Arktos Journal

No One Saw the Major Flaw in Nolan’s Odyssey

Richard Storey — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:01:29 GMT

Penelope and the Suitors (1912) by J. W. Waterhouse

Everyone is watching or hate-watching Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey… and the takes have been facile on either side. Infuriatingly, no one has defended, attacked or even noticed the main thrust of Nolan’s telling, that is, his ironically erroneous view of civilisation’s rise and collapse. Most damning of all, this theme escaped even the most influential critics on the right. What surer sign is there that we live in an intellectual dark age for the right wing? A crash course in the big picture of civilisational life cycles is desperately needed.

From the first trailer, my daughter (a classics student) noted the inaccurate armour and anachronisms, etc. Nolan chose to embrace meaningful inaccuracies, beating ever-ready historians to the punch. Otherwise, the now-milquetoast takes from the chuds, exemplified by Matt Walsh, could be spotted on the horizon: the cast is too diverse for ancient Greece (where Homer wrote rather explicitly about Africans), particularly Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, rapper Travis Scott as Demodocus, and Elliot Page as sacrificial Sinon. In truth, they were better casting choices than Jon Bernthal’s best impression of a coke addict. Such trite complaints were irksome.

Nolan’s films have always been love ‘em or hate ‘em, using a darker palette, snootily nonchalant about whether you can understand or hear the dialogue, setting overarching themes above narrative clarity. At least he had the vision and interest to take on such a grand project; he had the nous to see there was an interest in this subject, considering the immense popularity of Eric Cline and other’s lectures on this topic (here); he had the talent to take it to the screen with a reasonable watchtime and an unfairly maligned cinematography; even his misunderstandings required intelligence.

No, my criticism is not of Nolan, a typically liberal white man drawing attention to the most important subject of our time. My umbrage is with white men who cannot see past Zendaya’s few minutes of screen time to the most pertinent critique.

What grows civilisation and what kills it?

Across academic fields, the independently emerging conclusion is that religion gives rise to civilisation and is probably upstream of language and all human culture. Consider the liturgical scene of an alpha male with a freshly slain kill on a primitive altar. Delaying gratification, a sacrifice to keep the peace, his gestures make an icon or sign of the food and act; the others mimic him, pass on the food like a message or token in one ritual act, sharing not just a meal but meaning. The charity of the alpha, father, priest, and king figure becomes an objective, ritual and mutual sacrifice of the group for their common good, sacrifice being the sincerest demonstration of non-exploitative authenticity. This sign allowed for more abstract shared notions.

The biologist David Sloane Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral went so far as to say that religion is synonymous with the social organism, its very lifeblood. Students of civilisational collapse have long known this; consider two other Englishmen, writing in the twilight of the British Empire, who coincidentally treated this topic in two essays of the same title, The Fate of Empires. Sir John Glubb notably set the life expectancy of empires at 250 years, a figure proven more recently by now-popular Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics computer models. Glubb observed a perennial turn from sacrifice to selfishness, noting that weakening religion was accompanied by ‘defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners’. Likewise, John Hubbard perceived that religion, from the Latin religio, or “that which binds,” allowed civilisation to cohere across space and time, with even race and nation being subordinate to it.

The loss of religion is the cause of collapse — and Nolan’s Odyssey is explicit here. Odysseus states, ‘Our age of bronze is collapsing,’ because he and others had broken Zeus’ Law, depicted therein as the golden rule, that ancient and universal norm of reciprocity; albeit, the ancient Greek Xenia was a specific manifestation of this in ritual hospitality, setting rules between guests and hosts. How do you treat a travelling stranger who enters your feast and when have they overstayed their welcome? Treat guests as gods in disguise, just in case (excluding the disrespectful suitors). St Paul baptises Xenia, reminding us that the angels visiting Lot in Sodom found it void of hospitality. Nolan focuses on those stories which depict the breaking of Zeus’ Xenia, the Trojan Horse being a most deceitful example which, in Dante’s Inferno, lands Odysseus in hell. Nolan only loses the plot when addressing the causes of collapse.

During prosperous periods of summer, the love of money replaces religion. Victims of their own success, victorious empires defeat all outward enemies and make vast realms of peace, which means safety for commerce. Competition turns inward and economic, dynasties squabble over slices of the pie; the merchant spirit of giving as little as possible to your neighbour in return for taking as much as possible from them reigns where the warrior was once enthroned. The genius of Christ framed our spiritual struggle as between God and mammon, between religion and money, that ultimate technology which makes us believe we can do anything. This is the pride which comes before civilisation’s Icarian fall, as Glubb notes:

‘Money replaces honour and adventure as the objective of the best young men… To justify this departure from ancient tradition, the human mind easily devises its own justification. Military readiness, or aggressiveness, is denounced as primitive and immoral. Civilised peoples are too proud to fight.’

If the martial men of the heroic age are too toxic, who then are the heroes of declining civilisations? Artists.

‘The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. The word “celebrity” today is used to designate a comedian or a football player, not a statesman, a general, or a literary genius.’

Enter Christopher Nolan! He is the celebrated artist repudiating the proverbial strong men who create good times. Worse still, he conflates the foundational, civilisational figure of Odysseus with the later piratical sea people blamed by Bronze Age sources for the collapse. Thus, Nolan depicts Odysseus’ ship as a Viking longboat, not a trireme; in truth, the sea people probably have more in common with the “boat people” (illegal migrants) arriving on UK shores from Calais. Rather, Nolan is his own Trojan Horse, dramatising the cause of collapse whilst being the very vehicle of it.

Obviously, Nolan’s liberalism views xenia or hospitality through the lens of universal individualism, but this is the mindset of decline. ‘The individual was accordingly in a sense constituted by money,’ as Richard Seaford concludes on the introduction of coinage in ancient Greece (here). Unfettered, money isolates man ‘because it can in principle fulfil most or all of his needs,’ leading to egoism. The Mycenaeans’ bronze ingots were a precursor to later Greek coinage, just as their collapse prefigured Greek disunity and collapse. So, the love of money is not only the root of collapse, but also the seedbed of Nolan’s individualist worldview.

Unsurprisingly, this and the attendant misandry, noted above, are nothing new; they always lead to feminism and a suicidal drop in birthrates, the nail in civilisation’s coffin.

Of course, others have attacked Nolan’s Odyssey for its feminism (see Keith Woods here). Circe the witch is robbed of her femme fatale and is rather an abuse victim; she turns the men into pigs but is revealing the true nature of a warrior. Penelope’s histrionic tirade too: ‘Empty throne? I’ve been sitting on that empty throne for 20 years! My knowledge, my years of experience? That’s all nothing compared with the bristles on your chin!’ An uncharacteristic rant from the meek, pious, ideal wife who cannot and could not physically defend said throne. Nolan removed the execution of the treacherous maidservants as being too grim and misogynistic. It was even too feminist for Emily Wilson, the feminist classicist whose progressive translation partly inspired Nolan.

But the issue is not that the film is feminist; it is that feminism is part and parcel of the collapse Nolan bemoans.

Transcending Material Temptation

Rose Sybil — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:53:55 GMT

One Of The Family (1880) by Frederick George Cotman

My beautiful son was only seven weeks old. I spent nearly all of his waking hours holding him, and worked on finishing my Bachelor’s degree online during his naps. As usual, he fell asleep in the early evening. I smelled his head before kissing it, and gently placed him in his cradle. Then I hurried to the computer to finish some coursework.

As I worked on finance problems, a persistent urge to go check on him kept popping up in my mind. My logical brain quickly overrode it, thinking: This is my window to get schoolwork done so I can be fully present when he is awake. I pushed the thought aside, but it returned stronger each time. Then I felt a clear physical pull on my third eye.

In that moment, I realized I was logically reasoning away something beyond reason. This was third-eye intuition pulling on my conscious mind, not random worry. I jumped up and ran to my baby with foreboding in my heart. I knew something was terribly wrong when I picked him up. His sweet face was contorted in pain and his skin had turned a dark burgundy. He was suffocating on thick spit-up blocking his nose.

I sprang into action, calling 911 while running to grab the suction bulb. I cleared his nose, flung him over my shoulder, and hit his back until he cried. It was the most joyous sound I had ever heard. The EMT later told me I had caught it just in time before he turned blue, which is when brain damage would have begun. By being open to third-eye intuition and connected in the present moment, I saved my son’s life. I realized later on that my son would have died if I had continued to rationalize and had pushed my third-eye intuition out of awareness.

Intuition, Instinct, and the Body

Third-eye intuition lives in what I have described as the progenic realm — an incorporeal place beyond space and time that includes the past and potential future of peoples or a person. When people meditate into the third eye they tangibly feel themselves outside of the body within this realm that is both differentiated and simultaneously one. I have written about Progenic Hierarchy and what strengthens this realm, contrasted by material hierarchy and mimetics.

The third eye holds the wisdom of the past while pointing toward future generations. It carries wisdom from our recently deceased and ancestral protectors. Opening and attuning to your third eye results in a constant feeling of energy pulsating in and in front of the center of the forehead. Intuition comes as thoughts that appear but the energy will increase to a pull with clear warnings of danger or possible future outcomes, like the night I saved my baby. Though often treated as the center of all intuition, I have found this is not entirely accurate.

For me, as a woman and as a mother, the heart chakra is where the deepest and most meaningful insights bloom. It is the primary place for processing lived experience into meaning, receiving insight from the group subconscious, and understanding the felt reality of those who came before. Synchronicities are strongly tied to the heart and increase when it is in tune, especially in nature. Sitting above the solar plexus, it serves as the bridge between the celestial and earthly realms.

The earthly realms carry their own vital intuition. Gut instincts arise from the solar plexus which is our center of being. They may not feel as precise or externally interconnected as third-eye or heart insights, but they should never be ignored. The solar plexus reveals what is within our perceptual field but not yet conscious on an individual immediate level. Many modern problems, especially in liberalism, stem from a rejection of gut instincts or rootedness.

Higher reasoning and intuition should not reject the lower realms but build upon them. Instinct is too often conflated with impulsivity, causing both to be demonized. The belief that being above base instincts is spiritually superior is the end state of the Gnostic rejection of the physical world. We are meant to live fully in this body as the microcosm, in this world that is the living body of the divine as macrocosm. No higher insight or reason will be properly grounded if we first dismiss our body and its intuition.

Instinct, Passion, and Addiction

People conflate instincts with impulsive escapism and then demonize both, when the latter is really addiction. Addictions are imbalances, just as extreme renunciation of the world is an imbalance. The Stoics rightly identified issues with addiction, but much of Stoicism veered into ascetic excess and detachment from bonds. They lost the balanced wisdom of the Greeks and blurred the crucial distinction between passions or instincts and addictions.

True instinct is bodily intuition that reaches beyond limited conscious perception. Passion is an expression of love that keeps the soul alive, active in the world and connected to intuitions. Passion differs from addiction by not being a form of consumptive entropy, though one can be consumed by passion. Passions manifest as the love of learning, philosophy, eros in its highest sense, love for deep family bonds, loving devotion to the divine, or philia in fraternal love. The beauty of Western civilization came from passion projects, not market-driven calculations… because beauty is born of passion, not economics.

First Principles and the Temptation of Material Stasis

The Divine in a purely non-physical state cannot form meaning. All-powerful full-potentiality therefore sacrificed part of itself to create the physical world as a foil for meaning. This act required genuine risk because meaning cannot emerge under absolute predetermination or omnipotence. Spirit formed physical mater through self-sacrifice of its own omnipotent power as an act of first conception, then united with mater as an act of first procreation to layer life towards the formation of meaning. All life must be a sacrifice in that image, or it destroys itself in the consumption of mater for material.

Life is built on layers meant to house divine consciousness and beauty through creative complexity. Contrasting this with behavioral sink reveals the difference between living physical reality and mere material existence. Material is that which relates to matter but is not itself matter. Matter becomes purely material in its most entropic state, when it exists outside of the life-death cycle. A deliberate sacrifice of energy from full potentiality allows for life and death to flow into each other. When that potential is squandered for meaningless consumption and hyper production, it forsakes the sacred sacrifice.

The great risk in creation is the temptation to hold the physical world in a material stasis, ending the unfolding of meaning and complexity. This temptation is the Stasis of Forms (I discuss this in further detail in the Lost Heroic Age Series), or the desire to eliminate uncertainty by holding living processes in rigid materiality. It prevents the divine from acting within the world because we no longer recognize that we exist within the divine to participate in enacting meaning. As the heart chakra closes under layers of entropy, synchronicity fades or is misinterpreted as something purely external.

The mindset of the Stasis of Forms views revelation as a completed past pointing toward a final utopian, predetermined salvation, instead of potential fates in flux. This prevents Divine Providence by forsaking the present. It is no accident that the hope of bodily resurrection so closely resembles transhumanist dreams of engineered immortality. The latter is the same impulse without the divine; the former displaces the divine from the world and from its action through people, across ancestral lines, and lived experience. Both represent the desire for stasis to escape from life’s purpose.

By truly participating in the living divine foil of physical reality, we usher Providence into the world. This is what, I believe, allowed me to save my son. We must reject utopian ideals and rationalizations that remove us from the living present, lest we yield dystopian outcomes… as my future would have been if I was detached from or continued to ignore my third-eye intuition. Many would rationalize such a loss by saying it was meant to be or beyond our understanding, but such responses reinforce the rejection of life itself. Even with loss, to say it is predetermined beyond our understanding passively negates a vital response from the soul of the person (which causes a disruption of Being and Becoming that I discuss further in “Simulacra and the Dialectical Defeat of the Right”) that is responsible for meaning to begin with.

We are meant to live in this world, in this body, and to be present in this moment. Only when connected to divine living reality do we access intuition across all centers, as all life is a layering. We must embrace passion and creative risk to transcend into new forms of beautiful complexity, rather than a stasis. We are meant to be vessels of living fire between earth and heaven… passionate, intuitive, reasoning, and present as part of the divine mystery of life.

“The underlying life force or God is an ultimate, unchanging entity, but the gods themselves are living, evolving entities that transform alongside natural and celestial living absolutes. Symbolic or mythological shifts, over long spans of time, reflect the spirit of the people who hold them, as they become new states of being. The gods are reincarnated through these people, and significant events can even fracture and change how the god is expressed and its spiritual standing.”
— Rose Sybil, “Living Symbolism and Myth”

OUT NOW - Ideas in the Right Place: Foundations & Perspectives of the New Right

Arktos Journal — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:01:13 GMT

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 (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 twenty-five 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.

Alain de Benoist’s historic masterpiece — brought to you in English for the first time by Arktos — is now available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook on Amazon.

ORDER NOW

Shiloh Hendrix and the Lie of Law

Arktos Journal — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:57:28 GMT

The great redeeming value of the Donald Trump years is that they’ve clarified things. They have offered no salvation or solutions, but the polarization they’ve engendered ensures no one can delude themselves about what’s at stake. There is no longer any consensus about so-called American values. The Left has abandoned free speech since 2017, and the Right is turning against the “proposition nation.” Now, it appears both factions are dismissing the “rule of law” itself, except as a slogan wielded in bad faith. We can’t dispense with it quickly enough.

It was always a sham. Most of the great triumphs of American progressivism, from desegregation to homosexual marriage, were imposed undemocratically by justices who wanted to implement their policy preferences. Conceived by the Founders as the weakest branch of government, the Supreme Court is today essentially sovereign when it comes to domestic policy, with Congress unable or unwilling to legislate, the states rendered meaningless administrative entities, and even an “authoritarian” like Trump unwilling to defy the Court on decisions like birthright citizenship.

However, that is changing. Progressives are more willing to defy power than the Right, and with a conservative-leaning court, Democrats have lost their former institutional reverence. They are openly discussing packing the Court. Lower courts are also explicitly disobeying the Supreme Court on immigration issues, with the supreme court in Hawaii essentially denying its authority altogether.

Conservatives, given their naïve trust in institutions, abstractions, and the Constitution, have been slow to react. They might also be counting on the Supreme Court to eventually restore order, forgetting that Chief Justice John Roberts sees his job as maintaining the Court’s legitimacy among liberals, while swing vote Amy Coney Barrett is intimidated by left-wing protests.

However, another case may do what the Supreme Court has not: awaken ordinary white people to the lie of the “rule of law.” It is a case that every American has a stake in. It is the case of Shiloh Hendrix, a white mother in Minnesota who has been convicted for saying a word that is repeated countless times every single day by the Regime’s pets.

In April 2025, a black child stole something from Hendrix’s bag. She allegedly called the boy the Forbidden Word, the “N Word.” A certain Sharmake Omar, a Somali, then followed Hendrix, filming her as she tried to walk away with her child. Though a migrant, he understands how power functions in the United States and repeatedly dared her to say the word. She did.

The NAACP demanded charges be brought against her for Lèse-majesté, though the system had to at least call it something like “disorderly conduct.” Hendrix was probably lucky; she initially faced another charge, and some wanted more. A misdemeanor offense going to a jury is something extraordinary, and in this case it showed Minnesota’s determination to enforce what is, in reality, a blasphemy law.

But white people did not behave the way they usually do. Largely because of the black community’s support for the now convicted murderer Karmelo Anthony, whites rallied to Hendrix and raised her a considerable amount of money on GiveSendGo.

These racial proxy wars via fundraising herald the future, as atomized Americans can feel like they are part of the struggle through online activism. It is tempting to simply dismiss them as meaningless, but in a society defined by spectacle, all of this has power. There is a feedback loop: both sides radicalize each other. Identities are ultimately formed and defended by vanguards. This is the kind of case that builds them.

A jury then convicted Hendrix on one of two counts of disorderly conduct. Interestingly, she was acquitted of the charge that included using a racial slur against the black child. This alleged incident was not caught on video. Perhaps more importantly, the child’s father gave disastrously self-contradictory testimony. Though witnesses saw him speaking English with ease, the court went through the expensive farce of two translators for him. He initially claimed that he did not know that there was a fundraising site operating on his behalf. Later, however, he admitted he did know about the site and even knew how much money he had received. While it seems obvious that he committed perjury, the female judge — a Democrat appointee — intervened on his behalf and even scolded the defense attorney for attempting to show the court the still live fundraising site.

