The Rockford Institute’s publication of Organizing the Revolution
marks the first appearance in our language of an historian whose
insights apply not only to the French Revolution but to much of modern
politics as well.
Augustin Cochin
(1876–1916) was born into a family that had distinguished itself for
three generations in the antiliberal “Social Catholicism” movement. He
studied at the Ecole des Chartes and began to specialize in the study of
the Revolution in 1903. Drafted in 1914 and wounded four times, he
continued his researches during periods of convalescence. But he always
requested to be returned to the front, where he was killed on July 8,
1916 at the age of thirty-nine.
Cochin was a philosophical
historian in an era peculiarly unable to appreciate that rare talent. He
was trained in the supposedly “scientific” methods of research
formalized in his day under the influence of positivism, and was in fact
an irreproachably patient and thorough investigator of primary
archives. Yet he never succumbed to the prevailing notion that facts and
documents would tell their own story in the absence of a human
historian’s empathy and imagination. He always bore in mind that the
goal of historical research was a distinctive type of understanding.
Both
his archival and his interpretive labors were dedicated to elucidating
the development of Jacobinism, in which he (rightly) saw the central,
defining feature of the French Revolution. François Furet wrote: “his
approach to the problem of Jacobinism is so original that it has been
either not understood or buried, or both.”[1]
Most of his work
appeared only posthumously. His one finished book is a detailed study of
the first phase of the Revolution as it played out in Brittany: it was
published in 1925 by his collaborator Charles Charpentier. He had also
prepared (with Charpentier) a complete collection of the decrees of the
revolutionary government (August 23, 1793–July 27, 1794). His mother
arranged for the publication of two volumes of theoretical writings: The Philosophical Societies and Modern Democracy (1921), a collection of lectures and articles; and The Revolution and Free Thought (1924),
an unfinished work of interpretation. These met with reviews ranging
from the hostile to the uncomprehending to the dismissive.
The ancient Greeks had a school of philosophers known as the Sophists, who took pride in their ability to prove impossible things. Some sophists even hired themselves out at public events, where audiences could watch spellbound as they proceeded to prove propositions that were obviously false.
The sophist philosopher Gorgias (4th century b.c.) invented an ingenuous argument to prove that: nothing exists; and even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something exists and something can be known about it, such knowledge cannot be communicated to others; and even if something exists, can be known about, and can be communicated about, no incentive exists to communicate anything about it to others.
Comrade Norman, in the circles of European New Right you are well known as the leader of Maltese rightist political party named Imperium Europa. Why Europe? Which Europe? How do you reconcile ethnic, national, racial, continental elements in your political view?
Why Europe? Because Europe, this lovely bit of earth, belongs to us. This small, mountainous peninsula, pushed against the Atlantic by the Eurasian landmass, is the heartland of our civilisation. A Civilisation that has given the world the very concept of progress.
Other Civilisations like the great Chinese, had a timeless, static quality about them. This is the antithesis of the dynamic spirit embodied in the very fibres of the European peoples.
The IDEA of Imperium Europa is the only Way Forward. The only way to save our Spirit, our Race and High Culture from the present frenzy of self-destruction. For we did it all on our own. We let a hidden Enemy push us into fratricidal wars that saw the best of us killed, our strength sapped, our resources squandered.
Imperium Europa is an IDEA that will unify all Europids.
In both individual and collective life the economic factor is
today the most important, real, and decisive one. … An economic era is
by definition fundamentally anarchic and anti-hierarchical; it
represents a subversion of the normal order. … This subversive character
is present in both Marxism and in its apparent antagonist, modern
capitalism. The worst absurdity is for those who today claim to
represent a political ‘Right’ to remain in the dark, overcast circle
drawn by the demonic power of the economy—a circle inhabited by both
Marxism and capitalism, along with a whole series of intermediate
stages. Those today who line up against the forces of the Left should
insist on this. Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic vision of life which is the basis of both systems is identical.-- Julius Evola
“Sometimes the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and diffused; sometimes to prevent the growth in the State of great new private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. Above all it may sometimes happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen may be to do the exact opposite of the work which the Radicals had to do.
It may be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture.”
~G.K. Chesterton ‘Appreciations and Criticisms’, Chap. XVI, “A Child’s History of England.”
