Alexander Dugin recalls and revitalizes the legacy of Jean Thiriart, showing how cold geopolitical realism and fiery spiritual inspiration have been combined to generate enlivening visions of a European Revolution and Great Continental Empire.
After the Götterdämmerung
It seems as though Friedrich Nietzsche's prophecies concerning the "kingdom of the last men" are coming true in our time with ever greater clarity.
Following the "death of God", i.e., the removal of the sacred from modern civilization, and after the "twilight of the idols", i.e., the collapse of all the ideological fetishes that have animated humanity and driven it to fight for "new values," we are now approaching the last stage of "civilizational fatigue” — the planetary kingdom of victorious mediocrity, "neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm,” the poverty of whose paltry imagination is embodied in demagogic appeals to “universal human values.”
The last “idol” that was still somehow capable of inspiring peoples toward self-transcendence, or at the very least toward recognizing something that transcended the narrow boundaries of miserable, profane individuality and its completely inauthentic, imitative, chimerical existence, was “Soviet socialism” which, in Russia, was transformed from a materialist and utilitarian scheme into a mystical-idealistic and imperial structure.
The end of the “proletarian era” paradoxically coincided with the disappearance of the last trace of social idealism; as it turned out, Soviet materialism had merely masked a certain kind of special spirituality, albeit a heterodox one, while capitalist indifference toward the sphere of the spirit ultimately led to the real and absolute triumph of practical and social materialism. As it turns out, blatantly denying the Spirit is less effective than ignoring it or admitting it as some kind of “abstract,” “conditional” hypothesis alongside the “obviousness” of the material environment.
In August 1991, the last idol was shattered.
Then, a year later, on November 25th, 1992, Jean-François Thiriart, the Last Hero of Europe, died in Brussels; he was the greatest defender and theoretician of “Sovietism,” the unyielding Knight of radical social non-conformism, one of the most profound and rigorous thinkers, comprehending the hidden logic of historical entropy and rebelling against the kingdom of the “last men” at it inexorably advanced upon Europe along with the shadow of the Trans-Atlantic American continent. This Hero’s death sealed the end of the era known as the “twilight of the idols.” Cosmic Midnight, the exact onsetting instant which so worried Martin Heidegger, seems to have triumphed. The death of Jean Thiriart closed a special cycle.
The Knight of Europe
Thiriart was a man with an Idea, an Idea to which he subordinated all of his spiritual, intellectual, and physical energy. This Idea has a name: EUROPE.
For Thiriart, EUROPE was the supreme and absolute value to which everything else was to be sacrificed. In Thiriart’s relationship with Europe, we find the same mystical element as in Russian poets’ relationship with Russia (“If the holy warband says, ‘Leave Rus’ and live in paradise,’ I will say, ‘No need for paradise, give me my homeland’” — Sergey Esenin).
Europe was Thiriart’s passionately beloved Homeland; he acknowledged no higher values, no higher realities, no higher “idols.” Thiriart even developed a special way of thinking: “thinking on Europe’s terms.” But by this he did not mean the rotten, ugly civilization of merchants with which Europe is associated today; instead, he referred to a timeless, continental, cultural ensemble, which at certain points of time was embodied in the mighty, gigantic, and majestic forms of the Roman Empire, in the Empire of Alexander the Great and, later, in the Great Roman Empire of the German Nation under the scepter of the Hohenstaufens. Thiriart understood Europe as an Empire, and this is the title of one of his programmatic books. Thiriart’s approach to Europe was that of an ardent and passionate patriot, a nationalist. Beginning in the 1960’s, many European patriots followed him in calling themselves “European patriots” or “European nationalists.”
From Thiriart’s point of view, the imperial, true Europe, the Europe of soil, has been in decline for centuries and is even in a state of contradiction with its own inner logic. This fragmented, mercantile, capitalistic, thalassocratic Europe — since 1945, directly occupied by an opposing continent (the US) — is an Anti-Europe, a prisoner shackled in tight political, economic, and geopolitical shackles. Thiriart considered modern Europe to be politically unfree, economically dependent, and geopolitically (strategically) enslaved. The goal of Jean Thiriart's entire life was the Liberation of Europe, the destruction of its shackles — EUROPEAN REVOLUTION.
Scholars of the life and political activities of Jean Thiriart, the “Lenin” of the European Revolution as he is sometimes called, are often surprised at the logic of his path, which began with activism among Belgian communists, then shifted to Germanic National-Socialism and, after the defeat of the Reich and a stint in prison for “de-Nazificiation,” gave way to a phase of “National-European” politics; this last phase evolved from a collaboration with the OAS and supporters of the Belgian Congo to open “Sovietophilia” and “Maoism” in the 1970’s.