Indeed, as Hendrix’s attorney Brian Karalus admitted, he was not opposing the prosecution so much during the jury as the judge. Tom Hennessey, a pro-white activist on X, was seemingly the only person who actually attended the trial in a media capacity to report what was taking place in the courtroom. He noted the hostility of the judge, and efforts by her to reduce the chances of appeal by trying to prevent the defense attorney from having records made.

Though the media continues to imply that Hendrix is being punished for using a racial slur against “a child,” the truth is that she was acquitted of this, not least because a police officer testified that the child’s father initially said he did not feel his son was in danger. Instead, Hendrix was convicted of disorderly conduct in the more absurd case. Omar followed her with a camera, daring her to say the Forbidden Word, which she did, thus raising the question of whether it can really be “disorderly conduct” when you are saying a word the “victim” dared you to say.

If the “N Word” is so powerful that blacks simply cannot be trusted to refrain from violence if their delicate ears hear it, then surely the person who is provoking the confrontation, particularly against someone who is trying to leave with a child in hand, is the one responsible.

Nonetheless, the court system, in its majesty, decided that it became an offense only when Hendrix herself said it. The capstone to the farce is that the supposedly offended party did not testify. He has since fled to Somalia with the money he raised from a fundraiser. He had also previously been charged with a sex crime, but the state of Minnesota chose not to prosecute him “in the interest of justice.”

The precedent this sets is terrifying. Every non-white in the country now has an active incentive to follow white people around with a camera, daring them to say something that might cause offense. Blacks can either get white people put on trial for saying something or perhaps attack them with impunity. Such standards only go one way. Even now, blacks are berating random white people in Madison, Wisconsin, following a police shooting and openly threatening violence. They are not being accused of disorderly conduct, and they never will be.

Smart Prisons: The Glass Cave in the Digital Age

Arktos Journal — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:30:20 GMT

“The presently existing society is the only possible one, as it always has been and always will be” — this refrain, ceaselessly repeated by the society of the spectacle across all media and presented in various figures and ostensibly polyphonic ways, ultimately undermines theoretical critique and practical subversion at the level of the collective imagination. It persuades us of the non-existence of any “outside the cave” and, ultimately, of the cave itself, which confines us on a global scale.

In each of its performances, the spectacle aims to transform the cave, from which an exodus might be possible, either into an inescapable cage or into a place where the prisoners seeking liberation become passive admirers, oblivious to their chains.

This is the prevailing condition in the bleak age of Facebook, Twitter, and all the other postmodern egospheres — digital and strictly solitary variations on Plato’s cave.

This model appears to lead to the “perfect cave” of digital solitude in a technomorphic civilisation, where surveillance capitalism exploits pleasure-seeking servants on a daily basis through smart slavery. While the totalitarian systems of the “short century” oppressed freedom, surveillance neoliberalism exploits it and turns it into a profit-making enterprise, thereby presenting itself as the ultimate cool regime. The opposing Hegelian figures of the Servant and the Master converge to form the single figure of the homo neoliberalis, who, as an “entrepreneur of the self”, relentlessly exploits themselves to perform at the highest level. Each one, acting as Master, demands maximum productivity from their inner Servant, taking capitalist exploitation to its hyperbolic extreme.

Homo digitalis is increasingly assuming the guise of a subject of the fully technicised “cyber empire”, inhabited by vast numbers of internet-connected loners devoted to the posthuman language of emoticons in a society of likes. As a political system centred on the dyad of freedom and equality, socialism is reduced to the status of a mere individual activity on social media. Indeed, real socialism is being replaced by the “digital socialism” of social media and cyber platforms — the new smart prisons that trap individuals within the mechanisms of connected solitude and ceaseless value extraction.

The digitised, polished and seemingly free digital space is starting to resemble an immense smart concentration camp: a community that is anything but communal. Here, subjects are monitored and tracked, exploited yet content. They are deluded into believing that they are engaging in playful and entertaining experiences, when in reality they are labouring ceaselessly — and without any equivalent exchange — for the neoliberal order.

In this digital bubble, where connection supplants contact and social media loneliness replaces social interaction, users are alone and under surveillance. Almost every action generates profit for capital and is monitored and tracked in a panoptic way. The ludification made possible by emoticons and the whirlwind of likes conceals the fact that unsuspecting social media users, under the illusion of communicating and having fun, are working for capital without any equivalent exchange — and are therefore experiencing the most extreme form of exploitation.

Digitalisation and the infosphere contribute to the decline of the material world, thereby creating the paradox of a hyper-materialist society within an increasingly dematerialised order of things. They also promise exponential growth in freedom, which invariably turns into a regime of total surveillance: a smart prison whose invisible bars are made of the same material as the tracking and data-collection apps scattered across our technical devices. Consider the smartphone: “the mobile labour camp in which we voluntarily intern ourselves”, as defined by Byung-Chul Han. It de-realises the world, while simultaneously acting as a porthole onto reality that ceaselessly monitors its owner. This owner is controlled and happy to be so, voluntarily surrendering data and information on virtually every aspect of their life.

In the sub specie speleologica history of humanity, the latest cave – pending any that may come in the future – is made of glass. The new digital and smart prisons of our technomorphic civilisation are transparent and made of glass, much like Apple’s flagship store in New York. As described by Byung-Chul Han, it is a glass cube, a veritable temple of transparency which renders human beings — or rather, consumers — entirely transparent and viewable, eliminating every hidden corner and shadow. Everything must be seen and put on display. Moreover, individuals must desire nothing other than their own spectacularised display as a commodity.

The ideal slave of the glass cave, reduced to an identity-less silhouette, ceaselessly communicates and shares data and information, occupying every space with their presence and working at every moment for informational capitalism. This new “surveillance capitalism”, the realm of infocracy and “dataism”, not only exploits bodies and energy, but also information and data. Thanks to the total transparency of the new glass cave, access to information is used not only for psychopolitical surveillance and biopolitical control, but also to predict behaviour and generate profit.

Like Plato’s prisoners in the dark, the unsuspecting captives of the smart glass cave believe themselves to be free and creative in their constant performance and uninterrupted self-display in the shop windows of the virtual community. Inhabited solely by consumers, this community is nothing more than a commodified version of society. The more data these digital subjects generate, and the more actively they communicate their tastes, activities, passions and pursuits, the more efficient the surveillance becomes. Indeed, the smartphone itself appears as a smart prison — a surveillance and subjugation apparatus that does not repress freedom, but rather relentlessly exploits it in pursuit of control and profit.

Byung-Chul Han has written that the history of domination can be described as the domination of various screens. In Plato’s cave as he imagined it, we find the prototype of all screens: the archaic screen of the wall that projects shadows mistaken for reality. In Orwell’s 1984, we encounter a more advanced screen called a telescreen, which broadcasts propaganda ceaselessly and meticulously records everything that the subjects say and think in their homes.

The latest form of domination via screens seems to be realised through touchscreens on mobile phones. The smartphone has become the new medium of subjugation: an individualised, glass-walled cave in which people are no longer passive spectators, but active transmitters who produce and consume information without interruption. They are not forced to remain silent, but rather to speak and transmit incessantly, “selling” their stories and lives, their data and behavioural patterns to capital (storytelling is turned into storyselling). In short, communication is not prohibited as in the old caves, but promoted and encouraged on the condition that it always serves capital, its preservation and progress.

Plato’s Cave from the Republic.

In the old caves, from Plato’s Republic to Bentham’s Panopticon, inmates were watched over and punished. In the new glass caves of the digital age, with their touchscreen walls, inmates are motivated and high-performing, encouraged to show off and communicate. Consider the postmodern paradigm of the smart home, for example, with its sophisticated devices zealously installed by the owner that transform the flat into a digital prison where every action and utterance is meticulously monitored and recorded.

In this way, control, surveillance and tracking are perceived and experienced as conveniences and expressions of the coolness of the technologised world rather than as tools of convenient, comfortable and polished captivity for homo globalis. The perfect cave is glass-walled, not only so that its lifelong prisoner can be observed at every moment and in every corner of their consciousness, but also because the walls are invisible, so one is not even aware of their existence to begin with.

On this basis, the narrative so beloved of proponents of neoliberal discourse, which invariably portrays East Germany and the Soviet Union as grey empires controlling “the lives of others”, as the title of a successful film on the subject puts it, should be re-examined. The aim is, of course, to contrast these totalitarian regimes with the neoliberal ideal of freedom as a commodity. While it is true that citizens in Berlin on the other side of the Wall or in Stalinist Moscow were indeed spied on and monitored ceaselessly, we do not know to what extent or in what ways they were spied on in West Germany or the USA by the CIA. After all, both survived the fall of the Wall and the USSR’s inglorious demise.

However, it is equally true that inhabitants of the boundless glass cave are spied on, tracked and monitored to an immeasurably greater degree, made possible by techno-scientific progress which, as should now be clear, coincides with humanity’s subjugation to the techno-capitalist apparatus. Compared to Alexa, the “voice assistant” and “smart speaker” of today’s smart homes, the Stasi of the GDR appears archaic and amateurish in every respect. Homo neoliberalis, a prisoner of yet another manifestation of necessary false consciousness, condemns surveillance in East Germany and the Moscow of actually existing socialism as oppressive, yet experiences the incredibly more radical and pervasive domination he endures daily as “convenience” and “progress” with foolish glee.

Thus, mutatis mutandis, we see a model that was originally explored by modern thinkers and has now been updated in a digitally enhanced form. The new concept of the perfect cave coincides with one in which prisoners are subject to total control, and, the decisive novelty in the age of techno-narcotised masses being that they are happy to be so and actively collaborate in their own imprisonment.

This paradigm was originally explored by Jeremy Bentham and embodied in his design for a high-security prison in 1791, the Panopticon, which isolates prisoners and exercises total control over them. Perfect surveillance, characteristic of the ideal fortress from which escape is impossible, is entrusted to a single guard hidden in the central tower. Surrounded by a circular structure housing the prisoners’ cells, which are illuminated from the outside and separated by thick walls, the mysterious warden can observe everything and everyone without being seen himself (this is alluded to by the combination of the Greek pan [πᾶν] and optikos [ὀπτικός]). The inmates never know whether they are being observed. The inmates are potentially under surveillance at all times, since they can never see the observer: the gaze is one-way, as the observer is not observed and the observed are not observers.

The Panopticon

This asymmetrical relationship, in which the bond of domination and servitude is crystallised within the Benthamite “cave” – a concept analysed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975) – means that prisoners must behave as if they are under constant surveillance, even if this is not the case in reality. The tower may be unmanned, for example, but the prisoners would still have to behave as if the guard were in his post, as they would not know otherwise. They would have to adopt disciplined and almost automatic behaviours as if they were under total surveillance. This paradigm, revived by Bentham, was first outlined by the Sophist Critias — one of the Thirty Tyrants — who argued that the invention of “all-seeing” gods promoted moral behaviour by making individuals feel as if they were always being observed from above.

In the age of the new technomorphic order, control is total and its problematic nature is generally not even perceived; on the contrary, it is sought after and desired by the techno-narcoticised subjects of this new age. According to Adorno’s theorem, the omnipotence and invisibility of repression are mutually interdependent. In the digital age’s glass panopticon, inmates are unaware of their confinement and reveal everything about themselves without respite. In none of the previous caverns of historical adventure have subjects so willingly registered their details and provided authorities with information about their lives.

Remigration: The Reconquest of Meaning

Arktos Journal — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:01:28 GMT

“Without saints, without heroes, without kings, history is unintelligible.”

— Charles Maurras

Sociological rigor is necessary, but it must not lead to erasing the role of embodied figures. Behind the masses and underlying trends, there also stand men of flesh and blood who give language to diffuse anxieties, consciousness to nascent movements, and sometimes direction to historical transformations.

Now, in this first half of the 21st century, two names stand out for anyone seeking to understand this struggle for the reconquest of our continent and our civilization, today called remigration: Renaud Camus and Martin Sellner.

It was in Vienna, on March 5, 2026, that the two men met, at the invitation of The European Conservative and Vauban Books, to discuss remigration and the future of European identity. The choice of this city is far from insignificant. As Renaud Camus would recall, the 1683 siege was “one of those moments when Europe could have disappeared.” Indeed, in September of that year, a vast Ottoman army threatened the Austrian capital, which was saved only by heroic resistance. Yet, by a strange irony to which history holds the secret, the city where Europe defended itself against Turkish expansion today harbors a massive Turkish presence, no longer perceived as a historical or civilizational issue but as an ordinary phenomenon, administratively manageable and morally untouchable.

The Impotence of Words

The most troubling aspect of the present situation is perhaps not the demographic transformation of Europe itself, but the inability of Europeans to name it in the language of their own history. What other generations would have immediately perceived as a question of people, continuity, civilization, or belonging, we no longer know how to apprehend except through the neutral categories of governance, law, and the management of flows. Yet the author of Du sens has ceaselessly shown in his work that the great European crisis is not only political, nor even cultural, but first and foremost semantic. The crisis is above all a crisis of meaning. The decisive words — Europe, people, foreigner, culture, homeland — continue to circulate, but they have gradually been emptied of their thickness and gravity. The dispossession of the European peoples thus begins with a dispossession of language, and perhaps remigration must be understood, at this deeper level, not merely as a political project, but as an attempt to make words and things, names and realities, meaning and history coincide once again.

If the defense of Vienna against the Turks was a founding moment of Austrian history and identity, how could one still speak of “Austrian culture” on the day when it is represented mainly by people of Turkish descent? If Austria and Europe are “pregnant with an Islamic state,” in Martin Sellner’s words, will we still use the same names to designate them once they have given birth to this new reality? That is the whole issue. The crisis is not only in the facts; it lies in the strange linguistic operation that consists in asking words to retain their old historical resonance even as their content is radically altered. The problem Camus points to is therefore not only that there is demographic transformation, but, more fundamentally, that this transformation demands a new linguistic regime in which the old names survive as empty shells while their substance has shifted.

It is against this subversion of words and its practical consequences that Martin Sellner and Renaud Camus stand, determined to restore to the word Europe its true meaning. The meeting took place at Ronald Schwarzer’s, in a setting that seemed chosen to recall by itself what a civilization is when it still takes its own mise-en-scène seriously: an old Viennese residence, lit by candlelight, with a portrait of Metternich on one wall, as if historical and imperial Europe were still watching over the exchanges. In this flickering light, the discussion quickly turned not toward the technical aspects of remigration but toward its presuppositions, its deep causes, its historical and moral background.

From Equality to Deracination

Equality, legitimate in the order of law, has become in Europe a total reflex, a passion that no longer tolerates precedence, authority, model, or heritage. Nothing must any longer stand higher than anything else; nothing must impose itself by antiquity, by excellence, or by transmission. Yet for Camus, it is precisely from this point that a civilization begins to unlearn what it is. For culture is never a mere stock of works or museum decor. It presupposes an order, preferences, fidelities, works judged more central than others, a more upheld language, a denser memory — in short, a hierarchy.

“Culture is entirely hierarchy,” he has even written. A culture lives only on the condition that it knows what it places higher, what it transmits, what it venerates, what it asks each person to join. A civilization that no longer believes in hierarchy, in heritage, or in the centrality of its own forms becomes fatally incapable of resisting the reign of general equivalence. If all cultures are absolutely equal in value, if all populations are regarded as functionally interchangeable, if the past no longer carries authority, then the replacement of peoples itself ceases to appear as a tragic rupture. It becomes, too, a mere rearrangement, a variation in the great game of modern substitutions.

The observation is implacable and severe. Yet in this Viennese room, they did not linger long in the melancholy of diagnosis alone. For if the French writer has brought to light the European wound, the meeting with Martin Sellner aimed to signify that the latter in no way implies discouragement. What is the point of recognizing that words no longer coincide with things if one does not simultaneously seek the concrete conditions of their recoincidence?

Remigration presents itself as the effort to restore to Europe the frameworks without which no people can durably remain itself: namely, a majority conscious of itself, a culture sure enough of itself to impose itself without hatred, and a belonging that is not merely civic or bureaucratic. While Camus has long worked to restore to Europe the words of its own intelligibility, Martin Sellner for several years now has sought to give this wounded intelligibility an operative form. If a people still intends to endure as a historical subject, what institutions, what laws, what norms of citizenship must correspond to this will?

Nevertheless, the two men agreed that if remigration is to become a political reality, it must cease to be presented as a simple operation of constraint and must first be thought of as a moral project. This is doubtless the most delicate point of the whole affair. For the European right, Sellner remarked in substance, has often known how to name the danger, sometimes even to illustrate it forcefully, but far less often to oppose it with a language of legitimacy. It has denounced, sounded the alarm, protested; it has, on the other hand, struggled to say why remigration would be not only possible but just.

Yet, Sellner insisted, as long as remigration remains confined to an exclusively punitive or police imaginary, it will remain vulnerable to all caricatures. Its adversaries will then only have to present it as cold brutality, an ethnic cleansing program, or a pure policy of expulsion. To break this circle, he argues, it is necessary to show that it can be thought otherwise: not only as legitimate for the European peoples who intend to remain historical, but also as humane for the societies of origin themselves. It is not only a matter of protecting threatened European identities, but also of breaking with a world disorder that uproots men, empties countries of their vital forces, and subjects everything to indefinite circulation.

This is why Camus proposed shifting the vocabulary. Perhaps the term “remigration” is not equal to the situation we are living through. What we are experiencing is not a somewhat strong immigration; we are living through a veritable colonization. If we must recover the justness of words, we must recognize that colonization calls for decolonization. If colonization historically consisted in transporting populations, imposing new presences, and durably modifying the human and symbolic composition of a territory, then the great contemporary demographic transformations can, at least analogically, be reread in this light:

“all the more so since Europe is a thousand times more colonized today than it ever colonized.”

Once this framework is accepted, reversing the process no longer belongs to a monstrous exception but to a gesture comprehensible within modern history itself.

“If colonization is bad, then decolonization is necessarily good.”

The meaning of words is once again capital. Europeans are the natives of Europe. They therefore have the moral right to preserve their nations and their cultures. Moreover, remigration is not a project carrying violence, as its detractors accuse it; it is, once again, the exact opposite: remigration constitutes the last chance to avoid otherwise harsher confrontations. If current trends continue, Sellner explained, Europe will not head toward a peaceful and pluralist stabilization but toward an increase in disorder, communitarian fragmentation, and perhaps, in the end, open forms of ethno-religious conflict.

