Sam’s story highlights an equally serious problem; our own people. From naive liberals filled with delusions about equality and cultural relativism, to hardened leftists programmed against their own people, one of our greatest weaknesses is our lack of tribalism. If there’s one thing we urgently need to change going forward, this is it. Every other tribe sides with their own, and this will only intensify.

Whilst characters like Dick may be far from the top of the tree, they are loyal footsoldiers for the regime and they are numerous. Dick epitomises the banality of evil; the exact type of malicious, petty, self-righteous, midwit apparatchik now embedded in every one of our institutions. Reading Solzhenitsyn, in whose footsteps Sam has now followed, we meet scores of such characters; these dull-witted, malevolent, day-to-day enforcers of oppressive regimes are a recurring archetype throughout history.

Reclaiming our future necessitates clearing these people out root and branch. The most appropriate name for them is simply traitors, because that’s exactly what they are; those of our own who’ve sided with the enemy. When the tables turn, these people must be shown no mercy whatsoever.

Though locked up for a relatively short time, Sam emerged to a world which had already changed, most notably regarding the Overton Window. Sam comes out of prison to hear politicians using the same type of language he was locked up for; even just two years previously, the phrase ‘Pakistani rape gangs’ was unheard of as part of official discourse.

These changes are very real. Social media is now awash with far spicier content than the Hundred Handers stickers. MP Rupert Lowe, also head of a fast-rising political party, has helped bring the topic of remigration into the mainstream - a party which, after so much political disillusionment, actually seems to represent the British people.

Sam addresses the sacred cow of the post-WW2 doctrine, and the necessity of stepping over it once and for all. I recently reviewed the excellent book American History Z by Joey Oliver about the radicalisation of the Zoomer generation and he addresses the very same challenge.

This is significant, because all these things indicate a long-overdue convergence in right-wing thought. Terms like ‘dissident right’ as well as those coined by our enemies, ‘far-right’, simply seem irrelevant now. There is no ‘civic nationalism’, only nationalism. There is only one ‘right’, and worldwide, we are waking up to the great lie. The winners of WW2 got to write history, but we were not those winners. If we were, we wouldn’t be in this position now.

Despite these very positive trends in the awakening of our people, the bad guys are still in power and Sam Melia is just one of many victimised by the anti-white state. One particularly sickening example was that of David Morgan, a young man of just 24 from Wales, classed as vulnerable, locked up for one year and eight months for ‘racist and anti-Semitic’ X posts after two Jews campaigned for his prosecution. His X account remains online because it did not even breach the terms of service. Peter Lynch, a 61-year-old grandfather from Barnsley locked up for his part in the Southport protests, would never make it out alive. He died in prison in an apparent suicide.

As I write, a new article about Melia has just appeared in the Daily Mail headlined ‘Neo-Nazi who was jailed for handing out racist propaganda says prison made him even more radical as he plans to rejoin far-right group Patriotic Alternative’. This is a useful reminder that the British anti-white establishment consists of far more than government and the judiciary. It permeates the mainstream media, as well as entertainment and education. It’s embedded into every area of public life. The headline reads just like the judge’s sentencing remarks. Pick apart all the sensationalist language - ‘Neo-Nazi’, ‘Racist’, ‘Radical’, ‘Far-right’ - and what do you actually have? Nothing but slurs, arbitrary labels we’re now more than accustomed to. They’ve been so abused they have no longer have any meaning. Again, what did Sam do? He didn’t assault anyone, he didn’t plan a terror attack, nor did he encourage anyone to do so. He simply advocated for his own people, his own race. In our anti-white system that alone is enough to earn all the labels above. By extension then, the same terms apply to millions of us.

The good thing is that in the court of public opinion, these words have no longer have any power. Scrolling through the comments is illuminating; they are all supportive of Sam Melia. I tend to view the Daily Mail comment section as a barometer of ‘middle England’ - conservative in spirit but not especially red-pilled, by which I mean right-wing, but too often fooled into thinking enemies such as neocons and Israel are the good guys. Like it or not, The Daily Mail comment section is representative of a broad swathe of the country and the voting public. In a word, normies. Go back a few years, find a similar article with these hysterical headlines about the ‘far-right’, and beneath it you might read comments like ‘what goes through these people’s heads?’ or ‘hope prison taught this idiot a lesson.’ Not any more.

We can only hope that Sam’s imprisonment and the brutally unjust, excessive prosecutions of those like the Southport protestors which followed soon after it, represented at least a temporary peak of anti-white state tyranny. The amount of resources, not least in terms of state officials assigned to Sam, is quite astonishing. Given he benefited from Labour’s early release scheme, it also brings home the fact that these resources are heavily overburdened. For those afraid of speaking out, whether online or offline, anonymously or not, it’s important to understand that it’s impossible for them to lock us all up. Our talking points are becoming normalised. We have to keep pushing relentlessly. What’s certain is that if we don’t fight back now, far, far worse will follow.

Legal, Truthful, Guilty is officially available from 24 March. You can order it here on Amazon and from the website run by Sam’s family, Grandma Towler’s, in digital and print formats.

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The text you’ll find below is a speech by Dominique Venner from the 28th Conference of GRECE (“Research and Study Group for European Civilization”) held on November 27th, 1994.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the left suffered a massive loss of ideological legitimacy. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama even proclaimed in his book The End of History and The Last Man (1992) that liberalism has triumphed and that we have reached ‘the end of history.’ With the left in disarray, Nouvelle Droite thinkers began pushing the idea that dissident thinkers of all political stripes should unite to combat the final enemy: liberalism. To some, this became known as a “red-brown” scare, a threat that some say persists today. As per the theme of this conference, Gauche-Droite: La Fin d’un Système (Left-Right: The End of a System), there was a belief that, with the failures of communism, the left-right delineation in politics was beginning to fade.

In 1993, the Nouvelle Droite experienced its second “hot summer” as the mainstream media began ramping up attacks against the movement once again. On July 13th, 1993, the well-known French newspaper Le Monde published “The Appeal to Vigilance by Forty Intellectuals” in order to fight the “resurgence of anti-democratic currents of far Right thought in French and European intellectual life” (Le Monde July 13th, 1993). This “appeal” was signed by many prominent French intellectuals. Exactly one year to the date, Le Monde published a second “Appeal to Vigilance” (Le Monde July 13th, 1994). It called for a “perpetual vigilance” against a sinister and insidious “new fascism” aided by the far right’s clever “strategy of legitimation.” More than 1500 intellectuals throughout Europe signed the Second Appeal.

The Nouvelle Droite denounced these media attacks as the work of an Old Left McCarthyism designed to assure the continued existence of the established ideological powers.

In this speech, Venner argues that the collapse of Soviet communism did not represent a victory for the “free world” but rather revealed that bourgeois liberal democracy and communism share the same modernizing, destructive logic, both dissolving traditional communities, identities, and sacred bonds in favor of atomized individualism and market relations. He contends that the old left-right distinction has become meaningless, as both camps now serve the same “liberal-socialist” system, and that the 1968 generation’s supposed rebellion actually accelerated the commodification and homogenization they claimed to oppose. Drawing on Marx’s own critique of the bourgeoisie, Venner presents bourgeois society as the ironic final destination of the communist project itself.

Symbolically opened in the bicentenary year of another revolution, the implosion of the Soviet regime in Russia was initially interpreted as a resounding and lasting victory for the other incarnation of modernity—market democracy—of which the United States of America is both the symbol and the dominant power. Already, during the period of maturation of the Soviet communist crisis, numerous intellectuals, once disciples of one variety or another of Marxism-Leninism, had rallied with great fanfare or on the sly to the ideology of human rights and celebrated the benefits of “business” as the only true answers to the questions posed by modernity.

In living memory, the absolute bankruptcy of the regime born of the 1917 revolution is without equivalent. There is nothing comparable, for example, with the disappearance of German National Socialism, which was not destroyed from within, but following its military defeat after five years of a dreadful war, the occupation of its territory, the crushing of its armies, and the death of its leaders at the hands of the victorious powers allied against it.

In the USSR, the pitiful collapse of communism has but one cause: its inability to survive. To understand the significance of the death certificate authenticated by the General Secretary of the party of the Soviet Union and the Parliament of Russia assembled in Moscow, one must imagine a pope announcing in Rome, before the Sacred College of Cardinals, the death of God and the dissolution of the Church. What died in Moscow, along with its sacerdotal party, was indeed the very idea of communism, which had survived in the past all failures, all horrors, and even the admission of Stalinist crimes.

The death of the communist idea does not affect only those who were its avowed partisans. By destroying the foundation upon which rested the promise of universal happiness founded on the transformation of social relations, it also strikes the entire non-communist left. Even the most cynical and hardened politicians, the party apparatchiks, the prebendary intellectuals, and the beneficiaries of social monopolies retained in their hearts, in fossilized vestige, the soothing justification of the old faith in Progress, History, and the Proletariat—the holy trinity of the defunct religion.

From the moment the death of communism was announced in its land of election, as if by the wave of a magic wand, the attributes of bourgeois society were instantly substituted for those of communism. Private ownership of the means of production and the outward forms of pluralist democracy spontaneously replaced collectivism and the Party-State. After seventy-five years of Soviet experience, torrents of blood, destruction, and untold misery, history in its tribunal had rendered its verdict. Peacefully, capitalism had triumphed over communism. Inverting all the predictions of Marxism, here was the bourgeoisie imposing itself quite naturally as the final stage of communism.

After such a debacle, what remains of Marxist “science” and its pretensions to interpret history? What remains of a mountain of sacred texts once hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as the unsurpassable horizon of thought? Nothing remains.

Swept away by the shipwreck of communism, there disappears the “meaning of history,” that belief born of the Enlightenment, inseparable from democratic optimism. For all those who believed they could decipher the future thanks to a faith guaranteed by science, the sky has become empty, mute, and opaque. In the name of what, henceforth, could one imagine “changing life,” as a famous slogan of triumphant progressivism demanded ten years earlier?

Born in the 1930s and becoming by 1950 the ideological matrix of the left, progressivism had succeeded in triumphing, seizing intellectual power in most industrial societies of the West. Schematically, it was characterized by a goal: revolution (that of October 1917) and by privileged agents: the “left-wing intellectuals.” In France, these provided the Communist Party with its most faithful fellow travelers and the Socialist Party with a buzzing swarm of active sympathizers.

Struck head-on by the shockwave of the great collapse, their disarray is immense, as is their anguish about a henceforth unpredictable future.

While admitting themselves powerless to discover the founding principle of the post-communist world, they know and sense that it cannot be reduced either to the triumph of the market economy or to the American imperium.

This is what one of them summarized, among the most representative, in an interview given to a major evening daily where he counts only friends: “Imagine a laboratory,” he said.

“In this laboratory, a primordial soup, a big bang. And, within this big bang, a whole chain of chemical reactions of extraordinary violence. Molecules breaking apart... Molecules reforming... A formidable process, yes, of fission, combustion, corpuscular reconstitution, at the end of which will appear unprecedented synthetic products... There is nationalism here, of course. And bits of populism. And debris of antisemitism. And a little of that good old communism, less dead than it appeared. But all of this churned together. Put to the test of the big bang. With, at the heart of the tumult, as formidably improbable as the fascist synthesis was in its time, a monster that the new Europe is giving birth to before our eyes. It does not yet have a name, this monster. Nor a face. The hypothesis is merely that it exists. Or that it must one day exist. And that we must already, by estimation, strike the first blows against it...”

Making allowance for a native feverishness to which their author is accustomed, these somewhat disheveled remarks are not uninteresting. They show notably how “left-wing intellectuals” who have remained so seek in the fantasy of an imaginary threat a substitute for their need to frighten themselves and to hate.

Not all have remained at this infantile stage of thought. Take Milan Kundera, a Czech writer working in French, a former communist who has returned from his illusions, a man of unquestionable intellectual probity and great culture. Having lived in the Czechoslovak communist universe, he emigrated to France, discovering the mode of existence of a Western democracy. A precious experience for a critical mind, eager for comparisons. His conclusions have undermined several received ideas. What does he say? He says that the opposition between the communist world and the democratic world is an illusion, and that they have more resemblances than differences between them.