In fact, if we “think on Europe’s terms,” then these are not contradictions or pragmatic alliances on the part of a non-conformist politician. Communism, for Thiriart, was and remains “the best means of economically liberating Europe from arbitrary capitalist utilitarianism, whose only guideline is the notion of economic profit and which does not take national-continental interests into consideration.” In the ‘60’s, Thiriart, alongside the economist d’Astier, formulated his own understanding of “communism” and gave his own theory the more fitting and precise name of “national-communitarianism.” His support for the German Reich was conditioned by his understanding of the need to unify Europe at any cost. During a certain period, the ideal of the Hohenstaufen Empire was a guiding star for the German National-Socialists. Moreover, like many National Bolsheviks at the time, Thiriart considered the anti-English and anti-American orientation of the Third Reich to be the most essential aspect, while its anti-Slavic and anti-communist motives were an error that could be overcome in the future. The fact that everything turned out differently, and that the anti-Slavic line nevertheless became dominant in foreign policy, was a terrible tragedy for Thiriart, since the fatal end awaiting Hitler’s anti-Eastern and anti-Russian adventure was completely obvious in advance to all of Europe’s geopolitically educated advocates.
In the 1940’s, along with Evola and Ortega y Gasset, Thiriart participated in an SS publication specially intended for European youth, Young Europe, and belonged to the "left," "anti-Hitler" circles of the SS, who naively tried up to the very last moment to change the logic of the absurd and suicidal war with the East. Upon removing Hitler and the Anglophile lobby around him from power, they wanted to commit to a grand Drang nach Westen, shoulder-to-shoulder with Soviet soldiers, to put an end to the Anglo-Saxon plutocracy once and for all, ending the war not with a dismembered Berlin, but together with the Russians in a defeated London and a New York brought to its knees.
In the 1960’s, Thiriart returned to politics after having been forced to take a break, and this time stood up as the harbinger of a purified ideology, the ideology of EUROPE. This was an ideology free from the necessity of any pragmatic political alliance with communism or Nazism.
Thiriart chose the name “Young Europe” for this movement. This name thundered across the whole world in the ‘60’s as the first and only case in European politics when a movement that completely rejected the liberal-democratic ideology dominating the West and all the conventionalities of the System became widespread (especially among youth) and, at one point, was just about ready to turn into a formidable revolutionary fighting party, one that threatened the very existence of the System. This period of Young Europe saw the beginning of “Americanophobia” among European nationalists, which to this day remains the axial motif of all European “radicals.”
The European Revolution, however, did not take place. The superbly organized political investigation services, propaganda, repression, bribery, terror, and the System’s other moves eliminated the threat of Thiriart’s “imperial revolution.” (It is interesting that one of the primary methods they used was playing the “right” and “left” components of Young Europe against each other). After a certain pause in the early ’70’s, the “Lenin of the European National Revolution” put forth a new concept that summated his ideological path: the concept of a “Euro-Soviet Empire.”
The Isocrates from Brussels
The sheer radicality of a prospective “Euro-Soviet Empire” shocked even Thiriart’s long-time comrades. Its meaning typologically replicated the history of Isocrates, the Athenian patriot who, against the inertial opinion of most Athenians, insisted on surrendering Athens to Philip of Macedon, as he was perfectly conscious of the fact that only the fresh blood and geopolitical passion of the Northern kings could turn the thalassocratic, “capitalist,” decomposing port-city into a Great Continental Empire. Like Isocrates, Thiriart proposed surrendering Western Europe to the Soviet Army in order to form a “finished” continental state, free from the economic shackles of the World Bank, geopolitical occupation by American troops, and political servility to the interests of Israel.
Thiriart, before all others — before the New Right or the Russian patriots of the Perestroika era — recognized that, at the present historical moment, only the “Soviet model” represented an opportunity for cultural, political, and geopolitical independence from the global forces subjugating the planet, those most often grouped under the name of “globalism.” By “thinking in Europe’s terms,” Thiriart came to the conclusion that, not only does Russia belong to the European continental mass (if it was “Europe to the Urals” for de Gaulle, then for Thiriart it was “Europe to Vladivostok”) but also that the “Soviet model” should be taken as the basis for a new, Free Europe. For Thiriart, the peoples of the continent could, and should, be organically integrated only on the basis of this model — naturally, with the appropriate amendments and supplements provided by the theory of “national-communitarianism.”
Thiriart saw in the USSR and its structure a form of genuinely continental, tellurocratic Federal Empire, one that was based, like any Empire, on transnational, spatial, collectivist, and authoritarian principles, in direct opposition to the capitalist-utilitarian, pro-American, individualist, liberal model that is so fatal for Europe. From the correct but somewhat abstract formula “neither communism nor capitalism,” so typical of Europe’s national revolutionaries in the ‘60’s, Thiriart finally arrived at the formula of a “Euro-Soviet Empire.” In so doing, he was not picking “communism” as an abstract economic-political doctrine, but rather “Sovietism,” or the concrete form of the realization of socialism in Russia.