Far from being a fantasy of bloodthirsty extremists, remigration is the moderate and wise solution that remains before the peaceful paths close. According to all likelihood, we have a horizon of ten to fifteen years — depending on the country — before this window of reversibility closes definitively. Past a certain demographic, political, and mental threshold, the ongoing transformations will become much more difficult to halt, if not irreversible. “Civilizations are mortal,” we have grown accustomed to repeating since Paul Valéry. We will soon have the privilege of seeing one breathe its last if we do nothing.

Horizon of Reversibility

Once taboo, discussing remigration is no longer confined to the margins. Everywhere in Europe, the subject of demographic transformation is entering the public space decisively, and it is a safe bet that debates on this subject will only intensify in the years to come.

“Where the peril grows, that which saves also grows,” according to Hölderlin’s much-cited aphorism.

With demographic replacement also grows the consciousness of a civilizational struggle. If the “Little Replacement” of culture and the loss of the meaning of words have inexorably led to the “Great Replacement” demographically, it is possible that, inversely, it is through the struggle for remigration that Europeans will recover the sense of their being and their civilization. And that is perhaps what this meeting in Vienna showed: not just another conversation on immigration, but a moment when a diffuse anxiety took the form of a thought, then that of a project, and finally of a reconquest of the meaning of being European.

Originally published in Éléments no. 220, June-July 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

The Culture War: From Ruins to a New Beginning

Arktos Journal — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:21:48 GMT

The right believes it is winning the culture war, but Alain de Benoist argues it has won nothing at all: the progressive left simply collapsed under its own exhaustion, leaving the same dominant class still setting the tone. What looks like victory is a landscape of ruins, and the only way out runs through a populism willing to break with liberalism rather than merely inherit its machinery.

Today there is talk of a “rightward turn of the world,” or of a “global neo-reactionary wave,” or even of a “return of the dark years.” These are never anything more than polemical shorthand. Many on the right nonetheless draw from them the conclusion that they are on the verge of winning the “culture war.” What a strange idea! What war are we talking about? What battle has been won when the authoritative media-political system continues to refer solely to “incontestable authorities” who think the opposite of what most people think?

The truth is that the culture war has, at best, been won only by default. The progressive left has lost; the conservative right has not won. The adversary was not defeated; it collapsed of its own accord. But it has not, for all that, lost power. The intellectuals of the dominant class have nothing left to say; they content themselves with repeating the same mantras, yet it is still they who set the tone. Progressivism is dead, and gender theory and wokeism are merely its broom wagons1, yet they still hold center stage.

Getting Out of Liberalism

In an age of the willfully blind and the deaf on principle, of the media circus and its parish newsletters, in which communities — for want of any great collective project — are reduced to identitarian impulses or victimhood narratives, the few intellectual centers that remain have lost all grip on events. The great authors, the “guiding minds of the young” who once held authority, have died without being replaced. A certain number of talents are left here and there, but they remain ostracized, confined to the margins. For the rest, we have passed from the age of statesmen to that of experts in expertise — from Jaurès to Olivier Faure, from Édith Piaf to Aya Nakamura. Hardly progress.

All the classic political forces are at the stage of decomposition. The socialist left has been replaced by an indigestible, synthetic, “societal”2 product ever since it gave up the defense of workers and the critique of the relations of production, confining itself to expanding subjective rights within the framework of the dominant regime of alienation.

The right remains busy preserving its profits, even at the cost of lowering the general standard of living — all of it against the backdrop of the sordid bankruptcy of the bourgeois state and of a swelling public debt whose sole aim is to prop up consumption artificially.

There is a rout of the system, a rout of the progressive intellectuals, and a rout of a right that has not reformed itself and believes it has won victory all the while as it produces nothing historically capable of nourishing a coherent civilizational project. There is a landscape of ruins.

Who seriously contests the dominant ideology’s control over the world of culture? How is one to launch into a cultural battle without even knowing what the cultural signifier is the name of? In the name of what anthropological model? Of what symbolic imaginary? How is one to defend the singularity (of peoples and cultures) without thinking of the singular? What too often prevails is intellectual laziness and a timidity about looking beyond comfortable labels.

The populist wave has mainly given birth to liberal-conservative parties or regimes whose ideas are very often merely the resurgence of outdated notions or of accepted banalities that in no way herald a path of thought equal to the challenges of the moment. In economics or foreign policy, for example, they confine themselves to repeating the vulgate.

These movements and regimes that claim to defend the people still have not understood that liberalism is an ideology which knows only individuals and grants no particular status to collective entities — beginning with peoples and cultures — which sees in immigration nothing but the displacement of some number x of individuals from one country to another, and which, moreover, has always campaigned for the free movement of people, capital, and goods. Liberal populism is a contradiction in terms.

There is a great difference between coming to power because one has won an election and putting an end to the dominant hegemony. Replacing a left-wing man of the system with a right-wing man of the system does not get one out of the system. The recent controversy between the current Italian Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli, and the essayist Marcello Veneziani — who reproached Giorgia Meloni’s right for having fundamentally changed nothing in Italian society (solo fuffa, “just smoke and mirrors”) — was revealing in this respect. One can get out of the system only by adopting a position of rupture. To have at one’s disposal a strategy of rupture aimed at weighing upon the historical moment, one needs minds structured by one and the same conception of the world, of man, and of society. That is precisely what is lacking.

Populist leaders would do well to reflect on the fact that it is the popular classes who have the greatest interest in a radical transformation of society (and the bourgeois classes the greatest interest in its preservation). One might even be tempted to say that, faced with the three great ideologies of the modern world — conservatism, liberalism, and socialism — populism will be able truly to serve the people only by resolutely opposing the second and by seeking to forge an original synthesis of the other two. This means that populisms need a program that is at once conservative and revolutionary, one allowing them to found a new historical subject in the struggle for hegemony.

The idea of another society is, nowadays, difficult to envision: “Here we are, condemned to live in the world in which we live,” said François Furet. And yet, history is open. One needs only to step back a little to see it. One will then see, by the same token, that today something is ending and something is (re)beginning. And that everything remains to be done.

The Imperial Notion in Europe: Our Longest Political Memory

Arktos Journal — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:00:06 GMT

Thomas Cole, The Consummation [The Course of the Empire], 1836

In 27 BC, following a long period of civil wars, the Senate bestowed upon Octavian, who was already both imperator for life and princeps, the title of Augustus, meaning ‘the most illustrious one.’ In a world where authority held an eminently sacred character, the adopted son of the divine Caesar became the pontifex maximus only a few years later, thus assuming the highest office in Roman public religion. He was the holder of auctoritas, i.e., the wielder of a power founded on a moral superiority of an almost supernatural nature, surpassing the mere exercise of legal power (potestas).

According to Virgil, Jupiter had promised Venus this favourable status for all descendants of Aeneas, who had fled Troy to reach distant Latium. As for Augustus, he claimed to be a descendant of this mythical lineage. The connection established with the Greek epic did not simply link Rome to the immense prestige of Hellas, but also indicated that the benevolence of the gods responded to the conquests of a people. Indeed, Rome dominated a large part of the known world and, to that extent, its sovereign proved universal. Despite its many transformations, the imperial model remained the supreme foundation of political legitimacy for the central powers of our continent until the start of the 20^th century. In a dormant Europe forgetful of its own identity and destiny, it is undoubtedly worthwhile to reflect on the enduring nature of the imperial idea, an idea linked from the very beginning with the sacred dimension of the City-State’s destiny.

The Consecration of Power

The Empire would enshrine an enduring ascent of power, albeit one that was marked by temporary setbacks and internal divisions: since its founding in 753 BC, Rome had conquered the Italian peninsula, the Mediterranean Basin (renamed Mare Nostrum), and then Gaul. In the centuries that followed, an incredible mosaic of peoples, unified in the crucible of the Greco-Roman civilisation, found themselves subject to the prestige of the City. This exceptional feat seemed to herald an apogee of eternal permanence - which, however, was not to be. Although the Empire did persist in the East until 1453 AD, it had collapsed in the West as early as 476 AD, fragmenting into ‘barbarian’ kingdoms. This Roman eclipse would only end in 800 when, crowned in Rome on Christmas Day by Pope Leo III, Charlemagne undertook the first renovatio imperii.

Such is the great lesson of Antiquity: as a political construct, the Empire is subject to the life-cycles of ascent and decline; the model towards which Empire strives cannot be definitively attained in this world, since history can have no end. And yet, the Empire is also an ideal and a quest; this ceaselessly renewed effort to achieve rebirth thus constitutes a major element of the imperial notion itself.

As was the case with the Romans, a long rise to power established the Frankish legitimacy to restore the Empire. A victorious war leader, Clovis was baptised in 496, thus inscribing the Merovingian dynasty into the Roman Christian tradition. In 732, the Pippinid Charles Martel acquired immense prestige thanks to his victory over the Arabs at Poitiers. The Frankish domination of the West, now acknowledged by the Papacy, ultimately led to the Carolingian imperial renaissance. The old opposition between the earthly city and the heavenly one, as advocated by Saint Augustine, faded in the face of the concept of a Christian empire.

Upon Charlemagne’s death, the empire would crumble once again. On either side of a short-lived Middle Francia, two major political entities would emerge: the kingdom of the West Franks, whose kings were crowned by the archbishop of Reims, and that of the East Franks, whose rulers would soon lay claim to imperial dignity and receive their crowns from the pope. These twin powers would continue to rival one another at the heart of Western Christendom: from the 13^th century onwards, the king of France would aspire to be ‘emperor’ in his own kingdom.

As for the second renovatio imperii, it would be the work of Otto I, crowned in 962 following his defeat of the Magyars in 955. Once again, military success would pave the way for a renewal of power. Indeed, the Holy Roman Empire was not only German: Italy, Burgundy and Provence anchored it in the Latin world, and it also extended eastwards, incorporating significant parts of the Slavic and Baltic worlds.

Ancient City-State, Imperial Model and Nation-State

In Rome, the empire was first born of a city: such was, indeed, the political and archetypically Greek form of the young Roman Republic, forged by heroic aspirations. The ancient city was founded on a demanding type of political organisation: the duties and sacrifices imposed upon its citizens preserved its freedom, which was the supreme common good. When the Republic finally collapsed under its own weight, despite already dominating the Mediterranean world in the 1^st century BC, the Emperor became the cornerstone of a work of art of colossal proportions. Two centuries after Augustus, Marcus Aurelius would still cultivate the noble servitude of being merely the first among all citizens. The civic devotion of both the Senate and the Roman people, in whose name the Emperor acted as commander, gave full substance to imperial political order. Any occasional setbacks - and the folly of certain emperors - were thus offset by a political vitality wherein authority and responsibility fuelled each other.

The decadence of Roman civic values inevitably led to the decline of the Empire. The Edict of Caracalla, which, in 212 AD, granted citizenship to all free men of the Empire, constituted a significant step in this regard. By establishing itself in the provinces of the East, which had been superficially Hellenised by Alexander the Great, Rome left itself open to influences that would profoundly alter its political organisation, as well as the very values upon which its civilisation rested. The imperial state gradually became an apparatus that was as overwhelming as it was vulnerable.

This article is an excerpt from the newly released Institut Iliade volume What We Are: The Sources of European Identity, brought to you in English by Arktos:

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a surprising fusion would take place between classical heritage, Christianity and the contributions of Celtic and Germanic cultures. Following a long period of sedimentation, this melting pot would give birth to the feudal system, which would re-erect political order upon a new foundation: that of the nobility of the sword. Indeed, the services offered by knights marked a return to the commitment of the ancient citizen. Throughout the West, the ultimate guarantor of this hierarchy was none other than the Emperor.

The Holy Roman Empire also stands as a continuation of the ancient City-State, insofar as it placed the elective principle at the very heart of political order, with the Imperial Diet thus replacing the Senate of Rome. The authority inherent in the imperial function was separate from that held by the sovereign over any particular people, as the empire was not synonymous with the kingdoms or principalities that it comprised. This situation remained unchanged well into the modern era in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty prevailed over ethnic or religious ties - for imperial power is rooted in a principle of subsidiarity and tends to federate political entities rather than oppress, homogenise or level them. From this perspective, the notion of empire is not synonymous with the notion of imperialism. While always centring and organising, an Empire is not incompatible with the existence of ‘nationalities’ in the ethnic and cultural sense, nor with nation-states (defined as geopolitical entities inherited from a long history), yet it does stand against the ‘ideological’ conception of the Jacobin nation that emerged from the French Revolution.

The revolutionary fatherland, in fact, constitutes an abstract entity within which equal individuals avail themselves of the same universal rights. In the name of allegedly ‘immortal principles,’ it aims to spread the light of reason among different peoples. Such discourse is also that of the young republic of the United States of America, whose ‘manifest destiny,’ rooted in biblical and Protestant culture, takes on a full-fledged messianic dimension.

For its part, the imperial notion remains inseparable from the acknowledgement of a type of sacredness that is inherent in the sovereign function: rooted in long European memory, it stands at the antipodes of the secular and universal religion of perpetual progress and against the cult of the great global market.

The Spiritual Principle of Sovereignty

More than to a governmental system or the exercise of sovereignty over a given geographical area, imperial political order relates, first and foremost, to a spiritual principle. He who assumes an imperial title is invested with the sacred power of auctoritas. A transcendent force that proceeds from Jupiter himself, the imperium was thus associated with the right to consult the auspices (ius auspicium), that is, to ask the gods for answers; it bestowed power, whether of a military, legal, or religious nature. The Emperor’s authority manifested the power of both the Senate and the Roman people, all of whom were nothing in the absence of the pietas that conformed to the requirements of the mos maiorum, the ‘way of the ancestors’: the sacrality of a pious city was thus manifested through the very person of the emperor. Such was the origin of the imperial cult imposed upon conquered nations, who, incidentally, were allowed to retain their religious identity.

During the Late Roman Empire, the decline of Roman piety contributed to the erosion of institutions and the blurring of traditional values. The foundations of the religion of the Fatherland were gradually undermined, while the Eastern cults of Mithras and Sol Invictus enjoyed ever-increasing success. They thus paved the way for the adoption of a universal religion, a religion which would become dominant from the 4^th century onwards with the triumph of Christianity.

By restoring Roman imperial dignity in the West, Charlemagne remained nonetheless faithful to the Roman conception of imperium transposed into a Christian context. As a sacred institution, the empire closely united the principles of spiritual and temporal authority. Otto I’s renovatio was also consistent with this tradition, which bestowed upon the Emperor a distinct spiritual aura that remained independent of the papacy. At the beginning of the 11^th century, this rivalry between two titles, each laying claim to spiritual authority, logically led to the Investiture Controversy, which continued under the Hohenstaufens with the conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Through the Gregorian Reform, the Church strove to establish a clear distinction between temporal and spiritual power, clearly subordinating the former to the latter, over which it claimed absolute monopoly. The Holy Roman Empire was thus stripped of a part of its sacred dimension, even though Dante still considered the emperor to be ‘Roman’ in the spiritual sense, i.e., to be the successor of Caesar and Augustus. Although weakened, imperial dignity did not entirely lose its pre-eminence within the respublica christiana represented by mediaeval Europe.

Renewal on the Brink of the Abyss

As a result of the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War, the spiritual unity of Europe found itself shattered, with the Empire managing to survive itself. The Westphalian system, however, would allow for a certain balance of power to be maintained until the end of the 18^th century. By contrast, the events of 1789 would usher in the era of nationalism while dealing a fatal blow to the old Romano-Christian edifice: heir to the Revolution, a certain French general would then himself claim imperial dignity before precipitating the demise of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Following the Napoleonic Wars, the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire and Prussia—destined to give rise to the German Empire a few decades later—proceeded to unite as part of a Holy Alliance that guaranteed the prevailing European balance of power. This would be followed by the trauma of the First World War, which would ultimately sweep away the last vestiges of imperial tradition. Although Italian fascism and German National Socialism did, to some extent, lay claim to the legacy of ancient Roman civilisation and the mediaeval Reich, these modern totalitarian experiments had very little to do with their historical models.

As for today’s Europe, it seems to be renouncing its own destiny. Indeed, most of the states it comprises openly deny the identity of our civilisation, taking credit for a European construct utterly devoid of spiritual reference. It is thus more urgent than ever to recall the historical periods during which our peoples, united by a shared sense of identity, successfully hearkened to the call of the sacred and wielded instruments of power. Let us rekindle the nostalgia for the imperial ideal in the hearts of the sons and daughters of Europe, so that our nations may reconnect with their own unique genius and acquire the ability to join forces in laying the foundations of a political order on a continental scale! For it is as Nietzsche once predicted: Europe will be forged on the brink of the abyss. In anticipation of such a moment, let us continue to erect the citadels of our inner empire...

What We Are: The Sources of European Identity, fresh off the press from Arktos, features essays by leading lights of the Institut Iliade:

Philippe Conrad / Henri Levavasseur / Jean-François Gautier / Thibaud Cassel / Éric Grolier / Jean-Louis Voisin / Christopher Gérard / Lionel Rondouin / Édouard Chanot / François Bousquet, Grégoire Gambier / Jean-Yves Le Gallou.

Why Read Homer?

Institut Iliade — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:02:09 GMT

On 15 July, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey will cast us once again into the sails of Odysseus. If the names of Ithaca, Penelope, Charybdis and Scylla still resound within us, does our age truly know the work of Homer? Marion du Faouët invites us to read and reread this founding text of our civilization, to return to its voice, its rhythm, and to what it says of European man: mortal and faithful, cunning and fragile, rooted in a land, a memory and a lineage. A people that no longer reads its founding texts ends by no longer possessing them, and by wandering, far from itself. It is time for Europeans to take up again the road to Ithaca.

There are works whose very name is enough to give us the illusion of familiarity. They are part of the landscape. We came across them at school; we know a few of their characters, a few episodes, a few images. They are there, somewhere in our memory, like monuments we no longer visit. The Odyssey is one of them.

