Réfléchir & Agir: David Engels, you are an historian, and yet your discourse is also strongly political. How did this concern for the political come to you?

David Engels: My interest in the political follows naturally from my work as a historian, marked as it is by a fascination with civilizational cycles. Born in 1979 in Verviers, in Belgium, within a German-speaking community, I grew up with a hybrid identity, halfway between the Francophone and Germanophone worlds, which led me to adopt a resolutely European perspective: instead of an attachment to a nation, I feel a deep and visceral love for European civilization.

My studies in history, philosophy, and economics at Aachen then forged my comparatist vision of history, notably through the discovery of the work of Oswald Spengler — a vision I tried to integrate even into my university teaching once I had been appointed professor of Roman history at the Université libre de Bruxelles in 2008.

The publication of my book Le Déclin (The Decline) in 2013, which compared the crisis of the European Union to that of the Roman Republic, then marked a real turning point in my biography, for I was increasingly solicited by the media to speak about current politics and about my view of identitarian questions. My emigration to Poland in 2018, where I worked as a political analyst at the Instytut Zachodni, multiplied the occasions to intervene in public debate, because the European identitarian crisis, which I have long observed with disquiet, made itself felt above all in the stormy debate between the conservatism of the Visegrád states and Brussels’ attempts to impose a woke ideology throughout the European Union; and it is in this context that I developed the idea of hespérialisme1 — Hesperialism — in order to defend what remains of our civilization.

R&A: You rightly speak of the globalist project of métissage2 of our Western societies, an obligatory stage in the coming establishment of a world state. Your assessment is harsh but lucid: “Yes, we are heading straight into the wall — and afterwards will come the beginning of the civil wars.” Like us, do you think the electoral path is hopeless, and that only a civil war can pull us out of this long process of decadence?

DE: First, I confess I do not much believe in the imminent advent of a genuine world state, since great powers such as India, Russia, or China will always resist it fiercely. In the Western world, however, the globalist project, borne along by a materialist universalism, does indeed accelerate the disintegration of identities and leads to the rise of opaque supranational institutions weaving an inextricable web among all the states integrated into this system.

From this point of view, my comparison with the Roman Republic in Le Déclin reveals striking parallels with the past: mass migrations, asymmetrical wars, social polarization, the collapse of tradition, the transformation of political systems into oligarchies, and so on. These dynamics led Rome into civil wars, followed by a conservative authoritarian regime. Will we follow the same destiny? It is probable.

That said, I do not see this civil war as a deliberate choice or a desirable option, but as a regrettable fatality — inevitable though it be — flowing from present tendencies. To be sure, the electoral path, rigged though it is by elites largely disconnected from civilizational realities, is not entirely without hope, but it would demand an ideological awakening and a mobilization around European identity (in its true sense, of course, and not in its globalized Brussels version).

Hesperialism, the European civilizational patriotism that I defend in numerous books, seeks to encourage such an awakening by restoring a genuine identitarian pride — but time is pressing.

R&A: Precisely: what is this Hesperialism you propose in your book Défendre l’Europe civilisationnelle (Defending Civilizational Europe)?

DE: Hesperialism means a third way between globalist Euro-federalism and nationalist sovereigntism. It proposes a civilizational patriotism, unifying Europe around its cultural and spiritual identity without denying the nations. Faced with the “great confusion” — the erosion of traditions, wokeism, multiculturalism — Hesperialism advocates a rational return to transcendence, embodied in Christianity, and to European pride. Concretely, it is a matter of strengthening European cooperation in strategic domains (defense, borders, research) while restoring the subsidiarity of the nations.

Inspired by the thousand-year ideal of the Sacrum Imperium, the “Holy Roman Empire,” which allied unity and diversity, Hesperialism seeks to make European identity an enviable ideal, like the Romanitas under Augustus, which transformed an ethnic identity into a civilizational one.

Hic et nunc, this demands above all a genuine cultural revolution, without which a political transition will be impossible: reviving the faith, reappropriating our culture, uniting patriots in all the European countries, creating exemplary “parallel societies” such as I describe them in my book Que faire? (What Is To Be Done?), and above all by forming a true elite for the future before it is too late.

R&A: Will it not take a still greater crisis — empty refrigerators — for the white European peoples to rise up? But are they still capable of it?

DE: Indeed, the current political system excels at pushing back collapse from year to year by accumulating colossal debts — financial, migratory, demographic — and deferring them onto future generations, all while maintaining a surprising docility among the citizenry. This inertia is explained not only by propaganda, but also by European civilization’s slow entry into “post-history,” where the individual, deprived of the civilizational life force (élan), concentrates on his daily comfort, without higher ideals. This phenomenon, observable in all great civilizations in their final phase, singularly limits the capacity of Europeans to rise up. As in Rome, a few awakenings will always be possible, but they risk being confined to a mere change of elites rather than a collective remaking.

Certainly, a major crisis — “empty refrigerators,” for instance — could trigger reactions of that kind, but spiritual and identitarian disintegration renders European peoples’ capacity to unite behind a positive common project uncertain. Moreover, in order to give a framework to such an awakening, a patriotic elite would have to be formed, a bearer of a vision such as Hesperialism, so as to guarantee that a future upheaval might lead to that “rational return to tradition” which I defend in my new book Défendre l’Europe civilisationnelle.

R&A: This decadence has been recounted in minute detail alongside that of the Roman Empire… Juvenal has not aged a day, and neither have historians like Gibbon or MacMullen. Your book Le Déclin showed this very well, comparing the end of the Roman Republic (first century BC) with our own era…

DE: The Republic, like present-day Europe, was marked by mass migrations, demographic collapse, a decline of traditional religiosity, unprecedented social polarization, a crisis of the family, a first form of globalization, and, of course, the transformation of a participatory political system into an oligarchy, thereby provoking the rise of populism. These parallels, which were moreover already rather well intuited by Spengler, rest upon a progressive loss of transcendence and tradition in favor of a destructive materialism and individualism.

And if we widen our field of vision, similar parallelisms can be found with the late phases of most of the other great civilizations — for example the Warring States in China, or the Mazdakite disturbances in Iran. Each time, civilizations emptied of their true essence and identity see the ideals of a materialist pseudo-humanism driven to absurdity, undergo the advent of Caesarism, and tip over into civil disturbances that systematically usher in an authoritarian and conservative regime — that of Augustus, for instance, or of Han Gaozu, or of Khosrow.

R&A: You point to the attacks suffered by every traditional model. It is a veritable enterprise of generalized demolition… Scipio Africanus did no better at Carthage…

DE: Indeed, in my book Défendre l’Europe civilisationnelle, the chapter “The Great Confusion” describes in detail a profound identitarian crisis touching every aspect of our existence. This “confusion” is not unique, but Europe, borne along by its Faustian spirit — an unbridled quest for the infinite, once toward God, today toward matter — pushes self-destruction to an unprecedented degree. The deep cause is the abandonment of transcendence, replaced by a glorification of human omnipotence.

This reversal engenders multiple symptoms: the deconstruction of national and European identities, the erosion of traditional values (family, religion, community), and the rise of a materialist universalism embodied in wokeism. This ideology, far from being an accident, is the logical result of a rationalism pushed to absurdity, one that denies civilizational specificities. Only a reconstruction founded upon transcendence and civilizational patriotism can counter this dynamic and thus inaugurate the final phase of our civilization.

R&A: Concerning the family, one often speaks of LGBT propaganda, of abortion, and so on, but you rightly point out that the increasingly frequent separation of adults accustoms children to an affective relativism and to the absence of a father figure…

DE: Precisely. Frequent separations, encouraged by an individualistic and hedonistic culture, shatter the emotional stability of children, exposing them to a dangerous emotional relativism. The absence of a father figure, often bound up with these ruptures, deprives the young of a model of authority and responsibility, which is essential to social cohesion, as well as deprives children of the experience of a lasting polarity — or rather complementarity — between a masculine and a feminine familial pole.

To this are added ideological pressures, such as LGBT propaganda or the trivialization of abortion, which further relativize traditional family structures. These tendencies, unthinkable without the abandonment of transcendence and the desacralization of marriage, weaken the family cell, that true pillar of European civilization. That said, we find similar crises in just about all the other great civilizations, as well as the political will to “restore” the family once the crisis has been surmounted. Alas, this would require a return to values of duty and permanence impossible to impose politically and in the short term…

R&A: What will your next book be?

DE: My next book will be a novel exploring a future Europe in full decomposition. The narrator, wrongly accused and hunted, crosses the continent from Poland to France, by way of Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, meeting idealists, activists, traditionalist influencers, and cynical politicians. A blend of travel narrative, satire, and introspective meditation, it offers a critical — though not unsympathetic — autopsy of the European right, overwhelmed by the identitarian crisis…

Originally published in Réfléchir & Agir no. 88, Winter 2025

Interview conducted by Pierre Gillieth

Translated by Alexander Raynor

David Engels’ What Is To Be Done? Living with the Decline of Europe is coming soon from Arktos.

READ MORE from Arktos:

For a European Awakening is a selection of well-argued essays from the French New Right, where identitarian authors wrestle with ideas about ecology, history, and beauty. However, it is not simply an exposé of important themes and responses to key issues of our day but a call to action.

These essays explore questions about man’s relationship to his land, and how that territory shapes and defines him; questions about man’s role in nature as one of her children ‘shaped by thousands of years of long patience’.

In these pages, the authors point out the necessity for beauty in our world, to ‘re-enchant the world’ instead of slumbering in the dull muck of utilitarianism. As we rise to this task, should we grow discouraged by the naysayers and ‘deconstructors’ of European culture and tradition, we are called to remember Hölderlin’s words that ‘where danger lies, salvation grows’.

Essays by Philippe Conrad, Rémy Soulié, Henri Levavasseur, Jean-Philippe Antoni, Jean-François Gautier, Thibaud Cassel, Alix Marmin, Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Guillaume Travers, Olivier Eichenlaub, Anne-Laure Blanc, Paul Éparvier, Grégoire Gambier, and Alain de Benoist.

Nearly thirty-five years after its first French translation — long since impossible to find — Armin Mohler’s La Révolution conservatrice en Allemagne (1918–1932) (German original: Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932)1 has at last been reissued by Éditions Ars Magna, in a new edition enriched with a previously unpublished preface and afterword by Alain de Benoist.

Far more than a historical summa on the German right under Weimar, this major work offers nothing less than a morphology of worldviews. Behind the diversity of authors and schools, Mohler brings to light a single way of thinking about time, history, and action. This is essential reading for understanding one of the most fertile intellectual matrices of the twentieth century.

There are books that time surrounds with an almost legendary aura, especially when their rarity turns them into objects of quest for the most curious readers. Such was long the fate of Armin Mohler’s study devoted to the Conservative Revolution in Germany. Defended in 1949 as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Karl Jaspers and published the following year, the book quickly became one of the major references for anyone seeking to understand the intellectual ferment of the German right under the Weimar Republic.

Reissued a first time in 1972 and expanded with an imposing bibliography, then again in 1989, it was translated into French in 1993 from that third edition, but in a print run so limited that it soon became unobtainable. If the name of Mohler and that of his book left their mark, few were those who could actually read it. Its reappearance from Éditions Ars Magna, enriched with a previously unpublished preface and afterword by Alain de Benoist, thus fills a long-standing gap.

A Worldview

The very phrase “Conservative Revolution” is enough to surprise. It seems to unite two terms we have grown accustomed to contrasting. Yet it is precisely in this apparent contradiction that the whole fertility of the formula resides. By it Mohler designates neither a conservatism eager to restore a vanished world nor a progressive revolution carrying the promises of 1789 still further, but a revolt against the modern order, waged in the name of forces older and deeper than the ones that order had claimed to surpass.

In his book, Mohler draws up the inventory of the currents, journals, circles, and figures that make up this conservative-revolutionary nebula. For the francophone reader, this abundance of names and references has at first something vertiginous about it, so much does it refer to authors and historical realities that are often unfamiliar. Mohler distinguishes, as is well known, five great families within the Conservative Revolution: the Völkischen, the Young Conservatives, the National Revolutionaries, the Bündischen, and the peasant movement.

Yet, however fascinating the study of these different currents may be, this is perhaps not where the book’s principal interest lies today. These tendencies belong, in effect, to a German context very remote from our own, marked by the defeat of 1918 and the critique of the Weimar regime. What remains truly fertile is the common worldview that Mohler manages to bring out behind this apparent dispersion.

For Wilhelm Dilthey,2 the Weltanschauung (worldview) designates something vaster than philosophy. Philosophy is only the late, conceptual form of it. Before becoming a philosophical system, a worldview is a way of seeing, feeling, and willing; it engages the whole of man, and not speculative intelligence alone. It is the Leitbilder (”guiding images”) of the conservative-revolutionary worldview that Mohler foregrounds in his essay. He does not seek to extract from them a common program, still less to reduce this constellation to a unified doctrine — which would be a fool’s errand. He attempts rather to bring out the fundamental images around which very different thoughts, styles, and commitments are ordered. As he notes:

“When one wishes to describe a movement of ideas, nothing is more sterile than to line up isolated opinions, which must, by addition, subtraction, and division, produce the final result. The only fruitful thing is the study of behavior toward the few fundamental questions whose urgency is such that it excludes the arbitrariness of mere opinion. One of these questions is that of the relation to time — and it is in accordance with this that we have constructed our inquiry.”3

Toward a Heroic Realism

The Conservative Revolution has this decisive feature: it opposes to the linear conception of history — inherited from Christianity and then secularized by modern progressive thought — a spherical conception of becoming. The distinction — the sphere against the line — may at first seem idle, even byzantine. Yet it touches the very heart of any worldview. To cite Dilthey again, a Weltanschauung is always composed of an image of the world, an evaluation of life, and an orientation of the will. In the case of the Christian vision — which profoundly shaped two millennia of Western history — the image of the world is that of a history oriented toward an end: Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Redemption, and Judgment. Earthly life is then evaluated on the basis of a beyond, or a final term, that gives it its meaning, while the human will orients itself toward salvation and the exit from history. Modern progressive thought, moreover, did not abolish this structure; it simply transferred it into immanence.

Now, if we try to understand the Leitbilder that Mohler brings to light using the same Diltheyan schema, we can say that the German Conservative Revolution inverts each of these terms. Its image of the world is no longer that of the line, but that of the sphere: past, present, and future do not succeed one another there like the stages of a march toward redemption, but answer, reactivate, and reconfigure one another at every historical moment. Its evaluation of life is not that of consolation, happiness, or final equality, but that of heroic realism. Life is worth only what it is capable of producing in the way of greatness and of confronting its destiny. Its orientation of the will, finally, is neither nostalgic restoration nor progressive flight forward, but regeneration:

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s classic of the German Conservative Revolution, brought to you by Arktos:

Written in 1923, when Germany was in the throes of revolutionary demands from both the Left and the Right, Moeller van den Bruck envisioned a Germany that was radical, traditional and nationalistic. Angered by the harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War, and frustrated by the types of reforms being called for in the Weimar Republic, he examines all of the major political doctrines of his day and finds them wanting.

Instead, he calls for a return to empire — not the empire of the Kaiser or the Holy Roman Empire, but an empire of all German-speaking peoples, with a social hierarchy based upon strong communal values and German traditions which nurture, rather than belittle, strong individuals. Although van den Bruck was not a supporter of the National Socialists, they ended up adopting his term das dritte Reich for the state they intended to build.

With an original Foreword and Bibliography compiled by French New Right founder Alain de Benoist, who explains the book’s continuing relevance, this edition makes one of the most important works of Germany’s Conservative Revolution available again for the English-speaking world. This edition is a revised version of the condensed edition first published in 1934.

It is in this sense that the Conservative Revolution is indeed revolutionary because conservative. It is not a matter of bringing the past back to life, but of bringing back, against the world of dissolution, the powers capable of founding a new future.

For Mohler, this new worldview was neither the exclusive preserve of Germany — even if it expressed itself in that country with particular vigor for quite specific historical reasons — nor a phenomenon definitively confined to the interwar period. What the phrase “Conservative Revolution” designates is not a doctrine of the past, but a new way of apprehending the world, man, and time after the exhaustion of what Giorgio Locchi would call the “egalitarian tendency.”4

The Eternal Return

At a time when the idea of progress and emancipation no longer promises anything but the undifferentiation and dissolution of forms, Mohler’s book reminds us that there exists another path, another beginning. The line of progress may perhaps be exhausted, but we can still repeat these words of Zarathustra:

“All goes, all returns; eternally rolls the Wheel of Being. [...] Around every Here coils the Sphere of There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of Eternity.”

Further reading:

Mohler, Armin. The Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918–1932. Radix, 2018.

Locchi, Giorgio. Wagner, Nietzsche et le mythe surhumaniste [Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Suprahumanist Myth]. La Nouvelle Librairie / Institut Iliade, 2022. (COMING SOON IN ENGLISH FROM ARKTOS)

Originally published in Éléments, no. 221, August-September

Translated by Alexander Raynor

READ MORE from Antoine Dresse, brought to you by the Institut Iliade and Arktos:

Alain de Benoist traces the concept of "authoritarian liberalism" from Hermann Heller's 1930s coinage to its present-day resurgence, arguing that when liberal democracy feels threatened, it sheds its own principles and resorts to banning parties, criminalizing dissent, and policing not just acts but motives and thoughts.

The notion of “authoritarian liberalism” was born in the early 1930s, notably from the pen of the jurist Hermann Heller, a great adversary of Carl Schmitt. It resurfaces today in a different context, one in which liberticidal measures are proliferating at the very heart of liberal democracies. The covidist episode of lockdown and vaccinism marked a high point in the establishment of this authoritarian liberalism. The brutal repression of the Gilets jaunes [Yellow Vests] was another.

When liberalism feels threatened, it reacts like any other form of power — that is, like a dog afraid of having its bone taken away. When the dyke overflows and the “cordons sanitaires”1 begin to fray, all that remains is to ban the parties that win, to bar their candidates from standing for election, even to have them killed.

Of this we can be sure: cornered, the oligarchs of the System will stop at nothing. They have already multiplied bans and dissolutions, closed bank accounts, and decreed prohibitions of movement.

In Germany, a bill now proposes that municipalities exercise a right of pre-emption over real estate in order to prevent its acquisition by persons suspected of being “enemies of the Constitution.” This past February, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said so plainly: “In our country, freedom of expression ends where it undermines the Constitution.”

Now that the rejection of the dominant ideology is perceived as a scandal, any means will do to govern not merely without the people, but against them.

Surveillance Capitalism

The hunt for nonconformist ideas — which grants license to search the innermost conscience — goes back at least as far as the Inquisition. In a climate ruled at once by moral puritanism, racial prudishness, and sexual denialism, freedom of expression disappears the moment one begins to legislate on feelings (love and hate), to ban dissident remarks even when uttered in private or within the family circle, and to ask the courts to punish not merely acts but motives, intentions, and thoughts.

Ever since freedom of expression was made conditional, an Orwellian principle has been adopted: one may say anything except what one may not say. To which a second is added: whatever is not forbidden is merely (provisionally) tolerated. Everyone today lives under a regime of conditional liberty — that is, of liberty under surveillance.

The emergence of authoritarian liberalism shows not only that these two words, so often set in opposition, can become synonyms, but that it would be immensely naïve to expect any genuine protection of liberties from liberals. All the more so since the hardening of repression against dissidents goes hand in hand — and this is graver still — with an acceleration in the rollout of control and surveillance procedures throughout every Western country.

Alexandre Kojève, in his Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (g), had already foretold the gradual dissolution of political antagonisms into an administrative and police regime in which every contradiction would be absorbed into the technical management of things. In the age of “surveillance capitalism” (Shoshana Zuboff), the globalization of capital advances in lockstep with social control. In the name of the demand for “transparency,” technological surveillance, hygienic and biomedical surveillance, commercial surveillance, ideological surveillance, and sexual surveillance all claim to pass judgment on private conduct, to manage bodies, and to shape even the most intimate aspects of daily life.

In this way, the whole of society is progressively subjected to a global, reticular form of control that gathers an ever-increasing quantity of data to weigh on choices, steer tastes, influence opinions, and alter behaviors. It is no longer merely a matter of penalizing violations of the law but, as Giuseppe Gagliano has described, of building, by means of algorithms, “a world in which each individual can potentially be analyzed even before having done anything at all.”