“When I saw the first housing projects in Czechoslovakia, I thought I was seeing the very manifestation of communist horror. Only later did I understand that communism was showing me, in a hyperbolized or caricatured version, the common features of the modern world. The same omnipresent bureaucratization. Class struggle replaced by the arrogance of institutions toward the user. The degradation of artisanal know-how. The idiotic juvenophilia of official discourse. Holidays organized in herds. The ugliness of the countryside from which the traces of the peasant’s hand are disappearing. Uniformity. And, of these common denominators, the worst of all: disrespect for the individual and for his private life...”

Iconoclastic to the end, Kundera concludes:

“The experience of communism appears to me as an excellent introduction to the modern world in general; it has made me more sensitive to the absurd phenomena that people here are ready to perceive as innocent banality or as a necessary attribute of Holy Democracy.”

Nothing better underscores how the old left-right division no longer corresponds to any reality other than semantic inertias and personal interpretations. As political notions, left and right mean nothing if they are not translated into political practice. Now, what does this practice show? It shows parties and politicians apparently opposed, but speaking an identical language, referring to the same ideological themes—human rights, egalitarianism, formal democracy, anti-racism—while everything that might escape this soft consensus is erased. And behind the conventional discourse of single thought, the reality of corrupted societies gradually bursts forth.

A world where the wealth of speculators is paid for by the distress of those who work and by the misery of victims in concrete housing projects and desertified countryside. Remnants of nation-states having abdicated their sovereignty before the blind and planetary power of financial predators. European nations subjected to the foreseeable consequences of a foreign invasion prompted by idiotic economic calculations and justified by an intellectual class inhabited by hatred of the natives. Shattered societies within which all common rules of behavior have been destroyed and which hold together only through the fragile power of the bureaucrat, the judge, and the policeman.

For a long time, the years of the Cold War and the fear of military aggression partly masked the morbid evolution of Western societies. By giving credence to the myth of the “free world” against communist tyranny, the era of the Cold War had rooted the idea that, if the “free world” was often hard to defend, this was not due to its nature, to the nature of liberal society, but to its penetration by “subversion.” In this, one was gravely mistaken. Rather than striving to detect the ideas or agents of “subversion” and to denounce the pernicious influence of Karl Marx, one would have gained by reading him, since in the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto), published in 1848, the fellow had taken the trouble to describe the ills that were wrongly attributed to his disciples:

“Wherever it has taken power,” he already observed, “the bourgeoisie has trampled underfoot feudal, patriarchal, and idyllic relations. All the complex and varied bonds that united feudal man to his natural superiors, it has broken without mercy, leaving no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, the callous demands of ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the sacred shivers of religious ecstasy, of chivalric enthusiasm, of traditional sentimentality, in the icy waters of egotistical calculation. It has reduced personal dignity to a mere exchange value... The bourgeoisie has stripped of their halo all the occupations that were hitherto held venerable and regarded with pious awe. The physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the scientist—it has turned into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, reducing it to a mere money relation... The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, which means the conditions of production, that is to say, all social relations... This continual upheaval of production, this constant shaking of the entire social system, this perpetual agitation and insecurity distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all preceding ones... All that was solid and permanent goes up in smoke, all that was sacred is profaned, and men are finally forced to face their conditions of existence and their mutual relations with sober eyes... The bourgeoisie has subordinated the countryside to the city, it has made peasant peoples dependent on bourgeois peoples...”

A remarkable tableau, still current one hundred and fifty years later. With this difference: that in the era when the Manifesto of 1848 was drafted, there still remained traces of the old European world, of “our world,” whereas one hundred and fifty years later, nothing remains of it except in history books.

Karl Marx, naturally, rejoiced at this destruction of traditional European society. It heralded for him the subsequent advent of post-bourgeois society, of communist society, radical materialism, worldwide homogenization, and the end of history. He was not far wrong. What he wished for did indeed come about in part—in part only. But the resistances were stronger and deeper than he imagined while observing the world from the library of the British Museum. One should moreover ask whether the great revolution he described and announced was the effect of the “bourgeoisie” alone, or rather that of the universe of rationality and technology as a whole.

Tocqueville, in his time, had announced the perfect accomplishment of bourgeois society in American democracy, the work of Puritan bourgeois. He defined it as the despotism of mediocrity and conformism. In the following century, Sombart and Jünger meticulously prosecuted the case against a society embodied in their eyes by the French society born of 1789. On the other side of the Rhine and in a different register, the same accusations were brought by Drumont and Bernanos in the grand French pamphleteering style—a style quite unbourgeois. This fact draws attention to the resistances within French society itself, bourgeois society par excellence. After 1789, no other country, except Germany, was the site of such energetic intellectual, political, and social resistance to the power of the bourgeoisie, as the Vendean uprising of 1793 and the constellation of French counter-revolutionary thinkers remind us.

What are called the “ideas of 1789” were moreover most often English ideas. This had not escaped Spengler, who drew this conclusion: “England has rendered powerless all the States to which it has administered, as medicine, the poison of its own form.” The observation is transposable today to America, daughter of England. The manners and social behaviors proper to it and perhaps suited to it are deadly for other nations.

Bourgeoisie—that is quickly said. What relation exists between this word, this category, and bourgeois in flesh and blood, these mangy wretches, pointed at, denounced, sometimes massacred, as in Russia and in the Eastern countries after 1917 and after 1945? Do they even still exist? What relation between the concept of “bourgeois society,” that of bourgeois spirit (”thinking basely”), and each individual bourgeois? Numerous aristocrats, in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, had already unconsciously embraced the bourgeois mentality (individualism, the religion of money, reason, and law, submission to fashion). Likewise, there were many bourgeois in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who practiced and upheld aristocratic virtues (prowess, generosity and loyalty, sense of lineage, military honor). However, despite all individual exceptions, bourgeois society exists. The French, since 1789 and the Civil Code, know something about it. To be more exact and more current, one should now speak of “bourgeois-socialist” society, seat of that provisionally dominant hybrid that is “liberal-socialism.”

Far from being a danger to this system, progressivism has helped destroy in customs and even in law everything that could still check its expansion, everything that remained of the old communal forms, accelerating in lightning fashion the process of “commodification” of human beings, destruction of identities, disintegration of community bonds, and manipulation of nature.

It is striking to see how the former protesters of 1968, once freed from their revolutionary phraseology, became the docile employees and greedy profiteers of the Western consumer system. The error of these good young people in their youth had been to identify the traditional ways of being that they hated with capitalism. They had been very poor readers of Karl Marx. They had not understood that advanced capitalist society had a destructive power far superior to that of the rhetoricians of protest. When they discovered that the liberal world was working in the same direction as they were, but with means ultimately much more effective and pleasant than those of revolutionary asceticism, they asked only to rally. Far from harming market society, progressivism had helped blow away the last obstacles limiting its excesses.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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The text you’ll find below is a speech by Alain de Benoist from the 8th Conference of GRECE (“Research and Study Group for European Civilization”) held on October 22nd, 1972.

At the time of this conference, the Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”) was beginning to emerge as a serious school of political thought. In 1972, GRECE began to receive limited press coverage. At this time, GRECE was well-established, and a second Nouvelle Droite journal, Eléments (pour la civilisation européenne), would begin its circulation to the larger public the following year, with its first issue being published in September 1973. While Nouvelle École, which began circulation in 1968, was distributed in France and abroad (including Europe, South America, and South Africa), Eléments would largely circulate in France.

Many of the thinkers cited by Alain de Benoist in this speech were gradually rehabilitated within intellectual debate and went on to serve as key sources of inspiration for the distinct school of political thought that would come to be known as the European New Right.

In this essay, de Benoist meditates on civilizational decline, exploring parallels to Rome, cyclical history, the Great War as a wound, and the nature of decline.

In 1938, Henry de Montherlant, reporting the words of an Englishman of the time, exclaimed:

“The French are not people with whom one can go tiger hunting!” In 1972, one can read in Le petit livre rouge des écoliers et lycéens (The Little Red Book for Schoolchildren and High Schoolers): “Adults are paper tigers.”

The young protesters of today thus seem to have finally decided to go tiger hunting. But they are hunting paper tigers.

In one of his last works, Montherlant summarized in a striking way the evolution that our civilization has undergone over the course of several centuries. There was a time, he says, when drunken helots were shown as a spectacle to the children of men of virtue, so that these children would know what they ought not to be. Then, we arrived at the moment when, to these same children, drunken helots were still shown, but this time to give them an example of what they should be. We are now at the era when helots show their children the last men of virtue, telling them that this is what they must not be.

This is what a society in decline looks like.

Decadence! An ancient subject. “The fall of civilizations is the most striking and at the same time the most obscure of all the phenomena of history. In terrifying the mind, this calamity holds something so mysterious and so grandiose that the thinker never tires of considering it, of studying it, of circling around its secret.” Thus begins Gobineau’s famous Essai.1

It is indeed a reality, a fact that strikes the mind, that wounds our sensibility, against which we would like to protest and which, nevertheless, imposes itself upon us—it is a fact that civilizations are mortal. That there comes a moment when, for reasons often difficult to understand well, and even more to analyze, the great cultures gradually cease to grow and develop, and seem on the contrary so exhausted as to never find a second wind, age, falter, and die.

But the death of civilizations is like other deaths: there are several kinds. Some die of extinction, others of exhaustion, some perhaps of boredom. Only few die a violent death. It is not an exaggeration to say that some commit suicide (sometimes on command, when they have been subtly convinced to do so). None, in any case, disappears in that ideal manner evoked by Montherlant:

“Happy are those who die without prattle and without weeping, in the holy solitude where beasts die, and soldiers at the bottom of a distant shell crater.”

The causes of this are therefore diverse. It can be conquest, fatigue, laxity, dissolution, admixture. The Greco-Roman world had established the doctrine that States, peoples, and civilizations perish essentially through luxury, softness, poor administration, corruption of morals, and fanaticism. But these are only secondary symptoms, which appear only when the malady is already present. For a society that sinks into luxury, a citizen who declares himself unfit to bear arms, an administrator who hesitates to do his duty, or who no longer does it at all, morals that dissolve, fanaticisms and irrationalities that spread—all these phenomena are consequences, neither more nor less.

It is difficult to isolate a single cause and make it a global explanatory factor. And it even happens that what is a cause of decline in some cases can be, elsewhere, on another scale of values, a cause of success.

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In one of the chapters of his Essai, Gobineau speaks in these terms of corruption:

“Did the Phoenicians owe their ruin to the corruption that gnawed at them and that they went about sowing everywhere? No; quite the contrary, it was this corruption that was the principal instrument of their power and their glory; from the day when, on the shores of the Greek islands, they went about as dishonest traders, villainous hosts, seducing women to make merchandise of them, and stealing here and there the goods they ran off to sell, their reputation was, to be sure, well and justly tarnished; they grew nonetheless and held in the annals of the world a rank from which their rapacity and bad faith in no way contributed to their descent!”

And then, one must take into account the exhaustion of blood. Perhaps never more than now have we been able to observe the terrible effects of that dreadful European civil war that was the Great War of 1914–18.

France, and not only France, but all the countries involved, were, during those four tragic years, truly bled dry. The imprint that this conflict left on the d’Annunzios, the Jüngers, and the Montherlants is in itself most revealing.

We realize only now that the France of the early century was still a Gaulish France, a France where round-headed, blond-haired peasants with thick mustaches were still the majority, where they constituted a sort of biological reserve, thus guaranteeing a possibility of renewal that was the most important of promises made to our country. Now, this promise was not kept, because the best, whatever banner they fought under, were mowed down by great strokes of nothingness. Frankish France had begun to die between 1789 and 1793. Gaulish France, for its part, must have begun to disappear between 1914 and 1918. And these voids that have never been filled weigh cruelly upon us.

The Great War, as we all know, was the end of an era. It was the last time that men professing the same virtues and displaying the same type of energy found themselves face to face in the trenches.

Here, for example, is Wilhelm Weidemann. He is a student of philology. In 1916, he is twenty years old. From the Flanders front, where he is stationed, he writes to his family to report the death of a friend.

“No, we will not continue alone on our path,” he says in this letter. “We cannot forget him, we can speak of him... He remains ours, such as he was, proud and faithful. Henceforth, we can think without dread that after him, we too must pass through the dark gate that none pass through again, that keeps its secret, and that, yet, does not separate us from the dead. Death is not a friend, but I know her now so well that I can see her come tranquilly... She has brushed against me often, I have often dealt her without flinching, I pass daily under the thunder of cannons and the whistling of bullets, and I go straight ahead. The war has taken from me all that it could take; what remains to me and what I fight for, no one can take away.”