Odysseus, Penelope, Circe, Calypso, the Cyclops, the Sirens, Ithaca: these names still say something to us. But what do they really say? Are they still living presences, or only floating memories, fragments of general culture, images detached from the poem that gives them their meaning?

To reread The Odyssey is not to pay homage to some venerable antiquity. It is to return to one of the great texts in which Europe learned to think about man: the man who confronts the trial of the world and who suffers, who desires and errs, who schemes, who weeps, who resists, and who wants to return home.

For that is where the heart of the poem lies. Odysseus does not travel for the sake of travelling. He does not seek the elsewhere for its own sake. He does not wish to lose himself in the unknown, nor to undo what he is. He wants to find Ithaca again. This return involves far more than a journey across the sea. Odysseus must become once more king, husband, father, son, master of his own abode. He must take back his place within an order that his absence allowed to come undone. The whole poem strains toward this reconquest. In an age that readily prizes movement, rupture, permanent departure, Homer recalls something simple, almost scandalous today: there is grandeur in return.

Ithaca is nothing like a paradise. It is a harsh island, poor and rocky. Odysseus could choose better. He could remain with Calypso, who offers him immortality. He could surrender himself to pleasure, to forgetfulness, to rest. But he prefers his own land, his mortal wife, his son, his aging father, his threatened house, his destiny as a man. Because a mortal but rooted life is worth more than an eternity far from one’s own.

This is one of the great lessons of The Odyssey. Man is never, in it, an isolated individual floating above the world. He is always caught within bonds: a lineage, a house, a homeland, gods, the dead, duties. His freedom does not consist in ridding himself of these bonds, but in remaining faithful to them through trial.

Odysseus is great because he returns.

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The House of Odysseus

We must take Odysseus’s abode seriously. It occupies the center of the poem: the place where everything is lost, and where everything must be restored. During the king’s absence, the suitors occupy the palace. They devour his goods, covet Penelope, humiliate Telemachus, violate the laws of hospitality. In threatening the marriage, they assail an entire order.

The abode, in Homer, bears lineage, authority, transmission, memory. It is first of all a house of stone, with its halls, its threshold, its hearth, its bed rooted in the olive tree. But it is also a house in a deeper sense: a spiritual hearth, a continuity of blood, of name and of destiny. The house of Odysseus thus denotes not merely a building, but a lineage, a sovereignty, a fidelity handed down. It is there that the living and the dead, men and gods, wife and husband, father and son, are held together.

The return of Odysseus thus takes on a political and sacred significance. It restores each thing to its rightful place: to the wife her husband, to the son his father, to the kingdom its king, to the dead their honor, to the gods their justice. Whoever sees in Odysseus only an adventurer misses what is essential. Odysseus is first of all the one who returns to restore his abode.

A World Where the Gods Act

To reread Homer is also to consent to enter a world that is not our own.

We have grown accustomed to explaining myths. We turn the gods into symbols, rites into customs, portents into poetic images. Poseidon becomes the sea, Athena intelligence, Circe seduction, Calypso forgetfulness, the Sirens temptation. Such readings can illuminate certain aspects of the poem. But they become fatal if they make us forget that, in Homer, the gods are not mere metaphors. On the contrary, they are there. They act. Athena protects Odysseus and guides Telemachus. Poseidon pursues the hero with his wrath. Hermes conveys the messages of the gods. Circe transforms men. Calypso holds Odysseus back. Zeus arbitrates.

The whole poem unfolds in a world where the visible and the invisible are not separated as they are for us. The sea is not merely water. The wind is not merely a physical phenomenon. The oath is not merely a spoken word. Hospitality is not merely a courtesy. Sacrifice is not merely an ancient custom. Everything is caught within a vaster order. Odysseus acts, of course. He decides, he calculates, he endures, he lies at times, he hides, he strikes, he entreats. But he is never alone before a mute world. He advances through a universe shot through with signs, powers, limits.

This is where his cunning takes on its full meaning. The mètis of Odysseus denotes more than mere skill. It has nothing of the cynicism of a man who manipulates all that surrounds him. It is an intelligence of the real: knowing when to speak, when to keep silent, when to wait, when to reveal oneself, when to strike, when to entreat.

Homeric man is not great because he believes himself all-powerful. He is great because he knows that he is not.

A Voice Before Being a Book

We often read The Odyssey as a book. That is natural. But we must remember that before being a printed text, before being a schoolroom object, the poem was a voice. It comes from the world of the bards, of recitation, of song, of memory. Homer designates less an author in the modern sense than a poetic tradition, a way of transmitting the heroes, the gods, the transgressions, the sufferings and the glory.

The repetitions, the formulas, the epithets are not archaic encumbrances. They belong to this sung speech. “Odysseus of many wiles,” “grey-eyed Athena,” “rosy-fingered dawn,” “the wine-dark sea”: these expressions do not decorate the narrative. They carry it. They give the world its color, its rhythm, its form. Homer ought to be read aloud more often. To let the names be heard. To feel the return of the formulas. To understand that glory, kléos, is not modern celebrity, but that which abides because a song transmits it.

The bard keeps memory. He gives the living the tale of the dead. He preserves what deserves not to vanish. This is why a civilization that no longer reads its founding texts ends by no longer truly possessing them. It keeps their names, a few scenes, a few images, but it loses the voice that made them live.

Reading in Order to Transmit

It is not enough to preserve the great texts. They must be made desirable once more.

Homer asks for more than a citation or a distant respect. He asks to be frequented. One does not enter The Odyssey as one enters a museum, but as one enters an old house whose rooms are still inhabited. It takes time to recognize its thresholds, its voices, its lights, its shadows. One must consent to let oneself be led.

This is why transmission cannot be reduced to the accumulation of references. It presupposes an art of making others love him. To give a young reader a taste for Odysseus is not to impose a monument upon him; it is to open a road for him. To show him that these songs still speak of what he already knows without always being able to name it: the desire to leave, the fear of losing oneself, the call of return, fidelity, temptation, glory, death, the home.

We must therefore reread Homer simply, seriously, joyfully. Read him aloud at times, to recover the cadence of the poem. Read him with images, with maps, with different translations, with connections to the works he has nourished. Read him above all as a living work, not as a cultural obligation.

A tradition does not survive because one declares it important. It survives when men and women receive it deeply enough to want to transmit it in their turn. And it is with this memory that we must reconnect.

Homer as Beginning

Why begin with Homer? Because he is one of our beginnings. Not the beginning of everything, of course, but the beginning of a certain European way of looking at man: mortal, heroic, cunning, suffering, faithful, tempted, glorious and fragile; capable of grandeur, yet always placed beneath the gaze of the gods; drawn to the open sea, yet called back by the home; desirous of glory, yet shaken by the dead; tempted by immortality, yet choosing in the end the earth, the wife, the son and the father.

Homer gives us no ready-made lessons. He sets us in the presence of a world. He compels us to look higher, further, deeper.

This is why we must stop treating founding works as a decorative heritage. They are not there to embellish our discourse. They are there to form us. Still, they must be opened. Still, they must be read. Still, they must be given to others to read. A civilization may die beneath the blows of its enemies; it will certainly be extinguished if its heirs no longer know how to hear the poems that founded it.

Homer abides. It is for us to take up again the road to Ithaca.

Marion du Faouët — Promotion Dante

Originally published at the Iliade Institute

Translated by Alexander Raynor

OUT NOW - What We Are: The Sources of European Identity

Arktos Journal — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:17:11 GMT

What does it mean to be European? What formative experiences have shaped Europe’s distinctive civilisation, and what remains of it today?

Bringing together a selection of essays from the Institut Iliade, What We Are explores the sources of European identity through the ideas, traditions, and historical experiences that have defined Europe over millennia. From the Indo-European heritage, the worlds of Greece and Rome, and the legacy of mediaeval Christendom to Europe’s scientific spirit, artistic imagination, political forms, and relationship with nature, each chapter illuminates a vital dimension of Europe’s past, present, and possible future.

Addressed to those who refuse to accept the decline of European civilisation as inevitable, What We Are combines historical scholarship with philosophical reflection to reawaken Europe’s long memory and strengthen its resolve to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

What We Are: The Sources of European Identity, brought to you in English by Arktos, features essays by leading lights of the Institut Iliade:

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What We Are: The Sources of European Identity is the second volume of Institut Iliade essays brought to you by Arktos, following For a European Awakening: Nature, Excellence, Beauty.

Evola on the Problem of Decadence

Arktos Journal — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:04:29 GMT

The metapolitics of language involves, among other things, removing from the public sphere, in a more or less discreet manner, those useful modes of thought and perception that might facilitate the process Steve Sailer calls “noticing.”

Certain concepts help us recognize patterns: compare terms such as “anarcho-tyranny,” “class,” and “cuckservatism.” Those that don’t want these patterns to be noticed, by extension, also do not find it in their interest that such concepts be spread.

One such concept, with a long history, is decadence, used not only by fascists and reactionaries, but historically by everyone from communists such as Karl Marx to conservative politicians such as Arthur Balfour. In passing, we may also mention the Swedish troubadour Dan Berglund’s 1979 song Dekadensen (”The Decadence”) as an example of how strongly this term was once associated with the upper classes even within the radical Left.

The precise definitions of decadence have varied, as have the explanations for it. Where de Gobineau focused on racial mixing and Auster on the loss of faith, Marxists have tended to emphasize more material factors.

One worthwhile analysis is offered by the Traditionalist Julius Evola in “The Problem of Decadence.”

Evola’s “The Problem of Decadence” is included in the volume Recognitions — brought to you in English by Arktos:

Read an excerpt here.

In this short essay, Evola addresses the question of how the traditional world could be replaced by the modern world, despite the latter being inferior—first in the West and then across the globe. His view of history differs from the liberal one in that he begins not from the idea of “progress” but, on the contrary, from that of “decline.” Yet his distance from the liberal worldview goes deeper than this.

Evola sees traditional society as founded on sovereignty rather than violence. He speaks here of

“the ‘Olympian’ attribute of true authority and sovereignty […] its way of directly affirming itself, not by violence but by presence.”1

Further, he notes that

“adhesion and recognition on the part of the inferior are rather the fundamental basis of every normal and traditional hierarchy. It is not the superior who has need of the inferior, but the inferior who has need of the superior.”

The perceptive reader will likely notice a certain affinity here with anarchism, albeit of a non-egalitarian variety.

In a traditional society, some individuals embody admirable qualities in such a way that others recognize them and follow them voluntarily: in popular culture, compare the relationship between Splinter and the Turtles, or Yoda and Luke. On this point, Evola writes elsewhere:

“tradition is to us the victorious and creative presence in the world of what ‘is not of this world’, that is to say of spirit, conceived of as something stronger than any purely material and simply human force.”2
And:
“The antithesis between spirit and power, the opposition between strength and authority is only, once again, a characteristic of ‘modern’ thought.”

In many respects, Evola functions as a necessary “anti-Marx,” although he also observed that in a sufficiently decayed society, the unflattering theories and view of human nature advanced by Marx and Freud will indeed describe large segments of the population.

From this starting point, Evola goes on to explain how traditional civilizations could collapse in more or less sudden revolutions. This did not necessarily mean that their core had degenerated; rather, it was a consequence of free will. In “The Problem of Decadence,” he compares this to the stories of the Fall of Man and the rebellion of the angels:

“The revolutionary commences by killing the hierarchy in himself, mutilating in himself those possibilities which correspond to the interior foundation of order—and he then proceeds to demolish the order outside himself as well.”

This sets in motion a process that may culminate in the collapse of hierarchy, often leading to regicide or the murder of emperors, as in Russia and Ethiopia. But, according to Evola, this is fundamentally an inner process whose early stages often go unnoticed:

“Without a preliminary interior destruction, no revolution.”

As can be seen, it is not unreasonable to supplement Evola’s traditional analysis of decadence with thinkers such as Gobineau and Marx. Regardless, his emphasis on non-material factors and processes remains valuable.

Decadence is, above all, an unwillingness and an inability to even perceive any higher aspects of existence. It is therefore fought mainly through personal discipline and inner work, the goal of which, according to Evola, is

“absolute adherence to truth, uprightness, ability to subordinate the person to the work, inflexibility and rigour of the idea, indifference towards any outward recognition and any material benefit.”3

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

Julius Evola, “The Problem of Decadence” in Recognitions.

Julius Evola, “On the Secret of Degradation.”

Julius Evola, “The Order of the Iron Wreath.”

Gothic Olympus: The Hero's Journey Through Europe's Decadence

Arktos Journal — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:01:44 GMT

Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse, La Mort de La Pourpre (1914)

A review of Christian Chensvold, Gothic Olympus (London: Arktos, 2026). 170 p.

Gothic Olympus is an unusual and ambitious novel that combines several literary traditions into a single symbolic narrative. Drawing on fin-de-siècle decadence, Greek mythology, Western esotericism, Tarot symbolism, and reflections on the decline of Western civilization, the novel creates a world that moves constantly between history and myth, personal experience and spiritual destiny. Rather than following the conventions of contemporary realism, it seeks to build a symbolic universe in which characters, places, and events carry meanings that go far beyond their immediate role in the plot.

At the center of the story stands Julien Stanwyck, a young American artist whose life changes completely after the death of his mother. Before her death, she reveals that Julien’s true father was not the man who raised him but a French nobleman, the Comte de la Tour-Abolie. This discovery begins what appears at first to be a simple search for family origins and inheritance. However, as the novel develops, this search becomes something much larger. Julien’s quest for his father gradually turns into a search for spiritual origins, cultural identity, and ultimately a connection with the divine.

One of the most interesting ways to understand Gothic Olympus is through the ideas developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Campbell argued that many myths and stories from different cultures follow the same basic pattern, which he called the “hero’s journey.” The hero receives a call to adventure, leaves the ordinary world behind, faces trials and transformations, gains new knowledge, and eventually returns changed.

Julien’s story follows this pattern very closely. The death of his mother acts as the call to adventure. His departure from America marks the separation from his ordinary life. The shipwreck that occurs during his journey to Europe functions as a symbolic crossing of a threshold. In mythological traditions, water often represents death and rebirth, and this is exactly how the episode works in the novel: the destruction of the ship seems to erase Julien’s old identity and prepare him for a new existence. When he survives together with Zoe Wingate, it feels as though both have been chosen by forces beyond ordinary human understanding.

Zoe plays a crucial role throughout the novel. More than a romantic figure, she serves as a guide who introduces Julien to the world of symbols, Tarot, and destiny. In many ways she resembles the spiritual helpers who often appear in Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey. She helps Julien understand that his life is part of a larger pattern and that his experiences carry meanings that are not immediately visible.

The novel’s Parisian section is perhaps its most openly decadent part. Here Julien reinvents himself as Count Wrathchild, a theatrical performer and poet whose artistic career transforms his personal suffering into spectacle. Through this persona he becomes a symbol of beauty, decline, and cultural exhaustion. The atmosphere of these chapters recalls the world of late nineteenth-century European decadence, especially writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Yet the novel does not simply imitate these influences. Instead, it uses decadence as a stage in Julien’s spiritual development.

As Count Wrathchild, Julien turns decay into art. His performances celebrate beauty at the edge of collapse. Yet the novel makes clear that this fascination with decline cannot be the final answer. Julien is still trapped within the world of appearances. He has learned how to transform suffering into beauty, but he has not yet discovered a deeper purpose.

This deeper dimension begins to emerge when Julien arrives at the Château de la Tour-Abolie, the castle that forms part of his inheritance. The castle is one of the most important symbols in the entire novel. Although it still stands, it has fallen into ruin. It survives as an empty shell, deprived of the life and meaning it once possessed. As a symbol, the castle represents the state of European civilization itself. The structures remain, but the spiritual principles that once gave them meaning have largely disappeared.

The novel repeatedly returns to this theme. It presents modernity as an age marked by mass culture, materialism, and the loss of sacred values. It is this sense of civilizational decline that forms the emotional background of the entire story.

This theme is further developed through the character of Regina de la Fontaine-Sombre. Much more than a traditional villain, Regina represents what might be called active decadence. Unlike those who merely witness decline, she embraces and accelerates it. She uses social and cultural collapse as a tool for gaining power. Her conflict with Julien is therefore not simply personal, but represents two different responses to a world in crisis: one seeks spiritual renewal, while the other exploits destruction for its own purposes.

The appearance of Zapfe marks another important turning point in the novel. Up to this point, Gothic Olympus remains largely recognizable as a decadent historical fantasy with occult elements. After Zapfe enters the story, however, the narrative moves increasingly into the realm of myth and metaphysics.

Zapfe reveals that Julien’s destiny is much greater than he imagined. The crisis of Europe is presented not merely as a political or cultural problem but as a spiritual one. Humanity has lost contact with the divine world. As a result, the solution cannot come through politics or social reform. It must come through initiation and inner transformation.

This revelation leads to the novel’s most original section: Julien’s journey through an astral Greece populated by gods, archetypes, and symbolic landscapes. Here the story leaves realism almost completely behind, instead morphing into a sequence of initiatory experiences that reshape the protagonist from within.

The gods Julien encounters are not simply characters borrowed from classical mythology. They function as living archetypes: Achilles represents courage, discipline, and heroic action; Eros embodies the power of desire and attraction; Aphrodite represents beauty as a spiritual force; Zeus symbolizes sovereignty and divine authority. Through these encounters, Julien does not merely learn about the gods — he absorbs their qualities and incorporates them into his own being.

Once again, Campbell’s ideas help illuminate this part of the novel. These episodes resemble the trials and revelations that the hero experiences in the deepest stages of the journey. Julien undergoes a symbolic death of his former self and emerges transformed. He is no longer merely a decadent artist. He becomes a figure with a sacred mission.

READ MORE:

One of the novel’s most interesting themes is its treatment of eros. Rather than presenting desire as simply romantic or physical, Gothic Olympus views it as a cosmic force capable of both destruction and transformation. Desire can enslave or liberate. It can pull human beings downward or raise them toward transcendence. The relationship between Julien, Aphrodite, and Darlena explores this idea in depth. Darlena is not simply a love interest. She represents the completion of Julien’s spiritual development and the reconciliation of beauty, desire, and sacred meaning.