Social control makes it possible to anticipate, to delegitimize, or to incapacitate — not on the basis of what one has done, but of what one might do. Thus, the door is thrown open to the worst.

And that worst is “voluntary servitude.” When tyranny speaks the language of technology, algorithms produce self-disciplined subjects. The Korean sociologist Byung-Chul Han has shown that, in liberal societies, we are witnessing a new form of violence directed no longer against others but against oneself: in a world shaped by the capitalist diktats of performance and all-out mimetic rivalry, the self-imposed constraints born of the internalization of dominant norms are now added to old-style prohibitions.

Since social death has become the present-day form of the death penalty, censorship begins with self-censorship. The superego merges with the ego. The result is that it has become pointless to set liberty against constraint, for they are now one and the same. Byung-Chul Han sums this up in a Bernanosian formula: “The new violence always strikes the bearer of an interiority.”

The engine of self-constraint and self-policing is fear. The exploitation of fear, whatever its nature (crime, narco-trafficking, hybrid wars, cyberattacks, immigration, natural disasters, pandemics, terrorism, violence of every kind), makes it possible — under the pretext of better ensuring security — to abolish all liberties, to transform the state of exception into a permanent regime, and to present every new form of control as a new protection.

Where, then, does hope lie? To paraphrase Péguy, let us say that there are two kinds of men: those for whom today is merely the day after yesterday, and those for whom today is the eve of tomorrow. Good luck to the latter.

Originally published in Éléments, no. 221, August-September 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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

From a ‘post-modern’ liberal perspective, sovereign individuals must be able to construct themselves in complete autonomy. Social order thus no longer serves any other purpose but to guarantee the exercise of such free will. This doxa applies to the domain of sexual identity, where it becomes possible to postulate the existence of ‘gender’ categories completely independent of any biological realities. It also extends to the domain of the very identity of peoples and nations, both of which are thus reduced to an arbitrary construct whose nature is purely contractual, one in which the feeling of belonging to a single ethno-cultural community no longer has any place.

This ideology represents the ultimate stage of the individualistic and contractual conception of society developed by certain Enlightenment thinkers. Such an evolution could undoubtedly not have been imagined in the 18th century by the ‘founding fathers’ of philosophical liberalism, convinced as they were of allowing themselves to be wisely guided by Reason alone. The fact remains, however, that the fracture caused by their ‘rationalist’ system of thought enabled the subsequent emergence of political and social upheavals whose scope and violence have been considerable. Indeed, even in its early days, liberal thought, which now asserts itself as intrinsically ‘moderate’ in contrast with all kinds of ‘extremism’, all of which it rejects with equal good conscience, embodied a profound break with earlier conceptions of human nature—although Chesterton did define these new ideas as ‘Christian virtues gone mad’, and certain concepts of modern state theory do transpose secularised theological concepts into the non-religious sphere, as clearly demonstrated by Carl Schmitt.

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This article is an excerpt from Henri Levavasseur’s Identity: The Foundation of the City, brought to you in English by Arktos.

According to the liberal way of thinking, which Alain de Benoist flawlessly analysed in one of his recent works, man is not defined primarily as a member of a community anchored in a specific historical reality (family, ‘order’, fatherland), but mainly as an abstract, autonomous individual detached from the contingent identity inherited from his predecessors, and as someone who enters into a contract with society with the intention of guaranteeing the exercise of his own ‘natural’ rights. In the 8th chapter of his Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690, John Locke states that a child ‘is not born a subject of any government or country’.

The ideological construct on which the idea of a social contract is based takes of course little account of the historical existence of organic communities. Here, one encounters the old contrast between the notions of community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft), a contrast well highlighted by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in a famous work published in 1887. Having reached the ‘post-modern’ stage of its evolution, the extension of the liberal model sanctifies the disunion between polis and ethnos, that is, between sovereignty and identity. This model represents the culmination of the system of the ‘republican homeland’, one that is based on a purely contractual and ideological conception of the fatherland: it thus constitutes both its apogee and its final phase.

Although the republican homeland has never completely merged with the actual and physical fatherland, content instead with using the latter as ‘its support and instrument’ over a period of two centuries, as stated by Jean de Viguerie, the republic is now in grave danger of collapsing upon the ruins of France, akin to a parasite that would not long survive the organism whose substance it has drained.

Once all ties between sovereignty and identity have been severed, sovereignty inevitably escapes the body of the nation and ends up becoming the expression of a mosaic of individual demands . At the same time, since nature abhors a vacuum, the weakening of the nation logically ends up paving the way for the emergence of various forms of supra-national sovereignty, forms which, as predicted by Ernest Renan, would not necessarily be inclined to respect our genuine freedoms, which had hitherto been guaranteed through the exercise of national sovereignty In this domain, a systematic recourse to the universal morality of ‘human rights’ ultimately serves to undermine the very foundations of traditional political order, with the latter linked to the sovereignty of a people over its own territory.

This critical situation is obviously complicated by the massive presence of populations of non-European origin: by gradually imposing their customs, traditions and unique identity, these people are logically occupying the civilisational space left vacant by Europeans. And who could blame them? It is hardly possible, in fact, to identify, whether individually or collectively, with a homeland whose identity is reduced to abstract and universal principles. Brandishing ‘values’ whose expression appears increasingly outdated and using them as the sole instrument of their convictions, the republican authorities have nothing solid in the face of those who reject their model, nor anything to offer, especially to those who would like to assimilate into what remains of the French nation.

Through long-term and sometimes painful efforts, it is undoubtedly possible, over the generations, for an expatriate community to blend into the melting pot of the host nation, provided that this community does not constitute a mass large enough to suddenly upset the demographic balance of the host country and that the cultures of the two populations in question share certain affinities from the very outset. History provides us with numerous examples of successful assimilation processes, most often involving human groups and peoples from the same civilisational space, as was the case during the settlement of French Huguenots in Prussia after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Economic considerations also play a role in the process of assimilation of a foreign population. The Huguenots were an industrious and learned elite group, whose arrival contributed to strengthening the dynamism of the Prussian society into which they integrated; a situation that is, of course, different from that of most contemporary waves of migration.

Is collapse therefore inevitable? Well, it is likely that we have now entered a ‘long civilisational winter’, a process that will display all the aspects of gradual and slow death throes, as our country is shaken by some rather violent convulsive spasms. It is not impossible that the political entity called the ‘French Republic’ will continue to exist throughout this time, and that it will still be worth devoting some energy to in order to keep it as functional as possible, while ensuring above all else that we avoid relinquishing control to elements that are completely foreign to our desire to guarantee the sustainability of our ethno-cultural identity.

However, it would be futile to continue placing our hopes in the ability of this entity to embody ‘what we are’ . Our duty dictates that we do not give in to such blameworthy blindness through intellectual laziness, conformism or cowardice. Our generation must now accept a decisive historical responsibility, without losing sight of the fact that it is faced with the necessity to defend, one inch at a time, the ramparts of an already occupied citadel whose command no longer belongs to us, while simultaneously preparing other positions from which future generations can reclaim our civilisational space and grant it a new form once kairos (or the ‘right moment’) arrives; a moment that none of us can predict or situate. In the meantime, we must form a vanguard, without ceasing to wage a rearguard battle.

The same requirement is already imposed on the youth of other European nations, with whom unprecedented solidarity must be forged, thus allowing us all to preserve the identities of our peoples in full awareness of what unites us through each of them . It is impossible to engage in such a struggle without first reverting to a clear vision of the world, which, along with courage, constitutes the primary condition for our freedom of action. This approach is necessarily based on a mental return to one’s perennial sources, in harmony with a realistic anthropology that is free of all biases imposed upon us by two centuries of liberal ‘humanism’.

Henri Levavasseur’s Identity: The Foundation of the City — a call to the peoples of Europe to rebuild the City — is available from Arktos and on Amazon

More from Henri Levavasseur:

Five thousand years ago, communities of herders, warriors, and poets hailing from the Pontic Steppes set in motion one of the most consequential expansions in human history. These people, known as the Indo-Europeans, spread the languages, myths, and institutions that would define many of the ethnocultural groups of ancient and modern Europe and parts of Asia. Despite their distinct histories, European peoples continue to bear the imprints of this shared inheritance.

Drawing upon the latest discoveries in linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and genetics, Henri Levavasseur introduces readers to the reconstruction of the Indo-Europeans’ origins, language, culture, and worldview. At a time of cultural amnesia and the erasure of identities, Indo-European Echoes invites readers to reconnect with the shared “long memory” that anchors the identity of European peoples in their awareness of a common origin and ancient traditions.

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 one-third 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.

This is an excerpt from The Messiah and the Third Temple: The Heresy and Wars of Christian Zionism, by Paweł Lisicki, brought to you by Arktos:

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.

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.

Christian Zionists claim that the Bible contains two separate plans of God. One pertains to the earthly nation of Israel, and the other describes the destiny of the heavenly nation, the Church. The division became apparent when the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah. As a result, God suspended his plan for Israel and, in the meantime, called into existence a new, this time heavenly, people — the Church. Thus, “the course of time is interrupted. There is a great gap.”

In essence, Weber notes, this meant that the Christian Church existed outside the prophetic plan and was not referred to in any prophecies. Christians belonged exclusively to heaven. When any Christian community attempted to replace Israel, it betrayed God and rejected God’s plan. Moreover, proponents of this theology believe that only when true Christians are raptured into heaven by Christ can the seventieth week begin (a reference to Daniel’s prophecy). This refers to a week of years, an eschatological time, the last period before the parousia. These theses seem so aberrant that many readers are probably wondering how they could have been derived from the Holy Scriptures. Those left pondering this have yet to understand the Christian Zionists’ “charismatic” way of reading the Word of God.

Weber believes that the source of the historical victory of dispensationalist ideas in the US lies with the commitment to biblical literalism taken up by the disciples of John Nelson Darby, the founder of the movement who taught in Ireland in the 1830s. “Probably the most important reason for dispensationalism’s growing acceptance among evangelicals was dispensationalists’ unwavering loyalty to and defense of the Bible.”

At a time when Darwinism was gaining influence in the United States and liberalism imported from Germany was spreading, undermining the divine inspiration of the Bible, dispensationalists remained steadfast in their literal understanding of it. American Protestants sought support in something stable and unchanging. They saw the growing skepticism that characterized secular society and noticed that many pastors were succumbing to the liberal currents of the Enlightenment. Thus, the importance of Darby’s theology grew.

In 1908, Pastor Cyrus Scofield published a book entitled The Scofield Reference Bible with Oxford University Press. Its second edition appeared on the market in 1917. It caused a real sensation in the US. It is safe to say that it has shaped the thinking, faith, and understanding of the majority of American Protestants ever since. The author of the commentaries, Reverend Scofield, maintained that Christians were living at the end of the “times of the Gentiles.” These times encompassed “that long period beginning with the Babylonian captivity of Judah, under Nebuchadnezzar, [which shall] be brought to an end by the destruction of Gentile world power… [at] the coming of the Lord of glory.” This was supposed to happen at any moment. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 proved that these prophecies were being fulfilled.

In this way, the messianic era was restarted. Christian Zionists claimed that the best times for Jews would come with the establishment of their thousand-year kingdom. Admittedly, it was to be a bitter victory: the period from Christians’ rapture to heaven to the descent of Jesus and the establishment of the kingdom was to be a time of the worst persecution of the Jews. “Before all Israel is saved, most Jews will have to be destroyed.” Dispensationalists, following John Nelson Darby, called the coming period of great tribulation “the time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jer. 30:7), their descriptions of which draw heavily on the darkest passages of both Old and New Testament prophecies.

Initially, in the struggle for world domination, the Antichrist will side with Israel. Once he achieves his goal, he will change his attitude towards the Jews and demand worship in the Jewish temple. When he encounters resistance, he will proceed with great persecution. According to Hal Lindsey, one of the most popular evangelical preachers, “a numberless multitude of Jews will die, including 144,000 evangelists. This persecution will be much worse than that inflicted by Hitler.” At this point, Jesus will appear with his saints. “The Jewish remnant will hail him as their rightful Savior and king, then join with Jesus to reestablish David’s throne and purify the temple for the inauguration of the millennial kingdom.”

The second turning point in history after 1948 was the year 1967. For most Christian Zionists, the Six-Day War was a true miracle. John F. Walvoord, president of one of the most influential Protestant colleges, Dallas Seminary, believed that the capture of Jerusalem in 1967 by Israeli forces was “one of the most remarkable fulfillments of biblical prophecy since the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.” Shortly after Israel’s victory, many well-known Protestant preachers believed that the cycle of eschatological events would occur in the 1980s. When this did not happen, they began to push the date back step by step.

At the same time, they began to claim that the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem must be a prerequisite for the end. To achieve this, Israel must gain complete and absolute control over its own land. United by a common exegesis of the Old Testament, Christian Zionists therefore repeat the arguments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said: “Our claim to this land is based on the greatest and most incontrovertible document in creation — the Holy Bible. It’s the Bible that has given us the deed to this land. It is on the basis of the Bible that the Christian world and so much of the international community have recognized our right to it.”

Christian Zionists often visit Israel, just as they often invite Jewish rabbis to the US. However, these are not pilgrimages. Rather, they are “tourist trips” involving thousands of people and a very peculiar agenda. As Grace Halsell, a journalist who traveled to Israel with Pastor Jerry Falwell, one of the most prominent Christian Zionist leaders, wrote, there was virtually no mention of the life or teachings of Jesus on this trip. Rather, much more attention was devoted to discussions about Israel’s right to fight the Palestinians. They met with government officials, high-ranking officers, including generals, and political leaders such as Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres. Pastor Falwell invited the most important Israeli leaders to banquets. In his keynote speech, he said: “When you go back to the pharaohs, the Caesars, Adolf Hitler, and the Soviet Union, all those who dared to touch the apple of God’s eye — Israel — were punished by God. America is blessed because she has blessed Israel.”

This is the true essence of the teachings of Zionist pastors. At the same time, this blessing has a strictly temporal, political, and material dimension. Blessing Israel does not mean praying for its conversion and caring about Jews’ access to the truth of Christ. To bless means to organize fundraisers, collect money, and put pressure on politicians, all in order to increase Israel’s political and temporal power. “I think that if Israel falls, America will fall with it,” Jerry Falwell said on another occasion. “I think that’s crucial. I think the future of the world depends on the existence and success of the State of Israel.” The number of such statements is endless.

Therefore, whenever someone attempts to point out crimes committed by the Israeli army against civilians, that person must be reminded that they are acting against God’s will. To bless Israel means to completely uncritically accept its position in every conflict and on every issue. One does not examine or follow what Jewish politicians are really doing; one accepts by definition that they are right. Blessing is another way of saying political and ideological activism on behalf of Israel, or more precisely, on behalf of the Israeli nationalist-religious right. Both groups — Christian Zionists and Jewish religious Zionists — treat the Bible primarily as an instrument of conquest and territorial expansion. Israel’s power must be expanded as much as possible. The Arabs must either disappear completely or at least have their position severely weakened.

Without this, it would be impossible to achieve the most important goal: the construction of the Third Temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock, the Mosque of Omar, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Israel must be powerful enough in order to fearlessly carry out this final act, which is the most important from the point of view of Christian Zionists. They are aware of the potential repercussions, namely the outbreak of a war to the death with the entire Arab world, which is why they are trying to prepare for it. They support those Arab regimes that will remain neutral and are ready to attack those they consider a potential threat. Above all, however, they seek to radically reduce the Arab presence in Israel and Jerusalem itself. Once this is achieved — once Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank become fully Jewish — construction can begin.

The whole ideology seems like a trap set for God. The blessing given to Abraham ceases to be a grace; instead, as in the system of Catholic modernism, it turns out to be an irrevocable necessity. God can no longer take back these words, even if Abraham’s descendants prove unfaithful to Him. Grace imperceptibly becomes a necessity. It is supposedly a gift from God, but in the Christian Zionist version, it is irrevocable, irreversible, and cannot be taken away.

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.

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Paweł Lisicki’s The Messiah and the Third Temple: The Heresy and Wars of Christian Zionism is available from Arktos and on Amazon:

Most citizens in Western nations have no conception of who the people who control their destinies are. Thoroughly indoctrinated in the account of reality provided by parliamentary democracy, they sometimes even believe that elected officials are actually the ones who wield power. This is tragic, but given that we live in a society where reality is selectively conveyed by comparatively few actors, it is not particularly surprising.

An effective antidote to such delusions can be found in Kerry Bolton’s Revolution from Above (2011). Bolton has an academic background in, among other things, historical theology, and has written for both academic and popular-cultural media. In Revolution from Above, he studies the real actors who wield power, reaching a number of conclusions that make many of the myths and illusions of our time crumble.

The Dialecticians of Capital

Bolton identifies a number of wealthy dynasties that have had a decisive influence on English and American politics. These predictably include the Rockefellers, and names such as Ford, Warburg, J.P. Morgan, and Rothschild also appear. The fact that these dynasties have been able to create networks to advance their interests is, fundamentally, not a particularly astonishing idea. During the 1960s, they even allowed the historian Carroll Quigley to study their secret documents. In his magnum opus Tragedy and Hope, Quigley concluded that:

“… there does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which has no aversion to co-operating with Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for most of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.”

Bolton argues that Quigley incorrectly describes the network as Anglophile, since it is more accurately described as globalist. Quigley also describes how these networks of extremely wealthy actors operate; to a large extent, these operations are based around foundations and think tanks. Through such organizations they can, among other things, finance movements that promote their objectives, as well as establish contact with other important actors.

Most people today are accustomed to regarding McCarthyism as a dark period in U.S. history, during which the establishment, under the leadership of the bigoted McCarthy, relentlessly hunted down communists for no real reason. Quigley and Bolton offer a different account of events, showing that McCarthy was suppressed by the plutocratic dynasties when his activities threatened to expose their connections to cultural radicals and lead to a renewed American nationalism. When investigations began into the purposes actually being sponsored by various foundations, the plutocratic dynasties used their contacts in the media and politics to silence McCarthy and his supporters, just as they had used them against, among others, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, and Ron Paul.

Follow the Money: The Left as Useful Idiots

These dynasties have pumped vast sums of money into things that are today regarded as “anti-capitalist”. In this context, the boundary between anti-capitalist and pro-capitalist is rather blurred. Bolton shows how Herbert Marcuse worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, for several years (interestingly, the early recruits to the OSS came to a great extent from powerful families such as Morgan, Mellon and DuPont). In fact, Marcuse was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation to write both One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilisation. The Rockefeller Foundation also contributed more than $200,000 to enable exiled Frankfurt Marxists to establish new careers in the United States, where, among others, Adorno and Marcuse went on to exert a powerful influence over the entire intellectual sphere. It is doubtful whether today’s cultural Marxism and political correctness would have emerged at all had these intellectuals not been integrated into the American academic sphere, something that was thus financed by capital itself.

Kerry Bolton’s classic Revolution from Above, featuring well-documented information rather than “conspiracy” speculation, is available from Arktos and from Amazon.

The conclusion you reach when reading Bolton’s well-researched book is that either the big capitalists were too stupid for their own good, or today’s cultural radicals are useful idiots of big capital. For example, it turns out that Alfred Kinsey’s influential studies of human sexuality received substantial financial contributions from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. Similarly, Timothy Leary’s psychedelic experiments were financed by the CIA, while financier George Soros today is one of the leading sponsors of efforts to legalize marijuana. As a left-wing radical, one must therefore either conclude that the CIA and Soros are philanthropists, or else it appears that they regard drugs as a profitable market and/or a new form of social control. The same applies to things such as queer theory.

Bolton also shows how the CIA long sponsored non-Stalinist communists and the Left in general, even when they were openly hostile to the United States. In connection to this, he also traces one of the roots of today’s neoconservative movement: several neoconservatives have backgrounds as fiercely anti-Soviet leftists. He also encounters the explanation that the plutocrats promoted a more extreme and violent Left so that their own attempts to move the United States in a direction that could be described as “left-wing” would appear more moderate. Persistent reports also maintain that the “youth revolt” of 1968 in France was started by the CIA in order to clip the wings of de Gaulle, who was too anti-American in his policies. This has been claimed by, among others, Georges Pompidou, de Gaulle’s prime minister, and fits well with today’s “spontaneous” revolts in countries such as Serbia, Georgia and Iran, which begin as youth protests and later turn out to have been organized and sponsored by foreign actors.