By definition mimicry implies frequent bouts of self-hatred, which can
best be observed today, on a pathological scale, among the German people
and by extension among all guilt-ridden Whites in Europe and America.
Such new White mimicry is the product of a new cultural hegemony
following WWII.
The following is an excerpt from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. It is well worth reading and understanding.
My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.
These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom?
Summary — indebted, college educated kids with “degrees in worthlessness” means this is the end of the Ivory Tower Bubble. Universities are going to be downsized.
My comment — those who learn without colleges, and despite the financial disincentive to get educated, will be tomorrow’s mindweapons.
This is exactly like a stock boom and bust situation. The education boom goes bust, and NYSE:EDU goes down to .01 a share. Then smart cookies will buy up the stock at a penny a share (that is, get a home-schooled education) and be the next boom.
The stated ideology of the Italian fascists and the German Nazis often
did not marry up completely with the political policies they pursued.
"Fascist" and "fascism" are terms that one might suppose to be
simple badges, but dig beneath the surface and there are myriad
complexities and a morass of academic debate.
It is more than
six decades since the end of World War II and the fall of Nazi Germany,
but those events are the prism through which the word "fascism" is
still viewed.
The first "fascist" movement to gain power was
Mussolini's Blackshirts in Italy in 1922. Their movement could
certainly be said to be nationalist and authoritarian, as well as
accepting of violence in the struggle for political power, but much of
the rest of its characteristics have been subject to academic dispute.
For those who read French... A new paper on Traditionalism and the French "New Right:" Stéphane François, "Contre le monde moderne: la Nouvelle Droite et la 'Tradition'" (Religioscope, études et analyses n° 21, July 2009).
François traces the Traditionalist current within the French New Right (notably, the GRECE of Alain de Benoist) from its origins in the 1970s through its growing importance during the 1980s to the current day. He argues that Traditionalism has been important to the New Right in providing a basis for the reconstruction of Indo-European paganism as well as for its contribution to the New Right's anti-modern discourse, but that difficulties have arisen over Islam.
In Dominique Venner’s historical essay, Ernst Jünger: Un autre destin européen, the subject is presented as une figure ultime, a European archetype provisionally absent from Europe today, but nevertheless one rooted in the depths of the European spirit — and destined, thus, to re-appear should Europeans ever re-awake to re-assert themselves in the world.
Somewhat like a seismograph, the successive stages of Jünger’s long life (1895-1998) seemed to register the successive twentieth-century epochs of which he was its most emblematic representative.
In the period 1914-18, when Europeans worshiped the gods of war, he was a great warrior. After the defeat of 1918 and the shame of Weimar, he served as an eloquent proponent of the Conservative Revolution’s resistance to the Wilsonians “new world order.” Then, after looking to Hitler to deliver the Germans from their travails, he found that their presumed deliverer threatened an even more devastating travail, becoming, then, a precocious critic of the NS dictator.
In the many decades I have toiled in the vineyards of American racial nationalism, I have heard very few solutions offered to our people. We have been long on problems and negativity, and very short on solutions. This is a failure of leadership.
Instead of real leadership, some in the movement have adopted what I call the “Ain’t it awful?” strategy, which is simply to report one racial outrage and horror after another, or spin out ever-worsening doomsday scenarios. One day it is a horrible massacre in Wichita. The next it is a brutal killing in Knoxville. The purpose of reporting these horrors suppressed by the media is to wake our people up. And once they wake up, then they will do something.
Well, they are not going to do anything unless they are led to do something, unless concrete, workable solutions are suggested. That is what I want to talk about.
“Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land.” – Walter Scott
by Micheal O' Meara
One
Some time in the second half of the 1990s, a terminological change occurred in the racially conscious community.
Many who previously identified themselves as White Power advocates,
segregationists, separatists, supremacists, survivalists,
neo-Confederates, biological realists, etc. started calling themselves
“white nationalists.”
At the time (and I didn’t know much about these things then), I thought this reflected a changing political consciousness.
For what began after 1945 as a “movement” to maintain the integrity
of America’s racial character and prevent alien races from intruding
into its various “life worlds” had, by the 1990s, ceased to be a
realistic project — 30 years of Third-World immigration, “civil rights”
legislation, and various measures imposed by the federal government to
subordinate white interests to those of nonwhites had irrevocably
transformed the American people so that it was increasingly difficult
to characterize them as even a majority-white population.