On February 13, 1916, he is killed.

On the other side, here now is Marc Boasson. A corporal of infantry, also twenty years old. Like Weidemann, like all soldiers, he sends letters to his loved ones. He writes:

“The most horrible thought that imposes itself is that of the very vanity of a victory. Incapable, however brilliant one might like to suppose it, of henceforth compensating for the depopulation of a country bled white, France and Germany will emerge from the struggle exhausted for a long time. France, perhaps, for longer still. Finally, let us try to die well. Pyre of Hercules, conflagration of the Nibelungs, a vast heroic redness will remain in the sky of History, sublime and atrocious like the dazzle sometimes, in the shadow of twilight, of flaming liquids that set the horizon ablaze.”

On April 29, 1919, six months before the armistice, he too is killed.

I do not claim, of course, that such characters have all disappeared, nor that more recent events have not had occasion to reveal admirable ones, but still, at fifty years’ distance, one realizes that the spirit of the century has changed.

There was a time when war prolonged the old tradition of honor, and all the duels accumulated since antiquity. The Great War was at once the last of the classical wars and the first of the total wars. Far off now is the time when Achilles killed Lycaon saying Alla philos (Die, friend!). The time when one could fight without necessarily feeling anger or hatred for the adversary, but on the contrary, sometimes, a certain esteem that came precisely from the fact that one was fighting against him and that he breathed at the same level as you.

All these causes of decline that I have just enumerated are therefore also effects. They react upon one another, in the same way that today drugs are at once the cause of a certain state of mind, and the consequence of an era that produces drugs, and multiplies addicts...

One has the impression, more simply, that there comes a moment when the motor that drives the axis of civilization, when this motor is broken. Or rather when no fuel comes to feed it any longer. Then the motor continues to turn. But it turns now in a void, in a deafening clamor, and it is from this noise that the illusion is born that it is running at full speed.

Things, in general, go slowly. It would be futile to date at ten, or twenty, or thirty years, according to convenience or passion, the sources of a state of mind that has subtly introduced itself into the dwelling. The institution of a veritable Marxist mandarinate in the University, to cite only one example, is the culmination of a slow labor, undertaken notably by those good schoolteachers of the Third Republic, devoted servants of their country, great admirers of the Empire, faithful in combat against clerical pretensions, but who were also the spiritual sons of Rousseau, that is to say the children of dream and illusion.

Likewise, that a body like the Church, which was, even in its excesses, for centuries the example of firmness, certitude, and continuity, should today be shaken by internal convulsions and ravaged by doubt, this should only half surprise us. For one must know the patient infiltration that has operated within this body now sick, and which, progressively—it is the right word—has worked its way up the current of the hierarchy.

Decadence, in truth, has distant origins. So distant that one would waste time trying to situate them at a precise point in History, so true is it that in the final account, because such is life, all power begins to be lost from the day it is conquered.

But, if it is impossible to say when the decline began, at least one can signal in passing some of the symptoms that are its principal manifestations.

For M. Jean Cau, one of the characteristics of decadent eras is that everything there is codified. Even and especially what should not be. Because the natural sources, those that should flow of themselves, are dried up. “In the anthill,” he writes, “no one has honor. There are only rules of functioning. Laws. The less morality is each person’s affair, the more laws multiply. I would even say that the number of laws is inversely proportional to the sense of honor of those who are subject to them.”

And then, there is mediocrity and baseness. Not good or evil, both of which can be exercised in a powerful way. But abasement.

The Roman world, says Montherlant,

“knew how to recognize greatness, which the modern world does not see, mocks when it does see it, and places and exalts where it is not. When a people has hatred for all greatness, let their leader take good care not to pronounce the word! Had he done nothing for greatness, this word would still be too much! The people would make a stone of it, the day they wish to stone him” (Le treizième César (The Thirteenth Caesar)).

Montherlant had moreover remarked that in today’s France, at the cinema, at the theater, in all the public places where spectacles are given, it is generally enough for a character to pronounce a somewhat grand, somewhat strong reply, for him to say something noble or powerfully moving, for someone or some few in the audience to burst out laughing. And to burst out laughing without realizing that in mocking himself, a people removes forever its right to speak.

And Montherlant adds: The attitude of the French toward war and liberty

“can be summarized thus: it is all the same to them if they are gassed tomorrow, or if they are serfs, if they are given a 10% raise today (or if they are given holidays they don’t know what to do with, eagerly yearning for the resumption of work). In other words, stuck to their little pleasures, and drunk on them, until the precise instant when the first bomb falls, like flies on excrement, where one can seize them between two fingers. An attitude I would place under an epigraph drawn from the second discourse of the Corinthians to Lacedaemon, in Thucydides: ‘He who does not wish to prepare, because it would interrupt his pleasure, will soon see taken from him that very pleasure on account of which he did not wish to prepare...’”

Societies in decline correspond to those anthills to which Jean Cau alluded. They correspond to the materializing, petrifying, and solidifying apogee of the final state of the egalitarian illusion.

These societies no longer have leaders. They no longer want them. They pretend to believe that everyone can now claim the title of leader. In other words, everyone wants to lead. But no one wants to obey.

Jean Cau, in Le temps des esclaves (The Time of the Slaves), then says:

“When there are no more true masters, all of society is made of slaves. But of sad and empty slaves. And the bourgeois there is but the promoted and ashamed slave.”

Decadence, if you will, is fleas bustling about wondering what lions could possibly be good for.

But the domain in which exhaustion manifests itself most clearly is perhaps that of artistic creation and cultural manifestations.

When one can no longer create, one contents oneself with “adding” to the inside of or in relation to what others have already created. One refines, one distorts, one overcomplicates, one pretends to consider classical rules as outdated, then one rediscovers the value and interest of what one had declared outdated. One burns what one had adored, one adores what one had burned. One makes puns and plays on words. One buys shares on the Stock Exchange. One puts at the top what should be at the bottom, and at the bottom what should be at the top.

This yields, in the best of cases, the Hellenistic style compared to the Greek style. In the modern era, the noodle style, the “Jugend Stil” and kitsch. In antiquity, the time of the sileni, of the Bacchanalia and the Graeculi. The Tanagra statuettes. Later, the end of flamboyant Gothic, etc. All of this is still beautiful. But, already, the sources of renewal are exhausted. The power has departed.

In the preface to the work entitled Imperium, the American philosopher Francis Parker Yockey writes: “Originality at all costs is an effect of decadence, and decadence is pregnant with barbarism.”

One finds the same observations in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West). Oswald Spengler writes therein as follows:

“What marks the decline of creative force is the absence of form and of measure, necessary for the artist to produce a work that still has roundness and wholeness... (One can) no longer suffer the supra-personal rule, the absolute mathematics of form, the destiny of the formal language of art matured gradually... The ancient artists feel themselves masters of the great form, the late artists its slaves... The mark of all living art, perfect harmony between willing, obligation, and ability, evidence of the goal and unconsciousness of the means of realization, unity of art and culture: all this is past... Liberty and necessity were formerly identical. Now, one calls liberty a lack of discipline... The destiny of living form lived in the race and in the school, not in the private tendencies of individuals. Under the impulsion of a great tradition, the small artist too arrives at perfection, because living art guides him, and his task together with him. Today, these artists are obliged to want what they can no longer do, to work, to calculate, to combine with the intellect, where disciplined instinct is dead.”

Further on, Spengler says again:

“What is fabricated today in the name of art is impotence and falsehood (...). One may traverse all the exhibitions, all the concerts, all the theaters, one will encounter only art industrialists and noisy idlers who take pleasure in bringing to market something of whose uselessness they have long felt inwardly. In the general assembly of a joint-stock company or of the engineers of any factory, you will notice more intelligence, more taste, more character and ability than in all the painting and music of present-day Europe. For a single great artist, there have always existed a hundred useless art-makers. But as long as there was a great convention, therefore an authentic art, these bunglers themselves produced something good. One could forgive the existence of these hundred useless ones, because in the ensemble of tradition, they were the soil where that unique artist would bear fruit. But today, there remain only these 10,000 workers ‘for a living,’ whose necessity one cannot see, and it is certain that one could close all the art studios without art even being touched. We have (moreover) only to transport ourselves to Alexandria, in the year 200 BC, to know the artistic din with which a cosmopolitan civilization can delude itself about the death of its art. There, as in the great cities of present-day Europe, it is the quest for illusions of continuity in art, of personal originality, of ‘new style,’ of ‘unsuspected possibilities’; it is theoretical chatter, the magistral posturing by those who set the tone, like acrobats in the ring handling weights of 50 kilos in cardboard; it is the literary man substituted for the poet, the shameless farce of expressionism, considered as a fragment of art history and organized by art industrialists; it is the industrialization of thought, of feeling, of plasticity. Alexandria also had its philosopher-dramatists and its artist-directors, whom they preferred to Sophocles, and painters who discovered new orientations to astonish the public. What do we possess today under the name of art? A mendacious music, all of artificial noises of massed instruments; a mendacious painting which, on the formal foundation of past millennia, ‘founds’ every ten years a new style from which each is free to make what he will; a mendacious sculpture (finally), living by thefts from Assyria, from Egypt, from Mexico. And this alone, yet, this taste of profane people, is considered the expression and sign of the times” (Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), Vol. 1).

This citation is rather long. But if one reflects on the fact that these lines were written in 1917, one will admit that they have a value and a scope that render them singularly urgent today.

The theses of Spengler that I have just cited are known. The fact that great cultures, in the image of the individual organisms they contain, and which are themselves so many small universes inserted into the macrocosm, grow, mature, reach their apogee, age, and die, obviously does not mean that the idea of universal history cannot be taken into consideration. Spengler, who gave Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) the subtitle Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Outline of a Morphology of World History), moreover subsequently developed very original views in this direction, particularly in his last essays, which unfortunately have never been translated into French.

But to speak of universal history, even of the history of humanity, simply amounts to signaling that cultures do not develop in an isolated fashion. That there are, that there have always been among them, contacts and relations, and that these have exercised their influence on the development of each of these civilizations. This does not mean, of course, that history unfolds in all places at the same rhythm, nor above all in the same direction.

The very fact that civilizations are born and decline, that there are, if I may say so, highs and lows in History, shows how much the linear conception of History, that conception that theologians, Marxist theoreticians, Freudian psychoanalysts, and the scholiasts of Lévi-Straussian structuralism all agree to develop, how profoundly erroneous this conception is.

At the base of theories of unilinear History, I recall this only for the record, one always finds cultural egocentrism and irrationality. It is always a matter of an illuminated one (or a group of illuminated ones), who considers his own history as the beginning and culmination of the universe, intends to reduce the one to the other by enslaving minds, and claims in a sense to assimilate the Return to the Promised Land to immersion in the species, the entry into Paradise, the Golden Age, the classless society, and the Last Judgment.

To this conception of History, we oppose another, itself perfectly in accord with the complexity and the multiple perspectives of historical becoming. It will be a cyclical conception of History, or better said, a discontinuous one, where processes will come to replace events, and where the notion of destiny will take the place of simple causality.

It takes, in truth, a certain naivety, or a certain bad faith, to see in the Rome of Hildebrand, of Charles V, or of Alexander VI, the “logical” sequel to the Rome of Caesar, of Flaminius, and of Sulla.

I cite the Roman example deliberately. For it is an example that obsesses us and has never ceased to obsess historians of all times. The parallel has often been drawn between the Late Empire of yesterday and that of today. And it is significant that when Montherlant wished to tell his contemporaries what he thought of our era, it was toward Rome that he turned, to write a book entitled Le treizième César (The Thirteenth Caesar).

Everything begins again indeed. And if not in the same manner, at least in an analogous manner.

One encounters today in the street, in Paris as in Hamburg or San Francisco, groups of young people disoriented, disconcerted, and haggard. Some, having lost even the slightest consciousness of themselves, a tuft of hair on their shaved skulls, chant to the tune of “Hare Krishna,” dressed in saffron robes, shaking their crotales. The spectacle is not surprising to those familiar with the res romana, who know that nineteen centuries ago, the castrated priests of Cybele stirred about similarly, with their robes and their instruments, on the slopes of the Aventine Hill. That is why one should not be astonished that the partisans of Krishna, drowned in their pious imagery, instinctively find again, to curse today’s world and incense their idols, the tone of the early Church Fathers who glorified eunuchs for the greater glory of the kingdom of heaven.