“But if there were such a conspiracy, I would have read about it in the newspaper, because there’s always someone who can’t keep quiet…”

Bolton shows how most of the movements we today regard as “radical” were sponsored by the dynasties, perhaps particularly through the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and/or by the CIA. This includes the psychedelic revolution, feminism (with Gloria Steinem as an example), Kinsey’s sexual radicalism, Partisan Review, et cetera. Bolton also demonstrates the very strong connections between progressive media darlings such as Al Gore and Barack Obama on the one hand and powerful plutocratic actors on the other.

Bolton does not, however, consider the dynasties stupid. When they support subversive and antisocial movements, it is because doing so serves their interests and offers opportunities for new forms of social control. Thus, for example, drugs play an important role in Huxley’s Brave New World, while already Plato argued that the family must be replaced by the state when children are to be raised. According to director Aaron Russo, he was also allegedly offered the opportunity to become part of the network in conversations with Nicholas Rockefeller. Rockefeller is said to have explained the Rockefeller Foundation’s extensive contributions to feminism by saying that the goal was to get “the other half” into the labor market and replace the family with the state. Rockefeller’s cynical manner of expressing himself led Russo to decline the invitation and instead speak out on Alex Jones.

Overall, Bolton’s book is a gold mine. He shows how the seemingly spontaneous revolutions in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia were prepared over several years through contributions from, among others, Soros, and how the plutocrats today are turning their attention toward Iran and Burma. Here, the issue is often opening countries’ markets to the plutocrats; countries that, like Libya, Iran and Burma, seek a more independent policy are therefore lucrative targets (Bolton also shows how the fall of apartheid had more to do with economics than racial issues. When the ANC took power in the country, it carried out extensive privatizations that opened South Africa up to the dynasties). The connections between the dynasties and political power are also extensive, among other things through organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, and the overlap between the dynasties and the OSS/CIA already mentioned.

Bolton does not go into greater detail on theories that describe the dynasties as exclusively ethnic (Jews, lizards, et cetera). Nor does he describe in detail how they influence the media, a subject that would otherwise have been of great interest. But taken as a whole, Revolution From Above is an indispensable book that every politically minded person should read, especially those that regard themselves as supporters of popular government and democracy.

The power of these dynastic families can be regarded as nothing other than a mockery of any notion of popular exercise of power; on many occasions these interests have also directed American military power against sovereign nations, with enormous human suffering as a consequence. Bolton’s book should also be therapeutic reading for the useful idiots who seriously believe that queer theory, multiculturalism and drug liberalism are incompatible with the interests of big capital. He covers a number of important areas, ranging from the dynasties’ role in the Western powers’ betrayal of the White forces during the Russian Civil War to how the Rockefeller Foundation and the CIA sponsored modern art.

This is a book that will change the way the reader sees the world; at the same time, it is well researched, well sourced, and thus can hardly be regarded as “conspiracy theory” in the negative sense of the word. Just as even a paranoid person can have enemies, conspiracies can exist whether one is aware of them or not.

Kerry Bolton’s classic Revolution from Above is available from Arktos and on Amazon.

What distinguishes man from animals? As Condillac observed in 1755, to inquire into the nature of animals is ultimately to ask what makes us human. Engaging current debates in science and philosophy, Alain de Benoist addresses this essential question, tracing two millennia of reflections on humanity’s place in nature — from Aristotle and the Stoics through Christianity, modern philosophy, anthropology, and the latest research in biology and ethology.

Rejecting both the separation of man from the living world and the reduction of humanity to mere animality, Alain de Benoist’s Animals and Men charts a third way. In this concise tour de force that bridges whole epochs, disciplines, and ethical dilemmas, de Benoist sheds light on how man is an “unfinished” creature, open to the world, living and breathing by language, culture, and organization as much as by environment and instinct.

The leading philosopher of the European “New Right” offers a much-needed defense of human singularity that takes into consideration our rootedness in nature, the dignity of animals, and our intimate relationship with the living beings of our cosmos.

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The Decadent Movement was all but spent by 1900, and even critics at the time said it had been exhausted by a single novel, Against Nature, by J.-K. Huysmans, sixteen years before. A few works appeared as codas later — such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in 1911 and Leda Without Swan by Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1913 — and one can imagine the Decadents admiring the Ballet Russes of Diagilev, which took Paris by storm in 1909, the tango craze in Paris, London, and New York of 1913, and the imaginative films of George Melies, dramatized in Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo.

But change had come so fast in real life and seemed to quash the quest to find an artificial paradise through drugs, art, and mystical escapism. The years leading up to the Great War saw the proliferation of electricity, telephone, phonograph, cinema, and motorcar, not to mention the first flight of the Wright Brothers.

All the contemporary movements also lost steam: dandyism and aestheticism in England, Symbolist painting and poetry in Belgium, and the French Occult Revival in the realm of esotericism.

It was as if, to use the famous Decadent cliché, there was nothing left to say. Which is where we are with this series — at least for now.

And so, some final thoughts.

As one of the artistic hallmarks of Decadent style, let’s weave a florid tapestry of themes for a crescendo, starting with, in the words of Julius Evola, the “woman problem,” a major preoccupation of the artists and writers of the Decadent Movement.

The most sensitive of them began to turn their male gaze away from the fair sex, which was dubbed the “New Woman” in popular media of the times and femmes fatales in the imagination of Decadent authors and painters (the entire scope of this trope is given an exhaustive Marxist treatment in Bram Dijkstra’s 1986 study Idols of Perversity: Images of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture).

This is the same era that bequeathed Pierre Loti’s 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthemum, about the love affair between a Western man and Japanese woman, which influenced Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera Madame Butterly.

One hundred years later, I went down a similar path: precisely at the time I was discovering the Decadent authors, I intuited that something was “wrong” with Western women. They did not seem interested in being my guide, muse, angel, and support on my vision-quest for a destiny that would involve scraping the dome of the heavens to discover what lay behind. But, as Oswald Spengler writes in 1919, it’s actually men’s fault, for “Man makes history, woman is history.” Women from the East provided the temporary solution of receptive and pleasant feminine companionship at the turn of the millennium for myself and many others.

While commoners and prosperous bourgeois remained entranced by the women of the Belle Époque — understandably, as it was Western Woman at her most alluring, just look at the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Chandler Christy — sensitive artists and visionaries found their polarity switching from the material realm of human coupling to a longing for union with the divine, and the blending of mysticism and eroticism is the Decadent Movement’s flip-side of the femme fatale.

In search of a solution to the “woman problem,” the most soul-troubled men turned away from the loud suffragettes of the era, passing Eastern femininity as well, and discovered ancient paths leading to spiritual “occult brides,” as Evola elucidates for us in various books, from Revolt Against the Modern World to his work on the Grail legend and the Mysteries of Eros.

Here the initiate into Heroic Spirituality uses his erotic vital energy (vril, in the 19th-century novel from Bulwer-Lytton) for spiritual ascension and restoration of the Primordial State of unity in which all his energies, as reflections of his maker, are active. Julien Stanwyck in my new book Gothic Olympus goes through this process, and eventually wins a bride on the subtle plane who will be there to meet him in the afterlife and go on with him to further adventures, having maintained his consciousness across the threshold of mortality.

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.

In one key text, the longing for mystic rapture is combined with the rapid technological development of the era. And so in addition to the influential “Spirit Love” tale by Gautier and the ghost romances of Victor Emile Michelet, we get the 1886 novel The Future Eve — not eve as in evening, but the Eve of the Bible — by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, which involves the hiring of Thomas Edison to create an automaton modeled on the hero’s feminine ideal.

So yes, in this age where men are “walking away” from women, it is absolutely possible to create the feminine ideal that has haunted their imagination, according to ancient doctrines and the divine right of anyone who attempts and succeeds in the endeavor. What Jungians fail to consider in their writings on anima integration is whether this anima is more than just an aspect of a man’s psyche, but right would be a cosmic flower made of light, capable of being fecundated and given a life of its own.

Consider what metaphysical truth lies hidden inside the story from the Hebrew tradition that the original human, Adam Kadmon, was an androgyne, and that the Eve principle was taken from his left rib, resulting in the two earthly genders. From the Hellenic tradition, consider that when Zeus wanted a daughter — Athena, for which Athens is named — he pulled her out of his head. And finally, note that the axis between Heaven and Hell is vertical, and seeking to integrate one’s being in order to “mate” with the Supreme Creator is diametrically opposed to engaging with an AI-created girlfriend meant to stand as a substitute for a human female. The first instance stems from the desire to transcend what is human to embrace the divine, while the latter is spawn from the frustrated desire to embrace what is human and substituting something synthetic.

And now let’s tie this tapestry together with reference to one last work whose central symbol stands for the present state of Western man, having thrown away everything over the past 125 years and now gets to reap the extinction-facing crisis he has sown for himself. Oscar Wilde’s 1895 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a work of late-Victorian pop fiction filled with fashionable Decadent tropes. The plot involves a handsome lad who, through a diabolic deal, never grows old, while a portrait of him reveals all the horrible sins and debaucheries of his cursed soul.

In our dreary, end-times age, without love (the principle of higher bonding), sex (the principle of fruitful creation), hedonism (pleasure, named for the Greek figure Hedone), and voluptuousness (eroticism cultivated as an art form), we find ourselves in an era that encapsulates the great Decadent theme of sterility, as the weary Decadent male mantra “I am the last of my kind” becomes “My bloodline ends with me” in 21st-century feminist nihilism. For of all the tragedy that has befallen Western man, perhaps none is more disheartening than the destruction of the beauty of Eros — who lives on as a main character and driver of the story in my Gothic Olympus.

To perform an Internet search using the slightest imaginative erotic keywords is to stare into the very pit of hell. And so Dorian Gray’s portrait, pictured here from the 1945 film adaptation, serves as a fitting close to this series, an all-encapsulating selfie of Western man in 2026.

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Christian Chensvold’s Gothic Olympus is hot off the press from Arktos and available on Amazon.

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Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

Carl Gustaf Grimberg (1875–1941) was a Swedish historian, writer, and publisher. A graduate of the University of Gothenburg and a professor at Uppsala University, he is remembered in his native country for his 9-volume history of Sweden, Svenska folkets underbara öden (“The Wondrous Destinies of the Swedish People”) and gained international fame for his 14-volume Världshistoria: Folkens liv och kultur (“World History: The Life and Culture of Peoples”), which has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.

A History of Sweden, first published in 1935, was Grimberg’s definitive testimony for American readers. It was compiled out of Grimberg’s many books and translated by C. W. Foss, a professor at Augustana College and Lutheran lay leader in Rock Island, Illinois, one of the centers of the Swedish-American community.

Freshly edited for the first time in nearly a century, this Arktos edition revives a classic primer for Americans and Europeans to recover their heritage and discover the rich history of the Swedish people.

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Quite often, liberalism treats religion, myth, ritual, and the sacred as remnants of a long-vanished superstitious past. This is because liberalism’s anthropology places the rational individual at its centre and imagines him as secular, autonomous, and entirely post-mythological. From this emerged much of the modern legal and institutional order, based on the assumption that human beings can use reason to guide their lives, judge moral questions, and organise society.

But in its attempt to abolish myth and sacredness, liberalism has ended up creating its own secular substitutes. Equality, human rights, international law, progress, climate politics, inclusion, and similar concepts function as sacred objects within the liberal order. Whenever someone attempts to question them, not necessarily in order to abolish them, but perhaps even to improve them, they are defended with moral force by institutions, officials, and liberalism’s institutional gatekeepers, and treated as truths that must not be seriously questioned — similar to how religious priests defend their own religious truth that liberals laugh at so much.

One of liberalism’s most sacred words is equality. This can be seen in the way governments, NGOs, universities, courts, corporations, and others invoke it as if everyone already understands what it means. Yet the problem is that equality does not have one stable meaning shared by all who use it. For the religious, it may mean equality before God. Politically, it may mean equal treatment before the law. Socially, it may mean equal access to basic goods such as primary and secondary education. In a more meritocratic sense, it may mean equal opportunity to prove oneself. In its more radical form, it may mean the forced production of equal outcomes, or even the flattening of inherited traditions, identities, and forms of life.

Over the centuries, liberalism has moved through several meanings of equality, but in its most recent mutation it has arrived at equality as sameness. This means that every organic difference in nature, society, or institutional life such as role, outcome, sex, vocation, culture, inheritance, or status becomes immediately suspicious. If any hierarchy appears, the assumption is that it must have been created through some hidden or inherited oppression within the system, and that this hierarchy must therefore be corrected, flattened, and equalised through equality of outcome, representation, or status.

The problem, however, is that hierarchy is not an artificial or societal construct, as many liberals and leftists claim, but something organic, natural, and inherent to human life, present in every act of judgement, preference, and choice. Even something as simple as choosing pizza over pasta rests on an inherited hierarchy of preference, based on personal experience, taste, habit, and culture. When someone preserves the old watch or cross left by his father over a new plastic watch, or even a new Rolex or gold cross, he is acting through hierarchy. The question, therefore, is not whether hierarchy exists, but whether it is organic and rightly ordered, or artificial and corrupt.

If one looks at historical attempts to flatten hierarchy, one sees hierarchy return often in a more corrupt form. One example is the French Revolution, which dismantled the French aristocracy in a violent way - not that the old hierarchy was without corruption - only to see a new one emerge when Napoleon became emperor, created his own court, and helped consolidate a bureaucracy whose eventual elites could be as oppressive, and often more intrusive, than the old nobility.

Another similar example is the Russian Revolution, which promised the abolition of hierarchy and the ownership of work by the workers themselves. The Bolsheviks, having eliminated the Tsar and the old order — again, we say this without denying the corruption that helped provoke the Revolution in the first place — eventually created the bureaucratic order for which the Soviet Union became infamous. This new class, later known as the nomenklatura, had access to stores, housing, privileges, and forms of status unavailable to ordinary citizens, while many people had to bribe officials to secure access, advancement, or basic administrative action. The new hierarchies that emerged were often more rigid and corrupt than what they had replaced. In both cases, the attempt to abolish one hierarchy in the name of flattening difference produced new synthetic and artificial hierarchies that served power, bureaucracy, and ideological conformity.

In the modern era, a similar tendency can be observed in DEI, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, which often try to flatten established hierarchies of merit and performance, however imperfect, by treating them as suspicious or inherently corrupt. Through centralised institutional programmes, they attempt to create a more “equitable” workplace by replacing differences in achievement with targets of representation. This, as in earlier examples, results in the emergence of a more rigid hierarchy based on identity politics and perceived victimhood instead of competence and contribution.

This new hierarchy is based on checking demographic boxes in order to gain access to hiring quotas, fast-track promotion, protected status, or institutional preference, especially where such behaviour is rewarded through reputational incentives, ESG frameworks, funding expectations, or compliance pressures. This creates, as in previous examples, a new class whose position is secured not primarily by the value they create for the company, but by the identity category to which they belong or claim belonging. Something similar can also be observed in sports, where biological males who identify as women compete against biological females, giving them an advantage and weakening the older hierarchy of female athletic competence and fair competition. Here again, equality as sameness does not abolish hierarchy; it merely replaces one hierarchy with another, less transparent one, in which rank is increasingly determined by identity and ideological conformity rather than performance, contribution, or excellence.

Usually, such outcomes are blamed on Marxism, communism, or socialism. There is a kernel of truth in this, since those ideologies often seek to flatten hierarchies and reduce people to equal units. Yet liberalism is not innocent either, since part of this flattening comes from its own idea of the rational, abstract individual. In its most degraded form, liberalism gives absolute priority to the individual, detaching him from communal, metaphysical, physical, and biological forms such as family, peoplehood, religion, duty, place, and sex. Once liberalism decides that man is above all a rights-bearing individual, detached from these forms, he becomes an interchangeable economic unit. The differences that once gave him meaning become secondary, unimportant, or even oppressive, because the individual is imagined as oppressed by collective identity and duty. This is where liberalism and left-wing egalitarianism meet. Stripped of collective obligations and identities, the individual does not become unique; he becomes one more interchangeable unit, much like the worker in left-wing egalitarian thought.

If hierarchies emerge naturally, either in organic or corrupted, synthetic form, then they are inescapable, whether one likes them or not. The real question, then, is not whether society will have hierarchy, but what kind of hierarchy it should have.

From a Traditionalist perspective — with a capital T, meaning the 20th-century school associated with René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, and others, rather than ordinary small-t traditionalism — the attempt to flatten hierarchy, especially in the examples above, is seen as horizontal. By horizontal, Traditionalism means an orientation toward egalitarianism, materialism, individualism, uniformity, and what René Guénon called the reign of quantity: the reduction of reality to what can be counted, measured, compared, and standardised. Equality-as-sameness belongs to this horizontal view of the world because it can count and compare, but cannot understand quality: mastery of skill, vocation, office, seniority, character, or wisdom. It sees people as units, not as bearers of meaning. Verticality, on the other hand, does not see hierarchy as an accident or oppression to be dismantled, but as something that can emerge organically and express metaphysical order. The highest place in such a hierarchy should belong not to identity claims, but to wisdom, mastery and responsibility.

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From this perspective, sameness and interchangeability do not truly honour people. A man who has mastered a skill is not respected by being reduced to an interchangeable unit. A person formed by one culture is not interchangeable with a person formed by another. A mother is not elevated by pretending that motherhood is socially irrelevant. Real dignity and meaning begin by recognising what a person is within his inherited identities and duties toward family, culture, profession, people, nation, and civilisation, and by honouring him according to the responsibility he bears toward them.

Thus, the alternative to equality-as-sameness should be ordered dignity. Ordered dignity recognises that people have worth not because they are identical, but because they occupy meaningful places within structured orders of family, vocation, people, religion, nation, and civilisation. In a society ordered through such dignity, the focus is not on flattening hierarchy, but on helping each person fulfil his duties within the whole rightly and nobly.

A natural, organic hierarchy is not primarily about domination or power, but about responsibility within an order, expressed through the vocations, duties, and stations of life. Equality-as-sameness tries to flatten hierarchy, but repeatedly produces more corrupt, synthetic forms of hierarchy based on quotas, bureaucracies, speech restrictions, and ideological enforcement. A hierarchy rooted in ordered dignity, however, grows through natural and organic institutions such as families, schools, churches, guilds, and local communities. These institutions do not standardise or erase difference, but cultivate persons, cultures, customs, and local forms that are excellent and beautiful within their own differences.

Man is not dignified by being made the same as everyone else, but by being formed within an order that gives him place, duty, meaning, and inheritance.

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Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

In this exclusive interview with Arktos Journal, conducted by Alexander Raynor, the Austrian Identitarian Martin Sellner explains how a perceived lack of political representation led him to advocate remigration as a practical strategy for reversing the effects of mass immigration through legal and political means. He outlines the core arguments of his book Remigration, lessons from European history, the outcomes of the 2026 Remigration Summit, responses to critics, and reasons for optimism about the shifting public debate and younger generations.

Alexander Raynor: Mr. Sellner, you’ve been a prominent voice in the Identitarian movement for over a decade. What initially drew you to these ideas, and how did your personal journey lead to focusing so intently on the concept of remigration as a practical solution?

Martin Sellner: What initially motivated me to found the Identitarian movement in Austria was a big lack in representation. There was a huge silent majority and many young idealists, but no platform that could channel this energy into effective, nonviolent action.

I encountered the term “Remigration” through the French Identitarian and New Right tradition, and we gradually developed it into a broader political strategy. Mass immigration is created by political decisions, border policies, asylum rules, welfare incentives, citizenship laws, etc. It follows that these developments can also be reversed through political decisions.

Remigration became the logical conclusion of our work because it unites many symptoms into a practical program. It answers the question that the mainstream Right avoided for decades: not merely how to slow immigration, but how to reverse its accumulated consequences peacefully, legally, and over time.

