by Greg Johnson
When the Prussians defeated Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War, according to the rules of limited warfare, he should have retained his sovereignty and signed a peace treaty. But before that could happen, Napoleon III was overthrown by a popular government which launched its people’s war against Prussia.
In short, if limited warfare goes along with the principle of monarchy, unlimited warfare—including partisan warfare—goes along with the principle of popular sovereignty. For example, when kings, their cabinets, and their armies fight wars, it is possible to make neat distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. But when peoples fight wars—by means of mass levees and partisan tactics—the distinction between combatant and non-combatant is no longer so clear.
Furthermore, as the examples of the Napoleonic Wars and the Austro-Prussian War indicate, kings and their cabinets, when faced with defeat within the rules of limited warfare, are not above the temptation to appeal to the people and license partisan warfare. Thus when war loses its game-like quality and gets existentially serious—a matter of survival for whoever wages it—then limited warfare goes out the window, the underworld is mobilized, and all hell breaks loose.
Granted, partisan warfare existed before the rise of popular sovereignty, but whenever the people make war, they are performing sovereign functions. Thus partisan warfare is implicitly revolutionary. This may be why the Prussian monarchy ultimately resisted using partisan warfare, for once the principle of popular sovereignty is established, monarchy’s days are numbered.
According to Schmitt, the man who saw this most clearly was Vladimir Lenin, who was a careful student of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). In his notes on Clausewitz’s On War, Lenin distinguished real war (Voina) from mere military play (Igrá). Limited warfare is mere play because it is not existentially serious. Yes, people die in limited wars, but the state actors do not; the fundamental political system remains intact.
Lenin, of course, was a revolutionary who wanted to overthrow the existing system, and revolution has never been a form of limited warfare. Revolution has always had the utmost existential seriousness, because one can win only by destroying all other pretenders to sovereignty. Furthermore, Lenin was a Communist revolutionary. He fought in the name of the people, through totally mobilizing the people, which makes it difficult to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. Finally, Communism, like Islam and liberal democracy, is a universal political ideology, which means that it denies the legitimacy of all other forms of government all over the globe. Such an ideology can lead only to unlimited, global warfare until all distinctions are obliterated.
TYPES OF ENMITY
The friend-enemy distinction is the foundation of the political. In war, the enemy is obviously the most important category. Schmitt distinguishes at least four different types of enemy in Theory of the Partisan: (1) the legal enemy vs. (2) the real enemy, and (3) the relative enemy vs. (4) the absolute enemy.
One of the functions of the sovereign is to declare the enemy. This is the legal enemy. However, enmity is not merely conventional. There are real enemies and real friends based on real conflicts and harmonies of interest. Thus the legal enemy can be different from the real enemy. For example, in 1812, Prussia was allied with Napoleon against Russia. Thus, legally speaking, Russia was the enemy and France the friend. However, in terms of fundamental values and interests, France was the true enemy and Russia the true friend. Thus, in December of 1812, the Prussian General Hans von Yorck, who commanded the Prussian division of Napoleon’s army in Russia, defected to the Russians. In a letter to his king, Frederick William III, Yorck asked the king to decide whether to condemn him as a rebel for usurping his sovereign role of determining the enemy or to ratify his decision by moving against the real enemy, Napoleon.
For Schmitt, the relative enemy is the enemy of a limited, bracketed war, i.e., the sort of enemy with which one can make peace. The absolute enemy is the enemy in a colonial, civil, or revolutionary war, i.e., an enemy with which one cannot make peace and who must therefore be destroyed as a distinct being, either by absorption or extermination.
MORALITY & ENMITY
Civilized war is not the same as moralized war. In fact, civilized war is rather morally cynical. States can make war and peace out of the basest of motives. If you shoot 10 innocent hostages in reprisal for one murdered soldier, you are civilized. If you shoot 11, you are a barbarian. But in spite of this moral cynicism, bracketed warfare did serve the higher good by making it possible to limit the scope of warfare and conclude wars with peace.
According to Schmitt, injecting morality into warfare merely intensifies enmity thus widening the scope and prolonging the duration of warfare. We cannot afford this in a world with weapons of mass destruction:
. . . the ultimate danger exists not even in the present weapons of mass destruction and in a premeditated evil of men, but rather in the inescapability of a moral compulsion. Men who use these weapons against other men feel compelled morally to destroy these other men as offerings and objects. They must declare their opponents to be totally criminal and inhuman, to be a total non-value. Otherwise they themselves are nothing more than criminals and brutes. The logic of value and non-value reaches its full destructive consequence, and creates ever newer, ever deeper discrimination, criminalizations, and devaluations, until all non-valuable life has been destroyed. (p. 94)
THE FUTURE OF THE PARTISAN
Schmitt’s nightmare, like Heidegger’s, is the fulfillment of our ongoing “progress” toward a completely homogenized, global technological civilization. His deepest hope seems to be that the partisan, because of his telluric nature, can resist this future: “. . . the partisan, on whose telluric character we have focused, becomes the irritant for every person who thinks in terms of purpose-rationality and value-rationality. He provokes nothing short of a technocratic affect [by which Schmitt seems to mean “rage”]” (pp. 76–77). (Interestingly, in his later writings, such as “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Thing,” Heidegger also appeals to the telluric, i.e., “earth” [Erde], as a force of resistance to the technological drive toward complete transparency and availability.391)
Schmitt’s hope is that globalization and homogenization will not be completed because they will give rise to partisans who will resist the process in the name of their own particularity: their distinct homelands, cultures, and ways of life. Schmitt also hopes that partisans will appropriate modern technology to resist modern technocracy, that they will turn every modern “advance” into a new means and opportunity for resistance. In a rather apocalyptic, Road Warrior turn of imagination, he even speaks of partisans who will spring up after a nuclear war or other form of catastrophic civilizational collapse to inaugurate a new phase of world history.