Pierre Vial earlier spoke to us of those protesters of yesterday, of that miserable plebs of charlatans, of so-called saviors, of falsifiers, of soothsayers, of prophets, of parvenus, and of false masters, who flourished in the time of declining Rome, and of whom the filmmaker Fellini has restored to us the oppressive and motley image in the admirable film he adapted from the Satyricon.

It is good to return to this aspect of things.

In his essay, now a classic, on Le christianisme antique (Ancient Christianity) (Flammarion, 1928), Charles Guignebert makes the following observation:

“The Christians of the first ages believed the end of the world imminent and they desired it; quite naturally, they detached themselves from the cares and duties of earthly life, and, in their hearts, love of the heavenly Jerusalem did great harm to that of the Roman fatherland.”

Christian protesters, for example, declared themselves conscientious objectors. That was their way of opposing war to love (of neighbor), and, in a more general way, of dissociating themselves from Roman imperialism. “The same life cannot be owed to God and to Caesar,” wrote Tertullian. “And we cannot admit as licit the state of soldier, since the Lord has not permitted that one use the sword even once.”

The Church, subsequently, had no fewer occasions to resort to the sword. But let us wager that at that period of the Roman Empire, there must have been, alongside conscientious objections, a good number of cases of “leaks,” even publications of “top secret” military reports and some thefts of ministerial documents...

Christians, as we know, also refused to obey the leaders of the State. “Can we swear an oath to men,” Tertullian again asked, “we who have sworn an oath to God?”

Just as today one challenges the “bourgeois courts,” Saint Paul, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, challenges the courts of Rome. “When you have disputes,” he exclaims, “you go to take as judges people whom the Church despises! What a shame, in truth.”

Tertullian, ever him, is the first to use an argument that will be, after him, abundantly repeated, when he declares: “One is not bound to respect an unjust law!” The word, which today seems to have passed into custom, is worth pausing over. If only to oppose to it this maxim of the samurai, often cited by Montherlant: “One is bound to keep all the promises one has made, even when one has made them to a dog.”

In the eyes of the protesters of ancient Rome, all of society is corrupt. Money is evil. The time devoted to leisure is too long. What the Romans considered virtues becomes, in the eyes of their critics, so many inexpiable faults. And the evangelists hurl anathema upon this pagan universe that will not fail to succumb to its “internal contradictions.” In that “Apocalypse” that one should perhaps reread more often, John denounces in clear terms the City of Rome: “And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, covered with blasphemous titles and bearing seven heads and ten horns (...) The seven heads are the seven hills on which the woman sits... And this woman, she is the Great City, the one that reigns over the kings of the earth... In the measure of her pomp and her luxury, let her be given torment and misery.”

Torments and miseries, an overflowing imagination sets itself to draw up the complete catalog. One does not find there yet forced reeducation, nor camps in Siberia, but Tertullian evokes with no less jubilation that day of the Last Judgment, when, he says, the great, the rich, the strong, and the powerful will be judged.

“What an object of joy and pleasure it will be,” he writes, “to see so many celebrated monarchs, whom they said reigned in heaven, uttering dreadful groans in the midst of the profound darkness of hell with their god Jupiter and with the crowd of their favorites! What a sudden transport upon seeing so many governors, so many magistrates... burning in unbearable flames hotter than those where they once threw the martyrs, while the latter in turn insult them in this eternal and rigorous torture.”

The idyllic character of such a tableau left the Old Romans perplexed, despite its great evocative power, for the Romans, even those of the Late Empire, had great difficulty understanding that their absolute happiness, that of all humanity, could pass through the destruction of the good and the beautiful, and of all the things they loved.

Marcus Aurelius, skeptical, said: “What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.” In other words: a morality that leads to the destruction of a balanced society cannot be the one suited to each man taken individually.

“The State,” concludes Charles Guignebert, “hardly noticed until the course of the second century the social peril that Christianity seemed to harbor; but it then began to consider it as a sort of anarchism. It was the best princes, the most attached to the duties of their dignity and, as we would say (today), the most patriotic, who showed themselves the most bitter enemies of the Christian churches.”

Without bearing alone, of course, the responsibility for the fall of Rome, nascent Christianity found itself rather well served by it, used its vicissitudes to its profit, and, as the case might be, accelerated the process.

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At the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, a group of Roman aristocrats and literati, gathered around the senator Symmachus, did not hesitate moreover to take up again the accusations of pagan authors. They thus attributed responsibility for the misfortunes of Rome to the innovations introduced by Constantine and his successors, in contempt of the laws of ancient Roman tradition. For them, it was, without any doubt, the abandonment of the cult of the gods of origin that had condemned the Empire to perish.

Let us note in passing that a similar idea would resurface during the Renaissance. Then Montesquieu, in his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline), in 1734, would spread the idea of a decadence due to moral causes. Voltaire himself would multiply his sarcasms against the era of the Late Empire and the Byzantine period. Finally, the English historian Edward Gibbon, in his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published from 1776, would write: “I have described (finally) the triumph of barbarism and of religion.”

The heavenly Jerusalem of today’s protesters, the one they call for in the catacombs and the sewers, the opium dens and the sex shops, is the society without constraints, the city of immoderate pleasure, the city where all the streets will be downhill, where disorder will triumph over that supreme “injustice” that is the ordering of a normal society, where the struggle against scarcity will be nothing but a matter of “social organization,” and where the creation of economic utilities will be done automatically by the care of social Providence, chance and necessity, or their holy trinity.

For it is quite certain that at an era when courage is measured above all by the number of manifestos one has been able to sign, while virility is expressed preferably in horsepower, one can consider, with Jean Cau, that socialism is the “worldly religion of today’s slaves.”

In Le temps des esclaves (The Time of the Slaves), the work already cited, Jean Cau says again:

“If you want to be revolutionaries, be worthless. In a class, it is not the good students who want things to change.”

What is striking indeed is the poverty of current protest. Its creations are poor. Its imagination, supposed to take power, is poor. Its proposals are poor. Its conformism, on the other hand, is great. Protesters, in all the fashions of the moment, feel at home. Safe. They drown themselves in the voluptuous absurdity of their own jargons.

Goethe said he had the “mania for reality.” It is obviously a mania that is much lost today. Protesters, one could say, see the world only in the way they represent it to themselves, and above all in the way they represent themselves. For they see only their world, and not the universe that surrounds this world and, to a certain extent, explains and contains it.

They imagine that by acting as they think, they will act justly. And that is why their revolts end in intense disappointments.

They care, in truth, rather little about tomorrow. They ignore, as Jean Claude Valla has recalled, the laws of economics. They care also very little about those of politics. For them, the society that delimits their horizon is bad in its totality. Science is bad. Technology is bad. Natural laws are bad. Order is bad. As for knowing what can come after, it matters little. One must first destroy, they say. Thus they await the end of the world and the Last Judgment.

All this is doubled by a strange masochism, and a negation of the Self.

One of the reasons that incite intellectuals to sympathize with Marxist theories is, as we know, the antibourgeois theme. Yet, most of these intellectuals are themselves bourgeois and sons of bourgeois.

They are always ready, moreover, to praise a new Master, provided he is strong. Aragon sang of the GPU with poetic accents that Tertullian himself had not imagined.2 He also sang of Stalin, as his disciples sing the merits of China or Cuba. In a very general way, the more protest declares itself anti-authoritarian, the more it thrills with enthusiasm before the military parades of the Third World, Cuban Stakhanovism, and the militias of Peking.

“The intellectual,” wrote Jean Cau, “is a prostitute: The more one strikes him, the more he adores. The less one subjugates him, the more he cries oppression.”

This does not mean, of course, that the current society is perfect, nor that it responds to all our wishes. But still one must know where to situate a just protest. What is remarkable indeed in current protest is that it makes no effort to get out of the system it claims to criticize. It even provides it, by its critique, with an escape and an alternative. The protester opposes the “bourgeois” as the son opposes the father: it is a conflict of generations. Both are situated in the same perspective, in the same mental universe, in the same egalitarian dialectic. They separate only on the manner of realizing, more or less honestly, with more or less hypocrisy, with more or less concern for their personal interests, the same morality and the same values of decline.

One can be “anti-bourgeois.” But one must agree on the words. When we speak, to make a critique of it, of the “bourgeois” world, we do not mean to allude to the liberal, capitalist, and consumerist society to which the Western and developed civilization in which we live is reduced. More exactly, we do not refer to the bourgeoisie as an economic class, but indeed to its counterpart from the point of view of values.

“There exists,” writes Julius Evola, “an intellectual world, an art, a way of being, a general conception of existence that has taken form starting from the eighteenth century in parallel with the revolution of the Third Estate, and which appears today as something insipid, empty, and outdated.”

But there are two ways of taking a position, and of surpassing mercantile and bourgeois values. One can surpass them from below, and one can surpass them from above.

Surpassing from below amounts quite simply to a new regression. It is the surpassing to which current protest invites us, and that is why, vis-à-vis it, we do not hesitate to say that the state of things in place is still better.

“There exists however,” adds Evola, “another possibility, oriented this time toward the heights... This second possibility is tied to a resumption of heroic and aristocratic values, assumed in a natural and clear way, without rhetoric or grandiloquence. In the past, the Roman and Romano-Germanic world have already furnished typical examples of this. One can keep one’s distance from all that is merely human and above all subjective, one can despise bourgeois conformism, its petty egoism and its petty moralism, one can espouse a style of active impersonality, love what is essential and real in the superior sense, freed from the mists of sentimentality and intellectualist structures, one can dedicate oneself to a radical demystification, all this while standing upright, while feeling the evidence of that which, in life, goes beyond life, and drawing from it precise rules for action and behavior” (Gli uomini e le rovine (Men Among the Ruins). Sept-couleurs. 1972).

It is a matter of proceeding, as Nietzsche asked of us, to a true “transvaluation of values.” It is a matter of crystallizing a human type and, in accord with this type, of conferring a specific tone upon a given society.

When Jean Cau says that “the bourgeois is the anti-hero who has used cunning, trade, money, schemes, and who has debased himself as a man to become bourgeois,” and when he criticizes at the same time a certain protest, he is not positing his discourse as contradictory. He is, on the contrary, in his own logic.

One could, on this subject, multiply observations. But this has been done in the course of previous Colloquia, and time is counted for us.

Francis Parker Yockey, in Imperium, had enunciated a law that he called the “law of constancy of power.” He estimated that within a social ensemble, a nation, a civilization, the quantity of Power, of potency and energy, remained in the final account practically constant for a given population. That is to say that any quantity of energy would automatically find itself credited to another individual or another group of individuals.

This law seems more or less verified, in its broad outlines at least. What makes the weakness of some makes the strength of others. Victories nourish themselves on defeats. And the decline of aging cultures only accelerates the rise of those that are growing.

The question that arises today is situated very exactly in this perspective. It is a matter, even if we consider things in the long term, of knowing whether cities such as New York, Berlin, Rome, and Paris will one day be “cities of ancient culture,” cities of ancient glory, as are today Luxor, Thebes, Babylon, Texcoco, and Pataliputra.

Spengler drew from his works conclusions of a pessimistic nature. At least that is what has been said of them, the spirit of the times always labeling realism and lucidity as pessimism. Gobineau, whom it is obviously not a matter of taking at the letter, but who had the merit of interesting himself among the first in this question of decline, was no less reserved. His Essai ends on the most desperate of interrogations.

“Religion itself,” Spengler writes, “has not promised us eternity. Science, in showing us that we have begun, seems always to assure us that we must end. There is thus neither reason to be astonished nor to be moved in finding one more confirmation of a fact that could not pass for doubtful. The saddening foresight is not death, it is the certainty of arriving there only degraded; and perhaps even this shame reserved for our descendants could leave us insensitive, if we did not feel, by a secret horror, that the rapacious hands of destiny are already laid upon us.”

Oswald Spengler, in profound accord with himself, proposes hardly more than images, mute heroic examples. It is the Roman soldier dead at Pompeii whose example he gives, this soldier who was found buried under the ashes, standing and in arms, and who remained there simply because they had forgotten to come relieve him. But others have gone further in refusal.

On November 25, 1970, the writer Mishima, former lieutenant of the Imperial Japanese Army, committed suicide in Tokyo to bear witness. He reproved the spirit of his time.