AR: Your new book Remigration, along with Jean-Yves Le Gallou’s book of the same title, which you wrote the foreword for, lays out a detailed blueprint for addressing Europe’s immigration challenges. For readers unfamiliar with it, could you summarize the core argument and why you believe voluntary returns of unassimilated migrants, paired with renewed national confidence, represent a humane and realistic path forward?

What if the issue of our century isn’t managing migration, but reversing it altogether? What if we could replace the Great Replacement with a Great Remigration?

As mass Third World immigration floods Europe and North America, threatening to forever dissolve thousands of years of European heritage, remigration has become one of the central ideas and urgent imperatives on the political agenda. In a Europe that has made permanent immigration a non-negotiable norm, Jean-Yves Le Gallou’s Remigration: For a Europe for Our Children reverses the perspective by reviving a forgotten principle: the right of peoples to remain themselves in their own lands.

In this visionary yet straightforward manifesto, Jean-Yves Le Gallou presents the intellectual roots, historical precedents, and political and legal frameworks for remigration in the 21st century. Identifying the means by which globalist elites have facilitated the Great Replacement through administrative fiat and judicial dictatorship, Le Gallou shows how remigration is not only a matter of saving the lifeblood of European civilization, but is necessary to restore popular sovereignty and security in the public sphere.

Written as both diagnosis and rallying cry, Remigration puts forth a radical yet sensible alternative for today’s world and for generations to come.

Remigration is available from Arktos in paperback and ebook and on Amazon in paperback.

MS: The central argument is that immigration is not an irreversible force of nature. It is the result of laws, incentives, institutions, and political choices. Those choices can be changed.

Remigration is not one single measure, and it is not a chaotic push for collective expulsion. It is an umbrella term for a coordinated reversal of migratory flows. It begins with secure borders and the enforcement of existing return decisions, but it also includes the return of illegal migrants and rejected asylum seekers, the reform of residence and citizenship law, and generous incentives for voluntary return.

Voluntary return is particularly important. Many people living in Europe retain strong connections to their countries of origin. A serious policy could offer financial assistance, professional support, housing programs, or help with establishing businesses after return. That can be more humane for the individual and less expensive for the receiving country than decades of dependency, alienation, and social conflict.

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AR: Your book draws on historical patterns, the “politics of guilt,” and demographic realities. What key evidence or examples from Europe’s recent history do you think most strongly support the need for remigration policies today?

MS: There are some primary lessons Europe’s recent history has taught us. Firstly, temporary migration becomes permanent: the guest-worker programs of the 20th century were presented as temporary economic arrangements. Instead, temporary workers became permanent populations, followed by family reunification and continued immigration. The European East must not follow that path!

Second, there are limits to assimilation. Assimilation cannot compensate indefinitely for the scale and speed of migration. When large parallel communities develop, the pressure is reversed: institutions and culture begin adapting to the immigrants rather than newcomers adapting to the country. We now see reverse assimilation of Europeans converting to islam!

Third, the core is guilt. The politics of guilt has made Europeans afraid of even defining their interests as and ethnic group. These are interests that every other civilization regards as normal. Borders, demographic continuity, and cultural majorities are treated as morally questionable concepts. The result is political paralysis. Remigration begins by rejecting that paralysis. Reject white guilt and embrace your heritage.

AR: In May 2026, you helped organize and spoke at the Remigration Summit in Portugal, which brought together activists, thinkers, and figures from across Europe and the United States. What were the main takeaways from the event, and how did it build momentum for these ideas?

MS: The most important result was that remigration is no longer merely an internet debate. It is developing into an international field of political work. The main conclusion was that we already possess many of the individual instruments required. What has been missing is coordination and the “Resum” is providing this. Another important takeaway was that each country requires its own roadmap. Portugal, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, and the United States have different legal traditions, demographic situations, and political opportunities. The principles can be shared, but their implementation must be national. For this, exchanging experiences is crucial.

AR: At the summit, there was discussion around initiatives like the Institute for Remigration and broader policy proposals. How do you envision translating these discussions into concrete political action across different European countries?

MS: The Institute for Remigration is intended to provide the intellectual and lobby infrastructure that has been missing. The Left has spent decades building institutes, NGOs, academic networks, legal organizations, and professional campaign structures. Our side has often relied on isolated politicians and spontaneous and underfunded activism. The Institute’s task is to raise remigration to a scientific, legal, and strategic level. The objective is to move remigration through three distinct phases: from taboo to debate, from debate to policy, and from policy to implementation.

AR: Critics often portray remigration as extreme or unrealistic. How do you respond to concerns about feasibility, legal hurdles, or potential social tensions, and what models give you confidence that it could work peacefully?

MS: The first response is that the present system is itself extremely unrealistic. Refusing to change direction does not prevent conflict; it merely postpones decisions until the situation becomes more difficult. Remigration is the only way to prevent a civil war.

Also, voluntary departure should be prioritized wherever possible. This is not an extremist invention. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has operated assisted voluntary return programmes for decades, and European institutions already provide return counselling and reintegration assistance. In the US in 2025, we saw 1.9 million self-deportations. This can also work in Europe.

AR: With your book now available in English, how do you see these ideas resonating outside Europe, particularly in places like the United States facing its own border and integration debates? Do you see parallels or lessons that apply universally?

MS: Europe and the United States are not identical. America has a different history with immigration. However, the fundamental questions are universal:

Do you have a border, or can anyone enter?

Is citizenship a serious political bond or merely an administrative document?

How many and which foreigners can a society stomach, and can a people decide who may enter and remain?

Europe offers the United States a warning. Once replacement migration is tolerated for long periods, temporary exceptions become permanent rights. Also, the United States demonstrates that political direction matters. Border enforcement and deportation priorities can change rapidly.

AR: Looking ahead, what gives you hope that a “cultural reconquista” or demographic stabilization is still possible in Europe, and what role do you see for younger generations or new movements in achieving it?

MS: My hope comes from the speed with which political taboos are collapsing right before our eyes. Ten years ago, remigration was virtually absent from mainstream discussion. Today it is debated in parliaments, newspapers, courts, and international conferences. The Save Europe Act has gathered 600,000 Signatures in just two months.

The younger generation is particularly important because they experience the results of mass immigration directly, facing housing pressure, fragmented schools, and declining security. They are less emotionally attached to the political taboos of the post-war establishment.

A cultural reconquista does not mean nostalgia or a return to a frozen past. It means rediscovering and reigniting an eternal flame. Our ethnocultural continuity must live on.

Interview conducted by Alexander Raynor

Arktos Journal

Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

30,000 Years of Identity lays out the reflections of a historian who witnessed the defining events of Europe’s new dark age. Through an exploration of thirty millennia of history, it poses the questions Europeans are now compelled to ask themselves: What is Europe? Who are we, and where are we headed?

For Dominique Venner, Europe did not begin with markets, treaties, or ideologies. It arose from a cultural community whose roots stretch back into the depths of prehistory. It is an ancient civilization, enriched by its many peoples, a common spiritual heritage, and a noble ethos that has often had to be defended.

Returning to these roots and restoring long European memory is the purpose of this book, which presents nothing less than a metaphysics of history. Here, readers rediscover what is uniquely our own: from the cave art of the Stone Age, the Homeric epics, Celtic and Norse legends, and the Greek and Roman legacy to the medieval imagination and the ideals of courtly love. Venner masterfully uncovers the depths and continuity of European identity, encouraging us to rediscover authentic European tradition’s distinctive way of confronting life, death, love, and destiny.

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Today marks four years since the tragic murder of Daria Platonova Dugina, an advocate and translator of the French New Right, friend of leading Nouvelle Droite figures like Alain de Benoist, and the daughter of the Russian Traditionalist philosopher Alexander Dugin.

The text below is an excerpt from A Theory of Europe, the posthumously published collection of Dugina’s writings, lectures, and interviews on the Nouvelle Droite and the struggle for a European Renaissance today, brought to you by Arktos.

The false impression sometimes arises that politics is not necessary, that metaphysics is the goal and politics is only a rung, but no, this is not at all the case.

If you look at the seventh book of Plato’s Republic as a source, then you’ll see a description of the philosophical process of getting out of the cave, but immediately afterwards Plato, through Socrates, says that what is extremely necessary is in fact to return to the cave, to begin to rule. Because the philosopher is not simply a person who has got out of the cave (the cave of shadows, false opinions, and nihilism), but the one who returns in order to begin passing along his understanding of the Idea of the Good to others.

And so, today is an extremely important day for us, because we are gathering to begin to discuss politics in the spiritual paradigm. My presentation is called “The Decline of the West and the Resistance of the New Europe”.

First of all, we should briefly present the situation today in its eschatological meaning. Let us look at the apostolic prophets, who were already mentioned by Monk Isidor, that is the eschatological prophets who were like those from before the First Coming of Christ, who said that before the End of the World there will be a war between God and the devil that will last a thousand years. We are now living in a phase of war, and in political reality we see many signs of the End Times. I think everyone agrees with me that today we are living in the eschatological sphere that has been most precisely described by religious figures and prophets. But a very similar picture also emerges in the accounts of insightful people working in the sphere of culture, cultural studies, political science, and sociology.

I would like to speak about the outstanding philosopher Oswald Spengler, who ingeniously foretold the end of European civilisation in his renowned work The Decline of the West. It is extremely important that this work’s Italian translation was done by Julius Evola. I think this is symbolic. Of course, I know that you are familiar with these ideas, but I nevertheless want to say a few words about this concept. Spengler argued that Europe has passed from the phase of culture into a new period which he called a period of decline, that is the period of civilisation. In Spengler’s opinion, the death of European civilisation would come in the early 2000s. Now we understand that we really are at this end.

It is also interesting, as some have noticed, that in this case we are talking about the End of the World as a process. It is not a moment, but a process, an “ending end”. The End of the World is a process. This is how it is. In fact, Heidegger said the same of the End of the World and the end of the paradigm of Modernity when he said that the end won’t just arrive, but remains “noch nicht”, that is “not yet” in German. The end is coming, but it doesn’t just come and happen.

In Spengler’s opinion, the advent of totalitarianism in the political sphere is a symbol of the reform of civilisation. He used the term “tyranny”. I would like to say a bit about totalitarianism, because at the present moment we don’t yet have any real tyranny. I would also like to talk about the migration of peoples. This is what we are now observing amidst the decline of European civilisation. Two phenomena are taking place: the migration of peoples and totalitarianism — digital totalitarianism, or the coming of a third, liberal totalitarianism in the sphere of politics.

Today, without a doubt, we live in a world of a new totalitarianism, especially in Europe. This is not at all communist or fascist totalitarianism, but liberal totalitarianism. It is extremely important to point out that liberalism in its essence is just as totalitarian as other totalitarian regimes under communism and fascism. If we return to the eschatological and religious perspective, then we of course see the prospect of liberal totalitarianism sooner or later coming into one pair of hands, to a tyrant. Today, the West is ruled by one man, but he is not sovereign: Trump. Rather, he is a kind of postmodern caricature of a tyrant. A caricature, because he is not a tyrant in the likes of which Plato saw, but rather a simulacrum of a Platonic tyrant.

I’ve worked a lot on covering and analysing the presidential elections in France, and I know well the details of this new totalitarianism. We know that another Satanic figure, one close to the figure of the Antichrist as described by some religious philosophers, Emmanuel Macron, has come to power in a rather strange way, like an algorithm. These were not elections in the direct sense, but really something strange. An invisible force simply appointed Macron to this post without paying any attention to ideology or programme. The bizarre Macron phenomenon is a vivid model of the “third totalitarianism”. I would like to emphasise one wholly noteworthy trait of this personality — the level of development of his theory from the point of view of a philosophical paradigm. If we look at Macron, then we can see that he is really well educated. Despite appearing to have eclectic views, he has his own developed theory and he represents a closed system. He combines right-wing economics and left-wing politics, i.e. an integral right-left liberalism with a big dose of populism. But there is no life in him. If we look closely, we find something technical in all of this, something that is lethally boring.

At the same time, if we look at the philosophy of Marine Le Pen, we discover a fantastic contrast. It may be difficult to recognise a theory, a paradigm, behind her rhetoric and polemics and her contradictory populism which combines right-wing politics and left-wing economics. But if we look more attentively, we’ll catch sight of a fully structured philosophy and clear system standing behind her. On the outside, it seems as though behind Marine Le Pen stands a very vague paradigm, whereas the paradigm behind Macron is really rather differentiated. But we believe that the intellectual weakness that is characteristic of Marine Le Pen, her populism, which at times looks altogether naive, potentially harbours the roots of a new, alternative political philosophy. Why? Because she represents life.

If we use Bergson’s terminology, then we could say that that it is the élan vital (the “vital impulse”, the “energy of life”) that lies at the core of historical and political development. But this impulse doesn’t wield the clearest view of one’s self and surroundings. The vital impulse precedes reflection. The energy of life is blind in its movement, and this is clearly visible in the case of Marine Le Pen. Meanwhile, Macron overall completely represents death, the end of the vital impulse, due to his nihilism, which is a nihilism not from the point of view of Nietzsche, but of Spengler, in the sense of negating all traditional values and hierarchies. Of course, he is against the hierarchy of arms, the order of arms in the state and in metaphysics. He completely rejects the Platonic verticality, the Apollonian axis. In fact, moreover, I think he is even perfectly capable of reinterpreting it in the opposite sense. After all, he not only rejects it, but at times inverts it, brings the matter to an anti-hierarchy, anti-aristocracy, anti-Europe, and anti-France.

Marine Le Pen does not reject traditional values and traditional hierarchies, but she can’t bring herself to unite with them, because if she were to return to them, it would be written off as reactionary or conservative. This wouldn’t be conservatism in the best sense of the word, like the Conservative Revolution, but, to use the terminology of the political scientist René Rémond, would be a kind of “right legitimism”. I’m not certain, but if I have correctly understood Rémond, then I think that this would be a kind of “reactionarity”. Marine Le Pen is defending a new ideology which she doesn’t understand. Her rigidity exists because she doesn’t understand where to go. In fact, she lost, but she lost to the same extent that the people did — she doesn’t understand, but to the same extent that the people doesn’t. So, we can observe a naivety and even intellectual impotence on Marine Le Pen’s part in the face of the well-conceived doctrine that stands behind Macron.

However, if we view this interesting distinction through the prism of Leo Frobenius’ cultural morphology, then we can see an extremely interesting and importance circumstance. Frobenius, a friend of Spengler’s, worked out the doctrine of “captivation” (Ergriffenheit). He said that the personality, culture, and the state are irreproachable in all societies, especially the personality and culture. There are three phases: (1) Ergriffenheit, that is “captivation”, “emotional engagement”, or even “obsession”, (2) “expression” (Ausdruck), and (3) “application” (Anwendung). When we are captivated by something, we are enchanted by it. This is life, the energy of life, the principal of the vital impulse, the principle of creation. This is the first phase of culture, including political culture, and resembles the ideal Platonic position in which the philosopher is “engaged” or “captivated” by the idea, the Idea of the Good, and is enchanted in this state. The second phase, according to Frobenius, is expression. When the “captivation” is given a name, like when ideas of reform are formulated into theories and programmes, this is “expression”. In psychology, this is the cure, i.e. when we have understood our obsession and try to express it, which means that, once we succeed in doing so, the spiritual sickness is overcome. The third phase is the employment (Anwendung) of the vital impulse as expressed in concrete reality, its application. In this third phase of development, culture is completely de-sacralized and is overloaded with technology.

What Yvan Blot once told me in a private conversation is important: Macron is the Gestell, a Heideggerian term which is applied to the civilisation of Modernity, the civilisation of technology. Heidegger uses the term Gestell to designate the “process of the death of the world”. This is a very important notion in Heidegger’s later philosophy. Macron himself, liberal globalism, the paradigm that stands behind Macron is death. This is the third phase of culture according to Frobenius, the phase of application (Anwendung) and technology. It could also be called the “hegemony of the cave”, the cave that has been hermetically sealed off. This is in comparison to the open doctrine of Marine Le Pen, which has no final philosophical shape and is merely a rather approximate contour of a doctrine, one that is blind to its own vitality and its “captivation”. This is very, very important. As we know, Alain de Benoist has called Macron an “algorithm”, that is, a tiny technical detail, a cog in the system, a tiny rock in the cave — after all, Macron’s system is closed shut.

And so the time has come to draw out the comparison with Plato’s cave as described in the seventh book of the Republic. We have two orders, two models. The first model is the closed cave, where the prisoners remain ignorant of the Idea of the Good. This model represents liberal hegemony and the nihilistic dictatorship which Europe lives under today. The second model is the cave with the open possibility of leaving it — this is populism. This is an alternative to the closed system.

The people who are representing Europe today at our colloquium have before themselves the goal of getting out of the cave of nihilism. You are exiting the cave like the philosopher-king who makes it out of the cave of illusion and begins to see the Idea of the Good. Of course, after the darkness of the cave it is always difficult to catch sight of the Idea of the Good; after all, your eyes haven’t got used to the light and are still closed. But this step is extremely important.

Today, we live in a division into two Europes. The first Europe is the closed-off Europe of the cave of nihilism, the dictatorship of nihilism in Plato’s Cave, where all the people are prisoners. The second system, which all of you here today represent, is the system of intellectuals who are getting out of the cave in order to see the Light of the Good, and who return to the people so as to tell them what it is.

Today, the alternative to the cave with no way out, the cave that has a way out to contemplate the Good, is, without a doubt, populism. Populism in our days is a new form of anti-totalitarianism, a struggle to get out of the nihilistic dictatorship of the cave. It is the alternative to liberal hegemony.

It is interesting that today the political division is no longer horizontal, as it was before, as the schism between left and right has ended, but is vertical, so now the actual, relevant schism is above all between the elites and those below, the people. It is important that the representatives of this cave hegemony, the nihilistic cave, necessarily want the people to stay as prisoners at the bottom. After all, they themselves are not philosophers who have made their way out of the cave to govern. They themselves are prisoners of the very same cave, the liberal religion, only on the second floor. To recall, Plato’s cave has three levels, among which the lowest level is the masses subjected to harsh dictatorship, chained by their hands and legs and incapable of turning their heads away from the endless projections on the screen.

We have no ideology in the current conditions. We need to establish, affirm, and develop one. This conference is an invitation to create and develop a new ideology for Europe. We can’t say that we are populists. Populism is only a stage in life, the stage of “captivation”. It is part of the sickness. We are more like psychoanalysts. We are the psychologists of the birth process of a new populism, and we must give a schema, a philosophical paradigm, an explanation, an expression (Ausdruck) to this captivation.

The people are captivated and engaged in the fight against the elites — this is the main idea of populism according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the idea of how to direct and wage war against the liberal elites ruling over the people in these new conditions. In line with Frobenius, our role is to give expression to the élan vital, to the blind captivation of the masses, and to interpret the vital impulse of the people.

Daria Platonova Dugina’s A Theory of Europe: A View of the New Right is available from Arktos and on Amazon:

American Civilization brings together Julius Evola’s writings from 1930 to 1968 on the United States of America.

Reflecting on the rise of the US as the defining power of modernity, Evola goes beyond critiquing American politics to examine the spiritual and cultural dynamics of the egalitarian, consumerist, and democratic order that America has imposed upon itself and the world.

Delving into popular culture, American capitalism, the Cold War dilemma between the US and the USSR, and the problem of race in American identity, Evola foresaw the trends and crises which have haunted America and the world with only greater force over recent decades.

Selected by the Julius Evola Foundation and equipped with a fiery foreword for Americans by Kevin DeAnna, these articles are essential reading not only for understanding the legendary Italian Traditionalist’s views of the post-war 20th century, but also for pondering the fate and possibilities facing Americans and Europeans today.

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I do not have much taste for “morality.” I know its genealogy too well (which Nietzsche seems to me to have clarified rather well). I have a tendency, moreover, to consider that there are as many “moralities” as there are possible levels of humanity — which makes for quite a number. On the other hand, I believe strongly in principles, which can also be rules of life. (Every historical becoming goes from myth to principle by way of an idea). On the off chance, here are mine; I hope not to fail them too often.