When Julien finally returns to the ordinary world, twenty years have passed. This return corresponds to the final stage of Campbell’s hero’s journey. The hero comes back transformed and carrying a form of wisdom gained through suffering and initiation.

Yet Gothic Olympus offers a particularly melancholic version of this return: Julien discovers that Europe has continued to decline during his absence. The old world has not been restored. Modernity has advanced. Traditional forms have collapsed. The civilization he hoped to save appears largely lost.

This is one of the novel’s most mature and interesting features. Despite its admiration for aristocratic and spiritual ideals, the book does not ultimately suggest that the past can simply be restored. Julien does not rebuild the old order. He does not become a political savior. His victory is symbolic rather than historical.

The novel therefore presents a fundamental contrast between myth and history. History appears as the realm of decline, conflict, and impermanence. Myth, by contrast, preserves meaning beyond the destruction of particular societies and institutions. While civilizations may disappear, the spiritual truths expressed through myth can survive.

This idea gives the ending much of its emotional power. Julien does not save Europe in a practical sense. Instead, he preserves the possibility of meaning, beauty, and transcendence in a world that seems increasingly disconnected from them.

The style of Gothic Olympus reflects these ambitions. The prose is rich, dramatic, and highly symbolic. The novel favors visions, rituals, and archetypes over psychological realism. Readers accustomed to minimalist fiction may find its style excessive at times, but this excess is clearly intentional. The novel aims not for realism, but for enchantment. It seeks to create an atmosphere filled with ruined castles, occult revelations, mythological encounters, and spiritual mysteries.

In the end, Gothic Olympus is a bold and deeply unconventional work. Its greatest achievement lies in its ability to combine decadence, mythology, esotericism, and the structure of the hero’s journey into a coherent symbolic vision. Through Julien Stanwyck’s transformation, the novel explores questions of identity, destiny, cultural decline, and spiritual renewal. It suggests that even when history appears to have lost its direction, myth may still provide a source of meaning.

Enter the world of Gothic Olympus, brought to you by Arktos

EXPLORE MORE:

Christian Chensvold is the author of the Decadent Chronicles series, exclusive to Arktos Journal:

1: Introduction

2: The Serpent

3: Unemployed Hercules

4: Imagining Reality

5: Heart Laid Bare

6: A Season in Hell

7: LARP Against the Modern World

8: Fallen Empire

9: Dead Regent

10: Anywhere Out of This World

11: Towards a Gothic Fighting Style

Part 12 coming soon!

Diversity vs. "Diversity"

Arktos Journal — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:01:15 GMT

Alain de Benoist draws a sharp distinction between diversity — the natural plurality of peoples, languages, and cultures that has defined humanity for millennia — and "diversity," the ideological program that traffics under the same name in contemporary liberal societies.

Mathieu Bock-Côté often speaks of “diversitarian”1 ideology to designate the ideology at work in the “multicultural” or “inclusive” society — a fitting extension of the “open society” dear to Karl Popper. He does so rightly and as a good Québécois, for it is in Canada that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prided himself, following the recommendations of the 2008 Bouchard Report, on having made his country the first “diversitarian nation” — that is, in his own words, a vanguard laboratory of “happy diversity” (on the model of “happy globalization”), which consists in changing peoples so as to eliminate from within them any trace of a specific social and cultural personality.

In this cult of “diversity,” Bock-Côté sees at once the mark of a “falsified universalism” and a tool of social engineering meant to secure acceptance of the change of people in the name of universal human rights, of the “mixist”2 imperative, and of the cult of minorities: newcomers no longer have to adapt to the society that receives them; rather, it is that society that must transform itself to accommodate the ever-growing demands of individuals or groups “of diverse background.”

To condemn “diversitarian” ideology — is this also to condemn diversity? No, of course not. Why? Because there is diversity, and there is “diversity.”

Genetic diversity is the rule among all living things: it is what makes evolution possible. The diversity of species, the diversity of languages, of peoples, and of cultures is humanity’s great wealth. The safeguarding of biodiversity must therefore extend to the different cultures, so as to guarantee their right to historical continuity.

“The opposite of diversity is not exclusivism but uniformity. Diversity means variety, plurality; “diversity” means generalized hybridization, the mixing that makes variety disappear.”

A diversity of cultures and peoples, each with its own personality — such, precisely, has been humanity’s normal state for millennia. One lived then in a heterogeneous world of relatively homogeneous, rooted peoples. The “diversitarian” system produces exactly the opposite: an increasingly homogeneous world of peoples rendered ever more heterogeneous, to the point of being no more than aggregates of individuals drawn from everywhere — who, moreover, come to resemble one another more and more, which renders them interchangeable. It is this great upheaval — this passage from a heterogeneous global world to a homogeneous one, and from relatively homogeneous peoples to heterogeneous aggregates — that allows us to understand how “diversitarism” brings about the disappearance of differences, that is to say, of true diversity.

The opposite of diversity is not exclusivism but uniformity. Diversity means variety, plurality; “diversity” means generalized hybridization, the mixing that makes variety disappear. “Diversitarism” is a form of cosmopolitanism that tends to make diversity between cultures vanish by introducing it to excess within cultures. The “diversitarian” regime favors individual “diversity” the better to abolish collective diversity.

The aim is to work toward the indistinction of cultures and peoples: to champion the “diversity” of origins within a single society in order to secure its disappearance on a global scale. The example of Quebec may be taken up again here: by subjecting it to “diversity” — treated as an end in itself — what is sought is to make vanish that element of real diversity which the historical Québécois identity represents within Canada.

“Why live in common if we do not share the same culture?” Bock-Côté further asks. An excellent question, for one can only “live together” insofar as one can rely on a common foundation. The common is the natural support of diversity. Since “mixism” inevitably brings about the disappearance of the cultures called upon to mix, they end up all being the same. The common melts like snow in the sun amid a plurality of belongings within fragmented societies. Mixism reduces the share of the common to the point of making it disappear.

“The mistake of our elites,” says Chantal Delsol, “is to believe that diversity suffices on its own to produce a common life.” This belief is obviously false. The more heterogeneous a people is, the harder it is to govern (the law can no longer rely upon shared mores). The more “diverse” it is, the less it possesses a singular personality. The more heterogeneous it is, the less those who live within it are able to recognize themselves in those they rub shoulders with. The result — confirmed by numerous empirical studies — is the collapse of trust. Everyone mistrusts everyone, which accelerates the war of all against all. One need only travel the world to see it: multiracial societies are above all multiracist societies.

The dissolution of peoples entails, likewise, the dissolution of democracy, since it tends to abolish the distinction between citizens and non-citizens on which the principle of popular sovereignty rests. The dissolution of collective memory, and of the symbolic imaginary that accompanies it, is the ultimate consequence of the ruin of the very notion of the common. “Diversity training” policies are techniques of propaganda: they are, in reality, trainings in the acceptance of the dissolution of peoples.

Let us note, to conclude, this revealing paradox, well observed by John Mearsheimer: liberalism prides itself on defending pluralism in domestic politics while opposing it with all its might on the global scale, since it holds that capitalism and liberal democracy are the only regime that ought to apply to every country. As soon as foreign policy is concerned, variety is no longer admitted: every people is enjoined to adhere to the same “universal values.” True diversity, by then, is no more than a memory.

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Translated by Alexander Raynor

Originally published in Éléments on no. 219, April-May 2026

TN: “Diversitarian” is rendered from the French word diversitaire, a coinage on the word diversité, meaning “diversity.” Another coinage derived from the same word appears later in the essay: Diversitarianism/diversitarisme.

TN: “Mixist” is derived from the French word mélange, meaning “to mix.” Benoist uses the word mélangiste to describe a person whose ideology (mixism/mélangisme) treats ethno-cultural mixing as a moral good in itself. This is a term coined by Benoist.

OUT NOW - Indo-European Echoes: Our Ancestral Origins and Legacy

Arktos Journal — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:00:03 GMT

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.

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Ernst von Salomon: An Exceptional Destiny

STEUCKERS Robert — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:00:51 GMT

In this interview for Écrits de Rome, Robert Steuckers offers a wide-ranging reassessment of Ernst von Salomon, the Freikorps veteran, national-revolutionary, and author whose work has been published in English by Arktos.

EdR: Ernst von Salomon is generally regarded as an author of the Conservative Revolution. To which branch of that movement can he more precisely be connected?

RS: Ernst von Salomon and his work fall squarely within the category of the “national-revolutionaries,” in the terminology established by Armin Mohler, or, at times, within that of “soldierly nationalism.” Dominique Venner, in his books Baltikum and Un fascisme allemand (A German Fascism), as well as in his preface to Histoire proche (Recent History), would serve, over a long period, as the defender and interpreter of this “soldierism” that powerfully speaks to romantic temperaments.

Yet insufficient account is taken of the positions Ernst von Salomon adopted after the Second World War — particularly during the 1960s — when this former radical opponent of the “reparations” policies imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and of every form of alignment and subordination to the Western powers (France, the United Kingdom, the United States), transformed himself into an equally uncompromising militant, hostile to the policy of alignment with Washington within the framework of NATO. This anti-American stance led him to express solidarity with certain left-wing pacifists, which intrigued Venner, who paid him a visit six months before his untimely death in June 1972 (most likely due to sleep apnea).

The logic that animated Ernst von Salomon throughout his eventful life was a vehement rejection of Western models — characterized as “bourgeois” or “mercantile” — devoid of that Prussian or Teutonic sense of service, of the Kantian sense of duty (in which Kant is not perceived through the habitual lens of the “Enlightenment”), and of the sense of national continuity (wherein the ideology of Western democracies is seen as a machine for rendering peoples amnesiac).

In this respect, given the current crisis of Europe — ideologically Westernized, even in its Eastern regions — the thought of Ernst von Salomon is more contemporary than ever: the rejection of the ideological hodgepodge of the parties in power, everywhere in Europe, is a vital necessity; the rejection of all subjugation to the United States and to the political and anti-diplomatic practices of the United Kingdom and Macronist France is likewise a vital imperative for all European peoples, without exception.

EdR: If the other Ernst — Jünger, of course — is widely known, von Salomon is far less so: for what reasons? What were the ties between the two men?

RS: This question strikes me as somewhat idle. The reason for Jünger’s wide renown is essentially that he lived and worked intensely for 26 years longer than Ernst von Salomon. Yet other reasons besides Jünger’s exceptional longevity may be invoked: Jünger, who was a few years older, had fought in the regular army during the First World War, received the Pour le Mérite decoration, and was promoted by the cadres of the defeated army after 1918 — not as an active-duty officer (which he no longer was), but as a military writer of the highest order.

Nevertheless, both Ernst Jünger and Ernst von Salomon expressed a rigorous, highly uncompromising nationalism — at least until 1926 in Jünger’s case, and between 1927, the year of his release from prison, and 1933 in von Salomon’s — particularly in the wake of the great crisis of 1929 and the peasant revolt against the authorities of the Weimar Republic in Schleswig-Holstein. Neither wished to adhere to any form of nationalism aligned with the electoralist criteria of Weimar parliamentary politics. The historian of the Freikorps, Hansjoachim W. Koch, cites in this connection Ernst von Salomon (though one can find similar texts written by Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich-Georg): to break the subjugation to the Western powers, every development leading toward mass-oriented tendencies must be avoided, for such tendencies would drive the national movement to seize power by using the adversary’s own means — that is, by becoming a “party” (by adopting the “party-form”), by becoming an “organization” with no purpose other than to contest elections. Consequently, Ernst von Salomon (and Ernst Jünger in turn) held that “their own means must be different.” For Ernst von Salomon, this had meant, in the early 1920s, engagement in the famous Organisation Consul (OC), which organized the assassination attempt against Minister Walter Rathenau — a man who, nonetheless, by concluding the celebrated Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 with the young Soviet Union, had created the ideal conditions for escaping the economic grip of an Occident hatefully hostile to all European political forms arising from different religious or ideological matrices — much as, mutatis mutandis, former Chancellor Schröder did in the early 2000s by sponsoring the delivery of Russian gas to Germany.

Any reference to Ernst von Salomon is therefore not merely an expression of the vapid romanticism of those who dream — in a reverie — of one day playing at toy soldiers, but reflects a high-level political pragmatism — all the more so since Ernst von Salomon later admitted that the Freikorps campaigns in the Baltic states and the assassination of Rathenau had been indirectly assisted behind the scenes by British intelligence services, anxious to extend Lord Curzon’s “cordon sanitaire” in Eastern Europe and to close the Baltic to the Soviets, without having to commit English or Canadian troops.

EdR: Can one say that the experience of the Freikorps was for von Salomon the “founding experience” of his thought, as the war was for others?

RS: Clearly, the Freikorps experience is formative for Ernst von Salomon, since — unlike Ernst Jünger — he did not serve in the ranks of the German Imperial Army during the First World War. In an article of 1928 entitled Geist des Nationalismus (The Spirit of Nationalism), cited by his biographer Gregor Fröhlich, Ernst von Salomon wrote that, for every man of quality, personal experiences — which cannot be transmitted to any other, and least of all to some anonymous soul lost in the crowd — are always the paramount criterion of any genuine capacity to judge things and events correctly. He thereby rejected the conventional bourgeois nationalism of a Thomas Mann (often pertinent in certain of his observations), for that nationalism is a “contemplative nationalism,” remote from all lived bodily experience, bringing only “suffering” to the committed man — as Ernst Jünger also declared at the same period. This “contemplativism” of Mann, for von Salomon, is typical of a writer embedded in Zivilisation, where verbose discourse takes precedence over living expressions drawn from cruel experience and endured suffering.

These literary figures of “Western Zivilisation“ have thus turned their backs on the royal road toward the real world, and their intellectualism amounts to “spiritual sterility” — which, he added, constitutes “treason.” This intellectualism, he continued, must be rejected in the name of pure, unadulterated action, free of pusillanimity or prevarication. In this same article — judged capital for understanding Ernst von Salomon, according to Fröhlich — our former Freikorps fighter distinguishes “patriotism,” of the old stamp, predating 1914, a relic of the 19th century, from “nationalism.” Patriotism is the foolishness of the apolitical man who avoids decision and refuses to make “distinctions” (which would permit the identification of the enemy, and the sorting of wheat from chaff). These positions explain why Ernst von Salomon rejects the national-conservatism of the numerous veterans’ associations and a conservative fraction of the German bourgeoisie (which would align itself in 1933 with Hitler’s NSDAP).

As for the term “Nation,” in the Ernst von Salomon of 1928, it is not synonymous with a specific “state construction” but expresses a “mystery” in the process of revelation — without it yet being known whether it will ever be fully revealed. In this sense, nationalism must be the minority and elitist political force that participates in the unveiling of this “mystery,” thereby conferring upon it a permanent and fertile dynamism, which is also revolutionary, for it admits no fixed form and no sterilizing immobility. What is fixed, or already fixed, must be swept away, for it constitutes a disabling ballast.

The forward march of such a mystical nationalism, according to Ernst von Salomon and Ernst Jünger, must be a constant that never ceases. The German defeat of 1918 must not justify any refusal of this inexorable forward march of this young and intrepid nationalism, despite the dead weight brought by the masses — who lack will and are quick to accept all manner of betrayals. This nationalism does not oppose the idea of the State as such, but combats the State (the institutional jumble) as incarnated by the republican politicians who have taken it hostage for personal gain.

EdR: Lacking a systematic philosophy, von Salomon proposes a “worldview” composed of a certain number of intuitions. What are the principal ones?

RS: For Ernst von Salomon, the central idea of his nationalism proceeds from an acknowledgment of “Germany’s particular path” (the Sonderweg Deutschlands). This particularity distinguishes Germany radically from the West — Jacques Pirenne, in Belgium, would demonstrate how Central Europe, but also Spain, Italy, the Polish-Lithuanian space, and Russia, are not part of the French-absolutist or English-liberal Occident, and have not been since the 17th century.

Western liberalism aims to replace the organic character of every Polity or imperial space with societal constructions and artifices in which the economy is no longer embedded within social relations but, on the contrary, in which social relations are kept captive and enfeebled within the economic sphere. The result is the erasure of the political in favor of the economic.

This slide toward the apolitical and the all-economic means that the State no longer pursues genuinely political ends, but instead imposes a technical and rationalist order that — in theory — is supposed to bring individual happiness to all and financial prosperity to the materially better-off citizens. In the end, this amounts to stripping individuals and citizens of all meaning in their existence, plunging them into a lamentable banality — the antechamber of a probable physical disappearance, as our present times give us abundant reason to foresee. The maximization of profit — rather than the heroism of action — now occupies the center of the preoccupations of a declining humanity; and worse still, the promotion of such anti-values becomes the principal motive of the wars planned by the West (one would say today by its “Deep State”), or by Westernized polities.

EdR: The very embodiment of the Warrior, or the Hero — in Werner Sombart’s sense —, Ernst von Salomon seems to belong to a forever vanished age. What of him and his work do you nonetheless think must be retained for today?

RS: We have already seen what vision Ernst von Salomon held of the political soldier within a state framework organized by incompetent and contemptible politicians. The eras of the Wilhelmine German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and National Socialism are indeed gone — as are those of the Third Republic and the interwar period in France, where the Fifth Republic is likewise seen to be dying slowly. It is nonetheless worth recalling what Ernst von Salomon’s ideas were between 1945 and 1972, the year of his death. Under the Weimar Republic, von Salomon’s positions could be characterized as anti-Western and anti-liberal. In the new Federal Republic, proclaimed in 1949 and whose tutelary figure was Konrad Adenauer — champion of subjugation to the structures of the Atlantic world and promoter of Franco-German reconciliation — Ernst von Salomon was regarded as a crypto-communist, or even outright as an agent of the GDR. To this he replied in the columns of the neo-nationalist weekly Deutsche National-Zeitung (The German National Newspaper) (no. 20, 1954): “How could I be a Communist? Simply because I can’t stand the Americans? I would like, if the mood took me, to travel from Cologne to Wuppertal, from... all the way to Posen (today Poznań) without ever being impeded or blocked by any ideology or practice brought in by the occupiers...”