Guardian of the World Egg
Jean Thiriart was an atheist. Of course, this is enough to shock today’s “Orthodox neophytes” — those who have rushed just in time to hide their party cards, who have been able to forget their pioneer-Komsomol oaths and promises with the utmost ease, and who have been unable to utter a single phrase without sanctimonious moralizing. Those who just yesterday persecuted believers, and today are posing with cheeky eyes in the Temple — of course they see the Knight of Europe’s atheism as sufficient ground for shrugging off his ideas. But it is no coincidence that, among Thiriart’s friends, comrades, and followers in Europe as well as Russia, the majority are not only believers, but Traditionalists, i.e., radical advocates of Sacred Civilization. (In fact, something similar could be said of Nietzsche and Heidegger).
Thiriart saw in the religiosity typical of the modern world only a Pharisaism and deceit intended to conceal either cunning geopolitical calculation (as in the case of American religiosity or the pro-American policy of the Pope), or a refusal to confront reality, politics, and the surrounding social world (as in the case of numerous neo-spiritualist sects). Thiriart hated the “Bible” as “the main book of America” which thalassocratic exegetes use to justify their aggressive planetary expansion and regard as holding the United States to be the embodiment of the New Israel that is called upon to judge the nations. It is curious to note that many Orthodox and Islamic traditionalists have exactly the same attitude toward American religiosity (though they do not extend this attitude to Holy Scripture).
Moreover, Thiriart's atheism can be understood in yet another way. Since his entire thought always strove, first and foremost, towards cold, cruel realism — one example being his rejection of the abstractions of the "Third Way" and the responsible, courageous, yet risky choice of the "Euro-Soviet Empire from Vladivostok to Dublin" — his atheism was tantamount to a firm desire to remain within the framework of visualized reality, equivalent to a refusal of dissolution amidst those foggy labyrinths of soft ideology into which modern theorists of globalism try to lull human consciousness, in particular by appealing to mystical, occult, and spiritual motifs.
René Guénon, the greatest representative of Traditionalist thought, wrote in his main work, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, that the modern era can be depicted with the symbol of the World Egg open from the bottom — this comes after the preceding phase (the phase of coarse materialism), during which it was closed on top (closed off from spiritual, supra-cosmic influences). According to Guénon, the opening of the World Egg from the bottom means the advent of a new “pseudo-spirituality” – none other than a penetration into the human world by subhuman, demonic influences — the hordes of “Gogs and Magogs.”
In this truly apocalyptic era, materialism and atheism (which were purely negational at the preceding stage) become a lesser evil while still lacking any good, since real orthodoxy and fully-fledged spirituality in this period becomes the lot of a minority, a chosen spiritual elite that is capable of heroic feats. In this perspective, Thiriart appears as a genuine “defender of the Cosmic Egg” against subhuman influences. It is also telling that, in Tradition, the very idea of Empire is tightly bound up with the idea of a border that separates the human world from the demonic, subhuman worlds. Such, in particular, is the symbolism of the “iron wall” which, according to legend, was built by the Alexander the Great, the Empire-Builder, to thwart the invasion of the ecumene by the “hordes of Gogs and Magogs.”
Thiriart was a “fanatic of Empire.” His ideal was Frederick II Hohenstaufen, another Great Emperor about whom legends like those of Alexander the Great were told in the Middle Ages.
And so, can it not be said that Thiriart’s atheism was a special form of purely spiritual logic which, beyond words and exterior attributes, perfectly recognized the Pharisaic signboard, the sinister face of the Enemy of Man, and heroically challenged forces against which irreconcilable struggle is the main religious duty of every believer — believers not in letter, but in spirit?
The Final Journey
It is uncanny and symbolic that Jean Thiriart’s final journey in life was his trip to Russia. In August 1992, exactly a year after the August events that forever put an end to the dream of a “Euro-Soviet Empire,” Thiriart came to Moscow for the first time — Moscow, the thought and love of which he harbored for more than 50 years.
In the late ’60’s, in Iraq, Thiriart came closer than ever before to realizing his long-standing project of creating European Liberation Brigades to wage an armed struggle against American occupation troops in Europe and the Middle East. Camps were already set up, thousands of volunteers from Young Europe were ready to fill them. But, right at that moment, a strange order came from Moscow: “no anti-American operations,” “no contact with Thiriart.” He was forced to leave and fly to Egypt, to Nasser. (The only consolation being that the flight was made on a Soviet military aircraft). Moscow was paralyzed from within, incapable of radical geopolitical steps, penetrated by a network of Atlanticist “agents of influence.” Guerrilla war in Europe was thwarted. Thiriart’s meeting with “Kremlin bosses” was postponed indefinitely.