On September 21, 1972—it was exactly one month ago yesterday, on the day of the equinox—the writer Henry de Montherlant, former volunteer in the Great War, took his own life in an exemplary manner. Thus placing the final mark on a body of work destined to dominate the minds of the best. He too, he repeated it a hundred times, reproved the spirit of his time.

One can ask the question: what is this society where men of virtue, those who are great, but who do not have the taste for action, can express their reprobation in a manner suited to their measure only by taking their own lives in this way?

In ancient China, it happened that the steward of a king, or the tutor of a prince, in disagreement with such or such a decision of his sovereign, would address reproaches to him, then commit suicide in order to give these reproaches a bit more weight. That is, doubtless, a fine lesson in conduct. But a lesson that requires a certain responsiveness. For, in ancient times, the sovereign took heed of the warning: he was inclined to think that an opinion to which its author joined his death by way of calling card, deserved some attention.

Who would pay attention today to an opinion expressed in this manner? Very few people, we can guess.

Very few people, and all the less because the “total” war I evoked at the beginning of this exposition has today become much more total still. It has truly invaded everything.

Henry de Montherlant writes:

“The worldwide domination of imposture and the facility with which it is imposed, thanks to snobbery born of the lowering of intelligence (without speaking of lack of character), are novelties as important in the history of humanity as atomic inventions. Snobbery is social, political, religious, cultural, medical, economic. It insinuates itself into everything, leads to everything, and leads everything.” (Le treizième César (The Thirteenth Caesar)).

This is to say that if one wants to detect in the already advanced process of the decline that threatens, a flaw sufficient to block the mechanism; if one wants to effectively measure and weigh the probably small chances that may be parsimoniously dispensed to us, it is important to be at once well conscious of the importance of the stakes, of the extent of the terrain where these stakes must be disputed, and, on the other hand, firmly decided to utilize all the possibilities susceptible of effectively passing within our reach.

When it is a matter of History, the direction of the hands on the essential clock does not change, as anyone can guess, with good feelings and pious wishes. It requires an authority. “Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus,” it has been written, “would not have been able to make their constitutions observed for long if they had been unarmed.”

Nietzsche said: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

In these times, these are words to meditate upon.

One must not forget, indeed, that there exists in History a sort of pendulum, to whose play the dominant influences and currents have always alternated. The more the balance leans one way today, the more it will lean the other way tomorrow.

Montherlant, who, decidedly, will have been of precious help to us throughout this day, the Montherlant whose shadow has not finished enveloping us in the years to come, wrote:

“It happens (quite fortunately) that lions devour the one who released them. Which can also be said: whoever opened the sewer shall perish by the sewer.”

And finally, this last word, from Montherlant still, but which is already older:

“The more honesty is threatened, the more it commands us; the more vileness there is around it, the more it shines, like those evening lights in cities, lit when it is still day, but which illuminate only when night has fallen.”

What, then, are today the lights of the city? What are the lights lit in broad daylight, and which, for this reason, no one yet sees shining, but which, in the evening, once night has fallen, will illuminate the space around them? What are these lights that must not cease to shine in the dark, until morning comes?

It is not for me to answer this enigma of the historical sphinx. It is up to you.

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

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Radio Sputnik, Escalation Show Host: The main topic of this episode remains unchanged and will likely be with us for a long time to come. We are talking about the war in the Persian Gulf, the war in the Middle East. There is no other way to describe what is happening: this is not just a conflict or a temporary escalation — it is a full-fledged war. Since we intend to discuss it in detail, let me ask: in your opinion, is everything that is currently happening in the region truly serious and likely to last?

Alexander Dugin: It seems to me that in our volatile world, where everything is on the brink and hanging by a thread, we may face the most incredible twists and turns. Therefore, I do not believe any analysis that claims “this is long-term, and we know for sure” or “this is about to end, and we know for sure.” I don’t take that kind of responsibility upon myself. I believe we need to follow events, try to understand their meaning, and see how they unfold. Predictions that everything will end in six months or last indefinitely constantly fall apart. It seems to me that it’s not very responsible to make such predictions. The war is simply going on and on; it hasn’t ended.

Let’s compare: Trump originally intended it to end within a few hours, then a few days, but it has already lasted two weeks and is unfolding completely differently from that 12-day war between Israel and Iran that took place just under a year ago with US involvement. This is a different war in every respect; it is incomparable to the previous one. It is a radical war that has already inflicted colossal losses on Iran: virtually the entire religious, political, and military leadership of the country has been destroyed, people have died, and there is a massive bombing campaign targeting Iranian cities and economic facilities. Iran is responding with unprecedented resilience: it is not surrendering and, most importantly, is not entering into negotiations with the aggressor. Iran is regularly and massively bombing Israel. This information is censored because most of the American press is on the side of the US — they are participants in this conflict — so America is hiding the true state of affairs in Israel. Israel is gradually turning into Gaza, meaning more and more economic, military, and civilian facilities are being destroyed.

A real upheaval is brewing, so I do not rule out that we will see a regime change not in Iran, but in Israel — precisely because Netanyahu has disappeared, and they are trying to explain his absence somehow. In some cases, this is undoubtedly a fabricated hoax; in others, it is difficult to determine the truth, but in any case, something is happening in Israel: with Ben-Gvir, with Netanyahu, with society, with military strategy, and simply with the population — things we do not yet know about.

Judging by the fragmentary information, which is heavily censored in the West, Israel is gradually turning into Gaza. Iranian missiles are reaching their targets, piercing the “Iron Dome” and hitting their targets. Which ones exactly? To what extent? In my view, it is impossible to say anything definitive on such a scale. The Iranians present their perspective, the West presents its own. By all accounts, the damage Israel is currently sustaining is far greater than what was anticipated or reported in the West, though, of course, less than according to Iranian sources. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, but this is already very serious damage, which Israel certainly did not plan for during the first 12-day war with Iran. And just how extensive are the losses? It is difficult to assess at this point, but it is quite evident that Iran employed highly effective tactics: it closed the Strait of Hormuz, struck key economic and communications hubs in Arab countries, and targeted US embassies, intelligence centers, and energy facilities.

In other words, Iran — although unable to reach its main adversary, the US, as since it truly lacks the power to do so — has delivered highly effective strikes against local military bases and facilities from which attacks against it were launched, thereby completely shifting the balance of power in this situation. This shift has occurred not so much through military means, though military action was involved, as through economic ones. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as the possible blockage by the Houthis of another strait — the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, that is, access to the Red Sea — effectively puts the entire global energy system at risk. The Americans themselves, through their Ukrainian proxies, blew up Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines; the world had already been cut off from Russian oil by harsh sanctions, and now it is losing a second source of hydrocarbons, the Middle East, which is now blocked. This will deal a colossal blow to the global economy, and it is already being dealt. In other words, Iran has chosen a method of waging war that truly forces the enemy to reconsider its actions.

And here we see signs of panic in the White House, because Trump is now changing his statements every day, several times a day. One moment he boasts that he’ll solve the problem with Iran single-handedly, the next he says, “Come on, everyone, help us patrol the tankers in the Strait of Hormuz,” and he invites — just think about this — China to join. That is, not only the European countries, which he has just berated, humiliated, and called the worst names, but now China, too, must clean up the mess left by his completely unprovoked aggressive action against the Iranian people and state. And what do we see? Everyone is refusing to do this. Some have been wavering: Starmer, Macron, Merz — they’d say they’d send ships, then they wouldn’t. Now we see that even Meloni is refusing to participate, even though she is, generally speaking, an ally of Trump. It turns out that Trump doesn’t really understand what he’s doing.

And now more and more posts are appearing across American social media: “We are ruled by a madman, we are ruled by a maniac who has lost his mind, a paranoid.” And if we recall those dark stories surrounding the Epstein case, the picture becomes truly monstrous: at the helm of a nuclear power stands an unpredictable, deranged maniac whose statements and actions follow no logic, not even the most basic. Never mind logic — he does one thing in the morning, another in the afternoon, says something else in the evening, and the next morning it all starts over again. This applies to his games with tariffs and sanctions. It seems as though the world’s greatest power is now led by a seriously ill, mentally unstable individual who apparently also has a criminal, terrifying “trail” of crimes behind him.

So, how should we project and predict the situation going forward? It all started with a single calculation: that Iran would quickly begin negotiating on American terms, essentially admitting defeat and accepting US demands. But things turned out differently. Far more radical forces have come to power. Right now, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is, in essence, leading this war — these are ruthless people who have lost their spiritual and political leader, as well as their children. And Iran, in my view, will stand its ground until the very end. And if it stands its ground until the very end, then no one knows for sure what exactly “the end” means in this situation. Whether it’s nuclear strikes or a ground operation, and whether it will have any effect—that’s also impossible to say. Will Israel survive, will it last a little longer, or will it simply cease to exist as a state in the near future? After all, if we compare Israel to Iran, let alone the Islamic world, we realize that it is simply a small American military base — very active, very bold, but, by and large, it is not a country, not a state, and not a civilization. It is a kind of networked community that survives by manipulating other countries: America through its lobbies, Europe, and the Arab world.

That is, if this conflict is now increasingly becoming a clash of civilizations and will ultimately turn into one, and the religious factor on both sides is only growing with each passing day, I think it is reasonable to assume that Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth. Strictly speaking, this state in its current form has not existed for very long. In many ways, it is an artificial construct that, in essence, serves as a kind of Western proxy in the Middle East.

To what extent will it be defended, and what will be left to defend there? Well, maybe something will remain. But everything is taking on an increasingly ominous character, and, in my view, we have reached a point where one of the sides — either Israel or the US — could launch a strike with tactical nuclear weapons on Iranian territory. If Iran continues to act just as effectively and successfully, it will, of course, suffer enormous losses, and Iranian cities will also come under attack, but look at the map: compare Iran and Israel. Israel, compared to Iran, is much smaller than Gaza is compared to Israel itself. We see that Israel has turned Gaza into a wasteland. Theoretically, turning Israel into another Gaza is entirely possible. Especially since everyone else is gradually being drawn into this war, directly or indirectly. Some say they won’t support Trump now. By the way, Japan refused to send its fleet there to patrol ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and then Trump declares: this isn’t our business at all; we have enough oil of our own, and if you need oil, go and patrol it yourselves.

He started all this; he struck Iran. He provoked these retaliatory actions, which hit his own allies — the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait — and now he says: “I’m washing my hands of it; I have enough oil of my own; if you have any problems, go and defend your own tankers in the Strait of Hormuz yourselves.” It just doesn’t make any sense.

We’ve seen various leaders in America and Europe, and we’ve had various leaders of our own — some were on borderline mental stability, that’s understandable; such things happen in the world. But what we’re seeing today — that creature currently at the helm of America — is truly cause for immense alarm, because there’s no logic to his actions. Today he says one thing, tomorrow he says something else, and the day after that, something else entirely. So far, he hasn’t turned his fury against us, hasn’t directed his frenzied outburst of aggression at us; moreover, he’s somehow holding back on this issue—he clearly believes that one must act in order. Right now, he already has two active fronts: Latin America, Venezuela, and Cuba, which he needs to hold onto — he is preparing for an invasion by imposing sanctions and organizing a blockade. He is directly embroiled in the war in the Middle East, which shows no signs of ending, and further down the agenda there is China and Taiwan. The Ukrainian issue is clearly not a priority for him right now. But if these aggressive actions were to succeed, everything would simply be moving closer to us.

We need to understand this clearly: Iran is now a shield for us and for China, because we are next. And, of course, for Trump to launch aggression on all fronts, especially in his current state of incompetence, is simply too much. But we need to understand who we’re dealing with. Any notion that we can somehow negotiate with this system, that we can find common ground with these forces — all of that has collapsed. We tried, we did our best, and, by the way, we did it very correctly. Because when Trump came in, he set out a fairly sound agenda, and quite decent, serious, and consistent people rallied around him. Now he’s driven them all away—he fired the last ones just yesterday. He said: “I only have my friend Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, and Lindsey Graham, and everyone else who doesn’t like these friends of mine is hated by all of America, including conservatives, the right, and the left.” First, this trio — they’re freaks, physically ugly; second, they’re absolutely repulsive, they have zero charisma. In other words, all the decent people in Trump’s circle have left or aren’t commenting on anything now. JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly have all taken a new stance.