The rejection is thus twofold: rejection of the ideology imported by America, and of the abstruse schemas of Soviet Communism. Philosophically speaking, Ernst von Salomon never adhered to dogmatic communism, but by the late 1950s he had also ceased to belong to what may be called the “right” (especially if that right was to be conflated with a Christian Democracy knowingly subservient to the United States). Ernst von Salomon then advances a particular reading of the major theorists of the international left then in vogue: Mao, Marcuse, and above all Gramsci.

The idea of a “Solomonian Gramscianism” deserves our particular attention. Von Salomon’s reading of Gramsci, as Fröhlich recalls (p. 365), gives rise to a self-critique of his own activist trajectory — a period during which he had not understood that political and institutional hegemony is prepared through cultural struggle (the “long march through the institutions,” the better to subvert them). For Ernst von Salomon, the aim — through a metapolitical action of Gramscian inspiration — is to restore in Germany a genuine national feeling, which had to begin with the emergence of a “solidarity among all the declassed” (these constituting a new category, the logical sequel to that of the “outcasts”). This gathering of the “declassed” must be organized in opposition to the cultural domination imposed by the Western powers — a viewpoint he shared with Wolfgang Venohr and Armin Mohler, with whom he corresponded.

This solidarity among the declassed was to be simultaneously “revolutionary” and “conservative” — and, in that sense, “Prussian,” beyond whatever state forms Prussia may have taken in the course of German history: the Prussian spirit, according to von Salomon and Venohr, transcends such forms, which invariably become fixed at some point and are necessarily, therefore, transitory. Within the framework of these new positions — at once Gramscian and revolutionary-conservative — Ernst von Salomon, for the first time in his life in 1961, called for a vote in favor of a party: the Deutsche Friedensunion (DFU — German Peace Union), a small party advocating a transversal strategy uniting Communists, Socialists, neutralists, and nationalists, who were all to combine their efforts against the integration of the FRG into the Western, Atlanticist, and Americanophile machinery, and to pursue the reunification of the two German republics from a standpoint hostile to the United States.

This enthusiasm, however — which has not been entirely extinguished in Germany today — would prove to be a flash in the pan, for the authorities of the GDR, representing a rigid, if not caricatural, and highly unappealing form of communism, decided in August 1961 to build the Berlin Wall. The circles of the DFU then dwindled away in interminable ideological discussions of a Marxisant cast, entirely marked by sterility and devoid of political punch. Ernst von Salomon would leave this assembly of talkers, who in any event garnered only 1.9% in the elections of September 1961. In another register, the evolution of military technology — with the atomic bomb and intercontinental missiles — ruined the soldierly vision of Ernst von Salomon: for the boundaries of a nation no longer extend as far as the geographical points to which the strength of its men, as soldiers, carries them. Soldiers are therefore no longer the bearers of the Nation. We have entered the era of the omnipotence of technology, driven by a destructive fury (Ernst Jünger would arrive at similar reflections).

Von Salomon writes: “The degeneration of the phenomenon of war concerns in the first instance not the ordinary man, not the people, but the warrior himself. This degeneration devalues his mission, strips him of honor, confiscates all those virtues for the preservation of which the soldier fought” (Interview for the ORTF, 2 July 1972). The former warrior Ernst von Salomon becomes hostile to war — not because war is an anthropological constant, but hostile to any “just war” in the sense the Americans give it.

Reviving the Pagan Spirit

Arktos Journal — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:00:20 GMT

Robert Dragan, of Terre et Peuple, draws on the thought of Giorgio Locchi and Guillaume Faye to explore whether a revived "pagan spirit" can serve as the metaphysical foundation for a renewed European civilization. Moving through Nietzsche's diagnosis of Western nihilism and Heidegger's response to it, Dragan argues that neither Christian metaphysics nor Enlightenment rationalism can provide the cultural and spiritual grounding that European civilization requires.

As every civilization rests upon a metaphysical and religious foundation, it is essential, in order to reconstruct a durable political entity, to establish its rules.

Now, setting aside all purely religious questions, it is on the philosophical question of knowledge that Europe has experienced, at different periods of its History, a rupture. The Institut Iliade had the good idea of publishing a series of texts by and around the thought of Giorgio Locchi, the man who trained the cadres of GRECE at its inception. These texts illuminate the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The former had the prescience that the salvation of European civilization required a philosophical revolution, a radical change of perspective. The latter took up the question of the philosophy of knowledge, less as a pure metaphysician (it is known that he taught Aristotle and retained an intact esteem for him1) than as an analyst of human acts.

The Ambiguities of the Rejection of Metaphysics

“Both Heidegger and Nietzsche identified the primary origin and cause of the nihilism of Western culture in ‘metaphysics,’” declares Giorgio Locchi. Aristotle affirmed the five principles of the origin and unity of the World, through rational but purely intellectual demonstrations: such is, moreover, the meaning of the word meta, beside, and phusis, the sensible world capable of being measured. What could be drawn from this? The thesis of an “immobile first mover, unmoved by any other mover” could lead to the idea of a Creator external to and distinct from Creation. By its very nature, it was impossible to know anything whatsoever about it. Of acts outside the World (outside time and space), in particular those of this Creator, it was — and remains today — impossible to know anything. And the Catholic Church arrived at the same conclusions: “God is infinite and incomprehensible” (Saint Pius X, Catechism). It was nevertheless, according to Guillaume Faye, the strength of our civilization to frame our relationship to the world in these terms: “the metaphysical world-view carried within itself, unknowingly, the Will to power: to think the world in terms of the universalism of essences was to manifest a prodigious will to master and dominate it.”

This enterprise produced two outcomes: the Christian religion and the ratio-scientistic hope of the Left.

“The biblical religion is based on revelation, not on nature,” Guillaume Faye specifies. If metaphysical questioning can prove to be a sound logical method, it does not lead to a total perception of reality. The Council of Trent affirms: “for our soul to be able to rise to God, it is absolutely necessary that it be entirely freed from the senses.” Without the support of faith, Man alone is despairing: if his question is good, the answer no longer suits him once “God is dead,” as Nietzsche says. Guillaume Faye specifies: “the death of God coincides with the ‘beginning of nothingness.’ Nihilism marks the end of the possibility of all value. The human is placed before the void, stripped of ‘a supra-sensible world with binding power.’”

Nietzsche thus depicts the “Last Man” — the Man of the decline of Christian civilization: he attempts to preserve the cultural treasures of past centuries (architecture, literature, music, art of living) but nihilism gnaws at civilization, and he is powerless to hold back the falling tree: the “Last Man” is the most unhappy of men.

Another seeker of the Universal, enemy of the first, is the modern Thinker, imbued with the principles of the “Enlightenment.” He is the father of the Left, which aspires to universal Truth through the overthrow of Christian civilization. But its laws — Humanism, Scientism, Universalism — are equally powerless to arrive at an explanation of the World or to create an ideal political order, insofar as its presuppositions also partake of “Revelation,” this time that of the “Enlightenment”: equality of men, myths of the “noble savage,” of the “invention of property,” of the harmfulness of “Society.” According to Guillaume Faye, “a world conceived as law, as a principle finding the reality of its essence independently of life and human action” can only lead to nihilism.

According to Giorgio Locchi, “the human person is always ‘I,’ and within the ‘I,’ represents itself.” For Nietzsche, “the human being is an animal ‘devoid of instincts’ and, from this point of view, ‘indeterminate,’ ‘sick.’ Man, unlike any other living being, has no ‘nature,’ which compels him, if he is to survive, to equip himself with a substitute for nature, namely a ‘culture.’” This is why, according to Guillaume Faye, if “the Platonic heritage means that the world has become a metaphysical, theological, and then scientific ‘image,’ it virtually creates another: the subject, who thereby becomes the ‘measure of all things.’”

Human reason nevertheless strives to understand nature, in the Aristotelian manner, “for the simple reason that nature is our environment, and we do not doubt it”: we attempt its “unveiling through enframing (Gestell — a Heideggerian term),” says Guillaume Faye. Thus, he takes as an example mathematics, which “do not ‘describe’ anything of nature, but are the expression of a human aim toward nature, ta mathèmata, in Greek meaning ‘the things known in advance.’”

The existentialism of identitarian philosophers is therefore not guided by a theory of knowledge affirmed as purely nominalist, but rather belongs to a pragmatic principle of action.

Giorgio Locchi notes that for Heidegger, “the substance of man is not the spirit, but rather historical existence.” Consequently, the “fundamental structure of the person is identified in ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-Sein). Man, in order to exist, must create himself and, with ‘culture,’ create his own ‘world.’” He joins Nietzsche, for whom Man is compelled to equip himself with “a culture within which ‘custom,’ supported by ‘institutions,’ plays the role of instinct.” Life is built not according to a disembodied absolute, but more modestly through insertion within a harmonious community. Death is transcended therein, not as in Christianity through its erasure, but through the certainty of seeing the community and the culture in which we were born and lived endure. Man thus measures the limits of his sphere, and it is the political that gives him that measure.

Metaphysical questioning is a method for building the law of logic. But it does not lead to a total knowledge of reality. It is not a matter of rejecting it but rather of freeing oneself from the illusion that it would provide an absolute answer.

From paganism, one must not ask more than it can give.

Da Sein, Spherical Time

Thus freed from our appetite for total knowledge, we refocus on the realization of our existence.

On this subject, Giorgio Locchi specifies that “we can only represent time, as movement, through the linear and within the linear, and the movement of history only in a linear manner, as a succession of point-like moments, and we do so ‘quite naturally’ by projecting historical time onto the ‘line’ of biological and macrophysical time.” To the one- or two-dimensional conceptions of linear, cyclical, or segmented time, Heidegger (in Introduction to Metaphysics) substitutes a “three-dimensional” conception inherited “not from Nietzsche, but from Sophocles and the Greek tragic poets from whom Nietzsche himself had drawn” (Guillaume Faye). For Giorgio Locchi, “each ‘moment’ can and must be considered simultaneously as beginning, as center, and as end”; for “at every moment being begins,” in each “now” history begins: “the center is everywhere.” Presence in the world — Dasein — “is always at the threshold of itself — and of history.” What is true in the physical world and in life is not so in history, where “past, present, and future are always simultaneously present, configured as their ‘intimacy’ by a ‘present’ that is none other than Dasein itself.” Mentally, we carry memory, and we project ourselves toward the future. The present exists only through action. This memory is history, not in the sense of Geschichte — the History of academics, made up of “a succession of facts, of narration, of scientific interpretation or explanation of facts” — but in the Heideggerian sense of Historie — History lived and integrated by the individual: for Locchi, the “essence of Dasein resides in its historial existence” (das Wesen des Dasein liegt in seiner Existenz), the adjective “historial” expressing this enframing (Gestell) of reality, necessarily subjective. It possesses four dimensions, one spatial and three temporal. The “sphere” is, according to Armin Mohler (Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932), its best conceptual translation, better than the circle illustrating the Eternal Return, which implies that time would be cyclical, and therefore that, as in Hinduism, cycles once completed would return to their point of departure.

The decline and death of peoples derives, according to Guillaume Faye, from an “inauthentic conception of temporality (Zeitlichkeit). Man refuses to be what he is, a being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode), and numbs himself with the illusion of a desire for eternity that he believes he finds in daily worldliness. Such a conception of time rests on ideas of ‘the end of death.’” But with the death of God, we have entered “the piercing anguish of one who believed and no longer believes”: its dominant type on the right is Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” imprisoned within “the error of traditionalists and conservatives [which] is to think the content of what is transmitted as absolute.” A second type exists, the Left, which bets on a “linear end of history comparable to those found in the philosophies of ‘progress’”: it chooses the “consoling intoxication of facticity, or the nihilism of the modern world.”

Now, the past “is only the forgotten, fetishized result of past revolutions, of founding and creative acts, the choice made by some ‘founding hero’ among an infinity of possibilities.” According to Heidegger, “the beginning is still there. It is not behind us as something that was long ago, but stands before us.” Locchi shows that “it is each time a matter of destroying one past and constructing another. The ‘decision’ about the past is always — ‘co-originally’ — a decision about the future: it is the same decision. Thus is founded the historical freedom of man. And since Dasein is always overtaken by life, Dasein finds itself always at the threshold of itself — and of history.”

Toward a Historial Civilization

Values, from the Last Man to the Will to Power

If Nietzsche considers that our civilization is experiencing nihilation (Nichtung), Heidegger announces the post-nihilism.

It is not a matter of substituting a new “back-world” for Christianity. Still less of reinstating a “tawdry paganism,” as G. Faye calls it, such as a flight toward the Gods of ancient Greece. Nor is it a matter of preserving desacralized metaphysical values: the world of the “last men” paradoxically finds refuge in a kind of “morality of pleasure,” thus placing their “subversion” under the sign of bourgeois softness.

Heideggerian Dasein has no need of the lying myth of “victory over death” in order to act. Heidegger proposes to “suppress the very location of values, the supra-sensible as a domain, and consequently to posit values differently.” For Nietzsche, it is the “Will to power” that is the fundamental trait of life: values must henceforth be experienced as existence, not as essence. The struggle for the “dominion of the earth” is henceforth alone capable of restoring a sacred meaning to the existence of consciousness: “the man whose essence is that which is willed from the Will to power, that is the Superman (Übermensch), the one who must hold irresistible power (Übermacht) to accomplish his sovereignty,” says Heidegger in Off the Beaten Track.

To the logos of the metaphysicians is substituted the sacred and the mobilizing affectivity of muthos — myth: implicit values will no longer be words, but behaviors, a poïesis in the most authentic sense, a weltanschauung of which only poetic language can give an account.

Contemporary with the Conservative Revolution and ideally close to it, Heidegger was able to think further. “God is dead,” Nietzsche said. For superhumanism, man as a historical being can freely forge his own destiny. This requires first freeing oneself from one past and choosing another. “We must find the gods again,” Heidegger responds: the Greek recommencement is possible.

It is therefore indeed a kind of “paganism” that Heidegger assigns to modern times.

Technology as Expression of the Will

For Heidegger, the “men of happiness” deprive themselves of the only virtual form of modern spirituality: the Will to power in action within technological enframing. This is what G. Faye explains.

Modern technology seems to “cut us off” from nature, when in fact it brings us closer to it, for it brings us closer to its energy. In ancient Greek, energia moreover meant “presence.” This “unveiling of energy” belongs to the enframing (Gestell) of the world, the concrete expression of the Will to power. Against the noetic will to power (nous, “spirit”) of metaphysics, he opposes the path toward a poietic will to power. Téchnè is part of pro-ducing, of poiésis. Through an “audacious” project of a hyper-technicized world that wills itself as such, Europe, for Heidegger, will restore meaning to its “historial” existence. As soon as the technological age is inaugurated, this will to conceive the world, hitherto intellectual, unveils itself as reality: the human then takes the measure of his strength and can posit himself as value. Far from the devalorizing conception of nature, technical production must ultimately be understood as an unveiling, an unveiling that “the Greeks,” Heidegger writes, “called aléthéia, and which the Romans translated as veritas.”

Modernity brings, through scientific and technical power, a greatness capable of lastingly transforming mentalities. It offers the people a new “historial” mode of being-in-the-world, according to Faye drawing on Nietzschean categories, a “conscious and organized, Apollonian, spiritualization of the Dionysian will to power at work in technology.”

The Historial Community

The essential characteristic of every other living being is Arteigenheit or Artmässigkeit, the belonging to and conformity with its own species. Man is acted upon; he does not act. For reasons that are first biological: the community is rooted in the “physiological” being-in-the-world of the people, which transcends the separation between consciousness and nature, between thought and life. Then for cultural reasons: “the actual human person is ‘thrown at the origin into a common world already discovered by Others.’” According to Heidegger, “I am (sum) not I in the sense of my own Self, but I am (sum) the Others in the manner of the One (On).” For Locchi, “the existing man, Dasein, totalizes in his present the ‘having-been’ (Gewesenheit), which he assumes, and the ‘project’ (Entwurf) in which he participates in connection with his own. The conjunction of the past and the ‘ad-vening’ project renders the past present. The latter, like the future, is rendered present in the now. Individual existence confounds its ‘subjective’ temporality with the history of its community.” For Heidegger, civilization rests on the “care” (Sorge) that man has taken of his own life, as historial existence, by “civilizing” it within the framework of a “culture.” Each point-like “I” of “linear” (one-dimensional) time, by inscribing itself within tradition, thus makes available the totality of history, by ordering and determining it in memory as historical past-event, in action as historical actuality, and in the project of the future — as historical future. He who understands himself as situated within a three-dimensional historical time thus recognizes that his historical “decision” is always simultaneously a re-evocation of an epochally past origin — that is, one which is no longer present and therefore “lost” — a surpassing of a dominant and “decadent” present, and finally a project to be undertaken for a coming “superhuman,” one that has never yet been.

Locchi situates the stakes for us: to exist is to be in the world, and therefore first to live with others (Dasein ist Insein-Mitsein). But how to be-with-others? Certainly not by regarding others as humanity. The search for a community of destiny implies the re-creation of bonds of a spiritual nature between the individual and his people, between Dasein and the Volk. The “Hesperian” emergence of a “new Greece” must be thought as a historical rupture (Aufbruch). Heidegger names the new Greece the Abend-Land, translated as “Hesperia” (from the Greek hespera, “evening” — meaning the West, but which also and above all evokes the virtue of hope). Beyond the myth, Heidegger expressly reconnected the fundamental theme of all his philosophical reflection, the “question of Being,” to the “historical destiny of Europe.” And “in the most recent perspective of a future ‘Europe,’” “the UrSein, the originary being of Greek philosophy in Heidegger, in general,” must rest, according to Locchi, on “originary Indo-Europeanness.”

The Romantic author Hölderlin, in his poem To the Germans, expresses the bonds of the individual to his biological substrate thus:

Narrowly limited is the time of our life
We see and count the number of our years
But the years of peoples,
Did mortal eye ever see them?

Summary

The elaboration of metaphysics by Aristotle is indeed grounded in pure and therefore universally comprehensible reflection. But it leads to a dead end: no definitive knowledge of the order of the world emerges from it. It could serve as a philosophical basis for the Catholic Church, which supplemented it with the “revelation” of an imaginary supra-sensible world. Likewise, science has not delivered a key to understanding the order of the world: the “Enlightenment” of the “Revolution” owes its power solely to a moral dictatorship invented by Kant; this still serves today as the basis for the universalist coercive order of the political Left.