Schmitt’s great fear, however, is that even the telluric, identitarian nature of the partisan can be coopted by the technological world system. For example, he devotes a great deal of space to discussing the development of Marxist theories of guerrilla warfare from Lenin to Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara, noting how masterfully Communists were able to exploit even rooted and nationalistic partisans in order to advance a homogenizing global ideology.
Theory of the Partisan is a melancholy little book, by turns illuminating and obscure, nostalgic and revolutionary.
On the one hand, Schmitt clearly mourns the loss of classical bracketed warfare. In a rare moment of petulance, he blames Lenin for “blindly” destroying “all traditional bracketing of war” (p. 89). With all due contempt for Lenin, in this case he was not blind. His eyes were wide open.
Lenin saw quite clearly that classical bracketed warfare was a relic of the age of monarchy, and although it was indeed civilized, it was never all that serious. It was merely the expression of the petty politics of prestige and dynastic intrigue: the game of thrones.
The game of war never replaced real war. It simply drove it to
the margins. Real war is existentially serious: the stakes are global and the penalty for loss is biological extinction. This is what Nietzsche called “Grand Politics.” This is our fight, and we need to see it for what it is, with eyes unclouded by nostalgia and tears.
On the other hand, Schmitt’s vision of the identitarian partisan has genuine revolutionary potential. Perhaps the best contemporary examples of identitarian partisans are the defenders of biological rather than cultural diversity: Greenpeace, Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, and sundry freelance monkeywrenchers, tree-spikers, and animal protectors and liberators. These partisans take their telluric rootedness seriously. When white racial preservation inspires the levels of organization, idealism, and moral and physical courage displayed by partisans of trees, birds, and lab rats, I will no longer fear for our future.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
July 20, 2012
THE RISING:
THE REVOLUTIONARY LESSONS OF
MICHAEL COLLINS
GREGORY HOOD
Michael Collins is a must see for any revolutionary, especially those who feel all hope is lost. The film begins with defeat for the revolutionaries, and the survivors hiding like rats in underground tunnels. By the end, they are dictating policy in councils of state. For a White Nationalist, the rise of the eponymous hero is consistently inspiring.
But there is also the fall. Michael Collins shows the petty rivalries, greed, and political miscalculations that can destroy any movement from within.
This is not a paean to militancy for militancy’s sake. It is a warning of the costs of violence and the inevitability of betrayal. Perhaps more importantly, it shows how the end of a friendship can lead to the collapse of a state. It’s a graduate course in nationalist revolution.
It should be noted that we’ll look at this film mostly on its own terms, ignoring some of the historical errors. Chief among them is the horrifically unfair treatment of Éamon de Valera, easily the dominant Irish political figure of the 20th century. While these errors detract from the film, they do not destroy the film’s importance nor the lessons it has to teach us.
LESSON 1: THE BLOOD SACRIFICE ESTABLISHES THE STATE
Michael Collins begins with the Easter Rising of 1916. A sweeping panoramic of a scene of battle eventually ends on the General Post Office in Dublin, where Michael Collins (Liam Neeson) and the other Irish Volunteers are utterly outmatched by British soldiers using artillery. They surrender and are marched out, in uniform, by business-like British officers who contemptuously refer to the uprising as a “farce.”
Of course, in real life it was a farce, and far from popular among the Irish people. Many Irish had relatives fighting in the British Army during World War I, and the feeling of many in the Empire was that the Rising was an unforgivable stab in the back while Great Britain was fighting for its life on the battlefields of Europe. In some areas, Irish civilians physically fought with the Volunteers, and some were even killed. In actuality, it was a rather pathetic spectacle, with a tinpot army marching about in uniforms while their own nominal leader (Eoin MacNeill) tried to stop it.
None of this matters. The British, quite justifiably from their point of view, made the decision to execute the leaders of the rebellion. We see Éamon de Valera (Alan Rickman) writing a letter to Michael Collins while the now legendary figures of Connelly, Pearse, and Clarke are executed one by one in the background. De Valera is spared because he is an American citizen and writes to Collins, “The Irish Republic is a dream no longer. It is daily sealed by the lifeblood of those who proclaimed it. And every one of us they shoot brings more people to our side.”