1

Man is God’s partner, His associate for better or for worse. Both create in common. God is not above, nor outside of us. He is not beyond our sensations either. What matters is not to believe in God. What matters is to act in such a way that He can believe in us. To find and identify Him in us, to reveal ourselves as Him. Body and soul are one and the same thing. To reduce one to the other, to oppose these notions to each other: this stems from the same sickness of the spirit. A God who does not behave as one has the right to expect of Him deserves to be repudiated — provided that he who repudiates Him has given the best of himself.

2

It is not enough to be born, one must still be “created.” Creation is posterior to birth; one can only be “created” by oneself. This is how one gives oneself a soul. Meister Eckhart speaks of “self-creation” (Selbstschöpfung): “I was the cause of myself, there where I willed myself, and I was nothing else. I was what I willed, and what I willed was me.” In the Edda (Hávamál), there is the image of Odin sacrificed by himself to himself. A people founds a culture when it becomes cause of itself — when it finds in itself alone (in its tradition) the source of perpetual novelty. The same for man: to find in oneself the causes of self and the means of self-transcendence. (A decadent head of state is he who derives his authority from an other-than-self, from something other than the transcendence of his own principle).

3

Virtue is not a means relating to some ultimate end. It is its own end — its own reward. The interior reconquest or reconquest of self: the starting point of every quest as of every conquest. And first the mutual recognition and rediscovery of animus and anima. To establish over oneself a sovereign empire. To be to oneself one’s own object. To obey the Master who is in us, at the very instant we command the Slave who is in us. Search for the just mean.

4

To be oneself is not a sufficient watchword. One must still become what one can be — one must build oneself according to the idea one has of oneself. One must never be satisfied with oneself. One must want to change oneself before wanting to change the world. To accept the world as it is rather than accept ourselves as we are. To develop in ourselves those among our potentialities that make us specifically human; and among these, those that make us specifically ourselves. A strong will allows one to be what one wants — no matter what one was. Will takes precedence over all determinisms, even that of birth, provided that one can will. First cultivate interior energy, that energy of which “the ant can give proof as much as the elephant” (Stendhal), and which allows one to be in winter that through which spring returns.

5

Fix one’s own norm — and stick to it. Take the law in oneself, with the condition that it is not to be changed. (Which does not forbid giving new dimensions to the chosen perspective). Do not yield. Do not bend. Continue without reasons to continue. Be faithful to betrayed causes, be faithful for those who have not been. Be faithful also to those who are no longer. Defend against all and against oneself the idea one has of things and that one would like to be able to have of oneself.

6

Take “possession” of others only when one has taken “possession” of oneself: constraint upon oneself is the first condition of the right to constrain others. Likewise, tolerate one’s contemporaries after having tolerated oneself. The man of quality has demands first toward himself, the common man has them only toward others (Confucius). Power must be founded on superiority, not superiority on power. Those who direct have the right to possess, but those who possess do not necessarily have the right to direct. The man of quality is beyond despotisms: he dominates the dominators by ways that are his own. “A new nobility is necessarily opposed to everything that is rabble and despot” (Nietzsche).

The higher one climbs, the more one walks alone: the more one must count on oneself. Those who are above are responsible for those who are below: they must respond to their expectation; they have “privileges” only insofar as one can really unload onto them — otherwise, all revolts are just. Freely follow those who are superior to us: have pride in having found a Master (Stefan George). The counterpart of submission is not domination, but protection. One has the right to obey and the duty to command (oneself) — not the inverse. Proclaim the duty to have rights, and the fine right to have duties.

7

The world is immeasurable tragedy. All existence is tragic, all affirmation is tragic. The world is chaos — but one can give it form. What we do has no other meaning than that which we give it. Counterpart: everything resonates on everything. Our most minute gestures have a consequence in the most remote parts of the universe. Evil has no positive existence. It is only a simple limitation of what becomes — a limitation of the form that beings give to the world. A pure, eternal negation.

8

We deserve everything that happens to us — individually and collectively. Past a certain threshold, there is neither luck nor chance: our adversaries, in the final analysis, are never strong except through our own weaknesses. Consequently, do not merely accept, but will what happens. Will what happens once we have not been able to prevent it from occurring. No resignation, but the maintenance of our own freedom. Amor fati: the only means of acting when one can no longer act. Stoicism: the only possible conduct when others are no longer. Make it so that what we can do nothing about can also do nothing to us (Evola).

9

In the beginning was action. Great and strong things have no raison d’être; that is why they must be done. (But everything that is unmotivated is not necessarily great and strong). Action is the most important thing, not he who undertakes it; the mission, not he who fulfills it. Against individualism— for an active impersonality. What one must do cannot be explained in terms of motives. Nobility keeps silent.

10

Honor: never fail the norms one has set for oneself. The image one has of oneself becomes true — this is evident — from the instant one conforms to it. From then on, whether it be an “image” or a “reality” matters little; the two terms are merged. The idea becomes flesh: this is the true incarnation of the Logos. Every promise commits, no circumstance releases. To be able to be proud of oneself is the best means of not having to be ashamed of others.

11

Style is the man. Liturgy counts more than dogma. The beautiful is never wrong. It is better to do mediocre things well than to do excellent things badly. The way one does things is worth more than the things themselves. The way one lives one’s ideas is worth more than these ideas. The way one lives is worth more than what one lives — and sometimes more than life. More simplicity than manners, one is a boor; more manners than simplicity, one is a pedant; as much manners as simplicity, such is the man of quality (Confucius).

12

Nietzsche: “What is noble? To seek situations where one needs attitudes. To abandon happiness to the great number, that happiness which is peace of soul, virtue, comfort, Anglo-Saxon commercialism. To instinctively seek heavy responsibilities. To know how to make enemies everywhere, at worst to make one of oneself.”

This is an excerpt from Ideas in the Right Place by Alain de Benoist, hot off the press from Arktos.

The context:

In the summer of 1979, a media campaign was unleashed in France, and soon spread internationally, with the aim of discrediting and ostracizing a young movement that the press dubbed the Nouvelle Droite, or “New Right.”

Rather than submit to misinterpretations, caricatures, and outright lies, Alain de Benoist and the thinkers around GRECE (the Research and Study Group for European Civilization) accepted the challenge and leapt into the battle of ideas. In newspapers and journals, on television and radio, at conferences and round tables, the “New Right” demonstrated its vibrancy and prowess as a metapolitical force that saw its mission as laying the intellectual groundwork for a new European Renaissance.

Taking up the gauntlet as GRECE’s leading philosopher, Alain de Benoist selected 25 essays that he considered the most exemplary of the New Right’s principles and perspectives on questions that are at once timeless, contemporary, and beyond the modern divisions of left and right. The result was Ideas in the Right Place, a work that has endured as a source of penetrating reflections on the fundamental questions of culture, history, and politics.

13

Put one’s duty before one’s passions, and one’s passions before one’s interests. To accomplish “good actions” to earn one’s salvation, go to paradise, etc., is still to serve one’s interests. Do what one must, not what one loves. But this requires apprenticeship: man needs rules to build himself, because he is infinitely malleable. Work as service, duty as destiny.

14

Realize and ceaselessly remake the lived harmony of contingencies and principles. Make it so that acts conform to words. The man whose words exceed his acts is no more master of himself than the man whose acts exceed his words. To be sincere is not to tell the truth. It is to adhere entirely, without second thoughts, to everything one undertakes.

15

Do not repent, but draw lessons. Put everything into action. Not to do harm, but if one has done so, do not seek to justify oneself. The justifications one gives oneself are so many flights from oneself. Repentance does not aim to erase the fault, but to give oneself good conscience. Render good for good, justice for evil. (If one rendered good for evil, what would one render for good — and what value would it have?)

16

Never forgive; forget much. Never hate; despise often. Plebeian sentiments: hatred, rancor, susceptibility, vanity, avarice. Hatred, which is the contrary of contempt; rancor, which is the contrary of forgetting; susceptibility and vanity, which are the contrary of pride; avarice, which is the contrary of wealth. Of all these sentiments, ressentiment is the most despicable. Nietzsche: “Near is the time of the most despicable of men, he who is no longer even capable of despising himself.”

17

Against utilitarianism. As with men, as with armies. Troops that need to know why they are fighting in order to fight well are already mediocre troops. There is lower: troops that need to be convinced that their cause is the good one. And lower still: those that only fight when they have chances of prevailing. When one must undertake something, concern oneself only secondarily with knowing whether the enterprise can or cannot be crowned with success. The maxim of the Silent One remains the key to Dürer’s engraving, Knight, Death and the Devil. But it is not enough to undertake without being assured of victory, for one must still undertake even when one is sure to fail — because one is sure to fail: because remaining faithful to the norms one has given oneself is then the only honorable way to get through it. Think of the “soldier of Pompeii” (Spengler). And also of the example of Regulus. To want to do like the adversary under the pretext that it succeeded for him, is to become that adversary — not to be different from him. There is baseness as soon as one asks (oneself) “what is it for,” “what does it bring,” “what obliges us to do it.” To try to preserve at all costs a life that we will lose anyway — an apologue of living dogs and dead lions — there’s a fine absurdity.

18

Virtue, like vice, can only be the prerogative of an elite. They require the same capacity for self-mastery; they pertain less to “morality” than to pure will. The freedom to do something always goes hand in hand with a freedom with respect to that something. In other words, one must will only the things to which one also feels capable of renouncing. Julius Evola: “You are permitted to do something only insofar as you are also capable of abstaining from doing it. You are permitted to want something — and to obtain it — only insofar as you are also capable of abstaining from wanting it and giving it up.”

19

Do not seek to convince, seek rather to awaken. Life finds meaning in what is more than life — but not beyond life. What is more than life is not expressed in (and by) words, but is sometimes felt. Give precedence to soul over mind, to life over reason, to image over concept.

20

Lyricism can serve as a “moral” rule, provided that one has posited as the essential relation of existence not the relation of man to man, but that of man to the universe. (The only way there is to adhere to the world above is to build oneself by analogy with it). Great heads of state are those thanks to whom peoples can think of themselves lyrically.

21

The present actualizes all pasts, potentializes all futures. To accept the present, through jubilatory assumption of the instant, is to be able to enjoy at the same time all instants. Past, present, and future are the three perspectives, equally actual, given at every moment of historical becoming. Break definitively with the linear conception of history. Everything we do engages what has already come as much as what will (re)come.

22

The goal of life: to put something important between oneself and death. The epoch, like society, can prevent us from doing so. Two ways for society to drive one mad: demand too much, not propose enough. This can be, according to men, exactly the same thing.

23

Solitude. Know how to be of the party of the polar star: the one that stays in place when the others continue to turn. Peace is at the center of movement (Jünger) — in the axis of the wheel. Cultivate in oneself what the man of quality conserves, immutable, in all situations: Confucian jen, purusha of the Aryas, the humanitas of the Romans — the interior core of being.

24

There is no true piety but filial piety, extended to ancestors, to lineage and to people. Jesus affirming that Joseph is not his true father — that he is the son of a single God, the brother of all men — begins the process of disavowal of paternity. Our vanished ancestors are neither spiritually dead nor passed into another world. They are at our sides, in an invisible and rustling crowd. They surround us as long as their memory is perpetuated by their descendants. Thus is justified the cult of ancestors — and the duty to have their name respected.

25

All men of quality are brothers, no matter the race, country, and time.

— Alain de Benoist,

July 1977

Ideas in the Right Place: Foundations & Perspectives of the New Right, the classic masterpiece by Alain de Benoist, has been brought to you in English by Arktos

More from Alain de Benoist coming soon from Arktos:

Giorgio Locchi (1923–1992) was, along with figures such as Dominique Venner and Alain de Benoist, one of the founders of the French New Right. Guillaume Faye counted him among his most important sources of inspiration, and when you read Faye’s references to Locchi, it quickly becomes apparent that he was a valuable and original thinker.

Despite this, Locchi remains relatively unknown in the Anglophone world, with few of Locchi’s texts having been available to non-French speakers. Because of this, the anthology Definitions (published in English by Arktos in 2024) is a great service to culture: it is a collection of translated texts that offer an introduction to his thought.

The broadly liberal hegemony still dominating the West means that large parts of the prevailing worldview are taken for granted, indeed are even nameless. Like fish, we lack words for the water in which we swim. Locchi is like a sun illuminating what would otherwise remain hidden. He gives names to aspects of the common understanding of such things as humanity and history, using terms such as egalitarianism, segmentary conceptions of history, and mentality.

But Locchi also identifies an alternative: the suprahumanist tendency, represented by figures such as Wagner and Nietzsche. This makes him interesting from a metapolitical perspective, but also valuable to academics, artists, and political activists.

Giorgio Locchi’s Definitions — brought to you in English by Arktos, also available on Amazon:

Starting from Arnold Gehlen’s anthropology, Locchi shows that man is a biological being, but at the same time “world-open,” perpetually free to choose:

“To reduce man to a biological species is to strip him of his humanity, of his historicity. This, of course, is the unconscious desire of societies exhausted by history.”

This applies both to individuals and societies, for “culture is the nature of man.” Locchi identifies two anthropological ideal types, while remaining fully aware that they are tendencies that coexist in most people. On the one hand, there is the mass man, incapable of doing anything other than following; on the other there is the founder/hero, who possesses and realizes an idea of his society.

In Locchi’s model, there is no necessary contradiction between the autonomous individual and his or her society: the founder/hero both preserves and ennobles the culture and society of his people. The alternative is a false dichotomy: “taking charge of a society, the hero occupies the pinnacle of the social hierarchy by right.”

Also of interest in this context is Locchi’s discussion of the relationship between society and myth: “as a social bond, Myth organizes society, guaranteeing its coherence in space and across time.” Myth is central, which means that a society that loses its myths, or even allows its enemies to replace them, faces great dangers. Such a society needs new myths, and Locchi saw Bach and Wagner as attempts in this direction. This is a worthy project for artists, philosophers, and musicians.

Locchi also develops one of the New Right’s central ideas, the spherical conception of time. He identifies the linear, or more precisely segmentary, view of history that characterizes both the bourgeoisie and the Left, with the “end of history” as its goal. Such a view of history is characterized by an egalitarian impulse: the end of history has no place for “great men” or inequality. At the same time, Locchi shows that the egalitarian conception of history has had three phases, from the mythical through the ideological to the scientific. All proceed from the same mentality.

Another one of Locchi’s valuable insights is that ideological analysis must identify the underlying mentalities and sentiments. In contrast to the linear mode of thought, an anti-egalitarian mentality guides Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Conservative Revolutionaries of the 1920s. For Nietzsche, past, present, and future coexist; their meanings affect one another, and bygone events are potentially ever-present. Locchi’s view of history is “the struggle among men in the name of images they themselves make and which they mean, by realizing, to equal.” Here, too, we find an unapologetically agonistic ideal, in which rivalry and competition are not regarded as something negative but, on the contrary, as the engine of history.

The agonistic ideal is thoroughly Indo-European, something Locchi was well aware of. His essay “Indo-European Identity and the Modern World” is a fascinating application of the Indo-European worldview to society, in which the Indo-European myths of the war between the Æsir and Vanir depict how “the ‘predator-gods’, continuators of the ‘first man’ as self-domesticator, impose themselves through the binding magic of their chief, Odinn-Wotan.”

Likewise, two social categories can be identified historically: “those who attained a superior level of consciousness… offered themselves as an elite”; “the ‘domestication’ of the mass was effected by the elite.” Here Locchi draws on Dumézil’s description of the three Indo-European functions, albeit reduced and combined into two. It is as fascinating a read as his intellectual massacre of Lévi-Strauss’s project. For Locchi, all societies have an elite of magicians and warriors who, by having attained self-control, can also claim the right to lead them.

READ MORE from Arktos:

Overall, Definitions is a treasure trove, or an arsenal, for the genuine Right. Locchi writes with authority about Wagner, Nietzsche, and Dumézil, as well as Spengler and the Conservative Revolution.

He addresses the “American disease” that has afflicted Europe, describes the European Empire as an ideal, and identifies the egalitarian dream of bringing history—and with it, humanity in the Locchian sense—to an end (“then history as a whole also ends with us”). He describes attempts to rehabilitate, and neutralize, Nietzsche; in passing, he observes that “‘cold societies’ ought really to be called cultural broken branches.”

Locchi’s clear vision of man and history is inspiring, as is his warning against attempts to step outside of history. Equally inspiring, interesting, and impressive are his analyses of myths, from Oedipus and the Indo-European creation myth to The Ring of the Nibelung and the war of the gods.

The mentality that guided Locchi emerges in stark contrast to the mentality and sentiments guiding today’s “liberals” and “leftists”; and for most readers, Locchi is likely to be a source of inspiration.

In short, Definitions is metapolitics at its best, and this present time also seems ripe for the suprahumanist tendency and the spherical conception of history in a way that the 1980s perhaps were not.

Giorgio Locchi’s Definitions is available from Arktos and on Amazon.

COMING SOON:

Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Suprahumanist Myth — Locchi’s widely-regarded magnum opus — is forthcoming from Arktos this Autumn.

Note from the Institut Iliade:

Three thousand years after their composition, the Iliad and the Odyssey remain the living source of European literature and the European imagination. From the wrath of Achilles to the return of Odysseus, from Hector’s farewells to Penelope’s cunning, Dominique Venner rereads the Homeric poems as the founding legacy of a vision of the world — courage in the face of destiny, excellence as an ideal, man aligned with the order of the cosmos — handed down from century to century until reaching us.

“When I was in khâgne,” recalls François Jullien, one of the sharpest minds of our time, “a friend and I were called the Homerizers… And I have become more and more convinced that, if one is looking for the decisive categories of European thought (the categories of ‘action’ as well as the categories of ‘knowledge’), it is in Homer or Hesiod that one must look, well before Plato… Join the Iliad and the Odyssey together and you obtain the decisive orientations of Greek philosophy1.”

REMINDER:

Dominique Venner’s 30,000 Years of Identity: The History and Tradition of Europeans is coming soon from Arktos — now available for pre-order.

To celebrate this imminent historic release, all Venner titles in the Arktos Shop are 20% off until August 31st!

The European Bible: (Re-)Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey

The founding poems contain the first expression of historical thought. At the beginning of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides refers back to the Iliad to sketch in rapid strokes the ancient history of the Greeks, thereby crediting Homer with having laid its foundations. But this merit was small beside the rest. Inspired by the gods and by poetry — which are one and the same — Homer bequeathed to us the forgotten source of our tradition, the Greek expression of the entire Indo-European heritage, Celtic, Slavic, or Nordic, with a clarity and formal perfection without equal. This is why Georges Dumézil reread the Iliad in its entirety every year.

Who was Homer? Let us set aside the debates of the scholars. All that matters is what the Ancients thought. For them, the reality of the divine poet was beyond doubt. Nor did they ever doubt his dual paternity of the Iliad and the Odyssey.2

The Currency and Transmission of Homer

Homer’s continuing relevance was recalled in 2007 by the exhibition organized by the BNF (the National Library of France).3 It presented for the first time the rich collections of its Cabinet des médailles. As Patrick Morantin, the exhibition’s curator, wrote:

“One must first marvel that, at a distance of 3,000 years, a corpus of such scope has come down to us. What veneration must have surrounded the work of the Poet, in every era, for this poetic mass to have passed through wars, acts of vandalism, accidents, censorship, ignorance! How many works of late Antiquity have been lost, while today we can read the Iliad and the Odyssey in their entirety!”

And Morantin added:

“The Iliad is perhaps, along with the New Testament, the work known to us through the greatest number of sources.”

We know that Plato said Homer was “the educator of Greece.” He was therefore ours as well. The work, at first entirely oral, goes back to the eighth century before our era. Two centuries later, three Athenian statesmen, notably Pisistratus, had a first written edition established, which thus dates to the sixth century BC. Later, the exhibition’s curators specify, between the third and second centuries before our era,

“at the Museum of Alexandria Homer was the most studied author; he was also the first to be the object of a true critical edition. This critical activity begins with Zenodotus of Ephesus in the first half of the third century before our era, and culminates with Aristarchus of Samothrace, in the first half of the following century. (…) From the second century before our era onward, the text becomes uniform. The work of the Alexandrian scholars had fixed a norm to which everyone henceforth referred.”

The common source was the edition established in Athens in the sixth century BC at the behest of Pisistratus.

