by Greg Johnson
A PLURALISTIC MOVEMENT
The North American New Right is an intellectual movement with a political agenda, but it is not a hierarchical intellectual sect or a political party. Instead, it is a network of independent authors and activists. We do not have a rigorous and detailed party line, but we do share certain basic premises, questions, and aims. These leave a great deal of latitude for interpretation and application. But that is good.
As an intellectual movement, we embrace a variety of opinions and encourage civil debate. We believe that this is the best way to attract talented and creative people who will advance our agenda. We also believe that debating different perspectives on these issues is the best way to arrive at the truth, or a workable approximation of it.
We collaborate where collaboration is possible. Where differences exist, we seek to build consensus through dialogue and debate. Where differences persist, we agree to disagree and either change the subject or part ways. Because we are a loose network, we can overlap and interface with any number of hierarchical organizations without competing against them.
Just as we reject “apparatus logic,” we also reject “representation logic.” Because we are a pluralistic movement, there should be no presumption that a given author speaks for me or any other authors who are published here. Every author speaks only for himself.
This is important to understand, because part of every issue of North American New Right will be devoted to translations of articles from European New Right thinkers whose positions and aims differ from one another and also from those of the North American New Right. These works are offered for discussion and debate. In their breadth, depth, and originality, they are also exemplars of the kind of work we wish to cultivate in North America.
Even though the North American New Right is a metapolitical movement, and everything we do bears in some way on politics, there will be times when the connections will seem remote and tenuous. Thus we will surely be mocked as pointy-headed, ivory-tower intellectuals or apolitical dandies and poseurs. That is fine. A vibrant and effective intellectual movement has to be exciting to intellectuals, and intellectuals get excited by the oddest things. Besides, bullet-headed pragmatists who see no value in ideas that do not cause an immediate change in poll numbers tend to give up or sell out anyway.
What does that mean for the editorial policy of Counter-Currents Publishing and the journal North American New Right? It means, first of all, that those of you who share our concerns but may be holding back because you imagine you diverge from an unstated party line can relax. There is no party line beyond the questions and concerns outlined above. Second, it means that we encourage civil debate and commentary on our articles, interviews, and reviews, including this one. We welcome the challenge.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
September 30, 2011
DEDICATION
As this volume was going to press, we were saddened to learn of the death of one of our authors, Jonathan Bowden (April 12, 1962–March 29, 2012). We dedicate this volume to his memory.
San Francisco
April 30, 2012
THE DEATH OF
FRANCIS PARKER YOCKEY4
MICHAEL O’MEARA
_____________________
Fifty years ago today, June 17, 1960, Francis Parker Yockey, fearing he would be lobotomized by the US government, committed suicide while incarcerated in the San Francisco county jail.
Outside of this room, the anniversary of the death of this enigmatic figure—arguably America’s most brilliant anti-liberal thinker—is likely to go unobserved in his native land, for his legacy is still unclaimed.
Unlike what Evola called the “false Right,” whose alleged anti-liberalism derives from essentially liberal premises (constitutionalism, free markets, bourgeois social forms and sentiments, etc.), Yockey’s thought derived from Prussian rather than Anglo-American sources.
As his mentor, Oswald Spengler, argued in Prussianism and Socialism (1919), the cultural-political heritage of Prussia’s soldier-state grew out of the tradition bequeathed by the medieval knight, Pietism, and ethical socialism, while the market-based Anglo-American world was founded on principles associated with the Vikings, Calvinism, and individualism.
The ramifications of these different traditions were such that America—lacking a proper ruling class and a cultural stratum to sustain its European heritage—came, in time, to scorn its Old World parent, pioneering, in the process, civilizational forms whose materialist occupations and rationalist presumptions have sought to escape the so-called constraints of history, culture, and blood.
During the 19th century, the rising commercial and business classes, communicating vessels of the liberal ethos, allied with the cosmopolitan capitalism of the British Empire and the ascending economic might of America’s new low-church empire—an alliance ideologically arrayed under the banner of “Anglo-Saxonism” and implicitly opposed to continental Europeans attached to Listian economics, landed property, authority, and tradition.
In our age, the market forces of American liberalism have managed to denature not just the America’s European population, but a good part of the European world.
For though it brought material abundance to some, it also fostered a devastating nihilism that reduces meaning and being to a monetary designation.
If not for America, Yockey believed, the anti-liberal forces of authority, faith, and duty—in the form of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy—would have overthrown the liberal nomos, anchored in America’s “world leadership.”
Instead, the very opposite occurred.
First, the colony turned on its mother soil and father culture—then, it subjugated them, ending up, like the snake swallowing its tail, subjugating and denaturing itself—for it (the colony) was European in origin, and origin is inevitably destiny.