Since ancient pagan religion offers no greater answer to metaphysical questioning, a return to sacrificial practices as one imagines they were performed in Antiquity would constitute a ridiculous new-age sectarianism that would be politically counterproductive.

In announcing the death of God, Nietzsche announces the end of the crutch of the ultra-sensible world to which the “Last Man” stubbornly clings. It is in this context that Heidegger elaborates a philosophy for “being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode),” this man without an eternal soul. The latter must start from his senses in order to orient himself. The philosopher does not reject the logic of Aristotle — whom he admires — he does not lay claim to “idealism” in the sense assigned to it by the philosophy of knowledge, but he judges that metaphysical grammar alone is incapable of providing man with the conditions for his flourishing. Insofar as man is in “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-Sein), his life and his culture depend in no way on him alone, but on the civilization (Kultur) he has received as an inheritance. He does not live in an evanescent eternal present, but in the inheritance of the past, and in the projection into the future, the only (three-dimensional) space within which his “will to power” can express itself. Finally, this “will to power” can only be concretized within a collective framework, inherited from the past — namely the civilization of the “people” — and in the enframing (Gestell) of the world through technology, a mediation in view of political greatness. The biological death of the individual is surpassed only in action and in the biological survival of the race, the genetic basis of the “people.”

Originally published in Terre et Peuple, no. 106, December 2025.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

R. Dragan, Quelle philosophie pour les Identitaires? Terre et Peuple no. 102, pp. 31–33.

Citizen Vigilante: Catharsis and Reminder

Arktos Journal — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:00:55 GMT

Uwe Boll does not have an entirely spotless reputation as a filmmaker. In fact, he is often described as one of the worst in his field, and has achieved a notorious cult status. This judgement is not entirely fair, though: apart from his video game adaptations, Boll has also made entertaining films such as Postal and Assault on Wall Street.

His persona is populist in several respects, as he both swears and challenges critics to boxing matches. One of them, incidentally, described him as an “insane, two-fisted rogue, and a shockingly honest one at that, someone who absolutely adores film, knows its history and truly lives for what he does.”

Here, one can sense why Boll has continued to make films for decades despite the criticism, and how he has been able to do so. Beyond stiff dialogue and limited budgets, the German producer often displays a love for the medium and a vision that is lacking among the post-managerial-revolution producer class of Hollywood.

Uwe Boll

An obvious example of this is Boll’s latest film, the much-discussed Citizen Vigilante, starring Armie Hammer as Michael Sanders. The character bears similarities to Bruce Wayne: he is a financially independent American with a military background who ends up in a crime-ravaged Europe. The establishment refuses to deal with rape and other violations of the law, even refusing to acknowledge the connection to immigration policy. At the same time, the judiciary is portrayed as understanding toward the perpetrators but not toward the victims (a highly publicized gang rape that allegedly resulted in remarkably low sentences is said to have been the background for Boll’s film).

In a non-linear fashion, the film follows Sanders’ violent pursuit of justice; he punishes both the perpetrators and the judges who released them among potential new victims. Citizen Vigilante is difficult to classify. In terms of genre, it’s an action film in the same tradition as Death Wish and Taken. At the same time, it has strong elements of propaganda film and wish fulfilment, the latter made obvious not least in the protagonist’s lengthy speeches about crime and punishment.

The synthesis of these genres is not entirely unproblematic: it is a poor action film insofar as, in a propaganda film, there is no need to worry about the protagonist being killed. But it is also a poor propaganda film insofar as Boll, in a nod to the action format, gives the protagonist a certain moral ambiguity.

A charitable interpretation would be that with Citizen Vigilante he is creating something entirely novel, something related to the conscious interventions of the Situationists and other artistic avant-gardes, but this time with populist rather than communist undertones. If that is the idea, then it is a quality this film shares with Boll’s older work Assault on Wall Street, although the latter has clearer mythical undertones.

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Rest assured, Citizen Vigilante does not lack artistic aspects, even if the limited budget likely made the project more difficult. Hammer portrays the cold, psychologically abnormal even, Sanders in an exemplary manner, while Boll, due to limitations of space, can only hint at an almost Freudian complex built around the masculine and feminine, the Father and the Mother (cf. the opening scene). Viewed with the Father as a mythical figure at its core, it is an interesting film, regardless of whether we consider the absent father, the father as an authority figure, or the father-in spe project that Hammer portrays. Both the collective of men and the Establishment as a symbolic authority figure have failed the people of Europe, particularly women and children, and Boll/Sanders is acting in order to “teach them how to defend themselves.”

Boll’s film is strongly masculine-coded, and from this fact naturally follows an equally strong concern for women and children. This may incidentally explain why he lets the camera linger on the police officers the protagonist is forced to kill; it can just as easily be interpreted as rooted in a masculine sense of tragedy as in a more abstract “moral dilemma.”

Michael Sanders in Citizen Vigilante

All that said, Citizen Vigilante has not attracted attention primarily due to its artistic qualities or shortcomings; rather, it is its breach of the unspoken rules governing filmmaking that has provoked reactions. The vigilante genre has ancient roots; think only of the Vehmic courts, the Ku Klux Klan, Hermann Löns’ Der Wehrwolf, Batman, and others. It is normally regarded with a degree of suspicion and a certain anti-plebeian contempt. Films containing violence directed at politically, religiously, or ethnically disliked groups are nothing new either (cf. Inglourious Basterds, etc.).

What Boll does is break with the rules of representation: he not only portrays several of the rapists as immigrants, but also depicts justified violence against non-white people. In Western society, these are not considered objectionable groups, but rather symbolically valued victim groups. Added to this are the protagonist’s verbal and physical attacks on representatives of the judiciary and the Establishment. Doing any of this on film is taboo, but until now it has been an unspoken taboo.

When violence against whites or Christians has been portrayed with pleasure, even lust, in various films, the politically correct cineast and apologist has always been able to dismiss critics by saying they were overreacting: “it’s only a film.” The reactions to Citizen Vigilante show that it was not quite so simple; the one-directional violence in mainstream movies was always a part of its reward system. The principles of art — that it “should provoke” or it ”should be able to ask questions” — cease to apply when the artist has the wrong opinions. “Art should not be interpreted literally” when it concerns rap lyrics, but Boll “openly promotes the graphic, brutal and wholesale slaughter of Muslim immigrants,” to quote one critic. This is despite the fact that the film is not really “racist”: Sanders kills both black and white people and expresses a worldview containing elements of both counter-jihadism and libertarianism (“this is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists and the blindsided woke left. And if this takeover is successful, it’ll destroy the democracy you say you love. All the freedom, everything you enjoy and stand for”). However, the fact that the protagonist tells the family of a rapist that “I don’t think it was the good ones that got out of your country, I think it was the bad ones,” may not be entirely compatible with liberal sensibilities.

Because of all this, the film has been met with attempts at censorship, such as the German decision not to grant it an age rating. At the same time, it has gained a large audience in part because Elon Musk has made it available for free on X for a limited time.

Boll has succeeded in drawing attention to themes such as crime and immigration; it is less likely that audiences will be inspired by the protagonist’s methods, and that is probably not the producer’s intention either. Breaking hated and illegitimate taboos is an achievement in itself, and can offer a temporary feeling of freedom — a feeling that, incidentally, resembles something that has been lost.

An interesting question is to what extent the film will lead to more creations in the same vein, or whether Hollywood is now changing sides. This is unlikely, given that Boll, for better or worse, is still Boll: an outsider in this context. Even so, the popularity of Citizen Vigilante will probably not pass Hollywood by entirely; even if it is likely to be done discreetly, there may be certain adjustments to audience preferences in the future.

Regardless, the film’s value is primarily as a “happening” and an intervention. It offers a moment of catharsis, a moment where wrongdoers are actually punished, and serves as a reminder that many people do desire justice.

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Alain de Benoist: "The culture war has only been won by default"

Arktos Journal — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:01:02 GMT

While progressive hegemony wavers across the media, Alain de Benoist analyzes the fury unleashed by the slightest breach in their system. In his view, progressive dominance has collapsed on its own — but the conservative right has won nothing. Faced with this, he argues for producing content of real quality.

Faced with the “far right,” billionaire Matthieu Pigasse wants to “wage the cultural war” — and “to the bitter end.” Hence the cover of Les Inrockuptibles (which he owns) leading with “Culture against the fascists,” along with a petition signed by actresses Camille Cottin and Judith Godrèche, and by the comedian Guillaume Meurice. Six hundred figures from the film industry voice their indignation in Libération against Vincent Bolloré, fearing a “homogenization” of production.
In the media and on the red carpet, the battle for influence rages on. The Observatoire du journalisme (OJIM) turned to Alain de Benoist, often called out in the mainstream press for having theorized the “cultural war” as far back as the 1960s. Born in 1943, French essayist and journalist, founder of the journal Éléments, he is the principal theoretician of the Nouvelle Droite and the author of an extensive body of work.

OJIM: What is at stake here? Cultural hegemony, or the survival of a caste?

Alain de Benoist: The two are linked, but I would say first and foremost the survival of a caste. For decades, the dominant ideology has taken the form, in the cultural sphere, of a political-ideological-media micro-milieu that cultivates l’entre-soi [TN: closed in-group sociability; mixing only with one’s own kind] as the most natural thing in the world.

Tocqueville said that in an egalitarian society, even the smallest inequalities come to look like a scandal. Something similar is going on here: although progressive liberalism is not merely dominant but holds something close to a monopoly in the cultural domain, the smallest window of freedom that opens anywhere provokes indignant protest along the lines of: How is this possible? What on earth is going on?

CNews, about which a great deal could be said (and not necessarily in its favor), is just about the only television channel, among hundreds, where one occasionally hears views that run against the current. That is enough to give the functionaries of human-rights ideology the vapors — to provoke barrages of complaints, denunciations from professional informers [TN: French sycophantes in its original Greek sense of “denouncers,” not the English “flatterers”], calls for censorship, and blacklists.

And since we live in a world of ever-intensifying hysteria in social relations, things escalate at once to the extreme: Bolloré has bought up two publishing houses — when do the camps reopen? All of this is obviously absurd. The people understand none of it and couldn’t care less. The only thing they take away is this simple observation: the truth lies elsewhere.

OJIM: Alain de Benoist, you have been a journalist, an essayist, and an editor; you founded a think tank (G.R.E.C.E.). You have been living the “cultural war” for half a century, and indeed have paid a price for it, having been the target of numerous defamatory media campaigns. Does your analysis need to be updated?

Alain de Benoist: I don’t think so, but one must of course take new facts into account. First, the role of social media, which encourages an escalation of Manichean brutality and serves as a sounding board for the most brazen defamations, setting itself up as a permanent tribunal in which any accusation amounts to a conviction. But the underlying principle remains the same: culture carries images, values, and themes which, in the long run, end up saturating the symbolic imaginary and modifying collective behavior. What is at stake in the cultural war, as it always has been, is hegemony.

Today, hegemony still belongs not to “the left” — as is too easily said — but to a progressive camp which, for want of anything left to say, contents itself with turning the prayer wheel, repeating the same mantras (”antiracism,” gender theory, “republican” values, universalism). This camp is dominant, but it feels threatened. The privileged fear losing their privileges; the mutins de Panurge [TN: Philippe Muray’s coinage an inversion of the proverbial moutons de Panurge, the sheep of Rabelais’s Quart Livre who blindly follow one another to their death. Muray’s “mutineers of Panurge” are pseudo-rebels who imagine themselves transgressive while in fact conforming to the dominant consensus] fear losing their subsidies. By dint of warming the ice floe, they discover that it is melting under their feet. Like dogs afraid of losing their bone, they bare their teeth. This is entirely normal: if they were really strong, they could afford the luxury of indifference. We ought rather to take heart from it: their system will eventually implode, the accumulated mud will eventually dry up.

OJIM: Outlets like Radio Nova traffic in humor that is deliberately shocking and brutal. Other outlets, on a more moderate left, denounce a return of antisemitism. Can one laugh at everything?

Alain de Benoist: Pierre Desproges’s [TN: French humorist (1939–1988), famous for the line “On peut rire de tout, mais pas avec n’importe qui” — one can laugh at everything, but not with just anyone] well-known answer doesn’t satisfy me. Yes, of course, one ought to be able to laugh at everything — but that does not mean that everything is laughable. We are living in an age in which everything that was once naturally honored and respected is held up to derision. Mockery is an infirmity of the soul. Charlie Hebdo is free to publish what it likes, but I am among those who believe that the role of the school is not to show pupils cartoons they consider blasphemous.

In any normal society, there is a zone of the sacred; it must be off-limits to those who want to profane it the way others piss on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Today’s humorists only make low minds laugh. And besides — let us remember — we are not on earth merely to crack jokes!

OJIM: What metapolitical strategy would you recommend today to those who reject both liberal-progressive homogenization and the merely inverted mirror image of a purely reactive “combat right”? You seem to be denouncing our contemporaries’ inclination toward the path of least resistance.

Alain de Benoist: The only strategy is work, and the production of quality. A great many people “on the right” today think they are on the verge of winning the “cultural war.” But what war are they talking about? What battle has been won when those who hold authority in the political-media system still refer only to “incontestable authorities” who think the opposite of what the majority of people think?

The truth is that the cultural war has at best been won by default. The progressive left has lost; the conservative right has not won. The adversary has not been defeated — it has collapsed on its own. But it has not, for all that, lost power. When “the right” can field a few dozen researchers, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, biologists, and physicists capable of articulating a worldview alternative to the one that dominates today, we can return to the subject. But I don’t think that day is tomorrow.

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Originally published on the Observatoire du journalisme (OJIM) on May 21st, 2026.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

Ovid Facing the System: From Ancient Myth to the Modern Grotesque

Arktos Journal — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:01:58 GMT

Tomislav Sunic turns to Ovid's Metamorphoses to argue that the ancient myths diagnose our political present with uncanny precision, exposing the censorship and ritualized self-hatred of the contemporary System.

Marked for two thousand years by Christianity and its linear conception of time, we find it difficult to grasp the sense of myth as our ancestors understood it. The same goes for the secular apostles of Christianity — the communists and the liberals — who reject any mythic interpretation in politics. And yet it is likely that our ancestors, through their myths, understood the meaning of being and non-being better than we do. One need only read the mythic figures in Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses to grasp the behavior of our shape-shifting politicians.

European legends and tales likewise carry such mythic elements within them. They also help shape our national identities. A classic example is the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs) and the Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland), whose central motifs are the willingness to make absolute sacrifice for one’s own community. This is one of the reasons why myths and legends remain so popular among us, whether we call ourselves believers or atheists. We read Homer, the Brothers Grimm, and even Tolkien’s The Hobbit, because these tales awaken a part of our pagan imagination.

Though it boasts of rejecting all mythic discourse, the liberal System has developed its own founding myths: the myth of Progress, the myth of multiculturalism, and certain strange postwar myths of victimhood whose surreal character would surely have set the ancient Greeks laughing. Yet any critique of these new myths of the System is immediately perceived by its bien-pensants1 as a far-right imposture, even as a direct attack on liberal democracy itself. In the eyes of the System, anyone who dares to call liberal mythology into question exposes himself to exclusion, defamation, or professional and media proscription.

The ancient Greek and Roman myths — like the old European myths, legends, fables, and tales — had, and still have, regardless of their fantastical content, a powerful didactic function. They offer the community a moral orientation, and at the same time a clear warning: do not transgress the rules of the community, do not measure yourself against the gods, and do not let yourself be duped by the palaver of the Other — the foreigner — which works against the Self.

The ancient myths show clearly how hubris (excess), arrogance, and self-negation are punished by the gods, most often through drastic transformations into animals, stones, or other miscreants. By contrast, one need only glance at our political present: the liberal myths we now endure — together with the manipulations of language and the submission of the political class to these new mythic narratives — have already done considerable damage.

The Echo Chamber and the Wooden Tongue

The censorship currently in force and the new “wooden tongue” of the System can be traced back to several ancient Greek myths. These ancient myths correspond with astonishing precision to the present-day system of language control and thought control. The nymph Echo offers a perfect example of an “echo chamber” in which our politicians seem to be confined. Echo’s misfortune was orchestrated by the goddess Hera, the jealous wife of Zeus, who could not bear that Echo cover for her husband’s amorous escapades. Hera punished her by stripping her of her own voice and condemning her to repeat only the last syllables of the words spoken to her — a mere echo, in effect a wooden tongue stripped of all personal weight. The situation grows worse still when Echo falls in love with the narcissistic Narcissus, who does not return her affection. The result is a total breakdown of communication: Echo loses herself entirely, until nothing remains of her but her echo.

The fate of the nymph Echo applies with striking pertinence to the novlangue [Newspeak] that dominates the political and media communications of the clownish figures of the EU. Their litanies and incantations, borrowed from the Soviet idiom, are reduced to a few monosyllabic, demonological formulas: “hate speech,” “racism,” “the danger of fascism.”

Another example of censorship by the System is furnished to us by the myth of King Tereus. Although Tereus is married to Procne, he becomes obsessed with his sister-in-law Philomela. In an act of extreme violence, he rapes her and then cuts out her tongue so that she cannot reveal his crime. Deprived of speech, Philomela has no recourse but to weave a mute tapestry in order to communicate to her sister Procne the horror of her plight. This scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses dramatically illustrates the aberrant metamorphoses that media language is undergoing today. We today, like Philomela, are obliged to weave our samizdats and to use coded language in order to express ourselves and circumvent the censorship of the System.

For two thousand years, the European has oscillated between two contradictory drives that verge on the neurotic: on one hand, a powerful will to self-affirmation, of the kind seen in Homer and throughout our ancestral mythology and legends; on the other, a pathological mimicry of theological and ideological commissars, the mouthpieces of strange and chimerical myths. This profound rupture took hold with the advent of Christianity, and was perpetuated thereafter in its secular versions — liberal and communist — down to our own time. To be sure, the ancient myths feature many figures endowed with a powerful will, yet without their seeking to blindly imitate discourses coming from elsewhere. In our contemporary period, things are no longer that way. The people who govern us are fascinated by external narratives and by exotic myths bound up with racial mixing and the end of times.