From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

The memory of the poems suffered from the fall of the Western Roman Empire without, however, disappearing:

“If, in the medieval West, the link with Homer’s original text was broken, the name of the Poet never ceased to be venerated, and the memory of his heroes and their adventures was kept alive. Homer continued indirectly to nourish the imagination of the Middle Ages through the classical Latin poets such as Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, the Latin summaries of the Iliad, the apocryphal works of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys of Crete, the medieval romances such as the Roman de Troie (Romance of Troy) [by Benoît de Sainte-Maure] and their prose adaptations (…) so much so that the heroes and the matter of the epic were known to the cultivated public when, in the Renaissance, the Iliad and the Odyssey were rediscovered in their original text [in Greek].”

Paradoxically, despite its Christianization, the Byzantine Empire

“saw to the transmission of the ancient authors. The classical tradition was thus maintained at Byzantium, where, from 425 to 1453, the schools of Constantinople remained, as it were, its pillars. This is why it is inaccurate to speak of a ‘renaissance’ in the Eastern Roman Empire. In the West, by contrast, the rediscovery of Homer was a landmark event for the first Italian humanists.”

At the request of Petrarch, who did not read Greek, the first Latin translation of the Iliad was produced in 1365–66.

The decisive event was the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Shortly before, numerous learned Byzantines had taken refuge in Italy. Thus it was that the first editio princeps in Greek of the Iliad and the Odyssey appeared in Florence in 1488. The first French translation of the Iliad was produced in 1577, published by Breyer.

In an interview that opened the BNF catalogue, Jacqueline de Romilly stressed that the Iliad and the Odyssey reveal a high degree of civilization in the sense of refinement of manners. The historian added:

“My teacher Louis Bodin, a great specialist of Thucydides, told me shortly before his death: ‘Now, for me, there is nothing left but Homer.’ And it is somewhat the same for me now; one returns to the essential, to the wholly pure.”

To Always Be the Best

Through these poems flows the sap of eternal youth. They are the source of our literature and of an important part of our imagination. Their prodigiously inventive style may at first seem somewhat disconcerting, with its repeated epithets, which served as bearings for the listeners of Antiquity.4 But one must enter into the text, and soon one is spellbound.

In composing the Iliad, Homer made himself the creator of the first of all tragic epics, and with the Odyssey, of the first of all novels. Both place the individuality of their characters at the center of the narrative — something found in the tradition of no other civilization. As André Bonnard emphasized, the Iliad is a world peopled with countless characters, each distinct from the others. To bring them to life, Homer does not describe them; it is enough for him to lend them a gesture or a word. Hundreds of warriors die in the Iliad, but by a single specific trait the Poet gives each of them a singular life at the instant of dying. “And Diores fell in the dust, on his back, stretching out his arms toward his comrades” (IV, 524). A single gesture, and we are touched by this unknown Diores and his love of life.

Then comes the death of the Trojan Harpalion, a brave man who cannot master a movement of terror: “Turning about, he fell back on the group of his comrades, all the while glancing in every direction, lest a bronze point strike his flesh.” He sank into the arms of his companions and, on the ground, his body expressed its revolt by writhing “like a worm” (XIII, 654).

Almost all the characters of the Iliad, apart from the women, the children, and the old men, are warriors. Most are brave, but they are not brave in the same way. The bravery of Ajax, son of Telamon, first among the Greeks after Achilles by his imposing stature, his strength, and his fearless courage, stubborn as a rock, awe-inspiring: “So goes prodigious Ares [god of war] when he makes his way to battle… So prodigious Ajax, rampart of the Achaeans, sprang forward, a smile on his fierce face. And his feet beneath him went with great strides while he brandished the long-shadowed javelin. At the sight of him the Argives [Achaeans] were filled with great joy. A terrible trembling entered the limbs of every Trojan, and even Hector’s heart pounded in his breast… Ajax drew near, like unto a tower…” (VII, 208–219). A single combat, a duel, was joined between Ajax and Hector, full of fire, and Hector, after many an assault, was wounded in the neck. “The javelin made the black blood seep forth.” As night fell, heralds of arms stepped between the two combatants to separate them. Homer lets us discover to what degree combat obeys chivalric rules. The two adversaries agree to suspend the contest until the following day, showering each other with praise, even exchanging their arms (VII, 303–305). Stubborn as he is, Ajax yielded, with the feeling of having triumphed in this duel.

Different is the bravery of young Diomedes. He has the ardor and the impetus of youth. He is the youngest of the heroes of the Iliad after Achilles. He is never weary. After a hard day of fighting, he still volunteers for a perilous night expedition into the Trojan camp, in the company of Odysseus, a warrior as brave as he is cunning and circumspect.

Diomedes is also one of the chivalric temperaments of the Poem. One day, joining furious combat with a Trojan, he suddenly learns, at the moment of striking him with his spear, that this is Glaucus, son of a guest-friend of his father: “Then brave Diomedes was seized with pleasure and, planting his spear in the nourishing earth, addressed to his noble adversary these words full of friendship: In truth, you are a guest-friend of my father’s house, and our ties are of long standing… By your father and by my father, let us henceforth be friends to one another. So spoke Diomedes…” Thereupon the two warriors leap from their chariots, clasp hands, and seal their friendship (VI, 229).

Homer honors rooted individuality, and not the individualism that is its perversion. Together with respect for the adversary, despite implacable combat, these are the foundations of our tradition. One finds their trace in that modern Iliad which is Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel). These living foundations dominate the entire European psyche, tragedy, and philosophy alike. They enter into art beginning with Greek statuary; they irrigate political institutions and law.

Homer does not conceptualize, as the philosophers will do; he gives us things to see, he shows living examples, teaching the qualities that make a man a kalos agathos, noble and accomplished. “To always be the best,” Peleus says to his son Achilles, “to prevail over all others“ (Iliad, VI, 208). To be beautiful and brave, for a man; to be gentle, loving, and faithful, for a woman. The poet bequeathed in condensed form what Greece would offer to posterity: nature as model, the striving toward beauty, the creative force that drives one always to surpass oneself, excellence as an ideal of life.

The Iliad, Poem of Destiny

The Iliad is not only the poem of the Trojan War; it is the poem of destiny as our Borean ancestors perceived it5, whether Greek, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, or Latin. In it the Poet speaks the nobility that stands against the scourge of war. He speaks the courage of the heroes who kill and die. He speaks the sacrifice of those who defend their homeland, the grief of the women, the father’s farewell to the son who will carry him on, the despondency of the old. He speaks of many other things besides: the ambition of the chiefs, their vanity, their quarrels. He speaks, too, of bravery and cowardice, of friendship, love, and tenderness. He speaks the taste for glory that draws men up to the height of the gods. This poem where death reigns speaks the love of life — and also honor set higher than life, which makes one stronger than the gods.

In 16,000 verses and 24 books, the Poem recounts a brief episode at the end of the ten-year siege of Troy, most likely in the thirteenth century before our era. Troy, otherwise called Ilion (whence the Iliad), is a powerful fortified city, built at the entrance of the Dardanelles, on the Asian shore of the Hellespont, the perennial frontier between Occident and Orient. No more than the historians of today did those of Antiquity — Herodotus or Thucydides — doubt the reality of the events that frame the Iliad. The Trojans are Boreans (Europeans) of the same race as their Greek adversaries, the “fair-haired“ Achaeans, also called Argives (natives of the Argolid) or Danaans (descendants of the mythical Danaus). With this one difference: the Trojans are associated with Asia, and not only for geographical reasons. Their army includes barbarian contingents (foreign to the Greek world), a point that would be confirmed by the twentieth century’s archaeological discoveries concerning their relations with the highly composite Hittite Empire.

According to tradition, the conflict had a mythical origin involving the gods, who divide themselves between the two camps. Out of vengeance, Aphrodite (Venus among the Latins) grants to Paris, a young royal prince of Troy, son of the old king Priam, the power to seize Helen, the most beautiful of women, already married to the “fair-haired“ Menelaus, an Achaean, king of Sparta. The abduction of a royal wife by a foreigner is a crime that strikes at all the Achaeans. At the wedding, each of the Greek lords had sworn to uphold the union of Menelaus and the all-too-desirable Helen. And so an army gathered at Aulis with its swift ships, comparable to the drakkars of the Vikings to come, and set out for the Asian shores of the Troad. Troy will be punished, and Helen brought home. So begins the war: “All the earth, far and wide, laughed with the gleam of bronze…“

The Wrath and Reversal of Achilles

After ten years of a very long siege, accompanied by raids in the surrounding countryside, a quarrel sets Agamemnon, chief of the Achaean coalition, against Achilles, the most famous hero of his camp. Abusing his power, Agamemnon seizes Briseis “of the fair cheeks,” a young captive beloved of Achilles. Such is the pretext and the beginning of the poem: “Sing, goddess, the ruinous wrath of Achilles…” This goddess who sings the epic is the Muse, whose interpreter the Poet is — which underscores his ties with the divine world.

Gripped by a just anger, and after copiously insulting Agamemnon, Achilles decides to abandon the battle and “withdraws to his tent” (the phrase would become proverbial), together with his men (the Myrmidons).6

This wrath of Achilles — the principal hero of the Iliad, together with the Trojan Hector — is the pivot of the poem. His withdrawal and that of his men have the gravest consequences for the Achaeans. Victory deserts them. On the plain, beneath the walls of Troy, they suffer three defeats, each more disastrous than the last. From assailants they are reduced to the defensive. They must even build an entrenched camp around their ships. This entrenchment is soon forced by the Trojans led by Hector, the most famous of Priam’s sons. The enemy prepares to set fire to the Greek ships and drive the Greeks into the sea.

Throughout these harsh battles that fill the poem with carnage and exploits, the absence of Achilles is nothing other than the shining sign of his strength and his power. The bravest of the Achaean chiefs — massive Ajax, impetuous Diomedes, skillful Odysseus — try in vain to replace him.

On a night of black tragedy, between two disasters, while Achilles, in his tent, gnaws at himself in the inactivity to which he has condemned himself, he sees an embassy approach, led by the two greatest chiefs of the army, Ajax and Odysseus. They are joined by old Phoenix, who tries to make him hear his father’s voice. In the face of danger, Agamemnon has repented. He restores Briseis and offers sumptuous gifts by way of reparation. The embassy fails. Achilles persists in his rancor, putting himself in the wrong in his turn (Book IX).

The next day, the Trojans force the Greek defenses. Hector is already setting a ship ablaze. At the other end of the camp, Achilles sees the flames rise. Despite his obstinacy, he cannot remain unmoved by the entreaties of his friend Patroclus, another self. He agrees to send his troops back into the battle and clothes Patroclus in his own armor. This counter-offensive drives back the Trojans. But Patroclus is killed by Hector. Achilles’ grief is terrifying, but it restores him to life, unleashing in him a fury and a rage for vengeance against Hector, the slayer of Patroclus.

Thus is accomplished in the Poem a complete reversal of the dramatic action, which had been frozen by Achilles’ withdrawal. Mad with grief, the Achaean hero returns to the fight: “As a prodigious fire rages through the deep valleys of a parched mountain, the forest burns, and the wind, driving it in every direction, makes the flame whirl — so in every direction leapt Achilles. He went on, like unto night…“ (Book XVIII). After a ferocious duel, he kills Hector, then vents his fury on the corpse, dragging it endlessly through the dust behind his chariot.

Achilles and Helen Facing Destiny

To the grief of his friend’s death is added, for Achilles, the certainty of his own fate. An ancient prophecy holds that he will be killed as soon as he has taken Hector’s life. This Achilles has always known. Unlike other heroes fallen in battle, he knows his destiny in advance and has chosen it. He does not submit to it as a fatality, in the manner of the Orientals; he confronts it. In his earliest youth, the choice was offered to him between a long and peaceful life far from battle, and an intense life, cut short in the blaze of combat. And it is the latter that he willed, bequeathing to the men of the future a model of tragic greatness. Free of illusions, he knows he will have no other life: “A man’s life,” he says in Book IX, “cannot be won back; never again can it be carried off or seized, once it has passed the barrier of his teeth…” It is a thought that speaks to us.

Compared with the sacred texts of other peoples and other cultures, the freedom and sovereignty of Homer’s heroes are unique. The gods intervene in the Iliad, to be sure, in season and out of season, but without truly weighing on the autonomy of men. Their numerous interventions do no more than hasten what would have come to pass in any case. And one senses clearly that Homer does not take them altogether seriously (except perhaps Athena) — which would scandalize Plato, that stiff and moralizing spirit. In reality, the gods of Homer are allegories of the forces of nature and of life.

The last book of the Iliad is the theater of a reversal: when old Priam comes to beg for the return of the body of his son Hector, we see Achilles gradually open himself to compassion. Transformed by his own suffering, the hero proves more complex than his savage violence had suggested.

There are not only heroes and warriors in the Iliad; there are also women (Helen, Hecuba, and Andromache), children (Astyanax), old men (Priam). Nor are there only the brave. There is Paris, whose strange loves with Helen are at the origin of the Trojan War. Executing the will of Aphrodite, he was Helen’s seducer and abductor. The involuntary author of the war, he is also the one who will close it by killing Achilles with a treacherous arrow — an episode the Poem does not recount, and which is merely intimated by the prophecy Hector utters at the moment of his death (XXII, 359–360).

Paris — the pretty-boy, so often cowardly and vain — is the antithesis of his brother Hector, who despises him. Hector is the pure hero, protector of Troy, while Paris is the “scourge of his fatherland.” The woman he abducted and seduced, Helen, despises him and does not hesitate to abuse him: “So you are back from the battle! Ah! how much better it would have been for you to perish there under the blows of the mighty warrior who was my first husband!” (III, 428–436). She detests him, but, by the will of Aphrodite, she is enslaved to his sexual magnetism. Once again, Homer does not explain; he narrates, and what he says is full of a complex truth.

Helen is the opposite of Paris. She is moral where her lover is amoral. She revolts against the physical subjection Aphrodite imposes on her. Her nature was made for order. She never ceases to mourn the time when everything in her life was in its place: “I left my bridal chamber, my kin, my beloved daughter… And so I languish in tears.” Nothing predisposed her to play the role of the adulterous wife, the instrument of the ruin of two peoples. Nothing, except the intervention of the gods — that is to say, of fate.

With a great truthfulness that moves us, the Iliad thus displays several antagonistic natures: Helen and Paris, Achilles and Hector.

The Stoicism and Patriotism of Hector

Achilles is the incarnation of youth (he is under thirty). He is also the incarnation of Force. He is Force radiant and untamed, before which everything bows. A Force in thrall to passion. Achilles masters nothing; he suffers everything — Briseis, Agamemnon, Patroclus, Hector. Circumstances unleash in him one tempest after another. Everything in him defies death. He never thinks of it, though he knows it is near. He loves life enough to prefer its intensity to its duration. Strange destiny! His love of glory, his impatience, and his wrath keep him apart from the action for the first eighteen books of the Poem, to the point of putting his own people in danger. To save the army, it would suffice for him to rise — as Odysseus tells him: “Rise up and save the army…”

Awakened by the death of Patroclus, the Force rises: “Achilles rose… A great light shone from his head up to the sky, and he advanced to the edge of the ditch. There, standing, he uttered a cry, and that voice raised among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult” (XVIII).

Everything opposes him to Hector, to whom Homer’s sympathy implicitly goes. The Poem of the Achaeans thus holds up as an example their principal enemy. Do we know the equivalent of such nobility in our national narratives, or in the sacred books of the Far or Near East? Though he is as brave as Achilles, Hector’s bravery is not blind. He embodies the very figure of stoic courage. He is not ignorant of fear. He overcomes it. Sensing that all is lost, he will fight to the last of his strength.

Hector is also the incarnation of patriotism. Honor, for him, is one with duty. He is ready to die, not for his own glory, but for his country, his wife, and his child. He will defend them against all hope, for he knows that Troy is lost.

Nothing is more carnal than Hector’s love for his fatherland, of which his wife and son are the concrete images. He does not hide his forebodings from Andromache before leaving her to return to the fight: “I know a day will come when holy Troy shall perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam. But neither the future misery of the Trojans, nor that of my mother, of king Priam, and of my valiant brothers, grieves me so much as yours, when some bronze-armored Achaean shall rob you of your freedom and lead you away weeping… May the heavy earth cover me dead before I hear your cries, before I see you torn from this place…” (VI, 447–465). At these words, he stretches out his arms toward his son. But the child bursts into sobs, terrified by his father’s gleaming helmet. Laughing, Hector sets the helmet down and hands the child back to Andromache, who takes her son in her arms “laughing through her tears.” A scene in which the poetic genius of Homer bursts forth. Out of delicacy, Hector then softens his dark predictions: “Cease to grieve,” he says to Andromache. “No man can send me under the earth before the appointed hour…”

A moment before, Andromache was begging Hector not to expose himself. Now she thinks of it no longer. She has understood that he is defending her freedom and their mutual tenderness. There is in this last conversation of husband and wife something unique in ancient literature: a perfect equality in love. One never ceases to discover the incomparable richness of the Iliad, which closes with the preparation of Hector’s funeral — without the episodes of the death of Achilles or of the “Trojan horse,” which will be only briefly evoked in the Odyssey (Books XI and VIII).

The Odyssey: Man’s Place in the Cosmos

The second of the great poems recounts, in 12,000 verses and 24 books, the difficult return of Odysseus to his homeland — a return thwarted by a thousand fearsome snares. The Odyssey is thus the poem of the return, and the poem of just vengeance.

But the Odyssey is more than that. Under narrative pretexts different from those of the Iliad, the second poem suggests the “view of the world” proper to the Hellenes. It shows what man’s place is within nature, and his relation to the mysterious forces that command it.

The bringing of mortals into harmony with the cosmic order is at the heart of the Homeric poems. But Homer’s Heaven stands beyond the primitive epochs of the founding of the cosmos evoked by the old myths, whose content would be given form in Hesiod’s Theogony: the clash of Uranus and Cronus, the battle of the Olympian gods and their victory over the Titans. Of all this, the Poet retains only the Olympian light, without troubling to build a coherent system. In Homer, coherence is not in the discourse. It is in him.

The rupture and then the return to the cosmic order form the warp of the Odyssey. Involuntarily, Odysseus provoked the wrath of Poseidon by blinding his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus. So it is with the destiny of men. Without willing it, they provoke disasters and the anger of the gods (figurations of the natural forces). Then they must struggle and endure torments to recover the lost harmony. Such will be the lot of Odysseus. Facing the terrifying trials imposed by Poseidon, who has hurled him into the world of chaos — the world of monsters (Charybdis and Scylla) and of possessive or perverse nymphs (Calypso, Circe, the Sirens), not to mention a visit to the kingdom of the dead — the navigator battles tirelessly to escape the snares and recover his place in the order of the world. Flung from trap to mortal peril, he will take ten years to come home. This is not merely a pretext for Homer to charm his audience with fantastic tales. Odysseus’ long voyage is strung taut by the invincible desire to escape chaos and to regain the ordered cosmos of men who are “eaters of bread.” No doubt love for Penelope and longing for Ithaca lie at the heart of this desire for return. But they only translate the hope of being once more adjusted to the order of the world. Having found and reconquered his homeland, Odysseus will be able to take his place again in the chain of the generations, like a fragment of eternity.

In the final sequence, each episode of the reconquest of Ithaca imprints itself on the memory, up to the massacre of the “suitors” (the usurpers of Ithaca). How the hero makes himself known to his son Telemachus, and how together they weave the meticulous plan of vengeance. How Odysseus arrives at his manor disguised as a beggar, recognized only by his old dog Argos, who dies of joy at the sight. How he is recognized by his old nurse, Eurycleia, at the sight of an old scar, memento of a memorable boar hunt. And now comes Penelope — troubled, anxious, questioning. Then comes the moment of just vengeance in an orgy of blood. And, at last possible, the reunion with Penelope. Then Athena intervenes, delaying the arrival of “rosy-fingered” Dawn so that the night of the return may last long…

In the Odyssey, Homer does not sing only the memory of heroes. He glorifies Eurycleia, Odysseus’ old nurse, and Eumaeus, his swineherd — two subaltern figures nevertheless held up as examples for their intelligence and their fidelity. Their role is capital in the reconquest of Ithaca. Thanks to Homer, they have not ceased to live, down to our own day.