Though the “true America,” transplant of Europe, shared her destiny, Yockey believed modern liberal America had become an anti-Europe endeavoring not only to subjugate, occupy, and oppress her, but to destroy her unique heritage of blood and spirit.
The only Americans receptive to his anti-liberalism have, relatedly, been those, like him, whose loyalty to Europe’s High Culture estranged them from America’s culture-distorting—and blood-betraying—liberalism.
* * *
It is a testament, perhaps, to the organic philosophy of history he acquired from Spengler, that Yockey’s anti-liberalism grew from his German roots and from his identity with Europe’s High Culture, while America’s ruling ideas, even on its so-called Right, have stemmed mainly from liberalism’s Anglo-Calvinist tradition—and from the Jewish One-World Creed of Mammon it champions.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
June 21, 2010
SPIRITUAL & STRUCTURAL
PRESUPPOSITIONS
OF THE EUROPEAN UNION6
JULIUS EVOLA
_____________________
TRANSLATED BY R. BERKELEY AND BRUNO CARIOU
Circumstances have rendered the need for European unity imperative on our continent. Until now, this need has been fuelled principally by negative factors: the nations of Europe seek a defensive unity, not so much on the basis of anything positive and pre-existing, as because of the lack of any other choice in the face of the threatening pressure of non-European blocs and interests. This circumstance makes it difficult to see the inner form of any possible real European unity very clearly. Thought seems not to go much beyond the project of a coalition or federation, which, as such, will always have an extrinsic, aggregative, rather than organic, character. A unity which would really be organic could be only conceived on the basis of the formative force from inside and from above which is peculiar to a positive idea, a common culture, and a tradition. If we look at the European problem in these terms, it is clear that the situation is painful, and that problematic factors prevent us from indulging in an easy optimism.
Many have drawn attention to thes
e aspects of the European problem. In this respect, a significant work is that of Ulick Varange, entitled Imperium.7 A further examination of the difficulties which we have mentioned can be based upon this book.
Varange does not propose to defend the project of European unity in purely political terms; rather, he bases himself on the general philosophy of history and civilization which he derives from Oswald Spengler. The Spenglerian conception is well known: according to it, there is no singular and universal development of “culture,” but history both builds up and crushes down, in distinct and yet parallel cycles, various “cultures,” each of which constitutes an organism and has its own phases of youth, development, senescence, and decline, as do all organisms. More precisely, Spengler distinguishes in every cycle a period of “culture” (Kultur) from a period of “civilization” (Zivilisation). The first is found at the origins, under the sign of quality, and knows form, differentiation, national articulation, and living tradition; the second is the autumnal and crepuscular phase, in which the destructions of materialism and rationalism take place and the society approaches mechanicalness and formless grandeur, culminating in the reign of pure quantity. According to Spengler, such phenomena occur fatally in the cycle of any “culture.” They are biologically conditioned.
Up to this point, Varange follows Spengler, considering the European world, in accordance with Spengler’s conception, as one of these organisms of “culture,” endowed with its own life, developing an idea which is its own, and following a destiny which is specific to it. Moreover, he follows him in stating that the phase of its cycle through which Europe and the West is currently passing is that of “civilization.” However, in opposition to Spengler, who had accordingly launched the new formula of “the decline of the West,” he tries to turn the negative into the positive, to make the best of things, and to speak about new forces which would follow an imperative of rebirth, invoking values irreducible to materialism and rationalism. This cyclical development, beyond the ruins of the world of yesterday and the civilization of the 19th century, would push Europe towards a new era: an era of “absolute politics,” of supernationality and Authority, and therefore also of the Imperium. To follow this biological imperative in the age of civilization, or to perish, would be Europe’s only alternatives.
Accordingly, not only the scientistic and materialistic conception of the universe, but also liberalism and democracy, communism and the UN, pluralistic states and nationalist particularism—all these would be relegated to the past. The historical imperative would be to realize Europe as a nation-culture-race-state unit, based upon a resuscitatory principle of authority and upon new, precise, biological discriminations between friend and enemy, one’s own world and an alien, “barbarian” world.
It is necessary to give a good idea of what Varange calls “culture pathology,” because this will be useful to our aims. The accomplishment of the inner and natural law of culture-as-organism can be obstructed by processes of distortion (culture-distortion) when alien elements within it direct its energies towards actions and goals which have no connection to its real and vital needs and instead play into the hands of external forces. This finds direct application in the field of wars, since the true alternative is not, according to Varange, between war and peace, but between wars useful and necessary to a culture, and wars which alter and break it up.