Here’s what I want to say: Trump is in a hopeless position. That’s what needs to be understood. Therefore, the way he behaves both in war and in international politics in general is extremely dangerous. We need to be extremely cautious in such a situation.

Host: Let’s try to discuss this in a bit more detail, since there are many aspects of what you’ve said that warrant attention. Let’s start with the US and Israeli attack on Iran and Iran’s retaliatory strikes against the Middle Eastern monarchies. According to the latest information, the GDP of Kuwait and Qatar has already fallen by 14% and continues to decline: oil refineries are closing, and the entire oil industry in the region is stagnating. It is obvious that Iran is doing this deliberately. Judging even by Donald Trump’s words, which you quoted, he also agrees that the Gulf monarchies are no longer of interest to him as a source of oil. My next question is: who, in your opinion, benefits from this conflict? After all, the public, formal reasons were fabricated — we all understand that no one is even mentioning Iran’s nuclear weapons anymore. How would you define the original idea behind this conflagration? Who was supposed to win, who wants to win, and how?

Alexander Dugin: It seems to me that we are living on several levels at once: geopolitics, economics, and religious ideology. We generally believe that religious ideology is a whim that means nothing, because only material forces rule. But that is a mistake. The three parties to this conflict are largely motivated by visions of the end times, and these visions are diametrically opposed.

On the one hand, there is the idea of “Greater Israel” supported by Netanyahu: this is the war of the last days that he is waging against the so-called Amalek — Iran. In this struggle, the result must be the coming of the Messiah, and certain rituals are being prepared for this. The Sanhedrin has been established, red cows have been brought in, which must be sacrificed, and preparations are underway for the construction of the Third Temple. A high priest is being raised who does not touch the ground and is carried on a palanquin. An explosion is being prepared at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and just two days ago, for the first time in Israel’s history, religious services were banned during Ramadan. This is the reality of Israeli policy, which uses any means necessary to advance its messianic project.

Christian Zionism within Trump’s circle has also become a dominant force. Paula White, the leader of the evangelical dispensationalists who holds services at the White House, says that prophecy is being fulfilled, the end of the world is coming, which is why Israel is so important: let’s pray for it and kill all its enemies. The extent of religious fanaticism in Israel and the US should not be underestimated. Previously, this seemed like a minor whim, but now it has become a factor in major politics. Iran responds in kind, considering Trump and Netanyahu to be the Dajjal, the enemy. Geopolitics takes a back seat here.

Nevertheless, there is a certain logic to it. If Trump wants to establish the United States’ sole dominance, then he has an interest in severing economic ties between Russia and the rest of the world. Here, he is consistently following Biden’s line: sanctions, a ban on purchasing our oil, attacks on our tankers — he is encouraging all of this. On the other hand, all that remains is to shut down the second global energy production hub: the Middle East. America has its own oil and gas, and it is ready to sell them at exorbitant prices. Plus there’s Venezuela, which Trump considers already captured and occupied along with all its reserves. There you have an alternative source of global energy. This is a rigid, unipolar, hegemonic model.

The manner in which all this is being carried out resembles a paranoid postmodernist show or TV series about a bloodthirsty killer. The combination of the radical eschatology driving Israel, geopolitical conflict, and shifts in the energy balance paint a grim picture: Russia remains cut off from the world, a second source of resources is being taken out of commission, and all of this so that America can establish itself as the world’s hegemon, reigning over all in the coming “messianic times.”

Host: Let’s continue our conversation, but from a different angle. Trump is set to visit China; there are less than three weeks left until then. On the one hand, Beijing is the United States’ main geopolitical adversary — this is a fact that has been officially stated and is no secret. On the other hand, it is a country Washington cannot do without: China is the primary source of key resources and rare earth metals. Without them, American industry — from aviation to high-tech manufacturing — simply cannot function. How, in your opinion, can this dilemma be resolved in both Washington and Beijing? What impact could this visit actually have? There is even talk that China might force the US to adjust its policy in the Middle East by using its resource base as leverage. What are your thoughts on this?

Alexander Dugin: First of all, Trump announced today that he will not be traveling to China: his agenda is changing. What was planned three weeks in advance has been postponed until better times under current conditions — every minute counts here. Just recently, I was watching Western news channels: he said he wouldn’t go, let them send ships first.

In fact, there is a rational side to this: China is a massive pole in a multipolar world that must be reckoned with, just like Russia — for economic, political, military, and nuclear reasons. At the same time, it’s obvious that Trump doesn’t want to do that. He doesn’t want to reckon with anyone or anything, neither second-rate powers nor even first-rate ones. But so far, he hasn’t dared to start a direct conflict with China. Something is holding him back — perhaps the remnants of a previous, long-lost sense of reason. In principle, he isn’t ready to step onto such thin, confrontational ice.

Generally speaking, in his mind, the world is egocentric: there is only one decision-making center: himself. In fact, this is a very severe form of paranoia, where a person believes that only his “self” is consolidated and omnipotent, while everything else is an object of his power and will, which is obliged to obey. When someone does not obey, it provokes rage in him, a desire to take revenge and destroy. At the level of weaker targets, as he sees it, this succeeds: it succeeded with Maduro, it succeeded in eliminating Iran’s entire leadership, in supporting Israel in the destruction of Gaza, and now it is succeeding in subjugating Cuba and humiliating European partners by forcing them to act in the most pitiful manner. With those against whom he can pursue a policy of a paranoid center — where he is everything and the rest are nothing — he does so.

He views India and Japan as slaves. Apparently, the experience of Epstein’s island — this rule of absolute domination over children, over the weak, over victims — instilled in him such a monstrous, criminal manner of behavior. Trump behaves as if he were surrounded by Epstein’s victims: meek, powerless, unable to fight back. Epstein, to prevent his victims from biting him, knocked out their teeth — can you imagine? And Trump was a participant in these pedophile orgies. What is going on in his head? Who are we even dealing with? Right now, America is horrified by this.

We are dealing with a man of this psychological makeup. How does he view Russia and Iran? I think he sees both us and China as very dangerous competitors who could bear witness to these crimes and are capable of responding. That’s why, I believe, they truly hate us. But something is holding them back from attacking directly: too much depends on China and Russia in the economy, the military sphere, and politics. And he has another front to work on. Or, to be more precise, perhaps it’s no longer a front at all. I’m referring to Europe.

Host: You touched on the issue of Europe, which has once again found itself in an extremely strange position. First, Trump called on Europeans to help, then took offense at Starmer for offering help “at the wrong time,” and so on. In your view, does Europe today possess any agency at all — not only in its relations with Trump, but also in the context of the war in the Gulf, since it is Europe that suffers from this conflict in the first place? Has it retained the ability to influence any of the political developments currently unfolding?

Alexander Dugin: In this case, to continue the metaphor of Epstein’s island, Europe acts as an accomplice, as a guard or a laborer in the monstrous crimes committed by the main perpetrators. They have limited freedom, but in essence, they are simply employees of this island. They are not the main criminals, but they are not entirely victims either. Deep down, they might want to become “first-tier” players, but they understand that they can be cast aside at any moment and turned into victims. The Belgian Prime Minister spoke of the difference between a vassal and a slave, but in reality there is none: a vassal is treated with respect while being required to submit completely, whereas a slave is treated without any respect at all.

This is the position Europe finds itself in. If Trump wanted to pat it on the cheek and say, “Good, you serve me well, good job,” he would call it a “loyal vassal,” as he does when he is in a good mood. But if he gets angry, he treats his staff like slaves—he doesn’t pat them on the cheek, but bites them, hits them, throws an ashtray at their forehead.

The position of the vassal-slave is this: your master has changed, a madman has arrived, but what can you do? You can wait until he’s taken to a psychiatric clinic, or you can gradually sabotage things, saying that your department won’t carry out criminal operations. But then you’ll be fired or permanently relegated to the ranks of the victims. The contemporary European Union has little room to maneuver: I think they’re dreaming of the day when this nightmare will end, when the maniac will go away somewhere, and they can return to their status as proud vassals. For now, while Trump treats them like disobedient slaves, they try to resist, attempting to slip away from this chase to Epstein’s island, effectively finding themselves in the shoes of those forces that Trump treats as he pleases.

Here, everyone Trump deals with is de-subjectified: he is the sole subject, and everyone else is an object. Anyone who can be turned into an object, anyone who can be mocked with impunity, anyone who can be killed or raped— he does so. But Europe occupies an intermediate position: seemingly, these are also “guests” from the island who at any moment can become victims, reclassifying themselves from the class of rapists to the status of the raped. We, China, and great Iran — which is proves its dignity and unwillingness to become an object by refusing to be de-subjectified— are standing against this raging maniac. We are holding him back: our potential, our strategic nuclear weapons, our economy, our will, our president, and our society, which swears allegiance to traditional values, not Epstein’s values. We speak of sovereignty and are not prepared to play the role of vassals, even if we were to be pampered and coddled. We already tried our hand at this role in the 1990s, and we know how it ended.

Any negotiations with us and with China represent a severe psychological ordeal for Trump, because there he sees subjects. It is not so easy to de-subjectify us, and that is the main problem. What we need to do now is, while supporting Iran as much as possible, devise a counterstrategy, because such a world order cannot be allowed: we must figure out how to rein in this wild beast and place it in a secure zone.

Many people have been discussing how prescient our president was when he said that Kamala Harris would have been better. We all thought it was irony, assuming that Trump would do what he promised. It turned out our president was seeing the root of the matter. He is a remarkably perceptive man who sees further and deeper. What we are dealing with now is a global catastrophe: teetering on the brink of nuclear war precisely because a man who is frankly mentally unstable, with wild ideas, a deranged psyche, and obvious dementia, stands at the helm of a giant country. This is dangerous for everyone, so we need to think about how to save ourselves. By the way, it’s time for Europe to turn to us, because we are predictable.

Host: Let me continue on that very note. If we set Trump’s personality aside, we see that what is happening in the Middle East — an energy and economic blow — is inevitably leading Europe toward a full-scale catastrophe. Virtually all experts are writing about this. It turns out that the Europeans are walking to their own slaughter, just like lambs. I want to understand the reason for this behavior: is it a consequence of the short-sightedness and degradation of the elites, who simply do not realize that this crisis will bring them only impoverishment and economic collapse, or is it a conscious betrayal on the part of the European Union’s leadership, such as von der Leyen and others, who understand perfectly well where all this is leading, yet continue down this path? In your view, what is the real motivation behind Europe’s position, which is behaving so self-destructively?

Alexander Dugin: They simply have no choice. Do they really have one? They are simply part of this system; they are ordinary functionaries.

Host: But surely they can’t rise up against Trump, support Iran, Russia, China, and so on? Can you imagine that?

Alexander Dugin: No, of course not. Macron, that energetic politician whose orientation is unknown, or the BlackRock executive Merz, who looks like Himmler in a heavy sleep after death, or the absolute fool Starmer — are they supposed to take a stand for European sovereignty? All the politicians who could have moved in that direction — Schröder in Germany or figures in France like Mitterrand and Chirac — are gone. Those politicians were truly sovereign: even if they acted according to the rules of the Western world, according to Atlanticist rules, they possessed sovereignty.

Since then, there has been a series of rotations among European leaders, who have turned into mere puppets. They may be vain individuals, but they do not in the least reflect either the interests of European societies or the strategies of European geopolitics. In essence, they are part of a single American-centric system in which they have no freedom whatsoever. America’s globalist leaders framed this subordination of the EU elites in polite terms: they spoke of multilateralism, of cooperation, and claimed that “our partners’ opinions are very important to us.” It’s like an automated response: “Your opinion is very important to us,” but in reality, keep it to yourself.

Host: So, in your view, what is this: stupidity or betrayal?

Alexander Dugin: This is the result of a massive process. It didn’t happen overnight. It’s not just stupidity or betrayal. Europe effectively lost its sovereignty after 1945. As soon as the US became a superpower, it took responsibility over Europe’s major military-political and, later, economic issues, and the Old World’s authority only diminished. Of course, European leaders have repeatedly attempted to break free from this American hegemony and establish Europe as a sovereign actor with its own interests, goals, objectives, and values — just recall de Gaulle, who withdrew from NATO altogether. But these efforts failed, because Washington would say: “Why would you want to separate? We share common values; we respect you; you are our partners.” They were called partners, but in reality remained vassals who were treated “well.” “You don’t need to strengthen your own identity; that’s our job—we’ll think for you.” As they used to say in Germany: “Stop worrying about your conscience; the Führer thinks for you” — the same thing is happening now: “European leaders, Washington thinks for you.”