“The America of our grandchildren will be another country altogether,” says Pat Buchanan, “a nation unrecognizable to our parents, a giant Brazil of the North… By 2050, there will be scores of millions of people living here whose loyalty is to a foreign country… If, by 2050, the America we grew up in has become a Tower of Babel of squabbling minorities that is falling apart, it will be because of the treason of the elites, and our lack of will to overthrow them.”
In the preface to his book, A Defense of Virginia and the South, R.L. Dabney writes: “To the conquerors of my native State, and perhaps to some of her sons, a large part of the following defense will appear wholly unseasonable. A discussion of a social order totally overthrown…will appear as completely out of date to them as the ribs of Noah’s ark, bleaching amidst the eternal snows of Ararat, to his posterity, when engaged in building the Tower of Babel.”
You have heard today about the danger facing us, the potential death of the West, and our defense of kinism is wholly unseasonable to those who welcome the impending genocide. It is they who deny that race is real, assert that even if it is real, it’s not important; and even if it’s real and important, it’s wrong to discuss it. They have been trained to identify racism as the greatest problem facing us, and to deny, in the very next breath, that races exist. Well, one of the problems we face is that most people don’t know how to define a word like racism. I submit that racism is the belief that races other than one’s own are sub-human, or the belief that one’s race will be the only race in heaven. Kinism, on the other hand, is the benign awareness that homogeneous social structure breeds trust, and therefore safety. I further submit that the founding race of any nation has the right to determine its ethnic composition and its citizenship. As Jared Taylor reminds us: “If it is ‘racist’ to prefer the company of people of one’s race, to prefer the culture created by one’s race, and to want one’s race to survive and flourish, then virtually everyone of every color is ‘racist,’ and the term has no useful meaning.”
My recent Brussels Journal “exhumation” of Robert B. Edgerton’s remarkable study of Sick Societies
(1992) provoked a variety of responses, with a good many veering from
Edgerton’s main topic (also mine) of “maladaptation” into discussions
of colonialism and the relation of the West to the so-called Third
World. The sliding from one topic to another is itself of interest, but
I should first like to address a number of reader-comments that focus
directly on the “maladaptation” thesis.
The reader dubbing himself “Kapitein Andre” calls attention to the
contrast between Edgerton’s dispassionate discussion of “maladaptation”
with Jared Diamond’s politically de rigueur praise for contemporary Austronesian society in the widely reviewed and much praised Guns, Germs, & Steel:
“While Western European youth were playing video games and quaffing
unhealthy food and beverages, the Austronesian youth were exploring the
jungles, constructing shelters, hunting, etc. [Diamond] concluded that
the latter were much more intelligent.”
"Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful
limits of their powers; that their true office is to declare and
enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them
from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal
rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to
restrain him."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1816)1
Over the past week I've made two round trip flights by air, which means
I have had the distinct pleasure of passing through airport security
four times in seven days. It may be my imagination, but I believe that
our friendly neighborhood TSA officers are getting more authoritarian.
While the officer at the podium still exhibits call center courtesy,
those charged with seeing that people make their way through the
canvass rope maze and show up with their license and boarding pass
ready have taken to shouting orders as if managing a chain gang. Of
course, this characterization isn't far from the truth. However, I
don't really blame the officers personally that much. Their job is to
get people to act in a completely unnatural manner -- partially
disrobing in a crowded room full of strangers just for starters -- and
with the exception of frequent travelers they are never going to do it
right.
The following is an excerpt from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. It is well worth reading and understanding.
Dominique Venner
From an address to the 2008 
“The America of our grandchildren will be another country altogether,” says Pat Buchanan, “a nation unrecognizable to our parents, a giant Brazil of the North… By 2050, there will be scores of millions of people living here whose loyalty is to a foreign country… If, by 2050, the America we grew up in has become a Tower of Babel of squabbling minorities that is falling apart, it will be because of the treason of the elites, and our lack of will to overthrow them.”
"Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful
limits of their powers; that their true office is to declare and
enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them
from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal
rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to
restrain him."
The TOQ Classics Corner