Among the French and German classics, we already encounter this kind of grotesque mimicry of the Other. A famous example is to be found in Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman). Monsieur Jourdain seeks to imitate the nobility in his language, his manners, and his habits, and ends up making himself ridiculous through the unrelenting overreach of his social mimicry. The French language has a fine expression that applies to the Europeanist politicians and that is untranslatable into other European languages: « Il pète plus haut que son cul »2. Another, more radical example of aping the Other is found in a tale by the German writer Wilhelm Hauff, Der Affe als Mensch (”The Ape as Man”). In this story, a foreign confidence man arrives in a German village and brings with him a trained ape. The villagers, unable to recognize the animal for what it is, take it for a true gentleman and treat it as a model worthy of imitation.

The imitation of the mythology of the Other and the denial of self are not new phenomena in Europe. Today they appear with particular clarity in Germany. The most striking example of this blind imitation is found in the conduct of numerous German politicians who bow down before the “refugees” in order to publicly exhibit the white European man’s repentance. To this is added a foreign policy in which Israel occupies the place of the new European Superego [Surmoi]. Former chancellor Angela Merkel declared several years ago before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset: “Israel’s security is part of Germany’s reason of state and is never negotiable.” This German obsession with perpetual repentance hides itself today behind more presentable terms: the “myth of the welcome culture” [Willkommenskultur]3. In German, more honest expressions would be: the myth of eternal guilt, or the myth of self-hatred. This so-called “myth of welcome” is nothing other than a substitute for the now-defunct communism. What the communist regimes of Eastern Europe could not obtain by force, the System today seeks to impose through the permanent culpabilization of the white man.

Ovid’s myths, by contrast, are marked by a deeper wisdom: they are timeless and ahistorical. They can be recounted and transmitted in any age and in any place. This is why the ancient myths and legends of Europe can never be dogmatic: they require neither thought police nor Grand Inquisitor.

If today we observe the ancient European myths through the prism of the linear conception of historical time — a vision marked by Judaism and Christianity — this inevitably leads to a false self-perception. More precisely, the application of Christian temporal categories, along with their secular liberal or communist extensions (such as the idea of “the end of history”), constitutes a faulty approach to understanding the Greco-Roman myths, including the very notion of being.

Put simply: the ancient myths explain to us how to understand the world, while political and monotheistic myths invite us to change it — often with catastrophic consequences. The myth of European guilt, broadcast by the System on every wavelength, feeds on the Christian dogma of self-negation, which has already inflicted enormous damage on the peoples of Europe over the past two millennia. Indeed, it is all too easy and comfortable to mock the Jewish myths and their narratives of victimhood. But why criticize the Judaic myths while embracing without the slightest critical spirit the myth of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, or the spectacular conversion of Saul, become Saint Paul, who passed from the status of persecutor of Christians to that of fervent apostle of the mixing of peoples and of the policy of open borders? Saint Paul, this North African4, still serves today as the symbolic rampart of Western civilization for many Christian Europeans. The great connoisseur of the Homeric gods and myths, Walter F. Otto, who remains for us to this day the indispensable reference in mythological studies, wrote already in his major work Der Geist der Antike und die christliche Welt (The Spirit of Antiquity and the Christian World), which has unfortunately not been translated into French:

The sickness of the soul that inspired this new judgment upon man had its origin in Judaism. There reigned fear, accompanied by its terrible companions: contrition and self-hatred. Belief in a despot God — the exact opposite of the living and realistic religion of Homer — was deeply rooted in the spirit of the Jews, a spirit foreign to real life and devoid of imagination. (p. 44)

When one projects these mythic analogies onto our own time and confronts them with the grotesque buffooneries of our politicians, the political future of Europeans seems particularly bleak.

Originally published on Terre et Peuple

Translated by Alexander Raynor

Reconciling Land and Sea: Olivier Eichenlaub on the Geography of European Power

Arktos Journal — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:01:23 GMT

Alexander Raynor sits down for an interview with Olivier Eichenlaub, coordinator of the Institut Iliade's Research Division. Eichenlaub argues that Europe's uniquely interlocking coastline of seas and peninsulas predisposed the continent to power—and that recovering this inheritance means transcending Carl Schmitt's old opposition between land and sea.

Alexander Raynor: For English-speaking readers discovering you for the first time: who is Olivier Eichenlaub, how did you come to write on geopolitics, and what is the Institut Iliade, under whose auspices this book appears?

Olivier Eichenlaub: I am Olivier Eichenlaub, a French academic, a geographer by training and a teacher in the humanities. My path led me to teach in various schools of architecture as well as in several private training institutes, where I was able to develop an interdisciplinary approach to questions of territory, space, and society—one that draws as much on the work of the Nouvelle Droite as on the anti-utilitarian movements. In my book Europe puissance (Europe — A World Power), I am interested in particular in the relations between geographical configurations—seas, rivers, continental spaces, borders—and the historical and geopolitical dynamics that structure states and civilizations. In it I explore the place of our continent within the contemporary world system, defending the idea that Europe’s exceptional geography can continue to exert a lasting influence on its political, strategic, and civilizational trajectory.

My work therefore falls in large part within the editorial and intellectual line of the Institut Iliade, a circle for reflection and training devoted to the study of European civilization in its historical, cultural, and anthropological dimensions. This institute organizes colloquia, seminars, and training cycles aimed at deepening knowledge of the European heritage, at interrogating its historical continuities, and at reflecting on the conditions of its transmission in the contemporary world. It places the emphasis on the notions of culture, of civilization, and of long memory, offering a reading of contemporary stakes from within this perspective. Within the Iliade, where I currently coordinate the Research Division [Pôle Études], which publishes each year high-level Cahiers on important themes (Europe—Labor—Liberty), I also directed the collective volume Pour un réveil européen (For a European Awakening), which extends some of these reflections around cultural questions, the European heritage, and the forms of historical continuity.

AR: You open the book by recalling that after 1945 geopolitics became a taboo discipline, “radically forbidden almost everywhere, even under Stalin.” Why was it banished in this way, and can one really refuse to think geopolitically?

OE: In 1945, after the fall of the Third Reich, geopolitics became a taboo discipline. Born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was first of all a German science, one that would be widely used by the National Socialists to launch their territorial conquests, through concepts such as that of living space (Lebensraum), developed by Friedrich Ratzel around the 1890s, or that of pan-Germanism, associated with Karl Haushofer, who was also the founder of the first international academic journal of geopolitics. Given the political and human disaster that the Second World War had been, there is nothing surprising in the fact that no one wished to hear of it any longer during the decades of reconstruction, which, in Western Europe, were turned toward the new ideology of liberalism. For all that, the Europeans never ceased doing geopolitics; they simply preferred to speak of “foreign policy” or of “international relations,” without reference to the prior body of work. Yet if Stalin did indeed forbid the study of geopolitics on his territory, was he not concretely putting it into practice when he took part in the Yalta Conference to carve up Europe geographically according to political criteria? In reality, it is impossible to think in terms of strategy or sovereignty without at least a minimal reference to geopolitics—rather like Monsieur Jourdain, Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme, who spoke prose without knowing it. In France, one had to wait until the mid-1970s for the communist geographer Yves Lacoste to rehabilitate the discipline by founding the journal Hérodote—perhaps because, time having passed, he judged that this unjust censorship was over and done with, or perhaps also because he did not know its history well. Be that as it may, he was right to do so.

AR: The book rests on Carl Schmitt’s land/sea dialectic—a geopolitics of the land born in Germany, set against a geopolitics of the sea brought to its perfection by the Anglo-Saxons. Can you present this opposition for us, and explain why the European renaissance requires the reconciliation of these two spheres within the continent itself?

OE: Carl Schmitt developed at length a structuring opposition between Land and Sea, which he regarded as two fundamental principles of the organization of human societies: land powers are characterized by their territorial anchorage, the stability of their borders, and the importance accorded to political sovereignty, strongly rooted in a given territory. Conversely, maritime powers found their power on mobility, commerce, and mastery of the oceanic lines of communication that “open” space to exchange, to the circulation of goods, and to economic expansion. World history would be the result of a permanent tension between these two geopolitical logics, setting, for instance, the British and then the American model against the German or Russian model. This Schmittian approach is of course fundamental, but it does not truly apply at the scale of states, nor at that of an entire continent like Europe, which is simultaneously terrestrial and maritime. From the Atlantic to the Urals, Europe possesses, in fact, a wholly singular geographical configuration. It is an interlocking of lands and seas that interpenetrate one another and weld themselves together, with a highly irregular coastal profile that creates so many peninsulas, straits, and archipelagos. This complexity is found nowhere else in the world, neither in America, nor in China, nor in the Middle East. According to the Swiss essayist David Cosandey, this imbrication would lead to a “fundamental law of geography”: the European continent is an incomparable source of riches which, by its configuration, has generated a relative political stability among peoples, while also bringing about a stimulating competition between territories. This originality, which he sums up in the concept of “articulated thalassography”, would predispose Europe to innovation and excellence; it would lie at the origin of the development of the sciences and the techniques in Europe and of the continental superiority that followed from it beginning in the Middle Ages. A manifest expression, in short, of territory as a factor of power—one that requires going beyond Carl Schmitt’s fundamental dichotomy.

AR: You write that England—”however amicably one may speak of it”—remains the foremost enemy of European continental unity. That is a striking assertion for an English-speaking public. Are you targeting the English themselves, or the thalassocratic model of which they were the pioneers—the one Alain de Benoist links to globalization itself?

OE: When one speaks of a state in geopolitics, it is not unusual to name it by its capital: Washington is at this very moment confronting Tehran under the perplexed gaze of London, Paris, or Berlin. Behind these names of cities, one should imagine no other unity than that of the political power in place; not all Americans support the war, not all Iranians wish for the survival of the regime of the Mullahs—far from it. It is in the same state of mind that I speak of England, thereby committing, in fact, a classic error of the French literature, which often confuses it, for historical reasons, with the United Kingdom. As Alain de Benoist does as well, it is therefore clear that I am designating here the thalassocratic model devised by the British elites, and to a lesser degree the industrial model of which they are likewise the originators. I also stress in passing that the island of Britain has not always been turned toward the Atlantic, and that the Channel has at times been scarcely wider than a large river fairly easy to cross. We thus share a common history—that of King Arthur or that of Joan of Arc—who belong fully within a terrestrial geopolitics. That said, from the 17th century onward, England turned toward other, far vaster horizons, with an intensity that neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese had been able to imagine in building their world empires. What could be more natural, in the end, for a state that remains above all an island? But like many islands, England has developed ever since a certain mistrust of the continent, which it has sometimes tended to regard as a competitor. Even if it was from London that General de Gaulle called for Resistance during the Second World War, he had perfectly grasped this ambiguity. One will go on finding it thereafter throughout the history of the European Union, within which British decision-makers have often been particularly counterproductive, multiplying their “Trafalgar broadsides”...1 right up to Brexit. My esteem and my friendship for the British incline me to think that they will once again know how to move beyond this stage—not for a new Agincourt, but so that all the European peoples may together give themselves the means to build the power that Europe lacks.

AR: The book presents Russia as “Europe’s ideal energy partner” and argues that Europe cannot be conceived without Russia, against Huntington’s civilizational map. The book appeared in 2022, on the eve of the war in Ukraine—a war that severed the energy ties, hardened the division of the continent, and pushed the European Union further into the Atlanticist camp you criticize. Has the Russo-Ukrainian war refuted this chapter, or confirmed its warning? And beyond the present conflict: can the Euro-Russian relationship be repaired, and what would the first steps be?

OE: Is Russia part of Europe? Geographically, the majority of its territory lies in Asia, where it encompasses groups of populations that are varied from an ethnic point of view, with a more or less autonomous history of their own. Demographically, on the other hand, the great majority of Russians live in the western part of the territory, west of the Urals. From Saint Petersburg to Moscow, this western Russia has contributed greatly to European history: the contributions of Pushkin, of Peter I, of Ivan the Terrible, or of Leo Tolstoy, to cite only these, constitute a whole component of a common culture. Like Emperor Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II was a cousin of King George V. Politically, the Rus of Kiev also exerted considerable influence over the great plains of eastern Europe, controlling the vast eastern territories of Mitteleuropa, in particular Poland. But this vision is not that of the American political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose work implicitly influences part of the United States’ interventionism through a “clash of civilizations” that also runs through part of Europe. Here we find an American dread that goes back more than a century, to when Alfred Mahan declared that an alliance between Germany and Russia had to be avoided at all costs, so that Europe would not manage to rival the United States. This will to “divide and rule” would later be theorized by Halford Mackinder in his “pivot theory,” which Nicholas Spykman would envisage more concretely through the notion of “containment.” It is through this historical thickness that one must analyze the war that the United States is waging today against Russia by proxy armies—as Emmanuel Todd does very well,2 and as is shown also by the (more than probable) American sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline linking Germany and Russia under the Baltic Sea. By cutting off any possibility of continental collaboration with a historic and strategically vital energy ally, the Americans won, from an ideological point of view, the few decades that the Europeans lost, from a realist point of view, for the construction of a Europe as Power.

AR: Your third chapter argues that the European Union has built a “Europe-as-market” structurally incapable of thinking in civilizational terms—and you designate Kundera and the Visegrád countries as the guardians of a cultural idea of Europe. Why is it Eastern Europe, the region that suffered most in the 20th century, that remembers what Europe is?

OE: Certain geopoliticians distinguish what they call living borders from other borders they regard as dead. The former are lines of strategic and military tension. The latter, which generally succeed the former once the conflicts have passed, are above all memorial and cultural limits, which endure over the long term. The Iron Curtain is a characteristic illustration of this. In the East, the peoples certainly knew the dictatorship of communism, but they were spared the liberal and consumerist ideology that imposed itself in the West. After the fall of the Wall, this is surely what explains the positions of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe on questions as sensitive as the economy or extra-European immigration. Thus, behind Viktor Orbán’s Hungary at first, the Visegrád Group affirms its aspiration to a Europe more protective of peoples and nations, preferring to put forward a “patriotic economy” founded on the values of the family and on the ways of life inherited from Christendom rather than on mass consumption and individual libertarianism. It remains to be seen how long this specific mentality will be able to resist integration within the European Union and the pressure that the war in Ukraine exerts on political realism. In the meantime, Visegrád nonetheless appears as a counter-model with which one ought, at the very least, to enter into dialogue, so as to reconstruct a model capable of restoring a specific existence and power to Europe in an increasingly multipolar world.

AR: One of the most concrete sections of the book concerns infrastructure: the Rhine-Rhône canal, the high-speed rail links from Paris to the Black Sea, the lessons of the Roman roads and of the Trans-Siberian. Why is an infrastructure of this kind a civilizational question, and not merely an economic one?

OE: The history of the great empires shows that power does not rest solely on military force. To endure, an empire must organize the space it controls and connect to one another territories that are often vast and diverse. Infrastructure thus plays an essential role in the construction and the durability of civilizational wholes. From Antiquity onward, the great powers understood the strategic importance of communication networks. Roads, bridges, ports, canals, and postal relays made it possible to move armies rapidly, to transmit orders, and to ensure control of the peripheries. The economic function of these facilities is, moreover, obvious and essential. They facilitate commercial exchange, foster the circulation of merchandise, and allow the exploitation of resources. However, to limit infrastructure to its economic dimension alone would be a mistake. It possesses as well a cultural, political, and civilizational reach. The lines of communication do not transport only material goods; they also foster the circulation of ideas, of beliefs, of languages, and of forms of knowledge. The Roman roads helped to spread Roman law, Latin, and, later, Christianity across a large part of Europe. Infrastructure thus takes part in the formation of a common space. It brings different populations closer together and contributes to the emergence of a shared identity. In this sense, these are instruments of integration as much as tools of development. By structuring the flows of transport, energy, information, or commerce, large-scale infrastructure shapes spaces of influence and reinforces the position of the powers that control it. More than mere technical facilities, they are the arteries through which riches, men, ideas, and values circulate, contributing to the political cohesion of the great wholes, to the diffusion of cultural models, and to the affirmation of a vision of the world. Territorial planning is a major lever of power.

AR: You conclude with the Greek pairing of Hestia and Hermes—the hearth and the journey—and with this formula: “For a Swiss Europe, then... but with the sea.” Can you unfold this image for readers who have not yet opened the book, and tell us what you hope a reader formed within the maritime civilization will take away from your work?

OE: In Greek mythology, Hestia and Hermes are two complementary figures, who express the equilibrium between attachment to a place and exploration of the world. Hestia, goddess of the hearth, embodies stability, peace, and rootedness in the home and the community. Her sacred fire symbolizes that which remains and gathers. Conversely, Hermes is the god of movement, of journeys, and of exchanges. He watches over the roads, the borders, and the circulation of ideas. Where Hestia offers a fixed center, Hermes opens toward the outside and the unknown. Together, they express the equilibrium between attachment to a place and exploration of the world. What we remember of Europe’s greatness belongs most often to the world of Hermes: the discovery and conquest of the world, political universalism, scientific and technical progress, communication, and the exploration of space. But the world of Hermes is also a world in which one easily loses oneself. This is why it is necessary, too, to gather once more around the hearth, as Ulysses always sought to do in his Odyssey. After a long voyage during which she left behind a part of her soul, Europe must now rebuild herself as a community. To illustrate this idea, I could have taken the image of the Shire of the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. Out of provocation, I preferred to use that of Switzerland, foregrounding its skepticism toward the great technocratic systems, its direct relationship to democracy and to armed defense, and so on. But neither the Shire nor Switzerland has access to the sea. The European potential is therefore a thousand times greater than theirs—and we know how the Romans, or the merchants of the Hanse, knew how to make use of the Mediterranean and the Baltic. As for the question of what is to be done today with the world’s seas without losing oneself in them, let us leave it to the British, who are our European specialists on the matter, to answer it within the framework of a common construction.

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TN: a French idiom for a sudden, treacherous reversal or sabotaging blow, named for Nelson’s 1805 victory; an idiomatic alternative would be “a stab in the back.”

La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), Paris: Gallimard, 2024. Not yet translated.

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