The Poem of Femininity Respected

Because of the assertive presence of Penelope, the Odyssey is also the poem of femininity independent and respected. When Penelope appears in the great hall of the palace of Ithaca — tall and beautiful, her shining veils drawn over her cheeks, like unto golden Aphrodite — the knees of the “suitors” give way and desire floods their hearts (Odyssey, XVIII, 249).

Lover, wife, and mother, Penelope has charge of the little kingdom of Ithaca in Odysseus’ absence — a sign of the regard in which femininity was held. Many other women are present in Homer. In the Iliad: Helen, Andromache, Hecuba, and Briseis. In the Odyssey: Helen again, Calypso, and the charming Nausicaa. But Penelope eclipses them all, except perhaps Helen, who stands apart. Compelled, like the women of our own time, to invent the art of remaining feminine in a social world dominated by masculine values, she often suffers but never abdicates. She knows how to keep herself beautiful and desirable in spite of age. She, too, knows the importance of modesty for living in the society of men. When she is too sorely tormented, she takes refuge in sleep, watched over by Athena. Faced with the greedy pack of suitors, she does not join battle on the masculine terrain of violence. She uses cunning, smiles, invents the stratagem of the web forever to be rewoven, turning to her advantage the covetousness of which she is the object — and which perhaps does not displease her.

On Odysseus’ return, though he is the most cunning of men, she outwits him a little as well, feigning not to recognize him, even after he has massacred the “suitors” with the help of their son, Telemachus. He must first prove his identity by the test of the secret of the conjugal bed before she consents to give herself to him. In what sacred narrative of other cultures would one find the equivalent of Penelope and her radiant femininity?

The Political Order of the Shield of Achilles

Behind the narrative there also emerges a vision of the world and of life that awakens the memory of a lost wisdom. In Homer, the forests, the rocks, the wild beasts have souls. The whole of nature merges with the sacred, and men are not set apart from it.

If Homer’s world takes the cosmos as its model, it receives an ordered social description in the allegory of the shield of Achilles (Iliad, Book XVIII), forged by Hephaestus. Depicted upon it are two cities, one at peace, the other at war — the two faces of life. One discovers that the Greek city to come, with its citizens, its institutions, its reciprocal duties, is already present in the Homeric world. Hector says explicitly that he dies for the freedom of his fatherland (Iliad, VI, 455–528). The foundation of social organization and of civil peace is the ethnic unity of the city and respect for the laws, guaranteed by the elders. Men are happy in a happy society — one that always resembles itself, where one marries as the ancestors married, where one plows and harvests as one has always plowed and harvested. Individuals pass away, but the city endures.

As Marcel Conche has emphasized, a society that can read its future in its past is a society at rest, without anxiety. On this permanence is founded the feeling of security. By contrast, novelties — “progress” — will bring trouble. When one dreams of the ideal city and of better tomorrows, contentment with oneself is killed in each of us. From then on, discontent with oneself and with the world holds sway. What is figured on the shield of Achilles is, on the contrary, a happy society, wholly given over to the joy of living as it has always lived. The weddings are joyous, equity reigns, civic friendship is general. When war comes, the attacked city stands fast, the whole people mans the ramparts, the enemy has no ally within the walls. What peace for the soul!

Destiny Commands Gods and Men

Homer’s heroes are nevertheless not models of perfection. They are subject to error and to excess in the very proportion of their vitality. They pay the price for it, but never are they subjected to a transcendental justice punishing sins defined by a code external to life. Neither the pleasure of the senses, nor that of strength, nor the play of sexuality is equated with evil.

In Book III of the Iliad (III, 161–175), the all-too-beautiful Helen is invited by the old king Priam onto the walls of Troy, to describe for him the two armies facing each other, a truce having just been concluded. Well aware of being the involuntary cause of the war, Helen laments, saying she wishes she were dead. Priam then answers her with an infinite gentleness that surprises us: “No, my daughter, you are guilty of nothing. It is the gods who are guilty of everything!” What delicacy and what loftiness of vision on the part of the old king, all of whose sons will be killed. But what generous wisdom, too — a wisdom that frees human beings from the guilt with which other beliefs so often burden them.

In placing these words in Priam’s mouth, Homer is not saying that men are never guilty of the misfortunes that strike them. Elsewhere he shows how much calamity can be caused by vanity, envy, anger, stupidity, and other failings. But in the precise case of this war, as in many wars, he underscores that everything escapes the will of men. It is the gods, chance, or destiny that decide.

History has taught us how sound this interpretation is. How can one fail to be struck by its wisdom, when so many religions blame human beings and their supposed sins for all the disasters that befall them — earthquakes included?7

But Priam’s words have a still wider bearing. They suggest that, in human lives, many faults that we imagine to be such are often the effect of chance. This distance with regard to the mysteries of existence, this respect for others, are a constant in the Homeric poems. One may see in it proof of the very high level of civility and wisdom of the world Homer describes — to such a degree that, by comparison, our own might often appear barbarous.

Homer thus bequeathed to us, in their unaltered purity, our models and our principles of life: nature as foundation, excellence as goal, beauty as horizon, in the mutual respect of the feminine and the masculine.

The Poet reminds us that we were not born yesterday. He restores to us the foundations of our identity, the primordial expression of an ethical and aesthetic patrimony that is “ours,” which he himself held as an inheritance. And the principles he brought to life through his models have never ceased to be reborn, down to our own day — proof that the secret thread of our tradition could not be broken.

Originally published on July 1, 2007 on Dominique Venner’s Blog, dominiquevenner.fr; republished by the Iliade Institute.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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All Evola titles — including Andrea Scarabelli’s groundbreaking biography, Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life — are currently 20% off in the Arktos Shop until August 31.

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Who was Julius Evola (1898–1974)? Magician? Satanist? Dadaist? Fascist? Traditionalist? Or perhaps one of the most important thinkers of Europe’s true right in the 20th century?

A key to understanding Evola’s figure and personality is provided by Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life, the biography recently co-published by Arktos and PRAV Publishing.

The book was written by Andrea Scarabelli, an editor, translator, and journalist who is also one of the heads of the Italian branch of the New Right think tank GRECE (Research and Study Group for European Civilisation) and the Julius Evola Foundation in Rome.

Spanning over 729 pages and featuring more than 1,000 footnotes, Scarabelli’s work is not a dry academic study, but a vividly written biography of this “right-wing thinker of the century.” Moving beyond the demonization of Evola as a “fascist thinker” and “instigator of right-wing violence” — as he is portrayed in “anti-fascist” historiography — as well as beyond the apologetic glorification of the thinker often referred to as “the Baron,” this book paints a nuanced portrait of Evola that sets the record straight on many points (such as the third first name “Andrea” falsely attributed to him), all the while seeking to capture Evola in all his complexity.

The book takes us from the Alpine front of World War I, through the Dadaist era, to the occult circles of Rome; from the metapolitical struggle of the Conservative Revolution in Italy, Austria, and Germany to the 1968 revolution in Rome. Across these venues, the book explores Evola’s dual figure and personality: on the one hand, we have Evola the metapolitical fighter; on the other, we have the “other Evola,” the esoteric thinker who delved into Buddhist teachings, Hermetic tradition, and Freemasonry.

In Scarabelli’s tell-all, we also witness Evola’s transformation from a philosopher of the Absolute Self to a Traditionalist who sought to revive Indo-European tradition—especially pagan religiosity—in a revolt against modernity.

Over this journey of discovery, we learn about Evola’s connections to figures such as René Guénon, Carl Schmitt, Mircea Eliade, and Ernst Jünger, as well as about how the combative Italian came to be embroiled in literal fistfights with Italian Freemasons and the Fascist Squadristi.

Scarabelli not only explains the content of Evola’s works, but also, for example, the intentions behind the Baron’s changes to the German edition of his work Pagan Imperialism (1934), and how his Metaphysics of Sex (1958) became a bestseller.

Beyond books, the biography’s narrative is lightened by Evola’s mountain hikes, his encounters with women, and visits to haunted castles in Austria.

The author also discusses in detail Evola’s attempts to culturally influence Fascism and National Socialism in the spirit of the Conservative Revolution without himself becoming a supporter of those movements. What begins with a spiritual doctrine of race (or rather, a doctrine of castes) modeled on Aristotle culminates in Evola’s work for the SD’s Amt VI (Office for Cultural Policy) between 1943 and 1945. For the latter department, the occultist Evola was tasked with researching Freemasonry, ostensibly with the goal of creating a lodge which, purged of modernist ideas, could reconnect with an authentic European tradition of magic.

However, this esoteric work was abruptly interrupted on January 21, 1945, when Evola went for a walk on Schwarzenbergplatz in Vienna to test his fate during an American bombing raid. Long hospital stays and the paralysis of his legs completely transformed his life. Yet, despite persecution and defamation, he achieved belated fame in his old age.

Overall, Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life offers deep insight into the Roman philosopher’s thought and his networks. Anyone who wants to understand Evola beyond the defamation and myth-making cannot do without this work.

This review by Alexander Markovics, translated and edited for Arktos Journal, was first published in German in the 8/2026 issue of Aufgewacht:

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Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

In the face of a continent historically fragmented into state entities ever prone to waging war, there have been several attempts to unite Europe so that it could assume and fortify its power on a global scale.

Following the fall of Constantinople, in 1464 the Bohemian king George of Poděbrady suggested, for instance, that France and Venice ally themselves with Hungary and Poland to repel the Ottoman invaders. Two centuries later, Sully asked Henry IV to unite the Christian powers composed of ‘wise and royal economies’ so as to enable the French and English monarchies to counter the Habsburgs.

Although none of these attempts succeeded in imposing itself in a durable manner, they did nonetheless show that the unification of continental forces is a recurring European leitmotiv.

Over the centuries, this tendency has, in fact, manifested itself in three rather different forms. First, there was the imperial model, as encountered in the conquests of Caesar and Napoleon, taking on a more or less universal form through the establishment of overseas colonies. Next, we had the ‘Westphalian’ model, based on cooperation more so than on war, all within a framework of respecting borders and embracing a sensible balance of power. Last but not least, we have the third model, namely the one in which Europeans still live today, which involves economic cooperation based on liberal values rooted in the Cold War and the expansion of global capitalism. This third formula, which led to the establishment of the European Union, constitutes a most instructive political experiment, yet proves to be, generally speaking, incapable of perceiving the European space as a genuine territory of power.

Europe as a Market

Prior to the beginnings of European integration as such, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972) had already become one of the ‘fathers of Europe’ by founding the Pan-European Union (1926). Through Paneuropa (first the book and then the monthly journal bearing the same name), he campaigned passionately for the establishment of a United States of Europe, reviving an idea put forward nearly a century earlier by Victor Hugo in his famous speech at the International Peace Congress (1849).

During the interwar period, the Pan-European idea enjoyed considerable success among intellectual elites. It was championed by, among others, Aristide Briand, who argued that ‘some kind of federal bond must exist between peoples who, like the peoples of Europe, are geographically clustered.’ Coudenhove-Kalergi suggested starting with unifying German coal and French steel under a joint management structure symbolically enjoying a common passport, a single currency, and even an anthem, specifically Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Ode to Joy). This pan-European union acted as a promise of a peaceful and democratic renaissance capable of making Europe the ‘head of humanity’ in a heroic sort of spirit, a kind of mystique founded on classical culture, Christianity, and a vision of chivalric honour.

The project thus went far beyond mere economic cooperation, as it pursued a civilisational objective that would earn it many enemies, both among communists and nationalists. Similarly abiding by continental rather than national logic, the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) would, at about the same time, develop his theory of ‘Panism’ (Pan-Ideen, including Pan-Germanism), which had several aspects in common with the Coudenhove-Kalergi movement. Opposed to such a concept which he considered to be anti-national, Adolf Hitler would label Coudenhove-Kalergi a ‘cosmopolitan bastard,’ a fact that would drive the latter into exile in the United States following the outbreak of World War II. This episode would essentially bring the Pan-European movement, much of whose documentation is now lost, to a halt.

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This article is an excerpt from the Institut Iliade volume Europe — A World Power by Olivier Eichenlaub, brought to you in English by Arktos:

To offer a European alternative to the challenges embodied by communist Russia and post-war capitalist America, it was ultimately Jean Monnet’s (1888–1979) project that was adopted, albeit on a significantly reduced scale. Following the initial experience of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951), and under the impetus of French Minister Robert Schuman, the European Economic Community (EEC) would ultimately be established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, before being renamed the European Union as a result of the Maastricht Treaty (1992), which enshrined its liberal principles. The number of member states then increased from six to twelve. The pursued objective was to create a privileged economic partnership in Western Europe, one that would lead to social, and then political, harmony. In reality, however, it was primarily a matter of developing an economic strategy so as to compete with the Americans and the Russians by establishing a demographic market commensurate with the ambitions of global capitalism.

This objective explains, among other things, the premature accession of ten Eastern European countries in 2004, invited to join the Union following the collapse of communism in order to break free from Russian influence and immediately embrace a capitalist market economy. Today, this results in a rather opaque unity: although 27 European countries are members of the European Union, not all are part of the border-free travel zone (Schengen), and not all of them use the single currency introduced in 2002 (as part of the eurozone). Furthermore, it should be noted that Switzerland and Norway have never truly sought membership, nor has Russia been invited, while the Balkans remain candidates and the United Kingdom left the Union in 2020, having joined it rather reluctantly to begin with.

Throughout this evolution, several initiatives have undeniably contributed to strengthening European cohesion and creating a sense of shared belonging. This is particularly true of the Erasmus programme and the euro currency. Following the mandatory standardisation of the university system at European level, Erasmus now clearly promotes student mobility, as well as the recognition of degrees obtained abroad, fostering a mindset of international exchange and experiences that are highly valued among young Europeans. Likewise, the euro also facilitates exchanges and comparisons, generating new forms of cooperation, particularly in cross-border areas that have chosen to transcend national borders and organise themselves into so-called Eurodistricts (in Strasbourg, Basel, Catalonia, and the Palatinate) or Euroregions.

Beyond these efforts, however, it must be said that the majority of European policies never draw upon the full historical depth that Europe actually possesses. Indeed, they generally never allude to Aristotelian logic, nor to Roman organisation (which largely shaped the continent), but instead often give the impression of being remotely controlled by the ‘Eurocrats’ of Brussels, all within a mindset that is exclusively based on liberal free trade and sometimes seen as undemocratic. Nevertheless, European power cannot exist in the absence of a strong sense of shared belonging akin to the sort experienced in the Middle Ages, when it forged political communities bound together by cohesive energy and civilisational patriotism.

In short, what Europe truly needs is the very antithesis of what the European Union suggests through its vague notion of a ‘European citizen.’ The same applies to the failed 2005 Treaty, which, despite having an interesting text, failed to provide Europe with a constitution that would reaffirm its Christian origins. This ‘obliviousness’ of one’s roots and history clearly shows that the EU refuses to address Europe in terms of its actual identity, which, from a geopolitical perspective, comes across as both paradoxical and counterproductive. Ultimately, this reveals the EU’s near-structural inability to transcend its own managerial, administrative, and regulatory prerogatives and perceive Europe’s power in its true civilisational depth .

Civilisation

Jean Monnet himself admitted that if he were to ‘remodel’ the European project, he would begin by emphasising its unity and cultural riches rather than its economic potential. This idea was also championed by the Franco-Czech author Milan Kundera in the early 1980s, in a seminal manifesto that draws heavily on the identity-based conception of Europe as seen from the East:

“Europe hasn’t noticed the disappearance of its cultural home because Europe no longer perceives its unity as a cultural unity. In fact, what is European unity based on? In the Middle Ages, it was based on a shared religion. In the modern era, in which the medieval God has been changed into a Deus absconditus, religion bowed out, giving way to culture, which became the expression of the supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, defined itself, identified itself as European. […] Just as God long ago gave way to culture, culture in turn is giving way. But to what and to whom? What realm of supreme values will be capable of uniting Europe? Technical feats? The marketplace? The mass media? (Will the great poet be replaced by the great journalist?) Or by politics? But by which politics? The right or the left? Is there a discernible shared ideal that still exists above this Manichaeanism of the left and the right that is as stupid as it is insurmountable? Will it be the principle of tolerance, respect for the beliefs and ideas of other people? But won’t this tolerance become empty and useless if it no longer protects a rich creativity or a strong set of ideas?”

^{– Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. Edmund White, New York Review of Books 31:7 (26 April 1984)}

In a display of remarkable insight, Milan Kundera highlights the issue without any risky attempt at offering a solution. He nevertheless clearly indicates that only a culturally self-assured and assertive Europe can aspire to ‘create’ civilisation, and that this civilisation will, in his view, naturally emerge in the shape of a romantic and updated synthesis of the cultural model that characterises the German mindset as well as the quite universal model of values that typifies the French mentality.

Whatever the case, this synthesis cannot be reduced to a sum of cosmopolitan norms specific to the ‘spirit of our times’; on the contrary, it must oppose them using its own values, which it can only define through the depth of its own historical existence, without succumbing to fads, self-censorship, self-flagellation, or the denial of the biological realities that have allowed Europeans to survive throughout history.

Similarly, Europe must not succumb to wishful thinking by convincing itself that peace can be preserved at the price of some ‘necessary’ compromise of principle. As pointed out by Julien Freund, the essence of politics lies specifically in identifying one’s foe and distinguishing between ‘him’ and ‘us.’ The French philosopher and sociologist also underscores the fact that in most cases, it is not ‘we’ who designate our enemy, but ‘he’ that defines us as such. No human community could ever achieve internal harmony and ensure its external security without accepting this reality.

It is precisely by giving a name to the very continent that they inhabit that Europeans became aware of their historically exclusive uniqueness and capabilities: the very notion of Europe can, in fact, be interpreted as a means for European peoples to forge a strong, shared identity so as to differentiate themselves from both their adversaries and the rest of the world. It is therefore essential to redefine ourselves as a genuine civilisation and a community with a shared destiny, including all the significant and tangible relationships that this entails. In all areas where struggle is possible, it is now becoming urgent to shift from managerial and economic compromise to a genuine cultural and civilisational paradigm, starting immediately…

To conclude, what we mean by “Europe as a world power” is not based solely on traditional political criteria such as the use of force, confrontation, coercion, or the ‘capacity to impose and destroy,’ as Raymond Aron put it. In the face of future challenges, a common international diplomacy and European army would obviously be most useful when it comes to anticipating risks, preserving the continent’s territorial integrity, and protecting its borders.

This geopolitical objective, however, which has only been achieved a few times throughout history, depends first and foremost on our civilisational awakening: Europe must grasp the very magnitude of the (demographic, migratory, and climatic) dangers that lie ahead and react accordingly, while also remaining confident in its own ability to once again embrace its geography by organising its territory in a manner that enables greater cohesion, innovation, and autonomy. This power, ultimately, is none other than our capacity to live as free peoples and collectively shape our own destiny.

Olivier Eichenlaub’s Europe — A World Power is fresh off the press from Arktos.

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Don’t miss Alexander Raynor’s exclusive interview with the author in Arktos Journal, recently republished in French by the Institut Iliade:

Humor me for a little thought before I get to the real action — war, death, Ernst Jünger, das Recht. After all, you are here for the answers that action brings, and I aim to please.

∞ • ∞

Since man compartmentalized the psychopathy he calls consciousness into ideological bins of left, right, and center, we have heard tales of this or that thinker’s no doubt heroic journey into one of those bins. But the bin is a cage, and the man who embraces it lacks the experience to recognize it. This is my opinion, as I grapple with my own bout of consciousness. But like this consciousness, my opinion has been imposed upon me; it is something completely beyond my control. Here we wait for the legions of Free Willers to lay siege to my fatalistic fort — all of us compelled to think and act as we do, imagining the emotions that seize our limbs and shake us into action arise from distinct choices and not lifetimes of conditioning and causal chains that are tethered endlessly backward and forward in time, upon which we move like clothes on a dry-cleaning carousel.