The second is the case, not when we go to the battlefield against a real enemy, which threatens biologically the material and spiritual organism of our culture, in which case only a “total war” is conceivable, but when a war of this type bursts within a culture, as has actually happened to the West in the two last cataclysms. In these cataclysms, leaders of European nations themselves have favored the ruin of Europe and the fatal subjection of their homelands to foreign peoples and “barbarians,” of the East and of the West, rather than intending to co-operate in the construction of a new Europe which would go beyond the world of the 19th century and reorganize itself under new symbols of authority and of sociality. The fatal, and now quite visible, effect of this has not been the victory of some European nations over others, but that of anti-Europe, of Asia and America, over Europe as a whole.
This accusation is aimed specifically at England, but is extended by Varange to America, since he maintains that the whole system of American political interventionism developed as a result of a “culture distortion,” directing itself towards purposes devoid of organic relation to any vital national necessity.
Given this state of affairs, and the increasing tempo of disintegration, the challenge for the West is that of recognizing the biological imperative corresponding to the present phase of its cycle: that of going beyond division into states and of bringing about the unity of the European nation-state, and combining all its forces against anti-Europe.
This task, in its first stage, will be internal and spiritual. Europe must get rid of its traitors, parasites, and “distorters.”8 It is necessary that European culture cleanse itself of the residues of the materialistic, economistic, rationalistic, and egalitarian conceptions of the 19th century. In its second stage, the renewed unity of Europe as civilization or culture will have to find expression in a related political unity, to be pursued even at the cost of civil wars and of struggles against the powers which want to maintain Europe under their own control. Federations, customs unions, and other economic measures cannot constitute solutions; it is from an inner imperative that unity should arise: an imperative which is to be realized even if it appears to be economically disadvantageous, since economic criteria can no longer be considered as determinative in the new era. In the third stage, it will become possible and necessary to attack the problem of the necessary space for the excess population of the European nation, for which Varange sees the best solution as an outlet towards the East, where currently, under the mask of communism, the power of races biologically, immemorially, hostile to Western culture gathers and organizes itself.
This takes us far enough into the ideas of Varange for our current purposes. Let us now evaluate them.
The fundamental symbolism Varange evokes is that of the Imperium, and of a new principle of authority. Nevertheless we do not think that he sees quite clearly what this symbolism involves, if it is to be adopted as it should be; he does not discern the discrepancy between this symbolism and the inherent character of the late phase or “Zivilisation” of a culture, in our case of the European one.
In our opinion, Varange is certainly correct when he announces the inadequacy of every federalist or merely economic solution of the European problem. As we have already said, a true unity can only be of the organic type, and for this the plan is quite well-known: it is that already realized, for example, in the European medieval oecumene. It embraces both unity and multiplicity and is embodied in a hierarchical participatory system. What this requires us to overcome and to leave behind is nationalism, in the sense of schismatic absolutization of the particular; we must go beyond, or retreat from, this to the natural concept of nationality. Within any national space, a process of integration should then occur—politically—which would co-ordinate its forces into a hierarchical structure and establish an order based on a central principle of authority and sovereignty. The same thing should then repeat itself in the supranational space, in the European space in general, in which we will have the nations as partial organic unities gravitating into a “unum quod non est pars” (to use the Dantesque expression), that is to say into the field of a principle of authority hierarchically superior to each of them. This principle, to be such, should necessarily transcend the political field in the narrow sense, should be based upon itself alone, and should legitimize itself by means of an idea, a tradition, and a spiritual power. Then only would arise the Imperium: the free, organic, and manly European unity, really free from all leveling, liberalistic, democratic, chauvinistic, or collectivistic ideologies, presenting itself, by virtue of this achievement, in a precise separation from both “East” and �
��West,” that is to say from the two blocs which, like the arms of a single pair of pincers, are closing themselves around us.
Therefore, the premise of an eventual development of this type is not the dissolution of the nations into a single nation, in a sort of socially homogeneous single European substance, but the hierarchical integration of every nation. True organic unity, as opposed to mere mixture, is realized not through the bases, but through the summits. Once the nationalistic hubris, which is always accompanied by demagogic, collectivistic, and schismatic forces, is broken, and the individual nations are configured hierarchically, there will exist a virtual unification which will extend itself beyond the nations, while nevertheless leaving them their natural individuality and form.
In this way everything would proceed ideally. The trouble, however, is that the natural context for such an accomplishment is that of a world which is in the phase of “Kultur,” not of “Zivilisation”—to use the Spenglerian terminology. Writers such as Varange mix things belonging to distinct planes, falling into a mistake to which Mussolini also once exposed himself. Mussolini, probably not knowing Spengler’s major works, read his The Hour of Decision9 and was struck by the prognosis of a new Caesarism or Bonapartism: this is why he wanted the book to be translated into Italian. However, he did not understand the position in which, according to Spengler, formations of this type fall in the cyclic development of cultures: it is when the world of tradition collapses, when “Kultur” no longer exists, but only “Zivilisation,” when the qualitative values have fallen and the formless element of the “mass” takes the upper hand.