And they waited until a maniac appeared at the center of this system. Of course, they didn’t expect to find themselves under the thumb of a completely insane ruler who began to openly mock and humiliate them in public. He’s taking their energy resources, and when asked “why?” he replies: “I wanted to and I did it; there is no international law, there is only me and my idea of what is moral.” If you’re interested in oil—please, go to the Strait of Hormuz and fight the Iranians, but I’m staying out of it. It’s quite possible that any day now he’ll announce: “I’ve won, America has dealt a crushing blow, Iran no longer exists, I’m washing my hands of it.” And everything will remain the same: bombings of Israel, explosions at new bases. But Trump will insist that it’s all fake news. He’s already claiming that all the damage Israel is suffering is just artificial intelligence, that not a single rocket has penetrated the “Iron Dome,” that everything is fine. In such a hallucinatory, solipsistic world, you can declare victory for yourself and Europe will be left to deal with the consequences.

And where can she go? There’s zero freedom there. These leaders don’t like Trump, and who could possibly like him anyway? Looking at Melania Trump, I wonder: what’s going on in her mind? Who has she spent her life with? It’s truly terrifying. How can anyone love someone like that? You can tolerate it if you’ve been enslaved, but nothing more. She has such a stern expression because she understands: things are very bad; she is a victim. Perhaps she’s even sending signals when she says, “I’m a clairvoyant, I’m a visionary” —essentially screaming, “Save me.”

Host: Then she knows much more than we do…

Alexander Dugin: She definitely knows more than we do, and I think this knowledge is terribly ruining her life. But let’s leave her be. As for Europe, it has found itself in a position not even of a beloved wife, but of someone far more miserable on this Epstein Island into which the entire West has turned. European leaders have “fallen into a trap”: they didn’t want this, they dreamed of a different status, they wanted to be the ones setting the rules, but it didn’t work out. I don’t feel the slightest bit sorry for them. They deserve what’s happening to them, and even worse. That’s why we need to rely solely on our own strength, win this war, draw closer to our allies — Iran, North Korea, China — and seek other partners for a multipolar world. We must convince everyone who is still capable of exercising even a modicum of sovereignty of what threatens them if this hegemony persists, and build our multipolar world.

If revolutions occur in Europe and the local liberal, globalist elites are overthrown — well, I think we’ll extend a helping hand to them, a “lifeline,” or even a whole series of lifelines. But for that to happen, they must first deal with those on whom they have become dependent. The peoples of Europe are suffering twice over: they are ruled by maniacs who, in turn, have found themselves under the thumb of an even more terrifying maniac. Can you imagine what it’s like for them? The most important thing is that they’ve now even stopped being fed. Whereas vassals and slaves were at least provided with sustenance in the past, now the master has refused to feed them, and everyone else has no intention of stepping in to help. Epstein and Bill Gates once discussed what to do with the poor and concluded that they should be eliminated. In fact, perhaps that is exactly how this plan is working right now.

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

The idea of progress and treating the world as ready-to-hand is bound up with several archetypal figures or gestalts — to use Ernst Jünger’s terminology — which became leading icons in European culture over the Modern and Postmodern eras. They inspire both supporters of liberalism and Marxism — a priori progressive ideologies — as well as proponents of the so-called “Third Way” and conservatives. These figures are used to lend the Modernist paradigm apologetics drawn from Antiquity, constructing a false narrative of “objective linear progress” and the “special role of modern man, who creates development and civilization in this world.”

In their own time and context, some of these figures represented marginal figures and stories of titanic failure inevitably followed by punishment; others illustrated transitional moments in modern history. Through their examples, we can trace how archetypes of inferiority and failure which are based on hubris (ὕβρις, presumptuous encroachment upon the Divine Order), have been established and normalized along with corresponding ideologies and value systems. Thus, we see how the genuine heroism of Achilles and ecstatic or ascetic sacredness have been replaced with thoroughly modern, manufactured archetypes and simulacra.

Prometheus

The first figure in this series is Prometheus along with his humans.

The name Prometheus means “thinking ahead” or “foresight.” Prometheus is the brother of Epimetheus, “the one who thinks afterward,” “with hindsight” —the son of the Titan Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene, according to Hesiod. In his Theogony, Hesiod expounds a later tradition of stories connected with Prometheus and the regression of human generations (known as the succession of metaphysical ages).

Prometheus, who fought on the side of the gods in the Titanomachy, was sympathetic to humans and decided to deceive Zeus during the dividing up of the carcass of the sacrificial bull at Mekone. Through cunning, he forced Zeus to choose the worst parts — the bones and fat — leaving the meat hidden for the people. For this deception, Zeus deprived humans of fire, which Prometheus later stole and gave to humans, defying the will of the Thunderer.

Here we encounter a violation of the sacrificial order, a refusal to give to the heavenly father, Zeus, what is due to him according to the sacred order — the best part of the sacrifice. And in this, Prometheus foreshadows the figure of the bourgeois with his hatred of sacrifice — as described by the French sociologist of religion Georges Bataille. For the bourgeois, the sacrifice of a pig — which is a matter of routine for the peasant — is conceived as a mad act, as an irrational, foolish waste, for by killing the pig, he kills capital. The pig can give birth to piglets; they will multiply the herd, thereby generating capital — so the bourgeois thinks. But sacrifice abolishes this, wipes it out “into nothingness,” and is thus branded by the bourgeois as a “foolish act” and something that must be abolished. The idea of sacrifice is repugnant and unthinkable to the bourgeois, and this stance toward sacrifice is already anticipated by Prometheus in his crime.

In the Protagoras dialogue, Plato retells this story in the following way. Prometheus’ brother, Epimetheus, distributed qualities and gifts to all living beings, but out of a misunderstanding he gave the wrong lot to man. Prometheus then stole fire and the skills of Hephaestus and Athena, and gave the knowledge of crafts to people. But he could not give them the law of living together in community which Zeus processed. Seeing the increasing lawlessness and quarrels between men who could not live together, Zeus sent Hermes to establish truth and shame among men to strengthen their relations and become law.

Athena and Hephaestus’ skill and Zeus’ truth together made people complicit in the Divine lot. Prometheus’ sympathy for mankind is revealed in the story of the origin of the last (fifth) human generation with whom Hesiod wished he did not have to spend his time. According to this myth, after the flood that destroyed the previous generation, Prometheus created people out of fire, earth, and clay, but they turned out to be defective and imperfect. Athena or Zeus then breathed Spirit into them, thereby finally making them into humans, hence their twofold nature and the name of their generation, “Promethean.” Prometheus loved and cared for this mankind (the “last people”), but his rebellion against the law and will of Zeus for humans’ sake only caused them more suffering. For the theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora and instructed Hephaestus to chain Prometheus to a cliff in Colchis, where an eagle pecks at his liver every day.

Prometheus’ punishment is the subject of the famous tragedy by Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, which radically differs from the Greek’s predominantly solar-Divine orientation versus anti-divine Titanism. Aeschylus sings praises of Prometheus and exalts his feat, but remains silent on the grief that he brought to people. Aeschylus therefore differs radically from Hesiod, in whose work Zeus sees Prometheus’ tricks in advance.

Hesiod’s story is a story of the fall, whereas Aeschylus is optimistic about progress and Prometheus’ gifts to people:

One short word sums up all you need to know:

all human arts derive from Prometheus.

Prometheus continues to taunt Zeus and predicts his fall — as the Seer, he knows this secret. For refusing to give it up and for his impudence towards Hermes, Zeus casts Prometheus into Tartarus, whither he falls while uttering words typical of a genius of deceit and lies:

This onslaught from Zeus

comes at me openly

to fill me with fear.

O my revered mother,

O sky, whose encircling

light we all share,

you see:

how unjustly I suffer!

The figure of Prometheus, his message of rebellion against the supreme authority of the heavenly deity Zeus, and his closeness to human suffering, gained popularity during the Enlightenment. In his book Western Eschatology, Jacob Taubes writes: “In the shadow of Christ, Prometheus rises.”

Later, the dynamism of German idealism became the foundation for a new mythological conception of Prometheus, and Schelling unambiguously called Prometheus a symbol of philosophy. Taubes emphasizes: “Is it not evident that the tendency to posit the infinite in the finite and the secondary in the primary prevails in all philosophical discourse and inquiry? In the realm of Prometheus, the name of the Antichrist even becomes an honorary title.”

Thus, Prometheus became a symbol of struggle against tyranny and authority, including religion. Prometheus was seen as a humanist, the giver of reason (ratio), Modernity, and the patron of progress. He was praised by Percy and Mary Shelley, and Byron’s “Prometheus” depicted the idea of the light of rational reason and development leading humanity to prosperity:

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,

To render with thy precepts less

The sum of human wretchedness,

And strengthen Man with his own mind…

Here, the Titan’s gift of crafts to man are identified with progress in the field of technology and the Industrial Revolution. Enthusiasm for Prometheus was also expressed by Karl Marx, who went on to author a thoroughly materialist philosophy. Praising Prometheus, Marx called him the “saint of the philosophical calendar.”

Prometheus was also proclaimed to be a role model by Adolf Hitler, and in the United States of America the figure of his brother Atlas became the personification of the radical liberal-capitalist ideas of Ayn Rand’s objectivism. According to Friedrich Georg Jünger, Prometheus is the eternal instigator, the embodiment of incessant, active becoming and the desire for the new (as in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze’s “desire-machines”)

The Titan’s prophecy of Zeus’ fall is often interpreted as the onset of the “Gestalt of the Worker”, to use Jünger’s term, that is the era of machines in whose Titanic noise the Divinities do not dwell and from which they withdraw: “Where there are no gods, there are Titans,” writes Friedrich Georg Jünger. He adds:

Compared to his father Iapetus, Prometheus appears an innovator. He stands out from his circle and he stands alone. Although he belongs to the Titans, he advises Zeus in the battle waged against him. He moves way from his Titanic essence in its original form, diverges from it. But he is just as distant from the Divinities, and in connection with this stands the fact that he appears a loner; from all sides he is illuminated by light.

Prometheus is the adversary of the Olympians who inspires humanity to push its gift to the limit in the form of reason and modern technology. Thus, according to Martin Heidegger, humanity finally drives out the Divinities.

Daedalus and Icarus

Another figure of this sort from Antiquity was the great master engineer and craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the labyrinth in Crete where the bastard son of King Minos, the Minotaur, was imprisoned. Languishing in captivity at Minos, Daedalus decided to flee the island to his native Hellas. “The heavens are free, let us fly aloft them!”, the master exclaimed as he proceeded to create something unprecedentedly new: wings made of wax and feathers in the likeness of birds. Having crafted the wings, Daedalus instructed Icarus on how to fly with them:

“Let me warn you, Icarus,

to take the middle way,

in case the moisture weighs down your wings,

if you fly too low,

or if you go too high,

the sun scorches them.

Travel between the extremes…”

Daedalus and Icarus successfully leave Crete, and while flying over the other islands, people mistake them to be unknown Divinities. Winged and inspired, Icarus violates his father’s order to stay in the middle space and, playing too far, rises steeply up towards the sun. The fiery disk of Apollo burns his wings and melts the wax that holds the feathers together, and Icarus falls into the sea.

The story of Icarus, the son of the great artisan Daedalus, is very revealing. Firstly, it emphasizes that people belong to the middle world. Even while in flight, Daedalus instructs his son to keep to the mid space and not descend to the water (the hypochthonic level) or ascend too far up to the sun.

Secondly, for the Greeks, the sun was the face of Apollo. The Neoplatonists interpreted the Greek name Apollon, Ἀπόλλων, to be α-πολλα, that is “not-many”, or the One, ἕν.

Thirdly, Icarus’ tragic case shows us how fascination with artificial wings, which are otherwise appropriate and function in the world of people as long as they are not taken to overstep limits, leads a person to approach excess and blindly attempt to rise to the Sun-Apollo. It is not artificial wings that ascend to the Divinities, but ecstatic inspiration of the mind and spirit.

There is divine potential within man that no technology is capable of revealing, for technology is deeply rooted in the chthonic depths. In some sense, man ascends to the One only naked, i.e., cleansed of material aberrations and attachments. The illusory power of technology is fraught with deceit. For being entranced by technology, mankind pays with scorched wings and a grave in the depths of waters.