And now, only after the end of the USSR, after the humiliating collapse of that mighty geopolitical power that instilled fear across the planet, that was always on the precipice of expanding to the South and the West, that restrained the rapacious appetites of the thalassocratic US — only now could Jean Thiriart, the theoretician of the “Euro-Soviet Empire from Vladivostok to Dublin,” visit the former capital of Eurasia and meet with the people on whom the success of his European mission once depended, and with the people who are now — despite unprecedented betrayal, devastation, chaos, and national apathy — courageously moving towards the creation of the Great Eurasian Empire.
Egor Ligachev and Gennady Zyuganov, Sergey Baburin and Nikolai Pavlov, Alexander Prokhanov and Eduard Volodin, Geydar Dzhemal’ and Viktor Alksnis — each of them, in different ways, but with the same attention and interest, conversed and argued with Jean Thiriart, were astonished by his non-conformism, strove to understand his logic, reflected on his paradoxes, and were amazed by his completely youthful energy, which so contrasted with his age, the severity and danger of his fate, full of struggle, adventure, and revolutionary practice.
As an echo of that visit, a photograph made the rounds in Europe: Jean Thiriart on Arbat Street, symbolically strangling a cardboard Yeltsin. He came to the country for which he had been a geopolitical herald for many years only after power had slipped into the hands of the enemies of Eurasia, the enemies of Free Europe, pathetic puppets in an American puppet theater. On Red Square he saw speculators and done-up prostitutes, and the nostalgic group at the Lenin Museum underscored the bottomlessness of the fall taken by the once Great Power on whose behalf the Belgian Isocrates had challenged the citizens of fallen, plutocratic Europe.
He had every reason to hate the “fingerless Mobutu” who had destroyed a gigantic continental structure in an alcoholic stupor. He was even more indignant over the spotted traitor who had stuffed Israel’s Harvey Prize into his pocket as a handout for selling out the Empire. (It was Thiriart who brought to Russia the Belgian Zionist magazine Regard, which reported the details of Gorbachev’s award). Behind his usual cheerfulness and optimism, Thiriart hid the experience of an immense drama.
“The Lenin of the European Revolution” saw before him, in the city which he considered the main stronghold of the future Empire, a yawning abyss...
And yet his political Will remained unyielding. Bidding farewell to his Russian friends, Thiriart said: “Yeltsin is Kerensky, he is the Barras of the French Revolution, he is not Stalin!” “Stalin will come later, after him. He will definitely come, he cannot help but come. The hour of the great European Empire will strike sooner or later, and without Russia such an Empire simply cannot exist.” Democratic journalists with the skills of exemplary informers did not fail to hint that the National Salvation Front was created soon after Jean Thiriart’s visit to Moscow…
Fallen on the Field of Battle…
Immediately after Thiriart's release from the democratic dungeons, after his “de-Nazification," one of the highest officials of the Belgian security services confidentially assured him: "You don’t have to be afraid that we will kill you. Our System has studied the basics of political psychology perfectly — if we kill you, you will become a martyr. No, this is too dangerous. We will kill you with silence, indifference... You will suffocate economically, you’ll disappear on your own. So sleep peacefully, Mr. Thiriart." And thus it happened: Jean-François Thiriart died of a heart attack in his bed. In the morning, he was found already dead, with a calm smile on his face — he did not feel death.
Nevertheless, all those who are called by the Spirit to the front of the Empire know that, sooner or later, the right of the System will be trampled by another law — the law of Will, the law of Truth, the law of Force, the law of the Spirit, the law of EMPIRE. They know that Jean Thiriart, the Knight of Europe, fell as a Hero on the battlefield, in the midst of battle, in the fire and smoke of the Great Skirmish. They also know that from the depths of national shame, from the ashes of a mighty state, from under the rubble of a continental giant, a wave of Renaissance and Awakening is rising.
The peoples of the continent are accumulating their sacred rage against the Trans-Atlantic occupiers and their henchmen. The European Liberation Front is the National Salvation Front. Our struggle today is the Common Struggle in which the nations of the continent are called to accomplish a single unified anti-colonial Revolution, the prophet and herald of which was and remains JEAN THIRIART, the last true European, whose destiny and struggle anticipated Another Age, the Era of Empire on the other side of Cosmic Midnight, in the Eurasian TOMORROW.
Jean Thiriart?
Presente!
— Excerpted from Alexander Dugin, Konservativnaia Revoliutsiia (Arktogeia, 1994).
Read Jean Thiriart’s Europe: An Empire of 400 Million, brought to you in English by Arktos:
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