Michael O’Meara writes in “Cú Chulainn in the GPO” that the violent birth of the Irish Republic was no accident. It the living out of a myth, a “noble Ireland won by violent, resolute, virile action” inspired by “millenarian Catholicism (with its martyrs), ancient pagan myth (with its heroes), and a spirit of redemptive violence (couched in every recess of Irish culture).”392 The “slaughtered sheep” would brighten “the sacramental flame of their spirit.” O’Meara concludes that the sacrifice was not just for Ireland, but for a spiritual rebirth that would justify the Irish nation’s renewed existence, “for the sake of redeeming, in themselves, something of the old Aryo-Gaelic ways.”393
Once the sacred blood of revolutionaries was spilled, the Irish Republic became real, though it possessed no currency, territory, or international recognition. The policies enacted by the Irish Republic headed by de Valera became the political expression of the Irish nation, rather than a mummer’s farce of self-important and deluded men. The blood of fallen patriots made it real, the reaction of the British Empire granted it recognition, and the support of the Irish people followed in the wake of martyrdom. By losing, the Irish Volunteers won, for as Pearse said, “To refuse to fight would have been to lose. We have kept faith with the past, and handed down a tradition to the future.”394
Or, as de Valera put it in the film, “And from the day of our release, Michael, we must act as if the Republic is a fact. We defeat the British Empire by ignoring it.”
In the American experience, there are already proto-nationalist “governments” and states in exile. Harold Covington’s “Northwest American Republic,”395 the “Southern National Congress,” and the League of the South, and innumerable other would-be Founding Fathers make claims to be the political expression of various peoples. However, without the blood sacrifice, and the “recognition” granted by the military repression and extreme political reaction, such movements remain in the realm of myth.
Of course, that is where all nationalist movements have to begin.
LESSON 2: THE TRANSFER OF LEGITIMACY IS MENTAL BEFORE IT IS POLITICAL
In the American context, there’s a tiresome emphasis on individual “freedom,” which has become an all but meaningless phrase. In response, one should remember the admonition of Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini:
Without Country you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the Peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity. Soldiers without a banner, Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection; none will be sureties for you. Do not beguile yourselves with the hope of emancipation from unjust social conditions if you do not first conquer a Country for yourselves.
Michael Collins believes something similar. As an organizer addressing a restive crowd soon after his release from prison, his theme is not that the British are “unfair” or that the Irish need “equality.” He tells the people that the Irish nation already exists, though it’s legitimate leaders are rotting in English jails. “I was in one myself till a week ago,” he jokes.
He continues, “They can jail us, they can shoot us, they can even conscript us. They can use us as cannon fodder in the Somme. But, but! We have a weapon, more powerful than any in the arsenal of their British Empire. And that our weapon is our refusal. Our refusal to bow to any order but our own, any institution but our own.”
Here, Collins skillfully draws the distinction between the institutions of “their” Empire and contrasts it with the legitimate institutions that “we” can build—and bow to. More importantly, pointing aggressively at the “our friends at the Royal Irish Constabulary,” he identifies the people who want to “shut me up” and challenges the Irish people to raise their voices if he is cut down.
This speech pays dividends when Ned Broy (Stephen Rea), a detective working for The Castle (the center of British power in Ireland), warns Collins that the entire cabinet of the Irish Republic is to be arrested. Broy (a composite of the real Ned Broy and other characters) justifies his decision on the grounds that Collins can be “persuasive . . . what was it you said, our only weapon is our refusal.” The Irish Broy (whose name is repeatedly mispronounced by his English superiors) has transferred his loyalty from the state that pays his salary, to the new state that serves as the political expression of his pe
ople. This is the “revolution in the hearts and minds of the people” (to use John Adams’s phrase) necessary for any nationalist movement to succeed. It is also the outgrowth of de Valera’s entire strategy of building a parallel system of state.
LESSON 3 : POWER TRUMPS LEGALISM
Unfortunately, when we see the legitimate political expression of the Irish people in action, it is not impressive. The Cabinet of the Irish Republic is meeting in a tunnel. Dressed in suits and ties and carrying briefcases, they seem unlikely revolutionaries, squabbling over the extent of each minister’s “brief” and constantly pulling rank on one another.
Michael Collins and his sidekick Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn) are in, but not of this bureaucracy. Collins contemptuously dismisses a colleague’s charge that he is simply Minister for Intelligence by saying he’s the Minister for “Gunrunning, Daylight Robbery, and General Mayhem.” Interestingly, de Valera smiles wryly at this.
Collins reveals that the entire Cabinet is to be arrested, but Éamon de Valera sees this as an opportunity, not a danger. As President of the Irish Republic, he orders everyone to sleep at home—if they are all arrested “the public outcry will be deafening.” Of course, when de Valera is arrested, he’s dragged into a truck yelling futilely about an “illegal arrest by an illegal force of occupation”—a strange claim from a revolutionary leader. Significantly, Collins and Boland disobey their “chief,” escape capture, and make plans to accelerate their program of guerrilla warfare.
Earlier, we saw Collins leading an attack on an arsenal to capture weapons. He tells his guerrillas that they will be organized in “flying columns” and engage the enemy on nobody’s terms but their own. The resource-conscious Collins warns them each gun must be expected to capture ten more. At the same time, he imposes a core of discipline typical of a standard army.