Faust

The third figure takes us to the Middle Ages.

The legends of Dr. Johann Faust outstripped the real figure already in the Reformation, around which time they became part of German culture and were often mentioned by diverse authors. But the story of Faust found its most complete and famous form in what would be the opus magnum of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe himself is also reflected in Faust as a person who expressed his era and its contradictions.

Like Johann Wolfgang himself, Goethe’s scientist Faust is seized with passion over progress, the rigorous sciences, and the new picture of the world, but at the same time he is well-versed in alchemy, a connoisseur of grimoires, and even practices the invocations of theurgic magic. Thus, he correlates with the paradigm of the “Rosicrucian Enlightenment” described by Frances Yates, who attributes to the “founding fathers” of the natural sciences and Modernity a dualism of interests and aspirations, a state of transition and/or rift between the occult-mystical Renaissance and secular Modernity. The story of Faust illustrates man’s final liberation from nostalgia for the past and how he finally comes to stand on the side of the New Time of Modernity.

At the beginning of Faust, the doctor is depicted as a man who has become “jaded” with knowledge, whom little satisfies anymore. In yet another attempt to overcome his apathy, Faust takes on translating the New Testament into German, and it is in this fragment of the work that the changes in the thinking and worldview of Enlightenment man are fully revealed. In the spirit of the deism of Naturphilosophie, Faust begins to not simply translate Scripture, but to correct it in the spirit of the times.

It is written, “In the beginning was the Word. “

How soon I’m stopped! Who’ll help me to go on?

I cannot concede that words have such high worth

and must, if properly inspired,

translate the term some other way.

It is written: “In the beginning was the Mind. “

Reflect with care upon this first line,

and do not let your pen be hasty!

Can it be mind that makes all operate?

I’d better write: “In the beginning was the Power!”

Yet, even as I write this down,

something warns me not to keep it.

My spirit prompts me, now I see a solution

and boldly write: “In the beginning was the Act.”

This passage reflects the shift in perceptions of the sacred (in this instance, in the context of Christianity) from philosophical and priestly (word and thought) to martial (strength) and, finally, artisanal (deed). Faust’s interpretations echo the first steps of Ernst Jünger’s “Worker”, who is enraptured by the affairs of production and interprets everything else through this lens.

The doctor is distracted from further translating Scripture by an obsessive spirit, whose advice Faust follows to invoke Mephistopheles. Goethe portrays the Devil in this figure, but he also bears the markings of the Enlightenment. He enters the room dressed as a student, and he is slippery and not as omnipotent and unstoppable as some of the Titans. The Mephistopheles of Goethe’s Faust is closest of all to a human and acts as a complete double of Faust himself. Mephistopheles introduces himself thusly:

I am the Spirit of Eternal Negation,

and rightly so, since all that gains existence

is only fit to be destroyed; that’s why

it would be best if nothing ever got created.

Accordingly, my essence is what you call sin, destruction,

or — to speak plainly — Evil.

Mephistopheles appears as the embodiment of nihilism: the line “spirit that is always used to denying” speaks not about the completion of negation at some point, but an endless process of negating and denying again and again, an eternal “no.” Here the Devil mirrors the Titanism of becoming in the process of the nihilation of the beingful world, its taking-into-nothing.

Mephistopheles proposes Faust a deal: the spirit promises Faust the fulfillment of all his desires, which are different from the dreams of ordinary people, but on the condition that he is to play this game forever. Faust and Mephistopheles agree that death will overtake the doctor at the height of his fame as soon as he exclaims “Moment, stop!” But the evil genius of nihilism knows no pauses and stops. Only the Divinities, who reside in eternity in heaven, far from the world of becoming, do. Man, freezing for a moment, is destroyed by the flow of time descending into the abyss. The connection between Mephistopheles and the New Time of Modernity is emphasized by the fact that, having changed his appearance, he instructs a student who accidentally looks at Faust on how to comprehend science, and at the same time explains how, in general, such is a pointless engagement. At the end of the conversation, he leaves the thirsty student an autograph that is a quotation from the Book of Genesis: “And you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Mephistopheles thus equates the science of the Enlightenment with the apple of the serpent of Eden.

Faust and the Devil embark on journeys to the edges of the world, visiting countries and eras and meeting along the way different people, mythical beings, Divinities, demons, emperors and kings. Over the course of their wanderings, Faust loses the nobility for which he had been revered by ordinary people at the beginning of the story, and indulges in deceit, adultery, lies, and so on. By the end of the drama, we meet already our contemporary Faust, who says of himself:

I wish to rule and have possessions!

Acts alone count — glory is nothing.

Faust is already obsessed with pure action and realizing the will to power and property — fully in the spirit of the Protestant ethics of capitalism. He calls himself not a “likeness of God”, but a “king of nature” who has rejected the desire to get rid of boredom in an impulse towards God, opting instead to remain within the element of matter. The combination of positive and negative will is resolved by the latter’s victory, as the doctor closes himself off to Being, with which phase begins his fast track to death. Faust embraces the industrial idea of conquering the forces of nature. Watching the ebb and flow of the waves — a “useless waste of strength” — the spirit of the Arbeiter says:

It can be done! - Although the tides may flood,

when there’s a hill they gently press beyond it;

however arrogant their motions,

the slightest mound confronts them proudly,

the slightest depth attracts them to itself.

And so I quickly worked out plans,

resolving to obtain a precious satisfaction:

to bar the shore to the imperious sea,

narrow the limits of the ocean’s great expanse,

and force the waters back into themselves.

I’ve worked out every step within my mind;

this is what I want, what you must help me do!

Faust adventurously acquires for himself some coastal lands, where he unfolds a grandiose construction site to remodel the coast. Mephistopheles’ servants, which are lemurs (an image Ernst Jünger used in his books to depict the Gestapo and SS) build a huge palace, drain the swamps, and construct a dam. Faust is delighted by the sounds of shovels and the sight of crowds of workers, all the while as Mephistopheles has already given the order to dig his grave. Looking over his achievements, Faust pronounces the last dithyramb for man free from everything and capable of achieving happiness on earth by his own will.

Wishing to stop the highest moment, Faust drops dead. In Goethe’s Faust, with God’s permission, angels save Faust’s soul from Mephistopheles. Goethe’s drama thus reflects the spirit of the times: for his merits as a worker wishing to ennoble a person with will and freedom, angels save him from the Devil. This unthinkable substitution of sin for virtue in Goethe’s work is sanctioned by the God of deism and rationalism. Having lost the dispute over Faust’s soul, Mephistopheles in fact won all of humanity.

Man aspired to become God, but was content to be the king of nature. Negative will wins out, opening the way for Modernity and its strategies. But the modern Faustian man is not quite yet the “last one”, despite his anti-theistic struggle and progressism. He dreams of grand projects and transforming the natural world in accordance with his own (albeit Titanic) will. This is the proportionate antithesis to the Divine transfiguration. Faust is still struggling with boredom, still trying to inspire his being with engineering projects.

But when it comes to the contemporary man of the 21st century, we can recognize how he has largely lost the spirit of Faust and his passion. The last global projects of humanity, largely fueled by the worker ideology of socialism and the property of capitalism, ended with the first explorations of space. Thereafter, man gradually stepped back from global projects to local concerns with the “lifeworld” (Alfred Schutz). Even the space programs are already commonplace relicts. The world of media, virtuality, social networks, and the “Internet of things” (the third and fourth industrial revolutions) are today more important, more powerful, and more significant than the ideals of the second “classical” industrial revolution.

Active negative will dissipates into negative lack of will, or “willessness.” Postmodern man is a tired Faust; he has not yet died, but the boredom has overcome him. The routine of daily operations, messaging, Internet surfing, and consuming signs constitute his familiar and cozy, meaningless world in an endless stream of news feeds, pics, quote fragments, and reposts.

In retrospect, we cannot imagine Faust abandoning his engineering vision and his own militant way of transforming nature for the sake of a new TV series, or exclaiming “Stop, moment!” when his pic or post on Facebook gets 1000 likes. This is inconceivable and does not match his scale, but it is completely complementary to the last humanity that Mephistopheles wins and inherits. His eternal spirit of negation becomes embodied in the endless streams of social networks and media and infinite generations of AI-slop.

The Faustian spirit of insatiable desire for knowledge and transformation became a kind of archetype of the man of Modernity, who turned the beingful world into ready-to-hand raw materials. This was remarkably described by Oswald Spengler in the following words:

“The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained up in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the factory-worker. Out of a quite small branch of manual work - namely, the preparation-economy - there has grown up (in this one Culture alone) a mighty tree that casts its shadow over all the other vocations - namely, the economy of the machine-industry. It forces the entrepreneur not less than the workman to obedience. Both become slaves, and not masters, of the machine, that now for the first time develops is devilish and occult power.”

The enlightened creator type, that of the engineer and science expert who transforms the world and revels in progress, has penetrated the European mind so deeply that today even conservatives of various kinds, including those among the “New Right” and Traditionalists, right-wing anti-globalists, or even such parodies as the virtual Alt-Right all strive to preserve this figure and somehow revive it.

Exalting praise for machines and man’s fusion with automata could already be found in the Italian futurism of Marinetti as a common feature of the obsession with technology prominent in early 20th-century aesthetics and culture. This line was continued by the apologetics for the Faustian spirit expounded by Alain de Benoist’s former student, Guillaume Faye, the theorist of “Archeofuturism”, who proposes to “saddle” the beast of technology and affirm a compromise between pagan values and the ancient understanding of tekhne on the one hand, and modern technology, transhumanism, and futurism on the other. The same lines are continued today by his epigones like Jason Reza Jorjani and Constantin von Hoffmeister, who exploit the trashy aesthetics of 1970s–’90s pulp fiction horror, right-wing web-punk and vaporwave, and “esoteric metapolitics.” In the same vein are Alexander Dugin’s recent calls for “retrofuturism,” the creation of “Orthodox AI,” and other forms of “techno-traditional sovereignty.”

For our part, we have shown the grounds of the impossibility of all these chimerical illusions and deconstructed them in our book Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours.

Lack of consistency and due depth of reflection on one’s own history and “evolution” hinders the the so-called “(new) Right” from calling into question the spirit of Faust and the allegedly positive role of Prometheus. From this follows the obvious fact that modern conservatism (which as a term and phenomena is already extremely ephemeral) is rooted in the paradigm of Modernity and cannot step beyond it; it is not able to take the one more fundamental step towards greater consistency and authenticity in defending the interests and values of the world of Tradition.

Contemporary Rightists are right to reproach, expose, and fight the absolute adepts of progressism — the cultural-Marxist Left, the feminist episteme, and partially the propagandists of technological singularity — but their positive program de facto does not mean overcoming the discourse of Modernity and progress, but rather returning to earlier positions within the same linear-progressive paradigm. Whereas, in truth, what both contemporary radical Traditionalists and right-wing conservatives do not like is, in essence, a refraction of the same Promethean and Faustian aspirations and platforms, only on other planes. Let us recall that Prometheus was an exemplary figure for all three of the political theories of Modernity.

This is comparable to a beam of light which, falling into a prism, is scattered into a wide spectrum of shades. Therefore, calls to discard, for instance, radical social constructivism, gender theory, and cultural Marxism in the social sphere and values, are all well and good, but, at the same time, we hear calls to emphasize and support scientific-technological progress at every turn, whether it be Elon Musk’s techno-utopian nonsense, the outright dictatorship of Peter Thiel and Palantir, or China.

The resultant situation is nothing more than a contradictory compromise that will once again take us back to square one due to the inevitability and irreversibility of progress, which always touches and affects all spheres of human life. It is worth remembering that Faust concluded his pact with the Devil, a point which should be especially relevant to those on the Right who consider themselves champions of Christian values. Indeed, “eschatological-conservative” Iran has been the leader in sex-change operations and plastic surgery. Whenever technology “neutrally” proposes possibilities and solutions, conservatives’ values always end up being flexible.

From the point of view of classical Antiquity and pagan traditions, we are dealing with Titanic theomachy, with unbridled hubris. In other words, casus Faust-Prometheus boils down to the question: the Divinities or the Titans? The Sacred or the Gestell? Rejection or capitulation? This is Europe’s great problem, for Europe has opened Pandora’s box with its own hands.

Translated by Jafe Arnold

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