Most modernites adopt their left-right-center bin from their view of justice — that nebulous fantasy driving the actions of every rajasic fool ever struck with the paroxysm of life, which is to say, all of us. But here we are, all struck smart (not dumb) by the chain upon which we hang — where one man’s genocide is another’s self-assertion; where one woman’s terrorism is another’s fight for freedom; where one crusader’s Just Cause is another’s Devil. All of us are correct, of course — even those who vehemently contend that it is quite impossible for all to be correct, that only one way can be correct. We nevertheless all end up in the same abandoned grave — if not now then ten or twenty generations from now, after centuries of breeding and freedom-fighting have moved the conveyor belt far enough along the very free causal chain of consciousness.

I am under no illusion that those unfree souls compelled to disagree with me will miraculously counter their compulsion. Agreement in life is impossible; agreement is nonexistence — that utopian (because it does not exist) state of sat-cit-ānanda.¹ Yet, life has a way of making some more right than others; the beauty of correctness, however, is that it could not possibly matter; if it did, all would recognize It and adhere, attracted like moths to the flame, leaving us nothing but utopia, which is nothing but nothing. The question is, In a world full of correctness, how might one really-truly-correctly — be correct? How do “stones reveal themselves in the skin of the sea”; how does ice stand against fire?² The answer is in the thought that leads to impossible inaction: Oh, how the rajasic are riled at the thought — perish the thought! But life is not rajasic, nor is it sattvic, nor tamasic³ — but it is all of these, wailing, gnashing, loving, embracing, fighting, and silence. And the bins of consciousness are too small to hold what encompasses all. In the end, psychopathy is simply missing the point, which has always been life.

Now to the action.

∞ • ∞

Days before my unit was to leave Iraq, a handful of my comrades were killed by indirect fire while at the gym. We had already handed the mission off to our replacements and were just waiting to leave. Fifteen months before this, I was part of a platoon-sized element of newcomers that arrived to the unit just a few weeks after it had left. Over the course of our rapid pre-deployment preparation, the daily casualties our distant comrades sustained were announced at morning muster; we would spare a moment of silence for those killed in action and then get to work. Feelings of vengeance and curiosity accompanied the most mundane tasks: equipment issue, ranges, medical screening, casualty-care training, ordnance identification, chow, recreation, sleep, muster, reports of the dead and wounded. We wondered at the unknown fate awaiting us in that foreign land. But we weren’t dead or maimed yet, so we enjoyed the time we had. Perhaps all of it was fabricated to fill time and space; perhaps it still is. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine being mere days from returning to your loved ones after nearly 16 months away — only to be snuffed out in an instant. Of course, this is only a problem for the survivors.

Years later, driving a non-tactical vehicle in Kabul near Massoud Circle,⁴ I found myself behind one of the city’s omnipresent Toyota Corollas packed with military-aged males; the back row noticed what did not belong and locked eyes with me. We shared something primal in the exchange — something that would have been familiar to any Crusader in a far-off land. Our cars kept moving, but active eyes made note of the route. Days later, a few minutes after my team passed the place of the primal exchange, a VBIED⁵ knocked out another unit’s convoy. Missions began, ended, and endured from that single act. Perspective is all that matters; yet, given its nebulousness, contingent as it is on proclivity — frivolity — intensity — subjectivity — humanity, it hardly seems that even perspective matters.

Months before this ancient exchange of life and death, my contractor counterpart and I met a couple of Czech “operatives” in the early dark of Kabul; they were to give us a familiarization tour of the city as we developed our unit’s movement plan. The flamboyant Czech driver, sporting an East German leather jacket and slicked-back hair, got out of his car and came to my window; grinning widely, he said, “Good morning, sexy boys — are the Americans ready for a drive?” We were. “Okay, let’s go!” We followed his car through the empty streets, zigzagging past points of interest, noting which were the ones to avoid from our tour guide’s radioed suggestions. Avoid, embrace, or observe — the perspectives of a living, breathing war.

Near the end of that same tour, I watched from a short distance as ISIS-K⁶ militants, armed with rifles and Khyber knives, attacked the Afghan National Army hospital. Bedridden soldiers made makeshift ropes from sheets to escape the carnage. Many did not escape. But some did, climbing-jumping-falling from windows that transformed into escape hatches. Undoubtedly, on the inside, some valiantly opposed their attackers. And some survived, to endure in the society that made them, just as some of their subdued attackers were to live on, at least for a while, in a society that didn’t make them.

Being born into a society is like being born on a ceaseless train: one is a passenger long before the destination is known. You are one with the machine before noticing that you are moored to the intimacy of another’s identity. Invader and defender are each products of their machine, which are themselves products of the Machine.⁷ Passion — that primal fire — comes from being anchored in elusiveness: one constantly expects the surety of a fixed position, apparently unaware that the nature of any position is its fluidity. Position and passion: two sides of a rajasic coin we all pocket.

We tend to pocket more of the coin when we are young. I-I-I believe in something, says the youth — and good for him or her. May their choices be fruitful; may their choices be good — and they will be, which leads to elders making the fruitful and good decisions to send the youth to war. It’s for glory, not for profit, to be sure. Fight for justice, fight for freedom — you deserve both but will find neither, as long as you live. Oh, they’re out there, somewhere; you just won’t find them, because that’s life.

∞ • ∞

I was twelve years into my military career when I discovered Ernst Jünger. Storm of Steel was my introduction to the great German. Of all the youthful vigor and contemplative profundity in his war journal, one thing resonated with me more than anything else: the war hero’s observation of birds amidst the chaos of war.

It was strange ... to hear at night the cry of the partridges from the waste fields, or at dawn the careless song of the lark as it rose high above the trenches. Did it not seem then that life itself was speaking out of the confidence of its savage and visionary heart, knowing very well that in its more secret and essential depths it had nothing to fear from even the deadliest of wars, and going its way quite unaffected by the superficial interchange of peace and war?⁸

The contrast between the life indifferent to war and man’s indifference to life was striking and something I had noticed before. In some, chaos sparks contemplation; and in lowlight hours, it is birds that are often harbingers of deeper ponderings. What else can one ponder but the reason for our being there, in that space and time, making that which we are made to, bringing form to the void of our aimless existence, fulfilling the deepest drives of the “essential depths”? Jünger articulated what I had felt — from his youthful exhilaration on finding meaning amidst the devastation to his hints at a more forlorn future.

It was odd that the birds in the forest did not appear to be in the least put out by this hundredfold clatter. They sat peacefully above the swathes of smoke in the shattered branches, and in the brief intervals of silence we could hear their love-calls and untroubled songs.⁹

Why should simple birds be so untroubled while complex man frets and fights to the bitter end? It is consciousness that leads us to the richtige bins, the psychopathy of our fated state. And still we fight, generation after generation, each following their path to the left-right-center, each oblivious to the meaninglessness behind the all-important meaning.

But, too, there is meaning behind the meaninglessness. None of us — we products of the system¹⁰ — can be the final arbiter of life’s purpose (or lack thereof). We can only live as the causal chain demands: and here some will find meaning where others find void. What is it that separates form from the void? Time, space, causality — yes. But this is only the form of our experience, fated though it is. There is a form within the form, which is the experience that differentiates young from old, savage from sage. The difference between them is not just letters, but the nature of their being: He who finds meaning amidst the void fights for it and thus ushers void into form — this is what it means to be youthful and journeying to the fated bin; conversely: He who has seen the void amidst the meaning ceases all fighting and thus ushers form into the void. This is a simple formulation that only experience can offer.

∞ • ∞

Later in life, during the Second World War and on his way to more clearly articulating the anarch, Jünger commented on seeing action for the first time since his Storm of Steel days: “We jumped into the foxholes for cover and let the storm pass over... I have long since passed the age, or better said the condition, when I find such things amusing...”¹¹ It was not just physical age that changed the man, but the experience that often accompanies contemplative living. The glorification of war (i.e., the indifference of man) is only something those who haven’t experienced it can do; and if they have experienced it, then the stubbornly warlike are only bearers of the void, savages intent on imposing their meaning. Dominique Venner attempts to capture Jünger’s sentiment at the time: “His warrior mentality and political radicalism ... had now been shed like a serpent’s skin....¹² [He is convinced] that action ... always remains on the surface of things. It is a bearer of pipe dreams and catastrophe.”¹³

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At the outset, we quoted Baudelaire’s “The Joyful Corpse”: “And tell me if there still remains any torture / For this old soulless body, dead among the dead!” But Jünger himself quoted this line in Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis¹⁴ (Struggle as an Inner Experience, 1922). He was merely continuing the contemplativeness his writing career started with in Storm of Steel (1920). For despite its flirtations with nationalistic flair in the 1924 edition, Storm of Steel has endured precisely because it transcends the corruption into which nationalism inevitably descends. This is why, after a brief interwar period, Jünger distanced himself from what he saw and what Martin Heidegger described as “something fabricated.”¹⁵ Jünger ends the nationalistic 1924 version of Storm of Steel with a rousing flourish:

We — by this I mean ... the youth of this land who are capable of enthusiasm for an ideal — will not shrink from them. We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves entrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people. We stand for what will be and for what has been. Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in somber clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!¹⁶

This spirit never died in Jünger; what overcame it, however, was the realization that something so pure and heady always devolves into sordid institutionalization — the tyranny of bureaucratic profiteering, which is unavoidable as long as man exists in political modes. Hence we see in Jünger’s later writing more explicit detachment: What’s the use of aligning oneself with politicized movements when all that is being espoused is the collective ambition of cretins? The Jüngerian anarch is not a walking corpse, but a Zen lunatic hiding in the shadows of a corporate monstrosity and reflecting, at intervals, its fabricated light.

Jünger sought to be like the “background” life — the birds and insects — one encounters so often amidst the havoc of war, where “in its more secret and essential depths [life] had nothing to fear from even the deadliest of wars, and [goes] its way quite unaffected by ... superficial interchange[s].” In this way, man is a spiritual island, free to reckon with the self that might very well be God; this, of course, would be the only worthwhile pursuit amidst the relentless, superficial mayhem that we pretend is meaningful life. To be repulsed by late-stage Jünger is to be lost in an illusion. But such is life.

“We children of the times have become so tired of the bare facts,” Jünger writes in Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, “So tired.”¹⁷ Exhaustion comes from witnessing the charade. It is perhaps not the case that, as Venner said, Jünger’s “warrior mentality ... [was] shed like a serpent’s skin”; instead, it is certain that the warrior remained, though he trained his sights inward — to the only place where lasting change can finally be effected. One must ask: Who can know death but those who have seen it firsthand and in vain while living? For here death comes not once but twice. This knowing closes the loop on life and turns one into the bearer of a profound mystery. Such knowing, inexpressible to the uninitiated, comes only with experience. When you are new, you head to the bunker at the sound of incoming; in time, this urgency dissolves into resignation. Fate has its own way — especially for those blown to bits in the bunker. Ah, at least they fought like hell to survive! yell the uninitiated. But that’s just it — they didn’t: He who finds meaning amidst the void fights for it and thus ushers void into form. The uninitiated perpetuate the tyranny of beyng,¹⁸ which is the deepest death.¹⁹

Perhaps in the end, the anarch came to be because war, the father of all, made him so. Damning revolutionaries and partisans by ignoring them is not turning one’s back on the struggle, but finally truly embracing the struggle, which was only ever inward; it is not pacifism, but the realization that exoteric warring is a fool’s errand at best and a psychopathic wet dream at worst. What do you hope to win by winning the world? Certainly not your soul.

∞ • ∞

Heraclitus revealed his pessimism when he said that war is the father of all things — not because war had become an industry, a racket to widen the gap between rich and poor and satiate the bloodlust of born sadists. Instead, the ancient Greek saw that war, as Jünger later reflected, “is the song of life devouring itself. To live is to kill.”²⁰ That is, war is simply life, a destructive recursivity; but life is illusory, not because its traumas are not real — for all intents and purposes they are — but because it is a product of time-space-causality, which is change. Change is illusory because there can be only one changeless thing. But this is to say that change is māyā, the byproduct (emanation) of beyng, the Formless Absolute. (I discuss the metaphysics of the Absolute — that there is but one thing which must overcome itself by becoming two — in my Arktos trilogy, so I leave this matter aside here.) Thus, Heraclitus simply said that illusion is the father of all things. Indeed, and such is the position of Advaita Vedānta.²¹

Heraclitus’ arkhē (beginning) was plasmatic fire — and not just fire (pür) but ever-living fire (pür aeizōon)²²; his “one thing” was dynamism. This was in supposed contrast to Parmenides, who held Being as the arkhē: There can be only Being or Nonbeing; that there is Being at all precludes Nonbeing; thus, there is only Being. Of course, we see varied instantiations of this “Being,” which is where Heraclitean fire presents: If change is all we see, then change must be fundamental; this change is most purely manifest in the protean flame. But fire must obviously be a symbol for the ultimate reality, the arkhē, for not all is aflame. Here, however, we confront a similar conclusion to Parmenides: there is clearly but one thing whose distinct manifestations are illusory. And so we creatures of time-space-causality are left with the struggle (Kampf) of an illusion.

Illusion always follows the same recursive arc, whose distinctions are only ever a matter of perspective for one positioned within it: beginning, middle, and end — or birth, life, and death. In the one thing’s protean form, what is true in one position is untrue in another; in its absolute state, truth and untruth are meaningless. It is only the faint pulse of existence that threads together our growth and decline. But a faint pulse is a pulse nonetheless, and much blood has been spilt to keep it pumping. Illusion is indeed our progenitor.

∞ • ∞

Jünger’s anarch maintains a thready existence throughout his written work — from his days as a contemplative memoirist and vivified nationalist to the disillusioned entomologist and death’s-door Catholic convert. What is striking, however, is that as his life waned — or his disillusionment grew — the anarch manifested all the more strongly. As an author, Jünger is perhaps most remembered for his profound Storm of Steel and interbellum brashness. As his later cynicism shows, however, he cannot be faulted for his naïve brashness: he simply did not know better. Brilliant and receptive man that he was, experience led him to the more refined position of anarchian detachment.

Nowhere is the anarch more clearly described than in the meditative Eumeswil (1977), written when the author was eighty-two years old. Jünger was unique among men — living through and participating in two World Wars and unparalleled sociopolitical upheaval; displaying unquestionable bravery; possessing, along with spiritual depth, rare combinations of physical, mental, and emotional intelligence; being disciplined enough to record his experiences and literary enough to make them worth reading; applying tremendous curiosity and observational power in constructive ways; affirming the life he was given but remaining doubtful of its ultimate value; and so on. Of these, it is the healthy skepticism that kept him grounded and provided the nexus of his uniqueness. So many, because of their intoxicated desire to “have meaning,” affirm life (i.e., their choices) to the inescapable point of becoming predatory — a telltale sign of psychopathy, if not just being all-to-human. One must remain self-reflective, doubtful of oneself, in the face of life’s unmitigated affirmation; this is what makes one spiritual, contemplative, and a barrier against the biological massism pervading the illusion²³; this is what made Jünger so unique. Because Eumeswil is essentially a study of the anarch, the concept is described at various points throughout the novel; nevertheless, its clearest formulation is perhaps here:

As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously — at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man’s land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between tides.... This is the final refuge of the conservative who has lost all political and religious hope. To him, a thousand years are now small change; he bets on cosmic cycles. Some day, Paraclete will appear, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa will rise from his enchanted sleep and step forth from the mountain.²⁴

He bets on cosmic cycles — One waits for the end of the Kali Yuga. Or — laughably — should one wait for any spiritual awakening among the material constructs of the temporal world? If the latter, one could only be the Walking Void, the perpetuation of parasitical beyng, the embodiment of unconscious consciousness.²⁵ Barbarossa sleeps in the Kyffhäusergebirge, exalted in silence, waiting for the impossible and eventual return of his beginning. There can be no allegiance to the forms of the fallen age (Fellachentum). The anarch’s guiding principle exists, but it manifests only inwardly.

It is at once inconceivable and completely expected that the masses could misapprehend the meaning of Jünger’s anarch. Inconceivable because initiates see its obvious import among the ruins of modernity; expected because the masses are the fellah-like, exquisite cogs in a routinized and globalized existence. “The fellahin not only lack a destiny, but they also resent any claim to one wherever they sense it; consequently, the very word is viewed with suspicion”²⁶: These are hardly the thoughts of one who has shed his warrior mentality like a “serpent’s skin.” Rather, they reveal a position disgusted at the current, rajasic state of grit-and-grind and sophisticated enough to know there is nothing meaningful to be done about it: “The more reasonable an idea, the more hopeless its realization.”²⁷ And yet the dupes keep hoping — not for something real, but for something different, something that can be kept safe on a generational journey to an ideological bin. Youth isn’t wasted on the young; it’s a hurdle to be overcome, lest one morph into the next version of the thing one currently despises. The anarch is one who realizes that hope exists only in the place that is most neglected.

The anarch does not surrender or die; quite the contrary: he asserts his actual self²⁸ like few have done before — it is only that now he knows the situation, and before undertaking any mission one must know the situation. But how would anyone who has not lived this know it? One might as well, as Nietzsche offered, drink up the sea. The true Kämpfer learns how to navigate a crushing hostility that here feigns hospitality, there unreservedly ends you: “A basic theme for the anarch is how man ... can defy superior forces — whether state, society, or the elements — by making use of their rules without submitting to them.”²⁹ This fight is asymmetric and, more importantly, not meaningfully external; one would be — not a fool to think otherwise, but complicit in the cause one attempts to thwart. The anarch makes use of superior forces’ rules in support of the personal ethos that allows for a passing of the “great cycles” of time necessary to endure the fellah-like age of Kali Yuga. “This,” avows Jünger, “is the recipe for anyone who cares more about the substance of the world than its shadow — the philosopher, the artist, the believer.”³⁰ Tell me: What believer has given up? It is only that the anarch is the first believer to have any idea about the situation confronting us; every other so-called believer is an accomplice to the injustice they pretend to oppose.

Left, right, center — each plays the game they are allowed to play by the system that commands their action: Quite stupidly, they dream of changing the system by voting or subtly “appropriating” its levers. Since this has proven to be quite effective up to this point in human history, there is no need to wish them luck in their continued efforts. Anarchists, meanwhile, who imagine themselves “outside” the system they oppose, “will be destroyed by it after damaging it more or less,” for they seek freedom “in the collective.”³¹ All fail to see that the problem is inward, not outward; and thus all will fail — time and again — until the last sun dissolves over the final horizon.

Anarchs have “appropriated authority”³² — not the institutions of a fallen age — and “seek freedom in themselves.”³³ What use has he for dupes and dopes? He has fallen for the fallen age many times in his youth and has learned, painfully, heuristically, that there is no other way but to cease all fighting and thus usher form into the void. “Any man who swears allegiance to a political change is a fool,” the wise anarch affirms, “The most rudimentary step toward freedom is to free oneself from all that. Basically each person senses it, and yet he keeps voting.”³⁴ Nearly five decades later, another echoed the sentiment: “Why are we in a world where people we know ‘vote’? Or ‘vote’ for satanic ‘leaders’? One cannot vote oneself out of this really hopeless situation. Voting is a fool’s game — a vote is only consent to ... tyrannical rule...”³⁵ Yet here we are, five decades into the Age of the Anarch — or millennia into it if we rightly interpret Vedānta — and we all still prattle on about “change” and carefully carry our false selves to very appropriate ideological bins.

∞ • ∞

One can only hope that, by this point, the reader has seen that the journey to Nothing — i.e., the separation from modernity’s useless and active prattle — is certainly not nothing, and that it is, in fact, the only something one can hope to achieve. Though, as Jünger held, “The more reasonable an idea, the more hopeless its realization.” In the end, the anarch has no use for even hope — i.e., hope in anyone else’s recognizing anything remotely reasonable. This is because, as we have seen, even of those exposed to the conditions of their awakening, few among them possess the requisite disposition to assimilate the experience. Jünger tells us what’s required: “The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I ... do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer.”³⁶

The anarch simply waits for the end of the End — the Nothing that is the only something.

EXPLORE MORE by J. R. Sommer, brought to you by Arktos:

The third and final installment of J. R. Sommer’s philosophical trilogy, Supreme Being: The Spiritual Foundations of Multipolarity, is forthcoming from Arktos this year.